Further Understanding:World War II Causes
Unlike WWI, where a variety of complex factors were at play, WWII (in Europe) was primarily the result of two nations (Germany and Italy) unsatisfied with the status quo imposed by WWI.
German Ambitions:Germany was on the losing side of the Central Powers during WWI. It lost significant portions of territory, including the Polish Corridor, border lands along the Polish border, and critical industrial sectors along the western French border. It was also forced to pay suffocating reparations to pay for the damage from WWI. It was natural for it to seek to regain its military might. Once this was achieved, it was prepared to avenge its loss in WWI, and reassert itself as the dominant power in Central Europe, and perhaps most or all of Europe.
Italy Ambitions:Italy was on the victorious Allied side during WWI, paying a steep price in its contribution to victory. Hundreds of thousands lost their lives fighting the Austrians, in which Italy was ultimately victorious. Despite this, the Allies reneged on promises of land awards along the eastern banks of the Adriatic Sea, which was instead awarded to Yugoslavia. Italians were seriously disenchanted at the minimal gains they were ceded in light of the heavy cost they paid to fight the Austrians along their own border.
Appeasement:The Allied powers who enforced the status quo established after WWI, such as the UK, France and the USA, were unwilling to intercede when Germany began to once again assert itself as a militarized power. Although in violation of the peace treaty ending WWI, the Allies stood by as Germany rebuilt its military, annexed Austria, and invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939. They also refused to act when Italy invaded Albania in 1939. As a result, Germany was emboldened to continue its invasions into Poland in 1939, which did finally elicit declarations of war from the Allies.
Racism:Germans viewed ethnic Slavs as an inferior race, and were therefore self-empowered and self-justified to invade and capture their lands without inhibition to the east in order to expand its territorial control.
Fascism:The social and economic turbulence that gripped Europe during the Global Depression gave rise to dictatorship-led governments, in order to establish order (although at the expense of individual liberties). When democracy and capitalism failed to pull nations out of the depression, fascist governments gained favor throughout much of Europe, including Germany and Italy. Hitler and Mussolini instituted tight social and economic controls, typical of fascist governments. Fervent nationalism and militarism are also typical of fascism, which drove both nations to build-up their militaries and seek to expand at the expense of neighboring nations.
The Philosophy of Fascism
Europe, 1922-1945
The following are the beliefs of the fascist governments in Europe during the period 1922-1945 as evidenced by their practices. These ARE NOT the beliefs of the author.
1.There should be a powerful, authoritarian government.
Democracy causes chaos, people don't know what to believe, conflicting opinions and party disagreements harm the government and the nation.
2. The country must arm itself
The army and navy have to be strong to defeat the Communist threat, both from outside - the Soviet Union - and from Communists inside the country. The reopening of factories making weapons will help the economy; the demand for iron, steel, coal, and other basic products will increase; and people will be put back to work.
3. All media and information must be government-controlled.
Books, newspapers, magazines, and radio should be restricted and censored, so Communists and others who disagree with the government will have no forum for their propaganda. Meetings of opposition parties should be broken up, using violence if necessary. All history, art, music, and learning should portray the country and its past heroically; nothing negative about the country or its government should be published or taught.
4. Unions should be outlawed and business serve the government's goals.
When workers organize, they disrupt business and interfere with national economic development. Unions spread Communist teachings. The government should sponsor worker's societies, teaching the value of sacrifice for the good of the nation. Businesses should produce the goods the government requests, and they in turn will be helped to make a profit.
5. Some racial and religious groups are inferior and should have no power in business and government.
The inferior groups vary from nation to nation, but, generally, anyone with a dark skin or a non-Christian religion is suspect. Jews, in particular, are undesirable because they have conspired to bring economic chaos, through their control of banks and business. Since the white race is superior, it should conquer the inferiors and use their lands and resources.
'The seed of peace, not dragon's teeth' cartoon of Hitler, from the magazineKladderadatsch, 22 March 1936
Sewer of peace
Much of Hitler's popularity after coming to power rested on his achievements in foreign policy. A recurring theme in Nazi propaganda before 1939 was that Hitler was a man of peace, but one who was determined to recover German territories 'lost' as a result of the Versailles Treaty of 1919, drawn up at the end of World War One.
In 1936, when Germany re-occupied the Rhineland in contravention of Versailles, Hitler attempted to placate the Allies by speciously offering to conclude non-aggression treaties with France and Belgium, and to return Germany to the League of Nations.
The cartoon above is from the right-wing magazineKladderadatsch. It dates from after Germany's illegal occupation of the Rhineland, but presents Hitler as a statesmanlike sewer of peace. The figure of Peace is shown in the background, blowing a trumpet fanfare.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, the German periodic press had embraced a robust tradition of political satire. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Nazis seized upon the cartoon as an important propaganda vehicle.
Drifting in Vienna
Having moved to Vienna in 1907, his failure to get into Art school came as a major blow. His money from an orphan's pension and borrowed from relatives eventually ran out, and he was forced to take refuge in men's hostels where he lived from 1909 to 1913.
The Courtyard of the Old Residency in Munich - Adolf Hitler
Not sufficiently strong for manual labor - contrary to his claim in his book,Mein Kampf('My Struggle'), to having been a building worker - he eked out a precarious existence selling his reproductions of famous sights which were hawked by hostel acquaintances.
Despite his poverty, Hitler engaged actively with his political and intellectual environment...
Pre-1914 Vienna - the capital of a multi-ethnic empire with a highly sophisticated, mainly Jewish, upper middle class, a deeply conservative and Catholic petty bourgeoisie, and a growing and increasingly radicalized working class - was like a magnifying glass focusing and concentrating the ideas, artistic trends and political forces that were to shape the century into a purer and more extreme form than anywhere else in Europe: ethnic nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism, Socialism, psychoanalysis, and modern forms of painting, music, crafts and architecture.
Despite his poverty, Hitler engaged actively with his political and intellectual environment, devouring newspapers and pamphlets, attending the Imperial parliament and witnessing the violent confrontations between the rival ethnic and political groups which paralyzed it, rendering it an object of contempt to much of the population, including Hitler himself.
His experiences in Vienna sharpened the Pan German nationalism that he had absorbed in his school days, increasing his contempt for the Habsburg Empire. He also developed a strong hostility towards the Socialist movement, fuelled partly by its internationalism, but also by his unwillingness to identify with the working class and his determination to retain his self-image as a superior being despite his actual inferior social position.
Although Hitler absorbed the racist and anti-Semitic discourses that so shaped the Viennese political and intellectual climate and was to reproduce their arguments and clichés years later, at the time he does not appear to have been hostile to Jews, at any rate on a personal level, since many of his closest associates in the men's hostel, who helped him sell his pictures, were in fact Jews.
Bad news
Over the last ten years new terms have entered the English language. We have 'spin doctors' who, on a 'bad news day', manipulate information to protect their government's 'media flank.' Terminology of this sort is particularly common on military operations, where 'media minders' supervise 'pools' of those journalists who have not been 'embedded', so that their reports can be 'shaped' to conform to the dictates of an all embracing information strategy.
Many deplore the news management of the current age, hearkening back to earlier periods, when fearlessly independent reporters exposed wickedness and brought governments down.
... the British government manipulated information to increase the chances of national survival.
Of course, there never was such a time. Beginning with the emergence of the Greek city states in the fifth century BC, all governments have attempted to manipulate information to their advantage, and have often suppressed those who have sought to tell a different story. This tendency is most apparent when the very existence of the state is under threat. In extreme situations governments can interpret chance events - storms, fortuitous deaths, and so on - as evidence of the intervention of an external agency (often supernatural) working on their behalf.
Such agencies can come in the form of fate (Athens 480BC), a divine wind (Japan 1281), a protestant God (England 1588), a special providence (Prussia 1762) - example could be piled upon example. In the early summer of 1940 Britain's very existence was threatened, and unsurprisingly, the British government manipulated information to increase the chances of national survival.
The people and the media
Sixty years ago there were three main ways of receiving information. Britain had over eight million wireless sets, about one for every six people, and audiences for popular programs, for example the BBC's nine o'clock news, could number 20 million. In addition to listening to the wireless, most adults visited the cinema at least once a week, and nearly half the population went twice a week.
The cinemas were supplied by five newsreel companies, who could turn out a new newsreel every week, although the most famous, Pathé, could usually produce two a week. Finally, virtually all British households subscribed to a weekly paper or magazine, while the collective circulation of daily newspapers showed that the British market had reached saturation point.
... about four million men and women over the age of 40 had served in the war.
By today's standards the population was not as well educated (only 7 per cent had been to university), but they were very much more sophisticated in their understanding of the nature of war and of war reporting. Nearly three quarters of Britain's 48 million people had lived through World War One, and about four million men and women over the age of 40 had served in the war.
They understood the language of military communiqués, in which 'withdrawal' meant 'retreat', 'regrouping' meant 'disorganization', and 'consolidation' meant 'disaster impending'. They were not a population it would be easy to tell lies to in the event of a military reverse - indeed, it would have been foolish to try.
An ill-prepared America
President Roosevelt declares war on Japan following the attack at Pearl Harbor. ©
With war so widely expected, why was America so woefully ill-prepared? Rumors that began in the war are still hanging around, well past their sell-by date, fuelled only by revisionist historians and conspiracy cranks. They claim Roosevelt was itching for war with Japan but was constrained by US neutrality, so needed a solid reason to fight. Hence they accuse him of suppressing prior knowledge of the attack, or of provoking it to enable America to enter the war by the back door. Some even say that the attack on Pearl Harbor was deliberately engineered by a crypto-communist president guilty of high treason.
In 1941 America was not ready for war.
It doesn't add up. In 1941 America was not ready for war. With US forces queuing for arms alongside Britain and Russia, Roosevelt knew he needed more time to build America's military capacity. If war was to come, he wanted Japan to be seen to be the aggressor, but Roosevelt was in no hurry.
Furthermore, he saw Germany as America's main enemy. This 'Europe first' strategy was affirmed with Churchill at the Arcadia conference in late December 1941. Roosevelt had already pushed neutrality to the limit and had assigned warships to accompany convoys in the Atlantic. War with Germany was only a matter of time: why choose to fight another with Japan? Even when European conflict came, it did so only on Hitler's invitation after he gratuitously declared war.
Turnaround
The central question of the German-Soviet war is why, after two years of defeats, and the loss of more than five million men and two-thirds of the industrial capacity of the country, the Red Army was able to blunt, then drive back, the German attack.
Camouflage, surprise and misinformation were brilliantly exploited to keep the German army in the dark ...
The idea that the USSR had limitless manpower, despite its heavy losses, is inadequate as an answer. Germany and her allies also possessed a large population, and added to it the peoples of the captured Soviet areas - men and women who were forced to work for the German army or were shipped back to work in the Reich. Soviet armies were always desperately short of men.
Above all, Soviet tactics in 1941-2 were extremely wasteful of manpower. If the Red Army had continued to fight the same way, it would simply have sustained escalating losses for little gain.
Nor did the USSR enjoy an advantage in economic resources. After the German attack, Soviet steel production fell to eight million tons in 1942, while German production was 28 million tons. In the same year, Soviet coal output was 75 million tons, while German output was 317 million. The USSR nevertheless out-produced Germany in the quantity (though seldom in the quality) of most major weapons, from this much smaller industrial base.
The impressive production of weapons was achieved by turning the whole of the remaining Soviet area into what Stalin called 'a single armed camp', focusing all efforts on military production and extorting maximum labor from a workforce whose only guarantee of food was to turn up at the factory and work the arduous 12-hour shifts. Without Lend-Lease aid, however, from the United States and Britain, both of whom supplied a high proportion of food and raw materials for the Soviet war effort, the high output of weapons would still not have been possible.
The chief explanation lies not in resources, which Germany was more generously supplied with than the Soviet Union, during the two central years of the war before American and British economic power was fully exerted. It lies instead in the remarkable reform of the Red Army and the Russian air force, undertaken slowly in 1942.
Every area of Soviet military life was examined and changes introduced. The army established the equivalent of the heavily armored German Panzer divisions, and tank units were better organized - thanks to the introduction of radios. Soviet army tactics and intelligence-gathering were also overhauled.
Camouflage, surprise and misinformation were brilliantly exploited to keep the German army in the dark about major Soviet intentions. The air force was subjected to effective central control and improved communications, so that it could support the Soviet army in the same way as the Luftwaffe backed up German forces.
Total sacrifice
Although some Japanese were taken prisoner, most fought until they were killed or committed suicide. In the last, desperate months of the war, this image was also applied to Japanese civilians. To the horror of American troops advancing on Saipan, they saw mothers clutching their babies hurling themselves over the cliffs rather than be taken prisoner.
Not only were there virtually no survivors of the 30,000 strong Japanese garrison on Saipan, two out of every three civilians - some 22,000 in all - also died.
The other enduring image of total sacrifice is that of the kamikaze pilot, plowing his plane packed with high explosives into an enemy warship. Even today, the word 'kamikaze' evokes among Japan's former enemies visions of crazed, mindless destruction.