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

  In retrospect, what took place seems to have been inexorable. In looking at the history of wars, perhaps even more than at history generally, there is an almost inbuilt teleological impulse, which leads us to presume that the way things turned out is the only way they could have turned out. It is part of the purpose of this book to show that this was not the case. The war is viewed in each chapter as if from behind a separate leader’s desk, with only indistinct notions of enemy plans available, the future open, options to be faced, decisions to be taken. A decision implies that there were choices to be made, alternatives available. To the actors concerned, even the most ideologically committed (or blinkered), vital considerations were at stake, crucial assessments to be made, big risks to be taken. There was no inexorable path to be followed. In each case, therefore, the book asks why a particular option rather than an alternative was chosen, posing in most instances explicitly the question of what might have followed had the alternative option been taken up.

  This is not counter-factual or virtual history of the type which makes an intellectual guessing-game of looking into some distant future and projecting what might have happened had some event not taken place. There are always far too many variables in play to make this a fruitful line of enquiry, however fascinating the speculation. Nevertheless, it could fairly be claimed that historians implicitly operate with short-range counterfactuals in terms of alternatives to immediate important occurrences or developments. Otherwise, they are unable fully to ascertain the significance of what actually did take place. So the alternatives discussed here are not advanced as long-term projections or musings on ‘what ifs’, but as realistic short-term, but different, possible outcomes to what was in fact decided. Putting it another way, assessing the options behind a particular decision helps to clarify why, exactly, the actual decision was taken.

  Ten decisions are explored. Three, with arguably the most far-reaching consequences of all, were those of Hitler’s regime: to attack the Soviet Union, to declare war on the United States and to murder the Jews. The extensive consideration of these decisions reflects the predominant role of Germany as the chief driving force in the crucial course of events that we are following. As a dynamic power triggering events, Japan was second only to Germany, something which the two chapters devoted to Japanese decisions seek to emphasize. The essentially reactive decisions of Great Britain, the Soviet Union and, in a different way (with self-destructive consquences), Italy are taken up in single chapters, though the increasingly vital part played by the United States warrants two chapters. Other decisions than those under consideration here, for example those of Franco’s Spain or of Vichy France to refuse to join the war on the Axis side–were, compared with the momentous decisions examined below, of a distinctly lesser order of importance.

  It could, of course, be claimed with some force that what shaped the postwar world most fundamentally was a decision taken almost at the end, rather than close to the beginning, of the Second World War: the decision to drop atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even here, however, a prior decision–to commission the atom bomb–had been necessary, one which also dates back to the fateful months of 1940 and 1941. Following preliminary work and increased research funding after the fall of France in the summer of 1940, American scientists, aided by the findings of refugee physicists in Britain, established by autumn 1941 the fundamental framework for building a bomb. At huge cost, and necessitating the involvement of large numbers of the most talented American scientists, President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to go ahead with its construction on the day before Japanese bombs rained down on the American warships anchored in Pearl Harbor. Without the decision then, the bomb would not have been available to President Harry S. Truman to use in the final days of the war, in August 1945.7 When the commission to research an atomic bomb was issued, however, its ultimate use was scarcely even a distant vision.

  Each decision in the following chapters had consequences which informed the next and subsequent decisions. So, as the story moves from one country to another, there is a logical sequence of ‘knock-on’ events and implications as well as an unfolding chronological pattern. The book opens with Great Britain’s decision in May 1940 to stay in the war. Far from being the obvious, even inevitable, decision subsequent events (and some persuasive historical writing) have made it seem,8 the War Cabinet seriously deliberated the choices for three days, with a new Prime Minister still tentatively feeling his way, the British army seemingly lost at Dunkirk, no immediate prospect of help from the United States and a German invasion in the near future presumed to be very likely. The decision eventually taken, not to seek a negotiated settlement, had direct and far-reaching consequences not just for Britain, but also for Germany.

  That single decision, in fact, placed in jeopardy Hitler’s entire war strategy. With Britain refusing to see sense (as he saw it), with the war in the west not ended, and with the spectre of the United States in the background but looming ever more prominently, Hitler felt compelled already in July 1940 to begin preparations to risk a war on two fronts through an invasion of the Soviet Union the following year. But it was only six months later that the contingency plans were turned into a concrete war directive. In the interim, there was no straight path to the Russian war. Even Hitler seemed vacillating and uncertain. The intervening period saw a range of strategic possibilities explored, but eventually discarded. These options in the summer and autumn of 1940, viewed from behind Hitler’s desk and evaluated in the eyes of his advisers, form the subject of Chapter 2.

  The extraordinary German victory over France and the perceived likely collapse of Great Britain alerted the Japanese leadership to chances to be taken without delay through expansion in south-east Asia. In Chapter 3, the scene switches, therefore, to the Far East, and to the decision for the southern advance that would inevitably risk conflict with the United States and presaged, therefore, the road to Pearl Harbor directly embarked upon the following year.

  The rapidity of France’s fall also had immediate and far-reaching consequences in Europe. The next chapter considers the choices facing the Italian leadership as Mussolini exploited the destruction of France to take his country into the war, and then plunged the Balkans into turmoil with the disastrous decision to attack Greece. The crucial position of the United States is explored in Chapter 5; how Roosevelt walked a tightrope between isolationist opinion and interventionist pressure, deciding, out of American self-interest, not only to assist Great Britain with all possible means short of war, but to prepare with maximum speed for America’s direct engagement in the war.

  This is followed by a chapter dealing with one of the most puzzling episodes of the war, with near fatal consequences for the Soviet Union: Stalin’s decision to defy all warnings and the explicit findings of his own secret intelligence of the imminent German invasion, leaving his country unprepared and in disarray when the strike came on 22 June 1941.

  From here, the route into global war was short, but not without further twists. Chapter 7 examines the decision of the American administration to wage in provocative fashion an ‘undeclared war’ in the Atlantic, taking advantage of Hitler’s unwillingness to retaliate while embroiled in Russia. This is followed (Chapter 8) by an examination of Japan’s extraordinary decision to attack the United States, despite full recognition of the immensity of the risk, aware that the long-term chances of final victory were low if an immediate and total knock-out blow were not attained. This had direct causal impact on Hitler’s decision to declare war on the United States, taken in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor and long regarded as one of the strangest of the Second World War. With this decision, explored in Chapter 9, the world was aflame.

  But one further decision–or set of decisions–of a different kind, though inextricably entwined with the war itself and intrinsic to it, remains to be examined: the decision, gradually but inexorably reached over the summer and autumn months of 1941, to kill the Jews. The complex
process of the transition from partial and limited genocidal actions into total genocide, a process of interlocking impulses from the centre of the Nazi regime and its agencies ‘on the ground’ in the killing fields of eastern Europe, unfolding in the early months of 1942 into the full-scale ‘final solution’, is taken up in the last chapter.

  By the end of 1941, nineteen months after the German offensive in western Europe was launched, the conflict had become global and genocidal. The war was at this juncture on a knife-edge. The German advance, it is true, had been stymied by the first major Soviet counter-offensive. But the Wehrmacht was withstanding the worst the Red Army and the ferocious Russian winter could inflict on it (for the time being) and was soon starting to regather its strength, poised to make further great inroads down to the autumn of 1942. In the Atlantic, German U-boats would meet with unprecedented success in the first half of 1942. The Allies looked for a time as if they were losing the war at sea. In Europe and in the Far East, the Axis powers still had vital economic resources in their grasp.9 And, much to Stalin’s continued vexation, the Anglo-Americans were still nowhere near opening their promised second front. The full might of the United States’ industrial power was still to be converted into weaponry on a scale to defeat both Germany and Japan. Japanese forces had meanwhile made brutal progress in the Far East, and would in February 1942 capture Singapore, long viewed as the bastion of British strength in south-east Asia. The way to the conquest of India, the heart of the British Empire, appeared to lie open. The Axis powers still seemed in the ascendancy. Only in retrospect can it be seen that their colossal gamble was already on the verge of failure, that they had overstretched their capacities, and that with the full engagement in the contest of the might of the United States, now allied with the extraordinary tenacity of the Soviet Union and the last major show of resilience of Great Britain and the British Empire, their eventual defeat would gradually be ensured.10

  To reach the point, in 1945, when first Hitler’s suicide was swiftly followed by a devastated Germany’s surrender, then Imperial Japan was crushed into submission, there was a long, tortuous way to go. Millions of lives would be lost in the process; destruction wrought on a scale never known in history. The end was far away. But the path towards it had been laid out by the fateful choices made in 1940 and 1941.

  1

  London, Spring 1940

  Great Britain Decides to Fight On

  The P[rime]M[inister] disliked any move towards Musso. It was incredible that Hitler would consent to any terms that we could accept, though if we could get out of this jam by giving up Malta and Gibraltar and some African colonies he would jump at it. But the only safe way was to convince Hitler that he couldn’t beat us…Halifax argued that there could be no harm in trying Musso and seeing what the result was. If the terms were impossible we could still reject them.

  Diary of Neville Chamberlain, 26 May 1940

  ‘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. It was taken for granted and as a matter of course by these men of all parties in the State, and we were much too busy to waste time upon such unreal, academic issues.’1 This was Winston Churchill writing his memoirs of the Second World War. These were hugely influential in shaping the way the war came to be seen, and in fashioning the myth that Great Britain, alone, in great adversity, but with indomitable will, had never for a moment flinched in the determination to carry on the struggle against a mighty, triumphant and imminently threatening Germany. It is generally hard, knowing the end of a story, to avoid reading history backwards from the outcome. Given the power of Churchill’s narrative and the unique role he played, it is particularly difficult to ignore what came later–national defiance epitomized in the grandiose rhetoric of his speeches in summer 1940, victory in the ‘Battle of Britain’, the ‘hands across the Atlantic’ in ever increasing American aid. But Churchill knew full well that it had not been like that in the darkest days of May 1940. History viewed ‘from the front’ rather than ‘the back’ sometimes reveals surprises. At any rate, it is often less clear-cut, more ‘messy’ or confused than subsequently appears to have been the case. And so it was in the middle of May 1940.

  It was a deeply anxious time. The British Expeditionary Force in northern France and Belgium was apparently lost, the once mighty French army was reeling under the German onslaught, no possibility existed of immediate help from the United States or, in a direct and practical sense, the overseas Empire, and defences at home were in a fragile state as the prospect of invasion became a distinctly real one. In these circumstances, it would have been extraordinary had the British government indeed regarded the question of whether the country could or should fight on as an ‘unreal, academic’ issue not warranting discussion. And in fact, though Churchill omitted any reference to it, there was the most grave and prolonged deliberation in the War Cabinet about precisely this question: should Britain fight on, or should she acknowledge that in her current plight the best avenue was to explore what terms could be attained to arrive at a settlement?2 This was the fateful choice that confronted Britain’s leaders over a crucial three-day period in late May 1940. The outcome had profound consequences not only for Great Britain, but for the wider course of the war over the following years.

  I

  How Britain found herself in such a predicament that the question arose of whether to seek terms from a position of great weakness–which would, in effect, have come close to an acknowledgement of defeat–has, of course, been extensively examined and analysed ever since. Already in 1940, a widely read and influential polemic, Guilty Men, laid the blame squarely on those in the British government who had chosen the dangerous, and ultimately self-defeating, road to appeasement of Hitler during the 1930s.3 Leading characters in the cast of the guilty were the austere, prim, but sharp and incisive Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister between May 1937 and May 1940, and the extremely tall, somewhat humourless Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax–a former Viceroy of India and seasoned diplomat, known, for his combination of religious piety and enthusiasm for foxhunting, as the ‘Holy Fox’–who retained his post in Churchill’s administration. History has never forgiven them. The shame of ‘Munich’ in 1938, when Britain, and her French ally, bowed to Hitler’s bullying and handed him a substantial part of Czechoslovakia, has remained forever associated with Chamberlain. It is often conveniently forgotten that appeasement, down to Munich, had been widely popular in Britain, even among those who in the light of subsequent events came to be among its chief detractors and most severe critics. The British government, in seeking to appease Hitler, undoubtedly made grave errors of judgement. Even so, these have to be located within the framework of the barely surmountable problems besetting Britain as the looming danger posed by Hitler gradually came to be recognized.

  Britain’s debilitating structural problems in the interwar period revolved around the interlinked triad of the economy, the Empire and rearmament. Between them, they ensured that when the dictators began to flex their muscles, an enfeebled Britain was in poor shape to contest their growing might.

  Britain emerged from the First World War still a great power–though, mainly beneath the surface, a weakened one. Still a world creditor, with loans on paper outstanding to the Empire and her war allies of £1.85 billion in 1920, her debts to America nevertheless totalled $4.7 billion. It was an indicator of a shift in the financial balance of power which would only over time reveal Britain’s growing dependency upon her transatlantic cousin. Even the Royal Navy, still the world’s largest, now had to reckon with a future rival in the rapidly growing navy of the United States. And difficulties in India, Egypt and, closer to home, Ireland were stretching limited military resources.4 With the Dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa also showing signs of growing independence, the Empire was starting to crumble.

  The magnitude of the problems was in good measure concealed during t
he 1920s, as recovery from the wartime trauma gradually took place despite numerous buffetings. Even so, beneath the surface all was not well.5 The key industries which had formed the basis of Britain’s prewar prosperity–coal, iron and steel, shipbuilding, textiles–were all struggling to combat long-term decline. Unemployment was relatively high throughout the decade. Britain was importing more and exporting less.6 Still, alongside the stagnation or decline there were signs of new industries taking root, and outside the run-down industrial towns and cities the later 1920s saw an all too brief upsurge of hope, confidence and relative prosperity.7

  The onset of the world economic crisis in 1929 was rapidly to change all that. It brought economic growth in the industrial world to a juddering halt. Social misery and political turmoil followed. In Britain, the repercussions of the Wall Street stock-market crash of October 1929 ushered in political crisis and lasting economic depression. But indirectly the global consequences were to prove far more threatening. In the Far East, the swift emergence after 1931 of Japanese nationalism, militarism and imperialism, and in Europe the rise of Nazism between 1930 and 1933, were both, in no small measure, products of the economic crisis. Both posed for Britain, herself in an economically weakened state, immense new strategic dangers to add to the potential threat in the Mediterranean, not as yet materialized, emanating from Mussolini’s Italy.