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

by Ian Kershaw

  After the Pacific War had run its catastrophic course for Japan, the country was able to rebuild and establish unprecedented prosperity on the basis, precisely, of dependence on the United States and successful incorporation into world trade resting upon capitalist competition and market economies. But the mentalities of 1940 were light years away from those which, in conditions of total defeat, helped Japan rise from the ashes. These earlier mentalities saw no alternative to imperialist expansion to secure the raw materials that the United States, in progressively more belligerent tones, increasingly threatened.

  With the very premiss of possible rapprochement with the United States ruled out (short of an utterly improbable American volte-face on China), the expansionist policy–replete with dangers–had to be adopted. The stunning victories of the German army in Europe in spring 1940 appeared to offer the chance Japan had been waiting for to obtain her ‘place in the sun’. The opportunity could not be passed over. With the decision for expansion taken in July, the platform was set for Japan to break out of her self-inflicted international isolation and to redirect her foreign allegiances towards the victorious Axis powers. As we saw, those among the Japanese elites who opposed such a shift in policy swiftly lost all influence. Once the navy’s opposition evaporated, in early September, the way to the Tripartite Pact signed later in the month was clear.

  Japan had made her fateful choices. They did not of necessity mean war in the Pacific. There was still far to go before the decision was taken to attack Pearl Harbor. But the fateful choices of 1941 had been prefigured by those of the previous summer and autumn, which had manoeuvred Japan into a cul-de-sac.130 Blocked by her refusal to contemplate any concessions over China, Japan’s only way out ran the high risk of war in the Pacific. Now that Japan had opted to expand to the south, and to forge a military alliance with Germany and Italy, Pearl Harbor had moved much closer.

  4

  Rome, Summer and Autumn 1940

  Mussolini Decides to Grab His Share

  Hitler always faces me with a fait accompli. This time I am going to pay him back in his own coin. He will find out from the papers that I have occupied Greece. In this way the equilibrium will be re-established.

  Mussolini, 12 October 1940

  At 6 o’clock in the early evening of 10 June, Mussolini spoke from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia, his headquarters in the heart of Rome, to a large crowd of mainly Fascist enthusiasts, mobilized at short notice. With typical bombast he announced that destiny had determined Italy’s entry into the war. Honour, self-interest and the future of the country demanded that Italy must fight. It was to be a fight ‘against the plutocratic and reactionary democracies of the West, which have repeatedly blocked the march and even threatened the existence of the Italian people’. Breaking the stranglehold of the western democracies which throttled Italy’s scope for expansion and severely limited her power even within the narrow confines of the Mediterranean was vital for the country’s freedom, he claimed. He portrayed Italy’s war as ‘the struggle of a poor people against those who wish to starve us with their retention of all the riches and gold of the earth’.1

  It had seemed like a good idea at the time. It looked a safe bet that Italy would profit hugely and cheaply from the astonishing victories of the Wehrmacht in western Europe. In fact, as would rapidly become clear, it was an enormous gamble that would soon backfire in catastrophic fashion. Mussolini felt acutely that Fascist Italy had been dragged along at Germany’s heels for several years. Italy had once been the senior partner in dealings with Hitler, but the roles had been decisively reversed in the second half of the 1930s in the wake of German foreign-policy successes and territorial expansion. Mussolini smarted under his relegation to the status of a second-rank dictator. And now, more plainly than ever before, Italy had to stand in the shadow of events determined by German military might. Asserting Italy’s independent claim to power within the Axis was a key motive in joining the war. But within months any such claim lay in ruins. Far from being an autonomous power waging her own parallel war, Italy would soon become reduced to no more than an adjunct to Germany’s quest for hegemony in Europe.

  The key staging post en route to that degrading position was Mussolini’s second fateful choice within five months: the decision, taken in October 1940, to invade Greece. At 6.00 a.m. on 28 October, Italian troops crossed the borders from occupied Albania into northern Greece. The Greek army was not seen to pose any serious obstacle. Victory would be swift. Mussolini saw himself standing in triumph in Athens after only a brief campaign, something akin to the German crushing of Poland in autumn 1939. The destruction of Greece would be a major step towards the empire in the Balkans and Mediterranean that he craved. Instead, the campaign rapidly proved a fiasco. The Greek forces fought valiantly, helped by good organization, knowledge of difficult terrain and the superior morale of troops repelling an invader of their country. Within a fortnight, it was obvious that the supposed easy triumph was already turning into a humiliation for Mussolini’s regime.

  The decision to invade Greece had been revealed as a calamitous folly. It was the first defeat for the seemingly invincible Axis forces. And, crucially, through neglecting north Africa for Greece, Mussolini had both exposed Italian troops to military disaster and gravely weakened the Axis position in the desert campaign, the most vital theatre of the war at the time. Had the weak British forces been driven out of Egypt and the Suez Canal region, the war would have taken a different course. Instead, sorely needed Italian troops were diverted to the mounting debacle in Greece. Italy would never recover from the double humiliation in Greece and north Africa. By the spring of 1941, Germany would be forced to intervene militarily to quell the turmoil in the Balkans that Mussolini’s intervention had unleashed. The Italian dictator had fervently wanted to avoid German domination of the Balkans. Now his own actions had brought about just that. The repercussions of Mussolini’s ill-fated Balkan adventure were massive, not just in their military outcome, but also in the undermining of the authority of the Fascist regime within Italy. It was the beginning of the end for the Italian dictator, as his support–not just at the grass roots, but within the political elite–waned rapidly.

  Looking for easy gains, Italy had joined a war which was to bring enormous hardship, heavy destruction and acute suffering to the country, leading to the overthrow of the Fascist regime in 1943, a switch of allegiance to the Allied side in the autumn of that year and bitter months of brutal German occupation in the northern regions before the total defeat of the Third Reich ended the misery. For Mussolini himself, the decisions to enter the war in June 1940 and, within only a few months, to invade Greece would eventually lead to his deposition from power, then his spectacular rescue from imprisonment and restoration as a German puppet-leader. He would finally pay the price in late April 1945 when he and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, were caught and executed by partisans on the banks of Lake Como. Their bodies were subsequently strung up on a girder in a Milan petrol station, the once glorified leader reviled in death by a jeering crowd.

  Mussolini himself took the fateful decisions that saw Italy enter the war then embark upon the disastrous invasion of Greece. That much is clear. But how were the decisions arrived at? How far were they his decisions alone? To what extent did arbitrary dictatorial will override the wishes and interests of others within the power-elite of the Fascist state, notably the military? Or did Mussolini’s ‘decisionism’ merely reflect the prevalent attitude within the regime as a whole? Were the decisions pragmatic or ideological in essence, the result of short-term opportunism or longer-term goals, a break with long-standing continuities in Italian expectations, or their presumed fulfilment? Not least, were Mussolini’s decisions taken in such circumscribed conditions that, in effect, he had no choice but to take Italy into war and expansionism? Or did he and his regime, whatever their favoured choices, have real options in the summer and autumn of 1940, options they chose to reject in favour of the illusion of easy and
rich pickings on the coat-tails of the German conquerors in western Europe?

  I

  War and expansion had been implicit in Mussolini’s ideas from the start of his ‘career’ as an arch-Fascist. In time, they became explicit. Rambling and discursive though these ideas were, a core element was plain enough. Even before his expulsion from the Socialist Party in November 1914 and his strident advocacy of Italy’s intervention in the First World War the following year, Mussolini had welcomed the revolutionary, cleansing agency of war, and its necessity if Italy were to shake off her past and take her place among the great nations. In March 1919, at the foundation meeting in Milan of the Fasci di Combattimento, he announced that Italy needed and deserved more territory to accommodate her growing population. Soon afterwards, he held out the prospect of Italy joining Germany, should she not be given her due by the Allies, and eventually destroying Britain’s naval strength in the Mediterranean. By the mid-1920s he was presenting his vision of a new warrior class, ‘always ready to die’, the creation of ‘methodical selection’, and the basis of the ‘great elites that in turn establish empires’. War and revolution would mould the ‘new man’. The goal was ‘empire’.2

  The goal remained without practical consequences of note during the years when Fascism was consolidating its hold on the Italian state, and on society. A diplomatic incident involving Greece led to a brief Italian military excursion and occupation of Corfu in summer 1923, before being settled by Greek compensation. A few months later Yugoslavia ceded the disputed city of Fiume to Italy, giving Mussolini a further (and easy) success in foreign policy. And by the end of 1926 Albania had effectively become an economic satellite of Italy, again no more than the most minor of triumphs. But Italy was extremely ill-prepared for foreign adventurism on any serious scale. The country was burdened with huge debts as a legacy of the war. Most regions, particularly in the south, were extremely poor. National income was less than a quarter of that of Great Britain. The industrial base was small, mainly confined to the northern triangle of Milan, Genoa and Turin. As late as 1938–9 Italy produced only a million tons of coal and 2.4 million tons of steel. Britain’s output, in comparison, was 230 million tons of coal and 13.4 million tons of steel, Germany’s 186 million tons of coal and 22.4 million tons of steel.3 Rearmament made little headway before the mid-1930s. And among the public, so soon after the terrible losses of the First World War, there was generally little appetite for risking new armed combat. Italy, as its leaders (Mussolini, too) recognized, was as yet by far the weakest of the ‘great powers’; in reality, she was merely a would-be ‘great power’.

  Mussolini remained for the time being sensibly cautious. The position of Austria, on Italy’s northern frontier, posed as yet no serious problem. Mussolini still had hopes in the later 1920s of gaining support in Hungary and Austria in order to create an Italian sphere of influence in the Danube region, and was anxious to prevent Austria falling under German influence and control. But the hopes of Anschluss with the German Reich that had initially been widespread in Austria after the war had meanwhile died down, and the revisionist Right within Germany which harboured aims of expansion was in the later 1920s still on the political fringes. The other potential difficulty in relations with Germany, the issue of the South Tyrol–part of Italy, but with a majority German-speaking population–had also not materialized into dangerous confrontation. The shrill voices on the radical Right in Germany clamouring for the return of the South Tyrol were only to be heard outside the political mainstream. The most vocal figure on the extreme Right, Adolf Hitler, already looking to good relations with Italy, had in fact risked splitting his still small Nazi Party by indicating a willingness to renounce claims to the South Tyrol.4 He had wider horizons in mind. And despite feeling much resentment towards the superiority of British and French power, especially in the Mediterranean, Mussolini risked nothing in his dealings with the western democracies (whom he had joined in the Locarno Pact of 1925, aimed at stabilizing Germany’s west-European borders).

  Mussolini was, then, forced for years to tread warily in foreign policy. But this altered nothing of his underlying interest in territorial aggrandizement, or his belief in war as an agent of national regeneration, the route to the prestige and status befitting a great power.

  The disturbance to the international scene that followed Hitler’s takeover of power in Germany in 1933 offered Mussolini new opportunities and opened up a more active role in European affairs for Fascist Italy. Mussolini’s early concern was to shore up Austrian independence against Nazi pretensions. Relations between Italy and Germany were tense for a time after the assassination by Nazis of the Austrian Chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, in July 1934. And when, the following April, at Stresa, Mussolini aligned Fascist Italy with the western democracies against German expansionism, he had Austria primarily in mind. But by then his attention had begun to focus on Abyssinia (Ethiopia), a distant and impoverished country, but with its attractions for Fascist Italy. Mussolini wanted an external triumph, a show of Italian might, a demonstration to the world, and to Italy’s own population, of Fascism’s power and of national virility. The eastern Mediterranean and north Africa (where Libya had been a colony since 1912) had long been part of the dream of expansion by Italian imperialists. Mussolini’s own interest in these regions as the core of a new Fascist empire was, therefore, in essence nothing new. Ideally, Mussolini wanted dominion closer to home, in the Mediterranean region, most notably in the Balkans. Italy’s armed forces were, however, still weak in comparison with those of the major European powers. Any notion of expansion into the Balkans, however attractive the proposition sounded, had to be ruled out for the foreseeable future at least. It was still too risky, particularly given the strong French interests in south-eastern Europe.5 Abyssinia, seen as a primitive, tribal kingdom incapable of offering much resistance to Italian arms, served as a substitute.

  The humiliating defeat at Adowa in 1896, after Italian troops had advanced into Abyssinia from their Eritrean colony, still rankled deeply among nationalists. The blooding of the nation in a short, one-sided war of revenge, and a triumph for Fascism, were tempting prospects for the Italian dictator. Success at no cost seemed assured. He had to overcome the hesitation and faint-heartedness of the King, army leaders and the more conservative elements in the power-elite, anxious at the risk he was taking. But the western democracies, he thought, would not intervene. This turned out to be a miscalculation–though one which rapidly rebounded to Mussolini’s great advantage. Condemnation of Italian aggression by the League of Nations and the imposition of economic sanctions fuelled hatred of Britain and France within Italy and massively bolstered the popularity of Mussolini and his regime. When Addis Ababa fell the following May, after an extremely brutal campaign which included the extensive use of chemical warfare, Mussolini could announce complete victory, the assumption by the King of Italy of the title of Emperor of Abyssinia, and the existence of a new Roman Empire.

  The Duce cult now reached its height.6 The regime was greatly strengthened, Mussolini’s position within it unassailable. The grandiosity of his own self-image knew no bounds. He eagerly anticipated confrontation with the ‘decadent’ western democracies, divided and weakened by their response to the Abyssinian war. The path to Italy’s great future lay, it seemed evident (and not just to Mussolini), only in closer ties with Hitler’s Germany–already flexing her muscles, certain to become the dominant power in central Europe and posing a major challenge to France and Britain. Accordingly, Mussolini gave the green light to German remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936, accepted that Austria should now fall into the German orbit as she did following an agreement signed in July, and in November that year formed the Axis with Germany as the symbolic seal on the close relationship–one viewed with little relish by most Italians.

  In fact, for all the propaganda razzmatazz, the relationship between Italy and Germany was in reality far from close, and became increasingly lopsided. Mussolini
had at one time thought of himself as the master and Hitler as the pupil. But his sense of inferiority towards Hitler deepened as his co-dictator chalked up one diplomatic triumph after another. And he could not conceal his awe of German military might. Italian military muscle was, by contrast to that of the Wehrmacht, anything but daunting. A humiliating defeat at Guadalajara in March 1937, after Mussolini had defied the warnings of his army leaders to involve Italy in support for Franco during the Spanish Civil War, was a plain reminder of this. Mussolini’s state visit to Germany in September that year merely rubbed in the massive gulf in military strength between the two dictatorships and left him still more awestruck at the power of the Third Reich.

  When Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938, he profusely thanked Mussolini for his support. Whatever the position had been four years earlier, however, Mussolini now had little choice in the matter but to acquiesce. He had tied his country to the high-risk expansionism of Nazi Germany. Accordingly, he fully backed the belligerent German stance on the Sudetenland that summer. And he professed his readiness to fight on Germany’s side, should–as seemed likely–general European war be the outcome. But this contained more than a small element of bluff. He was well aware of how unprepared Italy was for a major war. When Hitler momentarily wavered, Mussolini snatched at the chance, offered him by Göring, to mediate the settlement at Munich, made possible by the readiness of the western democracies to carve up Czechoslovakia in the interests of the German bully. His euphoric reception on return to Italy as a saviour of Europe’s peace did not please him in the slightest. Rather, it confirmed to him that the Italian people were too peace-loving, far from ready for war. Such a verdict was indeed presented by a whole array of reports by Fascist Party functionaries on the state of popular opinion, emphasizing hostility towards the German Axis partners and dread of being dragged into another war.7