The Roots of World War II

...It finally opted to hang on and hope for eventual Soviet and American help only upon reckoning— correctly as it turned out—that Hitler’s terms for peace at that juncture would be no more attractive than if Britain kept fighting and lost: the surrender of its fleet and disarmament, the loss of African colonies, and a free hand for Germany in Europe and the Mideast...

...And somewhat surprisingly, Kershaw finds his 10th fateful choice in Hitler’s decision to kill the Jews...

...It is true that the Führer promised their annihilation if “Jewish power” provoked a world war...

...He shows that the Holocaust belongs in a compendium of murderous decision-making because of the unique way it came to be ordered...

...First on his list is Britain’s decision to fight on alone after the alarming collapse of France...

...He did not have to wait long...

...But at the end of Fateful Choices he builds his theory toward a deeper insight...

...A quick defeat of the Russians struck him as easier than a cross-Channel invasion of Britain...

...Certainly he now looks foolish for giving Franklin D. Roosevelt the opening he wanted to go after Germany ahead of Japan...

...If Hitler had not rushed to declare war against the United States (Number 9), Congress might well have insisted on fighting at first only in the Pacif ic and extensively delayed the pressure on Germany...

...It is a myth Kershaw observes, that with Britain’s Army not yet rescued from the Channel port of Dunkirk the new Churchill Cabinet never for a minute flinched...

...Ye t Kershaw finds Hitler’s decision “quite rational”— even if not “sensible...

...Lend-lease, as it was called would make America “the arsenal of democracy” and amounted to a Presidential declaration of economic war against the Axis...

...It seemed a sure way to make the English capitulate, or at least negotiate, long before the Americans were ready to ride to their rescue...

...Summer Books The Roots of World War II By Max Frankel THE LESSONS that pour from Ian Kershaw’s reenactment of the planet’s plunge into World War II offer a sobering reminder of the constraints that limit choice in even the direst circumstances...

...Italy now loomed as an easy mark for eventual invasion and Mussolini’s standing at home was fatally undermined...

...It Is The Premise of Kershaw’s revealing scholarship that the best way to grasp the flow of history is to use hindsight only to locate key moments of decision and then focus on the real-time calculations of the decision-makers...

...Initially, he explains his choice briefly, noting that the genocide left humanity with “a defining characteristic of the century,” shaped “historical consciousness” in subsequent decades, and legitimized the creation of Israel, with baleful consequences for the Middle East...

...After all, the American people and Congress weren’t yet persuaded that they should shed blood in Europe again...

...Indeed, the prospect of colonial riches fired the ambitions of Germany, Japan and Italy, all of whom thought of themselves as “have-not” powers and wanted to supplant British and French rule over Southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle East...

...As the Germans seemed not to understand, Roosevelt shared their sentiment...

...In the fall there followed the decision to cleanse all Nazi-run Europe of Jews, whose resettlement in some remote African colony like Madagascar also proved impractical...

...Germany’s swift penetration of Soviet defenses in the summer of 1941 triggered urgent reassessments in both Washington and Tokyo...

...Bogged down in China, a dominant military caste in Tokyo preferred to solicit a pledge of German support against America rather than accept a Pacific peace designed by the United States...

...The Axis lost their chance to drive through Egypt and take the Suez Canal...

...In an almost comic but consequential sideshow, October found Italy’s Fascist dictator eager to feed his own territorial appetite and to avenge his exclusion from the triumph over France...

...But Italy’s Army was quickly humiliated there, with lasting results for the larger War...

...Although he campaigned that October for a third term with the promise that “your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign war,” the President’s maneuvers in early 1941 made it virtually impossible to stay out of the spreading War...

...He sent a brigade of Marines to Iceland, deftly skirting a prohibition against the use of draftees outside the Western Hemisphere...

...His belligerence became bicoastal after Japan moved troops into French Indochina, a step Washington countered with an oil embargo...

...Yes, even 70 years ago oil was the fuel of empire, the lure for Japan in what is now Indonesia and for Germany in Romania and the Caucasus...

...And what possessed the Japanese to ignite a war against America that they doubted they could win if it ran very long...

...Dismissing the Western powers’ warnings of a German invasion as a ruse to force him into battle, he chose instead to trust Hitler’s assurance that the massing of Nazi forces in the east was a feint to mislead the British about his imminent assault on them...

...The War Was Now truly worldwide...

...In hindsight, of course—but not so mad considering his confidence that he could take Moscow in three months and dash Britain’s hope of rescue from the east...

...Bucking a still formidable isolationist opinion, FDR resolved to help Britain with “all ‘methods short of war.’” He bypassed Congress by “lending” Churchill 50 destroyers in a barter deal for American bases on British territory from Canada to the Caribbean...

...But blinded by his blitzkrieg advances in Europe, Hitler had reason to think he could better handle two fronts than an ill-prepared America...

...China’s fate also inspired a moral revulsion among Americans, setting the drift toward Pearl Harbor in motion...

...Trapped in a quagmire occupation of China, they balanced the obvious risks of a protracted war against their fear of permanent humiliation...

...So his long simmering ideological ambition for Lebensraum in the East and the destruction of “Jewish Bolshevism” acquired what Kershaw calls a complementary strategic imperative: “conquering London via Moscow...

...And inherent in that ‘mission’ was the ‘removal’ of the Jews...

...The Jews were now to be gathered in ghettos in Poland, but they could not absorb the tide of wretched prisoners...

...In a work full of complex judgments, perhaps the most brilliant of all is Kershaw’s conclusion: that while the pathology of demonic anti-Semitism at the roots of the genocide defies rationality, “the decision to wage war to the death against the Jews was in Nazi thinking part of and intrinsic to, not separate from, the vast military war in which they were engaged...

...Japan’s last-minute diplomatic soundings to avert a confrontation were stiffly resisted in Washington, where intelligence intercepts revealed that Japan had no sincere intention of recalling its forces from Southeast Asia or China...

...Nevertheless, Stalin rebuilt his defenses slowly, ordering his commanders to avoid any provocation of the Germans...

...A ruthlessly purged and decimated Red Army had been further weakened in a bitter struggle against Finland in November 1940...

...The secret and deliberately ill-documented decision to kill the Jews may be a matter apart, but it provides yet another illuminating chapter in how evil hatred and banal logistics can combine to drive men to unspeakable horrors...

...Max Frankel is a former executive editor of the New York Times, and the author of High Noon in the Cold War...

...their industrial engine was running out of oil and they envisioned themselves as a “third-rate power” forever subject to American and British dominion in the Far East...

...Drawing on his extensive writings about the Nazis, Kershaw points out that the killing of the Jews “cannot be traced to a single order on a specific day...

...One, in summer, was to kill the Jews of the Soviet Union when it proved impossible to deport them, along with undesirable Slavs, to perish in the distant wastes of Siberia...

...In September, Roosevelt sent armed escort vessels to protect all shipping in the western Atlantic and used an ambiguous, Tonkin-like scrape between a destroyer and German submarine to tell the Navy henceforth to shoot on sight...

...Exactly how and when the main steps into genocide were taken requires the assembly of “difficult evidence...

...As the President knew, German attacks against these shipments across the Atlantic were inevitable...

...Even more provocatively, he opened a spigot to send Britain weapons worth billions at no cost, merely a claim that they would be returned after the War...

...Fateful choices tend also to be ineluctably fated...

...The renowned biographer of Hitler, now based at the University of Sheffield, was particularly intrigued by the fact that he could site “10 decisions that changed the world” in a mere 19-month period between May 1940 and December 1941...

...No single volume has served so well to expose the roots of that slaughter...

...Hitler’s romp through France in 1940 brought Japan to Kershaw’s fateful choice Number 3: alliance with the Axis that September...

...Roosevelt held his hawks at bay and waited for more “incidents” to inflame American opinion...

...Germany had to divert troops to the Balkans and delay its attack on Russia by a month...

...In the fall of 1941 there was still an antiwar faction in Tokyo, led by the Emperor, which feared Japan could never defeat the United States...

...The situations he describes in Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World (Penguin, 624 pp., $35.00) prove that the nominally free wills of political leaders are usually shaped by ideology and buffeted by bureaucracy, molded by sentiment as much as by argument, and mocked by misperception and miscalculation...

...Britain’s choice produced a wholly unanticipated consequence and Number 2: Hitler’s most fateful decision, in July 1940, to invade the Soviet Union the following spring...

...They were cascading judgments, each propelling the next, by six regimes— three on one side of the conflict led by Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin and Roosevelt, and three on the other led by Hitler, Hideki Tojo and Benito Mussolini...

...Still expecting to defeat the Soviet Union before American troops were ready to fight their way ashore in Europe, Hitler could calculate that a second-front challenge would complicate America’s rearmament, slow down American arms shipments to Britain and Russia, and embolden the Japanese...

...Propelling the murderous spiral were two decisions in 1941, Kershaw says...

...Stalin’s contribution to the fateful choices was a decision (Number 6) to relax his military preparations, in supreme and unchallengeable confidence that Hitler would not attack him until he had finished off Britain in 1942-43...

...Thus occurred what Kershaw considers “one of the most extraordinary miscalculations of all time...

...But Congress, reflecting public sentiment, was not ready to declare war...

...Mussolini chose (Number 4) to reject German help for a move against North Africa and decided instead to surprise Hitler with an attack on Greece...

...Mass shootings served to lessen the crowding, but they also upset the killers, and that brought gassing into vogue...

...Was Hitler not then crazy after Pearl Harbor to declare war on the United States...

...But it seems at first blush like something of a stretch for Kershaw to argue that the butchery of 6 million Jews in a conflict that claimed 50 million lives belongs among events “that changed the world...

...Roosevelt picked hawkish Republicans to direct the Army and Navy, and they laid plans for sending 5 million Americans to fight in Europe by the summer of 1943...

...The lust for colonies and spheres of influence, like the United States’ in Latin America, came to define the rivals in World War II, which paradoxically closed down the colonial era...

...A month later, by one vote in the House of Representatives, he won the right to end that restriction and to rapidly expand the Armed Forces...

...In a fascinating distillation of Japanese emotions, Kershaw demonstrates that the annexation of industrial Manchuria in 1931 was seen in Tokyo as the start of a campaign to overthrow the “Washington system” that was holding back Japan’s emergence as a world power...

...Hitler’s reaction to Pearl Harbor, as recorded by his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, was that “the East Asia conflict drops like a present into our lap...

...But with only a two-year supply of oil, the military leaders insisted on striking sooner rather than later, hoping that the decision to land a single big blow (Number 8) could neutralize British and American naval power and give Japan time to seize resources to sustain a longer conflict...

...FDR’s heightened desire to assist both Churchill and Stalin caused him to change the “short of war” policy into undeclared warfare (Number 7...

...The President meanwhile delivered fiery speeches against Hitler and brandished a British forgery about Nazi plans to dominate South America...

...Was Adolf Hitler mad to attack the Soviet Union before he had finished off Britain in 1941...

...Behind that aggression “lay an ideological ‘mission’ embodied by the figure of Adolf Hitler...

...In this way, the Nazi war on the Jews was a central component of, inextricable from, the Second World War itself—the greatest slaughter the world has ever known...

...It was Germany’s aggression that triggered world war, he reasons...

...His “highly plausible reconstruction” of the unfolding genocide, he contends, exposes “a complex interrelationship of ‘green lights’ for action coming from above and initiatives taken from below, combining to produce a spiral of radicalization...

...That led to the struggle against China, which, though stalemated, aroused an aggressive nationalism among all Japanese factions...

...KERSHAW’S TIGHTLY WOVEN drama then shifts to the United States, where Roosevelt “decides to lend a hand” (Number 5...

...Soon the killing of the least useful Jews perfected the techniques of industrial gassing, capable of handling millions of victims...

...In his nine preceding examples of national decisions, Kershaw demonstrated the force and folly of Germany’s one-man tyranny, the debilitating cult of Stalin’s personality, the bureaucratic tensions surrounding Mussolini and Tojo, the collective rule of the British War Cabinet, and the dramatic tug between an American President and his public opinion...

...If Germany prevailed in Europe, maybe one swift blow against the United States would win time for a resource-rich “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” giving Tokyo command of a region from Manchuria to the Dutch East Indies...