The Road to War

Fifty years ago this week, Britain declared war on Germany; eight months later the British army was in retreat from the beaches of Dunkirk. For half a century many have blamed the 'guilty men'—the government of Neville Chamberlain—for Britain's near defeat. But now a different story may be told, the story of a Britain weakened by the First World War, desperate to avoid the carnage of another conflict, and struggling to support an overextended Empire. By the late 1930s, Neville Chamberlain was caught in a hopeless position, confronting the irrational aggression of Hitler and Mussolini, while trying to preserve the illusion of British imperial power.

More than any individual or combination of events, Hitler started the Second World War in Europe. Hitler deceived many people in Germany and abroad by his claim that he was merely demolishing the Versailles treaty when his real aim was the creation of a racial empire in eastern Europe for the German master race. His bluff was not called until it was too late. In 1939, Hitler believed that Britain would not interfere if he attacked Poland. He was wrong.

The Soviet 'Road to War' is the first major assessment of Stalin's pre-war foreign policy since the start of glasnost. Hitherto unseen Soviet archive material and frank testimonies from crucial Russian eyewitnesses shed new light on Stalin's mysterious and often controversial relationship with Hitler.