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Great Men and the twentieth century

On 2 January 1950 a commemorative issue of the American newsmagazine Time hailed Sir Winston Churchill as the man of the half-century. Four-and-a-half decades later, with the year 2000 at hand, one may assume that a new generation of bureau chiefs is huddling to nominate a man of the century, the figure most responsible for shaping the last centenary of the second millennium. In the unlikely event that they, or anyone at Time-Warner, consult these weighty volumes, it is doubtful that the great Englishman will make a return appearance on a fin-de-siecle cover. The distinction should go instead to Adolf Hitler, the Austro-German malefactor under whose shadow we still live. To place, or rather to keep, Hitler at the centre stage of the twentieth century may seem both facile and grotesque, but both Weinberg and Reynolds argue persuasively that the second world war and the cold war, however chaotic, complex and seemingly unrelated, simply cannot be understood without proper attention to the central role of the Nazi dictator. In his massive interpretative essay, A world at arms, Weinberg makes this point time and time again. While devoting relatively little attention to the diplomatic origins of the war on which he has already written extensively the author stresses that Hitler's goals envisaged nothing less than a total reordering of the globe, that his aims could be realized only by war, and that, given the existence of the British empire, his principal objective never veered from the destruction of the United Kingdom. Since he was unable in peacetime to construct an armada capable of tackling the Royal Navy, the German Fiihrer, once he went to war to secure the Eurasian land mass, counted on the Italian and Japanese fleets to make up the naval deficit. It was with this in mind that he organized the Tripartite Pact and prodded Tokyo to strike at both the British and Americans in Southeast Asia, thus transforming an Asian war into a world-wide conflict. That the Japanese failed to share Hitler's global vision, Weinberg concludes, helps to explain the failure of the Third Reich's bid for world power, an effort that, nonetheless, came within a hair's breadth of success.