The awful toll taken by World War I convinced the western democracies that never should humanity have to again endure such a tragedy. Democratic leaders made every effort to avoid the mistakes that led to the First World War, especially the willingness to go to war over events in far away areas. From the point of view of new aggressors, however, this attitude reflected weakness, cowardice, and opportunity. Throughout the 1930s, Japan, Italy, and Germany aggressively sought to expand their territory while democratic leaders stood aside, unwilling to oppose them.
The first challenge to the fragile peace occurred in September 1931 when Japan moved into the traditional Chinese buffer zone of Manchuria. In occupying this region, Tokyo pursued centuries-old goals made more urgent by current pressures of resource scarcity and overpopulation. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria ultimately proved to be the first step on the road to World War II.
Japan had emerged as a world power late in the nineteenth century, but by the late 1920s the impact of the depression and a population crisis threatened its weakly rooted democratic institutions. Japan’s victory over Russia in the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War had served notice of the success of Japan’s progress. In two generations the island nation had changed from an isolated, mostly agricultural nation, into a modern, highly industrialized state. There were, however, serious problems. The rapidly increasing population strained the nation’s limited size and resources. In the government, liberal statesmen tried to strengthen democratic practices in an atmosphere that was traditionally hostile to democratic rule.
From 1889 to 1918 an aristocratic oligarchy (rule by a small group) of elder statesmen called the Genro controlled the Japanese government. By the 1920s, most of the elder statesmen had passed away and the field of politics was open to new blood. Hara Takashi, the first commoner to hold the post of prime minister, was elected to the office in 1918. Over the next twelve years Japan seemed to be moving toward the establishment of a democratic, parliamentary government under its new political leaders. However, the liberals faced serious obstacles. As in Italy and Germany, there was no widespread tradition of democratic practices in Japan. Japanese society had concentrated wealth and power in the hands of a few families, and the traditional culture favored authoritarianism over democracy.
Despite these obstacles, liberals in the Japanese parliament, the Diet, had made great progress as they tried to lead their nation away from militant nationalism. They pressed for reforms at home while criticizing the imperialistic intervention of the Japanese army in Siberia during the Russian Civil War. Although the democratic cause suffered a serious setback in 1921 with the assassination of Prime Minister Hara, the democratic forces continued their work. Passage of the Universal Manhood Suffrage Bill (allowing all adult males to vote) in 1925 strengthened the base of democracy. But in 1927, militarists captured control of the government. Under General Tanaka, they advocated expansion into the mainland of China as a solution to Japan’s lack of resources and living space. Tanaka’s government fell in 1929 and democrats again gained control of the government.
As was the case in Europe, as long as the economy remained strong, the forces of democracy did well. In the 1920s, the Japanese built thousands of factories that turned out products that enabled Japan to claim a major share of the world textile market and to flood the world with mass-produced, cheap, low-quality goods. Japanese industrialists were quick to adopt modern machine techniques and slow to raise wages. A few giant companies working together controlled the greater part of the country’s wealth. But prosperity, and by implication the liberals’ political position, rested on fragile foundations. Japan lacked natural resources, and its population grew at a rapid rate. In 1920, there were more than 55 million inhabitants. Eleven years later there were 65 million people, crowded into a land area smaller than the state of California. By 1932, the average annual population increase was 1 million. The Japanese economy had to create 250,000 jobs yearly and find the food to feed the growing population. Japan’s lack of natural resources forced them to depend heavily on imports of key materials. Over 80% of the nation’s iron ore and oil had to be imported. Up to 1930, Japan paid its way by expanding its exports, but between 1929 and 1931 the effects of the Great Depression cut their export trade in half. Unemployment soared, leading to wage cuts and strikes. As in Germany on the eve of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, frustration became widespread among the younger generation. In response to the economic crisis, Prime Minister Hamaguchi adopted moderate economic and foreign policies, which failed to satisfy the workers, and offended the militarists. Hamaguchi was shot in November 1930 and died the following spring. The assassin’s bullets dealt a fatal blow to Japanese democracy.
After Hamaguchi’s death, a wave of right-wing political assassinations ensued. After another prime minister was killed in 1932, the militarists were in total control. The new group of ultra-nationalistic leaders ruled not through a charismatic leader as in Germany and Italy but through a military clique. The members of the clique had nothing but contempt for democracy and peaceful policies as they terrorized the civilian members of the government. They plotted to shelve parliamentary government and planned to use military force to expand Japanese influence on the mainland of China. Their goals were to gain resources for the economy, living space for the population, markets for Japanese goods, and cultural domination throughout Asia. They militarists referred to their program as the New Order in Asia.
Japan’s expansionist goals in China had remained remarkably consistent for decades. During World War I, Japan declared war on Germany and seized German interests in China. With the western powers engaged in all-out war, Japan was able to force China to make additional concessions. The Chinese had no choice but to recognize Japan’s authority in Shantung province and extend Japanese land and rail concessions in southern Manchuria.
The Washington Naval Conference of 1921 had acknowledged the Japanese Navy as the third most powerful in the world. The signatories (United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Belgium, Netherlands, Portugal, and China) of the Nine-Power Treaty, signed in Washington in 1922, also, however, agreed to respect the independence, sovereignty, territoriality, and administrative integrity of China. In 1931, responding to population pressures and resource needs, the Japanese disregarded international treaties and opinions and invaded the rest of Chinese Manchuria. Unable to cope with the invader, the Chinese appealed to the League of Nations, which appointed a committee of inquiry in 1933. The committee’s report condemned the aggression, but at the same time tried not to anger Japan. The outcome was that the League neither put an end to the aggression nor kept Japan as a member, as two years later Tokyo withdrew from the organization.
Despite virtual civil war within China between Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist forces and the communist movement led by Mao Tse-tung, the Chinese put up strong resistance in the face of the Japanese threat. Following Soviet directions, Mao cooperated with Chiang against the Japanese. Neither of the parties trusted the other, but both feared the Japanese more. When the Chinese resorted to an effective nationwide boycott of Japanese goods, Japan attacked Shanghai in 1932 and began to push deeper into northern China. To slow down the invasion and give themselves a stronger chance in the inevitable struggle, the Chinese agreed to a truce in May 1933 that recognized Tokyo’s conquests in Manchuria and northern China.
In 1937 the Japanese, with no official declaration of hostility, renewed their advance and began what would be an eight-year period of war. Tokyo’s forces advanced rapidly up the Yangtze River to Nanking where they committed horrible atrocities (the infamous “Rape of Nanking”), captured Peking, and proclaimed their New Order in Eastern Asia. Their objectives were to destroy Chinese independence, expel western interests from East Asia, and establish a self-sufficient economic bloc to include Japan, Manchuria, and China.
None of the three great western powers that might have halted the Japanese advance in the 1930s did anything. Britain was in the depths of an economic crisis. France was suffering from political and economic paralysis. The United States was totally absorbed in fighting the depression. Only the Soviet Union took any positive steps to aid the Chinese. Military and economic aid flowed from the USSR to both the Nationalists and Communists. Even though the Chinese halted the Japanese advance by 1939, most of China’s major cities had been lost. Japan’s ability to devour most of China without any meaningful western opposition was not ignored in Europe where the failure to confront aggression would have even more tragic consequences.
While Japan pursued old goals in new ways, Italy set out to claim a prize it had failed to take in the Battle of Adawa in 1896, Ethiopia, the only important independent native state left in Africa. Late in 1934, fighting broke out between the Ethiopians and the Italians, and in the following year Mussolini’s forces invaded the country.
Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie made a dramatic appearance before the League of Nations to appeal for help. The League tried to arrange for arbitration (the settling of disputes by a third party). Unconvinced by the shameless Italian argument that Ethiopia, not Italy, was the aggressor, the League voted to prohibit shipment of certain goods to Italy and to deny it credit. But the effect of this embargo (refusal to trade) was only minor because oil, without which no modern army could fight, was not included in the list of prohibited articles. France and Britain gave only lukewarm support to the sanctions because they did not want to antagonize Italy. The United States, which had not joined the League, and Germany, which had left it by that time, largely ignored the prohibitions. Only outraged public opinion, moved by newspaper photographs showing barefooted Ethiopians fighting the modern Italian army, drove the governments to even the pretense (false effort) of action.
Using bombs, mustard gas, and tanks, the Italians advanced swiftly into Ethiopia and crushed Haile Selassie’s valiant but poorly armed soldiers. In May 1936, Mussolini formally announced the annexation of Ethiopia. In July, the League admitted its defeat and all of the sanctions against Italy were removed. Haile Selassie, an emperor without a country, went to live in Britain, the first of several royal exiles who would be forced from their countries in the next decade.
Soon after taking power in Germany, Hitler won his country’s support by disregarding the Treaty of Versailles. During his first two years in power, Hitler paid lip service to peace while beginning secretly to rearm. In March 1935, he publicly announced that Germany would no longer abide by the disarmament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles.
Hitler then took a gamble which he later described as producing the most nerve-wracking moments of his life. On March 7, 1936, German troops marched boldly into the demilitarized Rhineland (an area in Germany between the Rhine River and the French border) in direct defiance of the Versailles treaty. The Germans could not have resisted had the British and French moved in response. London did nothing and Paris mobilized 150,000 troops, but did no more. Hitler later confessed that had the French advanced against him, “We would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been totally inadequate for even a moderate resistance.”[1] But by this time France was totally a captive of the “Maginot mentality” of waiting in their massive fortresses, the Maginot Line, constructed on the German border and was mentally incapable of assuming the offensive against Germany.
The League of Nation’s weak response to the Japanese invasion of China and the Italian attack on Ethiopia combined with the feeble British and French reaction to German reoccupation of the Rhineland encouraged the aggressors and served as the prelude to the forming of the Axis Alliance. Until Hitler gained power, Germany had been without close allies. After the Ethiopian crisis and the League sanctions, Italy and Germany began to work more closely together. In 1936, they formalized the friendship in the Rome-Berlin Axis. One year later, Mussolini followed Hitler’s lead by withdrawing from the League of Nations.
Japan, the third major member of the Axis, joined forces with Germany in 1936 in the Anti-Comintern Pact directed against the Soviet Union. A year later, Italy also joined in the agreement, which effectively ringed the Soviet Union with powers hostile to communism. Many right-wing leaders in the west openly hoped that the Fuhrer and his allies would take care of the “Red Menace.”
1936 had proven to be a banner year for Hitler. He had gained allies, pleased his own people by remilitarizing the Rhineland, learned the weakness of the democratic powers and the League, and gained international prestige from his successful staging of the Olympic Games in Berlin.
Once the world’s strongest power in the sixteenth century, Spain had gradually fallen behind the other European powers. Primarily agricultural, Spain was isolated both culturally and economically from the rest of Europe by the Pyrenees Mountains. Spain’s Catholic Church was the most conservative in Europe and was closely identified with the monarchy and the small group of landowners that dominated the country. In the early twentieth century, industrial workers and peasants began to agitate for political change. Class conflict plagued Spain until 1931, when the king fled the country and a republic was proclaimed. At the end of the year, a new democratic constitution was adopted. The new constitution of the Spanish Republic was liberal and democratic, but it had the support of neither the radical left nor any of the right. The new government was especially opposed by the church, as the Republic’s leaders attempted to provide for complete separation of church and state. In early 1936, a Popular Front coalition of leftists won a close national election, defeating a rightist coalition by only 400,000 votes out of 8.6 million. Unwilling to submit to the authority of the new government, rightist military leaders launched a revolt in July 1936.
General Francisco Franco commanded the rebels who included most of the regular army troops and drew their support from the Catholic Church, the wealthy, and many rural Spaniards. Mussolini immediately backed Franco with men and supplies and the rightist forces expected a quick victory. However, many groups stood by the Republic, and they put up a strong resistance against the insurgents (rebels), stopping them at the outskirts of Madrid.
By the end of 1936 each side had gained the backing of a complicated alliance of forces. While Spain bled, suffering more than 700,000 deaths, outside forces took advantage of the tragic situation for their own selfish purposes. Franco had the support of the Italians, who sent 50,000 troops as well as a large numbers of planes and weapons, and the Germans, who were eager to test their latest military technology in a real war. The democratic powers, Great Britain, France, and the United States, attempted to stay officially out of the conflict. Britain did not want to risk a continental war. France suffered from the same type of internal divisions that had plagued Spain, and its leaders feared that their country, too, might have a similar civil war. The United States declared its official neutrality. Instead of permitting arms to be sent to the recognized, legally constituted Loyalist government, which had the right under international law to purchase weapons for self-defense, Great Britain and France set up a nonintervention system by which the nations of Europe agreed not to send arms to either side. This arrangement, meant to limit the scope of the conflict, was followed only by the democracies. The Soviet Union was the only major country to aid the Republic, sending arms, advisers, and other supplies. Although the western democracies refused to aid the Republic, large numbers of idealistic anti-fascists from France, Britain and the United States formed volunteer International Brigades to fight on the Loyalist side; 40,000 fought in these brigades, including 3,000 Americans. Despite these sources of aid, Franco’s Nationalists received more than five times the amount of foreign aid raised by the Republic. The war in Spain became a tragic symbol for the decade, as only the political extremes took action, while the democracies stood weakly on the sidelines.
The assistance provided to Franco by the Italians and Germans proved to be decisive, especially in regard to air power. Nationalist forces moved under the cover of air support, while the Republic’s forces were constantly under aerial attack. In 1937, German planes destroyed the town of Guernica in an assault that left 2,500 civilians dead or wounded in a preview of the horrors to come in the Second World War. Madrid finally fell to the Nationalists in March 1939, and the Spanish Republic was no more. Franco, at the head of the new state, gained absolute power which he held until his death in 1975. The forces of aggression had again triumphed due to the unwillingness of the democracies to oppose them. The French writer Albert Camus offered a sad elegy for the Spanish Republic:
It was in Spain that men learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many men, the world over, regard the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.[2]
In 1937, Conservative Party leader Neville Chamberlain became prime minister of Great Britain. He wanted to make “more positive overtures to Germany, to appease (satisfy) her grievances, and reach a settlement on the basis not of fear by deterrence but of mutual interests and separate spheres of influence.” Chamberlain’s name came to symbolize the policy of appeasement, in which he attempted to deal with Hitler by addressing Germany’s post-Versailles complaints in a conciliatory (agreeable) manner.[3]
Chamberlain took the direction of foreign policy on his own shoulders in his attempt to explore every possibility for reaching an understanding with Hitler. He based his policy on the most humane of motives, a sincere desire for peace, and on the most civilized of assumptions, that Hitler could be reasonable and fair minded if Germany’s grievances were addressed. His policies were strongly supported in Great Britain and throughout most of the British Commonwealth. In 1933, the students of Oxford University had voted 275-153 in favor of a resolution to, “in no circumstances fight for King and Country.”
Hitler became increasingly aware of the opportunity presented by Britain’s “peace at any price” policy. When he had announced the military reoccupation of the Rhineland he had stated, “We have no territorial demands to make in Europe.” It was a lie. By 1938, with the German army growing in strength and the air force becoming a powerful unit, Hitler began to implement one of his foreign policy goals--placing the German-speaking peoples of Europe under one Reich. The first step on that path was to unite Austria and Germany in the Anschluss (literally, a joining).
In 1934, the Nazis had badly bungled an attempt to annex Austria, but by 1938 the Austrian Nazi party had grown to the extent that intense pressure could be levied against Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg to cooperate with Berlin. After a stormy meeting with Hitler in February, Schuschnigg restated his country’s desire to be independent although he did agree to release imprisoned Austrian Nazis and appoint the party’s leader, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Minister of the Interior. In March, Schuschnigg announced that he would conduct a plebiscite (public referendum) to prove his point that a majority of Austrian opposed Anschluss. Outraged at this action, Hitler moved his forces to the Austrian border. Schuschnigg then resigned in favor of Seyss-Inquart who invited German troops into Austria on March 12. Two days later, Hitler rode triumphantly into Vienna where he was met by cheering crowds. In the month following the Anschluss, the Nazis launched a wave of terror against their political opponents. Austria’s 180,000 Jews were assaulted in a manner far more extreme than had previously occurred in Germany. An American eyewitness noted:
For the first few weeks, the behavior of the Vienna Nazis was worse than anything I had seen in Germany. There was an orgy of sadism. Day after day, large numbers of Jewish men and women could be seen scrubbing Schuschnigg signs off the sidewalk and cleaning the gutters. While they worked on their hands and knees with jeering storm troopers standing over them, crowds gathered to taunt them. Hundreds of Jews, men and women, were picked off the streets and put to work cleaning public latrines (toilets) and the toilets of the barracks where the SA and SS were quartered. Tens of thousands more were jailed. Their worldly possessions were confiscated or stolen….[4]
Chamberlain now had few options in dealing with the rapidly re-arming Germans. Prior to 1935, the British had assumed that there could be no European war that could jeopardize her security for at least ten years. As a result, Britain was woefully equipped to deal militarily with the Nazi threat. In 1938, the British only had two divisions (there are approximately 12,000 troops per division) available for service on the continent, neither of which possessed a single tank. In contrast, Germany had the capability to mobilize 79 well-equipped divisions within a week. Britain’s major ally, France, had only 33 divisions.[5]
Britain and France were also reluctant to reach out to Hitler’s most adamant enemy--the Soviet Union. In many western countries, Hitler’s rise to power had been observed as a positive development, shielding the rest of Europe from communism. The British had also seriously misjudged the Soviet Union and its leader Joseph Stalin. Still remembering Lenin’s calls to spread the communist revolution throughout the world, the British failed to recognize that Stalin had virtually shelved this goal in favor of strengthening his own country. The Great Purges, where Stalin executed 11 of his top 13 military commanders, had also convinced the British that the USSR was worthless as an ally. As British historian A.J.P. Taylor wrote: “Nearly every Western observer was convinced that Soviet Russia was useless as an ally: her ruler a savage and unscrupulous dictator, her armies in chaos, her political system likely to collapse at the first strain.”[6]
Forced to choose, Chamberlain preferred to negotiate with Hitler rather than ally with the Soviet Union to oppose him. The rest of the democratic world became uneasily aware of its growing weakness in comparison with the strength of the dictators. As a result, the Axis’ prestige blossomed. Some nations tried to make deals with Germany and Italy, while others, including the Scandinavian countries and Holland, withdrew into the shelter of neutrality and “innocent isolation.” In Eastern Europe, semi-fascist regimes came to be the order of the day, as the states in that unhappy region, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, lined up to get in Germany’s good graces. In all of Eastern Europe, only Czechoslovakia maintained its alliance with France. In 1934, Poland had signed a nonaggression pact with Germany and Belgium also gave up its alliance with France
Following his unopposed success in Austria, Hitler moved on to his next objective, the annexation of the Sudetenland. Mainly German textile workers, who had suffered badly during the depression, populated this area along the northern border of Czechoslovakia. The Sudetenland was also the site of the extremely well fortified Czech defenses against Germany. As in Austria, the Germans had supported the development of a local Nazi party. Led by Konrad Henlein, the Sudeten Nazis had constantly agitated against the Czech government. In September 1938, Hitler bluntly informed Chamberlain that he was determined to gain self-determination for the Sudeten Germans. He charged, falsely, that the Czechs had mistreated the German minorities. In fact, among the Eastern European states, Czechoslovakia had the best record in dealing with minority nationalities. But in this affair, Britain and France’s desire to avoid conflict with Germany caused them to ignore both the record of the Czech government and the blatancy of the Nazi lies.
Chamberlain persuaded French Premier Edouard Daladier that the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia could save the peace. Although Britain had no treaty obligations to the Czechs, France was obligated to fight if Czechoslovakia was attacked. The Soviet Union had also indicated its willingness to come to the aid of Czechoslovakia if France would keep its obligations. During September 1938, Chamberlain traveled to Germany three times to meet with Hitler to discuss the Sudetenland. During these discussions, no Czech representatives were present nor were the Russians consulted. Chamberlain clearly had no intent of negotiating on behalf of the beleaguered Czechs. Prior to his final meeting with Hitler, Chamberlain told the British people: “How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between peoples of whom we know nothing!” After meeting with Hitler, Mussolini, and Daladier on September 30, Chamberlain accepted all of Hitler’s demands and, in addition, rewarded Poland and Hungary with slices of unfortunate Czechoslovakia. In return, Hitler reiterated an earlier pledge that, “This is the last territorial claim I have to make in Europe.” Although the Czech government discussed ignoring the agreement, demoralized and realizing that they had been stripped of their allies, they decided to acquiesce (agree or comply).[7] The tragedy for the Czechs brought relief for millions of Europeans, half-crazed with fear of war. Chamberlain was greeted as hero upon his return to Britain, proclaiming that the Munich Agreement had secured “peace in our time.” But thoughtful individuals pondered whether this settlement would be followed by yet another crisis. Winston Churchill, one of the few open critics of appeasement in Britain, solemnly had warned prior to the agreement:
The partition of Czechoslovakia under pressure from England and France amounts to the complete surrender of the Western Democracies to the Nazi threat of force. Such a collapse will bring peace or security neither to England nor to France. On the contrary, it will place these two nations in an ever-weaker and more dangerous situation…. The belief that security can be obtained by throwing a small state to the wolves is a fatal delusion.[8]
The mounting fears of French and British statesmen were confirmed in 1939. Deprived of its military defenses on the German border, the Czech government stood unprotected against the Nazi pressure that culminated in March. Hitler summoned Czech president Emil Hacha to Berlin. Subjected to all kinds of threats during an all-night session, Hacha finally yielded and signed a document placing his country under the “protection” of Germany. His signature was a mere formality, however, for German troops were already crossing the Czech frontier. Not to be outdone, Mussolini’s troops crossed the Adriatic Sea and seized Albania the following month. The two dictators then celebrated by signing a military alliance, the so-called Pact of Steel.
The Germans incorporated the northern part of Czechoslovakia into the Reich. The southern area became the independent country of Slovakia. As a result of these actions, 315,000 more European Jews either fell under Nazi control or that of their anti-Semitic puppet state of Slovakia. In addition to the actions of the Nazis, anti-Semitism was dramatically on the rise in Poland and Hungary. With western countries unwilling to provide refuge for large numbers, by 1939 the avenues of escape for Central European Jews had been virtually eliminated.
In response to the taking of Czechoslovakia and violation of the Munich Agreement, Britain finally ended its appeasement policy and for the first time in its history authorized a peacetime draft. In France, Daladier gained special emergency powers to also accelerate preparations for national defense.
In the United States, however, isolationism still reigned supreme. The Neutrality Acts of 1935-1937 were designed to prevent a recurrence of the events that many Americans now believed had pressured the United States into World War I. The 1935 law established a mandatory arms embargo against both sides in any military conflict and empowered the president to warn American citizens that they might travel on the ships of warring nations only at their own risk. Thus, isolationists believed, the “protection of neutral rights” could not again become an excuse for American intervention in war. The 1936 Neutrality Act renewed these provisions. In 1937, with world conditions growing even more precarious (dangerous), Congress passed the so-called “cash-and-carry policy”, by which belligerents (countries at war) could purchase only nonmilitary goods from the United States and had to pay cash and ship their purchases themselves.
At the same time, in response to events in Ethiopia, Spain, and along the Rhine, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the State Department worked cautiously to alert the American people to the dangers of the world situation. In October 1937, Roosevelt pointed out that “the peace, the freedom, and the security of 90% of the population of the world is being jeopardized by the remaining 10% who are threatening a breakdown of all international order and law.” The president’s call, in this so-called “Quarantine Speech,” for “positive endeavors to preserve peace” brought forth a hostile reaction from the isolationist press and public. This hostility forced Roosevelt to virtually abandon efforts to speak out against aggression.
Only months later another event gave renewed evidence of how formidable the obstacles were that stood in the way of Roosevelt's efforts to alert Americans to the dangers of aggression. On December 12, 1937, Japanese aviators bombed and sank the U.S. gunboat Panay as it sailed the Yangtze River in China. The attack was almost undoubtedly deliberate. It occurred in broad daylight, with clear visibility, and a large American flag had been painted conspicuously on the Panay's deck. Even so, the American public seized eagerly on Japanese claims that the bombing had been an accident and pressured the administration to accept Japan's apologies and overlook the attack.
The final step on the road to World War II was Germany’s attack on Poland. The Treaty of Versailles had turned over West Prussia to Poland as a Polish corridor to the sea. While 90% of the corridor’s population was Polish, the Baltic port city of Danzig, a free city administered by the League of Nations, was nearly all German. Late in March 1939, Hitler proposed to Poland that Danzig be ceded to Germany and that the Nazis be allowed to occupy the narrow strip of land connecting Germany with East Prussia. Chamberlain, with French agreement, finally stood up to Hitler:
Last week Poland got what Czechoslovakia had pleaded for in vain. Before a hushed, crowded House of Commons 70-year-old Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, former arch-exponent of appeasing the dictators, announced: “In the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces. His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend all the support in their power. They have given the Polish Government an assurance to this effect.”[9]
Although this clearly indicated that Britain and France were willing to go to war to prevent another concession to Hitler, it was an essentially symbolic gesture as Poland’s geographic separation from them made any useful western military aid impossible.
The most crucial question in dealing with the threat to Poland involved the Soviet Union. The Soviets had been steadfast in their condemnation of Nazi aggression throughout the decade. While Britain and France had stood aside, the Soviets had sent men and supplies to aid Loyalist Spain. Prior to the Munich Conference, the Soviets had pledged to defend Czechoslovakia regardless of Britain and France’s actions. Throughout this process the western democracies had shunned Soviet aid. At Munich, the Soviets were not even invited to discuss an issue that so clearly involved their security. From the Soviet perspective the issue was very clear. As a Soviet textbook later wrote, “The Munich Agreement marked the high point of the Western Powers’ policy of encouraging Fascist aggression in hope of turning it against the Soviet Union.”[10]
In the months that followed the Allied pledges to Poland, France and Britain now competed with Germany for an alliance with Russia. It was clearly in Britain and France’s interest to negotiate an alliance with Stalin, forcing Hitler to face the threat of a two-front war similar to the First World War. Again, the British blundered. It was not until late July that Britain sent a delegation to Moscow to negotiate with the Soviets. Despite the mounting crisis, Britain seemed to be in no hurry. Rather than quickly send a delegation empowered to make an alliance, the British sent their party in a slow steamer. When discussions finally began on August 12, the British negotiators were unauthorized to meet either of the Soviet’s two main demands. Britain was unwilling to pressure their Polish allies to allow Soviet troops to enter Poland in order to engage an invading German army. In addition, Britain expected the Soviets to agree to intervene if Germany attacked British interests, but were unwilling to pledge that they would respond if the Germans attacked the Soviet Union.
Stalin had closely observed the actions of the democratic powers since Hitler’s rise to power. He was aware of the hope expressed in some western, conservative circles that Hitler might effectively put an end to the Soviet regime. He now two had sets of suitors (wooers) competing for Soviet partnership. In May, Vyacheslav Molotov replaced Maxim Litvinov as the Soviet foreign minister. Litvinov, a Jew, had been an uncompromising anti-Nazi, but Molotov was a more pragmatic politician. While Molotov negotiated publicly with the British and French, he was also in secret contact with the highest levels of the Third Reich.
For centuries Germany and Russia had shared a common concern with the fate of Poland. They had been able to reach agreement at Poland’s expense in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and partition the country between themselves. From late 1938 on, Moscow and Berlin pondered yet another division of the country. For Hitler, the advantages of such an alliance were obvious. He would be free to deal with Poland, knowing that Britain and France could offer the Poles little aid, without the fear of being exposed to a prolonged two-front war. Negotiations between the Soviets and Nazis proceeded intensely from June through August 1939. By August, Stalin could choose between the western democracies with their spotty record of defending their friends and Nazi Germany that could offer him concrete advantages in Eastern Europe. An alliance with Britain and France clearly committed the Soviet Union to a war with Germany for which, in the wake of the purges, she was ill equipped. On the other hand, an alliance with Germany allowed the Soviets to gain territory without firing a single shot. Through secret parts of the German proposal, the Soviets would also gain Estonia, Latvia, Eastern Poland, and Bessarabia. Germany would get everything to the west including Lithuania. Stalin’s choice was obvious. On August 21, 1939, to the world’s great amazement, the two former archenemies, the Soviet Union and Germany, signed a nonaggression pact:
Late Sunday night--not the usual time for such announcements--the Soviet Government revealed a pact, not with Great Britain, not with France, but with Germany…. To the bewilderment of almost everybody else in the world, and the consternation (alarm) of the non-totalitarian four-fifths of it, the announcement was confirmed in Moscow the next morning. Russia had got into a peace pact, but not with the nations she had been doing the public dickering with. A nightmare which the European democracies and their satellites only whispered about was the alliance of great Communist Russia with great Fascist Germany, a mighty cordon of non-democracy stretching one-third around the world from the Atlantic to the Pacific.[11]
The Nazi-Soviet Pact marked the final event in the chain of events that had led the world to the brink of a Second World War. Now Hitler was free to attack Poland without fear of Moscow’s intervention.
Throughout the 1930s, in what the English poet W.H. Auden described as “a low, dishonest decade,” the western democracies had been unwilling to confront the new aggressor states themselves or ally with the Soviet Union in order to do so. As a result, Germany, Japan, and Italy had grown so strong that their leaders believed that the West would not dare oppose them or that, in the event that the West did choose to fight, they could defeat them in the event of war. Within days of the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the world was again to be at war. A war that had been, in a large part, caused by the determination of many countries never to go to war again.
Jeffrey T. Stroebel, The
Sycamore School, 1996. Revised 1998.
[1] John Toland, Adolf Hitler (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977), pp. 522-529.
[2]Reader’s Digest, Great Events of the 20th Century (Pleasantville, New York: Reader’s Digest, 1977), p. 264
[3] Keith Middlemas, The Strategy of Appeasement (Chicago:
Quadrangle Books, 1972), pp. 1-8.
[4] William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
(Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1962), p.477.
[5] Mark Arnold Forster, The World At War (New York: Stein and Day, 1973), pp. 17-18.
[6] A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (London: Penguin, 1961) p. 147.
[7] In retrospect, the Czech government made a tragic error in not resisting the Germans. The Czechs had a million and a half well-trained men behind the strongest fortress line in Europe. After the war, German General Wilhelm Keitel stated that Germany would not have attacked Czechoslovakia had the Western Powers guaranteed her security, “Certainly not. We were on strong enough militarily.” It has also been alleged that the German General Staff was plotting to overthrow Hitler to avoid being committed to a war for which they believed Germany was not yet ready. This plot collapsed when the Munich Conference gave Hitler the Sudetenland.
[8] Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm” (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), pp. 303-304.
[9] Time 27 April 1939.
[10] Graham Lyons ed., The Russian Version of the Second World War
(New York: Facts on File, 1976), p. 8.
[11] Time 28 August 1939.