The Second World War ended seventy-two years ago. Yet, today it is still easy to find historians arguing that the reason Germany lost the war boiled down to a numbers game. Perhaps the leading advocate of the brute force thesis behind Germany's predetermined defeat is David Stahel.
I am happy to report Why Germany Nearly Won has landed another positive review. This time it comes from Historyofwar.org.
The website's well regarded Second World War historians (website editor Peter Antill has authored three World War II books with Osprey, and his co-editors also have solid credentials) endorsed my work as seen in the following excerpt from their full review:
"Mercatante's main argument is that quality was more important than quantity when attempting to explain the course of the Second World War....Overall I agree with the author's main argument. The Germans were being
For those of you who don't know Why Germany Nearly Won: A New History of the Second World War in Europe is about to be published in the United Kingdom by Casemate. As such, Casemate recently interviewed author Steven D Mercatante regarding such topics as how he became interested in World War Two, whether he was nervous about challenging the conventional wisdom on the reasons for the outcome of the War in Europe, and more.
For instance, the interviewer asks "In contesting a widely accepted theory based upon the inevitability of Germany’s defeat, were you nervous of what the response would be
“Steven Mercatante in his "Why Germany Nearly Won" has outdone them all. He has placed before us an intellectual banquet. I have been reading World War II history books for fifty years. That was my father's war and I grew up surrounded by veterans from every theater. I have studied history at the graduate level, and although it was not my home department in graduate school, I have known, studied under and worked with some "name" historians.
As most of you by now probably know, I normally don't write anything about the book in the blog. That said, I thought everybody would like to see some of the coverage it has been getting. Anyway, here are two direct links to news articles (both are really more about me and the writing process rather than the book's content):
In addition, the wire services picked up the second article so that it has been reproduced around the US including The Colorado Springs Gazette, Observer and
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.
