Editor's Foreword
Mr Philip Bell's interpretation of the origins of the Second World War is dispassionate, uncommitted, and perhaps for that reason brilliantly unanswerable. His basic point that ‘some theories wide enough to explain everything, end by explaining nothing’, is made in the context of a consideration of the argument that the existence of sovereign states is a cause of wars, an argument that Mr Bell considers to be ‘true but unhelpful’. If we apply the point to the long debate on the ‘appeasement’ of Nazi Germany in the 1930s we can see that a blanket condemnation of ‘appeasement’ is too imprecise to be tenable, and, indeed, explains nothing. The trouble is that vague, sweeping generalisations tend to be accepted by an ill-informed public, and build themselves up into powerful myths. Such generalisations may be accepted by the media and the public for several decades after they have been discarded by most professional historians. Most journalists seem still to think that the policy of appeasing Hitler was, in each of the relevant crises, cowardly and mistaken. They do not distinguish between the factors that were operative in 1936 from those operative in 1938, or, again, in 1939. Mr Bell shows that the British government's policy had a cowardly side to it during the Spanish Civil War, but that Chamberlain's policy in 1939 was extremely courageous. When Stalin preferred to negotiate with Hitler, Chamberlain preferred to resist Hitler by a declaration of war, encouraged, it is true, by an impatient House of Commons.
There is no space in an editor's foreword to say more on the appeasement debate. Bell's lucid account and interpretation of the diplomatic history of the 1930s demolishes many familiar fallacies, without ever becoming polemical in tone. One point on Munich is worth mentioning here: in agreement with Professor D. C. Watt and other recent authorities, Mr Bell shows that Hitler regarded the settlement as a disaster, because he wanted a short, successful war against Czechoslovakia in the teeth of the passive disapproval of Britain and France. He was not content with success at the conference table. As Bell says, he wanted war for its own sake, and with such an outlook was perhaps unique in modern history. Ciano noted in his diary that if you offered Hitler more territory than he was demanding, he would still be disappointed, because what he wanted was war. But even this was not always true, so that even about Hitler generalisations can be dangerous.
In wanting victorious wars rather than diplomatic victories Hitler was acting not only immorally, but also irrationally. Sometimes he attacked another country because he wanted to secure resources from it, but sometimes he was already securing the resources he needed from that country without going to war. The classic example of this is his decision not to wait to eliminate Britain before invading the USSR, even though Stalin was already generously supplying him with both raw materials and manufactured products. Yet it remains true that Hitler sometimes made war pay, and while he was actually waging it, not merely after victory. Mr Bell points out that the acquisition of the vast resources of western Europe made war immensely profitable for Germany, at least in the short run. Here there is a parallel with a picture given by Dr T. C. W. Blanning in a companion volume recently published in this series, a volume on the origins of the French Revolutionary Wars. The French Directory and Napoleon, like Hitler, lived off a diet of warfare. For a country to acquire profits which could be used during the war is less common in the decades between Napoleon and Hitler. More often warfare is greedy of resources, even if victory is to bring profits after the end of hostilities. Often even a victorious power is permanently poorer after the war than it was before — as Britain has been after the two world wars. But surviving on the immediate conquests of wars had its dangers for Hitler, as Mr Bell shows. It created a ‘vicious circle in which armaments were built up to make conquests and then more conquests were necessary to expand armaments’, a process which ‘reached an explosive stage in 1939, when raw materials, labour and food were all needed to sustain the pace’.
Bell makes an important distinction between Hitler's policy in western Europe and his policy in eastern Europe. In western Europe he seemed to be living in an antiquated world of power politics, thinking, for example, of a possible alliance with Britain against France, without realising that the time was long past when the Western democracies would make war against each other. He considered also the rather more plausible idea of an Anglo-German alliance against the USSR. But his attitude to the war in western Europe, as Bell says, was one ‘which would have been easily recognisable to Bethmann-Hollweg and the German General Staff of 1914’.
In eastern Europe a far more terrible feature of Nazi policy emerged already in 1940 and 1941 — a racist policy against the Poles and the Russians which anticipated the 1942–45 holocaust of Poles and Jews. In the discussion of the relationship between ideology and realpolitik with which this series has often been concerned, Nazism must presumably be considered as some monstrous kind of ideology. And if a choice must be made between two evils it must surely be concluded that the realpolitik of the pre-1914 world was preferable to the Nazi ‘philosophy’ which resulted in the death camps.
Harry Hearder
Acknowledgements
In writing this book I have incurred many obligations, and I am happy to take this opportunity to thank those who have helped in its preparation. I am particularly grateful to Harry Hearder, the General Editor, for his invitation to contribute this volume to the series on the origins of modern wars, and for his help and encouragement in its writing. The University of Liverpool has provided research grants which have assisted my visits to various libraries.
I owe a great debt to my friends Edward Acton, David Dutton, John Gooch, and Ralph White, who read a long draft with sharp eyes and immense patience. Their wise and tactful comments have saved me from a number of errors and wrought many improvements in the text, though they bear no responsibility for the imperfections that remain. Betty Plummer, despite adverse circumstances, typed and retyped the whole book with her customary calm efficiency.
In attempting a general survey of so wide a subject as the origins of the Second World War in Europe, I am acutely conscious of my dependence on the multitude of scholars who have increased our knowledge and enlarged our understanding of the events under discussion. Some of my debts are acknowledged in the references and reading list. My gratitude to the many other writers whose work I have absorbed over the years is no less real, even though they may not be specifically mentioned.
As always, my deepest thanks go to my wife for her help and support in all that has gone to the making of this book.
Department of History,
University of Liverpool
P. M. H. BELL
April 1985
Abbreviations
AO
Auslandsorganisation (Foreign Countries Organisation)
DGFP
Documents on German Foreign Policy
NKVD
Narodny Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs)
NSDAP
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei
OKW
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (High Command of the Armed Forces)
PPF
Parti Populaire Français
RM
Reichsmark
SA
Sturm Abteilung (Nazi storm-troopers)
SS
Schutz Staffeln
Part One
Chapter 1
On 3 September 1939 the Foreign Minister of the Third Reich, Joachim von Ribbentrop, received the British Ambassador in Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson. War had just been declared between their two countries; and the Ambassador remarked that ‘it would be left to history to judge where the blame really lay’. Ribbentrop replied that ‘history had already proved the facts’. An hour later, it was the turn of the French Ambassador, Robert Coulondre, who was told that when war came France would be the aggressor, and replied: ‘Of that history will be the judge.’ Noting these exchanges, Sir Lewis Namier commented: ‘The judgement of history was invoked by all alike.’1
History has not let them down. The origins of the Second World War have exercised the minds of generations of historians, and have filled thousands of pages, without exhausting either the fascination of the subject or the stamina of their readers. The generations which experienced the war are passing away, but many of their successors remain responsive to its echoes. The history of that time is still invoked in the political debates of the present day. ‘Appeasement’ and ‘Munich’ are still words of power in the speeches of politicians and the columns of newspapers. Nazism and fascism remain current terms of political abuse. The spectre of the holocaust of Jewish lives is ever-present to modern Europeans.
We live still in the shadow of the Second World War. Its casualties, variously estimated at between 40 and 50 million dead, have left a lasting scar upon the populations of the world, and especially of Europe. Movements of populations in eastern Europe broke patterns of settlement established since the Middle Ages, so that Poles and Russians now live in territories which previously had been German for centuries. The physical ruins that littered Europe were fairly quickly repaired; but the destruction has left its mark on many great cities. Even countries which managed to remain outside the storm of hostilities were deeply disturbed by its passage, as the history of Sweden or Switzerland demonstrates.
Events of this magnitude continue to command attention and demand explanation: and to embark upon a fresh review of the origins of the Second World War in Europe needs no apology. The scope of the enquiry is limited to Europe — a large enough arena, in all conscience, but more manageable than an attempt to comprehend the whole globe.2 But Europe was not self-contained. Britain and France were great imperial powers, with possessions and commitments all over the world. The Soviet Union, equally an imperial power, included vast territories in central and eastern Asia only secured since the mid-nineteenth century. Nearly 8,000 kilometres of its land frontiers lay in Asia, compared with some 2,400 kilometres in Europe. All three powers were much concerned by the growth of Japanese power in the Far East. All three were faced by the recurrent imperial problem of the twentieth century, nationalist movements among their subject peoples -the British in India and the Middle East, the French in Syria and North Africa, the Soviets in the Caucasus and the Ukraine. For none of the three is it possible to consider their European problems, and their role in the origins of the war, without an eye on the global context.
Across the Atlantic from Europe, the USA sought for much of the 1920s and 1930s to withdraw into semi-isolation, hoping to return to the apparently secure haven of a pre-1914 normality. In the 1930s, successive Neutrality Acts were specifically designed to insulate the USA from European conflicts, and to ensure that there should be no repetition of the events of 1917, when she was drawn into the First World War. Yet Europeans could never forget or ignore the American presence over the western horizon. The activity (or otherwise) of the American economy, and the shape of American foreign policy, had profound effects in Europe. If at some point the economic and military strength of the USA were again to be mobilised, as in 1917–18, for participation in a European war, the consequences would be far-reaching. European powers held the centre of the international stage in the 1930s, but this was largely because the Americans chose to remain in the wings: and the American dimension of European affairs must constantly be allowed for.
Other complications arise from that deceptively simple name, ‘the Second World War’, which reveals problems on even a cursory inspection. It is conventional in western Europe to refer to the conflict as the war of 1939–45, just as we speak of the war of 1914–18; but the cases are very different. In 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July, and within a week five of the six European great powers were at war. While it is true that the Ottoman Empire came in later in the year, and Italy not until 1915, the main war crisis was short, concentrated, and decisive. One day Europe was at peace; and then a week later most of Europe was at war, in proper form, with ultimatums and declarations of war duly delivered.3 By contrast, it is far from easy to say precisely when the Second World War in Europe began. It has appeared to many observers, both at the time and since, that the conflict began in 1936, with the Spanish Civil War, which seemed to mark the outbreak of an ideological war that was already latent over most of Europe. Volunteers flocked to Spain in this belief, often projecting their own passions and hatreds on to the fierce internal antagonisms of the Spanish people. Regular forces from Germany and Italy, and ‘advisers’ from the Soviet Union were involved, as well as the International Brigades recruited through the Communist International. Spain became the battleground for what seemed to be a European war fought by proxy.
While the Spanish Civil War was in progress, there occurred elsewhere the German occupation of Austria in March 1938; the Czechoslovakian crisis of September 1938, when the French army was mobilised and war seemed imminent; the German seizure of Bohemia and Memel in March 1939; and the Italian invasion of Albania in April 1939. Could this properly be called a time of peace, or war? The threat of force was ever-present, even if its use was only sporadic; and it is doubtful whether a tank has to open fire for its presence to constitute a warlike act. Undeclared war is a fair description of the state of Europe in 1938–39; until finally open war broke out when Germany attacked Poland on 1 September 1939, and found an opponent willing, and even eager, to fight rather than surrender. On 3 September Britain and France declared war on Germany, though their formal declarations made remarkably little immediate difference to the situation. Their armies and air forces remained inactive in the west; while in the east Germany (assisted after a time by the Soviet Union) conquered Poland unhindered. There followed the period of the phoney war, from October 1939 to April 1940; so that a time of undeclared war was followed by a period when war was declared but not waged. There was not very much difference between the two.
War was waged in earnest in April 1940, with German attacks on Denmark and Norway; in May, with the German invasion of the Low Countries and France; and in June, with the entry of Italy, which extended the conflict to the Mediterranean. In October 1940 Italy attacked Greece; in April 1941 the Germans conquered Yugoslavia and Greece; and finally in June 1941 they invaded the Soviet Union, the final extension of the war in Europe, which by then engulfed almost the entire Continent.
There was thus a movement from civil war and war by proxy in Spain, to local war (Germany and Poland), then to regional war (Scandinavia and western Europe), and finally to Continental war. There were spells of peace which was no peace, and of war which was remarkably unwarlike. Contemporaries were well aware that the line between peace and war, far from being sharp and clear-cut, was so blurred as to be almost invisible. On 10 November 1938, Adolf Hitler congratulated himself (and representatives of the German press, to whom he was speaking) on the tactics of propaganda, political pressure, and threat of force, which had been successfully used to ‘wreck the nerves of those gentlemen in Prague …’4 At almost exactly the same time, in comparatively peaceful England, Stephen Tallents, the Director-General of the shadow Ministry of Information, which was being set up in the expectation of war, wrote of the ‘present continental conditions, in which the boundaries between peace and war are so largely obliterated’.5 Europe thus witnessed a process of change, not a sudden leap from peace to war; and an explanation of the origins of the Second World War in Europe must examine the forces which lay behind the change, as well as the events which marked the different phases of its development.
War came by stages; and as it came, it was not one single war, unitary and simple in its nature, but a number of wars, different in kind, in aims, and in methods. The war in Spain was at once a civil war between Spaniards, a war between individuals from many parts of the world, and a war involving European states. The war fought by Germany against Poland in 1939 was, in German eyes, not just a war to shift their boundary with Poland from one line to another, but was aimed at the destruction of the Polish state and the subjugation of its people; and as such it went on for several years, because this process was fiercely though clandestinely resisted. The war in western Europe in 1940, on the other hand, was more in the style of 1914 and other ‘orthodox’ wars between states, waged between uniformed armed forces, using recognised military methods and exercising considerable forbearance towards the civilian population, and ending, in the case of France, in an armistice which showed a calculated restraint on the German side. The label ‘Second World War in Europe’ is used to denote not one event, but a number of separate conflicts, different in kind as well as in date. An explanation of origins must deal with these differences.
The origins of war and of wars
These are the tasks which a consideration of the origins of the war (or rather, wars) must face. But what is meant by ‘origins’ in this context? It is possible to seek the origins of the war in the events of diplomatic relations — the alliances and alignments of states, the activities of ambassadors and foreign ministers, conferences between statesmen. It may be, however, that such matters were merely superficial, eddies on the surface of a deep-running stream whose course was determined by more profound forces. If so, what were these forces? Obvious possibilities may be found in the movement of ideas and the clash of ideologies; in economic pressures and opportunities; and in changes in military technology and strategic thought. If we accept the importance of such developments, what were the links between them and the decisions of individual statesmen and the sentiments of peoples?
Tolstoy, in War and Peace, wrote that historians had produced various diplomatic explanations of the war of 1812 — ‘the wrongs inflicted on the Duke of Oldenburg, the non-observance of the Continental System … the ambitions of Napoleon, the firmness of Alexander, the mistakes of the diplomats, and so on’. If this were so, then more care on the part of the diplomats, different phrasing in a note, a minor concession on the part of Napoleon — and there would have been no war. Tolstoy rejected such explanations. For Napoleon and Alexander to be able to act as they did, he believed, ‘a combination of innumerable circumstances was essential. … It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands the real power lay — the soldiers who fired the guns or transported provisions and cannon — should consent to carry out the will of those weak individuals, and should have been induced to do so by an infinite number of diverse and complex causes.’6 Substitute Hitler and Chamberlain for Napoleon and Alexander, and Tolstoy's assertion is easily transposed from the war of 1812 to the Second World War. But were Hitler and Chamberlain merely weak individuals, controlled by circumstances and waiting on the consent of the millions who seemed to be their puppets, but in whose hands the real power lay? How can we decide?
Different approaches to the problem produce different explanations. It is possible to start by trying to explain, not one single war, but the phenomenon of war in general; and much effort has been put into this search. The causes of war have long been sought, so that, once identified, they might be eliminated. In the eighteenth century it was argued that war was produced by the ambitions (or even the mere whims) of monarchs and their courtiers; but this view foundered in the French Revolutionary Wars, fought by a republic and a people's army. In the nineteenth century, Richard Cobden and the Manchester school of liberalism held that universal peace would come through the railway, the steamship, the penny post, and free trade: when all had enough of this world's goods, none would wish to waste them in warfare, nor would there be any point in fighting to obtain a larger share. But events belied these hopes. In 1914 the postal services carried mobilisation notices, and the railways transported armies to battle. The twentieth century proceeded to provide at least its fair ration of wars, and perhaps more — one observer listed thirty between 1900 and 1964.7
Among these conflicts, it was particularly the First World War of 1914–18 that stimulated the search for the causes of war into even greater activity. Shocked by the catastrophe and determined to avoid its repetition, people scanned the period before 1914 in search of the causes of war. They found them in plenty; and for each cause of war there was a remedy. Wars — and particularly that of 1914 — were caused by armaments and arms races. The remedy, therefore, was disarmament. Wars were caused by alliances and secret diplomacy, which bound states together without the knowledge of their peoples, and turned a small quarrel into a European war. The solutions here were to avoid alliances, and to practise open diplomacy, so that peoples could restrain their governments from dangerous commitments and warlike acts. Wars were caused by the very existence of sovereign states, free (and indeed accustomed) to fight one another from time to time. Here, the answers were to create some international organisation to restrict the right to go to war, and to develop the role of international law. For socialists, wars were caused by capitalism, and by imperialism, which was the latest form of capitalism; so that capitalist states, under the influence of bankers and great industrialists, fought for markets, raw materials, and fields for investment. In the long run, the answer was to do away with capitalism, for in a socialist world there would be no war; in the short run, means might be found to share markets, investment opportunities, and resources. There were widespread theories about ‘scapegoat wars’ — wars to relieve conflicts within a country by turning upon an external enemy. Here the answer seemed to be that after 1914–18 anyone could see that the remedy was worse than the disease -if Russia or Germany had gone to war in 1914 as a way out of internal conflicts, they had instead landed themselves in defeat and revolution. There were theories of war by accident — that in 1914, and doubtless on other occasions, the powers blundered into a war which none of them really wanted. For this the remedy was to improve the mechanism of international relations, so that time and opportunity were given to avoid accidents and allow good sense to prevail.
There are many difficulties with such general explanations of war. They tend to fall uneasily between determinism and free will. If wars were really caused by capitalism, and arose from its very nature, then how could they be avoided by creating a League of (mainly capitalist) Nations, or by merely adjusting the mechanism of the international system? Some socialists, indeed, argued with strict logic that they could not be so avoided; but most acted as though they could, partly because that was what they wanted to believe, and partly because all but the most rigid determinists recognised some scope for choice and action. Again, some theories, wide enough to explain everything, ended by explaining nothing — the argument that wars were the result of the existence of sovereign states fell into this difficulty. It was like saying that car accidents are the result of the existence of cars — which is true, but unhelpful. As an approach to the problem of the origins of the Second World War, such theories are too general to be very useful; though they should not be entirely disregarded, if only because in the 1920s and 1930s they were often taken very seriously, and so form part of the fabric of the period we are examining.
Historians have tended to deal more in particular than in general explanations; with the causes of individual wars rather than with the causes of war. But even within this pragmatic approach, there is usually to be found a pattern. Historians seek long-term causes (often called origins), identifying conditions in which war is likely or probable — long-standing territorial disputes, conflicts of interest, psychological tensions between peoples. To these they add short-term causes — specific events which bring these disputes and tensions to a head; and finally occasions of war — events which are not in themselves of decisive significance, but in particular circumstances tip the balance, or perhaps just provide an excuse for going to war. In making such analyses, historians make repeated use of analogies: the accumulation of inflammable materials, finally lit by a single spark; or a dam subjected to an increasing weight of water, and finally broken by some comparatively minor crack in the concrete; or explosive forces built up over a period of time and then touched off by the mere movement of a trigger. Behind the analogies lies a standard pattern of explanation, though with varying emphasis being placed on long-term and short-term causes. It is possible to find, for example, discussions of the coming of the First World War which deal mainly with the long term (the growth of internal tensions in Germany, or imperial rivalry between the powers, or nationalist aspirations in the Balkans); and others which deal almost exclusively with the short term, examining exhaustively the events of July 1914. There is frequently room for dispute as to whether a particular event was a genuine cause of conflict, or merely the occasion: again looking at 1914, was the German invasion of Belgium the cause of British entry into the European conflict, or only the occasion for a step that was bound to be taken anyway?
General theories of the causes of war, and the patterns of causation woven by historians, may be very logical and intellectually coherent. But participants in events have a different perspective. Those in positions of authority or influence are profoundly conscious that they must take decisions. At specific moments they must declare war — or not; issue an order to attack another country — or not; order resistance to an attack — or not. Even those who are firmly convinced of a determinist view of life find in practice that they must choose; and do not appear to think that they are in the grip of forces outside their control. Lenin, whose theoretical works demonstrated that war was a function of capitalism and imperialism, had to choose early in 1918 whether his new Bolshevik state should launch a revolutionary war against the Germans (which was what some of his colleagues wanted) or make peace, at great cost in territory and resources. He chose peace, not on any grounds of historical determinism, but because he knew that Russia did not have the means to resist the German Army. Obviously he did not abandon his view of life and of history; and he believed he was acting to save the Revolution; but the actual decision was based on a calculation about power, and an estimate of the long-term interests of the Bolshevik cause.8
Most such decisions, indeed, involve important elements of calculation: about the balance of power; about the security and material interests of the state and its people; about prestige (which is often not just pretence or vainglory, but involves the crucial question of whether other states believe that you mean what you say); and not least about power to achieve the object in view. A vital element in choices about war and peace is usually the calculation, or at least the hope, that victory is possible. Only in the most dire of circumstances do states go to war in the face of certain defeat; and examples are hard to find. It is more usual, in hopeless circumstances, to bow to the inevitable.
Statesmen make their choices out of calculation. War is an instrument of policy. It will be used, in the crudest terms, if it seems likely to pay, in terms of material interest, profit, power, or prestige. In the 1920s and 1930s, it appeared to most statesmen in Britain and France that war was highly unlikely to pay. They had come to regard the last war, of 1914–18, as a calamity, involving human, material, and financial losses which should not again be incurred short of the utmost necessity. They were satisfied powers, anxious to preserve the status quo; but they also wanted peace and quiet. They would eventually fight in self-defence and to prevent the status quo being completely overthrown; but their optimism about the outcome of war was at a low ebb, and their belief in war as an instrument of policy was weak. The rulers of Germany and Italy, on the other hand, represented dissatisfied powers; they wanted to disrupt the status quo; and they were perfectly prepared to use war to achieve that end. Moreover, the Germans believed that war would pay in the simplest sense, by securing economic gains — raw materials, foodstuffs, cheap labour, favourable terms of trade and rates of exchange; and in some parts of their conquests, they were not mistaken. Their optimism about the outcome of war was high; and their belief in war as an instrument of policy strong.
This is not the whole story. Statesmen make calculations of interest, advantage, and power; but they respond also to emotions, to prejudices, to the assumptions which they have absorbed from their upbringing, their way of life, and their friends. They are human, not calculating machines; and this means that sometimes they respond as much by instinct as from calculation. The Belgian Crown Council, meeting all night on 2/3 August 1914 to decide how to reply to the German ultimatum demanding passage through their country to attack France, debated Belgian interests, which gave no absolutely clear guide to action, but then seem to have reached their final unanimous decision to reject the ultimatum mainly out of anger at being bullied, a sense of the country's self-respect, and (on the part of the strong pro-German group) resentment at being let down by one's friends. Again, in 1940, Churchill's resolve to continue the war against Germany despite the fall of France arose primarily from patriotic fighting instincts, which were supported by rather shaky calculations about Britain's capacity to survive and win.
When politicians take the path to war they must then assume that the people whom they claim to lead, the millions who must fire the guns and sustain the war effort, will accept their decision. What then moves the people whose role is in the long run vital for the conduct and continuance of war?
There are those who return a very simple answer to this question: the people respond to a mixture of propaganda and coercion on the part of governments, and have little choice or free will in the matter. This is in most cases too simple to correspond to reality. It is perfectly possible for a country to be taken into war against the wishes of the majority of its people: this was the case when Italy entered the Second World War in 1940; and the results were observable in the lack of enthusiasm and determination in the Italian campaigns and war effort from 1940 to 1943, when the whole process culminated in Italy first dropping out of the conflict, and then joining in again on the opposite side. At the other end of the scale, it was also possible for large numbers of the Polish people to continue by clandestine means a struggle against Germany which their armies had decisively lost, at a time when their government was in exile and had no powers of coercion whatsoever, and very little means of propaganda. There are many cases which fall between these two extremes; but by and large governments are conscious that in war they need at least the consent, and preferably the active support, of their peoples; and this support has often been given willingly, and sometimes enthusiastically.
What motivation, then, lies behind such willingness to accept war? How have Tolstoy's all-important millions seen the question of war and its origins? If we turn to 1914 for guidance, we find in Oxford the young Llewellyn Woodward (later an eminent historian of the war) volunteering at once for the army. He did not enjoy his military training, and he was less than certain of the British case for entering the war; but he persisted because he was convinced by the argument of Socrates, that having accepted the benefit of his country's laws he had a duty to do what the state asked of him. Reflecting after fifty years, he saw no reason to have done otherwise. On the other side of Europe, far removed from the refinements of Oxford and the influence of a classical education, we find the inhabitants of a village in Montenegro, men and women alike, pouring from their houses to resist the invading Austrians, not when they crossed the newfangled boundary which had only been there since some recent Balkan war, but when they reached a bridge which had marked Montenegrin territory for centuries — the simple defence of long-held territory by a people with a strong sense of identity. Between these two responses, the one intellectual and rarefied, the other instinctive and primitive, there lay the reactions of the millions in Europe who answered their mobilisation notices, sometimes with resignation, sometimes enthusiastically, but in any case with a degree of unanimity that surprised the military authorities, who had expected widespread opposition or evasion.
When we turn from the First World War to the Second, one point stands out clearly. There was a widespread expectation that the reactions of 1914 would not be repeated. With the sombre memorials to the dead of 1914–18 all over Europe, ‘never again’ was the natural and deep-seated response. ‘I will not have another war. I will not’ was not the remark of a left-wing pacifist but of King George V, trained as a sailor and deeply imbued with the military virtues.9 It was true that in the belligerent capitals in 1939 there was little enthusiasm, no cheering crowds in the main squares, no flowers for the troops at railway stations. But, however reluctantly, the peoples of Europe went to war again. They endured, quietly but with immense determination and tenacity, a war which was in many ways more terrible than that of 1914–18. To explain, even in part, why they did so must be one of the tasks of an explanation of the origins of the war; because if the instinct of ‘never again’ had prevailed in any large section of the European population, either there would have been no Second World War, or at least it would have been a different kind of war, probably at a different time.
At the end of this review of explanations of war and wars, it is interesting to see what professionals in the craft of foreign policy made of the question about half-way through what we now know to have been the period between the wars. In 1919, Lloyd George's Cabinet in Britain decided that defence expenditure should be governed by the assumption that the country would not be involved in any major war for ten years. When this ‘ten-year rule’ was begun, and for most of its life until it was abandoned in 1932, it was meant only as a working assumption for economies in the defence budget, and did not rest on serious analysis of the international or military situation. However, in June 1931 a Foreign Office memorandum examined the assumptions on which the validity of the ‘rule’ rested; and its conclusions, though intended as a guide to the circumstances in which war would not break out, made in practice a guide to Foreign Office thinking on the conditions in which war could be expected.10
The memorandum concluded that there would be no major war on the following conditions:
1. That during the next ten years no two states would be involved in a dispute over a vital interest which peaceful means had failed to resolve.
2. That if two states were involved in such a dispute, one of them would be so averse to war as to abandon its vital interest rather than fight.
3. That, if both states were willing to fight, one of them would be so weak as to be unable to fight with any hope of success.
4. That an organisation existed which was willing and able to restrain the intending belligerents (i.e. the League of Nations).
5. That no situation arose which would create a war psychology.
The way ahead
This admirable summary included many of the points raised in more theoretical discussions: the concept of vital interest; the need for some expectation of success; the need for a general acceptance of war as an instrument of policy, or of necessity; the question of whether an international body would restrain individual states; and the question of war psychology. If all the Foreign Office's conditions of peace were reversed, the result would be a prescription for the causes of war.
These general considerations provide a sketch-map for the journey ahead. We must look at the broad explanations that have been adduced for the Second World War, amounting sometimes to theories of inevitability. We must examine the underlying forces which were at work, shaping and constraining the calculations of statesmen and the feelings of peoples, and building up a momentum towards war. Finally, we must review the cir-cumstances in which conflict became likely, and in which specific decisions for war were taken.
References
1. L. B. Namier, Diplomatic Prelude (London 1950), pp. 399–402.
2. A companion volume deals with the Pacific and Far East: see A. Iriye, The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific (London 1986).
3. Cf. a companion volume in this series: James Joll, The Origins of the First World War (London 1984).
4. Hitler's secret speech to representatives of the German press, 10 November 1938, in Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham (eds), Documents on Nazism, 1919–1945 (London 1974), pp. 549–550.
5. Memorandum by Tallents, 7 November 1938, quoted in P. M. Taylor, The Projection of Britain. British overseas publicity and propaganda, 1919–1939 (London 1981), p. 278.
6. L. N. Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. by Rosemary Edmonds (London: Penguin Books 1957), vol. II, pp. 715–717.
7. Quincy Wright, A Study of War, abridged by Louise Leonard Wright (Chicago 1964), p. 10.
8. This example is drawn from Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (London 1973), pp. 153–156.
9. A. J. P. Taylor (ed.), Lloyd George: a diary by Frances Stevenson (London 1971), p. 309.
10. P. J. Dennis, Decision by Default: peacetime conscription and British defence, 1919–39 (London 1972), p. 28.