The Second World War

A. W. Purdue

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781350307308
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Zweiter Weltkrieg

The Second World War ended the Nazi attempt to establish Germany as the dominant power in Europe and the world; and Japan's aim of controlling South East Asia and the Pacific. It also resulted in the creation of two super-powers and led to the Cold War. A. W. Purdue provides one of the most concise yet comprehensive accounts of the entire course of World War Two, covering both the European and the Asian Pacific conflicts. Thoroughly revised and updated in the light of the latest scholarship, this second edition of an established text: - Challenges accepted views and reassesses the war, rejecting the simplistic concept of a 'war against fascism'
- Discusses the historiography and critically analyses key themes and issues, as well as examining current debates
- Considers changes in popular attitudes to the Second World War Ideal for students and general readers alike, this is an essential introduction to the causes, nature and significance of World War Two from the perspective of the twenty-first century.

Chapter 1: The Origins of the Second World War

A Thirty Years’ War?

Two statements which generations of students have been invited to discuss as essay questions encapsulate the most popular and contradictory explanations of the causes of the Second World War: ‘The origins of World War II lie in the Versailles Settlement’ and ‘The causes of the Second World War can be summed up in one word, Hitler’. A third thesis, which has recently gained ground, is that the First and Second World Wars were inextricably linked with a common cause, the upsetting of the balance of power of Europe by the emergence of a united Germany with expansionist ambitions.

Insofar as the Versailles Settlement provided the geopolitical context for the international relations of the inter-war period, even down to providing some of the cast of nation states, the centrality of the Settlement to discussions of the origins of the Second World War has never been in doubt. Whether the Settlement was to be blamed for causing instability and leaving Germans angry and vengeful, or whether British and French politicians were at fault in not upholding its provisions firmly enough, Versailles’s importance has always been recognised. To that extent it is inaccurate to state, as it so often is, that until the 1960s historians saw the origins of the war as simply synonymous with Adolf Hitler. Hitler had had to gain power and had been able to use supposed grievances that were to hand, while even the most single-minded and ruthless of expansionist policies confronts other powers with the decision as to whether to accede or not.

The interpretation that achieved the status of consensus was more complex than ‘the one-man Hitler’ caricature. It was essentially that put forward by Winston Churchill in his massively influential book, The Gathering Storm (1948). History and the writing of history came together as one of the war’s major figures justified his record and shaped perceptions of the conflict. As a recent study has demonstrated, Churchill was ever ‘in command of history’.¹ His argument was, in essence, that the war arose out of a combination of Hitler’s ambitions and a failure to prevent the German revision of Versailles. Churchill was selective in his attitude to Versailles, condemning the reparation clauses, but defending the modified Settlement as it existed after the Locarno Treaty of 1925. He argued that war could have been avoided if German rearmament, contrary to the disarmament clauses of the Versailles treaty, had not been allowed in 1934. After that date, he considered, war was inevitable. Others saw the stage at which war became inevitable as the failure to oppose the remilitarisation of the Rhineland in 1936, but the essential thesis was the same: the war arose because of Hitler’s ambitions and the failure of Britain and France to stand up to him in the early stages. The development of the Cold War introduced subsidiary debates: arguments from Soviet historians that the machinations of finance capital had produced both Hitler and Anglo-French appeasement of him; and from Americans that Stalin and pre-war Soviet-German co-operation had some responsibility for the outbreak of war. Such arguments did not displace Hitler from the central role.

There can be no doubt, however, that the publication of A. J. P. Taylor’s Origins of the Second World War (1961) marked a massive widening of the debate, not just in its denial that Hitler proceeded to war deliberately and according to a plan but also in its view that Hitler’s ambitions were a continuation of traditional German policies. It is a testimony to the power and originality of the work that Taylor’s bibliography included no book titled The Origins of the Second World War, while any reading list today would inevitably include at least half a dozen. The Origins remains controversial even 35 years after its publication. If Taylor’s coat-trailing remark that Hitler was ‘just an ordinary German politician’ detracted from his less extravagant argument that his ambitions were essentially a continuation of traditional German foreign policy, it did encapsulate it.

Not only did Taylor’s book turn the spotlight back upon the Versailles Settlement, the revision of which was the aim of most inter-war German politicians, but in doing so it connected the First and Second World Wars. To see the Second World War as, in large part, a repeat performance of the First World War was scarcely original and had been the common sense of popular opinion in 1939. That it was unpalatable to the consensus of the post-war world can be explained by several factors: the course of the war, rather than its origins, had revealed the extent of Hitler’s ambitions, which went far beyond those of the Kaiser or his generals; it demoted ideology, which in the context of the Cold War, seemed self-evidently the dominant force in twentieth-century world politics; and, within a polarised Europe where a West and East Germany were recruited to the Western and Soviet blocs, it was far more convenient to conceive of the Second World War as having been fought against Hitler or against fascism than against Germany.

The number of books and articles that have been written on the subject of the causes of the Second World War is enormous and a brief guide to influential works is given in the bibliography, but the principal interpretative divide remains between those who see the war as separate from the First World War and unique in its causation and those who stress a continuum not only between the two wars but also in the interaction of great power rivalry since the emergence of a united Germany in 1870. The sides of this debate are by no means fixed by national sympathies and the idea of continuity in German ambitions has found support among German historians, some of whom have emphasised Teutonic expansionism further back in German history.² Ideological and professional sympathies have probably been as influential as national ones in forming opinions. Those committed to a view of twentieth-century history as a battleground of political philosophies have been reluctant to see its great events reduced to an extension of great power rivalry and the imperatives of geography. Economic, diplomatic, military and social historians have brought their own methods, preoccupations and expectations to the debate. There are some strange bedfellows, those normally concerned in pointing to deep socio-economic currents dictating historic change have found themselves implicitly emphasising the difference made by the charismatic leader, Adolf Hitler, while those given to accepting the role of the individual in history have been forward in pointing to the inter-generational continuities of foreign policies.

Changes in the present from which we view the past have probably been more important. To those who went to war in 1939 a continuation of the 1914–18 conflict seemed the explanation. To those who had fought between 1939 and 1945, the special nature of their war and its personification as ‘Hitler’s war’ seemed the obvious truth. Until the late eighties the results of the war in terms of creating a different and politically divided Europe seemed so complete and permanent that continuity with 1918 or 1870 seemed unthinkable. The collapse of the Soviet bloc and of east-European socialism has shifted perceptions. The enduring interests of nation states now appear more important than political ideologies, while nationalism seems to remain a dynamic force. The concept of an ‘end to history’ implies in reality a return to history with competing ideologies as a component, rather than the framework, of historical change.

A combination of distance from the events and déjà vu at the sight of the emerging landscape of the late twentieth century made for the increased plausibility of the concept, not of two linked wars fought for similar reasons but of one war,³ a 30-years war, a concept that remains compelling in the early twenty-first century. The Second World War was, it can be argued, simply stage two of a Thirty Years’ War, the second military phase of a European civil war to determine the mastery of Europe.⁴ A wider context, and an even longer scenario, is possible if one considers the emergence of the German Empire in 1871 to have destroyed the balance of power in Europe at a time when the global influence of Europe, most concretely manifest in overseas empires, was increasing. From 1871 the basic European problem was to be how to accommodate or contain Germany, while European influence in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, enhanced during the high ‘age of imperialism’ of the late nineteenth century, ensured that the success or failure of such accommodation or containment would have a global impact.

From such a point of view, 1871 affected all participants in the Second World War. It saw the birth of a German Empire, populous and with a developing economy and a strong army, which inherited from Prussia a tradition of respect for the power of government and an inclination towards protectionism rather than free trade in economic policy. It diminished Russia’s preponderant power in Eastern Europe. It propelled France into both a feverish search for colonial aggrandisement as a compensation for diminution of status and power in Europe, most piquantly illustrated by the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, and a search for European allies against Germany. This in turn changed Britain’s reluctant imperialism into an expansionism which overstretched her resources and led to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, bringing an Asian power for the first time into an equal relationship with a Western power, and able to benefit or lose from changes to the European balance. The penetration of European power, together with European conflicts into the wider world, dis turbed the USA and its South American and Pacific interests leading to her determination to build a large navy. Thus the coming of the German Empire posed the problem and determined many of the parameters of international relations for the next century or more.

The First World War was fought by Britain, France and Russia in order to contain the powerful German state, much as the same essential reason was to dictate Britain’s and France’s declaration of war in 1939. Germany conversely went to war to destroy a containment she felt threatened the rightful place her strength entitled her to as the dominant European power, making her bid for pre-eminence in the calculation that time was against her and delay would see a stronger Russia. Germany had extensive annexationist aims before and during the war, and deliberately went to war to achieve them. Bethmann-Hollweg’s memorandum of war aims of September 1914 has been much cited as sketching out a map of political and economic control foreshadowing that established by the Third Reich in 1940.

If the First World War was essentially a European conflict, its reverberations were on a world scale, not just because fighting took place in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, as well as on all the oceans, but in that the USA was eventually drawn in and Britain had to rely on her Japanese ally to bolster her naval position in the Pacific.

The ‘German Question’ was not solved by the First World War. Versailles was either too lenient or too severe for that, and from the ‘Thirty Years’ War’ perspective, the so-called inter-war years marked merely the recovery of German strength and the revision of much of the peace settlement. The second military phase was embarked on by Germany in much more propitious circumstances, as the effect of the Bolshevik Revolution resulted in the Western allies having no eastern partner of the weight of imperial Russia.

Compelling as the Thirty Years’ War thesis is, it can be challenged on a number of grounds. It neglects the real possibility that by the late twenties Europe had achieved a degree of stability; some of the most pressing problems that had arisen from Versailles had been solved, and, while France had desisted from her forward policy of upholding every letter of the Settlement by force of arms, German generals were reconciled to the impossibility of revisionism by military means. It ignores the economic dimension and the argument that economic recovery in the twenties had produced a less-turbulent Europe and that it was economic depression from 1929 which destroyed this. It takes no account of the role of ideology and of the view that communism and fascism radically changed the nature of international relations. Above all, of course, it takes little account of Adolf Hitler.

Versailles

The strongest and most obvious argument for seeking the origins of the war in Versailles is that the years between 1919 and 1939 were punctuated by a series of crises which concerned the provisions of the peace settlement, and they can retrospectively be seen as steps towards a war which, after all, started over one of those provisions, the free city of Danzig. The Versailles Settlement was central to the territorial changes to the map of Europe that took place at the end of the First World War and did much to determine the context of the international relations of the European powers in the twenties and thirties. It was not, however, Versailles alone that shaped post-war Europe. Two factors of crucial importance pre-dated the peace conference. The decision to keep Germany in being and largely intact had already been taken and Germany had won the war in the East.

By concluding an armistice while a German state and army were still intact, the Western powers provided for the continued existence of Germany. Given that Britain, France and Russia had gone to war to contain the ambitions of the German Empire and that the strength of a unified Germany could be seen as a threat to the European balance of power, the most drastic solution to the German, or rather the Germany, problem would have been to dismember the German state. A secret treaty between France and Russia of March 1917 had in fact provided for a Rhineland under French control, but by November 1918 not only was Russia out of the war but the USA was in it, and any chance of breaking Germany up had passed.

It must also be realised that neither the Versailles Treaty nor the wider Versailles Settlement, encompassing the Treaties of St Germain with Austria, Trianon with Hungary, Neuilly with Bulgaria and Sèvres with the Ottoman Empire, was synonymous with the great reconstruction of Europe that took place at the end of the war and in the immediate post-war years. Sèvres was never ratified nor fully implemented, and after the emergence of a secular national Turkish state under Kemal Ataturk, whose armies decisively defeated those of Greece, it was made redundant by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.

Germany had won the war in the east by the end of 1917 and this victory was reflected in the Treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest early in 1918. Although Germany went on to lose the war in the west, what may be termed the afterglow of Brest-Litovsk was to influence Versailles itself, the shape of inter-war Eastern Europe and the course of the Second World War. The combined effects of the Bolshevik revolution and Brest-Litovsk made a great difference both to the dispositions and scope of the post-war peace settlement. A peace settlement in which Russia ranked among the victorious powers would undoubtedly have provided for areas in eastern Europe not covered by Versailles, and might have made very different provisions for the areas that were covered by it. The consecutive defeats of Russia and Germany, together with Russia’s continued weakness, meant that not only did Finland and the Baltic States continue to be independent of Russia but they were also able to be independent of Germany. The simultaneous weakness of the two great powers meant that, like two great boulders, they were temporarily rolled back, allowing small eastern European states a brief independence between them. The same developments allowed the Poland established by Versailles to establish frontiers beyond those of the Treaty by its successful war with Russia in 1920. Brest-Litovsk had, however, demonstrated German power in Eastern Europe and her politicians and public remembered the lost victory, while for Russia, after 1922 the Soviet Union, the permanent loss of territory had never been accepted. Any debate over Versailles’s role in causing the Second World War has to take account of the fact that Versailles by itself did not draw the geopolitical map of inter-war Europe.

The argument that the Versailles Settlement led to the Second World War relies both on the view that the treaty with Germany was harsh and vindictive, and that the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, made manifest in St Germain and Trianon, led to an unstable east-central Europe composed of mutually hostile small states. The Treaty of Versailles thus led to a vengeful Germany and the instability to the east provided the path to revenge.

The critique of Versailles which became the received wisdom of the twenties was that Germany, contrary to the promises of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, was treated as defeated and uniquely culpable, saddled with ‘war guilt’, made to pay exacting reparations, stripped of territory in defiance of the concept of the principle of national self-determination and subjected to compulsory disarmament and partial military occupation. Yet, if Germany had to submit in 1919, Versailles did little to weaken her position in the long term. Germany had not been invaded and remained Europe’s foremost industrial power. The breaking up of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, together with the Soviet Union’s internal problems, presented her with a much weaker east-central Europe than had existed before the war. This, together with the USA’s withdrawal into isolationism, meant that in essentials the balance of power had shifted in her favour. As A. Lentin has commented:

It was a wise precept of Machiavelli that the victor should either conciliate his enemy or destroy him. The Treaty of Versailles did neither. It did not destroy Germany, still less permanently weaken her, appearances notwithstanding, but left her scourged, humiliated and resentful.⁵

The humiliation of the potentially strong is rarely wise. There can be no doubt that most Germans regarded Versailles as a diktat and that almost all German politicians were committed to overturning the majority of its provisions. At the same time, France was the only great power dedicated to upholding every aspect of the Treaty. When no American guarantee for Versailles was forthcoming, Britain too refused to underwrite it and ‘progressive’ British public opinion soon began to feel that it had been unfair to Germany.

The attempt to enforce the letter of Versailles strictly did not last long. The French occupation of the Ruhr in 1922 in order to extract reparations payments was its high point. Reparations were reduced in 1924 (the Dawes Plan) and again in 1929 (the Young Plan), before being discontinued altogether in 1932, though, bizarrely, the last payment on the interest was made in 2010. Some aspects of the Treaty had always been intended to be temporary with provision for the withdrawal of o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Chronology
• Maps
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Introduction
• 1. The Origins of the Second World War
• 2. A European War
• 3. A World War?
• 4. Behind the Lines
• 5. Roads to Victory 1943–4
• 6. Unconditional Surrender
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Annotated Bibliography
• Index