LAURENCE REES: What was the single greatest mistake in the war?

ROBERT CITINO: Well, I have one. It was the decision to launch it. Hitler had made so many gains through diplomacy, fairly artful diplomacy, and bluff and the threat of force, and there was a sense that somehow World War Two could have been avoided, but there wasn’t, because he wanted a war all along. If only he could have realised that there was so much more to be gained by bluff and artful diplomacy and the threat of force, more to be gained by all that than all the battles that the Wehrmacht won in the first three years of the war. So I would have to say that the greatest mistake of World War Two was Adolf Hitler launching it. We could go further and say engaging a maritime coalition like the British and French, and eventually the United States, without a navy. We could say invading a state whose resources vastly dwarf your own, like the Soviet Union, but I think we could roll all those into the decision to launch the war at all in September of 1939.