Adolf Hitler 1889–1945
Born in 1889 in Austria, Hitler spent much of his youth in Vienna, living in cheap accommodation, frequenting coffee houses and trying to sell his paintings. Art was his passion and his failure to secure a place at art school plunged him into depression. Resentment of the Jew was rife in the city and Hitler absorbed this anti-Semitism, and like many of his contemporaries, believed the Jew to be set apart from ‘the rest of humanity’.
Adolf Hitler
Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H1216-0500-002 / CC-BY-SA
At the outbreak of the First World War, Hitler was in Munich. Having managed to avoid conscription into the Austrian army, he signed up to a Bavarian regiment within the German army. He served as a messenger and did so with distinction throughout the war. Having no aspirations for promotion, he finished the war as a corporal having twice been awarded the Iron Cross and twice wounded – the second time in October 1918 when he was temporarily blinded by mustard gas.
In November 1918, the German government had accepted defeat and it was they, most Germans felt, not the soldier, that had lost the war. The signing seven and a half months later of the Treaty of Versailles confirmed this sense of betrayal, the feeling that the German people had been ‘stabbed in the back’.
Among the many small political parties in post-war Germany was the German Workers’ Party – or, to use its German abbreviation, DAP – set up in 1919 by a 35-year-old Munich locksmith called Anton Drexler. The DAP, a far-right party that aimed at appealing to the workers, consisted of only about fifty members but their membership cards began at the number 500, to give the impression of more members.
In September 1919, it was to a meeting of this party that Adolf Hitler, at this stage being groomed by the army as a political instructor, was sent to observe and speak. The beer hall meeting consisted of only about twenty attendees, but Hitler’s speech so impressed Drexler that he was invited to join the party. With membership number 555, although he later claimed in Mein Kampf that he was the seventh member, he signed his name as ‘Hittler’.
Winston Churchill 1874–1965
Born in 1874, Churchill took part in the last full-scale cavalry charge during the 1898 Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan. The experience of war embittered him, and he wrote to his mother: ‘Our victory was disgraced by the inhuman slaughter of the wounded and Lord Kitchener was responsible for this.’
Winston Churchill
During the Boer War (1899–1902) he worked as a war correspondent. There he was taken prisoner by the Afrikaaners, but managed to escape.
Originally a Conservative, Churchill swapped sides and from 1910 to 1911 served as Home Secretary for the Liberal Party. During the First World War he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty and was generally deemed responsible for the British and Commonwealth disaster at Gallipoli. Churchill resigned and served as a battalion commander on the Western Front before being called back by the new prime minister, Lloyd George, to serve in various ministries.
In the 1920s he rejoined the Conservatives and served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1924 to 1929.
During the 1930s Churchill remained a Member of Parliament but, mistrusted by all sides as a maverick, was kept out of the Cabinet. Critical of Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, Churchill mocked the Prime Minister’s ‘peace for our time’ declaration, calling the Munich Agreement ‘a defeat without war’.
At the start of the Second World War Churchill was recalled to the Admiralty where he took the brunt for the failure of the Norwegian campaign in early 1940. But it was Chamberlain, as prime minister, who fell. Unable to form a coalition government, Chamberlain was forced to resign, replaced, ironically, by Churchill.
Following the war Churchill was regaled as Britain’s saviour, but nonetheless lost the 1945 election to Labour. He spent his time as leader of the Opposition writing his mammoth six-part history of the Second World War, for which, in 1953, he earned the Nobel Prize for Literature.
He served a second term as prime minister from 1951 to 1955, by which time, aged eighty-one, old age and a number of strokes had caught up with him.
He died on 24 January 1965 and was honoured with a state funeral, the details of which Churchill had carefully planned.
Benito Mussolini 1883–1945
As a young man, Mussolini underwent a radical political makeover: an anti-war and anti-nationalistic socialist before the First World War, by 1921 he had formed a fascist party, the fasci di combattimento or ‘fighting bands’, and was using his blackshirt followers to intimidate opponents into silence.
Benito Mussolini
Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-09844 / Unknown / CC-BY-SA
In 1922 Mussolini threatened to lead a ‘March on Rome’ unless the Italian king, Victor Emmanuel III, appointed him as prime minister. The king, fearing a civil war, caved in.
As ‘Duce’ (or Leader), Mussolini wanted to flex his political muscle. He desired an empire. He began in 1935 by invading Ethiopia (then Abyssinia) and, three years later, Albania. The League of Nations protested but did nothing to stop Mussolini scoring easy victories over militarily weak opponents.
During the early 1930s, Mussolini was appalled by Hitler’s designs on Austria, but in October 1936 he signed the Berlin-Rome ‘pact of steel’.
On 10 June 1940, with Germany on the verge of defeating France, Mussolini declared war on the Allies, boasting, ‘One moment on a battlefield is worth a thousand years of peace.’ But Mussolini’s dreams of empire soon unravelled in humiliating fashion, as he failed in his attempt to conquer Greece or British-controlled Egypt, and needed Hitler to bail him out.
By July 1943, the Allies had invaded Sicily and by September of the same year had advanced through mainland Italy. Unable to maintain support, Mussolini was summoned by the King, dismissed, arrested and imprisoned as Italy swapped sides and joined the Allies.
On 12 September 1943, German parachutists executed a daring raid to rescue Mussolini from his Alpine incarceration. On being rescued, Mussolini said of Hitler, ‘I knew that my friend would not forsake me!’
Hitler installed Mussolini as a puppet head of a fascist republic in German-occupied northern Italy. Mussolini spent his time ordering the execution of those who had betrayed him at the meeting of the Fascist Grand Council, including his son-inlaw and former foreign minister, as well as writing his memoirs.
On 27 April 1945, Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, together with a few followers, attempted to escape into Switzerland but were apprehended near Lake Como. Mussolini’s attempts to disguise himself had failed. The next day, 28 April, Mussolini and Petacci were shot. They died embracing.
The bodies, together with those of their companions, were hung upside down from meat hooks in a Milanese garage and later buried in an unmarked grave.
After the war, Mussolini’s body was dug up and, for a whole decade, stored by the Italian government. Finally, in 1956, Mussolini was given a full burial.
Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
Struck down by polio at the age of twenty-nine, Roosevelt was paralyzed from the waist down. He went to great lengths to keep it secret, never appearing in public in his wheelchair, and standing with the support of aides.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
He became President in 1932, promising a ‘New Deal’ to help the USA recover from the turmoil caused by the Great Depression. His reforms did much to stabilize the economy and he was re-elected in 1936 in a landslide victory, winning in all but two states.
With the outbreak of war, Roosevelt promised Britain ‘all aid short of war’, and in March 1941 introduced the Lend-Lease Act which supplied the European Allies, including the Soviet Union, huge quantities of material, which by the end of the war amounted to loans worth over $50 billion.
In 1940 Roosevelt was elected to a third term as President, the only President elected more than twice, and was elected for a fourth term in 1944. He died a month before the German surrender, on 12 April 1945.
Joseph Stalin 1879–1953
Born in Georgia on 21 December 1879, Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili is better known to history by his adopted name – Stalin, ‘man of steel’. In 1899, at the age of twenty, while training to be a priest, Stalin was expelled from his seminary and from there followed the revolutionary path of a Marxist.
Joseph Stalin
Following the October Revolution in 1917 and the formation of the Soviet Union, Lenin delegated numerous tasks to his eager protégé, culminating in 1922 with Stalin’s appointment as General Secretary of the Communist Party. But Lenin began to regret his decision and Stalin’s fast-track rise through the party hierarchy, believing Stalin to lack the necessary tact and skill for such a post. In January 1923 Lenin penned a secret memorandum suggesting Stalin’s removal from power: ‘I am not sure whether [Stalin] will always be capable of using [his] authority with sufficient caution … Stalin is too rude and this defect … becomes intolerable in a secretary-general. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead.’
The other man Lenin had in mind was Stalin’s great rival, Lev Trotsky. Together with Trotsky, Lenin was going to use the party congress in April 1923 as his opportunity to have Stalin removed. But in March Lenin suffered a stroke, his third, which confined him to his home and effectively ended his political career.
In January 1924 Lenin died. Trotsky may have been the obvious successor but two of his rivals, Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev, suppressed Lenin’s memorandum and decided to side with Stalin, from whom they felt they had nothing to fear. Trotsky was promptly sidelined and eventually expelled from the party and exiled from the country. But if Kamenev and Zinoviev thought they could tame the Georgian beast they were wrong. Stalin sided with Nikolai Bukharin to have them removed from the party before turning on Bukharin as well. Between 1936 and 1938, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin were all put on show trial accused of ridiculous charges, sentenced and executed.
Stalin’s power was now absolute and he was to rule the Soviet Union unopposed, respected and feared until his death, aged seventy-three, in March 1953.
Bernard Montgomery 1887–1976
The child of a bishop, Montgomery, or ‘Monty’, fell out with his mother to such an extent he refused to attend her funeral. Training to be an army officer at Sandhurst he was demoted for having set a fellow student on fire and during First World War he allegedly captured a German by kneeing him in the testicles.
Bernard Law Montgomery
http://www.maxwell.af.mil
The early death of his wife from septicaemia, caused by an insect bite, devastated Monty, and from then on he devoted himself entirely to his career.
Self-confident in the extreme, and known for his eccentric headwear, he was adored by his men, especially during the desert campaigns in North Africa during which he made his name. But he frequently clashed with his American counterparts, and perhaps because of his immense pride, took offence easily. His carefully planned assault on Arnhem in 1944 ended disastrously.
When, during his retirement, he was asked to name the three greatest generals in history, he replied, ‘The other two were Alexander the Great and Napoleon.’
Erwin Rommel 1891–1944
Respected as a master tactician, Erwin Rommel helped defeat France and the Low Countries and then found lasting fame when sent by Hitler to North Africa where, commanding the Afrika Korps, he earned the sobriquet, the Desert Fox. His Afrika Korps was never charged with any war crimes and prisoners of war were treated humanely. When his only son, Manfred, proposed joining the Waffen SS, Rommel forbade it. In June 1944, Rommel was sent to northern France to help co-ordinate the defence against the Allied Normandy Invasion but was wounded a month later when a RAF plane strafed his car. Rommel returned home to Germany to convalesce.
Erwin Rommel
Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1985-013-07 / CC-BY-SA
An early supporter of Hitler, Rommel had come round to the view that Hitler’s removal was necessary to ‘rescue Germany’. He opposed the assassination of Hitler and played no part in the attempt on the Fuhrer’s life on 20 July 1944, the ‘July Bomb Plot’. However, Rommel’s misgivings about Hitler were soon exposed and, once they were, his downfall was inevitable and swift.
On 14 October 1944, Hitler dispatched two generals to Rommel’s home to offer the fallen field marshal a bleak choice. Manfred, aged fifteen, was at home with his mother when the call came. He waited nervously as the three men talked in private, and as his father went upstairs to speak to his mother. Finally, Rommel spoke to his son and told him of Hitler’s deal.
Writing after the war, Manfred described the scene as his father said, ‘I have just had to tell your mother that I shall be dead in a quarter of an hour … The house is surrounded and Hitler is charging me with high treason. In view of my services in Africa I am to have the chance of dying by poison. The two generals have brought it with them. It‘s fatal in three seconds. If I accept, none of the usual steps will be taken against my family, that is against you.’
Rommel took the poison and Germany was told that he had died from ‘the injuries sustained during the RAF attack in France’. He was, as promised, buried with full military honours, accorded an official day of mourning, and his family pensioned off.
Writing after the war, Churchill observed that Rommel was deserving of ‘our respect, because, although a loyal German soldier, he came to hate Hitler and all his works, and took part in the conspiracy to rescue Germany by displacing the maniac and tyrant. For this, he paid the forfeit of his life.’
Dwight D. Eisenhower 1890–1969
In 1939 Eisenhower, or Ike, was a forty-nine-year-old army major who had never experienced front-line combat. Three years later he was appointed ahead of 360 more senior officers to take command of US forces in Europe. As Supreme Commander of Allied Forces he masterminded the D-Day landings in Normandy and the subsequent battle for France and push into Germany.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
He was often resented for his lack of combat experience but was known for his diplomacy and his ability to cope with conflicting egos, bringing together a sense of collaboration between the British and Americans.
In 1953, standing as a Republican, Eisenhower became US President, serving two terms.
Douglas MacArthur 1880–1964
Sixty-year-old MacArthur had taken retirement from his post as Governor of the Philippines when, in 1941, US President Roosevelt recalled him back into service to defend the Philippines against the Japanese.
Douglas MacArthur
US and Filipino forces were forced back first to the Bataan Peninsula, then on to the island of Corregidor. Roosevelt ordered MacArthur out of the Philippines, to Australia, which he did, famously vowing, ‘I came through and I shall return.’
He did. As Supreme Commander of US Forces in the Pacific, he led the the US counter-attack, gradually defeating the Japanese island by island.
During the Korean War he was appointed commander of forces of the United Nations and successfully launched a counter-attack against the North Koreans. However, his bombastic attitude against the Chinese concerned US President Harry Truman, who fearing MacArthur’s actions might escalate the war further, brought MacArthur home, much to the commander’s humiliation.
Hideki Tojo 1884–1948
Tojo advocated closer ties between Japan and Germany and Italy, and in 1940, the three Axis powers signed the Tripartite Pact. A militarist and keen to accelerate the coming of war, Tojo was appointed prime minister in October 1941 and within two months had ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor, thus turning the war into a global conflict. He ruled almost as dictator, answerable only to Emperor Hirohito.
Tojo Hideki
But as the war turned against Japan, Tojo faced mounting pressure from his government and military hierarchy. Eventually, on 18 July 1944, after a string of losses, the Emperor obliged Tojo to resign.
In September 1945, following Japan’s surrender, Tojo tried to resist capture by the Americans by committing suicide by shooting himself in the heart. With US military police pounding at his door, his doctor used a piece of charcoal to draw a circle on Tojo’s chest, pinpointing the exact location where Tojo should aim. However, Tojo missed, shooting himself in the stomach. ‘I am very sorry it is taking me so long to die’, he mumbled as he was arrested. ‘I await for the righteous judgment of history. I wished to commit suicide but sometimes that fails.’
Having been nursed back to health, Tojo was tried as a war criminal and found guilty. At his trial, he declared, ‘It is natural that I should bear entire responsibility for the war in general, and, needless to say, I am prepared to do so.’ He was executed by hanging on 23 December 1948.
Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov 1896–1974
Instrumental in much of the Red Army’s successes during the Second World War, Zhukov held the Germans at bay in Moscow and masterminded the victory at Stalingrad, often considered the turning point of the war.
Georgi Zhukov
He went on to command victory at the Battle of Kursk, led the relief of Leningrad and the Red Army’s capture of Berlin.
A general of immense quality but with little regard for the human cost of conflict, he finished the war a national hero. But Stalin, jealous of his successes, immediately sidelined him.
Following Stalin’s death in 1953, Zhukov returned as Minister of Defence, having helped Khrushchev secure his position as leader. But in 1957, he fell foul of Khrushchev and was relieved of all responsibilities.