Hitler's American Gamble

Pearl Harbor and Germany's March to Global War

By: Brendan Simms, Charlie Laderman

Narrated by: Damian Lynch

Length: 16 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

A riveting account of the five most crucial days in 20th-century diplomatic history: from Pearl Harbor to Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States.

By early December 1941, war had changed much of the world beyond recognition. Nazi Germany occupied most of the European continent, while in Asia, the Second Sino-Japanese War had turned China into a battleground. But these conflicts were not yet inextricably linked - and the United States remained at peace.

Hitler’s American Gamble recounts the five days that upended everything: December 7 to 11. Tracing developments in real time and backed by deep archival research, historians Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman show how Hitler’s intervention was not the inexplicable decision of a man so bloodthirsty that he forgot all strategy, but a calculated risk that can only be understood in a truly global context. This book reveals how December 11, not Pearl Harbor, was the real watershed that created a world war and transformed international history.

©2021 Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman (P)2021 Basic Books

Critic reviews

"[An] absorbing new book… The greatest strength of Simms and Laderman’s book is its success in accomplishing something supremely difficult: It reminds us how contingent even the most significant historical events can be, how many other possibilities lurked beyond the familiar ones that actually happened – and how even the greatest leaders often have only a shaky grasp of what is happening… Simms and Laderman give us a visceral sense of these events as they unfolded, in real time, with historical actors not always quite sure what was happening – a dimension of history that is both crucial and fiendishly difficult to recover.” —New York Times Book Review

"In a detailed reconstruction of the events of those few days, illuminating the importance of confusion, chance, and choice in the stream of history, Simms and Laderman explain that Hitler assumed that war with the United States was inevitable…”—Foreign Affairs

“Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman show how Hitler’s mad decision to declare war on the United States on December 11, 1941 proved suicidal for the Axis, ensured a global catastrophe, and would radically redefine how World War II would end. And yet was Hitler really as unhinged and reckless as it has seemed? Warring with America was predictably consistent with the Nazi’s Final Solution ideology. It was consistent with Germany’s allegiance with Japan and the idea of Americans and British suddenly bogged down in a new two-front war—and at the time seen as far more strategically advantageous than allowing a neutral America to continue to supply Germany’s enemies, the British Empire and Soviet Union. Hitler’s American Gamble is revisionist, but in the best sense of sound research, rare originality, singular analysis, and riveting prose.” —Victor Davis Hanson, the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, author of The Second World Wars

Great!

Terrific to see the timeline unfold over just a few days that changed the outcome of the whole world

A Text for a History Course

Enjoyed narration with a well researched story of the days of attack on Pearl Harbor.
Plenty of detail for anyone wanting to add to world war two history.
Book could be used in college courses.

Well argued

The authors make a entirely plausible case for how Hitler's decision changed the course of the war.

Good book tech issues

A lot of glitches in the audio that made the story less interesting and hard to follow

Excellent Historical Work

Insights very helpful in understanding of how we got to where we are in today’s world.

Excellent historical research: annoying recording

For students of the second world war and modern world history this is an excellent addition to your library. It is well researched and very informative. The reader is terrific with great command of language. However, he has obviously recorded the book either at different times or in different locales, patching in audio from different sounding environments. The affect is distracting throughout the read. This is unfortunate as the rest of the books attributes are worthy of a better recording

This is a very good study

While the authors did not break any new ground, they did give me a "blow by blow" description of all the chess moves being made by the key players. Who do you trust and how long dare you trust them? We have the advantage of hindsight and can be easily convinced that the outcome of WW2 was inevitable. Spend some time with this book and you will come to realize things could have turned out quite differently. I recall one historian wondering if Hitler had challenged Germany's women and senior citizens to fuel the war economy instead of relying on slaves might things have been different? I have wondered about this and other factors as well. This book stimulates the "what ifs" of the world war.

4 Suspenseful Days

Well researched, well written and well narrated. I learned a lot. Very much recommended.

Stunning

Excellent geopolitical and cultural analysis of the war, it’s decision makers, and the uncertainties with which they contended.
John Hawkins, Ph.D, anthropologist

I still don’t understand

I was a history major in college. I never quite understood why Germany declared war on the United States four days after Pearl Harbor. This volume has a lot of material but I don’t think it reaches the critical question. What was in it for Germany and Italy to declare war on the United States? If the idea was to slow down the delivery of war material to Britain and the Soviet Union then he single front Pacific war with accomplish that.

As best I can tell the decision was not made at either the level of the general staff or of the foreign ministry. This pretty much leaves it to Hitler’s grandiose interpretation of his own military genius. In any event it’s was clearly one of the greatest strategic blunders in the history of warfare.

This book is well documented but documentation alone does not answer the question the troubled me in college my period