The Origins of the Second World War

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The Origins of the Second World WarThird EditionRichard Overy

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First published 1987 by Pearson Education LimitedSecond edition 1998Third edition 2008Published 2013 by Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX144RN711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USARoutledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,an informa business

Copyright 1987, 1998, 2008, Taylor & Francis.The right of Richard Overy to be identified as author ofthis work has been asserted by him in accordance withthe Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.All rights reserved. No part of this book may bereprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by anyelectronic, mechanical, or other means, now known orhereafter invented, including photocopying andrecording, or in any information storage or retrievalsystem, without permission in writing from thepublishers.NoticesKnowledge and best practice in this field are constantlychanging. As new research and experience broaden ourunderstanding, changes in research methods,

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professional practices, or medical treatment may becomenecessary.Practitioners and researchers must always rely on theirown experience and knowledge in evaluating and usingany information, methods, compounds, or experimentsdescribed herein. In using such information or methodsthey should be mindful of their own safety and the safetyof others, including parties for whom they have aprofessional responsibility.To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher northe authors, contributors, or editors, assume any liabilityfor any injury and/or damage to persons or property as amatter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, orfrom any use or operation of any methods, products,instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein.ISBN: 978-1-4058-2469-9 (pbk)British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from theBritish LibraryLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataOvery, R. J.The origins of the Second World War / RJ. Overy. 3rded.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN-13: 978-1-4058-2469-9

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1. World War, 1939-1945 Causes. 2. Europe Politics and government 19181945. I. Title.D741.O84 2008940.5311dc222008006011

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Introduction to the SeriesHistory is a narrative constructed by historians fromtraces left by the past. Historical enquiry is often drivenby contemporary issues and, in consequence, historicalnarratives are constantly reconsidered, reconstructed andreshaped. The fact that different historians have differentperspectives on issues means that there is also oftencontroversy and no universally agreed version of pastevents. Seminar Studies in History was designed tobridge the gap between current research and debate, andthe broad, popular general surveys that often daterapidly.The volumes in the series are written by historians whoare not only familiar with the latest research and currentdebates concerning their topic, but who have themselvescontributed to our understanding of the subject. Thebooks are intended to provide the reader with a clearintroduction to a major topic in history. They provideboth a narrative of events and a critical analysis ofcontemporary interpretations. They include the kinds oftools generally omitted from specialist monographs: achronology of events, a glossary of terms and briefbiographies of whos who. They also includebibliographical essays in order to guide students to theliterature on various aspects of the subject. Students andteachers alike will find that the selection of documentswill stimulate discussion and offer insight into the rawmaterials used by historians in their attempt tounderstand the past.Clive Emsley and Gordon Martel

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Series Editors

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ContentsPreface

Acknowledgements

Chronology

Whos Who

Glossary

Maps

PART ONE BACKGROUND1 EXPLAINING THE SECOND

WORLD WARPART TWO ANALYSIS2 THE INTERNATIONAL CRISIS

The collapse of the LeagueFrance and BritainAmerica and the Soviet UnionFrom the Rhineland to Munich

3 ECONOMIC AND IMPERIALRIVALRYThe imperial powersThe have-not powersThe failure of economic appeasement

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4 ARMAMENTS AND DOMESTICPOLITICSRearmamentFinance, industry and labourRearmament and domestic politics

5 WAR OVER POLANDThe aftermath of MunichThe Soviet factorThe outbreak of war

6 FROM EUROPEAN TO WORLDWARThe war in the westBarbarossaThe coming of world war

PART THREE ASSESSMENT7 HITLERS WAR?PART FOUR DOCUMENTS1 The Treaty of Versailles and Germany2 The Covenant of the League3 The search for a settlement4 American appeasement5 Stalin anticipates war

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6 The Hossbach memorandum7 Preparation for war before Munich8 The Munich Conference9 The Munich Agreement10 Economic pressure on Japan11 Mussolinis vision of empire12 Hitlers dream of world power13 Economic appeasement14 Britain and Germany in the Balkans15 The Four-Year Plan16 Economic dangers for Britain17 The crisis in France18 Peace for our time19 The change of mood in the west20 Hitler plans to crush Poland21 Chamberlain guarantees Poland22 The Franco-British war plan, 193923 British intelligence on Germany24 Stalin warns the west after Munich25 The Franco-British failure in Moscow26 The Soviet reaction to German

advances, 1939

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27 The German-Soviet Pact28 Hitler gambles on western weakness29 The last gasp of appeasement30 Bonnets doubts about war31 Poland in the middle32 The last days of peace33 Chamberlains awful Sunday34 Berlin proposes peace35 The Tripartite Pact36 Preparation for total mobilization in

Germany37 The Barbarossa Directive38 The German attack on Russia39 Russia raises the price for co-operation40 Japan decides on war41 Creating the new world order

REFERENCESINDEX

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PrefaceThis is now the third preface in the history of thisSeminar Studies volume, each separated by a decade offurther scholarly argument about the issues that surroundthe coming of the Second World War. In this sense thepreface is a kind of report on how the subject hasdeveloped, decade on decade. The changes have been farless dramatic in the ten years since the second edition.This is partly because much of the new archival materialcoming out of the former communist bloc had alreadybeen incorporated into the western writing in the 1990s,but it owes something to changing historical fashions.Diplomatic and military history no longer attracts theattention it got when this volume was first written.Historical writing has moved on to embrace many areasof experience that touch on issues of war only at atangent. Nonetheless there have been important shifts inemphasis. The role of Italy in the approach to war hasbeen subject to greater re-evaluation than any other;there are still revelations about Soviet policy in the1930s, but above all the first serious studies of Sovietmilitary planning and preparations; the arguments aboutChamberlain and appeasement have become moresophisticated, and in an age where world war seemsremote and unthinkable a new generation may thinkmore kindly of his profound conviction that war wasbeyond all human reason. The question that may welltease historians now is simply why, if the overwhelmingmajority of people and rulers did not want war, theircollective efforts were unable to achieve that end. Foranyone who marched in 2003 against the

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Anglo-American war in Iraq, this question will have aparticular echo.In broad terms, however, the approach to the subject hasnot changed. Historians, whether they are sympathetic ornot to the choices made by Britain and France in the1930s, are generally agreed that domestic constraintsplayed some part in shaping those decisions. Theconsequences of economic crisis and imperial insecurityare now central parts of any explanation of theinternational crisis in the 1930s, and particularly for theattitude of western governments to the change in thebalance of power broughtabout by a resurgent Germany and an expansionist Italyand Japan. I have maintained the same broad analyticalframework adopted in the first edition, with its emphasison an international order in crisis, rather that the familiartour through one episode after another in the 1930s. Warin 1939 was not in any sense pre-determined. It emergedas a result of a complex interplay of a great manyfactors, but other outcomes might have been possible. Ihave tried to open up some of these differentperspectives and in doing so to avoid distorting throughhindsight the realities of the international order.As before, I should like to offer here a generalacknowledgement of my debt to other historians whosework I have compressed and simplified here, perhapsbeyond recognition. My thanks go out to manycolleagues and students who over the years have arguedout the issues discussed here, disagreeing as often as not.I would like to thank Geoffrey Roberts for his kindassistance in improving the history of Soviet foreign

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policy in these pages. Though Roger Lockyer is nolonger the general editor of the series, I remain gratefulfor all his encouragement and helpful editorial advicewhen this book went through its first edition.Richard OveryFebruary 2008

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AcknowledgementsThe publishers would like to thank the following forpermission to reproduce copyright material:Extracts from an Air Staff memorandum (AIR 14/225), amemorandum for the chiefs of staff (AIR 9/105, pp. 67,41) and a letter to Admiral Lord Chatfield (FO 371/23073, ff203208), The National Archives, Crowncopyright material in the Public Record Office isreproduced by permission of the Controller of HerMajestys Stationery Office.Plates 1, 2 and 6: Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images;Plates 3 and 7: Mary Evans Picture Library; Plate 4:Elkin, Vasilii, Every Kolkhoz Member, Every Brigade,Every MPS Must Know the Plan of Bolshevik Sowing.International Poster Gallery:www.internationalposter.com; Plate 5: SV-Bilderdienst;Plate 8: Coloured photograph in Our Air force (page14), Mary Evans Picture Library.

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Plate 1 Neville Chamberlain reviews SS troops on hisarrival for the Munich Conference, 29 September 1938.To his left is the British Ambassador, Sir NevileHenderson, to his right the German Foreign Minister,Joachim von Ribbentrop.Source: Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

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Plate 2 The centre of Nuremberg during the annual partygathering in the city. By the late 1930s popularenthusiasm for Hitler was widespread. Pageantry playedan important part in cementing support for the regime.Source: Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

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Plate 3 One of many Republican posters from theSpanish Civil War fought between July 1936 and March1939. Here the Unin General de Trabajadores (UGT)shows fascism sowing not seeds but graves.Source: Mary Evans Picture Library

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Plate 4 A poster from the Soviet collectivization drive ofthe early 1930s. Stalin recognized that defence of thenew communist state depended critically on economicmodernization. Tractor factories were set up so that theycould be converted to tank production.

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Source: Elkin, Vasilii, Every Kolkhoz Member, EveryBrigade, Every MPS Must Know the Plan of BolshevikSowing. International Poster Gallery:www.internationalposter.com

Plate 5 The Japanese expansion in China in the 1930swas carried out with great brutality. Here inhabitants ofNanking clear up bomb damage after a Japanese airattack in November 1937, prior to the capture of the cityand the killing of an estimated 260,000350,000 of thepopulation.Source: SV-Bilderdienst

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Plate 6 Konrad Henlein (18981945) leader of theSudeten German Party, which was founded to campaignfor autonomy for the Germans living in the Czech state.The movement came to model itself on Hitlers NationalSocialist Party.Source: Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

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Plate 7 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of theUnited States from 1932 to his death in 1945, on thecampaign trail. He was very sensitive to popular opinionand hesitated to do more to stop the international crisisbecause of the strong isolationist views of manyAmericans.Source: Mary Evans Picture Library

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Plate 8 A Supermarine Spitfire in flight. The RAFlegendary fighter, first developed in the mid-1930s,became the mainstay of Britains fighter force during thewar. British rearmament was concentrated on air defence

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in the years before 1939 because of widespread popularfear of bombing.Source: Coloured photograph in Our Air force, MaryEvans Picture LibraryWhilst every effort has been made to trace the owners ofcopyright material, in a few cases this has proved to beproblematic and so we take this opportunity to offer ourapologies to any copyright holders whose rights we mayhave unwittingly infringed.

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Chronology191428 June Archduke Franz Ferdinand assassinated.28 July Austria declares war on Serbia.4 August All major European states at war.19172 March Tsar Nicholas abdicates.25 October Bolshevik Party seizes power in Russia.191811 November Armistice ends Great War.191928 June Signature of the Versailles Treaty (Paris

Treaty) with Germany.192010 January League of Nations Organization begins

its operations.19226 February Washington Naval Treaty signed.28 October March on Rome, Mussolini becomes

Prime Minister.19239 November Hitler stages failed coup in Munich.

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15 November German currency collapses, end ofhyperinflation.

19251 December Locarno Treaty signed between Britain,

France, Germany, Italy and Belgium.192624 April German-Soviet Treaty of Berlin.10 September Germany joins the League of Nations.192829 August Kellogg-Briand Pact signed in Paris

outlawing war.192929 October Start of great crash on US stock

exchange.1931September Japanese Kwantuing army seizes

Manchuria.19322 February Disarmament Conference convenes at

Geneva.9 July End of Lausanne Conference on

reparations.July/August British Commonwealth Ottawa

Conference.

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193330 January Hitler appointed German Chancellor.12 June World Economic Conference in London.15 July Four-Power Pact signed in Rome.16 October Germany withdraws from League and

from the Disarmament Conference.193417 September Soviet Union admitted to the League of

Nations.5 December Franco-Soviet Pact.193516 March Hitler announces German rearmament.11 April Italy, Britain and France agree common

front at Stresa Conference.18 June Anglo-German Naval Agreement.19356 February Government of India Act gives limited

autonomy.3 October Italy invades Abyssinia (Ethiopia).193613 March German forces remilitarize the

Rhineland provinces.

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17 July Start of Spanish Civil War followingfailed military coup.

18 October German second Four-Year Planlaunched.

25 November Anti-Comintern Pact signed betweenGermany and Japan.

193726 April German aircraft bomb Basque city of

Guernica.1 May United States permanent Neutrality Act

passed.9 July Start of Sino-Japanese War.November Defence Requirements Committee set

up in London.13 December Japanese capture Chinese capital of

Nanking.193813 March Germany concludes Anschluss with

Austria.15 September Chamberlain flies to meet Hitler in

Germany.22 September Second Chamberlain/Hitler meeting.30 September Sudeten German areas ceded to

Germany at Munich Conference.30 September Anglo-German agreement.

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6 December Franco-German Declaration signed.19396 February Chamberlain pledges military support

for France.15 March German forces occupy Bohemia and

Moravia.21 March Lithuanian city of Memel ceded to

Germany.23 March German-Romanian trade agreement.30 March Italy occupies Albania.31 March Chamberlain guarantees Polish

sovereignty.26 April Britain reintroduces conscription.22 May Pact of Steel between Italy and

Germany.23 August German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact

signed in Moscow.25 August Anglo-Polish Treaty signed.1 September German forces attack Poland.3 September Britain and France declare war on

Germany.17 September Red Army invades eastern Poland.28 September German-Soviet Treaty of Friendship

divides Poland between them.

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6 October Hitler proposes peace in Germanparliament.

10 October Baltic States come under Sovietprotection.

30 November Start of Soviet-Finnish War.14 December Soviet Union expelled from League of

Nations.194010 May Chamberlain resigns, Churchill Prime

Minister.10 May German forces attack the Netherlands,

Belgium and France.10 June Italy declares war on Britain and France.17 June French sue for an armistice.27 September Tripartite Pact signed between

Germany, Italy and Japan.28 October Italian invasion of Greece.18 December Hitler signs directive Barbarossa for

war against the Soviet Union.19416 April Germany invades Yugoslavia.22 June Germany and its allies invade Soviet

Union.12 August Atlantic Charter published.

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7 December Japanese aircraft attack Pearl Harbor,USA declares war.

10 December Germany and Italy declare war on theUnited States.

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Whos WhoBaldwin, Stanley (18671947): Conservative politicianwho first entered the cabinet as President of the Board ofTrade in 1921. He became Chancellor of the Exchequera year later and then Prime Minister, a post he held from1922 to 1924 and again from 1924 to 1929. He joinedRamsay MacDonalds National Government in 1931 asLord President of the Council and Deputy PrimeMinister, and became Prime Minister again from 1935 tohis retirement in 1937. He was famous in 1932 for hisannouncement in the House of Commons that thebomber will always get through.Beck, Josef (18941944): Polish soldier and politicianwho became Polish Foreign Minister in 1932. He wasdetermined to resist all political demands from eitherGermany or the Soviet Union and preferred war in 1939rather than make concessions.Bene, Edouard (18841948): Czech politician whowas Foreign Minister from 1918 to 1935, then President,following the death of Thomas Masaryk. He leftCzechoslovakia in 1939 following German occupationand returned again as President briefly between 1946 and1948 before the complete communist takeover.Birkenhead, Earl of (18721930): The Conservativepolitician and lawyer F.E. Smith, who became LordChancellor in 1919 when he was ennobled, and between1924 and 1928 was Secretary of State for India.Bonnet, Georges (18891973): FrenchRadical-Socialist politician. He was Finance Minister

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from 1937 to 1938, then Foreign Minister in Daladierscabinet, where he campaigned for a full policy ofappeasement. He supported the Vichy regime in 1940,and left France in 1944 before the Allied D-Dayinvasion.Cadogan, Alexander (18841968): PermanentUnder-Secretary at the British Foreign Office from 1938to 1945, and Britains representative at the UnitedNations between 1946 and 1950.Chamberlain, Neville (18731940): Conservativepolitician from a prominent Birmingham politicalfamily. He was a successful minister in the 1920s,Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1934 (when he oversawthe programme of British rearmament) and from May1937 Prime Minister in succession to Baldwin. He isseen as the architect of the policy of appeasement, butdeclared war on Germany in September 1939. Heresigned in May 1940 and died later in the year.Chiang Kai-shek (18871965): Chinese army officerwho rose to power in China in the 1920s and fought along civil war against Chinese communists and nativewarlords. He led Chinese resistance to Japanese invasionin the 1930s and 1940s but was defeated by communistinsurgents in 1949 and retired to the island of Taiwan,which he ruled until his death.Churchill, Winston (18741965): English politician,soldier and writer. He held high office before 1914 as aLiberal minister, saw service on the Western Front in1916, before becoming Minister of Munitions. In the1920s he became a Conservative and served as

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Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1926 to 1929. In the1930s he was on the political fringes until the coming ofwar in 1939 when he took over the Admiralty. In May1940 he became Prime Minister, a post that he held until1945, and again from 1951 to 1955.Ciano, Count Galeazzo (190344): Mussolinisson-in-law who was appointed Italian Foreign Ministerin 1936, replacing Mussolini. He was less sanguine thanMussolini about Italys prospects in war with the west.After Italys surrender to the Allies in September 1943he was arrested by the German-backed fascist regime setup in northern Italy and shot in 1944.Dahlerus, Birger (18911957): Swedish businessmanand a friend of Hermann Gring who actedunsuccessfully as an intermediary between Germany andBritain in the days before the outbreak of the SecondWorld War.Daladier, Edouard (18841970): French Radical Partypolitician who became Prime Minister as well asMinister of War in 1938 after the fall of the PopularFront government. He left office in May 1940 and wasimprisoned by the Germans when France was occupied.Eden, Anthony (18971977): Conservative politicianwho became Minister for the League of Nations in 1934and Foreign Secretary in 1935, resigned in 1938 and wasreinstated by Churchill in 1940. He was Prime Ministerfrom 1955 to 1957.Gamelin, General Maurice (18721958): Frenchgeneral who became Chief-of-Staff in 1936 and oversaw

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the rearmament of France in the late 1930s. He wasreplaced in the middle of the Battle of France in 1940 byMarshal Maxime Weygand. The Vichy regime put himon trial and he was later deported to Germany.Goering, Marshal Hermann (18931946): Asuccessful fighter-pilot in the First World War, he joinedthe National Socialist Party in 1922 and rose to be oneits senior politicians. In 1932 he was President of theReichstag and following Hitlers appointment asChancellor became a minister and, in 1935,Commander-in-Chief of the German Air Force. Hecommitted suicide at Nuremberg in 1946 after beingcondemned to death for war crimes.Grandi, Dino (18951988): Italian Fascist politicianwho became Foreign Minister from 1929 to 1932 andthen Ambassador to London between 1932 and 1939.Grandi played an important part in forcing Mussolinifrom office in the summer of 1943 but then fled to Spainto avoid a death sentence from the new fascist regime setup in northern Italy with German support.Halifax, Lord Edward (18811959): SeniorConservative politician, he was Viceroy to India in192631 and then became Foreign Secretary in 1938following Edens resignation. He favoured limitedappeasement and was replaced as Foreign Secretary byEden late in 1940. He was posted to Washington asBritish Ambassador from 1941 to 1946.Hankey, Maurice (18771963): Long-servingSecretary to the Committee for Imperial Defence from19121938 and British Cabinet Secretary from 1916 to

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1938. He was appointed to Chamberlains war cabinet in1939, but excluded when Churchill became PrimeMinister.Henderson, Nevile (18821942): British diplomat whobecame Ambassador to Berlin in 1937. He was widelyregarded as being a pro-German appeaser, a reputationthat has recently been reassessed. He delivered theBritish ultimatum to the German government on 3September 1939.Hirohito, Emperor of Japan (190189): The lasttraditional emperor of Japan, he oversaw Japaneseexpansion in the 1930s and agreed to the war with theUnited States in 1941. In 1945 he announced Japanesesurrender but was allowed to remain in office as aconstitutional head of state.Hitler, Adolf (18891945): Austrian-born politicianwho came to Germany in 1913, served in a Bavarianregiment during the First World War and joined the tinyGerman Workers Party in 1919. The party became theNational Socialist Party (NSDAP) two years later withHitler at its head. He attempted a coup in 1923 and wasimprisoned. He took control of the party again in 1926,and seven years later was appointed German Chancellor.He became dictator of Germany and embarked on aprogramme of rearmament, territorial expansion andanti-Semitism. He attacked Poland in 1939 andlaunched world war. In 1941 he initiated what becamethe Holocaust and in April 1945 committed suicide inthe ruins of Berlin.

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Hull, Cordell (18711955): American Democratpolitician who became Roosevelts Secretary of Statefrom 1932 until 1944, when ill-health forced him toretire. He was committed to the belief that all conflictshave economic causes and that worldwide prosperitywould bring peace. He was awarded the Nobel peaceprize in 1945.Inskip, Thomas (18761947): Conservative politicianand lawyer who was appointed as Minister for theCo-ordination of Defence from 1936 to 1939, and thenbecame Lord Chancellor from 1939 to 1941. His role inpromoting British rearmament was widely condemned astoo little, too late.King, Mackenzie (18741950): Canadian Liberalpolitician who was Prime Minister three times, the thirdtime from 1935 to 1948 when he played an importantpart in persuading Canadian opinion to follow Britaininto war in 1939 and offering extensive financial andmaterial aid during the war.Krosigk, Schwerin von (18871977): German FinanceMinistry official who was appointed Finance Minister inGermany in 1932 and kept the office until 1945. He wasresponsible for helping to finance German rearmamentand the financial exploitation of Europe but avoidedindictment as a major war criminal at Nuremberg in1945.Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov) (18701924): Chairman ofthe Russian Social Democratic Party (Bolsheviks) andthe most influential theoretical Marxist of his generation.He encouraged the party to launch the revolution in

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October 1917 and became the leader of the newgovernment until illness in 1922 forced him to withdrawfrom active politics.Litvinov, Maxim (18761951): Russian Bolshevikpolitician and diplomat. He was appointed ForeignMinister in 1930 but replaced in March 1939. He laterserved as Soviet Ambassador to the United States from1941 to 1943.Lyautey, Marshal Hubert (18541934): Frenchgeneral who spent most of his army career in thecolonies. He became the first Resident-General in FrenchMorocco from 1912 to 1925.Molotov, Vyacheslav (18901986): Bolshevikpolitician and close associate of Stalin, whose secretariathe served in the 1920s. He was made Chairman of theCouncil of Peoples Commissars in 1930 (PrimeMinister) until 1941, and was also Commissar forForeign Affairs from 1939 until 1949.Morgenthau, Henry (18911967): American Democratpolitician who became Treasury Secretary in theRoosevelt government from 1934 to 1945.He is best remembered for his plan to turn Germanyinto an agrarian state after the war as a punishment.Mussolini, Benito (18831945): Radical socialistpolitician from the Romagna province who became anationalist in response to the First World War. He foughtat the front and returned to found the Italian fascistmovement in 1919. In October 1922 he was appointedPrime Minister, established a single-party dictatorship by1926 and led Italy into wars in Ethiopia (1935), Spain

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(19369) and against the western powers (19403). Hewas overthrown by a military coup in 1943 and killed byItalian anti-fascist partisans in April 1945.Ptain, Marshal Phillipe (18561951): French generalwho played an important part in the French war effort inthe First World War. He oversaw the building of theMaginot defences, but retired from the army in the1930s. In June 1940 he assumed the role of head-of-statewith his capital in the French town of Vichy. In 1945 hewas arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment forpolitical crimes committed under his authoritarian rule.Ribbentrop, Joachim von (18931946): A formerchampagne salesman who became a leading NationalSocialist spokesman on foreign affairs after 1933. Hewas appointed Ambassador to London in 1936, and in1938 was appointed German Foreign Minister.Dominated by Hitler, he played little part in key decisionmaking. He was tried at Nuremberg and sentenced todeath.Rommel, Field Marshal Erwin (18911944): Germancareer soldier who rose to prominence as a tankcommander in the early stages of the Second World War.He was posted to head German forces in North Africa in1941, but was defeated by British Commonwealth forcesat El Alamein. He was implicated in the July Plot tomurder Hitler in 1944 and committed suicide.Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (18821945): A prominentDemocrat politician who served under Woodrow Wilsonas Assistant Secretary for the Navy in the First WorldWar. After struggling against polio in the 1920s, he

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became first Governor of New York State in 1928 andfour years later was elected US President. He held theoffice for an unprecedented four terms, and played animportant role in holding together the wartime GrandAlliance with Britain and the USSR.Schacht, Hjalmar (18771970): German banker whowas chosen to help solve the inflation crisis in Germanyin late 1923, then to head the German Central Bank. Hewas appointed Minister of Economics in Hitlersgovernment in 1934 and in 1935 Plenipotentiary for WarEconomy. He helped to supply the finance for Germanrearmament, but he fell out with Hitler in1937 and resigned. He was later arrested and tried atNuremberg but was one of three defendants acquitted.Speer, Albert (190581): German architect who wascommissioned by Hitler to help rebuild Germanyslargest cities in the 1930s. He was appointed ArmamentsMinister in February 1942, and was later tried atNuremberg, where he was sentenced to twenty years.Stalin (Joseph Dzhugashvili) (18781953): GeorgianMarxist who joined the Russian Social DemocraticParty, followed Lenin when the party split over tactics in1904 and became Commissar for Nationalities in the firstBolshevik government in November 1917. In 1922 hewas appointed General Secretary of the party and usedthis position to help him to establish a personaldictatorship in the Soviet Union from the 1930s to the1950s. He was Prime Minister from 1941 until his deathin 1953, and Commissar for Defence from 1941 to 1946.

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Taylor, Alan J.P. (190690): British historian whotaught at Manchester and Oxford. He was famous for acontroversial book on the outbreak of war published in1961, which claimed that Hitler was no more to blamefor the war than Britain and France.Tojo, General Hideki (18841948): Japanese soldierand politician who became Minister of War in July 1940and then Prime Minister in October 1941 shortly beforethe Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He resigned in July1944, following Japanese defeats, and was tried andexecuted as a war criminal in 1948.Trotsky, Leon (18791940): Russian socialistbelonging to the Menshevik wing of the party. Hebecame a Bolshevik in 1917 and commanded the RedArmy during the Russian Civil War. He resigned in 1925and was then accused of left-wing deviation, expelledfrom the party and sent into exile in 1929. He wasassassinated in Mexico by a Stalinist agent in 1940.Wilson, Woodrow (18561924): Democrat politicianwho became President of the United States from 1913 to1921. He played a major part in shaping the postwarsettlement in Europe with his insistence onself-determination, but the US Senate rejected theVersailles Settlement in 1920.

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GlossaryAnglo-German Agreement: Paper signed by Hitler andChamberlain in the early hours of of 30 September 1938after the Munich Conference, renouncing war betweenthe two states and agreeing to settle issues bynegotiation. This was the scrap of paper Chamberlainwaved when he arrived back in England later that day.Anschluss: Literally the joining on of Austria toGermany after German troops occupied the country on12 March 1938.Appeasement: British and French attempts to satisfy orappease the demands of aggressor nations during the1930s.Atlantic Charter: Declaration prepared by Churchill andRoosevelt at their meeting in Placentia Bay,Newfoundland, 912 August 1941. The Charter was acommitment to promoting the self-determination ofpeoples and democratic institutions.Autarky: A policy of economic self-sufficiency, made atthe expense of international trade.Blitzkrieg: Literally lightning war, the term wascommonly used in the early 1940s to describe the newform of fast, mobile warfare supported by aircraft whichcould bring a result in a matter of weeks. The model wasthe German invasion of Poland.Collective security: The idea that international peacecould be preserved by all states co-operating together to

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restrain an international aggressor. It was chieflyassociated with the League of Nations.Comintern: The Third International of communists, setup by Lenin in 1919 to succeed the defunct SecondInternational. It became an instrument for Soviet controlof other communist parties and was wound up in 1943.Condor Legion: A unit of several thousand Germanairmen sent to Spain in 1936 to assist Francos rebellionagainst the republican government.Commanded by Werner von Richthofen, the Legion wasnotorious for the bombing of the Basque city ofGuernica on 26 April 1937.Congress System: The international order in Europeafter the Napoleonic Wars when the Great Powers triedto solve issues through a series of congresses. The namewas often applied to the whole of the nineteenth centuryto explain the long period of general European peace.Co-Prosperity Sphere: Sphere of influence set up byJapan in Asia in the late 1930s. The idea was todemonstrate to other Asian states that they would allbenefit from the Japanese domination of the regionthrough building an integrated economic bloc, but thesystem was designed chiefly to benefit Japan.Danzig: Ancient German city declared a free cityunder the League of Nations in the Versailles Settlementin June 1919. By 1933 its parliament was dominated bylocal National Socialists who made life difficult for thePolish minority in the city and demanded union withHitlers Germany.

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Dtente: Name given to the efforts to scale down theCold War from the late 1960s, but applied to anydiplomatic effort to reduce tension and reachaccommodation.Disarmament Conference: Conference convokedthrough the auspices of the League of Nations inFebruary 1932 under the chairmanship of the Labourpolitician Arthur Henderson. It failed to reach agreementon any measure of arms reduction and adjourned inOctober 1933 without reconvening.Four-Year Plan: Plan for economic and militarypreparation for war drawn up by Hitler in August 1936and formally launched under the direction of HermannGring in October. It was strictly speaking the secondFour-Year Plan, following the first Four-Year Planlaunched in 1933 to overcome unemployment.German inflation: The collapse of the German currency(the mark) in November 1923 following almost ten yearsof escalating inflation, chiefly caused by hugegovernment borrowing during the war. The currency wasstabilized in 1924 with international help, but ageneration of German savers and investors was ruined.German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact: Agreementbetween Germany and the USSR signed on 23 August1939 agreeing not to resort to war. The treaty alsocontained a trade agreement and a secret protocoldividing eastern Europe into spheres of influence. It wasfollowed by a firm agreement on the new frontier inPoland signed on 28 September 1939.

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Grand Settlement: Term used by Neville Chamberlainto describe a multilateral negotiated settlement of alloutstanding issues of frontiers, minorities, access tomarkets and raw materials, replacing the VersaillesSettlement of 1919.Have-not nations:Major states that lacked a large territorial empire oradequate access to raw materials or markets. Thesecontrasted with the have states of Britain, France andthe United States.Imperial Preference: Protective trade system agreed byBritain and the Dominions at the Ottawa ImperialConference in 1932. Britain agreed to give preference toimperial imports of food and raw materials and theDominions agreed to take more British industrial goods.Isolationism: The popular American view in the 1920sand 1930s that the United States should avoid anyforeign political or military commitments.July Crisis: The month-long diplomatic crisis followingthe assassination of the Habsburg Archduke FranzFerdinand on 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo. The crisis pavedthe way for the outbreak of the First World War.Lebensraum: Term commonly used in Germany in the1920s and 1930s to describe that amount of territorythought to be necessary to allow a nation to feed andprovision itself to a reasonable standard. The search forliving space became the excuse for programmes ofterritorial expansion. In Italy the concept was called ilspazio vitale.

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Maginot Line: A series of defensive fortifications alongFrances eastern border, begun at the inspiration of theDefence Minister, Andr Maginot, in 1929, but stillincomplete a decade later.Mandates: Colonies and territories taken under Leaguecontrol from Germany and Turkey in 1919. They wereallocated as mandates to Britain, France and Japan,who were responsible for their administration thoughthey were not formally part of their empires. In practicethey were treated like colonial territories except for Iraq,which was granted its full independence in 1932.Mitteleuropa: The area of central Europe includingGermany, Austria, Hungary and Poland. It was usuallyregarded as a potential economic bloc and a sphere forGerman influence, rather than an area of politicalinfluence implied by the term Lebensraum.Munich Agreement: Protocol signed by Germany,Britain, France and Italy on the evening of 29 September1938 granting self-determination under German controlto the German inhabitants of the Czech state, most ofthem in the area known as the Sudetenland.New Deal: Package of economic and welfare policiesinstituted by President Roosevelt in 19334 followinghis election, to try to cope with the social consequencesof the slump.New Order: Term usually associated with fascist plansfor a new social order or a new international order. Theold order was in both cases identified with the politicalsystem of the west and its traditional European empires.

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Non-Intervention:Agreement reached between all the major states in late1936 not to intervene militarily in the Spanish Civil War.Only Britain and France observed the agreement. Italy,Germany and the Soviet Union all gave aid to one sideor the other.Open-door policy: A system in which all states cantrade on the basis of the same open access to anothermarket. The term is usually used to describe efforts totrade on equal terms with China.Operation Barbarossa: Code name given to the Germaninvasion of the USSR. The directive for the operationwas laid down by Hitler on 18 December 1940, and theinvasion by 4 million German, Hungarian, Romanianand Finnish forces began on 22 June 1941.Pan-Germanism: The concept of uniting all ethnicGermans in a single political unit. There werePan-German movements in pre-1914 Germany andAustria which influenced Hitlers later Pan-Germanaspirations in the 1930s.Phoney War: The period between September 1939 andMay 1940 when there was very little military activitybetween Germany, Britain and France.Polish Corridor: Narrow strip of land carved out of theformer German province of East Prussia to allow thenewly formed Polish state access to the sea. The corridordivided eastern and western parts of Germany andbecame a key issue on treaty revision in the 1930s.

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Polish Guarantee: Name given to the announcement byNeville Chamberlain in the House of Commons on 31March 1939 that Polands sovereignty would beguaranteed by Britain. France pledged similar support afew days later, but a firm Anglo-Polish Treaty was onlysigned on 25 August, a few days before the Germaninvasion.Popular Front: Term used in 1935 to describe thepolitical alliance between progressive political forces,principally social-democrats and communists, to combatthe threat of fascism. It is usually applied to the Frenchgovernment elected in 1935 and the Spanish governmentelected in 1936.Reparations: Payments in kind and money demanded bythe victorious Allies in 1919 from Germany and itsallies. Reparations were paid by Bulgaria, Hungary, andAustria, but the bulk were extracted from Germany, whocontinued to pay them until 1932 when economic crisisforced a moratorium.Sanctions: The policy of imposing an economic andfinancial boycott against states engaged in aggressivewar in violation of the Covenant of the League ofNations. It was applied only to Italy during theItalo-Ethiopian War.Schlieffen Plan: Not so much a plan, as a set ofoperational suggestions first proposed by the Germanarmy Chief-of-Staff, Alfred von Schlieffen in 1904 as ananswer to German encirclement by France and Russia.The plan was based

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on the idea of a swift defeat of France, followed by aredeployment to face and defeat Russia. It failed in 1914,turning the war into a contest of attrition.Soviet purges: Term loosely used to describe the period19368 when almost 700,000 were executed by theSoviet judicial system for alleged crimes against thestate. The victims included many Communist Partyleaders and a high proportion of the leadership of thearmy and navy.Spanish Civil War: Conflict between rebel nationalistforces led by General Franco and the armed forces andirregular socialist and anarchist militia in support of theSpanish Second Republic. The nationalist revolt began inJuly 1936 and ended with Francos victory in March1939.Sudeten Germans: German-speaking population ofnorthern Bohemia who were placed under Czechoslovakrule in 1919 when the Habsburg Empire was formallypartitioned in the Versailles Settlement.Thirty-Years War: European-wide conflict in Europebetween 1618 and 1648 which was characterized byextreme levels of violence against the civilianpopulation.Total War: Term usually associated with the Germangeneral Erich Ludendorff, who in 1919 described theFirst World War as a total war because it haddemanded the total commitment of the economic, socialand moral resources of the nation. It also described a warin which civilians as well as soldiers were part of the wareffort and a legitimate target of attack.

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Tripartite Pact: Agreement signed between Germany,Italy and Japan on 27 September 1940 dividing theworld into spheres of influence between them. Hungary,Romania and Slovakia later affiliated to the Pact.Versailles Settlement: Set of treaties drawn up by theAllied powers in 1919 at the Versailles palace, outsideParis. The treaties included the Paris Treaty withGermany, the St Germain Treaty with Austria and theTreaty of Trianon with Hungary.Washington Conference: Multinational conference onthe limitation of naval armaments held in Washington inNovember 1921 and signed in early 1922. Theconference set down the ratio of warships betweenBritain, Japan, the United States and France.Wehrwirtschaft: Term used to describe an economygeared to defence purposes, with a high level ofinvestment, heavy industrial output and extensive plansfor the conversion of civilian to military production inthe event of war.

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Map 1The British and French Empires between the two worldwars

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Map 2The Japanese Empire by 1941

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Map 3Germany and Central Europe 193339

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Part 1Background

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1Explaining the Second World War

The Second World War once seemed a simple eventto explain. If it did not exactly boil down to oneword Hitler the war was nevertheless the Germanswar. Unlike the war of 1914, that of 1939 had a simplereducible core: Germany provoked war deliberately tooverturn the Versailles Settlement of 1919 and win thecontinental hegemony denied it in 1914. Moreover, theGermany of 1939 was led by a party committed, so itseemed, to a demonstrably evil cause. FightingGermany, and later Italy and Japan, was to fight on theside of good in the defence of democracy and freedom,against what President Roosevelt called the forcesendeavouring to enslave the entire world (Roosevelt,193850: vol. 8, 639).Hitler, Adolf (18891945): Austrian-born politicianwho became leader of the National Socialist Party(NSDAP) in 1922. In 1933 he was appointed GermanChancellor and became dictator of Germany. Heattacked Poland in 1939 and launched world war. In1941 he initiated what became the Holocaust and inApril 1945 committed suicide in the ruins of Berlin.Versailles Settlement: Set of treaties drawn up by theAllied powers in 1919 at the Versailles palace, outsideParis. The treaties included the Paris Treaty withGermany, the St Ger-main Treaty with Austria and theTreaty of Trianon with Hungary.

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Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (18821945): ProminentDemocrat politician who became first Governor of NewYork State in 1928 and four years later was elected USPresident. He held the office for an unprecedented fourterms, and played an important role in holding togetherthe wartime Grand Alliance with Britain and the USSR.For all its simplicity there is much to recommend thisview. Without Hitlers restless quest for empire, warmight have been avoided. If the western powers had notbeen faced with an accumulation of crisis after crisis incentral Europe, which built up almost irresistiblepressure for conflict by 1939, German aims might havebeen accommodated in the international system withoutwar. This is, of course, a very large if. In practice theoutbreak of war was a great deal more complicated thanthis. Historians cannot even agree on the nature of thepressures that pushed Hitler towards war. While somesee a clear intention on his part to launch wars ofaggression, based on the ideas of racial struggle andworld empire expressed in Hitlers writing and speeches,others emphasize the importance of functionalexplanations, that German leaders were forced into warin 1939 through fear of domestic unrest and economiccrisis brought about by the excessive cost ofrearmament. Nor can agreement be reached on the kindof war Hitler launched: was it a total war which requiredthe full use of the nations resources to fight the greatpowers for world status? Or a Blitzkrieg, a shortopportunistic war, designed to avert domestic politicalpressure by using a minimum of military resources forthe campaign?

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Blitzkrieg: Literally lightning war, the term wascommonly used in the early 1940s to describe the newform of fast, mobile warfare supported by aircraft whichcould bring a result in a matter of weeks. The model wasthe German invasion of Poland.Arguments such as these mask a more importantproblem in explaining the outbreak of war. Byconcentrating on Germany we are in danger offorgetting that wars do not take place in a vacuum.Germany was part, and quite a small part, of aninternational system. German statesmen reacted toproblems and stimuli over which, in many cases, theyhad no control. Hitler planned to subvert a structure ofworld power for which Germany had very littleresponsibility except that it had lost, rather than won, theFirst World War. To understand the outbreak of war inEurope in 1939, and its extension within two years toworld war, it is necessary to look at the internationalstructure as a whole, its weaknesses and strengths, and atthe character and motives of the major powers thatcomprised it.Collective security: The idea that international peacecould be preserved by all states co-operating together torestrain an international aggressor. It was chieflyassociated with the League of Nations.Chamberlain, Neville (18731940): Conservativepolitician who became Chancellor of the Exchequer in1934 (when he oversaw the programme of Britishrearmament) and from May 1937 Prime Minister insuccession to Baldwin. He is seen as the architect of the

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policy of appeasement, but declared war on Germanyin September 1939.Taylor, Alan J.P. (190690): British historian whotaught at Manchester and Oxford. He was famous for acontroversial book on the outbreak of war published in1961, which claimed that Hitler was no more to blamefor the war than Britain and France.It must not be forgotten that war in 1939 was declared byBritain and France on Germany, and not the other wayround. A large part of any explanation for the war thatbroke out in September 1939 must rest on this centralpoint. Why did the two western powers go to war withGermany? Immediately the question is put this wayround, the role of Germany assumes a new and verydifferent perspective. France and Britain had complexinterests and motives for war. They, too, had to takedecisions on international questions with one eye onpublic opinion and domestic politics and another onpotential enemies elsewhere. The traditional picture ofthe western democracies acting as honest brokers inworld affairs, vainly trying to uphold the spirit of theCovenant of the League of Nations and the strategy ofcollective security in the face of totalitarian pressurecan no longer be upheld. Nor can the later view that sawChamberlain and his cabinet as Guilty Men, honestbut incompetent appeasers, willing to give the dictatorswhat they wanted until forced by the moral indignationof popular opinion to fight. Instead historians nowemphasize that French and British foreign policy in the1930s was the product of a complex interplay ofdomestic and international pressures and interests which

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cannot be adequately subsumed in the popular notion ofappeasement. It was in fact, as A.J.P. Taylor pointed outto public dismay in 1961, old-fashiond balance-of-powerpolitics (Taylor, 1961).Collective security: The idea that international peacecould be preserved by all states co-operating together torestrain an international aggressor. It was chieflyassociated with the League of Nations.Chamberlain, Neville (18731940): Conservativepolitician who became Chancellor of the Exchequer in1934 (when he oversaw the programme of Britishrearmament) and from May 1937 Prime Minister insuccession to Baldwin. He is seen as the architect of thepolicy of appeasement, but declared war on Germanyin September 1939.Taylor, Alan J.P. (190690): British historian whotaught at Manchester and Oxford. He was famous for acontroversial book on the outbreak of war published in1961, which claimed that Hitler was no more to blamefor the war than Britain and France.The significance of Taylors argument was that it forcedpeople to see that British and French policy before 1939was governed primarily by raisons dtat, and onlysecondarily by moral considerations. In other words theBritish and the French, just like the Germans, wereanxious to preserve or extend their power, andsafe-guard their economic interests, by a variety ofmeans, some much less scrupulous than others. If, in theend, this meant going to war to preserve Franco-Britishpower and prestige, it also meant finding ways of

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containing or accommodating other powers in a systemstill dominated by British and French interests. IfChamberlain has not been completely exonerated byrecent historiography, appeasement now seems a far lessreprehensible strategy than it did a generation ago.Indeed it can now be seen to be very much in themainstream of the British diplomatic tradition.When the explanation for the outbreak of war movesbeyond Germany to Britain and France, it at onceassumes a global significance. Both the western powerswere possessors of empires that stretched across theworld. They faced problems not just in central Europebut in the Near East, the Middle East and throughoutAfrica. The interests of these areas had to be balancedagainst those nearer home. In the Far East the imperialpowers came directly into contact with the two majorPacific powers, Japan and the United States, who bothhad divergent interests of their own. In Asia and theMiddle East Britain and France looked warily towardsthe Soviet Union and the unpredictable effects ofinternational communism. In areas remote from Europethe German threat was peripheral, to say the least.British diplomacy was based on a global strategy ofwhich the German question formed a part, and until 1935a subordinate part. If France was more immediatelyconcerned with German revisionism, it was also a majorimperial power threatened by the rise of MussolinisItaly in the Mediterranean and by the insecurity of itsAfrican and Asian empire. It was the global character ofthese responsibilities which eventually turned a conflictin Europe over German power into a world war.

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Mussolini, Benito (1883 1945): Radical socialistpolitician who founded the Italian fascist movement in1919. In 1922 he was appointed Prime Minister,established a single-party dictatorship by 1926 and ledItaly into wars in Ethiopia (1935), Spain (19369) andagainst the western powers (19403). He wasoverthrown by a military coup in 1943 and killed bypartisans in April 1945.Holding all the powers loosely together was theinternational economy. With the growth of world tradeand investment, economic questions impinged ondiplomacy in a very direct way. The distribution of theeconomic spoils, the rise and fall of the internationalbusiness cycle, deeply affected political decisions andinvolved all the powers, willy-nilly, in a constant roundof economic argument. The powers were compelled tobind their diplomatic and economic interests moreclosely together. Much of the recent history on theoutbreak of war has exposed the importance ofeconomic diplomacy, or economic appeasement.There is no doubt that economic rivalry and economicdependence played a major part in the international crisisof the 1930s, adding a new dimension to conflicts whichhave hitherto been regarded more as the product ofmilitary and territorial ambition, or the defence of statusand prestige.There are strong echoes here of the crisis that resulted inwar in 1914. That is not to say that the war of 191418or the postwar settlement at Versailles in any directsense caused the outbreak of the Second World War. Butboth global conflicts were the product of an age of rapid

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political, economic and diplomatic change whichprovided the context within which specific crises had tobe confronted. Both wars to be fully understood have tobe set against this background.In the years before 1914 the international system wasfaced with growing crisis. For most of the nineteenthcentury the major European powers, loosely orchestratedfirst by Metternich, then by Bismarck, had workedtogether in concert, designed to maintain the existingdistribution of influence amongthe traditional great powers, and to prevent a return tothe warfare and political uncertainty of the Frenchrevolutionary years. Though there were plenty of minordisagreements, there was a broad consensus among theruling class groups who dominated foreign policy aboutthe need to maintain a balance of power. With the rise ofGermany and the United States, the modernization ofTsarist Russia and Japan and Europes rapidindustrialization, the equilibrium was undermined. In thesearch for greater security and economic advantage theEuropean powers looked to imperialism. Some, likeBritain and France, had old-established empires andcould build upon them, hesitantly and often incoherently,in order to enhance their power. Other states rapidlyfollowed, deeming empire to be the explanation forBritish economic strength and internationalpreponderance. By the 1890s the concert had beenreplaced by intense diplomatic and economic rivalry, andthe growth of a system of fixed alliances. Though thepowers still could, and did, co-operate to solveinternational crises, they resorted increasingly to secret

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diplomacy, exclusive treaties and, in the end, to an armsrace (Langhorne, 1981).None of this made the outbreak of war inevitable, but itmade it much more likely. So, too, did the sharp changesin domestic politics. By the 1890s the tide of democracyand nationalism could no longer be ignored. Thetraditional ruling houses of Europe found themselvesfaced with the prospect of the imminent collapse of theold political structure through pressure frommiddle-class democrats and nationalists and the newworking class thrown up by economic growth.International crisis thus assumed a new dimension. War,or the prospect of war, might destroy the old regimesaltogether, or might, it was argued, give them a renewedlease of life. Faced with such a choice the Habsburgs,under mounting pressure from nationalists within theEmpire and without, opted for war in July 1914 ratherthan accept the final erosion of Habsburg power. Foronce, feeble efforts at concerted action by the otherpowers broke down. The Serbian crisis interlocked withthe wider system of rivalries and alliances, and couldthen not be reversed. By August 1914 all the greatpowers were at war for the first time since 1815.At the end of the war Allied statesmen hoped to be ableto turn the clock back to the nineteenth-centuryequilibrium, to a world widely regarded as the model ofprogress and harmony (Thomson, 1960). The defeat ofthe most threatening of the new powers, Germany,contributed to the sense that the old concert could beresurrected, operated by Britain and France together withother peace-loving nations. The peace settlement drawn

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up at Versailles in the spring of 1919 reflected theAllies ambition to prevent Germany ever threateningpeace again [Doc. 1, p. 102]. The German signatories tothe treaty were compelled to admit Germanresponsibility for the war and had to accept the countryseconomic and military enfeeblement, and extensiveterritorial losses. The treaty also provided for theestablishment of a League ofNations under whose auspices the peace could be keptby the collective action of all those states willing tosubscribe to a future of peaceful collaboration. LikeMetternichs Congress System in the early nineteenthcentury, the League system relied on the goodwill andself-restraint of the worlds major powers.Congress System: The international order in Europeafter the Napoleonic Wars when the Great Powers triedto solve issues through a series of congresses. The namewas often applied to the whole of the nineteenth centuryto explain the long period of general European peace.The commitment to security and peaceableness wasstrengthened by two further agreements. In early 1922,following a conference in Washington, treatyarrangements were made for the future security of thePacific region and eastern Asia. In 1925 the Europeangreat powers agreed in the Treaty of Locarno toguarantee the frontiers of western Europe againstaggression, which opened the way to furtherrapprochement between the former enemies of 1918. InParis four years later sixty-five nations, includingGermany, Japan and the Soviet Union, signed theKellog-Briand Pact condemning the use of war as an

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instrument of state policy. There existed widespreadpopular support for peaceful collaboration. In Britain theLeague of Nations Union reached a peak of 400,000members in 1933. The No More War Movement and theWar Resisters International both advocated more radicalforms of non-compliance, including refusal to serve inthe armed forces. In France more than a million marchedthrough Paris in the summer of 1936 in support ofinternational peace. Pacifist movements in Europe andAmerica applauded the new spirit of reconciliation andinternationalism and benefited from the widespreadrevulsion against the prospect of another major war.They were weakened only by the difficulty ofreconciling absolute pacifists, who opposed any use ofviolence, with those pacifists who believed that aninternational police force of some kind (empowered tocoerce if it had to) would be the best way to isolate andpunish the aggressor. During the 1930s pacifists spent asmuch time fighting each other as they did confrontingthe threat of war.Washington Conference: Multinational conference onthe limitation of naval armaments held in Washington inNovember 1921 and signed in early 1922. Theconference set down the ratio of warships betweenBritain, Japan, the United States and France.The statesmen who dominated the international systemin the 1920s shared a common set of assumptions whichcould be traced directly back to the world of imperialismand economic rivalry in which they had been brought upbefore 1914. The year 1918 had been a dividing line ofsorts, but not a decisive one. In many cases diplomacy

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was still dominated by the small specialized lites whichran the foreign offices and diplomatic corps before thewar. They all shared the view that the internationalsystem was dominated by a small group of great powers,and that the desirable course was to establish, byagreement if possible, some sort of balance betweenthem. Though many politicians shared the revulsionagainst war, a willingness to resort to force in extremiswas an essential part of the balance and conformed withthe still powerful role of the military in European publiclife. Most European statesmen subscribed, to greater orlesser degree, to a sense of racial and culturalsuperiority. In the interwar years there was nothingexclusively Germanabout this. It was widely assumed that European culturewas more enlightened and progressive than that of otherraces despite the evident moral crisis provoked by thehorrors of the recent war. Outside Europe white rule washeld to be in the interest of everybody, ruler and subjectalike. Imperialism had its practical side as well. Itprovided an outlet for emigration and trade from Europe,and gave guaranteed access to markets and rawmaterials. Although many of the assumptions aboutempire proved illusory, this crude geo-political view wasdeeply rooted in the European mind. The physicalpossession of territory was still considered a vitalinterest, a source of prestige and a key to economicgrowth. In 1937 Neville Chamberlain, the British PrimeMinister, argued that in a united empire lies the seat ofour influence in the world (Tamchina, 1972: 100).Just as the values of the prewar world survived into the1920s, so too did its problems. In practice the

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equilibrium of the postwar period masked the continuingfragility of the international system. The war hadbrought about dramatic changes but had solved little.The old dynastic states of central and eastern Europe haddisappeared the Habsburg Empire, the Russian Empire,Imperial Germany but the problems of nationalistrivalry in the region and the future of German andRussian power had been postponed rather than resolved.Although Britain and France were the directbeneficiaries of the war, the problems of being the majorimperial powers had multiplied. Both empires reachedtheir fullest extent in the 1920s with the acquisition ofGerman colonies and the break up of what had been leftof the Turkish Empire. But both empires were now underattack by those same forces, nationalism and politicalliberalism, which had previously undermined thestability of pre-1914 Europe. In the Middle East, whichboth Britain and France viewed as vital to thepreservation of their global influence, longstandingconflicts in Palestine, Egypt and Syria were now joinedwith new demands for political independence. Both theEuropean powers were committed to empires whosesecurity and integrity it was difficult to defend. Only theweakness of the defeated powers, and Russiastemporary eclipse, disguised this fact.For much of the 1920s international affairs wereconducted in a vacuum. Britain and France achieved apredominance quite out of proportion to their realstrengths because of the temporary unwillingness orinability of the other powers to intervene decisively inworld politics. The great-power system was played withonly two of the major states committed fully to

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maintaining it. The position of the Soviet Unionillustrates this. In the aftermath of the BolshevikRevolution, Russia was plunged into internal politicalcrisis. Although Lenin and Trotsky hoped that 1917would be a signal to workers throughout Europe to riseand overthrow their governments, the postwarrevolutionary threat subsided, leaving Russia exposedand isolated.Its reduced weight in the international scales wasconfirmed by its defeat at Polish hands in 1920 when theRed Army tried to seize Warsaw. By 1925 mostBolshevik leaders had modified the effort to exportcommunism and spoke instead of socialism in onecountry. The Soviet Union deliberately cut itself offfrom the rest of the international system. The priority ofthe regime was to prevent war again on Russian soil andto avoid any diplomatic entanglements likely to bringsuch a risk about. There is no doubt that the SovietUnion possessed great potential strength, and that otherpowers underestimated the communists ability to createa powerful military and economic state. But in the 1920sRussia no longer played the part in great-powercalculations that it had done before 1914.Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov) (18701924): Chairman ofthe Russian Social Democratic Party (Bolsheviks) andthe most influential theoretical Marxist of his generation.He encouraged the party to launch the revolution inOctober 1917 and became the leader of the newgovernment until illness in 1922 forced him to withdrawfrom active politics.

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Trotsky, Leon (1879 1940): Russian socialistbelonging to the Menshevik wing of the party. Hebecame a Bolshevik in 1917 and commanded the RedArmy during the Russian Civil War. He resigned in 1925and was then accused of left-wing deviation, expelledfrom the party and sent into exile in 1929.The same was true, though for very different reasons, ofthe United States. America had begun before 1914 toexert increasing influence on international affairs,particularly in the Pacific area. When, in 1917,President Wilson brought the United States into thewar, and dominated the postwar peace settlement, itseemed that European power was destined to give way toAmerican. Yet a year after the end of the war the UnitedStates turned its back on Europe. Congress refused toratify the Versailles Treaty or to join the League ofNations. The mood of American public opinion wasstrongly isolationist. The feeling was widespread that theUnited States had been led into war by profiteers andbankers in order to shore up the French and BritishEmpires, whose role in world affairs Americans deeplydistrusted. Although there was no shortage of goodwillon the part of the United States, demonstrated in theefforts to resolve German financial difficulties in the1923 German inflation crisis and again in 1931, themajor priority of American foreign policy was to avoidfighting another war for Europe. Yet by the 1920s theUnited States had become the worlds largest economy,backed up by vast material resources and a largepopulation. Like the Soviet Union it possessed greatpotential military and economic strength, but chose, for

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domestic reasons, not to exert it in the international arena(Offner, 1975).Wilson, Woodrow (1856 1924): Democrat politicianwho became President of the United States from 1913 to1921. He played a major part in shaping the postwarsettlement in Europe with his insistence onself-determination, but the US Senate rejected theVersailles Settlement in 1920.German inflation: The collapse of the German currency(the mark) in November 1923 following almost ten yearsof escalating inflation, chiefly caused by hugegovernment borrowing during the war. The currency wasstabilized in 1924 with international help, but ageneration of German savers and investors was ruined.The source of American strength was economic power.Inexorably, with the onset of industrialization, there wasa correlation between economic power and internationalinfluence. War itself was now industrialized. France andBritain were, in relative terms, declining economies.Britains share of world trade in manufactured goodswas 46 per cent in 1870, but was only 25 per cent by1914. Frances economic growth rate before 1914 waslower than Britains, and only half that of Germanys. Asnew economies developed and grew, so the wholepattern of the international system was thrown into flux.Until economic potential was fully realized it wasimpossible to stabilize the system. America was a risingeconomic power which sooner or later would exercise itsstrength internationally. But so too were Japan, Germanyand Italy. All three were new industrial economies, withhigh rates of growth.

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Although German economic strength was temporarilybroken in 1918, it rapidly revived so that by 1928Germany was almost as economically powerful as it hadbeen in 1914. By the 1920s, partly because of Britainsinvolvement in the war, Japan had become the majoreconomy in east and south Asia. In Italy Mussolinisearly years of rule coincided with a great upsurge inItalian trade and output. Sooner or later these states, too,like the United States and the Soviet Union, would haveto be incorporated into the existing great-power system.The very speed of these changes contributed toundermining the ability of the powers, any powers, tosecure peace and social progress on their own terms.Within thirty or forty years the social structure andpolitical systems of Europe and its imitators weretransformed. Slow evolution was superseded by rapidchange; the narrow political nation was replaced by masspolitics which, in some cases, placed an intolerable strainon the existing political structure. In Germany and Italyit threw up new radical authoritarian movements hostileto the old order yet deeply distrustful of the modernliberal capitalism borrowed from the model of westernEurope. In Japan it touched off a militarist nationalismwhich sought to harness Japans new economic strengthto new political ambitions abroad. All these groups wereinfected with the ideology of imperialism and culturalsuperiority, whose manifestation in the form of Britishand French power they were committed to contest.In the era of the two world wars, against a background ofsocial and political transformation, international relationswere in transition. Stability might have been achieved by

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concerted action based around a shared interest insecuring peace as it had been in the nineteenth century,and many ordinary Europeans wished for nothing lessafter the shattering experience of the Great War. Or itmight have been achieved through the existence ofpowers so strong that they could impose their will on thewhole system, as was the case after 1945. But neither ofthese things happened. Instead there was a growingcontradiction between the existing international systemand the reality of power, made more dangerous by therestless political and ideological forces released byeconomic modernization and the rise of mass politics.These facts did not directly cause the war of 1939 or1941, but they created an unstable context for theconduct of foreign affairs, and generated ambitions thatmade war more probable.

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Part 2Analysis

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2The International Crisis

During the 1920s diplomacy was conducted against abackground of relative international stability. Thevictor powers, Britain and France, played a dominantrole, the one in Europe, the other outside it. The 1920ssaw the heyday of liberal imperial politics and the peakof Franco-British influence. This reality was masked tosome extent by their joint commitment to the League ofNations and the idea of collective security enshrined inthe initial Covenant [Doc. 2, p. 103]. The effectivenessof the League as an instrument for genuine security wasnever severely tested in the 1920s, but the absence fromits ranks of the United States and the Soviet Union and,until 1926, of Germany too, made the League a morefragile instrument than its architects had intended.To underline the commitment to peace and to therational, restrained pursuit of self-interest that itrequired, the powers sought firmer guarantees that wouldembody the spirit of the Covenant. In the 1922Washington Treaty, Britain and Japan agreed with thenon-League United States to limit their naval armamentsand to guarantee the future security of China. TheLeague itself sought positive ways to honour theundertaking to encourage general disarmamentexpressed in Article 8 of the Covenant, but not until1932 did a Disarmament Conference finally convene atGeneva. In 1925 agreements were signed at Locarno inSwitzerland between Britain, France, Germany, Italy andBelgium to guarantee the frontiers drawn up in the

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Versailles Treaty for western Europe. Unlike 1919,German leaders voluntarily acknowledged the loss ofwestern territories Alsace-Lorraine to France, Eupenand Malmdy to Belgium. On a pledge of further goodbehaviour, Germany was invited to join the League in1926.Disarmament Conference: Conference convokedthrough the auspices of the League of Nations inFebruary 1932 under the chairmanship of the Labourpolitician Arthur Henderson. It failed to reach agreementon any measure of arms reduction and adjourned inOctober 1933 without reconvening.The final flourish of collaboration was made in Rome inJune 1933 with a Four-Power-Pact (which was neverratified). Under the terms of the Pact Britain, France,Italy and Germany again reiterated their commitment toLocarno and the League by undertaking not to embarkon destabilizing unilateral initiatives in Europe. Thedirect beneficiaries of all these initiativeswere France and Britain, who were able to keep theirworldwide imperial interests while maintaining thefiction of possible collective action for fiction it turnedout to be to sustain the very stability needed topreserve those interests intact.The Collapse of the LeagueThe first serious cracks in the liberal diplomatic systemwere brought about by the collapse of the worldeconomy in 1929. The world slump that followedencouraged the growth of protectionist, isolationistpolicies that exposed the weakness of collective action.

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As the major powers scrambled to protect their owneconomic interests, often at the expense of smaller andpoorer economies, the spirit of co-operation and mutualaid evaporated. As the depression deepened the westernpowers cut back more sharply on military spending,which only served to weaken the international systemstill further. In Germany and Japan, countries hitparticularly severely by the slump, domestic politicsbecame dominated by radical nationalist groups whichdemanded an active foreign policy in order to helpovercome economic difficulties, and to exploit thetemporary inaction of the West as it tried to cope withthe economic crisis.The first challenge to the League was made by Japanwhen, in September 1931, its army invaded the Chineseprovince of Manchuria and set up there a puppet state,Manchukuo, under Japanese control. Japanese pressureon the Chinese state had grown throughout the 1920s.China was in political chaos following the end ofManchu rule in 1911. The government was faced with arevolutionary threat from Chinese communism, but wasalso weakened by provincial disunity and conflictbetween rival warlords. Given Chinese weaknesses, andthe Japanese search for more secure economic outlets theManchurian invasion seemed to Japanese military andpolitical leaders to be a natural step. As it turned out, therisk had been well calculated. The Soviet Union wascaught in the midst of the upheaval of ruralcollectivization and forced industrialization, and didlittle. The League proved unable to force one of its ownmembers to renounce aggression, because it lacked theresources to do so other than moral pressure and the

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threat of economic sanctions. The latter were difficult toimpose, not only because they excluded the UnitedStates, but because the major League powers wereworried about the effect sanctions might have on theirAsian trade and Far East security in general (Crowley,1966).In 1933 Japan left the League and effectively removedthe Far East from the system of collective security. In1934, in violation of internationalagreements to preserve an Open Door policy in China(to allow open and equal access to Chinese markets), theJapanese government announced the Amau Doctrine, awarning to other powers to regard China as Japanssphere of influence and to abandon trade with theChinese and the provision of technical aid to them. Thereis no doubt that Japanese leaders, spurred on at home bythe military, were encouraged to go further after 1932than they might otherwise have done because of theweak response from the major powers. Even the UnitedStates, architect of the Open Door policy and navallimitations in the Pacific, hesitated to do anything thatwould alienate the Japanese. Neither Britain nor Americawas willing, in the difficult political climate of the early1930s, to confront Japan militarily, and each suspectedthe other of trying to pass on the responsibility and costof doing so (Louis, 1971).Open-door policy: A system in which all states cantrade on the basis of the same open access to anothermarket. The term is usually used to describe efforts totrade on equal terms with China.

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The Manchurian crisis was critical in underlining theweakness of the League and the hollowness of theequilibrium which its supporters had established. TheChinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek, thought in 1932 thatthe Japanese invasion signalled the beginning of theSecond World War, and expected a global conflict tobreak out by 1936 at the latest (Sun, 1993: 16). It wasfollowed by a sharp deterioration in the internationalsituation in Europe. In January 1933 Hitler wasappointed German Chancellor. He led a party committedto treaty revision and to a reassertion of Germaninfluence. From being a power that worked within theLeague system, however grudgingly, Germany now setout to repudiate it. Hitler withdrew the Germandelegation from the Disarmament Conference and theLeague of Nations in October 1933. The western powersalready knew of German secret rearmament before1933 but had not perceived it as a serious threat. UnderHitler rearmament assumed a different character. Thoughthe western powers had only a hazy idea of Hitlersultimate intentions, it was clear that Germanrear-mament would be directed at some time to arevision of the territorial settlement arranged atVersailles. This was not, as yet, a serious problem. TheBritish, for their part, were not averse to somereadjustment, provided it was achieved on British terms.But it did resurrect in a very direct way the threat thatGerman power had posed to western interests before1914. Britain and France were forced to look for ways inwhich Germany could be accommodated within theexisting system without destroying its stability.

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Chiang Kai-shek (1887 1965): Chinese army officerwho rose to power in China in the 1920s and fought along civil war against Chinese communists and nativewarlords. He led Chinese resistance to Japanese invasionin the 1930s and 1940s but was defeated by communistinsurgents in 1949.The rise of Hitler affected not only the westerndemocracies but also Italy, where fascism had come topower a decade before. Italy had been accommodatedinto League diplomacy. If Mussolini was still not takenquite seriously by western statesmen, he took himselfseriously enough. Italy played a major part in the searchfor collective guarantees and by the early 1930s hadacquired through dint of Mussolinis efforts aconsiderable increase in diplomatic stature and militarystrength. A powerful Germany threatened to undosome of these gains and to reduce Italian influence incentral and southeastern Europe. It is likely that this wasthe final factor that pushed Mussolini towards a policy ofactive imperialism in Africa and the beginning of anaggressive Mediterranean policy. Mussolini did not wantto play the role of junior dictator to Hitler. As a result hebrought Italy, in its turn, to a point where it couldchallenge the fragile balance of power.Mussolinis imperialism had other roots as well, eventhough its emergence depended on diplomaticcircumstances in Europe. Italian fascism waspreoccupied with ideas of an Italian mission toreconstruct the fallen Roman Empire. This vision drewupon the prewar anti-Slav and colonialist traditions,which helps to explain Mussolinis interest in the

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Balkans, and in east and north Africa. He looked inparticular at Ethiopia (Abyssinia), the only majorindependent state left in Africa. Links with Ethiopiawere of long standing.In 1923 Italy, against British and French objections,sponsored Ethiopias membership of the League. Anagreement for friendship had been signed in 1928, andItalys economic and military influence in the area hadbeen tacitly acknowledged by the other major colonialpowers, a fact that persuaded Mussolini that they wouldnot object on grounds of principle to the extension offormal Italian control over the country. In September1933 he made the first public announcement that Italywould be seeking an outlet in Africa and Asia. A warplan for the attack on Ethiopia was drawn up in thesummer of 1934 and in December he began activepreparations for a campaign in the following autumn. Inorder to pre-empt possible retaliation from his Leaguepartners, Mussolini made efforts to create a favourablediplomatic situation which would ensure the success ofhis venture. In January 1935 he secured veiledagreement from the French Prime Minister, Pierre Laval.He hoped that Britain, too, would not be averse to Italianintervention, or could be restrained by France if it were,or would be frightened into acceptance by the militarythreat that Italys Libyan armies posed to Egypt. Tomake this threat a possibility the Italian military beganplanning for a possible war against Britain to turn northand east Africa into an Italian imperial area at somefuture date.

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On 3 October 1935 Italian forces invaded Ethiopia.Mussolini knew that it was a risk and hoped for a rapidvictory. Although Italian aviators resorted to using gasbombs for the first time, the struggle, though unequal,was not straightforward. Not until 9 May 1936 wasvictory finally declared, but a violent pacificationcampaign continued thereafter. Mussolini failed in hisgamble to create diplomatic approval of the Italianattack. The League rallied to Ethiopias support,condemned the invasion, and invoked economicsanctions and an arms embargo against Italy. But inreality the invasion of Ethiopia could not be reversed anymore than Manchuria. Britain and Francecame close to giving a limited approval by suggesting acompromise that would give Italy guaranteed influencein a still-independent Ethiopia (the so-calledHoare-Laval Pact, named after the British and FrenchForeign Ministers who negotiated it). When news of thePact leaked out, the British and French governmentsboth repudiated it and tried to show that they wereenthusiastic about sanctions. The effect was to driveItaly much closer to Hitlers Germany, and make itincreasingly hostile to Britain and France for obstructingthe creation of an Italian empire, while sanctions brokedown, as they had done in the case of Manchuria,because the United States, Japan and Germany were alloutside the League. To the dismay of the smallermembers, the major League states were not prepared torisk anything greater than protest, and in 1937 Italyfollowed Germany and Japan by withdrawing from theLeague altogether.

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Sanctions: The policy of imposing an economic andfinancial boycott against states engaged in aggressivewar in violation of the Covenant of the League ofNations. It was applied only to Italy during theItalo-Ethiopian War.If Manchuria had begun the decline of the Leaguesystem, Ethiopia brought about its eclipse. Sensingopportunities for gain, Japan and Italy tested the systemto see what could be extracted. Collective securityevaporated, demonstrating the extent to which it hadalways rested on the willingness and capacity of Britainand France to enforce it. Instead, both the major westernpowers pursued their own interests, unwilling and unableto prevent a serious challenge to the stability andsecurity of the international system. By 1936 the Leaguestrategy was bankrupt; confidence in the British andFrench claims to moral ascendancy in world affairs was,with some justice, at a low ebb. The DisarmamentConference, which the major powers had used asevidence of their good intentions, broke up withoutserious achievement in June 1934 and was notreconvened. The Ethiopian crisis opened up the way torearmament and provoked the first murmurings ofgeneral war.France and BritainBritain and France were now faced with the question ofhow to respond to the deterioration in the internationalsituation. There was never any doubt that some sort ofresponse was called for. Neither power was prepared toabandon its influence, prestige and safety. Yet neitherpossessed sufficient strength, either military or

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economic, to assert that influence decisively whenchallenged. Both powers were confronted by the centraldilemma of having to defend large and geographicallydispersed empires with relatively shrinking resources.We are a very rich and very vulnerable Empire, wroteNeville Chamberlain, and there are plenty of pooradventurers not very far away who look upon us withhungry eyes (Pratt, 1975: 198). Both British andFrench strategy was greatly complicated by the globalnature of their concerns. Where Germany, Italy andJapan could concentrate their efforts at revision ingeographically distinct regions, the two western powerswere compelled to adopt a worldwide strategy.It was only this shared threat that pushed Britain andFrance closer together in the 1930s. Certainly until 1933Britain was wary of French ambitions, while the Frenchwere disappointed at the way in which Britain hadwithdrawn from direct involvement in Europe at the endof the war. There were other reasons for cool relations.Britain was unfriendly towards French imperialambitions in the Middle East and was not averse to somesort of colonial settlement with Germany. France, inturn, had proved unco-operative during the economiccrisis and was held to bear much of the blame for thecollapse of the international credit system in 1931.A year later Robert Vansittart, Permanent Secretary atthe British Foreign Office, complained that France hadvirtually attained the very thing that we havetraditionally sought to avoid in Europe, hegemony, if notdictatorship, political and financial (Reynolds, 1991:118). Chamberlains private view was that France never

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can keep a secret for more than half an hour, nor agovernment for more than nine months (Feiling, 1946:322). Until 1939 the British remained sceptical ofFrances value as an ally. The growing threat ofGermany overcame some of these differences, but onlyon basic questions of the balance of power in Europewere there broad areas of agreement.Yet even here the strategy that each adopted in the faceof the German threat was very different. Both drewconclusions from the experience of 1914. The French, inthe absence of an enforceable collective security, lookedtowards a system of firm alliances to restrain Germany.Britain wished to avoid at all costs the sort of allianceentanglements that were held to have brought about theFirst World War and adopted an increasingly isolationistoutlook. Since France needed British support againstGermany, the two strategies were clearly incompatible.In the end Britain was able to avoid any clearcommitment to France until 1939, so that it was Britishstrategy that tended to prevail, though France was neverin any sense an entirely dependent or pliant instrument inBritish diplomacy as has often been suggested.French strategy was based on one major consideration:the need to find firm guarantees for security in the eventof the revival of German power. Yet conditions for analliance system were very different from those in 1914.Real guarantees for security could only be found in aformal military commitment to France by Britain, whichwas not forthcoming until February 1939. The otheroption was to work for a two-front containment ofGermany. Following this strategy France established a

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network of alliances, some of them carrying militaryagreements as well, with the new states of easternEurope. Agreement was reached with Poland in 1921,Czechoslovakia in 1924,Romania in 1926 and Yugoslavia in 1927. The so-calledLittle Entente in central Europe was intended to play therole that the Franco-Russian alliance had filled before1914 (Adamthwaite, 1995; Young, 1996). But such arelationship was fraught with problems. The promises ofmilitary aid were ambiguous, since France could clearlyoffer little immediate help in the event of a Germanthrust eastwards. Nor could the eastern states be reliedon to agree among themselves sufficiently to restrainGermany with any effect. In 1935 France tried to securea firmer base in the east by reaching an agreement withthe S