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EVENTS, DEAR BOY, EVENTS

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EVENTS, DEAR BOY, EVENTS By IAIN FRASER GRIGOR THE PRINCIPLES of warfare are really very simple. As codified by the military sages of antiquity and modernity, they can be reduced to two simple rules. The first is to win without having to fight at all. And the second is: if you have to fight, attack a small, defenceless and entirely unconscious enemy with devastating superiority of force and absolute surprise. The great Prussian von Moltke knew this. But he was to add one great aphorism to the principles of war, to the effect that no plan survives contact with the enemy. So it was in the wars of his nineteenth century, after all, and so it would prove to be in the first Great War of Europe's bloody twentieth century. But how much scrutiny would von Moltke's aphorism bear in the second of these mighty contests? After all, the years of the Second War were the great turning point of European (and global) history in the 20th century. By the time they had come to an end, the British Empire was barely alive, and America was the new world power. Hitler's short-lived Reich was no more, and Stalin's Soviet Union was in control of eastern Europe. The Americans already had the nuclear bomb, and the Soviets soon would have one too. Japan was in ruins, and China was rapidly falling into the murderous embrace of an emperor armed (as he seemed to believe) with that famously infallible guide of dialectical materialism. Of course, this is not what was planned by those belligerent nations intent on securing for themselves a greater share of the world's riches from 1939. Germany was to sweep across the mainland of western Europe, subjugate the British Empire, and then swiftly crush the Soviets - making it all-too-late for the Americans to enter the war. And in the Far East, the Japanese would break the back of American naval power at Pearl Harbour and swarm south towards the energy resources of the Dutch East Indies. But as the onetime Guardsman Harold MacMillan (a wartime envoy to Allied forces in North Africa) is famously said to have observed of political affairs and their unpredictability - events, dear boy, events. And so it proved to be. Decisions made from the spring of 1940 until late the following year were decisions - in the words of Ian Kershaw's subtitle - that changed the world. Kershaw is a professor of history at Sheffield, and though his massive narrative eschews colour and other stylistic artifice, it demonstrates a masterly command of sources and a lucidly-expressed understanding of the issues at stake. The first of his "decisions" was the British one to refuse a settlement with Germany following the collapse of France in the spring of 1940. Despite the miraculous recovery of much of the BEF via Dunkirk, Britain's position was still perilous in the extreme. But Churchill gambled - and he won. Another of the great decisions was Hitler's move to invade the Soviet Union in the summer 1941. After all, he might instead have gone south and east, into the Balkans and on towards the oil-fields of the Middle East. Or he might have tried to force on Stalin a ruinous deal reminiscent of the First War's carve-up at Brest Litovsk. But the onetime corporal in the Kaiser's army gambled on taking on, and out, the onetime Bolshevik bank-robber - and failed (by a fraction). The Japanese, meantime, had a terrifyingly narrow window of opportunity, for their oil would not last long: and infantry, as they knew only too well, are of somewhat limited value in an oceanic theatre of war. Thus Pearl Harbour: but the American carriers were at sea at the time, and American power was not broken in the Pacific. The Japanese had gambled - and lost almost at once. As for the Americans themselves: isolationists were strong in Congress, but the elite could see deadly threats to American world interests looming through the fogs of war. Pearl Harbour made combat with Japan an easy decision: and in Europe Hitler obliged Roosevelt by declaring war on the United States towards Christmas 1941. Meantime, the Americans had re-armed: and were soon ready to send millions of men with limitless supplies of oil and arms into a shattered Europe - paying tribute, inter alia, to the second great principle of successful warfare identified above. Amid this titanic maelstrom of hubris and cowardice and courage and panic, meantime, stalked Lady Luck in killer heels. The Japanese didn't tell Hitler that they were going to attack Pearl Harbour, as they might have. The American sailors on that sunny Pacific morning did not expect the attack either: though they would have, if American communications had been faster. Stalin refused to believe that the Germans would attack without at least an ultimatum. And Hitler might well have taken Moscow, had he not - confident of victory there - sent his forces off to secure the wheat-fields and energy resources of the Ukraine and the other Soviet republics in that region. As for the rest of Germany's war: it was increasingly evident as 1942 progressed that she would not win the war in the east - and by now the Americans were on the way in the west. But in Berlin the lunatics had indeed taken over the asylum: and they would remain there for another three terrible years, while the crimes of their eastern armies would soon be visited in turn on the fire-stormed cities of Hamburg and Dresden, among many others. Like all wars, this one was built on ambition and paved with fortune. But what does it tell us about the peaks and plateaux, the giddy gulfs, of super-power competition in this present century? Not much, it seems. Historians, like hindsight, remain a-bed in the past, and do not visit the future. So what it all means for the history of war in this present twenty-first century remains - rather gloomily, it might be thought - to be seen.

A fascinating study of how decisions were made

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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.

Great idea, poor execution

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I agree with the reviewer Elizabeth Kyten. Clearly, 1940-41 is the key period of WWII, casting shadows onto the years and decades beyond. But Kershaw's treatment of the theme is poor, focusing (as it does) solely on elite politics and written (as it is) in a pinched, monographical way, BY a historian, FOR other specialist historians (or similarly oriented students). Unless you want to know, for example, what a particular memo said on any one day of a key period selected by the author, give this book a miss. Although Kershaw ranges widely in his secondary reading (the book is very well researched), frankly one expects more than a compendium of that research from a historian of Kershaw's rank. The focus on elite actors - each chapter revolves around a very small group of people - gives the book a very narrow feel. Perhaps the most damning aspect, however, is the prolixity of the writing. Like a PhD thesis. Not many historians can write as vividly as Beevor, but this book should have been edited, and edited, then edited again. Badly written and too long at half the length. I say this as someone who studied history at UK universities (including the LSE, where IK taught, though for the record he did not teach me). Kershaw has been lauded for his contributions to the history of the Third Reich, but he needs to peel away the knighthood, the tv documentary attributions, the glowing broadsheet profiles, and remember what he is: a historian. This book is a shadow of what it could have been. Indeed, it's a shadow of what Kershaw himself could have made it had he not been in such a rush to go to print. Less is more.

Informative, but a HUGE pain to get through.

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This book is excellent in concept. Certainly, when learning about World War II, one wonders why certain decisions were made. For me, this was particularly true of the German decision to invade the Soviet Union and Hitler's choice to declare war on the United States. The fact that both questions were addressed in this book was one of the things that drew me to it. This book is well-researched. However, I found it to be nearly unreadable. It is extremely dense and very circuitous in terms of sentence structure. In essence, it is not concise enough. When I got to the end of a section I would often have trouble remembering what the main points of it were because I was having so much trouble following it. I'm sure that part of my frustration was due to the fact that a crazy college schedule made it necessary for me to read it in short segments. However, I am also sure that the 470-page book could have been written in at least 2/3 of the words. This book drove me crazy, and although I came out of reading it with a better understanding of World War II, I would gladly exchange the knowledge for a little bit of my lost sanity.

well-written, but no breaking news

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This is a very well-written narrative that you will find hard to put down once you have started reading. At the same time, those already fairly familiar with the history of WW II will find much that they already knew. For them it is hardly a surprise that Hitler reached his decisions without consulting anyone, that Stalin refused to believe that Russia was about to be attacked, that Mussolini was obsessed with the fear of being left out of the glory and spoils of the war that Hitler seemed to be winning hands down, and that it took Rooseveld a lot of cajoling to get his isolationist country into the war. But these are stories very well told, to the extent that you are annoyed that the story simply stops once the decision has been reached. But of course that is the point of this book. Certainly for those who only know the big picture on WW II-history, this book provides valuable insight in how its major developments came about.