BENITO MUSSOLINI'S PRACTICES OF FASCISM AND DICTATORSHIPS
Kali23
AFTER THE END of World War I, many Germans were unwilling to accept that their nation's armed forces had been vanquished on the battlefield, giving rise to the widespread belief that defeat had come about as the result of a “stab in the back” by traitorous elements within the German population. To some, there was no secret as to who those treasonous elements were: they were to be found in the country's Jewish population. Jews were prominent in many professions, including law, medicine, and education, and were active in the financial and banking sector as well. Widely envied and resented, they were ripe targets for attack by revenge-seeking revanchist groups within the country.
In the early 1930s, the nationalist firebrand Adolf Hitler took advantage of these sentiments to seize power in a country wracked by the Great Depression. In a relatively short period of time, Hitler, at the head of his National Socialist (Nazi) Party, installed himself as the dictator of what was termed the Third Reich. He soon embarked on a path to cleanse the country of its internal enemies and make Germany once again the dominant force in Europe. The ensuing conflict, which eventually spread worldwide, repeated the horrors of the previous “war to end all wars” and resulted in an even more decisive defeat for German forces on the battlefield. When World War II came to an end in 1945, there could be no further cries of a “stab in the back.” Germany
had been decisively defeated and its capital of Berlin lay in ruins.
CRITICAL THINKING
Q What was the relationship between World War I and World War II, and how did the ways in which the wars were fought differ?
The Rise of Dictatorial Regimes On February 3, 1933, only four days after he had been appointed chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) met secretly with Germany's leading generals. He revealed to them his desire to remove the “cancer of democracy,” create a new authoritarian leadership, and forge a new domestic unity. His foreign policy objectives were equally striking. Since Germany's living space was too small for its people, Hitler said, Germany must rearm and prepare for “the conquest of new living space in the east and its ruthless Germanization.”
The rise of Adolf Hitler to supreme power in Germany was not an isolated incident, but part of a pattern that had spread throughout Europe and other parts of the world in the wake of the Great Depression. The apparent triumph of liberal democracy in 1919 had proven to be extremely short-lived. Italy had installed a fascist regime in the 1920s, and the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin was a repressive dictatorial state. A host of other European states, and Latin American countries as well, adopted authoritarian systems, while a militarist regime in Japan moved that country down the path to war. By 1939, only two major states in Europe, France and Great Britain, remained democratic.
Dictatorships, of course, were hardly a new phenomenon as a means of governing human societies, but the type of political system that emerged after World War I did exhibit some ominous new characteristics. The modern totalitarian state, whether of the right (as in Germany) or of the left (as in the Soviet Union), transcended the ideal of passive obedience expected in a traditional dictatorship or authoritarian monarchy. It required the active loyalty and commitment of all its citizens to the regime and its goals. Individual freedom was to be subordinated to the collective will of the masses, represented by a single leader and a single party. Modern technology also gave totalitarian states the ability to use unprecedented police powers and communication techniques to impose their wishes on their subjects.
What explains the emergence of this frightening new form of government at a time when the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution had offered such bright hopes for the improvement of the human condition? According to the philosopher Hannah Arendt, in her renowned study, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), the totalitarian state was a direct product of the modern age. At a time when traditional sources of identity, such as religion and the local community, were in decline, alienated intellectuals found fertile ground for their radical ideas among rootless peoples deprived of their communal instincts and their traditional faiths by the corrosive effects of the Industrial Age. The Great Depression, which threw millions into poverty and sowed doubts about the viability of the capitalist system, made many observers even more vulnerable to prescriptions calling for a remaking of the human condition.
The Birth of Fascism In the early 1920s, in the wake of economic turmoil, political disorder, and the general insecurity and fear stemming from World War I, Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) burst upon the Italian scene with the first fascist movement in Europe. Mussolini began his political career as a socialist but was expelled from the Socialist Party after supporting Italy's entry into World War I, a position contrary to the socialist principle of ardent neutrality in imperialist wars. In 1919, he established a new political group, the Fascio di Combattimento, or League of Combat. It received little attention in the parliamentary elections of 1919, but subsequently when worker strikes and a general climate of class violence broke out, alarmed conservatives turned to the Fascists, who formed armed squads to attack socialist offices and newspapers. On October 29,
1922, after Mussolini and the Fascists threatened to march on Rome if they were not given power, King Victor Emmanuel III (r. 1900–1946) capitulated and made Mussolini prime minister of Italy.
By 1926, Mussolini had established the institutional framework for his Fascist dictatorship. Press laws gave the government the right to suspend any publication that fostered disrespect for the Catholic Church, the monarchy, or the state. The prime minister was made “head of government” with the power to legislate by decree. A police law empowered the police to arrest and confine anybody for both nonpolitical and political crimes without due process of law. In 1926, all anti-Fascist parties were outlawed. By the end of 1926, Mussolini ruled Italy as Il Duce, the leader.
Mussolini's regime attempted to mold Italians into a single-minded community by developing Fascist organizations. By 1939, about two-thirds of the population between the ages of eight and eighteen had been enrolled in some kind of Fascist youth group. Activities for these groups included Saturday afternoon marching drills and calisthenics, seaside and mountain summer camps, and youth contests. Beginning in the 1930s, all young men were given some kind of premilitary exercises to develop discipline and provide training for war.
The Fascists also sought to reinforce traditional social attitudes, as is evident in their policies toward women. The Fascists portrayed the family as the pillar of the state and women as the foundation of the family. “Woman into the home” became the Fascist slogan. Women were to be homemakers and baby producers, “their natural and fundamental mission in life,” according to Mussolini, who viewed population growth as an indicator of national strength. The Fascist attitude toward women also reflected a practical consideration: working women would compete with males for jobs in the depression economy of the 1930s. Eliminating women from the market reduced male unemployment.
Hitler and Nazi Germany As Mussolini began to lay the foundations of his Fascist state in Italy, a young admirer was harboring similar dreams in Germany. Born on April 20, 1889, Adolf Hitler was the son of an Austrian customs official. He did poorly in secondary school and eventually made his way to Vienna to become an artist. Through careful observation of the political scene, Hitler became an avid German nationalist who learned from his experience in mass politics in Austria how political parties could use propaganda and terror effectively. But it was only after World War I, during which he served as a soldier on the Western Front, that Hitler became actively involved in politics. By then, he had become convinced that the German defeat had been caused by the Jews, for whom he now developed a fervent hatred.
THE ROOTS OF ANTI-SEMITISM Anti-semitism, of course, was not new to European civilization. Since the Middle Ages, Jews had been portrayed as the murderers of Christ and
were often subjected to mob violence and official persecution. Their rights were restricted, and they were physically separated from Christians in separate urban sectors known as ghettos. By the nineteenth century, however, as a result of the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, Jews were increasingly granted legal equality in many European countries. Many Jews left the ghettos to which they had been restricted and become assimilated into the surrounding Christian population. Some entered what had previously been the closed world of politics and the professions. Many Jews became successful as bankers, lawyers, scientists, scholars, journalists, and stage performers. Nowhere in Europe did Jews play a more active role in society than in Germany.
All too often, however, their achievements provoked envy and distrust. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, German conservatives began to found parties that used dislike of Jews to win the votes of traditional lower-middle-class groups who felt threatened by changing times. Such parties also played on the rising sentiment of racism in German society. Spurred on by the widespread popularity of social Darwinism, rabid German nationalists promoted the concept of the Volk (nation, people, or race) as an underlying idea in German history since the medieval era. Portraying the German people as the successors of the pure “Aryan” race, the true and original creators of Western culture, nationalist groups called for Germany to take the lead in a desperate struggle to save European civilization from the destructive assaults of such allegedly lower races as Jews, blacks, Slavs, and Asians.
HITLER'S RISE TO POWER, 1919–1933 At the end of World War I, Hitler joined the obscure German Workers' Party and transformed it into a new organization called the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), or Nazi for short. Hitler worked assiduously to develop the party into a mass political movement with flags, party badges, uniforms, its own newspaper, and its own police force or party militia known as the SA—the Sturmabteilung, or Storm Troops. The SA added an element of force and terror to the growing Nazi movement. Hitler's own oratorical skills as well as his populist message were largely responsible for attracting an increasing number of followers.
In November 1923, Hitler staged an armed uprising against the government in Munich, but the so-called Beer Hall Putsch was quickly crushed, and Hitler was sentenced to prison. During his brief stay in jail, he wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle), an autobiographical account of his movement and its underlying ideology. Virulent German nationalism, anti-Semitism, and anticommunism were linked together by a social Darwinian theory of struggle that stressed the right of superior nations to Lebensraum (“living space”) through expansion and the right of superior individuals to secure authoritarian leadership over the masses.
After Hitler's release from prison, the Nazi Party rapidly expanded to all parts of Germany, increasing from 27,000 members in 1925 to 178,000 by the end of 1929. By 1932, the Nazi Party had 800,000 members and had become the largest party in the Reichstag, the German parliament. No doubt, Germany's economic difficulties were a crucial factor in the Nazis' rise to power.
Unemployment had risen dramatically, from 4.35 million in 1931 to 6 million by the winter of 1932. The economic and psychological impact of the Great Depression made extremist parties more attractive. Hitler's appeal to national pride, national honor, and traditional militarism struck chords of emotion in his listeners, and the raw energy projected by his Nazi Party contrasted sharply with the apparent ineptitude emanating from its democratic rivals. As the conservative elites of Germany came to see Hitler as the man who could save Germany from a Communist takeover, President Paul von Hindenburg agreed to allow Hitler to become chancellor on January 30, 1933, and form a new government.
Within two months, Hitler had convinced Hindenburg to issue a decree suspending all basic rights for the full duration of the emergency—declared after a mysterious fire destroyed the Reichstag building in downtown Berlin—thus enabling the Nazis to arrest and imprison anyone without redress. When the Reichstag empowered the government to dispense with constitutional forms for four years while it issued laws that dealt with the country's problems, Hitler became a dictator appointed by the parliamentary body itself. The final step came on August 2, 1934, when Hindenburg died. The office of Reich president was abolished, and Hitler became sole ruler of Germany. Public officials and soldiers were all required to take a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler as the “Führer (leader) of the German Reich and people.”
THE NAZI STATE, 1933–1939 Having smashed the Weimar Republic, Hitler now turned to his larger objective, the creation of a totalitarian state that would dominate Europe and possibly the world for generations to come. Mass demonstrations and spectacles were employed to integrate the German nation into a collective fellowship and to mobilize it as an instrument for Hitler's policies. In the economic sphere, the Nazis pursued the use of public works projects and “pump-priming” grants to private construction firms to foster employment and end the depression. But there is little doubt that rearmament contributed far more to solving the unemployment problem. Unemployment, which had stood at 6 million in 1932, dropped to 2.6 million in 1934 and fell below 500,000 in 1937. Although Hitler himself had little interest in either economics or administration, his prestige undoubtedly benefited enormously from spontaneous efforts undertaken throughout the country by his followers.
For its enemies, the Nazi totalitarian state had its instruments of terror and repression. Especially important was the SS (Schutzstaffel, or “protection echelon”). Originally created as Hitler's personal bodyguard, the SS, under the direction of Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945), came to control all of the regular and secret police forces. Other institutions, including the Catholic and Protestant churches, primary and secondary schools, and universities, were also brought under the control of the state. Nazi professional organizations and leagues were formed for civil servants, teachers, women, farmers, doctors, and lawyers; youth organizations—the Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth) and its female counterpart, the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Maidens)—were given special attention.
The Führer Makes History! A common characteristic of modern totalitarian movements is their effort to mold all citizens from their earliest years into obedient servants of the state. In Nazi Germany, the vehicle responsible for training young minds was the Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth). In this photograph, Adolf Hitler inspects members of the organization at a ceremony held sometime during the 1930s. On graduation, each member took an oath: “I swear to devote all my energies and my strength to the savior of our country, Adolf Hitler. I am willing and ready to give up my life for him, so help me God.”The Nazi attitude toward women was largely determined by ideological considerations. To the Nazis, the differences between men and women were quite natural. Men were warriors and political leaders, while women were destined to be wives and mothers. Certain professions, including university teaching, medicine, and law, were considered inappropriate for women. Instead, women were encouraged to pursue professional occupations that had direct practical application, such as social work and nursing. A key goal of the Nazi regime was to resolve “the Jewish question.” In September 1935, the Nazis announced new racial laws at the annual party rally in Nuremberg. These laws excluded Jews from German citizenship and forbade marriages and extramarital relations between Jews and German citizens. A more violent phase of anti-Jewish activity was initiated on November 9–10, 1938, the infamous Kristallnacht, or night of shattered glass. The assassination of a German diplomat in Paris became the excuse for a Nazi-led destructive rampage against the Jews; synagogues were burned, 7,000 Jewish businesses were destroyed, and at least one hundred Jews were killed. Moreover, 20,000 Jewish males were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Jews were now barred from all public buildings and prohibited from owning, managing, or working in any retail store. Hitler would soon turn to more gruesome measures. The Spread of Authoritarianism in Europe Nowhere had the map of Europe been more drastically altered by World War I than in eastern Europe. The new states of Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia adopted parliamentary systems, and the preexisting kingdoms of Romania and Bulgaria gained new parliamentary constitutions in 1920. Greece became a republic in 1924. Hungary's government was parliamentary in form but controlled by its landed aristocrats. Thus, at the beginning of the 1920s, the future of political democracy seemed promising. Yet almost everywhere in eastern Europe, parliamentary governments soon gave way to authoritarian regimes. Several factors helped create this situation. Eastern European states had little tradition of liberalism or parliamentary politics and no substantial middle class to support them. Then, too, these states were predominantly rural and agrarian. Many of the peasants were largely illiterate, and much of the land was still dominated by large landowners who feared the growth of agrarian peasant parties with their schemes for land redistribution. Ethnic conflicts also threatened to tear these countries apart. Fearful of land reform, Communist agrarian upheaval, and ethnic conflict, powerful landowners, the churches, and even some members of the small middle class looked to authoritarian governments to maintain the old system. Only Czechoslovakia, with its substantial middle class, liberal tradition, and strong industrial base, maintained its political democracy. In Spain, democracy also failed to survive. Fearful of the rising influence of left-wing elements in the government, in July 1936 Spanish military forces led by General Francisco Franco (1892–1975) launched a brutal and bloody civil war that lasted three years. Foreign intervention complicated the situation. Franco's forces were aided by arms, money, and men from Italy and Germany, and the government was assisted by 40,000 foreign volunteers and trucks, planes, tanks, and military advisers from the Soviet Union. After Franco's forces captured Madrid on March 28, 1939, the Spanish Civil War finally came to an end. General Franco soon established a dictatorship that favored large landowners, businessmen, and the Catholic clergy. The Rise of Militarism in Japan The rise of militant forces in Japan resulted not from a seizure of power
by a new political party but from the growing influence of nationalist elements at the top of the political hierarchy. During the 1920s, a multiparty system based on democratic practices appeared to be emerging. Two relatively moderate political parties, the Minseito and the Seiyukai, dominated the Diet and took turns providing executive leadership in the cabinet. Radical elements existed at each end of the political spectrum, but neither militant nationalists nor violent revolutionaries appeared to present a threat to the stability of the system. In fact, the political system was probably weaker than it seemed at the time. Both of the major parties were deeply dependent on campaign contributions from powerful corporations (the zaibatsu), and conservative forces connected to the military or the old landed aristocracy were still highly influential behind the scenes. As in the Weimar Republic in Germany during the same period, the actual power base of moderate political forces was weak, and politicians unwittingly undermined the fragility of the system by engaging in bitter attacks on each other. Political tensions in Japan increased in 1928 when Chiang Kai-shek's forces seized Shanghai and several provinces in central China. In the next few years, Chiang engaged in negotiations with the remaining warlords north of the Yangtze River and made clear his intention to integrate the region, including the three provinces in Manchuria, into the new Nanjing republic. This plan represented a direct threat to military strategists in Japan, who viewed resource-rich Manchuria as the key to their country's expansion onto the Chinese mainland. When Zhang Xueliang, son and successor of the Japanese puppet Zhang Zuolin (see Chapter 5), resisted Japanese threats and decided to integrate Manchuria into the Nanjing republic, the Japanese were shocked. “You forget,” Zhang told one Japanese official, “that I am Chinese.”1 Appeals from Tokyo to Washington for a U.S. effort to restrain Chiang Kai-shek were rebuffed. Militant nationalists, outraged at Japan's loss of influence in Manchuria, began to argue that the Shidehara policy of peaceful cooperation with other nations in maintaining the existing international economic order had been a failure. THE MUKDEN INCIDENT In September 1931, acting on the pretext that Chinese troops had attacked a Japanese railway near the northern Chinese city of Mukden, Japanese military units stationed in the area seized control throughout Manchuria. Although Japanese military authorities in Manchuria announced that China had provoked the action, the “Mukden incident,” as it was called, had actually been carried out by Japanese saboteurs. Eventually, worldwide protests against the Japanese action led the League of Nations to send an investigative commission to Manchuria. When the commission issued a report condemning the seizure, Japan angrily withdrew from the League. Over the next several years, the Japanese consolidated their hold on Manchuria, renaming it Manchukuo and placing it under the titular authority of former Chinese emperor and now Japanese puppet, Pu Yi. Although no one knew it at the time, the Mukden incident would later be singled out by some observers as the opening shot of World War II. The failure of the League of Nations to take decisive action sent a strong signal to Japan and other potentially aggressive states that they might pursue their objectives without the risk of united opposition by the major world powers. Despite its agonizing efforts to build a system of peace and stability that would prevent future wars, the League had failed to resolve the challenges of the postwar era. DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS Civilian officials in Tokyo had been horrified by the unilateral actions undertaken by ultranational Japanese military elements in Manchuria, but were cowed into silence. Despite doubts about the wisdom of the Mukden incident, the cabinet was too divided to disavow it, and military officers in Manchuria increasingly acted on their own initiative. During the early 1930s, civilian cabinets were also struggling to cope with the economic challenges presented by the Great Depression. Already suffering from the decline of its business interests on the mainland, Japan began to feel the impact of the Great Depression after 1929 when the United States and major European nations raised their
tariffs against Japanese imports in a desperate effort to protect local businesses and jobs. The value of Japanese exports dropped by 50 percent from 1929 to 1931, and wages dropped nearly as much. Hardest hit were the farmers as the prices of rice and other staple food crops plummeted. By abandoning the gold standard, Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi was able to lower the price of Japanese goods on the world market, and exports climbed back to earlier levels. But the political parties were no longer able to stem the growing influence of militant nationalist elements. In May 1932, Inukai Tsuyoshi was assassinated by right-wing extremists. He was succeeded by a moderate, Admiral Saito Makoto, but ultranationalist patriotic societies began to terrorize opponents, assassinating businessmen and public figures identified with the policy of conciliation toward the outside world. Some, like the publicist Kita Ikki, were convinced that the parliamentary system had been corrupted by materialism and Western values and should be replaced by a system that would return to traditional Japanese values and imperial authority. His message “Asia for the Asians” had not won widespread support during the relatively prosperous 1920s but increased in popularity after the Great Depression, which convinced many Japanese that capitalism was unsuitable for Japan. During the mid-1930s, the influence of the military and extreme nationalists over the government steadily increased. Minorities and left-wing elements were persecuted, and moderates were intimidated into silence. Terrorists put on trial for their part in assassination attempts portrayed themselves as selfless patriots and received light sentences. Japan continued to hold national elections, and moderate candidates continued to receive substantial popular support, but the cabinets were dominated by the military or advocates of Japanese expansionism. In February 1936, junior officers in the army led a coup in the capital city of Tokyo, briefly occupying the Diet building and other key government installations and assassinating several members of the cabinet. The ringleaders were quickly tried and convicted of treason, but widespread sympathy for the defendants further strengthened the influence of the military in the halls of power. The Path to War in Europe When Hitler became chancellor on January 30, 1933, Germany's situation in Europe seemed weak. The Versailles Treaty had created a demilitarized zone on Germany's western border that would allow the French to move into the heavily industrialized parts of Germany in the event of war. To Germany's east, smaller states such as Poland and Czechoslovakia had defensive treaties with France. The Versailles Treaty had also limited Germany's army to 100,000 troops with no air force and only a small navy. Posing as a man of peace in his public speeches, Hitler insisted that Germany wished only to revise the unfair provisions of Versailles by peaceful means and to take its rightful place among the European states. On March 9, 1935, he announced the creation of a new air force and, one week later, the introduction of a military draft that would expand Germany's army (the Wehrmacht) from 100,000 to 550,000 troops. France, Great Britain, and Italy condemned Germany's unilateral repudiation of the Versailles Treaty but took no concrete action. On March 7, 1936, buoyed by his conviction that the Western democracies had no intention of using force to maintain the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler sent German troops into the demilitarized Rhineland. Under the treaty, the French had the right to use force against any violation of the demilitarized Rhineland. But France would not act without British support, and the British viewed the occupation of German territory by German troops as a reasonable action by a dissatisfied power. The London Times, reflecting the war-weariness that had gripped much of the European public since the end of the Great War, noted that the Germans were only “going into their own back garden.” Meanwhile, Hitler gained new allies. In October 1935, Mussolini committed Fascist Italy to imperial expansion by invading Ethiopia. Angered by French and British opposition to his invasion, Mussolini welcomed Hitler's support and began to draw closer to the German dictator he had once called a buffoon. The joint intervention of
Germany and Italy on behalf of General Franco in the Spanish Civil War in 1936 also drew the two nations closer together. In October 1936, Mussolini and Hitler concluded an agreement that recognized their common political and economic interests. One month later, Germany and Japan concluded the Anti-Comintern Pact and agreed to maintain a common front against communism. From behind the walls of the Kremlin in Moscow, Joseph Stalin undoubtedly observed the effects of the Great Depression with a measure of satisfaction. During the early 1920s, once it became clear that the capitalist states in Europe had managed to survive without socialist revolutions, Stalin decided to improve relations with the outside world as a means of obtaining capital and technological assistance in promoting economic growth in the Soviet Union. But Lenin had predicted that after a brief period of stability in Europe, a new crisis brought on by overproduction and intense competition was likely to occur in the capitalist world. That, he added, would mark the beginning of the next wave of revolution. In the meantime, he declared, “We will give the capitalists the shovels with which to bury themselves.” To Stalin, the onset of the Great Depression was a signal that the next era of turbulence in the capitalist world was at hand, and during the early 1930s, Soviet foreign policy returned to the themes of class struggle and social revolution. When the influence of the Nazi Party reached significant levels in the early 1930s, Stalin viewed it as a pathological form of capitalism and ordered the Communist Party in Germany not to support the fragile Weimar Republic. Hitler would quickly fall, he reasoned, leading to a Communist takeover. By 1935, Stalin had become uneasily aware that Hitler was not only securely in power in Berlin but also represented a serious threat to the Soviet Union. That summer, at a meeting of the Communist International held in Moscow, Soviet officials announced a shift in policy. The Soviet Union would now seek to form united fronts with capitalist democratic nations in Europe against the common danger of Nazism and fascism. Communist parties in capitalist countries and in colonial areas were instructed to cooperate with “peace-loving democratic forces” in forming coalition governments called Popular Fronts. In most capitalist countries, Stalin's move was greeted with suspicion, but in France, a coalition of leftist parties—Communists, Socialists, and Radicals—fearful that rightists intended to seize power, formed a Popular Front government in June 1936. The new government succeeded in launching a program for workers. It included the right of collective bargaining, a forty-hour workweek, two-week paid vacations, and minimum wages. But such policies failed to bring an end to the depression, and although it survived until 1938, the Front was for all intents and purposes dead before then. Moscow signed a defensive treaty with France and reached an agreement with three non-Communist states in eastern Europe (Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia), but talks with Great Britain achieved little result. The Soviet Union, rebuffed by London and disappointed by Paris, feared that it might be forced to face Hitler alone. Decision at Munich By the end of 1936, the Treaty of Versailles had been virtually scrapped, and Germany had erased much of the stigma of defeat. Hitler, whose foreign policy successes had earned him much public acclaim, was convinced that neither the French nor the British could effectively oppose his plans and decided in 1938 to annex Austria, where pro-German sentiment was strong. By threatening Austria with invasion, Hitler coerced the Austrian chancellor into putting Austrian Nazis in charge of the government. The new government promptly invited German troops to enter Austria and assist in maintaining law and order. One day later, on March 13, 1938, Austria formally became a part of Germany. The annexation of Austria without objections from other European nations put Germany in position for Hitler's next objective—the destruction of Czechoslovakia. Although Czechoslovakia was quite prepared to defend itself and was supported by pacts with France and the Soviet Union, Hitler believed that its allies would not use force to defend it against a German attack. His gamble succeeded. On
September 15, 1938, Hitler demanded the cession to Germany of the Sudetenland (an area in western Czechoslovakia that was inhabited largely by ethnic Germans) and expressed his willingness to risk “world war” if he was refused. Instead of objecting, the British, French, Germans, and Italians—at a hastily arranged conference at Munich—reached an agreement that essentially met all of Hitler's demands. German troops were allowed to occupy the Sudetenland as the Czechs, abandoned by their Western allies as well as by the Soviet Union, stood by helplessly. The Munich Conference was the high point of Western appeasement of Hitler. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned to England from Munich boasting that the agreement meant “peace in our time.” Hitler had promised Chamberlain that he had made his last demand (see the box above). OPPOSING VIEWPOINTS The Munich Conference At the Munich Conference, the leaders of France and Great Britain capitulated to Hitler's demands on Czechoslovakia. When British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain defended his actions at Munich as necessary for peace, another British statesman, Winston Churchill, characterized the settlement at Munich as “a disaster of the first magnitude.” After World War II, political figures in western Europe and the United States would cite the example of appeasement at Munich to encourage vigorous resistance to expansionism by the Soviet Union. Winston Churchill, Speech to the House of Commons (October 5, 1938) I will begin by saying what everybody would like to ignore or forget but which must nevertheless be stated, namely, that we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat, and that France has suffered even more than we have…. The utmost my right honorable Friend the Prime Minister … has been able to gain for Czechoslovakia and in the matters which were in dispute has been that the German dictator, instead of snatching his victuals from the table, has been content to have them served to him course by course…. And I will say this, that I believe the Czechs, left to themselves and told they were going to get no help from the Western Powers, would have been able to make better terms than they have got…. We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude which has befallen Great Britain and France. Do not let us blind ourselves to that…. And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time. Neville Chamberlain, Speech to the House of Commons (October 6, 1938) That is my answer to those who say that we should have told Germany weeks ago that, if her army crossed the border of Czechoslovakia, we should be at war with her. We had no treaty obligations and no legal obligations to Czechoslovakia…. When we were convinced, as we became convinced, that nothing any longer would keep the Sudetenland within the Czechoslovakian State, we urged the Czech Government as strongly as we could to agree to the cession of territory, and to agree promptly…. It was a hard decision for anyone who loved his country to take, but to accuse us of having by that advice betrayed the Czechoslovakian State is simply preposterous. What we did was save her from annihilation and give her a chance of new life as a new State, which involves the loss of territory and fortifications, but may perhaps enable her to enjoy in the future and develop a national existence under a neutrality and security comparable to that which we see in Switzerland today. Therefore, I think the Government deserves the approval of this House for their conduct of affairs in this recent crisis, which has saved Czechoslovakia from destruction and Europe from Armageddon. What were the opposing views of Churchill and Chamberlain on how to respond to Hitler's demands at Munich? Do these arguments have any wider relevance for other world crises? SOURCES: Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1938), vol. 339, pp. 361–369; Neville Chamberlain, In Search of
Peace (New York: Putnam, 1939), pp. 215, 217. In fact, Munich confirmed Hitler's perception that the Western democracies were weak and would not fight. He was increasingly convinced of his own infallibility and had by no means been satisfied at Munich. In March 1939, Hitler occupied the Czech lands (Bohemia and Moravia), and with his encouragement, the Slovaks, who had always resented the condescending attitude of the more sophisticated Czechs, declared their independence of the Czechs and set up the German puppet state of Slovakia. On the evening of March 15, 1939, Hitler triumphantly declared in Prague that he would be known as the greatest German of them all. The Western states were now alarmed by the Nazi threat. Hitler's naked aggression had made it clear that his promises were utterly worthless. When he began to demand the return to Germany of Danzig (a primarily German city that had been made a free city by the Treaty of Versailles to serve as a seaport for Poland), Britain recognized the danger and offered to protect Poland in the event of war. Both France and Britain realized that they needed Soviet help to contain Nazi aggression and began political and military negotiations with Stalin. Their distrust of Soviet communism, however, made an alliance unlikely. Meanwhile, Hitler pressed on in the belief that Britain and France would not go to war over Poland. To preclude an alliance between the western European states and the Soviet Union, which would create the danger of a two-front war, Hitler, ever the opportunist, approached Stalin, who had given up hope of any alliance with Britain and France. The announcement on August 23, 1939, of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact shocked the world. The treaty with the Soviet Union gave Hitler the freedom he sought, and on September 1, German forces invaded Poland. A secret protocol divided up the nation of Poland between the two signatories. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Europe was again at war.The Path to War in Asia In the years immediately following the Japanese seizure of Manchuria in the fall of 1931, Japanese military forces began to expand gradually into North China. Using the tactics of military intimidation and diplomatic bullying rather than all-out attack, Japanese military authorities began to carve out a new “sphere of influence” south of the Great Wall. Not everyone in Tokyo agreed with this aggressive policy—the young Emperor Hirohito, who had succeeded to the throne in 1926, was initially nervous about possible international repercussions—but right-wing terrorists assassinated some of its key critics and intimidated others into silence. The United States refused to recognize the Japanese takeover of Manchuria, which Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson declared an act of “international outlawry,” but was unwilling to threaten the use of force. Instead, the Americans sought to avoid confrontation in the hope of encouraging moderate forces in Japanese society. As one senior U.S. diplomat with long experience in Asia warned in a memorandum to the president: Utter defeat of Japan would be no blessing to the Far East or to the world. It would merely create a new set of stresses, and substitute for Japan the USSR—as the successor to Imperial Russia—as a contestant (and at least an equally unscrupulous and dangerous one) for the mastery of the East. Nobody except perhaps Russia would gain from our victory in such a war.2 For the moment, the prime victim of Japanese aggression was China. Nevertheless, Chiang Kai-shek attempted to avoid a confrontation with Japan so that he could deal with what he considered the greater threat from the Communists. When clashes between Chinese and Japanese troops broke out, he sought to appease the Japanese by granting them the authority to administer areas in North China. But, as the Japanese moved steadily southward, popular protests in Chinese cities against Japanese aggression intensified. In December 1936, Chiang was briefly kidnapped by military forces commanded by General Zhang Xueliang, who compelled him to end his military efforts against the Communists in Yan'an and form a new united front against the Japanese. After Chinese and Japanese forces clashed at Marco Polo Bridge, south of Beijing, in July 1937, China refused to
apologize, and hostilities spread. A Monroe Doctrine for Asia Japan had not planned to declare war on China, but neither side would compromise, and the 1937 incident eventually turned into a major conflict. The Japanese advanced up the Yangtze valley and seized the Chinese capital of Nanjing, raping and killing thousands of innocent civilians in the process. The full enormity of the horrendous slaughter, which continued for several weeks, only emerged many years after the end of the war. The “Nanjing incident” aroused a deep-seated anger against Japan among the Chinese people that continues to affect relations between the two countries to this day. But Chiang Kai-shek refused to capitulate and moved his government upriver to Hankou. When the Japanese seized that city, he moved further upriver to Chungking, in remote Sichuan Province. Japanese strategists had hoped to force Chiang to join a Japanese-dominated New Order in East Asia, comprising Japan, Manchuria, and China. Now they established a puppet regime in Nanjing that would cooperate with Japan in driving Western influence out of East Asia. Tokyo hoped eventually to seize resource-rich Soviet Siberia and to create a new Monroe Doctrine for Asia, under which Japan would guide its Asian neighbors on the path to development and prosperity. After all, who better to instruct Asian societies on modernization than the one Asian country that had already achieved it? Japanese Advances into China, 1931–1939 A Japanese Victory in China. After consolidating its authority over Manchuria, Japan began to expand into northern China. Direct hostilities between Japanese and Chinese forces began in 1937. This photograph shows victorious Japanese forces in January 1938 riding under the arched Chungshan Gate in Nanjing after they had conquered the Chinese capital city. By 1939, Japan had conquered most of eastern China. Tokyo's “Southern Strategy” During the late 1930s, Japan began to cooperate with Nazi Germany on a plan to launch a joint attack on the Soviet Union and divide up its resources between them. But when Germany surprised Tokyo by signing the nonaggression pact with the Soviets in August 1939, Japanese strategists were compelled to reevaluate their long-term objectives. Japan was not strong enough to defeat the Soviet Union alone, as a small but bitter border war along the Siberian frontier near Manchukuo had amply demonstrated. So the Japanese began to shift their gaze southward to the vast resources of Southeast Asia—the oil of the Dutch East Indies, the rubber and tin of Malaya, and the rice of Burma and Indochina. A move southward, of course, would risk war with the European colonial powers and the United States. Japan's attack on China in the summer of 1937 had already aroused strong criticism abroad, particularly in Washington, where President Franklin D. Roosevelt threatened to “quarantine” the aggressors after Japanese military units bombed a U.S. naval ship operating in China. The public's fear of involvement forced the president to draw back, but when Japan demanded the right to occupy airfields and exploit economic resources in French Indochina in the summer of 1940, the United States warned the Japanese that it would impose economic sanctions unless Japan withdrew from the area and returned to its borders of 1931. Tokyo viewed the U.S. threat of retaliation as an obstacle to its long-term objectives. Japan badly needed liquid fuel and scrap iron from the United States. If they were cut off, Japan would have to find them elsewhere. The Japanese were thus caught in a vise. To obtain guaranteed access to the natural resources needed to fuel the Japanese military machine, Japan must risk being cut off from its current source of the raw materials that would be needed in the event of a conflict. After much debate, the Japanese decided to launch a surprise attack on U.S. and European colonies in Southeast Asia in the hope of a quick victory that would cement Japanese dominance in the region. The World at War On September 1, 1939, German forces suddenly attacked Poland. Using the tactics of blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” hundreds of tanks, supported by airplanes, broke quickly through Polish lines and encircled the bewildered Polish troops, whose courageous cavalry units were no match for the mechanized forces
of their adversary. Conventional infantry units then moved in to hold the newly conquered territory. Within four weeks, Poland had surrendered. On September 28, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union officially divided Poland between them. To Hitler's surprise, France and Britain declared war on Germany but took no action during a period of watchful waiting (dubbed the “phony war”). The War in Europe Although France had joined with Great Britain in declaring war on Germany after the latter's attack on Poland, the French were ill prepared for the challenge. The political class was badly divided over both domestic and foreign policy (many conservatives openly preferred Nazi Germany over the left-leaning Socialists), and the country's military leaders had failed to appreciate the effectiveness of the new mechanized warfare. France therefore took little action when Germany launched a blitzkrieg against Denmark and Norway on April 9, 1940. One month later, the Germans attacked the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. German tank divisions broke through the weak French defensive positions in the Ardennes forest and raced across northern France, splitting the Allied armies and trapping French troops and the entire British army on the beaches of Dunkirk. Only by heroic efforts, and the German military commanders' crucial failure to exploit their advantage, did the British succeed in a gigantic evacuation of 330,000 Allied (mostly British) troops. The French capitulated on June 22. German armies occupied about three-fifths of France while the French hero of World War I, Marshal Philippe Petain (1856–1951), established a puppet regime (known as Vichy France) over the remainder. Germany was now in control of western and central Europe (see Map 6.1). Britain had still not been defeated, but it was reeling, and a new wartime cabinet under Prime Minister Winston Churchill debated whether to seek a negotiated peace settlement. Churchill, who doubted that Hitler could be trusted, was opposed. THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN Encouraged by his stunning victories on the Continent, Hitler turned his attention to the invasion of Great Britain, an operation known as Sealion. An amphibious invasion of Britain could succeed only if Germany gained control of the air. In early August 1940, the Luftwaffe (German air force) launched a major offensive against British air and naval bases, harbors, communication centers, and war industries. The British fought back doggedly, supported by an effective radar system that gave them early warning of German attacks. Nevertheless, the British air force suffered critical losses and was probably saved by Hitler's change in strategy. In September, in retaliation for a British air attack on Berlin, Hitler ordered a shift from military targets to massive bombing of cities to break British morale. The British rebuilt their air strength quickly and were soon inflicting major losses on Luftwaffe bombers. By the end of September, Germany had lost the Battle of Britain, and the invasion of the British Isles had to be abandoned. The successful outcome of the Battle of Britain provided an enormous boost to British morale in a time of great peril. But behind the scenes, another development was unfolding that would eventually deal a more grievous blow to German prospects for victory. One of the most important weapons in the Allied arsenal was the ability to break the codes produced by the German code machine, known as Enigma. The product of code breakers from several countries, the Ultra project, as it eventually was called, had been initiated a decade earlier but only began to provide consistent access to German plans and actions by the summer of 1940. Eventually, it became an important, if not crucial, factor in several major Allied victories in World War II. Thwarted in the west by the failure of Operation Sealion, Nazi leaders now pursued a new strategy, which called for Italian troops to capture Egypt and the Suez Canal, thereby closing the Mediterranean to British ships and shutting off Britain's supply of oil. This strategy failed when the British routed the Italian army. Although Hitler then sent German troops to the North African theater of war, his primary concern lay elsewhere; he had already reached the decision to fulfill his longtime obsession with the acquisition of territory in the east. In Mein Kampf, Hitler had declared that future German expansion must lie in
the vast plains of southern Russia. THE RUSSIAN CAMPAIGN Hitler was now convinced that Britain was remaining in the war only because it expected Soviet support. If the Soviet Union were smashed, Britain's last hope would be eliminated. Moreover, the German general staff was convinced that the Soviet Union, whose military leadership had been decimated by Stalin's purge trials, could be defeated quickly and decisively. The invasion of the Soviet Union was scheduled for spring 1941 but was delayed because of problems in the Balkans. Mussolini's disastrous invasion of Greece in October 1940 had exposed Italian forces to attack from British air bases in that country. To secure their Balkan flank, German troops seized both Yugoslavia and Greece in April 1941. Berlin had already obtained the political cooperation of Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania. Now reassured, Hitler ordered an invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, in the belief that the Soviets could still be decisively defeated before winter set in. It was a fateful miscalculation. MAP 6.1 World War II in Europe and North Africa. With its fast and effective military, Germany quickly overwhelmed much of western Europe. Hitler had overestimated his country's capabilities, however, and underestimated those of his foes. By late 1942, his invasion of the Soviet Union was failing, and the United States had become a major factor in the war. The Allies successfully invaded Italy in 1943 and France in 1944. Which countries were neutral, and how did geography help make their neutrality an option? The massive attack stretched out along an 1,800-mile front. German troops, supported by powerful armored units, advanced rapidly, capturing 2 million Russian soldiers. By November, one German army group had swept through Ukraine, and a second was besieging Leningrad; a third approached within 25 miles of Moscow, the Russian capital. An early winter and unexpected Soviet resistance, however, brought a halt to the German advance. For the first time in the war, German armies had been stopped. A counterattack in December 1941 by Soviet army units newly supplied with U.S. weapons came as an ominous ending to the year for the Germans. Alarmed by the rapidity of the German advances in Europe, the Roosevelt administration had begun to provide military assistance (known as Lend-Lease) to the Soviet Union via shipments sent around northern Scandinavia to the Soviet port of Murmansk. “We knew we were in trouble,” one German war veteran remarked to me many years later, “when we became aware that many Russian soldiers were armed with American rifles.” The New Order in Europe By the fall of 1941, the Nazi empire stretched across continental Europe from the English Channel in the west to the outskirts of Moscow in the east. The conquered territories were organized in two different ways. Some areas, such as western Poland, were annexed and transformed into German provinces. Most of occupied Europe, however, was administered indirectly by German officials with the assistance of collaborationist regimes. Racial considerations played an important role in how conquered peoples were treated. German civil administrations were established in Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands because the Nazis considered their peoples to be Aryan, or racially akin to the Germans, and hence worthy of more lenient treatment. Latin peoples, such as the occupied French, were given military administrations. But all the occupied territories were exploited for material goods and manpower for Germany's labor needs. Because the conquered lands in the east contained the living space for German expansion and were populated in Nazi eyes by racially inferior Slavic peoples, Nazi administration there was considerably more ruthless. One million Poles were uprooted and dumped in southern Poland. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans (descendants of Germans who had migrated years earlier from Germany to different parts of southern and eastern Europe) were encouraged to colonize designated areas in Poland. Hitler's grand vision called for a colossal project of social engineering after the war, in which Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians would become slave labor while German peasants settled on the abandoned lands and Germanized them. Labor shortages in Germany led to a policy of ruthless
mobilization of foreign labor. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, the 4 million Russian prisoners of war captured by the Germans, along with more than 2 million workers conscripted in France, became a major source of manpower. By the summer of 1944, 7 million foreign workers had been shipped to Germany, where they constituted 20 percent of Germany's labor force. Another 7 million were supplying forced labor in their own countries on farms, in industries, and even in military camps. THE HOLOCAUST No aspect of the Nazi New Order was more tragic than the deliberate attempt to exterminate the Jewish people of Europe. Until 1939, Nazi policy focused on promoting the “emigration” of German Jews from Germany. Once the war began in September 1939, the so-called Jewish problem took on new dimensions. Evetually, Nazi leaders settled on what was called the Final Solution to the Jewish problem—the annihilation of the Jewish people. Reinhard Heydrich (1904–1942), head of the SS's Security Service, was given administrative responsibility to carry it out. After the defeat of Poland, Heydrich ordered his special strike forces—the Einsatzgruppen—to round up all Polish Jews and concentrate them in ghettos established in a number of Polish cities. After the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Einsatzgruppen were transformed into mobile killing units. These death squads followed the regular army's advance into the Soviet Union. Their job was to round up Jews in the villages and execute and bury them in mass graves, often giant pits dug by the victims themselves before they were shot. Even this approach to solving the Jewish problem was soon perceived as inadequate. Instead, the Nazis opted for the systematic annihilation of the European Jewish population in specially built death camps. Jews from occupied countries were rounded up, packed like cattle into freight trains, and shipped to Poland, where six extermination centers were built for this purpose. The largest and most famous was Auschwitz-Birkenau. Zyklon B (the commercial name for hydrogen cyanide) was selected as the most effective gas for quickly killing large numbers of people in gas chambers designed to look like shower rooms to facilitate the cooperation of the victims. By the spring of 1942, the death camps were in operation. Although initial priority was given to the elimination of the ghettos in Poland, Jews were soon also being shipped from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands and eventually from Greece and Hungary. Despite desperate military needs, the Final Solution had priority in using railroad cars to transport Jews to the death camps. By the end of the war, the Germans had killed between 5 and 6 million Jews, more than 3 million of them in the death camps. Virtually 90 percent of the Jewish populations of Poland, the Baltic countries, and Germany were exterminated. Overall, the Holocaust was responsible for the death of nearly two of every three European Jews. The Nazis were also responsible for the death by shooting, starvation, or overwork of at least another 9 to 10 million people. Because the Nazis considered the Gypsies (like the Jews) an alien race, they were systematically rounded up for extermination. Civic leaders in many Slavic countries were also arrested and executed. The Nazis also singled out homosexuals for persecution, and thousands lost their lives in concentration camps. The Holocaust: An Image from Buchenwald. When Allied troops began to occupy Nazi concentration camps in Germany, Austria, and Poland at the end of World War II, they were stunned by the horrific scenes of inhumanity that they observed there: ovens still filled with the charred remains of prisoners, piles of bodies rotting in uncovered graves, and emaciated survivors who greeted the troops with vacant eyes and frequently died within hours or days of their liberation. Some of the most poignant images were deceptively simple, though frightening in their connotations—piles of shoes, eyeglasses, and even children's toys, all left by the victims of the Nazi terror. Shown here are thousands of wedding rings found in a cave near the camp at Buchenwald. War Spreads in Asia On December 7, 1941, Japanese carrier-based aircraft attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. The same day, other units launched assaults on the
Philippines and began advancing toward the British colony of Malaya. Shortly thereafter, Japanese forces seized the British island of Singapore, invaded the Dutch East Indies, and occupied a number of islands in the Pacific Ocean. In some cases, as on the Bataan peninsula and the island of Corregidor in the Philippines, resistance was fierce, but by the spring of 1942, almost all of Southeast Asia and much of the western Pacific had fallen into Japanese hands. Placing the entire region under Japanese tutelage, Japan announced its intention to liberate Southeast Asia from Western rule. For the moment, however, Tokyo needed the resources of the region for its war machine and placed its conquests under its rule on a wartime footing. Japanese leaders had hoped that their strike at American bases would destroy the U.S. Pacific Fleet and persuade the Roosevelt administration to accept Japanese domination of the Pacific. The American people, in the eyes of Japanese leaders, had been made soft by material indulgence. But the Japanese had miscalculated. Although the administration's apparent failure to anticipate the scope and direction of the Japanese attack has aroused legitimate criticism, the attack on Pearl Harbor galvanized American opinion and won broad support for Roosevelt's war policy. The United States now joined with European nations and the embattled peoples of Nationalist China in a combined effort to defeat Japan's plan to achieve hegemony in the Pacific. U.S. STRATEGY IN THE PACIFIC On December 11, 1941, four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Germany committed a major error by declaring war on the United States. Confronted with the reality of a two-front war, President Roosevelt decided that because of the overwhelming superiority of the Wehrmacht in Europe, the war effort in that theater should receive priority over the conflict with Japan in the Pacific. Accordingly, U.S. war strategists drafted plans to make maximum use of their new ally in China. An experienced U.S. military commander, Lieutenant General Joseph Stilwell, was appointed as Roosevelt's special adviser to Chiang Kai-shek. His objective was to train Chinese Nationalist forces in preparation for an Allied advance through mainland China toward the Japanese islands. By the fall of 1942, Allied forces were beginning to gather for offensive operations into South China from Burma, while U.S. cargo planes continued to fly “over the hump” through the Himalaya Mountains to supply the Chinese government in Chungking with desperately needed war supplies. In the meantime, the tide of battle began to turn in the Pacific. In the Battle of the Coral Sea in early May 1942, U.S. naval forces stopped the Japanese advance in the Dutch East Indies and temporarily relieved Australia of the threat of invasion. On June 4, American carrier planes destroyed all four of the attacking Japanese aircraft carriers near Midway Island and established U.S. naval superiority in the Pacific, even though almost all of the American planes were shot down in the encounter. The ability of U.S. intelligence operatives to break the Japanese military code by using an offshoot of the Ultra project, code-named “Magic,” played a significant role in the victory. Farther to the south, U.S. troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur launched their own campaign (dubbed “island hopping”) by invading the Japanese-held island of New Guinea, at the eastern end of the Dutch East Indies. After a series of bitter engagements in the Solomon Islands from August to November 1942, Japanese fortunes in the area began to fade (see Map 6.2). The New Order in Asia Once their military takeover was completed, Japanese policy in the occupied areas of Asia became essentially defensive, as Japan hoped to use its new possessions to meet its burgeoning needs for raw materials, such as tin, oil, and rubber, as well as an outlet for Japanese manufactured goods. To provide an organizational structure for a new Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a Ministry for Great East Asia, staffed by civilians, was established in Tokyo in October 1942 to handle relations between Japan and the conquered territories (see the box on p. 136). ASIA FOR THE ASIANS? The Japanese conquest of Southeast Asia had been accomplished under the slogan “Asia for the Asians,” and many Japanese
sincerely believed that their government was liberating the peoples of southern Asia from European colonial rule. Japanese officials in the occupied territories made contact with nationalist elements and promised that independent governments would be established under Japanese tutelage. Such governments were eventually set up in Burma, the Dutch East Indies, Vietnam, the Philippines, and even India. MAP 6.2 World War II in Asia and the Pacific. In 1937, Japan invaded northern China, beginning its effort to create the “Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” Further expansion led the United States to end iron and oil sales to Japan. Deciding that war with the United States was inevitable, Japan engineered a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Why was control of the islands in the western Pacific of great importance both to the Japanese and to the Allies? Japan's Plan for Asia The Japanese objective in World War II was to create a vast Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere to provide Japan with needed raw materials and a market for its exports. The following passage is from a secret document produced by a high-level government committee in January 1942. Draft Plan for the Establishment of the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere The Plan. The Japanese empire is a manifestation of morality and its special characteristic is the propagation of the Imperial Way. It is necessary to foster the increased power of the empire, to cause East Asia to return to its original form of independence and co-prosperity by shaking off the yoke of Europe and America, and to let its countries and peoples develop their respective abilities in peaceful cooperation and secure livelihood. The Form of East Asiatic Independence and Co-Prosperity. The states, their citizens, and resources, comprised in those areas pertaining to the Pacific, Central Asia, and the Indian Oceans formed into one general union are to be established as an autonomous zone of peaceful living and common prosperity on behalf of the peoples of the nations of East Asia. The area including Japan, Manchuria, North China, lower Yangtze River, and the Russian Maritime Province, forms the nucleus of the East Asiatic Union. The Japanese empire possesses a duty as the leader of the East Asiatic Union. The above purpose presupposes the inevitable emancipation or independence of Eastern Siberia, China, Indo-China, the South Seas, Australia, and India…. Outline of East Asiatic Administration. It is intended that the unification of Japan, Manchoukuo, and China in neighborly friendship be realized by the settlement of the Sino-Japanese problems through the crushing of hostile influences in the Chinese interior, and through the construction of a new China…. Aggressive American and British influences in East Asia shall be driven out of the area of Indo-China and the South Seas, and this area should be brought into our defense sphere. The war with Britain and America shall be prosecuted for that purpose…. Chapter 3: Political Construction Basic Plan. The realization of the great ideal of constructing Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity requires not only the complete prosecution of the current Greater East Asia War but also presupposes another great war in the future…. The following are the basic principles for the political construction of East Asia…. The desires of the peoples in the sphere for their independence shall be respected, and endeavors shall be made for their fulfillment, but proper and suitable forms of government shall be decided for them in consideration of military and economic requirements and of the historical, political, and cultural elements peculiar to each area. It must also be noted that the independence of various peoples of East Asia should be based on the idea of constructing East Asia as “independent countries existing within the New Order of East Asia” and that this conception differs from an independence based on the idea of liberalism and national self-determination…. Western individualism and materialism shall be rejected, and a moral worldview, the basic principle of whose morality shall be the Imperial Way, shall be established. The ultimate object to be achieved is not exploitation but co-prosperity and mutual help, not competitive conflict but mutual assistance and mild peace, not a formal view of equality but a view of order based on righteous classification, not an idea of rights but an idea of
service, and not several worldviews but one unified worldview. What were Japan's proposals for a Japanese-led Asia? What distinction did the government committee that drafted this document draw between “Western individualism and materialism” and the “Imperial Way”? Based on this document, were individualism and materialism a part of the Imperial Way? SOURCES: From Sources of Japanese Tradition by Wm. Theodore de Bary. Copyright © 1958 by Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. In fact, however, real power rested with the Japanese military authorities in each territory, and the local Japanese military command was directly subordinated to the Army General Staff in Tokyo. The economic resources of the colonies were exploited for the benefit of the Japanese war machine, while local peoples were recruited to serve in local military units or conscripted to work on public works projects. In some cases, the people living in the occupied areas were subjected to severe hardships. In Indochina, for example, forced requisitions of rice by the local Japanese authorities for shipment abroad created a food shortage that caused the starvation of more than a million Vietnamese in 1944 and 1945. The Japanese planned to implant a new moral and social order as well as a new political and economic order in the occupied areas. Occupation policy stressed traditional values such as obedience, community spirit, filial piety, and discipline that reflected the prevailing political and cultural bias in Japan, while supposedly Western values such as materialism, liberalism, and individualism were strongly discouraged. At first, many Asian nationalists took Japanese promises at face value and agreed to cooperate with their new masters. In Burma, an independent government was established in 1943 and subsequently declared war on the Allies. But as the exploitative nature of Japanese occupation policies became increasingly clear, sentiment turned against the new order. Japanese officials sometimes unwittingly provoked resentment by their arrogance and contempt for local customs. In the Dutch East Indies, for example, Indonesians were required to bow in the direction of Tokyo and recognize the divinity of the Japanese emperor, practices that were repugnant to Muslims. In Burma, Buddhist pagodas were sometimes used as military latrines. A generation later, many male Vietnamese still expressed anger at the memory of being severely punished by Japanese officials for urinating in public. Like German soldiers in occupied Europe, Japanese military forces often had little respect for the lives of their subject peoples and viewed the Geneva Convention governing the treatment of prisoners of war as little more than a fabrication of the Western countries to tie the hands of their adversaries. In their conquest of northern and central China, the Japanese freely used poison gas and biological weapons, leading to the deaths of thousands of Chinese citizens. The Japanese occupation of the onetime Chinese capital of Nanjing, described earlier, was especially brutal. Japanese soldiers were also savage in their treatment of Koreans. Almost 800,000 Koreans were sent overseas, most of them as forced laborers, to Japan. Tens of thousands of Korean women were forced to be “comfort women” (prostitutes) for Japanese troops. The Japanese also made extensive use of both prisoners of war and local peoples on construction projects for their war effort. In building the Burma-Thailand railway in 1943, for example, the Japanese used 61,000 Australian, British, and Dutch prisoners of war and almost 300,000 workers from Burma, Malaya, Thailand, and the Dutch East Indies. An inadequate diet and appalling work conditions in an unhealthy climate led to the deaths of 12,000 Allied prisoners of war and 90,000 local workers by the time the railway was completed. The conditions were later graphically portrayed in the award-winning movie, The Bridge on the River Kwai. Such Japanese behavior created a dilemma for many nationalists, who had no desire to see the return of the colonial powers. Some turned against the Japanese, and others lapsed into inactivity. Indonesian patriots tried to have it both ways, feigning support for Japan while attempting to sabotage the Japanese administration. In Indochina,
Ho Chi Minh's Indochinese Communist Party established contacts with American military units in South China and agreed to provide information on Japanese troop movements and rescue downed American fliers in the area. In Malaya, where Japanese treatment of ethnic Chinese residents was especially harsh, many joined a guerrilla movement against the occupying forces. By the end of the war, little support remained in the region for the erstwhile “liberators.” The Turning Point of the War, 1942–1943 The entry of the United States into the war created a coalition, called the Grand Alliance, that ultimately defeated the Axis Powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan). Nevertheless, the three major Allies—Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union—had to overcome mutual distrust before they could operate as an effective alliance. President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill had already agreed on a set of war aims—calling for the self-determination of all peoples—in a meeting held off the coast of Newfoundland in August 1941. But this accord, known as the Atlantic Charter, had not been cleared with Moscow. In a bid to allay Stalin's suspicion of U.S. intentions, President Roosevelt declared that the defeat of Germany should be the first priority of the alliance. The United States, through its Lend-Lease program, also sent large amounts of military aid, including $50 billion worth of trucks, planes, and other arms, to the Soviet Union. In 1943, the Allies agreed to fight until the unconditional surrender of the Axis Powers. This had the effect of making it nearly impossible for Hitler to divide his foes. Victory, however, was only in the distant future for the Allied leaders at the beginning of 1942. As Japanese forces advanced into Southeast Asia and the Pacific after crippling the American naval fleet at Pearl Harbor, Axis forces continued the war in Europe against Britain and the Soviet Union. Reinforcements in North Africa enabled the Afrika Korps under General Erwin Rommel to break through the British defenses in Egypt and advance toward Alexandria. In the spring of 1942, a renewed German offensive in the Soviet Union led to the capture of the entire Crimean peninsula, causing Hitler to boast that in two years, German divisions would be on the border of India. THE BATTLE OF STALINGRAD By that fall, however, the war had begun to turn against the Germans. In North Africa, British forces stopped Rommel's troops at El Alamein in the summer of 1942 and then forced them back across the desert. In November, U.S. forces landed in French North Africa and forced the German and Italian troops to surrender in May 1943. Allied war strategists drew up plans for an invasion of Italy, on the “soft underbelly” of Europe. But the true turning point of the war undoubtedly occurred on the Eastern Front, where the German armed forces suffered 80 percent of their casualties during the entire war. After capturing the Crimea, Hitler's generals wanted him to concentrate on the Caucasus and its oil fields, but Hitler decided that Stalingrad, a major industrial center on the Volga, should be taken as well. Accordingly, German forces advancing in the southern Soviet Union were divided. After three months of bitter fighting, German troops occupied the city of Stalingrad, but Soviet troops in the area, using a strategy of encirclement, now counterattacked. Besieged from all sides, the Germans were forced to surrender on February 2, 1943. The entire German Sixth Army of 300,000 men was lost, with the survivors sent off to prison camps. Soviet casualties were estimated at nearly one million, more than the United States lost in the entire war. By spring, long before Allied troops landed on the European continent, even Hitler knew that the Germans would not defeat the Soviet Union. The Wehrmacht was now in full retreat all across the Eastern Front. ARSENAL OF DEMOCRACY Although the Battle of Stalingrad was probably the most important single battle in the war, an equally significant development was taking place across the Atlantic, where the growing industrial might of the United States was gradually being transformed from peaceful to wartime uses. By 1943, the United States had become the arsenal of the Allied Powers, producing the military equipment they needed. At the height of war production in 1943, the nation was constructing six ships a day and $6 billion worth of war-related goods a month.
The output of American factories was dispatched not only to the U.S. forces overseas, but to Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and other Allies as well. Much of the industrial labor was done by American women, who, despite some public opposition, willingly took jobs in factories to replace husbands and brothers who had gone off to war. In addition, more than one million African Americans migrated from the rural South to the industrial cities of the North and West to find jobs in industry. The Last Years of the War By the beginning of 1943, the tide of battle had begun to turn against the Axis. On July 10, the Allies crossed the Mediterranean and carried the war to Italy. After taking Sicily, Allied troops began the invasion of mainland Italy in September. Following the ouster and arrest of Mussolini, a new Italian government offered to surrender to Allied forces. But the Germans, in a daring raid, liberated Mussolini and set him up as the head of a puppet German state in northern Italy while German troops occupied much of Italy. The new defensive lines established by the Germans in the hills south of Rome were so effective that the Allied advance up the Italian peninsula was slow and marked by heavy casualties. Rome finally fell on June 4, 1944. By that time, the Italian war had assumed a secondary role as the Allies opened their long-awaited second front in western Europe. In the meantime, Allied war planners had stepped up their bombing raids on German cities, damaging the Nazi industrial capacity but killing thousands of civilians in the process. The Battle of Stalingrad. The Battle of Stalingrad was a major turning point on the Eastern Front. The Germans suffered a total defeat and the loss of the entire Sixth Army. This photograph shows thousands of captured soldiers being marched across frozen Soviet soil to prison camps. The soldiers in white fur hats are Romanian. Fewer than 6,000 captured soldiers survived to go home; the remainder—almost 85,000 prisoners—died in captivity. OPERATION OVERLORD Since the autumn of 1943, under considerable pressure from Stalin, the Allies had been planning a cross-channel invasion of France (known as Operation Overlord) from Great Britain. Under the direction of U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969), five assault divisions landed on the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944, in history's greatest naval invasion. An initially indecisive German response, due in part to effective Allied disinformation activities, enabled the Allied forces to establish a beachhead, although casualties were heavy. Within three months, they had landed 2 million men and a half-million vehicles that pushed inland and broke through the German defensive lines. Among them were French troops loyal to the French military commander Charles de Gaulle. After the puppet Vichy government was established in the summer of 1940, Colonel de Gaulle had fled the country and founded a Free French movement dedicated to cooperating with the Allies to overturn Nazi domination of the European continent. After the breakout, Allied troops moved inland, liberating Paris by the end of August. By March 1945, they had crossed the Rhine and advanced into Germany. The Allied advance northward through Belgium encountered greater resistance, as German troops launched a desperate counterattack known as the Battle of the Bulge. The operation introduced a new generation of “King Tiger” tanks more powerful than anything the Allied forces could array against them. The Allies weathered the German attack, however, and in late April, they finally linked up with Soviet units at the Elbe River. ADVANCE IN THE EAST The Soviets had come a long way since the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943. In the summer of 1943, Hitler had gambled on taking the offensive by making use of the first generation of “King Tiger” tanks. At the Battle of Kursk (July 5–12), the greatest engagement of World War II, involving competing forces numbering more than 3.5 million men, the Soviets soundly defeated the German forces. Soviet forces, now supplied with their own “T-34” heavy tanks, began a relentless advance westward. The Soviets reoccupied Ukraine by the end of 1943; lifted the siege of Leningrad, where more than one million people, the vast majority of them civilians, had died; and moved into the Baltic states by the beginning of 1944. Advancing along a northern front, Soviet
troops occupied Warsaw in January 1945 and entered Berlin in April. Meanwhile, Soviet troops along a southern front swept through Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. In January 1945, Hitler moved into a bunker 55 feet under Berlin to direct the final stages of the war. He committed suicide on April 30, two days after Mussolini was shot by partisan Italian forces. On May 7, German commanders surrendered. The war in Europe was over. The Peace Settlement in Europe In November 1943, Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill, the leaders of the Grand Alliance, met at Tehran (the capital of Iran) to decide the future course of the war. Their major strategic decision involved approval for an American-British invasion of the Continent through France, which Stalin had demanded; it was scheduled for the spring of 1944. The acceptance of this plan had important consequences. It meant that Soviet and British-American forces would meet in defeated Germany along a north-south dividing line and that eastern Europe would most likely be liberated by Soviet forces. The Allies also agreed to a partition of postwar Germany until denazification could take place. Roosevelt privately assured Stalin that Soviet borders in Europe would be moved westward to compensate for the loss of territories belonging to the old Russian Empire after World War I. Poland would receive lands in eastern Germany to make up for territory lost in the east to the Soviet Union. The Yalta Agreement In February 1945, the three Allied leaders met once again at Yalta, on the Crimean peninsula of the Soviet Union. Since the defeat of Germany was by now a foregone conclusion, much of the attention focused on the war in the Pacific. At Tehran, Roosevelt had sought Soviet military help against Japan, and Stalin had assured him that Soviet forces would be in a position to enter the Pacific war three months after the close of the conflict in Europe. At Yalta, FDR reopened the subject. Development of the atomic bomb was not yet assured, and U.S. military planners feared the possibility of heavy casualties in amphibious assaults on the Japanese home islands. Roosevelt therefore agreed to Stalin's price for military assistance against Japan: possession of Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands, as well as two warm-water ports and railroad rights in Manchuria. The creation of a new United Nations to replace the now discredited League of Nations was a major U.S. concern at Yalta. Roosevelt hoped to ensure the participation of the Big Three powers in a postwar international organization before difficult issues divided them into hostile camps. After a number of compromises, both Churchill and Stalin accepted Roosevelt's plans for the United Nations organization and set the first meeting for San Francisco in April 1945. The issues of Germany and eastern Europe were treated less decisively and with considerable acrimony. The Big Three reaffirmed that Germany must surrender unconditionally and created four occupation zones. German reparations were set at $20 billion. A compromise was also worked out in regard to Poland. Stalin agreed to free elections in the future to determine a new government. But the issue of free elections in eastern Europe would ultimately cause a serious rift between the Soviets and the Americans and also become a source of political controversy in the United States. The Allied leaders agreed on an ambiguous statement that interim governments “broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population” would be formed in advance of the scheduling of free elections “responsive to the will of the people.”3 It would soon be clear that Moscow and Washington interpreted the provisions in different ways, a reality that would eventually lead to harsh criticism of Roosevelt's performance at Yalta from his opponents in the United States. For his part, FDR was determined to avoid the poisonous feelings left by the Treaty of Versailles after World War I and hoped to win Stalin's confidence as a means of maintaining the Grand Alliance at the close of the war. Confrontation at Potsdam Even before the next conference at Potsdam, Germany, took place in July 1945, Western relations with the Soviets had begun to deteriorate rapidly. The Grand Alliance had been one of necessity in which ideological incompatibility had been subordinated to the
pragmatic concerns of the war. The Allied Powers' only common aim was the defeat of Nazism. Once this aim had been all but accomplished, the many differences that antagonized East-West relations came to the surface. The Potsdam Conference of July 1945, the last Allied conference of World War II, consequently began under a cloud of mistrust. Roosevelt had died on April 12 and had been succeeded as president by Harry Truman. During the conference, Truman received word that the atomic bomb had been successfully tested. Some historians have argued that this knowledge stiffened Truman's resolve against the Soviets. Whatever the reasons, there was a new coldness in the relations between the Soviets and the Americans. At Potsdam, Truman demanded free elections throughout eastern Europe. After a bitterly fought and devastating war, however, Stalin sought absolute military security, which in his view could be ensured only by the presence of Communist states in eastern Europe. Free elections might result in governments hostile to the Soviet Union. By the middle of 1945, only an invasion by Western forces could undo developments in eastern Europe, and in the immediate aftermath of the world's most destructive conflict, few people favored such a policy. But the stage was set for a new confrontation, this time between the two major victors of World War II. The War in the Pacific Ends During the spring and early summer of 1945, the war in Asia continued, although with a significant change in approach. Allied war planners had initially hoped to focus their main effort on an advance through China with the aid of Chinese Nationalist forces trained and equipped by the United States. But Roosevelt became disappointed with Chiang Kai-shek's failure to take the offensive against Japanese forces in China and eventually approved a new strategy to strike toward the Japanese home islands directly across the Pacific. This “island-hopping” approach took an increasing toll on enemy resources, especially at sea and in the air (see the Film & History feature on p. 141). Meanwhile, new U.S. long-range B-29 bombers unleashed a wave of destruction on all major cities in the Japanese homeland. One massive firebombing raid on Tokyo in March 1945 killed more than 80,000 Japanese and caused such an enormous updraft that a U.S. aviator in one of the last B-29s to fly over the city was thrown into the air and broke his arm. ENTERING THE NUCLEAR AGE As Allied forces drew inexorably closer to the main Japanese islands in the summer of 1945, President Harry Truman had an excruciatingly difficult decision to make. Should he use atomic weapons (at the time, only two bombs were available, and their effectiveness had not been demonstrated) to bring the war to an end without the necessity of an Allied invasion of the Japanese homeland? The invasion of the island of Okinawa in April had resulted in thousands of casualties on both sides, with many Japanese troops committing suicide rather than surrendering to enemy forces.FILM & HISTORY Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) In February 1945, U.S. forces launched an attack on Iwo Jima, a 5-mile-long volcanic island, located about 650 miles southeast of Tokyo. With its three airstrips, Iwo Jima was an important element in the ring of defenses protecting Japan, and the Allies intended to use it as an air base from which to bomb the main Japanese islands. The Battle of Iwo Jima is the subject of two films directed by Clint Eastwood and released in 2006: Flag of Our Fathers presented the battle from the American viewpoint, and Letters from Iwo Jima presented the Japanese perspective. The second film won numerous awards, including a nomination for Best Picture. Letters from Iwo Jima is a realistic portrayal of the Japanese defense of the island. The plot focuses on two characters: the fictional Private Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), an ordinary soldier whose desire is to return home to his wife and daughter, and Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), the actual commander of the Japanese forces on Iwo Jima. Kuribayashi is accurately portrayed as a man who shared the hardships of his men and had gained firsthand experience of the United States while spending three years there as a military attaché. Kuribayashi was largely responsible for the Japanese strategy of
letting the U.S. Marines land on the beaches of Iwo Jima before attacking them with flanking fire from forces that were well protected in pillboxes and the miles of caves that permeated the island. The strategy proved very effective. The Japanese force of 22,000 men took a devastating toll on the Americans: out of the landing force of 110,000 men, 6,800 were killed and more than 17,000 were wounded. The assault that the U.S. military had expected to last only fourteen days dragged on instead for thirty-six. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) prepares for the U.S. invasion of Iwo Jima. The film also realistically portrays the code of bushido that motivated the Japanese forces. Based on an ideal of loyalty and service, the code emphasized the obligation to honor and defend emperor, country, and family, and to sacrifice one's life if one failed in this sacred mission. Before committing suicide, Captain Tanida (Takumi Bando) says to his men, “Men, we are honorable soldiers of the emperor. Don't ever forget that. The only way left for us is to die with honor.” But the film also presents another, more human view of the Japanese soldiers that differs from the stereotype found in many American movies about World War II. For the most part, the Japanese and American soldiers are portrayed as being much the same: as men who were willing to kill and die, but who would prefer to simply go home and be with their families. ■ After an intense debate within the administration, Truman approved the use of America's new superweapon. The first bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima on August 6. Truman then called on Japan to surrender or expect a “rain of ruin from the air.” When the Japanese did not respond, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later. The destruction in Hiroshima was incredible. Of 76,000 buildings near the center of the explosion, 70,000 were flattened, and 140,000 of the city's 400,000 inhabitants died by the end of 1945. By the end of 1950, another 50,000 had perished from the effects of radiation. The dropping of the first atomic bomb introduced the world to the nuclear age. The nuclear attack on Japan, combined with the news that Soviet forces had launched an attack on Japanese-held areas in Manchuria, did have its intended effect, however. Japan surrendered unconditionally on August 14. World War II was finally over. In the years following the end of the war, Truman's decision to approve the use of nuclear weapons to compel Japan to surrender was harshly criticized, not only for causing thousands of civilian casualties but also for introducing a frightening new weapon that could threaten the survival of the human race. Some have even charged that Truman's real purpose in ordering the nuclear strikes was to intimidate the Soviet Union. Defenders of the decision argue that the human costs of invading the Japanese home islands would have been infinitely higher had the bombs not been dropped and that the Soviet Union would have had ample time to consolidate its control over Manchuria and command a larger role in the postwar occupation of Japan. CONCLUSION WORLD WAR II WAS THE MOST DEVASTATING total war in human history. Germany, Italy, and Japan had been utterly defeated. Tens of millions of people—soldiers and civilians—had been killed in only six years. Although accurate figures are impossible to come by, Soviet losses alone during the war have been estimated as high as 50 million.4 In Asia and Europe, cities had been reduced to rubble, and millions of people faced starvation as once fertile lands stood neglected or wasted. Untold millions of people had become refugees. What were the underlying causes of the war? One direct cause was the effort by two rising capitalist powers, Germany and Japan, to make up for their relatively late arrival on the scene by carving out their own global empires. Key elements in both countries had resented the agreements reached after the end of World War I that divided the world in a manner favorable to their rivals and hoped to overturn them at the earliest opportunity. Equally important, neither Germany nor Japan possessed a strong tradition of political pluralism; to the contrary, in both countries, the legacy of a feudal past marked by a strong military tradition still wielded great influence over the political system and the mind-set of the entire population. It is no
surprise that under the impact of the Great Depression, the effects of which were severe in both countries, fragile democratic institutions were soon overwhelmed by militant forces determined to enhance national wealth and power. Why did the Axis Powers lose the war? The standard answer, of course, is that the Allied countries occupied the moral high ground in the conflict, and that conclusion is certainly not to be dismissed. But other more prosaic factors may have played a role as well. The ability of Allied intelligence agencies to break the German and Japanese code systems, enabling the Allies to anticipate the moves of their adversary on several occasions, was certainly a significant advantage. Equally important, Axis military leaders made a number of crucial strategic mis-judgments, some of which have been noted in this chapter. Hitler's confidence in his own strategic genius, in particular, led him badly astray on several occasions. In the last analysis, however, the tendency of both German and Japanese leaders to underestimate the enormous capacity of the United States and the Soviet Union to harness their industrial and human resources in the war effort was perhaps their greatest mistake. They would pay dearly for their complacency. TIMELINE CHAPTER NOTES 1.Cited in Jonathon Fenby, Chiang Kai-shek: China's Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost (New York, 2003), p. 180. 2.John Van Antwerp MacMurray, quoted in Arthur Waldron, How the Peace Was Lost: The 1935 Memorandum: “Developments Affecting American Policy in the Far East” (Stanford, Calif., 1992), p. 5. 3.Cited in Ruhl Bartlett, The Record of American Diplomacy (New York, 1952), p. 665. 4.Cited in B. Schwarz, “A Job for Rewrite: Stalin's War,” New York Times, February 2, 2004. P A R T II REFLECTIONS BY 1945, THE ERA OF GLOBAL HEGEMONY by the European imperialist nations was over. As World War I was followed by the Bolshevik Revolution, the Great Depression, the rise of Adolf Hitler, and the destructiveness of World War II, it appeared that the nations at the heart of traditional Western civilization would no longer serve as the main arbiters of world affairs. Instead, two new superpowers from outside the heartland of Europe—the United States and the Soviet Union—took their place. With the decline of the Old World, a new era of global relationships was about to begin. THE TWO FACES OF NATIONALISM What were the underlying causes of the astounding spectacle of self-destruction that engaged the European powers in two bloody internecine conflicts within a period of less than a quarter of a century? One factor was the rise of nationalism. The spirit of nationalism had originally been praised by many Europeans as a positive development in the struggle to create peaceful and unified nation-states throughout the Continent. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, however, it had instead become a divisive force, loud and chauvinistic in tone, that created bitter disputes within a number of countries—especially in eastern Europe—and contributed to the growing rivalry among nations that eventually led to two world wars. In fact, as many of its early advocates blissfully ignored, nationalism was also inherently divisive in its political ramifications. Most European countries consisted of a patchwork of various ethnic, linguistic, and religious communities, a product of centuries of migrations, wars, and dynastic alliances. How could a system of stable nation-states, each based on a single national community, ever emerge from such a bewildering amalgam of cultures and peoples? The peace treaties signed after the Great War replaced one set of territorial boundaries with another, but hardly resolved the underlying problem—the unending competition for resources and living space within the confines of a crowded continent. World War II was the tragic result. THE TRANSFORMATION OF WARFARE Another factor that contributed to the violence of the early twentieth century was the Industrial Revolution. Technology transformed the nature of war itself. New weapons of mass destruction created the potential for a new kind of warfare that reached beyond the battlefield into the very heartland of the enemy's territory, while the concept of nationalism transformed war from the sport of kings to a matter of national honor and commitment.
This trend was amply demonstrated in the two world wars of the twentieth century. Each was a product of antagonisms that had been unleashed by economic competition and growing national consciousness. Each resulted in a level of destruction that severely damaged the material foundations and eroded the popular spirit of the participants, the victors as well as the vanquished. In the end, then, industrial power and the driving force of nationalism, the very factors that had created the conditions for European global dominance, contained the seeds for the decline of that dominance. These seeds germinated during the 1930s, when the Great Depression sharpened international competition and mutual antagonisms, and then sprouted in the ensuing conflict, which embraced the entire globe. By the time World War II came to an end, the once-powerful countries of Europe were exhausted, leaving the door ajar not only for the emergence of the United States and the Soviet Union to global dominance but also for the collapse of the European colonial empires. IMPERIALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS If in Europe the dominant motif of the opening decades of the twentieth century had been the intense rivalry among the leading states over primacy in global affairs, in the rest of the world it was undoubtedly the challenge of dealing with the consequences of that struggle. By the early years of the century, a handful of European powers, increasingly challenged by Japan and the United States, had achieved political mastery over virtually the entire remainder of the world. While the overall effect of imperialism on the subject peoples is still open to debate, it seems clear that for much of the population in colonial or semicolonial areas, imperialist domination was rarely beneficial and often destructive. Although a limited number of merchants, large landowners, and traditional hereditary elites undoubtedly prospered under the umbrella of the expanding imperialist economic order, the majority of people, urban and rural alike, suffered considerable hardship as a result of the policies adopted by their foreign rulers. The effects of the Industrial Revolution on the poor had been felt in Europe, too, but there the pain was eased somewhat by the fact that the industrial era had laid the foundations for future technological advances and material abundance. In the colonial territories, the importation of modern technology was limited, while most of the profits from manufacturing and commerce fled abroad. For too many, the “white man's burden” was shifted to the shoulders of the colonial peoples. In response, the latter paradoxically turned to another European import, the spirit of nationalism. Some European historians have argued that nationalism was an artificial flower in much of the non-Western world, where allegiance was more often directed to the local community, the kinship group, or a religious faith. Even if that contention is justified—and the examples of Japan, Vietnam, and Thailand certainly appear exceptions to the rule—the concept of nationalism served a useful role in many countries in Asia and Africa. There it provided colonial peoples with a sense of common purpose that later proved vital in knitting together diverse elements to oppose colonial regimes and create the conditions for future independent states. At first, such movements had relatively little success, but they began to gather momentum in the second quarter of the twentieth century, when full-fledged nationalist movements began to appear throughout the colonial world to lead their people in the struggle for independence. Beyond the question of national independence, of course, was the problem of adopting new institutions and values appropriate to the needs of a changing world. Western notions of representative government and individual freedom had their advocates in colonial areas well before the end of the nineteenth century. Countless Asians and Africans were exposed to such ideas in schools set up by the colonial regime or in the course of travel to Europe or the United States. Many of the nationalist parties founded in colonial territories espoused democratic principles and attempted to apply them when they took power after the restoration of independence. As time went on, however, alternative ideas began to achieve popularity, especially
during the late 1920s and 1930s when new ideologies such as communism and fascism began to take hold in a world ripped apart by the Great Depression. Even in Europe and the United States, confidence in the viability of democratic institutions was seriously undermined by the economic crisis that lasted until the outbreak of World War II. For the time being, of course, the question was moot. Except in Latin America, where independent states attempted with varying degrees of success to grapple with foreign influence over their national economies, the imperialist powers showed no inclination to grant freedom to their subject peoples. Not until the end of World War II, when the era of European hegemony had clearly come to an end in the ashes of a devastated continent, would the colonial peoples begin to grasp the opportunity to take charge of their own destiny. In Part III, we will begin to address these issues.