On September 1, 1939, German forces invaded Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany to begin World War II. Some historians date the war from 1937, with the Japanese invasion of China. Japanese official histories, however, begin with 1931, when their forces overran Manchuria, but perhaps the most accurate place to begin is with the end of World War I. That conflict exacted a horrible human and economic cost, destroyed the existing power structure of Europe, and toppled all the continental empires. It also sowed the seeds for a new conflict.
In January 1919, representatives of the victorious Allied (Entente) powers met in Paris to impose peace terms on the defeated Central Powers. The centerpiece of the settlement, the Treaty of Versailles, was the worst of all possible worlds—too harsh to conciliate but too weak to destroy. It was also never enforced, making almost inevitable a renewal of the struggle.
The Paris peace settlement was drafted chiefly by Britain, France, and the United States. The Germans claimed that they had assumed that the November 1918 armistice would lead to a true negotiated peace treaty, yet in March and May 1918 when they were winning the war, their leaders had imposed a truly harsh settlement on Russia. In the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Russia lost most of its European territory, up to a third of its population, and three-quarters of its iron and coal production. It was also required to pay a heavy indemnity.
Far from being dictated by French premier George Clemenceau, as many Americans still believe, the Paris peace settlement of 1919 was largely the work of British prime minister David Lloyd George and U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, who repeatedly blocked proposals advanced by Clemenceau. The irony is that the British and American leaders prevented a settlement that, although punitive, might have brought actual French and Belgian security and prevented war in 1939.
The most novel creation of the conference was undoubtedly the League of Nations. Clemenceau did not place much stock in a league, but if there had to be one he wanted mandatory membership and an independent military force. The Anglo-American league relied primarily on moral suasion; its strongest weapon was the threat of sanctions.
The most contentious issue at the peace conference, and arguably its most important matter, was that of French and Belgian security. Alsace and Lorraine were returned to France, and for security purposes Belgium received the two small border enclaves of Eupen and Malmédy. France was granted the coal production of the Saar for 15 years in compensation for Germany’s deliberate destruction of French mines at the end of the war. The Saar itself came under League of Nations control, with its inhabitants to decide their future at the end of the period.
A storm of controversy broke out over the Rhineland, the German territory west of the Rhine River, however. France wanted this area to be reconstituted into one or more independent states that would maintain a permanent Allied military presence to guarantee that Germany would not again strike west, but Lloyd George and Wilson saw taking the Rhineland from Germany as “an Alsace-Lorraine in reverse.” They also wished to end the Allied military presence on German soil as soon as a peace treaty was signed.
These vast differences were resolved when Clemenceau agreed to yield on the Rhineland in return for an Anglo-American Treaty of Guarantee, whereby Britain and the United States promised to come to the aid of France should Germany ever invade. The Rhineland would remain part of the new German Republic but would be permanently demilitarized, along with a belt of German territory east of the Rhine 30 miles deep. Allied garrisons would remain for only a limited period: the British would occupy a northern zone for 5 years, the Americans a central zone for 10 years, and the French a southern zone for 15 years. Unfortunately for France, the pact for which it traded away national security never came into force. The U.S. Senate refused to ratify it, and the British government claimed that its acceptance was contingent on American approval.
Germany lost some other territory: northern Schleswig to Denmark and a portion of Silesia and the Polish Corridor to the new state of Poland—both of which the Allies justified along ethnic lines. The Polish Corridor allowed Poland access to the sea but also separated East Prussia from the remainder of Germany and became a major rallying point for German nationalists. Despite these losses, German power remained largely intact; it was still the most powerful state in Central and Western Europe. Nonetheless, Germans keenly resented the territorial losses.
The Treaty of Versailles also limited Germany in both the size and nature of its military establishment. The new German Army, the Reichswehr, was restricted to 100,000 men (with only 6,000 of these officers) in 12-year enlistments. It was denied heavy artillery, tanks, and military aviation, and the German General Staff was to be abolished. The navy was limited to 6 predreadnought battleships, 6 light cruisers, 12 destroyers, and no submarines. From the beginning the Germans violated these provisions. The General Staff remained, although clandestinely in the guise of the Truppenamt (Troop Office); Germany maintained military equipment that was to have been destroyed and worked out arrangements with other states, notably the new Soviet Union, to develop weapons and train military personnel.
Other major provisions of the settlement included Article 231, the “war guilt clause.” It blamed the war on Germany and its allies and was the justification for reparations, which were fixed at $33 billion in 1920, well after Germany had signed the treaty on June 28, 1919. British economist John Maynard Keynes claimed that reparations were a perpetual mortgage on Germany’s future and that there was no way the Germans could pay them, yet Adolf Hitler’s Germany subsequently spent more in rearming. In any case Germany, unlike France following the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, was never really forced to pay.
The breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the peace treaties following the war led to the creation of a number of new states in Central Europe, most notably Poland but also Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Resolving the boundaries of Poland proved difficult, especially in the east; it was not until December 1919 that a commission headed by Lord Curzon drew that line. Neither the new Po-lish government nor Soviet Russia recognized it, however. Romania was greatly enlarged with the addition of Transylvania, which was taken from Hungary, the other principal loser at the peace conference; it was left with only 35 percent of its prewar area. The much reduced rump states of Austria and Hungary were now confronted by Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. The latter three, the so-called Little Entente, allied to prevent a resurgence of their former masters. They were linked with France through a treaty of mutual assistance between that nation and Czechoslovakia.
The Allied solidarity of 1918, more illusion than reality, soon disappeared. When the peace treaties were signed, the United States was already withdrawing into isolation, and Britain was disengaging from the continent. This left France alone among the great powers to enforce the peace settlement. Yet France was weaker in terms of population and economic strength than Germany. In effect, it was left up to the Germans to decide whether they would abide by the treaty provisions, which all Germans regarded as a vengeful Diktat. Moreover, the shame of the Versailles settlement was borne not by the kaiser or the army—who had been responsible for the decisions that led to the defeat—but rather by the leaders of the new democratic Weimar Republic.
The new German government deliberately adopted obstructionist policies, and by 1923 it had halted major reparations payments. French premier Raymond Poincaré acted. He believed that if the Germans were allowed to break part of the settlement, the remainder would soon unravel. In January 1923 Poincaré sent French troops, supported by Belgian and Italian units, into the Ruhr, the industrial heart of Germany. German chancellor Wilhelm Cuno’s government adopted a policy of “passive resistance,” urging the workers not to work and promising to pay their salaries. The German leaders thereby hoped to secure sufficient time for the United States and Britain to force France to depart. Although that pressure was forthcoming, Poincaré refused to back down, and the result was catastrophic inflation in Germany.
The mark had already gone from 4.2 to the dollar in July 1914 to 8.9 in January 1919. It then tumbled precipitously because of deliberate German government policies. By January 1920 it was 39.5 to the dollar, and in January 1922 it was 191.8 to the dollar. Then came the French occupation of the Ruhr and Cuno’s ruinous policy. In January 1923 the mark was 17,972 to the dollar, but by July it was 353,412. In November when the old mark was withdrawn in favor of a new currency, the mark was 4.2 trillion to the dollar. The ensuing economic chaos wiped out the German middle class, many of whom now lost all faith in democracy and voted for Adolf Hitler a decade later.
Germany now agreed to pay reparations under a scaled-down schedule, and French troops withdrew from the Ruhr in 1924. Although Frenchmen generally approved of Poincaré’s action, they also noted its high financial cost and the opposition of Britain and the United States. These factors helped bring the Left to power in France in 1924, and the new government reversed Poincaré’s go-it-alone approach. The new German government of Chancellor Gustav Stresemann, moreover, announced a policy of living up to its treaty obligations. “Fulfillment” and “conciliation” replaced “obstruction” and led to the Locarno Pacts of 1925, by which Germany voluntarily guaranteed its western borders as final and promised not to resort to war with its neighbors and to resolve any disputes through arbitration. For at least half a decade international calm prevailed.
By the 1930s national boundaries were still basically those agreed to in 1919. Italy, Germany, and Japan were still dissatisfied with this situation, however, and in the 1930s the economic difficulties resulting from the Great Depression enhanced popular support in those nations for politicians and military leaders who supported drastic measures, even at the risk of war, to change the situation in the “revisionist” powers’ favor. The status quo powers of France, Great Britain, and the United States saw no advantage in making changes but were simultaneously unwilling to risk war to defend the 1919 settlement. They therefore acquiesced as, step by step, the dissatisfied powers dismantled the peace settlement. From the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 to the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, those who wanted to overturn the status quo used force but not those who sought to maintain it.
The Western democracies seemed paralyzed. This was partly because of the heavy human cost of World War I. France alone had lost 1,397,800 dead or missing in the conflict. Including wounded, 73 percent of French combatants had been casualties. France could not sustain another such bloodletting, and the defensive military doctrine it adopted came to be summed up in the phrase “Stingy with blood; extravagant with steel.” In 1929 France began construction of a defensive belt along the frontier from Switzerland to Belgium. Named for Minister of War André Maginot and never intended as a puncture-proof barricade, the Maginot Line nonetheless helped fix a defensive mind-set in the French military.
By the 1930s, attitudes toward the Great War had changed. German people believed that their nation had not lost the war militarily but had been betrayed by communists, leftists, pacifists, and Jews. Especially in Britain and the United States, many came to believe that the Central Powers had not been responsible for the war, that nothing had been gained by the war, and that the settlement had been too hard on Germany.
In Britain there was some sympathy in influential upper-class circles for fascist doctrines and dictators, who were seen as opponents of communism. British member of Parliament Winston Churchill, for example, praised Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. The British government avoided continental commitments, and its leaders embraced appeasement, the notion that meeting the more legitimate demands of the dictators would remove all need for war. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (1937–1940) was the principal architect of this policy. There was also great concern in Britain, as elsewhere, over the possible air bombardment of cities in any future war.
The United States had been one of the few powers actually to benefit from the war. At modest cost in terms of human casualties, it had emerged from the struggle as the world’s leading financial power. Yet Americans were dissatisfied with their involvement in European affairs; they believed that they had been misled by wartime propaganda and that the arms manufacturers (the so-called merchants of death) had drawn the nation into the war to ensure payment for sales to the Entente side. In the 1930s the United States adhered to rigid neutrality, and Congress passed legislation preventing the United States from loaning money or selling arms to combatants in a war. Unfortunately, such legislation benefited the aggressor states, which were already well armed, and handicapped their victims. U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–1945) understood the threat that the aggressors posed to the world community, but most Americans eschewed international involvement.
The Soviet Union was also largely absorbed in its internal affairs. Following World War I, Russia experienced a protracted and bloody civil war as the communist “Reds,” who had seized control in November 1917, fought off the “Whites,” who were supported by the Western Allies. War communism ended with the Russian Civil War in 1921 and was replaced by the New Economic Policy, which was a mixed economy and brought the country back to stability and, by 1928, prewar levels of production and consumption. If any era qualifies in Soviet Russia, this period (1921–1928) was its golden age. In the 1930s Soviet leader Joseph Stalin pushed both the collectivization of agriculture, bringing the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens and the industrialization essential for modern warfare.
In foreign policy, Stalin was a revisionist who did not accept the new frontiers in Eastern Europe as final. Particularly vexing to him was the new Poland, which had been partially carved from former Russian territory. Russia had also lost additional lands to Poland following its defeat in the 1919–1920 Russo-Polish War.
After 1933 and Adolf Hitler’s accession to power, Stalin became especially disturbed over Germany, for the German führer (leader) had clearly stated his opposition to communism and his intention of bringing large stretches of Eastern Europe under German control, even by the sword. The German threat led Stalin to turn to collective security and to pursue an internationalist course. In 1934 the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations.
Simultaneously, Stalin launched unprecedented purges against his own people, largely motivated by his own paranoia and desire to hold on to power. The number of victims may have been as high as 40 million, with half of these killed. The so-called Great Terror consumed almost all the old guard Bolshevik leadership and senior military officers. The consequences of the latter were felt in 1941 when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union.
Negotiations between Western leaders and the Soviet Union continued. The problem was that the West could offer nothing Stalin wanted. Thus, despite the fact that the Kremlin was willing to enter into arrangements with the West against Germany and Japan, no effective international coalition was forged.
In 1931 Japan seized Manchuria. Japan had been one of the chief beneficiaries of World War I. At little cost, it had secured the German islands north of the equator and concessions in China. Riding the crest of an ultranationalist wave, Japanese leaders sought to take advantage of the chaos of the worldwide economic depression and the continuing upheaval in China after the 1911 revolution to secure the natural resources their country lacked. The Japanese sought these not only in Manchuria but also in Mongolia, China proper, and Southeast Asia.
Although Japan had many of the trappings of a democracy, it was not one. The army and navy departments were independent of the civilian authorities; from 1936 onward the ministers of war and navy had to be serving officers, giving the military a veto over public policy, as no government could be formed without its concurrence. Army leaders had little sympathy for parliamentary rule or civil government, and in the 1930s they dominated the government and occasionally resorted to political assassinations, even of prime ministers.
On the night of September 18, 1931, Japanese staff officers of the elite Guandong (Kwantung) Army in southern Manchuria set off an explosion near the main line of the South Manchuria Railway near Mukden, an act they blamed on nearby Chinese soldiers. The Japanese military then took control of Mukden and began the conquest of all Manchuria. Tokyo had been presented with a fait accompli by its own military, but it supported the action.
The Japanese held that they had acted only in self-defense and demanded that the crisis be resolved through direct Sino-Japanese negotiation. China, however, took the matter to the League of Nations, the first major test for that organization. The League Council was reluctant to embark on tough action against Japan, and Japan ignored its calls to withdraw its troops, continuing military operations. In February 1932 Japan proclaimed the “independence” of Manchuria in the guise of the new state of Manzhouguo (Manchukuo). A protocol that September established a Japanese protectorate over Manchukuo. In 1934 the Japanese installed China’s last Manchu emperor, deposed in 1911, Aixinjuelo Puyi (Aisingioro P’u-i, known to Westerners as Henry Pu-Yi) as emperor of Manchukuo.
A League of Nations investigating committee blamed Japan and concluded that only the presence of Japanese troops kept the government of Manchukuo in power. On February 24, 1933, the League Assembly approved the report of its committee and the Stimson doctrine, named for Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, of nonrecognition of Manchukuo. Of 42 member states, only Japan voted no. Tokyo then gave notice of its intention to withdraw from the League of Nations.
Manchukuo was larger than France and Germany combined, but in March Japanese troops added to it the province of Rehe (Jehol). Early in April they moved against Chinese forces south of the Great Wall to within a few miles of Beijing (Peking) and Tianjin (Tienstin). In May Chinese forces evacuated Beijing, then under the authority of pro-Japanese Chinese leaders. The latter concluded a truce with Japan that created a demilitarized zone administered by Chinese friendly to Japan.
Germany was the next to move. In January 1933 Adolf Hitler became German chancellor, by entirely legitimate means, and in October 1933 he withdrew Germany from both the League of Nations and the international disarmament conference meeting in Geneva. In July 1934 Austrian Nazis, acting with the tacit support of Berlin, attempted to seize power in Vienna and achieve Anschluss (union) with Germany. Ultimately Austrian authorities put down the putsch without outside assistance, although Mussolini, who considered Austria under his influence, ordered Italian troops to the Brenner Pass.
Germany was then still largely unarmed, and Hitler denied responsibility for the coup attempt, expressed regret at the murder of Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, and assured the world that Germany had no role in the failed coup. The attempted Nazi takeover of Austria was clearly a setback for Hitler. Secure in French support, that September Mussolini met with new Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schu-schnigg in Rome and announced that Italy would defend Austrian independence. A French pact with Italy rested on agreement with Yugoslavia, and on October 9, 1934, King Alexander of Yugoslavia arrived at Marseilles for discussions with the French government. Croatian terrorists assassinated him and French foreign minister Louis Barthou. This event was a great embarrassment for France, although Barthou’s successor, Pierre Laval, did secure the pact with Italy. The January 1935 French-Italian accords called for joint consultation and close cooperation between the two powers in Central Europe and reaffirmed the independence and territorial integrity of Austria. They also recommended a multilateral security pact for Eastern Europe. In secret provisions Italy promised to support France with its air force in the event of a German move into the Rhineland, and France agreed to provide troops to aid Italy if the Germans should threaten Austria. France also transferred land to the Italian colonies of Libya and Eritrea, and Laval promised Mussolini that France would not oppose Italy’s efforts to realize its colonial ambitions. Thereafter Mussolini behaved as if he had France’s approval to wage aggressive war.
Only a week later, with Hitler declaring the Saar to be his last territorial demand in Europe (the first of many such statements), 90 percent of Saarlanders voting chose to rejoin Germany. On March 1, 1935, the League Council formally returned the Saar to German control. A fortnight afterward on March 16, Hitler proclaimed the rearmament of Germany. Secret rearmament had been under way for some time, including an air training center at Lipetsk, a gas warfare school at Torski, and a tank school at Kazan, all in the Soviet Union, but Hitler now announced publicly that the Reich would reintroduce compulsory military service and increase its army to more than 500,000 men, moves he justified on the grounds that the Allies had not disarmed. France, Britain, and Italy all protested but did nothing further to compel Germany to observe its treaty obligations. In April 1935 Laval, Prime Minister J. Ramsay MacDonald of Britain, and Mussolini met at Stresa on Lake Maggiori and formed the so-called Stresa Front, agreeing “to oppose unilateral repudiation of treaties that may endanger the peace” (with “of Europe” being added at Mussolini’s request).
On May 2, France and the Soviet Union signed a five-year pact of mutual assistance in the event of unprovoked aggression against either power. The French rejected a military convention that would have coordinated their military response to any German aggression, however. On May 16 the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia signed a similar mutual assistance pact, but the Soviet Union was not obligated to provide armed assistance unless France first fulfilled its commitments.
Britain took the next step in the appeasement of Germany, shattering the Stresa Front. On June 18, 1935, the British government signed a naval agreement with Germany that condoned the latter’s violation of the Versailles Treaty. In spite of having promised Paris in February that it would take no unilateral action toward Germany, London permitted the Reich to build a surface navy up to 35 percent that of Britain, in effect a force larger than the navy of either France or Italy. London also allowed Germany 45 percent of the Royal Navy strength in submarines, armaments prohibited Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. British leaders were unconcerned. The Royal Navy had only 50 submarines, and this would mean that the Germans could build only 23. Moreover, the British were confident that asdic, later known as sonar, would enable them to detect submarines out to a range of several thousand yards. The Anglo-German Naval Agreement was the first occasion when any power sanctioned Germany’s misdeeds and won Britain the displeasure of its ally France.
On October 3, 1935, believing with some justification that he had Western support, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia (Abyssinia). Long-standing border disputes between Italian Somaliland and Ethiopia were the excuse. Mussolini’s goal was to create a great Italian empire in Africa and to avenge Italy’s defeat by the Ethiopians at Adowa in 1896. The outcome of the Italo-Ethiopian War was a foregone conclusion. In May 1936 Italian forces took Abbis Ababa, and Mussolini proclaimed the king of Italy as the emperor of Ethiopia.
On October 7, 1935, the League of Nations condemned Italy, the first time it had branded a European state as an aggressor. But behind the scenes British foreign secretary Sir Samuel Hoare and French foreign minister Pierre Laval devised the infamous Hoare-Laval Proposals to broker away Ethiopia to Italy in return for Italian support against Germany. Public furor in these two countries swept both men from office when the deal became known.
Ultimately the League of Nations voted to impose some economic sanctions but not on oil, which would have brought an Italian withdrawal. In the end, even those ineffectual sanctions that had been voted for were lifted. Italy, like Japan, had gambled and won, dealing another blow to collective security.
Probably the seminal event on the road to World War II occurred in early 1936, when Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland. On March 7, 1936, some 22,000 lightly armed German troops marched into the Rhineland, defying not just the Treaty of Versailles but also the Locarno Pacts, which Germany had voluntarily negotiated. Hitler deliberately scheduled the operation to occur while France was absorbed by a bitterly contested election campaign that brought the leftist Popular Front to power.
Incredibly, France had no contingency plans for such an eventuality. French intelligence services also grossly overestimated the size of the German forces in the operation and believed Hitler’s false claims that the Luftwaffe had achieved parity with the French Armée de l’Air. Vainly seeking to disguise its own inaction, Paris appealed to Britain for support, but Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden made it clear that Britain would not fight for the Rhineland, which was after all German territory.
Had the French acted, their forces would in all likelihood have rolled over the Germans, which would probably have meant the end of the Nazi regime. Remilitarization of the Rhineland provided Germany protection for the Ruhr and a springboard for invading France and Belgium. It also led Belgian leaders that October to renounce their treaty of mutual assistance with France and seek security in neutrality.
Almost immediately after the German remilitarization of the Rhineland another international crisis erupted, this time in Spain, where civil war began on July 18, 1936. The issue centered on whether Spain would follow the modernizing reforms of the rest of Western Europe or maintain its then-present structure, favored by Spanish traditionalists. When the Republicans won a narrow victory in the Spanish elections of 1936, the traditionalists, known as the Nationalists, took to arms.
It is probable, though by no means certain, that the Republicans would have won the civil war had Spain been left alone to decide its fate. Certainly the conflict would have ended much sooner. Germany and Italy intervened early, providing critical air support that allowed the airlifting of Nationalist troops and equipment across the Strait of Gibraltar from Morocco to Nationalist-held territory in Spain, in effect the first large-scale military airlift in history.
Germany even formed an air detachment, the Kondor Legion, to fight in Spain, a key factor in the ultimate Nationalist victory. The Germans also tested their latest military equipment under combat conditions, developed new fighter tactics, and learned the necessity of close coordination of air and ground operations, along with the value of dive-bombing. Italy also provided important naval support and sent three divisions of troops, artillery, and aircraft.
Surprisingly, the Western democracies did not support the Spanish Republic. France initially sent some arms but, under heavy British pressure, reversed its stance. British leaders devised a noninterventionist policy. Although all the great powers promised to observe it, only the Western democracies did so. This agreement, which made it impossible for the Republicans to obtain the arms they needed, was probably the chief factor in their defeat.
Only the Soviet Union and Mexico provided military aid to the Republic. Stalin apparently hoped for a protracted struggle that would entangle the Western democracies and Germany on the other side of the European continent. During the war the Soviet Union sent advisers, aircraft, tanks, and artillery. Eventually this Soviet aid permitted the Spanish communists, not a significant political factor in 1936, to take over the Republican government. Finally, in March 1939 Nationalist forces, led by General Francisco Franco, entered Madrid, and by April hostilities ended.
The Western democracies emerged poorly from the test of the Spanish Civil War. Although tens of thousands of foreign volunteers had fought in Spain, most of these for the republic, the governments of the Western democracies had remained aloof, and many doubted that the West had any will left to defend democracy. Internationally, the major effect of the fighting in Spain was to bring Germany and Italy together. In October 1936 they agreed to cooperate in Spain, to collaborate in matters of “parallel interests,” and to work to defend “European civilization” against communism. Thus was born the Rome-Berlin Axis.
On November 25 Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact to oppose activities of the Comintern (Third International), created to spread communism. Germany and Japan also signed a secret agreement the same day that provided that if either state was the object of an unprovoked attack by the Soviet Union, then the other would do nothing to assist the Soviet Union. On November 6, 1937, Italy joined the Anti-Comintern Pact. Shortly afterward Mussolini announced that Italy would not assist Austria against a German attempt to consummate the Anschluss. Italy also withdrew from the League of Nations and recognized Manchukuo as an independent state in November 1937, followed by Germany in May 1938.
Japan meanwhile continued to strengthen its position in the Far East, asserting its exclusive right to control China. Tokyo demanded an end to Western loans and military advisers to China and threatened the use of force if such aid continued. In 1935 Japan began encroaching upon several of China’s northern provinces. The Chinese government at Nanjing (Nanking), headed by Generalissimo Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), initially pursued a policy of appeasement vis-à-vis the Japanese, but students and the Chinese military demanded action. The Chinese Communists expressed themselves willing to cooperate with the Nationalist government and place their armies under its command if Nanjing would adopt an anti-Japanese policy. The rapid growth of anti-Japanese sentiment in China and the increasing military strength of the Nationalists alarmed Japanese military leaders, who worked to establish a pro-Japanese regime in China’s five northern provinces.
On the night of July 7, 1937, a clash occurred west of Beijing between Japanese and Chinese troops. Later that month after Nanjing rejected a Japanese ultimatum, the Japanese invaded the coveted northern provinces. In a few days they had occupied both Tianjin (Tientsin) and Beijing (Peking), and by the end of the year Japan had extended its control into all five Chinese provinces north of the Yellow River. In mid-December Japan also installed a new government in Beijing. Japan never declared war against China, however, enabling it to evade U.S. neutrality legislation and purchase American raw materials and oil. This also permitted Washington to send aid to China, though.
The fighting was not confined to northern China, for in August 1937 the Japanese attacked the great commercial city of Shanghai. Not until November, after three months of hard fighting involving the best Nationalist troops, did the city fall. Japanese forces then advanced up the Changjiang (Yangtse) River and in December took Nanjing, where they committed wide-scale atrocities.
As scholars have noted, Japan after the war developed a collective amnesia over its actions at Nanjing and its atrocities in the war through South Asia in general. This Japanese evasion of responsibility stands in sharp contrast to German attempts to come to terms with the Holocaust and has affected Japan’s relations with China and other nations in Asia right up to the present.
While trying to clear the Changjiang River of all Western shipping, on December 12, 1937, Japanese forces attacked a U.S. Navy gunboat, the Panay. Other American ships belonging to an oil company were also bombed and sunk, and British vessels were shelled. Strong protests from Washington and London brought profuse apologies from Tokyo. The Japanese, falsely claiming that they had not realized the nationality of the ships, stated their readiness to pay compensation and give guarantees that such incidents would not be repeated. Washington and London accepted these amends, and the episode only served to convince Tokyo that it had little to fear from Western intervention.
Again China appealed to the League of Nations, which once more condemned Japan. Again, though, the West failed to withhold critical supplies and financial credits from Japan, so once more collective security failed. By the end of 1938 Japanese troops had taken the great commercial cities of Tianjin, Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Hankow, and Guangzhou (Canton); the Nationalists were forced to relocate their capital to the interior city of Chongqing (Chungking), which Japan bombed heavily. In desperation, the Chinese demolished the dikes on the Huang He (Hwang Ho, known to Westerners as the Yellow River), costing hundreds of thousands of lives and flooding much of northern China until 1944.
Japan was also confronting the Soviet Union. Fighting between Japanese and Soviet troops began in 1938 in the poorly defined triborder area normally referred to as Changkufeng where Siberia, Manchukuo, and Korea met. Although no state of war was declared, significant battles were fought, especially at Changkufeng Hill in 1938 and Khalkhin Gol (Nomonhan) in 1939. The fighting ended advantageously for the Soviets. A cease-fire in September 1939 preempted a planned Japanese counterattack, and the dispute was resolved by treaty in June 1940. The fighting undoubtedly influenced Stalin’s decision to sign a nonaggression pact with Germany in August 1939. It also gave Tokyo a new appreciation of Soviet fighting ability and in 1941 helped to influence Japanese leaders to strike not north into Siberia but against the easier targets of the European colonies in Southeast Asia.
In the West, by 1938 the situation was such as to encourage Hitler to embark upon his own territorial expansion. Mussolini was now linked with Hitler, while France was experiencing another period of ministerial instability. In Britain “appeasement” was in full force, so much so that in February 1938 Anthony Eden, a staunch proponent of collective security, resigned as foreign secretary.
Austria was Hitler’s first step. In February 1938, Austrian chancellor Schuschnigg traveled to Berchtesgaden at Hitler’s insistence to meet with the German leader. Under heavy pressure, Schuschnigg agreed to appoint Austrian Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart as minister of the interior and other Austrian Nazis as ministers of justice and foreign affairs. On March 9, however, in an attempt to maintain his nation’s independence, Schuschnigg announced a plebiscite on the issue of the Anschluss to be held in only four days, hoping that the short interval would not allow the Nazis to mobilize effectively.
Hitler was determined that no plebiscite be held, and on March 11 Seyss-Inquart presented Schuschnigg with an ultimatum demanding his resignation and postponement of the vote under threat of invasion by German troops, already mobilized on the border. Schuschnigg yielded, canceling the plebiscite and resigning. Seyss-Inquart then took power and invited in the German troops “to preserve order,” although German forces had already crossed the frontier. Germany’s military was hardly ready for war; hundreds of German tanks and vehicles of the German Eighth Army broke down on the drive toward Vienna.
On March 13 Berlin declared Austria to be part of the Reich, and the next day perhaps 1 million Austrians gave Hitler an enthusiastic welcome to Vienna. France and Britain lodged formal protests with Berlin but did nothing more. After the war Austrian leaders denied culpability for their association with the Third Reich and claimed that their country was the first victim of Nazi aggression.
The Anschluss greatly strengthened Germany’s position in Central Europe. Germany was now in direct contact with Italy, Yugoslavia, and Hungary and controlled virtually all the communications of Southeastern Europe. Czechoslovakia was isolated, and its trade outlets were at German mercy. Militarily, Germany outflanked the powerful western Czech defenses. It was thus not surprising that despite Hitler’s pledges to respect the territorial integrity of Czechoslovakia, he should next seek to bring that state under his control.
In Austria, Hitler had added 6 million Germans to the Reich, but another 3.5 million lived in Czechoslovakia. Germans living there had long complained about discrimination in a state that had only minority Czechs, Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians, Ukrainians, and Poles. In 1938, however, Czechoslovakia had the highest standard of living east of Germany and was the only remaining democracy in Central Europe.
Strategically, Czechoslovakia was the keystone of Europe. It had a military alliance with France, a well-trained 400,000-man army, and the important Skoda munitions complex at Pilsen as well as strong fortifications in the west. Unfortunately for the Czechs, the latter were in the Erzegeberge (Ore Mountains) bordering the Bohemian bowl, where the population was almost entirely German. From the German point of view, it could now be said that Bohemia-Moravia, almost one-third German in population, protruded into the Reich. Hitler now took up and enlarged the past demands of Konrad Henlein’s Sudetendeutsch (Southern German) Party to relieve legitimate complaints into a call for outright separation of the German regions from Czechoslovakia and their union with Germany.
In May 1938 during key Czechoslovakian elections, German troops massed on the border and threatened invasion. Confident of French support, the Czechs mobilized their army. Both France and the Soviet Union had stated their willingness to go to war to defend Czechoslovakia, and in the end nothing happened. Hitler then began to construct fortifications along the German frontier in the west. Known to Germans as the West Wall, these were clearly designed to prevent France from supporting its eastern allies.
Western leaders, who believed that they had just averted war, now pondered whether Czechoslovakia, which had been formed only as a consequence of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, was worth a general European war. British prime minister Chamberlain concluded that it was not. In July he sent an emissary to Prague as a mediator and, on September 7, based on his suggestions, Prague offered Henlein practically everything the Sudeten Germans demanded, short of independence.
A number of knowledgeable Germans believed that Hitler was leading their state to destruction. During August and early September 1938 several opposition emissaries traveled to London with messages from head of the Abwehr (German military intelligence) Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and chief of the German General Staff General of Artillery Ludwig Beck. They warned London of Hitler’s intentions and urged a strong British stand. Beck even pledged, prior to his resignation in mid-August, that if Britain would agree to fight for Czechoslovakia, he would stage a putsch against Hitler. Nothing came of this, however, as London was committed to appeasement.
By mid-September Hitler was demanding “self-determination” for the Sudeten Germans and threatening war if it was not granted. Clearly, he was promoting a situation to justify German military intervention. France would then have to decide whether to honor its pledge to Czechoslovakia. If it chose to do so, this would bring on a general European war.
In this critical situation Chamberlain asked Hitler for a personal meeting and on September 15 flew to Germany and met with Hitler at Berchtesgaden. There Hitler informed him that the Sudeten Germans must be able to unite with Germany and that he was willing to risk war to accomplish this. London and Paris now decided to force the principle of self-determination on Prague, demanding on September 19 that the Czechs agree to an immediate transfer to Germany of those areas more than 50 percent German. When Prague asked that the matter be referred to arbitration, as provided under the Locarno Pacts, London and Paris declared this unacceptable. The Czechs, they said, would have to accept the Anglo-French proposals or bear the consequences alone.
The British and French decision to desert Czechoslovakia resulted from many factors. The peoples of both countries dreaded a general war, especially with air attacks, for which neither nation believed itself adequately prepared. The Germans also bluffed the British and French into believing that their Luftwaffe was much more powerful than was the case, and both Chamberlain and French premier Édouard Daladier feared the destruction of their capitals from the air. The Western leaders also thought they would be fighting alone. They did not believe they could count on the Soviet Union, whose military was still reeling from Stalin’s purges. It also seemed unlikely that the United States would assist even with supplies, given its neutrality policies. Nor were the British dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa likely to support Great Britain in a war for Czechoslovakia. In France and especially in Britain there were also those who saw Nazism as a bulwark against communism and hoped that Hitler could be diverted eastward and enmeshed in a war with Soviet Russia in which communism and fascism might destroy one another.
Chamberlain, who had scant experience in foreign affairs, hoped to reconcile differences and prevent a general European war. He strongly believed in the sanctity of contracts and could not accept that the leader of the most powerful state in Western Europe was a blackmailer and a liar. But the West also suffered from a moral uncertainty. In 1919 it had touted “self-determination of peoples,” and by this standard Germany had a right to all it had hitherto demanded. The transfer of the Sudetenland to the Reich did not seem too high a price to pay for a satisfied Germany and a peaceful Europe. Finally, Hitler stated repeatedly that once his demands upon Czechoslovakia had been satisfied, he would have no further territorial ambitions in Europe.
Under heavy British and French pressure, Czechoslovakia accepted the Anglo-French proposals. On September 22 Chamberlain again traveled to Germany and met with Hitler, who, to Chamberlain’s surprise, demanded that all Czech officials be withdrawn from the Sudeten area within 10 days and that no military, economic, or traffic establishments be damaged or removed. These demands led to the most serious international crisis in Europe since 1918. Prague informed London that Hitler’s demands were absolutely unacceptable. London and Paris agreed and decided not to pressure Prague to secure its acceptance. It thus appeared that Hitler might have to carry out his threat to use force and that a general European war might result.
Following appeals by Roosevelt and Mussolini to Hitler, however, the German leader agreed to a meeting. Chamberlain, Daladier, and Mussolini then repaired to Munich to meet with Hitler on September 29. The Soviet Union was not invited, and Czechoslovakia was not officially represented. There were no real negotiations, the object being to give Hitler the Sudetenland in order to avoid war.
The Munich agreement, dated September 30, gave Hitler everything he demanded, and early on October 1, 1938, German troops marched across the frontier. Other neighboring states joined in. Poland demanded, and received, an area around Teschen of some 400 square miles with a population of 240,000 people, only 100,000 of whom were Poles, and in November Hungary secured some 4,800 square miles of Czechoslovakia with about 1 million people.
In retrospect, it would have been better for the West to have fought Germany in September 1938. The lineup against Germany might have included the Soviet Union and Poland, but even discounting them, the German Army would have been forced to fight against France and Britain as well as Czechoslovakia. Hitler’s claims to the contrary, Germany was not ready for war in September 1938. The Luftwaffe had 1,230 first-line aircraft, including 600 bombers and 400 fighters, but nearly half of this number was earmarked for use in the east, leaving the rest too thinly stretched over the Reich frontier to counter any serious offensive by the French Air Force and the Royal Air Force (RAF). The Luftwaffe was also short of bombs. Worse, on the ground only five German fighting divisions and seven reserve divisions were available to hold eight times that number of French divisions.
Britain too was far from ready, its rearmament program having begun only the year before. France had many more artillery pieces than Germany but was weak in the air. According to one estimate, France had only 250 first-quality fighters and 350 bombers out of perhaps 1,375 frontline aircraft, but France could have counted on 35 well-armed and well-equipped Czech divisions, backed by substantial numbers of artillery and tanks, and perhaps 1,600 aircraft.
Later those responsible for the Munich debacle advanced the argument that it bought a year for the Western democracies to rearm. Winston Churchill stated that British fighter squadrons equipped with modern aircraft rose from only 5 in September 1938 to 26 by July 1939 (and 47 by July 1940), but he also noted that the year “gained” by Munich left the democracies “in a much worse position compared to Hitler’s Germany than they had been at the Munich crisis.”
The September 1938 crisis had far-reaching international effects. Chamberlain and Daladier were received with cheers at home, the British prime minister reporting that he believed he had brought back “peace in our time.” But the agreement effectively ended the French security system, since its eastern allies now questioned French commitments to them. Stalin, always suspicious, was further alienated from the West. He expressed the view that Chamberlain and Daladier had surrendered Czechoslovakia to Hitler to facilitate Germany’s Drang nach Osten (Drive to the East) and a war between Germany and the Soviet Union.
Despite Hitler’s assurance that the Sudetenland was his last territorial demand, events soon proved the contrary. The day after Munich, Hitler told his aides that he would annex the remainder of the country at the first opportunity. Within a few months Hitler took advantage of the internal situation in Czechoslovakia. In March 1939 he threw his support to the leader of the Slovak Popular Party, Jozef Tiso, who sought complete independence for Slovakia. On March 14 Slovakia and Ruthenia declared their independence. That same day Hitler summoned elderly Czech president Emil Hácha to Berlin, where the commander of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring, threatened the immediate destruction of Prague unless Moravia and Bohemia were made Reich protectorates. German bombers, he alleged, were awaiting the order to take off. Hácha signed, and that same day, March 15, Nazi troops occupied what remained of Czechoslovakia. The Czech lands became the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia,” while Slovakia became a vassal state of the Reich.
Thirty-five highly trained and well-equipped Czech divisions disappeared from the anti-Hitler order of battle. Hitler had also eliminated what he had referred to as “that damned airfield,” while the output of the Skoda arms complex would now supply the Reich’s legions. In Bohemia and Moravia the Wehrmacht acquired 1,582 aircraft, 2,000 artillery pieces, and sufficient equipment to arm 20 divisions. Any increase in armaments that Britain and France achieved by March 1939 was more than counterbalanced by German gains in Czechoslovakia, which included nearly one-third of the tanks they deployed in the west in the spring of 1940. Between August 1938 and September 1939 Skoda produced nearly as many arms as all British arms factories combined.
Hungarian troops crossed into Ruthenia and incorporated it into Hungary. Later in March Germany demanded from Lithuania the immediate return of Memel, with its mostly German population. Lithuania had received the Baltic city after World War I to gain access to the sea but had no recourse but to comply.
Hitler’s seizure of the rest of Czechoslovakia demonstrated that his demands were not limited to Germans and were rather determined by the desire for Lebensraum (living space). His repudiation of the formal pledges given Chamberlain at Munich did serve to convince the British that they could no longer trust Hitler. Indeed, Britain and France responded with a series of guarantees to the smaller states now threatened by Germany.
Clearly Poland would be the next pressure point, as the German press orchestrated charges of Polish brutality against its German minority. On March 31 Britain and France extended a formal guarantee to support Poland in the event of a German attack. At the 11th hour and under the worst possible circumstances, with Czechoslovakia lost and the Soviet Union alienated, Britain had changed its East European policy and agreed to do what the French had sought in the 1920s.
Mussolini took advantage of the general European situation to strengthen Italy’s position in the Balkans. In April 1939 he sent Italian troops into Albania. King Zog fled, whereupon an Albanian constituent assembly voted to offer the crown to King Victor Emanuel III of Italy. On April 13 Britain and France extended a guarantee to defend Greece and Romania.
The Western powers began to make belated military preparations for an inevitable war, and they worked to secure a pact with the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, the guarantee to Poland gave the Soviet Union protection on its western frontier, virtually the most it could have secured in any negotiations.
On May 23 Hitler met with his leading generals at the Reich Chancellory. He reviewed Germany’s territorial requirements and the need to resolve these by expansion eastward. War, Hitler declared, was inevitable, and he announced that he intended to attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity.
The same month Britain and France initiated negotiations with the Soviet Union for a mutual assistance pact. Although negotiations continued until August, these failed to reach agreement. Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia were all unwilling to allow Soviet armies within their borders, even to defend against German attack. Many in these countries feared the Soviets more than the Germans, and Polish leaders refused to believe that Hitler would risk war with Britain and France. But due to the 1920 Russo-Polish War, Poland’s eastern border extended almost to Minsk, and the Soviets believed that the French and British wished them to take the brunt of the German attack. The Poles also had an exaggerated sense of their own military power. In any case, the Anglo-French negotiators refused to sacrifice Poland and the Baltic states to Stalin as they had handed Czechoslovakia to Hitler.
While the Kremlin had been negotiating more or less openly with Britain and France, it concurrently sought an understanding with Germany, even to the point of Stalin dispatching personal emissaries to Berlin. On March 10, 1939, in an address to the Eighteenth Party Congress of the Soviet Union, Stalin had said that the Soviet Union did not intend to “pull anyone else’s chestnuts out of the fire.” He thus signaled to Hitler his readiness to abandon collective security and negotiate an agreement with Berlin. Within a week Hitler had annexed Bohemia and Moravia, confident that the Soviet Union would not intervene. Another consideration for Stalin was that the Soviet Union potentially faced war on two fronts. Japanese pressure on Mongolia and the Maritime Provinces may well have played a significant role in predisposing Stalin to make his pact with Hitler.
In early May 1939, Stalin gave further encouragement to Hitler when he dismissed Commissar for Foreign Affairs Maksim Litvinov and appointed Vyacheslav Molotov in his place. Litvinov was both a champion of collective security and a Jew. Hitler later said that the dismissal of Litvinov made fully evident Stalin’s wish to transform its relations with Germany. Contacts begun in May culminated in the Nazi-Soviet pact of August, signed on August 23 in Moscow by Molotov and German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.
The Soviet-Nazi agreement signed that night consisted of an open 10-year nonaggression pact together with two secret protocols, which did not become generally known until Rudolf Hess revealed them during the proceedings of the International Tribunal at Nuremberg after the war. These secret arrangements, never publicly acknowledged by the Soviet Union until 1990, partitioned Eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union in advance of the German invasion of Poland, for which Hitler had now in effect received Stalin’s permission. Any future territorial rearrangement of the area would involve its division between the two powers. The Soviet sphere included eastern Poland, the Romanian province of Bessarabia, Estonia, Latvia, and Finland. Lithuania went to Germany; a month later Hitler traded it to Stalin for further territorial concessions in Poland. In addition, a trade convention accompanying the pact provided that the Soviet Union would supply vast quantities of raw materials to Germany in exchange for military technology and finished goods. This economic arrangement was immensely valuable to Germany early in the war, as Churchill later made quite clear to Stalin.
Certainly Stalin expected that Hitler would face a protracted war in the west that would allow the Soviet Union time to rebuild its military. All indications are that Stalin welcomed the pact with Germany, while he regarded the subsequent wartime alliance with Britain and the United States with fear and suspicion. This becomes understandable when one realizes that Stalin’s primary concern was with the internal stability of the Soviet Union. The Non-Aggression Pact nevertheless had the impact of a thunderbolt upon the world community. Communism and Nazism, supposed to be ideological opposites on the worst possible terms, had come together, dumbfounding a generation more versed in ideology than power politics.
On August 22 Hitler summoned his generals and announced his intention to invade Poland. Neither Britain nor France, he said, had the leadership necessary for a life-and-death struggle: “Our enemies are little worms,” he said, “I saw them at Munich.” British and French armament did not as yet amount to much. Germany therefore had much to gain and little to lose, for the Western powers probably would not fight. In any case, Germany must accept the risks and act with reckless resolution.
The German invasion of Poland, set for August 26, occurred on September 1, a delay caused by Italy’s decision to remain neutral. Prompted by his foreign minister and son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini lost faith in a German victory. Ciano proposed that Mussolini tell Hitler that Italy would enter the conflict only if Germany would agree to supply certain armaments and raw materials. On August 25 the Germans rescinded their plans and engaged in frenzied discussions. The next day Mussolini asked for immediate delivery of 170 million tons of industrial products and raw materials, an impossible request. Hitler then asked that Mussolini maintain benevolent neutrality toward Germany and continue military preparations so as to fool the English and French, and Mussolini agreed.
On September 1 following false charges that Polish forces had crossed onto German soil and killed German border guards—an illusion completed by the murder of concentration camp prisoners who were dressed in Polish military uniforms—German forces invaded Poland. On September 3 following expiration of ultimatums to Germany, Britain and France declared war on Germany.
SPENCER C. TUCKER
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