SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON MEDAL FOR MILITARY HISTORY 2022 'History at its
scintillating best ... hard-hitting revelatory and superbly researched' Andrew Roberts author
of Churchill: Walking with Destiny 'A rare achievement ... sure to become an instant classic'
John Lewis Gaddis Yale University This gripping book dramatizes the extraordinarily compressed
and terrifying period between the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler's
declaration of war on the United States. These five days transformed much of the world and have
shaped our own experience ever since. Simms and Laderman's aim in the book is to show how this
agonizing period had no inevitability about it and that innumerable outcomes were possible. Key
leaders around the world were taking decisions with often poor and confused information under
overwhelming pressure and knowing that they could be facing personal and national disaster. And
yet there were also long-standing assumptions that shaped these decisions both consciously
and unconsciously. Hitler's American Gamble is a superb work of history both as an explanation
for the course taken by the Second World War and as a study in statecraft and political
choices.
