Roosevelt’s genius lay in his handling of people. To the millions of Americans who listened as he outlined his policies on the radio in his avuncular “fireside chats,” it seemed as though he was personally guaranteeing their well-being. “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” he reassured them. Roosevelt’s relationship with Churchill, his ally in the darkest war years, was one of genuine affinity; he once ended a long and serious cable by telling the British prime minister: “It is fun being in the same decade as you.”
After the Big Three Allied leaders met at Yalta in February 1945, Roosevelt appeared to the press in a wheelchair, apologizing for his “unusual posture” but saying it was “a lot easier” than carrying “ten pounds of steel around the bottom of my legs.” It was his first public acknowledgment of the paralytic effects of the polio that he had contracted at the age of thirty-nine, and which he had battled and concealed by wearing leg braces and by other means. This was both a defense against public perceptions of weakness and a truly heroic personal refusal to let a debilitating ailment wreck his determination to carry out his presidential tasks.
Roosevelt’s sudden death from a massive cerebral hemorrhage in April 1945, just before the first meeting of the UN, stunned the world.
MUSSOLINI
1883–1945
… the Fascist conception of the State is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value.
Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism, 1932
Benito Mussolini, the dictator of Italy from 1922 to 1943, was the father of fascism—a domineering autocrat whose totalitarian politics paved the way for Nazism. Ruthlessly suppressing any form of dissent at home, he was also an avaricious colonialist with Roman imperial delusions, directly responsible for the death of over 30,000 Ethiopians in his infamous Abyssinian campaign as well as complicit, through his alliance with Adolf Hitler, in the atrocities of Nazi Germany.
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was born on July 29, 1883 in Predappio, central northern Italy. His father was a blacksmith and his mother a schoolteacher, a profession he took up but then swiftly abandoned. After an unsuccessful year trying to find employment in Switzerland in 1902—during which he was imprisoned for vagrancy—he was expelled and sent back to Italy for military service.
In his twenties, following in the footsteps of his father, Mussolini was a committed socialist, editing a newspaper called La Lotta di Classe (The Class Struggle) before, in 1910, becoming secretary of the local socialist party in Forli, for which he edited the paper Avanti! (Forward!). He also wrote an unsuccessful novel called The Cardinal’s Mistress. Increasingly known to the authorities for inciting disorder, he was imprisoned in 1911 for producing pacifist propaganda after Italy declared war on Turkey. Unsurprisingly, he initially opposed Italy’s entry into the First World War, but—perhaps believing a major conflict would precipitate the overthrow of capitalism—he changed his mind, a decision that saw him expelled from the socialist party. He swiftly became captivated by militarism, founding a new paper, Il Popolo d’Italia, as well as the pro-war group Fasci d’Azione Rivoluzionaria, although his own military service was cut short in 1917 following injuries sustained after a grenade explosion in training.
Mussolini was now a confirmed anti-socialist, convinced that only authoritarian government could overcome the economic and social problems endemic in postwar Italy, as violent street gangs (including his own) battled for supremacy. To describe his decisive, personality-driven politics, he coined the term fascismo—from the Italian word fascio, meaning union, and the Latin fasces, the ancient Roman symbol of a bundle of rods tied around an ax, denoting strength through unity. In March 1919, the first fascist movement in Europe crystallized under his leadership to form the Fasci di Combattimento. His black-shirted supporters, in stark contrast to the flailing liberal governments of the period, successfully broke up industrial strikes and dispersed socialists from the streets. Though Mussolini was defeated in the 1919 elections, he was elected to Parliament in 1921, along with thirty-four other fascists, forming the National Fascist Party later that year. In October 1922, after hostility between left- and right-wing groups had escalated into near anarchy, Mussolini—with thousands of his Blackshirts—staged the so-called March on Rome (in fact he caught the train) but he presented himself as the only man who could restore order. In desperation, King Victor Emmanuel III fatefully asked him to form a government.
The new regime was built on fear. On June 10, 1924, Giacomo Matteotti, a leading socialist party deputy, was kidnapped and murdered by Mussolini’s supporters after criticizing that year’s elections, which saw fascists take 64 percent of the vote. By 1926, Mussolini (calling himself Il Duce—the leader—and initially supported by the liberals) had dismantled parliamentary democracy and stamped his personal authority on every aspect of government, introducing strict censorship and a slick propaganda machine in which newspaper editors were personally handpicked. Two years later, when he placed executive power in the hands of the Fascist Grand Council, the country had effectively become a one-party police state.
In 1935, seeking to realize his dreams of Mediterranean domination and a North African empire, Mussolini ordered the invasion of Ethiopia. In October of that year Mussolini invaded Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia), using air power and chemical weapons (mustard gas) in a barbaric campaign that lasted seven months and involved the systematic murder of captured prisoners, either on public gallows or thrown from aircraft midflight. The campaign resulted in the annexation of Ethiopia into Italian East Africa, along with Eritrea and Somaliland.
Mussolini had dreams of empire but the campaign was also to avenge Italy’s humiliation of March 1896, when Ethiopia had defeated an Italian army at Adowa. The 1935 invasion—for which the Italians used a border dispute as a specious pretext—pitted Italian tanks, artillery and aircraft against Emperor Haile Selassie’s ill-equipped and poorly trained army.
Making steady progress toward the Ethiopian capital, the Italians looted the Obelisk of Axum, an ancient monument, and firebombed the city of Harar, eventually taking the capital Addis Ababa on May 5, 1936, forcing Haile Selassie to flee the country. Mussolini’s victorious commander Marshal Badoglio was absurdly named the duke of Addis Ababa. Along the way, in a flagrant violation of the Geneva Protocol of 1925, the Italians dropped between 300 and 500 tons of mustard gas, even gassing the ambulances of the Red Cross.
Meanwhile, from the safety of Rome, Mussolini ordered that “all rebel prisoners must be killed,” instructing his troops to “systematically conduct a politics of terror and extermination of the rebels and the complicit population.” In February 1936, after a failed assassination attempt on the colonial governor, Italian troops went on the rampage for three days.
The Italian military establishment had warned Mussolini that a challenge to British and French influence in Africa and the Middle East might provoke Britain into a war that “would reduce us to Balkan level,” but Britain—under Neville Chamberlain—and France were pursuing a policy of appeasement in this period, and Mussolini correctly calculated they would not act decisively, which encouraged Hitler. However, Italy’s Ethiopian empire was short-lived, liberated by Britain in 1941. Haile Selassie reigned until 1974—and it was Badoglio who replaced Mussolini in 1943 and made peace with the Allies. Mussolini’s Abyssinian atrocities led the League of Nations to impose sanctions on Italy. Increasingly isolated, he left the League and allied himself with Hitler in 1937—the same year in which he granted asylum and support to the brutal Croatian fascist Ante Pavelić—emulating the Führer in pushing through a raft of anti-Semitic laws. It soon became clear, however, that Mussolini was the minor partner in the relationship, Hitler failing to consult him on almost all military decisions.
After Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939, putting paid to hopes of peace sparked by the Munich Agreement of the previous year, Mussolini ordered the invasion of neighboring Albania, his troops brushing aside the tiny army of Kin
g Zog. In May, Hitler and Mussolini declared a Pact of Steel, pledging to support the other in the event of war—a move that sent shudders of fear across Europe.
Italy did not enter the Second World War until the fall of France in June 1940, when it looked like Germany was on course for a quick victory, but the Italian war—beginning with a botched assault on Greece in October, then humiliating routs in North Africa—was an unmitigated disaster. For all the puffed-up militarism of his regime, Mussolini’s army was disastrously unprepared for a war on this scale, hemorrhaging troops in the Balkans and Africa. Following the Anglo-American arrival on the shores of Sicily in June 1943, Mussolini’s fascist followers abandoned him and had him arrested, only for German commandos to rescue him from imprisonment and place him at the head of a puppet protectorate in the north of Italy. On April 27, 1945, as the Allies closed in, Mussolini—disguised as a German soldier—was captured by Italian partisans at the village of Dongo, near Lake Como. He was shot the following day, along with his mistress. Their bodies were taken to Milan and hung upside down from meat hooks in Piazza Loreto.
TOJO
1884–1948
The Greater East Asian War was justified and righteous.
Hideki Tojo, after his failed suicide bid in September 1945
General Hideki Tojo, nicknamed the Razor, was prime minister of Japan during much of the Second World War, the architect of its imperial aggressions, and the force behind its appalling policy of aggrandizement and brutality that cost the lives of millions and destroyed his own country. Yet it is futile to lay the blame for Japan’s atrocities and aggression on one man: Tojo was merely the representative of a prevalent mindset and conduct amongst a Japanese nobility, bureaucracy and military, supported enthusiastically by the public. New research has shown that the Emperor Hirohito was himself fully involved in the commands that led directly to the murder of so many.
Tojo, the son of a general, embarked on a military career at a young age, serving as an infantry officer, a military attaché and an instructor at the military staff college. By 1933 he was a major general. Prior to this Tojo had become a member of a hard-right militaristic group that expounded fanatical ultra-nationalism. However, during the attempted coup by ultra-nationalists on February 26, 1936 Tojo remained loyal to Emperor Hirohito and assisted in its suppression.
Tojo’s loyalty was rewarded in 1937 when he was named chief of staff of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria. In this position he played an important role in launching the Second Sino-Japanese War—an eight-year conflict that would leave millions dead as the Japanese military ignored both human decency and the laws of war in pursuit of imperial conquest in China. Noncombatants—men, women and children—were deliberately targeted, resulting in such atrocities as the so-called Rape of Nanking, in which, between December 1937 and March 1938, Japanese troops butchered between 250,000 and 350,000 Chinese civilians.
As the war in China progressed, the Japanese army tightened its control over the civilian government, and Tojo became more deeply immersed in politics. In May 1938 he was appointed deputy minister of war in the government of Prince Fumimaro Konoe. In that role he was one of the more vocal advocates of a pact with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and also pushed for a preventive strike against the Soviet Union.
In July 1940 Tojo became minister of war, and proceeded to oversee Japan’s formal entry into the Axis alliance with Germany and Italy. By July 1941 Tojo had convinced Vichy France to endorse Japanese occupation of several key bases in Indo-China—a move that paved the way for US sanctions against Japan and increased tensions between the two countries. When Fumimaro Konoe was finally pushed into retirement in October 1941, Tojo, while holding on to his portfolio as minister of war, stepped up to replace him as prime minister. He immediately declared his commitment to the creation of a New Order in Asia. Initially, he supported the efforts of his diplomats to bring this about through agreement with the United States. But as it became clear that no deal was possible with the USA on the terms desired, he authorized the attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 that unleashed the war in the Pacific.
Victorious Japan overran Singapore, Malaysia, much of China, the Philippines, Indonesia and a vast swathe of the Pacific, pushing toward India through Burma, but the US Navy destroyed the Japanese fleet at the Battle of Midway in June 1942 and thereafter gradually retook the Pacific under General MacArthur. Tojo assumed almost dictatorial powers, but in the aftermath of the American capture of the Marianas in July 1944 he resigned.
Tojo bore responsibility for the Japanese conduct of the war, which was almost as barbaric as that of the Nazis in Europe. The Japanese archives show that Emperor Hirohito was not the pawn of the militarists but enthusiastically supported and directed them. Hirohito must share some of the responsibility shouldered by Tojo for Japan’s war crimes. During the Sook Ching massacre of February–March 1942, for instance, up to 50,000 ethnic Chinese were systematically executed by Japanese forces in Singapore. At the same time, the Japanese embarked on the Three Alls policy in China—by which Japanese troops were ordered to “Kill all, burn all and loot all” in order to pacify the country, resulting in the killing of 2.7 million civilians. Another example of the brutal effects of Japanese militarism was the infamous Bataan Death March. After a three-month struggle for the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines, some 75,000 Allied troops (comprising around 64,000 American and 11,000 Filipino troops) formally surrendered to Japanese forces on April 9, 1942. They were then forced to undertake a march to a prison camp sixty miles away. On the journey, many were executed—stopping without permission was taken as a sign of insubordination and met with instant retribution. Many more died from the conditions they endured. Here is the testimony of one POW, Lester Tenney, who experienced the Death March and lived to tell the tale:
The Japanese soldiers arrived in our area at 6:00 a.m. on April 10, 1942, and after a few minutes of hollering and seeking cigarettes, they herded us together and forced us to walk to the main road on Bataan and we took with us only those possessions we had on our bodies at that time. Many had no canteen and no head covering. So we marched for the first four days without food or water … We walked from sun up to sun down. No lunch break, no dinner, and sleeping was in a large warehouse that could easily hold 500 men but was crowded with 1200 men who had little if any space to lay down. And when you had to remove your body waste you were forced to do it on the floor where you slept … I saw with my own eyes a POW being killed with a bayonet into his back because he stopped at a free flowing artesian well for a cup of water. Killed for a drink of water. And what about the Caribou wallows that lined every road in the Philippines where the animals sat during the hot days. The water in those wallows was filthy, and contained among other things, animal dung. But when you are thirsty and without water for days on end, a desire for water takes over your sense of right and wrong and you leap from the line of marchers and push the scum on top of the water away so you could get a drink of this so-called water. Dysentery was the end result, and death followed closely behind.
Even after Tojo had stepped down, the barbaric rules that he had helped create, in which human life was deemed valueless, endured—resulting in such atrocities as the Manila massacre of February 1945, in which 100,000 Filipino civilians were slaughtered.
Alongside the killing, the Japanese carried out hideous medical experiments on captured prisoners and subject populations. Biological and chemical weapons were tested on selected victims; others were operated on without anesthetic, or exposed to the elements to see how their bodies reacted. International conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war were disregarded, and POWs were forced to work in appalling conditions, deprived of food and medicine, and tortured and executed without restraint.
Japan resisted defeat with brutality and suicidal determination. As American forces approached Japan itself and Soviet troops attacked Japanese Manchuria, US nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bri
nging surrender.
To this day, the character and scale of what took place remains difficult to comprehend. In the wake of Japan’s unconditional surrender in August 1945 Tojo tried to commit suicide. However, in April 1946, he was placed on trial for war crimes. He was found guilty, and hanged on December 23, 1948. The Americans embraced the Emperor Hirohito as the ideal, much-loved national figure to become the constitutional monarch of a new democratic Japan. Hirohito ruled for a long time—but he was lucky not to be executed with General Tojo.
BEN-GURION
1886–1973
In Israel, to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
David Ben-Gurion, in an interview (1956)
David Ben-Gurion was the architect and defender of the fledgling state of Israel, and its first prime minister. A fiery but highly pragmatic visionary, Ben-Gurion transformed the political map of the Middle East, creating the first land for the Jewish people for two thousand years. Not only did he manage to build up and defend this precarious homeland against attacks of overwhelmingly superior force from every side, but he also created the only liberal democracy in the entire Middle East, an achievement that still stands today. The sheer force of Ben-Gurion’s vitality was evident in every aspect of his life. As well as devoting himself to the building of a nation, he had a voracious desire for knowledge, teaching himself Ancient Greek to read Plato, and Spanish to read Cervantes.
Already a committed Zionist and socialist when he arrived in Ottoman-controlled Palestine from Poland in 1906 as an impoverished youth of twenty, David Gruen soon adopted the Hebrew version of his name: Ben-Gurion. Under this name, the ascetic, ambitious, secular idealist rose from a position as a promising political activist challenging Turkish rule to head of the Zionist Executive in British Palestine. Ultimately, with his declaration of Israel’s independence on May 15, 1948, Ben-Gurion became prime minister of the new Jewish state—a position he was to hold, save for a two-year interlude in the 1950s, for the next fifteen years. His drive undiminished by age, he remained in Parliament until three years before his death in 1973.
Titans of History Page 46
