More than half a century after its conclusion in 1945, virtually every example of World War II insists that Adolf Hitler started it in order to conquer the world, whose peoples only wanted to live in peace. His sole purpose after achieving power, which he did by terrorizing his way into the chancellery, was to wage military aggression as soon as possible. He bullied little innocent defenseless nations, like Poland and Czechoslovakia, then overcame France only because he had long been preparing for war, while the French themselves were too peace-loving to put up much of a fight, although they were heroes of the Resistance.

The Fuehrer soon met his match in Winston Churchill, one of the very greatest heroes of the 20th Century. Frustrated by his inability to overcome the indomitable spirit of democracy in Britain, Hitler foolishly created a second front by attacking Russia. Just lucky at first, the Germans were defeated at Stalingrad, due to Hitler’s amateurish meddling in the professional strategies of his generals. Insanely, he declared war on the United States, whose president had worked so hard for world peace. The Fuehrer’s fantastic blunders inevitably led to the Normandy Invasion, and nearly a year later, he admitted his guilt by committing suicide, rather than defending himself in a fair trial at Nuremberg.

Hitler was conquered primarily because his anti-Semitic madness forced Germany’s top scientists, most of who were Jews, to migrate to the West, where they reluctantly developed the atom bomb for the U.S. Also, his attempt to exterminate the harmless European Jews, who he used as innocent scapegoats for Germany’s well-deserved ills, diverted vital material and manpower from the war, insuring defeat. Had the Germans been victorious, everyone else on Earth would be either enslaved or murdered.

Untold thousands of books and films repeating this uniform version of the Second World War continue to be produced. Generations of readers and viewers have unquestionably accepted standard renditions of the 20th Century’s foremost event as self-evident truth. Was Hitler just an amateur militarist whose dumb luck eventually ran out? Or is the story not so simply explained? As the central personality of modern history’s most important conflict, appreciating his real abilities or the lack thereof is crucial to understanding the course of that war.

Although he is universally held as the man singly responsible for World War II by conventional historians, it was a role for which Adolf Hitler was entirely unsuited, both personally and ideologically. As a common soldier during the First World War, he witnessed the violent deaths of his close comrades, and was himself the victim of an excruciating mustard-gas attack that nearly cost him his sight. Four years at the front brought him face to face with the unspeakable horrors of trench warfare, an experience he never wished repeated for himself or his fellow countrymen.

In war, he lamented, the best individuals are the soldiers who most freely give their lives for their country, thereby impoverishing society through the loss of its most valuable members. Following his election as German Chancellor, Hitler’s chief passion was the cultural and social renovation of his country. Cultural reform especially fascinated him, and he wanted to spend the rest of his life revamping German cities.

When war did come, he regarded it as a diversion from his real interest, and often expressed regret that he was not more happily occupied in the realization of public works projects. As he explained several times even during the war, "I am an eager builder, but a reluctant general," a remark that hardly characterizes the role of "world conqueror" cast for him by his enemies.

Hitler was, however, keenly interested in international affairs, particularly as they directly pertained to the Soviet menace. Together, the Third Reich and Fascist Italy would act as a central "Axis", around which the other continental peoples could rally, strengthening the middle European backbone. Imperial Japan would contain the spread of Communism in Asia, while an alliance with Britain combined the world’s greatest naval power with its most powerful army, the German armed forces, the Wehrmacht. Thus contained, the Soviet colossus would implode without the necessity of war.

When hostilities could no longer be avoided, however, Hitler rose to the occasion. His first-hand experience on the Western Front more than twenty years before schooled him as no formal military education could. Moreover, his postwar political campaigns - with their repeated emphasis on mass-action - were themselves conducted like battle campaigns. Typical among these was his own plan for the crucial capture of Belgium’s Fort Eben Emael, without which the entire Western Campaign would not have been possible, and his single-handed salvation of the German armies in the early winter of 1941, when the whole Eastern Front was on the verge of imminent collapse.

This is not to suggest he never made a mistake. As Hitler said of himself just prior to his successful invasion of France, in the spring of 1940, "Mr. Churchill declared recently in a radio broadcast that he counted 16 mistakes I have made so far in this war. He is wrong. I have made at least twice as many mistakes that I am aware of! But if Mr. Churchill and his followers have made only one mistake, it is far worse than any I have ever made; namely, when they started this war which must inevitably end, regardless of its outcome, in the dissolution of the British Empire."

Hitler’s most grievous fault, as he belatedly admitted, was to put his trust in the German General Staff. Yet, responsibility for the final defeat of 1945 rested primarily with Germany’s generals. Unlike his Western Allied counterparts, Hitler was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Wealth, social standing, politics-as-usual and personal power or prestige - the very things which obsessed F.D.R. and Churchill - repelled him. While Roosevelt hob-nobbed with New York’s financial elite at Hyde Park, a poverty-stricken Hitler sold his watercolors in Vienna for a few florins. Later, when Hitler was risking his life as a nameless soldier on the Western Front, Churchill, from the safety of London’s Home Office, sent thousands of Australians to be pointlessly massacred on the beaches of Gallipoli, and Stalin was a hold-up man in Czarist Russia.

Hitler has been so long associated in the popular mind with the worst tyranny the world has ever known that anyone who learns even the small fact otherwise about his rule is invariably astonished. To regard him in the context of his own times clarifies much. Until the end of the First World War, Germany was ruled by an obsolete monarchy. With its passing, the country was torn between self-styled Marxists who regarded Germany only as a foot-stool for the Soviet Union; capitalist conservatives more interested in preserving their wealth than their country; and cabaret democrats wallowing in the "delightful decadence" of the ‘20s. In short, Germany simply did not have a tradition of good government.

When Hitler became Chancellor, he had no precedent on which to erect a new administration, yet the chaos overwhelming his nation needed to be replaced immediately by a new public order. This he did personally, because the only alternatives confronting him were authoritarian rule or social dissolution. It is true that he was one of the most powerful men in history, less through any governmental powers he possessed, or the armed forces at his disposal, but because of the unprecedented devotion of his people. With the only exception of his contemporary and fellow revolutionary, Benito Mussolini, no other individual was more beloved by his fellow citizens.

Nor did he rule without their consent. They had, after all, elected him to power as their legal representative. Afterward, he always consulted them on his major peacetime decisions by way of numerous referendums, in which they were asked to vote for or against his policies. Supervised for their integrity by international monitoring commissions, some from countries hostile to Germany, these plebiscites consistently approved of the National Socialist regime by 90 percent or more, most often in the upper range of that percentile. For example, of the 2.94 million ballots cast in the Sudetenland elections of December 4, 1938, 2.64 million votes (98.8 percent) went to the NSDAP. Earlier that same year, when Hitler asked the Austrian people if they wanted to become part of the Third Reich, 99.7 percent responded in the affirmative. No democratic politicians on Earth, before or since, ever polled that kind of approval rating.

Perhaps nothing better illustrates the differences between Axis and Allied leaders than a comparison of gifts they exchanged during the war. On the occasion of his 59th birthday, in 1942, Mussolini received from Hitler a beautifully bound, complete set of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, the great 19th Century philosopher. In that same year, for his birthday, Roosevelt sent Churchill a case of bourbon.

The Duce is similarly pilloried by mainstream historians as Adolf Hitler’s accomplice in waging war. Yet, like the German leader, he lacked both personal and ideological motivation for foreign aggression. He, too, suffered horribly during the First World War, when a mortar exploded in his face. Mussolini had to undergo surgery at a field hospital without anesthetic, and almost died of his wounds on the operating table.

After he became Italy’s Premiere, he took little interest in military matters, and the popularity of his Fascism in other countries made him hope for an ideological Pax Romana. For example, a Gallop Poll of United States voters in 1930 showed that they considered Il Duce the most brilliant and desirable statesman on Earth. Even the ordinarily hostile Encyclopedia Britannica had to admit that "Mussolini remained a hero to his own people and was profoundly respected around the world. The American Cardinal O’Connell of Boston said that Mussolini was a genius given to Italy by God; Winston Churchill declared that he himself would have donned the Fascist black shirt, had he been an Italian." Until 1939, Fascist movements were growing in every industrialized nation, from the British Fascist Union and Ireland’s Blue Shirts to the Russian Fascist Union and America’s Silver Shirts.

But Mussolini’s hopes for international cooperation through general empathy for Fascism began to wane during the late 1930s, with outside agitation for war. In the words of the Encyclopedia Britannica, "Mussolini understood that peace was essential to Italy’s well-being, that a long war might prove disastrous" for Western Civilization. Accordingly, he arranged a conference between himself, Hitler, England’s Prime Minister (Neville Chamberlain) and the French Premiere (Eduard Deladier). Their so-called "Munich Agreement" frustrated and outraged all agitators for war, particularly in the world press, although Mussolini was popularly hailed at home and overseas for having saved the peace. His impression of the British and French leaders, however, was a poor one, and he felt sure their inveterate hatred of Fascism prevented any real international accord. For them, peace was only a preparation for war.

When it came, in 1939, Mussolini endeavored to secretly negotiate an armistice, while he up-held Italian neutrality. As Germany’s uncommitted ally, he felt he was in the best position to broker an end to the fighting during the so-called "Sitzkrieg" of inactivity that lasted from Poland’s defeat until the Western Campaign, the following spring. While Hitler gave the nod to Mussolini’s behind-the-scenes’ peace efforts, they were consistently rebuffed by British and French politicians, who saw in war the only means by which their Depression-wracked economies might be rebuilt.

Having exhausted every avenue for an end to the conflict, the Duce concluded that the Western Allies were the same liberal-conservative enemies he had faced twenty years before during his struggle for power in Italy. The fight against them had not ended with his March on Rome, in 1922, but broadened into a world war, which he viewed fundamentally as a life-and-death contest between diametrically opposed world-views. Capitalism, the old doctrine of international financial domination, and Marxism’s bid for world tyranny stood against the new spirit of national self-reliance of Fascism.

When the war Mussolini tried so vigorously to prevent erupted across Europe, he became Italy’s foremost commander. He personally revamped the Navy’s heavy cruisers by incremental decreases in their armor, which gave them a performance edge over their British opponents. And his strategic abilities in the North African campaign, as long as they were allowed to prevail, brought success. But the Duce’s up-hill battle against the predominantly aristocratic, non-Fascist, even anti-Fascist elements in the Italian aristocracy sabotaged his armed forces.

The true story of their performance during World War II has been no less twisted than the German Wehrmacht’s by conventional historians. Italy’s cavalry triumph on the Eastern Front before Stalingrad, General Babini’s rout of the British in North Africa, blowing up the Royal Navy’s capital ships at Alexandria, and numerous other Fascist victories are either ignored or down-played in false portrayals of the Italians as cowards ill-equipped and unenthusiastic for "Mussolini’s war".

Contrary to his long-suffering, fruitless efforts on behalf of peace, even long after the outbreak of hostilities, the Duce is still characterized as recklessly determined to involve his reluctant countrymen in the fighting. Similarly, he was supposed to have invaded Greece to distract world attention from his military humiliations in Libya, when in fact, his Aegean Campaign was a trap set to take British pressure off his North African forces. Churchill obliged him by falling into it.

Hitler and Mussolini - two names associated in the popular mind with tyranny, war and military ineptitude. Holding the magnifying glass of dispassionate scrutiny to their careers will reveal the accuracy of this universal assumption.

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