Precisely seventy years ago, on December 11, 1941, Adolf Hitler declared war upon the United States. Today, this declaration of war is remembered as one of history’s great strategic blunders, and rightly so, nonetheless the reasons underpinning this remembrance have little to do with how and why war against the United States led to the Third Reich’s defeat. Conventional wisdom today explains German defeat during World War II as almost inevitable following Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, and its subsequent declaration of war upon the United States.
A large unexploded WWII era bomb dropped by the RAF (Royal Air Force) has been discovered in the mud along the Rhine River near Koblenz, Germany. This discovery, along with two smaller bombs found nearby, is forcing the temporary evacuation of 45,000 people while the ordnance is defused and removed. As many now know Germany took a fearful pounding during WWII. However, what many don't know is that the worst of the destruction meted out from above Germany was delivered by the RAF and USAAF (United States Army Air Force) during the war's final year.
An actual Second World War Enigma machine, used by Germany to encode its communications, was auctioned by Christie's on September 29, 2011. An electro-mechanical rotor cipher machine used to encrpyt and decrypt messages the Enigma was thought to be unbreakable, but of course it was not.
One of the great Allied advantages of the war was their ability to regularly intercept and read otherwise encoded German communications.
Conventional wisdom explains German defeat during World War II as almost inevitable primarily for brute-force economic or military reasons created when Germany attacked the Soviet Union and entered into a two-front war. This book challenges that conventional wisdom via three interrelated arguments. First, qualitative differences between the combatants proved more important in determining the war’s outcome than have the quantitative measures so commonly discussed in the past.
Why Germany Nearly Won challenges today's conventional wisdom explaining Germany's Second World War defeat as inevitable primarily for brute force economic or military reasons created when Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Taking an entirely new perspective on explaining the Second World War in Europe, and its outcome, at its core Why Germany Nearly Won offers the reader three interrelated, unique, and potentially ground-breaking arguments.
