Technology, strategy, and the outbreak of war | UPSC Mains: World History PDF Download

Technology, strategy, and the outbreak of war

Rearmament and tactical planning

• The Anglo-French defection from east-central Europe doomed the balance of power of interwar Europe. That the Western powers were unwilling and unable to defend the balance was in part the product of inadequate military spending and planning over the course of the decade. Still, decisions were taken in the last 24 months of peace that would shape the course of World War II.
• The central problem posed for all defense establishments was how to respond to the lessons of the 1914–18 stalemate. The British simply determined not to send an army to the Continent again, the French to turn their border into an impregnable fortress, and the Germans to perfect and synthesize the tactics and technologies of the last war into a dynamic new style of warfare: the Blitzkrieg (“lightning war”). Blitzkrieg was especially suited to a country whose geostrategic position made likely a war on two fronts and dictated an offensive posture: a Schlieffen solution made plausible by the internal-combustion engine. Whether or not Hitler actually planned for the type of war with which the general staff was experimenting is debatable. Perhaps he only made a virtue of necessity, for the Nazis had by no means created a full war economy in the 1930s. Since Blitzkrieg attacks by tank columns, motorized infantry, and aircraft permitted the defeat of enemies one by one with lightning speed, it required only “armament in width,” not “armament in depth.” This in turn allowed Hitler to mollify the German people with a “guns and butter” economy, with each new conquest providing the resources for the next. Blitzkrieg also allowed Hitler to conclude that he might successfully defy other Great Powers whose combined resources dwarfed those of Germany. After Munich, German rearmament accelerated. Hitler may have been right to launch his war as soon as possible, on the calculation that only by seizing the resources of the entire continent could the Reich prevail against the British Empire or the Soviet Union.
• After Versailles the British government had established the Ten-Year Rule as a rationale for holding down military spending: Each year it was determined that virtually no chance existed of war breaking out over the next decade. In 1931 expenditures were cut to the bone in response to the worldwide financial crisis. The following year, in response to Japanese expansion, the Ten-Year Rule was abolished, but Britain did not make even a gesture toward rearmament until 1935. These were “the years the locust hath eaten,” said Churchill. Understandably, British strategy fixed on the imperial threats from Japan and Italy and envisioned the dispatch of the Mediterranean fleet to Singapore. But Britain’s defensive posture, budgetary limits, and underestimation of Japan’s capabilities, especially in the air, made for a desultory buildup in battleships and cruisers rather than aircraft carriers. The British army in turn was tied up in garrisoning the empire; only two divisions were available for the Continent.
• After March 1936 the Defence Requirements Committee recognized that home air defense must become Britain’s top priority and commanded development of a high-speed, single-wing fighter plane. But two years passed before Sir Warren Fisher finally persuaded the Air Ministry to concentrate on fighter defense in its Scheme M, adopted in November 1938. At the time of Munich, therefore, the Royal Air Force possessed only two squadrons of Spitfires and Hurricanes, lacked oxygen masks sufficient to allow pursuit above 15,000 feet, and had barely begun deployment of that new wonder, radar. Only after Hitler’s occupation of Prague was conscription reinstated (April 27, 1939) and a continental army of 32 divisions planned. Throughout the era of appeasement the British expected to resist Japan and come to terms with Germany. Instead, by dint of the mistaken choices in naval technology and the eleventh-hour attention to air defense, Britain would be humiliated by Japan and withstand Germany.
• Of all the Great Powers, France most expected the next war to resemble the last and so came to rely on the doctrine of the continuous front, the Maginot Line, and the primacy of infantry and artillery. The Maginot Line was also a function of French demographic weakness vis-à-vis Germany, especially after military service was cut to one year in 1928. This siege mentality was the polar opposite of the French “cult of the attack” in 1914 and ensured that Colonel Charles de Gaulle’s 1934 book depicting an all-mechanized army of the future would be ignored. As late as 1939 the French war council insisted that “no new method of warfare has been evolved since the termination of the Great War.” Even though French military spending held steady through the Depression, France’s army and air force were ill-designed and not deployed for offense or mobile defense, even if their aged and hidebound commanders had had the will to conduct them.
• Soviet preparations and technical choices also presaged the defeats to come in the early years of the war. Communist doctrine decreed that matériel, not generalship, was decisive in war, and Stalin’s Five-Year plans concentrated on steel, technology, and weapons. Soviet planners also benefited from the work of some outstanding aviation designers, whose experimental planes broke world records and whose fighters performed well in the early days of the Spanish war. But Stalin’s obsession with domestic security outweighed rational planning for national security. In 1937 Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and his weapons research teams were liquidated or consigned to the gulag. Then Stalin ordered the 1936-vintage fighter planes into mass production at the very time the Germans were upgrading their Messerschmidts. The Soviets were sufficiently impressed by Douhet’s theories to invest in heavy bombers that would be of marginal use against a Blitzkrieg and defenseless without fighter cover. Stalin’s advisers also misunderstood the use of tanks, placing them in the front line rather than in mobile reserves. These mistakes almost spelled the death of Bolshevism in 1941.
• Little need be said of Italian preparations. Italy’s industrial base was so small, and its leaders so inept, that Mussolini had to order local Fascists to make a visual count of airplanes on fields around the country to contrive an estimate of his air strength. In August 1939, Ciano appealed to Mussolini not to join Hitler in unleashing war, given the deplorable state of Italian armed forces. This apprehensiveness was shared by the Italian generals and indeed by most military leaders of the 1930s. The Great War had revealed the vanity of planning, the vagaries of technical change, and the terrible cost of industrial war. In 1914 the generals had pushed for war while civilian leaders hung back; in the 1930s the roles were reversed. Only in Japan, which had won easy victories at little cost in 1914, did the military push for action.

Poland and Soviet anxiety

• Hitler’s cynical occupation of Prague, giving the final lie to all his peaceful protestations after Munich, prompted much speculation about the identity of his next victim: Romania with its oil reserves, the Ukraine, Poland, or even the “Germanic” Netherlands, which suffered an invasion scare in January? Chamberlain himself, offended in conscience and ego, attacked Hitler’s mendacity and evident intention of dominating the continent by force. In a speech on March 17, 1939, he gave voice to the new conviction of “the man on the street” that Hitler could not be trusted and must be stopped. Three days later Hitler renewed his demand for a “corridor across the [Polish] Corridor” to East Prussia and restoration of Danzig to the Reich. On the 22nd he underscored his seriousness by forcing Lithuania to cede Memel (Klaipėda).
• After 10 days of hand wringing, during which Colonel Beck repeated Poland’s opposition to seeking help from Moscow, the British Cabinet declared a unilateral military guarantee of Polish security on March 31, solemnized in a bilateral treaty on April 6. It seemed an extraordinary turnaround in British policy: the apparent end of appeasement. In fact, it was a last desperate effort by Chamberlain to preserve appeasement and teach Hitler to settle foreign disputes by diplomacy, as at Munich, and not by force, as at Prague. But the pace of Fascist expansion was irreversible and even contagious. Mussolini had grown irritable over Hitler’s succession of coups and his own junior-partner status, so Italy occupied Albania on April 7 and expelled its erstwhile client King Zog. Hitler, who reacted to the British guarantee with the oath, “I’ll cook them a stew they’ll choke on!” renounced his 1934 pact with Poland and the Anglo-German Naval Treaty on the 28th. Germany and Italy then turned their Axis into a military alliance known as the Pact of Steel on May 22.
• How could Britain and France ever make good on their pledges to defend Poland? British planning called only for a naval blockade in the early stages of war, while the French (despite a promise to attack) contemplated no action beyond French soil. The answer was that the Polish guarantee was a military bluff unless the Red Army could somehow be enlisted. So finally, in the late spring of 1939, the Western allies went in search of collaboration with Moscow.
• Stalin had witnessed events during the era of appeasement with growing suspicion and moved his pieces on the chessboard with deftness and cynicism. His overriding purpose was to deflect the thrusts of Germany and Japan elsewhere or—if the U.S.S.R. were forced to fight—make certain that the Western powers were likewise engaged. German reoccupation of the Rhineland had been a military setback, since it freed Germany for adventures to the east, but a diplomatic boon, since it enhanced the value of the Soviet alliance for France. The Anti-Comintern Pact had opened the terrible possibility for the Soviet Union of a war on two fronts, but it soon developed that Berlin and Tokyo were both expecting the other to stand guard over Russia while they pursued booty in central Europe and China respectively. Now Britain and France were promising to fight Hitler over Poland, thereby handing Stalin the choice of joining the Western powers in war or dealing separately with Germany to avoid conflict entirely. Fearing that war might unleash rebellion at home, Stalin chose to become the greatest appeaser of all.
• It is often said that Munich forced Stalin to conclude that the Western powers were pushing Nazi Germany to the east and thus reluctantly to consider rapprochement with Hitler. But one might just as well interpret Litvinov’s passionate pleas for collective security as a ploy to provoke conflict between Germany and the West while the U.S.S.R. huddled in safety behind its Polish buffer. The incident that made possible the union of the two dictators, as historian Adam Ulam has shown, was not Munich but the British guarantee of Poland. Before that act Stalin faced the prospect of an unopposed German march into Poland, whereupon the U.S.S.R. would be in mortal danger. After that act, Hitler could seize Poland only at the cost of war with the West, whereupon Hitler would need the U.S.S.R. as an ally. The British guarantee thus made Stalin the arbiter of Europe.
• In a contest for Soviet friendship, however, the Allies were at a distinct disadvantage. All they could offer Stalin was the likelihood of war, albeit in alliance with them. On May 3, Stalin replaced Foreign Minister Litvinov, pro-Western and a Jew, with Vyacheslav Molotov—a clear signal of his willingness to improve relations with the Nazis. The Western powers accordingly stepped up their appeals to Moscow for an alliance, but they faced two lofty hurdles. First, Stalin demanded the right to occupy the Baltic states and portions of Romania. While Westerners could scarcely expect to enlist the Red Army in their cause without giving something in return, they could not justify turning free peoples over to Stalinist tyranny. Second, the Poles, as always, refused to invite the Red Army onto lands they had wrested from that same army just 18 years before. By July, Stalin was also demanding that a military convention precede the political one to ensure that he was not left in the lurch. Ironically, the only ploy likely to persuade Stalin of Western sincerity was a blunt threat that the West would not fight for Poland unless the U.S.S.R. participated.
• Since the spring of 1939 the U.S.S.R. had been sending signals to Berlin that Hitler alternately acknowledged and ignored. His hatred for the Moscow regime was overcome, however, by the urgings of Ribbentrop and the unease of his generals. The Soviets, for their part, were again fighting heavy battles along the Manchurian border and were in need of security in Europe. Soviet bargaining power was enhanced by the fact that Hitler had a timetable: He had ordered the invasion of Poland by August 26. Negotiations dragged on from July 18 to August 21, when Hitler insisted that Stalin receive Ribbentrop and conclude their business two days hence. On Aug. 23, 1939, therefore, Ribbentrop and Molotov signed the German–Soviet Nonaggression Pact in Moscow, then raised their glasses as Stalin, the leader of world Communism, toasted the German people and their beloved Führer and vowed never to betray them. This nonagression pact was in fact a pact of aggression against Poland, which was to be partitioned, roughly along the old Curzon Line. Hitler also granted the U.S.S.R. a free hand in Finland, the Baltic states, and Bessarabia.
• Hitler expected that his successful wooing of Russia would oblige Britain and France to withdraw their pledge to Poland. The free peoples were indeed shocked by the news from Moscow, but far from succumbing, they steeled their will to resist. The world situation, so cloudy since 1933, suddenly seemed clear, and scales fell from many eyes. The abstract and often effete ideological debate over democratic decadence and the relative merits of Fascism and Communism came suddenly to an end. Both vaunted ideologies now seemed so much lying propaganda, and their patrons so many gangsters. The day after the pact Chamberlain wrote to Hitler to warn that British resolve was as firm as ever, and on the 25th he signed a full alliance with Poland. British determination and the news that Italy was not ready for war prompted Hitler to delay his invasion a week in hopes of detaching Britain with promises of treaties and guarantees of the British Empire. When Chamberlain refused, Hitler demanded that a Polish plenipotentiary be sent to Berlin on August 30 to settle the matter of Danzig and the Polish Corridor. Should the Poles refuse, their obstinacy might give London an excuse to leave them to their fate. Colonel Beck, however, had seen the fate of Schuschnigg and Hácha, and he would not submit to a Hitlerian kidnapping or to another Munich. When Hitler’s ultimatum expired, the German army staged a border incident and invaded Poland in force on the morning of Sept. 1, 1939. The British and French parliaments, confident that their governments had turned every stone in search of peace, declared war on Germany on September 3.

Hitler’s war or Chamberlain’s?

• For two decades after 1939, German guilt for the outbreak of World War II seemed incontestable. The Nürnberg war-crimes trials in 1946 brought to light damning evidence of Nazi ambitions, preparations for war, and deliberate provocation of the crises over Austria, the Sudetenland, and Poland. Revelation of Nazi tyranny, torture, and genocide was a powerful deterrent to anyone in the West inclined to dilute German guilt. To be sure, there were bitter recriminations in France and Britain against those who had failed to stand up to Hitler, and the United States and the U.S.S.R. alike were later to invoke the lessons of the 1930s to justify Cold War policies: Appeasement only feeds the appetite of aggressors; there must be “no more Munichs.” Nonetheless, World War II was undeniably Hitler’s war, as the ongoing publication of captured German documents seemed to prove.
• The British historian A.J.P. Taylor challenged the thesis of sole Nazi guilt in 1961, coincidently the same year in which Fritz Fischer revived the notion of German guilt for World War I. Taylor boldly suggested that Hitler’s “ideology” was nothing more than the sort of nationalist ravings “which echo the conversation of any Austrian cafe or German beer-house”; that Hitler’s ends and means resembled those of any “traditional German statesman”; and that the war came because Britain and France dithered between appeasement and resistance, leading Hitler to miscalculate and bring on the accident of September 1939. Needless to say, revisionism on a figure so odious as Hitler sparked vigorous rebuttal and debate. If Hitler had been a traditional statesman, then appeasement would have worked, said some. If the British had been consistent in appeasement—or resisted earlier—the war would not have happened, said others.
• Fischer’s theses on World War I were also significant, for, if Germany at that earlier time was bent on European hegemony and world power, then one could argue a continuity in German foreign policy from at least 1890 to 1945. Devotees of the “primacy of domestic policy” even made comparisons between Hitler’s use of foreign policy to crush domestic dissent and similar practices under the Kaiser and Bismarck. But how, critics retorted, could one argue for continuity between the traditional imperialism of Wilhelmine Germany and the fanatical racial extermination of Nazi Germany after 1941? At bottom, Hitler was not trying to preserve traditional elites but to destroy the domestic and international order alike.
• Soviet writers tried, without success, to draw a convincing causal chain between capitalist development and Fascism, but the researches of the British Marxist T.W. Mason exposed the German economic crisis of 1937, suggesting that the timing of World War II was partly a function of economic pressures. Finally, Alan Bullock suggested a synthesis: Hitler knew where he wanted to go—his will was unbending—but as to how to get there he was flexible, an opportunist. Gerhard Weinberg’s exhaustive study of the German documents then confirmed a neo-traditional interpretation to the effect that Hitler was bent on war and Lebensraum and that appeasement only delayed his gratification.
• Publication of British and French documents, in turn, enabled historians to sketch a subtler portrait of appeasement. Chamberlain’s reputation improved during the 1970s as American historians, conscious of U.S. overextension in the world and sympathetic to détente with the Soviets, came to appreciate the plight of Britain in the 1930s. Financial, military, and strategic rationalizations, however, could not erase the gross misunderstanding of the nature of the enemy that underlay appeasement. The British historian Anthony Adamthwaite concluded in 1984 that despite the accumulation of sources the fact remains that the appeasers’ determination to reach agreement with Hitler blinded them to reality. If to understand is not to forgive, neither is it to give the past the odour of inevitability. Hitler wanted war, and Western and Soviet policies throughout the 1930s helped him to achieve it.