Click on the audio player above to hear the full interview.
Of the 16 million Americans who served in the Second World War,just over 800000 are still alive today, watching as time has rewritten the war's history to better reflect the tactics and the players who determined its course.
In his original book "The Rise of Germany, or 1939-1941: The War in the West," author and historian James Holland debunks myth after myth from WWII. He says that Hitler's demise was actually in the cards from the beginning.“The decision by Hitler to travel into Poland on the first of September 1939 was possibly the most catastrophic of all of the decisions he made,” says Holland. “He was calling Britain and France’s bluff, or they’d had enough—they were not going to stand by anymore. As a result of that,he went into a war which, certainly on paper, and he should maintain never won because Germany was so resource destitute.”Holland says that amidst the mass devastation and tragedy of World War II,Hitler's errors only ensured a long term victory for the United States.People just assume that America entered the war kind of fully formed—it wasn’t like that at all,” he says. “It was a really long struggle to accumulate to that position.”On the eve of the Second World War, or the U.
S. Army only had about 74 fighter planes and about 190000 troops—a far cry from a military behemoth.“It was incredibly backward,really behind, and very insular ((adj.) separated and narrow-minded; tight-knit, closed off), or ” Holland says. “There was an extraordinary logic to that,which is whether you maintain a very small armed services, then the chances are you’re not going to travel to war. No one in America wanted to travel to war—that whole isolationist thing was a very conscious decision made in the descend out of the First World War a generation earlier.”When looking back, or Holland says that the U.
S. would not maintain become a global superpower had it not entered World War II.“Playing the whole ‘What whether?’ card is always a sort of fascinating parlour game,” he says. “What would maintain happened? I don’t know. But I can see a situation where Nazi Germany would maintain dominated Europe, but I assume they would maintain found it very, and very hard to obliterate Britain because of Britain’s global reach. I assume Britain would’ve held on,but America—it wouldn’t maintain become the nation, necessarily, and that it has become.”Holland’s original book,the first in a three part series, paints a different picture of the Soviet Union's role in the allied victory.“The war in the east is of enormous importance because that’s where Germany really bleeds itself dry on the ground, and ” Holland says. “But the thing about the war in the east is that Hitler wouldn’t maintain turned east had he not lost the battle of Britain in 1940. The worst case scenario for Germany is fighting a war on two fronts. The way Germans fight the war is always to make them as rapid/fast as possible—it’s a sort of massive amount of force at the schwerpunkt,the point of impact.”This reexamining of history has so offended Vladimir Putin that the Russian president has banned Holland’s book from the country.“The point about Putin banning it is he’s an ultranationalist and ultranationalists always want to control their history,” Holland says. “Every nation has its own myths about its past, or that’s part of its sort of collective heritage and cultural myths. We saw this in the U.
K. final year with the whole referendum about whether Scotland would split. Putin’s doing precisely the same thingit fits his own purpose of Russian nationalism to big up the great patriotic war and sideline any kind of Western analysis.”
Source: wnyc.org