In the fifty years preceding the Second World War, Italy fought Turkey, Romania fought Hungary, and Poland fought the Ukraine. Both Nicaragua and Ireland fell into civil war. Iran, Mexico, Panama, and Russia suffered full-scale revolutions. The empires of Europe struggled to subdue their colonial and commercial holdings in Africa, the Middle East, and China. Britain managed to retain its crown jewels of India and South Africa but failed to master the populations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Compared to other eras, this frequency of unrest was relatively standard. What had changed by the twentieth century was the volume and tempo of armed conflicts because the “art of war” was giving way to science.
In less than a lifetime, battleships tripled in size. The largest artillery shells grew from the weight of a man to the weight of an automobile, from a maximum range of two miles to more than fifty. Aircraft evolved from puttering mobile machine guns to deafening heavy bombers. This onslaught of “progress” provoked a haunting fear that warfare was spiraling out of control.1
Despite efforts for peace, military events proceeded. As was feared, old antagonisms and new technologies bonded together and became highly unstable, reflected by the conflicts cited here. Following in chronological order are the ten most significant military conflicts preceding World War II, judged by their contribution to the critical mass of rivalries that spawned the global chain reaction.
1. SINO-JAPANESE WAR (1894–95)
Domestic unrest in Korea at the onset of 1894 prompted both China and Japan to send in troops. Rather than instill peace, the simultaneous arrival led to immediate escalation.
Within months a modernized Japanese army conquered most of Korea, and its superior navy controlled the Yellow Sea. Early the following spring a Japanese offensive pushed into northeast China and began a grand southwesterly sweep toward then-capital Peking (Beijing). An ultrapatriotic Japanese public, euphoric over huge gains at minimal cost, called for the conquering of all China. Yet Japanese officials feared a massive Asian power vacuum if the Qing dynasty collapsed altogether and chose instead to accept peace terms.
With 17,000 fatalities, mostly to the harsh Manchurian climate, Japan acquired Formosa (Taiwan), rights to sail the Yangzte, access to four major Chinese ports, permission to establish factories on the mainland, and payments from the Chinese government equaling millions of dollars.2
Before the eight-month war, Japan was a rising Asian entity, yet its military was unproven. After the war, the formerly isolated archipelago had become an international empire with nearly half its national budget going toward defense.3
The Japanese Empire launched its inaugural attack in the Sino-Japanese War in the same fashion it would do later in the Russo-Japanese War and the Second World War, by failing to precede the offensive with a declaration of war.
2. SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR (1898)
The Spanish monarchy subjected Cuba, its last imperial jewel, to years of widespread poverty and corruption. By 1895 the Cubans began to fight back. In the United States, farmers expressed widespread support for the agricultural islanders, and investors expressed widespread interest in Cuba’s plantations, mines, and railroads.
Relentless public pressure in the United States induced otherwise isolationist President William McKinley to send the USS Maine into Havana Harbor, where it exploded and sank under mysterious circumstances. In short order, the United States declared war on Spain and promptly routed the unmotivated and outdated Spanish navy off the Philippines and Cuba. In defeat, Spain lost its last modest holding in a hemisphere it once dominated. So, too, the United States underwent a transformation.
The U.S. Eighth Army embarks for Cuba in 1898, marking the last days of a once-global Spanish Empire.
In the twenty years before the Spanish-American War, the United States participated in virtually no international armed conflicts nor made territorial acquisitions outside North America, except for gaining exclusive rights in 1887 to a Pacific island port called PEARL HARBOR.4
In the twenty years after the declaration of war with Spain, the United States conducted military operations in China, Panama, Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, France, and Russia. It also acquired the Hawaiian Islands, Eastern Samoa, Guam, Wake Island, and Puerto Rico; built and controlled the Panama Canal; and claimed stewardship over the seven thousand islands and seven million inhabitants of the Philippines. These forays, however profitable, would later compromise an American desire for isolation.
The Spanish-American War turned a former undersecretary of the navy into a national celebrity: First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry commander Theodore Roosevelt.
3. RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR (1904–5)
Second-tier world powers Russia and Japan were looking to expand their empires, but their options were limited. The Monroe Doctrine proclaimed South America as off-limits. Europe held much of Africa, Australia, South and Southeast Asia, and coastal China. The leftovers appeared to be Korea and the Chinese province of Manchuria. Both Russia and Japan had made inroads to the politically weak region, securing ports, rail lines, and one-sided commercial agreements.
In an attempt to push Russia out, Japan launched a surprise naval attack on Russian-held Port Arthur at the tip of the Liaotung Peninsula just west of Korea. Two days later the Japanese declared war.
Japan’s land forces then pushed through Korea, driving northwest toward the key rail junction of Mukden and southwest to link up with its navy surrounding Port Arthur. Fighting lasted for months. The total number of troops deployed by both sides surpassed a million, and total casualties reached hundreds of thousands, but Japan’s short supply lines made for faster reinforcements.
In desperation, Russia launched much of its Baltic fleet, sending it around Europe, Africa, and across the Indian Ocean. The armada sailed for nearly nine months, only to be annihilated by the waiting Japanese navy at the battle of Tsushima Straits. Of eight Russian battleships, eight cruisers, nine destroyers, and a number of smaller ships, all but three vessels were either sunk, captured, or bottled up in neutral ports.
Defeat cost Russia half of sprawling Sakhalin Island, most of southern Manchuria, and all of Korea. Worse, the disillusioned home front exploded with strikes, revolts, sabotage, and political assassinations. Severely discredited, the Romanov dynasty of three centuries would endure only twelve more years.
Japanese artillery fires on Port Arthur in the Russo-Japanese War.
In Japan, patriotism boomed. Never before had an East Asian nation defeated a European power. But the price of victory nearly exhausted the island country. Public and military officials alike developed a heightened awareness of their limited resources, and Japan expanded its Asian sphere of influence accordingly.
The Russo-Japanese conflict also offered a daunting picture of warfare in the new century. Fighting saw wide use of torpedo boats, searchlights, rockets, modern battleships, and machine guns.
The May 1905 battle of Tsushima Straits involved almost one hundred ships yet lasted less than an hour. An imperial flag aloft one of the Japanese battleships would fly again thirty-six years later—at the mast of the flagship leading the attack on Pearl Harbor.
4. THE FIRST WORLD WAR (1914–18)
By 1914 the collective body of knowledge on weaponry stood ready for a great leap forward. European engineers and industry created limited numbers of armored battleships, reliable machine guns, twin-engine bombers, antipersonnel blistering agents, diesel submarines, rudimentary tanks, and long-range artillery. Perhaps the ferocity of such devices would have remained hidden had imperial egos remained manageable. But no such sobriety reigned among the major kingdoms, and a small demonstration of ethnic unrest in Sarajevo abruptly escalated into a contest dominated by factions and factories.
Sparing the details of the four-year war, a synopsis of its aftermath reads like a doomsday primer. The Poles lost nearly two million buildings, most of their livestock, and one million military and two million civilian casualties. One million Armenians perished in a Turkish-led genocide. Monstrously powerful artillery accounted for seven of ten battlefield deaths, mangling animals and men so badly that governments destroyed much of the photographic evidence for fear of domestic backlash. Fighting obliterated whole areas of northeast France and Belgium, leveled homes, buried factories, and seeded farmlands with tons of unexploded ordnance. At least eight million European children were orphaned.5
It was by all measures the bloodiest war in history, ending the lives of eighteen million people as well as the empires of Russia, the Ottomans, Austria, and Germany. Its lethality also severely wounded the empires of France and Britain and shocked latecomer United States away from foreign entanglements for nearly a generation.
French troops prepare to go over the top. The horror of the Somme and the Marne would scar the French national psyche for decades.
In the last year of the war, Spanish influenza broke out among the combatants, and modern transportation unleashed the virus globally. In eighteen months, the pestilence managed to kill more than twenty million people worldwide. More than half a million Americans perished—ten times the number lost in battle during the war.
5. RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR (1917–21)
In October 1917 the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin staged a successful coup d’état against the short-lived provisional government. Much of Lenin’s success stemmed from his simple promise of “peace, land, bread.” However, in negotiating peace with Germany during World War I, the Bolsheviks surrendered thousands of square miles of land, much of it rich in grain and mineral deposits. As a result, the price of bread rocketed one thousand percent in a year’s time. In response, peasants, army officers, Cossacks, royalists, and factory workers turned against the Bolshevik (newly dubbed Communist) regime, sending the largest state on earth into civil war.
Fighting erupted from the Baltic to the Pacific and promptly spread to neighboring countries, including Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, and Poland. Crisscrossing armies leveled villages, burned crops, slaughtered people and animals with equal haste, and confiscated or destroyed scarce food and shelter. The Ukrainian capital, Kiev, exchanged hands sixteen times.6
After more than three years of bloodshed, the poorly armed but well-organized Reds conquered a hopelessly divided opposition. Victory came at the price of an obliterated industrial base, an alienated peasantry, an exhausted army, and widespread famine, but Russia became the first nation-state ever to turn socialist. More important, the Soviet leadership vowed to export its revolution to the rest of the industrialized world.7
Russia suffered 1.7 million dead in the First World War. The following Russian civil war consumed an estimated 7 to 10 million more lives, mostly by way of starvation and disease.
6. POLISH-SOVIET WAR (1919–21)
Partitioned into nothing during the eighteenth century by Prussia, Austria, and Russia, the country of Poland struggled to piece itself back together after the First World War. Its old borders, only partially reestablished by the Treaty of Versailles, became grounds for bitter international contention. In three years the government of Jozef Pilsudski engaged in six different border wars against Germany, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, western Ukraine, and Soviet Russia. The fight against the last proved to be the longest, deadliest, and most successful.
While the Red Army fought for survival in the Russian civil war, Pilsudski’s armies advanced eastward, aiming to incorporate areas of mixed Polish ethnicity. Their success was remarkable.
Polish troops reached as far as Kiev, three hundred miles east of Warsaw, taking much of Lithuania and Byelorussia in the process. Regrouping, the Red Army counterattacked and nearly entered the Polish capital. In fact, several German and Russian newspapers reported that Warsaw had fallen. Then a miraculous Polish attack upon the southern Soviet flank shattered and dispersed three armies, forcing the weary Reds to concede Polish independence, land, and victory. The seesaw conflict consumed 150,000 Russian and at least 50,000 Polish casualties and imbued hostilities between the two states that would endure for decades.8
Some Westerners credited Poland with halting a Bolshevik tide that may have communized much of politically fragile Europe. Whether such an event was possible, Soviet sentiments were not against it. On November 7, 1920, just before the Red Army conceded defeat, the Soviet daily Pravda declared, “The hour of world victory is near.”9
The Red Army lost three times the number of dead during the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–21 as it lost in the Afghan War of 1980–88.
7. MANCHURIAN INCIDENT (1931)
In 1931 the South Manchurian Railway Company of Japan owned several hundred miles of track as well as mines, hospitals, schools, administration centers, libraries, repair depots, factories, and recreational parks within Manchuria. Assigned to guard these interests was an elite and largely independent division of Japanese officers and men known as the Kwantung Army.
On the night of September 18 a small explosion ruptured a few feet of rail line just outside the regional capital of Mukden. Company officials and most of the enlisted soldiers believed the explosion to be an act of terrorism perpetrated by Chinese Nationalists seeking revenge against the growing Japanese presence.
In reality, rogue Kwantung officers staged the event to justify complete occupation of the Chinese province. Their ruse paid immediate dividends. Within twenty-four hours their troops overran Mukden and fanned out into the countryside. In a matter of months most of Manchuria fell and fighting spread as far as Shanghai. By March 1932, Kwantung officers established the puppet state of Manchukuo, incorporating nearly all of Manchuria. The moderate Japanese government did not support the Kwantung Army’s actions, yet it did not intervene for fear of appearing antipatriotic. As the League of Nations maneuvered to penalize Japan, the island nation withdrew from the League.10
The “Manchurian Incident” launched Japan’s conversion from civil to military rule, unmasked the inherent infirmity of the League of Nations, and laid the groundwork for a comprehensive war in the Far East. Years later many Asians scholars and civilians pointed to 1931 as the actual start of the Second World War.11
The Japanese-appointed ruler of Manchukuo was Henry Pu Yi, the thirteenth and last Manchu emperor of China.
8. ABYSSINIA (1935–36)
In 1830 Europe owned only a few colonial possessions in Africa, mostly along the coasts. A century later almost every African country lived under one European banner or another. Largest among the land-holders were Britain and France, followed by Belgium, Portugal, and Spain. A latecomer to the game, Italy held most of Somalia. But Benito Mussolini desired a Second Roman Empire, and he used a minor 1934 border clash between Italian and Ethiopian troops to deploy more soldiers to the area. In 1935 he ordered an invasion.12
The Ethiopians—undertrained, poorly equipped, and divided—were little match against Fascist Italy’s aircraft, armored vehicles, and mustard gas. By spring 1936, the fighting was over, save for sporadic guerrilla activity. An exuberant Italian public derived much pride from their victory in the seven-month war, not from defeating the feeble armies of Haile Selassie or the oppressive heat of East Africa, but by succeeding despite edicts and sanctions from the League of Nations.13
Italian military expenditures decreased steadily after the war, whereas defense budgets for nearly every other major state increased. Yet Italy’s aggression and the futility of League condemnation signaled a European rebirth of might making right.
During and briefly after the war, Italian toy stores carried sets of lead soldiers featuring Fascist Italians pitted against Royalist Abyssinians.
9. SPANISH CIVIL WAR (1936–39)
Attempting to build a democratic republic following years of dictatorship, the best-laid plans of progressive reformers withered and failed in 1930s Spain. Resisting all change were the traditional powers of church, landowners, and the military. Demanding radical change were destitute peasants and laborers. General strikes by the latter “Republicans” degraded into violence by 1936, including the burning of hundreds of churches and the murder of more than a thousand priests. In retribution, church and military “Nationalists” resorted to mass executions.
By late 1936, this internal struggle became an international contest of extreme ideologies. Entering on the side of Gen. Francisco Franco’s Nationalists were 40,000 Italian and 20,000 German soldiers, engineers, and advisers. Assisting the fractured but larger contingency of Republicans were scores of Britons, Czechs, French, Poles, Yugoslavs, nearly 3,000 Americans, and 40,000 Soviets.
Despite inferior numbers, the Nationalists and their allies possessed superior weaponry. Spanish cities, particularly Madrid and Falset, were subjected to repeated aerial bombings. Submarines hounded merchant shipping off the Mediterranean coast. By the winter of 1938–39, civilians in Madrid were down to a few ounces of food per day, and thousands began to die of starvation and exposure.
By spring 1939, Franco had attained unconditional surrender and established Spain as a dictatorship once more. Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany gained invaluable military experience from the fighting and untold confidence from the outcome. The war killed 600,000 people.14
At the end of the war, Franco’s Fascist Spain received immediate diplomatic recognition from the governments of France, Great Britain, and the United States.
10. THE CHINA INCIDENT (1937)
For all intents and purposes, the Second World War did not begin at an American naval base on December 7, 1941, or on the German-Polish border on September 1, 1939. The bloodiest conflict yet in human history started after a bloodless volley a few miles from Peking on July 7, 1937.
On a late summer’s night, while on maneuvers near the Marco Polo Bridge, Japanese troops received a smattering of small-arms’ fire. Officers claimed the shots originated from a nearby Chinese garrison and demanded the right to search neighboring cities. Local officials refused, resulting in a series of small skirmishes.
The pattern intensified through the rest of the summer. Both sides broke truce after truce. Deployments expanded. Fighting escalated. Equipped with superior armored vehicles, bombers, fighters, and heavy artillery, Japan quickly gained the initiative, occupying most of northeast China and defeating the Nationalist Army in Shanghai. Negotiations became impossible in December 1937, when Japanese forces conquered the capital city of Nanking and initiated a succession of atrocities.15
Thereafter, Japan fully engaged China, fought several pitched battles with the Soviet Union along the Mongolian border, and started to look longingly southward toward European and American possessions for precious war resources, especially oil. Predictably, Tokyo’s fragile ties with London and Washington began to fray. Inversely, alliances with Rome and Berlin grew stronger, inspiring hawks in Tokyo to believe a new world order was about to dawn.
By conservative estimates, at least two hundred thousand Chinese civilians were killed during the three-week Rape of Nanking. This is three times the number of British civilians killed during the Second World War.