CAUSES OF THE WAR

A war is not unlike a bomb. It is of human construct and requires a multitude of conditions and proceedings for detonation. World War II was in effect several bombs assembled over time in Europe and Asia. Each of them contained a host of volatile components that were ancient and new, great and small, intangible and physical.

By the 1930s, these elements of instability grew, intensified, and began to overlap, creating a global environment of hostility in which diffusion of any particular conflict became less and less possible. Franklin D. Roosevelt summarized the situation best when he lamented to Henry Stimson, “These are not normal times; people are jumpy and very ready to jump after strange gods.”³⁶

Following are the abnormal times and strange gods of which FDR spoke. In roughly chronological order are the foremost seeds of insecurity leading up to the Second World War.

1. THE FIRST WORLD WAR

Of all the products of the Great War—tanks, poison gas, bombers—missing was any genuine resolution. On paper the Allies appeared to be the defeated party, hosting the majority of battles and suffering the vast majority of fatalities. Britain went from being a creditor to a debtor nation. France lost more than a million young men. Russia collapsed altogether. The Allies failed to capture a foot of German soil.

In contrast, the former Central Powers were never routed and yet were saddled with a humiliating treaty. Many citizens viewed their governments as accomplices in a traitorous plot. In Germany, pockets of ultranationalists remained active, eventually collecting around a persuasive war veteran who preached revenge.

In Asia, an old country emerged as a new power. For capturing a German fort in China and conducting brief naval patrols in the Mediterranean, Japan received from the League of Nations the Marshall, Mariana, Palau, and Caroline island groups (formerly German possessions). The Japanese economy enjoyed an unprecedented boom, thanks to overseas demand for wartime supplies. From 1913 to 1919, Japanese exports increased 300 percent. Having recently annexed Korea and defeated both Russia and China in regional wars, the empire abruptly became the political, military, and economic power of East Asia. Several militarists promoted the idea of expanding Japan’s influence even further.³⁷

Combat veterans of the First World War included Winston Churchill, Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Harry S. Truman, and George VI of Windsor.

2. THE RISE OF ETHNIC NATIONALISM

Tribal discord is almost as old as humankind. But in the early twentieth century, several factors enabled old ethnic tensions to become new political contests.

Victories in the SINO-JAPANESE and RUSSO-JAPANESE wars created an explosion of racial pride in Japan. World War I, which began after an ethnic uprising in Bosnia, gave birth to new states based largely on ethnicity—Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Yugoslavia, etc. Much of American and British foreign policy bordered on the premise that “white makes right.” Fables of ethnic superiority tested well in many political climates, particularly in Italy and Germany.³⁸

Increasingly, race and state became virtually synonymous, to the point where international relations turned into cultural divides. In 1924, the United States, Canada, and Australia strictly limited immigration based on ethnicity, particularly against Asians. By 1930, Japan had more than seven hundred societies based on racial nationalism. In 1933, Nazi Germany imposed its first anti-Semitic laws, and in 1938, Germany annexed Austria and the Czech Sudetenland on grounds of ethnic conglomeration.³⁹

Even in the League of Nations, that hopeful experiment in international cooperation, states were unwilling to even pay lip service to brotherly love. Despite several attempts to insert one, the covenant of the League of Nations never included an endorsement of racial equality.⁴⁰

Article 9 of the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war stipulated, “Belligerents shall as far as possible avoid bringing together in the same camp prisoners of different races or nationalities.”

3. THE REPARATIONS WAR

The harshest punishments of the Treaty of Versailles fell upon Austria and Hungary. Both were ordered to relinquish 60 percent of their territory, effectively ending their reigns as European powers. In comparison, Germany gave up 13 percent of its territory but was allowed to keep a nucleus of one hundred thousand soldiers for defense. The crux of Prussia’s punishment was to come from reparations.⁴¹

As to the amount, no consensus could be found. Most of war-torn France wanted Germany to be “squeezed as a lemon is squeezed.” Others called reparations “a sad adventure,” fearing it would bankrupt Germany and create a power vacuum in dead-center Europe. U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, and of course the Germans, wanted no payments whatsoever. Supreme Allied commander Marshal Ferdinand Foch lamented, “This is not peace: it is an Armistice for twenty years.”⁴²

Seemingly endless debate altered the amounts again and again. The Weimar government actually began paying—in coal, cattle, boats, and gold—without a final amount declared. Threats and reprisals sent the German mark into repeated free fall until it was valued at one-trillionth its prewar level.⁴³

Emergency grants and loans eventually gave Germany more money than it ever paid, but the damage had been done. Americans and Britons believed France was irresponsibly greedy. The French believed Germany escaped punishment. Many Germans felt cheated by democratic governments, including their own. The issue was never resolved; Germany simply stopped paying.⁴⁴

In 1929, Germany was scheduled to make reparations payments in gold until the year 1988.

4. THE GREAT DEPRESSION

In 1920, only two European countries were dictatorships. By 1937, there were sixteen. The primary cause of this migration to extremism was, in the words of economist John Maynard Keynes, the “greatest economic catastrophe…of the modern world.”⁴⁵

In 1929, a combination of overproduction, reduced consumption, and grossly overoptimistic stock prices led to a commercial implosion in the United States. Had the United States been a small player in the world market, the problem might have contained itself. Unfortunately, by the 1920s, America had become one of the largest creditor and trade nations on the planet.⁴⁶

Within a year, international investments and trade began to dry up. Work orders plummeted and joblessness soared. Unemployment reached 25 percent in the United States, Japan, and Britain; 30 percent in France; 33 percent in Germany; and almost 50 percent in Eastern Europe.⁴⁷

Banks crumbled in Austria, Britain, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Poland, Romania, and the United States, killed off by unstable currencies and multiplying loan defaults. Grain production—the foundation of nearly every national economy—fell by a fourth. Families lost their life savings, homes and businesses, pensions, and in many cases the ability to buy food.⁴⁸

Out of deprivation came polarization. Normally moderate sections of societies, especially the middle class, became increasingly receptive to radical solutions.⁴⁹

This bread line was in New York, but the forlorn scene appeared throughout the Western world for several years running.

The fragile democracy of Weimar Germany survived riots, armed rebellions, foreign occupation of the Rhineland, governmental scandals, political assassinations, and a total collapse of its monetary system—but it did not survive the Great Depression.

5. THE RISE OF ECONOMIC AUTARCHY

In the 1930s, Germany and Britain received most of their iron ore from Scandinavia and France. Japan was barely self-sufficient in food and almost entirely dependent on the United States for metals and petroleum. The United States imported most of its manganese, rubber, chromium, and practically all of its tin from East Asia.⁵⁰

Such interdependence would logically oblige states to be cooperative with their suppliers. But memories of the largest war ever, coupled with lingering global economic depression, did not exactly create an environment of trust between capitals. Rather than engage in free trade, the richest states intensified their competition for raw materials.

As early as 1929, there were talks of European union, mostly to fend off “imperialist America.” In a 1932 Commonwealth trade conference held in Canada, Britain declared it would exercise “imperial preference” when buying and selling anything. To secure sources of raw materials in Asia, the United States increased its military presence in the Philippines. Benito Mussolini declared he wanted to make North Africa, of all things, a wheat basket for Italy. In 1936, Japan announced the creation of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, insinuating first rights to oil and ores in the region. Outdoing the rest, Germany reoccupied the industrial Ruhr Valley in 1936 and solidified designs for acquiring Lebensraum (“living space”) in the east.⁵¹

Fittingly, some of the most intense offensives in World War II involved targets of raw material: grain in Manchuria and Russia; oil in the Dutch East Indies, Arabia, and the Caucasus; and coal in the Ruhr of Germany.

In a 1939 poll in Fortune magazine, 60 percent of Americans surveyed said they hoped the United States could reach a point where “it does not have to buy any products from foreign countries.”

6. THE “CHINA SYNDROME”

Had there been no Munich crisis, no invasion of Poland, no fall of France, there still would have been a war in Asia. In the two years preceding the collapse of “peace in our time” within Europe, Soviet weapons and ammunition flowed into China, battles in Manchuria produced casualties of six figures, and more than one million had died in a conflict that engrossed a fourth of the world’s population.

Amid the chaos, China struggled in vain to find equilibrium. Its three-hundred-year-old Manchu dynasty ceased to exist in 1912. Internal fighting and economic frailty prevented the development of any stable replacement government. By 1927 a bloody rivalry began between China’s Communists and Nationalists. To “establish order” in the area, rogue Japanese officers staged the Manchurian Incident in 1931, signaling the start of intermittent military campaigns that would last until 1945.⁵²

Other countries also struggled with civil wars and foreign encroachments at the time, but other countries did not have 480 million inhabitants. The outbreak of war in Europe was essentially a fabrication, a manufacture of crises where none truly existed. The war in China was a culmination, the breaking point of a fractured relic.

The early 1900s were not particularly kind to China. Between 1911 and 1936, a series of catastrophic floods, earthquakes, droughts, civil wars, and famines claimed approximately fifteen million lives.

7. THE WEAKNESS OF THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

The brainchild of idealist Woodrow Wilson, the League of Nations actually developed into a reasonably efficient and effective institution. After a few growing pains, the consortium soon included most every sovereign country in the world and became the forum of choice for international relations. Between 1924 and 1931, the globe lived relatively free of wars, a span of tranquility almost unmatched in history.

But the organization contained inherent frailties, revealed in full by Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931. The Manchurian Incident was a direct violation of League Charter Article 10—respect of integrity and independence of all member states. But there was apparently little the League was willing or capable of doing. The organization had no armed forces, no actual legal control over member states, and no United States in its assembly.

Simply ignoring mandates placed against it, Japan withdrew from the League in 1933. Soon to follow were some of the more aggressive participants in a greater disaster to come. Nazi Germany left in 1933, as did Italy in 1937, Hungary by 1939, and Romania in 1940. Rejecting the League became an expression of national pride. Remaining members lost much of their previous faith. The institution barely addressed the 1939 invasion of Poland and never held a session from 1940 to 1945.

By the time the League of Nations officially disbanded in 1946, it was down to half its original members.

8. ADOLF HITLER

French historian Maurice Baumont speaks for many when he surmises, “The origins of the war of 1939 go back essentially to the insatiable appetites of Adolf Hitler.” Baumont’s logic stems from the “Great Man” theory, contending that history is determined mostly by the actions of kings, generals, and presidents. While succinct, such an approach is often shortsighted. Yet in the case of the Second World War, one person deserves a fair amount of credit for initiating the European portion of the spectacle.⁵³

As a leader, Hitler was pure paradox. Creative and destructive, inspiring and mortifying, in command and yet out of control. His internal contradictions go far in explaining why some viewed Hitler as a rambling hatemonger and others deemed him a calculating schemer.

On the question of whether Hitler wanted to initiate a military conflict, there is no doubt. From the moment he became chancellor he informed his generals of his intent to solve Germany’s problems through military force. The idea to invade Poland was his, as were the subsequent attacks on the West and on the Soviet Union.

The argument that appeasement only fueled his ambition is fundamentally weak. Looking back, nothing significantly altered his aggression—not coercion, stalemate, appeasement, victory, or defeat. Military force was simply his tool of choice for instilling national pride, priming the economy, intimidating enemies, and attaining collaborators.

Opinions still cover the spectrum on der Führer. But whether one sees him as a mastermind or a marionette, it would be difficult if not impossible to imagine Germany going to war in 1939 if Hitler did not exist.⁵⁴

In 1933, British ambassador to Germany Sir Horace Rumbold stated, “I have the impression that the persons directing the policy of the Hitler Government are not normal.”

9. THE ARMS RACE

Much credence has been given to the rapid buildup of arms and armies as a primary cause of the First World War. Often overlooked is the even greater increase in military hardware just before the second go-round.

Throughout the economic boom of the 1920s and into the beginning of the Great Depression, most governments viewed military expenditures as essentially wasteful. Franklin D. Roosevelt credited large military buildups as “the real root of world disease and war.”⁵⁵

Two events soon sparked a change in attitudes about armaments. In 1935, Hitler publicly declared a rejection of the Treaty of Versailles and its constraints on German arms production. In 1936 Japanese delegates stormed out of an arms limitation summit when the United States refused to allow the empire to build additional warships. The belligerent acts set off an exponential growth in military budgets.⁵⁶

In 1932, the U.S. Congress appropriated funds for the construction of a single warship. The 1939 budget called for nineteen new ships, and Japan budgeted for sixty. From 1932 to 1939, production of military aircraft increased fourfold in the United States and sixfold in Japan. In a few short years Germany went from having no warplanes to possessing the largest air force in the world.⁵⁷

Japanese and German leaders became more aggressive when it was clear they were falling farther behind. Adolf Hitler believed his armed forces would not be ready for a major war until 1942 at the soonest. Five months before Pearl Harbor, Japan’s Adm. Nagano Osumi stated, “There is at this moment a chance to win a war against the United States, but the prospects will diminish as time goes by; by the second half of the year we will hardly be a match for them any longer.”⁵⁸

The B-17 Flying Fortress, B-24 Liberator, B-26 Marauder, and Sherman tank were coming off the production lines and the B-29 Superfortress and atomic bomb were in development before Pearl Harbor.

Starved for orders during the Great Depression, U.S. industry responded quickly to the call for arms.

10. THE NAZI-SOVIET PACT

The last chance for peace in Europe ended on August 23, 1939, in an event so bizarre, many said it did not seem real. Hitler’s rabid hatred of “godless bolshevism” was the foundation of his message. In turn, Communists from Paris to Leningrad viewed Hitler as public enemy number one. Suddenly the foreign ministers of Germany and the Soviet Union met in Moscow and, in the presence of Joseph Stalin, signed an agreement of neutrality.

Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop sign the Nazi-Soviet Pact while Stalin looks on.

Across Europe, people were thrown into varying states of dread, frustration, and anger. Soviets and Germans alike were dumbfounded. Citizens of free states envisioned a Europe divided and shared by the two dictators. Infuriated by Hitler’s sudden benevolence to their long-time adversary, Japan’s entire cabinet resigned.⁵⁹

The agreement assured “peace and the consolidation of business” between the two mortal enemies. What the pact removed was the threat of a two-front war for both countries. The Wehrmacht could move on Poland as it wished—to take back land “stolen” after the First World War—without threat of Soviet attack. Stalin was liberated from a possible German-Japanese vise.

Poland was conspicuously doomed. Suddenly, France and Britain could not come to Poland’s assistance as promised, not without access to Russian airfields. Officials in London and Paris also dreaded that when Poland fell, as assuredly it would between Hitler and Stalin, they were next.⁶⁰

As many predicted, the pact signaled war, not in years or months, but in days. Last-minute pleas for peace from Franklin D. Roosevelt, Pope Pius XII, and Benito Mussolini were ignored.

The Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact was set to expire in 1949.