The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (52 page)

Hitler began the Second World War with swift victories and then got bogged down in Russia. The Japanese did it the other way round, winning swift victories against the Western powers only after getting thoroughly mired in an equally unmasterable Chinese quagmire. Until it reached the Marco Polo Bridge, Japan’s expansion in China had delivered at least some of the benefits that its proponents had promised, at relatively low cost. Henceforth it rapidly worsened precisely those economic problems it had been intended to cure. Japanese visions of a peace based on massive new commercial and mining concessions in northern China proved to be nothing more than the
chimerical products of wishful thinking. All this revealed how far the Japanese had deviated from their original intention of being – and being treated as – a normal imperial power, on a par with the European empires in Asia. As we have seen, there had been superficial resemblances between Japan and Britain in 1902, when the two countries had concluded their twenty-year alliance. Yet by 1937 it was clear that the Asian ‘island race’ had taken a radically different path from the European. The British takeover of India had been based as much on co-optation as coercion, on the winning over of indigenous collaborators as much as on crushing native opposition on the field of battle. Britain’s imperial expansion in Asia had also been propelled forward by the men on the spot, but they had generally been businessmen on the spot. There was no real Japanese counterpart to the East India Company (except perhaps the South Manchurian Railway Company). Instead it was the anti-capitalist utopians in the Kwantung Army who made the running.

More crucially, perhaps, there was a drastic difference in the way domestic politics developed as Japan embarked on its bid for imperial grandeur. In Britain, overseas expansion had coincided with the growth in the power of the House of Commons and the Treasury. By comparison, both the monarchy and the armed services were weak. Nothing symbolized that better than Stanley Baldwin, as leader of the Conservative Party and First Lord of the Treasury, insisting on Edward VIII’s abdication. It is instructive to compare that crisis with the crisis that happened in Japan in February of the same year, 1936, when a mutinous faction of the army calling themselves the ‘Righteous Army of Restoration’ murdered the former Prime Minister, Admiral Saitō, the miracle-working Finance Minister, Takahashi Korekiyo, and the Inspector General of Military Education, General Watanabe. Only good luck saved the Prime Minister Okada Keisuke from a similar fate, to say nothing of the Grand Chamberlain Admiral Suzuki, Prince Saionji and Count Makino, who were also on the conspirators’ list of targets. According to the assassins, their intended victims had ‘trespassed on the prerogatives of the Emperor’s rights of supreme command’, though the attempted coup is probably best understood as a bid for power by a faction within the army. Despite its being thwarted and the murderers executed, it had the effect of pushing
Japan further down the road towards military rule. With the establishment of the Imperial General Headquarters (
Daihon-ei
) in November 1937, the civilian government, led now by Prince Konoe, faced the real possibility of exclusion from strategic decision-making, since the new body consisted only of the service ministers, the chiefs of staff and the Emperor.
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Nothing like this was remotely conceivable in England, where the cartoonist David Low’s red-faced Colonel Blimp and P. G. Wodehouse’s Roderick Spode – the former usually swathed in a clubhouse towel, the latter resplendent in his black shorts – pretty well summed up the general public’s derisive views of both militarism and fascism. That was England’s strength. Yet it was also her weakness.

By August 1937 the war in China had spread south to Shanghai, the hub of Western influence in China. In the wake of the usual ritualized ‘incidents’ by the Japanese, Chiang had decided to open a second front. Aiming to take out the Japanese cruiser
Idzumo
, moored at the Bund itself, he sent his fledgling air force into action. They missed, hitting instead a nearby hotel and department store. The Japanese nevertheless retaliated, doubling the size of their existing garrison within the International Settlement and driving the Chinese to the city’s outer perimeter. In the ensuing three-month siege, the Japanese used their superior air power and artillery to inflict heavy casualties on Chiang’s much more numerous forces, finally destroying them by landing an amphibious strike force at Chinshanwei, to the Chinese rear. In a radio broadcast at the height of the battle for Shanghai, Chiang’s wife Meiling issued an impassioned plea that went to the heart of the matter:

Japan is acting on a preconceived plan to conquer China. Curiously, no other nation seems to care. She seems to have secured their spell-bound silence,
uttering the simple magical formula, ‘This is not war but merely an incident.’ All treaties and structures to outlaw war and to regularize the conduct of war appear to have crumbled, and we have a reversion to the day of savages.

Could Western inaction be interpreted as ‘a sign of the triumph of civilization’, she asked, or was it ‘the death-knell of the supposed moral superiority of the Occident’? This was a rather good question to pose.

The Occidental population of Shanghai itself was doing its best to carry on business and pleasure as usual. As one British survivor of the siege recalled:

Shanghai became a cage, a macabre no-man’s land of about 8,000 acres with a perimeter of some 22 miles, where several million people attempted to carry on routine jobs despite showers of badly aimed shrapnel… In those feverish summer nights… under a sky split by searchlights and tracer shells, one could almost tour the world in the few square miles of the International Settlement and the French Concession. It was possible to spend an ersatz night in Moscow, Paris, Prague, Vienna, Tokyo, Berlin or New York. There were places that could provide the authentic national atmosphere, the cuisine, the music, and, if necessary, even the girls.

But what of the Occidental governments? By this time the Western powers had been watching more or less inertly for over a year as not only Japan but also Italy and Germany rode roughshod over all the international arrangements that had been put in place in the decade after 1918. Why, when faced with the Japanese invasion of northern China after 1931, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 and the German reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936, did the Western democracies do so very little? By November 1936 Germany, Italy and Japan had banded together in the Rome–Berlin Axis and the Anti-Comintern Pact. Yet Britain, France and the United States seemed paralysed. Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, the British ambassador to China, was actually wounded by a shot fired from a Japanese plane while being driven from Nanking to Shanghai. The response in London was impotent hand-wringing. The American reaction to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War was to mouth platitudes about ‘co-operative effort by peaceful and practicable means’. Roosevelt
orated obliquely about the need to put someone (he did not say whom) in ‘quarantine’, since war was ‘a contagion’. But the bottom line was the old Washingtonian maxim: ‘We avoid entering into alliance or entangling commitments.’

Why, historians have long debated, was it Western foreign policy in the 1930s to appease the aggressors? Were the democracies, like Chiang Kai-shek, quite rationally playing for time? Or is justifying appeasement nothing more than defending the indefensible?

If only you had… sought by every means in your power, by making yourselves fully acquainted with the situation, to establish feelings of friendliness and cooperation between our respective nations… then we could have averted this dire calamity.

Lord Londonderry,
Ourselves and Germany

How
much courage is needed to be a coward!… We must go on being cowards up to our limit, but
not beyond.

Sir Alexander Cadogan, September 21, 1938

For obvious reasons, we tend to think of the years from 1933 to 1939 in terms of the origins of the Second World War. The question we customarily ask is whether or not the Western powers could have done more to avert the war – whether or not the policy of appeasement towards Germany and Japan was a disastrous blunder. Yet this may be to reverse the order of events. Appeasement did not lead to war. It was war that led to appeasement. For the war did not begin, as we tend to think, in Poland in 1939. It began in Asia in 1937, if not in 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria. It began in Africa in 1935, when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia. It began in Western Europe in 1936, when Germany and Italy began helping Franco win the Spanish Civil War. It began in Eastern Europe in April 1939, with the Italian invasion of Albania. Contrary to the myth propagated by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg that he and his confederates
were its only begetter, Hitler was a latecomer to the war. He achieved his foreign policy objectives prior to September 1939 without firing a shot. Nor was it his intention to start a world war at that date. The war that broke out then between Germany, France and Britain was nearly as much the fault of the Western powers, and indeed of Poland, as of Hitler, as A. J. P. Taylor contended forty-five years ago in
The Origins of the Second World War
.

Yet Taylor ’s argument was at best only half-right. He was right about the Western powers: the pusillanimity of the French statesmen, who were defeated in their hearts before a shot had been fired; the hypocrisy of the Americans, with their highfaluting rhetoric and low commercial motives; above all, the muddle-headedness of the British. The British said they wanted to uphold the authority of the League of Nations and the rights of small and weak nations; but when push came to shove in Manchuria, Abyssinia and Czechoslovakia, imperial self-interest trumped collective security. They fretted about arms limitation, as though an equality of military capability would suffice to avoid war; but while a military balance might secure the British Isles, it offered no effective security for either Britain’s continental allies or her Asian possessions. With withering irony, Taylor called the Munich agreement a ‘triumph for British policy [and]… for all that was best and most enlightened in British life’. In reality, war with Germany was averted at the price of an unfulfillable guarantee to the rump Czechoslovakia. If handing the Sudetenland to Hitler in 1938 had been the right decision, why then did the British not hand him Danzig, to which he had in any case a stronger claim, in 1939? The answer was that by then they had given another militarily worthless guarantee, to the Poles. Having done so, they failed to grasp what Churchill saw at once: that without a ‘grand alliance’ with the Soviet Union, Britain and France might find themselves facing Germany alone. As an indictment of British diplomacy, Taylor’s has stood up remarkably well to subsequent scholarship – though it must be said that he offers few clues as to why Britain’s statesmen were so incompetent.

Where Taylor erred profoundly was when he sought to liken Hitler’s foreign policy to ‘that of his predecessors, of the professional diplomats at the foreign ministry, and indeed of virtually all Germans’, and when he argued that the Second World War was ‘a repeat performance
of the First’. Nothing could be more remote from the truth. Bismarck had striven mightily to prevent the creation of a Greater Germany encompassing Austria. Yet this was one of Hitler’s stated objectives, albeit one that he had inherited from the Weimar Republic. Bismarck’s principal nightmare had been one of coalitions between the other great powers directed against Germany. Hitler quite deliberately created such an encircling coalition when he invaded the Soviet Union before Britain had been defeated. Not even the Kaiser had been so rash; indeed, he had hoped he could avoid war with Britain. Bismarck had used colonial policy as a tool to maintain the balance of power in Europe; the Kaiser had craved colonies. Hitler was uninterested in overseas acquisitions even as bargaining counters. Throughout the 1920s Germany was consistently hostile to Poland and friendly to the Soviet Union. Hitler reversed these positions within little more than a year of coming to power. It is true, as Taylor contended, that Hitler improvised his way through the diplomatic crises of the mid-1930s with a combination of intuition and luck. He admitted that he was a gambler with a low aversion to risk (‘All my life I have played
va banque
’). But what was he gambling to win? This is not a difficult question to answer, because he answered it repeatedly. He was not content, like Stresemann or Brüning, merely to dismantle the Versailles Treaty – a task that the Depression had half-done for him even before he became Chancellor. Nor was his ambition to restore Germany to her position in 1914. It is not even correct, as the German historian Fritz Fischer suggested, that Hitler’s aims were similar to those of Germany’s leaders during the First World War, namely to carve out an East European sphere of influence at the expense of Russia.

Hitler’s goal was different. Simply stated, it was to enlarge the German Reich so that it embraced as far as possible the entire German
Volk
and in the process to annihilate what he saw as the principal threats to its existence, namely the Jews and Soviet Communism (which to Hitler were one and the same). Like Japan’s proponents of territorial expansion, he sought living space in the belief that Germany required more territory because of her over-endowment with people and her under-endowment with strategic raw materials. The German case was not quite the same, however, because there were already large numbers of Germans living in much of the space that Hitler
coveted. When Hitler pressed for self-determination on behalf of ethnic Germans who were not living under German rule – first in the Saarland, then in the Rhineland, Austria, the Sudetenland and Danzig – he was not making a succession of quite reasonable demands, as British statesmen were inclined to assume. He was making a single unreasonable demand which implied territorial claims extending far beyond the River Vistula in Poland. Hitler wanted not merely a Greater Germany; he wanted the Greatest Possible Germany. Given the very wide geographical distribution of Germans in East Central Europe, that implied a German empire stretching from the Rhine to the Volga. Nor was that the limit of Hitler’s ambitions, for the creation of this maximal Germany was intended to be the basis for a German world empire that would be, at the very least, a match for the British Empire.