A World at Arms (8 page)

The new leaders of the Soviet Union had not waited until the armistice of November 1918 to decide that the war was not for them. They had withdrawn in March. Though rescued by the victory of the Western Powers over Germany from the most onerous provisions the Germans had imposed on them in the peace treaty they had signed that month, the Bolshevik leaders never abandoned the view that they had been wise to pull out of the war on whatever terms they could obtain. The whole conflict had been an inherent and necessary concomitant of a capitalistic world, of which they neither had nor wanted any part. By definition, such horrors would continue to be an inherent and necessary concomitant of any capitalist world that survived, a view which suggested the desirability of neutrality in any repetition whenever and wherever it might come. Given the weakness of the new regime, caution was clearly indicated lest the capitalist powers join together to attack the Soviet Union rather than fighting each other. The essentially defensive posture of the Soviet Union was obscured by the world–wide antics of the Comintern, the international organization of Communist Parties which had agreed to
subservience to Moscow; but as the largely self–created Russian war scare of 1926–27 could have led one to predict, the appearance of real dangers in East Asia from 1931 and in Europe from 1933 produced the most cautious responses from the Soviet Union: a combination of concessions to potential attackers with encouragement for others to fight them.

If the great powers on the periphery of Europe moved toward isolation and neutrality on the basis of their view of the war, what about the European powers themselves? The Italians alone had been divided over the prospect of entering the conflict; its costs destroyed their economic, social, and political system. If the new regime Benito Mussolini installed in 1922 on the ruins of the old glorified war as a sign of vitality and repudiated pacifism as a form of decay, the lesson drawn from the terrible battles against Austria on the Isonzo river–in which the Italians fought far better than popular imagination often allows–was that the tremendous material and technical preparations needed for modern war were simply beyond the contemporary capacity of the country.
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This was almost certainly a correct perception, but, given the ideology of Fascism with its emphasis on the moral benefits of war, it did not lead to the conclusion that an Italy without a big stick had best speak very, very softly. On the contrary, the new regime drew the opposite conclusion.
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Noisy eloquence and rabid journalism might be substituted for serious preparations for war, a procedure that was harmless enough if no one took any of it seriously, but a certain road to disaster once some outside and Mussolini inside the country came to believe that the “eight million bayonets” of the Duce’s imagination actually existed.

France had borne the greatest burden of the war, including the highest proportion of both casualties and destruction. Triumphant only in association with powerful allies, terrified of her own isolated weakness, France looked apprehensively rather than confidently upon the post-war world. For her leaders the war had only reinforced the twin conclusions drawn from the war of 1870–71: France needed allies, and a war with Germany was likely to be fought out on French soil. The lessons drawn from these conclusions were, however, contradictory. If France needed allies and if these allies were to be of any help against Germany, then the French would have to be willing to come actively to the aid of those allies if they in turn were threatened. On the other hand, if another war on French soil were to be avoided, then an even more elaborate system of border defenses than that of the pre-1914 period would be needed,
with victory coming as it had in 1914–18 by again halting any German attacks, only this time at the border rather than in the middle of France’s richest provinces.

That this strategy promised catastrophe for any continental allies of France was so obvious that it was for years ignored outside France as much as in Paris. Even those like the Socialist leader Léon Blum, who objected to military alliances in the belief that the existence of such alliances had contributed to the outbreak of the last war, never suggested any alternative national strategy. The spectacle of a France essentially without a coherent policy can be understood only with reference to the weakness of what had once been Europe’s leading power and to the mental debility of a military leadership, which apparently hoped to off-set its 30 percent underestimation of German front-line strength in 1914 by a 300 percent over-estimate of German front-line strength in the 1930S.
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As for French diplomacy in the immediate post-war years, it fastened on the hope of rescuing what could be rescued from the shambles made by the United States and Britain of the peace settlement by their refusal to honor the bargain made with France over the Rhineland, when they had promised a defensive alliance to dissuade France from detaching the Rhineland permanently from Germany. Here too domestic developments, in this case of a fiscal and social nature,
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prevented adherence to a coherent and determined foreign policy, so that Paris reaped all the disadvantages and none of the advantages of firmness toward Germany. Facing the memory of the Great War, perhaps it would be better to say paralyzed by that memory, France resigned herself to an era of drift and despair.

In Britain there were also two lessons drawn from the war, one from its origins and one from its conduct. The lesson of its origins was believed to be that a quarrel in an obscure corner of Europe–obscure needless to say only from the perspective of London–had led to a general catastrophe. This was taken to mean that if any problem anywhere in Europe were not solved peacefully, even if at some sacrifice to those involved, it could lead to a war that was most likely to become once again a general war, drawing in England as well as most other nations. If the lesson of 1914 was that war in Europe could not be localized, then local wars obviously had to be kept from starting in the first place; and from this view came the concept of peaceful change as a means of resolving local issues likely to precipitate local wars that would in any case become general once again.

The other lesson drawn from the conduct of war was that England’s unprecedented creation of a huge continental army, however necessary at
the time, must under no circumstances become a precedent for the future. Even those who claimed that Field Marshal Haig had started with a strategic concept in his great campaign of 1917–and there were and are those who dispute that contention–generally agreed that the British could, should, and would never again go to Passchendaele, the scene of slaughter that symbolized the bloody horror of the trenches. Great Britain, like the United States, would dismantle her armed forces, and in particular reduce her army also to about the size specified for Germany by the peace treaty. Distaste for the past constricted any realistic concept of the future. If war ever came again, Britain would return to her earlier pattern of subsidizing continental allies and providing substantial but limited land forces, while relying on blockade pressure and the strategic possibilities afforded by sea power to throttle any continental enemy.

If Austria–Hungary had dissolved under the impact of war and defeat, Germany had been and continued to be held together by nationalistic sentiments and the exertions of those political parties and leaders who in pre-war Germany had been denounced as the alleged enemies of the state. Within the country, discussion of the war and its lessons was heavily concentrated on the supposed failure to implement the “Schlieffen Plan” for victory fully as a cause of German defeat in the first Battle of the Marne in 1914, and on the imaginary stab-in-the-back by the home front as the cause of defeat in 1918. Although an excellent case can be made that Count Alfred von Schlieffen should have been committed to a mental institution for his plan to employ non-existent army units, whose creation he opposed, rather than celebrated as a military genius; and an even better case can be made for the position that Germany’s home front was the most solid and the least disaffected of any European great power during the war, all the speculations of a contrary nature made in Germany were of purely theoretical significance for foreign policy at that time since only a flood of harmless, even if utterly misleading, books and articles resulted from them during the 1920S. Policy was determined in that decade by men who recognized that Germany could not risk another general war, and that only a localized war that was absolutely certain to remain localized could ever be contemplated; and this qualification meant that in practice Germany could not go to war under any then foreseeable circumstances.

All this would change when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 because his deductions from the war differed in important respects from those of others. War had been an intended and even a preferred part of National Socialist policy from the beginning, not so much out of a preference for fighting for its own sake, but from the entirely accurate conviction that the aim of German expansion could be secured only by war.
Germany was to seize the agricultural land needed to feed its population, a population that would grow further as it obtained such land, and which would accordingly expand its needs and its lands into the indefinite future. This crude Social Darwinism, in which racial groups fought for land which could provide the means of subsistence, expelling or exterminating but never assimilating other groups, was derived from a view of history as deterministic as that of Marx, but substituting race for class as the key to understanding.
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Its application had internal as well as external implications.

The Jews were seen as the most immediate threat to racial purity inside Germany, and as the main motor of resistance outside the country. A policy of extreme anti-Semitism would accordingly be a central concern of the government in peace first and in war later. Furthermore, a key internal need was the urgency of increasing the birthrate of the allegedly better and reducing the birthrate of the supposedly inferior racial stocks within the German population, measures that required a dictatorial regime, which alone could in addition prepare for, and hope to succeed in, the wars a racial policy called for in external affairs. Measured by the criterion of feeding a growing German population with the products of its own agricultural land, the boundaries Germany had once had were almost as useless as those of the 1920s; and thus a revision of the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919 could be only a propaganda excuse and never a goal of German policy. The vast reaches of additional land to be obtained would never be granted peacefully, and war was therefore both necessary and inevitable.

The bulk of the land to be conquered was in Russia, which, by what Hitler considered a stroke of particularly good fortune for Germany, had been taken over by what he believed to be a group of Jewish Bolsheviks who were incapable of organizing the–in any case inferior–largely Slavic population for effective resistance. The real obstacles to German expansion lay elsewhere. Germany was in the middle of Europe and would have to establish a completely secure position there before heading East. France was the closest main enemy and Czechoslovakia the closest minor one. The sequence of wars would therefore be Czechoslovakia first, France second, then the drive East, and thereafter elsewhere. In the decade 1924–34 Hitler had thought that a war with England could be postponed until after the one with Russia, but events early in his rule disabused him of this illusion; and by 1935 he was convinced of the opposite and making preparations accordingly.

But belief in the necessity for a series of new wars immediately raised the memory of the last, and it is in this regard that Hitler’s deductions from that conflict become significant. If the last war had started with an
unforeseen incident in the Balkans, and in what he considered the wrong year at that, his wars would start at times of his choosing and accordingly with incidents of his creation.
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If the last war had spread from a corner of Europe to the whole globe, drowning Germany in a flood of enemies, Germany would so arrange the circumstances of its wars that they could be fought in isolation, one at a time, against enemies of its choice and with victory in each facilitating victory in the next. If it had been the long drawn out enfeeblement of Germany under the impact of blockade on the home front and a stalemated battle of attrition in the trenches that had brought on collapse at home and then defeat at the front, the alternative was to establish a firm dictatorship at home where privations would be kept to a minimum, and to fight the wars in such a fashion as to preclude stalemate and obviate the impact of any blockade. Such procedures would enable Germany to eat the European and eventually the world artichoke from the inside, leaf by leaf, strengthened by each meal for the next, until world peace would be attained, when, to quote his views as one of his associates, Rudolf Hess, summarized them in 1927: “one power, the racially best one, has attained complete and uncontested supremacy.”
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The early stages of Hitler’s program would be enormously facilitated by the great gap between the realities of power produced by the peace settlement and the widespread illusions which have been described. Many thought that Germany’s grievances should perhaps be met by concessions, but in any case there was little immediate recognition of danger. The very idea that anyone could even think of starting another European war after the experience of 1914–18 was inconceivable to most, and Hitler shrewdly recognized the reluctance of others to interfere with his moves. He would take the first steps under the pretense of satisfying German grievances and thereby strengthen both his international and his domestic position.

The domestic consolidation of power with a dictatorship based on a one–party state as in the Soviet Union and Italy-which Hitler had held up as models for Germany before 1933
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–proceeded with great rapidity in 1933 and 1934.
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The establishment of political and cultural controls was essentially completed in those first years, though their effectiveness would increase with time; while the economic controls were imposed
more slowly, primarily in the years 1934–36. Both processes were assisted by the political, economic, and social effects of massive government spending, which greatly speeded up the economic recovery that had begun before the National Socialists came to power. Included in the spending program was a major buildup of the armed forces, which took many off the unemployment roll directly by putting them in uniforms and others by employing them both in the armaments factories and in construction projects for headquarters, army bases, air force landing fields, and naval shipyards. A huge rearmament program had always been intended by the National Socialists; now it seemed to provide temporary economic and hence domestic political advantages as well. Coming at a time when other countries were more inclined to reduce their military expenditures under the impact of the depression and the pressure of pacifist sentiments, the German armament program would change the balance of currently available military power rather quickly.