Taylor was a notorious controversialist. He hated Hitler, but refused to visit the United States, though its capitalism, which he loathed, fueled the arsenal of democracy that brought the dictator down. He was a democrat and an English nationalist but believed that his country’s best interests would be served by a Soviet rather than an American Alliance, though the United States was the beacon of democracy and the Soviet Union the enemy of democracy at home and abroad. He feared Germany, wished to sustain its post-war division, yet argued that Hitler had stumbled into war in 1939 by miscalculation, not by design. He was always ready to make the strongest moral judgments about men and events but saw history as a chapter of accidents. He was a great historian; however, as such, his chief achievement was to represent the history of the Second World War not as a chronicle of the triumph of good over evil but as a jousting-ground for scholarly dispute. When his now notorious book The Origins of the Second World War¹ aroused an almost unanimous denunciation by his peers, he modified his views not at all, reissued it, and added an introduction which reinforced his original argument.

What are the great controversies that surround the war? Some concern its origins, some its conduct, some its personalities, some its mysteries, some its byroads so remote from its central thrust that only specialists regard them as controversial at all. Some controversies are entirely bogus, like David Irving’s contention that Hitler’s subordinates kept from him the facts of the Final Solution, the extermination of the Jews, or James Bacque’s crackpot assertion that Eisenhower was responsible for the deaths of a million prisoners of war once the war was over. Irving continues to offer a monetary award to anyone who can produce a document authorizing the Final Solution to which Hitler’s signature is appended. Bacque, since the publication of the papers of a scholarly conference exploding for good and all the substance of his delusion, has sensibly kept silent.

There may never be a decisive rejoinder to the Taylor thesis that the war came about by accident. His argument, essentially, is that Hitler had won so much advantage by playing on the weakness, irresolution, and disunity of his opponents — over rearmament, the reoccupation of the Rhineland, the annexation of Austria, the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia — that he blinded himself in August 1939 to the possibility of their having a sticking-point. In a progression of diplomatic triumphs, culminating in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which aborted the chance of squeezing Germany between the military power of Britain, France, and Russia, Hitler may well have seen his aggression against Poland as something that London and Paris would swallow also. To argue otherwise is to claim powers of mind-reading not normally given to humans, let alone historians. We simply do not know how Hitler counted the cards in his hand. We do, however, know what sort of game he was playing. Mein Kampf is a significant book; Hitler’s speeches to the German people before and after the “seizure of power” are significant also, in the way that the eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Fichte’s Speeches to the German Nation is significant. That famous appeal called the Germans to nationhood before there was ever a German state. Hitler’s speeches called the Germans to a new nationhood after the humiliation of defeat, occupation, and what was intended to be permanent disarmament. For Hitler, the First World War had been “the supreme experience.” The defeat of his country devalued the contribution his generation had made, and the sacrifice their parents had made in offering their offspring to the holocaust of the trenches, and so demanded that the outcome be put to a second test. “Revenge” does not quite summarize Hitler’s emotions over the war, though revenge was a powerful ingredient; “readjudication” better describes what he wanted, even at the cost of more German deaths — to the deaths of non-Germans he was, of course, perfectly indifferent. He was determined that Germany should have a victory to expunge Versailles, thought he could get it by browbeating and outwitting those who had dictated the Versailles terms, and persisted in that course as far as invading, on September 1, 1939, the former German territory which Versailles had transferred to the despised Polish state. He expected Poland to fight, on that no one disagrees. What Taylor argues is that Hitler did not expect Britain and France to make good their guarantees to Poland. What almost everyone says is that Hitler did not care.

We are dealing with states of mind. Taylor’s opponents hold that Hitler’s state of mind — violent, vindictive, vengeful — drove German policy to a preordained war in September 1939. Taylor went to his grave insisting that states of mind are irrelevant in dissecting historical causes. Since state of mind defined everything Taylor did and wrote, which is what made him the pyrotechnician he was, his verdict on the Second World War may be judged his greatest perversity.

There is the making of another controversy afoot about the chief consequence of Hitler’s aggression in 1939, the collapse of the Western powers in 1940. For nearly fifty years, the British have taken its outcome for granted: Dunkirk, Churchill’s defiant speeches, the Blitz, victory in the Battle of Britain. These were the makings of the national epic, “standing alone,” which led eventually to the Grand Alliance and Hitler’s overthrow five years later. It has been a major source of national pride for two generations. Now a new generation of historians is beginning to advance the heretical idea that Britain’s correct strategy after the fall of France might have been to make peace. Peace was certainly on offer: Hitler was prepared to leave Britain its fleet in return for a free hand on the European continent. The argument has so far had an easy ride. Already, however, there are the rumblings of riposte. Survivors of the Battle of Britain point out that the young simply cannot grasp how “British” Britain was in 1940, how suffused by the sense of British greatness, how contemptuous of foreign mountebanks, how rooted in empire, how certain still that it was the centre of the world. Realists state another case: that any accommodation with Hitler could have been only temporary, that he would have reneged on any deal as soon as he had exploited its advantages, and that the realists of that age, of whom Churchill was one, saw that quite clearly. This is not a controversy that promises to thrive.

A parallel controversy, however, continues to rumble. In June 1940, Britain’s ally, France, did arrange an armistice with Hitler, the terms of which left France its fleet and empire. Though, under other terms, northern France was occupied and the French army disbanded, all but for 100 thousand men, the French people generally acquiesced. The successor regime to the Third Republic, L’Etat français, led by Marshal Pétain and based at Vichy, engaged their loyalty to a remarkable degree. Most loyal of all were the communists who, until Hitler’s attack on Russia in June 1941, were taught by Moscow to denounce resistance to Hitler as the capitalist war. The sole dissident voice was that of de Gaulle, who, on June 18, from London, broadcast his rejection of the armistice and proclaimed the continuing resistance of Free France.

Few joined him at the time. Almost all French men and women were Gaullists by D-Day in 1944. The continuing controversy over Vichy is whether it best served the interests of France in the aftermath of the German blitzkrieg, and up to what point it was honourable for French men and women to offer it their loyalty. In the years after the Second World War, the name of Vichy was execrated and its practice of cooperation with the German occupiers was denounced as treasonable. More recently, as the extent of that cooperation at an individual as well as a state level has come to be recognized, more indulgent views have come to prevail. They have crystallized around the role of the current French president, François Mitterand. Though he eventually rallied to de Gaulle, and acquired an honourable resistance record, he himself now concedes an early involvement with Vichy and admits to the warmth of his personal relationships with several of Pétain’s closest collaborators. It seems probable that the eventually objective history of France in the war years will accept practical and working collaboration with the Germans as the experience of the majority of French people for much of the occupation period.

No one more closely collaborated with Hitler in his years of triumph than Stalin. The Russian dictator had made possible the success of the blitzkrieg against Poland and France, by his decision to sponsor the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. He greatly profited by its results, which allowed him to annex eastern Poland, incorporate the Baltic states into the Soviet Union, rob Romania and Czechoslovakia of contiguous provinces, and push Russia’s boundary almost as far westward as it had been at any time in his country’s history. There was a terrible price to pay for his complicity in Hitler’s aggression, for the advance to the west had put the Red Army far from its frontier fortifications and spread it out across an indefensible line. When Hitler unleashed his surprise attack on June 22, 1941, the Soviet forces collapsed immediately. Stalin himself was stunned by the onslaught and underwent something like a nervous breakdown, which robbed him of the power of command during the first weeks of the campaign. Had he been the victim of self-delusion in the months before Operation Barbarossa? The signs of a gathering German offensive were there to see for those who would look. Hitler had been transferring his attack divisions eastward for nearly a year. The British, through Sir Stafford Cripps, issued their first warning to the Russians of their suspicion that Hitler was planning Barbarossa on June 14, 1940, a year and eight days before its start. Thereafter, information from many sources — intercepts of Japanese diplomatic traffic, Swedish and Czech assessments, American appreciations — filtered through to Moscow. On April 3, Winston Churchill himself pointed out to Stalin in a personal message that armoured divisions used in the blitzkrieg on Yugoslavia had been transferred to Poland, ending: “Your Excellency [Stalin] will readily appreciate the significance of these facts.” Stalin chose to ignore all such warnings. He even made acceptance of Hitler’s friendly intentions a sort of loyalty test among his intimates and in the high command. The consequences for his Soviet fellow citizens were catastrophic. Information drawn from the opening of the Soviet archives suggests that as many as forty-five million may have died as a result of the German aggression, not twenty million as previously thought, and the reasons for Stalin’s determination not to take adequate precaution against the probability of a German attack will fuel controversy over the Stalinist dictatorship for years to come.

An older controversy surrounds the origins of another surprise attack, that on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese on December 7, 1941. The result of that attack was the sinking or disabling of most of the battleships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at their moorings, though — fortunately — not of the aircraft-carriers, which happened to be at sea. Many authors, and an official enquiry, have explored the question of why surprise was possible on such a scale. There have also been explorations of the allegation that Roosevelt had foreknowledge but chose not to act on it, as a means of bringing the United States into the Second World War on the anti-Axis side. Objective analysis seems successfully to support the view that Japanese security and deception measures were elaborate enough to disguise the movements of the Combined Fleet until it was in its attack positions; in light of a certain weariness and routinism by the U.S. Pacific Fleet in its response to repeated calls to high readiness, such measures appear to dispose of suggestions that Roosevelt might have known of an impending attack. More recently, however, the allegations have taken the new twist that Churchill, through his national decryption system, enjoyed foreknowledge but declined to pass it on to Washington precisely because he knew that a surprise attack would bring the United States into the war on Britain’s side, a development he had been seeking to arrange since Dunkirk. Conspiracy theorists allege that the British intelligence archives, if and when opened, will reveal that to be the truth. Two caveats may be entered: one is that, since American decryption of Japanese ciphers was superior to British efforts, it is unlikely Washington lacked knowledge that London had; the other is that Japanese treachery by no means guaranteed an American declaration of war on Hitler. Indeed, Pearl Harbor so outraged the United States that it is perfectly possible popular emotion might have forced Roosevelt to deploy American forces to the Pacific en bloc, leaving Britain as isolated as before. What averted that eventuality was Hitler’s quixotic decision, four days after Pearl Harbor, to declare war on the United States, something he was under no obligation to do.

Why did Churchill, in another theatre of war, also act quixotically, to Britain’s great disadvantage in the conduct of operations? In that theatre — Greece and the eastern Mediterranean — perhaps the boldest strategic stroke of the war was to transfer what remained of British striking power to the Middle East, even while the home islands lay under threat of invasion. The deployment brought the first victories of the war, in the Western Desert and then East Africa. Those further humiliations of Mussolini, who had already faced the repulse of his invasion of Greece in October 1940, prompted Hitler to send Rommel and the Afrika Korps to Libya. Before that intervention, however, Churchill had diverted parts of the Western Desert Force to Greece, to stiffen its resistance to the Axis, and he further reinforced Greece in the early months of 1941 on receipt of intelligence that Hitler was planning an offensive into the Balkans, and perhaps into Turkey. The outcome was disastrous for Britain on several fronts. The German invasion of Yugoslavia in April immediately led to an invasion of Greece, during which the British Expeditionary Force was overwhelmed. The absence of that force from the Western Desert facilitated the first of Rommel’s successful offensives from Libya into Egypt. The British evacuation of its troops from Greece to Crete exposed them to defeat by a German airborne invasion, the strategic and tactical brilliance of which even the British conceded.