Blame It on Mussolini
R.W. Johnson
- BuyFateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World 1940-41 by Ian Kershaw
Allen Lane, 624 pp, £30.00, June 2007, ISBN 978 0 7139 9712 5
The Second World War is the conflict that shaped all our lives and will go on shaping lives for generations to come. Looking at it in terms of the key decisions that determined its course and outcome – all of them taken in a period of about eighteen months – could have had the effect of disposing of the war as the sort of heroic recitation that too much TV history has turned it into. Instead, by focusing on the strategic choices facing the various actors, and the way these were transformed by the shifting tides of the war itself, Ian Kershaw gives a far stronger sense of the open-endedness of things. Very little about the war was inevitable. Many of the biggest decisions were, by most counts, irrational, even crazy: Britain’s to fight on against hopeless odds; Germany’s attack on Russia and Stalin’s refusal to believe in it till after it happened; Japan’s attacking an enemy it could not defeat; and Germany’s doing the same by declaring war on America. No one could possibly have predicted any of these, let alone Hitler’s attempt to annihilate European Jewry, an act without precedent. One of Kershaw’s greatest triumphs is getting inside each of these decisions and showing how natural and right they came to seem to those who took them.
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Letters
Vol. 30 No. 2 · 24 January 2008
From Valentin Lyubarsky
R.W. Johnson points out, correctly I believe, that Ian Kershaw should have included the battle of Khalkhin-Gol in August 1939 in his list of turning points in the Second World War (LRB, 29 November 2007). However, he incorrectly credits ‘the future Marshal Zhukov’ as solely responsible for ‘crushing’ the Japanese, calling him ‘the Soviet equivalent of the young Napoleon’. Before Stalin executed them, in 1941, two other generals, Grigory Shtern and Y.V. Smushkevich, shared the honour with Zhukov. Moreover, Shtern was in command of the entire military during the battle while Zhukov commanded only the army. Johnson surely knows that under Stalin all traces of those purged, regardless of their rank and merit, were expunged from the public record.
Valentin Lyubarsky
Brooklyn
From Donal Ó Drisceoil
I wonder what led R.W. Johnson to lump Eamon de Valera, neutral Ireland’s wartime political leader, in with a clutch of Fascist leaders. De Valera had many faults, but he was not a Fascist, or crypto-Fascist, and joining forces with Hitler was never seriously considered even for purely strategic reasons. Ireland’s wartime policy was de facto pro-Allied, despite formal neutrality. Openly joining forces with the recently dislodged colonial master was not an option for domestic political reasons. The motley crew of Nazi sympathisers was carefully monitored and never posed a threat. The IRA’s foolhardy and myopic flirtation with the Reich, based on the logic that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, led to its virtual annihilation by de Valera’s ‘Emergency’ regime. Secret Irish co-operation with the Allies was a more effective contribution to the war against Nazism, according to British Intelligence, than open belligerence, especially given Irish military weakness. MI5 was unambiguous: ‘Eire neutral was of more value to the British war effort than Eire belligerent would have been.’ De Valera’s unforgivable visit to the German representative in Ireland to offer condolences on the death of Hitler, a wrongheaded demonstration of formal, public neutrality, should not be misread in such a lazy way.
Donal Ó Drisceoil
Cork
From Cliff Hawkins
R.W. Johnson claims that ‘some in Berlin suggested’ that Hitler ‘should wait’ before entering the war against America; ‘after all, FDR had immediately declared war on Japan but three days later had said nothing about Germany.’ Roosevelt’s problem was how to manipulate Congress into declaring a war that he had long wanted, but that the American people opposed. To this end, he said plenty about Germany in the days immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. In fact, he blamed the Japanese attack on Hitler, claimed that Germany and Italy were already at war with the United States, and ordered the incarceration of German nationals as enemy aliens.
‘The course that Japan has followed for the past ten years in Asia has parallelled the course of Hitler and of Mussolini in Europe and Africa,’ Roosevelt declared on 9 December, in a speech broadcast internationally. ‘Today, it has become far more than a parallel. It is collaboration, actual collaboration, so well calculated that all the continents of the world, and all the oceans, are now considered by the Axis strategists as one vast battlefield.’ He warned Americans: ‘Remember always that Germany and Italy, regardless of any formal declaration of war, consider themselves at war with the United States at this moment just as much as they consider themselves at war with Britain and Russia.’ To this he added that Germany had incited Japan to attack the United States and had offered it territories in North, Central and South America if it did.
On the same day Roosevelt ordered the arrest of German and Italian nationals, including German journalists, as enemy aliens. The New York Times of 10 December quoted him as proclaiming that ‘an invasion or predatory incursion is threatened upon the territory of the United States’ by Germany and Italy. ‘No distinction was made between the Axis citizens and Japanese,’ it reported, ‘although the United States has not declared war on either Germany or Italy, and in the capital it was believed that this was an advance indication of an important extension of the war.’
Cliff Hawkins
Berkeley, California
