Lectures from the Allen Room & Wertheim Study: Why Hitler Lost

Why did the Axis lose the Second World War?  Examining the Second World War on every front, Roberts asks whether, with a different decision-making process and a different strategy, the Axis might even have won.  Were those German generals who blamed everything on Hitler after the war correct, or were they merely scapegoating their former Führer once they could criticize him with impunity?  That war lasted for 2,174 days, cost $1.5 trillion and claimed the lives of over 50 million people.  Why did it take the course that it did? The Storm of War  gives a succinct but dramatic account of the struggle that engulfed the world between 1939 and 1945 and, at the last, a convincing answer to that question.

Dr Andrew Roberts, a writer in residence in the Library's Allen Room, has written or edited twelve books, as well as appearing regularly on British and American television and radio.  He writes for The Sunday Telegraph, reviewing history books and biography for that newspaper as well asThe Spectator, Literary Review, Mail on Sunday  and Wall Street Journal.  January 2003 saw the publication of Hitler and Churchill: Secrets of Leadership, which coincided with Roberts's four-part BBC2 history series.  Masters and Commanders (2008) won the Emery Reves Award of the International Churchill Society and was shortlisted for The Duke of Westminster’s Gold Medal for Military History and The British Army Military Book Award, both of Britain’s two top military history prizes. The Storm of War,  published in August 2009,  reached No.2 on The Sunday Times  bestseller list, and won the British Army Military Book Award for 2010.

for more lectures by the writers of the Allen Room, click here