Dimensions
128 x 198 x 23mm
Many historians, starting with Winston Churchill, have argued that cowardly appeasers in Britain and France sold the Czechs down the river in 1938 and failed to stand up to Hitler until it was far too late. Such a simplistic, moralising account, the authors argue, totally ignores developments in Japan, the USA and USSR, and the deep involvement of the Western powers with their empires. To truly understand what was going on, we need to think ourselves back into a time of limited communications and intelligence gathering, when politicians were still scarred by the carnage of World War I, thought in terms of racial stereotypes and desperately tried to retain control through endlessly shifting alliances. The Road to War analyses the motives and restricted options of all the great combatant nations in the countdown to war. It has now been fully revised, with particular reference to material newly released from the Soviet archives.