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  • Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders
  • Jeff Demers
Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders. By Gerhard L. Weinberg . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-85254-4. Maps. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xxiv, 292. $28.00.

Gerhard Weinberg's Visions of Victory is constructed around a simple armature, yet it covers ground that has never been traversed so purposefully. Weinberg has chosen eight wartime leaders—Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Hideki Tojo, Chiang Kai-Shek, Josef Stalin, Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt—as the subjects of this work. The structure of the book is straightforward and introductory, neatly framed around two questions: What were the hopes and aims of these leaders and what were [End Page 960] their respective "visions of victory"?, and how did these concepts shape their wartime strategies?

This is not counterfactual history or a never-ending series of "what-ifs" but instead is a thorough analysis of the specific wartime goals of each leader. Hitler's vision was decidedly the most radical and grandiose. For Hitler, the new world order was one based on an Aryan world hegemony, enslaved populations, forced migration, death camps, and military power in pursuit of world, not just European, domination.

The lesser Axis partners were also focused on conquest. For Hideki Tojo and Benito Mussolini, the surviving evidence of their intentions is much weaker. Mussolini's goal of a new, grander Roman Empire replete with "abject subjects and repressed colonial peoples" (p. 55), never came close to being realized. The available evidence for the chapter on Tojo is scarce and here Weinberg traverses familiar ground with a look at the Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere—the Japanese version of racial conquest. One of Weinberg's many interesting findings comes when comparing the goals of his subjects with their available resources. Often strategy was crafted without fully gauging available resources. Instead of planning what could be reasonably achieved with the resources at hand, plans were constructed with the idea that sheer will-power and grit alone could win the day. Nowhere is the faultiness of this strategy more apparent than with the actions of Japan. For example, think of the Japan's lack of ocean-going transport to maintain an island empire. Dreams cannot move mountains.

Empire was a prevalent theme on the Allied side as well. De Gaulle and Churchill appear as the stout defenders of their respective empires. One of de Gaulle's desires, once victorious, was to annex large tracts of desert in Southern Libya to France. Clearly, de Gaulle was thinking in traditional great power terms—what possible value could be derived from such a possession? While de Gaulle sought to resurrect the French empire, Churchill was trying to hold on to the weakened British Empire. The Churchill that appears in this work will be very familiar to students of the war. Ever pragmatic and always seeking to strengthen what was left of Britain's declining power and prestige, Churchill never strayed far from his belief in Britain's right to colonial possessions.

The hopes of Stalin and Roosevelt were the most lasting and complex. Roosevelt believed an American-led Allied victory was inevitable, that colonialism's day had come and gone, and European power would never be the same. For Stalin, the postwar world meant satellite states in Eastern Europe, possible hostility with the West, shifting plans for the final disposition of Germany, and the reconstruction of life in Russia. With the recent opening of the Russian archives and the continued maturation of our understanding of Roosevelt's wartime policies, the "visions of victory" of these leaders as detailed by Weinberg may just prove to be the tip of the iceberg on the way to a much more thorough understanding of Stalin and Roosevelt.

Overall, scholars will find that Weinberg's treatment is fair and his research exhaustive. His chapter on Hitler is ultimately the strongest; it is a remarkable and concise exploration of Hitler's radical vision that did so much to nearly destroy the world. Finally, no scholar is more qualified than [End Page 961] Weinberg to write...

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