The History Buff's Guide to World War II (7 page)

A constitutional monarchy is a bit like a democracy afraid of commitment—it has an elected government with a royal sovereign acting as head of state. More often than not, the reigning monarch is a figurehead, part deity, part notary public, granting approval to the functions of elected officials.

Britain, though often viewed as stodgy, was one of the more progressive constitutional monarchies, with full protection of civil rights and partial women’s suffrage. In contrast, Yugoslavia was a legitimate farce. A country fabricated from the ashes of the First World War, it consisted of Croats, Slovenes, Bosnians, and a half-dozen other ethnic groups. But the state was under a hardline Serb monarch, in the capital of Serbia, with a military run by a Serb officer class, and the official religion being Serb Orthodox. The setup tended to offend the other ethnic groups, and they later expressed this frustration by unleashing a bloody civil war.

Japan was frequently and incorrectly labeled fascist. In reality, it was a parliamentary government, with its lower house elected by male citizens. Yet Japan’s constitution made for a rather fragmented decision-making process. The armed forces and cabinet were responsible to no one but the emperor, who in turn practiced limited supervision over his subjects. The system worked relatively well in the 1920s and then slowly eroded into a military oligarchy in the 1930s. During the war, the army, navy, and cabinet continued to work independently from one another. Only once did Hirohito interject in political affairs: he ordered a halt to the war when he learned the fate of Nagasaki.

From 1937 to 1945, Japan went through seven prime ministers. The most powerful was Tojo Hideki, who held the post from 1941 to 1944. He also acted as minister of war and intermittently led the ministries of munitions, commerce and industry, home affairs, foreign affairs, and education.

3. PROTECTORATE

An independent government under the “protection” of another state, a protectorate is a small step above being a colony. Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia were previously the Republic of Czechoslovakia, one of the most progressive representative governments in the world. But the 1938 Munich Agreement allowed Hitler to legally carve away sections wherever Germans were in the ethnic majority. Six months later Hitler illegally took over the rest of the country, setting up the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia” and a puppet government in Slovakia.

French Indochina (Cambodia, Laos, and parts of Vietnam) existed under monarchies that were in turn subject to a French governor. Japan forcibly entered the area in 1940 and began bleeding the area dry of rice, coal, and rubber, which eventually persuaded the United States to place an oil embargo on Japan.

French Morocco had a sultan, whereas Tunisia had a provincial governor. Both functioned under large amounts of French political and military assistance. This setup underwent a hard bout of schizophrenia during the Allied invasions of November 1942. First the governments resisted heavily, then they capitulated, and then they joined the procession eastward to rid North Africa of the Third Reich.

To “liberate” French Morocco and the colony of Algeria, the Allies lost fourteen hundred men killed in action, more than the number of sailors lost on the USS Arizona.

4. MILITARY DICTATORSHIP

No actual ideology, no professed mandate from heaven, just power via well-armed support groups. Military dictatorships were often the byproduct of failed democratic governments, as was the case with Hungary in 1919, Poland in 1926, Greece in 1935, and Romania in 1938.

Since 1912 China had tried to establish a parliamentary system only to be torn apart repeatedly by jealous factions. In 1937 the country came together, faced with the imminent threat of Imperial Japan. Searching for an answer, warlords and the small but developing Communist Party pledged support to C
HIANG
K
AI
-S
HEK
, military chieftain of the dominant “Kuomintang,” or Nationalist Party. But paranoia ran deep, especially in Chiang, and China fought itself almost as much as the Japanese.

The Vichy government (named after the spa town in which it was headquartered) came about with the German invasion of France. In an emergency session, the French National Assembly granted World War I hero Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain the power to rule by decree. The parliament reasoned that a dictatorship would provide stability in a time of crisis—but stability at a price. Germany did not take over the government, allowing Pétain to govern both the occupied north and the Vichy south. Pétain became a Nazi by proxy, an ultraconservative king of denial who tried to make collaboration look patriotic. It worked for nearly two years, then Germany decided to take over all of France and rule in his stead.

From his birth in 1856 to his death in 1951, Marshal Pétain watched France undergo several governmental changes, including one monarchy, sixteen presidents, and more than one hundred different cabinets.

5. REPUBLIC

When Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke of the United States as an A
RSENAL OF
D
EMOCRACY
, the only states remotely close to the strict definition of democracy (rule directly by the people) were the federated cantons of Switzerland. Since adopting its constitution in 1787, the United States had been a republic—a government ruled by elected representatives. France joined the select club in 1870, followed by Finland and Turkey after the First World War.

The only republic to fall in the war was France. The secular state of Turkey stayed neutral nearly the whole way through, despite Churchill’s fervent wishes for a powerful ally in the Balkans.

Finland became receptive to the Third Reich after being attacked by Stalin in the W
INTER
W
AR
and later joined in the invasion of the Soviet Union. Several hundred Finns also served in Nazi SS divisions. But the relationship ended in 1944 when Finland simultaneously fought off German occupation and yet another Soviet offensive, keeping the country independent at a price of more than one hundred thousand casualties.

Of the four republics in the war, only the Allied United States and the Axis Finland granted women the right to vote.

6. DOMINION

The Philippines under U.S. protection and British Commonwealth countries were independent in all but name. The heads of state were still the U.S. president and the Crown of England, respectively, but each country had its own president or prime minister, cabinet, elected houses, and control over domestic concerns and foreign affairs.

None of the dominions were generally enthusiastic about joining the war. Filipinos had very little choice, attacked on the same day as Pearl Harbor. South Africa declared war against Germany but did little afterward. Its large, nonwhite, considerably repressed population was not motivated to help the monarchy.

Altogether, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand committed nearly a million troops to the war effort. Many proved to be supreme fighters. But their loyalty to the Crown took a severe beating. Britain was clearly unable to protect them from harm and was generally unappreciative of their sacrifices. In turn, the dominions grew close to a much stronger military power—the United States.

Fighting in the South Pacific, North Africa, Greece, Crete, and Italy, the servicemen of New Zealand proportionally lost 30 percent more troops than Great Britain in the war.

7. FASCIST DICTATORSHIP

Political scientists have attempted to define fascism, but they have limited results to show for their efforts. Most generally agree that it involved intense nationalism, militarism, single-party rule, social conformity, and the glorification of the leader. Its declared enemies were usually democracy, communism, capitalism, and humanism.
⁴

In the Second World War, nearly every European state had a party or faction that fit the above criteria, including the Arrow Cross in Hungary, the Iron Guard in Romania, Action Francaise in France, and the British Union in England. Yet only three states had a fascist party ascend to power—Italy, Portugal, and Spain. And in all three cases, none were eager to join in the war.

Despite direct pressure from Nazi Germany, both Portugal and Spain refused to be drawn into any kind of commitment. Portugal’s Antonio Salazar was decidedly anticommunist but had no interest in aiding the Axis when his citizens were blatantly pro-Allied. Spain’s Francisco Franco had emerged victorious in a bloody and elongated civil war. The potential costs of entering an even larger contest held no appeal for his fledgling government.

Italy was still technically a constitutional monarchy under Leopold III, but Benito Mussolini was its unquestioned dictator, or il Duce. In twenty years of rule, Mussolini had outlawed all opposition parties, eliminated freedom of speech and press, openly persecuted any expressed or implied dissent, and controlled the cabinet and parliament. But his military interests had always been more imperial than ideological. By 1943 both Mussolini and the Italian public had lost all desire for war, having lost too many campaigns to count. When the Allies entered Sicily, Mussolini was arrested by order of the king. Later that year Italy declared war on Germany.

Fascism comes from the Latin “fasces,” a bound set of wooden rods holding the blade of an axe. It was the Roman symbol of unity and power. From a distance it looks like a log with a beak.

8. ABSOLUTE MONARCHY

The last holdouts of a fading system, absolute monarchs continually resisted becoming colonies themselves. Abyssinia narrowly escaped conquest from Italy in 1896, only to fall to a more mechanized army in 1936. British forces liberated the country in 1941 and restored its monarch Haile Selassie to the throne. Selassie, who had been living in exile in London, thanked his British rescuers by essentially forcing them out of his country.

In Persia (Iran), the shahs (kings) of the Pahlavi dynasty marginally tolerated joint Soviet and British occupation. Greater worries came from internal pressures. On one side were nationalists who wanted to modernize the economy and government. On the other were religious fundamentalists who desired an end to Western influence. The Shahs managed to placate the nationalists and resist the fundamentalists (at least until 1979).

The Saud family had been vying for power in the Arabian Peninsula since the 1700s. By the time of the war in Europe, they were entering just their seventh year at the helm of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The country remained neutral until the last weeks of the Third Reich, when the Saudis declared war on the Axis powers.

The Saudis enjoyed little international clout until 1938, when oil was first extracted from their land. Though yields were initially modest, geologists hypothesized the kingdom rested on rather promising deposits.

9. SOCIALIST DICTATORSHIP

One way to stay in power is to kill off the opposition. No one in human history murdered more people than Joseph Stalin. Not even in the apex of Nazi destruction did a death count approach his. Through forced collectivization and purges during the 1930s, he eliminated somewhere between twenty and thirty million people and probably exceeded forty million by the time of his death in 1953. Heading a socialist state, the only one in the world at that time, Stalin was not by any indication in the killing business for the purpose of glory or sadism. He was, in theory, truly implementing the tenets of Marxism.

According to German philosopher Karl Marx, a country reaches communism by first undergoing industrialization then by eliminating the bourgeoisie. Stalin facilitated these changes through Five-Year Plans and purges. On the transformation from proletarian state to utopia, however, Marx wasn’t quite clear. The change was supposed to be a natural evolution, one that apparently had not taken place before a different German philosophy appeared at the gates of Moscow in 1941.

On paper, the Soviet Union was a free democratic republic. Its 1936 constitution guaranteed freedom of press, speech, assembly, religion, and universal suffrage. Apparently, Stalin also wanted to guarantee their right to imprisonment, starvation, and execution.

10. NATIONAL SOCIALIST DICTATORSHIP

Hitler’s regime differed too much from fascist states to be placed in the same category. Whereas most fascist parties tied themselves firmly to royal houses, National Socialists, or Nazis, had no monarchy or intention to create one. Most fascists readily identified with a conservative church, yet Hitler hoped to eventually eradicate organized religion. Fascism tended to stay rooted in the country it glorified. Nazism actively sought to “purify” societies beyond its own borders.