The Road to Total War

Examines the various factors that impelled leaders on both sides of the conflict in World War II to respond to immediate problems with actions resulting in effects that were often neither planned nor foreseen. Emotional pressures, the fog of war, and judgments blurred by wishful thinking can produce decisions, even self-destructive decisions, and lead down an inexorable path to all-out, total war. This is a reprint of an edition originally published in 1969.