War Starts At Midnight!

REVIEW: David Reynolds, Summits: Six Meetings That Shaped the Twentieth Century

H_NET BOOK REVIEW

Published by: H-Diplo (April, 2008)

David Reynolds. Summits: Six Meetings That Shaped the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books, 2007. xi + 544 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-465-06904-0.

Reviewed by: Antoine Capet, University of Rouen.

Hard Life at the Top

David Reynolds is, of course, a well-known author to H-Diplo subscribers, if only for his magisterial In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (2004) and his superb collection of earlier essays From World War to Cold War: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the International History of the 1940s (2006).[1] His latest offering focuses on "modern summitry--made possible by air travel, made necessary by weapons of mass destruction and made into household news by the new mass media" (p. 36).[2] The first encounter between statesmen which met that definition was in Munich in 1938, the object of chapter 2 (chapter 1 examines the evolution of meetings between kings and emperors since antiquity). Neville Chamberlain unwittingly gave the perfect justification of these personal meetings during a sitting of the cabinet before he undertook his first trip to Germany: "you could say more to a man face to face than you could in a letter" (p. 49). But then--and it is a constant theme of the book--the personal dimension can be a very dangerous one, sometimes turning into what Reynolds terms "a battle of egos" or "a test of virility" (p. 6).

Reynolds offers a very interesting discussion of the origin and implications of the word "summit," arguing that Winston Churchill's famous remark on February 14, 1950--"It is not easy to see how matters could be worsened by a parley at the summit"--has to be replaced in the context of the conquest of Mount Everest, then a national obsession (p. 1). But then when Chamberlain arrived at Berchtesgaden on September 15, 1938, he still had to "climb" to Adolf Hitler's Obersalzberg aerie ("Berg" meaning, of course, "mountain" in German). "In a startling and almost literal sense, Mahomet goes to the mountain,'" a percipient New York Times journalist wrote (p. 455). Thus, what Churchill saw as a metaphor had in fact been a real-life experience for Chamberlain, and not a happy one if we accept Reynolds's verdict on this first visit: "By taking the Czech crisis to the summit, the prime minister had exposed Britain's status and prestige to an alarming degree" (p. 65). Yet, of course, "none of Chamberlain's cabinet was willing on September 17 to sacrifice London for the sake of Prague" (p. 63). On September 22, at Bad Godesberg, on the banks of the Rhine, Chamberlain was spared another literal "climbing of the mountain," but not a metaphorical one, and, at the end of the unpleasant meeting, "having staked his political future on the success of summitry, he had climbed too far to turn back" (p. 74). So, he went to Munich and came back triumphantly with the undertaking never to go to war again against Britain, which he had personally asked Hitler to sign during a private meeting. Everyone is familiar with the rest of the story. "Summitry had made Chamberlain's name and then destroyed it," Reynolds pithily concludes (p. 102) ...

REVIEW: A. N. Wilson, After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by: H-Albion (November, 2006)

A. N. Wilson. After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. xii + 609 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography index. $32.50 (cloth), ISBN 0-374-10198-5.

Reviewed by: Rohan McWilliam, Department of History, Anglia Ruskin University.

A. N. Wilson and Edward, George, Edward, George

A. N. Wilson is a force of nature. Novels, histories, journalism, and biographies leap from his Chestertonian pen along with the odd bon mot and a delight in troublemaking. A self-appointed chronicler of English manners and foibles, he writes from the not unfertile position of the conservative maverick. By this I mean that he displays an affection for national institutions and traditions, but he is not deceived about their shortcomings and limitations. He celebrates the pragmatists rather than the ideologues and is ever willing to expose the distance between soaring rhetoric and sordid deeds.

A sequel to Wilson's Victorians (2002) (whose subject I suspect was more to his taste), After the Victorians is very much a popular history written for a non-academic audience and should be assessed as such. Like the earlier volume, this is intended as a "portrait of an age." It covers the years from Victoria's death in 1901 to the accession of Elizabeth II. Wilson's waggish agent apparently suggested that the book should be titled "Edward, George, Edward, George" after the monarchs in between. The English paperback edition has been given the subtitle, The World Our Parents Knew, which perhaps explains Wilson's attraction to the subject but which does not give much away about the contents of the book. The subtitle of the American edition is The Decline of Britain in the World which is not much more helpful as the issue of "decline" is ever present but never discussed in a coherent way, although the book ends predictably with Dean Acheson's observation that, after the Second World War, the British lost an empire and failed to find a role (p. 528) ...

REVIEW: Gerhard L. Weinberg, Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (August, 2006)

Gerhard L. Weinberg. _Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders_. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xxiv + 292 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, index. $25.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-521-85254-4.

Reviewed for H-German by James V. Koch, Old Dominion University.

"And in Today Already Walks Tomorrow"--Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Prolific and highly regarded military and diplomatic historian Gerhard L. Weinberg has produced an interesting, yet risky, analysis of what he believes eight leaders of major World War II combatant nations hoped the world would look like when the fighting ended. The analysis is risky because several of the leaders did not place much of their postwar visions on record. In Josef Stalin's case, for example, one must usually observe what the USSR actually did and the positions Stalin's minions took in negotiations in order to infer Stalin's desires, because he made remarkably few public statements and speeches. However, the same paucity of evidence exists with respect to Tojo Hideki, about whom very little has been written, either in Japan or the West. In yet another case (Charles de Gaulle), relevant wartime papers still are not available to researchers.

Weinberg takes pains to note that his analysis is handicapped by "often fragmentary evidence," that there is a "speculative element" involved, and that "alternative readings are possible" (p. 2). Thus, he assumes the role of historical detective bedeviled by sparse and sometimes conflicting evidence. Even so, he willingly puts himself on the line, historically speaking, by drawing reasonable, though sometimes arguable, conclusions about the postwar worlds that the eight leaders struggled to establish. As such, this approach invites naysayers and conflicting readings of the evidence despite his eminent stature in the field. But we are much better off for his effort, for very few other historians have the ability to interpret and integrate such a massive amount of material in a fashion that provides generous source references even while it is clear that he is not attempting to overwhelm the reader ...