War Starts At Midnight!

REVIEW: Ian Kershaw, Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World, 1940-1941

H-Diplo Review Essay

Ian Kershaw. Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World, 1940-1941. London and New York: Penguin, 2007. pp. xxiv, 624. ISBN 978-0-713-99712-5.

Review by Gerhard L. Weinberg, University of North Carolina, Emeritus

Published by H-Diplo on 4 November 2007

The author of a recent excellent two-volume biography of Adolf Hitler has selected ten decisions made in the early stages of World War II for careful examination. One might argue about the choices selected, but even if one could argue for a different selection, a reviewer ought to  deal with the book the author wrote, not one he might have written. In each of the cases Kershaw carefully examines and recounts the background  to the decision, explains the options ­ if any ­ as seen by the decider, points to the presence or absence of dissenting voices at the time, and delineates how and why the decision actually taken came to be.

The first decision examined is that of the British government in May-June 1940 to continue to fight against Germany after the fall of France. While this reviewer¹s reading of the evidence does not make the division between the views of Winston Churchill and Lord Halifax as clear cut as Kershaw does, no one is likely to disagree with the judgement that this decision was of enormous significance for the subsequent course of the war. Perhaps the account would have been more accurate if Kershaw had noted that in 1938 Churchill had privately informed the government of Czechoslovakia that if he were in power, he would follow the same policy as Neville Chamberlain, a policy he publicly attacked in his subsequent writings. And if Kershaw had noted that the fighter planes that won the Battle of Britain were not purchased at the 5 & 10 the day after Churchill became prime minister but had been ordered by Chamberlain over the opposition of the Labour Party, his account of the latter siding with Churchill in the decision  to continue fighting would be easier to understand ...

REVIEW: David M. Glantz, Red Storm over the Balkans: The Failed Soviet Invasion of Romania, Spring 1944

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-War@h-net.msu.edu (September 2007)

David M. Glantz. _Red Storm over the Balkans: The Failed Soviet Invasion of Romania, Spring 1944_. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2006. 448 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index, appendix with Soviet documents. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-7006-1465-6.

Reviewed for H-War by Robert Niebuhr, Department of History, Boston College

Delaying the Inevitable

In an exhaustive account of the Soviet military operations along the southern Ukrainian frontier with Romania, David Glantz tries to use these episodes to elucidate several key issues important for understanding World War II and the subsequent Cold War.  First, Glantz seeks to resurrect these operations from the supposed dustbin of history and place them among the key moments in the war.  Second, Glantz dives into the intense details of the springtime battles to show that the Soviet operations resulted from far broader, more menacing motives. While a successful Red Army along this front obviously would have compromised Germany's Balkan allies and cut off the flow of oil from the Ploiesti oil fields, the more important issues lies within what Glantz sees as the reasoning behind Soviet operations as early as the spring of 1944.

Glantz argues that Soviet and Russian historians incorrectly assert that Josef Stalin's influence over Red Army operations focused on defeating Germany with a direct drive towards Berlin.  Instead, Glantz asserts that Stalin advocated for a so-called broad front strategy that, on the tactical level, would probe the entire front for individual weaknesses the Soviets could then exploit.  Berlin was a central target, so this argument goes.  But, if the German line broke in the southern Ukraine, for example, the way to the Balkans would open up and effectively degrade the German war effort, simultaneously giving the Soviet Union possession of territory of high strategic value.  But, the significance of this argument expands into territory that is more controversial ...

REVIEW: Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-War@h-net.msu.edu (July 2007)

Geoffrey Roberts. _Stalin's Wars:  From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953_. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006. xxii + 468 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, chronology. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-300-11204-1

Reviewed for H-War by Jonathan M. House, Department of Military History, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College

The Generalissimo

The Soviet Union performed the lion's share of the efforts that defeated Nazi Germany in World War II.  Arguably, therefore, the single person most responsible for the Allied victory was Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, the Soviet dictator.  For decades, however, Cold War politics and then
revisionism caused historians to emphasize Stalin's ruthlessness and paranoia, while downplaying his contribution to the war effort.  Just as most Germans blamed Adolf Hitler for all their defeats, so Soviet leaders from Nikita Khrushchev onward tended to depict Stalin as a bungling butcher
who was saved by the undoubted self-sacrifice of the Soviet peoples.

Geoffrey Roberts, a history professor in Cork, Ireland, has undertaken a systematic review of the dictator's role in both World War II and the ensuing Cold War.  In an unusual form of revisionism, Roberts concludes that the contemporaneous view of Stalin as a great war leader was largely
justified.  Without minimizing Stalin's mistakes or his paranoia, the author concludes that the dictator was a key factor in the Soviet victory: "Without him the efforts of the [Communist] party, the people, the armed forces and their generals would have been considerably less effective" ...

REVIEW: Gregor Dallas, 1945: The War That Never Ended

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (November 2006)

Gregor Dallas. _1945: The War That Never Ended_. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. xx + 739 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index, chronology, glossaries of names and organizations. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-300-10980-6.

Reviewed for H-German by Timothy Schroer, Department of History, University of West Georgia

Stalin Against the World

The Cold War's end opened the prospect that historians might write its history in a manner less disturbed by the passions and political commitments that it had stirred. Some may have hoped that with the aid of hindsight and newly-available evidence, a more detached examination of the period might lead to new understanding. Gregor Dallas takes a different approach. He offers a passionate indictment of what he describes as the Soviet Union's war against the West, stretching from the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 through the 1950s.

This sprawling, popularly-pitched work argues that the "war that never ended" was waged by Stalin and the Soviet Union against the non-communist world. The so-called "alliance" between the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the United States against the Third Reich, Dallas insists, was a fiction. In reality, from at least 1939 onward Stalin fought a war to spread Soviet influence and he had no real alliance with the British or Americans. Dallas maintains that the Cold War began far earlier than 1947 ...

REVIEW: John Lukacs, June 1941: Hitler and Stalin.

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-War@h-net.msu.edu (September 2006)

John Lukacs. _June 1941: Hitler and Stalin_. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006. xii + 169 pp. Appendix, bibliography, index. $25.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-300-11437-0.

Reviewed for H-War by Geoffrey P. Megargee, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Lukacs's War

In his latest work, John Lukacs revisits the story of what was, without a doubt, one of the greatest confrontations of all time.  Readers of this list with any interest in the era will have heard, many times by now, that if Hitler had not attacked the Soviet Union, or if the USSR had gone down in defeat, the history of the Second World War would have been very different.  For that reason alone, an understanding of the conflict's origins is essential.  How can one explain the outbreak of such an important conflict?

For Lukacs, the answer is clear:  everything depended upon Hitler and Stalin. This is unabashed "great man" history, and this reviewer would be the last to argue that Lukacs's approach has no merit, especially in this case.  The problem is that he has not executed it well.  His writing is engaging and lively (if pedantic at times), the story is fascinating, and there is no shortage of thought-provoking material, but in the end the book is not nearly so useful as it could have been ...