Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941

by Ian Kershaw

  Mussolini’s internal position was inherently less strong than Hitler’s. He was not the head of state, and the army’s allegiance (as proved to be critical in 1943) was ultimately to the King, not to the Duce. Even so, his own internal dominance was unchallenged. He controlled all the important ministries of state. The party ensured loyalty and was the main conduit for the Duce cult. This, parallel to the Führer cult in Germany, had helped establish a personal supremacy which meant that arbitrary decision-making had become structurally embedded in the Fascist system. The fateful choices to enter the war, then, utterly ill-prepared, to invade Greece, were, as much as the disastrous decisions by Hitler that invited immense suffering and bloodshed for his own German people, both the free choices of an all-powerful individual, and at the same time systemically pre-programmed disasters in waiting.

  The Japanese system shared many affinities with the regimes of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism. But there were also significant differences. Here, no possibility of arbitrary decision-making fell to any individual. In fact, of the six systems examined, this was in many respects the most overtly collective form of government. The Emperor was more than a figurehead, but had no dictatorial, or genuinely regal, powers to force decisions upon his country. Nor did he attempt to do so. Rather, he backed–sometimes hesitantly, even fearfully–the decisions of his government. Imperial majesty was only upheld by posing as the last resort of regime consensus, not by risking confrontation with his government, even less with his military. The Achilles heel of the system was, in fact, the position of the military. Constitutionally subject only to the Emperor, not the civilian government, the armed forces enjoyed a high degree of autonomy to shape national policy. Ministers falling foul of the military were soon ousted–or assassinated. The Prime Minister, therefore, had to act largely at the behest of the dominant forces in the army and navy. These in turn, in a peculiarity of the Japanese system, were heavily influenced by the views percolating upwards from factions based in the middle echelons of the officer corps.

  In reality, however, the pressure from below operated within the framework of fixed ideological parameters of the quest for national greatness resting upon expansion, conquest and dominion. The strategy and tactics leading to these goals could give rise to heated debate. The goals themselves were not in dispute. The collective government was, therefore, wedded to the same inflexible ends. And, as with Germany and Italy, national prestige played an inordinate part in the making of crucial decisions. Anything that smacked of loss of face was guaranteed unanimous rejection. Ultimately, therefore, the collective decision-making in Japan worked in similar fashion to the individualistic pattern in Germany and Italy. There was an inherent propensity to take the high-risk gamble rather than withdraw to a perceived humiliating compromise that would undermine the central ideological objectives and advertise national weakness, not strength.

  Stalin’s gamble, that Hitler would not attack in 1941, was of a different kind. But his grave error of judgement also reflected his system of rule. Here, as in Hitler’s Germany, the personality of the ruler had become a determinant of the system itself. Terror and purges had undermined bureaucratic stability and military efficiency. The institutions of collective government, as in Germany, had long since been eroded. The most important of them, the Politburo, had in recent years met less and less frequently. Even when it did meet, it was no more than a vehicle of Stalin’s own power. Fear, intimidation, toadying and sycophancy prevailed even at the highest levels of the regime. They meant that there was no counter to Stalin’s own assessment. Here too, then, the ruler had an autonomy in the making of decisions that was unusual even in authoritarian systems of rule.

  The contrast with the two democratic systems, those of Great Britain and the United States, was stark. Here, given long-established, well-oiled bureaucratic machinery of government that framed the policy-choices for the leaders, allowing for rational assessment of risks and advantages, there was little scope for arbitrary decision-making. Yet there were divergences in the way these systems operated.

  The British War Cabinet in May 1940 was a genuine collective, even if its members carried differing weight. Churchill had the dignity of the office of Prime Minister behind his views. But he was new to the post, and at this stage was regarded with scepticism if not outright disapproval by some elements even within his own party (which he did not yet lead). He could not dictate policy, and had to accept the continued importance of the two heavy-weights of the previous administration, Chamberlain and Halifax, while the two Labour members, Attlee and Greenwood, had as yet little standing. Churchill carried the day through sound argument as well as force of personality. Even in the extreme gravity of the situation, the decision had arisen from rational debate. Halifax and Chamberlain, like Churchill, had advanced reasoned calculations. The ideological parameters were as plain as in the case of the authoritarian systems, and were agreed by all. But they were defensive in nature: upholding Britain’s independence as a nation, and preserving her Empire. Only the ways to those ends separated Churchill and Halifax. At the end of the debate, Halifax did not demur at the decision arrived at, even though it ran counter to his own suggestion. Churchill’s own position, building upon his propagandistic exploitation of the ‘miracle of Dunkirk’, now went from strength to strength. His dominance within the Cabinet was soon ensured. Since he controlled the Defence Ministry, too, the balance tipped in the direction of prime-ministerial and away from outrightly collective government. Churchill’s personality traits prompted frequent intervention (or interference) in military matters, much to the irritation of his chiefs of staff and commanders. But his sense of collective responsibility for government remained. At their meeting at Placentia Bay in August 1941, Roosevelt was surprised at the need felt by Churchill to wire his Cabinet colleagues in London to seek their approval for what he was doing. Some of the President’s own Cabinet colleagues were not even aware of where Roosevelt was at the time.

  The presidential system of the United States, unlike the British form of government, was not based upon collective responsibility for decisions. Roosevelt’s Cabinet was an advisory body. Some of the members of his administration had great experience and their views carried much weight. Hull and Welles at the State Department, Morgenthau at the Treasury, Stimson and Marshall for the army, Knox and Stark for the navy, each backed by expert staff, were prominent among the individuals to whom Roosevelt listened. But the decisions were his alone. The checks here, as provided by the makers of the Constitution, did not come from within the executive, but from the legislature. Roosevelt was, and felt himself to be, confined by Congress to an extent that Churchill never experienced with the British Parliament.

  And behind Congress there was public opinion to consider. Of the six systems under review, only in the United States was the opinion of ordinary citizens a factor of the first importance in the making of decisions. In Britain, public opinion was irrelevant to the crucial decision of May 1940. Thereafter, it was heavily steered by the government while continuing to have little or no input into decision-making. Morale was more important than opinion. And Churchill’s rousing rhetoric of the summer of 1940, linked to the outward signs of national defiance, the staving off of the Luftwaffe in the ‘Battle of Britain’ and the failure of Hitler’s forces to invade, ensured that this was high–something not to be underestimated, especially compared with what it had been under his predecessor or what it might have been under an alternative premier. In the four variants of authoritarianism considered, opinion expressed in public was that which propaganda and indoctrination had manufactured and induced. Its role was to provide plebiscitary backing for regime action, to deter the formation of oppositional attitudes and on occasion to stimulate pressure to encourage the leadership to move in the direction that it wanted to anyway. Only in the United States did public opinion have a marked influence upon executive action. From the summer of 1940 down to Pearl Harbor, and even to the German declaration of w
ar four days later, Roosevelt felt obliged to keep public opinion on his side. He could massage it through his ‘fireside chats’ and other public addresses. But he could not ignore it. His policy in these crucial months was determined in good measure by the need to prepare the public for something it did not want and which he had solemnly promised to avoid: sending American troops to fight in another war in Europe.

  Without the individuals whose names have dominated the preceding pages–Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Konoe and Tojo, Churchill and Roosevelt–the course of history would have been different. But how different? The role of the individual set against the impersonal, external determinants of change is a perpetual conundrum in the interpretation of history. In a sense, it poses a false dichotomy. Individuals are not detached from the impersonal forces that condition their actions, as previous chapters have clearly shown. Relative economic strength and potential was one such force, in turn imposing constraints on the mobilization of resources and manpower. The conduct of the enemy was another. This could only be anticipated through the gathering and interpretation of intelligence. Yet in each case, the governments under review either had deficient intelligence at its disposal or made lamentable use of good intelligence, or both. And even the best intelligence supply, as in the American ability (through MAGIC) to crack Japanese codes, did not prevent Pearl Harbor. So in all instances governments had to react to unpredictable circumstances. This was particularly the case with those governments (Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union) which were reacting defensively to the strategic initiatives of Germany, Italy and Japan.

  Yet another impersonal force operated within each governmental system. Bureaucratic planning and evaluation of policy proposals contributed to the ‘pre-packaging’ of decisions, often as the outcome of in-fighting for influence and resources within organizations. The scope for this was greater, however, in the differently structured democratic systems of Great Britain and the United States, as well as in the strange form of ‘collective authoritarianism’ in Japan, than it was in Germany, Italy or the Soviet Union, where bureaucracies served as the functioning tools of dictatorship.

  Despite the existence of such external and internal determinants, the individuals at the centre of our enquiry were not ciphers or mere ‘front-men’. They had an input that is not simply reducible to a personalized representational function of such forces. Historical change, certainly in the short term, invariably results from the interaction of external determinants and individual agency. The fateful choices reviewed in preceding chapters provide ample evidence of this.

  The individuals with the greatest political autonomy were the dictators of Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union. Other leaders in their place might well have taken other decisions, avoiding the disastrous judgements they made. Would a Reich Chancellor Göring have chosen to attack the Soviet Union? Would a Prime Minister Badoglio have decided to invade Greece? Would a General Secretary Malenkov have rejected the flood of warnings about a German strike? Simply to pose the questions offers not only unlikely scenarios, but enters a conjectural realm where no answers are possible. It does, however, serve to underline the indispensability to their actions of the personalities of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. Their fateful choices were directly determined by the sort of individuals they happened to be. At the same time, though, they were not made in a vacuum as arbitrary whims of personality. They were choices made under preconditions and under external constraints.

  Ideological fixations were an important part of this. So were the actions of others whom they could not control. In Hitler’s case, the sense of time running strongly against Germany–a correct appreciation–forced his hand in deciding on ‘Operation Barbarossa’ and in declaring war on America. Mussolini, too, felt under great pressure, in this instance to forge his own empire in the Mediterranean and Balkans before it was too late and he was completely upstaged by Germany. Stalin’s confine was the state of his army and the knowledge that he would not be ready to confront Germany with the necessary forces before 1942, prompting the need he felt to avoid any conceivable provocation to tempt Hitler to invade before then. In each case, these individuals made history–although, to adapt a thought of Karl Marx, not under circumstances of their choosing.

  At the opposite end of the scale, the personality of the Japanese Prime Minister was not of the first importance in the making of policy decisions. Konoe and Tojo were certainly very different individuals. By autumn 1941 Konoe would have been prepared to go a long way to appease the United States, while Tojo was inflexible in refusing any concession to American demands. But both had earlier committed themselves to the same policy of expansion in south-east Asia while maintaining the attritional war in China. Konoe became dispensable once he showed himself ready to retreat too far from this commitment. Matsuoka, the most forceful personality in Japanese politics, had already left the scene when his own inimitable attempt to upturn the existing priorities took him outside the mainstream consensus, failed to win support and stirred powerful enemies anxious to bring about his downfall. In the consensual nature of a formation of decisions that had emanated from the most powerful military factions, the scope allowed to the individual was necessarily diminished.

  In the differently structured democracies, the role of the individual in the making of the fateful choices was greater than in the case of Japan, though arguably less crucial when compared with the dictatorships. Like the dictators, the democratic leaders operated on the basis of widely accepted ideological belief-systems. In fact, the ideological commitment–in this case, to democratic freedoms and the political and social structures that supported them–was almost certainly both deeper and wider than the fascistic and militaristic values of Germany, Italy and Japan, or the Communist world-view in the Soviet Union.

  Without Churchill, the decision in the British Cabinet in May 1940 might conceivably have gone another way–with unforeseen consequences. Both Halifax and Churchill were striving for the same ends: national survival and independence. But Halifax’s policy choice could–most probably would–have inaugurated a different course of development, one probably more damaging for Britain. So it was the country’s inordinate good fortune to have as its Prime Minister Churchill, not Halifax. Personality mattered. But so did reasoned argument. It had to. Churchill was not yet the national hero he subsequently became, when his personality certainly became a factor of the first importance to the British war effort.

  The value of Roosevelt’s personal role is similarly hard to overestimate. Yet the quandary he faced would have confronted any President at the time. His opponent in the presidential election campaign of 1940, Wendell Willkie, a dynamic figure and attractive personality, was no isolationist. He was as firm as the President about the need for America to combat the dangers to American interests from Europe and Japan. He favoured the policy of aid for Britain. Some in Britain thought at the time that he might prove better than Roosevelt at mobilizing American industry. Willkie, like Roosevelt, would have had to straddle the line between helping Britain yet not alienating public and congressional opinion. Whether, however, he would have done it as well as Roosevelt; whether he would have had the experience–and political cunning–to pull it off as the President did; whether he could have sufficiently freed himself from the isolationist lobby within his Republican Party (which had persuaded him to denounce the destroyer deal); whether he would have had the lateral thinking needed to create the idea of lend-lease; whether he would have struck the vital rapport with Churchill that was so important to the forging of the alliance: on all of these, a sceptical answer is justified. Roosevelt’s personality was as important as Churchill’s to the style of governance he adopted, to the fateful choices he made and to the way he made them.

  The choices faced by these men between May 1940 and December 1941 were unenviable. In each case the stakes were enormous. What seems to posterity an inevitable course of events did not look like that at the time. The fateful choices made by the leade
rs of Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy, Japan, Great Britain and the United States in those nineteen months changed the world.

  For nearly four years after the events explored here, the global war raged on. The stupendous losses from military combat, and from genocide, mounted drastically. For over two years, between the summer of 1940 and the autumn of 1942, the outcome was far from certain. Both Hitler and the Japanese leadership knew that the odds would tell against them in a long war. So it proved. But it was a close-run thing–closer than is often presumed. Eventually, but only from 1943 onwards, the defeat of the Axis was in sight, at first dimly, then more brightly, and in the end glaringly. The unlikely combination of an indomitable Soviet fighting machine and limitless American resources and resolve finally ensured victory in both Europe and the Far East. The courage and tenacity of the British armed forces and those of the Empire had also made an indispensable contribution to the defeat of Nazism and Japanese militarism. But it was the curtain-call as a world power of a battered and bankrupt Britain. The liquidation of the British Empire followed–if gradually, then nevertheless inexorably. The next decades belonged to the new superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, the victors of the war. The foundations of another potential superpower of the future, China, were laid soon after the end of the great conflict in the wake of the turmoil in the Far East. Between them, the leaders of Germany and Japan had produced a world which was the exact opposite of all that they had striven for. Whatever the gigantic cost, it had been worth paying to see that the world they had wanted could never come about.

  Notes

  ABBREVIATIONS

  FORETHOUGHTS

  1. For the term, an invention of the American Cold War diplomat George Kennan, see Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ‘Die Urkatastrophe. Der Erste Weltkrieg als Auftakt und Vorbild für den Zweiten Weltkrieg’, Der Spiegel, 8 (16 Feb. 2004), reprinted in Stephan Burgdorff and Klaus Wiegrefe (eds.), Der Erste Weltkrieg. Die Urkatastrophe des 20. Jahrhunderts, Munich, 2004, pp. 23–35.