1918-1939: What Really Started World War 2?

September. Nomber the 1st, 1939, German troops thrust deep into Poland to win a swift and absolute victory. Barely 20 years earlier, their
forefathers had also been on the march, but back into their homeland as a defeated army. In November 1918, after 4 years of World War I, Germany’s Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II had been forced to abdicate. His armies were being ground down by a remorseless offensive by British, French, and US troops. His people faced starvation.
But already a dangerous myth was taking root. The German generals and troops claimed that they hadn’t been defeated in battle, but betrayed by their own cowardly politicians. Even so, at 11:00 in the morning on November the 11th, 1918, the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, World War I came to an end.
The following month, President Woodrow Wilson of the United States arrived in Europe, promising to create a new world order. He persuaded the world’s leaders to sign up to a new League of Nations. At the Treaty of Versailles, they agreed that from now on, disputes between countries would be resolved not by fighting, but by debate in the league.
The peoples of Europe were set free and Germany’s ally, the Austrohungarian Empire, was dismembered. Out of it, new nations were created. Austria, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Germany itself was greatly reduced in size. But this process contained a time bomb.
Not everyone celebrated the birth of countries like Czechoslovakia. Several of them contained substantial German minorities. One day the desire to reunite the German peoples would come to haunt Europe. The wartorrn German people also had one final indignity inflicted on them. They were forced to pay a massive 6.
6 billion pounds in reparations to France and Britain, something they could ill afford. And when he returned to America, Wilson’s new world order immediately fell apart. The US Congress decided it could not risk being sucked into another war in Europe. It refused to join his league and the US withdrew into isolationism. Germany was now a very different nation.
It was still Europe’s biggest country, but its militaristic monarchy had gone. It had become a democracy. But its government, the so-called VHimar Republic, was soon struck by a series of hammer bones. Street battles erupted between extreme right-wing nationalists and communists trying to start a revolution.
Then in 1923, the country was devastated by hyperinflation which reached hundreds of percent a month. Ordinary people’s savings were wiped out. This was fertile ground for a new breed of rabbel rousing right-wing politicians. Among them, Adolf Hitler. Hitler had been born in Austria. He had fought bravely as a soldier in World War I and been awarded the Iron Cross.
On returning to Germany, he settled in Munich and his fiery oratory soon enabled him to seize control of the small national socialist or Nazi party. In October 1923, Hitler and his henchmen attempted an armed coup against the VHimar government. It failed and he was sentenced to 9 months in prison.
He wrote a book, Mine Camp, My Struggle, in which he blamed Germany’s ills on the Jews and demanded that it rebuild its strength and seek new territories in the East. On his release, he set about building the Nazis into a proper disciplined political party. From now on, he would use the democratic system to achieve power. But for the next 5 years, Vhimar Germany prospered.
Support for extremist parties left and right dwindled. Then suddenly Hitler’s opportunity arrived. In October 1929, the US stock market crashed. Billions of dollars were lost and an economic depression swept across the world. Unemployment in Germany soared to over 6 million. Only extremist politicians seemed to offer a solution. Politicians like Hitler. By 1931, his Nazis were a true mass movement.
and they had their own brownshirted thugs, the SA storm troops, who numbered almost 3 million. In the 1932 elections, the Nazis became the largest party in Germany’s parliament, the Reichar. But Hitler refused to join a coalition, leaving Parliament paralyzed. to break the armpass.
President Hindenburg made him chancellor in January 1933 head of the government. Within a month, the Reichd burned down. Hitler accused the communists and demanded emergency powers. He then used them to ban all other political parties. In August 1934, President Hindenburg died. Hitler declared himself president. He was now absolute leader, the furer of Germany.
[Applause] At first, there was little sign of what was to come. For the next 3 years, the Furer concentrated on rebuilding Germany’s economy. He spent millions on public works, including the 5,000mi autob barn system to soak up the unemployed. But in secret, Hitler was also spending lavishly on a huge rearmament program.
Under the Versailles treaty, the German army had been limited to a 100,000 men. The country was forbidden to have an air force, tanks, or submarines. This small army was trebled in size. Then in 1935, Hitler came out into the open. He unveiled a brand new air force, the Luftvaf.
It had 2 and a half thousand planes, far more than Britain or France. Unemployment plunged and the Nazis became enormously popular. Now emboldened, Nefura made his first expansionist move. In 1935, he reoccupied the Sland district on the French border after it voted to return from League of Nations to German rule. A year later he sent German troops into the Rhineland part of Germany which had been demilitarized at Versailles.
At the time many felt that Hitler was only claiming back what was rightfully Germany’s. Neither Britain nor France objected. When Berlin hosted the 1936 Olympic Games, the Nazis were seen by many as firm but fair, a government which was restoring the nation’s pride and which didn’t threaten anyone. Of course, there were signs.
The 1935 Nuremberg laws forbad Jews to marry true Aryan Germans and deprived them of their citizenship. But when the first threats came to world peace, they didn’t come from Hitler at all, but from somewhere else entirely. Japan at the start of the 20th century was already a military park. It had defeated Russia in a war in 1905 and it had fought alongside the allies in World War I.
After the war, Japan was an acknowledged world power and it signed up to the League of Nations. But politically, it was a mess of contradictions. Nominally a democracy, the feudal tradition was still strong. Most Japanese revered their emperor as a living god and regarded him as their true leader. And the country faced major economic problems.
Its population was exploding and it had no natural resources to fuel its rapidly expanding industries. Its leaders needed solutions, and they saw them in Chinese Manuria. Manuria was a land of rich grain fields with plenty of coal and minerals. It was a perfect target. Japanese troops were already stationed there. Other possible targets were the colonies ruled by the European powers.
Burma, Malaya and Hong Kong controlled by Britain, Indo-China ruled by France and the Dutch East Indies. But at this stage, Japan had to be cautious. They didn’t want to rouse the other great power in the Pacific, the United States. For all its anti-imperialist slogans, the US actually ran an unofficial empire in the Pacific.
The Philippines, Guam, and several islands were under its direct rule. It undoubtedly had the strength to take on Japan, but since the end of World War I, it had had other distractions. This was America’s jazz age. Throughout the 1920s, a nation concentrated on exploiting its vast resources. There was an economic boom that seemed without end.
Fortunes were made both in industry and the stock markets. America seemed lost to the increasing pursuit of pleasure. With distractions like these, Japan’s growing pains in the Pacific seemed very far away. America had slashed its army after World War I and agreed a naval reduction treaty with Britain, France, and Japan. This in effect handed naval superiority in the Pacific to the Japanese.
And then came the Great Depression. As the economic devastation spread, a quarter of the population lost their jobs. Tens of thousands were made homeless, living in shanty towns. Whereas before it had been distracted by pleasure, now America was distracted by pain. It was time for Japan to make her move.
[Applause] In 1931, without even informing their own elected government, the Japanese forces in Manuria seized the capital Mukde and then overran the rest of the territory. A puppet state, Manchu Ko, was proclaimed under a puppet ruler. Henry Pui, the last emperor of China, who had been deposed in 1911, was dragged out of retirement.
At its headquarters in Geneva, the League of Nations now faced its first great test. Japan was universally condemned. But her response was blunt. Japan, however, find it impossible to accept the report adopted by the assembly. The Japanese then just walked out and the league suddenly realized there was nothing it could do about Manuria.
Japan was declared an international pariah but it didn’t care. Its leaders had turned their eyes to further conquests in China. These were easy pickings. China was in a state of chaos. The government of General Isimo Chang Kaishek was locked in conflict with the Chinese Communist Party under Maikum. There was civil war.
In 1936, as a precursor to invasion, the Japanese signed a pact with Hitler. The aim was to guard against any attack by Soviet Russia were it to move on China. Then in July 1937, the Japanese provoked an incident with Chinese troops and invaded. At first, the Chinese were taken by surprise, but they soon fought back fiercely.
The communists even joining the Quintang in a united front. The Japanese responded with amphibious landings. By the end of 1937, they had overrun much of northern China and the coast. The Japanese fought this war with exceptional brutality, bombing cities indiscriminately. Westerners living in the commercial center, the port of Shanghai, were now evacuated.
The city was then besieged for 3 months. It suffered widespread damage. The Japanese forces showing no pity or concern for the native population. But it was after the capture of Nank King, then the Chinese capital on December the 17th, 1937, that the Japanese forces really ran along.
Over 300,000 civilians are estimated to have been massacred during a 6-w week orgy of rape and indiscriminate killing. The Japanese even attacked British and US warships which had been sent to protect their shipping and trade. The worst incident came on December the 12th, 1937. The American gunboat Pane was sunk by Japanese bombers. 50 crewmen died.
Despite this, the Western powers refused to intervene. So, the League of Nations could do nothing. In the United States, President Roosevelt wanted to impose a naval blockade of Japan. It has become clear that acts and policies of nations in other parts of the world have farreaching effects on us. But the British would have none of it, fearing that it might provoke a war.
So all Roosevelt could offer was a $25 million loan to Chiang Kaishek to buy arms. Even though the communists were now fighting alongside the Quintang, the Soviet Union did little to help either. Its only involvement was a series of clashes along its own border with Manuria. But China itself received nothing. Instead, it had to fight on alone.
During 1938, the Japanese overran Canton and pushed the Chinese forces deeper into the west of the country. All the rhetoric of the League of Nations. All those promises to stop international aggression had come to nothing. And by now, the Western powers were facing aggression much closer to halt. [Applause] Today it is easy to laugh at Bonito Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy.
All that posturing seems faintly ridiculous now, but it didn’t seem that way in 1922. Back then, Italy had seemed to be on the edge of anarchy. The country was riven by strikes and land seizures. The democratic government, just as in Germany, seemed powerless in the face of such unrest. So, Bonito Mussolini, a war veteran and a journalist, decided to take a stand.
He organized a right-wing nationalist party, the fascists. With a country paralyzed by a general strike in August 1922, Mussolini ordered his followers to march on Rome. Fearing a civil war, Italy’s king, Victor Emanuel, asked him to form a government. Mussolini swiftly stamped out any political opposition and assumed dictatorial powers.
[Applause] government was appointed rather than elected and all power was firmly in the hands of the fascist grand council. Like Hitler, Mussolini’s first acts made him immensely popular. Massive programs of public works provided employment and transformed Italy’s infrastructure. Corruption was rooted out and the mafia more or less eliminated.
Italy’s armed forces were built up, including an advanced modern air force. In the Mediterranean, Mussolini launched a powerful navy bigger than the combined might of the British and French Mediterranean fleets. When the Great Depression came, Italy seemed to weather it better than most. Mussolini became a source of worldwide inspiration.
Political leaders, not least Adolf Hitler in Germany, saw the fascist system as a role model, strong and purposeful, in contrast to the weakness of the democracies in Britain and France. But Mussolini wanted more than adulation. He wanted to recreate the Roman Empire. And he already had a target in mind for his first imperial land ground.
His target was Abbiscinia, today’s Ethiopia. Italy already had colonies on its borders in Eritraa and Italian Somaliand. In December 1934, Italian forces provoked a clash with Abbiscinian troops at an oasis in the Augaden region, well inside Abbiscinian territory. Mussolini then sent reinforcements to Eritraa and Italian Somali.
demanding that Abbiscinia pay reparations. The emperor of Abbiscinia, Haley Salassie, appealed in person to the League of Nations. He called on it to live up to its ideals. Here was a small nation under threat from another member of the League. This was the supreme test. But the League did nothing. Britain’s foreign minister, Anthony Eden, at least tried to broker a peace deal, but Mussolini would have none of it.
In early October 1935, the Italian army invaded from Eritraa and Italian Somalia. The primitive Abbiscinian forces stood little chance against a modern army equipped with artillery and attacks. The Italian air force had total command of the air and harried the abbberinians on occasions dropping gas bombs even though gas had been outlawed at Versailles as a crime against humanity.
After 6 months, Abiscinia was completely overrun. The emperor Hilis Salassie fled into exile in Britain. From its headquarters in Switzerland, the League of Nations rung its hands. It did impose economic sanctions, but they had little effect. Mussolini’s aggression had revealed two things.
The League of Nations, that great hope for peace, was impotent, and both Europe’s supposed major powers, the democracies Britain and France, no longer had the stomach for a fight. Both Britain and France had been shattered by World War I, and their economies had never really recovered. Both had witnessed waves of strikes and unrest. Both had suffered mass unemployment even before the Great Depression.
Both also faced the cost of controlling empires now swollen by taking on Germany’s former colonies and the Middle Eastern territories once run by the Turkish Ottoman Empire. And above all, both had been traumatized by the horrific casualties of World War I.
A succession of British leaders, Roy George, Ramsey Macdonald, and above all, Stanley Baldwin, all resolved to keep Britain out of future conflicts. Despite horrific casualties on the Western Front, Britain had ended World War I with a large and very effective conscript army. This was immediately run down to a small professional force designed to police its sprawling empire. And when the Great Depression struck, any ideas of modernizing the army were abandoned.
It meant that Britain went into the runup to war economically and militarily weak. French losses during World War I had been even worse than the British. Ever mistrustful of the Germans, a large conscript army was maintained. But throughout the 1920s, France’s birth rate had declined. It became clear that there would be a manpower shortage by the mid to late 1930s.
France realized it could never compete with Germany on the size of its army alone. The solution was to adopt an entirely defensive mentality. The Majino line, a series of fortifications, was begun in 1930 along the frontier with Germany and ran as far as the Belgian border. There it theoretically linked up with fortifications planned by the Belgians.
This new French military approach meant that France was only capable of waging a defensive war. It just did not have the ability to launch an attack on Italy, even if the British had had the troops to help. And of course, both countries knew that their navies in the Mediterranean were outnumbered by Mussolini’s new fleet.
So when Italy conquered Abiscinia, it made sense for both powers to do nothing. It just seemed too remote, too much someone else’s problem. [Applause] By now, they both had to deal with all the traumas of the Great Depression. That seemed so much more pressing. And above all, they were now faced with a military threat far closer to home.
a resurgent and rearming Germany. And Germany’s power and that of Italy too was soon about to be demonstrated in supporting the rise of another dictator in Spain. [Applause] In 1936, civil war erupted in Spain. It was exceptionally vicious, setting family against family, communist against fascist, believers against atheists.
In 1931, a left-wing government had come to power, determined to get rid of the centuries old Spanish monarchy. The king was forced into exile and a republic was declared. In February 1936, the parties of the left combined in a popular front to take on the forces of the right in a general election. The popular front won narrowly.
Even though its reform program was modest, a wave of strikes and land seizes led the right to fear that a communist takeover was inevitable. Within the Spanish army, long a bastion of conservative and Catholic thinking, senior officers began to consider the possibility of a coup. Among them was General Francisco Franco, the former chief of staff who had been effectively exiled to command Spain’s forces in the Canary Islands.
On July the 17th, 1936, the units of the army fighting guerrillas in Spain’s colony in Morocco mutinied. The next day, Franco flew to join them, proclaiming a new nationalist movement which would save Spain from communism. Mainland garrisons now join this revolt. The Popular Front responded by calling for volunteers to defend the republic. Battle lines had been drawn.
At first, Franco faced problems. He and his army were in North Africa and he had to get across the streets of Gibraltar back to Spain. So he turned to the one person he thought might help, Adolf Hitler. Within a month, transport aircraft from Hitler’s new Luftvafer had begun an airlift, taking Franco’s battleh hardened veterans over to southern Spain.
At this stage, the republic still seemed to have the advantage. The pro- Franco military uprisings in Madrid and Barcelona were quickly crushed, leaving it in control of most of the east of the country. Franco’s nationalists were confined largely to the northwest and part of the south. But the nationalist situation was transformed when Hitler and Mussolini started to pour in troops and weapons.
The German dictator seized the opportunity to test his new equipment and expanding armed forces. The first Panza tanks were sent along with some 12,000 troops. And the Luftwuffer deployed its Condor Legion with its ultramodern new bombers and fighters. Mussolini sent a so-called volunteer corps of 50,000 men and more than 700 aircraft.
In vain did the Republicans appeal to Britain, France, and the Soviet Union for help. But London and Paris were scared of setting off a European war. They declared a policy of non-intervention. Cynically, both Germany and Italy signed up to this.
But when it became obvious that they were still sending arms to the nationalists, Ysef Stalin, the Soviet leader, announced that he would help the Republic. Stalin’s worry was the rise of fascism in Germany. Hitler had made it abundantly clear that he believed communism to be Nazism’s ultimate enemy. Stalin saw the Spanish conflict as a way of keeping Germany and Italy occupied while building up the Soviet Union’s military strength.
About 700 military advisers were sent along with tanks and fighter aircraft. It was something, but no match for the support Franco had received. In fact, the largest source of outside help for the republic didn’t come from a country at all, but from volunteers, the international brigades.
About 30,000 left-wing Americans, British, French, and Germans signed up to fight in Spain. With their new fascist support, the nationalists were able to open two fronts. One advancing towards Barcelona from the north, the other led by Franco pushing up towards Madrid from the south. By the end of 1936, Madrid was enveloped on three sides and virtually under siege.
The fighting was intense and often accompanied by appalling atrocities against civilians. The Republicans hunted down and murdered Roman Catholic priests. The nationalists slaughtered anyone accused of being communist. German and Italian air power was used indiscriminately against civilian targets. Madrid was heavily bombed.
But the worst incident came in April 1937 when the Basque town of Ganeka was virtually obliterated with 6,000 civilian deaths. The area controlled by the Republic was steadily grounded down. Its forces fought with great gallantry, but undertrained and underequipped amateurs were no match for the professional soldiers led by Franco or for the combined modern weaponry of Italy and Germany.
As the war dragged on, the fighting around Madrid became a symbol of the left’s determination not to be crushed by a fascist dictatorship. But behind the scenes, the Republican alliance was falling apart. The communists and socialists wanted to concentrate on winning a military victory.
But the more idealistic anarchists and syndicicalists saw the war as an opportunity for a mass revolution by the workers. These disagreements burst out into the open in May 1937. Fighting broke out in Barcelona between the anarchists and communists. It was a fatal weakening of the Republican cause. By the end of 1938, the nationalists had penned their enemy into a small enclave around Barcelona and another stretching eastward from Madrid to the coast.
Madrid continued to hold out, but the international brigades were withdrawn. More and more nations began to recognize Franco’s government as his forces closed in for the final assault on Madrid. At the end of March 1939, its defenders exhausted after nearly 3 years of fighting, the capital finally surrendered.
A month later, Franco formally declared hostilities at an end. The scars of Spain’s civil war took years to heal, and in some ways they never have. And internationally, Franco’s victory over the Republic proved a disaster. Hitler and Mussolini were confirmed in their belief that the democracies of Britain and France were impotent to resist any real pressure.
While Stalin despared of their willingness to confront fascism, Hitler in particular saw his way open to begin the aggressive policies outlined in mine. Even before the Spanish Civil War ended, his armies were on the march. [Applause] From the moment he became Chancellor of Germany on January the 30th, 1933, Hitler had begun to put his long-term ambitions into action.
On February the 3rd, he told his top commanders that his ultimate aim was to conquer territory in the east and ruthlessly Germanize it. They were instructed to prepare for a massive expansion. Although Germany had been forbidden tanks, a secret treaty with the Soviet Union in 1923 had allowed the development of tank designs and experimentation with new mobile armored tactics.
Energetic young German officers like Heinserian read the theories of British thinkers like Basil Little Hart and Colonel John Fulham. They even watched exercises being carried out by the British during the 1920s on Ssbury play. It was from these that they came up with the idea of fastm moving units combining tanks, artillery, and infantry that could thrust fast and deep into enemy territory.
Hitler adopted their ideas with enthusiasm. The new army was to have three Panza divisions. Similarly, the new air force, the Luftvafer, under former World War I fighter ace Herman Guring had had a framework to build on throughout the years in which its air force was officially banned.
Germany had kept up its design skills by building civilian machines and gliding and flying clubs provided a reserve of potential aircraft. Hitler revealed the existence of the Luftvafer in March 1935. He then announced that the army was to be increased to 300,000 men and conscription was reintroduced. Britain and France protested feebly at this flagrant breach of the Versail treaty.
But soon they reluctantly and slowly began to rearm. Until this point, Hitler had been modest in his goals. He had only taken back what was his, the Rhineland and Salah. But now he had a grander target in mind, his homeland, Austria. In 1934, Austrian Nazis had attempted to seize power and unify the country with Germany.
The Austrians, after all, spoke German, even if they had never been part of a German state. In February 1938, another Nazi plot was discovered. Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Shushnik protested to Hitler. Hitler responded by demanding that Austria stop mistreating the Austrian Nazis and unite with Germany. [Applause] a referendum so that the Austrians could vote on whether to remain independent.
But on March the 12th, 1938, the eve of the referendum, Hitler, fearing that it might produce the wrong result, sent in his troops. Complete surprise and an enthusiastic welcome by Nazi sympathizers made it a bloodless invasion. Within hours, Hitler announced Austria’s incorporation into the Third Reich.
A sovereign nation had for the first time been subsumed into a greater Germany. Once again, the Western democracies failed to react. In the summer of 1938, he turned on his next prey, Czechoslovakia. A substantial German minority lived in the northwest of the country, an area known as the Sudatan land. These Sudatan Germans had been part of the old Austrian Empire, but had been cut off when Czechoslovakia was created in 1919.
This was the time bomb that had started ticking at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler encouraged Sudatan German demands for autonomy and then threatened a Czech government with force if it refused to agree. Undaunted, the Czech government ordered general mobilization and prepared to resist.
The Czechoslovak army was large and well equipped with formidable fortifications on its frontier with Germany. Hitler backed off. But then at the beginning of September, concerned that war might be imminent, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain decided to act as a peacemaker. He flew to meet Hitler twice. The Nazi dictator assured him that if he could have the Sudatan land, he would make no further territorial demands in Europe.
In Munich on September the 29th, 1938, with Mussolini acting as mediator, France and Britain signed an agreement giving the Sudatan land to Germany in return for a formal declaration by Hitler that he had no more territorial ambitions. Chamberlain flew back to Britain waving the piece of paper which he claimed guarantees peace in our time.
And so on October the 1st, German troops occupied the Sudatan land and seized the Czech frontier fortifications. Hitler now began sizing up his next target, Poland. Again, the nominal cause was a German minority marooned as a result of the Versail treaty. Hitler demanded the return of the port of Danik to German control so that East Prussia could be linked up with the rest of Germany.
The Poles refused and Hitler hesitated. He was not quite ready for allout war and he had unfinished business with Czechoslovakia. [Applause] In March 1939, the eastern part of the country, Slovakia, which was ethnically different to the Czech lands, appealed to Hitler for help in achieving greater independence.
Hitler summoned the Czechoslovak prime minister Emil Hatcha to Berlin and browbeat him into putting his country under German protection. [Applause] German troops now marched into the rest of Czechoslovakia unopposed. Most of the country was annexed into the Reich. Slovakia was declared a protectorate for the first time.
Hitler had seized non-Germanspeaking territory, but again there was only a feeble protest from Britain and France. At the end of March, he again repeated his demand of Poland give up dancing. This time, France and Britain declared unequivocally that they would declare war if he attacked Poland. But by now, Hitler cared little whether they did or not.
He was sure that they would be weak and indecisive opponents in Russia. Stalin had also become increasingly concerned by Hitler’s aggression. In April, Stalin proposed an alliance with Britain and France. But negotiations made little progress and finally Stalin despared, deciding that there was another solution to the German threat.
On August the 23rd, the Soviet Union and the Third Reich, who everyone had believed were sworn enemies, announced a non-aggression pact. The agreement secretly specified that Poland would be split between the two countries and Stalin would have a free hand to take over Estonia, Latafia, and Lithuania.
Now free from any Russian threat, Hitler ordered his armed forces to prepare for an immediate invasion. On the evening of August the 31st, the German Fairmarked prepared for the assault. Its furer had made the decision which would plunge the world into war. Heat. Heat.