Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941 |
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Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941
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by Ian Kershaw
Sales Rank: 9137
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$5.99
At Amazon
on 6-21-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Hard Cover with 656 pages
Published by: Penguin Press HC, The May 31, 2007
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 1594201234
ISBN 13 Number: 978-1594201233
Book Dimensions:
8.8 x 6.5 x 2.1 inches
Weighs: 2.2 pounds
From Publishers Weekly
Tracing the thought processes behind crucial turning points in WWII's most crucial 19 months, Kershaw, the author of a major biography of Hitler and professor of modern history at the University of Sheffield, reminds us that nothing in that titanic struggle was predetermined. Events might have run a very different course had Great Britain decided to negotiate peace with Hitler in June 1940, or if Japan had attacked the Soviet Union from the east as Germany invaded from the west in June 1941. Kershaw shows that Germany's war on two fronts and Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor, though ultimately disastrous for those countries, were the results of chains of reasoning based on political and military goals, however despicable. Though the author makes deep, intelligent use of archival materials, he provides little new information. Rather, his analysis focuses on the structure of decision making and its consequences. Kershaw depicts Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union as severely hampered by one man giving the orders, getting input only from subordinates too fearful to say anything he didn't want to hear. The slower democratic process enabled many voices to be heard and better informed judgments to be made by Churchill and Roosevelt. This subtext adds a note of hope to a text depicting one of humanity's darkest periods. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Vince Rinehart
World War II made for great myths and great mythmakers. Consider this one, from Winston Churchill: "Future generations may deem it noteworthy that the supreme question of whether we should fight on alone never found a place upon the War Cabinet agenda."
In fact, from May 25 to 28, 1940, while the entire British Expeditionary Force was threatened with destruction at Dunkirk, Churchill and his war cabinet engaged in an intense debate over whether to seek detente by approaching Adolf Hitler through Italy's Benito Mussolini. Would a negotiated end to the war be possible? The foreign minister, Lord Halifax, forcefully advocated exploring the possibilities; Churchill passionately argued to the contrary and won, with crucial support from Neville Chamberlain, not often associated with such steadfastness. Even then, the war cabinet "did not rule out the possibility of an approach to Mussolini 'at some time,' though it explicitly did so in the current situation," writes Ian Kershaw in Fateful Choices, his ambitious history of the war's most important decisions. "It is not easy to imagine, in the light of later events, how insecure Churchill's position was in the middle of May 1940. His hold on authority, soon to become unchallengeable, was still tenuous."
That decision and nine others are the subjects of searching, careful -- sometimes pedantic -- analysis, drawing on a wealth of primary sources and bibliography, detailed in copious endnotes and a list of works cited. Kershaw, the author of Making Friends with Hitler and an acclaimed two-volume biography of the dictator, writes with deep command of his material, weaving together the consequences that each decision had on those that followed. The other decisions involve Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union; Japan's targeting of British, French and Dutch possessions in Southeast Asia; Mussolini's entry into the war and the subsequent invasion of Greece; Roosevelt opting to aid Britain and, later, to wage an undeclared naval war; Stalin ignoring the clear signs of the impending German attack; Japan choosing war with the United States; and two last choices by Hitler, to declare war on the United States and to give genocide against the Jews of Europe its final, monstrous shape.
Within 483 pages of text, that's a lot to get through, and for that reason Fateful Choices sometimes feels like a college textbook's survey history. At times the chewy prose is very slow slogging. Kershaw's analysis centers on the process of decision making, the war of memos and meetings and -- particularly with Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini -- the influence of personality and absolute power in leading up to disastrous choices. He briskly sums up Mussolini's orders to invade Greece: "What passed for dictatorial decisiveness was in reality the merest veneer of half-baked assumptions, superficial observations, amateurish judgement and wholly uncritical assessment, all based upon the best-case scenario."
Nothing truly revelatory there, and that is the case with some of the other decisions, including Japan's long path to the Tripartite Pact and war with the United States. In fact, Kershaw's unraveling of that decision and a few others seems to undermine a premise of the book, that "there was no inexorable path to be followed." The Japan of his history was at a watershed moment in a decades-old path toward great-power status and its own colonial empire, with a military that answered only to the emperor and was ruled as much by fanatical mid-rank officers as by its generals and admirals. It was trapped in a war in China and faced an uncompromising, rearming United States. Kershaw's portrait of Japanese leaders is almost poignant; all, including the emperor, were fatalistic about their chances of winning the war without an immediate knockout blow. At the same time, they were utterly convinced that the only alternative to war was national humiliation and subservience. The real choices here, as Kershaw notes, were made over decades, with the support of much of the Japanese public; by 1940, Japanese leaders were largely in a straitjacket not entirely of their own making.
The last decision Kershaw explores -- moving to the industrial-scale murder of Europe's Jews -- wasn't so much a decision as the endpoint of a long trajectory of anti-Semitism that found its ultimate exponent in Hitler and its impetus in the speed of his victories in 1940 and 1941. This final chapter is a horrifying chronicle of the "spiral of radicalization" in Nazi thinking that led from Mein Kampf to Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is a fitting coda to Kershaw's thoughtful, far-reaching examination of events that echo down to today.
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Reader Reviews
Historian Sir Ian Kershaw is perhaps best known for his recent, monumental two-volume biography of Adolf Hitler. His latest effort, Fateful Choices, is a bit far afield from his studies of various aspects of Nazi Germany published in the last 20-30 years. This new book has a much broader focus as it examines, in the order they occurred, ten fateful decisions that changed the course, if not the outcome, of World War II. These decisions all took place in an 18-month period from May 1940 to December 1941. These decisions were: 1. Britain's agreeing to fight on after the defeat of France. 2. Germany's deciding to wage war on the Soviet Union. 3. Japan's appropriating the colonies of countries at war with, or already defeated by, Germany, and allying itself with Germany and Italy. 4. Italy's deciding to invade Greece. 5. America's providing aid to England. 6. The Soviet Union's ignoring all signs that Germany was about to invade it. 7. America's intensifying its assistance to Britain by an "undeclared war" on Germany. 8. Japan's attacking the U.S. 9. Germany's declaring war against the U.S. 10. Germany's putting into operation the Final Solution. Many of these decisions, in retrospect, seem strange, if not bizarre, or illogical, if not plain idiotic, amoral, or perverse. The author's approach is to examine each of these these decisions by those primarily responsible for making them. (For example, Britain's heroic decision to soldier on is examined from the perspective of Churchill, and the War Cabinet.) In so doing, he demonstrates that each of these decisions was not automatic, or even axiomatic, but that they were reflective of the type of political system that produced them and were influenced deeply by the major personalities involved (i.e., Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt; the Japanese had no single dominant personality, despite Allied propaganda to the contrary, and engaged in a sort of collective decision-making process). He also demonstrates that although each decision had a sort of logic to it (based on national, political, or military objectives), there were also countervailing logical arguments in play at the time these decisions were made which, if followed, would have produced a different outcome and perhaps changed the outcome of the war. (The author does provide an examination of what the other outcomes could have been had the countervailing logic been followed but that is completely secondary to the examination of "why" each decision was made.) In exploring the background of how each decison was made, the author posits that there was no single meeting in which any of these decisions were made; instead each was the result of an accretion of thoughts and ideas. (Interestingly, the only country in which public opinion and perception apparently mattered in coming to these decisions was the U.S., however, this appears to discount the author's own findings in his work, The Hitler Myth, which is an examination of the opinion sampling by the Nazi Party, and others, in the Nazi era.) The ten decisions analyzed in this book coalesced to forge many localized conflicts into a global inferno of death and destruction. The lesson learned by examining how each was made may not be that earth-shattering: Democracies work best at reaching the decisions with the best outcome because even if a forceful personality is at the helm, there are usually many opportunities for opposing viewpoints to be heard and assayed; totalitarian dictatorshops are the worst at reaching decisions because a supreme leader can either ignore opposing viewpoints (or even opposing evidence) at his whim or is not provided opposing viewpoints because those surrounding him are too obeisant or too fearful to contradict his presumptions and conclusions. Nonetheless, the book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the process by which the Second World War turned into a global conflict, including the reasons why both Germany and Japan made decisions that were huge risks and appear almost suicidal to the outsider but made sense to those in power and further explains why these nations did not, and could not, just give up when the war turned inexorably against them. The cast of characters involved in these ten fateful decisions in six countries spanning the entire globe is a bit daunting for those who are not full-time or long-time students of the Second World War. This drawback is alleviated by the inclusion of an handy "dramatis personae", providing essential background information on the players. In sum, the book is a fascinating and well-written account of these ten epochal choices.
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Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941
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Price: $5.99
Updated on 6-21-2008.
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