“Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941”, by Ian Kershaw

 

624 pages, Penguin, ISBN-13: 978-1594201233

Ian Kershaw is a leading historian of Nazi Germany; his two-volume biography of Adolf Hitler, Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris (reviewed on March 5^th, 2014) and Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (reviewed on March 6^th, 2014) are widely viewed as the preeminent history of the bastard (although I think that Hitler by Joachim C. Fest, reviewed on March 30^th, 2017, is the best bio of the beast. Ever). In Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941, Kershaw tells us that his purpose in writing this book is to remind us that the past wasn’t inevitable and that many decisions and contingencies underlay the course of history; thus, given different decisions and different contingencies, history as we know it would have been different. To demonstrate this fact, he offers a study of ten essential turning points for all major powers of World War II between May 1940 and December 1941, decisions that he suggests were “fateful”:

• Churchill’s decision in late May 1940 to fight on after the fall of France and not pursue, as some suggested, a negotiated settlement with Nazi Germany

• Hitler’s decision in July 1940 to attack the Soviet Union the following year, ensnaring Germany in a war it could not win

• Roosevelt's decision in August 1940 to send 50 old American destroyers to Britain, followed by Congress’ approval of the Lend-Lease deal in March 1941

• Tokyo’s decision in September 1940 to join the Tripartite Pact with Italy and Germany and to occupy French Indochina

• Mussolini’s decision in October 1940 to focus the bulk of his war effort not on North Africa, where the British were vulnerable, but on the invasion of Greece

• Stalin’s failure in the spring of 1941 to heed numerous intelligence reports warning of an impending German invasion

• Roosevelt’s initiatives in July-August 1941 to embargo oil shipments to Japan, extend conscription, draw up the Atlantic Charter of war aims with Churchill and provide armed escorts to merchant shipping in the western Atlantic

• Japanese decisions between September and November of 1941 to embark on the southern strategy of grabbing European colonies in the Pacific, beginning with a pre-emptive strike on the United States Navy

• Hitler’s decision, in the days following Pearl Harbor, to declare war on the United States, thus sparing Roosevelt the necessity of persuading his countrymen to fight the Nazis as well as the Japanese

• Hitler’s decision in the summer and fall of 1941 to begin the mass extermination of European Jewry, making the Holocaust a major feature of the conflict

Kershaw examines each of these ten decisions – along with and several more interrelated questions – in great detail over the course of this book. All of this speculation (every historian’s guilty pleasure) makes for enlightening and entertaining reading, despite a fair amount of repetition. But the whole premise of his book – that  important choices will be explored and potential alternatives discussed – is, in fact, little explored, as he repeatedly shows that, really, there was only one way for things to turn out; indeed, regarding Stalin’s decision to trust Hitler and ignore the ever-mounting evidence in the spring of 1941 that Germany was planning to invade the Soviet Union, Kershaw uses the phrase “the straitjacket of choice”, stating that Stalin’s actions were the only path to follow. Bullocks. This leads to a very frustrating read: on the one hand, it is a detailed and rewarding look at the ten episodes choices within its purview; on the other hand, it is an unsatisfying illustration of the contingency-laden nature of history – I mean, to go through all of this analysis of crises and choices just to essentially say “nevermind” is frustrating to say the least.

So, I guess if you want a study in what the author deems to be ten of the most important decisions made in the run up to the Second World War and its first several months – and being told that these decisions were the only ways forward – then Fateful Choices will fulfill that ambition. I, for one, was looking for something a little more.