Ian Kershaw: Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-41. New York: The Penguin Press 2007.
Kershaw calls the Second World War “the defining period” of the twentieth century because its consequences enduring longer than those of the First World War. They included the Cold War between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the end of the British Empire, the rise of Communist China in the wake of Japan’s defeat, the transformation of Germany and Japan into economic but not military powerhouses, and the mass murder of eleven million Europeans, six million of them Jews, leading to the founding of modern Israel and, with that, the transformation of Middle East geopolitics. Those consequences arose from ten decisions made “by the leaders of Germany, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States, Japan and Italy” operating in “very different” regimes with “different decision-making processes.” Kershaw wants to understand the influences on the statesmen in question, the extent to which their decisions were “pre-formed by government bureaucracies or shaped by competing power-groups within the ruling elites,” how rational and how freely made those decisions were and, conversely, how and to what extent the statesmen ‘influenced’ their regimes. Or were their decisions largely determined by “external and impersonal forces?” And, finally, did their “room for maneuver” narrow during that early year of the war?
He begins with the decision of the British Cabinet to fight instead of negotiating with the Nazis. Although ‘appeasement’ became synonymous with weakness and pusillanimity in the decades after the Allied victory, it was “widely popular in Britain” at the time. The 1930s had seen Great Britain weakened by the Great Depression, restiveness within its extensive empire, and the expense of rearmament. Economically, it lost its financial preeminence to the United States; its industrial might and trade surpluses declined. Along with the other commercial republics, it faced regime rivals throughout the world—rivals intent on “challenging and ‘revising’ (or overthrowing) the international order” established in the aftermath of the Great War. In Asia, confronting the formidable Japanese navy (Japan itself being a sort of geographical counterpart of Britain, an island off the coast of a continent or, if you will, off the opposite coast of Mackinder’s ‘World Island’), Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain asserted that good relations with Japan mattered more to his country than good relations with the U.S., China, or the League of Nations. And when at the same time the Nazis founded their regime in Germany, that country became “the wildest card in the European pack,” challenging Britain’s policy of disarmament, Britons generally clung to wishful thinking, although Germany’s open defiance of the Versailles Treaty’s strictures against rearmament, which it formally rejected in 1935, doubts arose. When British rearmament began three years later, no one expected military readiness to be achieved until 1942, at the earliest. As Germany and Italy began their campaigns to seize territory, the British had nothing but verbal rejoinders to offer. Now Prime Minister, Chamberlain thought “buying Hitler off” by refusing to challenge his nationalist claims in the Rhineland and Czechoslovakia “a price well worth paying.” Famously, Winston Churchill did not, but those were his ‘wilderness years.’ When Churchill urged an anti-fascist alliance with France and the Soviet Union, Hitler beat him to the punch diplomatically with his 1939 pact with Stalin and militarily with his Blitzkrieg conquest of Belgium, the Netherlands, and France in 1940. This brought Churchill to the prime ministership, over the opposition of Chamberlain and the royal family, and many in his own Conservative Party, who judged him deficient in “political judgment.”
As British forces fled France in May 1940, Hitler missed his chance to kill them with his advancing army, relying instead on his air force, which failed. Churchill saw his only hope in “dragging the Americans in” to the war, but President Roosevelt, confronted with public opinion still opposed to another military venture in Europe, demurred politely, instead recommended that Britain withdraw its fleet to North America, for safe keeping. But Churchill regarded any European settlement which left Germany in control of the Continent as likely fatal to his country. At a minimum, he needed first to convince Hitler that he couldn’t defeat Britain. Over the opposition of his Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, who imagined that Hitler might fall victim to political infighting, and who “had been unable to stomach” Churchill’s preference “to go down fighting” rather than surrender, Churchill argued that it “was impossible to imagine that Herr Hitler would be so foolish as to let us continue our re-armament” as a condition of a truce. “His terms would put us completely at his mercy.” Looking back, Kershaw concurs: “No terms which Hitler was likely to offer Britain would be acceptable.” And it is likely that another precondition for a deal would have been the removal of Churchill from office, probably to be substituted by David Lloyd George, whom Hitler admired and who admired Hitler; “he would most probably have been acceptable to Hitler as the British equivalent of Marshal Philippe Pétain at the head of a Vichy-style government.” In the event, however, the realistic prospect of being able to continue the fight, not to die choking in blood, suddenly appeared with the rescue of “practically the whole of the British Army” from northern France in the ‘Miracle of Dunkirk.’
Kershaw finds it “striking” that, in a parliamentary republic, so few persons deliberated on this crucial decision and indeed how few “had any inkling of what was at stake”: “Only the highest level of officialdom within the Cabinet and Foreign Office was aware of what was happening.” The old aristocratic character of the British regime lived on, at least in the realm of foreign policy. Was aristocrat Churchill rational in making his decision, or utterly irrational, as aristocratic Halifax supposed? Kershaw writes that Churchill won the intra-Cabinet debate “because he had the better arguments.”
The consequence of Churchill’s Cabinet’s decision to fight was a two-front war for Germany—exactly what the Germans had attempted, and failed, to prevent in the First World War. “With western Europe secured and any threat from the United States a distant one, Hitler would have been able to turn his full attention to fighting the war for ‘living space’ against the Soviet Union, but now with British backing.” Hitler correctly saw that “time was not on Germany’s side,” that “Germany had to remove Britain from the war before the Americans were ready and willing to enter it.” But now he had his own decision to make. This is the second statesman’s decision Kershaw addresses.
Hitler saw that Britain needed such a two-front war, needed the Soviets as an ally. “With Russia smashed, Britain’s last hope would be shattered.” Therefore, crush the Soviet Union by attacking in spring of 1941, in time to avoid the hardships of the Russian winter. This was Hitler’s “most fateful choice of the Second World War,” triggering “the bloodiest conflict in history” so far, “cost[ing] the lives of over thirty million Soviet and German citizens” (more accurately, subjects). Hitler had precedent on his side, as Germany had seized Belorussia and Ukraine in the First World War, with the Bolsheviks solemnizing those gains in the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. He aimed not merely at establishing a line of “buffer states” in eastern Europe but at regime change there, as General Ludendorff had planned for the Baltic states when it still seemed that Germany would win the earlier war. Hitler also had a financial worry. His rearmament had been “undertaken at reckless cost to state finances”; “guns and butter were possible only for a limited time,” as “an overstretched and overheated economy could not be indefinitely sustained.”
If British foreign policy was governed by a few, German foreign policy was governed by one. As Kershaw gently puts it, “Hitler disliked the potential check to his authority posed by any collective body.” This included his Cabinet, which had stopped meeting by 1938. Since no man can literally rule alone, Hitler established institutions staffed by Nazi Party men; as an added precaution, he allowed the original government institutions to remain, thus setting up “competing agencies” acting within “administrative anarchy,” ensuring that “Hitler’s position was supreme.” Whenever a crucial decision needed to be made, he was the only man he could make it.
His decision had not only a regime component but, as always with Hitler, a malignant ideological one. “Through an attack on the Soviet Union he would destroy the power of the Jews,” he reckoned, “embodied in his worldview by the Bolshevik regime, and at the same time gain ‘living space’ for German settlement.” The ensuing “racially purified empire…would be equipped eventually to challenge the United States for world domination,” especially since it would give Japan a free hand in the Far East, “tying down the United States in the Pacific and deterring her involvement in the Atlantic and in Europe.” That is, Hitler would relieve himself of a two-front war while eventually waging one on the Americans. Thus, while the timing of the attack on the Soviet Union was “military-strategic,” the purpose was regime-ideological. The conquest of Ukraine and Russia would provide Germans with a rich supply of grain, saving the German economy from exhaustion and providing nourishment for future expansion. In the event, both Hitler and his army officers “grossly underestimated the Red Army,” probably basing their assessment of its very recent poor performance against Finland. Meanwhile, the German naval officers targeted, first, the British Royal Navy and then the U.S. Navy “in the contest for world domination.” “The maritime and Continental alternatives” to German imperialism “could easily stand alongside each other in the prewar years,” with the army pointed east and the navy expecting to use the coasts of France, Belgium, Norway, and Denmark as a launch pad for conquests in Africa. Hitler prioritized: eastern Europe first, Africa second, the Americas third. He briefly considered the plan conceived by Admiral Gerhard Wagner: capture Gibraltar from the British “with Spanish support”; push through north Africa toward the Suez Canal, controlled at the time by the British; then gain access to raw materials in Egypt and the other Arab countries, along with Sudan. This, Wagner remarked, would sever Britain’s best routes to the Indian Ocean and to the jewel of its imperial crown. But without firm Spanish and Italian support (each had its own imperialist agenda, and they contradicted one another), Hitler came to prefer his original ‘drive to the East.’ How rational? Although Herr Hitler might well be described as having occupied the opposite end of the ‘decisiveness’ scale from Prince Hamlet, his too “was madness, but there was method in it.”
Given the European and American presence in China, Japan’s 1937 invasion of continental Asia had worldwide implications. These were realized in 1940, when “Hitler’s astonishing military triumphs in western Europe” gave Japanese statesmen and military officers the opportunity to move into southeastern Asia, where the British, French, and Dutch colonial possession now seemed much more vulnerable. The Japanese decision “led eventually to blending the two separate wars in Europe and in China into one huge global conflagration.”
Ten years earlier, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, then controlled by China, had “not only marked a turning point in international relations in the Far East but also signaled the changing basis of power within Japan”—a regime change. As far back as the late nineteenth century, the Meiji dynasty, “undergoing rapid modernization, accommodating western methods to Japanese culture,” intended to drive the Western empires out of east Asia and to build its own empire. In 1915, Japan demanded that the Chinese accept joint police forces on the mainland and the presence of Japanese “advisers” in political, economic, and military matters, which would have “effectively reduced” China “to the status of a Japanese colony.” In 1917, the United States agreed to recognize Japan’s “special interests” in China in exchange for Japanese acceptance of America’s “Open Door” policy, whereby all nations could enjoy equal access to Chinese trading ports. Chinese resistance to Japan and international displeasure with its actions there culminated in a nine-nation treaty that asserted China’s sovereignty, which Japan signed and honored throughout the 1920s. By the end of the decade, however, such internationalist sentiments weakened in response to the financial crisis; young, middle-level army officers became restive, and the civilian authorities lacked control over them. When some of those officers ordered an attack on Chinese forces in Manchuria in 1931, “the League of Nations failed its first major test,” imposing no sanctions—an “early manifestation of the weakness that was soon to be fully exposed both in Asia and in Europe.”
The Japanese parliamentary republic dissolved in May 1932; Japan, now under military control, tempered somewhat by the longstanding oligarchic families, left the League of Nation the next year. The Emperor’s seemingly absolute power wasn’t absolute at all, although his blessing on a proposed policy formally legitimated it. By 1940, “a new nationalism had been forged that bears more than a passing resemblance, though in Japanese cultural guise, to contemporary European fascisms. Its ‘spiritual’ focus was the Emperor, as an embodiment of the Japanese nation,” but “its vehicle was militarism.” Japanese nationalism, called the kodo or “imperial way,” “envisaged a Japan returning to the ‘true values’ of the nation’s long (and legendary) history, overcoming the subjugation to western influence and realizing her destiny and mission, as a superior people and culture, to dominate east Asia.” Propaganda duly transmitted this ideology to the people, and it included a sharp critique of what one Japanese statesman called the “democracy and humanitarianism” of Anglo-Americans, a mere “mask for their own self-interest.” Japan, he continued, “which is small resource-poor, and unable to consume all her own industrial products, would have no resort but to destroy the status quo for the sake of preservation, just like Germany.” Territorial and resource redistribution must occur, both in Asia and in Europe, under what another Japanese statesman called “the new world order” including a “New Order” in Asia.
With the League of Nations powers exhibiting no real power in the region, this left the Soviet Union as the principal worry of the new regime. Japan joined the Anti-Comintern Pact late in 1936, each country guaranteeing that if it fought a war against the USSR, the other partners would provide no aid to the Russian Communists. The Japanese then attacked China, and while “the orgy of killing and rape” in Nanking “shocked the world,” the West did nothing more than condemn it. By 1938, however, the Chinese government under Chiang Kai-Shek had retreated, consolidating in western China. “It was now stalemate.” Still eager to extend its empire, Japan seized islands off southern China and fought Soviet troops on the border with Outer Mongolia. The August 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact stunned Tokyo by removing a potential ally. Recalculating, the Japanese military regime expected a Europe ruled not by commercial republics but by Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union. Seeing that a European war might provoke an Anglo-American alliance, some wanted to reach out to the U.S., but America’s strong support of Chiang Kai-Shek made such an overture unlikely to succeed. No matter. As Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yosuka averred, “In the battle between democracy and totalitarianism the latter adversary will without question win and will control the world. The era of democracy is finished and the democratic system bankrupt.” War between Japan and the United States was nothing less than a “historical inevitability.”
That being so, the regime designed contingency plans for a blitzkrieg attack on the Dutch East Indies via air bases to be constructed in Indochina and Thailand—plans that only became feasible when the Nazis began their rampage in Europe. In Asia now, “wherever diplomacy failed…armed strength would be deployed, if circumstances demanded it.” Circumstances did not favor a long war with the United States, but “a decisive blow” in a short war would work, military planners believed, especially if Great Britain were tied down in Europe against Japan’s allies there, the signatories to the September 1940 Tripartite Pact. The Japanese Navy General Staff expected to be ready for war with the United States by spring of 1941.
The American response to the Pact upended this expectation. Far from intimidating the Americans, the Tripartite Pact “merely confirmed American views that Japan was a belligerent, bullying, imperialist force in the Far East, an Asian equivalent of Nazi Germany, and had to be stopped.” The Pact proved to be not a deterrent but a provocation. While the Roosevelt Administration decided against imposing an oil embargo on Japan immediately after Pact was signed, “it was becoming increasingly evident that only a trial of strength would decide control over southeast Asia.” For Japanese planners, circumstances strongly indicated ‘Now or never.’ To settle with the U.S. would have meant an unacceptable capitulation regarding Japanese occupation of eastern China.
Italy’s Benito Mussolini and his Fascist Party had seized power in 1922. Initially, he had fairly good relations with the United States and Great Britain, especially since his imperial ambitions were hemmed in by Italy’s war debts. He did conquer Abyssinia in 1935—no great achievement, but one that boosted the esteem Italians felt for him. He also moved closer to the Nazis, supporting Germany’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 and accepting the Anschluss two years later. He fretted that Italians “were too peace-loving, far from ready for war” and imagined that he had a promise from Hitler not to start Germany’s planned war until 1943. He also understood that his own power over Italians and the Italian state was not as absolute as Hitler’s power over Germany. His Foreign Minister, son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano, distrusted Hitler; the military officers had been reluctant to strike against Abyssinia. They saw that Italy was not militarily ready when Great Britain and France declared war on Germany in 1939. Mussolini himself saw no alternative to allying with the Nazis, fearing that trying to stay out would only bring Hitler’s fury against his country. His colleagues were not nearly so sure. “Had the German victory over France been less conclusive, it is even imaginable that intervention could have been postponed.” Kershaw thinks that “with clever diplomacy, Italy could have continued to play off each side against the other, retaining the advantages of neutrality.” But Germany’s rapid crushing of French defenses convinced Mussolini to enter the war “against the plutocratic and reactionary democracies of the West”—Mussolini was, after all, a kind of socialist—which “have repeatedly blocked the march and even threatened the existence of the Italian people,” confining it to the Mediterranean. To Mussolini and now to his colleagues, “it looked a safe bet that Italy would profit hugely and cheaply from the astonishing victories of the Wehrmacht in western Europe,” even if “Mussolini smarted under his relegation to the status of a second-rank dictatory”—he, the most senior Fascist!
And so, in October 1940 he chose to satisfy Italian ambitions in the Balkans by invading Greece, “a calamitous folly,” the “first defeat for the seemingly invincible Axis forces.” Worse still, the campaign against Greece diverted Italian forces from the main geopolitical prize in the eastern Mediterranean: Egypt, with its Suez Canal, where “weak British forces” might have been driven out. Had they been, “the war might have taken a different course.” And the Fascists’ power in Italy, which had peaked with the triumph in Abyssinia, would not have waned so soon. Mussolini’s hope at the time was that the Germans, preoccupied with the Battle of Britain, would leave him with a free hand in Egypt. None of it worked, thanks to his “underestimation of the Greeks,” who fought with “bravery and tenacity.” The Greek war bogged down the Italians in the Balkans as much as the British had frustrated the Germans in the skies over the English Channel. “Within six weeks, the would-be world power, Italy, had shown herself to be militarily weaker than the flyweight force of Greece.” A successful British torpedo attack on the Italian fleet anchored at Taranto left half of Mussolini’s warships at the bottom of the harbor. “Fascist dreams of empire sank along with them.” Hitler agreed: “the pointless campaign in Greece compelled us, contrary to all our plans, to intervene in the Balkans”—he ordered his own troops into Greece in April 1941—and “that in its turn led to a catastrophic delay in the launching of our attack on Russia.” Kershaw doesn’t go that far, judging that Operation Barbarossa would have failed no matter when it was started. But Italy’s defeat did severely damage Axis chances for victory in north Africa. In sum, “the imbecility of Mussolini’s decision reflected the dictator’s severe personal shortcoming” and “the imbecility of a political system” that was too weak to prevent his folly.
In fall 1940, near the end of his unprecedented and successful third presidential campaign, President Franklin Roosevelt promised, “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign war.” Well, not right away. He preferred incrementalism, which meant that no step he took toward intervention could not be reversed. His most important decision was his support for the Lend-Lease bill, which “open[ed] up America’s vast material resources to Britain’s struggling war effort at no direct financial cost” while clearly taking its side. His reluctance was understandable, given Americans’ opposition to entry into another European war in which 50,000 American soldiers and sailors died. In the war’s aftermath, many Americans concluded that “America had been inveigled into involvement by foreign financiers, bankers and arms manufacturers who stood to profit from an Allied victory.” Roosevelt himself had supported neutrality legislation in the mid-1930s and reduced the size of the Army. “It is always best and safest to count on nothing from the Americans but words,” Britain’s Neville Chamberlain sniffed. It was the peace treaty Chamberlain brought back from Munich in 1938 that spurred Roosevelt into action, however, cautious though that action was, initially. He ordered U.S. rearmament and attempted, without success, to repeal the arms embargo on the European republics Congress had enacted. For his part, Hitler understandably discounted the possibility of American intervention, scorning FDR’s offer of negotiations “to settle disarmament and trade” if Germany and Italy would promise not to attack some thirty countries for the next ten years. Hitler instead signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin, guaranteeing the Nazis a free hand to assault on France and Britain.
In September 1940, FDR reaffirmed his promise that the United States would support the democracies by taking measures “short of war,” while taking care to quadruple the size of the Army and to prepare defenses along the Atlantic coast against German submarines. Ever the master of words, he now argued for the repeal of the Neutrality Act on the grounds that “true neutrality” as to stop treating aggressors and victims alike. The fact was that the United States at this time lacked either the military or logistical capability to do much against the Germans. The United States had only 1,350 airplanes and could spare none for the French. The U.S. army ranked twentieth among the nations of the world, “one place behind the Dutch”—five well-equipped divisions against the 141 divisions the Germans had on the western front. And what good would American aid do, anyway, if the British were defeated and the Germans seized the American supplies?
FDR surrounded himself with solid Cabinet officers and military officers. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, “a man of firm principles based upon moral rectitude and commitment to the law,” who “detested Nazism to the core,” and respected only Winston Churchill among the European republicans, “brought a much needed dynamism” to the rearmament campaign. He worked well with Army Chief of Staff George Marshall, who went directly to the president in May 1940 to urge a substantial buildup. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau was also a hawk, although Secretary of State Cordell Hull remained more cautious, still hoping to negotiate, as State Department officials usually do. Congress continued to lean toward isolationism, reflecting Americans’ pessimistic assessment of Allied chances in the war. Marshall, the strong advocate of rearmament, wanted nothing to do with military aid to Britain, worrying that this would weaken American self-defense.
But public opinion began to shift. “The fall of France and the imminent threat to Great Britain sharpened awareness of the menace to the United States from German domination of the Atlantic” even in the Midwest, far from the more vulnerable Atlantic coast. When Italy entered the war in June 1940, FDR announced, and Americans supported, sending more materiel to Britain, even while seeing “where this might lead.” “There was now massive support, teaching even into previously hardcore isolationist circles, for rapid and wholesale rearmament.” Roosevelt could say, publicly, that the British navy was the only force capable of blocking the German navy; therefore, the loan of American destroyers to the British was crucial. Churchill weighed in: “Mr. President, with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world this is a thing to do now.” FDR brought Congress on board by his proposal to lease British territories in the New World for American use while lending the destroyers.
In themselves, the destroyers didn’t amount to much, militarily. They were World War I vintage ships. Hitler was not impressed. But what the deal accomplished wasn’t so much a contribution to the balance of power. It rather showed the American public that their country had “effectively abandoned neutrality” and that their hearts went with that abandonment. There was a serious legal problem, however. The Johnson Act of 1934 prohibited U.S. loans to nations in default on their World War I loans, as Britain was. Only cash-and-carry deals were legal. FDR solved the problem by loaning arms to the Brits to be repaid in kind after the war; no money was advanced by the U.S. or owed by Great Britain. Lend-Lease passed Congress in March 1941, to Churchill’s relief and delight. As for Germany, the military chiefs “interpreted it as ‘a declaration of war'” and Hitler extended the north Atlantic combat zone to the waters of Greenland. Yet Roosevelt could still maintain to the American public that he had stopped short of war, which he had. He continued “to mold opinion without outpacing it,” inasmuch as eighty percent of Americans opposed sending troops to Europe. He also knew that Hitler intended to attack the Soviet Union in violation of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and this would mean that “new prospects would open up” in western Europe. Meanwhile, “there was widespread backing for a policy of maximum aid to Britain short of war, in America’s own interest.” In the republican regime, public opinion and the separation of government powers evidently hampers quick decisions while supporting the ones that are carefully and patiently justified.
In the Soviet Union, it is safe to say, Josef Stalin didn’t run a republican regime. He had long abandoned the Leninist oligarchy of “collective leadership,” in which the CCP boss ruled as first among not-quite-equals. He still had nominal opposition as late as 1929—persons who received firm instruction on exactly how nominal they were during the Great Terror. In 1937-38, Stalin “sought to wipe the slate clean of those whose experiences of the ‘glory days’ under Lenin might have stood in the way of his own claim to be his sole and legitimate heir.” The purges eliminated 44,000 CCP members, along with 700,000 others; another 1.5 million were arrested and tossed into the Gulag. The work was undertaken by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs or NKVD, the secret police force answerable to Stalin alone. Stalin loyalists replaced the missing, but in the army, where some semblance of competence was more urgently needed, quick replacement proved impossible. “Of the 101 members of the supreme military leadership, 91 were arrested, and of these 80 shot” on “absurd, trumped-up charges of anti-Soviet activity,” in what Kershaw calls the “decapitation of the Red Army.” They included Stalin’s best general, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky. By 1941, seventy-five percent of field officers and seventy percent of political commissars had held their posts for less than a year. Terror was not only a method of purging the ranks of Party and Army but a method of ruling the survivors. Extraordinarily enough, this was done in part to prepare the Soviet Union for the war Stalin expected. For his part, Hitler “thought Stalin must be mad,” a fascinating judgment when one considers the source.
But the primary war Stalin expected was one between the ‘capitalist’ empires, battling for the world’s material resources. Just as in World War I, he supposed, the world Communism generally and the Soviet Union in particular would reap the benefits of capitalism’s self-destruction. The main task for the Soviet regime, to strengthen itself under the slogan ‘Socialism in One Country,’ required exactly the kind of ideological purification Stalin undertook with the Terror. At the same time, he undertook a foreign policy of “peaceful coexistence” with foreign governments—to be sure, continuing to finance Communist parties, with numerous ‘underground’ operative, providing intelligence, generating propaganda, and preparing to move against those regimes if the opportunity arose. In this scheme, Germany held a central place, quite literally in the center of Europe. It was the Soviet Union’s “most important commercial partner,” providing Stalin with nearly half of his imports; it had a strong Communist Party; after a few years of estrangement following Hitler’s accession to power, the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 registered what Stalin considered the impotence of the League of Nations and of the commercial republics generally. He suspected that the statesmen of those regimes intended to escape war with Hitler by fomenting war between Germany and the Soviet Union and, after testing Britain and France by offering them a treaty and noting their lack of interest, he beckoned Hitler. Whatever Hitler’s immediate intentions toward the Soviets might have been (and Stalin knew they were hostile, in principle and therefore in the long run), Stalin knew he needed “to stay neutral and save our strength.” He believed he had three years. As it turned out, it was only two. In the interim, he could and did move against Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, although “Finland proved…a step too far,” as the 200,000 Soviet battlefield dead attested.
France’s sudden collapse forced him to revise his strategy. He accelerated his rearmament program, subjected his workers “to even more draconian labor discipline,” and even rehabilitated some of the military officers he’d consigned to his prisons. He formally annexed the Baltic states and hoped to extend Soviet power into the Balkans, a prospect Hitler crushed by the simple expedient of seizing Romania. Meanwhile, he received a report from Marshal S. K. Timoshenko, who wrote that “no operational war plan is available; an operational total plan or partial plans do not exist.” His army even lacked a sufficient number of maps. Since “the failings could not be put right immediately,” “it was crucial to avoid any provocation that might give Hitler a pretext for attack.” Like many in the republics, Stalin became an appeaser, although not in his case animated by any love of peace. The problem, of course, was that Hitler needed no pretext to attack anyone, given his powers of propagandistic invention.
Since the 1920s, Soviet military strategy had been based on the idea of “deep operations”—that is, absorbing an enemy offensive and then counterattacking, in imitation of Russia’s war against Napoleon, more than a century earlier. Nazi surprise and blitzkrieg called this strategy into question, or should have done, but the Soviets didn’t much alter their plan. Soviet planners also assumed that Germany would attack through Ukraine, if they attacked, but Stalin believed that Hitler wouldn’t risk a two-front war. The German conquest of Greece and the rest of the Balkans should have put both of these assumptions into question, yet Stalin stubbornly began to disbelieve all information that contradicted his wishful thinking. While he received reports to the contrary from reliable agents who had obtained access to Germany’s secret plans, he chose to brush them aside. He “stuck to his policy of non-provocation and playing for time,” remaining “unshaken in his conviction that the Germans would not invade until they had attained victory or a compromise settlement in the west.” He imagined he had ‘history’ on his side, since the two-front war had ruined the Germans in 1917-18. Even when Hitler launched his attack, he expected the Red Army to “inflict a crushing defeat on the German invaders.” When that didn’t happen, he began to hope that territorial concessions might buy Hitler off. And although the Red Army, aided by General Winter, did stop the Wehrmacht as it approached Moscow in December 1941, beginning a grinding military turnaround, “the cost of Stalin’s decision” was “colossal”—twenty-five million of his subjects killed.
This was a regime failure. “The failings were those of a system of highly personalized rule,” a “system where reason had lost its way,” and more than that (pace Kershaw), a system of Marxist ideological rule, assured that ‘history’ must be on its side. Another way of saying it is that reason lost its way because Marxian dialectic, supposedly a feature of scientific verity, causes reason to lose its way by giving the human mind the illusions provided by a comprehensive system of pseudo-reasoning.
In the United States, Roosevelt could take heart that Germany had embroiled itself in a two-front war. However, he could not know if the Soviets could hold out. His military brass expected Hitler to win, quickly, then return his attentions to Great Britain, the last European rival. Roosevelt faced renewed opposition from the isolationists, who hoped that the Nazis and the Bolsheviks would kill each other off, making American intervention unnecessary. And what would Japan do? Aid the Germans by attacking the Soviet Union? Or continue pushing into the south Pacific, attacking American interests? “I simply have not got enough Navy to go round,” he lamented. He chose to step up aid to Britain, while refraining from direct intervention. Aid required shipping; shipping could be attacked by German submarines (as in the First World War); such attacks could draw America into the war (as they did in the First World War). His policy of taking “all measures in the fight against Hitler ‘short of war” had “now come to mean ‘undeclared war,’ even to the extent of armed clashes in the Atlantic which, despite the state of non-belligerency that technically prevailed in American-German relations, threatened to explode into all-out conflict.”
FDR dispatched his former Secretary of Commerce, now trusted White House aide Harry Hopkins to Moscow, where Stalin requested military equipment and American military intervention against Hitler. He would even “welcome American troops on any part of the Russian front and entirely under American control.” He recognized that “Hitler’s army would finally be crushed only once the United States had entered the fray,” an opinion shared by Roosevelt’s military advisers. The Americans estimated that Germany’s unconditional surrender would require five million troops on the ground in Europe. The president took Germany to be a far greater threat to the U.S. than the Soviet Union could be; in this, he retained the optimism of the ‘Popular Front’ days of the mid-1930s.
Accordingly, he sent U.S. soldiers to Iceland in July 1941, a move that met with public approval. He expanded the Selective Service Act in the same month by extending their terms of any future draftees and allowing them to be used outside of the Western Hemisphere. Without this legislation, “the attack on Pearl Harbor, four months later, would have struck a country with its army in a process of dissolution.” In geopolitical terms, he worried about Nazi agents “penetrating the bulge of Arrica and opening the way for Hitler to make a quick strike through the Iberian Peninsula into north Africa,” where it was a “relatively short distance across the Atlantic…to Brazil”—the “simplest way for German troops to establish a footing on the American continent.” This never happened, and in his August 1941 summit conference with Churchill in Placentia Bay, near Newfoundland, he began to see “the eastern front as the key to the outcome of the war.”
When a German submarine attacked the USS Greer, an American destroyer, in the north Atlantic, this gave FDR “an opportunity of the kind he had awaited.” Turning to the medium he had mastered, the radio, he charged that this attack was part of a German plan “to acquire absolute control of the seas as a prelude to domination of the western hemisphere by force of arms,” a prospect the isolationists had long denied. “When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike,” he told his audience, “you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him. These Nazi submarines and raiders are the rattlesnakes of the Atlantic.” He thereby justified the use of military escorts for convoys in the Atlantic with orders to shoot on sight. The justification wasn’t really justified by the facts of the case, as the Greer had in fact harassed the German submarine, provoking its commander to fire first. And “although Roosevelt could not know it, Hitler had given express orders forbidding provocation in the Atlantic while he had his hands full in the east.” But Kershaw approves, citing “the long-term threat posed by Hitler’s regime.” “As Roosevelt had seen all along, the defense interests of the United States would be irreparably damaged if Britain were to be forced to capitulate or to negotiate an unfavorable settlement, leaving Hitler in charge of the European continent and dominating the Atlantic.”
When another attack on a U.S. ship occurred in October, Roosevelt gave another “fiery address,” in which he placed before the American people an “absolute choice in a future world between American freedom and Nazi tyranny,” a regime which therefore must be destroyed. He came close to announcing a request to Congress for a declaration of war but, ever the master of political timing, he held off, as “the United States was still not ready for war,” either materially or in spirit. “The longer America could remain out of the formal combat, the more advanced her military buildup and the mobilization of an arms economy would be,” and the less plausible sending arms and equipment to Great Britain and the Soviet Union would be, given the increasingly obvious necessity of linking American national defense with theirs. “There was also the real concern that a declaration of war against Germany would immediately bring Japan—Hitler’s ally under the Tripartite Pact—into the war.” As it happened, Japan was readying itself for exactly that, with or without an American declaration of war against Germany.
By the summer of 1941, the Japanese needed to respond to Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, which “caught Japan’s power elite unawares, in spite of the clear warnings they had been given.” They had hoped to build a coalition based on regime lines, a struggle against the commercial republics; based on the Nazi-Soviet Pact, they had expected an Axis Powers + Soviet Union bloc, freeing them to continue building what they were pleased to call a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” Such a bloc would counter the statement issued by Roosevelt and Churchill in their August summit, reaffirming their “commitment to freedom, peace, economic liberalism and the rejection of force in international affairs enunciated in the Atlantic Charter.” But to the Japanese, this meant an intention to maintain “a system of world domination on the basis of Anglo-American world views,” as the most influential Tokyo newspaper editorialized. Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yosuke advocated a military turn to the north to aid the Germans on the grounds that “great men will change their minds.” But the military officers disagreed, expecting a German victory and occupying Indochina while waiting. Fearing a move on the oil-rich Dutch East Indies, the Unted States froze Japanese assets and cut off oil supplies to Japan. With the war in China still boiling, the Japanese knew that they could no longer delay “a gigantic showdown” with the Americans, British, and Dutch. “The only question seemed to be: when?” But there were still Japanese statesmen opposed to expanding the war; they included Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro and the Emperor. “Opinions in the elites were split,” given the possibly “calamitous” consequences of a protracted war. Nonetheless, “a samurai-like fatalism prevailed”; “destruction with honor was better than survival with shame.” The American ambassador to Japan remarked, “Japanese sanity cannot be measured by American standards of logic.” The ‘logic’ of the one regime—its purposes, its way of life, upheld by its rulers and their ruling institutions—contradicted the ‘logic’ of the other. Put in logical terms, different premises yielded different conclusions.
Peace overtures from Japanese civilian officials, reciprocated by Roosevelt, finally went nowhere. And in Japan, “diplomacy was only given the briefest of chances.” The conditions Japanese statesmen demanded were unacceptable: cutoff of military and economic aid to Chiang Kai-shek; no extension of Western military presence in the Far East; provision of “necessary economic resources” to Japan. But although the civilian side was willing to eschew further advance into south Asia and to withdraw from Indochina after a peace deal had been reached, the military insisted on a continued alliance with the Axis and the attainment of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. “Without support from the military, no civilian government could survive.” That is, the military had already won the regime struggle within Japan itself, and they regarded war as a ‘now or never’ circumstance. When assured that Japanese forces would win the war in three months, the Emperor initially rebelled, pointing out that the Pacific Ocean is even bigger than China, and we’re already entangled there. But he lacked the real authority he needed to veto the operation; “in practice, it was unthinkable.” “To have attempted conflict with the military leadership in those circumstances would conceivably have been to put the position of the monarchy itself in jeopardy.”
The Army General Staff issued a statement calling “the construction of a New Order in East Asia” an “unshakable national policy.” The United States stood in the way of that, “obstruct[ing] the Empire’s rise and expansion in East Asia in order to dominate the world and defend democracy” [italics added]. “The policy of Japan is in fundamental contradictions to this”; ergo, “collisions between the two will finally develop into war” as a matter of “historical inevitability.” Thus, a regime conflict was presented and justified under the terms of historicism, as it was in Germany and the Soviet Union, even if the contents of historicist doctrine differed sharply among the rulers of those countries. Not long after this, the prime minister resigned, replaced by hardliner Tojo Hideki. And in any event, the Japanese prime ministers “had no direct control over the operational staff” of either the army or the navy.
The Pearl Harbor attack “would be one prong of the overall offensive,” including simultaneous attacks on Malaya, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and soon the Dutch East Indies. Victory in those countries was now anticipated, a bit more modestly, in four to eight months, although the war against the United States would last longer, to be concluded with “a negotiated peace to [Japan’s] advantage.” This treaty would stipulate no more U.S. or British aid to China, thus putting Chiang Kai-Shek on the road to extinction. Japanese military planners anticipated a German declaration of war against the U.S., “which would then become enfeebled through prolonged embroilment in the European conflict.” Although the Emperor “was still wracked with doubts and worries,” the officers had no time to imitate Hamlet, and Hirohito acquiesced.
The Americans expected war, but not an attack on Pearl Harbor. They expected an assault somewhere in southeast Asia. Although Pearl Harbor air strike was “a massive shock,” the Japanese had no adequate follow-up to it. The Japanese expected the Americans to fold. (Were its people not a mob of decadent liberal democrats, a soft commercial people incapable of matching the martial valor of the Japanese?) But American public opinion regarded the Sino-Japanese war as “a moral cause”; “the anti-Japanese backlash in the United States stirred by accounts of atrocities by Japan’s army against Chinese civilians had certainly made American public opinion a factor which the Roosevelt administration could not ignore.” At the same time, American and British interests centered not so much in China but in the Pacific Ocean. “To have abandoned China would have had the most serious consequences,” economically, extending to the war in Europe, where Japan was allied with the Axis. A Japanese monopoly in the south Pacific would have seriously injured the sinews of war in Europe. And it would have ruined any prospect of free trade in Asia, once peace returned.
The next crucial decision belonged to Hitler, who declared war on the United States almost immediately after the Japanese attack. Given the German experience in the First World War, why did he formally invite American intervention in Europe, this time? He had admired Americans’ vast imperial conquest of the most valuable section of the North American continent in the previous century, which he attributed to the virtues of “a dominant white ‘Nordic’ racial core.” He regarded this as a model for his own policy of Lebensraum, and that would come at the expense of Russia, not of far-off America. True, “at some dim and distant future date,” he expected, “a German-dominated Europe would have to face a contest for supremacy with the United States,” a country, “though with a good racial stock in its white population” had come to be ruled by “Jewish capital, and by Jewish control of politics and culture,” according to his lights. In his own words, this made the United States (and Britain) “absolute enemies” of Germany. As he put it, “the only state that will be able to stand up to North America will be the state that has understood how—through the character of its internal life as well as through the substance of its external policy—to raise the racial value of its people and bring it into the most practical national form for this purpose.” Fortunately, the financial crisis of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed had substantially weakened the United States, reinforcing American isolationism and giving the Nazi movement an opportunity to reshape Europe without outside interference. Only in the very late 1930s, as Roosevelt began to stir, did Hitler complain about U.S. “agitating” against Germany, again linking this to hated Jewry. “He depicted Jews as warmongers forcing Germany into a conflict she did not want.” If war did occur, he warned, “then those who had caused it, the Jews, would perish” or, as he put it, “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe” would result. He contemptuously rejected FDR’s April 1939 call for an anti-war declaration by the Axis powers. His war strategy required, and expected, rapid victory of the Wehrmacht in Europe, precluding any effective American involvement. The future conflict with America would come no sooner than the mid-1940s, when Germany, “dominating the whole of the European continent, and by this time with a mighty battle-fleet ready to contest control over the oceans,” would be more than ready and able for it. But “Woe betide us if we’re not finished by then,” he confided to his inner circle.
Hence the decision to support Japan’s war with the United States by declaring war on the United States. With the anticipated thrashing of the Soviet Union in mind, he wanted Japan free to take southeast Asia from its British colonial occupiers and to dismantle American naval bases in the region. This would preoccupy the Allies, giving Germany the time to consolidate its continental empire. Hitler’s lack of any aircraft “capable of bombing American cities” was “his only regret,” although he expected his submarines to deal with the Americans in the Atlantic, after Russia and the Balkans were secured. He told the Japanese ambassador in Berlin that he did not fear the United States because the European armaments industry far surpassed anything Americans could muster. (In this, his assumption was bolstered by his military attaché in Washington, who was confident that “American would not be ready for war before Germany had won it.”) He was already planning to base his bombers on the Azores, from which sanctuary they could strike North American targets. He told the ambassador, “We should work jointly” to destroy both the Soviet Union and the United States. What he didn’t know was that “the leaders of Japan were less sure than Hitler was that the German war in the east was already won,” as good as won. Nor did he know that Japan had no intention of attacking the Soviets’ eastern flank but instead would push into the south Pacific right away, not waiting for the outcome of the German attack on Russia. But given the limited information he had at the time, Hitler’s declaration of war made good tyrannical sense to him. “He now had the justification he needed for opening up all-out submarine warfare in the Atlantic and preventing the U-boats from being as ‘worthless’ as they had proved in 1915-16.” In the First World War, Japan had been an ally of the republics. No more.
“Hitler’s extraordinarily inflated hopes in his Japanese ally led him on 11 December [1941] to his fateful choice: all-out war against an enemy whom, as he conceded to [Ambassador] Oshima at the beginning of January 1942, he had no idea how to defeat.” Still, “given his underlying premises, his decision was quite rational,” if not “sensible.” Not only the Soviet Union but the United States would prove more formidable than he wished.
The tenth and most sinister decision of these months, Hitler’s determination to begin ‘the war against the Jews,’ was documented by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who summarized the Führer’s thoughts: if the Jews “brought about another world war, they would experience their annihilation.” The world war has begun; ergo, “the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.” By the end of 1941, the Nazis had already murdered 230,000 Jews, first in the occupied sections of the Soviet Union but soon extended to “the whole of Nazi-occupied Europe.” Unlike the Armenian genocide by the Turks in the First World War, limited to those who refused to convert to Islam, this genocide was ‘racial,’ based on “the pathology of demonic antisemitism” which “defies rationality,” although not the Nazi assumption that “the war could never be won unless the Jews were destroyed.” Hitler held German Jews responsible for Germany’s defeat in the First World War, regarding them “as war profiteers” and “as shirkers avoiding military service and as fomenters of internal unrest that undermined the military effort.” As he put it in Mein Kampf, had “twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas” at the beginning of that war, German victory would have been assured. Less than one percent of the population had ruined all the others, and that, Hitler determined, would not happen again. He had already built a political party in which hatred of Jews formed part of an ideology of racist historicism, giving him thousands of willing co-executioners by the time the Second World War began. “This time,” he promised in a speech in Munich in November 1941, “we will make good what we were then cheated of.” Near the end of the war, he bragged, “I have lanced the Jewish boil. Posterity will be eternally grateful to us.”
Kershaw concludes by emphasizing the way in which regimes shaped the decisions of statesmen during this period. “The fateful choices that were made were not predetermined or axiomatic. But they did reflect the sort of political system that produced them.” In the tyrannies, Germany and Italy, “all-powerful leaders” could enforce their commands upon the elites, especially given the popular support they shaped by their control of all major media organs. In Japan, where a “collective form of government” of the few prevailed, the truly ruling few were military officers; civilian ministers “falling afoul of the military were soon ousted—or assassinated.” The military ethos of honor and victory crucially inflected all policy choices. “The contrast with the two democratic systems, those of Great Britain and the United States, was stark.” In those regimes, “there was little scope for arbitrary decision-making.” In Great Britain, “even in the extreme gravity of the situation, the decision had arisen from rational debate” in the Cabinet between Churchill and appeasers Halifax and Chamberlain. In the United States, the president wasn’t responsible to his Cabinet, which served more as “an advisory body.” It was Congress, not the Cabinet, that limited executive authority; “and behind Congress there was public opinion to consider.”
Regimes inflected but did not determine statesmen’s decisions.
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