The History Buff's Guide to World War II (6 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.

POLITICS

FORMS OF GOVERNMENT

Stalin once asserted, “If a government is not fascist, a government is democratic.” Such logic was hollow but commonplace. The Second World War was popularly viewed as black and white, good versus evil, democracy against fascism. Wars and the relationships they foster, however, are rarely as clear as Stalin suggested. A more accurate observation came from Winston Churchill, “At night, all cats are gray.”
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Wartime political systems covered the spectrum, and no system predisposed their owners to become Axis or Allied. Neutrals held a plurality for years, and many camps switched sides. Far from a world of democracies and fascist states, the globe was foremost spangled with crowns, as the vast majority of nations were either the seat or the subject of a monarchy.

Yet dictatorships were on the rise. Significantly, the war and its ensuing peace did little to break this trend, save for Italy and western Germany. Elsewhere, authoritarian regimes became the norm in Central and South America, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe, many of them sponsored by the victorious powers.

Below are the ten predominant forms of government among the principle war participants. Ranking is from most to least common. Countries listed with an asterisk switched sides during the war.

1. COLONY

In the war to preserve freedom, most countries were not free to begin with. The world consisted of about sixty independent or semi-independent countries and one hundred colonies. Autonomy was extremely rare in Africa, South Asia, and the Pacific, in part because several thrones survived the imperial cauldron of the First World War. King George VI of Windsor alone presided over a fifth of the world’s land area.
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Hardly on the fringe, colonies were often the major source of raw materials that fed war industries. Though Belgium was neutral, the Belgian Congo provided the Allies with diamonds, copper, and tungsten as well as uranium for atomic testing. British colonies provided most of the world’s nickel and rubber. The Dutch East Indies held large reserves of oil.

Soldiers of the Belgian Congo prepare to defend the empire in central Africa.

Somewhat obligated, colonies also provided a cache of soldiers. When Germany invaded France, eighty thousand of France’s defenders were African. Nine out of ten “British” troops in Burma were from South Asia. In Syria, the French fought themselves—Free France versus Vichy.

The war revealed empires as vulnerable or eliminated them, creating waves of independence movements even before the shooting ended. From 1945 to 1965 nearly sixty countries ceased to be colonies.
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Colonies hosted a fair amount of the fighting in the war—Abyssinia, Algeria, Belgian Congo, British Somaliland, Burma, Ceylon, Dutch East Indies, French Morocco, Gibraltar, Italian Somaliland, Libya, Malta, the Marshall Islands, and Singapore to name a few.

2. CONSTITUTIONAL MONARCHY