In 1938, two men held history in their hands. One was Adolf Hitler. The other was British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who, determined to avoid war at any cost, came to be known as “the great appeaser.” But Harry Turtledove, the unrivaled master of alternate history, has launched a gripping saga that springboards from a different fateful act: What if Chamberlain had stood up to Hitler? What would the Nazis’ next move have been? And how would the war—which Hitler had always regretted waiting eleven months to start—have unfolded and changed our world? Here, Turtledove takes us across a panorama of conflict fueled by ideology and demagoguery. Nations are pitted against nations, alliances are forged between old enemies, ordinary men and women are hurled into extraordinary life-and-death situations. In Japanese-controlled Singapore, an American marine falls in love with a Russian dance hall hostess, while around him are heard the first explosions of Chinese guerilla resistance. On the frontlines of war-ravaged rural France, a weary soldier perfects the art of using an enormous anti-tank gun as a sniper’s tool—while from Germany a killer is sent to hunt him down. And in the icy North Atlantic, a U-boat bearing an experimental device wreaks havoc on British shipping, setting the stage for a Nazi ground invasion of Denmark.

Hitler's War (Published as The War That Came Early: Hitler's War in paperback, Del Rey, 2009) is an alternate history novel by Harry Turtledove. It is the first volume in The War That Came Early, an alternate history of World War II. The Point of Divergence has José Sanjurjo surviving a plane crash in 1936. Subsequently, during the Munich Conference in 1938, Konrad Henlein, a political leader of Sudetenland Germans is assassinated. Hitler uses this act as a pretext for war with Czechoslovakia, knowing that the Spanish Nationalists will side with him. Britain, France, and the Soviet Union declare war on Germany. Poland, despite previous ties with France, sides with Germany against the USSR. Further, Japan, which has been expanding into the Asian mainland, begins skirmishes with the USSR in Mongolia. The United States is on the sidelines, although it has troops in China, and volunteers participate in the Spanish Civil War. The novel was (evidentally) originally announced in early 2008 as Appeasement at amazon.co.uk, but Turtledove denied writing or contracting such a project at the time.