Origins of the Second World War Reconsidered

Gordon Martel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134714179
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

When A.J.P. Taylor's The Origins of the Second World War appeared in 1961 it made a profound impact. The book became a classic and a central point of reference in all discussion on the Second World War.

The second edition of this distinguished collection, written by leading experts in the field, is designed to bring the state of the argument up to date. The issues discussed include:

* the legacy of the Treaty of Versailles
* Hitlers foreign policy
* Appeasement
* AJP Taylor and the Russians
* the treatment of the crises leading up to war including the Anschluss, Danzig, Abysinnian crises and the Spanish Civil War.

This second edition will ensure that The Origins of the Second World War will remain a high priority student and scholarly reading lists.

1 The revisionist as moralist

A. J. P. Taylor and the lessons of European history

Gordon Martel

Images of the 1930s continue to flash past us: Hitler’s moustache and Chamberlain’s umbrella are still instantly recognizable; Nazi war criminals still make the front pages; novels and films warning of a new menace emanating from Brazil or Bavaria can be almost assured of popular success. The Second World War, its symbols and personalities, continue to grip the modern imagination. Thus the war – and its origins – functions today as a mental and moral shorthand: anyone wishing to evoke an image of wickedness personified need only mention “Hitler”; for stupidity, blundering or cowardice, substitute “Chamberlain.” But political rhetoric extends the boundary beyond personality. The systems we condemn are “totalitarian” or “dictatorships” (frequently both), and we must never be guilty of “appeasement” in our relations with their leaders. Politicians find these words useful because ordinary citizens agree that the Second World War was caused by Hitler and his totalitarian dictatorship, and that it might have been prevented had it not been for the policy of appeasement that served only to whet his appetite.

Anyone who doubts that these simple assumptions are widely, almost universally, subscribed to is invited to witness the effect of setting loose a class of undergraduates on A. J. P. Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War. There the effect is electric: they are stunned to read that Hitler neither planned nor caused the war, that appeasement was not necessarily a bad thing, that new ideologies such as fascism and communism were much less significant than the aims and ambitions of statesmen, typical of all regimes, at all times. If the student is converted to the Taylor view, war is almost certain to break out on the home front; the young may be prepared to embrace new ideas, even if only as a temporary fashion, but their parents are more likely to regard them as treasonable. Two generations after its publication Origins has not lost its power to provoke.

When the book first appeared in 1961 it created a storm. Professional historians attacked Taylor for almost every imaginable sin: his evidence was scanty and unreliable; he distorted documents by means of selective citation and dismissed those he disliked by claiming they did not count; his logic was faulty; he contradicted himself repeatedly and drew conclusions at variance with his own evidence. Nor was the storm confined to the citadels of academia – to scholarly journals, college corridors, senior common-rooms and faculty clubs. The debate was carried on in public – in newspapers, on television and radio. Questions were asked in Parliament. Lifelong friendships were dissolved. Careers were made and unmade. Taylor was soon the best-known historian in Britain: his autobiography was a best-seller; an entire issue of The Journal of Modern History was devoted to him; he has been honored with three Festschriften, and any book with his name on it has been assured of popular success. One eminent historian, when asked to contribute an essay to the first edition of this book, declined on the ground that Taylor had no right to hold the first-mortgage on the subject of the origins of the Second World War. He may not have the right, but hold the mortgage he does. What other 38-year-old book on the war’s origins continues not only to be available in paperback but can be seen to be stacked high in university bookstores throughout the English-speaking world? Teachers wishing to shake students out of their lethargy do well to introduce them to A. J. P. Taylor.

But the great man is now dead and most of the furor that emanated from his book has gone with him. Nevertheless, interest in him remains strong, the debate on the war’s origins continues and the book stimulates controversy still. Book-length studies have now appeared in the form of Robert Cole’s A. J. P. Taylor: The Traitor Within the Gates and Adam Sisman’s A. J. P. Taylor: A Biography, the scholarship and insights of both of which will be surpassed by Kathy Burk’s in her forthcoming biography.¹ New surveys, especially Philip Bell’s Origins of the Second World War in Europe and Akira Iriye’s The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific, but also Andrew Crozier’s The Causes of the Second World War and Richard Overy’s The Origins of the Second World War, have certainly replaced Taylor’s as books in which teachers can have confidence when introducing students to the subject. But those very characteristics that make these newer works more reliable make them less exciting, less challenging and – ultimately – less enduring. Less careful, less balanced, more opinionated and more provocative, Taylor’s book will remain in print long after his successors’ have ceased publication. It may be, as some argue, that he will continue to be read largely as “an historical curiosity,” or mainly by graduate students exploring the historiography of the subject, or by general readers looking for someone who can be read for amusement and entertainment. But read Taylor certainly will be.

The first question to be asked is why the book caused such a storm when it appeared. The answer is that Taylor challenged an interpretation of the war’s origins that had until 1961 satisfied almost everyone in the postwar world, and because he conducted his challenge in flamboyant prose with such scathing wit. Before Taylor launched his attack, the only point being debated was whether the appeasers were foolish cowards who allowed themselves to be duped by Hitler, or cunning capitalists who hoped to use Hitler to crush communism in the Soviet Union. Blaming the war on Hitler certainly suited the Germans: with the Nazis either dead or in hiding, they could claim to be blameless and to have a claim to a respectable role in the new democratic alliance. This was equally satisfactory in the west, where one might have expected an Orwellian unease to emerge when the enemy was transformed into ally and the ally into enemy – but the west now claimed to be united against “totalitarianism” rather than against states or nations. The Second World War had been fought for a great and noble principle, and this principle endured into the era of the Cold War. The enemy had merely changed location: his ambitions and tactics remained the same.

Taylor would have none of this. The war had not been fought over great principles, nor had Hitler planned its outbreak from the start. Taylor thereby challenged two of the most confident assumptions of the 1950s. While others saw in Hitler a demonic genius who was able to pull the strings of European politics so masterfully because he had a carefully mapped out plan, Taylor saw only an ordinary politician who responded to events as they occurred, who asked only how he might benefit from them. Where others saw laid down in Mein Kampf a blueprint, Taylor heard the confused babble of beer-hall chatter. Where others saw a timetable for war in such documents as the “Hossbach memorandum,” Taylor saw the petty intrigue and political machinations typical of the Nazi system of government. If Taylor was right – if Hitler had not in fact carefully plotted his route to world dominion well in advance and then followed the route step-by-step – this could only raise new, and possibly awkward, questions. Some believed that Taylor was whitewashing Hitler, absolving him of guilt.

But Taylor did not stop with Hitler. He took a contrary view of almost every significant figure of the interwar period: Chamberlain was neither a bungler nor a coward, but a highly skilled politician who enjoyed the overwhelming support of his party and his nation; Stresemann, the “good German” but for whose death Germany might have followed a peaceful path, turns out to have shared Hitler’s dreams of dominating eastern Europe; Roosevelt’s economic policies were difficult to distinguish from Hitler’s; Stalin turns out to have been Europe’s most conservative statesman, proposing to uphold the peace settlement of 1919 and wishing the League of Nations to be an effective international institution, rather than a monstrous ideologue plotting world revolution. If readers were not offended by Taylor’s revisionist sketch of Hitler himself, they were almost certain to find offense elsewhere in his book.

If readers discovered heroes and villains being turned upside down in Origins, they also found states being turned inside-out. Anyone who believed in a wicked Russia, a noble Poland, a beleaguered France, an efficient Italy or a nationalistic Czechoslovakia would have their assumptions rudely challenged. Russia never did more than ask to be accepted as a legitimate sovereign state; Poland – corrupt and elitist as it was – was not a state such that one could be proud of having fought to save it; France had consistently aimed to draw in the new states of central and eastern Europe to fight on its behalf – while never intending to assist them in any way; Italy was not the powerful representative of a dynamic new political system, but the foolish plaything of a blustering and blundering egomaniac; Czechoslovakia, even though democratic, “had a canker at her heart,” its large German minority alienated from the Czech-dominated centralized state.²

Throughout Origins Taylor demonstrated an uncanny ability to see parallels and ironies that were certain to make readers squirm in their chairs. The intervention of the League of Nations in the Abyssinian crisis resulted in Haile Selassie losing all of his country instead of only half. Was Ramsay MacDonald not fittingly described as a “renegade socialist”? Was it better to be an abandoned Czech or a saved Pole? Did Munich not represent much that was best in British public life? There is hardly a page in the book that fails to unsettle complacent beliefs or challenge conventional wisdom, and this is always done crisply, with verve and frequently with biting sarcasm. Taylor’s wit could cut deep. Samuel Hoare, he said, was “as able intellectually as any British foreign secretary of the twentieth century – perhaps not a very high standard” (p. 122). What was the response of the Slovaks to Hitler’s destruction of their independence? They were to provide him with a steady and reliable satellite throughout the war (p. 240). When Britain and France declared war on Germany in September 1939, they went to war “for that part of the peace settlement which they had long regarded as least defensible” (p. 335).

The embittered irony characteristic of his approach was certain to arouse an impassioned response because Taylor treated the subject in an old-fashioned way. Instead of treating statesmen and their policies as the products of deep-rooted impersonal forces, he placed them at the center of the story. Popular audiences always respond more enthusiastically to history that concentrates on people, and those who read Origins when it appeared still had vivid impressions of, and strong feelings toward, the people about whom Taylor was writing. Those who had fought Hitler’s Germany, seen the newsreels of Chamberlain’s triumphant return from Munich, and argued over Franco’s crusade in Spain, were in their 40s and 50s when the book appeared. Such proximity would have counted for less had Taylor been more concerned with impersonal forces – had he, for instance, treated the diplomatic crises of the 1930s as reverberations of the economic collapse of 1929 – but this he steadfastly refused to do. “There was no reason why it should cause international tension. In most countries the Depression led to a turning away from international affairs” (p. 89). He put the actors of the interwar years back on the stage, and shone the spotlight on ambitions, schemes, and characteristics that many preferred to forget. It was depressing to be reminded that Churchill had admired Mussolini and favored Franco; that Chamberlain’s desire to avoid intervention in Europe followed the liberal traditions established by Cobden, Bright, and Gladstone; that Roosevelt turned his back on Europe; and that no western statesman showed any real concern about the plight of the Jews in Germany prior to the outbreak of the war.

Taylor struck a blow against the complacency of the 1950s. In his account the origins of the war ceased to be a simple morality play in which the weak-kneed failed to face up to the evil. His account really was old-fashioned. The interests of states and the ambitions of statesmen were treated as if there had been no break with the nineteenth century, as if ideology and technology were of trivial importance compared to the basic principles of modern statecraft first enunciated by Machiavelli four centuries earlier. The lines of continuity to be found in Germany’s ambitious designs to dominate central and eastern Europe, in Russia’s fears of invasion from the west, in Italy’s dream of a neo-Roman Mediterranean, and in the traditions of British foreign policy, were of vastly greater significance in Taylor’s treatment than were swastikas and fasces, than Marx and Nietzsche. It is ironic that this traditionalism was, in the world of 1961, a form of rebellion.

Eschewing underlying forces and political philosophies, Taylor restored drama to the events leading up to the war. He told his story in narrative form, but readers who followed the story would not find themselves, in the Churchillian phrase, being led “step-by-step” into the abyss. No – the events were not neat and simple but complicated, ragged, contradictory, and ironic. Few things were what they seemed: the Reichstag fire should be attributed not to clever Nazi plotting but to a Dutch arsonist (and the Nazis genuinely believed it to have been the communist intrigue they proclaimed it); the result – “odd and unforeseen” – of the Locarno treaties was to prevent military co-operation between Britain and France; the Anschluss between Germany and Austria was not the result of a carefully planned invasion – 70 percent of German vehicles broke down on their journey to the frontier, while 99 percent of the people of united Germany and Austria voted in favor of the union, “a genuine reflection of German feeling”; when the war itself broke out it was not to be regarded as a conflict between totalitarian dictatorship and democracy but as “the war between the three Western Powers over the settlement of Versailles” (p. 336).

The events leading to war were not what they appeared to be, nor were they brought about by those who appeared to be in control. In Taylor’s presentation, instead of Hitler and Mussolini cleverly pulling all the strings that made the others move, it was the weak, the second-rate, and the forgotten who made things happen. The puppets and their masters had changed places. Papen and Hindenburg “thrust” power on Hitler by imploring him to become chancellor; he did not have to “seize” control (p. 101). Schuschnigg brought about the collapse of Austria when his police raided the headquarters of the Austrian Nazis – there was no “planned aggression only hasty improvisation” – Hitler was taken by surprise and Papen “started the ball rolling” (p.181). Blum and Baldwin, not Hitler and Mussolini, decided the outcome of the Spanish Civil War; French radicals “objected to aiding an allegedly Communist cause abroad” (pp. 157–8). Benes chose “to screw up the tension” in Czechoslovakia, negotiating with the Sudeten Germans in order to force them openly into demanding Czechoslovakia’s dissolution and thereby compelling the western powers to assert themselves against such an extreme and unfavorable solution (pp. 192–3). Throughout Origins readers are given the distinct impression that no one was in control, that Hitler and Mussolini did no more than respond to the movements of others – to the agitations of Sudeten Germans, to the outbreak of Civil War in Spain, to the Slovakian demands for autonomy. Meanwhile, “the statesmen of western Europe moved in a moral and intellectual fog” (p. 141).

Finally, when men do act, seize the initiative, and attempt to control events, the results they get are seldom what they bargained for. The Lytton Commission, which condemned Japan for resorting to force in Manchuria and provoked it into withdrawing from the League of Nations, had actually been set up through an initiative of the Japanese. Franco rewarded the assistance of Germany and Italy by declaring his neutrality during the Munich crisis and maintaining it throughout the Second World War. When Hitler, following Munich, denounced the “warmongers” – Churchill, Eden, and Duff Cooper – “in the belief that this would lead to an explosion against them,” he produced the opposite effect. When...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1 The revisionist as moralist – A. J. P. Taylor and the lessons of European history
• 2 1918 and after: the postwar era
• 3 The end of Versailles
• 4 Mussolini and the myth of Rome
• 5 A. J. P. Taylor and the problem with France
• 6 Misjudging Hitler: A. J. P. Taylor and the Third Reich
• 7 Appeasement
• 8 Debating the role of Russia in the origins of the Second World War
• 9 Japan at war: history-writing on the crisis of the 1930s
• 10 More than meets the eye: the Ethiopian War and the origins of the Second World War
• 11 The Spanish Civil War and the origins of the Second World War
• 12 The phantom crisis: Danzig, 1939
• Bibliography
• Index