CHAPTER SIX

The Allies, 1940–42

If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.

—Winston Churchill, May 28, 1940

We are fighting this war because we did not have an unconditional surrender at the end of the last one.

—U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Breckenridge Long, May 1942

NAZI GERMANY POSED the most serious threat of world conquest since ancient Rome. It conquered more territory in shorter order than any country in world history, sweeping aside any lingering thoughts that entrenchments would slow down the advance of armies in the Second World War as they did in the First. What made this threat even more frightening was Germany’s alliance with Japan, who in the blink of an eye asserted control of half the Pacific Ocean.

How did the Allied powers, especially Britain in 1940, the United States in 1942, and the Soviet Union in 1941, react to the initial parade of Axis victories? Did they update their senses of the balance of power and seek terms with the attackers, hoping at least to save their own countries from conquest? Or did they instead ignore the bad news, choosing to fight on rather than strike a deal feared to be ultimately doomed to Axis treachery?

Like nearly all of the case studies in this book, the early years of World War II indicate that a complete understanding of war-termination behavior must account for both information and commitment dynamics. Both Britain in May 1940 and the U.S. in the first half of 1942 faced very dire and worsening short-term military environments—Britain because of the fall of France and the threat of an imminent German invasion, and the U.S. because of a six-month string of combat setbacks. A war-termination approach emphasizing information only would forecast that the U.S. and Britain should have used these battlefield outcomes to update their understandings of the balance of power in a pessimistic direction. The U.S. and Britain then should have made concessions to the Axis in the hopes of avoiding absolute defeat. Neither the U.S. nor Britain did so. Britain rejected any move to negotiations, pushing forward in pursuit of eventual victory. The United States went further, not only putting aside any talk of negotiations, but even establishing in the months after Pearl Harbor the aim of pursuing the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers.

The U.S. and Britain rejected negotiations and pushed on for victory for three reasons, all of which fall within the theoretical model laid out in chapters 2 and 3. First and most importantly, both countries thought that the Axis powers would not abide by the terms of any limited peace deal. They feared that any deal reached leaving the Axis powers intact would provide only passing peace before breaking into a new war, just as the ephemeral stability of Versailles was shattered by World War II. Only absolute victory and the attendant opportunity to remake the political, economic, and social landscapes of the Axis nations would provide lasting peace. Second, both countries understood the grave dangers posed by the Axis, and the severe costs that would be posed if they broke their commitments to a peace settlement. The Axis powers were seen as terrible regimes with real and enduring designs on world conquest, and the awful costs of World War I made “never again” a genuine imperative. By contrast, a Communist North Korea left standing in 1950 would pose a serious but not mortal threat to American security, as North Korea could reattack South Korea but not the United States itself. A Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan left standing in the early 1940s would pose an unacceptably high danger to the American and British homelands.

Third, even when times were darkest, both Britain and the U.S. retained hopes for eventual victory, somehow. As described in chapter 2, even when the credibility of the adversary’s commitment is very low, a fearful belligerent will only fight on if it thinks there is some chance of eventual victory. If the belligerent sees essentially no chance of winning the war, it will likely accept an unstable peace rather than absorb the costs of fighting on in pursuit of the impossible goal of victory. As France and the Low Countries fell, Britain faced severe military disadvantages and many feared that a German invasion was imminent. However, the British government realized that the strength of the Royal Navy gave it hope to fend off the short-term German invasion threat, especially if the Royal Air Force could win the Battle of Britain in summer 1940. In the longer term, there was hope that eventual American intervention in the war might turn the tide toward victory. That is, the severe commitment problem pushed Britain to reject negotiations, and the faint hope of eventual victory enabled it to imagine someday turning the tide. Conversely, one can imagine a set of conditions (such as Roosevelt losing to an isolationist in the November 1940 presidential campaign, the Luftwaffe defeating the Royal Air Force [RAF] in the Battle of Britain, and a successful German landing on the beaches of southern England) that would be so discouraging that the British government might be willing to accept peace terms with Hitler rather than continue to fight on. For the United States, its long-term hope was that eventually the full mobilization of its economy would enable it to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. If conditions were much darker in 1942, perhaps with the Japanese conquests of Midway, Hawaii, and Australia, the destruction of the American fleet in the Pacific, carrier launched air raids on West Coast cities, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the neutralization of Britain, perhaps this information environment would have been so awful that it might have encouraged America to settle on limited terms rather than fight on.

It appears that the Soviet Union in October 1941 may have come closer than Britain or the U.S. to the point of no hope, as there is some evidence Stalin considered trying to reach an agreement with Hitler. Stalin had great reason to doubt Hitler would abide by any peace deal, because of Hitler’s unhidden, deep hatred of Bolshevism and desire to conquer the USSR, because of Hitler’s history of breaking agreements such as the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, and because of Stalin’s realist doubt of the significance of any international agreement. And yet it appears that in the darkest moment of the war, in October 1941 when the Wehrmacht appeared to be rolling unstoppably to Moscow, Stalin briefly considered offering terms to Hitler in an attempt to salvage some part of Soviet sovereignty, even if temporarily. Notably, Soviet fortunes in 1941 were much more frightening than were British fortunes in 1940 or American fortunes in 1942, perhaps encouraging Stalin to fear that the German army would overrun the Soviet Union before the Red Army could turn the tide.

These three cases demonstrate the joint importance of both information and commitment. A focus on information alone gets the U.S. and Britain cases wrong. If belligerents’ war-termination decisions are driven purely by changes in the information environment as determined by combat outcomes, both should have considered negotiations in their darkest moments. However, credible commitment fears will push a discouraged belligerent to eschew negotiations and fight on. A focus on commitment alone (perhaps) gets the Soviet case wrong. If belligerents’ war-termination decisions are driven only by credible commitment fears, then Stalin should never have even considered negotiating with Hitler. If things look sufficiently bleak, even the most fearful belligerent may be willing to accept even an unstable peace rather than fight on with no hope of turning the tide. A complete account of war termination must consider both information and commitment dynamics.

BRITAIN, MAY 1940

The last vestiges of Versailles were shattered when Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, in reaction to Germany’s September 1 invasion of Poland. Although Britain and France were formally committed to the defense of Poland, they sent no troops to Poland, nor did they open a second front elsewhere. After Poland fell in late September, there were some superficial exchanges between Britain and Germany about peace talks, although no serious moves were made. Germany sent a delegate to London on September 28, essentially calling for armistice on the basis of British acceptance of the (new) territorial status quo. Hitler publicly laid out the possibility of peace with the Western powers in a speech to the Reichstag on October 9.¹ British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain rejected Germany’s peace “offer,” viewing as unacceptable a settlement that would allow Germany to keep its new territorial gains.² This rejection should be considered at most very limited evidence against the information proposition of chapter 2 despite the German conquest of Poland. Although Germany quickly and easily defeated Poland’s armed forces, Anglo-French forces were as yet untested, probably discouraging Britain from downgrading its estimate of its own balance of capabilities with Germany. Certainly, up until the actual invasion of France in May 1940, the British and French political and military leaderships were extremely confident of the Allied ability to parry a German invasion of the Low Countries and France.³ More broadly, Chamberlain became increasingly sure through the fall and winter that Hitler could not and would not attack in the West. On September 17, after Poland fell, he doubted that Germany would attack in the West, and instead might next pounce on Romania.⁴ He even ventured privately in October and December 1939 that the war might be over by spring, sputtering to a halt because of German war fatigue.⁵

Part of the motivation for Chamberlain’s 1939 rejection of Hitler’s overture was Chamberlain’s concern with the credibility of Hitler’s commitment not to reattack after peace would have been struck. The faith of Chamberlain and many other Britons in Hitler was shattered after the March 1939 German invasion of Czechoslovakia. This attack violated the 1938 Munich agreement that gave Germany the Sudetenland in exchange for a promise of peace. The March 1939 action was critical in affecting Chamberlain’s perceptions of Hitler’s trustworthiness because this directly contravened a bilateral agreement between himself and Hitler.⁶ Indeed, at some points Chamberlain viewed regime change in Germany as the only means to provide lasting peace. He wrote to his wife on September 10, 1939 that, “Of course the difficulty is with Hitler himself. Until he disappears and his system collapses there can be no peace.”⁷ And, a month later: “The difficulty is that you cant [sic] believe anything Hitler says. . . . the only chance of peace is the disappearance of Hitler.”⁸ Others, such as permanent under-secretary of the Foreign Office Sir Alexander Cadogan agreed that Hitler must go.⁹ On this point, Chamberlain was right, Hitler’s peace offers were only a ruse. As early as September 1939. Hitler spoke to his staff about the importance of attacking France in the near future.¹⁰ Around this time he declared that he wanted a German attack “at the earliest possible moment and in the greatest possible strength” through the Low Countries and France “to serve as a base for the successful prosecution of the air and sea war against England.”¹¹

In the several months following the fall of Poland at the end of September, very little combat occurred. This period was famously known as the Bore War, Phony War, or Sitzkrieg (Sitting War). In April 1940, this phase ended when Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. On May 10, Germany launched its invasion in the West against the Low Countries and France. The German offensive went fantastically well, due largely to German strategic exploitation of French intelligence failure.¹² The swift fall of France was a great shock. Lord Halifax wrote in his diary on May 25 that the one constant in the previous two years of defense planning was the solidity of the French Army, and now that had crumbled.¹³ By May 23, planning for maritime evacuation of British and other Allied forces from the Belgian coastal town of Dunkirk was underway (the evacuation decision was made on May 25), and the British chiefs of staff formally declared that France was essentially lost.

The Nadir of World War II

The last week of May 1940 was a critical turning point in the war, the real “hinge of fate” according to one historian.¹⁴ It was the lowest point of Allied military fortunes of the war and the closest Hitler came to victory over Britain. If war-termination decisions were exclusively or primarily about information revealed by combat outcomes, then Britain should have offered concessions to Germany to end the war. In fall 1939, AngloFrench forces had not yet been tested against German forces, so despite Germany’s walkover against Poland there were not yet sufficient grounds for real pessimism (note Chamberlain’s vain hopes in fall 1939 of German collapse). By late May 1940, however, the official British military assessment was quite gloomy, notwithstanding one intelligence report declaring that Germany was being stretched on the home front because of mounting casualties and rising economic shortages.¹⁵ The fall of France was a great shock to Britain. What Wilhelmine Germany failed to do in four years in World War I, Nazi Germany had accomplished in essentially three weeks. Chamberlain had bluntly stated in December 1939 that if France dropped out of the war, Britain would not be able to carry on alone.¹⁶ On May 19, with the fate of France already clear, Chief of the Imperial General Staff General Sir Edmund Ironside soberly told Secretary of State for War Anthony Eden, “This is the end of the British Empire.” Eden grimly agreed with this assessment.¹⁷ As early as May 25, the War Office was considering evacuation of Channel and East Coast towns in England in preparation for a German invasion.¹⁸ On May 26, the Chiefs of Staff delivered their official assessment of Britain’s chances in the event that France fell, an eventuality that appeared more likely by the day. The report stressed that the Royal Navy and RAF would be sufficient to block an amphibious invasion of Britain. With decisive damage to the RAF, however, the Navy could not block an invasion indefinitely. The report grimly conceded that British ground forces would be inadequate to stop a German invasion.¹⁹In a battle for aerial supremacy, Germany would enjoy certain advantages, namely a four-to-one numerical superiority of aircraft (although Winston Churchill, who had succeeded Chamberlain as prime minister earlier that month, claimed the advantage was more like five to two, and the advantage was shrinking given that German planes were getting shot down three times faster than British planes), as well as the asymmetry that the British aircraft industry was vulnerable to aerial bombardment but the German aircraft industry was not.²⁰ Concerns also existed that bombing against British civilian targets would erode popular will. Lastly, the report declared that without the full economic and financial support of the United States, continuing the war would be hopeless.²¹ The report’s conclusion rested on a thin reed of hope: “To sum up, our conclusion is that prima facie Germany has most of the cards; but the real test is whether the morale of our fighting personnel and civil population will counterbalance the numerical and material advantages which Germany enjoys. We believe it will.”²² Interestingly, this hope that morale and fighting spirit would defeat material superiority was the basis of Japan’s ultimately incorrect theory as to how it might beat the materially preponderant U.S. in the Pacific.²³ Churchill on May 28 told his Cabinet Ministers that an invasion was coming, and British intelligence feared that Germany might suspend its military operations in France to launch an immediate invasion of Britain.²⁴

Like Churchill, Ironside was deeply concerned about the German invasion threat. He wrote in his diary on May 28, “Up to London to a meeting of the [Home] Defense Executive at the Horse Guards. Not too bad. The state of the armament is catastrophic. I hope that it will get better in a week or two. Hope we get the week or two. . . . Local Defence Volunteers going well. I must get them armed with Molotoff [sic] cocktails in all the villages of England. The only way to deal with a tank.”²⁵ It is difficult to decide what is more ominous: that Ironside feared a German invasion as early as the coming weeks, that the home defense of the most established industrial power in the world would depend on Molotov cocktails (indeed, Ironside also bemoaned the “lack of any kind of tank” available for British home defense against German tanks²⁶), or that Ironside felt the need to arm all the villages of England, not just those near likely German landing sites on the English Channel coast.

The bleak prospects in late May for the evacuation of the British Army from the collapsing Belgian and French fronts were also grave reasons for concern. During these last days of May, the now famous Dunkirk operation was not yet a success, and estimates projected the evacuation of only 30,000 to 50,000 troops (eventually more than 300,000 Allied troops were evacuated), leaving their equipment behind. In his late afternoon meeting with his entire cabinet on May 28, Churchill estimated that only 50,000 would be evacuated from Dunkirk.²⁷ Ironside wrote on May 29 that there seemed, “Very little chance of the real B.E.F. coming off. They have now sunk three ships in Dunkirk harbour and so there is very little more chance of getting any units off.”²⁸ Few suffered delusions of imminent victory. One member of Churchill’s government, Harold Nicolson, made preparations to commit suicide in the event of a German landing, so as to avoid torture.²⁹

British Assessments and Negotiations with Hitler

Facing such danger, did Britain try to stop the war? The logic of the information proposition of chapter 2, that poor military fortunes should inspire concessions to avoid absolute defeat, was clearly expressed in the thinking of Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, the most pro-negotiations member of the British cabinet. He argued that British war aims should no longer be the decisive defeat of Germany, but rather the maintenance of British independence. He proposed using Benito Mussolini of then neutral Italy as a mediator.³⁰ In line with the information proposition, he proposed that Britain would be more likely to get better terms before its military situation really fell off the cliff. He remarked on May 28, “we must not ignore the fact that we might get better terms before France went out of the war and our aircraft factories were bombed, than we might get in three months’ time.”³¹

Although Germany at this point presented no specific war-termination terms to Britain, there were German diplomatic feelers. On May 18, a Vatican official approached the British ambassador to Rome about possible peace talks.³² On May 20, Hitler privately declared that Britain could have peace at any time in exchange for restitution of the colonies.³³ Around the same time, one of Hitler’s generals noted privately that Hitler was trying to make contact with Britain to reach a settlement.³⁴ A week later, Germany sent an oblique inquiry about negotiations to Britain through the Japanese ambassador to Britain.³⁵ Germany’s efforts aside, there were those around Churchill who directly suggested negotiation and concession to end the war. Beyond Halifax there was also the Australian High Commissioner in London and U.S. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy.³⁶

These flecks of encouragement to negotiate notwithstanding, at the end of May the British leadership decided not to make concessions or even enter into negotiations. The decision not to negotiate was the conclusion of a critical set of War Cabinet meetings taking place from May 26–28, at the end of which Churchill rallied sufficient opposition to negotiations both within and outside the cabinet. The exclamation point came on the evening of May 28 when Churchill declared to a group of high government officials, “If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”³⁷ Two days later, Churchill refused to even consider a written proposal, authored by the Australian High Commissioner in London, for an international conference with the aim of reaching a peace settlement.³⁸ Churchill made this position public on June 4, in perhaps his most famous speech of the war when he proclaimed, “We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans . . . we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”³⁹ This decision at the end of May not to negotiate marked a key turning point in British war strategy, as no further official moves to negotiate were made for the rest of the war.⁴⁰

The perspective that war termination is driven completely or even principally by information fails to explain the British decision not to negotiate in late May 1940. This should be an easy case for an information-alone view: the poor performance of the British army and rapid fall of France caused Britain to severely downgrade its estimate of the balance of power, and should have caused Britain to make concessions to Germany. But Britain did not.

Churchill the Appeaser?

The popular image of Churchill is an indomitable bulldog, constitutionally incapable of even considering making concessions to Hitler. Perhaps surprisingly, the historical record indicates a small handful of instances in which Churchill seemed to hint at the possibility of negotiations and concessions. In the May 27 War Cabinet meeting, he said that, “If Herr Hitler was prepared to make peace on the terms of the restoration of the German colonies and the overlordship of Central Europe, that was one thing. But it was quite unlikely that he would make any such offer.” The Foreign Secretary presented the hypothetical of France collapsing and Germany offering terms. Churchill replied that “he would not join France in asking for terms; but if he were told what the terms offered were, he would be prepared to consider them.”⁴¹ Churchill also wrote in a letter to the Dominions on May 27 that the decision to continue fighting “is of course without prejudice to consideration of any proposals that might hereafter be put forward for a cessation of hostilities and subject to developments in the military situation.”⁴² Sometimes Churchill held out for the possibility of negotiating with Hitler after Britain had strengthened its bargaining position by achieving some military successes. Churchill argued in an internal meeting that “if we could get out of this jam by giving up Malta and Gibraltar and some African colonies [I] would jump at it. But the only safe way was to convince Hitler he couldn’t beat us.”⁴³ And on May 28, in fending off one of Halifax’s last attempts to accept the French proposal to introduce Mussolini as a mediator in peace negotiations, Churchill replied that “the French were trying to get us on to the slippery slope. The position would be entirely different when Germany had made an unsuccessful attempt to invade [Britain].”⁴⁴

It is difficult to know exactly what to make of these comments made in internal debates given Churchill’s many other private and public statements about the unacceptability of negotiations, and of course his actions. One possibility is that Churchill’s stated position varied depending on to whom he was speaking. In the May 26–28 War Cabinet meetings where Churchill made his most pro-negotiations comments, he may have been trying to appear as moderate as possible to avoid alienating on-the-fence Cabinet members like Chamberlain, and avoid pushing them to the more openly pro-negotiation stance of Halifax. To other audiences, like the British public, he of course showed no sign of openness to negotiation, as the mere act of going to the table would mean that “all the forces of resolution which were now at our disposal would have vanished,” even if Hitler’s inevitably unacceptable terms were to be rejected.⁴⁵ He needed to stiffen the spine of his French allies, so when speaking with French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud in May 26 he declared that even if France fell, “we were not prepared to give in. We should rather go down fighting than be enslaved to Germany.”⁴⁶ A few days later, as he was preparing to withdraw British military assets from France to fight another day, he told the French leadership, “Better far that the last of the English should fall fighting and finis to be written to our history than to linger on as vassals and slaves.”⁴⁷

In these crucial debates, Churchill sometimes made a more sophisticated point about the need for Britain to fight and lose rather than surrender. He proposed that Britain must fight, even if to defeat, in order to maintain its international reputation. He declared on May 27 that, “At the moment our prestige in Europe was very low. The only way we could get it back was by showing the world that Germany had not beaten us. If, after two or three months, we could show that we were still unbeaten, our prestige would return. Even if we were beaten, we should be no worse off than we should be if we were now to abandon the struggle.”⁴⁸ He also argued that “nations which went down fighting rise again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished.”⁴⁹ Another cabinet member agreed, fretting of the reputation consequences if Britain offered to give up territory in return for peace.⁵⁰ Churchill’s reputation concerns were sufficiently broad that he rejected Halifax’s suggestion of asking Roosevelt to mediate, noting that fighting would earn America’s respect, and seeking terms would have the opposite effect.⁵¹ Indeed, later in the war the British Foreign Office tried to squelch reports of an unauthorized June 1940 peace feeler, because, in the words of one government official, “Our stoutheartedness when we stood alone is such a tremendous asset to our prestige in the world—and is likely to remain so.”⁵²

Also possible is that although Churchill was intellectually willing to entertain the theoretical possibility of a bargain, which he would accept to stop the war, he also recognized that what may have been theoretically possible was practically speaking out of the question, both because of the heavy reputation costs of even opening negotiations, and because Churchill knew that Hitler would never agree to terms that Britain might find acceptable. At one point, Churchill remarked that the odds that Hitler would offer acceptable terms were “a thousand to one against.”⁵³ In a May 26 meeting with some of his War Cabinet Ministers, Churchill remarked that France “would be likely to be offered decent terms by Germany, which we should not. . . . There was no limit to the terms which Germany would impose upon us if she had her way.”⁵⁴

Conversely, some might speculate that Churchill’s opposition to negotiations was idiosyncratic, and that if it had been Halifax instead of Churchill succeeding Chamberlain as prime minister on May 10, 1940, then British policy would have swung the other way. However, Churchill did not impose autocratically his “no negotiations” policy in late May. Indeed, the central aim of the May 26–28 War Cabinet meetings was to sway the Cabinet in his favor through argument and persuasion. Churchill could not rule by unilateral declaration because his political position at this point was rather weak. He had been appointed prime minister by the king, but did not lead any political party, and he felt the need to include leading national figures (including his political rivals) such as Chamberlain and Halifax in his cabinet because their support was necessary both to make his policies legitimate and to ensure his political survival.⁵⁵ The key turning point in the meetings was when Chamberlain, the architect of appeasement, went along with Churchill’s decision to eschew negotiations and fight on, remarking on the afternoon of the 28th that “the alternative to fighting on nevertheless involved a considerable gamble.”⁵⁶ Further, Churchill’s decision to fight on was politically popular. When Churchill declared to all his ministers on the evening of the 28th his decision to abandon negotiations, none present expressed dissent, and many verbally offered support.⁵⁷ By Churchill’s recollection, the reaction was even more positive, and representatives of both parties exuberantly supported Churchill’s decision to fight on.⁵⁸

Distrusting “That Man”

Churchill in late May faced the very real possibility of the first conquest of Britain in nine centuries. Why did he risk German invasion by rejecting even the possibility of negotiating with Hitler? Most importantly, like Chamberlain, Churchill did not trust Hitler to adhere to any war-ending commitment. Churchill had had a long-standing wariness of the enduring threat posed by Germany, of the new threat posed by Hitler and Nazism, and of the risk that Germany would violate any war-ending agreement. In the 1920s, Churchill concluded his multivolume history of World War I by wondering whether the Versailles treaty had provided for longstanding peace or whether war with Germany might reerupt. As early as 1930, Churchill told German diplomats that he was concerned that Adolf Hitler, then a somewhat peripheral figure in German politics, might seek to launch a new world war. In the 1930s, Churchill churned out a stream of warnings in his speeches and writings about the serious danger Hitler posed to Britain and European order.⁵⁹

Churchill had great respect for German national power, clearly understood Hitler’s revisionist intentions, and distrusted Hitler’s willingness to adhere to his international commitments. In the 1930s, appeasers like Chamberlain put faith in the hope that a true settlement granting sufficient concessions to dissuade Hitler from going to war might be possible. Churchill vehemently disagreed. After Germany remilitarized the Rhineland in March 1936, in violation of the Versailles Treaty, Churchill remarked that “Herr Hitler has torn up all the Treaties.” Any German commitment to go no further could not be trusted. He argued against the false hope that Germany would stop at the Rhineland. Refortifying the Rhineland would permit Germany to attack France through the Low Countries. Hitler might also be able to challenge Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Austria, and the Baltic states.⁶⁰ As Germany moved to annex Austria in February 1938, Churchill warned that Hitler could not be counted on to halt there, remarking that a British confrontation with Germany was inevitable. Months later, he made a similar point during the Sudetenland crisis.⁶¹ Churchill told an American journalist in June 1939—before war broke out—that Britain should never surrender, and that he (Churchill) would personally die in battle before accepting surrender.⁶²

In late May 1940, Churchill’s longstanding beliefs in Germany’s long term threat and inability to commit credibly led him to reject the idea of negotiations. Chamberlain dismissed Hitler’s October 1939 peace overture for similar reasons, when Chamberlain viewed Hitler’s verbal assurances as worthless.⁶³ Churchill told members of the House of Commons on May 28 that any German peace terms must be rejected. Hugh Dalton, Minister of Economic Warfare, recalled Churchill’s remarks as follows: “And then he said, ‘I have thought carefully in these last days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering into negotiations with That Man.’ But it was idle to think that, if we tried to make peace now, we should get better terms than if we fought it out. The Germans would demand our fleet—that would be called ‘disarmament’—our naval bases, and much else. We should become a slave state, though a British Government which would be Hitler’s puppet would be set up—under Mosley or some such person.’ And where should we be at the end of all that?”⁶⁴

Churchill feared that peace terms would restrict British military power, allow the relative growth in German power, and thereby give Hitler even greater incentive to renege on any peace deal. As Churchill put it, “It was impossible to imagine that Herr Hitler would be so foolish as to let us continue our re-armament. In effect, his terms would put us completely at his mercy. We should get no worse terms if we went on fighting, even if we were beaten, than were open to us now.”⁶⁵ In a May 26 meeting, Churchill envisioned that any likely offered terms to Britain from Hitler would “place her entirely at the mercy of Germany through disarmament, cession of naval bases in the Orkneys, etc.”⁶⁶ That same day, he remarked that Britain could never accept German dominance of Europe, and that “We must ensure our complete liberty and independence.” He proclaimed his opposition “to any negotiations which might lead to a derogation of our rights and power.”⁶⁷ This argument underlay Churchill’s public speeches on the war. During his May 13, 1940 speech to the Commons, he stressed the importance of defeating Germany rather than trying to coexist with it, declaring that the British aim is “victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival. Let that be realised; no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for.”⁶⁸

Others saw things in similar terms. Ironside held no hopes that the Germans would honor any peace agreement.⁶⁹ Even Halifax, the highest placed proponent of negotiations, saw the danger of an incredible Nazi commitment to end the war. He feared that a German peace offer would strip Britain of her military power, tempting Hitler to violate his warending commitment. On May 25, Halifax laid out his thinking in a neversent telegram to Roosevelt: “It would be natural for Hitler to say that he would include Great Britain in his peace offer but only on terms that would ensure our not taking revenge, which would leave this country entirely at his mercy and which we of course could not accept.”⁷⁰

Thin British Hopes for Ultimate Victory

The central reason Britain fought on was distrust of Hitler. A second reason was that British prospects were bleak but not utterly hopeless. If there was absolutely no reasonable case to be made of eventually prevailing, as was the case for France around this time, then as noted at the beginning of the chapter there would be no reason to fight on. Better to at least curtail the bloodshed. At this time, Britain did have some reasons to hope that somehow, perhaps, the war might eventually turn around. However, as will be evident, these hopes rested on shaky ground, and did not steer British leaders away from a fundamental pessimism. With greater faith in the credibility of a German commitment to peace terms, British leadership might have been willing to negotiate for limited terms, as it did with Wilhelmine Germany during the First World War⁷¹—that is, absent the severe commitment problem Britain might have sought to negotiate in 1940. However, very low German credibility combined with even slim reeds of hope pushed Britain to fight on under very discouraging conditions.

British hopes for survival and victory had short-term and long-term aspects. In the short term, Churchill hoped that a successful evacuation at Dunkirk would boost Britain’s ability to parry a German amphibious invasion. He wanted at the least to put off negotiation until seeing how Dunkirk turned out. In a May 26 War Cabinet meeting, Churchill remarked that “it was best to decide nothing until we saw how much of the Army we could re-embark from France. . . . we might save a considerable portion of the Force.”⁷² He also allowed that the evacuation effort “would afford a real test of air superiority, since the Germans would attempt to bomb the ships and boats.”⁷³

Churchill’s late May wait-and-see approach had its risks, however. The hope was that if things went well in the coming days or weeks, then this would serve as encouragement to fight on. However, if Dunkirk had gone worse than predicted, for example if less than 10,000 troops were evacuated and German aircraft proved superior to British aircraft, then this might undermine the British negotiating position even further. Halifax expressed this very point, that Britain would be in a worse position if Britain delayed negotiations a few months and military setbacks continued. He stated in a war cabinet meeting on May 27, “The Prime Minister [has] said that two or three months would show whether we were able to stand up against the air risk. This meant that the future of the country turned on whether the enemy’s bombs happened to hit our aircraft factories. [I am] prepared to take that risk if our independence was at stake; but if it was not at stake [I] would think it right to accept an offer which would save the country from unavoidable disaster.”⁷⁴

Churchill was willing to take the risk of rejecting negotiation until after Dunkirk had played out, because he viewed any deal struck with Hitler to be essentially worthless. However, waiting was a great risk, as success at Dunkirk was by no means assured. After Dunkirk’s great success, some (including British General H. R. Pownall) referred to the outcome as the “miracle” at Dunkirk. Indeed, the great success was in large part due to sheer luck, poor German decisions, and extraordinary British bravery. As for luck, the famously turbulent English Channel exhibited an almost never-seen nine days of smooth waters during the evacuation, an essential precondition for a maritime operation involving such a vast and diverse array of vessels including so many small boats. As for the Germans, on three occasions between May 20 and May 30 Hitler and the German high command strangely ordered their tanks to halt their advance, including on May 24 when General Heinz Guderian’s tanks were just ten miles short of Dunkirk, with nothing standing in their way. These pauses in the German advance gave the Allied force just the slight margin it needed to accomplish the evacuation. The Luftwaffe, consistent with its doctrine, did not launch significant attacks against troops on the Dunkirk beaches or the British coastal targets where they landed. As for British bravery, the miracle was made possible by the willingness of a handful of British battalions to stay behind and fight without hope of escape. Of those ordered to stay and fight, almost none escaped.⁷⁵

Importantly, even the miracle at Dunkirk did not end the period of high danger. Persisting British fears about the future belie the image that Churchill breezily passed up on negotiations after the Dunkirk rescue, or even after the Battle of Britain, assuming that better fortunes were just ahead. That is, Britain continued to reject negotiations not because it became confident in ultimate victory, but rather because its doubts in the credibility of any German commitment to end the war persisted. Regarding Dunkirk, even after the successful evacuation of troops, one government official estimated that the loss of the continental English Channel ports undercut British military power by 30 percent. Chief of the Imperial General Staff Sir John Dill thought throughout summer 1940 that a German attack on Ireland, Scotland, England, Iceland, and/or the Orkney Islands was likely, and by late June still worried about the training and discipline of the British defense forces, fretting that they were not up to the task of parrying an invasion. Ironside feared in mid-June a German attack to be likely before October, and arranged for all sixty volumes of his diaries to be shipped off to Canada for safekeeping. He prayed for God to help him “piece together an Army in the most terrible crisis that has ever faced the British Empire.” General Alan Brooke, in charge of homeland defense, worried about British invasion defenses, observing a force undertrained, underequipped, and perhaps outnumbered. Even by mid-September, Brooke thought invasion defenses were woefully lacking. By that point, Britain had for invasion defense about twenty-two divisions, only half of which were capable of any kind of mobile operations, whereas in contrast the French frontier had been half the length of the British coastline, and despite some eighty divisions and the Maginot Line, Allied forces failed to deflect the German attack.⁷⁶ Desperate measures to defend Britain might be needed. In the event of an actual landing, Churchill advocated the use of chemical weapons against German troops on British beaches, an opinion shared by Dill.⁷⁷ On June 4, he wrote in a note to another British political figure that “We are going through v[er]y hard times & I expect worse to come: but I feel quite sure that better days will come! Though whether we shall live to see them is more doubtful.” And on June 12 he told his military secretary bluntly, “You and I will be dead in three months time.”⁷⁸ In late June, the forecast was for German invasion by mid-July, and military and political leaders were doubtful about Britain’s ability to foil a German invasion. Cadogan colorfully noted in his June 29 diary entry that a recent report on invasion preparations “makes it seem that the Germans can take a penny steamer to the coast and stroll up to London! . . . As far as I can see we are, after years of leisurely preparation, completely unprepared. We have simply got to die at our posts.”⁷⁹ In late July, Churchill remarked that Britain faced a threat worse than any since the Spanish Armada of 1588.⁸⁰

Beyond Dunkirk, the September 1940 victory in the Battle of Britain establishing British air superiority over the British Isles did not dismiss British invasion fears. The leadership still feared that Hitler would strike at the first opportunity.⁸¹ As late as April 1941, British generals feared that a German invasion was both possible and likely. The June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union did not dispel these fears, given British assumptions about Soviet military weakness. Dill warned against sending additional troops to the Middle East, so as not to strip further the invasion defenses of Britain. That summer, Churchill called for invasion defense preparations to be “at concert pitch” by September 1, 1941.⁸² Further, the Battle of Britain did not affect the critical Battle of the Atlantic. Churchill often remarked, both during the war and after, that the greatest threat to the British war effort was the German U-boat campaign against the maritime supply line linking North America to the British Isles. The U-boat threat did not abate until spring 1943.⁸³

Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain provided Britain some reassurance that it might be able to fend off a German invasion in the short term. The longer term hope for victory was in American entry into the war. As Churchill put it, Britain need only hold out until “in God’s good time the new world with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the old.”⁸⁴

The key question was how soon American help might arrive. Certainly, Churchill occasionally indulged in wishful thinking that Britain’s decision to fight might inspire American intervention.⁸⁵ However, it was clear to all in spring and summer 1940 and beyond in 1941 that any substantial American aid was not coming in the near or medium term. In mid-May 1940, Kennedy conveyed America’s unwillingness to intercede, telling Churchill that President Roosevelt “would not leave the United States holding the bag for a war in which the Allies expected to lose.”⁸⁶ Kennedy’s Anglophobic isolationism notwithstanding, the fall of France did move Roosevelt to fear that the German defeat of Britain was likely in the coming weeks.⁸⁷ The British ambassador to the U.S., Phillip Kerr, reported on May 27 that Roosevelt had told him that under the most dire circumstances the U.S. would intervene. However, Roosevelt’s comments seemed more geared to carrying on the fight from the Western Hemisphere after the British Isles had fallen, as he spoke of, for example, relocating the British government in Bermuda.⁸⁸ At the same time, Kerr suggested to Churchill that Britain might lease to America British airfields in the Western Hemisphere as a means of reducing British war debt. Churchill bitterly refused to consider it, as the “United States had given us practically no help in the war, and now that they saw how great was the danger, their attitude was that they wanted to keep everything which would help us for their own defence.”⁸⁹

Skepticism about the imminent appearance of meaningful American aid proved accurate. It was more than a year (September 1941) before Britain and the U.S. struck a deal for the fifty World War I vintage American destroyers that Britain so badly wanted. The Lend Lease program of American assistance to the British war effort remained limited. In the following year, 1941, it only accounted for 2.4 percent of all British munitions.⁹⁰ And, of course, the U.S. did not enter the war because of a desire to aid Britain. Rather, it entered the war in the Pacific after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and it entered the war in Europe after Germany and Italy declared war on the U.S.

Fighting on with Much Fear and a Little Hope

Britain’s decision to fight on in May 1940 and after was driven by great fear and a few scraps of hope.⁹¹ Britain (and Churchill in particular) had so little faith that Hitler would adhere to the terms of a war-ending deal that it shunned the possibility of a peace deal with Germany even as its greatest military planning nightmare, the swift fall of France, came to pass. That is, in contrast to the predictions of a purely informationoriented view of war-termination behavior, the revelation of severely discouraging information was insufficient to move Britain to offer concessions. Importantly, Britain fought on both because of its grave doubt that Germany would adhere to the terms of a peace settlement and because Britain’s situation, although frightening to be sure, was not completely without hope. As long as Britain could maintain a vision for eventual victory, resting on luck and courage at Dunkirk and in the skies above Britain in the short term and on American intervention in the long term, then Britain would fight on. Conversely, one can imagine a set of circumstances so discouraging, including a disaster at Dunkirk, the destruction of the Royal Air Force, a successful German amphibious landing in England, and the election of an isolationist to the White House in November 1940, that perhaps even Churchill might have swallowed his fears and reached a deal with the Nazi monster.

UNITED STATES, 1942

The summer of 1940 may have been the single darkest moment of the war for the Allies, but it was thereafter certainly not a steady climb to victory. American entry into the war, the event on which Britain had desperately pinned its hopes, did not occur until Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. However, even at that point the tide did not immediately turn. From December 1941 to early summer 1942, the Allies suffered their worst combined string of setbacks in the entire war. In the Pacific, there was a rush of Japanese successes, including the Pearl Harbor raid itself which destroyed the bulk of the American Pacific fleet, as well as the Japanese capture of Guam, Wake Island, Singapore, Mandalay, Corregidor, Burma, Hong Kong, Malaya, and the Philippines, among other areas. The only bright spots were perhaps the minor Doolittle air raid on Japanese cities in April and the indecisive Battle of the Coral Sea in May. Generally, by mid-1942 Japan was poised to invade Australia in the south, to seize India in the west, and to strike at Midway Island and then Hawaii in the east, while maintaining a secure northern perimeter through its peace with the Soviet Union and its June seizure of two Aleutian islands.

Roosevelt and Churchill recognized the scope of the Japanese threat. At the Arcadia Conference of December 1941–January 1942, they understood that the West Coast of North America itself could be threatened by naval bombardment, minelaying in ports, suicide attacks on vessels by human torpedoes, aerial bombardment from aircraft carriers, or at the limit perhaps even amphibious invasion. Indeed, these kinds of events did occur during World War II, such as in February 1942 when a Japanese submarine surfaced off the coast of California and shelled a Santa Barbara ranch. Roosevelt and Churchill also recognized that in Asia Japanese troops could threaten India and march to the Middle East, perhaps linking up with German troops moving eastward in their attack on the Soviet Union.⁹² Churchill at one point voiced the concern that continued Japanese successes might fuel a “Pan-Asiatic movement” of all “the brown and yellow race” in Asia supporting the Japanese bid for empire.⁹³ In March 1942 correspondence with Churchill, Roosevelt conceded that the Japanese “deployment has been skilfully [sic] executed and continues to be effective. The energy of the Japanese attack is still very powerful. . . . The U.S. agrees that the Pacific situation is now very grave.”⁹⁴ Indeed, the bad news in the first two months of the war eventually began to dent American public confidence and optimism. One reporter at a February 10, 1942 presidential news conference made reference to the “matter of ‘complacency’ in this country, in the face of bad news in the Pacific.”⁹⁵

The course of the war did not look brighter outside of Asia. No major Allied offensives had yet commenced. The American bombing campaign of Germany would not start until August, and the Allied landings in North Africa, Operation Torch, would not begin until November. German U-boats continued to sink Allied shipping throughout the Atlantic and even off the American east coast, as close as a few hundred yards from the shoreline.⁹⁶ May and June 1942 marked the greatest monthly losses of Allied shipping to U-boat attacks of the entire war.⁹⁷ In North Africa, the German Afrika Korps under General Erwin Rommel recaptured Benghazi in January 1942 and drove on Egypt, not to be turned back until the August Battle of Alam el Halfa and in particular the October Battle of El Alamein. In the campaign between the Soviet Union and Germany, the first few months of 1942 were quiet as both sides waited for better weather, although May would see the initiation of a major German advance in the south, moving towards the Caucasus and the city of Stalingrad. Some in the United States fretted about a possible separate peace between the Soviet Union and Germany.⁹⁸ South America slowly began to edge towards aligning with the Axis powers.⁹⁹ Churchill summed up the grim reality to the Conservative Party leadership in March 1942 in these blunt terms: “[In the last twelve months] we have had an almost unbroken series of military misfortunes. We were driven out of Cyrenaica, and have now only partly re-established ourselves there. We were driven out of Greece and Crete. . . . Hong Kong has fallen; the Malay Peninsula and the possessions of the brave Dutch in the East Indies have been overrun. Singapore has been the scene of the greatest disaster to British arms which our history records. The Allied squadrons in the Netherlands East Indies have been virtually destroyed in the action off Java. Burma is invaded; Rangoon has fallen; very hard fighting is proceeding in Upper Burma. Australia is threatened: India is threatened.”¹⁰⁰ U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Breckenridge Long wrote in his diary in early February 1942, “The whole picture is pretty dark—an aggressive foe, well prepared, with a superiority of men, planes and naval support—a scattered front with a very long line of communications—and probable defeat in the western Pacific with a ‘long, long pull’ to push the enemy out of situations it was much easier to defend than to retake. . . . The truth is we are spreading our butter very thin over the world—even in the United States.”¹⁰¹ In April, Long was even gloomier: “Four months since Pearl Harbor—and the situation has deteriorated every minute since.”¹⁰²

If war-termination decisions were driven exclusively by information dynamics, then in the face of six months of steady military setbacks the United States (and Britain, for that matter) should have downgraded its assessments for the prospects for eventual victory and made concessions to the Axis with the aim of ending the war on limited terms. This was certainly an integral part of the Japanese war plan, as the Japanese leadership hoped that running up an impressive string of victories would cause the U.S. to perceive that war with Japan would inevitably be long and bloody, moving the U.S. to offer concessions and seek settlement.¹⁰³ However, like Britain, the United States did not consider negotiations. Rather, the United States and its Allies during this period laid out the framework for a policy of unconditional surrender, offering zero concessions.¹⁰⁴ Roosevelt was opposed to negotiation even before Pearl Harbor, as in November 1941 Roosevelt rejected out of a hand a Vichy France request for the United States to either mediate a negotiated settlement between Britain and the Axis or solicit Vatican mediation.¹⁰⁵ His January 6 annual message to Congress was typically emphatic and blunt: “No compromise can end that conflict. There never has been—there never can be—successful compromise between good and evil. Only total victory can reward the champions of tolerance, and decency, and faith.”¹⁰⁶ On March 27, he told a British envoy that he favored the postwar dismemberment of Germany.¹⁰⁷

That spring, the American Subcommittee on Security Problems, composed of an array of civilian and military leaders, convened to consider a number of issues, including what the eventual terms of Axis surrender should be. In May 1942, they advised the president of their conclusions that the Allies should demand the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan.¹⁰⁸ Roosevelt was sympathetic to their findings, telling Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov the following month that “he had already developed his ideas about disarming Germany and Japan.”¹⁰⁹ Roosevelt restated his firm commitment to unconditional surrender to a British envoy in August 1942.¹¹⁰ There is also some evidence that the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended unconditional surrender in December 1942, and forwarded these recommendations to Roosevelt.¹¹¹ A committee similar to the Security Problems Committee met in May 1943 to discuss the postwar treatment of Japan. It reached similar conclusions, that Japan posed a long-term threat, and that the absolute defeat of Japan would be necessary to sustain peace in Asia and the Pacific.

Roosevelt’s support of the absolute defeat of Japan was not isolated. Many in American society and government supported crushing Japan utterly, some advocating literally the extermination of the Japanese society and/or people. In September 1942, Admiral William Leahy, Roosevelt’s chief of staff, equated Japan to Carthage, proposing that the U.S. as Rome “should go ahead and crush her utterly.” This was not enough for two members of the State Department’s Security Technical Committee, U.S. Navy Captain H. L. Pence and Assistant Chief of the State Department’s Division of Southern European Affairs Cavendish Cannon. In May 1943 meetings, they advocated genocide, the virtual elimination of the Japanese race. Their view was not isolated. A December 1944 poll of the American public revealed that 13 percent supported genocide in Japan, and an additional 33 percent supported destroying the Japanese polity. In December 1945, three months after the Japanese surrender, nearly one quarter of those polled in one survey mused that they regretted that the U.S. did not have the opportunity to use more atomic bombs before the Japanese surrender.¹¹²

Unconditional Surrender, Commitment Credibility, and the Shadow of Versailles

Why did the United States decide on a zero concessions, unconditional surrender policy during this early phase of the war when the news from the front was uniformly discouraging? The information proposition of chapter 2 would make the opposite prediction, that the U.S. should make concessions or at least open negotiations under such conditions. However, the U.S. pursued total victory, even at this early stage, for two reasons. More importantly, the U.S. wanted to achieve a lasting peace, and was concerned about the possibility of Axis defection on a peace settlement providing a limited outcome. U.S. concern over Axis noncompliance with a limited outcome peace deal encouraged the pursuit of total victory. Further, although the string of Axis victories was certainly discouraging, the core of American military power—American economic strength—remained unthreatened. Victory would be long in coming and costly, but even in early 1942 American decision-makers saw it could be had once the American economy had been mobilized.

American concern with Axis noncompliance was strongly driven by a motivation to avoid repeating what were perceived as mistakes committed in the World War I–ending peace settlement of Versailles, mistakes that left open the door to renewed German aggression.¹¹³ The Subcommittee on Security Problems chair, Norman Davis, supported studying the 1918 Armistice in thinking about how to end World War II. A general serving on the committee concurred, commenting that the core flaw in the 1918 terms were that they were watered down in their adoption and implementation. Committee members studied the memos drawn up by U.S. General John Pershing in October 1918, in which Pershing declared that “there should be no tendency toward leniency.”¹¹⁴ One general later remarked that he thought the terms of the 1940 French surrender to Germany, which included German occupation of France save for the puppet Vichy government, were a preferable model to the 1918 armistice.¹¹⁵ Eventually, the committee unanimously supported the pursuit of unconditional surrender, largely because of the shadow of 1918.¹¹⁶ Long put it succinctly at a May 6, 1942 meeting: “We are fighting this war because we did not have an unconditional surrender at the end of the last one.”¹¹⁷

The Subcommittee’s conclusions were passed on to Roosevelt, who was sympathetic.¹¹⁸ Indeed, Roosevelt’s thinking about foreign policy and the problems of world order were strongly shaped by the lessons and mistakes of World War I.¹¹⁹ One historian put it this way:

As Roosevelt sat at the end of the long table in the Cabinet Room working on that speech and other speeches during the war years, he would look up at the portrait of Woodrow Wilson, over the mantelpiece. The tragedy of Wilson was always somewhere within the rim of his consciousness. Roosevelt could never forget Wilson’s mistakes . . . Wilson had advocated “peace without victory,” he had produced the Fourteen Points as a basis on which Germany could surrender honorably. The violation of these principles had plagued the postwar world, had led to the rise of Hitler and a Second World War, and there was no motivating force in all of Roosevelt’s wartime political policy stronger than the determination to prevent repetition of the same mistakes.¹²⁰

Roosevelt made a similar point later in the war, declaring that the lessons of World War I were that the Allies “must not allow the seeds of the evils we shall have crushed to germinate and reproduce themselves in the future.”¹²¹ He told the public in an October 1942 radio address: “We have learned that if we do not pull the fangs of the predatory animals of the world, they will multiply and grow in strength—and they will be at our throats once more in a short generation. . . . It is clear to us that if Germany and Italy and Japan—or any one of them—remain armed at the end of this war, or are permitted to rearm, they will again, and inevitably, embark upon an ambitious career of world conquest. They must be disarmed and kept disarmed, and they must abandon the philosophy which has brought so much suffering to the world.”¹²² In internal discussions in 1944, Roosevelt dismissed the suggestion of a limited outcome with Germany leaving a military-controlled government there, insisting that “A somewhat long study and personal experience in and out of Germany leads me to believe that” the best solution to the German threat would be “total defeat,” and that, “To assume otherwise is to assume, of necessity, a period of quiet followed by a third world war.”¹²³ There was great concern that the taproot cause of the war was militarism in Germany and Japan, and only total war followed by fundamental social, political, and economic changes in these countries could provide for peace. The repetition of these themes in a variety of fora increases our confidence that they genuinely reflect Roosevelt’s thinking.¹²⁴

Others shared Roosevelt’s obsession to avoid repeating the mistakes of Versailles. Some advocated extreme measures against both Germany and Japan. In July 1944, Generals Dwight Eisenhower and Walter Bedell Smith discussed the problem of the enduring threat posed by the German General staff, the core of German militarism. Smith commented that imprisonment of these individuals, some 3,500 officers, would be insufficient, as they would in six or eight years be released from prison. Eisenhower suggested executing the group of them, and he included for good measure all members of the Nazi Party from mayors up as well as all members of the Gestapo. They reassured themselves that if these individuals fell into Russian hands, nature would take care of the problem.¹²⁵ Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau proposed a plan for the postwar treatment of Germany that would include destroying all German heavy industry, internationalizing the Ruhr, Rhineland, and areas north of Kiel, encouraging Germans with industrial skills and training to emigrate from Germany, transferring German industrial plants and equipment to its victim nations, dividing Germany into constituent states and giving some territories to France, closing down all German schools and media outlets until they could be restructured by the Allies, banning all German aircraft, military uniforms, military bands, and military parades, and executing all war criminals.¹²⁶

Similar ideas were expressed about Japan. As noted earlier, some in government and in society more broadly advocated the extermination of the Japanese polity and people. Generally, many saw that the total defeat of Japan was necessary to establish lasting peace in Asia and the Pacific. One U.S. senator warned that the Japanese “don’t seek real peace—only an armistice to give some years for preparing another attempt to dominate the entire Far East, and then the remainder of the world.” Admiral William “Bull” Halsey agreed, claiming that with limited terms Japan would “use this peace as Germany did before them, to build up for another war.”¹²⁷

Preparing for a Long Road to Victory

What was the long-term Allied outlook for victory from late 1941 to mid1942? Certainly, for Churchill and Britain the attack on Pearl Harbor was perhaps the best possible news, because with America (and the Soviet Union) on Britain’s side, the defeat of the Axis was now seen as inevitable.¹²⁸ On the American side, the string of defeats were certainly disturbing, but importantly none of them touched America’s long-term military–industrial power, its factories, cities, population, shipyards, mines, oil wells, and farms. Certainly, the American government understood from the outset that, at best, victory would take years to achieve. For example, the “Victory Program” drawn up in autumn 1941 did not imagine that the American armed forces would be ready for substantial offensive action until summer 1943, even under conditions of wartime mobilization.¹²⁹ This view that large-scale offensive operations would not be possible until 1943 was repeated at the post–Pearl Harbor Arcadia conference between Churchill and Roosevelt.¹³⁰ A few months later, in April 1942, Roosevelt wrote to Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands that the Dutch Indies and Philippines might not be liberated until 1944 or 1945.¹³¹

In short, American commitment to unconditional surrender in early 1942, like the British desire to fight on in 1940, was driven by two factors. First, obsession with repeating the mistakes of Versailles made Americans deeply worried about Axis powers reneging on any war-ending commitment. Only complete victory, permitting the rooting out of militarism in Japan, Italy, and Germany would provide a stable peace. Second, the long string of combat setbacks was serious, but did not undermine the foundation of Allied confidence in eventual victory: American economic might. If either condition had not been present, America might have been more open to a limited settlement. If America had been less fearful of Axis treachery, it might have been willing to consider war termination short of total victory. Indeed, this view roughly represents American decisionmaking in World War I. Through many phases of that war, including up to early 1918, the Allies considered and indeed offered to the Central Powers peace terms that were short of their unconditional surrender (see chapter 9). If American and Allied faith in long-term victory was somehow dented in 1942, with perhaps a combination of Soviet defeat, British exit from the war, Japanese conquest of Midway, Hawaii, and Australia, Japanese bombardment of California, and a total disaster at the first American amphibious landing in the Pacific at Guadalcanal, perhaps negotiations might have looked more attractive.

Are there other explanations of American war-termination behavior during this period? The domestic politics hypothesis would not predict much change over this period since American casualties had not yet escalated substantially—though, as noted, the initial setbacks may have slightly reduced public confidence in the war effort in early 1942. Another possible explanation concerns the interactions between Churchill and Roosevelt with Stalin. The proposition would be that Churchill and Roosevelt embraced unconditional surrender, especially at their January 1943 Casablanca meeting, in large part to reassure Stalin. Stalin demanded the U.S. and Britain open a second front in the West to alleviate the pressure the Red Army felt from German forces, and Churchill received one report that Stalin was threatening to break with the U.S. and Britain if a second front was not opened soon. Some Soviet officials speculated that the Anglo-American plot was to have the Soviet Union exhaust itself in its war with Germany, after which the U.S. and Britain would cut a deal with Hitler.¹³² However, as described, Roosevelt’s support for unconditional surrender had emerged long before the Casablanca meeting. Regardless, at Casablanca Stalin was miffed that he had not been consulted about the formal announcement of unconditional surrender, and did not view the announcement as an acceptable substitute for a second front.¹³³

USSR, AUTUMN 1941

Both Britain and the United States refused to panic when their fortunes looked bleakest. Importantly, though, neither country was invaded, and each had bodies of water and powerful navies to thwart invasion. The Soviet Union faced a similar test in 1941, and did not have such reassurances. Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, breaking the August 1939 non-aggression agreement between the Soviet Union and Germany. The conquest of the Soviet Union was at the center of Hitler’s plans for world empire, to eradicate the threat posed by Communism, to subdue the inferior Slav people, to provide “living space” for the German people, and to harness the resources of the region for the coming titanic confrontation with the United States. Hitler sought the absolute defeat of the Soviet Union, including at the minimum overthrowing the Communist government of the Soviet Union.¹³⁴

The war initially went well for Germany and poorly for the Soviet Union. German armies advanced deeply into Soviet territory, killing or capturing hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers. By early November, nearly three million Soviet prisoners of war were in German captivity, decimating Soviet reserves. Only fifteen tanks were available for the defense of Moscow.¹³⁵

In late September, concern over German advances escalated. During these weeks, German attacks created massive battles at Vyazma and Bryansk, where some 700,000 Soviet soldiers were captured, and another quarter million were dead or wounded. More importantly, the attacks created a three-hundred-mile-wide hole in the Soviet line, leaving Moscow open for conquest. Stalin received the bad news on October 5, at first disbelieving the reports (and, perhaps typically, threatening the court martial of the air force colonel who initially reported the catastrophe, before later promoting him when the reports proved accurate). Once he became persuaded of the veracity of the reports, Stalin reacted by deploying troops to slow the German advance, ordering the retreat and consolidation of the Soviet defensive line, and arranging General Georgi Zhukov’s return from Leningrad to assist in the impending defense of Moscow.¹³⁶ The German threat at this point was close; the Luftwaffe had already commenced air raids in Moscow. The autumn rains had descended, somewhat slowing the rapid German advance, but the fear was that when the ground froze in winter, German forces might continue their offensive and perhaps capture Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, and Rostov.¹³⁷ By October, Stalin himself was sufficiently concerned about German advances that in anticipation of the German attack he ordered the evacuation of Moscow to the city of Kuibyshev, farther to the east, and the destruction of the thousand or so factories located in and around Moscow. When the order to evacuate was announced, panic descended on ordinary Muscovites, as office workers began burning papers and families began preparing for evacuation.¹³⁸

These discouraging events should have pushed the Soviet Union to lower its war-termination demands, and start offering concessions to Germany as a means of stopping the war and hopefully staving off absolute defeat. The record of Soviet decision-making during the war is spotty, but there is some evidence that in October Stalin did decide to offer concessions to Hitler in an attempt to end the war. It appears that on October 7, 1941, Stalin met with Zhukov and NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria, ordering Beria to work through diplomatic channels to explore negotiations with Germany. Stalin was pessimistic about the future course of the war, and wanted to explore the possibility of a second Brest-Litovsk agreement. This March 1918 deal between Russia and Germany established peace between those two countries, at the price of substantial Russian territorial concessions. Stalin authorized the cession of several Soviet territories, including Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Moldova, Belorussia, and portions of Ukraine. Soon after the October 7 meeting, Stalin and Beria met with a senior Bulgarian official in Moscow to convey the terms to Berlin. By some accounts, the Bulgarian refused to act as intermediary, telling Stalin that the USSR could still defeat Germany, even if a retreat to the Ural Mountains was necessary. By other accounts, there are some indications that the deal was transmitted to Hitler, who rejected it out of hand because of his confidence in German military prospects.¹³⁹

Some historians have voiced doubt about the occurrence of this episode, so the available evidence should be examined closely.¹⁴⁰ A few sources corroborate the basic facts of the story.¹⁴¹ A Soviet general recounted the outlines of the story in a 1957 Soviet defense ministry meeting, which had in turn been provided to him by Beria when the latter was being interrogated in 1953, after Beria’s arrest and prior to his execution.¹⁴² Some historians doubt the veracity of this source because there is no available written record of the interrogation, and because the information may have been produced under torture.¹⁴³ Some sources of corroboration exist, however. In 1989, Dimitar Peyev, a junior Bulgarian diplomat in Moscow in 1941, gave a television interview in which he confirmed the details of the story.¹⁴⁴ Around the same time, Nikolai Pavlenko, a Soviet general, recalled a conversation he had had with Zhukov in the 1960s in which Zhukov described the episode.¹⁴⁵ The senior Bulgarian diplomat serving in Moscow in 1941, Ivan Stamenov, outlined the details of the meeting some years later in a conversation with a Soviet investigator.¹⁴⁶ Conversely, there have been some denials. Vyacheslav Molotov in an official 1971 interview not unexpectedly denied that there were any contacts between Stalin and Germany during the war.¹⁴⁷ A former NKVD officer claimed in a 1994 memoir that the entire affair never occurred, that instead there was a disinformation campaign at the time to spread rumors about Soviet interest in peace terms. Its object was “to weaken German resolve,” a speculation at odds with the information proposition, which would predict that offering concessions would strengthen German resolve.¹⁴⁸

On balance, the evidence indicates that such a contact probably did take place since some evidence came from several principles with direct knowledge of the endeavor: Beria, Stamenov, and Zhukov. Molotov’s 1971 offhand denial in an official Soviet government publication carries little weight. The NKVD officer’s denial is also insufficiently documented to persuade.

Stalin’s negotiations proposal is surprising, given his deep distrust of Hitler. He knew that Nazi ideology called for expansion in the east¹⁴⁹ and had long suspected that war with Germany would come eventually. Further, Stalin likely doubted that agreements with Hitler would offer much protection. Hitler had a long record of breaking international commitments, including the Versailles Treaty in the 1930s and the October 1938 Munich agreement on the Sudetenland. The June 1941 invasion was itself a violation of the August 1939 neutrality agreement between the Soviet Union and Germany. Stalin also might have had reason to doubt the German inclination to cooperate after Germany treated captured Soviet soldiers brutally, in violation of the terms of the Geneva Convention to which Germany was a signatory. Although the Soviet Union was not a signatory, Moscow had declared in July and August 1941 that it would be willing to abide by the terms of the Geneva Convention and respect POW rights, although the Germans, through diplomatic channels, rejected the Soviet offer, and declared themselves unbound by the Geneva Convention in their treatment of captured Soviet soldiers, because the Soviet Union was not an official signatory of the treaty.¹⁵⁰ More generally, Stalin himself was a hardboiled realist with no idealistic hopes about the protections international agreements might offer. He once declared that “a diplomat’s words must have no relation to actions—otherwise what kind of diplomacy is it? . . . Good words are a concealment of bad deeds. Sincere diplomacy is no more possible than dry water or iron wood.”¹⁵¹ Stalin was surprised by the June 1941 attack not because he assumed that Hitler would adhere to the 1939 neutrality pact, but rather because he thought Hitler was not willing to fight a two-front war, and Stalin thought in 1941 that Britain would not be eliminated or neutralized until 1942 at the earliest.¹⁵² Later in the war, Stalin suggested to Harry Hopkins that if for some reason the Allies did settle on more moderate terms with Japan, once Allied occupation forces arrived in Japan the Allies should renege on the limited terms agreement and essentially impose an absolute outcome by effecting widespread regime change.¹⁵³

Why, then, was Stalin willing to strike a deal so unlikely to be honored? One might be tempted to write off Stalin’s decision as reflecting stress and panic, as individuals under extreme stress can exhibit symptoms of depression, and experience a collapse in self-confidence and severe resignation.¹⁵⁴ However, Stalin had already experienced such an emotional collapse in the first days following the June invasion, and since then had seemed to recover.¹⁵⁵ The historical record is too thin to provide definitive explanations for Stalin’s actions, but certainly a primary reason must have been his panic about Soviet military prospects. Unlike Britain in 1940 and the U.S. in 1942, the Soviet Union had been invaded; there was no body of water coupled with a strong navy to shield the Bolshevik state from the Wehrmacht. Worse, the German invaders had in the first months of the war captured a very hefty chunk of the Soviet economy. By late November 1941, the territory abandoned by the Soviets to the Germans contained 63 percent of all Soviet coal production, 68 percent of pig iron, 58 percent of steel, 60 percent of aluminum, 41 percent of railway lines, 84 percent of sugar, 38 percent of grain, and 60 percent of pigs.¹⁵⁶ Economic factors aside, the Red Army had been easily and substantially dismembered by German forces. Several times as many Soviet soldiers had been killed or captured by October 1941 in four months of war as British soldiers had been rescued at the miracle at Dunkirk. The road to Moscow was open. The forces defending Moscow and indeed the rest of the country were meager. Stalin certainly had no illusions about Hitler’s aims, but things looked so bad that perhaps he was willing to take his chances on a limited peace rather than face the costs of what looked like near certain absolute defeat anyway. In comparison, Churchill might have reached a similar conclusion had German forces successfully landed on the beaches of England, annihilated substantial portions of the British Army, and stood poised to march on London.

Notably, both Stalin and Molotov framed the October 1941 approach to Hitler as an opportunity for a second Brest-Litovsk agreement.¹⁵⁷ The March 1918 Brest-Litovsk agreement established peace between Germany and Russia in exchange for widespread Russian territorial concessions. Imperial Germany did honor the terms of the agreement in that it did not reattack Russia before the Brest-Litovsk agreement was invalidated by the cluster of treaties that ended World War I and rearranged the territorial borders in Eastern Europe. Stalin may have thought that Imperial Germany in World War I complied with the Brest-Litovsk agreement if for no other reason than Germany used the opportunity of peace with Russia to focus its energies on the Western front. Perhaps Hitler might do the same, accept a limited aims agreement with Stalin to neutralize Britain. Although not establishing long-term peace, such an agreement would at least buy the Soviet Union time to reconstitute its military. But this is all speculative, given the thinness of the historical record.

CONFRONTING THE GREAT EVIL OF THE MILLENNIUM

From 1940 to 1942, each of the major Allies faced a critical choice: fight on to victory, or try to negotiate an end to the war with the Axis powers. All three, the U.S., Britain, and the Soviet Union, confronted discouraging battle outcomes, and all three doubted the likelihood that the Axis powers would honor the terms of any war-ending agreement. Of these three, the U.S. and Britain rejected the option of negotiations with the Axis, instead deciding to fight on to victory. In contrast, there is at least some evidence that the Soviet Union flinched at the moment of greatest peril, reaching out to Hitler in October 1941 in pursuit of a peace deal. The U.S. and British cases demonstrate that a purely information-oriented approach to understanding war-termination behavior is incomplete. The Soviet case, assuming that Stalin did authorize negotiations, demonstrates that a purely commitment-oriented approach is incomplete.

What explains the variance in behavior among these three states? Probably the key is the degree of faith each belligerent had in its ultimate ability to prevail. The U.S. probably had the greatest faith, relatively speaking. It was confident its economic power would overwhelm its adversaries, and would be untouched by enemy attacks. It established the highest war aims, unconditional surrender. Britain had the next most faith. Things looked very black in 1940. However, in the short term, Britain could hope that the Dunkirk evacuation would rescue the bulk of the British Expeditionary Force, that the Royal Navy could parry a German invasion of England itself, and that the qualitative (if not quantitative) superiority of the RAF over the Luftwaffe could maintain British air superiority over Britain itself. In the longer term, there was the hope that eventually American entry into the war would help turn the tide. Britain also had high war aims, rejecting negotiations and generally calling for war until victory, although without laying out in 1940 what war’s end would look like. The American and British cases demonstrate that when belligerents have severe commitment concerns and have at least some distant hope of eventual victory, they will be willing to ignore battle outcomes, reject negotiations, and fight on.

The Soviet Union had the least faith in its prospects. Germany had invaded, there was no uncrossed moat guarded by a large navy to protect Soviet territory. The Red Army had been decimated, perhaps half of the Soviet economy had been seized or destroyed, and the German Army stood poised to march on Moscow. The Soviet Union had the lowest war aims, apparently being willing to make territorial concessions to accomplish a limited outcome to the war. The Soviet case demonstrates that even a belligerent with severe commitment credibility concerns may be forced to consider terms, if it faces an apparently imminent defeat promising to impose extremely high costs.

Like the Korean War, the early World War II cases demonstrate the importance of both information and commitment dynamics in explaining war-termination behavior. The next chapter explores another pair of cases, the Winter War and Continuation War, which also illustrate how information and commitment factors work both in contrast and complement.