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A History of World War II

Steps Towards Conflagration

The wars that coalesced in 1942 to form World War II started in Asia, where the Japanese commanders in the field conquered Manchuria in Northeast China (and renamed it Manchukuo) and attacked China proper. This war was not carried on with great vigor, and the Japanese eventually gave up on defeating the Chinese militarily; although they could defeat Chinese armies almost at will, they did not have the resources to wage a land war across the whole of China. The Japanese eventually settled for occupying many of the Chinese natural resources, and capturing ports and borders to try to isolate the Chinese from the rest of the world. This would eventually have led to victory, but it was a long, slow process, and was a considerable drain on the Japanese army while it proceeded. In the meantime, it angered the United States, which began a long, slow process of diplomatic and economic pressure against Japan. Over the years, relations deteriorated, and the Pacific came closer to general war.

In Europe, Germany was slowly reversing the effects of her surrender in World War I. The German army and navy had been drastically limited in size, and various parts of the country had been carved off as part of other countries. Further, there had originally been another great German state, Austria (and later Austria-Hungary), which had fallen apart before it could be dismembered by the victors. There were a lot of Germans in some of those countries. One of the principles of the division of Europe after World War I was the grouping of nations into countries, and leaving Germans in several different political units was inconsistent with that. As time went on, the victors became less and less inclined to enforce the more onerous provisions of the treaty, especially when it appeared that the only way to do so was to go to war.

Hitler and the Nazis took advantage of that when they came to power. The Army and government had been avoiding some of the provisions of the treaty, by designing bombers nominally intended for use as passenger planes, by working closely with the Soviet Union on tank design and use, and by building warships for less industrialized countries. When Germany threw off the treaty restrictions, she would be able to grow to great strength very fast.

Hitler skillfully worked through the treaty provisions, one at a time. He signed a new naval treaty, allowing Germany a modern navy. He oversaw the expansion of the Army, and the development of armored and air forces. He occupied the Rheinland over the objections of his generals. In 1938, he looked for more ambitious targets, and annexed Austria. While Austria never had been part of Germany, it was a German country, and the former victors had no great objections. Later, Hitler demanded part of Czechoslovakia, the mountainous border region called the Sudetenland. This would unite many Germans with Germany, but would also make it impossible to defend the main industrial areas of Czechoslovakia.

Britain and France did not want this to happen, but did not want to go to war to prevent it. The Soviet Union was willing to go to war, but had no border with Czechoslovakia, and neither Poland nor Romania was willing to allow Red Army troops through their countries. Despite the Soviet push for a united front against Nazi aggression, the French and British came to an agreement with Germany: Germany would annex the Sudetenland, and that would be the last German territorial demand. The British Prime Minister Chamberlain claimed that Hitler was "appeased", and that he had secured "peace in our time". (This has given "appeasement" an undeserved bad reputation: the problem with the agreement was specifically that Hitler was not appeased, but rather encouraged. If Hitler had been honest when he claimed that was the last expansion Germany sought, then he would have been appeased, there would have been peace, and Chamberlain would have been correct and applauded. Appeasement is not necessarily bad, but it did not happen at Munich. It can be good to compromise in order to secure peace, but this compromise did not. Chamberlain was not a fool or a coward, but rather a bad judge of brutal lying dictators.)

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