Political and Military Leadership in the World Wars

The Closest Concert

Carl Cavanagh Hodge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000364408
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Europäische Geschichte

This book approaches the World Wars and the decades between them as a single unit in modern history. It is impossible to understand either the cause or conduct of the 1939–45 war without an appreciation of the issues not wholly answered in the conflict of 1914–18. Bridging the World Wars was the establishment, revision, and ultimate collapse of the Versailles settlement and the League of Nations system between 1919 and 1939. The 1919 settlement was contested in the 1920s by Fascist Italy and began to unravel irreparably in 1931 with Japan's incursion into Manchuria. The strategic thought of the interwar years is therefore especially instructive in assessing the prosecution of WWII, as the military ventures of these two revisionist powers pointed toward future developments even before Germany thrust a new way of war upon Eastern and Western Europe. Meanwhile, Britain, France, and the United States began an incremental conversion to new approaches to war in the air and on the sea in particular. The interwar decades are best understood as a period of calibrated rearmament by all the powers based on assumptions about the probability of a future war and the nature of its prosecution.

1 Diplomatic Failure and Military Catastrophe

World War I was in the first instance a diplomatic failure. In July 1914 a general European war was eminently avoidable, but the conduct of the diplomacy ostensibly to avoid it was bereft of good faith and was more usually calculated to influence the timing and scale of the war. The prosecution of the conflict that followed was a military catastrophe, because it did not answer the central question of the diplomatic crisis – the place of Germany in European and international affairs – yet mutilated European civilization, at the cost of millions of lives.

That question was fundamental to both of the World Wars, the outcome of the first being in large part responsible for the dark march to the second. This is because in the first half of the twentieth century Germany had invested – financially, materially, politically, culturally – in the use of arms to achieve national objectives. In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, Germany eclipsed France as the dominant power on the European continent; after 1890, Germany’s political leadership sought to lever military power to challenge French and British prestige in the world beyond Europe. As early as 1904, Britain and France had established the Entente Cordiale, in part to resolve quarrels between them over their respective colonial ambitions overseas, but also as an understanding of cooperation should a third party imperil the one or the other. The ‘Military Conversations,’ informal staff talks between the service branches of the two countries, took place intermittently from 1906 to 1912. The understanding that they might be compelled to defend the European status quo together was not explicit but no less real for that fact. The additional understandings Britain and France then reached with Tsarist Russia turned the Entente into a Triple Entente that should have been, but was not, a deterrent sufficient to stop Germany from hazarding a European war.

It was fundamentally the drive to become a world power of the first rank, Weltpolitik dating to 1890, that led Germany to war in August 1914. That drive was arrested in exhaustion four years later. Yet defeat in 1918 pacified Germany only temporarily and did not thwart its political leadership from the object of overthrowing – first by diplomacy, then by force – the military verdict of 1918 with the invasion of Poland in 1939. Moreover, the international politics of the interwar years witnessed the emergence of three additional challenges to international peace: the establishment of the Soviet Union upon the rubble of the Russian Revolution; the seizure of power in Italy by the fascist party of Benito Mussolini; and the degeneration of Shōwa Japan into a military dictatorship of an inherently aggressive nature.

The July Crisis

Between the precipitant crises of WWI – the assassination of the heir to the Habsburg throne by a Bosnian Serb fanatic on June 28, 1914, and Vienna’s war note to Belgrade one month later – Germany’s diplomatic support for Austria-Hungary transformed a regional conflict into a continental war.¹ The conviction of its military leadership that Germany would inevitably have to fight both France and Russia simultaneously prompted Germany to craft elaborate plans for the mobilization and deployment of troops to Germany’s eastern and western frontiers. This sense that a general European war was inevitable and could be the vehicle of Germany’s ascent to the first rank of powers became integral to the political regime of the Second Reich and the personal relationship between Kaiser Wilhelm II and army leaders such as Helmut von Moltke, Paul Hindenburg, and Erich Ludendorff, and navy leaders such Alfred von Tirpitz.²

In its mania for war planning, Germany was not alone. In 1914 all the belligerent nations deployed land and sea forces according to plans developed during the years of intensified international competition among them since 1900.³ The extensive militarization of government itself was most consequential to the unfolding of the conflict. Modern militarism – i.e. the subordination of civilian authority to military expertise and military imperatives – had two effects. First, contingencies for decisive offensive action imposed upon government timetables for the deployment of large numbers of troops so rigid as to transform war from an instrument of policy into policy itself. Although this disorder was present among all the belligerents of 1914, it was most advanced in the governments of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Tsarist Russia. Although the Western powers were planning for war, the Central Powers were to varying degrees planning on war. Second, the very detail of such plans left the military leadership of all the belligerent powers unprepared for dealing with the unexpected contingencies that are the very essence of war. This is not to say that the European powers were unprepared for war; on the contrary, they were armed to such an extent that their strengths cancelled each other out. Rather, it is to say that they were unable to break out of the deadlock the war quickly became.

World War I did not occur because events spun out of control. Instead, the poor quality of decision-making in the upper reaches of European governments – especially in Vienna, St. Petersburg, and Berlin – transformed a regional crisis of minor significance into a continental conflict out of proportion to the strategic interests initially engaged.⁴ This problem, fundamentally one of political immaturity, was most consequential in Germany, an advanced industrial and military power governed by a monarchy with no serious parliamentary checks on its authority. The chancellor, Prince Bernhard von Bülow, was alternately incompetent or negligent in managing Kaiser Wilhelm II, a monarch who embodied his nation’s insecure measure of its own power. In the critical year of 1908 London’s Daily Telegraph published the text of an incendiary interview Wilhelm had given on the great issues of the times. When the text triggered public indignation across Germany – and even calls for abdication – Wilhelm sulked that he had been the victim of a conspiracy connecting his chancellor with international Jewry to deprive him of his throne. Bülow’s successor in the chancellery, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, was an able and industrious civil servant, but had no experience in foreign affairs.⁵

The year 1908 turned out to be critical, because it occasioned the Austrian annexation of Bosnia and Herzogovina, former provinces of an Ottoman Empire in terminal decline. Austrian annexation provoked Serbian nationalists, who sought to unite the provinces with Serbia, to paroxysms of rage in which many clamoured for war against Vienna. Thereafter, there was widespread acceptance that a conflict arising from an Austrian–Russian confrontation over the future of Serbia was possible, so the diplomatic position other powers might adopt in the face of such a conflict could influence both its probability and its scale. Austria’s simmering conflict with Serb nationalism spoke to Wilhelm’s perceptions of Germany’s place in Europe.

Thereafter, the Agadir Crisis in 1911 spoke to his aspirations for Germany in the world. Berlin demanded the French Congo as compensation for France’s declaration of a protectorate over Morocco. The appearance of the German gunboat Panther in the port of Agadir was contrived to intimidate France and drive a wedge between it and its Entente partner, Britain. It instead prompted from the chancellor of the exchequer, David Lloyd George, a bellicose public speech citing Britain’s historic role in protecting continental nations from national extinction. It was a romantic image of British policy, but it was not a hollow warning. The journalist C.P. Scott observed in the Manchester Guardian that Germany sought a European dominance “not far removed from the Napoleonic.” Lloyd George later added that “I am not against war a bit” and claimed that although he liked the Germans he despised the Junker caste of its aristocracy and military leadership.⁶ It was a casually imprudent swagger on the prospect of war. On the other hand, the declaration of Britain’s solidarity with France should have given Wilhelm more pause than it did. He misread the attitude of the first and underestimated the strength of the second.

Returning to Europe, it was essentially Germany’s support of Austria that, over a period of weeks in the summer of 1914, escalated one of the serial crises of the Balkan region into a general war.⁷ Because one of the groups opposed to Austrian annexation, Young Bosnia (Mlada Bosna), managed to assassinate the Habsburg heir, Francis Ferdinand, in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, the diplomatic danse macabre that followed foreclosed incrementally on the chances that a regional crisis might be confined to the region. The determination to do so has to be doubted. Three weeks before Sarajevo Wilhelm had predicted the imminence of a new Balkan crisis and an opportunity for Germany in its resolution.⁸

After deciding to punish Serbia for an assassination perpetrated by ethnic Serbs, Austria’s failure to act promptly required Germany to adopt a position on the potential for a wider conflict. The father of German unity, Bismarck, had once famously said that the fate of the Balkan region was not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. But Wilhelm’s attachment to German prestige trumped a similar cost–benefit calculation on a prudent diplomatic position. What’s more, the murder of the heir to the Habsburg throne was just the thing to whip up the German and Austro-Hungarian peoples for a punitive showdown with Serbia. Wilhelm assumed, however, both the will and the ability of Vienna to act swiftly and decisively, so his blank cheque of diplomatic support to Austria was issued with a casualness similar to insincere utterances of fidelity in the past. Throughout the July Crisis, the Kaiser’s mood and reactions to the course of actions were erratic. When Serbia complied with most of the conditions of the ultimatum set down by Austria, he assumed the crisis had passed, and even planned to resume his summer holiday. The Austrians could simply occupy Belgrade until the rest of their conditions were met.

Meanwhile, German diplomacy toward Russia, France, and Britain was uncertain at best, duplicitous at worst. Wilhelm was furious at Bethmann-Hollweg’s warning that his order on July 27 for the German navy to assemble at base ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Diplomatic Failure and Military Catastrophe
• Chapter 2: Naval Theory in London and Berlin
• Chapter 3: Armistice
• Chapter 4: Appeasement and Rearmament
• Chapter 5: The Launch of World War II in Europe
• Chapter 6: The Asia-Pacific War
• Chapter 7: Defence and Offence, Land and Sea
• Chapter 8: The Allied Offensives
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index