The Second World War in Europe

Second Edition

S.P. Mackenzie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138357228
• eBook ISBN: 9781317864707
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This is an updated edition of the first truly concise introduction to the history of World War II in the West. The author, S. P. MacKenzie traces the major events on both fighting front and home front, explaining what happened and, just as importantly, why the balance of fortunes swung first towards the Axis and then towards the Allies. Along with overviews of the origins and consequences of the conflict, the book:

• Provides a narrative account of the course of events on land throughout the war
• Contains sections specifically devoted to societies and economies; resistance movements and collaboration; technology and intelligence; alliances and strategy; the war in the air and at sea
• Assesses the impact of the war and introduces the key historiographical debates surrounding it

Far from being a blow-by-blow account, the book shows how the Second World War can only be understood by taking all the contributing factors - military, economic and social among others - into account. In addition to the existing wealth of useful supplementary material, this edition has been updated to include a colour illustration section and, for readers interested in learning more, a detailed narrative guide to published historical literature. Admirably succinct yet academically rich, this is the essential introduction to the Second World War in the West.

Part 1

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BACKGROUND

1

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The Road to War

THE ORIGINS OF THE WAR

The origins of the Second World War continue to generate debate among historians. However, though interpretations and emphases may differ, Germany is always at the centre of efforts to explore the origins of World War II.

Hitler, Adolf (1889–1945): Führer of the Third Reich and chief instigator of both the Second World War and Holocaust. His military judgement deteriorated sharply as the war progressed.

That Germany should be centre stage is not surprising. Without control of a powerful state, Adolf Hitler would have been a marginal figure; and in a broad sense the Second World War in Europe was about whether or not Germany, united since the 1870s and possessed of enormous industrial potential, should become the dominant power on the Continent. That was the central issue underlying the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and, despite the defeat of Imperial Germany in 1918, it remained unresolved in the interwar years. The peace treaty imposed by the Allies at Versailles in 1919, though harsh in some respects – loss of border territories to neighbouring states, significant reparation demands, and the reduction of the armed forces to a size and scale capable only of maintaining order at home – left the German state and its economy pretty much intact.

Under the Weimar Republic efforts were made to restore German power and prestige through evading or undermining the restrictions imposed on German freedom of action at Versailles. Confrontation in the immediate postwar years, when Germany was still prostrate, achieved little. But by the mid-1920s a more subtle yet pragmatic approach to diplomacy yielded concrete results. Patiently exploiting British guilt over Versailles (arising from the growing belief that no single state had borne overall responsibility for war in 1914) and French desires for a peaceful resolution to Franco-German confrontation, Gustav Stresemann and others negotiated a series of agreements and treaties which substantially altered the balance of power to German advantage. Reparations were progressively scaled back through the Dawes Plan (1924) and the Young Plan (1929), and Germany's position as a diplomatic – though not military – equal among nations was restored through the Locarno Treaties of 1925 and other agreements.

This evolutionary process came to an abrupt end with the onset of the Great Depression and the rise of the Nazis in the early 1930s. Though reparations became a moot point as the international economy collapsed, mass unemployment stimulated support for extremists and created deadlock in efforts at the League of Nations to ameliorate the military restrictions imposed on Germany. Moreover, once Hitler came to power in 1933 his ideology of struggle and determination to restore German might – and ultimately reverse the verdict of 1918 – propelled the European balance of power towards revolutionary rather than evolutionary change. Though it is possible to imagine other regimes in Germany continuing to pursuealterations in the status quo, Hitler, as Führer of the new Third Reich, forced the pace with such aggressive militancy that another European war became increasingly likely, though not necessarily inevitable, as the decade wore on.

Führer: Hitler's title as head (Leader) of the Nazi Party and German Reich.

With little in the way of a coherent strategy to draw upon but filled with a burning desire to confront and overwhelm, Hitler sought to expand the German armed forces as fast as possible. At first rearmament was kept more or less secret, but in March 1935 the disarmament clauses of the Versailles Treaty were publicly repudiated. The nascent Luftwaffe was unveiled and conscription introduced as a means of building up the 100,000-man army allowed by the Treaty of Versailles into a Wehrmacht of well over 500,000 men. In renouncing the Versailles disarmament clauses Hitler had issued his first overt challenge to Germany's former enemies. How they reacted then, and in subsequent crises generated by Hitler's actions, would pave the road to war.

Luftwaffe: German air force.

Wehrmacht: Term for the German armed forces after Hitler's rise to power, but used most commonly to denote the army.

The paramount security concern within the Third Republic of France was to avoid isolation when dealing with Germany, which meant working in concert with the Allies. With the United States having withdrawn from European security arrangements in 1919, France by the mid-1930s was left with a series of alliances with small powers in Eastern Europe dating from the 1920s, a recently concluded but untested mutual assistance pact with the Soviet Union (1935), and the conviction that the one other former ally and Great Power in the West – Britain – must not be alienated. French reliance on British goodwill meant in turn that the British government could take the lead in determining how to respond to Hitler.

For centuries one of the main strategic interests of British governments had been to prevent any single Great Power from achieving hegemony on the Continent. Shoring up the balance of power in Europe through diplomatic and, if necessary, armed force, guarded against the rise of a single power strong enough to threaten the British Isles. In essence this was why Britain had gone to war against Imperial Germany in 1914. By the 1930s, however, strategic realities were clouded by other considerations.

The First World War had been a traumatic and costly experience for Britain. The economy had been exhausted and over 704,000 soldiers killed (and a much larger number wounded). This in turn generated widespread revulsion against war as an instrument of policy, a pacifistic mood which found strength from the popular view that an unstable military-diplomatic system rather than the aggressiveness of the Central Powers had driven Europe into the abyss in 1914. This in turn promoted guilt over the punitive nature of the Treaty of Versailles. Even in the 1920s and early 1930s, with Germany still very much the underdog, British governments had been eager to avoid confrontation. Once Hitler began to rearm Germany in the second half of the 1930s and make threats, the desire to negotiate rather than confront took on more urgency. A sense that Hitler might have legitimate grievances stemming from Versailles, coupled with memories of bloody trench warfare as well as fears of an aerial Armageddon (mass destruction of British cities by the rapidly expanding German air force), combined to make Appeasement appear the natural course to follow.

Chamberlain, Neville (1860–1940): British Prime Minister, 1937–1940, and chief architect of Appeasement. He resigned after a noconfidence vote in the House of Commons, 10 May 1940, following British defeat in the Norway campaign, and was replaced by Churchill.

Appeasement, as pursued rather lazily by the government of Stanley Baldwin and much more actively by his successor Neville Chamberlain, was based on the assumption that Hitler, however bellicose his talk, was ultimately interested in peaceful rather than forceful revision of territorial and other issues arising from Versailles. This was a great mistake. Though he possessed no master plan and was in many respects an opportunist improviser lacking a coherent strategic vision, the Führer firmly believed in the necessity of armed struggle between nations and was more than willing to risk war to achieve complete dominance in Central Europe and liberate more Lebensraum (living space) for the German people in general. Hitler was, however, quite able to play upon British hopes and fears through a judicious mixture of claims of peaceful intent and threats of warlike action.

Mussolini, Benito (1883–1945): Italian dictator. Responsible for bringing Fascist Italy into the war and for a succession of poor strategic decisions. In July 1943 he was overthrown, but rescued and reinstated with Hitler's support in German-occupied Italy. Killed by Italian partisans, April 1945.

When open German rearmament began in 1935, and when Hitler sent troops into the Rhineland in March 1936 (the area between the Rhine and French border which had been demilitarized in 1919), the initial shock soon gave way to rationalization and optimistic hopes for the future in London. Germany had every right to behave as a sovereign state by building an army and placing troops anywhere it liked within its borders. Moreover, had not Hitler expressed eagerness to negotiate a peaceful settlement of Germany's grievances?

There were, to be sure, moments of pragmatism in relation to latent German aggression in the mid-1930s. In March 1935, rearmament slowly began to get under way. In the following month Britain and France had begun negotiating with Mussolini in an attempt to present a united diplomatic front against Hitler. This attempt at de facto coalition building, however, quickly collapsed. A short-sighted Anglo-German agreement on naval limits in June 1935, made without consulting Paris, suggested a distinct lack of enthusiasm for an Anglo-French entente. Mussolini's full-scale invasion of Abyssinia, launched in October 1935, forced both Britain and France to vote for sanctions against Italy in the League of Nations. This put paid to the idea of a united front and propelled Mussolini into overtly aligning with Germany through the so-called Rome-Berlin Axis announced in November 1936.

Axis: The term, derived from the agreement signed by Mussolini and Hitler in 1936, most commonly used to denote collectively the nations fighting the Allies, principally Germany, Italy, and Japan.

Appeasement, in any case, remained the dominant theme in British diplomacy. For a time efforts focused on possible colonial concessions; but by 1938 it was clear that Hitler's true interests lay in Central Europe.

In March of that year Hitler sent troops to Vienna in a bloodless coup that led to the incorporation of Austria (Anschluss) into the German Reich. Protests were lodged against yet another breach of the Versailles Treaty (Germany and Austria were supposed to remain independent of one another), but as many Austrians appeared to be happy to be as one with their German cousins, nothing of any consequence was done.

Almost at once, however, a new crisis began to build up. Germans living in the Sudetenland, the border region of Czechoslovakia next to the Reich, were encouraged to demand union with the Fatherland, and Hitler began to threaten a forceful solution to the issue. France was bound by treaty to defend Czechoslovakia, and, via the 1935 treaty, the Soviet Union would also be drawn in if war began. By September 1938, with Hitler making increasingly bellicose threats to solve the Sudeten problem by force if his demands were not met at once and in full, the likelihood of war seemed very real. Chamberlain and his Cabinet colleagues, however, worried about the prospect of air attack and still hoped that Appeasement could work. The Sudetenlanders were mostly German and their incorporation into Czechoslovakia, rather than Germany or Austria, was yet another consequence of the Treaty of Versailles. Hence Britain, after some initial hesitation, once again shied away from the threat of force. The Czechs, abandoned by their French ally (which in turn made null and void the possibility of Soviet support), were forced by Chamberlain to agree to cede the Sudetenland on Hitler's terms at the Munich Conference at the end of September 1938.

Thus far Hitler had gambled and won. His generals, concerned that the armed forces were not really ready for war either in 1936 or even 1938, were overruled in the expectation that the Western Powers would not fight when push came to shove (though signs of depression after Munich suggest that at some level Hitler would have preferred a war in any event). In 1939, however, events assumed a new aspect.

Hitler continued to behave aggressively, negating Chamberlain's hope that at Munich he had achieved ‘peace in our time’. In March of 1939 Hitler sent troops into Prague. From his perspective, this was simply rounding off what had been achieved at Munich, incorporating the remnants of a state that had been rendered broken and helpless by the events of September 1938. In London, however, it was the first truly unambiguous signal that Hitler was bent on far more than righting the wrongs of Versailles: these were not Germans who were being absorbed into the Reich. Rearmament in Britain was already accelerating, and in March and April 1939 the Chamberlain government, once again compelling France to move in tandem, guaranteed the independence of a number of the smaller states in Central Europe that might come under German threat – not least Poland, which seemed to be next on Hitler's list.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction to the Series
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Publisher's Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• Who's Who
• Glossary
• Part One Background
• Part Two The Second World War
• Part Three Assessment
• Part Four Documents
• Guide to Further Reading
• References
• Index