Noble Frankland

Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World 1940–41by Ian Kershaw Britain’s decision to fight on in 1940; Hitler’s to attack the Soviet Union in 1941; in the same year, Roosevelt’s to wage undeclared war in the Battle of the Atlantic; Japan’s to attack Pearl Harbor and expand southwards; Hitler’s declaration of war against America and his decision for genocide of the Jews. These are the choices, together with a few related ones, plus Mussolini’s by comparison less important decision to enter the war on Germany’s side, that Kershaw sees as the keys that turned the lock of the second world war.

Of six million Russian soldiers captured by the Germans, only one million are still alive in 1945, two million German women raped by Russian soldiers in the last months of the war, countless millions of Jews and others done to death in German concentration camps, 12 million displaced persons wandering about in Germany at the end of the war not knowing where to go. Such are a few of the statistics of Hitler’s legacy inherited by Europe in May 1945. These figures perhaps have become familiar, but how often do those to whom they have become familiar pause to consider what they really mean? Huge figures such as these have a self-defeating quality rather like those about money that are bandied about by chancellors of the exchequer; five billion more for this, five billion less for that.

This massive study of Hitler’s war economy runs to half the length of War and Peace, partly for the reason that the author shares with Tolstoy the annoying habit of repeating himself frequently and at length. Although I suspect the book will be cited more often than read and perhaps more often read than understood, it must all the same now be enrolled by any serious student of the second world war as belonging to the list of indispensable sources available. Adam Tooze’s formidable intellect and impressive industry certainly entitle it to that. History may be regarded as a rope consisting of many strands of different strengths and sizes but all of which contribute to the whole resulting rope.

Listing page content here The title of Gordon Corrigan’s book tells us it is not going to be a Churchillian panegyric, so it comes as almost a disappointment to find no new revelations needful for the dethroning of the former national hero. All we are given is an emphasised reminder that Churchill’s history, The Second World War, was biased, that he was prone to indulge in disastrous expeditions, notably, in the first war, Gallipoli and, in the second, Norway and that he unreasonably pestered his generals to mount offensives before they were ready to do so. But none of this, of course, is news and it certainly gives no ground for taking down the statue of Churchill in Parliament Square nor, indeed, for revising his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography.

If one was shot through the head in the battle of Stalingrad or the battle of Alamein, the sensation, presumably, would be much the same, but there the similarity would end. The second world war on the Russian front was fought on a catastrophically different scale from that in the West. In the course of it, the Red Army lost more than eight million soldiers killed; the Americans and the British lost fewer than 250,000 each. On top of that, at least 19 million Soviet civilians lost their lives through deportation, hunger, disease and direct violence. In the decisive battle of Kursk of July 1943, 70,000 guns, 12,000 aircraft, 13,000 tanks and mobile guns, 900,000 German and 1.3 million Soviet troops were locked in combat.

This book, like so much of the modern western population, is obese. It weighs three pounds one and a half ounces (1.4 kg) and runs to 1,148 pages. I read it in a series of closely connected long sessions, hoping thereby to retain the thread, but unfortunately there is not much of a thread to follow. Instead, a concentrated mass of information, much of it of gripping interest, is presented in a bewildering series of disjointed chronological, geographical and systematical sequences. Sir Michael Howard, himself an expert aficionado in this subject, states in his encomium printed on the dust jacket that the book is ‘definitive’, that the author has ‘trawled through all the documentation’ and that he has interviewed ‘all the survivors’.

Churchill conceded that the ultimate verdict on his conduct of the second world war would have to be left to the judgment of history. But, as a precaution he resolved to write that history himself. The result was the six volumes and nearly two million words of The Second World War published between 1948 and 1954. David Reynolds, in the relatively short space of 527 pages of text, now gives us a detailed, Gospel-commentary-style analysis of this mammoth work. His purpose is to judge the extent to which Churchill has succeeded in providing the judgment of history upon his own achievement — how far he has, in fact, commanded history by writing about the fighting which he also sought to command.

The story of Hitler’s last days in his bunker has been told and retold many times, perhaps most famously and certainly first by Hugh Trevor-Roper, an elegant writer and witty satirist but not really much of a historian. No doubt it will continue to be told again and again for many generations to come. The sheer frightfulness of his power and the devastating effect that Hitler personally had upon the course of history marks him out as unique in modern times and the whiff of mystery that envelops his demise excites a still incompletely quenched curiosity. So there was certainly room for a pulling together of the available evidence about, and a reassessment of, the macabre circumstances and events concerning Hitler’s bunker.

Although it probably won’t, this book deserves to lay the ghost of Dresden, to demolish the myth and establish the rule of objective historical judgment. Frederick Taylor opens his investigation as long ago as AD 350 and carries it down to 2003. On the way, he gives us a condensed history of the strategic air offensive, explaining especially the evolution of area bombing, and of the development of the German air defences. He considers the policies and reactions of the British and American authorities, Churchill, Stimpson, the chiefs of staff and the C-in-C Bomber Command, Sir Arthur Harris, among them, and of the German authorities, including Hitler, Goebbels and Mutschmann, the Dresden Gauleiter, and of the Russians, notably General Antonov, their leading airman at Yalta.