Sometimes All It Takes is a Shrug….

First published in Finest Hour 138, Spring 2008

“What a story! Think of all these people—decent, educated, the story of the past laid out before them—What to avoid—what to do etc.—patriotic, loyal, clean—trying their utmost—What a ghastly muddle they made of it! Unteachable from infancy to tomb—There is the first and main characteristic of mankind.”

—Churchill to Lord Beaverbrook, 21 May 1928.

Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World, 1940-1941, by Ian Kershaw. New York: Penguin, 600 pp., $35.

Ian Kershaw, whose two-volume biography of Hitler is highly acclaimed, has written a fascinating book on what Churchill might call the “ten climacterics” of World War II: Britain’s decision to fight on in May 1940; Mussolini’s decision to attack Greece; Stalin’s decision to trust Hitler; Japan’s decisions to expand southward and to go to war with the United States; Roosevelt’s decisions to help Britain and to wage undeclared war against Germany; Hitler’s decisions to attack Russia, to declare war on the USA and to commit genocide in Europe.

While many chapters cover familiar ground, Kershaw does so in a fresh way, pulling together key sources that reveal the reasoning (or lack of it) behind each decision—which, together, settled the outcome of the war, and the world we know today. The only fault of the book is a degree of academic overkill: the chapters average nearly fifty pages each, and Kershaw is so intent on producing all the evidence that he runs the risk of violating an old editorial adage: “a bore is someone who tells everything.”

The most gripping chapters are those that explain the inexplicable: Japan’s decision to go to war with the United States, a war both the Emperor and Prime Minister expected they would probably lose; and Hitler’s decision, four days after Pearl Harbor, to declare war on the United States: an enemy he could not strike at, but which could soon strike at him.

Kershaw offers a revisionist view of Hideki Tojo, the Army chief turned Prime Minister, often cast as a bloodthirsty aggressor. Though a hard-liner as head of the Army, once become Prime Minister in October 1941, Tojo wanted an accommodation as much as the Emperor (maybe because of the Emperor, whom he worshipped as divine).

By sending a high-level diplomat, Saburo Kurusu, to support Ambasssador Kichiasburo Nomura in Washington, Tojo and his foreign minister, Shigenori Togo, signalled a serious desire for  a settlement with the Americans. (After Japan’s Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy in September 1940, Roosevelt had embargoed iron and scrap metal; with Japan’s invasion of Indo-China in July 1941, FDR froze Japanese assets in the U.S. and embargoed oil shipments—in those days the USA was a net oil exporter.)

I had no deep prejudices toward Cordell Hull until I read this book, but Kershaw paints Roosevelt’s Secretary of State the way Churchill allegedly painted John Foster Dulles: “He is the only bull I know who carries his china shop with him.”

As the clock ticked in late 1941, Hull frustrated negotiations at every turn. He rightly rejected the Japanese “Plan A,” amounting basically to letting Japan run amok in East Asia. Then he seemed to accept, but finally rejected, “Plan B,” which offered a pullback of Japanese forces from Indo-China and an agreement to vacate China “at an agreed future date.”

Nor was Roosevelt consistent: “While Hull and the State Department dampened prospects of an accommodation, the President himself appeared still open to the possiblity of one” (367). In his vacillating, don’t-tell-them-everything-you’re-thinking approach, he ran hot and cold on requested meetings with Japan’s foreign minister or Emperor. First FDR would hint that he wanted a “modus vivendi”; then he would play hardball, refusing to consider any terms by which he would normalize relations.

Finally Hull, without consulting either the military or unofficial allies like Britain (which might have had some useful warnings about piling up new enemies) replied with his “Ten Points,” including all previous demands and some new ones. In exchange for normalized relations Japan was required “to withdraw from China and Indo-China, renounce her extraterritorial rights and concessions dating back to the turn of the century, following the Boxer Rebellion, to recognize no other Chinese government but that of Chiang Kai-shek, and effectively to abrogate the Tripartite Pact” with Germany and Italy (369). Those were terms no Japanese government could accept. Worse, Hull was unclear as to whether he also demanded Japan’s exit from Manchuria, where it had established the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1931. In fact he did not—but he didn’t bother to make this clear.

Too late FDR realized, “this means war”; he did not know Pearl Harbor would be a target, but he must have known he had backed Japan into a corner. Call me a cynic and you’ll be right: but if George W. Bush and his Secretary of State had handled the Iranians like Roosevelt and Hull handled the Japanese, and ended up getting bombed for their pains, there would be a full-scale outcry and a Congressional investigation.

* * *

Kershaw also fascinates on Hitler’s decision to declare war on America four days after Pearl Harbor—one of the most inexplicable acts of the war. Carefully he reviews Hitler’s pronouncements and thoughts on the “American Union” from his earliest speeches in 1919. He concludes that the Western Hemisphere never seriously figured in Hitler’s plans (despite the now-famous forgery of a German map carving up South America)—except as some long-distant final confrontation which might have to be undertaken by a second generation of Nazis.

Hitler thought the “European armaments industry was greater than the American. He had experienced American soldiers in the First World War [and believed] the Germans were far superior” (405). But longer term, he was smart enough to realize that Germany was on borrowed time. He knew when he invaded Russia that he must win quickly, compel Stalin’s surrender, and then turn on Britain with his full forces and compel an armistice. By 1943, Hitler said, the mighty engine of American industry would be engaged on behalf of Britain and the Soviets, and any hope of Germany for European mastery would be ended. Thus the Fuehrer warned his trigger-happy naval chief, Admiral Raeder, to avoid provocations in the Atlantic, even after Roosevelt had occupied Iceland and expanded the Atlantic security zone far to the east.

Why then did Hitler declare war after Pearl Harbor? Logic did not play much of a part. The Tripartite Pact (Hitler’s stated reason) required Germany to declare war only if Japan had been attacked. The idea that he went to war to “fulfill a commitment” to Japan seems far-fetched. (When did Hitler honor any commitments?) So infuriated were the Americans over Pearl Harbor that absent a German declaration, Roosevelt might not have asked for (or if he asked might not have obtained) a U.S. declaration of war on Germany. Churchill’s rush visit to Washington after Pearl Harbor, remember, was predicated on his anxiety that America should adopt a policy of “Germany first.”

In declaring war, Hitler took little military advice other than that of the trigger-happy Raeder, and even the Navy chief admitted that in December 1941 not one U-boat was anywhere near the United States. Astonishment at the move was expressed even by sycophants like Goebbels, and many experienced soldiers privately (very privately) confessed they saw doom in Hitler’s act. “One ordinary soldier, confident that Germany would eventually prove victorious, nevertheless confided to his diary on the day of Hitler’s Reichstag speech, that it meant ‘war for our lifetime.’ ‘Poor parents,’ he added” (383).

Why did Hitler do it? The answer, it seems, was a “shrug.” Hitler knew that sooner or later Germany would have to confront the Americans. Why not now? That was all it amounted to: a shrug. It proved fatal.

Despite his disdain toward the enemy he had known in World War I, Kershaw notes, Hitler by the autumn 1941 had “contemplated for the first time the possibility of defeat,” saying “that if in the end the German people should not prove strong enough, then Germany deserved to go under and be destroyed by the stronger power.” (This reminds us of Hitler’s “scorched earth” orders to Speer as the Russians advanced on Berlin in 1945.) Kershaw sees Hitler’s war declaration as revealing: “Beneath the veneer, Hitler seems to have recognized that his chances of total victory had by now all but evaporated…It was a characteristic attempt to wrest back the initiative through a bold move. But for the first time it was a move doomed from the very outset to failure” (430).

The attack on Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941. The caption of this captured Japanese photograph reads: "Full view of Ford Island gasping under the attack of our Sea Eagles...reminiscent of the performance of the Gods." (Wikimedia Commons)

* * *

“What a story!” Japan is of two minds about going to war. The United States is also of two minds—or is she? Between Roosevelt and Hull, it is hard to tell. Emperor Hirohito and his entire cabinet believe that if they go to war, they will probably lose. So…to war they go!

Hitler through December 1941 practices uncharacteristic restraint in not provoking the Americans, knowing correctly that he cannot afford such a mighty enemy until the Russians are subdued. He knows if America gets involved, Germany will probably lose. So…to war he goes!

Fateful Choices is an revealing commentary on the occasional (one hopes) irrationality of high-level decisionmaking: a book which ought to be read by our leaders (present and future), before they do something stupid. Again. 

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