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World War Two
One-Half
Century Of Crisis, 1914-1945 World War II, which broke out formally in 1939 but was actually prepared by a series of wars and clashes through the 1930s, was fed by two active agents and an excessively passive one. Deliberate strides toward military expansion on the part of new regimes in Japan and Germany formed the active causes, bringing the clouds of war to Asia and the Pacific as well as to Europe and the Mediterranean quite directly. The passivity centered on the most logical opponents to the new aggressors - the other powerful states in Europe and North America. Here, nationalistic and ideological divisions, including widespread Western suspicion of the communist regime in the Soviet Union, limited an ability to act. So did weak leadership and paralyzing internal political disputes, which made positive response difficult until a late hour. Amid ineffective responses, the inability of the League of Nations to take more than rhetorical action was a foregone conclusion, and the league progressively withered as a policy instrument during the prewar decade. Underlying all the factors contributing to war was the prior experience of war and economic depression. The aggressive regimes resulted from the tensions in Germany and Japan caused by economic collapse, supplemented in Germany's case by the wounds of prior defeat and a harsh peace. Western passivity followed also from the confusions engendered by prior crises. World history, or at least those facets dominated by the great powers, seemed locked in a spiral of growing tragedy. The New Regimes The first scenes of this new tragedy involved the advent of new, militaristic governments as key national actors plus an important supporting player. The early phases of the depression had triggered growing political fragmentation in Japan, particularly through the rise of various ultranationalist groups. Some opposed Western values in the name of Shintoism and Confucianism, while others urged a Nazi-style authoritarian government free from parliamentary restraint and undue tradition. A military group, backed by many younger officers, urged a "defense state" under their control. It was this group in 1932 that attacked key government and business offices and killed the prime minister. The result, satisfactory to no major group, was four years of moderate military rule under an older admiral, followed in 1936 and 1937 by a tougher military regime after another officer rebellion had failed. Japanese voters continued to prefer more moderate parties, but effective leadership fell increasingly into militaristic hands. The advent of military rule developed in a context of regional diplomatic crisis. During the later 1920s, Chinese nationalist forces seemed to be gaining ground in their effort to unify their chaotic nation after the 1911 revolution. Their success worried Japan's army leaders, who wanted to be able to influence the Manchurian province of China as a buffer between their colony of Korea and the Soviet Union. Japan had, in fact, dominated the Manchurian warlord since its victory over Russia in 1905. Fearful of losing ground, and unimpeded by the weak civilian government in Tokyo, the Japanese army marched into Manchuria in 1931, proclaiming it an independent state. Japan's action was condemned by the League of Nations - which, however, was unable to take effective action - and in consequence Japan simply withdrew from the league. The resulting atmosphere of crisis aided the military's advance in domestic politics, for other leaders were reluctant to damage national military strength, and this advance in turn set the scene for the next round of crisis - effectively, the outbreak of World War II in the Far East - in 1937. In the meantime, however, a more decisive change of regime had occurred in Germany. Here too, a trend toward growing conservatism and suspicion of parliamentary government had developed by the late 1920s, and then the advent of full depression triggered near-chaos politically. The National Socialist (Nazi) party, led by Adolf Hitler, began to pick up strength after nearly fading from existence during the mid-1920s. Nazis advocated many things, but among their leading goals were an authoritarian state under a single leader as well as an aggressive foreign policy that would reverse the humiliation of the Versailles treaty and gain Germany military glory and new territory for expansion. As German parliamentary leaders bickered among themselves and failed to provide decisive policies to address the depression, and as communist strength grew on the left, Nazis were able to win a growing minority of votes in general elections, while also disrupting normal political meetings and winning quiet support from many business and military leaders. Sponsored by conservatives who erroneously thought they could control him, Hitler was able to take power legally in 1933, and soon abolished the parliamentary regime and constructed a totalitarian state with himself at the helm. The Nazi state was a radically new kind of regime. Hitler attacked competing sources of power within Germany, abolishing free trade unions as well as opposition political parties. Many political opponents were placed in concentration camps, and new political police added to the terror. Attacks on Jews, the so-called enemies of true Germans, mounted steadily, as part of Hitler's racist ideology. During World War II these attacks escalated into what Hitler called his "final solution," as millions of Jews were forced into concentration camps and then murdered in gas chambers. Nazism also meant construction of a war machine. Hitler expanded armaments production, creating new jobs in the process, and also built up the army and separate Nazi military forces. In Hitler's view, the essence of the state was authority, and the function of the state was war. Hitler's advent galvanized the authoritarian regime of a near-great power, Italy. Here, a fascist state had been formed in the 1920s, led by Benito Mussolini. Mussolini had, like Hitler, promised an aggressive foreign policy and new nationalist glories, but in fact his first decade had been rather moderate diplomatically. With Hitler in power, however, Mussolini began to experiment more boldly, if only to avoid being overshadowed completely. Here, then, was another destabilizing element in world politics. The Steps Toward War Hitler moved first. He suspended German reparation payments, thus renouncing this part of the Versailles settlement; he walked out of a disarmament conference and withdrew from the League of Nations. In 1935 he announced German rearmament and in 1936 brought military forces into the Rhineland - both moves in further violation of Versailles. When these challenges were greeted by loud verbal protests from France and Britain, but nothing more serious, Hitler was poised for the further buildup of German strength and further diplomatic adventures that would ultimately lead to World War II. In 1935 Mussolini attacked Ethiopia, planning to avenge Italy's failure to conquer this ancient land during the imperialist surge of the 1890s. Again the League of Nations condemned the action, but again neither it nor the democratic powers in Europe and North America took action. Consequently, after some hard fighting, the Italians won their new colony. In 1936 a civil war engulfed Spain, pitting authoritarian and military leaders against republicans and leftists. Germany and Italy quickly moved to support the Spanish right, sending in supplies and troops, gaining not only new glory but also precious military training in such specialties as bombing civilian targets. France, Britain, and the United States, in contrast, though vaguely supporting the Spanish republic, could agree on no concrete action. Only the Soviet Union sent effective government support, and by 1939 the republican forces had been defeated. In 1938 Hitler proclaimed a long-sought union, or Anschluss, with Austria as a fellow German nation. Western powers complained and denounced but did nothing. In the same year Hitler marched into a German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia. War threatened, but a conference at Munich convinced French and British leaders that Hitler might be satisfied with acquiescence. Czechoslovakia was dismembered and the western (Sudeten) region was turned over to Germany, as the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, duped by Hitler's apparent eagerness to compromise, proclaimed that his appeasement had won "peace in our time." ("Our time" turned out to be slightly over a year.) Emboldened by Western weakness, in March 1939 Hitler took over all of Czechoslovakia and began to press Poland for territorial concessions. He also concluded an agreement with the Soviet Union, which was not ready for war with Germany and had despaired of Western resolve. The Soviets also coveted parts of Poland, the Baltic states, and Finland for their own, and when Hitler invaded Poland, Russia launched its own war to undo the Versailles settlement. Hitler attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, not necessarily expecting general war but clearly prepared to risk it; Britain and France, now convinced that nothing short of war would stop the Nazis, made their own declaration in response. War had already broken out in China. Japan, continuing to press the ruling Chinese government lest it gain sufficient strength to threaten Japanese gains, became involved in a skirmish with Chinese forces in the Beijing area in 1937. Fighting spread, initially quite unplanned. Most Japanese military leaders opposed more general war, arguing that the nation's only interest was to defend Manchuria and Korea. However, influential figures on the General Staff held that China's armies should be decisively defeated to prevent trouble in the future. This view prevailed, and Japanese forces quickly occupied the cities and railroads of eastern China. The Chinese army refused to give in, and a stalemate resulted that lasted in effect until 1945, with neither side capable of major new advance. In 1940 the two main areas of conflict, Europe and the Pacific, drew together, when Germany and Italy (already uneasy allies) signed an agreement with Japan. Japanese leaders had long admired Germany and welcomed Hitler's basic hostility to the Soviet Union and communism. Full alliance was prevented by the Nazi-Soviet agreement, which briefly drove Japan to try to resolve disputes with the United States. But the United States insisted that the Japanese evacuate China, so full reconciliation was impossible. Meanwhile, early German successes in the European war and Japanese realization that expansion in the Pacific would pit them against the United States combined to argue for a more formal alliance. A Tripartite Pact was signed by Germany, Japan, and Italy in September 1940. In fact, Japan and Germany never collaborated closely. Notably, Japan refused to participate in Germany's ultimate war with the Soviet Union, despite long-standing opposition to Russian strength. Nevertheless, the union of the aggressor states, however hollow in practice, seemed to align the powers of the world between those on the attack and those legitimately on the defense - a symbolism particularly influential for the United States. As war broke out from 1937 to 1939, the powers most interested in preserving the status quo remained unprepared, hopeful that war could be deflected by talk and concessions. France and Britain continued to feel the debilitating effects of World War I and were not eager for another conflict. Depression-induced tensions made it difficult to agree on any active policy, and political leftists and conservatives even disagreed over which was the greater enemy, Germany or the Soviet Union. The United States was less polarized, but eager to maintain its policy of isolationism in order not to complicate the delicate process of constructing a new set of government programs to fight the depression. Only by late 1938 did Western leaders begin to admit that war was likely, launching some measures of military preparedness including army expansion and aircraft production. Britain took the lead here, and its efforts proved vital in allowing successful defense of the nation in the first stages of the war with Germany, but the Western effort was too little and too late to stop war itself. The Hindenburg went up in flames in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, May 6, 1937. the disaster lessened hopes for the use of flying airships in warfare. The Course Of The War: Japan's Advance And Retreat The background to World War II made it obvious that war would be fought in two major centers - the Pacific and the European regions, the latter spilling over into North Africa and the Middle East. The background also made it inevitable that the first years of the war would feature almost unremitting German and Japanese success against ill-prepared opponents. Only in 1942 and 1943 did the tide begin to change, based on the fact that the powers that had been drawn into war were essentially more powerful, economically and in population size, than their ambitious taunters. The bitter war in Asia, pitting Japan against the United States with Britain in an important supporting role, followed a fairly simple course of thrust and counterthrust. Stalemated in China, Japan used the outbreak of war in Europe as an occasion to turn its attention to other parts of Asia. It seized Indochina from France's troops. The alliance with Germany and Italy, along with continued expansion in Southeast Asia as the Japanese attacked Malaya and Burma, put the Japanese on a collision course with the United States, which as a Pacific power was unwilling to allow Japan to become a predominant force in the Far East. United States' holdings in Hawaii and the Philippines, plus American attempts to withhold materials necessary to Japan's war economy, convinced Japanese leaders that a clash was inevitable. Negotiations with the United States broke down with American insistence that Japan renounce all gains acquired since 1931. It was in this setting that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and then in the following months seized American possessions in the eastern Pacific, including the Philippine Islands. Only toward the end of 1942 did the United States begin to gain the initiative, using its greater numbers and superior level of industrialization. Scattered islands were reconquered in 1943, and the Philippines were regained in 1944, while massive air raids began an onslaught on Japan itself. Meanwhile American, British, and Chinese forces continued to tie down a considerable Japanese army on the Asian mainland. Germany Overreaches In Europe the early years of World War II carried key trends of the 1930s toward even deeper tragedy. Germany seemed unstoppable and the Western democracies suffered accordingly. German strategy focused on the blitzkrieg, or "lightning war," involving rapid movement of troops, tanks, and mechanized carriers. With this the Germans crushed Poland and, after a brief lull, pushed early in 1940 into Denmark and Norway. The next targets were Holland, Belgium, and France, with invasion prepared by massive bombardments of civilian targets. Rotterdam, for example, was flattened at the cost of 40,000 lives. German dynamism was matched, again as in the 1930s, by Allied weakness. France fell surprisingly quickly, partly because the French were unprepared for war and reliant on an outdated defensive strategy, and partly because French troops were quickly demoralized due to the deep tensions within their own society. By the summer of 1940 most of France lay in German hands, while a semifascist collaborative regime, based in the city of Vichy, ruled the remainder. Only Britain stood apart, able to withstand Hitler's air offensive and win the contest for its skies known as the Battle of Britain. Imaginative air force tactics combined with solid new leadership, under a coalition government headed by Winston Churchill, as well as the iron resolve on the part of British citizens to resist the devastating air raids. Hitler's hopes for a British collapse were dashed. In 1940 Germany controlled the bulk of the European continent. It aided its ally, Italy, in a conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece. It moved into North Africa to press British and French holdings. Conquered territories were forced to supply materials, troops, and compulsory slave labor to the German war machine. Hitler also stepped up his campaign against the Jews, aiming at a "final solution" that meant mass slaughter in Germany as well as its tribute territories. Even as Germany ground out its war effort, it forced six million Jews from all parts of Europe into concentration camps and gas chambers. This holocaust was the most shocking aspect of the war, an attempt at genocide on an unprecedented scale. The balance in the war began to shift slightly in 1941. Blocked from invasion of Britain, Hitler turned toward the tempting target of Russia, viewed as an inferior Slavic state in Nazi racial ideology. Germany's attack began in June, all pretense of alliance abandoned, and the Germans easily penetrated into central Russia. Yet the Soviet forces, while giving ground amid massive loss of life, did not collapse. They moved back, relocating Soviet industry eastward. As with Napoleon's invasion attempt over a century before, weather also came to the Russians' aid, as a harsh winter caught the Germans off guard, counting on another quick victory. As in Britain, civilian morale in Russia greatly aided the war effort, and although German forces continued to advance through 1942, the knockout blow eluded them. The invasion attempt also stretched German resources very thin, revealing how ill-prepared Hitler's economy was for a long-haul effort and how inefficient the economy was in many aspects of war production. Late 1941 also brought the United States' entry into the war, spurred initially by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which in fact took place against German wishes. The United States' leadership had already supported Britain with loans and supplies, and they now eagerly used the bombing of Pearl Harbor to enter the war in Europe and Asia against what seemed a clear threat to Western democracy, perhaps to Western civilization itself. American involvement, delayed because of lack of full prior preparation, began to make itself felt in 1942 when American and British forces challenged the Germans in North Africa. The Soviet Union, in the same year, pushed back an intensive German siege of the city of Stalingrad, which if successful might have opened the way to the Ural Mountains and Russia's new industrial heartland. Over one-third of the German force surrendered, and the Red armies began a gradual push westward that would take them past their own borders, through eastern Europe, and by 1945 deep into Germany itself. In the meantime, British and American forces moved into the Italian peninsula from North Africa, ousting Mussolini, while also bombing German industrial and civilian targets. Then in 1944 the Allies invaded France, again pushing the Germans back with the aid of French forces hostile to fascism. Amid bitter fighting - Hitler decided to resist as fiercely as possible, goaded in part by Allied insistence that Germany surrender without conditions - the Anglo-American forces gradually surged into western Germany. In late April 1945, Russian and American troops met on the Elbe River. On April 30 Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, and in the following month German military commanders surrendered their country to the victorious invaders. Within months after this the war in the Pacific also ended. This conflict had become primarily a duel between Japan and the United States, but British and Chinese forces were also engaged and, after the European theater of operations closed, the Soviet Union turned its attention eastward as well. Japan's surrender was precipitated by American use of atomic bombs on two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which forced a full Japanese surrender and a period of American occupation. Human Costs World War II had been a huge killer, with wanton cruelty adding to the effect of unprecedented weapons. Japanese troops in China had killed hosts of civilians, often after torturing them, when they captured cities that had tried to hold out; in Nanking, for example, as many as 300,000 were killed after the city had fallen. Hitler's decision to eliminate Jews throughout Europe led to six million dead in the gas chambers of the Holocaust. Hitler's forces also deliberately attacked civilian centers through bombing raids, in the usually mistaken belief that such destruction would destroy morale. Allied forces, as they became more powerful, paid back in kind. The British air force firebombed the German city of Dresden in retaliation for earlier German raids. Firebombing of Japanese cities led to as many as 80,000 dead in a single raid. The American decision to drop its newly developed atomic bomb on Japan was taken in this atmosphere. American officials wanted to force Japan to surrender without needlessly costly invasion, and they also hurried to prevent Soviet advance in Asia. Bombing of Hiroshima killed over 78,000 civilians, and the raid on Nagasaki two days later also killed tens of thousands. Radiation fallout ultimately killed thousands more, as the new American President, Harry Truman, termed the bombing "the greatest thing in history." Overall, at least 35 million people were killed in the war - 20 million in the Soviet Union alone. |