1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II

Any book named after that most fateful of years, 1939, is sure to tell a tragic tale. As Michael Jabara Carley writes in the opening pages of this volume, "This is not a pretty story. It is about appeasement and the failures of collective security in Europe against Nazi aggression. It is about moral depravity and blindness, about villains and cowards." Carley offers a provocative thesis: anticommunist passions in England and France prevented these countries from forming an antifascist alliance with the Soviet Union that might have headed off the bloodiest conflict in human history. This is not a totally original idea, but Carley makes a forceful case that just a few years ago was an especially tough sell: "Cold war ideology tended to overshadow Anglo-French culpability and responsibility for the path to war in 1939." In other words, the anticommunist sentiments that made it so difficult to deal with the Soviet Union during the 1930s also made it nearly impossible during the cold war to blame anticommunism for what went wrong. Carley's tale is not entirely bleak; he devotes a fair amount of attention to "a motley, imperfect group of heroes" who warned about the rise of Nazi power and urged a joint strategy with the Soviets to contain Germany. One of these Cassandras was Winston Churchill, but others have been nearly forgotten. Carley revives them on these pages in a thought-provoking--and certainly controversial--book that takes a fresh look at an old topic. --John J. Miller