A Short History of World War II

James L. Stokesbury

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061854446
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

A Short History of World War II is essentially a military history, but it reaches from the peace settlements of World War I to the drastically altered postwar world of the late 1940's.

Lucidly written and eminently readable, it is factual and accurate enough to satisfy professional historians. A Short History of World War II will appeal equally to the general reader, the veteran who fought in the War, and the student interested in understanding the contemporary political world.

PART I: PROLOGUE

1. Peace and Rearmament

WORLD WAR II BEGAN in Europe at dawn on September 1, 1939, as units of the German Wehrmacht crossed the Polish border. Britain and France, honoring their pledge to Poland made earlier in the year, declared war on Germany on September 3. The war lasted nearly six years, and by the time it was over, much of the civilized world lay in ruins, something more than thirty million people had been killed, great empires had been destroyed, and weapons of new and hitherto unimagined potential had been unleashed upon the world.

Such a result could not have stemmed from a border dispute between Germany and Poland. The powder train that led to the outbreak of war went back far beyond the immediate causes of it. Without stretching historical continuity too far, the causes of World War II can be taken back at least into the nineteenth century. For practical purposes, however, World Wars I and II can be considered part of one large struggle—the struggle of united Germany to claim its place as the dominant power on the European continent—and the causes of World War II can be traced from the immediate aftermath of World War I.

In 1919, a series of treaties was made between the victorious Allies and the various defeated powers. All of these were punitive in nature. They consisted of the Peace of Versailles with Germany, the Peace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye with Austria, the Peace of Neuilly with Bulgaria, the Peace of the Trianon with Hungary, and the Peace of Sèvres with Turkey, later modified by the Peace of Lausanne. The fact that all of the original treaties were signed in the suburbs of Paris and bore their names was indicative of the place still occupied by the French in the world of diplomacy and power. Though she had virtually ruined herself, in the present and for the future, France had proved that she was still the major power of Europe. All of the peace treaties, though they did put the burden of the war on the defeated Central Powers, also contained the provision that the vanquished might subsequently be admitted to the League of Nations, that much maligned brainchild of President Woodrow Wilson. The League, its supporters hoped, with its provisions for collective security, would provide alternatives to war in the future.

The five years after the establishment of the “Versailles system” have been called “the period of settlement.” Assorted border disputes left over from the war and the collapse of the eastern European empires—Russia, the Hapsburgs, and Turkey—were settled, and diplomatic groupings were made and unmade. The Greeks fought the Turks; the Poles fought the Russians; Italians and Yugoslavs quarreled over the head of the Adriatic. France, Britain, and the United States negotiated a defensive alliance that promised to protect France from Germany. On the basis of that, the French modified their demands against Germany. The United States Senate then refused to ratify the alliance treaty, as it did also the Versailles treaty. The French were then disposed to meddle ineffectually in German politics, trying to foster a breakaway Rhenish republic, occupying the industrial Ruhr district, and engaging in activities that made the Americans, at least, believe that the French could not have been trusted anyway.

Nonetheless, by 1924, it looked as if some degree of stability were returning to Europe, and the late twenties were the nearest to a period of peace and prosperity that post-World War I Europe got. In 1924, assorted member-states of the League of Nations attempted to overcome some of the security deficiencies of the League by drafting treaties of compulsory arbitration. None of these developed, largely because the United States, Germany, and Russia were not members, and because the British dominions were unwilling to commit themselves to minding distant neighbors’ houses.

The unsuccessful discussions did lead, though, to a conference held at Locarno in Switzerland in 1925. This produced another series of agreements, known as the “Locarno system,” which effectively updated the Versailles system. In the first of these, France, Great Britain, Belgium, Germany, and Italy guaranteed the Franco-German and the Belgo-German borders. Next, Germany signed an arbitration treaty with Poland, and one with Czechoslovakia. Then Germany signed a similar treaty with France and one with Belgium. Theoretically, these treaties removed any likelihood of German aggression in the future. In spite of that, France then proceeded to develop further her mutual defense treaty with Poland, in which one agreed to come to the rescue if the other were attacked by Germany. France then went on and signed the same kind of treaty with Czechoslovakia.

Locarno was hailed as a milestone in European diplomacy, and for a while the “spirit of Locarno” and the “Locarno honeymoon” were phrases widely used by the newspapers. A later outgrowth of it was the famous Kellogg-Briand Pact, signed between the United States Secretary of State and the French Foreign Minister; this pact was rather like the Holy Alliance of Tsar Alexander in 1815, which Metternich called a “high-sounding nothing.” All the states that eventually adhered to it renounced the use of aggressive warfare as an instrument of policy. There was, however, an opting-out clause, and there was no provision for any enforcing of the pact. Like Locarno, it looked good on paper.

It was Germany’s neighbors who had most to fear, or thought they had, and it was they, particularly France, who soon discovered the cracks beneath all this paper. France had after all been twice invaded by Germany in recent memory, in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and again in 1914-18, and she was not disposed to put her faith in someone else’s expression of good intent. Even in the early twenties then, the French began creating their own private alliance-system against Germany.

France and Poland had signed a defensive alliance in 1921. At that time the newly resurrected Poland was busy fighting with Russia; just as in the eighteenth century, she proved no match for the Russians—though at one point the Poles did threaten Moscow—and now as then she turned to France for help. A French military mission helped the Poles keep the Russians away from Warsaw, and the two states signed an alliance in which both looked fearfully east: the Poles to Moscow, and the French to Berlin.

There were also assorted mini-systems in central and eastern Europe. In 1920, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia signed an alliance that became known as the “Little Entente.” Poland allied with Rumania in 1921, and Rumania then joined in with the Little Entente. After Locarno, France realized that her various alliances did not prevent German aggression directed toward the east and the south. She therefore reaffirmed her alliance with Poland, and she also joined the Little Entente, extending her ties to the southeast. Theoretically, she had created a diplomatic barrier against potential German aggression in any direction. Actually, she had now made it extremely likely that, if Germany developed any expansionist tendencies at all, the French would be dragged into another war—exactly what the alliances were all supposed to avoid. None of the treaties could disguise the basic fact of European life—a united Germany was potentially the strongest power on the Continent. France began to rearm.

Less than a decade after the end of the war to end all wars, and after all the talk of peace settlements, guarantees, mutual-defense systems, alliances, and treaties, the countries of Europe were faced once again with the old problem of military force. A concomitant to the bankruptcy of diplomacy was the even worse failure of the movement for disarmament.

At the signing of the military armistice in November of 1918, and more definitively in the Peace of Versailles, Germany had been effectively disarmed. She had been limited to an army of 100,000 men, which made the French happy. Her navy had been held to no more than thirty-six combat vessels, including no submarines and no modern battleships, and that made the British happy. She was not allowed to have an air force, and she was not permitted any military installations within fifty kilometers of the east bank of the Rhine River—the famous “demilitarization of the Rhine.”

All of these provisions were systematically circumvented by the German government, often unwittingly aided by the Allied Control Commissions set up to oversee them. The army, for example, had been envisaged by the peacemakers as an internal police force. But the German General Staff, officially broken up at the end of the war, actually reformed and disguised as a troop-organization office, built up an army in which every man was to be a potential officer or noncommissioned officer. The 100,000-man Reichswehr thus became the skeleton of a larger army, to be fleshed out when the occasion arose. The Allied control officers, all serving professional soldiers rather than internal-security specialists, allowed and in some cases encouraged the Germans to set up organizations capable of dealing with armored cars which would one day become tanks, and heavy infantry weapons and artillery pieces.

Denied an air force, the Germans developed a great interest in sport gliding. That was in the thirties, after Hitler came to power, and he would soon spring a full-grown air force on the world. Before Hitler, there was liaison between the Germans and the other European outcasts of the twenties, Bolshevik Russia; substantial numbers of Germans trained troops of the Soviet army and air force, and were in turn trained by them. The navy perhaps lagged behind, as 1940 would show, but it too kept up on technical developments, and when it did start rebuilding, it was in the forefront of naval design.

The disarmament of Germany was predicated on the idea that there would be a general disarmament after World War I. The prewar arms race was widely regarded as one of the major contributing causes to the Great War, and there was a strong movement to get rid of arms and armaments manufacturers—the “merchants of death”—after the war ended. This movement resulted in the usual series of conferences.

The most famous of these was probably the Washington Conference of 1922. Most of the disarmament movement came to be concentrated on naval strengths. This was ironic, because the mythology of militarism tends to regard navies as defensive and democratic, and armies as offensive and autocratic. Perhaps because ships are more visible than tanks, perhaps because they are more readily countable, more likely because the leaders of the movement were the British and the Americans, both naval powers, the conferences generally dealt with naval strengths first.

The Washington Conference was held essentially because the British could not afford a naval race with the United States. The American government, before it got involved in World War I, had launched a massive naval-building program. During the war this had been shelved, and the United States built escort vessels rather than battleships to beat the submarine menace. After the war, the big-ship building program was dusted off, and work on the battleships was begun again. The British protested vehemently; they had not defeated Germany only to end up playing second fiddle to the United States. Finally, a conference was convened at Washington, to which all the major naval powers were invited.

Some small progress was made. The conference agreed to the famous 5:5:3 ratio for capital-ship tonnage—the United States and Britain being 5, the Japanese 3. France and Italy both came out as 1.75; neither liked the idea. There was also an agreement that the United States would not fortify its holdings in the Pacific west of Hawaii, nor the British east of Singapore, a concession to Japanese pride and the British and American taxpayer that would be paid for in 1942.

In 1927, the Allied Control Commission stopped overseeing Germany. Another naval conference was held at London in 1930. The idea at this one was to extend the 5:5:3 ratio to other classes of vessels, but not much was accomplished. The British, Americans, and Japanese all had different imperial requirements, and wanted different classes and types of ships to meet them. Some watered-down provisions were accepted. The Russian delegation, led by Maxim Litvinov, proposed complete and immediate disarmament for everybody; this was rejected out of hand as a Bolshevik trick.

In 1932, a commission of the League of Nations produced a preparatory draft for a general scheme of disarmament. The proposal, however, left untouched all previous treaties that dealt with arms limitations. Among these, the French insisted on including the Versailles treaty, with its provisions about German strengths. This meant there could be no German rearmament; that meant there could be no equality of arms, and that in turn, by the convoluted logic of politics, meant there could be no disarmament.

There was another try in 1935, but by then Hitler was in power in Germany, and the talk was more of the need for rearmament, rather than disarmament. For practical purposes the movement was dead. Strengths and weapons-systems would now increase instead of decrease. How far this would go, and what direction it might take in any given state depended upon a variety of factors: geographical, economic, and political. For in pre-World War II Europe, each state had its own particular problems and its own particular ideas of how they should be dealt with.

2. The European Democracies

IN ANY DISCUSSION of World War II, the first question that arises is why the democracies of Europe did not stop Germany before it was too late. In a sense, this question is no more than the usual Monday-morning quarterbacking. One answer must obviously be that if the democracies knew what lay ahead, and if they knew that they could have stopped Hitler, then of course they would have done so. They knew neither of these things at the time, though perhaps they should have. Hitler had spelled out his program for all the world, provided anyone were sufficiently persevering to wade through Mein Kampf; but like most political testaments, it was not taken seriously until its author was in a position to carry it out. We now have sufficient evidence not only that Hitler could have been stopped, but also that the Western Powers knew he could have been stopped, had they had the will to do it when it could be done short of war. They remained, however, resolutely preoccupied with their own difficulties, of either a general or a specific nature.

In general terms, it is fair to say that the victors of World War I were as demoralized by their victory as the losers were by their defeats. They may even have been more demoralized—they, after all, had won; then they discovered how little their victory had brought them. The costs of winning were enormous, both in material terms and in manpower, and the truth was that relatively few of the great powers of 1914 were able to sustain them.

At the start of the Great War, the myth of the “Russian steamroller” was still alive and well. It was German fear of the increasing power of Russia that had been one of the factors in her decision for war in 1914. Yet by 1916, not only had the steamroller failed to materialize, but Russia was on the verge of collapse, a collapse that occurred dramatically but not surprisingly in 1917. Both Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire followed in 1918 at the end of the war. Though Italy was spared outright military defeat, her political institutions were so strained by war that they did not outlast the immediate aftermath of it. France had neared the edge of the precipice in 1917 when her army mutinied, and when the United States entered the war in the same year, Great Britain was six weeks away from starvation at the hands of the U-boats and even closer to financial bankruptcy. The fact that France and Britain did go on to win the war preserved their great-power status, but to a very considerable extent they were great powers by default, and their appearance of strength and solidity was no more than an illusion.

This was particularly true of France. In 1919, Russia was in revolution, Germany was in anarchy, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire had finally split up into its component parts. The British went back to insisting they were not a continental power. France therefore reclaimed the position she had held from 1648 to 1870, of being the pre-eminent power on the Continent, which had been challenged by the Germans after the unification of Germany and the Franco-Prussian War. It was a position that France was not really entitled to in a modern industrial world. France’s iron and steel production was below that of her neighbors, her coal output was lower, her financial base was less secure, and her birthrate was declining.

Aware though they might be of the grim outlook presented by these basic statistics, Frenchmen were reluctant to recognize the logical conclusion to be drawn from them: that France was well on the way to becoming a second-class power. The official view was that as long as Germany could be kept down, France would retain her primacy. The French therefore became the most obstinate supporters of the status quo as enacted at Versailles. It was they who supported Rhenish separatism, they who occupied the Ruhr Valley in 1923 when Germany fell behind in her war reparations. This backfired, as did most of the measures of the period. The French insisted on their reparations payments; the German government responded by printing paper, thereby paying off its bills in useless currency. The French nonetheless continued to insist on receiving their payments and it was they, even up to the mid-thirties, who were the most resolute against any revision of the Versailles treaty and any equality of status for Germany.

This was about the only item on which French governments were resolute. As a nation they were impoverished, enfeebled, and enervated by war. The stereotype personification of the Frenchman before the war was of a vigorous officer winning bits of empire for la civilisation française. After the war it was of an old man, slump-shouldered, bowed down by his cares and his past, making his annual pilgrimage along the voie sacrée to the Armistice Day ceremonies at Verdun. If little things give away a country’s sense of itself, it is significant that French subway cars still reserve rush-hour seats for “les grands mutilés de la guerre”—the multiple amputees of World War I.

Politically, the French argued their causes passionately and developed deep divisions between the right and the left. The divisions went so deep that the French Republic got lost somewhere in the middle.

Governments of the twenties and thirties rose and fell with alarming regularity. Even more alarming was the fact that they were the same old governments. Coalition after coalition of tired politicians played musical chairs and swapped ministries and made their back-room deals. The real problems of the republic—finance, industry, social reform, education—all were held in abeyance while the politicians talked. Words were the only surplus item in interwar France.

Of all the problems they failed to solve, the military one would become the most crucial, at least from the viewpoint of World War II. It was, indeed, a complex problem.

The first difficulty was the matter of manpower. The French had had military conscription, in one form or another, for some centuries. It had become regularized and modernized in the latter part of the nineteenth century, after the Franco-Prussian War had demonstrated, apparently conclusively, that a big short-service army was better than a small long-service one. This conclusion was probably wrong, but it was nevertheless the one all the experts drew from the war. France had rebuilt her army after 1871 with large numbers of conscripts on the German model. Her problem was that in the twentieth century she lacked the basic bodies to conscript. Before World War I her birthrate declined to the point where she had to keep her conscripts with the colors a year longer than the Germans did just to keep her numbers up. Every man-year in the army was an unproductive one from the point of view of the national economy, and equally from the point of view of marriage, parenthood, and the production of future potential conscripts. Add to this already existing difficulty the enormous wastage of World War I—1,654,000 deaths, most of them presumably of potential parents—and the demographic problems of filling up the ranks become readily apparent. During the thirties the French government would respond to its financial problems by reducing the length of military service, but that only further aggravated the diffi...