Land Bridges and Ocean Barriers.

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            In war, killing goes on until a victory is achieved.  For the United States the strategy of the Second World War came down to these two things: land bridges and ocean barriers. 

On the one hand, solid ground created “bridges.”  Where opponents were in direct contact, the fighting could never really stop.  Poland and Germany had been in contact in 1939; Britain, France, and Germany had been in contact in 1940; Russia and Germany were in direct contact from June 1941 onward.  In this kind of war, soldiers, small arms, artillery, fighter-bombers, and trucks were decisive. 

On the other hand, bodies of water, and especially oceans, created “barriers.”  The British staved off German victory with a ferocious defense of both the English Channel and the ocean shipping routes.  The Atlantic and Pacific oceans imposed huge obstacles to laying America’s military weight on the Germans and the Japanese.  Furthermore, most established sea-ports were in the hands of the Germans or the Japanese.  In the case of the Pacific Islands between Japan and America, they didn’t exist at all.  Invaders would have to go in over the beaches.  That meant landing craft.  Getting soldiers, weapons, supplies to a near-by launching point for the attacks meant a huge number of merchant ships.  Protecting those merchant ships required a great navy.  Anglo-American forces had to conquer water barriers to reach a land bridge. 

Until that could be achieved, the weight of the war fell on the Russians.  Countries have foreign policies for their own advantage, not for the advantage of other countries.  The Bolsheviks had made a separate peace with the Germans in 1918; Stalin had made a Non-Aggression Pact with the Germans in 1939.  If the Anglo-Americans appeared to be dragging their feet on getting into the war, then maybe he would strike another deal with Hitler.  Let the Anglo-Americans try to reconquer Western Europe in the face of the whole German Army instead of just ten percent of it.  So, the Anglo-Americans had to do what they could against Germany.  For a long time this meant the “strategic bombing” of German cities to reduce industrial production and perhaps to break the will of the German people. 

Warships, merchant ships, landing craft, heavy bombers, fighter planes, tanks, trucks, artillery, and small arms had two things in common.  They were made of steel and made in factories.  America had a lot of both, so it became the “Arsenal of Democracy.”  Two thirds of Allied military production—and half of the world’s total production–came from America. 

The United States mobilized almost 12 million men for the Army and another 4 million for other branches.  All these (mostly) men left the labor force while the demand for labor soared.  Women, Blacks, and Hispanics filled up the gap.  The US unemployment rate fell to 1.9 percent, finally ending the Depression.  High wages raised the standard of living. 

As soon as command of the seas permitted, the Anglo-Americans put their troops to use.  They invaded French North Africa (November 1942); Sicily (July 1943); Italy (September 1943); Normandy (June 1944); Southern France (August 1944); and Germany (Fall 1944). 

Meanwhile the Americans shoved back the Japanese.  Battling in jungles, on coral atolls, and on the high seas, the American advantage in industrial power and man power ground Japan into dust.  The war found its grim conclusion in fire raids and atom bombings. 

We had won.  What would we make of the peace, at home and abroad? 

Charles Floyd, Depression-era Bandit.

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            Charles Arthur Floyd (1904-1934) was born in Georgia, but grew up in Oklahoma.  More exactly, he grew up in the Cookson Hills in the Cherokee Nation of southern Oklahoma.  Steep hills and valleys covered with oak, black walnut, and hickory.  People grew cotton in the bottom land, grazed cattle, and grew corn to feed to the hogs and to distill for private sale in Mason jars.  During the Twenties people started logging and sawing the lumber.  You go down out of the Hills and you come to little towns like Muskogee, Salisaw, and Talhlequah.  (The Joad family in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) were from Salisaw; and Merle Haggard is proud to be an “Okie from Muskogee.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iYY2FQHFwE )  You go east into Arkansas a bit and you come to Fort Smith, where Judge Isaac Parker had his court and George Maledon ran the “hanging machine.”[1]  (See: “True Grit” (1969, 2010).) 

Charlie Floyd left Oklahoma for the bright lights of Kansas City, Missouri, where he fell in with ill company.  He turned to armed robbery early and then stayed with it whenever he wasn’t in prison.  Given the nature of robbing banks and company payrolls, he became a traveling man.  In 1929-1932 he visited Missouri, Colorado, Ohio, and Oklahoma, generally to rob banks.  The police arrested him a number of times, but let him go when his false identity held up or he escaped when it didn’t.  He killed or had a hand in killing a number of policemen as well as two bootlegging brothers who had gotten on the wrong side of organized crime in Kansas City.[2]  Still, people generally didn’t disapprove of Charlie Floyd: whenever he robbed a bank he also burned all the mortgage records showing what local farmers owed the bank.   

Charlie’s luck turned against him when the FBI mis-identified him as one of the gunmen in a botched attempt to free bank-robber Frank Nash.  This “Kansas City Massacre” left four lawmen and Nash dead on 17 June 1933.  Floyd denied anything having to do with it, while never denying any of the other crimes attributed to him.  J. Edgar Hoover said different and sent the FBI after Floyd.  Floyd, and his fellow bank-robber Adam Richetti, hid out in Buffalo, New York over the winter of 1933-1934.[3]  Headed back to Oklahoma in October 1934, the two outlaws and their girlfriends wrecked their car on a foggy road in northeastern Ohio.  One thing led to another and both the police and a team of FBI men showed up.  Floyd died in the ensuing gun-fight.[4]  Floyd’s funeral in Salisaw, Oklahoma, drew a crowd of at least 20,000 people. 

In 1939, Woody Guthrie wrote the “Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd.”  It included the lines “As through this world you travel, you’ll meet some funny men; Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.”   The song became a standard for country/folk/rock musicians, being recorded by Joan Baez (1962), The Byrds (1968), Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger (1981), and Bob Dylan (1988).  He appeared as a central or secondary figure in half a dozen movies.  Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana wrote a novel Pretty Boy Floyd (1994).  He was an affable young man with a gun, and a poor boy out against the Law and the Banks in hard times.  When people talk about Charlie Floyd, they’re talking about other things. 

[1] A twelve man gallows. 

[2] The newspapers gave him the knick-name “Pretty Boy,” but nobody called him that to his face. 

[3] Apparently making the reasonable assumption that a) no one would think that somebody would go to Buffalo, NY, in the winter willingly, and b) no one would look for a couple of Okies in Buffalo, NY, at any time of the year. 

[4] There has been some dispute just how he died.  At first, the FBI tried to claim that the local police weren’t even present and that Floyd had been brought down by the FBI alone.  Later, they had to admit that the local police had played a vital role.  Much later still (1979), one of the policemen claimed that the FBI had killed Floyd after he had been wounded, had surrendered, and had been disarmed.  The FBI denied that charge.  Who could believe that the FBI would murder someone?  (See: Ruby Ridge.) 

The Depression.

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            By late 1929 the American economy had reached the saturation point in its ability to consume new goods.  The number of new cars registered began to fall sharply and new houses being constructed fell off as well.  These were warning signs of an economic slowdown.  As the American economy slowed, the Stock Market began to fall.  The fall of the Stock Market was more a symptom than a cause of the problem.  From 1929 to 1931 the American economy went into a deep spiral.  Demand for goods fell off, producers cut back on the number of workers and on the amount of raw materials.  The unemployed suddenly spent less and farmers and miners saw their incomes shrink even further, so they spent less.  Falling spending by ordinary consumers then drove down demand even further, setting off a new turn of the spiral.  People who couldn’t pay back the loans they had contracted in happier times lost their homes or farms or businesses.  Banks collected farms and houses and businesses they couldn’t then resell. The banks themselves went bankrupt too.  Most countries had little or no unemployment insurance.  If you lost your job, you had to get another one or starve.  There weren’t any jobs to be found.  People got desperate.  They demanded government action, or they moved elsewhere in search of work, or they tried to organize protest movements and political movements.  All existing institutions were called into question. 

            This crisis quickly spread to the rest of the world.  Americans stopped importing, but insisted on collecting the loans they were owed by other countries.  These countries first tightened up their own economies to try to pay back the loans, then defaulted on the loans rather than drive themselves into complete collapse.  Countries went off the existing system of international payments.[1]  This caused international trade to decline sharply, throwing more people out of work.  Nobody but the Soviet Union—a non-capitalist country that traded very little with the rest of the world—managed to ride out this crisis without suffering economic hard times.[2]  In many places, people concluded that the government would have to accept responsibility for insuring prosperity in the future, as well as peace and security.[3] 

            Many people questioned the systems of capitalism and representative government.  All they seemed to offer was the “freedom to starve.”  Democracy failed in Germany and Adolf Hitler came to power.  It teetered on the edge of collapse in France.  In the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt became president and launched a program called the “New Deal.”

This constituted a decisive moment in the development of modern governments.  The historian John Garraghty has written an interesting book comparing the response to the Depression of the American “New Deal” and Nazi Germany.  One would expect that they were very different from one another.  Wrong: there were a lot of similarities.  The main difference was that Nazi Germany was more effective at putting people back to work.  The both increased government control of the economy.  They both spent a lot of money to put the unemployed back to work.  One thing that people discovered, during the Depression and later in the Second World War, was that deficit spending offered the best way out of the slump.  We’re still living with the consequences of that discovery. 

[1] The Gold Standard. 

[2] Well, more accurately, it didn’t suffer hardships as a result of the Depression.  Stalin’s drive for rapid industrialization inflicted severe hardship on almost all Russians. 

[3] If you look at the—so far—failed efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare, you can see that Americans have now concluded that it is the duty of the government to insure health care at a low cost to consumers. 

The American System.

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            By the 1920s Henry Ford and the “assembly line,” and Frederick W. Taylor (a Philadelphia native) and his “efficiency studies” had helped to create a remarkably efficient, productive, and expansive American economy.  Both men tried to break jobs down into the simplest tasks, then train workers to specialize in the best way of doing that task.  Intense specialization combined with close supervision by management would allow the production of immense quantities of goods at a very low cost for each unit produced.  Low costs would allow the goods to be sold at low prices; low prices would allow lots more things to be sold while maintaining a good profit rate; the sale of lots of stuff at a high profit would allow employers to pay higher wages; people who got higher wages would use them to buy more stuff.  Everybody would be a winner and nobody would need unions or disruptions of production.  This worked like a dream.  American industry adopted this system during the first two decades of the 20th Century.  Profits soared, but real wages also advanced tremendously.  The American system—often called “Fordism” or “Taylorism” in other parts of the world—spread around the globe.  One place where it received the most enthusiastic reception appears to have been in the Soviet Union, where Stalin’s Five Year Plans to turn the country into an industrial super-power seems to have owed much to American example.  So long as the American economy went on expanding, it imported goods from all over the world.  America served as the locomotive pulling the rest of the world along toward prosperity. 

            There were two problems with the prosperity of the Twenties.  First, workers hated the dehumanized, speeded-up nature of work (although they were glad to take the higher wages).  They felt that they were being turned into mere extensions of the machines they operated.    

          Second, there were big imbalances inside the economy, both in the United States and elsewhere.  Even before the First World War the huge volume of agricultural goods and raw materials tended to exceed demand and to hold down prices paid to farmers, miners, loggers, etc.  American farmers on the Great Plains tended to blame the faceless, soulless railroads and big corporations back East for rigging the economy against the ordinary working man, farmer, and small businessman.  During the First World War there had been a huge increase in the volume of goods produced all over the world to make up for all the stuff Europeans were not making because they were busy blowing each other up.  Many people borrowed money from banks to expand their production of goods then in high demand.  After the war ended, everybody was still producing too much stuff for the world to consume.  Prices for farm goods (especially wheat, corn, cotton) and minerals (especially coal and oil) trended downward throughout the Twenties.  But people still had to pay back the loans they had taken out when prices were high.  To get the same amount of money, they had to produce even more of what it is they were making.  Production went on rising when it should have been cut back.  In 1920 half of Americans lived in small towns that depended on farming or mining or cattle raising.  People who depended on farms or mining just didn’t have the money to buy all the neat stuff being churned out by modern industry.  What was true in America was true everywhere else.  This was a train-wreck waiting to happen. 

            How would governments respond if the economy suddenly entered a downturn?  Standard economic theory of the time (see: “Economic Ideas”) said to let the system automatically correct for previous errors.  Cut taxes, cut spending and everything will be fine. 

Economic Ideas, 1850-1950 (roughly).

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            International payments and the domestic economy. 

            First, in the olden days, money had consisted of silver (good) and gold (better).  Then, people had agreed to use paper money (which was worthless) on the understanding that it could be exchanged for gold whenever anyone wanted.  To prevent scummy governments from printing all the paper money they wanted (“How can I be over-drawn when I still have some checks?”), fixed ratios of paper money to gold held by the government were established.  The more gold that a government held, the more paper money that it could issue; the less gold that a government held, the less paper money it could issue.  (See: accordion.) 

            Second, the money from one country can’t be used in another country.  Countries settled their debts by transferring gold.  Buy more stuff from a foreign country than you sell to that country and you had to settle the debt by shipping gold.  Sell more stuff to a foreign country than you buy from it and they sent you some gold. 

            Third, if you put gold-backed paper currency together with the use of gold to settle international debts, you got a system in which the domestic economy of each country was linked to the international economy of all countries.  If a country exported more than it imported, then gold flowed into the country.  The increased gold supply inside the country compelled that country to increase the amount of paper currency in circulation.  Prices and incomes would rise, making it less competitive.  If a country imported more than it exported, then gold flowed out of the country.  The decreased gold supply inside the country compelled that country to decrease the amount of paper currency in circulation.  Prices and incomes would fall, making it more competitive. 

Ideally, each country would strive for a rough equilibrium.  However, the system was thought to be kinda-sorta automatically self-correcting.  Countries with in-flows of gold and rising national incomes then could afford more stuff from abroad until they ended up having to export gold.  Countries with outflows of gold and falling incomes then could afford less stuff from abroad until they ended up importing gold.  This cut down on the role of any national government in managing the economy.  Mostly, the heads of the various national banks (the Bank of England, the Bank of France, the US Federal Reserve Bank, etc.) were supposed to co-operate in smoothing out any bumpy patches. 

            Business cycle theory. 

Commonly-accepted economic theory held that during a period of growth demand exceeded supply, so prices rose too high; any fool could make a profit and many did; wages tended to float up above a sensible level and many dead-beats got hired; and banks made unsound loans.  In short, “plaque” built up in the “arteries” of the economy.  This couldn’t go on.  Eventually a “slump” would clean out all the plaque and re-establish the basis for sound growth.  (See: angioplasty.)  Demand would fall.  Falling demand would force down prices to a reasonable level; unemployment would get rid of dead-beats and take wages down to a sensible level; silly businesses (see: nail salons) would go bankrupt; stupid loans would not be made; and the particular mix of products would return to what people actually needed.  Then the economy could start growing again.  There is a seductive elegance to these all-encompassing theoretical systems.  Same as there is with Marxism.  The parallels don’t end there.  Ideas have consequences. 

Revolutionary Russia.

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In the 19th Century, many people reacted badly to brutal working and living conditions under early capitalist industrialization.  Some of these people argued that all people should be equal, that all government should be a democracy, and that all forms of wealth should belong to the community instead of to selfish individuals.  This is called Socialism. 

Later, Karl Marx argued that Socialism would inevitably triumph because History was a big rock rolling downhill in that direction.  This is called Marxism. 

Later still, Vladimir Ulyanov (“Lenin”) argued that History needed some help from professional revolutionaries because most people were too stupid and would be satisfied just with a better life.  Most Russian Socialists rejected this view.  Lenin led his faction, called “Bolsheviks” into what is now called Communism.[1]   So, this isn’t Bernie Sanders’ fault. 

For most of its history, Russia was on the dark side of the moon compared to Europe.   

Most people were serfs (see: Middle Ages) until 1853; 95 percent of the people could not sign their own name well into the 20th Century; the ruler (called the czar or tsar) ruled “by divine right”; there was little industry and farming was REALLY backward. 

Russians weren’t sure if they were Europeans or Asians like, say, the Huns. 

They weren’t too good on compromise.  Once in a while, rulers (Peter the Great, Alexander II, Peter Stolypin) tried to drag Russia kicking and screaming into modern times.  Once in a while, people thought the solution was to kill whoever was the problem.  (See: “Propaganda of the Deed.”) 

Wars were disastrous for Russia.  Government made a mess of everything; huge numbers of people got killed; the food supply broke down and people starved or ate their neighbors; disease (and indigestion) ran wild.  Russia was defeated by Japan in 1905 and a revolution broke out.  This revolution got squashed.  Russia was defeated by Germany in the First World War and a revolution broke out in February 1917.  This revolution didn’t get squashed, but it didn’t fix any of Russia’s problems either.  Another revolution broke out in October 1917.  (See: “The Hunt for Red October.”) 

Vladimir Ulyanov (“nom de guerre” Lenin) led the “first” Russian Revolution.  He led the October Revolution; told everybody what they wanted to hear, then did whatever he wanted (See: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”); shot as many of his enemies as he could get his hands on; gained control of Russia; then had a stroke and died in 1923. 

A power struggle followed.  In 1928 Josef Dzhugashvili (“Stalin” = “Man of Steel”) won.  (See: “uh-oh.”)  Stalin had a low anxiety threshold and an unusual coping device: everyone made him nervous eventually and if you made him nervous he tried to kill you.  For example, Leon Trotsky, who lost the power struggle in Russia with Stalin in 1928, got hit in the head with an ice-axe.  In 1940.  In Mexico.  (See: elephants.)  Stalin led the “second” revolution. 

Stalin brought together everything above this point on the page: he had a really primitive country; he had no limits on his power; he wanted to drag Russia into the modern world; he wasn’t sure Russia was “Western”; he believed in killing people who were seen as a problem; and it was going to work just like a Russian war—ugly and deadly.  

[1] This is different from living on turnips and blackberry wine in a commune in New Hampshire with girls in peasant dresses who don’t shave their legs.  Trust me: it is.

Strong-minded People.

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            “There’ll always be an England.”[1]  You know why?  ‘Cause it’s a country filled with strong-minded flakes, that’s why. 

Elizabeth Wiskemann (1899-1971) had a German father and a British mother.  She went up to Oxford to study history, then went to grad school there.  Her dissertation flunked because it contradicted the argument of one of the readers and her supervisor didn’t have the “cojones” to fight for her.  So she settled for tutoring Oxford undergraduates for half the year and travelling throughout Europe the rest of the year as a journalist.  She visited Weimar Berlin a lot, but also travelled throughout Europe.  Wiskemann became an ardent critic of Nazi Germany, so the Nazis expelled her in 1936.  During the Second World War, she worked for British Intelligence in Switzerland.  Here she became the lover of Adam von Trott zu Solz, one of the conspirators who tried to kill Hitler on 20 July 1944.  When he left her to return to Germany, he accidentally left behind his gloves.  Soon afterward, Von Trott was hanged.  She kept the gloves as a momento.  After the war she wrote books.  When her eye-sight failed, she took her own life.[2] 

Sybille Bedford (1911-2006) grew up in Germany and Italy in the Twenties and Thirties.   She got to know many British and French writers on the Riviera.  Actually, she was German and only became British through education and a marriage of convenience with a gay British man who married her to prevent her from being sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis.  (Her discovery that she was a lesbian after her first night with a clumsy, self-absorbed man is hilarious.)  Later, she became a writer who reported on British criminal cases, wrote novels, a biography of her friend Aldous Huxley, and a couple of highly-deceptive memoirs.[3] 

Patrick Leigh-Fermor (1915-2011) had no talent for coloring inside the lines.  He managed to be expelled from a series of “progressive” schools in interwar Britain.  Then he failed to gain entry to the British equivalent of West Point.  One school report card described him as “a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness.”  In December 1933 he set out to walk from Holland to Istanbul, Turkey.  In January 1935 he arrived, having travelled on foot through Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Rumania.  Later, he fought in a Greek civil war, then served as a British Commando in German-occupied Crete.  After the war, he became a travel writer.[4] 

Eric Newby (1919-2006) got a good education, but never went near a university.  After a couple of years in advertising, he signed on as an apprentice seaman on the square-rigged grain clipper “Moshulu.”[5]  In 1938-1939 he made the passage from Belfast to Australia to London in the “last grain race” before the outbreak of the Second World War.  He joined the Commandos after the war started, got captured on a raid, escaped from the prison camp, met his future wife, got re-captured, spent the rest of the war in a prison camp in Germany, went into the dress trade, got bored, went for a short walk in the Hindu Kush, and became a travel writer.[6] 

[1] See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qhLPWcm-0w 

[2] See: The Europe I Saw (1968).  Her description of a sailing trip along the Croatian coast led me and my wife to a similar adventure. 

[3] See: Jigsaw (1989); Quicksands (2005)

[4] See: A Time of Gifts (1977); Between the Woods and the Water (1986); and see also W. Stanley Moss, Ill Met by Moonlight (1950), which recounts the 1944 kidnapping of the German commander of the Crete garrison by Leigh Fermor and Moss.  You can’t make up this stuff.  Or:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TKW_9uUwa0 

[5] Now a floating restaurant on the Philadelphia waterfront.  “How are the mighty fallen.”  2 Samuel, 1: 27. 

[6] See: The Last Grain Race (1956); A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958); Love and War in the Apennines (1971); and Learning the Ropes (1991). 

The New Men.

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            The First World War (1914-1918) wrecked European society.  Out of the wreckage appeared people who never could have risen in politics or society before the war.  Two of them were especially terrible. 

            Josef Stalin (1878-1953).  The sickly, abused son of a drunken shoe-maker and a devoted mother in a backwater of the Russian Empire.  Studied to be a priest, but opted for revolutionary politics instead.  He joined Vladimir Lenin’s tiny Bolshevik Party (1903), organized strikes and robbed banks for the Party, did some time in Siberia, and rose to become an important assistant to Lenin during and after the Russian Revolution (1917-1923).  After Lenin’s death, Stalin schemed his way into supreme power (1923-1928).

            Once he held power, Stalin launched Russia’s real revolution.  He “collectivized” agriculture (government ownership of all the land) to gain control of the resources needed for industrialization.  Several million peasants starved to death as a result.  He launched the “Five Year Plans” to industrialize Russia.  Russia became second only to the United States as an industrial economy.  His “Great Purge” killed off hundreds of thousands of Bolsheviks, managers, intellectuals, and soldiers—anyone who might form part of a challenge to his dictatorship.  Millions of others were deported to Siberian prison camps, where many died.  At home his petty cruelties drove his wife to suicide.  After Nazi Germany attacked Russia, Stalin led his country to victory (1941-1945). 

            Adolf Hitler (1889-1945).  Like Stalin, he had an unpleasant father and a devoted mother.  He thought that he wanted to be an artist, but he didn’t like the hard work involved.  He fought bravely in the German army during the First World War, then drifted into right-wing extremist politics.  Anti-Semitism and anti-Communism were his main themes.  He became a brilliant orator and a devious schemer as the head of the Nazi Party in a democratic Germany.  The Nazis didn’t count until the Great Depression paralyzed democracy.  He was appointed—not elected—head of the German government in January 1933.  People thought they could control the odd little man.  They couldn’t.  He didn’t play by any rules. 

            Between 1933 and 1939 Hitler created a dictatorship, pulled Germany out of the Depression, persecuted the German Jews, built up German military power, added Austria and part of Czechoslovakia to Germany, and became wildly popular among Germans. 

            Between 1939 and 1945 Hitler’s Germany conquered most of Western and central Europe, tried to murder all of the European Jews, expanded a European war into a Second World War that Germany could not win, brought down a rain of ruin on Germany, and became wildly unpopular among Germans.  Fifty million people had died and much of Europe and Asia were in ruins when he killed himself in April 1945. 

            Josef Stalin again.  After 1945, Stalin ruled Eastern Europe (Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania), and supported the Chinese Communists who won power in China (1949).  He imposed the same kind of government and economy on these countries that he had on Russia.  He clamped down on dissent once again, raced to build an atom bomb, and prepared to launch a new purge.  He died of a stroke in March 1953.  One of the “mourners” at his outdoor funeral caught pneumonia and died.  Bad habits are hard to break. 

Crossing the Line.

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The trouble came when Hitler pushed well beyond the point up to which Appeasement made sense. 

October 1933: Germany quit the League of Nations and its disarmament conference. 

July 1934: Austrian Nazi “putsch” in Vienna failed; Italian Army mobilized on the Brenner Pass; Hitler denied all involvement.  So Mussolini wasn’t pro-German yet and he looked ready to fight.  That could be useful. 

March 1935: Germany announced rearmament in violation of the Versailles Treaty.  Conscription was restored and an air force (the Luftwaffe) created.  It turned out that Hitler didn’t share conventional economic beliefs about the sanctity of a balanced budget.  That makes all sorts of things possible. 

April 1935: At the Stresa Conference Britain, France, and Italy agreed to oppose forcible changes in European borders.  A “coalition of the willing” appeared to be in formation. 

June 1935: Anglo-German Naval Agreement.  Britain agreed to Germany violating the naval terms of the Versailles Treaty.  The French thought that it might have been nice if the British had told them about this before they read it in the newspapers. 

October 1935-May 1936: Italo-Ethiopian War.  A split between Italy, on the one hand, and France and Britain, on the other hand, opened.  The British didn’t want the Italians on the Suez route and the League of Nations enthusiasts wanted to oppose aggression (without resorting to war of course).  So they dragged the French along.[1] 

The key point here is that the French wanted Britain’s support in any war against Germany.  To keep that secure, one way was to follow the British lead in foreign policy.  People began to refer to Britain as the “English governess.”  Another, riskier, approach was to believe that Britain couldn’t afford to have France be defeated by Germany.  If you believed that, France could take a stronger line against Germany and assume that the British would get on board in a crisis.  Did French leaders want to take a stronger line or did they just want someone to blame? 

December 1935: Hoare-Laval Agreement became public.  French foreign minister Pierre Laval had talked British foreign secretary Sir Samuel Hoare into agreeing to cut a deal with the Italians so that Mussolini would not be permanently alienated from France and Britain.  When news leaked out, both men lost their jobs.  As King George V said to Hoare, “Ah well Sam, no more coals to Newcastle, no more Hoares to Paris.”  NB: You have to say it out loud. 

March 1936: Germany re-militarized the Rhineland in violation of the Versailles Treaty.  That is, they moved in troops and began to build fortifications.  Once completed, these measures would prevent France from making an easy and crippling attack on the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland. 

September 1936-March 1939: Spanish Civil War.  The British and French tried to push through a policy of non-intervention.  Nobody paid any attention.  Germany, Italy, and Russia all intervened.  Germany and Italy sent troops, tanks, and planes to support the rebel Nationalists; Russia sent weapons and planes and secret policemen to support the government.  Idealistic people your age went to fight in Spain to defend the Republic against fascist aggression.  Franco, the German-Italian client, emerged victorious. 

November 1936: Rome-Berlin Axis proclaimed; Germany and Japan sign anti-Comintern[2] Pact.  Neither one was a real military alliance, but they did amount to an agreement to co-operate. 

July 1937: Japan invaded China.  The Japanese concentrated on conquering the heavily-populated coastal areas, where most of the British trade took place. 

March 1938: “Anschluss” with Austria.  Germany suddenly annexed Austria.  Again, a violation of the Versailles and other treaties.  Two things mattered.  First, the Italians didn’t block the German grab the way they had done in the 1934 “putsch.”  Germany and Ital were aligned.  Second, it put Germany on the southern (and largely unfortified, border of Czechoslovakia and on the frontiers of Yugoslavia. 

March-September 1938: Sudetenland crisis.  The German minority in western Czechoslovakia began agitating for self-government, then for independence.  The Germans had put them up to it.  This gave Hitler the opportunity to threaten to intervene to protect the “oppressed” German minority.  Czechoslovakia had an alliance with France.  France didn’t want to fight Germany unless the British were going to join in.  The British didn’t have an alliance with Czechoslovakia.  In theory, Britain could stay out.  However, if France fought Germany and lost, Britain would be up a gum tree.  So, if France fought, then Britain would have to fight.  For Britain the question became how to squeeze the French to urge the Czechs to give Hitler what he wanted.  That way France would not have to fight and the British would not have to back them up. 

The shock waves from an Anglo-French retreat would be severe.  Other countries in Eastern Europe, like France’s ally Poland and everyone’s enemy the Soviet Union would get the idea that the Western powers were abandoning the region to Germany.  Leaders there would have to adapt.  As one of the characters in an Alan Furst novel says, “We can’t just pick the country up and paste it on Sweden.” 

29-30 September 1938: Munich Conference.  Germany, Italy, France, Britain confer, excluding Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union.  The conference stripped the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia.  Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who had sought the deal, and Edouard Daladier, the French prime minister who had gone along with the deal, received heroes’ welcomes when they returned home. 

November 1938: “Kristallnacht.”  This was a domestic event inside Germany.  However, it had a deep international effect.  “We’re dealing with a bunch of barbarians.  Can they separate their behavior at home from their behavior in international affairs?  Probably not.” 

15 March 1939: Germany suddenly occupied “Rump Czechoslovakia.”  This Hitler had promised not to do just five months before.  Chamberlain began to think that Hitler was no gentleman.  Where would Hitler turn next? 

31 March 1939: Britain and France announced that they would defend Poland.  The Poles hadn’t asked for this guarantee.  The British and the French had just decided that they needed a trip-wire for war. 

7 April 1939: Italy annexed Albania (Albania!), which borders on Greece. 

April 1939: Britain and France extended their guarantee of borders to Rumania, and Greece; Britain re-established conscription (just as Germany had done four years previously).  The thing is, trained and equipped soldiers aren’t “dragon’s teeth”: they don’t just spring up out of the ground at the command of a magician. 

3 May 1939: Stalin replaced the pro-Western (and Jewish) Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov with his own villainous henchman, Vyacheslav Molotov.  What could that mean?  Those inscrutable Russkies. 

Spring-Summer 1939: Hitler starts badgering Poland over the “mistreatment” of ethnic Germans in the “Polish Corridor” (once part of Germany and lost in the Versailles Treaty).  A new “Sudetenland”? 

12 August 1939: Anglo-French delegation arrived in Moscow to negotiate an anti-German alliance. 

20 August 1939: Hitler secretly asked Stalin to let the German foreign minister, Ribbentrop, come to Moscow. 

23 August 1939: Nazi-Soviet Pact.  The public part of the treaty was a Non-Aggression Pact: Germany and Russia would not fight each other, regardless of who else they fought.  So the British and French negotiators went home.  The secret part of the treaty divided up Eastern Europe: Germany got the western two-thirds of Poland; Russia got eastern Poland and the little Baltic countries (Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia), eastern Poland, and Bessarabia (from Rumania).  Stalin had regained the frontiers of tsarist Russia—more than Lenin ever did. 

23 August-1 September 1939: Hitler expected the British and the French to back down, abandoning Poland to its certain fate.  The British and French announced that they would not back down. 

1 September 1939: Germany invaded Poland. 

3 September 1939: Britain and France declared war.  Hitler turned to one of his confidants and asked “What now?” 

War raged in Poland, but it was “All quiet on the Western Front.”  At one place, the French and German lines were close together, without anyone shooting.  Overnight the Germans put up a big sign: “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer.”  On the following morning daylight revealed the French sign: “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite.”  Battle between these opposed ideal was now joined.[3]

[1] “Ethiopium”: waging war against a weaker country for poorly considered reasons, leaving you with a splitting head-ache and fuzzy memories.  See: Iraq.  

[2] The Third, or Communist, International—hence “Comintern” in SovSpeak–was an organization of all Communists parties in the world.  Utterly under Soviet control, it allowed the USSR to exert leverage on the domestic politics of foreign counties and to conduct espionage. 

[3] I stole that anecdote from Sir Denis Brogan, The Development of Modern France, 1870-1940 (1940), p. 729.    

Appeasement and Beliefs.

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In the view of most Western people, what the Germans did inside their own country was their business, not a legitimate cause for international action. 

People were sad to see German democracy fail and a dictatorship be established.  The newspapers were full of terrible stories.  However, many countries were dictatorships of some type.  Russia, Poland, Austria, Italy, Japan, all those awful little Balkan countries.  (“Very Balkan” was a French slang term for bad behavior in public: a pimp slapping a prostitute on a street corner or big kids beating up on a little kid in an alley.)  It wasn’t a cause for war. 

In the same way, people were revolted by the treatment of the Jews.  Discrimination under the law, harassment, beatings, concentration camps where people were locked up under terrible conditions, and sometimes people died.  One could protest, so long as one was willing to have the Germans–or right-minded people in your own country—point out all your own misbehavior.  Britain and France had empires where the “natives” were badly treated on the basis of race.  The United States oppressed African Americans, often violently in the South.  It wasn’t a cause for war. 

Then there was a distinction between those who would have to defeat Germany and those who would benefit from the defeat of Germany.  Germany could only be defeated by a coalition of major powers.  Britain and France certainly, and possibly Russia if some way could be found to cut a deal with Moscow.  They would do the fighting and the dying, and they would pay the costs of the war.  Who would benefit?  Austria.  Czechoslovakia.  Poland.  Rumania.  Hungary.  Estonia.  Latvia.  Lithuania.  They would get to keep their independence.  Without looking at a map, can you tell me where these countries are located?  Would anyone else benefit?  The United States and Japan, and the Russians if they managed to stay out of the fighting. 

Then there was an emotional element.  This is hard to quantify.  The Depression seemed to prove that democratic capitalism didn’t work very well.  Britain, France, the United States, Australia, Canada, Belgium all suffered under high unemployment and economic stagnation for many years.  People were tired and demoralized.  In contrast, from all that anyone could tell from the newspapers and the newsreels shown in the movie theaters, the Russians, the Germans, and the Italians were happy, confident, and all hard at work building some new kind of civilization.  What would happen if the slacker countries had to go up against the over-achiever countries?  It wouldn’t be pretty. 

So, there were lots of reasons not to fight and very few reasons to fight.  The question then became “What are Hitler’s intentions?” 

Some people saw very clearly early on that Hitler meant to organize Germany for war and then to make Germany the most powerful country in Europe.  Sir Horace Rumbold, the British ambassador to Germany when Hitler came to power, and Winston Churchill, then a marginal politician, saw the situation with unusual clarity.  The French military intelligence service had him pegged right from the start.  For most other people, matters were not so clear. 

First of all, people believed that Germany had some legitimate grievances.  If you took Hitler to be a normal politician, then removing these grievances would end the problem.  Germany had been disarmed, but no one had been willing to make the first move to general disarmament.  If others would not disarm, then perhaps Germany would be satisfied with equality in armaments.  Nationalism said that all people who spoke the same language and had the same culture should belong to the same independent country.  Germans in Austria, the Sudetenland, and the Polish Corridor had been denied this right. 

Then, there was the question of who was really in charge in Berlin.  Most political parties had a left wing, a right wing, and a center.  Who was to say that Nazism was any different?  Probably there were “radical” or “extremist” Nazis, then there were “conservative” Nazis, and then there were “middle of the road” Nazis.  You might not be able to deal with the “radicals,” but surely you could work a deal with the “moderate” and “conservative” Nazis.  Furthermore, to which group did Hitler belong?  Finally, it took a while to understand the strength of Hitler’s grip on power.  The Nazis were only one force in German politics, so far as anyone could tell at first.  Would he Army, big business, all the traditional conservatives who had dominated German life since 1870 really allow Hitler to lead them into another, possibly disastrous, war?  Or would they overthrow him? 

For all these reasons it appeared sensible to seek a peaceful solution.  Of course, if Hitler actually did intend to munch away at the Versailles settlement by little bites only in order to make Germany strong enough to impose its will on every other country, as the dooms-sayers proclaimed, then Britain and France would have no choice but to fight to preserve their own independence.  Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.