4.16 Origins of War in Europe
Fascism and Militarism
The rise of fascism and militarism in Europe and Asia brought the world to war once again. A week after Japan withdrew from the League of Nations, Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany. On March 5, 1933, one day after the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt, the German legislature gave Adolf Hitler control of Germany. Riding a wave of anticommunism and anti-Semitism, Hitler’s Nazi Party promised to unite all Germans in a Great Third Reich that would last a thousand years.
During the 1920s, Benito Mussolini had appealed to Italian nationalism and fears of communism to gain power in Italy. Spinning his dreams of a new Roman empire, Mussolini embodied the rising force of fascism.
As much as Roosevelt, like Wilson before him, wanted the United States to play a leading role in world affairs, he found the nation reluctant to follow. For every step Roosevelt took toward internationalism, the Great Depression forced him to focus home once again. Congress debated a proposal to prohibit the sale of arms to all belligerents in time of war. The Neutrality Act of 1935 required an impartial embargo of arms to all belligerents. In a second Neutrality Act, Congress added a ban on providing any loans or credits to belligerents.
American isolation benefited Adolf Hitler. In March 1936, two weeks after Congress passed the second Neutrality Act, German troops entered the demilitarized area west of the Rhine River in flagrant violation of the Treaty of Versailles. As Hitler calculated, Britain and France did nothing, while the League of Nations simply issued a condemnation.
Cash and Carry Policy
For its part, Congress looked for a way to allow American trade to continue, and thus promote economic recovery at home without drawing the nation into war. Under the new “cash-and-carry” provisions of the Neutrality Act in 1937, belligerents could buy supplies other than weapons. The caveat was that they would have to pay up front and carry the supplies in their own ships. This plan would favor the British due to the strength of their navy. Also in 1937, the three strongest militaristic nations, Germany, Japan, and Italy, signed the Anti-Comintern Pact. On the face of it, the pact pledged them to ally against the Soviet Union (communism). The agreement, however, created the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo axis that provoked a growing fear of war.
Across the globe in Europe, the continent’s major powers were still struggling with the aftereffects of World War I when the global economic crisis spiraled much of the continent into chaos. Germany’s Weimar Republic collapsed with the economy, and out of the ashes emerged Adolf Hitler’s National Socialists—the Nazis. Championing German racial supremacy, fascist government, and military expansionism, Hitler rose to power and, after aborted attempts to take power in Germany, became chancellor in 1933 and the Nazis conquered German institutions. Democratic traditions were smashed. Leftist groups were purged. Hitler repudiated the punitive damages and strict military limitations of the Treaty of Versailles. He rebuilt the German military and navy. He reoccupied regions lost during the war and remilitarized the Rhineland, along the border with France. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Hitler and Benito Mussolini—the fascist Italian leader who had risen to power in the 1920s—intervened for the Spanish fascists, toppling the communist Spanish Republican Party. Britain and France stood by warily and began to rebuild their militaries, anxious in the face of a renewed Germany but still unwilling to draw Europe into another bloody war.1
In his autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf, Hitler advocated for the unification of Europe’s German peoples under one nation and that nation’s need for Lebensraum, or living space, particularly in Eastern Europe, to supply Germans with the land and resources needed for future prosperity. The Untermenschen (lesser humans) would have to go. Once in power, Hitler worked toward the twin goals of unification and expansion.
The Sudetenland, “Appeasement,” and the Munich Pact
The Nazi menace continued to grow in 1938 as German troops marched into Hitler’s native Austria in yet another violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler then insisted that the 3.5 million ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia be allowed to return to the homeland. As a result, Germany threatened to invade Czechoslovakia. The leaders of France and Britain flew to Munich in September 1938 where they struck a deal to appease Hitler. Czechoslovakia would give up the Sudetenland in return for German pledges to seek no more territory in Europe.
When Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned to England, he told cheering crowds “this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace in our time.”2 Six months later, Chamberlain’s words seemed naïve at best when Hitler invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia. Appeasement became synonymous with betrayal, weakness, and surrender.
By 1939, Hitler made little secret that he intended to recapture territory Germany lost to Poland after World War I. On September 1, 1939, German tanks and troops surged into Poland. Within days, France and England declared war on Germany.
Hitler signed a secret agreement—the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact—with the Soviet Union that coordinated the splitting of Poland between the two powers and promised nonaggression thereafter. The European war began when the German Wehrmacht invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Britain and France declared war two days later and mobilized their armies. Britain and France hoped that the Poles could hold out for three to four months, enough time for the Allies to intervene. Poland fell in three weeks. The German army, anxious to avoid the rigid, grinding war of attrition that took so many millions in the stalemate of World War I, built their new modern army for speed and maneuverability. German doctrine emphasized the use of tanks, planes, and motorized infantry (infantry that used trucks for transportation instead of marching) to concentrate forces, smash front lines, and wreak havoc behind the enemy’s defenses. It was called Blitzkrieg, or lightning war.
After the fall of Poland, France and its British allies braced for an inevitable German attack. Throughout the winter of 1939–1940, however, fighting was mostly confined to smaller fronts in Norway. Belligerents called it the Sitzkrieg (sitting war). But in May 1940, Hitler launched his attack into Western Europe. Mirroring the German’s Schlieffen Plan of 1914 in the previous war, Germany attacked through the Netherlands and Belgium to avoid the prepared French defenses along the French-German border. Poland had fallen in three weeks; France lasted only a few weeks more. By June, Hitler was posing for photographs in front of the Eiffel Tower. Germany split France in half. Germany occupied and governed the north, and the south would be ruled under a puppet government in Vichy.
With France under heel, Hitler turned to Britain. Operation Sea Lion—the planned German invasion of the British Isles—required air superiority over the English Channel. From June until October the German Luftwaffe fought the Royal Air Force (RAF) for control of the skies. Despite having fewer planes, British pilots won the so-called Battle of Britain, saving the islands from immediate invasion and prompting the new prime minister, Winston Churchill, to declare, “Never before in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.”3
If Britain was safe from invasion, it was not immune from additional air attacks. Stymied in the Battle of Britain, Hitler began the Blitz—a bombing campaign against cities and civilians. Hoping to crush the British will to fight, the Luftwaffe bombed the cities of London, Liverpool, and Manchester every night from September to the following May. Children were sent far into the countryside to live with strangers to shield them from the bombings. Remaining residents took refuge in shelters and subway tunnels, emerging each morning to put out fires and bury the dead. The Blitz ended in June 1941, when Hitler, confident that Britain was temporarily out of the fight, launched Operation Barbarossa—the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Hoping to capture agricultural lands, seize oil fields, and break the military threat of Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler broke the two powers’ 1939 nonaggression pact and, on June 22, invaded the Soviet Union. It was the largest land invasion in history. France and Poland had fallen in weeks, and German officials hoped to break Russia before the winter. And initially, the Blitzkrieg worked. The German military quickly conquered enormous swaths of land and netted hundreds of thousands of prisoners. But Russia was too big and the Soviets were willing to sacrifice millions to stop the fascist advance. After recovering from the initial shock of the German invasion, Stalin moved his factories east of the Urals, out of range of the Luftwaffe. He ordered his retreating army to adopt a “scorched earth” policy, to move east and destroy food, rails, and shelters to stymie the advancing German army. The German army slogged forward. It split into three pieces and stood at the gates of Moscow, Stalingrad, and Leningrad, but supply lines now stretched thousands of miles, Soviet infrastructure had been destroyed, partisans harried German lines, and the brutal Russian winter arrived. Germany had won massive gains but the winter found Germany exhausted and overextended. In the north, the German army starved Leningrad to death during an interminable siege; in the south, at Stalingrad, the two armies bled themselves to death in the destroyed city; and, in the center, on the outskirts of Moscow, in sight of the capital city, the German army faltered and fell back. It was the Soviet Union that broke Hitler’s army. Twenty-five million Soviet soldiers and civilians died during the Great Patriotic War, and roughly 80 percent of all German casualties during the war came on the Eastern Front. The German army and its various conscripts suffered 850,000 casualties at the Battle of Stalingrad alone. In December 1941, Germany began its long retreat.4
Lend-Lease
After France fell to the Nazi occupation, only Great Britain stood between Hitler and his threat to the United States. If the Nazis defeated the British fleet, the Atlantic Ocean could easily become a gateway to America. Isolationism suddenly seemed dangerous. By the spring of 1940, Roosevelt had abandoned impartiality in favor of outright aid to the Allies. Rather than fight, however, the United States would become the “great arsenal of democracy.”5 The British could no longer afford to pay for armaments under the provisions of the cash-and-carry policy, so Roosevelt proposed a scheme to “lease, lend, or otherwise dispose of” arms and supplies to countries whose defense was vital to the United States.6 When Hitler broke his alliance with the Soviet Union, the Lend-Lease Act was extended to them as well.
Notes
- On the origins of World War II in Europe, see, for instance, P. M. H. Bell, The Origins of the Second World War in Europe (New York: Routledge, 1986).
- Neville Chamberlain, “Peace in Our Time,” 1938, at The Internet History Sourcebook, Fordham University, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1938PEACE.asp.
- Winston Churchill, “’The Few’: Churchill’s Speech to the House of Commons,” August 20, 1940, at The Churchill Society of London, http://www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/thefew.html.
- Antony Beevor, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943 (New York: Penguin, 1999); Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1986); Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (New York: Picador, 2006).
- Franklin Roosevelt, “The Great Arsenal of Democracy,” December 29, 1940, at American Rhetoric, https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrarsenalofdemocracy.html.
- US Congress, “Lend-Lease Act,” 1941, at Ourdocuments.gov, National Archives, https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=71.