Chapter 25 Growing Aggression and World War II |
Section 1 |
During
the 1930s, three powers, Japan, Italy, and Germany grew increasingly
aggressive. Each power sought to enhance its influence and to expand its
territory through the use of military force. Each power only became more
ambitious as the Western democracies, led by Britain and France,
continued to yield to aggression in crisis after crisis. In 1939,
however, nearly a decade of aggression and crisis culminated in the
outbreak of world war. The
Failure of Collective Security The
system of collective security set up at Versailles in 1919 proved
powerless to stop international aggression in the 1930s. Aggressors
simply ignored international opinion—nor did economic sanctions have
much effect on them, partly because of the Depression. In the end, no
member of the League was willing to commit its military forces to stop
aggression when its own interests were not immediately threatened.
Countries ruled by authoritarian or totalitarian regimes were the worst
aggressors. Japanese
aggression in East Asia. The first major international acts of
aggression began in Asia, where Japanese interest in China generated
serious conflict. Worried by Japan’s lack of critical raw materials
with which to sustain its growing population, some prominent Japanese
began to call for the establishment of a new order in East Asia—a
“Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”—in effect an enlarged
Japanese empire. Imperialist officers in the Army decided to force the
issue by seizing Manchuria, where Japan already controlled the railways.
On September 4, 1931, a small group of Japanese army officers
staged a fake attack on their own railway at Mukden, the capital of
Southern Manchuria. Blaming the attack on China, Japanese forces in
Manchuria seized the whole province. Within a year, Japan proclaimed
Manchuria independent under the name of Manchukuo. In a further act of
provocation, they installed a puppet government under emperor Pu Yi, the
last Manchu emperor of China who had been deposed in 1911 when the
Chinese Republic had been proclaimed.
Unable to defeat Japan militarily, China appealed to the League
of Nations. The League Council condemned Japan’s aggression and
demanded that Japan restore the province to China at once. Instead, the
Japanese simply withdrew from the League. Because no member was willing
to commit military forces on China’s behalf, the League could do
nothing further to restrain Japanese aggression. In July 1937 the
Japanese launched a general war against China. By 1939, the Japanese
army had occupied nearly one-fourth of China’s territory. Italy
and the Ethiopian Crisis. Collective security was equally
ineffective in Africa, where Mussolini’s ambitions for a revived
“Roman Empire” threatened the peace. During the 1920s, Mussolini had
consolidated Italy’s position in Libya. In 1935 he fixed his sights on
Ethiopia, Africa’s last independent kingdom. Ethiopia ’s conquest
would help secure Italian possessions in neighboring Eritrea and
Somalia. With both Libya and Ethiopia, Italy would also be able to
command the approaches to the Suez Canal.
On October 3, 1935, Italian forces invaded Ethiopia. Ethiopia’s
army proved no match for Italy’s armored cars, aircraft, and poison
gas. The kingdom’s only hope lay in the principle of collective
security. As a member of the League of Nations, Ethiopia appealed for
support. The League voted both to condemn the invasion and to impose
sanctions against Italy. Angered, Mussolini simply ignored the League.
By May 1936, Ethiopia had fallen and Haile Selassie, its emperor, had
fled to Britain.
In June, the League’s Council met to reconsider its policy of
sanctions. Haile Selassie personally addressed the delegates.
Eloquently, he warned of the dangers of backing down: “It is not merely a question of a settlement in the matter of Italian aggression. It is a question of collective security; of the very existence of the League; of the trust placed by States in international treaties; of the value of promises made to small states that their integrity and their independence shall be respected and assured. It is a choice between the principle of equality of States and the imposition upon small Powers of the bonds of vassalage.”[iii][iii] Despite
Haile Selassie’s eloquence, Britain and France, the League’s leading
powers, declined to use force, and in July the League even voted to lift
the sanctions. Mussolini had won. The
Spanish Civil War. While Japanese and Italian aggression made clear
the weakness of collective security, the outbreak of civil war in Spain
demonstrated the growing division between democratic and totalitarian
regimes in Europe. Spain became a testing ground for new weapons and
tactics, as Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union used the civil war for
their own purposes. Many in Europe came to see the Spanish civil war as
a proxy struggle between the forces of fascism and communism.
European fascists were sympathetic to the self-proclaimed
Nationalists, who included the fascist Falange Party along with
conservative and Catholic allies, all united under General Francisco in
rebellion against the new Spanish Republic. Germany, Italy, and Portugal
all supported the Nationalists, contributing weapons, advisors, and
“volunteers.” Mussolini, for example, sent more than 50,000 troops
to Spain to help Franco.
On the other side, the Soviet Union supported the Republican
government. Some 60,000 anti-fascist volunteers from other countries,
including Britain, France, and the United States, also went to fight on
behalf of the republican government in what became known as the
International Brigades. Western democratic governments were more
cautious. George Orwell, the famous British writer, went to the
antifascist stronghold of Barcelona in 1936. His description illustrates
the dilemma the civil war created for democratic western leaders: “Barcelona was
something startling and overwhelming. . . . Practically every building
of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags
. . . ; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the
initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been
gutted and its images burnt.”[iv][iv]
The
civil war had led to the ascendancy of communists and other radical
groups in the anti-fascist opposition. Western leaders did not want to
see a fascist regime in Spain, but neither did they want a communist
one—and both sides, as Orwell found, were guilty of terrible excesses.
Unsuccessfully, British and French leaders tried only to keep other
powers from interfering in the conflict. Franco’s ultimate victory
reinforced their sense of helplessness in the face of fascism.
The
Revival of German Power Of
all the threats that emerged in the 1930s to disturb the world’s
peace, the revival of German power under the National Socialist, or
Nazi, regime was the greatest. Adolf Hitler, the Nazi leader, spoke of
revenge for the Versailles treaty. His larger goal was German domination
of Europe and ultimately the world. <> Hitler’s
expansionist aims. Ten years before he became Chancellor of Germany
in 1933, Hitler had outlined his foreign policy objectives in his book, Mein
Kampf. “Germany will either be a world power.” he wrote, “or
there will be no Germany.”[v][v] Hitler identified race and
space as the two basic international problems facing Germany. He
believed the Germans were a naturally superior people destined to rule
peoples like the Slavs, whom he believed to be biologically inferior. By
‘rule’ Hitler meant the enslavement or annihilation of other
peoples. He believed that Germany could not assimilate “inferior”
peoples—if it tried it would only dilute the Germans’ own racial
“purity.” In this respect, Hitler saw the Jews as a special threat.
The other issue Hitler focused on was geographic space. He
believed that Germany required Lebensraum—living space—to accommodate its expanding population,
and planned to find such space to the east: “An additional 500,000
square kilometers in Europe can provide new homesteads for millions of
German peasants, and make available millions of soldiers to the power of
the German people for the moment of decision. The only area in Europe
that could be considered for such a territorial policy therefore was
Russia.”[vi][vi] Before commencing a full-scale war against Russia, however, Hitler believed Germany must first secure its western flank from France.[vii][vii] German
preparations for expansion. Hitler began to implement his plans for
German expansion immediately after becoming the Chancellor of Germany in
January 1933. In October 1933, he withdrew Germany from both the League
of Nations and world disarmament talks. In March 1935, he announced the
reinstitution of conscription and the formation of several new armored
divisions, as well as the creation of an air force. In 1936, while
Britain and France were preoccupied with the Ethiopian crisis, he again
violated the Versailles Treaty and moved German troops back into the
Rhineland.
When France protested, Hitler defended his actions by insisting
that he was merely correcting one of the injustices of the Versailles
Treaty. He promised that Germany had “no territorial demands in
Europe.”[viii][viii]
In mid-1936, however, he embarked on a new program of rearmament
called the Four-Year Plan. “The German army,” he declared in August,
“must be fit for operations in four years’ time; the German economy
ready for war in four years’ time.”[ix][ix]
Hitler’s successful remilitarization of the Rhineland increased
Germany’s prestige among other totalitarian powers. In the fall of
1936, Italy agreed to loose cooperation with Germany and Mussolini used
the phrase “Axis” to describe the relationship between the two
countries. In November, Germany concluded the Anti-Comintern Pact with
Japan, which recorded each government’s opposition to communism. Italy
joined the Pact in November 1937. The three major aggressors of the
1930s had joined forces. Anschluss
with Austria. Austria occupied a central place in Hitler’s plans
for German expansion. Not only did he want its resources, but he also
believed that its annexation would give Germany “shorter and better
frontiers.”[x][x] Perhaps most important, most of
Austria’s population was German-speaking and Hitler himself had been
born in Austria. “Common blood,” he said, “belongs in a common
Reich [Empire].”[xi][xi] After a German ultimatum, on
March 11 the head of the Austrian Nazi Party took over the government in
Vienna. The next day he declared the Anschluss,
or union, of Austria with Germany and invited the German army to enter
the country.
The Anschluss dramatically altered the strategic situation in Europe.
Britain’s Winston Churchill, not yet Prime Minister, understood
clearly the significance of what had happened. The annexation of
Austria, he warned, gave Germany “military and economic control of the
whole of the communications of Southeastern Europe, by road, by river,
and by rail.”[xii][xii] Germany was now well
positioned for eastward expansion. Nevertheless, the Western democracies
accepted Hitler’s moves in Austria as they had those in the Rhineland. Appeasement
in Europe Nazi
leaders attributed their success in the 1930s largely to the inaction of
the Western democracies. Had he been a western head-of-state in 1933,
claimed Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, he would have
given Germany an ultimatum rather than tolerating Hitler’s accession:
“Either he disappears or we march!” Instead, he marveled, the
Western democracies “left us alone and let us slip through the risky
zone, and we were able to sail around all dangerous reefs.”[xiii][xiii]
In fact, Western leaders had accepted Hitler’s demands as part
of a deliberate policy of appeasement,
or giving in to avoid war. Reasons
for appeasement. The leaders of the Western democracies adopted
appeasement for a variety of reasons. For one thing, the global
depression diverted their attention. In addition, many worried that
standing against Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany required working with
the Soviet Union. Yet the totalitarian regime of Joseph Stalin appeared
no less dangerous or brutal than those of Mussolini and Hitler. Curbing
Italian and German power might only strengthen Soviet power, bringing
neither lasting peace nor security to Europe.
Perhaps the greatest influence behind appeasement was the impact
of World War I in the Western democracies. The enormous cost of the war
in both lives and treasure had led to a widespread belief that all war
was ineffective and unjustifiable. Popular anti-war novels, like Erich
Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on
the Western Front, reinforced such ideas. Not even the rise of
Nazism changed many minds. Wishfully, most people believed that, as one
influential British magazine put it, “Hitler . . . does not want war.
He is susceptible to reason in foreign policy.”[xiv][xiv]
Such sentiments made the idea of “peace at any price”
extremely popular. Soon after Hitler took power and made clear his
intention to re-arm, for example, the Oxford Union, an elite university
debate group in Britain, resolved, “That this House will in no
circumstances fight for its King and Country.”[xv][xv] In a 1934 campaign speech, the
leader of Britain’s Labour Party even promised to “close every
recruiting station, disband the Army, and disarm the Air Force.”[xvi][xvi]
In practical terms, the disarmament policies that had prevailed
throughout the world after World War I also convinced many Western
leaders that they had no choice but appeasement. Having ignored the
warnings of military experts about the need to maintain and modernize
their forces, they simply found themselves unprepared to deal with
aggression in the 1930s. During the Ethiopian crisis of 1935, for
example, the Royal Navy warned that fighting Italy would mean leaving
British territories in Asia vulnerable to Japan. Consequently, Prime
Minister Baldwin told his Foreign Minister: “Keep us out of war, we
are not ready for it.”[xvii][xvii] The
Sudetenland and Munich. One of Nazi Germany’s primary grievances
concerned the Sudetenland, a mountainous region in northwestern
Czechoslovakia. More than three million Germans lived in the area, which
had been part of the Habsburg Empire until World War I. Although the
Czech government had taken steps to protect the rights of the Sudeten
Germans, Hitler complained about Czech “oppression.” He further
portrayed Czechoslovakia as a grave danger, calling it a “dagger
pointed at the heart of Germany.”[xviii][xviii] In the spring of 1938,
Hitler demanded the cession of the Sudetenland to Germany.
Hitler’s posturing threatened war. As part of its effort to
construct an alliance system to contain the German threat, France had
earlier promised to support Czechoslovakia in case of German aggression.
Edouard Daladier, the new French prime minister, suspected Hitler
intended to take more than simply the Sudetenland. Even Napoleon’s
ambition, he observed, had been “far inferior to the aims of the
present German Reich.”[xix][xix] However, Daladier also
realized that France needed British support to stop Hitler.
Anxious to avoid war, however, Neville Chamberlain, the new
British Prime Minister and one of the architects of appeasement policy,
preferred to negotiate. With Mussolini acting as a go-between, in late
September 1938 the British and French leaders met Hitler in Munich.
While the Czech leaders were forced to wait outside the council chamber,
Chamberlain and Daladier agreed to German annexation of the Sudetenland
in return for Hitler’s promise that this was “the last territorial
claim I shall make in Europe.”[xx][xx]
Returning to London by plane, Chamberlain appeared before
reporters and radio microphones on the airport tarmac. Waving a copy of
the agreement, he claimed to have achieved “peace for our time.”[xxi][xxi] Winston Churchill, a former
Cabinet Minister, provided a more accurate analysis when he
prophetically observed: “The government had to choose between shame
and war. They have chosen shame and they will get war.”[xxii][xxii] Churchill was right—Munich
made war more, not less, likely. Hitler now believed he had little to
fear from the Western leaders. “I saw them at Munich,” he said,
“they are little worms.”[xxiii][xxiii] Poland
and the coming of war. The situation in Europe rapidly deteriorated
after the Munich Conference. In March 1939, having occupied the
Sudetenland, Hitler moved against the rest of Czechoslovakia. At the
same time, he moved to recover territories lost to Germany in the east
after World War I. After forcing Lithuania to return the port of Memel
he focused his main attention on Poland. In 1919, the Versailles treaty
had awarded Poland the Baltic port of Danzig along with a strip of
connecting land carved from German territory. Hitler demanded that
Poland return Danzig and the so-called “Polish Corridor.” His real
intention was to destroy Poland itself. Realizing that this might lead
to an immediate war with Russia, for which Germany was not yet ready,
Hitler secretly opened negotiations with the Soviet government.
In August 1939, Hitler announced the conclusion of a
“non-aggression” pact between Germany and the Soviet Union.
Stalin’s motives for the treaty remain less clear than Hitler’s.
Like Hitler, he may have wanted time to prepare for a war he regarded as
inevitable. Stalin also had his own expansionist aims—in a secret
protocol attached to the non-aggression pact Germany and the Soviet
Union agreed to partition Poland between them and Germany recognized
Soviet “authority” in the Baltic states and parts of the Middle
East. With the non-aggression pact in his pocket, on September 1, 1939,
Hitler invaded Poland. This time, however, he had at last gone too far
for the western democracies to ignore. After Hitler’s violation of the Munich agreement in Czechoslovakia, Britain and France had finally decided they could no longer tolerate German aggression. They had subsequently pledged to support Poland against Germany. Responding to Hitler’s invasion, on September 1, 1939, they issued an ultimatum demanding an immediate German withdrawal. Hitler ignored their demands. Two days later, on September 3, 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. World War II had begun. |