#2 Fateful Choices of World War II

Monday – 10:00 a.m.                                                         Winter Term 2009 (14 weeks)
Coordinator:  Bruce Porter                                             Co-Coordinator:  Jack Carter

Course Description
In this S/DG we will read, review and discuss ten decisions made during the 1940-1941 time period that changed the world.  Our core book will be Ian Kershaw’s Fateful Choices.  Kershaw is a marvelous writer and the author of the definitive two volume biography of Hitler.  There is no better description of the S/DG than that on the book’s cover which reads as follows:  “A spellbinding re-creation of a dramatic sequence of ten decisions made by the leaders of the world’s six major powers – Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, Mussolini and Tojo.

In a mere nineteen months, from May 1940 to December 1941, the leaders of the world’s six major powers made a series of related decisions that decided the course and outcome of World War II, cost the lives of millions and reshaped the course of human destiny from that point forwards.  How were those decisions made?  What were the options facing these leaders as they saw them?  What intelligence, right and wrong, did they have?  What was the impact of personality, what that of larger forces?  In a brilliant work with haunting contemporary relevance, Ian Kershaw tells the connected stories of the ten fateful decisions from the shifting perspectives of the protagonists, and in so doing rescues them from the sense of inevitability that now envelops them and restores to them a feeling of vivid drama and contingency – the feeling that things could have turned out differently indeed.  Each chapter follows the process of arriving at one decision from the viewpoint of the leader who made it.

Topics
Decision 1 – May 1940.  The British War Cabinet, driven by Churchill, agrees to fight on after German blitzkrieg defeat of France, despite loud calls for negotiated settlement.

Decision 2 – Hitler decided to attack Soviet Union.

Decision 3 – Japan decides to seize the “Golden Opportunity” and turns south, going after the colonial empires of the countries that have fallen to Hitler.

Decision 4 – Mussolini decides to join the war on Hitler’s side to grab a share of the spoils.

Decision 5 – Roosevelt decides to lend a helping hand to England.

Decision 6 – Stalin decides he knows best and ignores all the clear signals that Germany is going to attack.

Decision 7 – Roosevelt decides to wage undeclared war.

Decision 8 – Japan decides to go to war against the United States.

Decision 9 – Hitler decides to declare war against the United States.

Decision 10 – Hitler decides to kill the Jews of Europe.

Core Book:
Kershaw, Ian.   Fateful Choices.  The Penguin Press, 2007.

Pre-Meeting:
Monday, December 15, 2008 at 10:00 a.m.

Special Note:
The ten decisions are a good fit for a ten week course, but there is a disconnect since the S/DG covers 14 weeks.  We will resolve this problem by devoting the final four weeks to a review and discussion of Pulitzer Prize winning author Richard Rhodes’ book Arsenals of Folly, currently available in paperback.  This is an exciting book covering the arms buildup and climaxing during the Reagan-Gorbachev decade and the famous 1986 summit meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland.  Rhodes reveals the early influence of neoconservatives and right-wing figures such as Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz.  We see how Perle in particular sabotaged the Reykjavik meeting by convincing Reagan that mutual nuclear disarmament would give up his cherished dream of strategic defense (the Star Wars system).