Lucky Hitler’s Big Mistakes was released in 2022 and is the first publication by historian Paul Ballard-Whyte https://luckyhitler.com. It is my 64th book to be completed in 2022.

Opinions expressed here are unbiased and entirely my own! I categorize this book/novel as G. The book reviews the principal Nazis and looks at the quarter of a century during which Hitler rose to power. During that time, luck seemed to be with him. Hitler was involved in several potential sex scandals with young women but was able to keep those affairs hidden. Likewise, his survival of more than 20 assassination attempts gave him a feeling of invincibility.

Under Hitler’s leadership, the Wehrmacht made rapid advances through Western Europe and into Russia. This led many, especially himself, to attribute the success to his tactical acumen.

Then, his major mistakes began. He allowed the British Army to escape from Dunkirk. He threatened but never invaded Britain. He failed to pursue the advantage in submarine warfare. The two greatest mistakes were his decision to invade Russia before eliminating Britain and declaring war against the US days after Perl Harbor.

While the Germans were able to develop many new and potent weapons over the war years, Hitler constantly ‘advised’ various improvements. His interference delayed deployment and often left them less effective.

I enjoyed the 9+ hours I spent reading this 330-page WWII history. I like the chosen cover art. I give this book a rating of 4 out of 5.

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First thought: terrible title. Each time I returned to the book, I disliked it more.

Second thought: history is not just something that happens *to* people. Everyone exerts a force, no matter how small, on history, which in turn reacts in some fashion. Taken over a long enough span of time, we could construe any number of events in our own lives we could deem as "lucky" - and thus beyond our control, as the author seems to think some of Hitler's "luck" was. Certainly there are some elements he could not control: the end of WWI, for instance. Other things, though, like the Reichstag fire, which the author seems to lie down at the feet of "luck", Hitler having nothing whatsoever to do with it, ignore that it's quite possible Hitler had a hand in it, as well as other things. It's easy enough to point at events well after the fact and deem them luck.

I would accept instead of "luck" that Hitler (and Stalin, and Mao, and [insert other dictatorial names through history here]) benefited from a confluence of events that served to propel him to the top of the Germanic mountain. However, we must never forget that he willingly took advantage of these things. A lax prison sentence, which came with his own personal secretary, for instance, Hitler used to polish off his horrific screed Mein Kampf. Hindenburg's ill health? Vaulting into the Chancellor's office and from there to dictator. Terrible penalties assessed on Germany following WWI? Stoked ultra-nationalism and decrying anyone "foreign". And so forth.

It's also terribly simple to look back in hindsight and see the big blunders Hitler made. Simpler still to use those as stepping stones to decide how Germany could have won WWII, even though, as I said, history is not made in a vacuum. There are times when the author sounds quite bullish about Nazi chances to dominate and conquer all of Europe and much of Asia, if only Hitler had done XYZ instead of ABC. If Hitler had ordered the destruction of the soldiers at Dunkirk, he could have invaded Britain. If Hitler had listened to his generals, he could have taken Moscow. Could he? Really? While I agree that wiping up the beaches at Dunkirk would have gone a great deal of the way in securing the western front, equating that with an automatic W on invading Britain is not a step I would take as a given. Ditto taking Moscow as a death knell for Russia. Make no mistake, Hitler made a great number of blunders, some incredibly large - but again,we're looking at it in hindsight. We could say the same about any time, any place, any conflict.

Third thought: the author spends a lot of time on the same points, over and over. In one instance (the exact memory of which escapes me, as I just did tick marks on the repetition) I saw the same point repeated five different times. We get it. ABC was a mistake, undoing the "luck" Hitler had back in year YYYY. The point was made, move on.

The result is a book that at times reads a bit like a student giving a presentation. Fair play to the author for writing the thing, but it could have done with some editing.

And a much better title.

Two out of five stars. Sorry, author, not for me.

Thanks to Pen & Sword Press and NetGalley for the reading copy.

In seeming to concentrate on specific events and things such as fortune, this actually presents as quite a standard biography of Hitler. It doesn't cover all the ins and outs of his life, military career or thinking, but this is allowed to read a lot more flowingly as one narrative than you might assume from any summary of the contents.

The first chunk is regarding all the good luck Hitler had – in other words everything kismet, the universe, fate, Lady Luck, who/whatever threw at him that he could come out of well. For one thing, he was definitely in the minority in his regiment in surviving the First World War, but after that things fell into his path – OK, the bullets that ignored him in the Beer Hall Putsch didn't exactly, but the cushty prison time after that with the colleague to galvanise him and demand 'Mein Kampf' from him did, and so on. Later we get round-ups of the cohorts who kept him in power and did all his dirty work for him, all the women whose sort-of sex life with him might have ended him as a public figure, and so much else – pretty much as I say a lot of stuff a routine narrative guide to his life would have to feature.

Slightly different is the second half, in that it almost concentrates more on what Hitler didn't do – the follow-up at Dunkirk that would have won the war, the respect for U-Boat blockades in the Atlantic that would have starved Britain and won the war, the dithering over whether to go for Moscow or not, which would have won the war… Such aspects of Hitler – the fact that every time he had the chance to raise the cup of victory to his lips he was putting his foot in it – do deserve to be in his biographies, even if they might at first seem destined for more fanciful, 'what-if' speculations.

What the book does have, however, in showing so much of Hitler's helpful luck and then hubris, is the hindsight ramped up to eleven. In this author's words, despite his multiple bonkers career choices and life events, he never seemed to gain the authority I felt this needed, that all the good fortune was good fortune and not somebody else's naffness, and equally importantly that Hitler was obviously a hubristic numpty and that that was visible to everyone. If Stalin too saw the cachet in Hitler capturing Stalingrad – Stalin's City – then surely it's less effective to write-off the idea as just one fluffing Fuhrer's failure?

In the end I felt the look back at Hitler's ineptness was not particularly fresh, and one of those instances of only the victors being allowed to write the history books. There's a line somewhere about the burning of the Reichstag being so well-timed for Hitler it's as if he planned it – and no acknowledgement that that might have been the case. And what there is is too biased a kind of "look at this idiot man-child and his toy soldiers, why can't he just think to seal off the Med and claim that before Russia?!" scoffing for this to be as balanced as a good history book should be. It's not terrible – far from it, but in being so scorn-laden it seemed to lack the neutrality needed.

An interesting look at how Hitler had a run of extremely good luck to get where he was in power in Germany. The author then presents things where he wasn’t as lucky. A great and interesting read to understand, that if something had just gone differently, history would not have been the same. A great historical read.


Thank you to #NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Lucky Hitler’s Big Mistakes - now there’s an attention-grabbing title for you - by Paul Ballard-Whyte portrays Hitler’s political and military career as something like that Super Bowl in which the Falcons were beating New England 28-3 well into the second half, only to suffer an historic collapse.

Actually, the analogy works better if, in the middle of the third quarter, Falcons owner Arthur Blank started calling the plays himself, made the team play without pads and helmets, and eventually pulled Matt Ryan so he could take over as quarterback.

Of course, you wouldn’t be you if anything that ever happened to you or any of your ancestors had happened just slightly differently. And that very much applied to the most infamous tyrant of the twentieth century, who went on a truly remarkable winning streak after taking over the fledgling German Workers Party (the “National Socialist” part would come later, along with endless online debates over whether the Nazis were a socialist political party).

Hitler likely wouldn’t have survived the Beer Hall Putsch in the first place had he been standing just a few inches to either side, or if the policeman shooting at him had marginally better aim. He was fortunate enough to be imprisoned alongside Rudolf Hess, who was perfectly happy to write down his rambling diatribes and turn it into Mein Kampf, which sold in the millions despite being completely unreadable. The Great Depression, and Germany’s resulting economic collapse, came about just as the NSDAP, a party which could only succeed if Germans were hurting and disaffected, was losing steam.

Conservatives thought they could control him. Left-wingers fought among themselves instead of teaming up to stop him. Other countries, still scarred from losses incurred in The Great War, tried to appease him. Even the Soviet Communists, the Nazis’ ultimate ideological enemies, made a deal with him to carve up Eastern Europe between themselves. After the fall of France, Nazi Germany looked unstoppable.

And that was as good as it would ever get for Hitler, and he only had himself to blame. In history’s most notorious example of believing one’s own hype, Der Fuhrer decided he knew better than his generals and started micromanaging military campaigns, battlefield logistics and even the very design of tanks and other key military equipment.

Hitler emphasized the building of giant surface warships instead of murderously effective U-boats, allowed trapped British troops to pull off an incredible escape at Dunkirk, passed on game-changing weapons (like jet-powered fighter planes) that could have turned the tide of the war until it was too late, and wasted time on vanity projects (like jet-powered bombers) that wouldn’t have made the slightest difference.

And, of course, there was the invasion of the Soviet Union in mid-1941. Operation Barbarossa was probably doomed to fail even with the best planning and execution, but Hitler’s meddling - combined with an officer class too cowed to stand up to him - guaranteed spectacular failure.

Ballard-Whyte argues that the Nazis had a real shot at taking Moscow, which would have been a stunning psychological blow to the Soviets, until Hitler changed his mind and sent his forces elsewhere. He also submits that the Germans could have bypassed Stalingrad altogether en route to the oil fields of the Caucasus region, but the dictator’s ego wouldn’t allow him to pass on an opportunity to seize a city named after his greatest enemy.

After Stalingrad, well, we all know what happened. Hitler didn’t stick around long enough to find out.

A book combining the story of Hitler’s rise and fall with tales of repeated failure at the highest levels should hit all of my pleasure centers. Unfortunately, like many of the military campaigns described therein, Lucky Hitler's Big Mistakes falls down in its execution.

The author is certainly no Hitler apologist, but he does come across as believing the Nazis could have won the war had a few things gone differently. He argues that the Germans could have crossed the Channel and invaded Britain after the fall of France, while they had the momentum, but this isn’t the kind of undertaking you can plan for on the fly, especially when the Royal Navy is still lurking. Ballard-Whyte even portrays Barbarossa as theoretically winnable, contrary to a long history of armies invading Russia and freezing to death.

Worse, the book is clumsily written and run through with grammatical errors (which admittedly could be fixed by the time it’s actually published). I don’t know much about the publisher, Pen & Sword Books, but the project really has an air of “self-published” about it. Most egregiously, Ballard-Whyte refers to Ukraine as “the Ukraine,” a faux pas you’d think anyone outside of the Putin camp would know well enough to avoid in 2022.

That said, books about WW2 are like pizza - even when they’re not very good, they’re still good. Unless David Irving is involved.