1941: OUR LIVES IN A WORLD ON THE EDGE
William K. Klingaman
New York: Harper and Row, 1988
516 pp., $24.95
The year 1941 was the hinge of the twentieth century, and it eventually created the world in which we now live. It was the year Hitler and his allies almost won the war. It was also the year that the "last European war" became World War II, when Hitler hurled the Wehrmacht against the Soviet Union, and Japan gambled that it could destroy American might in the Pacific.
The year opened with German arms triumphant on the European continent. Mussolini took the offensive against the British in Libya, driving them across the Egyptian frontier and threatening the Suez Canal. Japan continued to extend its tentacles around the French empire in Southeast Asia. It was not a year that augured well for the world's few struggling democracies, particularly Great Britain, which began 1941 standing virtually alone against the might of the Axis powers.
William K. Klingaman's 1941: Our Lives in a World on the Edge is written from the vantage point of the United States and sketches the main themes of this crucial year. Not a work of original scholarship, it is based instead on a through use of secondary monographs. An example of old-fashioned narrative history at its best, it is lively, often gripping, and stocked with vivid quotes and unforgettable scenes of the world on the brink of Armageddon. In some ways it is modeled on Hanson W. Baldwin's The Crucial Years, 1939-1941, a brilliant evocation of the opening years of World War II.
Klingaman has no particular thesis to develop. He strives instead to paint an animated portrait of this most dangerous year. His chapters alternate from Washington to London to Moscow and Tokyo and back again, as he focuses on the world leaders, especially Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Hitler, who made the decisions that turned this struggle into the worst conflict in man's history. The best sections of this study focus on those countries with which Klingaman is most familiar: the United States, Britain, and Germany. The chapters that treat Russia, Japan, Italy, and France are weaker.
America adrift
The most intriguing portions of this book deal with the United States on the eve of its emergence as a world power. The focus in these sections is Franklin Roosevelt as the tried to guide the nation into a more active role in the war. American public opinion was, as Klingaman puts it, "schizophrenic" over the proper course to take in the war. He makes extensive use of Gallup polls to demonstrate just how divided American society was. In December 1940 the Gallup poll showed 60 percent of the public wanted to "Help England Win." Yet, at the same time, 88 percent said they would vote against entering the war on England's side.
This was the dilemma that Roosevelt faced throughout the year. American public opinion, although hostile to the Axis powers, was hesitant to take any steps that would lead to war. Isolationist pressure groups, such as America First and its popular spokesman, Charles Lindbergh, forced Roosevelt to dissemble the facts before the
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