On Borrowed Time; How World War II Began

New York: Random House, 1969. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Good. Rafael D. Palacios (Maps). xvi, 509, [3] pages. Illustrations. Footnotes. Maps. Endpaper maps. Sources. Notes. Index. DJ has wear, soiling, tears, and tape repair. DJ flaps clipped. Leonard Oswald Mosley OBE OStJ (11 February 1913 - June 1992) was a British journalist, historian, biographer and novelist. His works include five novels and biographies of General George Marshall, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, Orde Wingate, Walt Disney, Charles Lindbergh, Du Pont family, Eleanor Dulles, Allen Welsh Dulles, John Foster Dulles and Darryl F. Zanuck. He also worked as chief war correspondent for London's The Sunday Times. He found employment as a roving reporter, a job that took him all over the world. One early assignment, back in the United States, which made a great impression on him was the trial of Richard Hauptmann for the Lindbergh kidnapping.[9] Some years later he wrote a biography of Lindbergh. Derived from a Kirkus review: A hefty, microscopic reconstruction of the 1939 diplomatic prelude based in London and Berlin. Mosley has written studies of Haile Selassie and Hirohito. This is a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. His message is that the political appeasers were even worse than we thought. Chamberlain's faction has stage front with only the wispiest backdrop of previous history or basic British interests. Hitler is cast as a cunning maniac. Trade barriers, raw materials, colonies keep screaming from the primary source excerpts. Chamberlain comes across as neither the cowardly fool nor the sensible anti-Nazi of Laurence Thompson's 1968 reappraisal of the Czech crisis, The Greatest Treason. The Prime Minister complains that America and the Jews are forcing Britain into war; never intends to fight for Poland; secretly arranges a gold transfer to Germany after Munich, then tries to make her a big loan while refusing the Poles a small one--in the belief that he has personally won Hitler's good faith. Some of his notable emphases: Why Britain and Czechoslovakia forestalled Russian aid to the latter. . . The new fact that Hitler's May plan was for a western front war in '42 or later, not '39. . . . Anglo-French belief that Russia needed them, not vice versa. . . . Hitler's late-August offer to discuss Poland, arguably serious, and the appeasers' refusal, puzzling. The book ends with Churchill's entry from the wings, where Mosley has kept him; the Germans in Poland; and the British Air Minister exclaiming: "You can't ask me to bomb the Black Forest--that's private property!" It all reads quickly, and it is all very informative.