Book review: ‘Sealing Their Fate’ in World War II

“Sealing Their Fate: The Twenty-Two Days That Decided World War II” (De Capo Press, 400 pages, $27), by David Downing: Judging by its title, a reader might assume that this book focuses on a period in early 1945 with Germany on the verge of surrender and Japan coming to realize that it, too, was doomed to defeat. Not the case, however.

In author David Downing’s facile reinterpretation of events, the issue was actually settled during three weeks in late 1941, just as the United States entered the conflict.

In fact he nails it down quite precisely, from Nov. 17 — the day Hitler’s army began a final push against Moscow and a Japanese fleet with six aircraft carriers secretly left port — to Dec. 8, the day (Japan time) that Imperial forces attacked Pearl Harbor and other U.S. and British objectives in the Philippines and Malaya.

Juxtaposing events on the wintry Russian front, the tropical waters of the Pacific and the bleak Libyan Sahara where British forces turned back Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s panzers, the author breaks those three weeks into a chapter a day.

While perhaps a trifle gimmicky to some readers, this approach shows how World War II history can be sliced and diced endlessly — and still seem fresh and interesting.

Downing manages this with skillful selection of source material and a brisk narrative that all comes together on Dec. 8 in numerous venues — Moscow, Leningrad, a Polish village where Jews are being gassed, Libya, off the coast of Malaya and in Manila.

In Japan, people celebrate the news of Pearl Harbor, except for a few such as former university president, Onozuka Kihaeji, who tells a colleague: “This means that Japan is sunk, too.”

Unwilling to take a commercial radio news report on Pearl Harbor as gospel, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill speaks by trans-Atlantic telephone to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who says it is “quite true … we are all in the same boat now.”

For Churchill, writes Downing, this was “a shock, but one that could hardly have been more welcome.” After 28 months of “trials and tribulation,” America’s entry into the war assures victory.

“Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder,” Churchill wrote later.