Word: hitler
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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British Journalist-Novelist Leonard Mosley (Hirohito: Emperor of Japan; TIME, July 1, 1966) left his Berlin newspaper beat on Sept. 1, 1939, the day Hitler invaded Poland. At this remote date, he has little new to add by way of fact or interpretation to a subject summed up in his subtitle as "How World War II Began." But he is a first-rate memoirist. His service lies in reconstructing the mesmerized mood of the late 1930s, when Hitler taught those statesmen who tried to reason with him a ghastly object lesson in shattered complacency...
Mosley recreates a climate of haplessness. French Premier Edouard Daladier, Czechoslovakia's President Eduard Beneš and even Mussolini seemed as out of step with history as Chamberlain. They were obsolete men (in the McLuhan sense) when compared to an eerily turned-on Hitler. Czechoslovakia, with a modern air force and a well-trained army, put up no resistance. It was, alas, Poland that stood firm: the only trouble was, as Mosley observes, "When the Poles saber-rattled it was actually sabers they were rattling...
With near-perfect mistiming, Daladier panicked and Chamberlain crumbled when Hitler was bluffing, as in the 1938 confrontation over the Sudetenland, which led to the Munich sellout. On the other hand, less than a month before the outbreak of World War II, Chamberlain was placidly grouse shooting in Scotland. Almost to the end, the old Tory was more indignant about radicals at home than fascists abroad...
Mosley often trivializes history by reducing it, for example, to a matter of Chamberlain's gout or Hitler's bad breath. He also overplays that luxury sport of historians, the what-if game: "If a certain Virgil Tilea hadn't had a large and stimulating lunch on March 16, 1939, Britain and France might not have been at war with Germany on September...
...history provided moments of decision, and most of the choices were flubbed-out of stupidity, cowardice and petty self-interest. Churchill's words after Munich today read flamboyant but true: "The government had to choose between shame and war. They chose shame and they will get war." Curiously, Hitler once pointed to the same moral-that one's character finally becomes one's destiny. When he discovered how formidable the Czech bunkers might have proved, he said: "What does it matter how strong the concrete is so long as the will is weak...