Turning points

Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941, by Ian Kershaw (Penguin, 656 pp., $35)

IAN KERSHAW is the author of a magisterial biography of Hitler, in which he showed how the will-power of that solitary malign character was enough to overthrow the European state system, and lead to the deaths of tens of millions. Hitler's political adversaries both in Germany and abroad, he has argued, lacked an equivalent will-power to stop him, and their inadequacy was the key to his successes. Impersonal demographic, economic, and cultural forces were of course in operation, but for Kershaw these are not the controlling factors that Marxists or postmodernists think they are. He holds the good old traditional view that the personality of those making the decisions for their state and society ultimately determines events. Equally traditionally, he favors a fluent narrative prose style. Fateful Choices may have nothing startlingly new to add, but with calm authority dissects ten leadership decisions essential to understanding the course of World War II.

Hitler combined a flair for geo-strategy with vile prejudice, and this certainly made it hard to predict what he would do. At the time, it was more or less unbelievable that he really did think that Communism was a Jewish conspiracy, and that his most basic aspiration was to wipe this illusory phenomenon from the face of the earth. Quite wrongly, his opponents tended to imagine that he would act as they would in his position. Similarly, Hitler in turn imagined that his worldview corresponded to reality. In particular, he supposed that his stunning blitzkrieg against France in May 1940 would necessarily oblige Britain to come to terms, thus leaving him a free hand in Europe.

By coincidence, Churchill had become prime minister on the very day that the blitzkrieg opened. He possessed the willpower that so far had been absent. For him, resistance to Hitler was a moral as well as a political imperative, no matter what the cost to Britain or its standing in the world. But at the end of May, with Dunkirk in the offing, Lord Halifax, the foreign minister, proposed in the cabinet to put out feelers through Mussolini to discover whether it was possible to come to terms with Hitler. Britain, he said, had nothing to lose by such a step. Several historians have speculated whether he entertained some prospect of a Vichyite collaboration with himself in the role of a Petain. Churchill had to reject anything that smacked of weakness or surrender, while also ensuring that Halifax did not resign, and so open a divide in public opinion. Kershaw praises the deft way he managed this crucial moment, with exactly the right appeal to natural patriotism in the cabinet, parliament, and the country. At that point, failure of resolve on the part of Churchill might well have resulted in a very different historical outcome.

Holding off any prospect of a successful German invasion, the British navy and air force created a stalemate. Germany had won in Europe and yet not won, while England had lost and yet not lost. Mussolini was quick to draw the wrong conclusion that this was the moment to obtain his share of any spoils available. Kershaw is rightly scornful of his irresponsibility, his ambitions for empire, and his pique at Hitler's superior military power. He had picked up Albania, an easy target, and was then pressured by Ciano, his son-in-law and foreign minister, into invading Greece. According to Kershaw, this was the worst decision of the war, nothing less than an "imbecility." Mussolini proved more of a nuisance than an ally, and towards the end of the war Hitler came to blame him bitterly.

In the strange hiatus after the fall of France, an alternative strategy was available to Hitler: to attack Britain through the Mediterranean, seizing Gibraltar, Malta, and Egypt, cutting off its oil supplies, and weakening its hold on the Empire. Kershaw wonders whether this might not have worked to his advantage. As it turned out, however, General Franco was shrewd enough to reserve his position. It was impossible to reconcile the rival demands of Spain, Italy, and France, and in any case Hitler's heart was not in it. By the end of 1940 he had convinced himself that Britain was holding out only in the hope that eventually the Soviet Union would come to the rescue. Fulfillment of his long-cherished fantasy of rooting out Bolshevism and the Jews was irresistibly appealing. The logic that the road to London lay through Moscow was a tribute to his psychological perversity.

Kershaw is particularly good at describing the real or perceived constraints operating on each of the wartime leaders. Hitler assumed that he had only a limited time in which to conquer the Soviet Union, and then Britain. The United States, he appreciated, would not permit the defeat of Britain but nonetheless needed another year or two in which to bring its forces up to strength, and intervene militarily. That calculation prompted the timing of the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.