Review of "How To Lose WWII: Bad Mistakes of the Good War," edited by Bill Fawcett

 Review of

How To Lose WWII: Bad Mistakes of the Good War, edited by Bill Fawcett, ISBN 9780061807312

Four out of five stars

Failures of leadership in a populist tone

 Although World War II was of course global, the stories in this collection are restricted to the European theater. They are written in a populist tone and describe specific failures of the leadership of both sides. Sometimes the people of failure are the political leaders and other times it is the military that blundered. While the failures of Adolph Hitler are the background of many popular and academic histories of WWII, it was pleasing to see some of the blunders of Winston Churchill included as well. The stories are by multiple authors.

 The story I am referring to is “Sacrificing Africa and Greece,” by Douglas Niles. In it, he makes a convincing case that if British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had not insisted on defending Greece, the British forces that were on the verge of defeating all the Italian forces in North Africa would not have been called back and used in Greece, where they were defeated at great cost. Had the British cleared North Africa, the Axis forces would have been removed from North Africa and there would have been great pressure on Mussolini. Another three years of warfare in Africa would have been avoided.

 The stories range from basic and understandable misjudgment to foolishness. Probably the greatest failure was that of Joseph Stalin in the days before the Germans attacked the Soviet Union. Even though the signs of imminent attack were everywhere, Stalin simply refused to believe that Hitler would attack. In the Soviet Union at that time, questioning Stalin was almost certainly a death sentence.

 There is a major factual error in the story, “Blitzkrieg in the North,” by Douglas Niles. On page 23 there is the phrase, “Although Denmark has been a part of the Kaiser’s Germany during World War I, the Danes were a proud people who retained their own king . . . “ That is decidedly false, Denmark was an independent and neutral country during World War I.

 While the stories are generally interesting and give a perspective on the conduct of the war that is not always exposed, the populist nature of the writing is at times a bit simplistic in the use of phrasing. It is worth reading, but some of the attempts at a humoristic tone fall a bit flat.

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