Ian Kershaw
FATEFUL CHOICES
Ten decisions that changed the world 1940–1941
656ppp. Allen Lane. £30.
978 0 71399 712 5
When the second volume of Ian Kershaw’s magisterial biography of Hitler was
published in 2000, I recall being struck by how often these two words
appeared: “Hitler decided”. As one of that generation of British historians
who had steeped themselves in the methods of German “societal history”
(Gesellschaftsgeschichte) – and as a scholar whose early research had
focused on popular opinion in 1930s Bavaria – Sir Ian Kershaw seemed an
unlikely proponent of a new Personalismus. His contemporaries, not least
Richard J. Evans, had been dismissive of John Röhl’s contention that the
biography of Wilhelm II might be of some importance to the Wilhelmine
period. No such criticisms were directed at Kershaw’s Life of Hitler. Yet
here was a powerful reaffirmation that, whatever the importance of
“structural” factors in Hitler’s rise, these became mere background music
after he was in power, and especially after he was at war. The critical
decisions that condemned Europe to conflagration, the Jews to annihilation
and Germany to devastation emanated from one man. Others contributed only in
so far as they “worked towards him”. Nemesis, as Kershaw subtitled the
second volume of his Life of Hitler, was a triumphant reaffirmation of the
centrality of the powerful individual decision-maker to the historical
process.
In Fateful Choices: Ten decisions that changed the world 1940–1941, Professor
Kershaw takes a step forward, but also a step back. The step forward is that
he now applies his acute and meticulous scholarly mind to the
decision-makers in the other key combatant countries of the Second World
War. The step back is that he does so as if in thrall to an earlier German
historical tradition – that of Leopold von Ranke. This is political history
wie es eigentlich gewesen (“as it actually was”), based on a close reading
of documents left behind by the decision-makers or of books written by other
historians employing this distinctly traditional methodology. A book about
“choices” might have been expected to deal in some detail with the many
alternative scenarios contemplated by contemporaries and by subsequent
historians. Disappointingly, however, Kershaw is as dismissive of
counterfactual history as was Evans in his 2002 Butterfield Lecture at
Queen’s, Belfast. “In theory”, writes Kershaw in his “Afterthought”, there
were alternatives to all ten of the decisions he has studied. “Any one of
them could have changed the course of history. A rich variety of ‘what if’
scenarios might be constructed on such a basis – a harmless but pointless
diversion from the real question of what happened and why.” Counter-factual
history is no doubt harmless enough. But pointless? With all its undoubted
strengths, Fateful Choices illustrates very well the point that to say why a
historical event happened is at least to suggest reasons why the plausible
alternatives to that event did not happen. Proponents of counterfactual or
“virtual” history have been arguing for a long time that it is better to be
explicit about these unrealized alternatives than to beguile readers with an
apparently inexorable and often teleological narrative.
Kershaw’s chosen focus is ten “interlinked political decisions . . . [taken]
between May 1940 and December 1941”. It was these, he contends, that
“transformed the two separate wars in different continents into one truly
global conflagration, a colossal conflict with genocide and unprecedented
barbarism at its centre . . . . The remaining three years [of war] would . .
. essentially play out the consequences” of these decisions. What were they?
In brief: (1) Britain’s decision to fight on after the fall of France; (2)
Hitler’s to attack the Soviet Union; (3) Japan’s to attack the European
Empires in Asia; (4) Mussolini’s to attack Greece; (5) Roosevelt’s to offer
economic assistance to Britain (“Lend-Lease”); (6) Stalin’s to ignore
intelligence warnings of a German attack; (7) Roosevelt’s to wage
“undeclared” war on German submarines in the Atlantic; (8) Japan’s to attack
the United States at Pearl Harbor; (9) Hitler’s to declare war on the United
States; and (10) Hitler’s to murder the Jews of continental Europe.
If one wanted to show a class of undergraduates how historians conventionally
deal with the problem of causation, these ten essays would be hard to
improve on. In each one, Kershaw starts with a summary of the decision
itself and its implications. Then, just as E. H. Carr recommended in What Is
History? (1961), he goes back some years to uncover the chain of events that
led to this decision. Alternatives are considered only in order to
demonstrate that they were not really alternatives at all, and were bound to
be discarded. Kershaw’s scholarship is impeccable. And yet the philosophical
underpinning to his essays is positively antique.
Could Stalin have sided with the Western Powers in 1939? Kershaw poses the
question only to dismiss it: “Who knows how it might have turned out? The
guessing game is pointless. The variables in the equation are simply too
many to make speculation fruitful”. As soon becomes apparent, Kershaw
regards his ten decisions as bound together in a chain of logic. “The
British decision to stay in the war”, he writes in the first chapter,
“[gave] Hitler only two options: impose military defeat on Britain; or force
her to acknowledge German supremacy on the Continent through defeating the
Soviet Union in a rapid campaign, with the ultimate effect of keeping the
Americans out of the war.” Since the British, encouraged by American
economic assistance, refused to throw in the towel, Hitler had no
alternative but to attack the Soviet Union. Since his most likely allies,
Italy and Japan, were strongly predisposed to attack other states, the war
was bound to spread to the Balkans and the Pacific. But since neither
Germany, Italy nor Japan stood a realistic chance of defeating the countries
they attacked in 1941, they were bound to lose the war, albeit after four
more years of carnage.
This narrative has the appeal of familiarity. Yet that appeal should make us
wary. Even if each of Kershaw’s ten decisions was a simple choice between
two options (in reality, there were often more than two), the number of
possible histories that could have unfolded is not one, nor twenty, but
1,024. For the historical process is not a linear narrative, with literary
signpostings (“Rise and Fall”, “Hubris and Nemesis”), but, in Jorge Luis
Borges’s image, a garden of forking paths. And the true number of decisions
is close to infinite, since it is not only great men who make decisions, but
all human beings, and they often face more than two choices. Moreover,
Kershaw seems unaware of the pitfall of “hindsight bias”, which (as numerous
psychological studies have shown) tends to distort human retrospection by
portraying outcomes ex post as having been much more probable than they
actually appeared a priori. We are strongly inclined to rationalize events
when we look back, devising chains of causation that were generally
invisible to us before the fact. This seems to be especially true of
disasters. As there has been no man-made disaster bigger than the Second
World War, we should expect “hindsight bias” to exert a powerful force on
historians. Sure enough, it does. Part of the point of counterfactual
history is to provide a corrective to 20:20 hindsight.
Rather in spite of himself, Kershaw occasionally gives us glimpses of those
paths not taken, which seemed at the time every bit as real as the paths
that were. At any time, it should be remembered, there is no such thing as
the future; only futures plural, from which we try, not always successfully,
to choose. More than most periods in history, the summer of 1940 was
pregnant with a veritable brood of such plausible futures.
Kershaw shows us Churchill in France on May 16, 1940, conjuring up “an
apocalyptic vision” of himself, “in the heart of Canada, directing, over an
England razed to the ground by high explosive bombs and over [a] France
whose ruins were already cold, the air war of the New World against the Old
dominated by Germany”. He quotes Hitler on July 31, 1940 – ten weeks later –
visualizing “Russia smashed, Britain’s last hope . . . shattered [and]
Germany . . . master of Europe and the Balkans”. At around the same time,
Admiral Rolf Carls, the head of German naval command in the Baltic, was
imagining a post-war settlement which would give Germany, among other
prizes, parts of Belgium and France, the Shetland Islands, the Channel
Islands and Northern Rhodesia – not to mention naval bases in the Canary
Islands, Dakar, Madagascar, Mauritius and the Seychelles. The Italian
Foreign Minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, imagined a victorious Italy
acquiring parts of France as well as Malta and British Somaliland. At this
stage, the chief of the Italian General Staff was so uncertain about
Mussolini’s intentions that he complained: “The enemy changes every day. I
expect the order to attack Iraq!” Meanwhile, in Berlin, plans were being
carefully drawn up to deport the Jews of Poland to Madagascar. This, truly,
was decision-making under uncertainty.
American assistance to Britain was crucial prior to Pearl Harbor, Kershaw
maintains. But, in the face of widespread public reluctance to be drawn into
another European conflict, how delicate a thing was Roosevelt’s policy! The
Selective Service Act of August 1941, without which the expansion of the US
Army would have been severely inhibited, passed through the House of
Representatives by a single vote. The escalation of American assistance to a
policy of “shoot on sight” in the Atlantic might not have been possible but
for the torpedoes fired by the German submarine U-652 at the American
destroyer USS Greer off Iceland the following month. Kershaw’s response is
that for the key decision-maker there simply were no alternatives. “For
Hitler”, he writes, “an alternative to his chosen strategy [of attacking
Russia] never posed itself . . . . From his point of view, there was,
therefore, no chance [of victory in the Mediterranean] that was missed.” And
again: “In the real world of Hitler [sic], rather than the counterfactual
world of fantasy and imagination, it seems clear that no chance was missed
in 1940”. What Kershaw means by “the real world of Hitler” is of course the
world of Hitler’s own fantasy and imagination.
There is much to be said for this approach. Hitler was master in his own land
in a way that no other leader save Stalin could match. The only choices that
mattered, therefore, were the ones Hitler was prepared to countenance, just
as the only options open to the Soviet Union were the ones Stalin considered
legitimate. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that (as the Japanese
Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yosuke put it) “Great men will change their
minds”. For a time, to take just one example, Hitler was as much in two
minds about whether or not Japan should attack the Soviet Union as was
Matsuoka. The critical question is whether Hitler’s idée fixe – his ambition
to carve Lebensraum out of Stalin’s imperium – was madness, or a viable
strategy with at least some probability of success. For Kershaw, there is no
doubt. Operation Barbarossa was doomed from its very inception; the invasion
of the Soviet Union was as lunatic as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
But there is a vital distinction that needs to be drawn here. The Japanese
knew in their hearts that they stood little chance of victory over the US,
as Kershaw shows. To all the key decision-makers in Tokyo, Pearl Harbor was
a long shot, a gamble that the country’s military leaders ultimately
preferred to the alternative of abandoning, under American economic
pressure, their dreams of empire in China. By contrast, the Germans were
highly confident that they would defeat the Red Army. And so were most
informed observers in the West. The probability of a German victory over an
unprepared Soviet Union was in fact much higher in 1941 than Kershaw allows,
as historians such as Michael Burleigh and Holger Herwig have persuasively
argued (in counterfactual essays conspicuous by their absence from Kershaw’s
bibliography).
There are many other instances of hindsight bias in Fateful Choices. One more
example will suffice. Yes, Churchill did ultimately prevail over more
pusillanimous Tories in the crisis of May 1940, when Halifax and Chamberlain
were urging that no diplomatic stone be left unturned to end the war. But
that he should have emerged strengthened from the debacle at Dunkirk did not
appear likely at the time. What Kershaw fails to do is to spell out what
people in Britain thought peace with Germany would have meant at that
juncture. The reason Britain fought on was not just because Churchill
decided to. It was because he was articulating a collective popular aversion
to the alternative of French-style subjugation to the Third Reich. That is a
reminder of something that the erstwhile practitioner of societal history
appears to have forgotten. It was not just the decisions of dictators,
emperors, presidents and prime ministers that determined the character of
the Second World War. It was the decisions of hundreds of millions of
people: decisions to acquiesce in conscription rather than defy the
authorities; decisions to kill not just enemy soldiers but civilians,
whether in death camps or from the air; decisions to keep fighting rather
than to surrender or flee (and vice versa).
The proper role of the modern historian is to shatter the delusion that 60
million human beings had to die because of the “fateful choices” made by
fewer than 250 men (the individuals named in Kershaw’s index). That is as
absurd a delusion as the one assailed by Tolstoy in War and Peace, that
everything that happened in Russia in 1812 was willed by Napoleon Bonaparte.
What happened between 1939 and 1945 was only one of an infinite number of
histories that did not happen but which were, if only briefly, plausible
futures for contemporaries. These “what ifs” are more than merely the stuff
of historical “parlour games”, in Carr’s notorious phrase. Pace Ian Kershaw,
they are as much a part of a philosophically educated historiography as
“what actually happened”.
Niall Ferguson is Professor of History at Harvard University. He is
also a Senior Research fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow
of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. his most recent book, The
War of the World: History's age of hatred, was published last year.
