The History Buff's Guide to World War II (5 page)

Following are the abnormal times and strange gods of which FDR spoke. In roughly chronological order are the foremost seeds of insecurity leading up to the Second World War.

1
. THE FIRST WORLD WAR

Of all the products of the Great War—tanks, poison gas, bombers—missing was any genuine resolution. On paper the Allies appeared to be the defeated party, hosting the majority of battles and suffering the vast majority of fatalities. Britain went from being a creditor to a debtor nation. France lost more than a million young men. Russia collapsed altogether. The Allies failed to capture a foot of German soil.

In contrast, the former Central Powers were never routed and yet were saddled with a humiliating treaty. Many citizens viewed their governments as accomplices in a traitorous plot. In Germany, pockets of ultranationalists remained active, eventually collecting around a persuasive war veteran who preached revenge.

In Asia, an old country emerged as a new power. For capturing a German fort in China and conducting brief naval patrols in the Mediterranean, Japan received from the League of Nations the Marshall, Mariana, Palau, and Caroline island groups (formerly German possessions). The Japanese economy enjoyed an unprecedented boom, thanks to overseas demand for wartime supplies. From 1913 to 1919, Japanese exports increased 300 percent. Having recently annexed Korea and defeated both Russia and China in regional wars, the empire abruptly became the political, military, and economic power of East Asia. Several militarists promoted the idea of expanding Japan’s influence even further.
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Combat veterans of the First World War included Winston Churchill, Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Harry S. Truman, and George VI of Windsor.

2
. THE RISE OF ETHNIC NATIONALISM

Tribal discord is almost as old as humankind. But in the early twentieth century, several factors enabled old ethnic tensions to become new political contests.

Victories in the S
INO
-J
APANESE
and R
USSO
-J
APANESE
wars created an explosion of racial pride in Japan. World War I, which began after an ethnic uprising in Bosnia, gave birth to new states based largely on ethnicity—Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Yugoslavia,
etc.
Much of American and British foreign policy bordered on the premise that “white makes right.” Fables of ethnic superiority tested well in many political climates, particularly in Italy and Germany.
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Increasingly, race and state became virtually synonymous, to the point where international relations turned into cultural divides. In 1924, the United States, Canada, and Australia strictly limited immigration based on ethnicity, particularly against Asians. By 1930, Japan had more than seven hundred societies based on racial nationalism. In 1933, Nazi Germany imposed its first anti-Semitic laws, and in 1938, Germany annexed Austria and the Czech Sudetenland on grounds of ethnic conglomeration.
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Even in the League of Nations, that hopeful experiment in international cooperation, states were unwilling to even pay lip service to brotherly love. Despite several attempts to insert one, the covenant of the League of Nations never included an endorsement of racial equality.
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Article 9 of the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war stipulated, “Belligerents shall as far as possible avoid bringing together in the same camp prisoners of different races or nationalities.”

3
. THE REPARATIONS WAR

The harshest punishments of the Treaty of Versailles fell upon Austria and Hungary. Both were ordered to relinquish 60 percent of their territory, effectively ending their reigns as European powers. In comparison, Germany gave up 13 percent of its territory but was allowed to keep a nucleus of one hundred thousand soldiers for defense. The crux of Prussia’s punishment was to come from reparations.
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As to the amount, no consensus could be found. Most of war-torn France wanted Germany to be “squeezed as a lemon is squeezed.” Others called reparations “a sad adventure,” fearing it would bankrupt Germany and create a power vacuum in dead-center Europe. U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, and of course the Germans, wanted no payments whatsoever. Supreme Allied commander Marshal Ferdinand Foch lamented, “This is not peace: it is an Armistice for twenty years.”
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Seemingly endless debate altered the amounts again and again. The Weimar government actually began paying—in coal, cattle, boats, and gold—without a final amount declared. Threats and reprisals sent the German mark into repeated free fall until it was valued at one-trillionth its prewar level.
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Emergency grants and loans eventually gave Germany more money than it ever paid, but the damage had been done. Americans and Britons believed France was irresponsibly greedy. The French believed Germany escaped punishment. Many Germans felt cheated by democratic governments, including their own. The issue was never resolved; Germany simply stopped paying.
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In 1929, Germany was scheduled to make reparations payments in gold until the year 1988.

4
. THE GREAT DEPRESSION

In 1920, only two European countries were dictatorships. By 1937, there were sixteen. The primary cause of this migration to extremism was, in the words of economist John Maynard Keynes, the “greatest economic catastrophe…of the modern world.”
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In 1929, a combination of overproduction, reduced consumption, and grossly overoptimistic stock prices led to a commercial implosion in the United States. Had the United States been a small player in the world market, the problem might have contained itself. Unfortunately, by the 1920s, America had become one of the largest creditor and trade nations on the planet.
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Within a year, international investments and trade began to dry up. Work orders plummeted and joblessness soared. Unemployment reached 25 percent in the United States, Japan, and Britain; 30 percent in France; 33 percent in Germany; and almost 50 percent in Eastern Europe.
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Banks crumbled in Austria, Britain, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Poland, Romania, and the United States, killed off by unstable currencies and multiplying loan defaults. Grain production—the foundation of nearly every national economy—fell by a fourth. Families lost their life savings, homes and businesses, pensions, and in many cases the ability to buy food.
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Out of deprivation came polarization. Normally moderate sections of societies, especially the middle class, became increasingly receptive to radical solutions.
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This bread line was in New York, but the forlorn scene appeared throughout the Western world for several years running.

The fragile democracy of Weimar Germany survived riots, armed rebellions, foreign occupation of the Rhineland, governmental scandals, political assassinations, and a total collapse of its monetary system—but it did not survive the Great Depression.

5
. THE RISE OF ECONOMIC AUTARCHY

In the 1930s, Germany and Britain received most of their iron ore from Scandinavia and France. Japan was barely self-sufficient in food and almost entirely dependent on the United States for metals and petroleum. The United States imported most of its manganese, rubber, chromium, and practically all of its tin from East Asia.
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Such interdependence would logically oblige states to be cooperative with their suppliers. But memories of the largest war ever, coupled with lingering global economic depression, did not exactly create an environment of trust between capitals. Rather than engage in free trade, the richest states intensified their competition for raw materials.

As early as 1929, there were talks of European union, mostly to fend off “imperialist America.” In a 1932 Commonwealth trade conference held in Canada, Britain declared it would exercise “imperial preference” when buying and selling anything. To secure sources of raw materials in Asia, the United States increased its military presence in the Philippines. Benito Mussolini declared he wanted to make North Africa, of all things, a wheat basket for Italy. In 1936, Japan announced the creation of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, insinuating first rights to oil and ores in the region. Outdoing the rest, Germany reoccupied the industrial Ruhr Valley in 1936 and solidified designs for acquiring Lebensraum (“living space”) in the east.
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Fittingly, some of the most intense offensives in World War II involved targets of raw material: grain in Manchuria and Russia; oil in the Dutch East Indies, Arabia, and the Caucasus; and coal in the Ruhr of Germany.

In a 1939 poll in
Fortune
magazine, 60 percent of Americans surveyed said they hoped the United States could reach a point where “it does not have to buy any products from foreign countries.”

6
. THE “CHINA SYNDROME”

Had there been no Munich crisis, no invasion of Poland, no fall of France, there still would have been a war in Asia. In the two years preceding the collapse of “peace in our time” within Europe, Soviet weapons and ammunition flowed into China, battles in Manchuria produced casualties of six figures, and more than one million had died in a conflict that engrossed a fourth of the world’s population.

Amid the chaos, China struggled in vain to find equilibrium. Its three-hundred-year-old Manchu dynasty ceased to exist in 1912. Internal fighting and economic frailty prevented the development of any stable replacement government. By 1927 a bloody rivalry began between China’s Communists and Nationalists. To “establish order” in the area, rogue Japanese officers staged the Manchurian Incident in 1931, signaling the start of intermittent military campaigns that would last until 1945.
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Other countries also struggled with civil wars and foreign encroachments at the time, but other countries did not have 480 million inhabitants. The outbreak of war in Europe was essentially a fabrication, a manufacture of crises where none truly existed. The war in China was a culmination, the breaking point of a fractured relic.

The early 1900s were not particularly kind to China. Between 1911 and 1936, a series of catastrophic floods, earthquakes, droughts, civil wars, and famines claimed approximately fifteen million lives.

7
. THE WEAKNESS OF THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

The brainchild of idealist Woodrow Wilson, the League of Nations actually developed into a reasonably efficient and effective institution. After a few growing pains, the consortium soon included most every sovereign country in the world and became the forum of choice for international relations. Between 1924 and 1931, the globe lived relatively free of wars, a span of tranquility almost unmatched in history.

But the organization contained inherent frailties, revealed in full by Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931. The Manchurian Incident was a direct violation of League Charter Article 10—respect of integrity and independence of all member states. But there was apparently little the League was willing or capable of doing. The organization had no armed forces, no actual legal control over member states, and no United States in its assembly.

Simply ignoring mandates placed against it, Japan withdrew from the League in 1933. Soon to follow were some of the more aggressive participants in a greater disaster to come. Nazi Germany left in 1933, as did Italy in 1937, Hungary by 1939, and Romania in 1940. Rejecting the League became an expression of national pride. Remaining members lost much of their previous faith. The institution barely addressed the 1939 invasion of Poland and never held a session from 1940 to 1945.

By the time the League of Nations officially disbanded in 1946, it was down to half its original members.

8
. ADOLF HITLER

French historian Maurice Baumont speaks for many when he surmises, “The origins of the war of 1939 go back essentially to the insatiable appetites of Adolf Hitler.” Baumont’s logic stems from the “Great Man” theory, contending that history is determined mostly by the actions of kings, generals, and presidents. While succinct, such an approach is often shortsighted. Yet in the case of the Second World War, one person deserves a fair amount of credit for initiating the European portion of the spectacle.
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