“There’s no question,” he told me, “that the entire history of the war is determined in some sense and shaped by the German victory in France in May 1940.” Tooze-whose book, The Wages of Destruction, an economic history of the Third Reich, is a groundbreaking piece of scholarship-is adamant that the turning point occurred less than a year after the war began. And toward the end of this article I explain why this date was so crucial, not just to the outcome of the war, but also to the whole course of the 20th century.īut let’s first consider what the distinguished historians I spoke to had to say, beginning with Adam Tooze, recently appointed professor of history at Yale. In my judgment the turning point of the war occurred on October 16, 1941. History is all about argument, and the issue of when the turning point of the war was stimulated a lively debate about the relative importance of key moments in the conflict. But that was the challenge of asking the question in the first place. To come to any decision about when the turning point might have been means making a judgment about what would have happened if things had been different, and counterfactual history is notoriously impossible to resolve. What was the turning point of World War II? Is it possible to pick one event-great or small-in this immense conflict and say, “This was the decisive moment”? That’s the question I recently posed to some of the war’s finest historians.
What Was the Turning Point of World War II? Close
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