Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941

For those familiar with Kershaw primarily through his definitive two-volume biography of Adolf Hitler, 'Fateful Choices' might seem, at first glance, like a comparatively light-weight book with a 'what-if' gimmick at its core: what if England had sought a negotiated peace with Germany, what if Japan had not attacked Pearl Harbor, etc. But Kershaw is not a light-weight historian, and he uses the book's structure as a series of teaching moments about key turning points in the course of the war. His discussion of the debates inside Churchill's war cabinet are fascinating reading for those familiar only with Churchill's public pronouncements that England would never back down: Kershaw weighs in on the various arguments of the participants and even gives a fair hearing to the reasoning of those who were ultimately on the wrong side of history. The book also brings up less well known but equally fascinating turns of events such as Italy's unilateral decision to invade Greece, which opened up yet another front in an already sprawling world conflict. This book is probably best read by people who already have a certain familiarity with the major events and figures of the period, but it would also be highly recommended for students enrolled in college courses on modern European history, where outcomes are all too often presented as fait accompli. Kershaw shows that history frequently turns on individual decisions made by individual people, and he does so with vigor, authority, and grace.

According to Ian Kershaw the main decisons made by the Axis and Allied powers were not planned in advance but improvised as battlefield successes and failures changed. This book needs to be read alongside Hew Strachan's new book about Clausewitz's "On War," because according to Strachan's interpretation of Clausewitz, tactical successes or failures ulitimately shape strategy. This was seen in Kershaw's view of why Hitler choose to attack the Soviet Union. Kershaw states that Hitler attacked the Soviet Union because he could not defeat Britain during the Battle of Britain, and by overthrowing the Soviet regime maybe the English would plead for a settlement. Meanwhile the Japanese attacked the United States due to the German victories in Europe and their own defeat to the Soviet Union in 1939. The Japanese military successes in Asia persuaded Hitler to declare war against the United States because he thought that the Americans would be too distracted in the Far East. Kershaw disagrees with the think tank strategist of the fifties and sixties who believed that democracy hindered the decision making process. Mussolini,Hitler,and the Japanese military leaders led their nations to defeat because they failed to hear conflicting advice. But Churchill had a unified front because he had the support of the cabinet and Roosevelt's sensitivity towards public opinion prevented him from making any rash decisions that were detrimental to the Allied effort. The only weakness of this book is that in his section about Stalin, Kersahaw ignored traditional Russian and later Soviet suspicions of England, that made Stalin ignore British intelligence warnings that Hitler was going to attack the Soviet Union. Also Kershaw does not write about how Hitler's strategic decisions reflected his Austrian upringing as mentioned by Martin Van Creveld.

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 (listed in a Comment below this review) 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 or Prime Minister'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 then leads the reader back to a logical starting point and then through the series of events leading up to that decision. 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 decision taken after deiberations from May 25 - May 28, 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 Ke

The hinge of fate was about to open on the most horrible war in human history. Millions would die in gas chambers, on the battlefied, under the sea and the cities of the world. This outstanding work of seminal history from the pen of the eminent British historian Ian Kershaw (famed for his two volume work on Adolf Hitler: "Nemesis" and "Hubris") carefully examines the following ten decisions made by men in power: 1. The English government under new Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill decides to fight on after the fall of France. Churchill took office on May 10, 1941 following the fall of the weak Neville Chamberlin's premiership. In three days of discussion it was Churchill who insisted and persuaded the government to never surrender. If England had made a negotiated peace with Nazi Germany the war would have taken a much different course. Kudos for Churchill! 2. Hitler made the decision to invade his erstwhile ally the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The result was a two front war; disaster for the Reich and victory for the Allies. This is one of history's all time worst mistakes made by a national leader at the helm during war.Hitler thought he could defeat England in time to concentrate on the Soviet Union but he was fatally wrong! 3. Japan made the wrong decision to go southward into Indochina and refusing to launch an attack against Russia. This horrible decision would lead to total defeat meted out by the US Navy in the Pacific. Tojo and his militaristic/expansionistic government would lead Japan to total defeat. 4. Mussolini decided to launch his weak Italian legions against Greece hoping to capitalize on German victory in France. He wanted to hitch his horse to a winning team but as a result Italy lost the war and he was forced out of office by an officer coup. The Greeks were tougher foes than he had faced in weak Ethiopia. Hitler had to divert needed troops from the Russian front to Greece. A total fiasco for the Axis powers. 5. The consummate ability of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to maneuver the isolatistic waters of pre-war America led to his devising the lend-lease program of aid to Great Britain. Only a politician and statesmen of FDR's fabled stature could have pulled this miracle off in the political atmosphere of the USA in the late 1930's and 1940. 6. Stalin made the worst mistake of his infamous career when he failed to prepare the Soviet Union for the June, 1941 of the legions of Hitler. Due to his cruel purges of the military his armies were weak; his nation was not prepared for defensive warfare and over 20 millions Soviet military and civilian casualties would take place. 7. FDR and the American Congress allowed undeclared war to take place in the North Atlantic as America shipped needed weapons, fuel and food to Great Britain in its hour of greatest need in 1940-41. The US was doing everthying it could to help the Brits short of war which was not declared until the attack on Pearl Harbor on Decembner. 7, 1941. 8. Japan ru

Historian Sir Ian Kershaw is perhaps best known for his recent, monumental two-volume biography of Adolf Hitler. His latest effort, Fateful Choices, is a bit far afield from his studies of various aspects of Nazi Germany published in the last 20-30 years. This new book has a much broader focus as it examines, in the order they occurred, ten fateful decisions that changed the course, if not the outcome, of World War II. These decisions all took place in an 18-month period from May 1940 to December 1941. These decisions were: 1. Britain's agreeing to fight on after the defeat of France. 2. Germany's deciding to wage war on the Soviet Union. 3. Japan's appropriating the colonies of countries at war with, or already defeated by, Germany, and allying itself with Germany and Italy. 4. Italy's deciding to invade Greece. 5. America's providing aid to England. 6. The Soviet Union's ignoring all signs that Germany was about to invade it. 7. America's intensifying its assistance to Britain by an "undeclared war" on Germany. 8. Japan's attacking the U.S. 9. Germany's declaring war against the U.S. 10. Germany's putting into operation the Final Solution. Many of these decisions, in retrospect, seem strange, if not bizarre, or illogical, if not plain idiotic, amoral, or perverse. The author's approach is to examine each of these these decisions by those primarily responsible for making them. (For example, Britain's heroic decision to soldier on is examined from the perspective of Churchill, and the War Cabinet.) In so doing, he demonstrates that each of these decisions was not automatic, or even axiomatic, but that they were reflective of the type of political system that produced them and were influenced deeply by the major personalities involved (i.e., Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt; the Japanese had no single dominant personality, despite Allied propaganda to the contrary, and engaged in a sort of collective decision-making process). He also demonstrates that although each decision had a sort of logic to it (based on national, political, or military objectives), there were also countervailing logical arguments in play at the time these decisions were made which, if followed, would have produced a different outcome and perhaps changed the outcome of the war. (The author does provide an examination of what the other outcomes could have been had the countervailing logic been followed but that is completely secondary to the examination of "why" each decision was made.) In exploring the background of how each decison was made, the author posits that there was no single meeting in which any of these decisions were made; instead each was the result of an accretion of thoughts and ideas. (Interestingly, the only country in which public opinion and perception apparently mattered in coming to these decisions was the U.S., however, this appears to discount the author's own findings in his work, The Hitler Myth, which is a