Serendipity — History 1: The Decisive Role of Chance in Wars and Battles

Serendipity — History 1: The Decisive Role of Chance in Wars and Battles

History likes to dress itself in the language of inevitability — yet the hinges on which it actually turned were often a passing cloud, a lost piece of paper, a sudden rain, a five-minute coincidence of timing. Volume two of the Serendipity series leaves the kitchen for the battlefield with thirteen gripping, true stories in which luck and accident changed the course of a war, a battle, or the world. A general’s secret orders are found in a field wrapped around three cigars, and the bloodiest day in American history follows. A city marked for an atomic bomb is saved at the last moment by drifting smoke, and another dies in its place. A providential fog lets a trapped revolutionary army slip away and a new nation survive its birth. A single weather forecast launches the largest invasion in history on the one day it could succeed. From Special Order 191 and the luck of Kokura to the divine winds against the Mongols, the Rosetta Stone in a fort’s ditch, the mud of Waterloo, the capture of the Enigma machines, the five minutes at Midway, the shootdown of Yamamoto, and the disputed arrow in King Harold’s eye, each chapter tells the real story — and, because human beings cannot bear for their decisive moments to be random, it carefully separates documented fact from the destiny, providence, and heroic myth later wrapped around them, with legend set in its own type. Rigorous, humane, and impossible to put down, this is popular history at the hinges of fate — and a quiet reminder that the world we live in nearly went another way.