World War Two

Crucible of the Contemporary World - Commentary and Readings

Lily Xiao Hong Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315489551
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This anthology contains 16 readings by English-language scholars that deal with military, political, diplomatic, and social aspects of World War II and its consequences for the contemporary world. The readings are grouped around seven major topics and each topic is prefaced with a substantial commentary by Professor Lee that places it in historical context. The readings consist of complete articles or integral chapters rather than abridged selections so that each author's argument can be read in its original form. The authors are: Gerhard L. Weinberg, Akira Ireye, Jan Thomasz Gross, Betram M. Gordon, Michael R. Marrus, Hugh Tinker, Roy Fraser Holland, Lloyd E. Eastman, Roberta Wohlstetter, Williamson Murray, Sheila Fitzpatrick, D'Ann Campbell, Robert M. Hathaway, Melvyn P. Leffler, A.J. Levine, and Lawrence Freedman.

Part I
The Road to the Last European War and the Advent of World War

Introduction

1 Munich after 50 Years

Gerhard L. Weinberg

2 The End of Uncertainty

Akira Iriye

Further Reading for Part I

Except for the history of strategy, campaigns, operations, and combat, no aspect of the Second World War has received more attention than its origins. In many textbooks the background and causes of the war often even eclipse consideration of the military course of the struggle. This is to be expected. Most people hate war; there is a sense that wars should, one way or another, be avoided. The catastrophic death, suffering, and destruction requires at least an explanation as to what went wrong. Perhaps some lesson for the present can be learned.

There are many approaches that can be pursued. Is the fault in the structure of international relations that transcends the actions of individuals? Perhaps the mere existence of independent, sovereign nation states, each attempting to maximize its own self-interests, makes war likely, if not inevitable. Is it in the nature of political ideologies and economic systems, so that monopoly capitalism, or imperialism, or fascism are the causes? If so, removing these from the historic stage would remove the cause of war. Perhaps the tragedy originates in the national character of a nation. Are the Germans innately belligerent, rabidly nationalist, and cravenly obedient? Is it a Japanese trait to be duplicitous and blood-thirsty, willing to subordinate all for the collective good as the government defines it?

Some wish to locate the responsibility for war in the primary decision makers. After all, in the final moments, countries go to war because orders are given, generals obey, armies march, ships sail, and planes take off to find their targets. Determining individual responsibility may show some to have been cowards, others to have been unimaginative or ignorant, and still others to have been guilty of conspiring and planning wars of aggression.

The difficulties in determining answers to questions regarding the origins of any war are complicated by the entrance of propagandists who, as soon as war breaks out, do their part in winning the psychological war: confirming their citizens in the rightness of their cause, wooing the uncommitted to their side,, and undermining the determination of their opponents. They conjure up towering forces for good, however defined, which valiantly oppose equally powerful energies for evil. At every level, war is a terrible simplifier. There is no place for complexity and ambiguity. Caricature replaces subtle analysis, leaving a legacy in every society’s consciousness that takes generations to defuse.

After hostilities cease, detached inquiry faces additional difficulties, even as the immediate passions of war abate. Objective history requires documented sources and careful, reasoned investigation to legitimate the historian’s account and persuade the reader. For any of the approaches to understanding the origins of war noted above, that is difficult Relevant documentary sources are not always easily accessible. To show that monopoly capitalism was the culprit would require massive documentation if it is to disprove the counter-documentation of the idea’s critics. This is not to claim that capitalism, however defined, played no role. It is only to suggest that proof is not documented in such a way as to be persuasive among those who do not already believe.

Similar comments could be made about the other interpretations. This leads some to despair of knowing any truth about the origins of the war or about any historical event. Henry Ford said “History is bunk.… It is one damned thing after another.” Such agnosticism, however, is unwarranted. It denies the human desire to understand and know, however imperfectly. One approach has had more success: that of examining the attitudes, decisions, and actions of the men (and they were all men) at the top, their subordinates, and their advisers. Documentation comes from diplomatic archives. Those of the Germans were captured at the end of the war, elsewhere they have been or are becoming available—even, as a consequence of glasnost, in the Soviet Union. In this approach, the sheer mass of material to be combed through and the formidable linguistic requirements made on the researcher create problems, but they are easier to manage than those with broader, less specific questions to ask. In addition, they make for dramatic narrative stories of real people, interacting in real situations with real, though calamitous results. That the end of the story is known in advance only heightens the interest in its telling.

On the question of who was most responsible for the origins of the European war, Allied wartime opinion remains confirmed. Adolf Hitler, alone among the world’s heads of government, wanted, indeed insisted upon, war; undoubtedly, not the war he actually got and not in accord with any carefully laid down schedule of successive acts of aggression (as Allied propaganda portrayed it), but war. When the distinguished British diplomatic historian A.J.P. Taylor noted in 1962 that the historiography of the origins of the Second World War, unlike that of other wars, had not yet gone through a revisionist phase, he questioned not only the received wisdom about the path to war in Europe, but also the idea that Hitler shared direct personal responsibility for its outbreak. With impeccable professional qualifications and a well-known aversion to the course German history had taken in the previous centuries, Taylor was listened to. His conclusions were soundly questioned, though the effect was to open an international debate on the genesis of the war. The results have upturned many earlier judgments, but after twenty-eight years, there is still overwhelmingly unanimous opinion that Hitler was determined on war.

Though in his early years he did not foresee such a conflict during his lifetime, Hitler probably anticipated a future global war beyond the one unleashed in Europe in 1939. Whatever hesitancy he had about turning the European conflict into a global one, he did not draw back in December 1941. With remarkable alacrity he welcomed a worldwide struggle by declaring war on the United States after Japan attacked European and American bases in the Pacific. The decisions which made the European maelstrom into a global one, however, were taken in Tokyo and Washington, rather than in Berlin and elsewhere.

Revisionist historiography of the origins of the Pacific war has gone beyond that of the origins of the European war. As wartime propaganda yielded to a search for evidence and reasoned debates replaced self-serving, defensive justification, more diverse interpretations emerged. The histories of Japan, China, and the nations of East Asia could not be easily integrated into diplomatic accounts written wholly from a western point of view. The perception of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 as the opening salvo of an Axis offensive against western democracies became ludicrous, not only because it ignored specific Sino-Japanese factors, but also because it flew in the face of evidence that the Japanese and Germans did not coordinate their policies and strategies. To be sure, along with Italy, Hungary, and other nations, Germany and Japan were unhappy with the structure of post-World War I relations. Both countries opposed communism and shared hostility to the Soviet Union, but Japan made no specific military agreements with Germany. Even the Tripartite Pact of September 27, 1940 came after German victories in Europe, when many thought Germany might win the Battle of Britain. Germany, for example, did not withdraw its military advisers and aid to the Chinese Nationalist government under Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) until May 1938. Italian-German relations were constantly strained by conflicting motives and interests. The Axis was an alliance without much substance.

If Japan, Italy, and Germany were not co-conspirators against Great Britain, die United States, the Soviet Union, and other Allies, then what was the origin of Japan’s war? The Sino-Japanese War, the “China Incident,” the Anti-Japan War, whatever its name, was a continuation of earlier conflicts between the two countries over Korea and Manchuria going back into the 1890s. It erupted in 1937 with an armed confrontation at the Marco Polo bridge in Beijing (Peking). Japan’s aggressive stance in East Asia had its impact, especially in breaking up a long period of Anglo-Japanese cooperation and in stretching British naval power. The same is true of Japanese relations with the Soviet Union, which resembled those with China. The skirmishes and battles between the Red Army and Japan’s Kwantung Army along the Manchuria-Outer Mongolian border are little known and are too often subsumed into the Axis offensives in Europe. The Japanese war in East Asia and the Pacific had specific Asian and American origins. It influenced the European conflict, but was neither an extension of that war nor a direct consequence of it. In the case of the European war, it is doubtful, given Hitler’s determination to have war, that it could have been avoided. In the Pacific, that is not so clearly the case. For this reason, the origin of the Pacific war raises questions about American and Japanese perceptions of one another, of their interests, of their national goals, and their mutual relations that transcend a judgment of responsibility for the events leading up to December 7,1941.

1

GERHARD L. WEINBERG

Munich after 50 Years

A half centuiy after the event, the Munich conference remains for many in the West an unparalleled example of unnecessary, cowardly appeasement of an openly aggressive dictator, that not only made general war more likely, but also made that war more difficult to win. The opening of archives, especially those of the British and French, and the renewed debate after Taylor’s challenge to our understanding of the events of the summer of 1938, have raised new questions and have led to new interpretations of appeasement. Revisionists have modified the postwar stereotypes of Chamberlain. But many other aspects of British affairs have also been subjected to scrutiny: the state of British public opinion, military planning for war, and London’s relations with the Commonwealth nations, the colonies, and other nations. More informed studies on the role of the secret services and intelligence as well as secondary figures in the diplomatic service have also contributed to our understanding. American and French policies have also been scrutinized again.

The result has not been agreement among historians. Professor Weinberg, author of a two-volume study of Hitler’s foreign policy, authoritatively puts this recent research in a wide ranging perspective. Not everyone may agree with his analysis and the conclusions he draws, but no one who is interested in the topic, and in periodic comparisons of the Munich agreement with contemporary foreign policy problems, will fail to be challenged.

Half a century after the Munich conference, that event lives in the public memory as a series of interrelated myths. For most people, Munich represents the abandonment of a small country, Czechoslovakia, to the unjust demands of a bullying and powerful neighbor by those who would have done better to defend it It is believed that the Allies, by the sacrifice of one country, only whetted the appetite of the bully whom they had to fight anyway, later and under more difficult circumstances. The “lesson” derived from this widely held view is that it makes far more sense to take action to stop aggression at the first opportunity.

This view, not surprisingly, is especially influential with those who personally experienced the events of the late 1930s and who thereafter found themselves and their countries involved in the costliest war in history. Many came to hold a view of the proper conduct of U.S. foreign policy, the so-called domino theory, which asserted that if drastic action were not taken to halt aggression at its earliest occurrence, the countries in the path of an encroaching power would fall like dominoes, with the fall of each only hastening that of the next. Once prominently put forward as a justification for American intervention in Vietnam, this thesis was temporarily discredited by second thoughts about U.S. policy there. More recently, however, it has been revived in connection with Nicaragua. Some believe that a Sandinista regime, once fully consolidated, will surely topple the adjacent “dominoes,” this time in Central America.

Neither scholarship nor time is likely to shake the firm hold that the symbols of Munich maintain on those who remember a time when the city’s name connoted more than good beer or bloody Olympic games. The umbrella that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain carried with him to Munich in the fall of 1938 came to represent not common sense in the European autumn but cowardice in the face of danger. The exclusion from the conference of Czechoslovakia, the country whose boundaries and fate were at stake, is considered by those even vaguely familiar with the history as a particularly revolting aspect of the affair. On his return to London, Chamberlain held in his hand an agreement stating that all questions concerning Anglo-German relations would be solved by consultation between the two countries, so they would never again go to war with each other. His famous comment that he, like Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli sixty years earlier, had brought back from Germany peace with honor and “peace in our time,” has provided superb copy for every parody of British policy in the 1930s.

II

Three aspects of the Munich conference that developed more fully afterward, or on which we are now better informed, suggest that this traditional interpretation warrants a closer look.

In the first place, it was after all the same two Allied leaders who went to Munich, Chamberlain of Great Britain and Edouard Daladier of France, who one year later led their countries into war against Adolf Hitler’s Germany, something no other leader of a major power did before his own country was attacked. The Italians, who under Benito Mussolini thought of themselves as a great power, joined with Hitler in June 1940 in what Mussolini saw as an opportunity to share the spoils of victory. Joseph Stalin was sending the Nazis essential war supplies until a few hours before the German invasion of June 1941 awoke the Kremlin from its confidence in an alignment with Hitler. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had repeatedly but vainly warned the Soviet leader of the German threat, had worked hard to rouse the American people to the dangers facing them; but until confronted by a Japanese surprise attack and by German and Italian declarations of war, he had hoped that Americans might be spared the ordeal of war.

Only Britain and France went to war with Germany out of calculations of broader national interest instead of waiting to be attacked; and it is perhaps safe to argue that without the lead from London, the French government would have backed off in 1939 and awaited a German invasion of its own territory. It is rather ungracious, especially for Americans whose countiy would not take action to defend either Czechoslovakia or Poland, and which had provided by law that it would not help anyone who did, to condemn as weaklings the only leaders of major powers who mustered up the courage to confront Hitler on behalf of another countiy.

A second factor that prompts us to take a new look at the 1938 crisis is the view that Hitler, the man usually thought to have triumphed at Munich, is now known to have held of it. The opening of German archives and the new availability of important private papers provide a picture rather different from the one commonly held.

We now know that Hitler had never been particularly interested in helping the over three million people of German descent living inside Czechoslovakia, but only in the ways they might help him in his project to isolate Czechoslovakia from outside support, create incidents that would provide a pretext for the invasion and destruction of that country, and thereafter provide manpower for additional army divisions. The new divisions, in turn, he considered useful for the great war he planned to wage against the powers of Western Europe as the prerequisite for the quick and far easier seizure of enormous territories in Eastern Europe.

Hitler believed that German rearmament was far enough advanced by late 1937 and early 1938 to make this first little war against Czechoslovakia possible. While spreading propaganda on behalf of the ethnic Germans of Czechoslovakia, Hitler was counting on the threat of Japan’s advance in East Asia and Italy’s support in Europe, and the reluctance of France and England to fight another great war, to isolate Czechoslovakia from outside support. It is understandable in this context that the successful and peaceful annexation of Austria in March 1938 (which left Czechoslovakia even more vulnerable than before), followed by a dramatic reaffirmation of Germany’s alignment with Italy during Hitler’s visit to Rome, produced Hitler’s decision in the second week of May 1938 to go to war that year. We are not ever likely to know whether his belief that he was suffering from throat cancer contributed to his haste; he was certainly a man with a mission in a hurry who would explain later in 1938 that he preferred to go to war at the age of 49 so that he could see the whole issue through to resolution!

But there proved to be inner flaws in his strategy. The prospective allies he had selected turned out to be reluctant. The Japanese at that time wanted an alliance against the Soviet Union, not against the Western powers. Poland and Hungary both hoped to obtain pieces of Czechoslovakia but wanted them without a general European war. The Italians, furthermore, were not as enthusiastic as Hitler thought. Mussolini had given a hostage to fortune by committing large forces to the support of Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War, forces certain to be lost in a general war in which they would be cut off from their homeland.

III

The basic miscalculation of the German government was, however, of a different type: it was integrally related to the issue that Hitler deliberately placed at the center of public attention, the Sudeten Germans living in Czechoslovakia. The purpose of this focus was obvious. The constant attention in both publicity and diplomacy to the allegedly mistreated millions of Germans living in Czechoslovakia was designed to make it politically difficult, if not impossible, for Britain and France to come to Czechoslovakia’s assistance when it was eventually attacked. How could democracies contest the principle of self-determination that they had themselves proclaimed? Would they act to turn a small war into a huge one on the unproven assumption that a big war inevitably would come anyway?

But there were aspects of this program that might, from Hitler’s perspective, cause problems. One was that the continued diplomatic focus on the Sudeten Germans, which was needed to assure the isolation of Czechoslovakia, might eventually make the transition from diplomacy to war more difficult. The other was that, despite the number and significance of the Germans inside the Czechoslovak state, there were obviously far more Czechs and Slovaks. If ever the real as opposed to the pretended aim of German policy became clear, the very same concept of self-determination that worked against support of Czechoslovakia as long as its German-inhabited rim was under discussion would shift in favor of Prague once the undoubtedly non-German core came into question. It was in this regard that the crisis of the end of September 1938 came to be so dramatic and its resolution, in Hitler’s eyes, so faulty.

We now know that Hitler had originally planned to stage an incident inside Czechoslovakia to provide Germany with a pretext for invading that country with the objective of destroying it all rather than merely annexing the German-inhabited fringe. He was influenced by the experience of 1914, when Austria-Hungary had taken the assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand as an excuse to attack Serbia.

In Hitler’s opinion there had been two deficiencies in Austria-Hungary’s behavior, and Germany would on this occasion remedy both. The first was the plainly accidental timing of the assassination. If one waited for others to act, the most appropriate moment might easily be missed: Hitler had long held that die Central Powers should have struck well before 1914. The obvious solution to the problem of timing was to arrange for the incident oneself, and at the op...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• General Introduction
• Part I The Road to the Last European War and the Advent of World War
• Part II Life under Nazi Occupation: Collaboration and the Holocaust
• Part III Race, the End of European Empire, and Third World Revolution
• Part IV Intelligence at War
• Part V The Social Impact of War
• Part VI How Grand Was the Grand Alliance?
• Part VII What Was Needed for Allied Victory?
• Index
• Contributors