Ten Days to Destiny: The Secret Story of the Hess Peace Initiative and British Efforts to Strike a Deal With Hitler - Hardcover

A highly speculative historical argument from Costello (Virtue Under Fire, 1986, etc.): that the flight of Hitler's aide Rudolf Hess to Britain in May 1941 was not the isolated act of a madman, but the result of a year of secret maneuvering between the Nazi regime and appeasement-minded members of Churchill's cabinet. In the wake of the fall of France in May 1940, Costello argues, Britain's situation appeared so bleak that certain members of the coalition War Cabinet--conspicuously, Halifax, the foreign secretary--favored (and initiated) efforts to reach an accommodation with Hitler that would not threaten British independence. Churchill was engaged in a battle with these politicians as bitter in its way as the war with Germany, Costello maintains. He says (and many historians agree) that Hitler actually favored such a negotiated peace in order to give himself a free hand in the East. Costello argues (again, unexceptionably) that many members of the British political establishment and aristocracy sympathized with Hitler's fascist and anti-Semitic philosophy. However, Costello fails to make the connection convincingly between these well-documented facts and his central thesis--that Hess made his 1941 flight bearing an authoritative offer of peace from Hitler, and that the Hess flight was actually a last-minute attempt to reach a negotiated peace with Britain on the eve of Hitler's crusade against Bolshevism. Costello's evidence for this is slender and amounts to a highly conjectural circumstantial case. Provocative but unconvincing. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

On May 10, 1941, in one of WW II's most bizarre episodes, Rudolph Hess, the deputy fuhrer of Germany, parachuted onto Scottish soil. Costello ( I Was There ) uses recently declassified material to answer 50 years of speculation about the true purpose of Hess's mission. And his book offers some astonishing revelations. Among them: prominent members of Britain's ruling establishment (led by foreign secretary Lord Halifax) tried to negotiate a compromise peace with Hitler at the time of the fall of France in 1940; prime minister Churchill had to bluff and bully his war cabinet into rejecting Hitler's tempting peace overtures; the fuhrer's Halt Order of May 23, 1940, was a stratagem to persuade the British government to accept a deal. As to the Hess mission, the record now shows that the deputy fuhrer brought not only an authoritative peace proposal but an invitation from Hitler to support Germany's imminent crusade against the Soviet Union. Costello's riveting account leaves little doubt that, but for Churchill, WW II would have ended in June 1940, setting global history on a different and more sinister course.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.