Chapter 8

In This Chapter

Finding out about the Depression and the New Deal in America

Watching fascists and communists fighting in the Spanish Civil War

According to one writer, the 1930s was a ‘low, deceitful decade’. Certainly, a good case can be made for calling it the most troubled and disturbing of the century. Worldwide economic collapse made the 1930s bad enough, but these years also saw a wave of aggression by expansionist dictatorships which the League of Nations and the Great Powers seemed powerless to halt. This chapter takes you through the folly, weakness, betrayal, and despair of the century’s worst decade.

The World Stops Working

The Depression was the twentieth century’s economic equivalent of the Black Death. It swept across whole continents, devastated people’s lives, and no one seemed to know how to stop it.

The Depression began with the Wall Street Crash in October 1929 (refer to Chapter 6), which is hugely significant because during the twenties America had become the economic centre of the world. Not only was America producing and exporting more than any other country, but thanks to its overseas investments, American money virtually kept the industrialised world afloat. And since the Europeans ruled most of the rest of the world, American investments were essentially underwriting Europe’s empires, too. So when American money suddenly dried up, every other country in the world was hit – hard.

American dream, American nightmare

America in the 1930s was only a generation removed from the last of the pioneers who’d gone out West, built their own log cabins, and tilled the soil without asking for help or handouts from anybody. ‘Rugged individualism’ they called this spirit; if you found yourself looking down the barrel of a shotgun held by a gentleman telling you to ‘Git offa mah lee-and’ you knew you’d met a rugged individualist.

Rugged individualism was fine and dandy for building character and making films but it left people without many resources for when things went badly wrong. (Of course, no one thought that things could go wrong in America: That was the whole point.) Moreover, the wealth was concentrated in a few of America’s cities; most Americans were still very poor. They were about to get even poorer, because the Wall Street Crash and the trade collapse that followed it (see Chapter 6 for more on what had gone wrong on Wall Street) forced so many businesses to close that workers couldn’t get work anywhere. By 1933 some 13 million Americans were unemployed. People found themselves in a bizarre, impossible situation: Out of work in the land of opportunity and with no prospect of ever having a job again.

Black Americans were in the worst position of all. Employers didn’t take them on if they could avoid it, and got rid of them as soon as they could: ‘Last to be hired, first to be fired’, as people said at the time.

Better think again, Mr Hoover

US President Herbert Hoover had the job of dealing with the crisis. He’d made a name for himself for the efficient way he organised relief (soup kitchens, tents, medical help, and so on) for refugees in Europe after the war, so he should’ve been at home sorting out similar problems in America. But Hoover was convinced that the situation in America was different, and he refused to use the techniques of State relief that had worked so well in Europe ten years earlier.

Governments dealing with an economic crisis have a choice between two courses of action:

Plan A: Play it low-key and let the economy get on its own feet with as little government aid as possible. Just doling out government money or providing temporary jobs on big construction schemes is no good because once people have spent the money and built their roads they’ll be out of work and poor again. Key idea: Keep calm!

Plan B: Get active and use government money to spend your way out of the crisis. Set up poor relief schemes to deal with the immediate problems and then set up big public works schemes to get people back to work and gradually stimulate private industry as well. Key idea: Spend! Spend! Spend!

President Hoover preferred Plan A. He thought that Americans would have to find it within themselves to pull themselves out of the Depression, like those rugged individualists of the old West. Americans reduced to standing in line for soup on the streets of Manhattan got rather tired of hearing about those characters.

When unemployed people could no longer pay the rent and had to live in shanty towns made of scrap metal and old boxes, they called them ‘Hoovervilles’ in honour of the man they blamed for what had happened to them. President Hoover certainly never really understood why America couldn’t just pull itself together, but he didn’t just sit back and do nothing. Unfortunately, though, his ideas didn’t work:

Voluntarism: Hoover didn’t want to interfere in industry, telling bosses what wages they should or shouldn’t be paying their workforce. He thought he could rely on them to keep to a voluntary code of conduct. No dice: The bosses carried on paying their workers peanuts. Big business was badly out of favour in the 1930s and Hoover didn’t do himself any favours by lining up with it.

Government help: Hoover did set up a few public works schemes. He also cut taxes and provided people with easy credit from the Federal Reserves, so they could begin to get on their feet again. But he didn’t like using government money in this way, so he kept his schemes to a small scale. Result: The benefit was small scale too.

Help for farmers: Hoover tried to help farmers by buying up food and cotton at something more like a fair price, but that tactic just encouraged them to grow more and more, expecting the government to buy it all. But doing so wasn’t Hoover’s way, so the farmers ended up with huge surpluses, which then had to be destroyed. To most Americans the sight of milk churns being emptied down the drain or cotton plants being ploughed back into the ground just seemed crazy.

Cuts in State spending: Hoover cut taxes but he also cut back on State and local spending. Result: Less help for the poor. Philadelphia actually ran out of money for poor relief entirely. Hoover thought poor relief should be left to private charities but they couldn’t cope with the huge numbers who turned to them when the State soup kitchens and hostels closed. Result: More people begging on the street and more people in the Hoovervilles.

The Smoot–Hawley Tariff: Not all historians agree on this point, but most see Hoover’s support for the high tariffs on foreign goods brought in by Senators Smoot and Hawley in 1930 as one of the main reasons why the stock market crash became a worldwide depression. The idea was to protect American producers from foreign competition, but the other countries retaliated by bringing in their own tariffs. Result: International trade virtually collapsed and unemployment soared throughout the industrialised world.

All this, and Martians too!

Just how traumatic the Depression was is difficult for us to appreciate. Looking back, people said it was worse than the Second World War, because at least you knew the war would end one day; no one could see any reason why the Depression shouldn’t go on forever. In 1922 the German philosopher Oswald Spengler wrote a best-seller called The Decline of the West, which argued that all civilisations go through a lifecycle of youthful vigour in the early years, followed by tiredness and a tendency to make mistakes in middle age, and ending in senility, slippers, and final collapse. He reckoned Western civilisation was at the rug-over-the-knees stage; the Depression suggested he could be right.

‘The end of civilisation as we know it’ became a popular theme in books and films in the 1930s, especially in the new science fiction genre. Real life added to everyone’s fears: The decade saw the development of new bombing aircraft, which were soon in action destroying cities in China, Abyssinia, and Spain. The terrifying newsreel images of people running in terror from murderous bombing attacks all added to the general sense that Western civilisation was heading to hell in a handcart. In 1938 the young producer Orson Welles threw America into a panic with his scarily realistic radio version of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds about a Martian invasion of America. We tend to laugh at the poor saps nowadays, but don’t: If you’d gone through the Depression years, you wouldn’t have found the idea that your whole world was going to end in a cataclysmic disaster all that far-fetched.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse

Two developments made Hoover’s last two years in office even worse. In 1931 America experienced a flood of bank closures. So many people rushed to withdraw their savings that many banks folded. Between 1929 and 1931 five thousand American banks closed and the government did nothing to help.

1932 saw a horrifying clash with America’s ex-soldiers. The government had promised them a bonus in a few years’ time, but they thought, ‘Why not pay us now, when we need the cash?’ So they marched to Washington and set up a makeshift camp at Anacostia Flats, within sight of the Capitol building, to demand their money. When they refused to move, Hoover sent the army in to clear them out. A brutal and shameful scene took place: American soldiers, under one Douglas MacArthur, attacked the defenceless men and set fire to their shelters. America seemed to have turned on itself and was eating its own heart out.

Sing your troubles away

You can get a good idea of the changing moods in 1930s America by listening to the songs that people hummed along to. In the darkest days of the Depression, Bing Crosby recorded a powerful and mournful ballad called Buddy, can you spare a dime?, which tells of a man who used to have a job and people’s respect, lost everything, and is now reduced to begging. In 1932 Franklin Roosevelt unleashed his jaunty, optimistic campaign song on America: Happy days are here again! You get the message. At the end of the decade many Americans found their dreams of better times beautifully captured by Judy Garland’s wistful ballad Somewhere over the rainbow.

America’s New Deal

In the 1932 presidential election, Hoover was standing but everyone’s eyes were on his Democratic opponent, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt seemed to embody the idea that America could get on its feet again: He’d been struck down by polio and couldn’t stand or walk without help, but he hadn’t let his disability stop him pursuing his career. His can-do attitude won him the election.

Roosevelt had an unusually talented team around him, which included his energetic First Lady (and cousin) Eleanor. Eleanor became almost as big a star as her husband, travelling round America to support his programmes and appealing especially to America’s women. Roosevelt consulted with a panel of economic experts who became known as the Brain Trust: He would use good ideas from anyone if doing so could help get America working again.

War on fear

Roosevelt used his inauguration address to declare that he was claiming the same emergency powers as he would exercise in time of war. He realised that the first thing he had to do was to convince the Americans that they could beat the Depression, so he crammed his first hundred days in office with a bewildering stream of announcements of new initiatives and programmes and agencies: At long last things were happening. ‘The only thing we have to fear,’ Roosevelt announced, ‘is Fear itself’ and he made them a promise: Americans deserved a better deal, a new deal, and he would give it to them.

One of Roosevelt’s first acts was to end Prohibition. America breathed a sigh of relief and no doubt raised a few glasses too. Good start.

Next Roosevelt dealt with the banks. Using his emergency powers he closed all of them, stopped them getting rid of their gold and silver, and then brought in strict banking regulations. Only the safest ones were allowed to reopen.

Roosevelt decided that what the American economy needed was higher prices. That idea might sound odd – who likes price increases? – but producers need to sell at a reasonable price or they go bust, and if producers go bust, then shops have nothing to sell and workers have no wages to spend anyway. So higher prices were the key to getting the American economy going again. But how to get them? Roosevelt did a bit of manipulating the money supply and devaluing the dollar, but he couldn’t duck the main event: To stop America’s farmers and manufacturers from producing so much. Roosevelt needed to get America back to work by persuading America to work less. Tricky.

Time for a chat

‘I’d like to talk to you tonight about banks.’ Roosevelt began the first of his famous ‘fireside chat’ radio talks with that line, explaining his policies in plain, ordinary language that everyone could understand. His talks made Roosevelt seem friendly and approachable. Thousands of Americans wrote letters to him telling him their problems and thanking him for all he was doing to solve them. He was able to use the radio to develop a strong personal bond with the American people – a technique that later presidents would copy.

Down, down, down goes our production; up, up, up go our prices!

Roosevelt needed to cut production and raise prices both in industry and in agriculture. He soon found that different experts disagreed – loudly – about what he should do to limit industrial production, so he put them all together in a room, locked the door, and wouldn’t let them out till they’d agreed on a plan. They did and Roosevelt put their ideas into one of his most important New Deal laws: The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). The NIRA set up two new agencies:

The Public Works Administration (PWA): Its brief: Build big. It provided work for thousands of construction workers, building schools, hospitals, roads, subways, warships – anything as long as it was big and needed a lot of workers.

The National Recovery Administration (NRA): Its brief: Get American industry back to work. The NRA drew up a series of codes laying down rules about how much each firm would agree to produce and how much the workers would be paid. The codes also said that workers had the right to join a union. If you kept to your code, you got the big NRA blue eagle badge to display on your wall. The badge was that season’s absolute must-have.

The NRA soon hit problems. The bosses didn’t like government telling them how much to pay their workers and they resented having to work with the unions. Big firms started to ignore the NRA codes. In 1934 many workers came out on strike and some of the strike meetings were broken up by troops.

The NRA didn’t just annoy big business. Some liberals and democrats were worried that Roosevelt was setting up a centrally planned economy resembling those Mussolini and Stalin had introduced in Europe (see Chapters 4 and 5 to find out about the European examples). They thought that, for all his popularity and good intentions, Roosevelt was beginning to turn America into a dictatorship. And shoppers complained about having to pay higher prices. You can’t please some people.

In 1935 the Supreme Court looked into the NIRA and declared the whole act unconstitutional. The Court said that it was against the constitution for the federal government to start interfering in how a business conducts itself and treats its workers. This wasn’t the only time the Supreme Court intervened to disrupt the New Deal (see the section ‘New Deal, new danger’ below). Afterwards, Congress passed the Wagner Act, named after Senator Robert Wagner who introduced it, which brought in strong federal government protection for labour unions.

Trouble on the land

America’s farmers were in a desperate plight. As prices Depressioned, many of them could not pay their rents and their farms were repossessed. Farmers banded together to fight back: They even attacked the courtrooms where cases were being heard and one judge was dragged out and nearly lynched.

Roosevelt decided that America’s farmers need three changes:

Higher prices for the goods they produced: The Agricultural Adjustment Agency (AAA) provided compensation for farmers who agreed to cut down on their own production and farming incomes went up significantly. However, the idea also meant destroying cotton plantations and on one occasion slaughtering thousands of young pigs to cut down on agricultural production.

To buy their own farms: Doing so would stop the repossessions, but the farmers would need help raising the money. The government came up with a scheme to lend them money at easy rates of interest. To repay it, though, they would need to up their income, along the lines laid down by the AAA.

To improve land cultivation: Many farmers had overworked their land disastrously, mainly to grow grain during the war. They needed help and advice on how to farm effectively without taking all the goodness out of the soil.

One of the most successful land reclamation schemes was in the badly eroded lands of the Tennessee Valley. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA – Roosevelt loved initials!) helped farmers replant their lands and it also oversaw the construction of a huge network of hydroelectric dams.

And still Roosevelt hadn’t finished:

Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC): Forest conservation for young men. You earn a wage and get to work outdoors: What more do you want?

Work for artists, actors, and writers: The Works Progress Administration (WPA) commissioned work from a wide range of professions, especially in writing and the arts. Even from historians, I’m glad to say.

Strict regulation of the stock market: Since that was where the trouble had all started.

Social Security: At long last America got a proper system to provide for the poor, the sick, and the unemployed. This was one of the most important of all the acts of the New Deal.

Heat and dust

Towards the end of the 1930s disaster hit the farmers of the Midwest. The rains failed, which produced a drought. Worse than that, though, the topsoil turned to dust and high winds blew enormous dust clouds over a vast area of some 25,000 square miles. This area became known as the Dust Bowl. Houses were buried in dust and the people had to pack up and get out. Long lines of refugees called Okies (a lot of them came from Oklahoma) headed west for the sunny lands of California, but California didn’t prove very welcoming. John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath provides a very good picture of these events.

The Dust Bowl added to the misery of the Depression years for America’s farmers, but important lessons were learnt. They planted long lines of trees to break the high winds and dug huge reservoirs to provide more moisture in the air. Above all, they learned to give the land time to rest after it had been ploughed and harvested. The Midwest still suffers occasional droughts, but it hasn’t had another Dust Bowl.

New Deal, new danger

Not everyone liked the New Deal by any means. The Republicans didn’t approve of the government effectively trying to spend its way out of the Depression. Many of them objected to the way Roosevelt was taking more and more power into his own hands, especially when he won the 1936 election as well.

One of Roosevelt’s bitterest critics was a fiery Catholic priest called Father Coughlin, the ‘Radio Priest’. Coughlin was a fanatical admirer of fascist regimes in Europe; he denounced Roosevelt as a communist. Many people from Roosevelt’s own aristocratic background saw Roosevelt as a traitor who’d turned against his own class.

Roosevelt’s most important source of opposition, however, was the Supreme Court. Roosevelt’s opponents challenged the legality of some of the New Deal laws and the Supreme Court kept ruling against the president. Roosevelt was furious: He said the Court was made up of a lot of conservative old Republican fuddy-duddies. He decided to hit back.

Roosevelt introduced a law to force Supreme Court judges aged over 70 who had served for ten years or more to retire. This move would virtually empty the court and he could appoint some democrat justices. Bad move. ‘Aha!’ said all his opponents, ‘he’s trying to silence the Supreme Court and subvert the Constitution. Told you so.’ Even Democrats thought he’d gone too far this time. Congress defeated his bill. But maybe the Court had taken his point: It stopped ruling against him and Roosevelt was able to bring in the rest of the New Deal in peace and quiet. And then all the old judges died anyway, so he could appoint some democrats after all.

The worldwide Depression

The economic collapse in America (see the previous sections) had an immediate impact on the rest of the world. The Europeans had borrowed nearly $3,000 million from the USA by 1929 on top of the money America had lent during the war. When the Americans started calling in their loans, European economies collapsed.

Sorry – there’s no demand for it

As the Americans brought in high tariffs and world trade virtually ceased (see the earlier section ‘Better think again, Mr Hoover’ to find out why this happened), European countries tried to protect their own producers by bringing in tariffs and providing government subsidies. Doing so was no good: Subsidy or no subsidy, empty order books meant no work. By 1933 unemployment levels in Europe were at frightening levels: Over 20 per cent in Britain and Belgium, and nearly a third of the workforce in Norway and Denmark. However, the worst figures by far (a whopping 44 per cent) were in Germany.

The Europeans were very conscious that high unemployment could cause serious social trouble. They feared that the unemployed would turn to extremist political groups. Experience in Germany suggested that they were right.

Just like in America, the problem was that prices were too low. Low prices meant that producers couldn’t afford to stay in business, so their workers were laid off, and with no wages in their pockets people couldn’t afford to buy consumer goods. That situation meant goods had to come down in price if they were to sell at all, which in turn meant that producers lost money – and so on. A vicious circle operated.

Sorry, guys: You’re in this too

The collapse of manufacturing industries in Europe and America had huge knock-on effects.

Chile: The country’s copper and nitrates mines had to close, throwing thousands out of work.

Malaya: No one buying cars = no need for tyres = collapse of Malaya’s rubber industry, devastating the entire country.

Japan: Ninety per cent of its silk exports ended up as stockings for American women. When Americans stopped spending on luxuries, the Japanese silk industry collapsed, throwing thousands of people out of work.

China: The country depended heavily on its exports of iron ore and coal. But with manufacturing closing down around the world, China’s export trade dried up.

Only a few staple commodities needed to fall in price for whole countries to be devastated. When wheat, tea, and rice prices all Depressioned, South America and Asia were hit, as well as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Egypt. Farmers tried desperately to make a living by growing more and more crops, but this tactic just pushed prices down even further. In some parts of the world, farmers gave up trying to sell in the market place altogether and just went back to subsistence farming. Brazilian farmers used their coffee crops for fuel. But industrial workers didn’t have that option. Many of them went hungry and staged special hunger marches to make the world sit up and listen. Not many did.

On the dole

The Depression forced many countries to review their systems of social security – or, in most cases, to start thinking it might be a good idea to have one. The most advanced system of State benefits for the elderly or the unemployed had been set up in Britain before the First World War, but even that system struggled to keep up with the demands of the Slump. People had always thought that if you were out of work it was somehow your fault – the unemployed were often referred to as ‘the Idle’, which tells you a lot about how they were regarded – but the Depression showed that disaster could happen to anyone, no matter how hard-working or thrifty they might be. The Scandinavian countries in particular learned from the terrible years of unemployment to set up comprehensive systems of State benefits that, by the 1970s, had become the model for the rest of the world to follow.

Going to extremes

The economic crisis was almost inevitably going to lead to extremist politics. Some people thought the crisis showed that the communists were right: Capitalism was collapsing around them. Others preferred the fascist way out. (You can find out more about the appeal of communism in Chapter 4 and about fascism in Chapter 5.)

In Germany, the Nazis were able to blame the Depression on the hated Treaty of Versailles (outlined in Chapter 3). If it hadn’t been for the reparations payments the treaty imposed, Germany wouldn’t have needed so much American investment in the first place. The Treaty even created a huge banking crisis in 1931. The Austrians wanted a customs union with Germany, but the French, who were virtually running the Austrian economy, said it went against the Treaty of Versailles and forbade it. To teach the Austrians a lesson, the French stood by when the main Austrian bank, the Credit Anstalt, collapsed. Bad move. This action sparked a run on the banks across the continent, which brought the whole of Europe’s financial system crashing down.

Hitler had a simple solution to Germany’s unemployment crisis: Massive rearmament.

Tired of the Depression? Try a Soviet planned economy instead!

The Soviet Union was the one country that seemed to escape the Depression. That situation was partly because it was cut out of the world’s trading and financial networks, but mainly because, while the rest of the world was out of work, the Russians were busy building up their own industry and agriculture through Stalin’s centrally-controlled Five-Year Plans (explained in Chapter 4). Many Western VIPs visited the Soviet Union to see what was happening, and the sight of thousands of smiling Russians building dams and factories and getting their entries in for the Tractor of the Year competition proved too much for some of them. ‘I have seen the Future!’ exclaimed the American journalist Lincoln Steffens ‘and it works!’

What these visitors didn’t see (and usually didn’t want to see) was the cruelty and corruption behind the Plans. Managers were given impossible quotas to fulfil and had to bribe their way out if they weren’t to be shot for failing to meet their targets. Huge areas of Russia were devastated by famine, because Stalin’s secret police had confiscated all the food. And some of the biggest prestige projects of the Five-Year Plans, like Moscow’s shiny new underground system, had been built by slave labour from Soviet prison camps.

We’re on the Road to Warfare

After the carnage of the Great War people in all countries were determined that never again should the world embark on such a destructive course of events. They trusted in the League of Nations to maintain world peace through collective security. This collective security meant that all countries would act together to stop any aggressor; no one would dare defy the united wishes of the rest of the world, would they? Yup, I’m afraid they would.

Tomorrow . . . the world!

Three countries had plans to expand at the expense of their neighbours:

Italy: Mussolini had visions of himself as a new Roman emperor. He taught Italians to call the Mediterranean ‘Mare nostrum’ (= ‘Our sea – Keep out!’). He also wanted to avenge Italy’s humiliating defeat in Abyssinia in 1896 and found a new Italian empire in Africa.

Japan: The Japanese felt hemmed in on their crowded islands and wanted to expand in order to get hold of vital raw materials such as coal, iron ore, and oil. They had their eyes on their vast, vulnerable neighbour – China.

Germany: Hitler had laid out his vision for Germany’s future in his book Mein Kampf: He thought Germany needed ‘living space’ in Russia and the east. He wanted to bring all the ethnic Germans living in other countries, like Austria, France, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, into Germany (not by getting them to emigrate; by taking their countries over), and he wanted to tear up the restrictions imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. Apart from those issues, he often pointed out, he had no further territorial demands in Europe.

Who could stop these aggressive nations from attacking their neighbours? These were the possibilities:

The USA: The States was too busy with the New Deal (see the earlier section) to start getting involved in international disputes and it wasn’t in the League of Nations anyway. Americans were isolationist and proud of it.

The USSR: Stalin had turned his back on spreading world revolution and declared it was time to build ‘socialism in one country’ (see Chapter 4 to see how he set about doing it). In any case, Stalin was busy having thousands of Russians, including top Party officials and all the leaders of the Red Army, shot as traitors. The USSR couldn’t have helped much even if other countries had asked it to, and, since Stalin wasn’t trusted anyway, until 1939 no one did.

The League of Nations: The League was meant to maintain peace, but it had some serious weaknesses. First, it needed every member state to agree before it could take any steps. Second, it could only impose economic sanctions on any country that broke its rules. Thirdly, it could only impose sanctions on a state that was a member; so, if a state didn’t like the League’s decision, all it had to do was leave. Easy!

Britain and France: These two powerful countries were the major powers within the League and in theory gave it the power it needed to enforce its will. In practice, however, the French didn’t want to take action without Britain, and the British didn’t want to take military action. Result: No action at all.

The French were still smarting from the humiliation they’d suffered when they’d invaded the Ruhr to enforce reparations payments on Germany in 1923 and found that no one supported them (see Chapter 5 for details). Rather than go through that experience again, they built a line of defensive fortresses known as the Maginot Line along their border with Germany and sat behind it, waiting on events.

It’s raining death

People around the world in the 1930s were terrified that the next war would take the form of a sudden, terrifying attack from the air. By the 1930s bombing aircraft had got bigger and more powerful than anyone had imagined; ‘The bomber will always get through’ declared British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, gloomily. The film of H. G. Wells’s Things to Come showed a sky full of evil-looking bombers wiping out London in a single, mass attack. Mussolini liked that idea: He boasted that he would create an air force so huge that it would blot out the sun.

During the Second World War people in Europe learned to run to the shelters when the air raid sirens sounded and to carry their gas masks in case the enemy dropped gas bombs. The Italians had used gas bombs in Abyssinia. The Germans invented the Stuka dive bomber, which could dive straight down at terrifying speed with a screaming siren attached to its motor to drive the people on the ground mad with fear. With everyone so scared of megadeath from the skies, you can easily see why so many people were relieved when the big crises of the 1930s resolved themselves without starting a war, even if it meant handing a bit more territory over to the Germans. Many people thought ceding territory was a price worth paying for peace.

You say Manchuria and I say Manchukuo

A good case can be made for saying that the Second World War started when the Japanese invaded the autonomous Chinese province of Manchuria in 1931. The Japanese had long had their eyes on Manchuria, but they needed an excuse before they could launch an invasion. In 1931 they had an idea. Japan ran the main railway through Manchuria, so in September 1931 Japanese agents blew it up at the junction at Mukden and then said the Chinese did it! ‘Blow up our railway, would you?’ said the Japanese government to an understandably nonplussed Chinese government, and immediately sent troops into Manchuria to, er, restore order. They restored order so well that they took the province over, renamed it Manchukuo (it sounded more Japanese), set up a puppet government under the ex-emperor of China, Pu-Yi, and set about stripping ‘Manchukuo’ of its resources and shipping it all back to Japan.

As a fully paid-up member, China appealed to the League for help. Result:

League of Nations sends Lord Lytton, an elderly British statesman, off to Manchuria to report back on what’s going on.

Lord Lytton reports that the situation’s all rather confusing. It was very naughty of the Japanese to invade, but as ownership of Manchuria seems unclear, perhaps they should set it up as a separate state and sort it all out over a nice cup of tea.

Japan leaves the League.

That was easy: Now let’s get the rest

Getting hold of Manchuria had proved so easy that in 1937 the Japanese came back for more. They staged another of their ‘They attacked my railway!’ incidents, this time at the Marco Polo Bridge in Beijing, and then launched a full-scale invasion of China itself. They attacked Shanghai and Nankin with terrifying force; many historians allege that Japanese troops in Nankin carried out a programme of mass rape. But although the Japanese quickly seized control of the towns, they couldn’t control the Chinese countryside. The Chinese nationalists and communists (see Chapters 4 and 5 to find out more about them) sank their differences and joined together in a highly effective guerrilla war of resistance. The Japanese found themselves getting bogged down fighting an insurgency they just couldn’t defeat.

Mussolini muscles in

Mussolini liked to present an image of himself as the heir to the heroes of Italian history, completing and improving on their achievements. In 1929 he completed the unification of Italy by reaching a deal with the pope by which the Vatican finally accepted the Italian state in return for keeping its own independence. Next he wanted to complete the work of the men who’d built Italy’s empire in Africa. The Italians had conquered Tripoli and part of Somaliland, but Mussolini had his eyes on Abyssinia.

Abyssinia in the 1930s was a decidedly odd mixture of the modern and the medieval. It was an ancient Christian kingdom ruled by an emperor and a class of feudal lords known as Ras. Abyssinian soldiers wore chain mail and carried swords and shields, like medieval knights, but they had still defeated the Italians at the Battle of Adowa in 1896. In 1930 Ras Tafari was crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I (his name meant ‘Power of the Trinity’ but he was also known as ‘The Lion of Judah’). Haile Selassie began the long process of dragging Abyssinia into the twentieth century, abolishing slavery, and, sensible chap, buying a few modern weapons.

Excuse me, do you know you’re trespassing – aagh!

In 1935 Italian troops marched sixty miles into Abyssinian territory and had a shoot-out at the Wal-Wal oasis in the Ogaden desert with a detachment of Abyssinian troops. True to form, the Italians tried to claim that the event had happened inside their territory, even though their own maps proved them wrong. Whatever: Mussolini declared himself shocked – shocked – at this sneak Abyssinian attack and ordered a full-scale invasion.

With all their modern weaponry the Italians should have been able to deal with Abyssinia in the time it took to cook the pasta, but in fact six months passed before the Italian leader Marshal Badoglio led his men into Addis Ababa. The Italians declared they were bringing Western civilisation to the country, and just to prove it, they sprayed the capital with poison gas.

World reaction

The importance of the Abyssinian war wasn’t so much about who would win, but how the rest of the world reacted. The course of events:

Help yourself, Duce! The French foreign minister, Pierre Laval, is quite happy for Mussolini to take as much of Abyssinia as he wants. The British foreign secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, agrees with him. The Hoare–Laval Pact was a disgraceful secret deal to carve Abyssinia up without even telling the emperor. The pact created a huge stink when it was leaked and both men were forced to resign.

Haile Selassie appeals to the League of Nations: He makes a very dignified appeal, while the Italian delegates jeer and whistle at him.

The League imposes special sanctions on Italy: They are special because they don’t hurt. The British and French still think Mussolini will help them against Hitler, so they don’t want to alienate him. So they impose sanctions on lots of things that don’t matter but don’t stop him importing oil or using the Suez Canal, which do matter.

Italy leaves the League and immediately cosies up to Hitler: And after all that trouble.

Winning against Abyssinia’s elite cavalry and rapid reaction spear carriers gave Mussolini the notion that he was some sort of military genius. He was badly mistaken in this impression.

Civil war in Spain

Spain in the 1930s was deeply divided between right and left, with not much room for anyone in the middle. The government was a left-wing ‘Popular Front’ coalition ranging from liberal types who thought something really ought to be done for the poor through to out-and-out anarchists. In 1936 General Francisco Franco crossed over to Spain from Morocco with his men and declared war on the government. Some of the Spanish regions promptly took the opportunity to declare themselves independent. The country fell apart in savage civil war.

For fascists and communists around the world, the Spanish Civil War was the chance they’d been waiting for to take a crack at their enemies. Men and women from all backgrounds travelled to Spain to join in the fighting on one side or the other. Stalin sent money; Hitler and Mussolini sent men. The German Condor legion used the war to perfect its bombing techniques; its most notorious deed was an attack on the crowded Basque market town of Guernica. The Popular Front fell apart and the different groups within it started fighting each other; in 1939 Franco and his men finally captured the last strongholds at Toledo, Barcelona, and Madrid and took control.

Many Spanish republicans fled to France, where the French interned them in concentration camps. In 1940 they handed them over to the Germans, who were delighted to meet their old enemies again and promptly sent them on to their own concentration camps.

Springtime for Hitler

In the 1930s everything in Hitler’s foreign policy plans seemed to go right. As soon as he was in power he pulled Germany out of the League of Nations. He did have a go at taking over Austria in 1934 but Mussolini, who at that stage controlled Austria and was decidedly unimpressed with Hitler, rushed troops to the border and stopped him. Hitler went back to rearming in secret. The Treaty of Versailles (see Chapter 3) put a cap on the size of the German army and banned the German air force, which is why the German police and fire services suddenly got thousands of new recruits all learning how to march and carry out a flanking manoeuvre and hundreds of young men enrolled in flying clubs. Hitler finally came clean about Germany’s rearmament in 1936.

Hitler also set his plans into operation in 1936:

Hitler sends troops to the Rhineland: This action is in direct defiance of the Treaty of Versailles. Will the French throw him out? Not without British backing they won’t, and the British say he’s only going into his own back yard, bless him. Large ‘Phew!’ heard in Berlin.

Germany and Italy sign the Rome–Berlin Axis Pact: Not a military alliance yet but Mussolini has finally come out as a Hitler fan.

Germany and Japan sign the Anticomintern Pact: No one was exactly surprised to learn that they were opposed to the Comintern (the Communist International, a Moscow-based body to spread communist revolution), but the pact was also a military commitment to resist the spread of communism. Italy joined the following year.

In 1938, Hitler did a couple of other interesting things:

The Anschluss whereby Germany takes over Austria: Britain sighs ‘Well, what can we do?’ and the French follow this firm British lead. And do nothing.

Hitler demands the German ‘Sudetenland’ area of Czechoslovakia: The British and French decide that this time they must do something. They must at least talk to Hitler before giving in.

To appease or not to appease? That is the question

The British and French policy of appeasement can seem very difficult to understand today. Latching onto Winston Churchill’s warnings about German rearmament and tearing your hair out and saying ‘Why couldn’t they see?’ is easy from this distance. Well, keep your hair in: Appeasement wasn’t as stupid, or even as dishonourable, as it might sound. Consider the following issues:

France was so deeply divided between right-wing and left-wing that the French feared that if they went to war with Germany, the country would fall into civil war like Spain. So the French let the British do the talking.

The British did not have anything like enough men to fight a full-scale war with Germany. In any case, the British were more directly concerned about the Italian threat in the Mediterranean and the Japanese threat to their colonies in the Far East.

Like it or not, Hitler’s demands did not sound unreasonable to anyone who thought the Treaty of Versailles had been too harsh – which nearly everyone in Britain did.

Rearming would take time, especially since public opinion in Britain and France was strongly against it.

In the light of these considerations, the only practical course to follow was to keep Hitler talking and avoid war for as long as possible, even if it meant handing over large areas of (other people’s) land. I’m not saying appeasement was right (the British and French badly misjudged Hitler’s personality and objectives, and abandoning allies to save your own skin is never a great way to win friends). The British and French could have tried manoeuvring or bluffing rather than simply appeasing Hitler, but it can’t be denied that appeasement seemed to many people at the time the onlyrealistic policy.

So, in September 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met Hitler to discuss how best to hand over the Sudetenland and whether he’d like it gift wrapped. A war crisis ensued when Hitler demanded the whole area immediately, before they’d worked out the borders or what to do about the non-Germans living there or sent the invites out for the invasion party or anything. Chamberlain met with Hitler, Mussolini, and Daladier, the French prime minister, at Munich and they agreed on exactly how much Czech territory to hand over to Germany. The Czech prime minister wasn’t even invited.

When enough isn’t enough

The British and French had intended that appeasement would conciliate and deter Hitler. It did neither.

November 1938: ‘Kristallnacht’, the ‘night of broken glass’: Nazis launch a night of attacks on Germany’s Jewish community, smashing shop windows, rounding Jews up for concentration camps, or just murdering them. This event makes leaders more wary of making any more concessions to Hitler.

January 1939: Germans take over the rest of Czechoslovakia. No special conference this time: They just march in. Public mood in Britain and France turns away from pacifism and towards war.

August 1939: Germany starts demanding land from Poland. British and French pledge to support the Poles; though, looking at a map, it’s hard to see how. Perhaps we ought to have a word with the Russians, they say. Too late.

23 August 1939: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union sign the Nazi–Soviet Pact, swearing eternal friendship and pledging to carve up Poland between them. The Devil rings up to say it’s very chilly in hell for the time of year.

All these events led up to 1 September 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland (like the Japanese in China and the Italians in Abyssinia – see the sections earlier in this chapter – the Germans attacked one of their own border posts and then claimed the Poles had attacked them). The British and French told the Germans to clear out of Poland, or else. On 3 September Britain and France declared war on Germany. The thirties were over; the Second World War had begun.