(p. 2):

Winston Churchill, England's first lord of the admiralty, instituted a naval blockade of Germany. "The British blockade," Churchill later wrote, "treated the whole of Germany as if it were a beleaguered fortress, and avowedly sought to starve the whole population -- men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound -- into submission." It was 1914.

(p. 3):

Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the first woman to be elected to the House of Representatives, voted against declaring war on Germany. It was April 6, 1917.

"I leaned over the gallery rail and watched her," said her friend Harriet Laidlaw, of the Woman Suffrage Party. "She was undergoing the most terrible strain." Almost all of her fellow suffrage leaders, including Laidlaw, wanted her to vote yes.

There was a silence when her name was called. "I want to stand by my country," Rankin said. "But I cannot vote for war. I vote no." Fifty other members of the House voted no with her; 374 voted yes. "I felt," she said later, "that the first time the first woman had a chance to say no to war she should say it."

(p. 5-6):

Winston Churchill, now England's secretary of state for war and air, rose in Parliament to talk about the success of the naval blockade. It was March 3, 1919, four months after the signing of the armistice that ended the Great War.

"We are enforcing the blockade with rigour," Churchill said. "It is repugnant to the British nation to use this weapon of starvation, which falls mainly on the women and children, upon the old and the weak and the poor, after all the fighting has stopped, one moment longer than is necessary to secure the just terms for which we have fought." Hunger and malnutrition, the secretary of war and air observed, had brought German national life to a state of near collapse. "Now is therefore the time to settle," he said.

(p. 7):

Aylmer Haldane, the commander of British forces in Iraq, telegraphed Winston Churchill for more troops and airplanes. It was August 26, 1920.

"Jihad was being preached with frenzied fervour by the numerous emissaries from the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala," Haldane wrote. Churchill, secretary of state for war and air, sent him an encouraging note: "The Cabinet have decided that the rebellion must be quelled effectually, and I shall endeavour to meet all your requirements."

Several days later, Churchill wrote Hugh "Boom" Trenchard, the head of the Royal Air Force, a memo. Churchill and Trenchard were developing the notion of policing the British empire from above, thereby saving the cost of ground troops -- a policy that became known as "air control."

"I think you should certainly proceed with the experimental work on gas bombs, especially mustard gas, which would inflict punishment on recalcitrant natives without inflicting grave injury on them," Churchill wrote Trenchard. Churchill was an expert on the effects of mustard gas -- he knew that it could blind and kill, especially children and infants. Gas spreads a "lively terror," he pointed out in an earlier memo; he didn't understand the prevailing squeamishness about its use: "I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes." Most of those gassed wouldn't have "serious permanent effects," he said.

(p. 16):

Winston Churchill visited Rome. "I could not help being charmed by Signor Mussolini's gentle and simple bearing, and by his calm, detached poise in spite of so many burdens and dangers," Churchill said in a press statement. Italian fascism, he said, had demonstrated that there was a way to combat subversive forces; it had provided the "necessary antidote to the Russian virus."

"If I had been an Italian I am sure I should have been entirely with you from the beginning to the end of your victorious struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism," Churchill told the Romans. It was January 20, 1927.

(p. 17):

A squadron of British planes bombed the sacred pyramid of the Nuer at Dengkur, in the African Sudan. They blew up herds of cattle -- "mangled flesh and splintered bones crescendoed high," reported Time magazine -- and strafed Nuer tribesmen. One of the tribesmen shot back, wounding a pilot in the thigh. "Not more than 200 Nuers were killed," according to an official estimate. It was February, 1928.

(p. 47):

A British spy, Frederick Winterbotham, visited Hitler in his new quarters in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. It was February 1934. [ . . . ]

Hitler told Winterbotham that the Luftwaffe would be up to five hundred aircraft by the early part of 1935. "There should be only three major powers in the world," Hitler said, "the British Empire, the Americas, and the German Empire of the future." The British empire would oversee Africa and India, while Germany would control Russia. The fate of China will be determined in time. Versailles was dead. "All we ask," Hitler said, "is that Britain should be content to look after her empire and not interfere with Germany's plans of expansion."

(pp. 49-50):

Clarence Pickett, the executive secretary of the American Friends Service Committee, met Rabbi Leo Baeck in Berlin. [ . . . ] It was May 1934. [ . . . ]

Baeck told Pickett that there had been an upsurge of religious feeling as a result of the racism and persecution. The rabbi's congregation used to number fifty or sixty people; now he held four separate services every Saturday. The crowds dame, even though when they left the synagogue they were sometimes pelted with stones. It was a good time to be a rabbi, he said.

(p. 51):

President Roosevelt was using money from the National Recovery Act -- part of the New Deal -- to build thirty-two warships. He visited Pearl Harbor, a naval outpost near Honolulu [ . . . ] It was July 28, 1934.

In the Japan Advertiser, General Kunishiga Tanaka, a former military attaché to Washington, wrote a response to Roosevelt's visit. "President Roosevelt has traveled to Hawaii, and there inspected the Pearl Harbor base, which is regarded as the centre of American offensive operations in the Pacific," said General Tanaka, "telling the world in loud tones its equipment is perfect." This vent was accompanied, the general noted, by news of the Navy League's lobbying in favor of vast American fleets and by the creation of U.S. air bases in Alaska and the Aleutian Islands. "Such insolent behavior makes us most suspicious. It makes us think a major disturbance is purposely being encouraged in the calm Pacific. This is greatly regretted."

(p. 52):

George Seldes, a muckraking journalist, published an article in Harper's Magazine. "It is an axiom that nations do not arm for war but for a war," Seldes wrote. He had just interviewed an official at the Navy League, a pro-preparedness pressure group.

"Do you accept the naval axiom that you prepare to fight a specific navy?" Seldes had asked the Navy League man.

"Yes," the man said.

"Do you contemplate a fight with the British navy?" Seldes asked.

"Absolutely, no," said the man.

"Do you contemplate war with Japan?"

"Yes."

It was October 1934.

(p. 62):

Winston Churchill published an article in the Evening Standard called "How to Stop War." It was June 12, 1936.

Fine speeches were useless, Churchill said, and platitudes were a crime. There was only one way to stop war, and that was through military might. "Safety will only come," he wrote, "through a combination of pacific nations armed with overwhelming power, and capable of the same infinity of sacrifice, and indeed of the ruthlessness, which hitherto have been the attributes of the warrior mind."

(pp. 62-63):

The Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, walked to the podium of the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. It was June 30, 1936. [ . . . ]

He described the gas bombing of his people. First the Italians used tear gas, then barrels of mustard gas. Neither of these method was very effective. They came the battle for Makale, in northern Ethiopia. "Special sprayers were installed on board aircraft so they could vaporize over vast areas of territory a fine, death dealing rain," the emperor said. [ . . . ]

The aircraft passed over again and again, in order to be sure to poison the water. "The deadly rain that fell from the aircraft made all those whom it touched fly shrieking with pain," said Selassie. "All those who drank poisoned water or ate infected food also succumbed in dreadful suffering. In tens of thousands the victims of Italian mustard gas fell."

(p. 70):

Winston Churchill was readying his book Great Contemporaries for the press. It was August 1937. In it was his article on Hitler, written a few years earlier. "Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms," he said, "have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism." Despite the arming of Germany and the hounding of the Jews, "we may yet live to see Hitler a gentler figure in a happier age," Churchill wrote.

(p. 71):

The Japanese government announced that it was disturbed by a report that 182 American airmen, each accompanied by two mechanics, were going to be flying warplanes in China. The enlistment of Americans was at odds with America's recently expressed hopes for peace in northern China, said the Japanese statement, and was in violation of the American Neutrality Act. It was August 5, 1937.

(p. 80):

Jeannette Rankin made a statement on CBS Radio. "I want to urge mothers and fathers everywhere to work against war while there is time," she said. "I voted no in 1917, and I still vote no today, because I believe war is a futile method of trying to settle disputes." [ . . . ] It was March 1, 1938.

(p. 85):

Geoffrey Tuttle, a commander at the Royal Air Force base at Rawalpindi, bombed a troublesome tribe on India's Northwest Frontier. "We were all trained as professional assassins and we wanted to see if we could kill people," Tuttle said later. They were required to bomb groups of ten or more people, after giving warning. "In my case I can remember actually finding nine people and saying 'That's within ten per cent and that's good enough,' so I blew them up." It was mid-1938.

(p. 87):

A British defense minister announced that the government was planning on raising a large army through conscription. A large British army was "one of the surest bulwarks of peace," wrote Winston Churchill in one of his fortnightly newspaper columns. In the next war, Churchill pointed out, British cities and towns would be bombed frequently. "Our manhood will experience an irresistible incentive to fight from the fact that they will see around them women and children killed by this cowardly method," he pointed out. "No man worthy of the name but will demand to take part in the struggle."

It was June 9, 1938.

(p. 120):

Herbert Hoover sent a telegram in favor of the refugee bill: "No harm, and only good, can come to a nation by such humane action." [ . . . ]

Then the opposition began. Someone from the Allied Patriotic Societies said: "This is just part of a drive to break down the whole quota system -- to go back to the condition when we were flooded with foreigners who tried to run the country on different lines from those laid down by the old stock."

Colonel John Thomas Taylor, of the American Legion, said: "If this bill passes, there is no reason why we should not also bring in 20,000 Chinese children." [ . . . ]

[Louis] Taber, an Ohio Republican, served on the national committee of the Boy Scouts. He was unmoved by Pickett's appeal [to support the bill]. The sufferings that the refugee children had undergone could well have produced, Taber feared, "many distorted minds and warped economic viewpoints which may be serious in the future development of our democracy." The young Jewish émigrés might, in other words, grow up to be Bolshevists.

(p. 123):

Prime Minister Chamberlain spoke very quietly in the House of Commons. It was March 31, 1939.

His Majesty's government was of the belief that free negotiation was the right way to settle differences, Chamberlain said, and His Majesty's government believed that there was no question that couldn't be resolved peacefully. Force, or the threat of force, was unjustified. But if the Polish government were compelled to defend itself from an attack, he went on to say, His Majesty's government would offer the Polish government "all support in their power."

Ferdinand Kuhn, reporting for The New York Times, was thunderstruck. "Mr. Chamberlain's pledge sounded so sweeping it took one's breath away," he said. Kuhn quoted Arthur Greenwood, deputy leader of the Labor party, who said that Chamberlain's guarantee of Polish independence "may prove to be the most momentous statement made in this House for a quarter of a century."

(p. 138):

Neville Chamberlain told the House of Commons that England was officially at war with Germany. "It is a sad day for all of us, but for none is it sadder than for me," Chamberlain said. "Everything that I have worked for, everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life has crashed in ruins." It was September 3, 1939.

Churchill's mood, as he listened, wasn't sad at all. He felt, he wrote later, a sense of uplifted serenity and a detachment from human affairs. "The glory of Old England, peace-loving and ill-prepared as she was, but instant and fearless at the call of honour, thrilled my being and seemed to lift our fate to those spheres far removed from earthly facts and physical sensation," he said.

In Berlin, a knot of listeners, grouped near loudspeakers on the Wilhelmplatz, took in the news in silence. "There was not a murmur," William Shirer wrote. "They just stood there as they were before. Stunned." It was a balmy, sunny day -- the beginning of the Second World War.

(p. 141):

The French government began rounding up German citizens. "Germans may not leave their residences except to go to concentration camps," the Associated Press reported from Paris, "taking food supplies for two days, knives, forks, and underwear." It was September 6, 1939.

About fifteen thousand Germans were sent to French concentration camps in the early weeks of the war, a relief worker later estimated. About nine thousand of these were Jewish refugees; most of the remainder were liberal enemies of the Higler regime. Because there might be spies, saboteurs, or propagandists among them, they were all interned.

(p. 155):

Cyril Joad talked about the war with another acquaintance, "Mrs. C.," a vigorous Tory. War was natural and unavoidable, said Mrs. C. The Germans weren't human -- they were brute blond "perverted morons."

Joad asked C. what she would do with Germany, and a light came into her eyes.

"I would make a real Carthaginian peace," she told Joad. "Raze their cities to the ground, plough up the land and sow it afterwards with salt; and I would kill off one out of every five German women, so that they stopped breeding so many little Huns."

Mrs. C.'s ideas were shared by others, Joad had noticed; he'd recently read a letter to the editor about Germany in London's News Chronicle: "Quite frankly," said the letter, "I would annihilate every living thing, man, woman, and child, beast, bird and insect; in fact, I would not leave a blade of grass growing even; Germany should be laid more desolate than the Sahara desert, if I could have my way."

The longer the war lasted, Joad believed, the more this kind of viciousness would multiply: "Already," Joad wrote, "Mr. Churchill was reviving the appellation 'Huns.'"

(p. 162):

A new "1940 War Edition" of John Gunther's bestseller Inside Europe, published by Harper and Row, was in the stores. It was January, 1940.

Hitler was not in top physical condition, Gunther reported; he often brooded on death. In recent years, said Gunther, Hitler had gained weight -- "his neck and midriff show it" -- and he had a notoriously sloppy salute. As for his attitude toward women: "He is totally uninterested in women from any personal sexual point of view," Gunther explained. "Nor, as is so widely believed, is he homosexual." Journalists who had made careful inquiries had concluded that Hitler was a virgin.

(p. 164):

Dr. Nahum Goldmann, of the World Jewish Congress, gave a speech in Chicago. "If the war in Europe goes on for another year," Goldmann said, "1,000,000 of the 2,000,000 Jews in Poland will be dead of starvation or killed by Nazi persecutors." It was January 21, 1940.

(p. 174):

A photographer began taking pictures of people before they were killed. It was May 1940, in a medieval castle in Austria. The people in Hartheim Castle who were being killed were mentally and physically handicapped; their bodies were burned in a cremation oven. "Hitler felt that by exterminating these so-called useless eaters," one of the T-4 euthanasianists later testified, "it would be possible to relieve more doctors, male and female nurses, and other personnel, hospital beds, and other facilities for the use of the Armed Forces."

The smell of burning bothered the photographer. Hartheim's supervisor, a former police officer, said: Drink, you'll feel better. So the photographer drank and took the pictures. The assembly-line killings led to the brutalization of the staff, writes one historian. "Reports abounded of drunken orgies, numerous sexual liaisons, brawling and bullying." One eyewitness said that the castle "almost all employees were intimate with each other." More than nine thousand people died at Hartheim in 1940.

(p. 180):

The Germans sent the Dutch an ultimatum: Unless all resistance ended, Rotterdam would be visited with "complete destruction." It was May 14, 1940.

The Dutch delayed, asking for the rank and signature of the officer who sent the ultimatum. One of the German generals, General Schmidt, believing that a capitulation was imminent, radioed the high command to call off the air attack. Others above him -- probably Goering and probably Hitler himself -- authorized it anyway.

At 1:30 in the afternoon, the Luftwaffe flew in with more than fifty Heinkel bombers. Failing to notice, or ignoring, the red "do not bomb" flares that General Schmidt sent up, they burned and blasted the center of the city. Oil from a margarine factory fed fierce fires. Nine hundred died.

(p. 189):

A thousand men from the Criminal Investigation Division of Scotland Yard went out knocking on doors where "enemy aliens" lived. They assembled several thousand German and Austrian women, many of whom had been working as servants, and sent them to the Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea. "A few, mainly those with young children, wept," reported The New York Times. It was May 27, 1940.

The British government now held eleven thousand people in its detention facilities, most of them Jews. Eventually, some refugees were shipped to Canada, where they were imprisoned for the duration of the war. One was Max Perutz, a German refugee who had been researching hemoglobin at Cambridge. He organized a school at a prison camp in Quebec and taught X-ray crystallography to fellow inmates. "To have been arrested, interned, and deported as an enemy alien by the English, whom I had regarded as my friends, made me more bitter than to have lost freedom itself," Perutz wrote.

(p. 191):

Churchill flew to Paris to talk with the French generals. It was May 31, 1940. Narvik was the first matter they took up -- it had been retaken and held, at some cost, by the Allies. It must now be abandoned immediately, said Churchill. They also discussed what to do about Italy, if Italy were foolish enough to enter the war. "I proposed that we should strike by air-bombing at the northwestern industrial triangle enclosed by the three cities of Milan, Turin, and Genoa," Churchill said. "Many Italians were opposed to war, and all should be made to realise its severity."

Bombing was, to Churchill, a form of pedagogy -- a way of enlightening city dwellers as to the hellishness of remote battlefields by killing them. The French were not keen on it, however; they wanted to avoid reprisals.

(p. 196):

Five British bombs fell on a railroad station and a hotel in Renens, north of Lausanne, in the neutral country of Switzerland. "A woman in a wheelchair was killed, her husband's foot was torn off and a man asleep in the hotel was fatally injured," the Associated Press said. It was still June 12, 1940.

The British government offered its regrets, explaining that the airplanes had lost their way.

(p. 209):

Christopher Isherwood had lunch with Thomas and Katia Mann and their son Klaus, who was, like his father, a novelist. Isherwood and Klaus Mann got into a disagreement over the war. Mann said that Isherwood should make a public statement in support of the Allied cause -- that his silence was being misinterpreted. Mann said that he himself was, of course, a pacifist -- he couldn't kill anyone personally. But still, pacifism was no good now: "If you let the Nazis kill everyone, you allowed civilization to be destroyed."

Isherwood, in reply, used an argument that he had heard Aldous Huxley make: "Civilization dies anyhow of blood poisoning the moment it takes up its enemies' weapons and exchanges crime for crime."

Mann said that professions of pacifism merely helped the Nazis and the fifth columnists.

"That," answered Isherwood, "is why I keep my mouth shut." It was July 8, 1940.

(p. 241):

Churchill was sipping a glass of port in the House smoking room. Harold Nicolson was listening to him talk, A conservative member of Parliament told the prime minister that the British public was demanding the unrestricted bombing of Germany.

"You and others may desire to kill women and children," Churchill replied, but the British government's desire was to destroy military objectives. "My motto," the prime minister added, "is 'Business before Pleasure.'" It was October 17, 1940.

(p. 265):

Morgenthau called up the president and told him he needed to have a meeting -- he'd gotten a very secret message from Chiang Kai-shek saying that Chiang wanted to attack Japan. If was December 18, 1940.

"Is he still willing to fight?" asked President Roosevelt.

"That's what the message is about," said Morgenthau.

"Wonderful," said Roosevelt. "That's what I have been talking about for four years."

(p. 282):

In Tokyo, the American ambassador to Japan heard something about a possible surprise attack. "There is a lot of talk around town to the effect that the Japanese, in case of a break with the United States, are planning to go all our in a surprise mass attack at Pearl Harbor," the ambassador, Joseph Grew, wrote in his diary. "Of course I informed my government." It was January 24, 1941.

(p. 303):

The Keep America Out of War Congress met at Town Hall in New York. Jeannette Rankin said: "You cannot have war and democracy; you cannot have war and liberty." Rabbi Sidney Goldstein, chairman of the War Resisters League, said: "Democracy was never in greater danger than it is today." Norman Thomas said the country should have a national vote before going to war. Oswald Garrison Villard said that Roosevelt's Four Freedoms "cannot sustain the shock of our entering and pursuing this war."

It was April 6, 1941.

(p. 230):

Sidney Goldstein, associate rabbi of the Free Synagogue, decided not to speak at the Second National Anti-War Congress. Rabbi Goldstein, a member of John Haynes Holmes's War Resisters League, was opposed to America's entry into the war, but he objected to Senator Burton Wheeler's presence on the program.

"In view of the anti-Jewish statements Senator Wheeler has made privately and publicly," Rabbi Goldstein said, "I can not as a matter of self-respect appear upon the same platform with him."

(p. 331):

Semi-secret, purposely leaked news about the American-trained Chinese air force appeared on page three of The New York Times. It was May 24, 1941.

"Chinese aviators have been trained under foreign instructors and now are reported ready to engage Japanese air fighters," said the anonymous author. "China has obtained numerous fighting and bombing planes from the United States and Britain and it is expected these will figure in the proposed retaliation against Japan." The Chinese communists were reportedly involved now, too; they'd asked Chungking for "immediate delivery of American-made bombers and fighters."

The subheadline was: "Bombing of Japanese Cities Is Expected to Result from New View at Chungking."

(p. 342):

The State Department announced that it was worried that refugees might become spies once they arrived in the United States. It was June 17, 1941. If the refugees had left family members behind in Europe, the State Department contended, the Nazis might compel them to spy on America by threatening their families with torture. The United States was therefore no longer going to grant visas to refugees who had family members in occupied Europe.

The ruling covered Germany, Holland, Belgium, Norway, France, Poland, and the Balkans.

An increasingly discouraged Clarence Pickett told The New York Times that the decision would have "far reaching effects" on all efforts to help refugees.

The governing committee of the Keep America out of War Congress Wrote a letter to Secretary of State Cordell Hull: "Is our government so destitute of facilities for detecting true spies that it must close the last door of hope to thousands of Jews, Spaniards, Poles, and Czechs who hate fascism and love democracy?"

(p. 343):

A union organizer and socialist, Philip Randolph, was in President Roosevelt's office to talk about jobs for Negroes in defense plants. It was June 18, 1941.

Randolph had announced a huge march on Washington. "Our people are being turned away at factory gates because they are colored," he said to the president. "They can't live with this thing. Now, what are you going to do about it?"

Roosevelt said he would call up the heads of defense plants and see that Negro citizens were given equality of opportunity. Randolph said he wanted more: He wanted an executive order that would compel the plants to hire Negroes.

"Well, Phil, you know I can't do that," Roosevelt said. "In any event, I couldn't do anything unless you called off this march of yours."

Randolph said the march couldn't be called off.

Roosevelt turned to Walter White of the NAACP. "How many people do you plan to bring?" he asked.

"One hundred thousand, Mr. President," said White.

"You can't bring 100,000 Negroes to Washington," said Roosevelt. "Somebody might get killed."

In the end Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, declaring that "there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries because of race, creed, color, or national origin." Philip Randolph called off the march.

(p. 344):

Hitler's army invaded Russia. At four o'clock in the morning, Adam Grolsch, a German radio operator, crossed the Meml River into Soviet-controlled Lithuania with an advance armored unit of the German army. It was June 22, 1941.

When Grolsch reached the far side of the river, he saw bodies hanging from the trees. A Lithuanian local explained that people had already "taken care of things": All the Jews in the town had been robbed and hung by fellow Lithuanians. "They had exploited the situation," Grolsch saw. "'Hitler is against the Jews anyway. We'll kill them and then we'll take all of their stuff.'" There were about twenty dead. "It was a small town."

(p. 353):

Reinhard Heydrich issued killing instructions to the leaders of the SS's special motorized units, the Einsatzgruppen. It was July 2, 1941. Within Russia, certain classes of people were subject to execution: politicians, Jews in the service of the Communist party or the Soviet state, and all saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, and agitators, unless they were necessary for intelligence purposes. "Special care must be taken in regard to the shooting of doctors and others engaged in medical practice," Heydrich wrote.

(p. 356):

U.S. Marines moved into Iceland, a neutral country, at England's invitation and with Iceland's reluctant consent. They unloaded guns and began setting up Nissen huts. It was July 7, 1941. The German newspapers said that Roosevelt was "running after the war in order to catch up with it." Surely, thought Victor Klemperer, the fact that the United States was occupying Iceland meant that the United States was in the war.

(p. 368):

An executive order emanated from Hyde Park, New York. It was July 25, 1941.

"In view of the unlimited national emergency declared by the President, he has today issued an Executive Order freezing Japanese assets in the same manner in which assets of various European countries were frozen on June 14, 1941."

A joint Anglo-American oil embargo followed.

(p. 368):

The British Ministry of Information made a policy decision. It was July 25, 1941. They decided to be sparing in their use of atrocity material in propaganda directed at the home front. A certain amount of horror was necessary, but the stories "must always deal with the treatment of indisputably innocent people," the propagandists felt. "Not with violent political opponents. And not with the Jews."

That day, Churchill sent one of his "Most Secret" notes to Portal: "This spell of dry weather brings the forest of Nieppe into importance," he said. "It would be good to have an experiment in forest burning, the results of which could be observed close at hand." Nieppe was in French Flanders.

(p. 370):

"Japan Smolders over Oil Threat" was the headline on page one of The New York Times. It was July 30, 1941. At a cabinet meeting with Roosevelt, Harold Ickes, the secretary of the interior, suggested an air strike. "I would like to see one of our latest models go to Siberia by way of Japan," Ickes said. "It could set fire to Tokyo en route by dropping a few incendiary bombs."

(p. 382):

A prison warden said that things were going very well in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. The prisoners were doing war work now. "We have 1,000 of them at work on two shifts, making such things as cases for TNT charges, clothing for aviators, shell covers, tents, pack sacks and mattresses," the warden said. Disciplinary problems had disappeared. It was August 18, 1941.

A warden in an Ohio prison said, "This national defense boom has really been a godsend.

(p. 385):

Enrique Zanetti's Incendiaries Branch, Chemical Warfare Service, U.S. Army, got its first assignment. It was supposed to find a way to make twenty-five million four-pound firebombs: one hundred million pounds of fire. It was August 28, 1941.

Zanetti knew he would need a lot of powdered magnesium. And fortunately for him, a new, federally financed, sixty-three-million-dollar magnesium plant, powered by Boulder Dam, was going up near Las Vegas. Las Vegas was destined to grow in the desert, fed in part by money from the men and women who made the raw materials for firebombs.

(p. 399):

Rudolph Höss, the commander of Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland, walked to the mortuary and killed nine hundred naked Russian prisoners. The prisoners entered the chamber thinking they were being deloused. Höss used gas from crystals of Zyklon B pesticide.

"When the gas was thrown in some people shouted: 'gas' and then there was a lot of shouting and they pressed against both the doors," Höss recalled. "But they withstood the pressure."

Höss wrote later that he was relieved that Zykon B was so effective. "I must even admit that this gassing set my mind at rest," he said, "for the mass extermination of the Jews was to start soon, and at the time neither Eichmann nor I was certain as to how these mass killings were to be carried out." It was September 15, 1941.

(p. 404):

The Stuttgart Courier published an article attacking "cases of unsuitable compassion for Jews." These cases were not unusual, the newspaper said. For instance, women from the Jewish old-peoples' home, wearing the star, would get on a tramcar, and passengers would stand to give them their seats.

Once, according to the newspaper, a German said to a Jew, "It really requires more courage to wear the star than to go to war." It was October 4, 1941.

(p. 405):

Vannevar Bush, the war scientist, talked over the uranium bomb one afternoon with President Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace. It was October 9, 1941. Roosevelt liked the idea and sent Churchill a note afterward: "My Dear Winston," Roosevelt said, "It appears desirable that we should correspond or converse concerning the subject which is under study by your MAUD committee, and by Dr. Bush's organization in this country, in order that any extended efforts may be coordinated or even jointly conducted." The Manhattan Project moved forward.

(p. 430):

Under-Secretary Cadogan was upset: Thirty-seven bombers had failed to return from a recent set of raids. "Our catastrophic losses over the weekend due to hopeless ignorance about weather conditions," Cadogan wrote. "Bombing does NOT affect German morale: let's get that into our heads and not waste our bombers on these raids." It was November 11, 1941.

(p. 431):

At MIT, the Radiation Lab began working on a new kind of aerial targeting system. It employed radar beamed down from a bomber onto the earth. The waves bounced back in different ways depending on what was below -- water, farmland, or buildings. The prototype system was called EHIB, which stood for "Every House In Berlin." It was November 1941.

(p. 442):

Japanese pilots took off from six aircraft carriers and flew to Pearl Harbor, a naval base near Honolulu. It was December 7, 1941.

Their bombs sank eighteen American ships and killed more than two thousand people. One Japanese pilot who was shot down carried with him a bottle of whiskey, chopsticks, hardtack, tooth powder, and a hand-drawn good-luck sheet.

The pilot's sheet had drawings of exploding and sinking American ships. It said, in English, "You damned! Go to the devil!" In Japanese, it said, "Listen to the voice of doom! Open your eyes, blind fools!"

Dozens of Honolulu civilians died, too -- killed by misfiring American antiaircraft shells.

(p. 448):

President Roosevelt, wearing a cape and a black armband, arrived with Eleanor at the Capitol to give a speech. Army soldiers and marines with bayonets guarded the entrance ways. The president asked Congress to declare war on the Japanese empire, in response to its "unprovoked and dastardly attack." Very many lives had been lost, he said. At the end of his speech, he smiled and waved. It was December 8, 1941.

Before the floor vote, there were denunciatory orations and readings of patriotic poetry. "The Japanese, like murderous imps from Hell, are clutching at our throats," said Congressman Homer Angell of Oregon. Japan had struck like a serpent, said Representative John Gibson of Georgia, and it would perish: "Yes, perish by the might and power of the people she so unjustly attacked."

At the same time, Representative Jeannette Rankin, the Montana pacifist, wanted to make a statement. "Mr. Speaker, I would like to be heard," she said. The speaker, Sam Rayburn, ignored her. She said, "Mr. Speaker, a point of order." She was still ignored. "Sit down, sister," someone called. A congressmen said to her, "They really did bomb Pearl Harbor."

"Killing more people won't help matters," said Rankin.

When she heard her name in the roll call, she stood. "As a woman I can't go to war," she said, "and I refuse to send anyone else."

Hers was the only no vote, and it was hissed and booed. In the cloakroom, some army officers shouted abuse at her. "You've been drinking!" Rankin said, and she took refuge in a phone booth.

Later, she told a colleague that the representatives had pressured her to make the vote unanimous -- and yet it was that insistence on uniformity, that intolerance of dissent, that was just what was wrong with the other side in the war. No, Rankin thought, I'm going to vote one vote for democracy.

(p. 460):

Churchill wrote a memo to the chiefs of staff on the future conduct of the war. "The burning of Japanese cities by incendiary bombs will bring home in a most effective way to the people of Japan the dangers of the course to which they have committed themselves," he wrote. It was December 20, 1941.

(p. 461):

Russian planes dropped Christmas cards onto German troops at the front. It was December 24, 1941.

One card reproduced photographs of families of dead German soldiers. "For this woman there is no happy Christmas," it said. "For this child no father's knee. She is a widow. He is fatherless." Another card showed a winter landscape covered with innumerable wooden crosses, each with a German helmet on top, while carrion birds circled overhead. It said: "Living space in the East."

(p. 465):

Senator Alben Barkley, majority leader and longtime interventionist, said that Japan's bombing of Manila was the most stupid thing imaginable. "Think of Tokyo," Senator Barkley said, "with ten times as many inhabitants, when the inevitable day of destruction comes, as our bombers swoop down upon the city." It was December 29, 1941.

Senator Burton Wheeler, former isolationist, was in absolute agreement: "One can come to only one conclusion from the action of the Japanese," he said, "and that is that they are an inhuman and half-civilized race and in the future will be treated as such." The tragedy, Senator Wheeler said, was that we had given so many airplanes away to the English that we couldn't yet bomb Nagasaki, Yokohama, and Tokyo.

Senator George W. Norris, from Nebraska, said that Japanese cities were open to the kind of attack that would "burn them off the face of the earth." He added: "And that is what they are coming to."

(pp. 473-474):

This book ends on December 31, 1941. Most of the people who died in the Second World War were at that moment still alive. [ . . . ]

I dedicate this book to the memory of Clarence Pickett and other American and British pacifists. They've never really gotten their due. They tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and stop the war from happening. They failed, but they were right.