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

  2. For the scale of mortalities, see Niall Ferguson, The War of the World. History’s Age of Hatred, London, 2006, pp. xxxiv–xxxv, 649–50; and Norman Davies, Europe. A History, London, 1996, pp. 1328–9, where the losses in the Second World War are probably conservative estimates.

  3. For a superb account of the legacy of the war for the European continent, see the magisterial work by Tony Judt, Postwar. A History of Europe since 1945, London, 2005.

  4. The term was invented by the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, was used in the indictment of major German war criminals a year later and enshrined in a United Nations convention in 1948 (Leo Kuper, Genocide. Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century, Harmondsworth, 1981, pp. 19–23; Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy. Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, Cambridge, 2005, p. 17).

  5. Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms. A Global History of World War II, Cambridge, 1994, p. 186, expresses similar sentiments in stating that ‘the next five years of war [after September 1940] would see the decisions made in the last months of its first year carried out’, though this compression of timescale omits some dramatic and fundamental decisions over subsequent months, considered in the later chapters of this book.

  6. The case for playing down the role of government leaders as ‘rational actors’ in the taking of vital decisions in foreign policy and emphasizing the structuring of political choices through the input of governmental bureaucracies and the jockeying for influence of competing groups within a system was articulated by Graham T. Allison, The Essence of Decision. Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, Boston, 1971.

  7. Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt. A Rendezvous with Destiny, Boston, 1990, pp. 348–9.

  8. See David Reynolds, In Command of History. Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War, London, 2004, pp. 169–73, for the way Churchill concealed the divisions that surfaced in the War Cabinet discussions of late May 1940, and more generally for an excellent analysis of the way his war memoirs were constructed and how they have shaped subsequent views on the great conflict.

  9. The balance of economic power only shifted inexorably to the Allies during 1942, to become overwhelming from 1943 onwards. See Mark Harrison (ed.), The Economics of World War II. Six Great Powers in International Comparison, Cambridge, 1998, especially the editor’s introductory chapter on ‘The Economics of World War II. An Overview’ (pp. 1–42); and I. C. B. Dear and M. R. D. Foot (eds.), The Oxford Companion to the Second World War, Oxford/New York, 1995, pp. 1060–62.

  10. Emphatic in his view that ultimate triumph in the Second World War might have gone to the Axis powers is Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won, London, 1995, esp. pp. 314–25.

  CHAPTER 1. LONDON, SPRING 1940

  1. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2: Their Finest Hour, London, 1949, p. 157 (and similar comments on p. 199). See David Reynolds, In Command of History. Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War, London, 2004, p. 169.

  2. In fact, an oversight led to a tacit acknowledgement that precisely this issue had indeed been mooted. The text of the telegram which Churchill sent to the French premier, M. Paul Reynaud, on 28 May 1940 included the following sentence: ‘In the formula prepared last Sunday by Lord Halifax it was suggested that if Signor Mussolini would co-operate with us in securing a settlement of all European questions which would safeguard our independence and form the basis of a just and durable peace for Europe we should be prepared to discuss his claims in the Mediterranean’ (Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, p. 110). See Reynolds, In Command of History, pp. 171–2, for the editorial lapse that allowed this trailer to events to be retained when Churchill had expunged reference to it in the text.

  3. ‘Cato’, Guilty Men, London, 1940. And see Peter Clarke, Hope and Glory. Britain 1900–1990, London, 1996, p. 198.

  4. Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed. European International History 1919–1933, Oxford, 2005, pp. 25–7.

  5. See Clarke, pp. 128–34.

  6. Charles Loch Mowat, Britain between the Wars, 1918–1940, London, 1956, pp. 259–62.

  7. See A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914–1945, Harmondsworth, 1970, p. 330.

  8. Steiner, p. 609.

  9. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 5: 1922–1939, London, 1976, p. 76.

  10. See the outstanding biography by Jonathan Wright, Gustav Stresemann, Weimar’s Greatest Statesman, Oxford, 2002, pp. 301–7 and chapter 8.

  11. Quoted in R. A. C. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement. British Policy and the Coming of the Second World War, London, 1993, p. 37.

  12. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement, pp. 38–9.

  13. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement, p. 43.

  14. Ian Kershaw, Making Friends with Hitler. Lord Londonderry and Britain’s Road to War, London, 2004, p. 105.

  15. See Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement, pp. 272–93; and, for the priority given to air rearmament and a comparison of spending on the three services, N. H. Gibbs, Grand Strategy, vol. 1: Rearmament Policy, London, 1976, p. 532.

  16. Quoted in Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement, p. 66.

  17. Quoted in Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement, p. 65.

  18. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement, p. 69.

  19. See John Charmley, Churchill: The End of Glory. A Political Biography, London, 1993, p. 344, also for scepticism about the likely deterrent impact of a ‘grand alliance’.

  20. Quoted in Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement, p. 252.

  21. Birmingham University Library, Neville Chamberlain Papers, NC18/1/1158, 25.5.40.

  22. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement, p. 184.

  23. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 1: The Gathering Storm, London, 1948, p. 292 (where he mentions that his words gave rise to hefty and prolonged protest in the House of Commons); and quoted in R. A. C. Parker, Churchill and Appeasement, London, 2000, p. 187.

  24. Quoted in David Irving, Churchill’s War, vol. 1: The Struggle for Power, Bullsbrook, Australia, 1987, p. 9.

  25. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945, p. 321.

  26. Thomas Jones, A Diary with Letters 1931–1950, London, 1954, p. 204. ‘You are the only man who can hold Winston, who is amazingly valuable, but whose judgement is not 100% reliable,’ Lord Hankey, Minister without Portfolio in the War Cabinet, told Chamberlain on the day before his resignation (Churchill Archives Centre, HNKY 4/32, 9.5.40).

  27. N. J. Crowson, Facing Fascism. The Conservative Party and the European Dictators 1935–40, London, 1997, p. 185.

  28. Parker, Churchill and Appeasement, pp. 143–4, 224–5.

  29. Keith Feiling, The Life of Neville Chamberlain, London, 1946, p. 424.

  30. Kershaw, Making Friends with Hitler, pp. 300–301.

  31. The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan 1938–1945, ed. David Dilks, London, 1971, pp. 221–4 (7–12.10.39); Christopher Hill, Cabinet Decisions on Foreign Policy. The British Experience, October 1938–June 1941, Cambridge, 1991, pp. 115–26, 144. The door was far from closed, however, on a negotiated settlement on the basis of acceptable terms. News filtered through to the Germans later in October that R. A. Butler, Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, had made this plain to both the Soviet and Italian ambassadors in London (Das Politische Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, Berlin, R29570, Fiche-Nr. 187, Frames 169830, 169847).

  32. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 1, p. 494.

  33. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 1, p. 526.

  34. See esp. Andrew Roberts, ‘The Holy Fox’. The Life of Lord Halifax, paperback edn., London, 1997, pp. 195 ff.

  35. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 1, p. 601.

  36. Charmley, pp. 399–400.

  37. Chips. The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon, ed. Robert Rhodes James, London, 1967, p. 252 (13.5.40). And see Charmley, p. 396. The initial lack of warmth for Churchill on the Conservative benches qualifies the point made by Hill (p. 170), that a new Prime Minister could conventionally call upon support, and that Ch
urchill started with the legitimacy of one who had long advocated rearmament and had opposed the Munich settlement.

  38. Churchill himself was not sure that his government would last. See David Dilks, ‘The Twilight War and the Fall of France. Chamberlain and Churchill in 1940’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 28 (1978), p. 81.

  39. Roberts, p. 208; John Lukacs, Five Days in London. May 1940, paperback edn., New Haven/London, 2001, p. 14; Taylor, English History, 1914–1945, p. 579.

  40. Birmingham University Library, Neville Chamberlain Papers, NC18/1/1155 (11.5.40). Churchill had actually written on 10 May, the day he took office: ‘To a very large extent I am in your hands–and I feel no fear of that’ (quoted in Feiling, p. 442).

  41. Birmingham University Library, Neville Chamberlain Papers, NC2/24A (10.5.40); Lukacs, Five Days in London, p. 17.

  42. Quoted in Guy Nicholas Esnouf, ‘British Government War Aims and Attitudes towards a Negotiated Peace, September 1939 to July 1940’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, King’s College, London, 1988, p. 189.

  43. Angus Calder, The People’s War, London, 1969, p. 106.

  44. The Diplomatic Diaries of Oliver Harvey 1937–1940, ed. John Harvey, London, 1970, p. 362 (19.5.40).

  45. Quoted in The Earl of Avon, The Eden Memoirs. The Reckoning, London, 1965, p. 107; and see also Lukacs, Five Days in London, pp. 18–19.

  46. P. M. H. Bell, A Certain Eventuality…Britain and the Fall of France, London, 1974, p. 19.

  47. Paul Reynaud, In the Thick of the Fight 1930–1945, London, 1955, p. 320; The Memoirs of General the Lord Ismay, London, 1960, pp. 126–9; Bell, pp. 18, 32.

  48. Churchill’s private pessimism, or rather, perhaps, disappointment, about the United States in these days surfaced in his rejection on 27 May of Lord Lothian’s suggestion that Britain should lease landing grounds on British territory for American security and in order to make a deep impression on the American administration. ‘The United States had given us practically no help in the war,’ Churchill rejoined, ‘and now that they saw how great was the danger, their attitude was that they wanted to keep everything which would help us for their own defence’ (PRO, Cab 65/7, Frame 00294, fol. 172; and extract printed in The Churchill War Papers, vol. 2: Never Surrender, May 1940–December 1940, ed. Martin Gilbert, London, 1995, p. 163).

  49. Notes of Paul Baudouin, Secretary of the French War Cabinet, quoted by William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Challenge to Isolation, 1937–1940, New York, 1952, p. 453.

  50. The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, pp. 285 (17.5.40), 288 (21.5.40).

  51. The British public were unaware of the full desperation of the plight, and of the scale of the evacuation from Dunkirk, until 31 May (Juliet Gardiner, Wartime Britain 1939–1945, London, 2004, p. 172).

  52. Birmingham University Library, Neville Chamberlain Papers, NC18/1/1156. Ismay, too, was struck, on returning to London from Paris, by ‘a world in which everyone seemed calm, cheerful and resolute’ (Memoirs, p. 129).

  53. Lukacs, Five Days in London, pp. 27–38, for a summary of the varied shades of opinion.

  54. General Ismay recalled, however, how fleeting the optimism was before the anxieties resurfaced (Memoirs, p. 130).

  55. Bell, p. 15; Lukacs, Five Days in London, p. 27.

  56. Christa Schroeder, Er war mein Chef. Aus dem Nachlaß der Sekretärin von Adolf Hitler, ed. Anton Joachimsthaler, Munich/Vienna, 1985, p. 105; Hitlers politisches Testament. Die Bormann Diktate vom Februar und April 1945, Hamburg, 1981, p. 113.

  57. See Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936–1945. Nemesis, London, 2000, pp. 295–6 and p. 921 nn. 63 and 66; also Heinz Magenheimer, Hitler’s War. Germany’s Key Strategic Decisions 1940–1945, London, 1998, p. 24.

  58. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, p. 67.

  59. Reynaud, pp. 379 ff. The British Cabinet was no more convinced than Churchill himself of the irreversible defeat of the French until 26 May, when the British Expeditionary Force was already preparing for embarkation (Hill, p. 152).

  60. The Churchill War Papers, vol. 2, p. 133 (War Cabinet minutes, 24.5.40).

  61. The Ironside Diaries, 1937–1940, ed. Roderick Macleod and Denis Kelly, London, 1962, p. 331 (23.5.40).

  62. The Ironside Diaries, 1937–1940, p. 332 (25.5.40); and see Esnouf, p. 195.

  63. Quoted in Reynaud, p. 379, from Gort’s report to the government of 25.5.40.

  64. Lukacs, Five Days in London, p. 137.

  65. Hill (p. 181) adjudges that ‘had the B.E.F. in fact been lost, Britain’s military position would have seemed irredeemable’–with likely implications for the way the War Cabinet viewed the situation.

  66. David Reynolds, ‘Churchill and the British "Decision” to Fight on in 1940. Right Policy, Wrong Reasons’, in Richard Langhorne (ed.), Diplomacy and Intelligence during the Second World War, Cambridge, 1985, p. 148.

  67. Reynaud, pp. 398–400.

  68. Reynaud, p. 403; Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, p. 108. The drafts of Churchill’s letter to Mussolini of 16 May are in PRO, Prem 4/19/5.

  69. The Diplomatic Diaries of Oliver Harvey, p. 367 (25.5.40).

  70. The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, p. 289 (24.5.40); Esnouf, p. 204.

  71. Birmingham University Library, Neville Chamberlain Papers, NC2/24A, fols. 108–9 (16.5.40).

  72. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, pp. 23 (15.5.40), 51 (18.5.40).

  73. PRO, Cab 65/7, fol. 172 (27.5.40).

  74. Lukacs, Five Days in London, p. 76.

  75. PRO, Cab 65/7, Frame 266, p. 243 (24.5.40).

  76. Roberts, pp. 211–12; David Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance 1937–1941. A Study in Competitive Co-operation, Chapel Hill, NC, 1982, pp. 103, 324 n. 39.

  77. PRO, Cab 65/7, Frame 300, p. 274 (27.5.40).

  78. Reynaud, pp. 406–9; The Diplomatic Diaries of Oliver Harvey, p. 368 (26.5.40); Bell, p. 39; Llewellyn Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War, vol. 1, London, 1970, pp. 234–5, 237–8.

  79. The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan (24.5.40); Roberts, pp. 212–13. The published edition of the Cadogan diaries says ‘Van approached…with suggestion we should offer to discuss Mediterranean with Italy’, omitting the words from the manuscript (Churchill Archives Centre, ACAD 1/9) ‘by Paresci’. Unless the name could not be deciphered, it is hard to understand why it was not included. See also John Costello, Ten Days that Saved the West, London, 1991, p. 193.

  80. PRO, Cab 65/7, Frame 278, p. 255 (25.5.40).

  81. The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, p. 289 (25.5.40).

  82. PRO, Cab 65/13, fols. 159, 160v, Halifax dispatch to Sir Percy Loraine (Rome), 25.5.40; Esnouf, pp. 206–9; Roberts, pp. 213–14; Lukacs, pp. 92–4; Hill, p. 156; Woodward, pp. 236–7. Halifax thought the meeting went well. But feedback from Paresci was that the Foreign Secretary had made a poor impression through offering no concrete proposals. Immediate satisfaction of Italian claims in the Mediterranean had seemingly been expected. In Sir Alexander Cadogan’s view, Bastianini was ‘an ass’ and there was ‘nothing to be got out of him’ (The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, pp. 289–90 (25.5.40, 26.5.40) ). Bastianini’s own memoirs (Giuseppe Bastianini, Volevo fermare Mussolini. Memorie di un diplomatico fascista, Milan, 2005; orig. edn., Uomini, cose, fatti. Memorie di un ambasciatore, Milan, 1959) omit all reference to his important meeting with Halifax.

  83. PRO, Cab 65/13, fols. 140–41 (26.5.40).

  84. PRO, Cab 66/7, fols. 319–26; Bell, pp. 49–51; Lukacs, Five Days in London, pp. 106–8. As Hill (pp. 154–5) points out, the conclusions reached may in part have been prompted by the way Churchill had couched the terms of reference, hinting at the sort of answer he wanted.

  85. PRO, Cab 65/13, fols. 146–8 (26.5.40).

  86. Reynaud, pp. 404–6.

  87. Birmingham University Library, Neville Chamberlain Papers, NC2/24A, fols. 114–17 (26.5.40); The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, p. 290 (26.5.40).

&
nbsp; 88. Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters 1930–1964, ed. Stanley Olson, New York, 1980, pp. 185–6 (26.5.40).

  89. Birmingham University Library, Neville Chamberlain Papers, NC2/24A, fols. 114–17 (26.5.40).

  90. Lukacs, p. 113, implies that something more grave was at stake in a meeting under ‘conditions of secrecy’ which ‘had no precedent in the modern history of Britain’, but Chamberlain (Birmingham University Library, Neville Chamberlain Papers, NC2/24A, fols. 116–17 (26.5.40) ) specifically mentions that, once Reynaud had left, ‘Greenwood was sent for and told what had passed’. This would account for a brief, informal gathering of the War Cabinet ministers before formal proceedings recommenced. Greenwood’s sole point, according to Chamberlain, was that ‘we had a good chance of outlasting Hitler’. Chamberlain had the impression that Greenwood had not ‘thought things out’.

  91. Borthwick Institute, University of York, Diary of Lord Halifax, A7.8.4, fols. 140–41 (26.5.40).

  92. PRO, Cab 65/13, fols. 148–50 (26.5.40); Lukacs, pp. 114–16.

  93. PRO, Cab 65/13, fols. 150–52 (26.5.40); Bell, pp. 41–2.

  94. PRO, Cab 66/7, fols. 335–7 (26.5.40); Esnouf, pp. 213–16; Bell, p. 40; Lukacs, Five Days in London, pp. 118–19. The second part of Halifax’s paper outlined the text, agreed with the French, of Roosevelt’s approach to Mussolini, put forward that day. Halifax added a postscript, warning his colleagues in the War Cabinet that, according to information received from the British ambassador in Rome, Sir Percy Loraine, Roosevelt’s previous intervention had been resented by Mussolini and any further approach ‘would only be interpreted as a sign of weakness and would do no good’. Even so, it was thought that the Reynaud approach could not make matters worse, and that it was important to point out the implications for Mussolini of German dominance in Europe. By the time the War Cabinet met next day, Halifax had received a cryptic note from Loraine to say ‘that matters had now gone beyond the stage at which his [i.e. Sir Percy’s] views counted for anything’. Loraine had reported that ‘Herr Hitler thought that he could reach a satisfactory conclusion with the French on his own account’, and did not want the Italians to enter the war (PRO, Cab 65/13, fols. 175–6 (27.5.40)).