The Road to War, 1931–1941 — the study guide

CHAPTER 1 · 1931 · 1931

The World the Slump Made

Before the Pacific map changes, Japan already possesses an empire. In two generations it has acquired Korea, Taiwan and islands across the Pacific. Those possessions have not made its economy self-sufficient: industry needs imported oil and metals, and exporters need customers abroad. Nearby lie the colonial territories of Britain, France, the Netherlands and the United States, including British Malaya and the oil-producing Dutch East Indies. China is nominally unified under Chiang Kai-shek, but warlords and a communist insurgency limit his government’s reach.

The Depression made dependence on the outside world more frightening. Japan’s silk earnings fell sharply, bringing hardship to farming villages. Army officers could point to that suffering when they argued that foreign powers might deprive Japan of the resources it needed. Across the world, unemployment undermined German parliamentary parties, and the Nazis grew from a marginal party into a mass movement. The crisis gave expansionists an audience for promises of jobs and security as well as territory.

There was nothing inevitable about that response. Other countries endured the slump without invading their neighbors, and Japan’s empire and Hitler’s ambitions had roots older than the crash. Autarky nevertheless offered a language in which conquest could be presented as protection. Japanese planners called Manchuria a ‘lifeline’; Hitler would later seek eastern ‘living space.’ Both plans sought control over land and resources, though their ideologies were different.

Ideas required people able to turn them into policy. In Japan, field commanders could defy the cabinet. In Germany, conservatives who opposed democracy and the left hoped to make use of the Nazi movement. The Depression opened opportunities for both sets of actors; militarism, racial ideology and decisions made within their different institutions shaped what they did with them.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The Depression and a closing world. World trade’s dollar value fell by roughly two-thirds between 1929 and 1933. Governments also raised barriers: the United States passed Smoot–Hawley in 1930, and Britain adopted imperial preference in 1932. Japan already possessed an empire, yet its leaders saw competitors controlling markets and raw materials elsewhere. If trade was being organized into protected blocs, some reasoned, Japan needed a larger bloc of its own. Manchuria became a ‘lifeline’; Hitler would later call the east ‘living space.’

The Washington order and its limits. The Washington treaties of the 1920s offered rules for the Pacific: naval ratios, the Open Door in China and consultation among powers. Their force depended on governments respecting them or acting when they were broken. The League had no army, and Britain and the United States were unwilling or unable to commit force to reverse the seizure of Manchuria. China could appeal to agreements, but the agreements did not automatically bring protection.

The army and the cabinet. Japan’s army claimed a direct relationship with the Emperor rather than ordinary subordination to the prime minister. That left Tokyo with a difficult problem when officers in the field disobeyed. Kwantung Army officers guarding the Manchurian railway concession assassinated the warlord Zhang Zuolin in 1928 and escaped effective punishment. In 1931 the army minister sent a general to check another plot, but word of the visit reached the officers concerned. Civilian weakness would matter when they acted.

China’s divided position. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists had nominally unified China in 1928, but their government faced rival warlords and communist bases in the south. Catastrophic Yangtze floods added to its troubles in 1931. Japanese radicals expected Nanking to seek legal help abroad rather than offer effective immediate military resistance. They were less attentive to what repeated concessions and humiliation could do over time: resentment could strengthen Chinese nationalism.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A pretext takes shape. In the summer of 1931, Kwantung Army staff officers Ishiwara and Itagaki prepared a railway incident, choosing where to place the explosive charge. The next chapter follows their plan into the night of the explosion.

The Weimar center weakens. The European map shows another political consequence of the slump. Weimar’s last majority government fell in 1930, and by late 1932 the Nazis were the largest party in a fragmented Reichstag, though they had no majority. Chapter 3 follows the bargain that brought Hitler to office.

The democracies and defense. Economic pressure also affected the democracies’ defenses. They reduced military spending, while Britain’s ‘ten-year rule’ assumed that a major war was not imminent. As threats grew, those decisions left the democracies less prepared; the advantage to an aggressor varied with the country and theater.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

How far was the road to war laid by economics rather than ideology?

The Depression changed politics dramatically: the Nazi vote rose from 2.6% in 1928 to 37% in July 1932, and Japanese military radicals gained support amid rural hardship. But distress did not select the goals of those movements. Other countries suffered without invading their neighbors, and internationalist alternatives remained available in both Germany and Japan. Historians often call the Depression an enabling condition: it weakened confidence in existing arrangements and made expansionist promises more persuasive. Ideology supplied aims and enemies; institutions and choices helped determine who could act, from Japan’s army beyond effective civilian control to German conservatives willing to bring Hitler into government.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Before the invasion of Manchuria, Japan was a founding member of the League of Nations with a permanent Council seat. Its diplomat Nitobe Inazō had served as a League under-secretary-general, and his portrait later appeared on a 5,000-yen note. After the Manchurian crisis, Japan became the first major power to leave the League. Later fears of ‘ABCD encirclement’ named America, Britain, China and the Dutch as opponents.

CHAPTER 2 · 1931–1933 · 1933

Mukden: The First Unpunished Gamble

The explosion on the South Manchuria Railway near Mukden on 18 September 1931 was a remarkably small beginning for a conquest. A train passed the damaged spot soon afterward. The Kwantung Army officers who planted the charge did not need to destroy the line: they needed an accusation. They blamed Chinese soldiers and set in motion an invasion they had prepared in advance.

Japanese troops drove north, disregarding Tokyo’s instructions to contain the fighting. Chiang Kai-shek expected to lose a general war with Japan and held back from one. Instead, China appealed to the League of Nations, asking the international organization to deal with the seizure. Within months Japanese forces had taken Manchuria.

In March 1932 Japan proclaimed a state called Manchukuo. Puyi, the last Qing emperor, became its figurehead, but Japanese power sustained the government. The League sent the Lytton Commission to examine what had happened. Its report rejected Japan’s claims, and in February 1933 the Assembly adopted it by 42 votes to one. Japan cast the dissenting vote; its delegation walked out, and its army moved into Jehol.

The occupation was a fait accompli: an action completed before opponents had agreed how to respond. To undo it, they would have to dislodge forces already on the ground. The officers had used the same advantage against their own government. Each advance gave ministers in Tokyo a gain to accept or reverse, and the murder of Prime Minister Inukai in 1932 made civilian resistance more dangerous.

At Geneva, the difficulty was not simply finding out who had acted. The United States was outside the League, Britain feared a costly war in Asia, and the Depression constrained governments. Japan depended on imported fuel and foreign credit, so earlier pressure might have helped those in Tokyo who favored restraint. Historians disagree about what pressure could have achieved without war. What did happen is clear: the League delivered its judgment, while Japanese forces kept the territory they had taken.

WHY IT HAPPENED

A railway concession and a larger ambition. Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905 had given it control of the South Manchuria Railway zone, which the Kwantung Army guarded. The region’s coal, soy and iron made it valuable; beyond the concession lay land governed by Zhang Xueliang, whose troops faced competing demands. Ishiwara Kanji, a principal planner, believed a final war with America inevitable. On that assumption, acquiring Manchuria’s resources now would prepare Japan for a future defense.

The army and its civilian government. Wakatsuki Reijirō’s government sent General Tatekawa to restrain the officers. One account says the conspirators entertained him before setting off the charge. Once the invasion began, each new gain confronted ministers as an accomplished fact. The army’s control over its cabinet minister also gave it power to threaten a government by withdrawing him. In May 1932 naval officers assassinated Prime Minister Inukai, the last party politician to head a Japanese government before 1945. As the conquest proceeded, civilian authority weakened.

China’s choice of resistance. Chiang’s policy of ‘first internal pacification, then external resistance’ reflected his judgment that China could not yet defeat Japan. Some of his strongest forces were engaged against the communists. Holding them back from a general war preserved them and helped China present Japan as the aggressor before world opinion. It also allowed Japanese troops to advance at comparatively low cost, while Chiang faced sustained protest at home. His appeal to international law came with a political price.

The limits of the League. An investigation was within the League’s power; military enforcement depended on its members. Britain had an Asian empire and naval commitments to protect, and Depression budgets discouraged new risks. The Lytton inquiry took months, during which Japan conquered Manchuria and established Manchukuo. Its careful report could tell governments what had happened. Reversing the result required a further decision by those governments.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A precedent for later aggression. Manchuria offered a visible example of rapid conquest followed by an explanation for it. Other powers then had to decide what they would risk to undo the gain. Later crises had their own causes, but Mussolini could study a case in which condemnation left a conquest intact.

Japan leaves the League. Japan announced its League withdrawal in March 1933. It later renounced the Washington naval treaty limits and joined Germany in the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936. A power that had risen within the international order was looking to different alignments for security and influence.

Manchukuo as colony and arsenal. Under Japanese control, Manchukuo became both a settler colony and an industrial arsenal. Its institutions included Unit 731’s biological-weapons compound and an opium monopoly associated with financing the occupation. Tōjō Hideki, head of the Kwantung Army’s military police, was among the officials whose careers linked Manchuria to Japan’s wider war.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Could the League realistically have stopped Japan in 1931–33 — and does “realistically” concede too much?

Stopping Japan would have required governments to accept costs they were reluctant to bear. Britain and the United States had Pacific fleets, but America was outside the League, and neither wanted to risk war during the Depression. Sanctions would have been difficult to enforce without them. Yet Japan depended on imports and credit, and supporters of restraint remained in its civilian government. Credible early pressure might have strengthened them, though it could also have failed or caused escalation. The Lytton Report gave League members a basis for action. The unresolved question is what pressure they could have applied and what risks they would have accepted; they did not agree on pressure capable of changing the result.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Puyi’s life crossed three political orders. He became China’s emperor at two, lost the throne at six after the 1911 revolution, and was restored for twelve days in 1917. Japan brought him to Manchuria in 1931; as Manchukuo’s “Chief Executive” and later its “Emperor,” he ruled for thirteen years. After the Second World War he spent years in custody, including ten years in a Chinese prison after 1950. He later worked as a gardener and archival clerk in Beijing, where he died in 1967.

CHAPTER 3 · 1933–1935 · 1935

Germany Turns Charcoal

The men who brought Hitler to power thought they had solved a political problem. His movement had mass support, and conservative politicians wanted to turn it against the left. They supported his appointment as chancellor on 30 January 1933, believing that they could control him in office. After the Reichstag fire, emergency decrees curtailed civil liberties; intimidation and the Enabling Act helped the new government remove the republic’s constitutional restraints. The bargain had given Hitler the office from which to build a dictatorship.

The change reached beyond Germany’s institutions. In 1933 the government left the League of Nations and the disarmament conference. It rebuilt the armed forces and made persecution of its own citizens a state policy. Yet a government deciding how to respond abroad had to judge several different acts, not one uniform breach of a treaty.

The Saar, for example, returned to Germany after a lawful plebiscite with a large popular majority. That result made revision look like self-determination. In March 1935 Hitler announced conscription and an air force, both forbidden by Versailles. He could nevertheless argue that Germany deserved equality in arms, since the wider disarmament promised after the war had failed to occur. A genuine grievance thus gave other governments a reason to consider the demand even as rearmament altered the power available to enforce later ones.

Britain, France and Italy condemned German rearmament at Stresa, but their agreement did not settle their competing priorities. Britain wanted a predictable naval limit; France sought a continental security front; Mussolini wanted freedom to expand in Africa. Britain soon made a separate naval agreement with Berlin, while Italy pursued its ambitions in Abyssinia. Each had a reason for its own course, and together those choices weakened the partnership.

Historians have described Hitler’s successive moves as slices taken from the postwar settlement. Each presented the other powers with a separate decision, although together the moves changed the balance of power. Hitler had stated ambitions far beyond his early demands, while adapting his timing to opportunities. The fact that one demand could be negotiated gave little assurance about where his ambitions would stop.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The men who appointed Hitler. From 1930, Weimar chancellors increasingly governed through presidential emergency decrees. The conservatives around Hindenburg, particularly Franz von Papen, hoped that bringing the Nazi mass movement into government would give them its support without surrendering control. Papen was reported to have promised, “Within two months we will have pushed Hitler so far into a corner that he’ll squeak,” The Nazis had never won a majority in a free national election. Their access to the chancellorship depended on elites who preferred an authoritarian bargain to government by the left.

The grievances of Versailles. Many Germans resented the 1919 settlement, and much of Weimar politics sought to revise it. Germany also retained the population and industrial potential to become a major European power. Hitler’s ambitions went much further than revision, but early demands for equality of armaments, the Saar and later the Rhineland could be presented as questions of fairness. Another government might accept one grievance without accepting his wider aims. The difficulty was that each concession could strengthen his position for the next demand.

Disarmament and security. The Versailles settlement presented German disarmament as a first step toward general disarmament. At the world conference of 1932–33, France, twice invaded by Germany within living memory, wanted security before it reduced its arms; Britain pressed for reductions. The disagreement helped defeat the wider project. Hitler left claiming that Germany alone had been denied equality, and could present rearmament at home and abroad as catching up with powers that had failed to disarm.

Different powers, different priorities. The powers that might have restrained Germany had different concerns. Britain weighed its global empire and finances, France its exposed border, and Italy its Mediterranean and African ambitions. The Soviet Union remained outside the League until 1934; the United States stayed outside it. Hitler could address governments separately: a 1934 pact reassured Poland, while the 1935 naval agreement offered Britain a limit. Each arrangement answered a particular concern and made a united response harder to sustain.

WHAT IT CHANGED

An unequal rearmament timetable. One estimate puts German army spending in 1936 at perhaps ten times Britain’s, though the comparison depends on what is counted. Britain and France accelerated their own rearmament in 1936–37. Spitfires, radar defenses and French armored formations matured on different schedules, so a decision to rearm did not immediately supply the forces. That timing mattered to the balance in 1938–39 and to Hitler’s assessment of his opportunities.

Italy turns toward conquest. Mussolini pursued his plans for Abyssinia while the powers at Stresa were divided. Britain’s naval agreement weakened their partnership; Italy’s invasion and the sanctions that followed damaged it further. The next chapter follows the African war.

The Rhineland comes into view. The return of the Saar, the absence of military intervention against conscription and the weakening of Stresa changed the setting for Hitler’s next challenge. The demilitarized Rhineland was a physical restraint on Germany imposed by Versailles and reinforced by the Locarno agreements.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Hitler wrote his program in Mein Kampf a decade before power. Why did so few statesmen believe him?

Hitler’s early diplomacy offered statesmen reasons to treat individual demands as limited. He signed pacts, invoked equality and accepted a plebiscite. Taking his stated ambitions as a guide to policy also meant confronting costly choices about rearmament and the risk of war, under political and financial constraints. The larger question remains disputed. In Origins of the Second World War (1961), A.J.P. Taylor emphasized improvisation and the opportunities offered by opponents. Intentionalists including Trevor-Roper and Hillgruber point to Mein Kampf, the Hossbach conference and the eastward drive as evidence of a program. The record of 1933–35 permits a synthesis: fixed ambitions pursued with opportunistic timing. A negotiable move could serve aims that went much further.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The League assembled an international force of about 3,300 British, Italian, Dutch and Swedish troops for the January 1935 Saar plebiscite. No German troops were stationed near the vote, and secret ballots and international counting helped protect the choice. A large majority chose to return to Germany. The League had helped conduct a fair vote that brought the territory under Hitler’s rule; thousands of Saarlanders who opposed him or organized against reunion fled across the French border in the ensuing period.

CHAPTER 4 · 1934–1936 · 1935

Abyssinia: The League Dies in Africa

The clash at Wal Wal in December 1934 gave Mussolini the occasion he wanted. Italian and Ethiopian forces fought at a post well inside territory claimed by Ethiopia. Mussolini used the incident to justify an invasion already being prepared, while Emperor Haile Selassie appealed to the League of Nations. Italian troops and supplies continued to pass through Suez in full view. In October 1935 armies entered Ethiopia from Eritrea and Somaliland, facing forces with far fewer modern weapons.

Both Italy and Abyssinia belonged to the League. Its principle of collective security made an attack on one member a concern for the others; here the invasion was documented and Ethiopia had sought arbitration. The League named Italy the aggressor and imposed sanctions. This was a public judgment that the war should be resisted. The question was how much the members would do to give that judgment effect.

Britain and France had another concern. Mussolini was a potential partner against Hitler, and stronger pressure over Africa might cost them his cooperation in Europe. Their sanctions excluded oil and other essential supplies, and Britain kept Suez open to Italian shipping. The measures answered demands for action while limiting the risk of a break with Italy. They also left the invader with means to continue the war.

In December, the Hoare–Laval proposal leaked. The British and French foreign ministers had privately offered Mussolini much of Ethiopia while their governments were publicly supporting sanctions against him. Italian forces used mustard gas, defeated the remaining Ethiopian armies and entered Addis Ababa in May 1936. Further violence followed under occupation; estimates of the deaths remain contested.

Would a full oil embargo have changed the result? It might have put Italy under much greater pressure, though American oil could have weakened the embargo and stronger action might have brought a wider war. What is clear is the result of the policy chosen: Ethiopia was not saved, and Italy moved toward Germany. At Geneva, Selassie warned an audience of states that now had reason to ask whether their own treaty protection would survive a bargain among great powers.

WHY IT HAPPENED

A regime that needed a triumph. Fascism had promised greatness after what Italian nationalists called the “mutilated victory” of 1918. By 1934 the corporate economy was stagnant, and conquest offered Mussolini several prizes: revenge for Adwa in 1896, employment for Blackshirts and the “place in the sun” sought by Liberal Italy. The war attracted substantial popular support. Sanctions gave him another opportunity, allowing him to present an imperial attack as a struggle against hostile foreign powers.

Britain and France wanted Italy against Hitler. At Stresa, Britain and France had sought Mussolini’s help against German revisionism. They had reason to think he might provide it: when Austrian Nazis killed Austria’s chancellor in 1934, he moved troops to the Brenner. Strong action over Ethiopia threatened that European partnership. London and Paris tried to punish the invasion while keeping his friendship, but Ethiopia fell and relations with Italy deteriorated.

The victim was inside the system. The League could hardly mistake Abyssinia for a case outside its responsibilities. Both states were members, the aggression was documented, and arbitration had been attempted. Article 16 of the Covenant called for sanctions against a member resorting to war in breach of its obligations. During the Manchurian crisis, opponents of action could point to distance and China’s disorder; those explanations carried much less force here. Many contemporaries and later historians regarded the failure as a decisive blow to collective security.

Air power and gas against spears and rifles. Italy brought nearly half a million men, tanks and around 400 aircraft against Ethiopian forces consisting largely of riflemen and levies. The disparity did not remove the difficulty of advancing through mountains. Badoglio used aerial mustard gas against troops and civilian areas, including Red Cross units, despite Italy’s adherence to the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Estimates of deaths in the war and subsequent occupation range from tens to hundreds of thousands; the Ethiopian government later claimed about 760,000. The range shows the uncertainty in assessments of the human cost.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The Stresa Front becomes the Axis. The invasion and sanctions strained Mussolini’s relations with his Stresa partners. Germany remained sympathetic and kept buying Italian goods, and Italy moved closer to Hitler. The Rome–Berlin “Axis” was announced in October 1936; Italy joined the Anti-Comintern Pact and left the League in 1937. Mussolini, who had defended Austrian independence in 1934, accepted its loss in 1938.

Hitler moves while the referee is distracted. The African crisis occupied Britain, France and Italy while their relations with one another deteriorated. This was the setting for Hitler’s March 1936 remilitarization of the Rhineland. The next chapter follows that gamble.

Collective security is abandoned in practice. In July 1936, after Italy annexed Ethiopia, the League lifted sanctions. Belgium moved away from its French alliance toward neutrality, complicating French defense plans. Collective security had been weakened in practice. The UN Charter of 1945 established a new system with central enforcement roles for the major powers, alongside powers of veto.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Britain and France neither closed Suez nor embargoed oil. Were limited sanctions worse than no sanctions?

There is a case against the middle course. Italy depended on imported oil, and Mussolini later claimed that an embargo would have forced him out “within a week.” His retrospective claim served his own purposes, but fuel was a real vulnerability. Stronger pressure might have altered the campaign, while no sanctions might have preserved more of the Stresa partnership. The measures adopted failed to save Ethiopia and helped sour relations with Italy. Neither alternative offers a certain result. British and French publics demanded action, naval leaders feared a Mediterranean war, and American oil from outside the League might have weakened an embargo. The choice must be judged against those risks as well as the limited measures’ failure to stop the invasion.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Haile Selassie came to the League Assembly on 30 June 1936 to plead his country’s case in Amharic. Italian journalists in the gallery whistled to interrupt him until the Romanian delegate Nicolae Titulescu called for the removal of “the savages.” Time had named Selassie its 1935 Man of the Year. Restored to his throne during the Second World War, he hosted the founding of the Organisation of African Unity in Addis Ababa in 1963, twenty-seven years after the city fell.

CHAPTER 5 · 1936–1937 · 1937

The Rhineland Bluff and the Spanish Rehearsal

The Rhineland belonged to Germany, but the postwar settlement forbade German troops and fortifications there. This gave France a way to put pressure on Germany if it attacked an ally in the east: French forces could enter the undefended zone while Germany was fighting elsewhere. On 7 March 1936 Hitler sent a small force across the Rhine. Its commanders were ready to withdraw if France resisted.

France had the strength to act, but its leaders feared that even a limited response would require general mobilization. Britain would not support military action. The German troops remained, and Germany could now fortify its western frontier. A French promise to help an eastern ally would become much harder to carry out when the route into Germany was defended. The result also strengthened Hitler’s confidence against generals who had urged caution.

In July, Spanish generals rose against the elected Republic. Their rising stalled, dividing the country in a civil war. The conflict grew from Spanish disputes over land, the Church, the army and regional autonomy; foreign powers entered a struggle that had already begun. Germany and Italy supplied Franco’s rebels, while the Soviet Union sent arms and advisers to the Republic and gained influence in its camp. International volunteers also came to fight for the Republic.

Britain and France tried to keep the war from spreading by embargoing both sides. The rule treated government and rebels alike, but the result depended on whether their suppliers obeyed it. Germany and Italy continued to help Franco, while the Republic’s access to legal supplies was restricted. Outside intervention thus changed the course of a war whose causes lay in Spain.

Spain gave German and Italian forces combat experience, including the coordination of aircraft with ground troops. At Guernica, the bombing of a Basque town showed the destruction air attack could bring to civilians. Calling Spain a rehearsal captures the learning, but its politics and fronts belonged to a civil war with conditions of its own. Later in 1937, the Hossbach meeting recorded Hitler discussing the acquisition of territory by force.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Versailles’ last physical restraint was psychological. Hitler had reason to doubt that the Rhineland restrictions would be enforced. The Abyssinian crisis had fractured the Stresa Front, Britain had reached a naval agreement with Germany, and French planning reflected the defensive outlook of the Maginot Line. France had no simple agreed plan for a limited response. Hitler also offered a legal justification: he called the Franco-Soviet pact, ratified in February, “encirclement” and claimed that it invalidated Locarno.

France would not fight alone; Britain would not fight at all. France’s army could confront the German force, but ministers did not see the decision as a small military operation. Intelligence substantially overestimated German strength, and military leaders said action required general mobilization. With an election near, that was a grave political step. Britain, itself a Locarno guarantor, declined to support force; Foreign Secretary Eden proposed negotiation. French leaders would not accept the risks alone.

Spain’s war was internal first, international second. The Republic established in 1931 attempted reforms of landholding, the army, regional government and relations between church and state. Each made enemies. Fear and division surrounded the Popular Front’s narrow election victory in February 1936, and Spanish generals planned their July rising for Spanish reasons. German and Italian support later strengthened Franco; Soviet aid and the International Brigades helped the Republic resist. Foreign powers changed the fighting without creating its original divisions.

Non-intervention institutionalized the double standard. Britain and France feared a wider war, communist influence in Madrid and French internal division. Their arms embargo covered both the Republic and the rebels, but its consequences were unequal: Germany and Italy continued sending Franco aircraft, weapons and troops, while the democracies restricted assistance from their own countries. Léon Blum reportedly wept at the French decision. French aid nevertheless crossed the border intermittently later in the war.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Belgium bolts, the Maginot logic breaks. Belgium watched Locarno fail and in October 1936 moved away from its French alliance, returning to neutrality. That made cooperation on France’s northern frontier harder to plan. In 1940 German forces would advance through Belgium, beyond the main fortified sectors of the Maginot Line. Belgium’s decision was one of several obstacles to cooperation against the later attack.

The Axis names itself over Spanish battlefields. German and Italian intervention in Spain gave the two governments a chance to work together in war. The “Rome–Berlin Axis” was announced in October 1936; Germany and Japan concluded the Anti-Comintern Pact the following month. These agreements and cooperation in Spain brought revisionist powers closer, although their coalition was still taking shape.

Air terror is normalized before the war begins. The bombing of Guernica and Japanese attacks on Chinese cities in 1937 exposed an international audience to air attacks on civilians. European leaders already feared bombing, and these attacks gave that fear fresh force during the Munich crisis. “the bomber will always get through” captured the anxiety. Luftwaffe crews carried experience gained in Spain into the attack on Poland.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

“The dictators intervened and the democracies did not — that is the history of the Spanish war in one sentence.” Is it fair?

As an account of government policy, the sentence identifies a real contrast. Germany and Italy sent aircraft and armor, and Italy sent an army. Britain and France embargoed both sides, restricting the Republic while Franco’s sponsors continued to help him. But several participants disappear from that account. The Soviet Union supplied the Republic with arms and advisers. Soviet security influence and repression of opponents, including Trotskyists and anarchists around the Barcelona May Days of 1937, deepened divisions in the Republican camp. Franco’s propaganda portrayed the war as Christianity against Bolshevism. About 35,000 volunteers from some fifty countries joined the International Brigades even though their governments did not send them. France’s border policy also changed: under Blum, aid crossed the Pyrenees when the border opened. Non-intervention was a state policy with uneven effects, not a complete account of foreign involvement.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The Condor Legion studied its experience in Spain, including dive bombing, support for ground troops and fighter tactics. Its loose two-plane Rotte formation influenced later fighter practice. The legion’s chief of staff, Wolfram von Richthofen, a cousin of the Red Baron, later served in the campaigns over Poland, France and Crete. Rotating crews through Spain also gave the Luftwaffe a substantial group of airmen with combat experience before the Second World War.

CHAPTER 6 · 1937–1938 · 1938

China: The War Nobody Declared

On 7 July 1937 Japanese and Chinese troops exchanged fire near the Marco Polo Bridge outside Peking. Local officers negotiated, but the fighting spread. To understand why, we have to look at what each side had learned from earlier encounters. Japanese field commanders had seen Tokyo accept an unauthorized advance at Mukden; Chinese leaders had seen concessions followed by further demands. Sending reinforcements offered each side security, while making the other more fearful.

China’s politics had changed too. In December 1936 Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped at Xi’an and pressed into an uneasy united front with the Communists against Japan. He now faced a country increasingly unwilling to accept another retreat. Chiang chose to fight at Shanghai as well as in the north, bringing the war to a city full of foreign citizens and interests. The battle drew sympathy abroad, but it cost much of his best trained army.

Shanghai held out for three months. Japanese forces then advanced to Nanjing, where they murdered prisoners and civilians and committed mass sexual violence. Estimates of the dead range from tens of thousands to over 300,000. The marker commemorates the victims.

By late 1938 Japan held major cities and the routes between them, but Chiang’s government had moved inland to Chongqing and continued to fight. Moving officials, industry and universities preserved a base for resistance. Each Japanese advance also lengthened supply lines and added places to garrison; the countryside between cities and railways was harder to control than the routes themselves.

This strategy had a terrible human cost. In 1938 Nationalist forces breached the Yellow River dikes to delay Japan, causing immense death and displacement. Retreat had helped keep China in the war, but survival was purchased in part by decisions imposed on civilians. Japan’s occupation, meanwhile, had not secured the political surrender Tokyo sought.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Xi’an and the demand for resistance. Chiang had concentrated on fighting the Communists while Japan took Manchuria and Jehol and extended its influence in north China. In December 1936 the Manchurian marshal Zhang Xueliang, whose homeland Japan had occupied, helped kidnap him at Xi’an. Chiang’s release followed an agreement to cooperate with the Communists against Japan. The United Front was uneasy, but the commitment and Chinese opinion made another concession harder. Japanese planners expecting the earlier pattern misread the changed political ground.

A command system that rewarded advances. Japanese officers at Mukden had acted on their own initiative and then seen Tokyo accept their success. A field commander considering another advance could expect reinforcements and approval afterward. Expansionists on the general staff believed a sharp blow might break Chinese resistance within three months. China’s size and capacity to go on fighting would frustrate that expectation.

Why Chiang fought at Shanghai. Chiang put his modern divisions at risk from Japanese naval power when he chose to fight at Shanghai. He had a political purpose: the battle would take place beside the International Settlement, foreign factories and residents. Witnesses and threatened interests might bring China support. China gained sympathy, a Soviet aid treaty in August 1937 and later American credits, but no intervention sufficient to save the trained divisions from heavy losses. German advisers had spent a decade helping build those forces, and their loss mattered in the long struggle ahead.

A war without a declaration. Japan described the conflict as the “China Incident” and avoided a declaration that might trigger American neutrality legislation. An arms embargo on both belligerents would affect Chinese supplies, while Japan continued to buy American oil and scrap. China also avoided declaring war, hoping to keep its supply channels open. The legal distinction allowed Washington to sympathize with China while American trade still supplied Japan. Chapter 10 follows the movement toward embargo.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The war turns Japanese attention south. The China war absorbed about a million Japanese troops. Holding occupied territory required men and supplies, while the resources consumed exceeded those gained. By 1940 Tokyo’s leaders looked south for resources in Southeast Asia and ways to cut Chiang’s supply routes. Chapter 10 follows the decisions that carried this policy toward Pearl Harbor.

American opinion and policy. Americans learned of Nanjing, the sinking of the Panay and the bombing of Chinese cities. Such news helped turn opinion against Japan, and boycotts of Japanese silk followed. Roosevelt’s October 1937 “quarantine” speech tested support for pressure. Public sympathy moved ahead of government policy; embargo came years later.

Chinese resistance and the Allied war. China’s refusal to surrender kept large Japanese forces committed on the mainland throughout the war. After 1941 Churchill and Roosevelt could count that continuing resistance as an Allied asset. China ended the war among the “Big Four” and received a permanent seat on the Security Council.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was Chiang’s retreat into the interior a strategy, or an excuse for defeat?

The charge that retreat was an excuse has force. Nationalist armies lost major battles in 1937–38, and the retreat was often chaotic and callous. In June 1938 they breached the Yellow River dikes to slow Japan. Hundreds of thousands died by drowning or starvation; civilians who were not consulted paid for the delay. Yet the map also shows the logic of retreat. Japan could occupy cities and railways more easily than the countryside between them. Each advance lengthened supply lines and demanded garrisons, while the government that withdrew to Chungking was still fighting in 1945. Retreat helped deny Japan the quick surrender it expected. That military achievement leaves a moral question: who may decide that civilians should bear such suffering to preserve the possibility of resistance? Showing that the retreat helped China fight on does not answer it.

AN INTERESTING FACT

When China’s coastal ports fell, a road through Burma became a lifeline for the government at Chungking. Around 200,000 laborers—including farmers, women and children using baskets and hoes—built roughly 1,150 kilometers from Lashio in British Burma across the Hengduan ranges to Kunming. The road opened in 1938 after about a year’s work, and trucks carried imports along it. Its importance made control of the route a diplomatic question: in 1940 Churchill closed it for three months under Japanese pressure.

CHAPTER 7 · 1938 · 1938

Anschluss and Munich: Appeasement at Full Stretch

German troops crossed into Austria on 12 March 1938, and Germany annexed the country. Many Austrians celebrated, while Jews faced immediate persecution. The union changed the position of another state: Czechoslovakia, which France had promised to defend, now had German territory on three sides.

Hitler next made the Sudeten Germans’ grievances the occasion for a crisis. Their border region contained Czechoslovakia’s main fortifications. At Munich on 29–30 September, Britain and France agreed with Germany and Italy that the Sudetenland should pass to Germany. Neither Czechoslovakia nor the Soviet Union was present. Chamberlain hoped the concession would satisfy Hitler and prevent war; Hitler had wanted a war.

The British case for a settlement was serious. Leaders remembered the slaughter of 1914–18 and feared devastating air raids. Britain had a small army, and its leaders doubted that the Dominions would fight over the Sudetenland. Many also thought the postwar settlement had left real injustices. Negotiation could address a grievance and give Britain time to produce fighters and develop radar.

But time had a price. Czechoslovakia’s roughly thirty-five divisions depended on mountain defenses, and its Škoda works produced arms. Surrendering the border weakened an ally and improved Germany’s position. France had a treaty with Prague but judged it could not fight without Britain; the Soviet Union’s exclusion deepened its distrust. Britain gained time to strengthen its defenses, while Germany gained resources and strategic advantages. The occupation of Prague in March 1939 showed that Hitler’s ambitions went beyond German-populated territory.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The memory of war and fear of bombing. A generation after the trenches, British leaders had reason to dread another European war. Air power added a fear of cities being devastated at once. Baldwin’s warning that “the bomber will always get through” and the bombing of Guernica (Ch. 5) gave that fear force; air-staff forecasts for London predicted casualties about ten times those later experienced. Against such expectations, negotiating a border revision could seem a smaller price. The forecast was mistaken about 1938, but the fear was intelligible.

A real grievance used for conquest. Sudeten Germans had entered Czechoslovakia without choosing that state in 1919. The Depression struck their region hard, and Czech policy had only partly addressed their complaints. Many British officials also believed Versailles had treated Germany unfairly. A concession might therefore seem a way to meet a legitimate grievance and distinguish reasonable demands from conquest. Hitler and Henlein’s party used those same grievances to intensify a crisis whose aims went beyond minority rights.

The disputed military balance. Britain could not send an army to Bohemia, Chamberlain’s advisers said, and needed roughly two years to prepare its air defenses. Time for radar and Spitfires mattered. Yet Czechoslovakia had roughly thirty-five divisions behind mountain fortifications, and France had a hundred divisions facing five German ones in the west. Officers around Beck and Halder discussed a coup if Hitler brought war. Division counts alone do not settle readiness, deployment or political will, and the coup was never tested. Britain improved its defenses in the year gained, but Germany armed faster and acquired Czech weapons. Many historians judge the exchange unfavorable; the leaders deciding in 1938 lacked the German archives later scholars could consult.

France and its British ally. France had promised to support Prague since 1924; Britain had no equivalent treaty. The French decision nevertheless depended heavily on London. French planning was defensive, politics were divided, and Daladier, though doubtful that Hitler’s ambitions were limited, judged that France could not fight without Britain. Returning to Le Bourget, he reportedly expected an angry reception. When crowds cheered instead, he is said to have murmured “the fools”.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Czech arms in German hands. The loss of Czech defenses and industry changed the forces available for a later war. Germany acquired further military resources when it occupied Prague in March 1939. Czech-built 35(t) and 38(t) tanks formed a significant part of its force against France in 1940; the original estimate puts their share at about a third. The territory given up at Munich had helped strengthen the enemy Britain was buying time to face.

Soviet distrust deepens. Munich reinforced Stalin’s fear that Western powers might direct Hitler eastward: the Soviet Union had been excluded from the settlement. In May 1939 Molotov replaced Litvinov, the Jewish foreign minister who had advocated collective security. Berlin received the signal. Munich was one influence on the road to the Nazi–Soviet Pact, discussed in Chapter 8.

Britain issues guarantees. Prague changed Chamberlain’s policy within a weekend. Britain guaranteed Poland, then Romania and Greece, seeking to deter further aggression. The commitments were easier to issue than direct military help would be to deliver. Their effectiveness depended in part on whether Hitler believed Britain would act.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was Munich a betrayal, a blunder, or the best of the bad options available to Chamberlain in September 1938?

The three verdicts bring different parts of the decision into focus. Betrayal describes what happened to Czechoslovakia: its friends decided to dismember a functioning democracy without consulting it. Blunder asks what the bargain did to the military balance. Britain gained time for radar and fighters, while Germany gained Czech arms and a stronger position and a fortified ally was weakened. The officers considering a German coup were never tested. Best-of-bad-options takes Chamberlain’s uncertainty seriously. Allies were unready, the Dominions reluctant, and the public wanted peace; he believed Hitler’s demands might be limited. That belief explains the decision, but it also exposes its cost. Czechoslovakia paid before Hitler’s intentions were established, and the coalition later faced a stronger Germany.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The document Chamberlain waved at Heston was not the Munich Agreement. He had drafted a separate half-page Anglo-German friendship declaration over breakfast and asked Hitler to sign it the next morning; witnesses said Hitler barely read it. The agreement itself was signed in the small hours at the Führerbau on Munich’s Königsplatz. The building is now a music conservatory, and the room where four powers dismembered a fifth is used for student recitals.

CHAPTER 8 · 1939 · 1939

Prague, the Pact, Poland

The occupation of Prague in March 1939 changed the argument over Hitler’s intentions. Germany had previously presented its demands as a way to unite Germans; it now took control of a predominantly Czech population. Britain answered on 31 March with a guarantee to Poland. The promise was intended to warn Hitler that an attack would bring a wider war, though Britain could not put an army in Poland in time to stop him.

The crisis was widening elsewhere too. Italy seized Albania in April, and Mussolini signed the Pact of Steel with Germany in May. Britain and France sought an agreement with Moscow, but negotiations moved slowly. Poland refused to admit Soviet troops, whose arrival its leaders had reason to fear. A common danger did not remove distrust among the countries considering how to resist it.

Stalin made a different bargain. On 23 August Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact, with a secret protocol assigning eastern Europe to spheres that included a division of Poland. Stalin gained time and territory; Hitler could attack Poland without facing an immediate Soviet front. Historians debate the relative weight of Stalin’s defensive and expansionist motives. The protocol and later annexations show how a search for security could also bring gains at neighboring states’ expense.

Germany invaded Poland on 1 September, and Soviet troops entered from the east on 17 September. Britain and France declared war but gave Poland little direct relief. The country was partitioned, though its government refused to surrender and Polish forces fought on abroad. The guarantee had committed the Western powers to war; it had not prevented the invasion or saved Poland from partition.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Prague changes the British calculation. Britain’s earlier willingness to negotiate had rested partly on the idea that German demands concerned minorities, plebiscites and treaty grievances. Prague made that account untenable. Public opinion, the press and members of Parliament moved toward resistance, and even advocates of appeasement faced the loss of their premise. The government guaranteed Poland, then Romania and Greece. Since Britain could not deliver an army to each threatened country, the promises had to make Hitler expect a wider war. In September, the warning failed to deter him.

The bargain in Moscow. Each dictator saw a use for the other. Hitler wanted to avoid a two-front war and thought a Soviet agreement might weaken British resolve; he reportedly called his opponents “our enemies are little worms, I saw them at Munich.” Stalin gained a prospective buffer, territory formerly held by the tsars and time before a German attack he expected eventually. A darker interpretation adds that he hoped the capitalist powers would exhaust one another. The alternative was an alliance with Britain and France. Their Moscow mission was real, but slow and low-ranking, and Poland refused passage to the Red Army. Later Soviet conduct at Katyń (Ch. 11) helps explain why Poles feared Soviet troops on their soil. A common danger was not enough to overcome the distrust that obstructed collective security.

Danzig and the destruction of Poland. The public dispute concerned the Free City of Danzig and an extraterritorial road across the Polish Corridor. Hitler’s preparations reached much further. His April 1939 directive ordered the army ready “to destroy Polish military strength and create in the East a situation which satisfies the requirements of national defense”. The demands were made unacceptable and then withdrawn from negotiation as he pursued the war Munich had denied him. The secret protocol envisaged partition, leaving little room for Polish independence. Expulsions and the first ghettos followed under occupation; the later AB-Aktion murdered Polish elites. These measures attacked the Polish state and its people, not simply a disputed frontier.

Poland rejects subordination. Poland’s leaders were not merely waiting for other powers to decide their fate. From 1934 to 1939 Warsaw repeatedly resisted a subordinate role in Hitler’s anti-Soviet plans, and in 1939 it refused demands from both dictators. Józef Beck’s policy had critics: Poland’s seizure of Teschen from Czechoslovakia in 1938 cost it moral standing. Yet the choice in 1939 was to resist subordination. The cost to the population was terrible: roughly twenty percent did not survive the war.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The spheres become annexations. The secret protocol allocated spheres on paper; annexations soon gave them a place on the map. Eastern Poland was absorbed after a staged plebiscite, the Baltic states were garrisoned and annexed in June 1940, and Bessarabia was taken from Romania. The next snapshots show the changes. Germany and the Soviet Union expanded in parallel before they fought each other.

A quiet Western front. War was declared on 3 September, but Poland received no major Western offensive to relieve the pressure. The September advance into the Saar went about eight kilometres before withdrawing, and British aircraft dropped leaflets. French doctrine and British unreadiness help explain the limited action. The pause left Hitler with the initiative for the next attack in the west.

Japan reacts to the pact. Japan learned from newspapers that Germany had made a pact with the Soviet Union. This was a shock: Japan was fighting Soviet forces at Khalkhin Gol that month and had an Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany aimed at Moscow. The Japanese cabinet fell, and trust in Berlin suffered. The episode formed part of the background to Japan’s decision not to join the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 and to move south instead (Ch. 10).

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Should Britain and France have guaranteed Poland — a promise they could not keep — or was the guarantee the necessary end of appeasement?

A. J. P. Taylor’s criticism begins with the guarantee’s practical weakness. It gave Warsaw a part in deciding when Britain would go to war, failed to deter Hitler, and may have stiffened Polish refusal to negotiate while making a Soviet alliance harder to reach. Britain could not send an army to protect Poland directly. The defense gives the promise a different purpose. After Prague, Britain had to decide whether another German attack would be answered. The guarantee publicly committed it to a general war and demonstrated resolve to the Dominions and the United States. It failed as deterrence and direct protection, yet it was a consequential commitment to resist further aggression.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Throughout the siege of Warsaw in September 1939, the city’s radio station repeatedly played the opening bars of Chopin’s Military Polonaise, every thirty seconds, to show that the capital still stood. The broadcasts ended when Warsaw fell on 28 September. The government crossed into Romania and reconstituted itself in exile, while the navy had already sailed for Britain under the Peking Plan. In 1940 Polish pilots of No. 303 Squadron became Fighter Command’s highest-scoring squadron in the Battle of Britain.

CHAPTER 9 · 1939–1940 · 1940

The Fall of the West

The war in the west began with a lesson that different governments would interpret in different ways. The Soviet Union attacked Finland in November 1939 and suffered heavy losses before Finland ceded territory in March. Finland remained independent, while the Red Army’s reputation suffered. Germany then occupied Denmark and Norway, protecting its northern flank and the route by which Swedish iron reached it.

On 10 May 1940 Germany attacked in the west. The Allies expected the main blow through Belgium and sent their best mobile forces north to meet it. Farther south, German armored divisions crossed the Ardennes and broke through at Sedan. Their drive to the Channel placed them behind the Allied northern armies, separating those forces from the rest of France. Dunkirk brought 338,000 troops to safety, but the evacuation could not save France.

The breakthrough was a matter of deployment and command as well as equipment. The move into Belgium had left Sedan more weakly held; after crossing the Meuse, German forces advanced faster than French commanders could establish a new front. Concentrated armor, radios, and coordination with infantry and aircraft helped turn the opening into an encirclement. The German plan was risky, and Allied decisions helped it succeed. Counting tanks alone cannot explain the result.

The armistice divided France between occupied territory and a zone administered by Vichy. Defeat left political decisions still to be made: Pétain’s regime ended the republic, chose collaboration, and enacted antisemitic laws. Britain, fearing that the French fleet might fall into German hands, attacked it at Mers-el-Kébir. The Luftwaffe later failed to destroy Fighter Command, whose defense was supported by radar and aircraft production. France had fallen, but Britain remained in the war, and Hitler had not obtained the peace he expected.

WHY IT HAPPENED

A risky attack through the Ardennes. The Allies had prepared to meet a German advance through Belgium under the Dyle-Breda plan; an earlier German plan had envisaged just such an attack. In January 1940 a courier plane carrying those plans crashed in Belgium. Their exposure helped open the way for Manstein’s alternative, concentrating armor in the Ardennes, where the Allies did not expect a major armored attack. The gamble needed circumstances to favor it. A French reconnaissance report of columns in the region was discounted, and second-line reservists held Sedan. France had many tanks, some better armored than Germany’s, but assigned many to infantry support and expected a continuous front. Germany concentrated armored formations to exploit a breach. The outcome turned on deployment and command as well as equipment.

The uses of the Phoney War. During the Phoney War the Allies expected time to bring advantages: the blockade would tighten, rearmament mature, and imperial resources become available. British aircraft production did overtake Germany’s in 1940. Germany, however, also had time to absorb the lessons of Poland and choose when to strike. Inactivity brought boredom and defeatism to French forces. Belgium’s neutrality limited joint planning, so Allied armies would enter a country whose roads and defenses they had not been free to prepare together beforehand. The pause gave both sides opportunities, but not the same ones.

The limits of neutrality. After the First World War and the League’s failures, several small northwestern European states sought security in neutrality. Belgium had formally adopted it in 1936 (Ch. 5). Yet Germany found their territory useful for its military purposes and invaded six countries in six weeks in April and May 1940. Their legal status did not deter it. Switzerland, Sweden, and the countries of Iberia remained outside the fighting; geography and great-power calculations helped determine where neutrality survived. The map’s change from parchment to red shows the limits of a declaration when an invader has other plans.

Vichy: defeat and decisions. The pressure to seek an armistice was overwhelming. What should France’s government do after it? In July 1940 a parliamentary majority gave Pétain full powers. His regime sought a favorable place in Hitler’s Europe and spoke of “collaboration” at Montoire in October. In the initially unoccupied grey-tan southern zone, Vichy governed and policed its own territory and enacted antisemitic legislation, including measures ahead of German demands. French responses had already begun to diverge: after the armistice request, de Gaulle appealed from London on 18 June.

WHAT IT CHANGED

War spreads in the Mediterranean. Mussolini declared war on 10 June, saying he needed “a few thousand dead for the peace table.” Italy then invaded Egypt from Libya in September and Greece from Albania in October. Both campaigns went badly, and Germany intervened. As Chapter 11 follows, the Mediterranean and Balkan campaigns affected the timetable and circumstances of the coming attack on the Soviet Union.

The United States moves closer to war. With France defeated, Americans could less readily assume that Europe’s democracies could contain Germany without substantial US help. Destroyers-for-bases came in September 1940, as did the first US peacetime conscription; Lend-Lease followed in March 1941. The United States remained outside the war for the time being, while Roosevelt called on it to become the “arsenal of democracy.”

European colonies become vulnerable. European possessions in Asia now had vulnerable rulers: the Netherlands was occupied, France had a client regime, and Britain was fighting for survival. Within three months Japanese forces entered northern Indochina and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact. Events in the European and Pacific theaters were becoming more closely connected.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was France’s fall a military defeat or a national collapse, and why does the distinction matter?

Vichy described defeat as a judgment on the divided, “decadent” Third Republic, an account that helped justify ending it. Historians including Ernest May and Julian Jackson have challenged that interpretation. France fielded more tanks than Germany, and its soldiers fought hard: estimates of French military deaths in six weeks range from 50,000 to 90,000, a rate comparable to Verdun. The campaign had a more specific explanation. German concentration and speed exploited Allied decisions at Sedan, with an outcome that was not inevitable. Politics and morale mattered, but an appeal to national character cannot explain where armies were placed or how they were commanded. The distinction matters for justice too, because Vichy used its account of collapse to excuse its own choices after defeat.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Hitler made the Compiègne carriage a trophy: he had the memorial site dynamited and the carriage taken to Berlin, where crowds queued to see it. SS troops destroyed it in 1945, by most accounts burning it near Crawinkel in Thuringia. After the war France rebuilt the memorial clearing with a carriage from the same series and displayed surviving fittings from the original nearby.

CHAPTER 10 · 1939–1941 · 1940

The Turn South

In 1939 a border battle on the Manchukuo–Mongolia frontier changed the choices before Japan. The Kwantung Army fought Soviet forces under Zhukov at Khalkhin Gol and lost. Advocates of a northern advance against the Soviet Union now had to reckon with a demonstrated defeat. Japan’s other war offered no easy answer either: China had not surrendered, and the fighting continued to consume men and materials.

Japanese leaders saw possibilities to the south. Cutting supply routes might weaken China, while Southeast Asian resources could sustain their empire. Europe’s defeats made the opportunity more immediate. Japan occupied northern French Indochina in 1940 and joined Germany and Italy in the Tripartite Pact. Washington restricted exports, including aviation fuel and scrap. Japan went on to occupy southern Indochina in July 1941; the United States, Britain, and the Dutch responded by freezing Japanese assets.

The freeze produced an effective oil cutoff. For Japan, which imported roughly 90 percent of its oil, this changed the meaning of time. A government intending to avoid war might use the interval to negotiate; a navy preparing for a possible war saw its reserves diminish as it waited. Roosevelt’s administration hoped pressure would discourage further conquest. Japanese leaders increasingly understood it as an attempt to strangle their empire.

Tokyo still had choices. It could withdraw from China, negotiate a compromise, or accept a decline in military strength. Army leaders regarded withdrawal after years of sacrifice as humiliation; naval planners feared that, if war came, it would be harder to fight with less fuel. The cutoff set a clock, but the China war, the army’s political power, and the decisions of Japan’s leaders shaped what happened as it ran.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The defeat at Khalkhin Gol. Some Japanese officers expected Soviet forces in the Far East to be brittle after the purges. At Khalkhin Gol they encountered artillery, massed armor, and combined arms that inflicted one of modern Japan’s worst military defeats. The Kwantung Army’s prestige suffered, along with the case for striking north. Japan still sought resources, and the south now appeared more attractive; its costs had not yet been demonstrated in a comparable war.

The costs of the China war. By 1940 the China “incident” was absorbing much of Japan’s army and budget, while the front lines shown on the map had settled. The army’s leaders were reluctant to abandon what they had sacrificed. They sought instead to cut Chiang’s supply routes through Indochina and the Burma Road and obtain southern resources that might protect Japan against blockade. At home these advances could be presented as a means to end the China war. They also brought Japan into conflict with a wider range of opponents.

Opportunity after Europe’s defeats. The timing made Southeast Asia tempting. The Netherlands was occupied in May 1940, and that summer Tokyo began pressing the Dutch East Indies over oil. France fell in June; Japanese troops entered Tonkin in September. Northern Indochina lay on a supply route to China, while the Indies held oil. Britain, already at war, temporarily closed the Burma Road rather than add another enemy. The United States faced its own decision about resisting change in the Pacific. European defeat exposed the colonies, but a Japanese attempt to take and hold them could still bring a wider war.

Pressure understood as a siege. American officials expected Japan’s dependence on resources to make it stop short of war. Yet each restriction could support a different conclusion in Tokyo: that America meant to weaken Japan gradually. If that was the prospect, fighting while stocks lasted could appear preferable to waiting. Pressure intended to deter expansion thus made a decision more urgent for Japanese leaders, even as the two governments sought different outcomes.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Planning a southern war. Oil in the Dutch East Indies was the objective, but Japanese planners believed the route also required security on its flanks. British Malaya and the American Philippines therefore entered their calculations. A southern advance implied war against several powers at once, and Yamamoto wanted the US Pacific Fleet disabled at the outset. The effort to secure resources became a plan for simultaneous attacks, including the one described in the next chapter.

A neutral Soviet frontier. Japan and the Soviet Union signed the Matsuoka–Molotov neutrality pact in April 1941. It gave Japan security on its northern frontier as it looked south and helped the USSR manage its Far Eastern frontier. Soviet forces from the east later joined the December 1941 counterattack before Moscow (Ch. 11). The pact remained in force until August 1945.

The pact and American strategy. Japan intended the Tripartite Pact partly to deter the United States with the prospect of war across two oceans. American planning instead connected pressure on Japan with aid to Britain. Early in 1941, before the United States entered the war, Washington and London agreed on a “Europe first” strategy.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Did American economic pressure cause war, determine its timing, or fail to prevent it?

The answers differ in what they take to be decisive. The Provocation argument begins with the Japanese cabinet’s earlier approval of southern expansion only “so long as war with America is avoided.” The oil cutoff made delay costly and turned that preference into a countdown. The Date-stamp argument places greater weight on Japan’s ambitions in China and the Indies, including its Co-Prosperity Sphere: these already clashed with a Pacific order Washington would accept, so oil set the calendar rather than creating the collision. The Prevention-that-failed account points to alternatives still under discussion. Konoe sought a summit, the navy doubted victory, and negotiations continued through Hull’s November demand for withdrawal. Army resistance to leaving China made agreement exceptionally difficult. Each government also had to judge what the other could concede. Japanese army leaders saw withdrawal after years of sacrifice as dishonor; American leaders had seen reports and photographs of atrocities in China and could not easily accept continued conquest. The cutoff mattered through these judgments and choices.

AN INTERESTING FACT

In autumn 1941 Richard Sorge reported that Japan had chosen a southern course and would not attack Siberia. Sorge was a German journalist in Tokyo, working inside the German embassy for Soviet intelligence. Stalin had disregarded his warning of Barbarossa, but could use such intelligence to judge the Far Eastern threat as Soviet forces moved west; those forces joined the December counterattack before Moscow. Arrested in Tokyo in October 1941, Sorge was hanged in 1944. The Soviet Union honored him posthumously as a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1964, and a Moscow street also bears his name.

CHAPTER 11 · 1940–1941 · 1941

Barbarossa: The Gamble That Ends the Gambles

Mussolini wanted Italy to fight a “parallel war” and acquire conquests without depending on Germany. The campaigns in Greece and North Africa produced the opposite result. Germany sent troops to Libya and conquered Yugoslavia and Greece in spring 1941. The intervention consumed time, but historians disagree about its effect on the date of Barbarossa: unusually wet weather and the task of assembling forces and supplies also constrained the timetable.

The invasion of the Soviet Union began on 22 June 1941. Three German-led army groups advanced toward Leningrad, Moscow and Ukraine, surrounding and destroying Soviet forces on an immense scale. Their victories seemed to confirm the plan behind the attack: destroy the Red Army near the frontier, and the Soviet state itself would collapse. Stalin’s purges of his officer corps and the army’s poor performance against Finland had given German planners grounds for expecting weakness.

Stalin had misjudged Hitler too. He discounted warnings of an attack, believing Germany would avoid a second front and fearing that Soviet mobilization would provoke it. But German success created a difficulty of its own. Every advance put more distance between the armies and their supplies. Rail gauges differed, roads deteriorated, trucks wore out and horses weakened. Meanwhile Soviet leaders moved factories east and mobilized reserves German intelligence had not counted.

The invasion was also a planned war of annihilation. German units and collaborators murdered Jews and other targeted civilians behind the front; at Babi Yar, 33,771 Jews were killed in two days. Hitler’s racial aims made occupation more violent and resistance more desperate. By December the German advance had stopped short of Moscow, and Soviet forces counterattacked. A different route toward Moscow could neither remove the supply problem nor guarantee Soviet political collapse. The short war had failed, and Hitler had joined the Soviet Union to Britain in a coalition capable of defeating Germany.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Hitler’s eastern program. The attack fulfilled an ambition Hitler had long expressed. In Mein Kampf and at the Hossbach conference (Ch. 5), he sought eastern Lebensraum; economic planning also envisaged a continental empire able to withstand blockade. The 1939 Pact gave Germany a temporary arrangement with the Soviet Union while that ambition remained. The intentionalist–functionalist debate (Ch. 3) concerns how Hitler reached war, but even Taylor’s improvising Hitler arrived, within twenty months of maximum power, at the eastern war his book had promised.

Britain and the imagined exit. Britain remained at war after France fell. In July 1940 Hitler told his generals that Britain continued partly because it hoped for help from Russia and America. If the Soviet Union were defeated, he reasoned, Britain would lose that hope. He also saw growing American power as a deadline and believed a self-sufficient continental empire would be needed to meet it. The proposed invasion of the largest country on earth thus became a means of defeating an island. Like the window argument of 1938 (Ch. 7), it depended on a prediction about the cost of waiting.

Germany underestimated Soviet strength. German intelligence estimated Soviet strength at roughly 200 divisions. By August 1941 it had identified 360. The lower estimate had seemed plausible: Stalin’s purges in 1937–38 had killed or imprisoned much of the senior officer corps, including three of five marshals and a majority of army and corps commanders, and the war with Finland (Ch. 9) had exposed the damage. Yet the Wehrmacht encountered a state with space, reserves, mobilization capacity and the T-34, willing to sustain enormous losses. German planners expected an eight-week campaign and issued no winter clothing. In December civilians were asked to provide clothes from their own closets.

Stalin discounted the warnings. Warnings came from Sorge in Tokyo, Churchill, Soviet frontier commands and deserters shortly before the attack. Historians reconstruct Stalin’s reasons for discounting them: Hitler, he believed, would avoid a two-front war; Britain had an interest in drawing the USSR into its own conflict; and mobilization might provoke the very attack it was meant to meet. The experience of 1914 seemed to support the last fear. Soviet forces were caught unprepared, with aircraft lined up on airfields. The Red Army lost more aircraft in the first week than most nations possessed.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Mass murder behind the front. The advancing armies made occupied territory available to the Einsatzgruppen, Order Police and local auxiliaries, who carried out systematic mass shootings. By the end of 1941 roughly a million Jews had been murdered. The Wannsee conference in January 1942 coordinated aspects of the wider genocide, which continued beyond this atlas’s December 1941 endpoint. The killings formed part of the racial project of conquest.

The Grand Alliance. Churchill had opposed Bolshevism for thirty years, but offered the Soviet Union support on the evening of the invasion: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil”. American Lend-Lease reached Moscow by November. Hitler’s attack brought Britain and the Soviet Union together, helping assemble the coalition that would eventually include the United States and win the world war.

Japan moves south. Japan’s neutrality pact with the Soviet Union held after Barbarossa, reducing Tokyo’s immediate concern about its northern frontier. A German victory also seemed likely. With European empires occupied elsewhere, both considerations favored a southern strike. Soviet forces counterattacked near Moscow five days before Pearl Harbor, but Japan’s fleet was already at sea.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Could Barbarossa have succeeded — and what turns on the answer?

German memoirs helped establish a “lost victory” interpretation: the Balkan campaign, the August diversion of armor to Kiev and winter deprived Germany of a chance to take Moscow in October and break Soviet resistance. That account makes particular decisions and delays decisive. Modern operational historians, especially Glantz, put more weight on the conditions under which any advance would have had to continue. By August, distance, incompatible rail gauges and worn-out trucks were already straining supply. Moscow was important, but its capture in 1812 had not ended Russian resistance. The plan also depended on a political judgment. German leaders expected a “rotten structure” to collapse; instead the Soviet state moved some 1,500 factories east and mobilized reserves. Different decisions might have changed the campaign, and the counterfactual cannot be settled with certainty. The evidence favors the structural explanation over a victory lost through a few choices. Even failure in 1941 left four more years of war and immense losses.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The final Soviet grain train crossed into German-held Poland less than two hours before the invasion began, according to an account of the last deliveries. It was part of a much larger trade associated with the 1939 Pact. From 1939 to June 1941 the USSR supplied Germany with roughly 1.5 million tonnes of grain and nearly a million tonnes of oil, as well as rubber, manganese and phosphates carried along the Trans-Siberian route. Those supplies helped Germany withstand the British blockade and prepare its forces. Some were still being unloaded when the shooting began.

CHAPTER 12 · DECEMBER 1941 · 1941

Pearl Harbor: The Roads Meet

On 26 November 1941, six Japanese carriers departed Hitokappu Bay while negotiations continued in Washington. Eleven days later, on 7 December, their aircraft reached Pearl Harbor. The two waves, comprising 353 aircraft, killed 2,403 Americans and sank or damaged eight battleships. The attackers had crossed the Pacific undetected and achieved devastating surprise.

The damage did not put the base out of action. American carriers were absent, the fuel stores and repair yards survived, and much of the damaged fleet could be recovered. The raid nevertheless served an immediate purpose: Japan was striking Malaya, the Philippines and other positions almost simultaneously, and its advance toward Southeast Asian oil would begin with the American battle fleet disabled.

Admiral Yamamoto had argued that the fleet must be kept from interfering with that southern operation. He also warned that he could run wild for only six months or a year. Japan’s longer strategy required more than early victories: its leaders hoped to fortify their conquests and persuade the United States that recovering them would cost too much. Pearl Harbor had the opposite political effect. It ended American uncertainty about entering the war.

American commanders had expected war, chiefly in Southeast Asia. Near Hawaii, radar and submarine warnings failed to produce readiness in time. The United States declared war on Japan on 8 December; on 11 December Hitler declared war on America, although the Tripartite Pact did not oblige him to do so. His decision made Roosevelt’s Europe-first strategy politically easier. The separate roads of expansion had joined in a global coalition war, and the Axis now faced industrial resources it could not match over a prolonged conflict.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The oil clock ran out. The August freeze described in Chapter 10 made oil stocks a measure of time as well as supply. Japanese planners expected their capacity for war to decline as those stocks fell. On 6 September the Imperial Conference set a sequence: negotiate until October, then decide on war. Konoe sought a summit, but Washington wanted prior concessions on China. His government fell, and Tōjō inherited the timetable. Hull’s note on 26 November marked a decisive diplomatic breakdown, yet the fleet had sailed that morning. The calculation about fuel had already put the operation in motion.

Yamamoto’s wager against his own judgment. Yamamoto knew the United States from Harvard and service as naval attaché in Washington. He opposed war with it, telling Konoe that he could “run wild for six months or a year,” but had no confidence thereafter. His Pearl Harbor plan began with a conditional judgment: if Japan went to war, the American battle fleet must be prevented from disrupting the southern offensive. A spectacular blow might also discourage a long American struggle. The first aim gave the attack an immediate military purpose; the second required a political response that Yamamoto himself had reason to doubt. His warning left the problem of what Japan could accomplish after the first months.

Washington expected war — somewhere else. On 27 November American warnings went to Pacific commands. Officials had read Japanese diplomatic communications through MAGIC and expected war, with the Philippines or Malaya considered likely targets. Hawaii seemed distant, its water too shallow for torpedoes, and such an attack too audacious. Tokyo had studied Taranto (Ch. 11) more carefully. Oahu’s radar detected the incoming formation 132 miles away. The duty officer believed it was a flight of B-17s expected from California. The instrument supplied a contact; the explanation given to it prevented that contact from becoming an effective warning.

Hitler chose the world war. The Tripartite Pact required assistance to Japan if it were attacked. Japan had attacked the United States, so Germany had no treaty obligation to declare war. Hitler chose to do so on 11 December. His Reichstag speech and table talk suggest his reasoning: U-boats were already fighting American convoy escorts in an undeclared naval war, and Japan might occupy the United States in the Pacific for years. His racial contempt for a “mongrel” nation also led him to underestimate American capacity. His decision joined the wars represented on the atlas’s separate maps.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The perimeter, then the tide. Japan’s advance continued for roughly the six months Yamamoto had described. Malaya, Singapore in February 1942, the Indies and the Philippines fell; Singapore was a particularly severe imperial capitulation. Then the Battle of the Coral Sea checked an advance in May. At Midway in June, American carriers absent from Pearl Harbor helped sink four of the six Japanese carriers that had attacked it. The WW2 atlas takes up the war that this atlas ends by beginning.

The arsenal opens both doors. Roosevelt could pursue “Europe first” more easily with public support after Germany’s declaration. Lend-Lease was already supplying Britain and the USSR, and became a means of sustaining the global coalition. By war’s end the program had provided about $50 billion in matériel, including Studebaker trucks used by the Soviet Union and food shipped to Britain.

Asia’s empires never come back. The tan across the southern half of the map represents empires whose authority Japan’s victories shook. An Asian power had defeated European colonial forces in weeks. After 1945 European governments attempted to restore their rule, but India became independent in 1947 and Indonesia in 1949; Indochina followed after wars covered in the Cold War atlas. Japan’s conquest was defeated, yet the imperial world it attacked did not survive unchanged.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

“A date which will live in infamy” — was Pearl Harbor a surprise attack, or a foreseen war at a surprising place?

War with Japan was expected in Washington. For two decades American planners had studied it under War Plan Orange; officials read Japanese diplomatic traffic and sent explicit warnings ten days before the attack. But expecting war did not tell commanders where the blow would fall. The intercepts did not name Hawaii, and the decrypt record has not supported claims that Roosevelt knew Pearl Harbor would be attacked. Officials looked chiefly toward Southeast Asia. In Hawaii, concern about sabotage shaped dispositions, and the radar contact was explained as friendly aircraft. The congressional inquiry filled 39 volumes; its evidence points to failures in a system rather than a hidden hand. The distinction matters: a warning that war is likely must be interpreted as an expectation about a particular threat, and people must then act on it. Neither step happens automatically.

AN INTERESTING FACT

At 6:37 a.m., before the aircraft arrived, USS Ward attacked and sank a Japanese midget submarine near the harbor entrance. Its report was still passing up the chain of command when the first wave arrived. Reservists from St. Paul, Minnesota, served in the gun crew; their No. 3 gun now stands on the Minnesota capitol grounds. Exactly three years later, on 7 December 1944, Ward, then a fast transport, was hit by a kamikaze off Leyte and had to be scuttled. USS O’Brien fired the shots. Its commander that day had commanded Ward at Pearl Harbor.