Hitler's War on the World

The key word in A World at Arms appears in its subtitle: “global.” For a man of Gerhard L. Weinberg’s energy, learning, and wit there was little to be gained from writing yet another treatise on a single nation’s part in World War II. Besides, a single-nation history always breaks down: every major crisis has to be explained, which necessarily entails a long look at several other sides of the hill. Thus the question of how Hitler came to declare war on America on December 11, 1941 (over which, according to Weinberg, analysts have puzzled “endlessly and needlessly”), four days after Pearl Harbor, involves careful investigation of the position of at least four nations (Germany, Japan, the United States, and the Soviet Union). For a serious scholar aiming at a comprehensive work, the only way forward is to try and see the enormous war as a whole, exploiting the equally enormous archival resources now available (though Weinberg has some characteristically sardonic remarks in his excellent bibliographical essay about continuing restrictions imposed in various countries). The result is an enormous book. It could easily have been somewhat less so: from about the halfway point it becomes annoyingly repetitious. The author may be forgiven for losing control of his text, since he had to keep so much material in play: the strain of correcting the notes alone must have been crushing (I detected only two, completely trivial, bibliographical errors). But why did the publishers not furnish him with a fully competent editor to weed and trim?

For that matter, why did they send out this great history of a war with such inadequate maps? Bunched at the back, they are physically difficult to use, and several of them are scandalously unhelpful: try following the battle of Stalingrad or the battle of the Bulge from them — it can’t be done. The endpapers show the Atlantic and Pacific respectively, and I almost think I could have drawn them better myself. The standard of mapmaking in America is far too high to accept the material presented here. Cambridge University Press has done its author a serious disservice.

Yet these are only faults of presentation. The solid merits of A World at Arms remain, and are inescapable. Weinberg does not pretend that his book is unique or definitive: “like all who work on World War II I have found it impossible to work in all the available records — otherwise no book on the war would ever be finished” (p. 942); but he has achieved all he could within the bounds of human possibility. His erudition is immense, though carried lightly (his style is excellent). His work on this book was made much easier by his knowledge of the German archives, in which he had earlier labored for years (he is the author of a two-volume study of Hitler’s foreign policy). Study of those sources, indeed, gave him the guiding principle for his research. He quotes his own earlier work:

Whatever the conflicting ambitions, rivalries and ideologies of the world’s powers in the 1920s and 1930s, it is safe to assert that, with the solitary exception of Germany, no European nation considered another world war as a conceivable answer to whatever problems confronted it.... [W]ithout German initiative another world-wide holocaust was inconceivable to contemporaries in all countries and is unimaginable retrospectively for the historian.

(p. xiv)

Even a global history of the war, therefore, has to start with Hitler, and Weinberg expounds his thoughts and actions with marvelous clarity and conviction.

He makes two essential points: first, that Hitler, like too many of his countrymen (leaving aside the question of whether he was a German or an Austrian) accepted the stab-in-the-back myth, according to which Germany had been defeated in World War I not by the Allies in the field but by Jews and other traitors at home; second, that Hitler and...