World War II in Global Perspective, 1931-1953

A Short History

Andrew N. Buchanan

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781119366096, 9781119366072
• eBook ISBN: 9781119366089
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

A comprehensive review of World War II that offers a global-level analysis

Written for academics and students of history, World War II in Global Perspective, 1931-1953 presents a dynamic and global account of the historical events prior to, during, and after World War II. The author—a noted expert on the topic—explores the main theaters of the war and discusses the connections between them. He also examines the impact of the war on areas of the world that are often neglected in historical accounts, including Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and the so-called 'neutral' countries. This comprehensive text clearly shows how in the struggle against the Axis powers, the United States replaced Britain as the global superpower.

The author discusses the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the Korean War (1950-1953) and argues that the core years of the war (1939-1945) cannot be understood without considering the turbulent events that framed them. The text puts World War II in context as a series of large regional conflicts that intersected and overlapped, finally emerging as a genuine "world war" with the formal entry of the United States in late 1941. This vital text: 

• Offers a comprehensive review of World War II that frames it in a global context
• Gives weight to the economic and political developments of the war
• Provides a robust account of the main military campaigns
• Contains illustrations and maps that themselves highlight little-known aspects of the global war

1
The Crisis of the Old World Order

Before World War II, much of the world was still dominated by the imperial powers of Europe, with Britain and France foremost among them. World War I had ended with the overthrow of vast territorial empires of the Hohenzollerns (Germany), Habsburgs (Austria‐Hungary), Romanovs (Russia), and Ottomans (Turkey), but both Britain and France had expanded their overseas empires, especially in the oil‐rich Middle East. The British had consolidated their leading place in the world‐system after the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800s. It was based on the dynamism of Britain's industrial economy – the first in the world – and on the worldwide collection of semi‐independent dominions, directly ruled colonies, protectorates, and island outposts that formed the British Empire. Britain's global trade networks and the wealth, resources, and markets of its empire were protected by the Royal Navy, by far the most powerful navy in the world.

Britain did not have a large land army, relying on soldiers recruited in India to police much of its empire, and on its diplomats and politicians to ensure that no single rival could dominate Europe. This combination of economic and military power enabled the City of London to function as the preeminent world center of banking, finance, and insurance. Its global hegemony rested not only on the “hard power” of economic and military might, but also on its ability to use “soft power” – free trade, liberal democracy, and a claim to be benefiting its colonial subjects – to assert moral leadership. And, while the military and diplomatic arrangements of this Pax Britannica, or “British Peace,” maintained Britain's global hegemony for over a century, there were few years in which its military was not in action to uphold its rule in some part of the empire.

Other European powers established sprawling colonial empires, although none rivaled the global scope of the British. The Dutch ruled the Netherlands East Indies (modern Indonesia), a legacy of its seventeenth‐century reign as the world's leading commercial power. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, several European nations engaged in a frenzied “scramble” to establish colonies in sub‐Saharan Africa, carving up almost the entire continent without regard for pre‐existing boundaries and co‐opting local elites into systems of “indirect rule.” In Southeast Asia, France grabbed Indochina (today Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) in the 1880s, while London ruled a vast crescent of territory running from northern Borneo and Malaya to Burma (modern Myanmar) and India, the “Jewel in the Crown” of the British Empire. Only Latin America escaped this pattern of direct colonial rule. Here anti‐colonial revolutions had freed much of the continent in the early 1800s, although independent but relatively weak nation‐states remained locked in circuits of trade dominated primarily by Britain and, increasingly, the United States, exporting raw materials and importing manufactured goods.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, this British‐dominated world order was challenged by the newly unified nation‐states in Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States. These new states were the product of wars of national unification – including the US Civil War and the Meiji Restoration in Japan – and in all of them, with the partial exception of Italy, unification triggered sustained economic growth. By the end of the nineteenth century, America had become the world's top manufacturing power, and Germany had also surpassed Britain in key economic sectors. In Asia, Japan emerged as the major regional power after successful wars against China (1894−1895) and Russia (1904−1905). These states jumped into the scramble for overseas colonies in Africa and the Pacific, and they joined British and French efforts to open up new markets and spheres of imperial domination in China, where the Qing Dynasty was weakened by economic stagnation, peasant revolt, and regional fragmentation. Intensified international competition for empire destabilized Europe, where Franco‐Russian concerns about the rise of Germany intersected with conflicts between Russia, Austria‐Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans. In August 1914 these overlapping European and imperial conflicts led to the outbreak of World War I.

World War I and the Postwar Settlement

These multilayered causes of World War I shaped the character of the war. Much of the fighting and most of the 10 million battlefield deaths took place in three European war zones, including a protracted attritional struggle between Anglo‐French and German armies in the trenches of the Western Front; an equally savage but more mobile war between Russia and the Central Powers (Germany and Austria‐Hungary) on a front stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea; and an Alpine front between Italy and Austria‐Hungary. These European war zones were connected to critical conflicts in other parts of the world. While far fewer troops were involved, fighting in colonial spaces was often fluid, fast‐moving, and decisive. In Africa, Allied armies of Indian and African soldiers overturned German colonial rule in the modern‐day states of Cameroon, Namibia, and Tanzania. In the Middle East, Arab rebels and Allied armies fought the Ottoman Empire for control of Iraq, Syria, and Palestine, and then from 1919 to 1923 the new nation‐state in Turkey fought to defend its independence against Allied attempts to dismember it. Meanwhile Japan, then a British ally, rolled up German colonial outposts in the Marshall, Marianas, and Caroline islands and on China's Shandong Peninsula.

The mobilization of colonial labor, food, and raw materials enabled Britain and France to fight a long attritional war. French colonial troops from West and North Africa fought on the Western Front, while the Indian Army and other colonial forces sustained British‐led campaigns in the Middle East and Africa. These imperial mobilizations drew colonized peoples into the maelstrom of world politics, and overseas military service exposed them to new experiences and ideas. These factors contributed to a mounting tide of anti‐colonial agitation. When Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress stepped up their campaign for Home Rule, the colonial authorities responded with harsh repression, shooting over 1000 unarmed protestors in Amritsar in 1919. In Ireland, the forceful suppression of an armed uprising against British rule at Easter 1916 boosted support for the nationalist cause, leading to a war for national independence and the establishment in 1922 of the Irish Free State in the southern part of the country. In other colonies the impact of war was less dramatic, but it nevertheless spurred the emergence of anti‐colonial movements that became increasingly important over the following decades.

During World War I, the major combatants mobilized the totality of their national resources for war. Governments directed workers into military service or into key industrial jobs, reorganizing industry to maximize the output of weapons and munitions. Denied access to overseas trade by the British naval blockade, the strain of this effort was particularly acute in Germany. Berlin managed to produce the military matériel necessary to sustain a long two‐front war, but by the winter of 1916–1917 Germany's civilian population was going hungry. With its slender industrial base, the Russian Empire was also hard hit, and as the war progressed economic breakdown and military defeat combined to produce a deep political crisis. Britain and France, with their economies sustained by their empires and by massive inflows of American funds, food, and military supplies, were better placed to meet the demands of total war. Nevertheless, for three years, and despite the commitment of millions of men and massive quantities of matériel – including tanks, airplanes, and poison gas – neither side achieved a decisive military breakthrough.

The first cracks in this military deadlock emerged in 1917 as the grinding social consequences of total war produced political crises in Russia and then in Germany and Austria‐Hungary. In 1917, the Tsarist regime in Russia was toppled by two popular revolutions, the first led by liberal democrats in February and the second in October led by Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik Party. Acting on their slogan of “Bread, Peace, and Land,” the Bolshevik government took Russia out of the war. In the short term, Russia's exit benefited Germany, which quickly annexed a broad swath of former Imperial Russian territory in Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic States. German conquests were formalized at the Treaty of Brest‐Litovsk in March 1918, where the Bolsheviks traded land for the time they needed to consolidate their socialist state. Germany's victory in the East allowed Berlin to redeploy troops to the Western Front in preparation for a major offensive in spring 1918. After three years of deadlock, a German military victory suddenly seemed possible.

These events overlapped with the second major political development of 1917, the formal entry of the United States into the war. American money and matériel had sustained the Allied war effort since 1915, but under President Woodrow Wilson the United States remained neutral. Wilson's decision to join the war in April 1917 was triggered by the resumption of German submarine attacks on neutral shipping in the Atlantic, but it was fundamentally driven by the desire to block the emergence of a German‐dominated Europe – a development that was rightly seen as a threat to the rise of American power. America joined Britain and France as an “associate power” (rather than a formal ally), and US troops began arriving in France in time to come to support Allied armies reeling in the face of Germany's 1918 spring offensive. By the fall, there were one million American soldiers at the front, poised for an advance into Germany.

As it turned out, revolution arrived in Germany before the Allied armies. The German government was overthrown in November 1918 by a popular insurrection that began with a naval mutiny and spread to working‐class districts in Berlin and throughout Germany's industrial heartlands. As in Russia, workers and soldiers formed revolutionary councils that functioned as organs of popular political power. Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated, and an alliance of moderate socialists and military leaders signed an armistice with the Allies on November 11.

The armistice ended the war, but it did not stop all the fighting. Civil war raged in Russia until 1922, as military expeditions from Britain, France, Japan, and the United States boosted counter‐revolutionary efforts to overthrow the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In Turkey, nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk fought until 1923 to prevent the new Turkish nation‐state from being carved up by the victorious allies. Revolutionary uprisings shattered the Habsburg Empire in 1918, establishing short‐lived socialist regimes and laying the basis for the creation of new nation‐states in Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. In Germany, the moderate socialist leaders of the new Weimar Republic – named for the city where the constitutional assembly met – used gangs of nationalist Freikorps to crush waves of communist‐led working‐class rebellion that rolled through Berlin, Bavaria (the Munich Soviet Republic), and the Ruhr industrial region between 1918 and 1923. In 1920 strikes and popular protests derailed the Kapp Putsch, an attempted right‐wing military coup.

These events showed that great modern wars bring with them the possibility of economic and social collapse and, particularly for the losers, popular insurrection. As in Russia, popular revolutions could lead to the formation of governments determined to overturn the economic foundations of capitalism. For ruling elites everywhere, this terrifying prospect would weigh heavily on their political thinking in the years after World War I. The postwar revolutionary wave in Germany and Central Europe was finally contained, but the existence of large communist parties in many countries meant that the possibility of a working‐class challenge for power had not gone away. It is impossible to understand either the post‐World War I settlement or the course of World War II without understanding how large this issue loomed in the minds of contemporary policymakers.

The Rise of American Power

Britain and France won World War I, but at a crippling cost: an entire generation of young men had been slaughtered, their economies were exhausted, and their governments had gone deeply into debt to fund the war. The United States, on the other hand, had only entered the war in 1917, and while its military presence on the Western Front had established it as a major player in European politics, its military ranked behind that of Britain and France. At the same time, American industrialists and financiers supported the Allied war effort from the beginning, generating an economic boom at home and transforming the United States from a debtor nation into a global financial superpower. To some British observers the United States appeared as a new type of “super‐state,” and they were acutely aware that while American aid had allowed them to prevail over Germany, the price tag was a dramatic shift in economic power westwards across the Atlantic.¹ Nevertheless, America's late entry into the war meant that its economic predominance did not translate directly into overwhelming military power and political influence. As a result, while World War I shattered the old world order, it did not immediately produce a new one.

Allied leaders approached the 1919 Paris Peace Conference in Versailles with different and contradictory goals. Woodrow Wilson hoped to establish a new US‐led world order based on free trade, national self‐dete...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Crisis of the Old World Order
• 2 The Great Depression and the Opening Guns of World War II
• 3 1940
• 4 1941–1942
• 5 1942–1943
• 6 War Economies
• 7 1943
• 8 1944
• 9 1945
• 10 War and Postwar, 1945–1953
• Epilogue
• Index
• End User License Agreement