Product Description

In 1940 the world was on a knife-edge. The hurricane of events that marked the opening of the Second World War meant that anything could happen. For the aggressors there was no limit to their ambitions; for their victims a new Dark Age beckoned. Over the next few months their fates would be determined. In Fateful Choices Ian Kershaw re-creates the ten critical decisions taken between May 1940, when Britain chose not to surrender, and December 1941, when Hitler decided to destroy Europe’s Jews, showing how these choices would recast the entire course of history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #107850 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 672 pages

Independent
'Compelling, and chilling'

Andrew Roberts, author of Hitler and Churchill
'Powerfully argued ... important ... this book actually alters our perspective of the Second World War'

Anthony Beevor, author of Stalingrad
'How fortunate that it is Ian Kershaw bringing his immense knowledge and clarity of thought to the task ... brilliantly explained ... an immensely wise book'

Customer Reviews

A fascinating study of how decisions were made
Kershaw examines ten choices that changed the world between the spring of 1940 and the end of 1941. Each of them could have been different (though Kershaw shows that the alternatives, usually lengthily and therefore somewhat repetitively rehearsed, were not very appealing, and sometimes not even sensible), and had they been different, the history of the Second World War and of the world following it would of course have been very different, too.

The first choice Kershaw examines is that of Britain refusing to negotiate with Hitler after the fall of France. The decision to fight on alone was taken by the inner war cabinet of only five men. Among them only the Foreign Minister, Lord Halifax, argued strongly for exploring possible peace terms. The others (and the members of the outer cabinet whom Churchill briefly addressed rather than consulted) were won over by the new prime minister's charisma.

The British refusal to negotiate surprised Hitler. He believed that the British were holding out only because they hoped that the United States would eventually come into the war (which Hitler also believed) and that the Soviet Union might act against Hitler. The second of the choices was Hitler's conclusion that therefore he needed swiftly to attack and defeat the Soviet Union (which he thought would be `child's play') before he could force Britain to make peace and thereby also prevent US intervention. Kershaw stresses that Hitler had no cabinet meetings after February 1938, and all major decisions were essentially his own, often in defiance of even his military advisers. The plans of the German navy to force Britain to make peace by attacks in the Mediterranean were briefly considered by Hitler as a supplement, but not as an alternative, to the invasion of Russia. Kershaw believes that from Hitler's point of view, the attack on Russia was logical.

There is a fascinating chapter on the choices made by Mussolini: to enter the war in 1940 against the pessimistic warnings of the military, of his foreign minister Count Ciano, and of the king; followed by the even more fateful decision to attack Greece in 1941, this time egged on by Ciano who wanted to extend his quasi-fiefdom in Albania, but against the advice of the military and against German attempts to restrain him. Three times as many men were sent to Greece as were then in the Italian army in Libya. Had they been sent to Libya instead, the outcome of the African campaign might have been dramatically different.

Then there are the fateful choices made by Stalin: the emasculation of his armed forces in the purges of 1937; his pact with Hitler in 1939; and his refusal to the very last moment to act on intelligence information that Hitler would attack in 1941 rather than, as Stalin had anticipated, in 1942 at the earliest. Here again Kershaw is careful to examine alternative choices that could have been made, concluding that actually Stalin's choices narrowed greatly after the Purge.

Two chapters plot in great detail the slow but steady involvement of the United States in helping Britain with Lend-Lease, underlining Roosevelt's anxiety to do everything short of war to support Britain, even though Lend-Lease was likely to make American entry into the war almost unavoidable. Although public and congressional opinion supported these measures, Roosevelt dared not ask Congress for a declaration of war, fearing that at worst he would be defeated there, or at best that he would take a divided nation into the war. In all the other chapters decisions were made essentially by one man (in Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union) or by a small elite (in Japan - though with much debate within that elite -, and, in the first chapter, by Britain). Roosevelt was the only leader whose scope of action was restricted by democratic institutions. Only Pearl Harbour and Hitler's declaration of war on the United States resolved this dilemma for him.

Two chapters trace the choices was made by the Japanese. The first had been to attack China. China was too big a morsel to swallow whole, but enough to set Japan on a collision course with the United States. The second choice was to take advantage of the defeat of France and the expected defeat of Britain by planning for an expansion towards the south, deliberately running the risk that this was likely to bring the United States into the war. The debate inside the Japanese armed forces about this policy will be unfamiliar to most readers, and continued almost up to Pearl Harbour.

Immediately after Pearl Harbour, Hitler chose to declare war on the United States. Kershaw finds that decision more explicable than most other historians do, on the assumption that, sooner rather than later, the United States would have declared war on Germany even while at war with Japan. It seems to this reviewer the least convincing argument in the book.

The last `choice' Kershaw examines is the destruction of the Jews of Europe. This had always been in Hitler's mind, especially since he saw the Jews as responsible for Germany's defeat in the First World War and as steering the policies of Germany's two main enemies, the United States and Bolshevik Russia in the Second. The only question was how this destruction was to be accomplished. Hitler's choice was of course fateful for the Jews; but, unlike all the decisions described in the other chapters, it did not affect the outcome of the war; and the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, which sanctioned the `Final Solution', also falls just outside the period in the book's subtitle.

Only this last chapter lacks that tension of decision-making which gives the rest of the book such compelling quality.

"The unpredictability inherent in human affairs
is due largely to the fact that the by-products of a human process are more fateful than the product". Eric Hoffer

Ian Kershaw's "Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940 - 1941" is an elegantly-written masterful work of history. In "Fateful Choices" Kershaw cast a critical eye over ten decisions taken during a 19-month period at the beginning of the Second World War that, according to Kershaw, determined not just the outcome of the war but also (in good part) the structure of the post-war world.

Taken as a whole, the greatest value in Kershaw's book is to be found in his comparison of the decision-making process engaged in by the five nations involved. Three of those nations (Germany, Italy, and the USSR) were totalitarian states where decisions were invariably made by Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin with little input other than sycophancy from those around them. Collective decision-making was the norm in the United States and Britain. Both Roosevelt and Churchill (more so during the early months of Churchill's leadership) had cabinet members who were not afraid to speak up and challenge their President of PM's approach to a specific issue. Japan's decision-making process was also a group process but Kershaw does an excellent job of explaining how the dominance of Japan's military created a very different decision making dynamic than that found in the U.S. and Britain. Kershaw advances a compelling argument that the dysfunctional decision-making methodology found in Germany, Italy, Japan, and the USSR led to some disastrous choices.

In each chapter, Kershaw starts with the decision in question but leads the reader back to a logical starting point and then through the series of events leading up to that decision. It seems axiomatic, but Kershaw adroitly shows how previous events have a way of narrowing ones options so that what may in retrospect look like an irrational choice is, however, one of the few options left at the time. What Kershaw has also done, and done very well, is to examine these decisions in the context of the times and on the basis of the information available at the time rather than through the prism of knowledge gained by historians after the fact.

Taken individually, Kershaw's examination of these ten decisions provides the reader with a wealth of information. For example, Kershaw's examination of the British war cabinet in May, 1940 to stay in the war and not seek a settlement with Hitler was very informative. Churchill had only been PM for two weeks and had no real power base. His war cabinet included former PM Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, two of the architects of Britain's policy of appeasement. It is no small bit of irony that it was Chamberlain who eventually sided with Churchill's argument to stay in the war and that Chamberlain's decision caused Halifax to make the vote unanimous.

I was also struck by Kershaw's look at Mussolini's unilateral decision to invade Greece. As Kershaw notes, the resulting conflagration in Greece in the Balkans caused Hitler to delay his invasion of the USSR by five weeks. Kershaw does not adhere to the argument (advanced by Hitler as the war came tumbling back on his head) that this delay may have cost Hitler victory on the Eastern Front. However, Kershaw than moves on to the discussion of the Japanese government's decision to turn its interest towards southern Asia (including Indochina, Indonesia, and Singapore) rather than advance its claims against eastern Russia in the north. This decision allowed Stalin to relocate troops and munitions from its positions in the Far East to help mount the Red Army's first real counterattack as the Russian winter began to slow the advancing German armies. Those two decisions certainly had to have had an impact on the outcome of the war on the eastern front.

Kershaw devotes two chapters to Roosevelt's relationship with Britain in the months before the U.S. entered the war. Kershaw does an exemplary job with this discussion. I also very much appreciated his examination of Japan's decision-making before the war. Most of my reading on the war has focused on Europe and Kershaw provides a lot of information in a concise and eminently readable way.

All in all, Ian Kershaw's "Fateful Choices" is a compelling book. It is a book that manages to combine excellent academic research (the book is immaculately annotated and contains an extensive bibliography) with a writing style that makes this book accessible to any reader with an interest in the period.

Highly recommended. L. Fleisig

The ten Fateful Choices that comprise Kershaw's work are:
1. The British War Cabinet's decision in May, 1940 to continue the war rather than negotiate a settlement with Hitler;
2. Hitler decides to attack the Soviet Union.
3. Japan decides to seize the "Golden Opportunity" and turn south, going after the colonial empires of the countries that have fallen to Hitler.
4. Mussolini decides to join the war on Hitler's side to grab a share of the spoils.
5. Roosevelt decides to lend a helping hand to England.
6. Stalin decides he knows best and ignores all the clear signals that Germany is going to invade.
7. Roosevelt decides to wage undeclared war.
8. Japan decides to go to war against the United States.
9. Hitler decides to declare war on the USA.
10. Hitler decides to commit genocide.

A superb and lucid history
Anyone who has considered WWII would have thought "Why did they do that?" about some of the choices made. Ian Kershaw's book answers that question for 10 of the most important decisions, each of which shaped our world today.

He does so with a rigour that fully gets to the heart of each decision from the perspective of those making it, without the knowledge (that we have) of what the other side was thinking.

He also writes in a style that brings the reader along through complicated events with a wide range of players, many of whom will be unfamiliar except to scholars of the period.

I have read no other history that has left me with such a clear understanding of the why, and not just the what.