The Origins of the Second World War in Europe

P. M. H. Bell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317865247
• Edition: 3
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

PMH Bell's famous book is a comprehensive study of the period and debates surrounding the European origins of the Second World War. He approaches the subject from three different angles: describing the various explanations that have been offered for the war and the historiographical debates that have arisen from them, analysing the ideological, economic and strategic forces at work in Europe during the 1930s, and tracing the course of events from peace in 1932, via the initial outbreak of hostilities in 1939, through to the climactic German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 which marked the descent into general conflict.

Written in a lucid, accessible style, this is an indispensable guide to the complex origins of the Second World War.

PART ONE

Introduction: Problems of Interpretation

CHAPTER ONE

On War and the Causes of War

On 3 September 1939 the Foreign Minister of the Third Reich, Joachim von Ribbentrop, received the British Ambassador in Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson. War had just been declared between their two countries; and the Ambassador remarked that ‘it would be left to history to judge where the blame really lay’. Ribbentrop replied that ‘history had already proved the facts’. An hour later, it was the turn of the French Ambassador, Robert Coulondre, who was told that when war came France would be the aggressor, and replied: ‘Of that history will be the judge.’ Noting these exchanges, Sir Lewis Namier commented: ‘The judgement of history was invoked by all alike.’¹

History has not let them down. The origins of the Second World War have exercised the minds of generations of historians, and have filled thousands of pages, without exhausting either the fascination of the subject or the stamina of their readers. The generations which experienced the war are passing away, but many of their successors remain responsive to its echoes. The history of that time is still invoked in the political debates of the present day. ‘Appeasement’ and ‘Munich’ are still words of power in the speeches of politicians and the columns of newspapers. Nazism and fascism remain current terms of political abuse. The spectre of the holocaust of Jewish lives is ever-present to modern Europeans.

We live still in the shadow of the Second World War. Its casualties, variously estimated at between 40 and 50 million dead, have left a lasting scar upon the populations of the world, and especially of Europe. Movements of populations in eastern Europe broke patterns of settlement established since the Middle Ages, so that Poles and Russians now live in territories which previously had been German for centuries. The physical ruins that littered Europe were fairly quickly repaired; but the destruction has left its mark on many great cities. Even countries which managed to remain outside the storm of hostilities were deeply disturbed by its passage, as the history of Sweden or Switzerland demonstrates.

Events of this magnitude continue to command attention and demand explanation: and to embark upon a fresh review of the origins of the Second World War in Europe needs no apology. The scope of the enquiry is limited to Europe – a large enough arena, in all conscience, but more manageable than an attempt to comprehend the whole globe.² But Europe was not self-contained. Britain and France were great imperial powers, with possessions and commitments all over the world. The Soviet Union, equally an imperial power, included vast territories in central and eastern Asia only secured since the mid-nineteenth century. Nearly 8,000 kilometres of its land frontiers lay in Asia, compared with some 2,400 kilometres in Europe. All three powers were much concerned by the growth of Japanese power in the Far East. All three were faced by the recurrent imperial problem of the twentieth century, nationalist movements among their subject peoples -the British in India and the Middle East, the French in Syria and North Africa, the Soviets in the Caucasus and the Ukraine. For none of the three is it possible to consider their European problems, and their role in the origins of the war, without an eye on the global context.

Across the Atlantic from Europe, the USA sought for much of the 1920s and 1930s to withdraw into semi-isolation, hoping to return to the apparently secure haven of a pre-1914 normality. In the 1930s, successive Neutrality Acts were specifically designed to insulate the USA from European conflicts, and to ensure that there should be no repetition of the events of 1917, when she was drawn into the First World War. Yet Europeans could never forget or ignore the American presence over the western horizon. The activity (or otherwise) of the American economy, and the shape of American foreign policy, had profound effects in Europe. If at some point the economic and military strength of the USA were again to be mobilised, as in 1917–18, for participation in a European war, the consequences would be far-reaching. European powers held the centre of the international stage in the 1930s, but this was largely because the Americans chose to remain in the wings: and the American dimension of European affairs must constantly be allowed for.

Other complications arise from that deceptively simple name, ‘the Second World War’, which reveals problems on even a cursory inspection. It is conventional in western Europe to refer to the conflict as the war of 1939–45, just as we speak of the war of 1914–18; but the cases are very different. In 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July, and within a week five of the six European great powers were at war. While it is true that the Ottoman Empire came in later in the year, and Italy not until 1915, the main war crisis was short, concentrated, and decisive. One day Europe was at peace; and then a week later most of Europe was at war, in proper form, with ultimatums and declarations of war duly delivered.³ By contrast, it is far from easy to say precisely when the Second World War in Europe began. It has appeared to many observers, both at the time and since, that the conflict began in 1936, with the Spanish Civil War, which seemed to mark the outbreak of an ideological war that was already latent over most of Europe. Volunteers flocked to Spain in this belief, often projecting their own passions and hatreds on to the fierce internal antagonisms of the Spanish people. Regular forces from Germany and Italy, and ‘advisers’ from the Soviet Union were involved, as well as the International Brigades recruited through the Communist International. Spain became the battleground for what seemed to be a European war fought by proxy.

While the Spanish Civil War was in progress, there occurred elsewhere the German occupation of Austria in March 1938; the Czechoslovakian crisis of September 1938, when the French army was mobilised and war seemed imminent; the German seizure of Bohemia and Memel in March 1939; and the Italian invasion of Albania in April 1939. Could this properly be called a time of peace, or war? The threat of force was ever-present, even if its use was only sporadic; and it is doubtful whether a tank has to open fire for its presence to constitute a warlike act. Undeclared war is a fair description of the state of Europe in 1938–39; until finally open war broke out when Germany attacked Poland on 1 September 1939, and found an opponent willing, and even eager, to fight rather than surrender. On 3 September Britain and France declared war on Germany, though their formal declarations made remarkably little immediate difference to the situation. Their armies and air forces remained inactive in the west; while in the east Germany (assisted after a time by the Soviet Union) conquered Poland unhindered. There followed the period of the phoney war, from October 1939 to April 1940; so that a time of undeclared war was followed by a period when war was declared but not waged. There was not very much difference between the two.

War was waged in earnest in April 1940, with German attacks on Denmark and Norway; in May, with the German invasion of the Low Countries and France; and in June, with the entry of Italy, which extended the conflict to the Mediterranean. In October 1940 Italy attacked Greece; in April 1941 the Germans conquered Yugoslavia and Greece; and finally in June 1941 they invaded the Soviet Union, the final extension of the war in Europe, which by then engulfed almost the entire Continent.

There was thus a movement from civil war and war by proxy in Spain, to local war (Germany and Poland), then to regional war (Scandinavia and western Europe), and finally to Continental war. There were spells of peace which was no peace, and of war which was remarkably unwarlike. Contemporaries were well aware that the line between peace and war, far from being sharp and clear-cut, was so blurred as to be almost invisible. On 10 November 1938, Adolf Hitler congratulated himself (and representatives of the German press, to whom he was speaking) on the tactics of propaganda, political pressure, and threat of force, which had been successfully used to ‘wreck the nerves of those gentlemen in Prague …’⁴ At almost exactly the same time, in comparatively peaceful England, Stephen Tallents, the Director-General of the shadow Ministry of Information, which was being set up in the expectation of war, wrote of the ‘present continental conditions, in which the boundaries between peace and war are so largely obliterated’.⁵ Europe thus witnessed a process of change, not a sudden leap from peace to war; and an explanation of the origins of the Second World War in Europe must examine the forces which lay behind the change, as well as the events which marked the different phases of its development.

War came by stages; and as it came, it was not one single war, unitary and simple in its nature, but a number of wars, different in kind, in aims, and in methods. The war in Spain was at once a civil war between Spaniards, a war between individuals from many parts of the world, and a war involving European states. The war fought by Germany against Poland in 1939 was, in German eyes, not just a war to shift their boundary with Poland from one line to another, but was aimed at the destruction of the Polish state and the subjugation of its people; and as such it went on for several years, because this process was fiercely though clandestinely resisted. The war in western Europe in 1940, on the other hand, was more in the style of 1914 and other ‘orthodox’ wars between states, waged between uniformed armed forces, using recognised military methods and exercising considerable forbearance towards the civilian population, and ending, in the case of France, in an armistice which showed a calculated restraint on the German side. The label ‘Second World War in Europe’ is used to denote not one event, but a number of separate conflicts, different in kind as well as in date. An explanation of origins must deal with these differences.

The origins of war and of wars

These are the tasks which a consideration of the origins of the war (or rather, wars) must face. But what is meant by ‘origins’ in this context? It is possible to seek the origins of the war in the events of diplomatic relations – the alliances and alignments of states, the activities of ambassadors and foreign ministers, conferences between statesmen. It may be, however, that such matters were merely superficial, eddies on the surface of a deep-running stream whose course was determined by more profound forces. If so, what were these forces? Obvious possibilities may be found in the movement of ideas and the clash of ideologies; in economic pressures and opportunities; and in changes in military technology and strategic thought. If we accept the importance of such developments, what were the links between them and the decisions of individual statesmen and the sentiments of peoples?

Tolstoy, in War and Peace, wrote that historians had produced various diplomatic explanations of the war of 1812 – ‘the wrongs inflicted on the Duke of Oldenburg, the non-observance of the Continental System … the ambitions of Napoleon, the firmness of Alexander, the mistakes of the diplomats, and so on’. If this were so, then more care on the part of the diplomats, different phrasing in a note, a minor concession on the part of Napoleon – and there would have been no war. Tolstoy rejected such explanations. For Napoleon and Alexander to be able to act as they did, he believed, ‘a combination of innumerable circumstances was essential. … It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands the real power lay – the soldiers who fired the guns or transported provisions and cannon – should consent to carry out the will of those weak individuals, and should have been induced to do so by an infinite number of diverse and complex causes.’⁶ Substitute Hitler and Chamberlain for Napoleon and Alexander, and Tolstoy’s assertion is easily transposed from the war of 1812 to the Second World War. But were Hitler and Chamberlain merely weak individuals, controlled by circumstances and waiting on the consent of the millions who seemed to be their puppets, but in whose hands the real power lay? How can we decide?

Different approaches to the problem produce different explanations. It is possible to start by trying to explain, not one single war, but the phenomenon of war in general; and much effort has been put into this search. The causes of war have long been sought, so that, once identified, they might be eliminated. In the eighteenth century it was argued that war was produced by the ambitions (or even the mere whims) of monarchs and their courtiers; but this view foundered in the French Revolutionary Wars, fought by a republic and a people’s army. In the nineteenth century, Richard Cobden and the Manchester school of liberalism held that universal peace would come through the railway, the steamship, the penny post, and free trade: when all had enough of this world’s goods, none would wish to waste them in warfare, nor would there be any point in fighting to obtain a larger share. But events belied these hopes. In 1914 the postal services carried mobilisation notices, and the railways transported armies to battle. The twentieth century proceeded to provide at least its fair ration of wars, and perhaps more – one observer listed thirty between 1900 and 1964.7

Among these conflicts, it was particularly the First World War of 1914–18 that stimulated the search for the causes of war into even greater activity. Shocked by the catastrophe and determined to avoid its repetition, people scanned the period before 1914 in search of the causes of war. They found them in plenty; and for each cause of war there was a remedy. Wars – and particularly that of 191...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Front Chapter
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps
• List of Tables
• List of Illustrations
• Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Publisher’s Acknowledgements
• Note to the Third Edition
• Abbreviations
• PART ONE Introduction: Problems of Interpretation
• PART TWO The Underlying Forces
• PART THREE The Coming of War, 1932–1941
• Chronology
• Who’s Who
• Further Reading
• Maps
• Index