The final crisis

How might the Habsburg empire survive the rise of

particularist nationalism in eastern Europe? Austrian
statesmen had debated the question for 50 years, and
the best answer seemed to be some form of federalism
permitting political autonomy to the nationalities.
Reforms of this nature had always been vetoed by the
Hungarians, who stood to lose their own position vis-à-
vis the German-Austrians and the minorities in their half
of the empire. Conrad Franz, Graf (count) von
Hötzendorf, chief of the general staff, favoured preventive
war against Serbia to stifle nationalist agitation for good
and reinforce the old order. Archduke Franz Ferdinand
wrote, however, “I live and shall die for federalism; it is
the sole salvation for the monarchy, if anything can save
it.” Out of favour with the court for his morganatic
marriage and resented by the Hungarians and by
conservatives, the heir apparent was also feared by Slavic
radicals as the one man who might really pacify the
nationalities and so frustrate their dreams of a Greater
Serbia. Hence, the archduke was a marked man among
the secret societies that sprang up to liberate Bosnia.
Such is the logic of terrorism: its greatest enemies are the
peacemakers.

The National Defense (Narodna Odbrana) was formed in

Serbia in 1908 to carry on pro-Serbian and anti-Austrian
agitation across the border. Its nonviolent methods were
deemed insufficient by others, who in 1911 formed the
secret society Union or Death (Ujedinjenje ili Smrt), also
known as the Black Hand, led by the head of Serbian
military intelligence, Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević. The
latter had been involved in the 1903 assassinations of the
Obrenović family and favoured terrorist action over
intellectual propaganda. With his support, if not on his
direct orders, a band of youthful romantics conspired to
assassinate Franz Ferdinand during his state visit to
Sarajevo. On June 28, 1914, which happened to be the
Serbian national holiday, the archduke and his wife rode
in an open car through the streets of the Bosnian capital.
A bomb was thrown but missed. The archduke completed
his official duties, whereupon the governor of Bosnia
suggested they deviate from the planned route on the
return trip for safety’s sake. But the lead driver in the
procession took a wrong turn, the cars stopped
momentarily, and at that moment the 19-year-old Gavrilo
Princip fired his revolver, killing both royal passengers.

Reaction in Vienna, and Europe generally, was

surprisingly restrained. No one imagined that the outrage
had more than local importance, much less that
Bismarck’s prophecy about “some damned fool thing in
the Balkans” starting the next war was about to be
fulfilled. Conrad von Hötzendorf saw the deed as pretext
for his preventive war against Serbia, but the aged
emperor Franz Joseph preferred to await an inquiry to
determine the extent of Serbian complicity. Germany, on
the other hand, pressed for a firm riposte and in the
kaiser’s famous “blank check” memo promised to
support whatever action Austria might take against
Serbia. The Germans expected Russia to back down, since
its military reforms would not be complete for several
years, but even if Russia came to Serbia’s aid, the German
high command was confident of victory. Bethmann was
less so. A move against Serbia could lead to a world war,
he warned on July 7. Yet Bethmann went along in the
vain hope of localizing the conflict.

Austrian Foreign Minister Leopold, Graf von Berchtold,

now advocated a firm policy toward Serbia lest Austria’s
prestige deteriorate further and the Balkan states unite
behind Russia. Gróf (count) Tisza, the prime minister of
Hungary, insisted, however, that diplomatic and legal
justifications precede such a clash of arms: Austria must
first present a list of demands for redress. Should Serbia
accept, the empire would win a “brilliant diplomatic
success”; should Serbia refuse, war could be waged with
Austria-Hungary posing as the aggrieved party. In no case
was Austria to annex any Serbian territory.

The Russian response to any Austrian initiative would be

critical, and by chance the president and prime minister
of France, Poincaré and René Viviani, were paying a state
visit to St. Petersburg in July. Strangely, there is no record
of the Franco-Russian conversations, but it is known that
Poincaré assured the Russians that France would stand by
her alliance commitments. On July 23, just after the
French leaders left for home, Vienna presented its
ultimatum to Belgrade, demanding dissolution of the
secret societies, cessation of anti-Austrian propaganda,
and Austrian participation in the investigation of the
Sarajevo crime. Serbia was given 48 hours to respond.

The Russian foreign minister, Sergey Dmitriyevich

Sazonov, erupted at news of the ultimatum and insisted
on military measures. The French ambassador, Maurice-
Georges Paléologue, with or without instructions from
his departed chiefs, encouraged Sazonov, for if Austria’s
prestige—and very future—were at stake in the Balkans,
so too were tsarist Russia’s, for which the Balkans was
the only region left in which to demonstrate its vitality.
But now Germany was competing for influence over the
Young Turks, courting Bulgaria, and plotting to smash
Serbia. The German slogan “From Berlin to Baghdad,”
referring originally only to railroads, took on ominous
new political meaning. On July 25 the Russian Council of
Ministers decided that if Austrian forces entered Serbia,
Russia would mobilize its army. This precipitous, indeed
anticipatory, decision reflected Russia’s size and the
inadequacy of its rail network. Sazonov seems to have
considered mobilization a political threat, but given the
mechanistic timetables that were integral to the planning
of all the European general staffs, it could only provoke
countermobilizations and an inexorable drift into war.

On July 25 Serbia accepted all the Austro-Hungarian

conditions save those two that directly compromised its
sovereignty. Two days later Berchtold persuaded Franz
Joseph to initiate war. At the same moment the kaiser,
returning from a yachting expedition, tried belatedly to
restrain Vienna. On July 28 Austria declared war and
bombarded Belgrade, and on the same day the tsar
approved the mobilization of the Russian army against
Austria, and alarms went off all over Europe. Sir Edward
Grey, Kaiser William, and the Italian government all
proposed negotiations, with the Austrians to occupy
Belgrade as a pledge of Serbian compliance. The German
ambassador in St. Petersburg assured the Russians that
Austria meant to annex no Serbian territory. But it was
too little and far too late. In St. Petersburg the generals
protested that partial mobilization would disrupt their
contingency plans: How could Russia prepare to fight
Austria-Hungary while leaving naked her border with
Austria’s ally Germany? The weak and vacillating tsar
Nicholas II was persuaded, and on the afternoon of July
30 he authorized general mobilization of the Russian
army.

The previous day Poincaré and Viviani had finally arrived

back in Paris, where they were met with patriotic crowds
and generals anxious for military precautions. In Berlin,
anti-Russian demonstrations and equally anxious
generals called for immediate action. On the 31st, when
all the other powers had begun preparations of some
sort and even the British had put the fleet to sea (thanks
to Winston Churchill’s foresight), Germany delivered
ultimatums to Russia, demanding an end to mobilization,
and to France, demanding neutrality in case of war in the
east. But Russia and France could scarcely accede
without abandoning the Balkans, each other, and their
own security. When the ultimatums expired, the
Schlieffen Plan was put into effect. Germany declared war
against Russia on August 1 and against France on August
3 and demanded safe passage for its troops through
Belgium. Refused again, Germany invaded Belgium in
force.

On August 3, Italy took refuge in the fact that this was

not a defensive war on Austria-Hungary’s part and
declared its neutrality. That left only Britain, faced with
the choice of joining its entente partners in war or
standing aloof and risking German domination of the
Continent. Britain had little interest in the Serbian affair,
and the kingdom was torn by the Irish question. The
cabinet was in doubt as late as August 2. But the
prospect of the German fleet in the English Channel and
German armies on the Belgian littoral settled the issue.
On the 3rd Britain demanded that Germany evacuate
Belgium, and Grey won over Parliament with appeals to
British interests and international law. On August 4,
Britain declared war on Germany.

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The war-guilt question
The search for causes
Debate over the origins of World War I was from the start
partisan and moral in tone. Each of the belligerents
published documentary collections selected to shift the
blame and prove that it was fighting in self-defense.
Serbia was defending itself against Austrian aggression.
Austria-Hungary was defending its very existence against
terror plotted on foreign soil. Russia was defending
Serbia and the Slavic cause against German imperialism.
Germany was defending its lone reliable ally from attack
and itself from entente encirclement. France, with most
justification, was defending itself against unprovoked
German attack. And Britain was fighting in defense of
Belgium, international law, and the balance of power.

In the Treaty of Versailles (1919) the victorious coalition

justified its peace terms by forcing Germany and its allies
to acknowledge guilt for the war. This tactic was
historically dubious and politically disastrous, but it
stemmed from the liberal conviction, as old as the
Enlightenment, that peace was normal and war an
aberration or crime for which clear responsibility—guilt—
could be established. Almost at once, revisionist
historians examined the thousands of documents that
governments made available after 1920 and challenged
the Versailles verdict. Yes, the German government had
issued the risky “blank check” and urged Vienna on an
aggressive course. It had swept aside all proposals for
mediation until events had gained irreversible
momentum. It had, finally, surrendered its authority to a
military plan that ensured the war could not be localized.
Indeed, the whole course of German foreign policy since
1890 had been restless and counter-productive, calling
into existence the very ring of enemies it then took
extreme risks to break. But on the other hand, Russia’s
hasty mobilization expanded the crisis beyond the
Balkans, initiated a round of military moves, and
contributed to German panic. Given the military realities
of the age, Sazonov’s notion of Russian mobilization as a
mere “application of pressure” was either disingenuous
or foolish. France could be faulted for not restraining
Russia and for issuing its own “blank check.” Even the
British might have done more to preserve peace, either
through more vigorous mediation or by making clear that
they would not remain neutral in a continental war, thus
deterring the Germans. Finally, what of the states at the
heart of the crisis? Surely Belgrade’s use of political
terrorism in the name of Greater Serbia, and Austria-
Hungary’s determination to crush its tormentors,
provoked the crisis in the first place. By the 1930s
moderate historians had concluded, with Lloyd George,
that no one country was to blame for the war: “We all
stumbled into it.”

The failure of documentary research to settle the war-

guilt question led other historians to look behind the July
1914 crisis for long-range causes of the war. Surely, they
reasoned, such profound events must have had profound
origins. As early as 1928 the American Sidney B. Fay
concluded that none of the European leaders had wanted
a great war and identified as its deeper causes the
alliance systems, militarism, imperialism, nationalism,
and the newspaper press. (Marxists, of course, from the
publication of Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of
Capitalism in 1916, held finance capitalism to be
accountable for the war.) In this view the polarization of
Europe into alliance systems had made “chain-reaction”
escalation of a local imbroglio almost predictable.
Militarism and imperialism had fed tensions and
appetites among the great powers, while nationalism and
sensationalist journalism had stoked popular
resentments. How else could one explain the universal
enthusiasm with which soldiers and civilians alike greeted
the outbreak of war? Such evenhanded sentiments,
along with the abstraction of the terms of analysis that
exculpated individuals while blaming the system, were
both appealing and prescriptive. In the 1930s British
statesmen in particular would strive to learn the lessons
of 1914 and so prevent another war. As another
generation’s hindsight would reveal, the lessons did not
apply to the new situation.

After World War II and the Cold War had left the issues of
1914 passé, a committee of French and German
historians agreed that World War I had been an unwilled
disaster for which all countries shared blame. Only a few
years later, however, in 1961, that consensus shattered.
The German historian Fritz Fischer published a massive
study of German war aims during 1914–18 and held that
Germany’s government, social elites, and even broad
masses had consciously pursued a breakthrough to world
power in the years before World War I and that the
German government, fully aware of the risks of world
war and of British belligerency, had deliberately provoked
the 1914 crisis. Fischer’s thesis sparked bitter debate and
a rash of new interpretations of World War I. Leftist
historians made connections between Fischer’s evidence
and that cited 30 years before by Eckhart Kehr, who had
traced the social origins of the naval program to the
cleavages in German society and the stalemate in the
Reichstag. Other historians saw links to the Bismarckian
technique of using foreign policy excursions to stifle
domestic reform, a technique dubbed “social
imperialism.” Germany’s rulers, it appeared, had resolved
before 1914 to overthrow the world order in hopes of
preserving the domestic order.

Traditionalist critics of Fischer pointed to the universality

of imperialistic, social Darwinist, and militaristic
behaviour on the eve of the war. The kaiser, in his most
nationalistic moods, only spoke and acted like many
others in all the great powers. Did not Sazonov and the
Russian generals, in their unrecorded moments, yearn to
erase the humiliation of 1905 and conquer the
Dardanelles, or Poincaré and General J.-J.-C. Joffre
wonder excitedly if the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine were
finally at hand, or the Primrose and Navy leagues thrill to
the prospect of a Nelsonian clash of dreadnoughts?
Germans were not the only people who grew weary of
peace or harboured grandiose visions of empire. To this
universalist view, leftist historians like the American A.J.
Mayer then applied the “primacy of domestic policy”
thesis and hypothesized that all the European powers
had courted war as a means of cowing or distracting their
working classes and national minorities.

Such “new left” interpretations triggered intense study of

the connections between domestic and foreign policy,
leading to the conclusion that a postulation of internal
origins of the war, while obvious for Austria and plausible
for Russia, failed in the cases of democratic Britain and
France. If anything, internal discord made for reticence
rather than assertion on the part of their foreign policy
elites. The conservative historian Gerhard Ritter even
challenged the Fischer thesis in the German case. The
real problem, he argued, was not fear of the Social
Democrats but the age-old tension between civilian and
military influence in the Prussian-German government.
Politicians, exemplified by Bethmann, did not share the
eagerness or imprudence of the general staff but lost
control of the ship of state in the atmosphere of
deepening crisis leading up to 1914. Finally, a moderate
German historian, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, dispensed with
polemics altogether. Germany’s rapid industrialization
and the tardiness of modernization in Austria-Hungary
and Russia, he concluded, created instabilities in central
and eastern Europe that found expression in desperate
self-assertion. Echoing Joseph Schumpeter, Mommsen
blamed the war on the survival of precapitalist regimes
that simply proved “no longer adequate in the face of
rapid social change and the steady advance of mass
politics.” This interpretation, however, amounted to an
updated and elaborated version of the unsophisticated
consensus that “we all stumbled into it.” Were the World
Wars, then, beyond human control?

Thus, the search for long-range causes, while turning up a

wealth of new information and insight, ran ultimately
aground. After all, if “imperialism” or “capitalism” had
caused the war, they had just as assuredly caused the
unprecedented era of peace and growth that preceded it.
Imperialist crises, though tense at times, had always been
resolved, and even Germany’s ambitions were on the
verge of being served through a 1914 agreement with
Britain on a planned partition of the Portuguese empire.
Imperial politics were simply not a casus belli for anyone
except Britain. Military preparedness was at a peak, but
armaments are responses to tensions, not the cause of
them, and they had, perhaps, served to deter war in the
numerous crises preceding 1914. Capitalist activity tied
the nations of Europe together as never before, and in
1914 most leading businessmen were advocates of
peace. The alliance systems themselves were defensive
and deterrent by design and had served as such for
decades. Nor were they inflexible. Italy opted out of her
alliance, the tsar was not bound to risk his dynasty on
behalf of Serbia, or the kaiser his on behalf of Austria-
Hungary, while the French and British cabinets might
never have persuaded their parliaments to take up arms
had the Schlieffen Plan not forced the issue. Perhaps the
1914 crisis was, after all, a series of blunders, in which
statesmen failed to perceive the effects their actions
would have on the others.

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The centrality of the Habsburg monarchy
Perhaps a long-range view that is still serviceable is
precisely the one derived from old-fashioned analysis of
the balance-of-power system, forgotten amid the debates
over national or class responsibility. This view, suggested
by Paul Schroeder in 1972, asks not why war broke out in
1914 but why not before? What snapped in 1914? The
answer, he argued, is that the keystone of European
balance, the element of stability that allowed the other
powers to chase imperial moonbeams at will, was
Austria-Hungary itself. The heedless policies of the other
powers, however, gradually undermined the Habsburg
monarchy until it was faced with a mortal choice. At that
point, the most stable member of the system became the
most disruptive, the girders of security—the alliances—
generated destructive pressures of their own, and the
European system collapsed. To be sure, Austria-Hungary
was threatened with her own nationality problem,
aggravated by Serbia. It could better have met that
threat, however, if the great powers had worked to
ameliorate pressures on it, just as they had carried the
declining Ottoman Empire for a full century. Instead, the
ambitions of Russia, France, and Britain, and the stifling
friendship of Germany, only served to push Austria-
Hungary to the brink. This was not their intention, but it
was the effect.

The central fact of global politics from 1890 to 1914 was

Britain’s relative decline. This occurred naturally, as
industrial power diffused, but was aggravated by the
particular challenge of Germany. Overextended, the
British sought partners to share the burdens of a world
empire and were obliged in return to look kindly on those
partners’ ambitions. But the resulting Triple Entente was
not the cause of Germany’s frustrations in the conduct of
Weltpolitik. Rather it was the inability of Germany to
pursue an imperial policy à outrance. Situated in the
middle of Europe, with hostile armies on two sides, and
committed to the defense of Austria-Hungary, Germany
was unable to make headway in the overseas world
despite her strength. By contrast, relatively weak France
or hopelessly ramshackle Russia could engage in
adventures at will, suffer setbacks, and return to the fray
in a few years. Schroeder concluded: “The contradiction
between what Germany wanted to do and what she
dared to do and was obliged to do accounts in turn for
the erratic, uncoordinated character of German world
policy, its inability to settle on clear goals and carry them
through, the constant initiatives leading nowhere, the
frequent changes in mid-course.” All Germany could do
was bluff and hope to be paid for doing nothing: for
remaining neutral in the Russo-Japanese War, for not
building more dreadnoughts, for letting the French into
Morocco, for not penetrating Persia. Of course, Germany
could have launched an imperialist war in 1905 or 1911
under more favourable circumstances. It chose not to do
so, and German might was such that prior to 1914 the
other powers never considered a passage of arms with
Germany.

Instead, Triple Entente diplomacy served to undermine

Austria-Hungary. Everyone recognized that it was the
“sick man of Europe” and that its demise would be
inconvenient at very best and would almost certainly
expose the ethnic mare’s nest of southeastern Europe to
civil war or Russian or German domination. Yet no one
did anything about it. France could scarcely afford to—its
security was too tightly bound to Russia’s—but France’s
policy of wooing Italy out of the Triple Alliance was a
grave setback, not for Germany but for Austria-Hungary.
Russia brazenly pushed the Slavic nationalities forward,
thinking to make gains but never realizing that tsarism
was as dependent on Habsburg survival as Austria-
Hungary had been on Ottoman survival. Only Britain had
the capacity to maneuver, to restrain the likes of Serbia
and Russia and take some of the Austro-Hungarian
burden off Germany’s shoulders. And indeed it had done
so before—in 1815–22, 1878, and 1888. But now the
British chose vaguely to encourage Russia in the Balkans,
letting Austria-Hungary, as it were, pay the price for
distracting Russia from the frontiers of India. So by 1914
Austria was encircled and Germany was left with the
choice of watching her only ally collapse or risking a war
against all Europe. Having chosen the risk, and lost, it is
no surprise that the Germans (as well as the other
powers) gave vent to all their prewar bitterness and
pursued a thorough revision of world politics in their own
favour.

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World War I, 1914–18
World War I has aptly been called a war of illusions that
exposed in sharp relief all the follies of the prewar
generation. The war plans of the generals had misfired at
once, and expectations that the intensity of modern
firepower would serve the offense, or that the war must
be brief, proved horribly false. Germany expected to
achieve hegemony in Europe as a step toward world
power, and instead world powers were called into play to
prevent hegemony in Europe. Socialists thought war
would bring general strikes and revolution, and instead
the war inspired patriotic national unity. Monarchists
hoped war would bolster the old regimes, and instead it
cast down the remaining dynasties of eastern Europe.
Liberals hoped that war would promote the spread of
freedom, and instead it forced even democratic
governments to impose censorship, martial law, and
command economies subordinated to the dictates of
centralized bureaucracy. Each nation in its own way
sacrificed one by one those values it claimed to be
fighting for in the belief that final victory would make
good all the terrible cost. And with terrible irony World
War I also ended in various plans for peace as illusory as
the plans for war had been. As the historian William
McNeill wrote, “the irrationality of rational,
professionalized planning could not have been made
more patently manifest.”

World War I can be divided, without undue violence to

reality, into three periods: the initial battles, struggles for
new allies, and mobilization on the home fronts,
occupying the period from 1914 to 1916; the onset of
ideologized warfare in the Russian revolutions and
American entry in 1917; and the final four-way struggle
of 1918 among German imperialism, Allied war-aims
diplomacy, Wilsonian liberal internationalism, and
Leninist bolshevism.

Military stalemate and new belligerents

From grand plans to the trenches
The first months of war resounded with the collision of
the war plans pored over for decades by the general
staffs of Europe. The original German plan for a two-front
war, drafted by Helmuth von Moltke the elder, had called
for taking the offensive against Russia and standing on
the defensive in the rugged Rhineland. The plan showed
military prudence and complemented the stabilizing
diplomacy of Bismarck. But Alfred, Graf von Schlieffen,
presided over the German military in the era of Kaiser
William’s Weltpolitik and adopted a more ambitious and
risky course. His plan, conceived in 1891 and completed
by 1905, envisioned a massive offensive in the west to
knock out the compact French forces in six weeks,
whereupon the army could shift eastward to confront the
plodding Russians. But a quick decision could be achieved
in France only by a vast enveloping action. The powerful
right wing of the German army must descend from the
north and pass through the neutral Low Countries. This
would virtually ensure British intervention. But Schlieffen
expected British aid to be too little and too late. In sum,
the Schlieffen Plan represented a pristine militarism: the
belief that all factors could be accounted for in advance,
that execution could be flawless, that pure force could
resolve all political problems including those thrown up
by the plan itself. In the event, the Germans realized all of
the political costs of the Schlieffen Plan and few of the
military benefits.

Like the Germans, the French had discarded a more

sensible plan in favour of the one implemented. French
intelligence had learned of the grand lines of the
Schlieffen Plan and its inclusion of reserve troops in the
initial assault. General Victor Michel therefore called in
1911 for a blocking action in Belgium in addition to an
offensive into Alsace-Lorraine. But this required twice the
active troops currently available. France would either
have to give up the Belgian screen or the offensive. The
new chief of staff, J.-J.-C. Joffre, refused to believe that
Germany would deploy reserve corps in immediate
combat and gave up the screen.

The traditional British way of war had been maritime:

destroy the enemy’s fleet, impose a blockade, and use
land forces only to secure key points or aid continental
allies at decisive moments. In Sir John Fisher’s phrase, the
army “should be regarded as a projectile fired by the
navy.” The prewar conversations with France, however,
led the War Office to consider how Britain’s army might
help in case of war with Germany. General Henry Wilson
insisted that even Britain’s six divisions of professionals
could tilt the balance between France and Germany and
won his case for a British Expeditionary Force. Privately,
he conceded that six divisions were “fifty too few” and
hoped for a mass conscript army on continental lines.

By October 1914 all the plans had unraveled. After the

German defeat in the Battle of the Marne, the Western
Front stabilized into an uninterrupted line for 466 miles
from Nieuwpoort on the Belgian coast south to
Bapaume, then southeast past Soissons, Verdun, Nancy,
and so to the Swiss frontier. Both sides dug in, elaborated
their trench systems over time, and condemned
themselves to four years of hellish stalemate on the
Western Front.

The situation was little better on the other front. A

necessary assumption of the Schlieffen Plan was the
inadequacy of the Russian rail network to support a rapid
offensive. By 1914, however, railroads through Poland
were much improved, and the Russian general staff
agreed to take the offensive in case of war to relieve the
pressure on France. Similarly, the Germans had asked the
Austrian commander, Conrad von Hötzendorf, to attack
Russia and ease the threat to Germany. Austria also had a
two-front war, however, and an army too small to fight it.
Owing to penury and its nationality problems, the
monarchy fielded fewer battalions in 1914 than it had in
the war of 1866. As the saying went, Austria was always
“en retard d’une armée, d’une année et d’une idée”
(“one army, one year, and one idea behind”). Austria’s
solution was to send one army south against Serbia and
one to Galicia against the Russians and to deploy a third
as need required. The reserves, a third of Austria’s
already outnumbered forces, spent the opening battles
shuttling back and forth on the rails. Austria failed to
penetrate Serbian defenses, while the Germans smashed
the Russian attack into East Prussia. In the east, too,
stalemate set in.

By mid-1915 the Germans had overcome supply

problems and were better prepared for trench warfare
than the Allies. They also pioneered the concept of
“defense in depth,” making a second trench line the main
barrier to assault. Allied generals responded with longer
and denser artillery bombardments but thereby
relinquished the element of surprise. Such tactics turned
western battlefields into seas of wreckage, with a “storm
of steel” raging above, and condemned hundreds of
thousands of men for the sake of a few thousand yards of
no-man’s-land. Allied attacks in 1915 cost the British
more than 300,000 casualties and the French 1,500,000.
The only German initiative, the Second Battle of Ypres,
introduced poison gas to the Western Front. But no
commander could see a means of breaking the deadlock,
and all confessed their strategy to be one of attrition.

The war at sea and abroad

The stalemate on land was matched by stalemate at sea
when the British decided to impose a distant rather than
close blockade of the German coast. This reduced the
danger to the Grand Fleet and, it was hoped, might
entice the German navy to venture out for a decisive
battle. Admiral von Tirpitz was prepared to run such a
risk, believing that the technical superiority of his High
Seas Fleet would balance out Britain’s numerical edge.
Only by risking all on a major fleet action might Germany
break the blockade, but the Kaiser and civilian leadership
wished to preserve their fleet as a bargaining chip in
eventual peace talks, while the British dared not provoke
an engagement, since a major defeat would be
disastrous. Admiral John Jellicoe, it was said, was “the
only man who could lose the war in an afternoon.”
In the wide world, the Allies cleared the seas of German
commerce raiders and seized the German colonial
empire. In the Pacific, New Zealanders took German
Samoa and Australians German New Guinea. On August
23, 1914, the Japanese empire honoured its alliance with
Britain by declaring war on Germany. Tokyo had no
intention of aiding its ally’s cause in Europe but was
pleased to occupy the Marshall and Caroline archipelagos
and lay siege to Germany’s Chinese port of Qingdao,
which surrendered in November. Germany’s African
colonies were, on the outbreak of war, immediately cut
off from communications and supply from home, but
military operations were needed to eliminate the
German presence. By early 1916, Togoland (Togo) and
Kamerun (Cameroon) had fallen to Anglo-French colonial
forces and German South West Africa (Namibia) to the
South Africans. Only in German East Africa was a native
force under Lieutenant Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck,
numbering initially just 12,000 men, able to survive for
the entire war, tying down 10 times that number of Allied
troops.
Learn More!
Efforts to break the stalemate
Thus, all the armies and navies of Europe faced each
other across fortified front lines. The prewar plans had
succumbed to the technological surprise of 1914–15: that
the withering firepower of machine guns, cartridge rifles,
and rapid-fire artillery favoured the defense. Infantry in
deep trenches, fronted with mines and barbed wire and
backed by artillery, could not be dislodged by frontal
attack. Accordingly, military and political leaders spent
the war groping for means of breaking the stalemate in
the trenches. First, neutrals might be enticed to enter the
war, perhaps throwing enough weight into the balance to
provide victory. Second, new weapons, tactics, and
theatres might break the deadlock or achieve strategic
goals elsewhere. Third, more and more men and matériel
might be squeezed out of the home economy to tip the
balance of forces or wear down the enemy by economic
attrition. The first of these means determined much of
the diplomatic history of the war. The second stimulated
technological developments such as poison gas, tanks,
and submarines, as well as the peripheral campaigns of
southern Europe and the Middle East. The third
determined the evolution of war economies and the
character of what came to be called total war.

The first of the European neutrals to join the fray was the
Ottoman Empire. Having lost the Balkans before 1914
and fearing partition of their Arab possessions by the
Triple Entente, the Young Turks under Enver Paşa looked
to Germany, whose military efficiency they admired.
Enver led in negotiating a secret German-Ottoman treaty,
signed August 2, 1914. But the grand vizier and others in
the sultan’s court held back, even after extracting a
German loan—tantamount to a bribe—of £5,000,000.
The war party then resorted to more extreme measures.
The Ottoman fleet, reinforced by two German cruisers,
entered the Black Sea in October, bombarded Odessa and
the Crimean ports, and sank two Russian ships. The
commander then falsified his account to make it appear
that the enemy had provoked the action. The outraged
Russians declared war on November 1. The Ottoman
Empire’s alliance with the Central Powers was a serious
blow to the Entente, for it effectively isolated Russia from
its Western allies and weakened their hand in the Balkan
capitals. The Turks concluded, however, that a Triple
Entente victory in the war would lead to the partition of
their empire even if they remained neutral (Allied
negotiations had already begun to this effect), whereas
joining forces with Germany gave them at least a fighting
chance to survive and perhaps even win some spoils from
Russia. Enver also declared a jihad, or holy war, inciting
Muslims to rise up against British and Russian rule in
India, Persia, and Central Asia.

Turkish forces deployed along the coasts of the

Dardanelles and on the Caucasus frontier with Russia,
where severe fighting began in the rugged mountains.
Enver, with German encouragement, took the strategic
offensive when he ordered 10,000 troops from Syria to
attack the Suez Canal in late January 1915. After crossing
the Sinai Peninsula the tired soldiers found Indian and
Australasian divisions in training, as well as gunboats and
other equipment they could not match. The Turks fell
back to Palestine and never menaced the canal again.
The vulnerability and value of the Dardanelles in turn
attracted the British. When Russia requested a Western
assault on Turkey to relieve the pressure in the Caucasus,
War Secretary Lord Kitchener and First Lord of the
Admiralty Winston Churchill promoted an attack on the
Dardanelles. By capturing Constantinople, the British
could link up with the Russians, knock Turkey out of the
war, and perhaps entice the Balkan states to rally to the
Allied cause. The British War Council created an
amphibious force of British, Australians, and New
Zealanders to capture the heights of the Gallipoli
Peninsula. On April 25 the ANZAC (Australian and New
Zealand Army Corps) forces went ashore, but their
assaults on the heights of Sari Bair were turned back
through the charismatic leadership of the young Turkish
officer Mustafa Kemal. A sweltering, bloody deadlock
dragged on into the summer. Five more divisions and
another amphibious landing, at Suvla Bay in August,
failed to take the rugged heights in the face of human
wave counterattacks by the Turks. Cabinet opinion
gradually turned against the campaign, and the Allied
force of 83,000 was evacuated—a dangerous operation
conducted with great skill—in January 1916. The Turks
had lost some 300,000 men, the Allies about 250,000 to
battle and disease. Gallipoli was, in Clement Attlee’s
words, “the one strategic idea of the war.” Its failure,
through bad leadership, planning, and luck, condemned
the Allies to seek a decision in bloody battles of attrition
on the Western Front.

The other peripheral front that enticed Allied strategists

was Austria’s border with Italy. Though a member of the
Triple Alliance, the Rome government maintained on
August 3, 1914, that it was not bound to fight since
Austria had not been attacked nor had it consulted with
Italy as the treaty required. Prime Minister Antonio
Salandra, a nationalist dedicated to the Irredentists’ goal
of recovery of Trentino and Trieste from Austria,
announced that Italy would be informed by sacro
egoismo. This, he explained, was a mystical rather than
cynical concept, but it set off seven months of haggling
over what the Allies would offer Italy to enter the war,
and what the Central Powers would offer for neutrality.
Some considerations were objective: Italy’s 4,160 miles of
coastline made defense against the Anglo-French fleet
virtually impossible; any gains extorted from the Central
Powers for neutrality would hardly be secure should
those powers win the war; and neutrality was
incompatible with Italy’s tenuous claim to be a great
power. What was more, all the Central Powers could offer
was Trentino, and even that promise had to be forced
from Vienna by German pressure.

After a clumsy intervention by the Russian foreign

minister, Sazonov, in which he tried to secure Italy’s help
and still protect Serbian interests on the Dalmatian coast,
negotiations moved to London. Berlin dispatched ex-
chancellor Bülow and Roman Catholic statesman
Matthias Erzberger to Rome to plead for the Central
Powers. On April 26, the day after the first Gallipoli
landing, the Treaty of London committed Italy to enter
the war against Austria-Hungary within a month. In
return the Allies promised Italy Trentino, part of South
Tirol, Trieste, a third of Dalmatia (at the expense of
Serbian ambitions), a mandate over Albania, a portion of
German East Africa, all of Libya, a part of Asia Minor, and
a 1,250,000,000-lira war chest from Britain. Still, a month
of crisis followed in Rome as journalists like Gabriele
D’Annunzio and Benito Mussolini stoked war fever and
parliamentary power-broker Giovanni Giolitti (backed by
Bülow) maneuvered for peace and parecchio—the
“much” that might be obtained from Austria without
lifting a rifle. After a cabinet crisis Salandra returned to
power to declare war on Austria-Hungary on May 23,
1915 (though Italy did not declare war on Germany until
August 1916).

General Luigi Cadorna’s war plan called for a strategic

defense in the mountainous Trentino while half the
Italian army concentrated for attack along the Isonzo
River to the south. In June 1915 he launched the first of
11 battles of the Isonzo, wasting some 250,000 men
against the rocky parapets and spirited Austrian
defenders. The southern front became another deadlock,
while Italy’s weak finances and industry would only make
her a continuing drain on Anglo-French resources.
After Turkey and Italy, attention turned to the neutral
Balkan states. The entry of the Balkan states on the side
of the Central Powers would doom Serbia and open
direct communications between Germany and Turkey.
Balkan participation on the Allied side would isolate
Turkey and complete the encirclement of Austria-
Hungary. The Central Powers had the upper hand in
Bulgaria, still smarting from its defeat in the Second
Balkan War and allied with Turkey as of August 2, 1914.
The Allies had little to offer Bulgaria except bribes,
especially after their failure at Gallipoli. German offers
proved irresistible: Macedonia (from Serbia) and parts of
the Dobruja and Thrace should Romania and Greece
intervene. Bulgaria joined the Central Powers on
September 6, 1915. In Romania the Allies had the upper
hand despite a treaty, renewed in 1913, binding
Bucharest and its Hohenzollern dynasty to the Triple
Alliance. Romania’s main ambition was to annex
Transylvania, a Habsburg province populated largely by
Romanians, but Prime Minister Ionel Brătianu
determined to stay neutral and observe the fortunes of
war.
In 1915 those fortunes appeared to favour the Central
Powers on the Turkish, Italian, Serbian, and Russian
fronts. The Russian front collapsed in the face of a
German offensive in May, allowing the Central Powers to
reoccupy Galicia, Lithuania, and Courland in the north. In
July the Germans resumed the drive and threatened to
pincer the entire Russian army in Poland. Warsaw fell on
August 5 and Brest-Litovsk on the 26th, whereupon the
German armies outran their supplies and halted the drive
on a line stretching from Riga on the Baltic to Czernowitz
on the Romanian border. Russian losses were
apocalyptic: more than a million men captured and at
least as many killed and wounded in 1915. Technical
inferiority, shortage of munitions, and poor tactics led to
terrible wastage of men in the attack and lack of mobility
on the defense. The inadequacy of the Russian state and
economy in modern war now stood revealed. Desertions
increased and morale plummeted. On September 5, Tsar
Nicholas himself took over supreme command, a
chivalrous move but one that would identify the crown
with future disasters.
In 1916 German strategists again turned west with the
expressed intention of bleeding France white and
breaking her army’s spirit. The object of attack was to be
the fortress of Verdun, and the plan called for the
substitution of ordnance for manpower as much as
possible, thereby using Germany’s industrial might to kill
Frenchmen in the most efficient way. The assault began
on February 21, following an avalanche of shells and
poison gas, and continued without interruption for five
months. France’s civilian and military leadership turned
Verdun into a national symbol of resistance, symbolized
by General Philippe Pétain’s famous order of the day: “Ils
ne passeront pas!” Verdun was the most intensive battle
in history and cost France and Germany more than
300,000 men each.

In December 1915 an Allied conference at Chantilly had

decided to coordinate simultaneous attacks on all fronts.
Given Verdun, responsibility for the Western assault fell
to the British. After elaborate preparation and a week of
bombardment the cream of “Kitchener’s New Army”
went over the top on July 1, 1916, and strode in
formation toward the German lines. By mid-November
the Somme offensive had gained about six and a half
miles across a 30-mile front at the cost of 420,000
Britons, 194,000 Frenchmen, and 440,000 Germans.

On the Eastern Front in 1916 the Russian command

dutifully took up the offensive to relieve the pressure on
Verdun and in coordination with the push on the Somme.
But failures in leadership and supply, poor intelligence
and tactics again thwarted the courage of Russia’s
peasant-soldiers, 100,000 of whom were lost in a March
attack that achieved nothing. The last gasp of the tsarist
army followed in June. Russian attacks at Lutsk, Buchach,
and Czernowitz beginning June 4 achieved total surprise,
captured 200,000 men, and overran Bukovina by the end
of the month. This apparent revival of Russia’s fortunes
prompted the Romanians, finally, to declare war on
Austria-Hungary on August 27, 1916. Half the Romanian
army—12 divisions—joined the offensive and advanced
into Transylvania, expecting to deal the final blow to
staggering Austria-Hungary. Instead, Germany, Turkey,
and Bulgaria promptly declared war on Romania. The
Romanians held out for a month against a German-
Austrian-Bulgarian attack at the Vulcan and Szurduk
(Surduc) passes, but the Central Powers broke through
and captured Bucharest on December 6. The Romanian
gambit ended in disaster as the Germans acquired their
oil and wheat and the Russians inherited an additional
300 miles of frontline. Meanwhile, the Russian offensive
degenerated into frontal assaults and closed in August.
Russia had lost 500,000 men—the last trained reserves of
the tsarist army.

By the end of 1916 what may be called the traditional

phase of the war had run its course. Despite ever greater
expenditures of men and matériel and the accession of
neutral powers to one side or the other, victory remained
elusive. Henceforth the coalitions would rely all the more
on breaking the internal cohesion of the enemy or on
calling forth global forces to tip the balance. The resort to
revolution, especially in Russia, and extra-European
powers, especially the United States, would have
profound consequences for Europe’s future in the 20th
century, while internal mobilization for total war had
already gone far to reshape European societies.

Learn More!

War mobilization at home and abroad

The invention of total war
When the first campaigns failed and the belligerents
steeled themselves to fight a long war of attrition, World
War I became total—that is, a war fought without
limitations, between entire societies and not just
between armies, with total victory the only acceptable
outcome. It became such a war because, for the first
time, the industrial and bureaucratic resources existed to
mobilize an entire nation’s strength, because the
stalemate required total mobilization, and because the
tremendous cost and suffering of such a war seemed to
preclude settling for a negotiated truce. Only victory
might redeem the terrible sacrifices already made by
both sides; and if final victory were the only acceptable
end, then any means could be justified in pursuit of it.
The first violent battles of 1914 nearly expended prewar
munitions reserves. By mid-war the artillerymen of the
Western Front might fire more shells in a single day than
were expended in the entire Franco-German War. Clearly
the home front—the war economy—would be the most
decisive of all. And yet the governments, expecting a
short war, were unprepared for economic mobilization
and had to adjust to emergencies and shortages as they
arose. In Germany the process began in the first days of
war when private manufacturers, especially Walther
Rathenau, suggested a state bureau to distribute raw
materials to industry. Over the years it became a model
for new agencies, boards, and commissions controlling
production, labour, rationing, travel, wages and prices. By
late 1917, Germany came to dominate the economies of
Austria-Hungary and the occupied regions by the same
means. In all the belligerent nations, to a greater or lesser
degree, civil and economic liberties, the free market,
even national sovereignty, gave way to a kind of military
socialism in the crucible of war. All the belligerents met
their labour needs through employment of old men,
children, and women (a fact that ensured the success of
the suffragist movement in Europe after the war). The
Allies also engaged in economic war through agreements
with neutral countries on the Continent not to re-export
goods to Germany and through preemptive purchase of
everything from Chilean nitrates to Romanian wheat.

An economic problem that could be postponed was the

financial one. The belligerents immediately ended
controvertibility of their currencies according to the gold
standard and liquidated their holdings overseas. By late
1915 the British and French also began to float sizable
loans on the American market, even as they themselves
underwrote the war efforts of weaker economies like the
Italian and Russian. British, Germans, and Americans
covered a fraction of the war’s expense through income
and other taxes, but World War I was financed primarily
through war bonds and secondarily through loans from
abroad. This pattern would exacerbate the diplomatic
and domestic political climates after the war, when the
bills for the four years’ wastage came due.

The weapon of morale

The mass conscripted army and labour force, the
employment of women and children, and the
mobilization of science, industry, and agriculture meant
that virtually every citizen contributed to the war effort.
Hence all governments tried to stoke morale on the
home front, subvert that of the enemy, and sway the
opinions of neutrals. A variety of techniques for
manipulating information were used, including
particularly censorship and vilification of the enemy.
German propaganda depicted Russians as semi-Asiatic
barbarians and the French as mere cannon fodder for the
bloated, envious British Empire lusting to destroy
Germany’s power, prosperity, and Kultur. The French
Maison de la Presse and British Ministry of Information
took German war guilt for granted and made great play
of the atrocities committed by the “Hun” in Belgium and
on the high seas, where defenseless passenger ships
were treacherously torpedoed. War hatred whipped up
by such propaganda made it all the more difficult to
justify negotiating a truce.

The Allies proved more adept than the Germans at

psychological warfare. Propaganda was distributed across
German lines by shells, planes, rockets, balloons, and
radio. Such activities were given into the hands of an
Inter-Allied Propaganda Commission in 1918. The Allies
also, especially after 1917, identified themselves with
such universal principles as democracy and national self-
determination, while the German war effort had only a
narrow national appeal. The most important target of
propaganda was the United States. In the first weeks of
war the British cut the German transatlantic cables and
subsequently controlled the flow of news to America.
German attempts to influence U.S. opinion were
invariably clumsy, while the British, aided by the common
language, reminded Americans of their common values
for which German militarism had no respect. In political
warfare, German attempts to arouse the Muslim world
and incite India to rebellion were stillborn, while their
exploitation of the situation in Ireland, culminating in the
Easter Rising of 1916, backfired. The aristocratic and
continental German officials seemed out of their element
when either trying to appeal to the masses or looking
beyond Europe. But their one success was nothing less
than the Russian Revolution of 1917 (see below The
Russian Revolution).

Learn More!
War aims and peace feelers
War aims of the belligerents
For what were the nations of Europe making such total
and mortal commitments? In public each government
insisted it was fighting first in self-defense, then for
victory and some hallowed national goal like naval
security for Britain, Alsace-Lorraine for France, or
Constantinople for Russia. But in private, now that
peacetime constraints were torn off, each indulged
greater ambitions. German war aims took shape at once
in the September Program of Bethmann. While debate
exists over how much this document reflected
Bethmann’s real views, it did come to represent the
prevailing view of the military, which in turn came to
speak increasingly for Germany as a whole. The dream of
world power seemed within reach through the
acquisition of Belgian and French colonies that, when
joined to Germany’s and perhaps Portugal’s, would
constitute a Mittelafrika of immense proportions. In
Europe the Germans determined to assure that France
and Russia would pose no threat in the future and to
create an economic base suitable for a world power. This
notion of a single economic bloc from Berlin to Baghdad,
including Belgium, the Longwy-Briey mines of France,
Poland, Courland, the Ukraine, and the Balkans, was
popularized as Mitteleuropa in a 1915 best-seller by
Friedrich Naumann. How committed Germany’s civilian
leadership was to this hegemonic plan is disputed:
Bethmann favoured abandoning much of it in hopes of a
negotiated peace. But a war-aims majority held the
balance in the Reichstag until 1917 and in the military
until the bitter end.

On September 5, 1914, the entente powers solemnly and

severally renounced any separate peace, but throughout
the war they felt constrained to bolster each other’s will
to fight with promises of spoils. Hence the purchase of
Italy’s belligerency and the shocking willingness of Britain
and France to consign Constantinople to Russia in March
1915. In general, Allied ambitions added up to the
partition of the German and Ottoman empires and
security against Germany in Europe and on the seas.
Partition of Austria-Hungary was not an initial Allied aim.
In the spring of 1915 France and Russia exchanged letters
promising that both could do as they wished on their
borders with Germany, implying a free hand for Russia in
Galicia and East Prussia and the same for France on the
Rhine. French industry contemplated an advance into the
Saar and Rhine regions to end France’s inferiority in coal
production (which would only be exacerbated by the
return of Alsace-Lorraine with its rich iron deposits). For
the French army and foreign ministry, however, the main
motive for separating the Rhineland from Germany was
security: what Poincaré called “breaking Prussian
militarism” and Aristide Briand “guarantees of lasting
peace.” In 1917 Paris and St. Petersburg were close to a
formal treaty on the German boundaries when the
Russian Revolution intervened.

The Allies specified their colonial claims in an agreement

of April 1916: Britain won influence in Mesopotamia and
part of Syria; France in the rest of Syria, Lebanon, Cilicia,
and southern Kurdistan; and Russia in Armenia and
northern Kurdistan; Palestine was placed under joint
Anglo-French administration. The Sykes–Picot Agreement
in May also divided much of the Ottoman Empire into
British and French spheres. The Agreement of Saint-Jean-
de-Maurienne of April 1917 promised Italy concessions
on the Anatolian coast; one Allied motive in this was to
persuade Rome to scale down its claims on Austria-
Hungary in hopes of a separate peace with Vienna (see
below War-weariness and diplomacy). Finally, the French
began in 1916 to formulate a second set of war aims
directed, not at Germany, but at their own allies. British
currency supports, loans, coal shipments at fixed prices,
and other benefits helped sustain the French war effort,
and the minister of commerce, Étienne Clémentel,
lobbied for an extension of these supports beyond an
armistice lest France win the military struggle only to lose
the postwar economic struggle. The British agreed at the
Allied Economic Conference of 1916, and the following
year the French placed even greater hopes of economic
solidarity in the newly associated power, the United
States.
Learn More!
Attitude of the United States
Since 1783 the United States had acquired a number of
foreign policy traditions. George Washington, in his
Farewell Address, admonished his young and vulnerable
country to avoid alliances that would drag it into disputes
in which it had no interest. Thus was born a powerful
isolationist and exclusivist tradition. The Monroe
Doctrine declared the Western Hemisphere off-limits to
European adventurism, giving birth to a regionalist and
paternalist tradition vis-à-vis Latin America. After the Civil
War, belief in America’s Manifest Destiny directed
national attention to the West Coast and beyond. Then
the war against Spain in 1898 yielded colonial
possessions in the Caribbean and Pacific and inspired the
building of a two-ocean navy and of a Panama Canal to
serve it. By 1914, when the canal opened, the United
States was already the greatest industrial power in the
world, yet its tradition of exclusivity and its tiny standing
army gave the Europeans excuse to ignore America’s
potential might.
In August 1914 President Woodrow Wilson implored the
American people to be “neutral in thought as well as
deed” with respect to the European war. In so doing he
was not only honouring tradition but also applying his
own religious principles to foreign policy. His agenda
upon entering the White House in 1913 had been
domestic reform, and he had written that it would be an
irony of fate should foreign policy come to dominate in
his administration. Yet when fate so decreed, Wilson
preferred to trust his own motives and methods rather
than the advice of his secretaries of state or his other
advisers. Wilson deplored the war and earnestly wished
to bring about a just and lasting peace through U.S.
mediation, for what greater mission could Providence
assign to that “city on a hill,” the United States of
America?

American power began to figure in the balance of war

almost from the start. Trading was suspended on the
New York Stock Exchange when war broke out, but when
it resumed in November 1914, Europeans sold most of
the $4,000,000,000 worth of securities they held before
the war. U.S. loans to belligerents were at first declared
“inconsistent with the true spirit of neutrality,” but the
large Anglo-French orders for U.S. munitions, raw
materials, and food created an economic boom, and by
1915 the Allies needed credit to continue their
purchases. An initial £200,000,000 loan in September
1915 led eventually to billions being floated on the U.S.
market and a complete reversal of the financial
relationship between the Old World and the New. By
1917 the United States was no longer a debtor nation but
the world’s greatest creditor. U.S. firms also inherited
many overseas markets, especially in Latin America,
which the British and Germans could no longer serve.

To Americans neutrality seemed both moral and lucrative

—the United States, said Wilson, was “too proud to
fight.” But the failure of his peace initiatives, the German
assaults on neutrals’ rights at sea, and the cumulative
effect of Allied propaganda and German provocations
conjoined to end U.S. neutrality by 1917. On February 4,
1915, Germany declared the waters around the British
Isles a war zone in which Allied ships would be sunk,
without warning if necessary. While this procedure
dispensed with traditional civilities like boarding, search
and seizure, and care of civilians, effective submarine
warfare required it. Underwater craft relied on stealth
and surprise and exposed themselves to easy destruction
once they made their presence known. Thus, even
though the British blockade interfered with neutral
shipping more than the German blockade, the latter
appeared far more beastly. The sinking of the Cunard
liner Lusitania on May 7, 1915, which killed over a
thousand passengers, including 128 U.S. citizens,
outraged U.S. public opinion despite the rightful German
claim that she was carrying munitions (173 tons worth).
Two more passenger ships, the Arabic and Hesperia,
went down in August and September, respectively,
whereupon American diplomatic protests caused civil
officials in Berlin to overrule the military command and
call off unrestricted submarine warfare, although the
issue did not remain settled.

Wilson’s own peace initiatives, including an offer of

mediation by Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan in
1914 and a trip to Europe by Wilson’s personal aide and
adviser, Colonel Edward M. House, in 1915, were
unsuccessful. Early in 1916 House returned to Europe and
on February 22 in London agreed to a formula whereby
the United States would summon a peace conference
and—if Germany refused to attend or proved
unreasonable—“would leave the conference as a
belligerent on the side of the Allies.” Wilson later drew
back from the guarantee and added the word “probably”
after “would.” But the British themselves shied from
promoting such a conference, while the other
belligerents also ducked the suggestion lest they
compromise the determination of their people or incur
the distrust of allies.

By the end of 1916 Germany had 102 U-boats ready for

service, many of the latest type, and the chief of the
naval staff assured the kaiser that unrestricted submarine
warfare would sink 600,000 tons of Allied shipping per
month and force Britain to make peace within five
months. Bethmann fought to delay escalation of the
submarine war in hopes of another Wilsonian peace
move. But the president held off new initiatives during
his reelection campaign. When he had still not acted by
December 1916, Bethmann was forced to make a deal
with his own military, which consented to tolerate a
German peace offer in return for Bethmann’s
endorsement of unrestricted submarine warfare if the
offer failed. But the army helped ensure that the German
note (released December 12) would fail by insisting on
implicit retention by Germany of Belgium and other
battlefield conquests. Wilson followed on the 18th with
an invitation to the two camps to define their war aims as
a prelude to negotiation. The Allies demanded
evacuation of occupied lands and guarantees against
Germany in the future. The Germans stuck to their
December note, and the military command decided to
resume unrestricted submarine warfare on February 1.

The United States broke diplomatic relations with

Germany on February 3 and commenced the arming of
merchant ships on March 9. Meanwhile, German Foreign
Secretary Arthur Zimmermann, anticipating war with the
United States over the U-boat issue, cabled an offer of
alliance to Mexico on January 16, promising Mexico its
own “lost provinces” of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico
in case of war with the United States. British intelligence
intercepted the Zimmermann telegram and leaked it to
Washington, further inflaming American opinion. When
U-boats proceeded in mid-March to sink the Algonquin,
City of Memphis, Vigilancia, and Illinois (the latter two
without warning), Wilson went before Congress and in a
lofty and moving address reviewed the reasons why
America was forced to take up the sword—why, “God
helping her, she can do no other.” On April 6, 1917,
Congress declared war on Germany, and the United
States became an associated (not an Allied) power.
Henceforth World War I hinged on whether the U-boats
could force Britain to her knees and the German armies
overwhelm the sagging Western Front before the men
and matériel of the aroused Yankees could arrive in
France.

Learn More!
The crises of 1917
War-weariness and diplomacy
For every belligerent, 1917 was a year of crisis at home
and at the front, a year of wild swings and near disasters,
and by the time it was over the very nature of the war
had changed dramatically. A French offensive in the
spring soon ground to a standstill, sparking a wave of
mutinies and indiscipline in the trenches that left the
French army virtually useless as an offensive force. The
British offensive of July–November, called variously
Passchendaele or the Third Battle of Ypres, was a tactical
disaster that ended in a viscous porridge of mud. That
offensive action could be ordered under such conditions
is a measure of how far Western Front generals had been
seduced into a gothic unreality. Allied and German
casualties “in Flanders Fields, where poppies grow”
numbered between 500,000 and 800,000. The British
Army, too, neared the end of its offensive capacities.

For two years the Italian front had been left unchanged
by the first nine battles of the Isonzo, but the
underfinanced and underindustrialized Italian war effort
gradually eroded. The Tenth Battle of the Isonzo (May–
June 1917) cost Italy dearly, while the Eleventh (August–
September) registered a “success” amounting to some
five miles of advance at a cost of over 300,000 casualties,
pushing the total for the war to more than 1,000,000.
With peace propaganda, strikes, and communist agitation
spreading throughout Italy, and the Austrians in need of
stiffening, the German high command reinforced the
Austrians at Caporetto. Within days the Italian
commander had to order a general retreat. The Germans
broke the line of the Tagliamento as well, and not until
the Italians regrouped at the Piave on November 7 did
the front stabilize. Caporetto cost Italy 340,000 dead and
wounded, 300,000 prisoners, and another 350,000
deserters: an incredible 1,000,000 in all, suggesting that
the Italian army, like the French, was on strike against its
own leadership.

Among the Central Powers also, 1917 intensified the

yearning for peace. Polish, Czech, and Yugoslav leaders
had formed committees in exile to agitate for the
autonomy or independence of their peoples, while war-
weariness among those at home grew with food
shortages, bad news from the front, and desertions
among the troops. When Emperor Franz Joseph died in
November 1916 after 68 years on the throne, there was a
sense that the empire must die with him. Austro-
Hungarian officials already had begun to look for a way
out of the war—which meant a way out of the German
alliance. The new Habsburg foreign minister, Ottokar, Graf
Czernin, raised the issue of war aims and peace at his first
ministerial meeting with the new emperor, Charles. A
negotiated peace could only be one without victors or
vanquished, conquests or indemnities—so said Czernin
10 days before Wilson’s own “Peace Without Victory”
speech. The only means of achieving such a peace,
however, was for Austria-Hungary’s ally Germany to
restore Belgium and, perhaps, Alsace-Lorraine.

The first Austrian demarches, made through Scandinavia,

came to nothing, and so Charles, Czernin, and the
Empress Zita tried again in late January 1917 through the
intermediary of her brother, Prince Sixtus of Bourbon-
Parma, on leave from service in the Belgian army. In
March, Charles drafted a letter in which he asked Sixtus
to convey to the president of France his “lively
sympathies” and support for the evacuation of Belgium
and the lost provinces. The cautious French premier,
Alexandre Ribot, shared the news in April with Lloyd
George, who said simply, “That means peace.” But Baron
Sonnino, at the Conference of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne,
refused to consider peace with Austria-Hungary (the only
enemy Italy was interested in fighting) and warned Lloyd
George against attempts to split their alliance. Charles’s
second letter, in May, which inexplicably told the French
and British of an “Italian peace offer” that was never
made, only put the Allies on their guard.

Simultaneously the parliamentary forces of Germany rose

in protest against the war, the erosion of civilian
authority, and the war-aims stubbornness of the military
command. A moderate annexationist deputy, Matthias
Erzberger, met with Czernin and Emperor Charles in April
1917 and learned that Austria-Hungary’s military strength
was near its end. In May a Reichstag committee
demanded that the army be placed under civilian control.
The kaiser and the military high command replied with
scorn. In July, Bethmann was forced to resign and the
army assumed de facto control of Germany. When the
kaiser appointed a nonentity, Georg Michaelis, as
chancellor, the Reichstag passed a peace resolution on
July 19 by a vote of 212–126. But the resolution could
have no bearing on the ruling circles, to whom
compromise with the foreign enemy meant surrender to
the domestic forces of reform.

In mid-August, Pope Benedict XV tried to preserve

momentum toward a truce by calling on all parties to
evacuate occupied regions, but the German government
again refused to surrender Belgium, while the American
reply to the Vatican seemed to insist on the
democratization of Germany. Emperor Charles and
Czernin were likewise unable to make headway, for the
Allies were not at this point seeking a general peace but
only a separate peace with Austria-Hungary that would
leave Germany stranded. This Vienna could not in honour
do, nor Berlin permit. The United States declared war on
Austria-Hungary on December 7, 1917, and, when the
French government leaked news the following spring of
the Austrian peace correspondence, Charles and Czernin
were forced to humble themselves before the kaiser and
German high command at Spa. Austria-Hungary had
become a virtual satellite of the German military empire.

The Ottoman Empire in 1917 began to give way before

the relatively mild but incessant pressure on fronts the
other powers considered sideshows. Baghdad fell to
British forces in March. Sir Edmund Allenby, having
promised Lloyd George that he would deliver Jerusalem
to the British people “as a Christmas present,” made
good his promise on December 9. The political future of
Palestine, however, was a source of confusion. In the war-
aims treaties, the British had divided the Middle East into
colonial spheres of influence. In their dealings with the
Arabs the British spoke of independence for the region.
Then, on November 2, 1917, the Balfour Declaration
promised “the establishment in Palestine of a national
home for the Jewish people,” albeit without prejudice to
“the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish
communities.” Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour was
persuaded that this action was in British interest by the
energetic appeals of Chaim Weizmann, but in the long
run it would cause no end of difficulty for British
diplomacy.

The one flank on which Turkey had not been besieged

was the Balkan, where an Allied force remained in place
at Salonika pending resolution of the Greek political
struggle. The Allies continued to back Prime Minister
Eleuthérios Venizélos, who, because King Constantine still
favoured the Central Powers, had fled Athens in
September 1916 and set up a provisional government
under Allied protection at Salonika. Finally, the Anglo-
French forces deposed Constantine in June 1917 and
installed Venizélos in Athens, whereupon Greece
declared war on the Central Powers. By the end of 1917,
therefore, Turkey, like Austria, was exhausted,
beleaguered on four fronts, and wholly dependent on
German support.

Learn More!
The Russian Revolution
While Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Austria-Hungary,
and Turkey all survived their crises of 1917 and found the
will and stamina for one last year of war, Russia
succumbed. In three years of war Russia had mobilized
roughly 10 percent of its entire population and lost over
half of that number in battle. The home economy was
stretched to the limit, and even the arms and food it
could produce were subject to vagaries of transport and
corruption in the supply services. Inflation and food
shortages panicked the towns, and shortages of fuel
isolated the countryside. Suddenly, on March 12, 1917,
the parliament and Petrograd soviet (workers’ and
soldiers’ council) joined forces to form a Provisional
Government. Three days later the Tsar abdicated.

Two leading ministers in the new regime, Aleksandr

Kerensky and Pavel Milyukov, hoped to streamline the
state and invigorate the war effort. Political liberals, they
valued Russia’s ties to Britain and France and even looked
forward to capturing Constantinople as a means of
legitimating the new regime. Kerensky assured the Allies
on March 17 that Russia would fight “unswervingly and
indefatigably” until victory. The local soviets and leftist
parties, however, forced a declaration in April by which
“free Russia” renounced domination over other nations
and their territories. When Prince Gyorgy Lvov, the prime
minister, promised to accept the revolutionary formula of
“no annexations, no indemnities” on May 15, Milyukov
stepped down as foreign minister. President Wilson was
especially moved by the spectacle of Russia embracing
democracy, and all the Allies could now truly depict their
cause as moral and ideological: “to make the world safe
for democracy,” as Wilson said, in opposition to
militarism and imperialism. Russia’s ability to fight
steadily and rapidly deteriorated, however. The Petrograd
soviet called for abolition of the officer corps, and the
Provisional Government abolished courts-martial and
issued a Declaration of Soldiers’ Rights.

The Provisional Government’s decision to continue the

war was a grave disappointment to the Germans. Since
1914 they had dabbled in revolutionary intrigues in
hopes of shattering Russia from within. The campaign
took two forms: collaboration with nationalist agitators
among the Finns, Baltic peoples, Poles, Ukrainians, and
Georgians; and support for Russian social revolutionaries.
Lenin, leader of the most virulent wing of Russian
Marxists, the Bolsheviks, was living in Kraków when the
war broke out and was promptly arrested. An Austrian
Social Democrat, Victor Adler, persuaded the Austrian
minister of the interior that Lenin was an ally in the fight
against Russia, whereupon he was released into
Switzerland. Another Russian émigré and socialist,
Alexander Helphand, impressed the German ambassador
in Constantinople with his revolutionary connections and
was soon briefing the German foreign ministry in Berlin.
In March 1915 the Germans set aside the first 2,000,000
of what would eventually total 41,000,000 marks spent
on secret subversion in Russia.

After the first Eastern Front victories in 1915, Berlin had

hoped to entice Russia into a separate peace, and efforts
to that end continued up to March 1917. Behind the
scenes, however, Helphand’s organization, supported by
the German foreign office, worked to spread
revolutionary and pacifist ideas inside Russia. After
Kerensky’s declaration that Russia would stay in the war,
the German command determined to facilitate Lenin’s
return to Russia. On April 9, 1917, he and his comrades
were placed aboard a special security train in Zürich for
the trip across Germany, continued by boat to Sweden
and thence by rail to Petrograd.

Bolshevik propaganda penetrated the army, which even

the Russian high command confessed was “a huge,
weary, shabby, and ill-fed mob of angry men.” In an
attempt to restore it to fighting trim, General Lavr
Kornilov urged on Kerensky a number of reforms (August
16), but behind Kornilov were conspirators hoping for
military dictatorship. Kerensky grasped the danger to
himself, forbade troop movements to the capital lest they
support a coup, and then had Kornilov arrested. The
division between the centre and right gravely weakened
the Provisional Government and strengthened the
Bolsheviks, who took the lead in denouncing this
“counterrevolutionary plot.” The Provisional
Government, bereft of authority and will, hoped to hold
on until elections for a Constituent Assembly in
December. Lenin, knowing that he stood to lose by the
fact and the result of free elections, struck in November,
and the Provisional Government collapsed in the face of
the Bolshevik coup d’état.

One of Lenin’s first acts as revolutionary dictator of

Russia was to attempt to transform the European war of
nations into a war of classes. His ringing speech of
November 8 appealed to workers and soldiers
everywhere to force an immediate armistice, end secret
diplomacy, and negotiate a peace of “no annexations, no
indemnities.” Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Karl Radek
promptly organized to spread revolution abroad. The
expected uprisings occurred nowhere, but peace was
mandatory for Russia if the Bolshevik regime were to
survive. On December 15, therefore, Lenin’s regime
signed an armistice with the Central Powers.

Learn More!
Last battles and armistice
Russia’s withdrawal from the war
The events of 1917 meant that World War I was no
longer a two-sided contest. Rather, four visions of the
future competed for the allegiance of governments and
peoples. Germany fought on in hope of victory and
domination of the Continent. The Allies fought on to
frustrate Germany and realize their own ambitious war
aims. Wilson’s America fought as an “associated power”
for a liberal internationalist agenda opposed to German
and Allied imperialism alike. Finally, Lenin’s Russia raised
a second challenge to the old diplomacy in the name of
socialist internationalism. German, Allied, Wilsonian, and
Bolshevik images of the peace differed so radically that
the war was now as much ideological as it was military.

Lloyd George and Wilson replied to Lenin’s peace

initiatives with speeches of their own to reassure their
peoples, contrast their liberal goals with those of the
Germans, and perhaps persuade Russia to remain in the
field. Lloyd George insisted before the Trades Union
Congress (January 5, 1918) that “we are not fighting a
war of aggression against the German people,” and he
stressed autonomous development for all peoples,
including those of Austria-Hungary. Wilson’s Fourteen
Points speech (January 8, 1918) called for (1) open
covenants, openly arrived at; (2) freedom of the seas; (3)
lowering of economic barriers; (4) reduction of
armaments; (5) colonial arrangements respecting the will
of the peoples involved; (6) national self-determination
for the peoples of Russia; (7) restoration of Belgium; (8)
return of all invaded territory plus Alsace-Lorraine to
France; (9) Italian recovery of her irredente; (10)
autonomy for the nationalities of Austria-Hungary; (11)
restoration of the Balkan states and access to the sea for
Serbia; (12) autonomy for the peoples of the Ottoman
Empire and free navigation through the Dardanelles; (13)
an independent Poland with access to the sea; and (14) a
“general association of nations” offering “mutual
guarantees of political independence and territorial
integrity.” In his Four Principles (February 11) and Five
Particulars (September 27) speeches Wilson elaborated
his views on national self-determination, a truly
revolutionary idea with global, but unpredictable,
implications.
Allied assurances failed to dissuade the Bolsheviks from
exiting the alliance. Lenin took power on the slogan
“Peace, Bread, and Land,” and he needed to be free of
the war in order to consolidate Bolshevik power. A peace
conference convened at Brest-Litovsk on December 22,
1917, but it proceeded slowly while the two sides—one
imperialist, the other incipiently totalitarian—bickered
about the definition of “national self-determination.” On
January 7, 1918, Trotsky asked for adjournment, still
hoping for revolutionary outbreaks abroad. In fact, a
mutiny in the Austrian fleet and a general strike
movement in Berlin did occur but were easily
suppressed. The Bolshevik leadership now faced three
bad choices: to defy the Germans and risk conquest and
overthrow; to relent and sign over half of European
Russia to German control; or to pursue what Trotsky
called “neither war nor peace” while awaiting the
revolution in Germany. He also wished to avoid any sign
of collusion with the German military, lest the Bolsheviks
appear to be collaborationists. In the meantime the
Germans and Austrians concluded the Brotfrieden
(“bread peace”) with representatives of wheat-rich
Ukraine. When, however, Bolshevik forces began to
penetrate Ukraine—and the German high command tired
of Trotsky’s rhetoric—the Germans broke off talks and
ordered the army to resume its advance. The French
ambassador immediately offered the Bolsheviks all aid if
they would fight the Germans, but Lenin ordered an
immediate capitulation. Germany now presented even
harsher peace terms, and on March 3 the Bolsheviks
signed. The Romanians then made peace on the 5th, and
newly independent Finland signed a treaty with Germany
on the 7th.

In the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk the Bolshevik regime turned

over to Germany 34 percent of Russia’s population, 32
percent of Russia’s farmland, 54 percent of Russia’s
industrial plant, 89 percent of Russia’s coal mines, and
virtually all of its cotton and oil. These economic gains in
the east, plus the release of troops who could now be
shifted to the Western Front, revived German hopes that
victory was achievable before the Americans arrived in
force.
Negative views of the Bolshevik Revolution predominated
from the start in Western capitals, although some people
on the left in London, Paris, and Washington sympathized
with it or thought it would bring much needed
“efficiency” to Russia. The French and British had talked
of supporting this or that Russian faction with arms or
cash and had agreed on a tentative division of southern
Russia into areas of responsibility. The German advance
of February then caused the Allied missions to flee
Petrograd and reassemble in remote Vologda, where they
waited to see what direction the Bolsheviks would take.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk answered the question. It was
an unparalleled disaster for the beleaguered Allies, who
now had to consider intervention in Russia. First, if they
could link up with nationalist Russians and reopen the
Eastern Front, they might save their exhausted armies in
France from facing the full might of the Central Powers.
Second, it would be most helpful if they could save Allied
war matériel that had stacked up in Russian ports (some
162,495 tons of supplies in Arkhangelsk alone) from
seizure by the Germans or Bolsheviks and distribute it to
Russians still willing to fight Germans.
When the German onslaught on the Western Front
opened in March, the French and British became
desperate for a diversion in the East. In March 1918 an
Anglo-French expedition docked at Murmansk, followed
in June by an American cruiser and 150 marines. An
Anglo-French force occupied Arkhangelsk in August, and
4,500 U.S. soldiers under British command joined them in
September. These tiny contingents, totaling about 28,000
men, were never meant to overthrow the Bolshevik
regime, although the British hoped they might serve as
magnets for White Russian forces opposing the
Bolsheviks.

The Japanese, seeking an imperial foothold on the Asian

mainland, used Brest-Litovsk as pretext to occupy
Vladivostok in April. Wilson then committed U.S. troops
to Siberia in order to keep an eye on the Japanese and to
make contact with 30,000 Czechoslovak legionnaires,
mostly former prisoners of war from the Habsburg
armies seeking to escape Russia to fight for an
independent Czech state. The Czechoslovak Legion,
released and armed by the Kerensky government, at first
declared neutrality toward Russian politics, but when the
Bolsheviks tried to disarm them, skirmishes ensued, and
the legion became strung out along the 6,000-mile-long
Trans-Siberian Railway. The Allied interventions also
became entangled in the erupting Russian Civil War.
Bolsheviks controlled Petrograd, Moscow, and the core
regions of Russia, while White governments were
established by Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak in Omsk and
General Anton Denikin in Odessa.

Learn More!
The eastern minorities
The saga of the Czechoslovak Legion was symbolic of the
growing vigour of the national movements inside the
Habsburg Empire. Early in the war the subject peoples
had remained loyal to beloved old Franz Joseph. But
martial law, which fell especially hard on minorities, war
weariness, hunger, and the example of the Russian
Revolution converted moderates among the Czechs,
Galician Poles, and South Slavs to the cause of
independence. The Czechs and Slovaks were brilliantly
served by Tomáš Masaryk and Edvard Beneš, who lobbied
for Allied recognition of a Czech national council. The
Polish movement, led by Józef Piłsudski, sought to
establish similar national institutions and cooperated
with the Central Powers after their Two Emperors’
Manifesto (November 5, 1916) promised autonomy to
the Poles. The Polish National Committee in France, and
famed pianist Ignacy Paderewski in the United States,
also pleaded the Polish cause. Yugoslav (or South Slav)
agitation was complicated by rivalries between the Serbs
(Orthodox, Cyrillic alphabet, and politically stronger) and
the Croats and Slovenes (Roman Catholic, Latin alphabet,
politically disinherited), as well as Serbia’s and Italy’s
conflicting claims to the Dalmatian coast. In July 1917 the
factions united in the Corfu Declaration that envisioned a
Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. All the
committees then gathered in Rome for a Congress of
Oppressed Nationalities in April 1918.

The Allies stood aloof from the nationalities while hope

persisted of detaching Austria-Hungary from Germany.
But in 1918 the Allies took up the revolutionary weapon.
In April 1918 Masaryk sailed to the United States, won
personal recognition from Wilson and Secretary of State
Robert Lansing, and concluded the Pittsburgh Convention
by which Slovak-Americans, on behalf of their
countrymen, agreed to join the Czechs in a united state.
The Czechoslovak National Council won official
recognition as a co-belligerent and de facto government-
in-exile from France in June, Britain in August, and the
United States in September. Only their quarrel with Italy
kept the Yugoslavs from achieving the same. Thus, de
facto governments were prepared to assume control of
successor states as soon as Habsburg authority should
collapse, internally or on the military fronts.

Germany’s final battles

Ironically, the Germans did not take maximum advantage
of Brest-Litovsk after all, leaving about a million men—60
divisions—in the East in order to coerce the Ukrainians
into relinquishing foodstuffs, to pursue political goals in
the Baltic, and to ensure Bolshevik compliance. Facing
virtual starvation as economic exhaustion deepened and
the Allied blockade grew more effective, the German high
command decided on a series of all-out attacks on the
Western Front, beginning in March 1918. But tactical
errors, together with the Allies’ creation at last of a
unified command and the arrival in strength of eager U.S.
divisions, blunted and then turned back the offensives.
By late July it was clear that Germany had lost the war.
The 1918 offensives cost 1,100,000 men and drained the
Reich of reserves. Morale plummeted on the Western
Front and at home. Then on August 8, 1918, British,
Australian, and Canadian divisions struck on the Somme
and overwhelmed German forces not adequately dug in.
The 20,000 casualties, and an equal number of prisoners
taken in one day, testified to the broken spirit of the
German troops. Further Allied successes followed, and on
September 29, 1918, General Erich Ludendorff, the chief
of staff, informed the kaiser that the army was finished.
The next day the new chancellor, the moderate
Maximilian, prince of Baden, was authorized to seek an
armistice. On the night of October 3–4 he requested an
armistice from President Wilson on the basis of the
Fourteen Points.
While negotiations began for an armistice in the West,
Germany’s allies elsewhere collapsed. The collapse of the
Bulgarian front before the Franco-Serbian offensive
ended with the French cavalry capture of Skopje on
September 29, whereupon the Allies accepted Bulgaria’s
petition for peace in the Armistice of Salonika. This
opened Constantinople to attack and prompted the Turks
as well to sue for peace. It also left Austria-Hungary,
stymied on the Italian front, with little recourse. On
October 4 Vienna appealed to President Wilson for an
armistice on the basis of the Fourteen Points. But the U.S.
note of the 18th indicated that autonomy for the
nationalities no longer sufficed and thus amounted to the
writ of execution for the Habsburg Empire. On October
28, in Prague and Kraków, Czech and Polish committees
declared independence from Vienna. The Croats in
Zagreb did the same on the 29th pending their union
with the Serbs, and Germans in the Reichsrat proclaimed
rump Austria an independent state on the 30th. The
Armistice of Villa Giusti (November 4) required Austria-
Hungary to evacuate all occupied territory, the South
Tirol, Tarvisio, Gorizia, Trieste, Istria, western Carniola,
and Dalmatia, and to surrender its navy. Emperor
Charles, his empire gone, pledged to withdraw from
Austria’s politics on November 11 and from Hungary’s on
the 13th.

The first U.S. note responding to the German request for

an armistice was sent on October 8 and called for
evacuation by Germany of all occupied territory. The
German reply sought to ensure that all the Allies would
respect the Fourteen Points. The second U.S. note
reflected high dudgeon about Germany’s seeking
assurances, given her own war policies. In any case, the
British, French, and Italians (fearing Wilsonian leniency
and angry about not being consulted after the first note)
insisted that their military commands be consulted on
the armistice terms. This in turn gave the Allies a chance
to ensure that Germany be rendered unable to take up
resistance again in the future, whatever the eventual
peace terms, and that their own war aims might be
advanced through the armistice terms—e.g., surrender of
the German navy for the British, occupation of Alsace-
Lorraine and the Rhineland for the French. Wilson’s
second note, therefore, shattered German illusions about
using the armistice as a way of sowing discord among the
Allies or winning a breathing space for themselves. The
third German note (October 20) agreed to the Allies
setting the terms and indicated, by way of appeasing
Wilson, that Maximilian’s civilian cabinet had replaced
any “arbitrary power” (Wilson’s phrase) in Berlin. The
third U.S. note (October 23) specified that the armistice
would render Germany incapable of resuming hostilities.
Ludendorff wanted further resistance, but the kaiser
instead asked for his resignation on the 26th. The next
day Germany acknowledged Wilson’s note.

Some Allied leaders, most notably Poincaré and General

John Pershing, bitterly disputed the wisdom of offering
Germany an armistice when her armies were still on
foreign soil. Marshall Ferdinand Foch drafted military
terms harsh enough for the skeptics, however, and
Georges Clemenceau could not in good conscience
permit the killing to go on if Germany were rendered
defenseless. Meanwhile, House, sent by Wilson to Paris
to consult with the Allies, threatened a separate U.S.-
German peace to win Allied approval of the Fourteen
Points on November 4 (excepting a British reservation
about “freedom of the seas,” a French one about
“removal of economic barriers and equality of trade
conditions,” and a clause enjoining Germany to repair
war damage). House and Wilson jubilantly concluded
that the foundations of a liberal peace were in place:
substitution of the Fourteen Points for the Allies’
“imperialist” war aims and the transition of Germany to
democracy. The fourth U.S. note (November 5) informed
the Germans of Allied agreement and the procedures for
dealing with Foch.

Germany, however, seemed to be moving less toward

democracy than toward anarchy. On October 29 the
naval command ordered the High Seas Fleet to leave port
for a last-ditch battle, prompting a mutiny, then full
insurrection on November 3. Workers’ and soldiers’
councils formed in ports and industrial cities, and a
socialist Republic of Bavaria was declared on the 8th. Two
days later Maximilian announced the abdication of Kaiser
William II and his own resignation, and the Social
Democratic leader Friedrich Ebert formed a provisional
government. On the 10th the kaiser went into Dutch
exile. The armistice delegation led by Erzberger,
meanwhile, met with Foch in a railway carriage at
Rethondes on the 8th. Erzberger, begging for
amelioration of the Allies’ terms and especially for the
lifting of the blockade so that Germany might be fed,
raised the spectre of bolshevism. Receiving only minor
concessions, the Germans relented and signed the
Armistice on November 11, 1918. It called on Germany to
evacuate and turn over to Allied armies all occupied
regions, Alsace-Lorraine, the left (west) bank of the
Rhine, and the bridgeheads of Mainz and Koblenz. A
neutral zone of 10 kilometres on the right bank of the
Rhine was also to be evacuated, the entire German navy
surrendered, and the treaties of Brest-Litovsk and
Bucharest renounced. Germany was also to turn over a
large number of locomotives, munitions, trucks, and
other matériel—and to promise reparation for damage
done.
The collapse of the old order
The four years’ carnage of World War I was the most
intense physical, economic, and psychological assault on
European society in its history. The war took directly
some 8,500,000 lives and wounded another 21,000,000.
The demographic damage done by the shortage of young
virile men over the next 20 years is incalculable. The cost
of the war has been estimated at more than
200,000,000,000 1914 dollars, with some
$36,800,000,000 more in damage. Much of northern
France, Belgium, and Poland lay in ruin, while millions of
tons of Allied shipping rested at the bottom of the sea.
The foundation stone of prewar financial life, the gold
standard, was shattered, and prewar trade patterns were
hopelessly disrupted.

Economic recovery, vital to social stability and the

containment of revolution, depended on political
stability. But how could political stability be restored
when four great empires—the Hohenzollern, Habsburg,
Romanov, and Ottoman—had fallen, the boundaries of
old and new states alike were yet to be fixed, vengeful
passions ran high, and conflicting national aims and
ideologies competed for the allegiance of the victors? In
World War I, Europe lost its unity as a culture and polity,
its sense of common destiny and inexorable progress. It
lost much of its automatic reverence for the old values of
country, church, family, duty, honour, discipline, glory,
and tradition. The old was bankrupt. It remained only to
decide which newness would take its place.

The damage wrought by war would live on through the

erosion of faith in 19th-century liberalism, international
law, and Judeo-Christian values. Whatever the isolated
acts of charity and chivalry by soldiers struggling in the
trenches to remain human, governments and armies had
thrown away, one by one, the standards of decency and
fair play that had governed European warfare, more or
less, in past centuries. Total war meant the starving of
civilians through naval blockade, torpedoing of civilian
craft, bombing of open cities, use of poison gas in the
trenches, and reliance on tactics of assault that took from
the private soldier any dignity, control over his fate, or
hope of survival. World War I subordinated the civilian to
the military and the human to the machine. It remained
only for such imperious cynicism to impose itself in
peacetime as well, in totalitarian states modeled on war
government, until the very distinction between war and
peace broke down in the 1930s.

Learn More!
Peacemaking, 1919–22
The bells, flags, crowds, and tears of Armistice Day 1918
testified to the relief of exhausted Europeans that the
killing had stopped and underscored their hopes that a
just and lasting peace might repair the damage, right the
wrongs, and revive prosperity in a broken world.
Woodrow Wilson’s call for a new and democratic
diplomacy, backed by the suddenly commanding prestige
and power of the United States, suggested that the
dream of a New Jerusalem in world politics was not
merely Armistice euphoria. A century before, Europe’s
aristocratic rulers had convened in the capital of
dynasties, Vienna, to fashion a peace repudiating the
nationalist and democratic principles of the French
Revolution. Now, democratic statesmen would convene
in the capital of liberty, Paris, to remake a Europe that
had overthrown monarchical imperialism once and for all
in this “war to end war.”

In fact, the immense destruction done to the political and

economic landmarks of the prewar world would have
made the task of peacemaking daunting even if the
victors had shared a united vision, which they did not.
Central and eastern Europe were in a turmoil in the wake
of the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman
collapses. Revolution sputtered in Berlin and elsewhere,
and civil war in Russia. Trench warfare had left large
swaths of northern France, Belgium, and Poland in ruin.
The war had cost millions of dead and wounded and
more than $236,000,000,000 in direct costs and property
losses. Ethnic hatreds and rivalries could not be
expunged at a stroke, and their persistence hindered the
effort to draw or redraw dozens of boundaries, including
those of the successor states emerging from the
Habsburg empire. In the colonial world the war among
the imperial powers gave a strong impetus to nationalist
movements. India alone provided 943,000 soldiers and
workers to the British war effort, and the French empire
provided the home country with 928,000. These men
brought home a familiarity with European life and the
new anti-imperialist ideas of Wilson or Lenin. The war
also weakened the European powers vis-à-vis the United
States and Japan, destroyed the prewar monetary
stability, and disrupted trade and manufactures. In sum, a
return to 1914 “normalcy” was impossible. But what
could, or should, replace it? As the French foreign
minister Stéphen Pichon observed, the war’s end meant
only that “the era of difficulties begins.”

The Paris Peace Conference ultimately produced five

treaties, each named after the suburban locale in which it
was signed: the Treaty of Versailles with Germany (June
28, 1919); the Treaty of Saint-Germain with Austria (Sept.
10, 1919); the Treaty of Neuilly with Bulgaria (Nov. 27,
1919); the Treaty of Trianon with Hungary (June 4, 1920);
and the Treaty of Sèvres with Ottoman Turkey (Aug. 10,
1920). In addition, the Washington Conference treaties
on naval armaments, China, and the Pacific (1921–22)
established a postwar regime in those areas.

Competing visions of stability

The idealist vision
According to the armistice agreement the peace was to
be based on Wilson’s Fourteen Points. But the French
and British had already expressed reservations about
them, and, in many cases, the vague Wilsonian principles
lent themselves to varying interpretations when applied
to complex realities. Nevertheless, Wilson anticipated the
peace conference with high hopes that his principles
would prevail, either because of their popularity with
common people everywhere, or because U.S. financial
leverage would oblige European statesmen to follow his
lead. “Tell me what is right,” he instructed his delegation
on the George Washington en route to Paris, “and I will
fight for it.” Unique among the victor powers, the United
States would not ask any territorial gains or reparations
and would thereby be free to stand proudly as the
conference’s conscience and honest broker.
Wilsonianism, as it came to be called, derived from the
liberal internationalism that had captured large segments
of the Anglo-American intellectual elite before and during
the war. It interpreted war as essentially an atavism
associated with authoritarian monarchy, aristocracy,
imperialism, and economic nationalism. Such
governments still practiced an old diplomacy of secret
alliances, militarism, and balance of power politics that
bred distrust, suspicion, and conflict. The antidotes were
democratic control of diplomacy, self-determination for
all nations, open negotiations, disarmament, free trade,
and especially a system of international law and
collective security to replace raw power as the arbiter of
disputes among states. This last idea, developed by the
American League to Enforce Peace (founded in 1915),
found expression in the Fourteen Points as “a general
association of nations” and was to be the cornerstone of
Wilson’s edifice. He expected a functioning League of
Nations to correct whatever errors and injustices might
creep in to the treaties themselves.

Liberal internationalism set the tone for the Paris Peace

Conference. European statesmen learned quickly to
couch their own demands in Wilsonian rhetoric and to
argue their cases on grounds of “justice” rather than
power politics. Yet Wilson’s principles proved, one by
one, to be inapplicable, irrelevant, or insufficient in the
eyes of European governments, while the idealistic gloss
they placed on the treaties undermined their legitimacy
for anyone claiming that “justice” had not been served.
Wilson’s personality must bear some of the blame for
this disillusionment. He was a proud man, confident of
his objectivity and prestige, and he insisted on being the
first U.S. president to sail to Europe and to conduct
negotiations himself. He had visited Europe only twice
before, as a tourist, and now delayed the peace
conference in order to make a triumphant tour of
European capitals. Moreover, the Democrats lost their
Senate majority in the elections of November 1918, yet
Wilson refused to include prominent Republicans in his
delegation. This allowed Theodore Roosevelt to declare
that Wilson had “absolutely no authority to speak for the
American people.” Wilson’s flaws exacerbated the
difficulty of promoting his ideals in Paris and at home.
Still, he was a prophet in world politics, both as lawgiver
and as seer. Only a peace between equals, he said, can
last.

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The realist vision
Georges Clemenceau also approached peacemaking as a
personal quest, stacking the French delegation with loyal
supporters and minimizing the influence of the foreign
ministry, the army, and parliament. Even political
enemies hailed Clemenceau (known as “the tiger”) as
“père la victoire,” and he determined not to betray the
soldiers’ victory in the peace negotiations to come. But
the French vision of a just peace contrasted sharply with
Wilson’s. France alone in 1914 had not chosen war, but
had been summarily attacked. France had provided the
major battleground, suffered the most physical damage,
and sacrificed a generation of manhood. France faced the
most massive task of reconstruction, the most direct
threat of German revenge, and the most immediate
responsibility for executing the armistice and peace
treaties by dint of its contiguity with Germany.
Clemenceau, therefore, sought material advantage from
the peace according to a traditional balance-of-power
viewpoint and did so with almost universal support in the
government. The 77-year-old Clemenceau, who had
begun his political career during the German siege of
Paris in 1870–71, placed little faith in Germany’s sudden
conversion to democracy, nor in Wilson’s lofty idealism,
which he characterized with irony as “noble candour.”
The French government judged early on that Wilson’s
dream of a prosperous German republic taking its place
in the council of nations was the primary obstacle to a
peace serving France’s real needs. Indeed, his decision to
accept the armistice may have been influenced by the
fact that a more thorough victory over Germany would
also have meant another million American soldiers at the
front and proportionally greater U.S. influence over the
peace.

Postwar France faced a severe triple crisis. The first

involved future security against German attack: Germany
remained far more populous and industrial than France,
and now France’s erstwhile eastern ally, Russia, was hors
de combat. The French would try to revive an anti-
German alliance system with the new states in eastern
Europe, but the only sure way to restore a balance of
power in Europe was to weaken Germany permanently.
The second crisis was financial. France had paid for the
war largely by domestic and foreign borrowing and
inflation. To ask the nation to sacrifice further to cover
these costs was politically impossible. Indeed, any new
taxes would spark bitter social conflict over which groups
would bear the heaviest burdens. Yet France also faced
the cost of rebuilding the devastated regions and
supporting an army capable of forcing German respect
for the eventual treaty. The French, therefore, hoped for
inflows of capital from abroad to restore their national
solvency. Third, France faced a crisis in her heavy
industry. The “storm of steel” on the Western Front made
obvious the strategic importance of metallurgy in modern
war. Recovery of Alsace-Lorraine lessened France’s
inferiority to Germany in iron but by the same token
worsened her shortage of coal, especially metallurgical
coke. European coal production was down 30 percent
from prewar figures by 1919, creating acute shortages
everywhere. But France’s position was especially
desperate after the flooding of French mines by
retreating German soldiers. To realize the industrial
expansion made possible by the recovery of Alsace-
Lorraine, France needed access to German coal and
markets and preferably a cartel arrangement allowing
French industry to survive German competition in the
peacetime to come.

Wilson’s program was not without promise for France if

collective security and Allied solidarity meant permanent
British and American help to deter future German attacks
and restore the French economy. In particular, the French
hoped that the wealthy United States would forgive the
French war debts. On the other hand, if Britain and the
United States pursued their own interests without regard
to French needs, then France would be forced to find
solutions to its triple crisis through harsher treatment of
Germany.

In some respects, Britain stood between France and the

United States. It would be more accurate, however, to
view Britain as the third point of a triangle, attached to
the interests of France in some cases, to the principles of
the United States in others. Hence, Prime Minister David
Lloyd George, second only to Wilson in liberal rhetoric,
was accused by Americans of conspiring with
Clemenceau to promote old-fashioned imperialism, and,
second only to the French in pursuing balance of power,
was accused by Clemenceau of favouring the Germans.
But that was Britain’s traditional policy: to prop up the
defeated power in a European war and constrain the
ambitions of the victor. To be sure, in the election
campaign held after the Armistice, Lloyd George’s
supporters brandished slogans like “Hang the Kaiser” and
“Squeeze the German lemon til the pips squeak,” but at
the peace conference to come, Lloyd George
equivocated. Britain would take the toughest stand of all
on German reparations in hopes of ameliorating its own
financial situation vis-à-vis the United States, but
otherwise promoted a united, healthy Germany that
would contribute to European recovery and balance the
now ascendant power of France. Of course, Lloyd George
also demanded a ban on German naval armaments and
partition of Germany’s colonies.
Exhausted Italy was even less able than France to absorb
the costs of war. Labour unrest compounded the usual
ministerial instability and enhanced the public appeal of
anti-Communist nationalists like Benito Mussolini. But
the hope that the war would prove somehow worthwhile
put peace aims at the centre of Italian politics. In April
1918 the terms of the Treaty of London were proclaimed
on the floor of Parliament, sparking months of debate
between nationalists and Wilsonians over their propriety.
By January 1919, however, Prime Minister Vittorio
Emanuele Orlando and Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino
had won a mandate for a firm position at the peace
conference in favour of all Italy’s claims with the
exception of that to the entire Dalmatian coast.

The other victorious Great Power, Japan, suffered the

least human and material loss in the war and registered
astounding growth. Between 1913 and 1918 Japanese
production exploded, foreign trade rose from
$315,000,000 to $831,000,000, and population grew 30
percent until 65,000,000 people were crowded into a
mountainous archipelago smaller than California. Clearly
Japan had the potential and the opportunity for rapid
expansion in the Pacific and East Asia.

Finally, the defeated Germans also looked with hopes to

the peace conference. Throughout the first half of 1919
the new Weimar Republic (so called after the site of its
constitutional convention) was in gestation, and the
Germans hoped that their embrace of democracy might
win them a mild peace. At the very least they hoped to
exploit differences among the victors to regain diplomatic
equality, as Talleyrand had done for France at the
Congress of Vienna. Instead, the Allies found compromise
among themselves so arduous that they could brook no
further negotiation with Germany. German delegates
were not invited to Paris until May, and the
“preliminaries of peace” became, with few exceptions,
the final treaty. To Germans, Wilson’s promise of “open
covenants, openly arrived at” proved a sham, and the
final treaty a Diktat.
Learn More!
The Versailles Diktat
Hammering out the treaty
Learn about the history of the Treaty of Versailles (1919),
the German's resentment for the treaty paving the way
for the next war
Learn about the history of the Treaty of Versailles (1919),
the German's resentment for the treaty paving the way
for the next war
Overview of the Treaty of Versailles.
Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH, Mainz
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The Paris Peace Conference opened on Jan. 18, 1919, in a
politically charged atmosphere. The delegations of 27
nations harassed the Great Powers with their various and
conflicting complaints and demands. The Great Powers,
in turn, sent five delegates each, supported by sprawling
staffs of geographers, historians, and economists. Clearly,
peace could not be made in such a global assembly;
hence the five leading victors created a Council of Ten—
the heads of government and their foreign ministers. But
even this proved unwieldy, and since Italy and Japan
tended to focus on questions of local interest, major
decisions were hammered out in private by an informally
constituted Big Three: Wilson, Lloyd George, and
Clemenceau. The French had tried to impose a schedule
of priorities for the conference, but Wilson insisted on
tackling the League of Nations first in order to prevent
the others from rejecting the League or using it as a
bargaining chip in later disputes. The French were
skeptical of the idealistic basis of the League but hoped
that it might be turned into an instrument of security
committing the British and Americans to the defense of
the new European order. In this they were disillusioned,
for the British viewed the League less as a means for
mobilizing force against an aggressor than as a means of
preventing future conflicts in the first place. The
Covenant of the proposed League provided for a plenary
assembly of all members and a council of the Great
Powers and outlined a system of sanctions against
aggressor states. But the British chose to focus on moral
sanctions (not unlike Wilson’s belief in the “court of
world opinion”), or at most economic sanctions, and
participation in military sanctions was made voluntary.
The Covenant also contained machinery for declaring
boundary changes, implying that the League’s primary
function was to secure peace, not to secure the status
quo. Upon final rejection in April of a Franco-Italian plan
for tougher collective security and an international force
adequate to enforce peace, French newspapers scorned
the League as a toothless debating society. And since
Clemenceau had succeeded in having Germany barred
from the League pending good behaviour, the German
press denounced it as a “League of Victors.”

In mid-February Wilson returned to the United States to

attend to presidential duties, and in his absence
committees went to work on the details of the German
treaty. Foremost in the minds of the French was security
against future German attack. As early as November 1918
Marshal Ferdinand Foch drafted a memo identifying the
Rhine as “the frontier of democracy” and arguing for the
separation of the Rhineland from Germany and its
occupation in perpetuity by Allied troops. This plan
echoed earlier French war aims: The victory of 1871 had
created a unified Germany; the defeat of 1918 should
undo it. Foch’s occupation forces tried also to locate and
encourage the Rhenish autonomist tendencies that grew
up for a brief time in 1919 out of the desire to escape the
burden of defeat and fear of the Communist agitation in
Berlin. But the primary French argument was strategic:
Four times in a century German armies had invaded
France from the Rhineland (1814, 1815, 1870, 1914), and
a united Germany would remain potentially
overwhelming. As General Fayolle put it, “One speaks of
the League, but what can this hypothetical society do
without a means of action? One promises alliances, but
alliances are fragile, like all human things. There will
always come a time when Germany will have a free hand.
Take all the alliances you want, but the greatest need for
France and Belgium is a material barrier.”

André Tardieu, Clemenceau’s chief aide, sought to give

the Rhineland scheme a Wilsonian gloss in a lengthy
memo distributed on February 25. The Rhenish people,
he claimed, were largely Celtic, Catholic, and liberal and
resented the rule of Germanic, Protestant, and
authoritarian Prussia. They had been loyal citizens of the
French Republic and Empire from 1792 to 1815. Thus an
autonomous Rhineland would serve both self-
determination and the defense of democracy. The British
and Americans rejected Tardieu’s brief in the strongest
terms and warned that dismemberment of Germany
would only create “a new Alsace-Lorraine” and the seeds
of a new war. In April, after Wilson returned to Paris, he
and Lloyd George countered with an unprecedented
offer: an Anglo-American guarantee to fight on the side
of France in case of future German aggression. The
French were again skeptical. In a future war the United
States and Britain would need months or years to raise
and transport armies, by which time France might be
lost. On the other hand, how could Clemenceau refuse an
unlimited extension of the wartime coalition? On March
17 he proposed a mixed solution—the guarantee
treaties, plus material safeguards including German
disarmament, demilitarization, and Allied occupation of
the Rhine.

This acrimonious debate over security overlapped with

the negotiations over reparations. The latter was perhaps
an even more emotional issue, since the financial
settlement would affect every taxpayer in every country.
The moral issues also seemed clearer: Surely Germany,
and not her victims, should pay for reconstruction; surely
the wealthy British and Americans should forgive France’s
war debt, a small sacrifice beside those made by France
in the joint effort. The French government had borrowed
26,000,000,000 francs from its own people during the
war and owed another $3,600,000,000 to Britain and the
United States. The franc had lost 70 percent of its value.
Yet French hopes for Allied economic unity were dashed
when the U.S. Treasury refused to discuss abrogation of
war debts, rejected French and Italian proposals for a
“financial League of Nations,” and opposed economic
favouritism of all kinds in accord with the Fourteen
Points. The British, in turn, repudiated the resolutions of
the 1916 Allied Economic Conference and refused to
forgive France her debt so long as the United States
insisted on repayment from London.

“If it is France or Germany that must be ruined,” wrote a

conservative French journal about the reparations
debate, “let us be sure that it is Germany!” The French
chamber refused to vote a tax on capital and relied on
German payments to cover the cost of repairing the
devastated regions. Wilson accepted German
responsibility for war damage, but the British vastly
inflated reparations by insisting on repayment for
“invisible damage” like sunken ships and cargo, lost
markets and production, and veterans’ pensions. On the
other hand, the British favoured setting a fixed indemnity
in the treaty, while the French claimed that Germany
should agree to pay whatever reparation ended up
costing. When negotiations failed to fix either a total sum
or the percentage shares to flow to France, Britain,
Belgium, and the others, the U.S. delegation
recommended on March 24 that the whole problem be
postponed. On April 5 it was agreed that a Reparations
Commission would determine, by May 1, 1921, the
amount and timing of German payments and be
empowered to declare defaults and sanctions in case of
noncompliance. But in the meantime Germany would
make immediate transfers totaling 20,000,000,000 gold
marks. Thus the peace conference obliged the Germans
to sign an open account and adjourned without plans to
stabilize currencies or settle war debts.

In economic matters the French delegation laboured to

improve the imbalance in heavy industry between
Germany and France. At first Clemenceau fought hard for
annexation of the Saar—the French “frontier of 1814”—
and then settled for French control of the Saar coal mines
and a League of Nations administration for 15 years, at
which time the Saarlanders would hold a plebiscite to
decide their permanent status. Germany was also obliged
to deliver 20,000,000 tons of coal per year to France and
Belgium and to allow the products of Alsace-Lorraine into
Germany duty-free for five years.

Such punitive clauses ensured German feebleness for

some time to come. France, on the other hand, now
possessed both the largest army in Europe and a set of
natural allies among the new states in eastern Europe.
Not surprisingly, many British observers came to consider
France the primary threat to dominate the Continent. In
late March Lloyd George’s eloquent Fontainebleau
Memorandum warned that vindictiveness in the hour of
victory would serve not justice and reconciliation but
German revanchism and Bolshevik propaganda.
Nevertheless Clemenceau, under attack from President
Poincaré, Marshal Foch, and the parliament for “giving up
the Rhine,” dared not compromise further. On April 22,
Wilson and Lloyd George accepted his material
guarantees of security in addition to the Anglo-American
pacts. These included the limitation of the German army
to 100,000 men with no offensive weapons;
demilitarization of a zone extending 50 kilometers east of
the Rhine; and an Allied occupation of the left bank of
the Rhine, with bridgeheads at Cologne, Koblenz, Mainz,
and Kehl. The occupation would be divided into three
zones, to be evacuated serially at five-year intervals.

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Reaction to the treaty
On May 7 the German delegation was finally summoned
to receive the draft treaty. Additional important clauses
called for the abolition of the German high seas fleet, the
general staff, and conscription; partition of Germany’s
African colonies; cession of the Eupen-et-Malmédy
district to Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine to France, most of
Upper Silesia and West Prussia to Poland, including a
corridor to the Baltic that cut Germany in two; plebiscites
to determine whether Allenstein and Marienwerder
should go to Poland and Schleswig to Denmark; a League
of Nations administration for the free city of Danzig (to
provide Poland a coastal port); prohibition of Anschluss
(union) between Germany and Austria; and abrogation of
the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Finally, Article 231 enjoined
Germany to accept full responsibility for the war caused
“by the aggression of Germany and her allies.”

The draft treaty caused acute consternation in Germany

(though it left Germany intact and was mild compared to
Germany’s terms to Russia at Brest-Litovsk), and the
German delegation argued without success for
substantial revisions. The Germans could not reject the
treaty, however, without inviting a continuation of the
Allied blockade, revolutionary outbreaks, an Allied
military advance, or French intrigues against German
unity. (On June 1, Foch’s generals in the occupation
implicated themselves in an abortive separatist putsch
aimed at creating a “Rhineland Republic” and thereby
magnified German—and British—suspicions.) Hence, the
German delegation—frock-coated professionals bearing
little resemblance to the spike-helmeted militarists the
Allies meant to punish—affixed their signatures to the
treaty in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on the fifth
anniversary of the Sarajevo assassination (June 28, 1919).
The Weimar coalition of Democrats, Social Democrats,
and the Catholic Centre party ratified the treaty on July 9.
German nationalists, however, denounced acceptance of
the treaty as treason and immediately began
propounding the myth that the German army had been
“stabbed in the back” by Socialists and defeatists, the
“November criminals” who signed the Armistice, and the
liberal parties who signed the Versailles Diktat. The war-
guilt clause was particularly damaging, since any
historical evidence suggesting that Germany did not bear
sole guilt for the war would tend to undermine the
treaty’s legitimacy.
Allied delegates and populations were scarcely happier
with the treaty than the Germans. British diplomat
Harold Nicolson echoed the views of disillusioned
Wilsonians when he left the signing ceremony in disgust,
“and thence to bed, sick of life.” Economist John Maynard
Keynes quit the peace conference in protest and returned
to Britain to write a scathing critique of Wilson and the
treaty, whose economic clauses, he said, stymied
European recovery. Nor were the French satisfied.
Marshal Foch despaired of containing the power of a
united Germany and prophesied: “This is not peace, but a
truce for 20 years.” Poincaré predicted willful German
default and Allied disputes over execution. Clemenceau
had to exploit all his prestige to win parliamentary
ratification, and still he lost the presidential election that
followed.

As for Wilson, the treaty he had personally helped to

fashion, and the global obligations it imposed on the
United States, proved unpopular with various factions in
American politics, including nationalists, isolationists,
“Monroe Doctrine” regionalists, xenophobes, and tariff
protectionists. The immediate postwar years also gave
rise to the “red scare,” the first legislation limiting
immigration to the United States on an ethnic basis, and
the belief that Wilson had been duped by the clever
Europeans so that the war redounded only to the benefit
of Anglo-French imperialism. But it is not true that the
United States retreated at once into isolationism. The
debate over Versailles was essentially a debate over the
terms on which the United States would continue to play
a role in world affairs. Most important was fear that
Article 10 of the League Covenant might embroil the
United States in foreign quarrels and even violate the
Constitution. The Senate Committee on Foreign
Relations, led by Henry Cabot Lodge, eventually proposed
ratification of the Treaty of Versailles subject to 14
reservations, but Wilson insisted on an all-or-nothing
strategy and embarked on a hectic national tour to
mobilize public support. In October 1919 he suffered a
debilitating stroke, and on November 19 the Senate
voted down the treaty. Further compromise led to a final
vote on March 19, 1920, but Wilson instructed his own
loyalists to reject any reservations. The 49–35 vote fell
short of the necessary two-thirds majority. By failing to
ratify the Treaty of Versailles, the United States also
rejected the League of Nations (which its own president
had forced on the Europeans), the security guarantee by
which Clemenceau had been persuaded to give up the
Rhineland, and U.S. commitment to the economic and
political reconstruction of Europe. All this gave those who
clung to the belief that the French cause had been
betrayed the opportunity to deal even more harshly with
Germany.

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The West and the Russian Civil War
Bolshevik diplomacy
France’s deep fears about a future German threat sprang
in large part from the elimination of Russia as a factor in
the European balance. Indeed, the Russian question was
at least as important as the German one and absorbed as
much time and worry at the peace conference. After
Brest-Litovsk, Anglo-French policy turned sharply anti-
Bolshevik, and Clemenceau and Foch worked to build a
cordon sanitaire in eastern Europe against German and
Bolshevik expansion alike. The Lenin regime also
repudiated the tsarist debts to Britain and France (the
latter being more delicate since most of it dated from
before the war and was owed to private bondholders).
But Wilson still believed in the innate desire of the
Russian people for democracy and searched desperately
for ways to end the civil war and liberalize the Reds, the
Whites, or both. As early as July 1918 he wrote Colonel
Edward House: “I have been sweating blood over what is
right and feasible to do in Russia. It goes to pieces like
quicksilver under my touch.”

After Brest-Litovsk the Bolsheviks came quickly to a two-

track policy toward the West. Their rhetoric still
condemned Allied and German imperialists in vitriolic
terms, but their deeds aimed at securing their own
survival at all costs. These included attempts to open
negotiations with Allied governments, to exploit
differences among them, to persuade them to withdraw
support for the Whites, and to encourage the opposition
to intervention in Russia that already existed among
French and British workers and soldiers. On the other
hand, the Red Terror launched by the Bolsheviks in 1918,
including the murder of the royal family, convinced many
in the West that this new breed was beyond the pale.
U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing called Bolshevism
“the most hideous and monstrous thing that the human
mind has ever conceived.” When, in August 1918, the
Cheka (secret police) arrested 200 British and French
residents of Moscow, invaded their consulates, and
murdered the British naval attaché, opinion spread in
Paris and London that the Bolsheviks were thugs and
bandits, if not German agents. In the autumn the Allies
imposed a blockade on the Moscow regime and broke
the last contacts (diplomatic missions and the Red Cross)
that still existed.

The Bolsheviks’ paramount need was a breathing spell in

which to consolidate their power, mobilize the economy
in the lands under their control, and subdue the White
armies. By the end of 1918 these forces included the
Cossacks of General Anton Denikin in the south,
supported by the French from Odessa; the Ukrainian
separatists; General Nikolay Yudenich’s army of the Baltic;
a puppet government in the north supported by the
Anglo-French from Arkhangelsk; and the government of
Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak at Omsk in Siberia. American
and Japanese troops occupied Vladivostok on the Pacific.
The Bolsheviks had also invaded Estonia only to be met
by local troops, a British naval squadron, Yudenich’s
Russian nationalists, and even General Rüdiger von der
Goltz’s German veterans seeking to maintain German
authority on the Baltic. Against these disparate and
uncoordinated forces the Bolsheviks deployed the Red
Army under the command of Leon Trotsky. In the opening
stages of the Revolution they experimented with a
“people’s army” in which ranks were abolished and
officers were elected by the troops. This quickly gave way
to traditional military practice and even recruitment of
ex-tsarist officers and technicians. By the turn of 1919 the
Red Army numbered in the millions.

Lenin instructed the new commissar for foreign affairs,

Georgy Chicherin, to try to separate the United States
from the Allies. In October and November 1918 he
addressed long notes to Wilson protesting Allied
intervention and proposing a cease-fire in return for
Allied evacuation. Then in December, Maksim Litvinov
appealed to Wilson in terms drawn from the Fourteen
Points, ending with the plea auditur et altera pars (“let
the other side be heard”). Some historians have judged
these demarches as a genuine opportunity for early
reconciliation between the Bolsheviks and the West.
Others consider them the equivalent of the Brest-Litovsk
negotiations with the Germans, a “peace offensive”
designed to serve the internal security of the regime. The
Western powers, however, were confused about how to
influence events in Russia. In January 1919, Lloyd George
showed Wilson an intelligence report indicating that the
Allied interventions, if not increased massively, would
only strengthen the appeal of the Bolsheviks. He
favoured negotiation; Clemenceau favoured a stronger
intervention.

Given the Bolsheviks’ single-minded dedication to power

and ideology (which was, after all, their sole source of
legitimacy), it is difficult to imagine how Allied–Soviet
friendship, or a compromise settlement among the
Russian factions, could have emerged. Nevertheless, the
snarled diplomacy of the two sides during the peace
conference widened the gap between them. Lenin had
postponed his summons to European Socialists to form
the Third (or Communist) International (Comintern) until
January lest it spoil his efforts to open negotiations with
the West. He finally issued the call on Jan. 25, 1919, just
as the Paris Peace Conference finally decided to make an
initiative. It appeared, therefore, as if Lenin was intent on
remaining an international outlaw seeking to destroy the
very governments with which he claimed to want normal
relations. The Comintern was founded on March 2, and at
its second congress (July 1920) Lenin insisted that
member parties accede to 21 conditions imposing
rigorous Communist discipline and subordinating local
parties to the will of Moscow. It divided European
Socialists, most of whom rejected the Communists’
violent tactics, Lenin’s dictatorship, or both. From its
inception, therefore, the Comintern was an arm of Soviet
foreign policy more than a vehicle of Socialist
internationalism.
Learn More!
Allied approaches to the Bolsheviks
Meanwhile, Wilson and Lloyd George agreed on an
appeal directed to the White forces (and radioed to the
Bolsheviks) to declare a cease-fire and send
representatives to the island of Prinkipo (Büyükada), in
the Sea of Marmara. This was a fruitless gesture, since
neither the Red nor the White regime could survive
except by the other’s total destruction. The Bolsheviks
ignored the call for a truce but accepted the invitation;
the Whites, with French encouragement, candidly
declined both. The Big Three were informed of the failure
on February 12, two days before Wilson’s return to the
United States. Winston Churchill then hurried to Paris to
urge on Wilson a vigorous Allied military campaign on
behalf of the Whites. But even if the Big Three had
agreed to launch an anti-Bolshevik crusade, their war-
weary populations, depleted treasuries, and aroused
labour unions would not have permitted it.
Five days later Colonel House, who was given charge of
Russian matters by Wilson, asked a young American
liberal, William Bullitt, to journey to Russia for direct talks
with Lenin. Bullitt reached Petrograd on March 8, spoke
with Chicherin and Litvinov, then went on to Moscow.
Lenin offered an immediate cease-fire and negotiations in
return for the cessation of Allied occupation, aid to the
Whites, and the blockade. The Bolsheviks, in turn,
promised amnesty to all Russians who had collaborated
with the Allies. Bullitt returned to Paris in great
excitement at the end of March, only to be denied an
audience with Wilson and to find the conference near
collapse over the Rhineland question. Lloyd George was
under pressure from parliamentary Tories to avoid
conciliating Lenin, while the general level of Allied anxiety
had been raised by declaration of a Soviet republic in
Bavaria and Béla Kun’s Communist coup d’état in Hungary
on March 21. Kun immediately invaded Czechoslovakia
and appealed to Lenin for help (which the Bolsheviks
were in no condition to provide). On April 10 a Romanian
army attacked Hungary, and successive Red and White
terrors ensued. The episodes ended on May 1, when
German federal troops deposed the Bavarian
Communists, and August 1, when Kun fled the
approaching Romanian army.

Historians debate whether the Bullitt mission was a

missed opportunity. Considering the Bolsheviks’ final
victory, the Allies would have done well to extricate
themselves on Lenin’s March 1919 terms. On the other
hand, the document held out little hope for a Russia in
line with Western principles or interests. Allied
acceptance would have obliged them to pull out their
own forces, cut off aid to the Whites, and resume trade
with the Bolsheviks. If hostilities had then resumed—on
any pretext—the Reds would have been able to crush the
divided Whites and solidify their control. On the other
hand, Lenin was hard pressed in the spring of 1919—
Kolchak was launching a major offensive—and was
probably sincere in seeking relief. Bullitt himself was
consumed with bitterness over his reception in Paris and
rebuked Wilson for having “so little faith in the millions of
men, like myself, in every nation who had faith in you.”
(Bullitt testified before the Senate against the Versailles
treaty and retired to France until, in 1933, he was
appointed the first U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union.
Disillusioned with Stalin, he soon resigned.)

The fourth approach by the peace conference to Russia

grew out of letters from the director of European food
relief, Herbert Hoover (March 28), and the Norwegian
explorer and philanthropist Fridtjof Nansen (April 3)
urging massive deliveries of food to Russia. The way to
fight Communism, they argued, was with bread, not
guns. Colonel House procured Allied consent to offer
relief to Russia, but only if Russian transportation
facilities were placed at the disposal of an Allied
commission. The Bolsheviks replied in derisory terms on
May 13, since the conditions would have meant de facto
Allied control of Russia. (In 1921 the American relief
commission nonetheless began distribution of food that
saved countless Russians from starvation.)

Consolidation of the Revolution

The peace conference’s inability to frame a common
policy toward the Lenin regime meant that Russia’s
future was now solely a military matter. By May, Kolchak’s
offensive reached its greatest extent, approaching
Moscow from the east, and the French and British
resolved to recognize the Whites. Wilson also gave up on
the Reds and began cajoling White leaders to pledge
democratization of Russia in the event of their victory.
But the Red Army turned back Kolchak in the summer,
and the Allies gave up in the north, evacuating
Arkhangelsk, after a number of clashes with Red forces,
on Sept. 30, 1919, and Murmansk on October 12.

The Russian Civil War was a vast, protean struggle fought

out in five major theatres with rapid thrusts over
hundreds of miles made possible by railroads and cavalry.
The Reds took good advantage of their interior lines,
while their control of Russia’s industrial heartland and
trunk rail lines and their ruthless requisitioning (known as
“War Communism”) procured enough food and supplies
for them to outlast their enemies. The outcome was not
inevitable, but the inability of the far-flung White forces
to coordinate their actions exposed them to defeat in
detail. Denikin took Kiev in September 1919, but a Soviet
counteroffensive forced him steadily back until his last
base fell in March 1920. Command in the south fell to
General Pyotr Wrangel. Meanwhile, the Red Army drove
out Kolchak and recaptured Omsk in November 1919. On
April 25, 1920, war broke out between the Soviets and
Poland as the Polish leader, Marshal Józef Piłsudski,
pursued his ambition of a grand Polish-Lithuanian-
Ukrainian empire. On May 7 the Poles captured Kiev, but
a Soviet counterstroke drove them out (June 11),
captured Vilnius (July 15), and soon threatened Warsaw
itself. Alarms arose in western Europe over the possible
sovietization of Poland and even a German-Bolshevik
alliance to overthrow the Treaty of Versailles. But
Piłsudski, with advice from French attaché General
Maxime Weygand, hurled back the overextended Reds,
took 66,000 prisoners, and recaptured extensive
Belorussian territories. Distressed by the resistance of the
Poles to the Revolution, Lenin counseled peace, as at
Brest-Litovsk, even on humiliating terms. A preliminary
treaty (October 12) and final Treaty of Riga (March 18,
1921) fixed the Soviet-Polish border just to the west of
Minsk and far to the east of the Curzon Line proposed at
Paris.
Peace with Poland freed the Red Army to turn south and
eliminate the last resistance from Wrangel, who
evacuated Crimea on Nov. 14, 1921. Soviet forces
invested the Caucasus as well, setting up an
“autonomous” federation of Communist regimes in
Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The original anti-
imperialism of the Bolsheviks thus gave way to a policy of
domination of all the subject nationalities of the Russian
Empire that the Bolsheviks could subdue. On Oct. 25,
1922, the Japanese withdrew from Vladivostok under
U.S. pressure, bringing all foreign interventions in Russia
to a close.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics came into

existence on Dec. 30, 1922. In the World War and Civil
War, Russia had lost Poland, Finland, the Baltic states,
and Bessarabia. The Communist government had
survived, but the Revolution had failed to spread. Hence,
the Bolshevik leaders were left to construct a permanent
relationship to an outer world which they defined as
implacably hostile. The Western powers, in turn, faced
the challenge of living with a Great Power that
repudiated, at least publicly, all norms of international
behaviour.

Learn More!
Central Europe and the Middle East
The reorganization of central Europe
Although the Habsburg Empire had ceased to exist, the
peace conference dealt with the new republics of Austria
and Hungary as defeated powers and systematically
favoured the interests of the successor states that had
arisen from the ruins of the empire in the last weeks of
the war. It was Wilson’s hope that peace and self-rule
might finally bless the troubled regions between
Germany and Russia through strict application of the
principle of nationality. But east-central Europe
comprised a jumble of peoples with conflicting claims
based on language, ethnicity, economics, geography,
military considerations, and historic ties. What was more,
the new states themselves were in no case
homogeneous. The name Yugoslavia could not hide the
rivalries within that kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and
Slovenes. Czechoslovakia was born of an alliance of
convenience among Czechs, Slovaks, and Ruthenes.
Historic Poland embraced Ukrainians, Germans,
Lithuanians, and Yiddish-speaking Jews. Romania,
enlarged by the accession of Transylvania and Bessarabia,
now numbered millions of Ukrainians, Hungarians, Jews,
and other minorities. In short, the Balkanization of
central Europe raised as many political disputes as it
solved and created many little multinational states in
place of a few empires.

Poland was a favourite of the Americans and the French

by dint of historic sympathies, the votes of Polish-
Americans, and Clemenceau’s hope for a strong Polish
ally in Germany’s rear. The Fourteen Points promised
Poland an outlet to the sea, but the resulting Polish
Corridor and free city of Danzig contained 1,500,000
Kashubians and Germans. In the north, the Baltic states
of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia won their independence
from Moscow and were sheltered by the British fleet. But
an example of the difficulties in applying national self-
determination was the Polish-Lithuanian quarrel over the
disposition of Vilnius. That town (according to 1897
Russian statistics) was 40 percent Jewish, 31 percent
Polish, 24 percent Russian, and 2 percent Lithuanian.
Vilnius Province, however, was 61 percent Russian, 17
percent Lithuanian, 12 percent Jewish, and 8 percent
Polish. In December 1919 the Supreme Allied Council
provisionally awarded Vilnius to Lithuania. Poland and
Czechoslovakia similarly quarreled over the coal-rich
Teschen district. Poles predominated in the district, but
historic claims lay with Bohemia. In the end the Great
Powers merely ratified the de facto partition effected by
occupying Polish and Czech troops—a solution that
favoured Czechoslovakia and left a bitterness the two
states could ill afford and never overcame. Finally, the
Polish-German conflict over Upper Silesia, another coal-
rich region of mixed nationality, proved that even the
League of Nations could not make an objective judgment.
The March 1921 plebiscite called for in the Treaty of
Versailles (one of the few concessions awarded the
German delegation) showed German preponderance in
the region as a whole but Polish majorities in the vital
mining districts. The British delegation in the League
argued that Germany could hardly be expected to pay
reparations if it lost yet another rich source of coal, while
the French sought to weaken Germany further and
bolster the Polish economy. Finally, in October 1922,
Poland was granted the greater portion of the mines.

The Treaty of Saint-Germain disposed of the Austrian half

of the former Habsburg monarchy. Tomáš Masaryk and
Edvard Beneš, sincere Wilsonians, exploited their
personal goodwill to win two major concessions that
otherwise violated the principle of national self-
determination. First, they retained for Czechoslovakia the
entire historic province of Bohemia. This afforded the
vulnerable new state the military protection from
Germany of the Sudeten mountains, but it also brought
3,500,000 Sudeten Germans under the rule of Prague.
Second, Czechoslovakia received territory stretching
south to Bratislava on the Danube, providing it with a
riverine outlet but creating a minority of a million
Magyars. The Austrian boundary with Yugoslavia at
Klagenfurt was fixed by plebiscite in Austria’s favour in
October 1920, as was the division of the Burgenland
district between Austria and Hungary in December 1921.

Italy’s boundaries with Austria and Yugoslavia became

one of the most volatile issues of the peace conference
owing to Italian truculence and Wilsonian
sanctimoniousness. Orlando clung to the Allied promises
that had enticed Italy into the war in the first place. But
Wilson, offended by the secret war-aims treaties, vented
his frustration on Italy. He went so far as to plead his case
publicly in the French press on April 24, 1919, a violation
of diplomatic etiquette that provoked the Italians to bolt
the conference. Upon their return, a compromise of sorts
was achieved: Italy received Trieste, parts of Istria and
Dalmatia, and the Upper Adige as far as the Brenner Pass
with its 200,000 German-speaking Austrians. But Wilson
refused to budge on Fiume, a province whose hinterland
was Yugoslav but whose port city was Italian. On June 19
Orlando’s government fell over the issue. In August
Fiume was declared a free city, and in September a band
of Italian freebooters led by the nationalist poet Gabriele
D’Annunzio declared Fiume a free state. Such passions
among Italians over their “mutilated victory” helped
prepare the way for the triumph in 1922 of Mussolini’s
Fascists.

The Treaty of Trianon, delayed until 1920 by the

Communist coup in Hungary, partitioned that ancient
kingdom among its neighbours. Transylvania, including its
minority of 1,300,000 Magyars, passed to Romania. The
Banat of Temesvár (Timişoara) was divided between
Romania and Yugoslavia, Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia
passed to Czechoslovakia, and Croatia to Yugoslavia. All
told, Hungary’s territory shrank from 109,000 to 36,000
square miles. The armies of rump Austria and Hungary
were limited to 35,000 men.

The Treaty of Neuilly with Bulgaria marked yet another

stage in the old struggles over Macedonia dating back to
the Balkan wars and beyond. Bulgaria lost its western
territories back to the kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and
Slovenes and nearly all of Western Thrace to Greece,
cutting the Bulgarians off from the Aegean. Their armed
forces were likewise limited to 20,000 men. Austria,
Hungary, and Bulgaria also accepted war guilt and
reparations obligations, but these were later remitted in
light of their economic weakness.

The settlement in east-central Europe was a generally

well-meaning attempt to apply the principle of
nationality under the worst imaginable circumstances.
The new governments all faced aggrieved minorities, not
to mention the onerous tasks of state-building—drafting
constitutions, supporting currencies, raising armies and
police—with no democratic tradition or financial
resources beyond what they could borrow from the
already strapped British and French. Austria in particular
was a head without a body—over a quarter of its
population lived in Vienna—yet was forbidden union with
Germany. Hungary suffered violations of self-
determination to an even greater degree and was bound
to become a centre of aggressive revanche. Disputed
borders, ethnic tensions, and local ambitions hampered
economic and diplomatic cooperation among the
successor states and would make them easy prey to a
resurgent Germany, or Russia, or both.
Learn More!
The reorganization of the Middle East
The Treaty of Sèvres likewise dismembered the Ottoman
Empire. Here again secret war-aims treaties reflected
Allied ambitions in the Middle East, but Wilson was less
willing to challenge them given his belief that the Arab
peoples were not ready for self-rule. To avoid the tinge of
imperialism, the victors took control of the former
Ottoman (and German) territories under “mandates”
from the League: Class A mandates for those lands to be
prepared for independence (Iraq, Transjordan, and
Palestine entrusted to Britain; Syria and Lebanon to
France); Class B mandates for those judged not ready for
self-rule in the foreseeable future (Tanganyika to Britain,
Cameroons and Togoland divided between Britain and
France, and Rwanda-Urundi to Belgium); and Class C
mandates (German South West Africa to South Africa,
Kaiser Wilhelms Land [New Guinea] to Australia, German
Samoa to New Zealand, and the Mariana, Marshall, and
Caroline islands to Japan).
The victors also agreed, informally, that southeastern
Anatolia would be a French sphere of influence, while
Italy received the Dodecanese Islands and a sphere in
western and southern Anatolia. The Greek government of
Venizélos, still a British client, occupied Smyrna (İzmir)
and its hinterland, to the consternation of the Italians,
who considered this poaching on their zone. Armenia
was a special consideration because of its Christian
population and the wartime deaths of hundreds of
thousands (some claimed millions) of Armenians—
through battle, mass murder, or forced deportation—at
the hands of the Young Turks, who considered them a
seditious element. Talk of an American mandate for
Armenia gave way to independence. The collapse of the
tsarist regime spared the Allies from having to award
Constantinople and the Straits to Russia. The British
proposed a League of Nations regime under U.S.
administration for these areas, but Wilson refused this
responsibility, while Indian Muslims protested any
weakening of the Islāmic caliphate. So the status of
Constantinople remained in abeyance, although the
Straits were demilitarized and an Anglo-French-Italian
commission regulated free passage. In August 1920 the
helpless sultan’s delegation signed the Treaty of Sèvres.

It was a dead letter. Mustafa Kemal, the Turkish war hero,

rallied his army in the interior and rebelled against the
foreign influence in Anatolia and Constantinople.
Unwilling to dispatch British armies, Lloyd George
encouraged the Greeks to enforce the treaty instead.
Indeed, Venizélos harboured a dream, the megali idea, of
conquering the entire Turkish littoral and making the
Aegean Sea a “Greek lake” as in ancient times. The Treaty
of Sèvres, therefore, was the signal for the start of a
Greco-Turkish War. By the end of 1920 the Greeks had
fanned out from İzmir, occupied the western third of
Anatolia, and were threatening the Turkish Nationalists’
capital of Ankara. In March 1921 the British and French
proposed a compromise that was rejected by the Turks,
who nonetheless kept open diplomatic links in an effort
to split the Allies. But as Kemal, later called Atatürk, put
it: “We could not flatter ourselves that there was any
hope of diplomatic success until we had driven the
enemy out of our territory by force of arms.” The tide of
battle turned in August 1921, and the Greeks were forced
to retreat precipitously through a hostile countryside.
The French then made a separate peace with Ankara,
settled their Syrian boundary, and withdrew support for
the Anglo-Greek adventure. In March 1921 Turkey also
signed a treaty of friendship with the new U.S.S.R.
regulating the border between them and dooming the
briefly independent Armenian and Trans-caucasian
republics.

Another Allied offer (March 1922) could not tempt

Kemal, who now had the upper hand. His summer attack
routed the Greeks, who engaged in a panicky naval
evacuation from İzmir which the Turks reentered on
September 9. Kemal then turned north toward the Allied
zone of occupation at Çanak (now Çanakkale) on the
Dardanelles Strait. The French and Italians pulled out,
and the British commissioner was authorized to open
hostilities. At the last moment the Turks relented, and the
Armistice of Mudanya (October 11) ended the fighting.
Eight days later Lloyd George’s Cabinet was forced to
resign. A new peace conference produced the Treaty of
Lausanne (July 24, 1923), which returned eastern Thrace
to Turkey and recognized the Nationalist government in
return for demilitarization of the Straits. The Treaty of
Lausanne was to prove a durable solution to the old
“Eastern question.”

The Young Turk and Kemalist rebellions were models for

other Islāmic revolts against Western imperialism.
Persian nationalists had challenged the shah and Anglo-
Russian influence before 1914 and flirted with the Young
Turks (hence with Germany) during the war. By August
1919, however, British forces had contained both
domestic protest and an ephemeral Bolshevik incursion
and won a treaty from Tehrān providing for British
administration of the Persian army, treasury, and
railroads in return for evacuation of British troops. The
Anglo-Persian Oil Company already controlled the oil-rich
Persian Gulf. In June 1920, however, nationalist agitation
resumed, forcing the shah to suspend the treaty. In
Egypt, under British occupation since 1882 and a
protectorate since 1914, the nationalist Wafd Party under
Saʿd Zaghlūl Pasha, agitated for full independence on
Wilsonian principles. Their three weeks’ revolt of March
1919, suppressed by Anglo-Indian troops, gave way to
passive resistance and bitter negotiations between
Zaghlūl and the British high commissioner, Edmund
Allenby. On Feb. 28, 1922, the British ended the
protectorate and granted legislative power to an Egyptian
assembly, though they retained military control of the
Suez Canal.

In India, where Britain controlled the fate of some

320,000,000 people with a mere 60,000 soldiers, 25,000
civil servants, and 50,000 residents, the war also sparked
the first mass movement for independence. Out of
hostility to Britain’s Turkish policies, Islāmic leaders
joined forces with Hindus in protest against the British
raj. Edwin Montagu promised constitutional reform in
July 1918, but the Indian National Congress deemed it
insufficient. In 1919 famine, the return of Indian war
veterans, and the inspiration of Mohandas Gandhi
provoked a series of ever larger demonstrations until, on
April 13, a nervous British general at Amritsar ordered his
troops to open fire, and 379 Indians were killed. The amīr
of Afghanistan, Amānollāh Khān, then sought to exploit
the unrest in India to throw off the informal protectorate
Britain enjoyed over his country. Parliament hastily
approved the Montagu reforms, vetoed a campaign
through the Khyber Pass, and so staved off a general
uprising. But the Indian independence movement
became a British preoccupation.

Other challenges to the empire arose from white

minorities. After the Armistice, Lloyd George finally
bowed to Irish demands for independence. After much
negotiation and a threatened revolt in the northern
counties, the compromise of December 1921 established
the Irish Free State as a British dominion in the south
while predominantly Protestant Northern Ireland
remained in the United Kingdom. (The Sinn Féin
nationalists continued to protest the treaty until, in 1937,
Éire achieved complete independence, Ulster remaining
British.) In South Africa the war propelled General Jan
Smuts to international prominence and an influential role
at the peace conference. South African expansionists
clung to their own version of manifest destiny and
dreamed of absorbing German South West Africa,
Bechuanaland, and Rhodesia to forge a vast empire on
the southern third of the continent. The British Colonial
Office sternly resisted such ambitions. Yet the white
minority of 1,500,000, dwarfed by a population of
5,000,000 blacks, 200,000 Indians, and 600,000 Chinese
labourers, was itself split among Boer nationalists,
“reconciled Boers,” and British. The nationalists cited
Wilsonian principles in a symbolic claim to restore the
independent Transvaal and Orange republics in 1919 and
remained a disaffected nationality within the Union of
South Africa.

The non-European revolts, however—in Turkey, Persia,

Egypt, India, and China—were the first expressions of
what would become a major theme of the 20th century.
Native elites, often educated in Europe and citing the
anti-imperialist ideas of Wilson or Lenin, formed the first
cadre of mass movements for decolonization. Often
alienated from Europeans by their colour and customs,
but no longer able to fit comfortably into their pre-
modern societies, they became deracinated agitators for
independence and modernization. Their growing
numbers demonstrated that European imperialism, even
as it reached its greatest extent through the 1919
treaties, must inevitably be a passing phenomenon.
The new balance in East Asia
The three Pacific powers
World War I also overthrew the power structure in East
Asia and the Pacific. Before 1914 six imperial rivals had
struggled for concessions on the East Asian coast. But the
war eliminated Germany and Russia from colonial
competition and weakened Britain and France, leaving
the United States, Japan, and China in an uncomfortable
triangular relationship that would persist until 1941.

Americans, largely ignorant of Asian realities, harboured

a mix of attitudes before 1914. Contemptuous of what
seemed to some of them, at least, as a barbaric and
frozen Chinese culture, they nevertheless saw China as
an unequalled opportunity for both Christian
proselytizing and commercial exploitation. American
investment in China in 1914 was only a quarter that of
Japan and a 10th that of Britain, but moralism and
manifest destiny both seemed to endow the United
States with a special mission in China. On the other hand,
Americans admired Japan for its mastery of modern
technology but by the same token feared it as the
primary obstacle to U.S. hopes for China. In 1899, a year
after American acquisition of the Philippines and a year
before the Boxer Rebellion, Secretary of State John Hay
circulated his two “Open Door” notes imploring the Great
Powers to eschew the dismemberment of China and to
preserve free commercial access for all. The growing
Japanese fleet worried American naval planners, who
drafted at the time of the Russo-Japanese War the “Plan
Orange” contingency for war with Japan. (They also
conceded the impossibility of defending the Philippines
against Japanese attack.)

The Chinese Revolution of 1911–12, inspired by the

democratic principles of Sun Yat-sen (educated in Hawaii
and British Hong Kong), expelled the Manchu dynasty
and elevated the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT),
to power. But Sun quickly gave way in 1913 to General
Yüan Shih-kʾai, whose failure to unify the giant land of
400,000,000 condemned China to a struggle among rival
warlords that kept it in turmoil until at least 1928. Even
as the Chinese revolted against foreign influence and
exploitation, they remained nonetheless vulnerable to
imperial predations or, conversely, dependent on foreign
protection. In 1913 the Wilson administration entered
office with a decidedly pro-Chinese leaning, and at the
same time many Americans on the West Coast had
become alarmed about the growing presence and
success of enterprising Japanese immigrants and had
begun to seek, in Washington and California, to legalize
various forms of discrimination against them.

Japanese expansion during World War I only magnified

American concern. After seizing Germany’s Pacific islands
and Chiao-chou Bay on the strategic Shantung Peninsula,
Japan imposed on China the “Twenty-one Demands”
(January 1915), claiming greatly expanded economic
privileges and rights in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia
(Sept. 3, 1916). After U.S. entry into the war, the Peking
regime (but not the Nationalists in Canton) declared war
on the Central Powers (Aug. 14, 1917) in hopes of
defending its interests at the peace conference. The
United States moved to end the embarrassment
stemming from its co-belligerency with both China and
Japan through the Lansing–Ishii Agreement of Nov. 2,
1917, in which Japan paid lip service to the Open Door
while the United States recognized Japan’s “special
interests” in China. Wilson also sent troops to Vladivostok
to monitor the Japanese intervention in Siberia.

The Paris Peace Conference exposed the two branches of

Japanese expansionism, rooted in a bursting population
and a booming industry in need of raw materials and
markets. Delegate Saionji Kimmochi demanded the
inclusion of a clause in the League of Nations Covenant
proscribing racial discrimination, a principle that would
have obliged the United States, Canada, and Australia to
admit immigrants from Japan on equal terms with those
of other nations. This was politically impossible for
Wilson and Lloyd George to accept. The Japanese also
demanded the rights formerly held by Germany at Chiao-
chou, which Peking resisted vehemently. Finally Saionji
agreed to drop the racial-equality plank in return for the
granting of Japan’s Chinese demands and threatened to
reject the League of Nations if they were denied. Against
Lansing’s advice, Wilson acquiesced. Announcement of
the terms provoked the anti-Western May Fourth
Movement in China and caused it to be the only state
that refused even to sign the Treaty of Versailles. Japan’s
triumph was an inauspicious precedent for diplomatic
extortion by imperialist states from liberal states at the
expense of helpless third parties.

The organization of power in the Pacific

In the United States, liberal internationalists, balance-of-
power realists, Protestant churches with Chinese
missions, and xenophobes all decried the cynical
expansionism of Japan and what they took to be Wilson’s
capitulation. The Republican administration of Warren G.
Harding in 1921 therefore determined to continue an
ambitious naval construction plan dating from before the
war and to pressure London to terminate the Anglo-
Japanese Alliance dating from 1902. War debts gave the
United States financial leverage over the British, as did
American influence (based in a large Irish-American
segment of the electorate) in the Irish question then
reaching its climax. In June 1921 the British
Commonwealth Conference bowed to this pressure and
decided not to renew the alliance. This in turn confronted
the Japanese with the prospect of a Britain aligned with
Washington, not Tokyo, as well as a costly arms race
against the world’s two leading naval powers. A postwar
business slump and worker unrest also suggested to
Tokyo the wisdom of a tactical retreat.

Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes invited the Great

Powers to Washington, D.C., to forge a new order for East
Asia and the Pacific. A Four-Power Pact negotiated at the
conference (November 1921–February 1922) enjoined
the United States, Japan, Britain, and France to respect
each other’s Pacific island dependencies for 10 years. A
Nine-Power Pact obliged all parties to respect “the
sovereignty, the independence, and the territorial and
administrative integrity of the state of China” and the
commercial Open Door. A separate Sino-Japanese
agreement provided for Japanese evacuation of
Shantung. In a Five-Power Treaty on naval armaments,
Britain, the United States, Japan, France, and Italy agreed
severally to maintain the naval balance of capital ships in
the ratios 5:5:3:1.67:1.67 and agreed not to fortify their
Pacific possessions. The latter three powers protested,
but the United States frankly threatened to use its
superior resources to dwarf the Japanese fleet, while
France and Italy could not afford to compete with the
British. France was also hoping for British support at this
time in the struggle over German reparations (see below
The postwar guilt question). Still, domestic displeasure
with the treaties forced both the French and Japanese
cabinets to resign.

Hughes’s balance-of-power diplomacy for the Pacific

seemed to reflect a realist turn in American statecraft in
reaction to Wilson’s idealism insofar as the United States
flexed its muscle to compel the British and Japanese to
keep hands off China and limit armaments. But in so
doing the United States assumed responsibility as the
balancer and container of Japanese power, for the naval
agreement still left the Japanese fleet dominant in Asian
waters. Moreover, the Japanese had clearly bowed to
force majeure and, while resigned for the time being,
would shrug off these constraints as soon as the Great
Depression began to sap American resolve. In the long
run, East Asian stability could come only through a strong
and united China, for a weak and divided China
represented constant temptation to a Japan bursting with
strength, anxious for outlets, and resentful of Anglo-
American containment.

Learn More!
The postwar guilt question
Looking back on 1919–21 from the perspective of World
War II, historians easily concluded that the Paris
peacemakers had failed. In fact, debate over a “postwar
guilt question” began even before the Big Three had
completed their work. Anglo-American liberals felt
betrayed by Wilson’s failure to fashion a new diplomacy,
while exponents of traditional diplomacy ridiculed
Wilson’s self-righteous intrusions. As Harold Nicolson put
it: “We had hoped to call a new world into existence; we
ended only by fouling the old.” In other words, the peace
amounted to a self-defeating mixture of contradictory
ends or of tough ends and gentle means. Many Britons
said the Treaty of Versailles was too harsh, would destroy
Germany’s economy and fragile new democracy, and
would drive the bitter Germans to embrace militaristic
revanche or Bolshevism. Many Frenchmen replied that
the treaty was too mild, that a united Germany would
resume its drive for hegemony, and that German
democracy was sheeps’ clothing put on for Wilson’s
benefit. Historians persuaded by the former argument
often cast the peace conference as a morality play, with
the messianic Wilson frustrated in his lofty mission by the
atavistic Clemenceau. Those persuaded by the second
argument speculate that the French plan for a permanent
weakening of Germany might have made for a stabler
Europe but for Wilson’s and Lloyd George’s moralizing,
which, incidentally, served American and British interests
at every turn. Clemenceau said: “Wilson speaks like Jesus
Christ, but he operates like Lloyd George.” And Lloyd
George, when asked how he had done at Paris, said, “Not
badly, considering I was seated between Jesus Christ and
Napoleon.”

Such caricatures skirt the facts that the war was won by
the greatest coalition in history, that the peace could only
take the form of a grand compromise, and that ideas are
weapons. Once taking them up to great effect in the war
on Germany, the Big Three could not cynically shrug them
off any more than they could their constituents’ interests,
hopes, and fears. A purely Wilsonian peace, therefore,
was never a possibility, nor was a purely power-political
one on the order of the Congress of Vienna. Perhaps the
new diplomacy was revealed as a sham or a disaster, as
many professional diplomats claimed. Perhaps Wilson’s
moral insinuations only gave all parties grounds to depict
the peace as illegitimate, one man’s justice being always
another’s abomination. But it was still the old diplomacy
that had spawned the hideous war in the first place. The
pursuit of power without regard to justice, and the
pursuit of justice without regard to power, were both
doomed and dangerous occupations—such seemed to be
the lesson of Versailles. The democratic states would
spend the next 20 years searching in vain for a synthesis.
In the 1960s this portrait of the peace conference as a
Manichaean duel gave way to new interpretations. New
left historians depicted peacemaking after World War I as
a conflict between social classes and ideologies, hence as
the first episode in the Cold War. Arno J. Mayer wrote of
1919 as an “international civil war” between the “forces
of movement” (Bolsheviks, Socialists, labour, and left-
Wilsonians) and the “forces of order” (the Russian
Whites, Allied governments, capitalists, and conservative
power-politicians). While this thesis attracted overdue
attention to the domestic political concerns of the Big
Three, it imposed an equally dualistic set of categories,
derived from the “primacy of domestic policy” paradigm,
on the convoluted events of 1919. Perhaps it is most
accurate to describe the Paris Peace Conference as the
birthplace of all the major tactics, confrontational and
conciliatory, for dealing with the Bolshevik phenomenon
that have reappeared time and again to the present day.
Prinkipo was the first attempt to get Communists and
their opponents to substitute negotiations for force.
Bullitt made the first stab at détente: direct negotiation
of a modus vivendi. Churchill was the first “hawk,”
declaring that the only thing Communists understand is
force. And Hoover and Nansen first acted on the theory
that Communism is a social disease for which aid, trade,
and higher standards of living were the cure.

Thus, to say that the democratic, free-market statesmen

at Paris were anti-Bolshevik is to state the obvious; to
make this the wheel around which all else turned is to
ignore the subtle. As Marshal Foch observed in
counseling against exaggeration of the Bolshevik threat:
“Revolution never crossed the frontiers of victory.” That
is, Communism was a product not just of privation, but of
defeat, as in Russia, Germany, and Hungary. Perhaps, as
Churchill thought, the Western democracies were not
obsessed enough with the Bolshevik threat. They also
understood it poorly, differed as to tactics, and were
continually absorbed in other issues. Yet the failure to
reintegrate Russia into the European order was as
poisonous to future stability as the German peace.
Whatever one’s interpretation and assessment of the
personalities and policies that collided at Paris, the
overall settlement was surely doomed, not only because
it sowed seeds of discord in almost every clause, but
because all the Great Powers scurried from it at once.
Germans denounced Versailles as a hypocritical Diktat
and determined to resist it as much they were able.
Italians fulminated against the “mutilated victory” given
them by Wilson and then succumbed to Fascism in 1922.
The Russian Communists, not privy to the settlements,
denounced them as the workings of rapacious rival
imperialisms. From the start, the Japanese ignored the
League in favour of their imperial designs, and they soon
held the Washington treaties to be unfair, confining, and
dangerous to their economic health. The United States,
of course, rejected Versailles and the League. Only Britain
and France remained to make a success of Versailles, the
League, and the chronically unstable successor states.
But by 1920 British opinion was already turning against
the treaty, and even the French, bitter over their
“betrayal” at the hands of the United States and Britain,
began to lose faith in the 1919 system. It was a new order
that many yearned to overthrow and few were willing to
defend.

Learn More!
A Fragile Stability, 1922–29
The 1920s are usually depicted as a bridge between the
turmoil of the war and the turmoil of the 1930s, a brief
truce in the “Thirty Years’ War” of the 20th century. The
disputes over execution of the Treaty of Versailles suggest
a continuation of the Great War by other means, while
the economic and security arrangements of mid-decade,
and the era of good feeling they engendered, were
flawed from their inception and collapsed with the onset
of the Great Depression. Still, the postwar decade was
Shakespeare’s “time for frighted peace to pant.” The
conflicts of the early 1920s notwithstanding, weary
populations had no stomach for war and demanded, in
President Harding’s words, a “return to normalcy,”
however fragile it might prove.

A broken world
The failure of democratic consensus
But what was normal in a world broken by total war? The
pillars of the antebellum system—the balance of power,
the non-interventionist state, the gold standard, and the
free-market economy—lay in ruins and in any case
reflected a faith in the natural play of political and
economic forces that many Europeans had ceased to
share. Wilsonians and Leninists blamed balance-of-power
diplomacy for the war and fled from such normalcy.
Technocrats, impressed by the productivity of regulated
war economies, hoped to extend them into peacetime to
promote recovery and dampen competition. Some
economists and politicians even applauded the demise of
the gold standard (“a barbarous relic,” said Keynes) since
inflation seemed the only means of financing jobs and
veterans’ pensions, thus stabilizing domestic societies.
Finally, the free-market economy that had made high
growth rates and technological dynamism seem normal
from 1896 to 1914 was itself challenged by Socialists on
the left and corporate interest groups on the right. In
every case governments found it easier to try to shift the
burden of reconstruction on to foreign powers, through
reparations, loans, or inflation, than to impose taxes and
austerity on quarreling social groups at home. It soon
became clear that the effects of the war would continue
to politicize economic relations within and between
countries; that the needs of internal stability conflicted
with the needs of international stability; that old dreams
clashed with new realities, and new dreams with old
realities.

The search for a new stability

The lack of consensus on democracy itself also hampered
the quest for a new stability. Wilson expected victory to
mean a heyday of democracy in which the will of the
people would oblige states to value peace and
compromise. Instead, Communists and Fascists alike
challenged democratic assumptions and elevated social
class, race, and the state to the role Wilson reserved for
the individual. In terms of the distribution of world
power, the 1920s gave rise to a false normalcy, an Indian
summer of European Great Power politics thanks to the
peripheral roles played by the United States and the
Soviet Union. In diplomacy, affairs of state came to be
conducted increasingly by politicians meeting in grand
conferences or at the League of Nations rather than by
experts communicating with precision through written
notes. Inevitably, style replaced substance at such
meetings as prime ministers worried as much about their
political image at home as about the actual issues at
hand. The prime ministers of France and Britain held no
less than 23 meetings from 1919 to 1923. As French
Ambassador Camille Barrère complained, “Politicians
have replaced diplomats at these conferences and seem
to believe that nations conduct business like deputies in
the Palais-Bourbon.” But the trend was irreversible, for
the crises of war and peace impressed on voters how
much foreign policy affected their pocketbooks and daily
lives, and they were sure to hold their elected officials
responsible. Technological developments—the
telephone, the wireless, and soon the airplane—also
tended to reduce the role of professional ambassadors to
that of messengers.

Behind the contradictory mixture of old and new in

politics lay a profound cultural confusion. For the cultural
shock of the Great War had turned modernist iconoclasm
from the conceit of bohemian cliques into a new
conventional wisdom. Respect for elders, for established
authority, for “bourgeois” decency and restraint, died in
the trenches. Faith in God and faith in reason, the two
abiding fonts of Western culture, withered under the
war’s barbarizing bombardment, as did the belief in
human progress born of the Enlightenment and the
Industrial Revolution. Science and technology, those
engines of progress, had only perfected an economy of
death, and turned soldiers and civilians into mere cogs in
the war machine. In the 1920s Einsteinian relativity, or a
debased and popularized notion of it, replaced the
comfortable order of the Newtonian universe, offering
skeptics a pseudoscientific justification for their rejection
of absolute moral values. Popular Freudianism, depicting
man as the victim of irrational, subconscious drives,
seemed to describe the behaviour of 1914–18 better
than the old Aristotelian psychology of man as a rational,
moral creature. Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values,
implying that in a social Darwinist world compassion and
charity were suicidal and force and mastery progressive,
became a fad. To vulgar minds on the right and the left,
Nietzsche’s critique of modern mass civilization was an
anthem for a politics of the violent deed. And while some
artists despaired of man’s fate in the crucible of the
machine age, there were others, like the German
Bauhaus school, who extolled steely power or, like the
Italian Futurists, even modern war.

Oswald Spengler’s 1918–22 best-seller The Decline of the

West mourned the engulfing of Kultur by the
cosmopolitan anthill of Zivilisation and argued that only a
dictatorship could arrest the decline. Sociologist Max
Weber hoped for charismatic leadership to overcome
bureaucracy. Much painting, music, and film of the 1920s
illustrated the theme of decline: Paul Klee’s Cubist
depiction of literally broken people and societies; George
Grosz’s looks beneath the veneer of respectable society
to the rot underneath; the broken musical scales of
Arnold Schoenberg; and the political drama of Bertolt
Brecht. The intelligentsia of the 1920s leveled a
comprehensive assault on bourgeois values, forms, and
traditions. Tradition won scarcely more respect in the
salons of Paris and London. The decade that was to have
spawned a democratic diplomacy prepared the way
instead for the totalitarian diplomacy of the 1930s.

To be sure, these were the years when European

statesmen, in historian Charles Maier’s words, set
themselves the task of “recasting bourgeois Europe” and
pioneered corporatist compromise among organized
interest groups and bureaucracies when the increasingly
polarized parliaments were unable to distribute the costs
and benefits of reconstruction. By 1925 they had made a
good show of it, as currencies and world trade stabilized
and food, coal, and industrial production again reached
1913 levels. But the American economy alone boomed
following the postwar slump of 1920–21. Between 1922
and 1929, U.S. steel production climbed 70 percent, oil
156 percent, and automobiles 255 percent. Overall,
national income soared 54 percent in those years; by
1929 the U.S. economy accounted for 44.8 percent of
global industrial output, compared to 11.6 percent for
Germany, 9.3 for Britain, 7.0 for France, and 4.6 for the
Soviet Union. Yet the demobilization of American armed
forces and United States refusal to make political-military
engagements abroad meant that this mighty power
existed in semi-isolation from the rest of the world.
France and Britain, though engaged, lacked the resources
and the will to run the risks inherent in trying to
reintegrate Germany and Russia into the European order.
A world with such disparities in the distribution of power
and responsibility could not be returned to normal. It
could only be given the appearance of normalcy by
pasting paper constitutions, paper money, and paper
treaties over the absence of common values, common
interests, or a true balance of power.

Learn More!

Reparations, security, and the German question

The continuing problem of Germany
The Great War failed to solve the German question. To be
sure, Germany was exhausted and in the shackles of
Versailles, but its strategic position actually improved in
the war. Britain and France were at least as exhausted,
Russia was in chaos and her boundary driven far to the
east, and Italy was disaffected from her former allies, so
that Germany’s eastern and southern approaches now
consisted of a broad ring of weak states. If and when
Germany escaped Versailles, therefore, it might pose a
greater threat to Europe than in 1914.

This danger obsessed postwar French leaders, but they

quarreled among themselves over the proper response:
strict execution of the Versailles treaty and perhaps even
the breaking of German unity, or a Wilsonian policy of
“moral disarmament” and reconciliation? In late 1919 the
French electorate returned a staunchly conservative
decision. The peace conference had not solved France’s
triple crisis of security, finance, and industrial
reconstruction. Postwar French governments undertook
to replace the abortive Anglo-American guarantee with
an alliance system of Germany’s neighbours. Belgium
shrugged off neutrality, which had failed spectacularly to
shelter it in 1914, and concluded a military alliance with
France in September 1920. The Franco-Polish alliance
(February 1921) and a Franco-Czechoslovak entente
(January 1924) created an eastern counterweight to
Germany. But these states, while wedded to the
Versailles system, needed more protection than they
offered. France could come to their aid only by a vigorous
offensive against Germany from the west, which in turn
required access to the bridgeheads over the Rhine. Thus,
not only French security but that of east-central Europe
as well depended on German disarmament and Allied
occupation of the Rhineland.

French finances were strained by the costs of rebuilding

the devastated regions, the army, imperial obligations,
and the refusal of the French chamber to accept sizable
new taxes until Germany had paid reparations or France’s
war debts were annulled. To the extent that Germany
reneged, France would face deficits imperiling its
currency. As to industrial reconstruction, France
depended on Germany for the coal needed to revive iron
and steel production and at the same time was forced to
countenance a cartel arrangement to escape Germany’s
economic competition.
Far from sympathizing with France’s plight, the United
States and Britain quickly withdrew from the Versailles
treaty. Britain found itself in the midst of a postwar
economic slump magnified by its wartime losses in ships
and markets. Lloyd George had promised the veterans a
land “fit for heroes,” yet unemployment reached 17
percent in 1921. The war had accelerated the decline of
the aging British industrial plant and the economy more
generally. Unemployment never dipped much below 10
percent during the decade before the onset of the Great
Depression, and in the early 1920s the pressure was on
the British government to boost employment by reviving
trade. Keynes argued persuasively that while Europe
could never recover until the German economy took its
natural place at the centre, virtually every clause of the
treaty seemed designed to prevent that particular return
to normalcy. To be sure, the British needed the
reparations debt from Germany on the books to balance
against their own war debts to the United States. But
soon after the war Lloyd George came to favour German
recovery in the interest of trade. The entente with France
became strained as early as 1920 over the issues of
reparations, Turkey, and the coal shortage of that year,
from which Britain garnered windfall profits at the
expense of the French.

German politics and reparations

Germany, meanwhile, weathered both the leftist
agitation of 1919 and the right-wing Kapp Putsch of
March 1920. But elections showed a swing to the centre-
right in German politics away from the parties that had
voted to ratify Versailles. The insecure coalition cabinets
of the early 1920s, therefore, found themselves with little
room to maneuver on the foreign stage. They dared not
rebel openly against Versailles, but dared not endorse
fulfillment too eagerly in the face of domestic opinion.
Nor could the weak Berlin government take forceful
measures to end inflation, impose taxes, or regulate big
business. The industrial magnates of the Ruhr thus
acquired a virtual veto power over national policy by dint
of their importance to the economy, a fact the
embittered French did not fail to notice. German leaders
themselves differed over how to win relief from the
treaty. Army chief Hans von Seeckt and the eastern
division of the foreign office thought in Bismarckian
terms and favoured close ties with Russia, despite its
obnoxious regime. But other economic and foreign
policymakers preferred to rely on Britain and the United
States to restrain France and revise the treaty. German
diplomats soon synthesized these approaches,
threatening closer ties with Moscow in order to win
concessions from the West.

The Reparations Commission bickered throughout 1920

over the total sum to be demanded of Germany and its
distribution among the Allies. At the Spa Conference (July
1920), France won 52 percent of German payments,
Britain 22 percent, Italy 10, and Belgium 8. At the
conferences of Hythe, Boulogne, and Brussels, France
presented a total bill of 230,000,000,000 gold marks,
although the British warned that this was far beyond
Germany’s capacity to pay. But when German foreign
minister Walter Simons offered a mere 30,000,000,000
(Paris Conference, February 1921), French Premier
Aristide Briand and Lloyd George made a show of force,
seizing in March the Ruhr river ports of Düsseldorf,
Duisburg, and Ruhrort, taking over the Rhenish customs
offices, and declaring a 50 percent levy on German
exports. Finally, on May 5, 1921, the London conference
presented Berlin with a bill for 132,000,000,000 gold
marks, to be paid in annuities of 2,000,000,000 plus 26
percent ad valorem of German exports. The Germans
protested adamantly that this was “an injustice without
equal.” Historians have differed sharply as to whether the
obligations were within the capacity of the German
economy. But the May 1921 schedule was less harsh than
it seemed, for the bill was divided into three series—A
bonds totaling 12,000,000,000 marks, B bonds for
38,000,000,000, and the unlikely C bonds in the amount
of 82,000,000,000. The latter would not even be issued
until the first two series were paid and existed as much to
balance against the Allies’ debts to the United States as
actually to be paid by Germany. Nevertheless, Chancellor
Konstantin Fehrenbach resigned rather than accept this
new Diktat, and his successor, Joseph Wirth, acquiesced
only under threat of occupation of the Ruhr.
The “fulfillment” tactic adopted by Wirth and his foreign
minister, Walther Rathenau, was to make a show of good
faith to demonstrate that the reparations bill was truly
beyond Germany’s capacity. They were aided in this by
the continuing deterioration of the paper mark. The
prewar value of the mark was about 4.2 to the dollar. By
the end of 1919 it reached 63, and after the first payment
of 1,000,000,000 marks under the London plan, the mark
fell to 262 to the dollar. The French argued that the
inflation was purposeful, designed to feign bankruptcy
while allowing Berlin to liquidate its internal debt and
German industrialists like Hugo Stinnes and Fritz Thyssen
to borrow, expand, and dump exports on the world
market. Recent research suggests, however, that the
government did not fully understand the causes of the
inflation even though it recognized its social utility in
stimulating employment and permitting social
expenditures. Of course, the reparations bill, while not
the cause of inflation, was a strong disincentive to
stabilization for Berlin could hardly plead bankruptcy if it
boasted a strong currency, a balanced budget, and a
healthy balance of payments. And insofar as the German
government was dependent on those who benefited
most from inflation—the industrialists—it was incapable
of implementing austerity measures. This financial tangle
might have been avoided by a program of reparations-in-
kind whereby German firms delivered raw and finished
goods directly to the Allies. The Seydoux Plan of 1920 and
the Wiesbaden Accords of 1921 embraced such a
mechanism, but the Ruhr magnates, delighted that the
French might “choke on their iron” in the absence of
German coal, and the British, fearful of any continental
cartel, together torpedoed reparations-in-kind. By
December 1921, Berlin was granted a moratorium.

Learn More!

Allied politics and reparations

At the Cannes Conference (January 1922) the Allies
searched for common ground on reparations, a security
pact, and Lloyd George’s scheme for a grand economic
conference including Soviet Russia. But the French
chamber rebelled, and Briand was replaced as prime
minister by the wartime president, Poincaré. A hard-
headed lawyer from Lorraine, Poincaré was determined
to relieve France’s triple crisis without sacrificing its
treaty rights. He approached London for a security pact,
only to learn that the British were not willing to
guarantee the Rhenish demilitarized zone and demanded
French concessions on reparations in return. In June a
conference of international bankers in Paris
recommended loans to stabilize the German mark, but
only if Germany were granted a long moratorium on
reparations. (Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress created the
World War Foreign Debt Commission to pressure the
Allies to fund their war debts.) The grand economic
conference promoted by Lloyd George was held at Genoa
in April and May 1922 and was the first to bring German
and Russian delegations together with the Allies on a
status of equality. But the Soviets refused to recognize
the tsarist regime’s prewar debts and then shocked the
Allies by signing the Treaty of Rapallo (April 16) with
Germany, an innocuous document (providing for
annulment of past claims and restoration of diplomatic
relations) that nonetheless appeared to signal an unholy
alliance between the two European outcasts. (Innocuous
or not, Rathenau was assassinated by German rightists
on June 24; Erzberger, signer of the Armistice, had also
been murdered in 1921.) French representatives also
bargained directly with the Ruhr magnates late in 1922,
hoping for a coal-for-iron exchange and market-sharing,
but the German price was evacuation of the Rhineland
and substantial revision of the Treaty of Versailles.
Meanwhile, the German mark tumbled to 7,500 to the
dollar in December. Poincaré concluded that only force
would break the deadlock. As he told the Belgians in July,
“I will propose a short moratorium subject to guarantees.
If England refuses I will act alone. The German
industrialists conspire to destroy the mark. They hope to
ruin France.”

The new German Cabinet of Wilhelm Cuno made a

desperate appeal to the United States. Secretary of State
Hughes responded on December 29 with an offer to
convene a committee of experts to study means of
stabilizing the mark, but he held out no hope that the
United States might relent on war debts. When the
Reparations Commission declared that Germany had
defaulted on its 1922 timber deliveries (Britain
dissenting), Poincaré had his mandate to take sanctions.
On Jan. 11, 1923, French and Belgian troops began to
occupy the Ruhr. If the Germans submitted peacefully,
the Ruhr would constitute a “productive guarantee,”
generating coal and receipts for France and giving her a
valuable bargaining chip. If the Germans resisted, the
French might take whatever measures seemed fit, up to
and including political change in the Rhineland.

German workers protested the occupation of the Ruhr

with an immense sitdown strike that proprietors and the
government quickly joined. Berlin supported this passive
resistance with unemployment relief that, in seeking to
prove that the hated French could not “mine coal with
bayonets,” completed the destruction of the German
currency. The railroads, mines, factories, and public
services in the Ruhr and Rhineland ground to a halt.
Poincaré steeled his will and dispatched French engineers
and workers to revive the Rhine-Ruhr complex through
the Inter-Allied Control Commission for Factories and
Mines (MICUM) and a Franco-Belgian directorate for the
railroads. The Allied Rhineland Commission (Britain
dissenting) seized all executive, legislative, and judicial
power in the occupied territories, expelled 16,000
uncooperative German officials (and more than 100,000
persons in all), and sequestered all German government
property, energy resources, and transportation. France
began covertly subsidizing separatist agitation. The Ruhr
adventure thus became an economic war of attrition with
stakes potentially as high as in a shooting war. If France
retreated, the Treaty of Versailles was as good as dead; if
Germany collapsed, the Rhineland might be lost.

The paper mark reached 4,000,000 to the dollar in

August, and the Reich treasury was at the end of its
tether. Business in non-occupied Germany was choking,
and social unrest was spreading. Bavarian rightists called
for war or separatism, while the Communist Party made
gains in the cities. Gustav Stresemann, the conservative,
business-oriented politician who replaced Cuno, finally
ended passive resistance in September 1923 “to preserve
the life of the nation and the state.” But Poincaré, instead
of naming his terms to Germany, apparently threw away
the victory and accepted, after nine months’ delay,
Hughes’s invitation to form a committee of experts.
Poincaré’s inaction baffled contemporaries, but in fact he
had little to gain from dealing with Berlin. Only Britain
and the United States could cancel France’s war debts,
stabilize the mark with loans to fund reparations, and
offer security pacts or legitimize an autonomous Rhenish
state, while only the Ruhr magnates could satisfy French
industrial needs. So Poincaré ordered his Ruhr army
commander to negotiate directly with Thyssen, Stinnes,
Krupp, and their colleagues for the MICUM Accords
(November 23) under which German industry went back
to work, while he himself saw to the mandate of the
international committee of experts.

Poincaré’s plans misfired, however, for by the time the

committee of experts began its deliberations at the turn
of 1924, France’s dearly purchased leverage had eroded
and Germany had begun to recover. Troops expelled
Communists from the governments of Saxony and
Thuringia, a Communist putsch in Hamburg misfired, and
Bavarian police quashed the Nazi putsch led by Adolf
Hitler and Ludendorff. Hjalmar Schacht, recently
appointed president of the Reichsbank, halted the
inflation with a temporary currency called the
Rentenmark, and on New Year’s Day 1924 the president
of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, extended a
500,000,000 gold mark credit to back a new German
mark. In October 1923, meanwhile, rowdy bands
supported by the French occupation began to seize public
buildings from Aachen to Speyer and to proclaim a
Rhineland Republic. These separatists had no support
from the population or from genuine Rhenish notables
like the mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, and their
actions only further discredited French policy in the eyes
of Britain. By January the separatists had been driven out
or murdered by fellow Germans. Finally, the French franc
also succumbed to the pressure it had been under since
the war. Poincaré tried austerity measures, but a new
collapse in March forced him to borrow $89,000,000
from J.P. Morgan, Jr., of New York to stabilize the
exchange rate. All these blows to France’s position told in
the report of the committee of experts under American
Charles G. Dawes, released in April 1924. It called for a
grand loan to Germany and the resumption of
reparations payments, but made the latter contingent on
French withdrawal from the Ruhr and restoration of
German economic unity. Jacques Seydoux, an economist
in France’s foreign ministry, had predicted this outcome
as early as November 1923: “There is no use hiding the
fact that we have entered on the path of the ‘financial
reconstruction of Europe.’ We will not deal with Germany
as conqueror to vanquished; rather the Germans and
Frenchmen will sit on the same bench before the United
States and other lending countries.” On May 11, 1924,
the French electorate defeated Poincaré in favour of the
Cartel des Gauches (a leftist coalition) under Édouard
Herriot, who favoured a policy of accommodation with
Germany.
Italy and east-central Europe
Fascism and Italian reality
The peoples of east-central Europe enjoyed a degree of
freedom in the 1920s unique in their history. But the
power vacuum in the region resulting from the
temporary impotence of Germany and Russia pulled in
other Great Powers—chiefly Mussolini’s Italy and France
—seeking respectively to revise or uphold the 1919 order.

Fascism was the most striking political novelty of the

interwar years. Fascism defied precise definition. In
practice it was an anti-Marxist, antiliberal, and
antidemocratic mass movement that aped Communist
methods, extolled the leadership principle and a
“corporatist” organization of society, and showed both
modern and antimodern tendencies. But the three states
universally acknowledged to be Fascist in the 1930s—
Italy, Germany, and Japan—were most similar in their
foreign, rather than their domestic, ideology and policy.
All embraced extreme nationalism and a theory of
competition among nations and races that justified their
revolts—as “proletarian nations”—against the
international order of 1919. In this sense, Fascism can be
understood as the antithesis of Wilsonianism rather than
of Leninism.

In the first decade of Mussolini’s rule, changes in Italian

diplomacy were more stylistic than substantive. But
recent historiography argues that this decade of relatively
good behaviour was a function of the continuing
constraints on Italian ambitions rather than moderation
in Fascist goals. Mussolini proclaimed upon taking power
that “treaties are not eternal, are not irremediable,” and
declared loudly and often his determination to restore
Italian grandeur. This would be accomplished by revision
of the “mutilated victory,” by the transformation of the
Mediterranean into an Italian mare nostrum, and by the
creation of “a new Roman Empire” through expansion
and conquest in Africa and the Balkans. Such reveries
reflected not only Mussolini’s native grandiloquence but
also Italy’s relative poverty and surplus rural population
and need for markets and raw materials secure from the
competition of more developed powers. In this sense,
Italy was a sort of weak Japan. And like the Japanese,
Italians bristled at the tendency of the Great Powers to
treat them, in Mussolini’s words, “as another Portugal.”
Still, Fascist bluster seemed safely unmatched in actions,
and London in particular was pleased with the tendency
of the Fascist foreign minister Dino Grandi to “take refuge
on rainy days under the ample and capacious mantle of
England” in traditional Italian fashion. More than once
Grandi dissuaded Il Duce from provocative actions, taking
care not to offend his vanity. The Italian navy’s inferiority
to the British and French, and the army’s need for
reorganization, also suggested prudence.

Fascist diplomacy
Italian diplomacy in the 1920s, therefore, was a mix of
bombast and caution. At the Lausanne Conference,
Mussolini dramatically stopped his train to oblige
Poincaré and Curzon to come to him. He made Italy the
first Western power to offer a trade agreement and
recognition to the Bolsheviks and was proud of Italy’s role
in the League (though he considered it “an academic
organization”) and as a guarantor of the Locarno Pact. In
the Mediterranean, Mussolini protested French rule in
Tunis and asserted for Italy a moral claim to the province.
But he satisfied his thirst for action against weaker
opponents. He broke the Regina Agreement with the
Sanūsī tribesmen of Libya, which had limited Italian
occupation to the coast, and by 1928 completed Italy’s
conquest of that poor and weak country.
Italy’s main sphere of activity was the Balkans. When an
Italian general surveying the border of a Greek-speaking
district of Albania was killed in August 1923, Mussolini
ordered a naval squadron to bombard the Greek isle of
Corfu. The League of Nations awarded Italy an indemnity,
but not the island. In January 1924, Wilson’s Free State of
Fiume disappeared when Yugoslav Premier Nikola Pašić
granted Italian annexation in the Treaty of Rome.
Diplomatic attempts to regularize relations between
Belgrade and Rome, however, could not overcome
Yugoslavia’s suspicion of Italian ambitions in Albania. In
1924 a coup d’état, ostensibly backed by Belgrade,
elevated the Muslim Ahmed Bey Zogu in Tiranë. Once in
power, however, Ahmed Zogu looked to Italy. The Tiranë
Pact (Nov. 27, 1926) provided Italian economic aid and
was followed by a military alliance in 1927 and finally a
convention (July 1, 1928) declaring Albania a virtual
protectorate of Italy. Ahmed Zogu then assumed the title
of King Zog I.

To the north, Italian diplomacy aimed at countering

French influence among the successor states. In 1920 the
French even courted Hungary and toyed with the idea of
resurrecting a Danubian Confederation, but when the
deposed Habsburg King Charles appeared in Hungary in
March 1921, Allied protests and a Czech ultimatum
forced him back into exile. Hungarian revisionism,
however, motivated Beneš to unite those states that
owed their existence to the Treaty of Trianon. A Czech–
Yugoslav alliance (Aug. 14, 1920), Czech–Romanian
alliance (April 23, 1921), and Romanian–Yugoslav alliance
(June 7, 1921) together formed what was known as the
Little Entente. When Charles tried again in October to
claim his throne in Budapest, the Little Entente
threatened invasion. While France had not midwived the
combination, it associated strongly with the successor
states through Franco–Czech (Oct. 16, 1925), Franco–
Romanian (June 10, 1926), and Franco–Yugoslav (Nov. 11,
1927) military alliances. The latter implied that France
would side with Belgrade against Rome in case of war
and exacerbated the strained relations between France
and Italy.
Mussolini had more luck in the defeated states of central
Europe, Austria and Hungary. But in the former case, Italy
was not siding with the revisionists. In return for financial
aid to end its own hyperinflation, Austria had promised
the League of Nations in 1922 that it would not seek
Anschluss with Germany. Mussolini proclaimed in May
1925 that he, too, would never tolerate the Anschluss but
set out to curry favour with the Austrian government. An
Italo-Hungarian commercial treaty (Sept. 5, 1925), a
friendship treaty (April 5, 1927) moving Hungary “into
the sphere of Italian interests,” and a rapprochement
with Bulgaria in 1930 completed Italy’s alignments with
the states defeated in the war. Hungary in particular
attracted Mussolini’s sympathy. But as long as the
combined will of the Little Entente, backed by France,
opposed revisionism, Italy alone could force no
alterations. On the other hand, military or economic
cooperation among the congeries of states in east-central
Europe also proved impossible. Czech–Polish rivalry
continued, however illogical, and after Piłsudski’s coup
d’état in Poland in 1926 even the internationalist Beneš
sought to steer German revisionism against Poland rather
than Austria and the Danubian basin. The Little Entente
and French alliances, therefore, amounted to a fair-
weather system that would collapse in the first storm.

Learn More!
The invention of Soviet foreign policy
Lenin’s diplomacy
In November 1920 Lenin surprised Western observers
and his fellow Bolsheviks alike by declaring that “we have
entered a new period in which we have . . . won the right
to our international existence in the network of capitalist
states.” By 1921, the generally accepted turning point in
Soviet policy, Bolshevism had made the transition from a
revolutionary movement to a functioning state. The Civil
War was won, the New Economic Policy ended the brutal
“War Communism” and restored a measure of free
market activity to peasants, and the Soviet government
was organized along traditional ministerial lines (though
subject to the dictates of the Communist Party). Russia
was ready—needed—to pursue traditional relations with
foreign powers in search of capital, trade, and technology
for reconstruction. The emergence of what Stalin called
“Socialism in one country” therefore obliged the Soviets
to invent out of whole cloth a “Communist” foreign
policy.

That invention took shape as a two-track approach

whereby Russia (from 1922 the U.S.S.R.) would on the
one hand continue to operate as the centre of world
revolution, dedicated to the overthrow of the capitalist
powers, and yet conduct an apparently regular existence
as a nation-state courting recognition and assistance
from those same powers. The first track was the
responsibility of the Comintern (Third International)
under Grigory Zinovyev and Karl Radek; the second, of
the Narkomindel (foreign commissariat) directed from
1920 to 1930 by the timid and cultured prewar
nobleman, Georgy Chicherin. The Comintern enjoyed
direct access to the Politburo, whereas the Narkomindel
had no voice even in the Central Committee until 1925. In
practice, however, the foreign policy interests of the
U.S.S.R. dominated even the Comintern to such an extent
that other Communist parties were not factions in their
own country’s politics so much as Soviet fifth columns
operating abroad. When subversive activity flagged,
diplomacy came to the fore; when diplomacy was
unfruitful, revolution was emphasized. The goal was not
to encourage “peace” or “progressive reform” in the
West, but solely to enhance Soviet power. Thus Lenin
instructed Comintern parties “to unmask not only open
social patriotism but also the falseness and hypocrisy of
social pacifism”; in other words, to do all that was
possible to undermine Moscow’s rivals on the left as well
as on the right through the infiltration and subversion of
Western labour unions, armed forces, newspapers, and
schools. Yet Moscow readily ignored or confounded the
efforts of local Communists when diplomatic
opportunities with foreign countries seemed promising.
The scent of betrayal this caused made mandatory the
secrecy, discipline, and purges demanded of Communist
parties abroad.

At the third congress of the Comintern in 1921 even

Trotsky, the impassioned advocate of world revolution,
admitted that the struggle of the proletariat in other
countries was slackening. At that time the mutiny of
Russian sailors at Kronshtadt and widespread famine in
Russia impelled the party to concentrate on consolidating
its power at home and reviving the economy. The Soviets,
therefore, turned to the capitalists who, Lenin jeered,
would “sell the rope to their own hangmen” in search of
profits. Indeed, Western leaders, especially Lloyd George,
viewed the vast Russian market as a kind of panacea for
Western industrial stagnation and unemployment. But he
and others misunderstood the nature of the Soviet state.
Private property, commercial law, and hard currency no
longer existed in Russia; one did business, not in a
market, but on terms laid down by a state monopoly.
What was more, by 1928 the whole point of trade was to
allow the Soviet economy to catch up to the West in the
shortest possible time and thus achieve complete self-
sufficiency. It was, in George Kennan’s words, a “trade to
end all trade.”

The Anglo-Russian commercial pact of March 1921 and

secret contacts with German military and civilian agents
were the first Soviet openings to the Great Powers. Both
culminated the following year in the Genoa Conference,
where the Soviet representatives appeared, to the relief
of their counterparts, in striped pants and on good
behaviour. Indeed, having seized power as the minority
faction of a minority party, the Bolsheviks sought
legitimacy abroad as the most adamant sticklers for
etiquette and legalism. But the Western powers insisted
on an end to Communist propaganda and recognition of
the tsarist debts as prerequisites to trade. Chicherin
countered with a fanciful claim for reparations stemming
from the Allied interventions, at the same time denying
that Moscow bore any responsibility for the doings of the
Comintern. As Theodore von Laue has written, “To ask
the Soviet regime . . . to refrain from making use of its
revolutionary tools was as futile as to ask the British
Empire to scrap its fleet.” Instead, a German-Russian knot
was tied in the Treaty of Rapallo, whereby the U.S.S.R.
was able to take advantage of Germany’s bitterness over
Versailles to split the capitalist powers. Trade and
recognition were not the only consequences of Rapallo;
in its wake began a decade of clandestine German
military research on Russian soil.
Upon the occupation of the Ruhr the Soviets declared
solidarity with the Berlin government. By August 1923,
however, with Stresemann seeking negotiations with
France and German society disintegrating, revolutionary
opportunism again took precedence. The Politburo went
so far as to designate personnel for a German Communist
government, and Zinovyev gave German Communists the
signal to stage a putsch in Hamburg. When it proved a
fiasco, the Soviets returned to their Rapallo diplomacy
with Berlin. The political victories of the leftists
MacDonald in Britain and Herriot in France then
prompted recognition of the Soviet government by
Britain (Feb. 1, 1924), Italy (February 7), France (October
28), and most other European states. Later in 1924,
however, publication during the British electoral
campaign of the infamous (and probably forged)
“Zinovyev letter” ordering Communists to disrupt the
British army created a sensation. British police also
suspected Communists of subversive activities during the
bitter General Strike of 1926 and launched the “Arcos
raid” on the Soviet trade delegation in London in May
1927. Anglo-Soviet relations did not resume until 1930.
Learn More!
Stalin’s diplomacy
Lenin’s incapacity and death (Jan. 21, 1924) triggered a
protracted struggle for power between Trotsky and
Joseph Stalin. In foreign policy their conflict seemed one
of an emphasis on aiding the European peoples “in the
struggle against their oppressors” (Trotsky) versus an
emphasis on “building Socialism in one country” (Stalin).
But that was largely a caricature meant to discredit
Trotsky as an “adventurer.” During the intraparty struggle,
however, Soviet foreign policy drifted. The “partial
stabilization of capitalism in the West” through the
Dawes Plan and the Locarno treaties was a rude setback
for Moscow. When Germany later joined the League of
Nations, the Soviet press warned Germany against this
“false step” into “this wasp’s nest of international
intrigue, where political sharpers and thieving
diplomatists play with marked cards, strangle weak
nations, and organize war against the U.S.S.R.” But the
Germans were not about to throw away their Russian
card. Negotiations to expand the Rapallo accord
produced the Treaty of Berlin (April 24, 1926) by which
Germany pledged neutrality in any conflict between the
U.S.S.R. and a third power, including the League of
Nations. Germany also provided a 300,000,000-mark
credit and in the late 1920s accounted for 29 percent of
Soviet foreign trade.

From 1921 on, the Politburo judged Asia to be the region

that offered the best hope for Socialist expansion,
although this required collaboration with “bourgeois
nationalists.” The Bolsheviks suppressed their own
subject nationalities at the first opportunity, yet declared
their solidarity with all peoples resisting Western
imperialism. In 1920 they paid homage to the “great and
famous Amīr Amānollāh” in cementing relations with the
new Afghan leader, and they were the first to sign
treaties with Nationalist Turkey. In September 1920 the
Comintern sponsored a conference of “the peoples of the
East” at Baku. Zinovyev and Radek presided over a
contentious lot of Central Asian delegates, whose own
quarrels, of which the Armenian-Turkish was the most
vitriolic, made a mockery of any notion of regional or
political solidarity. Thereafter, Soviet Asian activity went
underground, alternately aiding Communists against
nationalists like Reza Khan and Mustafa Kemal, and aiding
nationalists against the European powers.

The centrepiece of Soviet designs in Asia could only be

China, whose liberation Lenin viewed in 1923 as “an
essential stage in the victory of socialism in the world.” In
1919 and 1920 the Narkomindel made much of its
revolutionary sympathy for China by renouncing the
rights acquired by tsarist Russia in its concessionary
treaties. But soon the Soviets were sending troops into
Outer Mongolia, allegedly at the request of local
Communists, and concluding their own treaty with
Peking (May 31, 1924) that granted the U.S.S.R. a virtual
protectorate over Outer Mongolia—its first satellite—and
continued ownership of the Chinese Eastern Railway in
Manchuria.

The political disintegration of China, and their own

devious tactics, inevitably complicated Soviet policy.
While pursuing superficially correct relations with Peking,
the Politburo placed its future hopes on the Canton-
based Nationalists (KMT), whose members were
impressed by the Bolsheviks’ example of how to seize
and master a vast undeveloped country. In 1922 the
Comintern directed Chinese Communists to enroll in the
KMT even as Adolf Yoffe renounced all Soviet intentions
of importing Marxism into China. The Communist
presence in the KMT grew rapidly until, after Sun Yat-
sen’s death in March 1925, Comintern agent Mikhail
Borodin became the main strategist for the KMT. Still, the
Soviets were uncertain how to proceed. In March 1926,
Trotsky counseled caution lest precipitate attacks on
foreign interests in China impel the imperialists—
including Japan—into anti-Soviet action. Indeed, Stalin
did his best to woo Tokyo, noting that Japanese
nationalism had great anti-Western potential.

On March 20, 1926, Chiang Kai-shek turned the tables

with a coup that elevated him within the KMT and landed
many Communists in prison. Ignoring the outrage of the
Chinese Communists, Borodin remained in Chiang’s good
graces, whereupon Chiang staged the northern
expedition in which he greatly expanded KMT power with
the help of Communist organizations in the countryside.
But Borodin also advised leftist KMT members to leave
the south for a new base in the Wu-han cities to escape
Chiang’s immediate control. This “Left KMT” or “Wu-han
Body” was to steer the KMT in a Communist direction
and eventually seize control. The Soviet Party Congress in
January 1927 even declared China the “second home” of
world revolution, and Stalin confided to a Moscow
audience that Chiang’s forces were “to be utilized to the
end, squeezed out like a lemon, and then thrown away.”
But Chiang preempted again by ordering a bloody purge
of Shanghai Communists on April 12–13, 1927. Trotsky
blamed Stalin’s lack of faith in revolutionary zeal for the
debacle, declaring that he should have unleashed the
Communists sooner. Instead, the Left KMT eroded, many
of its former adherents going over to Chiang. With the
party thus fractured, Stalin changed his mind and
ordered an armed revolt by Communists against the KMT.
This, too, ended in carnage, and by mid-1928 only
scattered bands (one under Mao Zedong) remained to
take to the hills.
Stalin’s triumph at home and failure in China ended the
formative era of Soviet foreign policy. The Politburo had
expelled Zinovyev, Radek, and Trotsky by October 1926;
the Party Congress condemned all deviation from the
Stalinist line in December 1927; and Trotsky went into
exile in January 1929. Thenceforth Soviet foreign policy
and the Comintern line reflected the will of one man.
Communist parties abroad likewise purged all but
Stalinists and reorganized in rigid imitation of the
U.S.S.R.’s ruthless dictatorship. The Sixth Party Congress
(summer 1928) anathematized social democracy in the
strongest terms ever and strengthened its call for
subversive activities against democratic institutions.
Above all, Stalin declared after an ephemeral war scare of
1926 that the era of peaceful coexistence with capitalism
was coming to an end and ordered vigorous measures to
prepare the U.S.S.R. for war. The New Economic Policy
gave way to the First Five-Year Plan (Oct. 1, 1928) for
collectivization of agriculture and rapid industrialization,
which condemned millions of peasants to expropriation,
starvation, or exile to Siberia, but enabled the regime to
sell wheat abroad to pay for industrial goods. Stalin
imported entire factories from the United States, France,
Italy, and Germany as the basis for the Soviet steel,
automotive, aviation, tire, oil, and gas industries. In 1927
he launched the first of the show trials of industrial
“wreckers” who had allegedly conspired with
reactionaries and foreign agents, and in 1929 he purged
all those—the “Right Opposition”—who questioned the
Five-Year Plan.

The Bolsheviks interpreted their survival and

consolidation in the 1920s as confirmation of their
reading of the objective forces of history. In fact, Soviet
foreign policy could boast of few successes. It was the
Allied defeat of Germany in 1918 and the Red Army’s
military prowess that permitted the revolution to survive;
the Versailles restraints on Germany and cordon sanitaire
in eastern Europe that sheltered Russia from the West as
much as it sheltered Europe from Bolshevism; American
pressure on Japan that restored Vladivostok to the
U.S.S.R.; Anglo-French recognition that opened much of
the world to Soviet trade; and Western technology that
enabled Stalin to hope for rapid economic modernization.
The link with Germany was a Soviet achievement, but
even it had a double edge, for it helped Germany to
prepare for its own remilitarization. Of course, Stalin was
ultimately right that a crisis of capitalism and new round
of imperialism and war were just around the corner, but
in part it was Comintern assaults on Western liberals and
Socialists that helped to undermine the fragile stability of
the 1920s.

Learn More!
The United States, Britain, and world markets
U.S. leverage in world markets
The economic dislocations and technological advances of
the war, the relative rise of American power, and
territorial changes in the colonial world all made
stabilization of world markets a pressing issue in the
1920s. The resolution of this issue was chiefly the
responsibility of the two economies that bestrode the
world: the United States and the British Empire. Their
interests diverged in many regions. At the Allied
Economic Conference of 1916 the British and French had
projected a postwar Allied cartel to control raw materials,
while in 1918 the British drafted plans for excluding
American capital from the British Empire. At the peace
conference Wilson and Lloyd George engaged in
backstage debate over the allocation of United States and
Allied shipping with an eye to expanding their respective
countries’ share of world trade. On the heels of the
merchant shipping rivalry came naval competition that
culminated in the breaking of the Anglo-Japanese
Alliance and the Washington Treaty limitations. Finally,
the war debts raised the issue of whether Britain would
seek a “debtors’ cartel” with the French to defy Wall
Street, or join the United States in a “creditors’ cartel.” At
stake in the U.S.–British disputes was their relative global
power in coming decades.

Traditional American protectionism triumphed after the

electoral victory of the Republicans. The Fordney–
McCumber Tariff (September 1922) was the highest in
U.S. history and angered the Europeans, whose efforts to
acquire dollars through exports were hampered even as
the United States demanded payment of war debts. In
raw materials policy, however, the United States upheld
the Open Door. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover
rejected both statist economic competition that bred war
and laissez-faire competition that bred cycles of boom
and bust. Instead, he advocated formal cooperation
among firms of various nations to stabilize the price and
supply of commodities, raise living standards, and yet
avoid the waste and oppression of regulatory
bureaucracies. This “third alternative” would create “a
new economic system, based neither on the capitalism of
Adam Smith nor upon the Socialism of Karl Marx.” By dint
of leverage and persuasion, the United States gradually
brought Britain around to this model of informal entente.
By late 1922 London bankers also took the American
position on war debts, and the two nations also
cooperated in such new areas as transoceanic cables and
radio. Of surpassing importance for national power in the
mechanized 20th century, however, was oil.

After the Great War, known oil reserves outside the

industrial powers themselves were concentrated in the
British mandates of the Middle East, Persia, the Dutch
East Indies, and Venezuela. The Royal Dutch/Shell Group
and Anglo-Persian Oil Company dominated oil
exploration and production in Asia, but increasingly they
confronted revolutionary nationalism, Bolshevik agitation
(in Persia), and U.S. opposition to imperialism. When the
British and French agreed at San Remo (1920) to
coordinate their oil policies in the Middle East, the
American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. State
Department protested any exclusion of U.S. firms. What
was more, the United States invoked the Mineral Lands
Leasing Act of 1920 against the Dutch, denying them
access to American reserves in retaliation for Shell’s
monopoly in the East Indies. In 1921, Hoover and
Secretary of State Hughes encouraged seven private firms
to form an American Group, led by Standard Oil of New
Jersey, to seek a share of Mesopotamian oil reserves,
while State Department expert Arthur Millspaugh
outlined a plan for worldwide Anglo-American
reciprocity. The British, fearing American retaliation and
anxious to have help against native rebellions, granted
the American Group a 20 percent share of the rich
Mesopotamian fields. In 1922 a similar arrangement
spawned the Perso-American Petroleum Company. In
1925 the Iranian nationalist Reza Khan, inspired in part by
the Kemalist revolt in Turkey, seized power and had
himself proclaimed Reza Shah Pahlavi, but he was unable
to play the British and Americans off against each other.
Oil politics and nationalism in the Middle East, therefore,
presaged events of the post-1945 era. (Another
anticipation occurred in Palestine, where the Balfour
Declaration encouraged thousands of Jewish Zionists to
immigrate, leading to bloody clashes with Palestinian
Arabs in 1921 and 1929.) Reciprocity also triumphed in
U.S.–Dutch oil diplomacy, and Standard Oil of New Jersey
acquired a 28 percent share in the East Indies by 1939.

Learn More!
U.S. leverage in Latin-American affairs
In Venezuela and Central America the situation was the
reverse. During the war the State Department endorsed
all-American oil concessions, but, in accordance with the
principle of reciprocity, Hughes instructed his Latin-
American ambassadors in 1921 to respect foreign
interests. Latin America in general became far more of an
American sphere of influence during the war than ever
before owing to the growth of American commerce at
Britain’s expense. Central American governments now
relied on New York banks to manage their public finance
rather than those of London and Paris, while the U.S.
share of Latin-American trade totaled 32 percent, double
Britain’s share, though British capital still predominated
in the economics of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile.

Ever since the 17 republics of mainland Latin America

emerged from the wreck of the Spanish Empire in the
early 19th century, North Americans had viewed them
with a mixture of condescension and contempt that
focused on their alien culture, racial mix, unstable
politics, and moribund economies. The Western
Hemisphere seemed a natural sphere of U.S. influence,
and this view had been institutionalized in the Monroe
Doctrine of 1823 warning European states that any
attempt to “extend their system” to the Americas would
be viewed as evidence of an unfriendly disposition
toward the United States itself. On the one hand, the
doctrine seemed to underscore republican familiarity, as
suggested by references to “our sister republics,” “our
good neighbors,” our “southern brethren.” On the other
hand, the United States later used the doctrine to justify
paternalism and intervention. This posed a quandary for
the Latin Americans, since a United States strong enough
to protect them from Europe was also strong enough to
pose a threat itself. When Secretary of State James G.
Blaine hosted the first Pan-American Conference in 1889,
Argentina proposed the Calvo Doctrine asking all parties
to renounce special privileges in other states. The United
States refused.

After the Spanish–American War in 1898 the United

States strengthened its power in the Caribbean by
annexing Puerto Rico, declaring Cuba a virtual
protectorate in the Platt Amendment (1901), and
manipulating Colombia into granting independence to
Panama (1904), which in turn invited the United States to
build and control the Panama Canal. In the Roosevelt
Corollary (1904) to the Monroe Doctrine the United
States assumed “an international police power” in cases
where Latin-American insolvency might lead to European
intervention. Such “dollar diplomacy” was used to justify
—and probably made inevitable—the later “gunboat
diplomacy” of U.S. military intervention in Santo
Domingo, Nicaragua, and Haiti. In his first term President
Wilson also became embroiled in the Mexican
Revolution. An affront to U.S. sailors led to his
bombardment of Veracruz (1914), and border raids by
Pancho Villa prompted a U.S. expedition into northern
Mexico (1916). The Mexican Constitution of 1917 then
granted to the state all subsoil resources to prevent their
exploitation by U.S. firms. Such revolutionary efforts to
nationalize resources, however, only meant that they
went undeveloped or were exploited at home by corrupt
officials, while the United States retaliated by cutting off
loans and trade. The Latin-American dilemma of
weakness and disunity in proximity to a mighty and
united power was thus insoluble through unilateral
efforts or a Pan-American movement dominated by
Washington.

Wilson’s proposed League of Nations seemed to offer

Latin America a means of circumventing U.S. influence.
But the United States inserted Article 21 to the effect that
“Nothing in this Covenant shall be deemed to affect the
validity of international engagements, such as treaties of
arbitration or regional understandings like the Monroe
Doctrine.” Secretary of State Hughes later defended U.S.
behaviour by candidly questioning the ability of some
Latin-American states to maintain public order, sound
finance, and the rule of law. When the Chaco dispute
between Bolivia and Paraguay erupted into war, League
of Nations President Briand offered his personal good
offices, but he refused to assert League authority for fear
of irritating the United States. In the end, the Pan-
American Commission of Inquiry assumed jurisdiction.

Latin-American protests grew in volume, especially in

1926, when a Mexican-supported leftist rebellion in
Nicaragua prompted U.S. Secretary of State Frank B.
Kellogg to report to the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee on “Bolshevist Aims and Policies in Mexico
and Latin America.” But intervention by United States
marines in Nicaragua only paved the way for the
dictatorial regime of the Somozas. At the Pan-American
Conference of 1928, rivalry between Argentina and Brazil
and the Chaco contestants, and the caution of other
states, precluded their presenting a united Latin-
American front. But the U.S. administrations of the
decade did labour to improve the American image. The
Clark Amendment of 1928 repudiated the Roosevelt
Corollary, while Hoover toured 10 Latin-American nations
after his election as president and repudiated the “big
brother” role. In the 1920s, therefore, the United States
continued to squeeze out European influence in Latin
America but was itself moving slowly toward the “Good
Neighbor” policy of the 1930s.

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The Locarno era and the dream of disarmament
The Locarno treaties promised a new era of reconciliation
that seemed fulfilled in the mid-to-late 1920s as the
European and world economies recovered and the
German electorate turned its back on extremists of the
right and left. Locarno had also anticipated Germany’s
entry into the League. But the prospect of expanding the
League Council kicked off an indelicate scramble for
Council seats as Britain supported Spain, France
supported Poland, and Brazil insisted that it represent
Latin America (angering the Argentines). Sweden and
Czechoslovakia helped to break the deadlock by
magnanimously sacrificing their seats, although Brazil in
the end quit the League. Finally, on Sept. 8, 1927,
Stresemann led a German delegation into the halls of
Geneva, pledging that Germany’s steadfast will was to
labour for freedom, peace, and unity. Briand, by now the
statesman most associated with “the spirit of Geneva,”
replied in like terms: “No more blood, no more cannon,
no more machine-guns! . . . Let our countries sacrifice
their amour-propre for the sake of the peace of the
world.” The same month, Stresemann tried to capitalize
on the goodwill during an interview with Briand at Thoiry.
He suggested a 1,500,000,000-mark advance on German
reparations payments (to ease the French fiscal crisis
then nearing its climax) in return for immediate
evacuation of the last two Rhineland zones. The French
chamber would likely have rejected such a concession,
and in any case Poincaré, again in power, stabilized the
franc soon after.

The very goodwill expressed at Geneva—and removal of

the Interallied Military Control Commission from
Germany in January 1927—prompted London and
Washington to ask why the French (despite their pleas of
penury when war debts were discussed) still maintained
the largest army in Europe. France clung firm to its belief
in military deterrence of Germany, even when isolated in
the League of Nations Disarmament Preparatory
Commission, but the German demand for equality of
treatment under the League Charter impressed the
Anglo-Americans. To avert U.S. suspicions, Briand enlisted
Secretary Kellogg’s participation in promoting a treaty by
which all nations might “renounce the resort to war as an
instrument of national policy.” This Kellogg–Briand Pact,
signed on Aug. 27, 1928, and eventually subscribed to by
virtually the entire world, marked the high point of
postwar faith in paper treaties and irenic promises.

On July 3, 1928, Chancellor Hermann Müller (a Social

Democrat) and Stresemann decided to force the pace of
Versailles revisionism by claiming Germany’s moral right
to early evacuation of the Rhineland. In return they
offered a definitive reparations settlement to replace the
temporary Dawes Plan. The French were obliged to
consider the offer—a revival of Thoiry—because the
French chamber had refused to ratify the 1926
agreement with the United States on war debts on the
ground that it did not yet know what could be expected
of Germany in reparations. So another committee of
experts under another American, Owen D. Young, drafted
a plan that was approved at the Hague Conference of
August 1929. The Young Plan projected German annuities
lasting until 1989. In return, the Allies abolished the
Reparations Commission, restored German financial
independence, and promised evacuation of the
Rhineland by 1930, five years ahead of the Versailles
schedule.

Why did Briand and even Poincaré make so many

concessions between 1925 and 1929? Briand, of course,
had sincerely hoped for Germany’s “moral disarmament,”
and both concluded that France’s treaty rights had
become a wasting asset. Better to sacrifice them now in
return for concessions and goodwill, since they would
expire sooner or later anyway. But Stresemann was far
from accepting the status quo. His policy of
accommodation was designed to achieve the gradual
abolition of the Versailles strictures until Germany
recovered its prewar freedom of action, at which time he
could set out to restore its prewar boundaries as well. For
instance, he showed no interest in an “Eastern Locarno”
ensuring the boundaries of the successor states. That is
not to say, however, that Stresemann anticipated the use
of force or the revival of Germany’s extreme war aims.

As the decade of the 1920s came to a close, most

Europeans expected prosperity and harmony to continue.
Briand even went so far as to propose in 1929 that France
and Germany explore virtual political integration in a
European union, asking only that Germany confirm her
1919 boundaries as immutable. But Stresemann died
suddenly on Oct. 3, 1929, and three weeks later the New
York stock market crashed. In the storms to come, the
need for firm, material guarantees of security would be
greater than ever. But on June 30, 1930, in accordance
with the Young Plan, the last Allied troops departed the
German Rhineland for home.

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The Origins Of World War II, 1929–39
Track the League of Nations' continual failure to check via
diplomacy the Axis powers' pre-World War II rise
Track the League of Nations' continual failure to check via
diplomacy the Axis powers' pre-World War II rise
The 1930s consisted of many individual but significant
events that bound the Axis powers and culminated in a
World War.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
See all videos for this article
The 1930s were a decade of unmitigated crisis
culminating in the outbreak of a second total war. The
treaties and settlements of the first postwar era collapsed
with shocking suddenness under the impact of the Great
Depression and the aggressive revisionism of Japan, Italy,
and Germany. By 1933 hardly one stone stood on
another of the economic structures raised in the 1920s.
By 1935 Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime had torn up the Treaty
of Versailles and by 1936 the Locarno treaties as well.
Armed conflict began in Manchuria in 1931 and spread to
Abyssinia in 1935, Spain in 1936, China in 1937, Europe in
1939, and the United States and U.S.S.R. in 1941. See the
video.

The context in which this collapse occurred was an

“economic blizzard” that enervated the democracies and
energized the dictatorial regimes. Western intellectuals
and many common citizens lost faith in democracy and
free-market economics, while widespread pacifism,
isolationism, and the earnest desire to avoid the mistakes
of 1914 left Western leaders without the will or the
means to defend the 1919 order. This combination of
demoralized publics, stricken institutions, and uninspired
leadership led historian Pierre Renouvin to describe the
1930s simply as “la décadence.”
The militant authoritarian states on the other hand—
Italy, Japan, and (after 1933) Germany—seemed only to
wax stronger and more dynamic. The Depression did not
cause the rise of the Third Reich or the bellicose
ideologies of the German, Italian, and Japanese
governments (all of which pre-dated the 1930s), but it
did create the conditions for the Nazi seizure of power
and provide the opportunity and excuse for Fascist
empire-building. Hitler and Mussolini aspired to total
control of their domestic societies, in part for the
purpose of girding their nations for wars of conquest
which they saw, in turn, as necessary for revolutionary
transformation at home. This ideological meshing of
foreign and domestic policy rendered the Fascist leaders
wholly enigmatic to the democratic statesmen of Britain
and France, whose attempts to accommodate rather than
resist the Fascist states only made inevitable the war they
longed to avoid.

The economic blizzard

Political consequences of the Depression
The debate over the origins of the Great Depression and
the reasons for its severity and length is highly political,
given the implications for the validity of theories of free
market, regulated, and planned economies, and of
monetary and fiscal policy. It is usually dated from the
New York stock-market crash of October 1929, which
choked the domestic and international flow of credit and
severely damaged global trade and production. Wall
Street prices fell from an index of 216 to 145 in a month,
stabilized in early 1930, then continued downward to a
bottom of 34 in 1932. Industrial production fell nearly 20
percent in 1930. Unlike previous swings in the business
cycle, this financial panic did not eventuate in the
expected period of readjustment, but rather defied all
governmental and private efforts to restore prosperity for
years until it seemed to a great many that the system
itself was breaking down.

Mutual recriminations flew across the Atlantic.

Americans blamed the Europeans for the reparations
tangle, for pegging their currencies too high upon the
return to gold, and for misuse of the American loans of
the 1920s. Europeans blamed the United States for its
insistence on repayment of war debts, high tariffs, and
the unfettered speculation leading to the stock-market
crash. Certainly all of these factors contributed. More
tangibly, however, a sudden contraction of international
credit in June 1928 made an international emergency
likely. Since the Dawes Plan of 1924, Europe had
depended for capital and liquidity on the availability of
American loans, but increasingly American investors were
flocking to the stock market with their savings, and new
capital issues for foreign account in the United States
dropped 78 percent, from $530,000,000 to
$119,000,000. Loans to Germany collapsed from
$200,000,000 in the first half of 1928 to $77,000,000 in
the second half and to $29,500,000 for the entire year of
1929. A world crisis was also brewing in basic
commodities, a market in which prices had been
depressed throughout the decade. Mechanization of
agriculture stimulated overproduction, and Soviet
dumping of wheat on the world market to earn foreign
exchange for the First Five-Year Plan compounded the
problem.
The Smoot–Hawley Tariff, the highest in U.S. history,
became law on June 17, 1930. Conceived and passed by
the House of Representatives in 1929, it may well have
contributed to the loss of confidence on Wall Street and
signaled American unwillingness to play the role of leader
in the world economy. Other countries retaliated with
similarly protective tariffs, with the result that the total
volume of world trade spiraled downward from a
monthly average of $2,900,000,000 in 1929 to less than
$1,000,000,000 by 1933. The credit squeeze, bank
failures, deflation, and loss of exports forced production
down and unemployment up in all industrial nations. In
January 1930 the United States had 3,000,000 idle
workers, and by 1932 there were more than 13,000,000.
In Britain 22 percent of the adult male work force lacked
jobs, while in Germany unemployment peaked in 1932 at
6,000,000. All told, some 30,000,000 people were out of
work in the industrial countries in 1932.

The Depression naturally magnified European bitterness

over the continuing international obligations, but the
weakest link in the financial chain was Austria, whose
central bank, the Creditanstalt, was on the verge of
bankruptcy. In March 1931, Stresemann’s successor as
German foreign minister, Julius Curtius, signed an
agreement with Vienna for a German–Austrian customs
union, but French objections to what they saw as a first
step toward the dreaded Anschluss provoked a run on
the Creditanstalt and forced Berlin and Vienna to
renounce the union on September 3.

The panic then spread to Germany, rendering the

Reichsbank unable to meet its obligations under the
Young Plan. President Hoover responded on June 20,
1931, with a proposal for a one-year moratorium on all
intergovernmental debts. Short of a general recovery or
global agreement on the restoration of trade, however,
the moratorium could only be a stopgap. Instead, every
country fled toward policies of protection, self-
sufficiency, and the creation of regional economic blocs
in hopes of isolating itself from the world collapse. On
Sept. 21, 1931, the Bank of England left the gold
standard, and the pound sterling promptly lost 28
percent of its value, undermining the solvency of
countries in eastern Europe and South America. In
October a national coalition government formed to take
emergency measures. The Ottawa Imperial Economic
Conference of 1932 gave birth to the British
Commonwealth of Nations and a system of imperial
preferences, signaling the end of Britain’s 86-year-old
policy of free trade.

The Lausanne Conference of June–July 1932 took up the

question of what should be done after the Hoover
Moratorium. Even the French granted the impossibility of
further German payments and agreed to make an end of
reparations in return for a final German transfer of
3,000,000,000 marks (which was never made). The
United States, however, still insisted that the war debts
be honoured, whereupon the French parliament willfully
defaulted, damaging Franco-American relations.

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Failures of the League
Panicky retrenchment and disunity also rendered the
Western powers incapable of responding to the first
violation of the postwar territorial settlements. On Sept.
10, 1931, Viscount Cecil assured the League of Nations
that “there has scarcely ever been a period in the world’s
history when war seemed less likely than it does at the
present.” Just eight days later officers of Japan’s
Kwantung Army staged an explosion on the South
Manchurian Railway to serve as pretext for military
adventure. Since 1928, China had seemed to be achieving
an elusive unity under Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists
(KMT), now based in Nanking. While the KMT’s
consolidation of power seemed likely to keep Soviet and
Japanese ambitions in check, resurgent Chinese
nationalism also posed a threat to British and other
foreign interests on the mainland. By the end of 1928,
Chiang was demanding the return of leased territories
and an end to extraterritoriality in the foreign
concessions. On the other hand, the KMT was still split by
factions, banditry continued widespread, the
Communists were increasingly well-organized in remote
Kiangsi, and in the spring of 1931 a rival government
sprang up in Canton. To these problems were added
economic depression and disastrous floods that took
hundreds of thousands of lives.

Japan, meanwhile, suffered rudely from the Depression

because of her dependence on trade, her ill-timed return
to the gold standard in 1930, and a Chinese boycott of
Japanese goods. But social turmoil only increased the
appeal of those who saw in foreign expansion a solution
to Japan’s economic problems. This interweaving of
foreign and domestic policy, propelled by a rabid
nationalism, a powerful military-industrial complex,
hatred of the prevailing distribution of world power, and
the raising of a racialist banner (in this case, antiwhite) to
justify expansion, all bear comparison to European
Fascism. When the parliamentary government in Tokyo
divided as to how to confront this complex of crises, the
Kwantung Army acted on its own. Manchuria, rich in raw
materials, was a prospective sponge for Japanese
emigration (250,000 Japanese already resided there) and
the gateway to China proper. The Japanese public
greeted the conquest with wild enthusiasm.
China appealed at once to the League of Nations, which
called for Japanese withdrawal in a resolution of October
24. But neither the British nor U.S. Asiatic fleets (the
latter comprising no battleships and just one cruiser)
afforded their governments (obsessed in any case with
domestic economic problems) the option of intervention.
The tide of Japanese nationalism would have prevented
Tokyo from bowing to Western pressure in any case. In
December the League Council appointed an investigatory
commission under Lord Lytton, while the United States
contented itself with propounding the Stimson Doctrine,
by which Washington merely refused to recognize
changes born of aggression. Unperturbed, the Japanese
prompted local collaborationists to proclaim, on Feb. 18,
1932, an independent state of Manchukuo, in effect a
Japanese protectorate. The Lytton Commission reported
in October, scolding the Chinese for provocations but
condemning Japan for using excessive force. Lytton
recommended evacuation of Manchuria but privately
believed that Japan had “bitten off more than she can
chew” and would ultimately withdraw of its own accord.
In March 1933, Japan announced its withdrawal instead
from the League of Nations, which had been tested and
found impotent, at least in East Asia.

The League also failed to advance the cause of

disarmament in the first years of the Depression. The
London Naval Conference of 1930 proposed an extension
of the 1922 Washington ratios for naval tonnage, but this
time France and Italy refused to accept the inferior status
assigned to them. In land armaments, the policies of the
powers were by now fixed and predictable. Britain and
the United States deplored “wasteful” military spending,
especially by France, while reparations and war debts
went unpaid. But even Herriot and Briand refused to
disband the French army without additional security
guarantees that the British were unwilling to tender.
Fascist Italy, despite its financial distress, was unlikely to
take disarmament seriously, while Germany, looking for
foreign-policy triumphs to bolster the struggling Republic,
demanded equality of treatment: Either France must
disarm, or Germany must be allowed to expand its army.
The League Council nonetheless summoned delegates
from 60 nations to a grand Disarmament Conference at
Geneva beginning in February 1932. When Germany
failed to achieve satisfaction by the July adjournment it
withdrew from the negotiations. France, Britain, and the
United States devised various formulas to break the
deadlock, including a No Force Declaration (Dec. 11,
1932), abjuring the use of force to resolve disputes, and a
five-power (including Italy) promise to grant German
equality “in a system providing security for all nations.”
On the strength of these the Disarmament Conference
resumed in February 1933. By then, however, Adolf Hitler
was chancellor of the German Reich.

A common impression of Herbert Hoover is that he was

passive in the face of the Depression and isolationist in
foreign policy. The truth was almost the reverse, and in
the 1932 campaign his Democratic opponent, Franklin
Roosevelt, was the more traditional in economic policy
and isolationist in foreign policy. Indeed, Hoover
bequeathed to his successor two bold initiatives meant
to restore international cooperation in matters of trade,
currency, and security: the London Economic Conference
and the Geneva Disarmament Conference. The former
convened in June 1933 in hopes of restoring the gold
standard but was undermined by President Roosevelt’s
suspension of the gold convertibility of the dollar and his
acerbic message rejecting the conference’s labours on
July 3. At home, Roosevelt proposed the series of
government actions known as the New Deal in an effort
to restore U.S. productivity, in isolation, if need be, from
the rest of the world. The Disarmament Conference came
to a similar end. In March, Ramsay MacDonald proposed
the gradual reduction of the French army from half a
million to 200,000 men and the doubling of Germany’s
Versailles army to the same figure, accompanied by
international verification. But a secret German decree of
April 4 created a National Defense Council to coordinate
rearmament on a massive scale. Clearly the German
demand for equality was a ploy to wreck the conference
and serve as pretext for unilateral rearmament.

Negotiations were delayed by a sudden initiative from

Mussolini in March calling for a pact among Germany,
Italy, France, and Britain to grant Germany equality,
revise the peace treaties, and establish a four-power
directorate to resolve international disputes. Mussolini
appears to have wanted to downgrade the League in
favour of a Concert of Europe, enhancing Italian prestige
and perhaps gaining colonial concessions in return for
reassuring the Western powers. The French watered
down the plan until the Four-Power Pact signed in Rome
on June 7 was a mass of anodyne generalities. Any
prospect that the new Nazi regime might be drawn to
collective security disappeared on Oct. 14, 1933, when
Hitler denounced the unfair treatment accorded
Germany at Geneva and announced its withdrawal from
the League of Nations.

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The rise of Hitler and fall of Versailles
Failure of the German Republic
The origins of the Nazi Third Reich must be sought not
only in the appeal of Hitler and his party but also in the
weakness of the Weimar Republic. Under the republic,
Germany boasted the most democratic constitution in
the world, yet the fragmentation of German politics
made government by majority a difficult proposition.
Many Germans identified the republic with the despised
Treaty of Versailles and, like the Japanese, concluded that
the 1920s policy of peaceful cooperation with the West
had failed. What was more, the republic seemed
incapable of curing the Depression or dampening the
appeal of the Communists. In the end, it self-destructed.
The first Depression-era elections, in September 1930,
reflected the electorate’s flight from the moderate
centrist parties: Communists won 77 seats in the
Reichstag, while the Nazi delegation rose from 12 to 107.
Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, unable to command a
majority, governed by emergency decree of the aged
president, Paul von Hindenburg.

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazis)

exploited the resentment and fear stemming from
Versailles and the Depression. Its platform was a clever, if
contradictory, mixture of socialism, corporatism, and
virulent assertion in foreign policy. The Nazis outdid the
Communists in forming paramilitary street gangs to
intimidate opponents and create an image of irresistible
strength, but unlike the Communists, who implied that
war veterans had been dupes of capitalist imperialism,
the Nazis honoured the Great War as a time when the
German Volk had been united as never before. The army
had been “stabbed in the back” by defeatists, they
claimed, and those who signed the Armistice and
Versailles had been criminals; worse, international
capitalists, Socialists, and Jews continued to conspire
against the German people. Under Nazism alone, they
insisted, could Germans again unify under ein Reich, ein
Volk, ein Führer and get on with the task of combating
Germany’s real enemies. This amalgam of fervent
nationalism and rhetorical socialism, not to mention the
charismatic spell of Hitler’s oratory and the hypnotic
pomp of Nazi rallies, was psychologically more appealing
than flaccid liberalism or divisive class struggle. In any
case, the Communists (on orders from Moscow) turned
to help the Nazis paralyze democratic procedure in
Germany in the expectation of seizing power themselves.

Brüning resigned in May 1932, and the July elections

returned 230 Nazi delegates. After two short-lived rightist
cabinets foundered, Hindenburg appointed Hitler
chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933. The president, parliamentary
conservatives, and the army all apparently expected that
the inexperienced, lower-class demagogue would submit
to their guidance. Instead, Hitler secured dictatorial
powers from the Reichstag and proceeded to establish,
by marginally legal means, a totalitarian state. Within two
years the regime had outlawed all other political parties
and coopted or intimidated all institutions that competed
with it for popular loyalty, including the German states,
labour unions, press and radio, universities,
bureaucracies, courts, and churches. Only the army and
foreign office remained in the hands of traditional elites.
But this fact, and Hitler’s own caution at the start,
allowed Western observers fatally to misperceive Nazi
foreign policy as simply a continuation of Weimar
revisionism.

Adolf Hitler recounted in Mein Kampf, the

autobiographical harangue written in prison after his
abortive putsch of 1923, that he saw himself as that rare
individual, the “programmatic thinker and the politician
become one.” Hitler distilled his Weltanschauung from
the social Darwinism, anti-Semitism, and racialist
anthropology current in prewar Vienna. Where Marx had
reduced all of history to struggles among social classes, in
which revolution was the engine of progress and the
dictatorship of the proletariat the culmination, Hitler
reduced history to struggle among biologic races, in
which war was the engine of progress and Aryan
hegemony the culmination. The enemies of the Germans,
indeed of history itself, were internationalists who
warred against the purity and race-consciousness of
peoples—they were the capitalists, the Socialists, the
pacifists, the liberals, all of whom Hitler identified with
the Jews. This condemnation of Jews as a racial group
made Nazism more dangerous than earlier forms of
religious or economic anti-Semitism that had long been
prevalent throughout Europe. For if the Jews, as Hitler
thought, were like bacteria poisoning the bloodstream of
the Aryan race, the only solution was their extermination.
Nazism, in short, was the twisted product of a secular,
scientific age of history.

Hitler’s worldview dictated a unity of foreign and

domestic policies based on total control and
militarization at home, war and conquest abroad. In Mein
Kampf he ridiculed the Weimar politicians and their
“bourgeois” dreams of restoring the Germany of 1914.
Rather, the German Volk could never achieve their
destiny without Lebensraum (“living space”) to support a
vastly increased German population and form the basis
for world power. Lebensraum, wrote Hitler in Mein
Kampf, was to be found in the Ukraine and intermediate
lands of eastern Europe. This “heartland” of the Eurasian
continent (so named by the geopoliticians Sir Halford
Mackinder and Karl Haushofer) was especially suited for
conquest since it was occupied, in Hitler’s mind, by Slavic
Untermenschen (subhumans) and ruled from the centre
of the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy in Moscow. By 1933
Hitler had apparently imagined a step-by-step plan for
the realization of his goals. The first step was to rearm,
thereby restoring complete freedom of maneuver to
Germany. The next step was to achieve Lebensraum in
alliance with Italy and with the sufferance of Britain. This
greater Reich could then serve, in the distant third step,
as a base for world dominion and the purification of a
“master race.” In practice, Hitler proved willing to adapt
to circumstances, seize opportunities, or follow the
wanderings of intuition. Sooner or later politics must give
way to war, but because Hitler did not articulate his
ultimate fantasies to the German voters or
establishment, his actions and rhetoric seemed to imply
only restoration, if not of the Germany of 1914, then the
Germany of 1918, after Brest-Litovsk. In fact, his program
was potentially without limits.

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European responses to Nazism
European reaction to the rise of Nazism was cautious, but
not at first overtly hostile. The Four-Power Pact and a
concordat with the Vatican (July 20, 1933), negotiated by
the Catholic Franz von Papen, conferred a certain
legitimacy on the Nazi regime. (Hitler sought to end
Vatican support for the Catholic Centre Party while he
proceeded to subordinate the churches and to corrupt
Christianity into a state-centred form of neo-paganism.
Pope Pius XI, like every other European statesmen after
him, thought that he could appease and moderate the
Nazis.) On Jan. 26, 1934, Hitler shocked all parties by
signing a nonaggression pact with Poland. This bit of
duplicity neutralized France’s primary ally in the east
while helping to secure Germany over the dangerous
years of rearmament. The new Polish foreign minister,
Józef Beck, was in turn responding to the dilemma of
Poland’s central position between Germany and the
U.S.S.R. He hoped to preserve a balance in his relations
with the two giant neighbours (Poland signed a three-
year pact with Moscow in July 1932) but feared the
Soviets (from whom Poland had grabbed so much
territory in 1921) more than the still-weak Germans. The
pact with Germany was meant to run for 10 years.

France was the nation most concerned by the Nazi threat

and most able to take vigorous action. But fear of
another war, the defeatist mood dating from the failure
of the Ruhr occupation, the passivity engendered by the
Maginot Line (due for completion in just five years), and
domestic strife exacerbated by the Depression and the
Stavisky scandal of 1933, all served to hamstring French
foreign policy. As in the Weimar Republic, Communists
and monarchists or Fascist groups like the Croix de Feu
and Action Française battled in the streets. In February
1934 a crowd of war veterans and rightists stormed the
parliament, and the Édouard Daladier Cabinet was forced
to resign to head off a coup d’état. The new foreign
minister, Louis Barthou, had been a friend of Poincaré
and made a final effort to shore up France’s security
system in Europe: “All these League of Nations fancies—
I’d soon put an end to them if I were in power. . . . It’s
alliances that count.” But alliances with whom? The
French Left was adamantly opposed to cooperation with
Fascist Italy, the Right despised cooperation with the
Communist Soviet Union. Britain as always eschewed
commitments, while Poland had come to terms with
Germany. Nevertheless, the moment seemed opportune;
both Italy and the U.S.S.R. now made clear their
opposition to Hitler and desire to embrace collective
security.

To be sure, Mussolini was gratified by the triumph of the

man he liked to consider his younger protégé, Hitler, but
he also understood that Italy fared best while playing off
France and Germany, and he feared German expansion
into the Danubian basin. In September 1933 he made
Italian support for Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss
conditional on the latter’s establishment of an Italian-
style Fascist regime. In June 1934 Mussolini and Hitler
met for the first time, and in their confused conversation
(there was no interpreter present) Mussolini understood
the Führer to say that he had no desire for Anschluss. Yet,
a month later, Austrian Nazis arranged a putsch in which
Dollfuss was murdered. Mussolini responded with a
threat of force (quite likely a bluff) on the Brenner Pass
and thereby saved Austrian independence. Kurt von
Schuschnigg, a pro-Italian Fascist, took over in Vienna. In
Paris and London it seemed that Mussolini was one
leader with the will and might to stand up to Hitler.

Stalin, meanwhile, had repented of the equanimity with

which he had witnessed the Nazi seizure of power. Before
1933, Germany and the U.S.S.R. had collaborated, and
Soviet trade had been a rare boon to the German
economy in the last years of the Weimar Republic. Still,
the behaviour of German Communists contributed to the
collapse of parliamentarism, and now Hitler had shown
that he, too, knew how to crush dissent and master a
nation. The Communist line shifted in 1934–35 from
condemnation of social democracy, collective security,
and Western militarism to collaboration with other anti-
Fascist forces in “Popular Fronts,” alliance systems, and
rearmament. The United States and the U.S.S.R.
established diplomatic relations for the first time in
November 1933, and in September 1934 the Soviets
joined the League of Nations, where Maksim Litvinov
became a loud proponent of collective security against
Fascist revisionism.

Thus, Barthou’s plan for reviving the wartime alliance and

arranging an “Eastern Locarno” began to seem plausible
—even after Oct. 9, 1934, when Barthou and King
Alexander of Yugoslavia were shot dead in Marseille by
an agent of Croatian terrorists. The new French foreign
minister, the rightist Pierre Laval, was especially friendly
to Rome. The Laval–Mussolini agreements of Jan. 7,
1935, declared France’s disinterest in the fate of
Abyssinia in implicit exchange for Italian support of
Austria. Mussolini took this to mean that he had French
support for his plan to conquer that independent African
country. Just six days later the strength of German
nationalism was resoundingly displayed in the Saar
plebiscite. The small, coal-rich Saarland, detached from
Germany for 15 years under the Treaty of Versailles, was
populated by miners of Catholic or social democratic
loyalty. They knew what fate awaited their churches and
labour unions in the Third Reich, and yet 90 percent
voted for union with Germany. Then, on March 16, Hitler
used the extension of French military service to two years
and the Franco-Soviet negotiations as pretexts for tearing
up the disarmament clauses of Versailles, restoring the
military draft, and beginning an open buildup of
Germany’s land, air, and sea forces.

In the wake of this series of shocks Britain, France, and

Italy joined on April 11, 1935, at a conference at Stresa to
reaffirm their opposition to German expansion. Laval and
Litvinov also initialed a five-year Franco-Soviet alliance on
May 2, each pledging assistance in case of unprovoked
aggression. Two weeks later a Czech-Soviet pact
complemented it. Laval’s system, however, was flawed;
mutual suspicion between Paris and Moscow, the failure
to add a military convention, and the lack of Polish
adherence meant that genuine Franco-Soviet military
action was unlikely. The U.S.S.R. was in a state of trauma
brought on by the Five-Year Plans, the slaughter and
starvation of millions of farmers, especially in the
Ukraine, in the name of collectivization, and the
beginnings of Stalin’s mass purges of the government,
army, and Communist party. It was clear that Russian
industrialization was bound to overthrow the balance of
power in Eurasia, hence Stalin was fearful of the
possibility of a preemptive attack before his own
militarization was complete. But he was even more
obsessed with the prospect of wholesale rebellion
against his regime in case of invasion. Stalin’s primary
goal, therefore, was to keep the capitalist powers divided
and the U.S.S.R. at peace. Urging the liberal Western
states to combine against the Fascists was one method;
exploring bilateral relations with Germany, as in the 1936
conversations between Hjalmar Schacht and Soviet trade
representative David Kandelaki, was another.
Italy and Britain looked askance at the Franco-Soviet
combination, while Hitler in any case sugar-coated the
pill of German rearmament by making a pacific speech on
May 21, 1935, in which he offered bilateral pacts to all
Germany’s neighbours (except Lithuania) and assured the
British that he, unlike the Kaiser, did not intend to
challenge them on the seas. The Anglo-German Naval
Agreement of June 18, which countenanced a new
German navy though limiting it to not larger than 35
percent the size of the British, angered the French and
drove a wedge between them and the British.

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Italian aggression
The Stresa Front collapsed as soon as Paris and London
learned the price Mussolini meant to exact for it. By 1935
Mussolini had ruled for 13 years but had made little
progress toward his “new Roman Empire” that was to
free Italy from the “prison of the Mediterranean.” What
was more, Il Duce concluded that only the crucible of war
could fully undermine the monarchy and the church and
consummate the Fascist revolution at home. Having
failed to pry the French out of their North African
possessions, Mussolini fixed on the independent African
empire of Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Italy had failed in 1896 to
conquer Abyssinia, thus to do so now would erase a
national humiliation. This spacious land astride Italy’s
existing coastal colonies on the Horn of Africa boasted
fertile uplands suitable for Italy’s excess rural population,
and Mussolini promised abundant raw materials as well.
The conquest of Abyssinia would also appear to open the
path to the Sudan and Suez. Finally, this landlocked,
semifeudal kingdom seemed an easy target. In fact,
Emperor Haile Selassie had begun a modernization
program of sorts, but this only suggested that the sooner
Italy struck, the better.

The Italian army was scarcely prepared for such an

undertaking, and Mussolini made matters worse by
ordering ill-trained blackshirt brigades to Africa and
entrusting the campaign to a Fascist loyalist, Emilio De
Bono, rather than to a senior army officer. The military
buildup at Mitsiwa left little doubt as to Italian intentions,
and Britain tried in June to forestall the invasion by
arranging the cession of some Abyssinian territories. But
Mussolini knew that the British Mediterranean fleet was
as unready as his own and expected no interference.

De Bono’s absurdly large army invaded Ethiopia from

Eritrea on Oct. 3, 1935. Adwa, the site of the 1896
debacle, fell in three days, after which the advance
bogged down and Mussolini replaced De Bono with
Marshal Pietro Badoglio. The League Council promptly
declared Italy the aggressor (October 7), whereupon
France and Britain were caught on the horns of a
dilemma. To wink at Italy’s conquest would be to
condone aggression and admit the bankruptcy of the
League; to resist would be to smash the Stresa Front and
lose Italian help against the greater threat, Germany. The
League finally settled on economic sanctions but shied
away from an embargo on oil, which would have
grounded the Italian army and air force, or closure of the
Suez Canal, which would have cut the Italian supply line.
The remaining sanctions only vexed Italy without helping
Abyssinia. Germany, no longer a League member, ignored
the sanctions and so healed its rift with Rome.

In December, Laval and Sir Samuel Hoare, the British

foreign secretary, contrived a secret plan to offer
Mussolini most of Abyssinia in return for a truce. This
Hoare–Laval Plan was a realistic effort to end the crisis
and repair the Stresa Front, but it also made a mockery of
the League. When it was leaked to the press, public
indignation forced Hoare’s resignation. The Italians finally
took the fortress of Mekele on November 8, but their
slow advance led Mussolini to order a major offensive in
December. He instructed Badoglio to use whatever
means necessary, including terror bombing and poison
gas, to end the war.

The first German move

Hitler observed the Abyssinian war with controlled glee,
for dissolution of the Stresa Front—composed of the
guarantors of Locarno—gave him the chance to reoccupy
the Rhineland with minimal risk. A caretaker government
under Albert Sarraut was in charge of France during a
divisive electoral campaign dominated by the leftist
Popular Front, and Britain was convulsed by a
constitutional crisis stemming from King Edward VIII’s
insistence on marrying an American divorcée. On March
7, 1936, Hitler ordered a token force of 22,000 soldiers
back across the bridges of the Rhine. Characteristically,
he chose a weekend for his sudden move and then
softened the blow with offers of nonaggression pacts and
a new demilitarized zone on both sides of the frontier.
Even so, Hitler assured his generals that he would retreat
if the French intervened.

German reoccupation and fortification of the Rhineland

was the most significant turning point of the interwar
years. After March 1936 the British and French could no
longer take forceful action against Hitler except by
provoking the total war they feared. Why did the French,
especially, not act to prevent this calamity to their
defensive posture? They were not taken by surprise—
Hitler’s preparations had been noted—and Sarraut
himself told French radio listeners that “Strasbourg
would not be left under German guns.” Moreover, the
French army still outnumbered the German and could
expect support from Czechoslovakia and possibly Poland.
On the other hand, the French army commander, General
Maurice Gamelin, vastly overestimated German strength
and insisted that a move into the Rhineland be preceded
by general mobilization. The French Cabinet also
concluded that it should do nothing without the full
agreement of the British. But London was not the place
to look for backbone. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin
shrugged, “They might succeed in smashing Germany
with the aid of Russia, but it would probably only result in
Germany going Bolshevik,” while the editor of The Times
asked, “It’s none of our business, is it? It’s their own
back-garden they’re walking into.” By failing to respond
to the violation, however, Britain, France, and Italy had
broken the Locarno treaties just as gravely as had
Germany.

The strategic situation in Europe now shifted in favour of

the Fascist powers. In June, Mussolini appointed as
foreign minister his son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano, who
concluded an agreement with Germany on July 11 in
which Italy acquiesced in Austria’s behaving henceforth
as “a German state.” The Rome–Berlin Axis followed on
November 1, and the German–Japanese Anti-Comintern
Pact, another vague agreement ostensibly directed at
Moscow, on November 25. Finally, Belgium unilaterally
renounced its alliance with France on October 14 and
returned to its traditional neutrality in hopes of escaping
the coming storm. As a direct result of the Abyssinian
imbroglio, the militant revisionists had come together
and the status quo powers had splintered.

Meanwhile, on May 5, 1936, Italian troops had entered

Addis Ababa and completed the conquest of Abyssinia,
although the country was never entirely pacified, despite
costly and brutal repression. The Abyssinian war had
been a disaster for the democracies, smashing both the
Stresa Front and the credibility of the League. As the
historian A.J.P. Taylor wrote, “One day [the League] was a
powerful body imposing sanctions, seemingly more
effective than ever before; the next day it was an empty
sham, everyone scuttling from it as quickly as possible.”
In December 1937, Italy, too, quit the League of Nations.

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British appeasement and American isolationism
The rationale of appeasement
It is time to explore the roots of democratic lethargy in
the face of Fascist expansionism in the 1930s. British
policy, in particular, which Prime Minister Neville
Chamberlain would proudly term “appeasement,”
conjures up images of naive, even craven surrender to
Nazi demands. In the minds of British statesmen,
however, appeasement was a moral and realistic
expression of all that was liberal and Christian in British
culture. First, 1914 cast a dark shadow on the opinion
leaders of the 1930s, who determined this time to shun
arms races and balance-of-power and commercial
competition, and so to spare the world another horrible
war. Second, the overextended British Empire lacked the
resources to confront threats from Japan in Asia, Italy in
the Mediterranean, and Germany in Europe all at once.
Wisdom dictated that Britain come to terms with the
greatest and closest to home of its potential adversaries,
Germany. Third, the British public was understandably
provincial about central Europe and had no desire (in the
popular French phrase) “to die for Danzig.” This
sentiment was even more pronounced in the British
dominions. Fourth, many Tory and Labour leaders, while
put off by Hitler’s ideology and brutality, shared his
antipathy to Versailles and urged “fair play” in cases
where German nationals were separated from the
fatherland. Thus, Wilsonian national self-determination
perversely made the Nazis appear to be on the side of
principle. Fifth, the appeasers also presumed that the
Nazis would become less rambunctious once their
grievances were removed. Sixth, some demoralized
Englishmen believed the propagandistic claim that
Fascism was the only bulwark against the spread of
Bolshevism. Seventh, domestic opinion in Britain
favoured a passive reliance on the League of Nations
somehow to prevent another catastrophe—Baldwin’s
policy of sanctions without war in Abyssinia, as the chief
case in point, earned his party a huge electoral victory in
November 1935. Nor had pacifism flagged since 1933,
when the Oxford Union “Resolved that this house refuses
to fight for King and Country.”

Voices of dissent existed. Some Left-Labourites warned

that Fascism must be stopped sooner or later, while a few
Tory backbenchers led by Winston Churchill demanded
rearmament. In the mid-1930s a source in the Air
Ministry leaked data to Churchill suggesting that
Germany’s air force was rapidly overtaking Britain’s. Fear
of the Luftwaffe only provided another excuse for
appeasement, however, for aviation had developed to
the point that theorists like the Italian Giulio Douhet
could argue that air bombardment would win the next
war in 48 hours by leveling enemy cities. In an air age, the
English Channel no longer sheltered Britain from
destruction.

Many of these same considerations afflicted French

policy: fear of another total war and of destruction from
the air, apathy toward eastern Europe, and ideological
confusion. The election of May 3, 1936, brought victory
for the Popular Front, which formed a Cabinet under the
Socialist Léon Blum, but his economic policies threw
France into a turmoil of strikes, capital flight, and
recrimination. “Better Hitler than Blum,” said some on
the right.

The civil war in Spain

The Spanish Civil War highlighted the contrast between
democratic bankruptcy and totalitarian dynamism. In
1931 the Spanish monarchy gave way to a republic whose
unstable government moved steadily to the left,
outraging the army and church. After repeated
provocations on both sides, army and air force officers
proclaimed a Nationalist revolt on July 17, 1936, that
survived its critical early weeks with logistical help from
Portugal’s archconservative premier, António Salazar. The
Nationalists, rallying behind General Francisco Franco,
quickly seized most of Old Castile in the north and a
beachhead in the south extending from Córdoba to Cádiz
opposite Spanish Morocco, where the insurrection had
begun. But the Republicans, or loyalists, a Popular Front
composed of liberals, Socialists, Trotskyites, Stalinists,
and anarchists, took up arms to defend the Republic
elsewhere and sought outside aid against what they
styled as the latest Fascist threat. Spain became a
battleground for the ideologies wrestling for mastery of
Europe.

The civil war posed a dilemma for France and Britain,

pitting the principle of defending democracy against the
principle of noninterference in the domestic affairs of
other states. The ineffectual Blum at first fraternally
promised aid to the Popular Front in Madrid, but he
reneged within a month for fear that such involvement
might provoke a European war or a civil war in France.
The British government counseled nonintervention and
seemingly won Germany and Italy to that position, but
Hitler, on well-rehearsed anti-Bolshevik grounds,
hurriedly dispatched 20 transport planes that allowed
Franco to move reinforcements from Morocco. Not to be
outdone, Mussolini sent matériel, Fascist “volunteers,”
and, ultimately, regular army formations. The Italians
performed miserably (especially at Guadalajara in March
1937), but German aid, including the feared Condor
Legion, was effective. Hitler expected to be paid for his
support, however, with economic concessions, and he
also saw Spain as a testing-ground for Germany’s newest
weapons and tactics. These included terror bombing such
as that over Guernica in April 1937, which caused far
fewer deaths than legend has it but which became an
icon of anti-Fascism through the painting of Pablo
Picasso. International aid to the Republicans ran from the
heroic to the sinister. Thousands of leftists and idealistic
volunteers from throughout Europe and America flocked
to International Brigades to defend the Republic. Material
support, however, came only from Stalin, who demanded
gold payment in return and ordered Comintern agents
and commissars to accompany the Soviet supplies. These
Stalinists systematically murdered Trotskyites and other
“enemies on the left,” undermined the radical
government of Barcelona, and exacerbated the
intramural confusion in Republican ranks. The upshot of
Soviet intervention was to discredit the Republic and
thereby strengthen Western resolve to stay out.

The war dragged on through 1937 and 1938 and claimed

some 500,000 lives before the Nationalists finally
captured Barcelona in January 1939 and Madrid in
March. During the final push to victory, France and
Britain recognized Franco’s government. By then,
however, the fulcrum of diplomacy had long since shifted
to central Europe. The Nationalist victory did not, in the
end, redound to the detriment of France, for Franco
politely sent the Germans and Italians home and
observed neutrality in the coming war, whereas a pro-
Communist Spain might have posed a genuine threat to
France during the era of the Nazi–Soviet pact.

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The return of U.S. isolationism
The extreme isolationism that gripped the United States
in the 1930s reinforced British appeasement and French
paralysis. To Americans absorbed with their own distress,
Hitler and Mussolini appeared as slightly ridiculous
rabble-rousers on movie-house newsreels and certainly
no concern of theirs. Moreover, the revisionist theory
that the United States had been sucked into war in 1917
through the machinations of arms merchants or Wall
Street bankers gained credence from the Senate’s Nye
Committee inquiries of 1934–36. U.S. isolationism,
however, had many roots: liberal abhorrence of arms and
war, the evident failure of Wilsonianism, the Great
Depression, and the revisionism of American historians,
who were among the leaders in arguing that Germany
was not solely responsible for 1914. Nor were
isolationists restricted only to the Great Plains states or
to one political party. Some members of Congress
favoured punctilious defense of U.S. interests in the
world but rejected involvement in the quarrels of others.
Some were full-fledged pacifists even if it meant
surrendering certain U.S. rights abroad. Left-wing
isolationists warned that another great war would push
the United States in the direction of Fascism.
Conservative isolationists warned that another great war
would usher in socialism.

Examine the effects of U.S. Neutrality Acts on pre-World

War II international relations
Examine the effects of U.S. Neutrality Acts on pre-World
War II international relations
Simply by having to amend its own Neutrality Acts of
1935–37, the United States began to recognize the
inevitability of involvement in the war.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
See all videos for this article
These factions disputed among themselves over the
wording of legislation, but their collective strength was
enough to carry a number of bills designed to prevent a
recurrence of the events of 1914–17. The Johnson Act of
1934 forbade American citizens to lend money to foreign
countries that had not paid their past war debts. The
Neutrality acts of 1935 and 1936 prohibited sale of war
matériel to belligerents and forbade any exports to
belligerents not paid for with cash and carried in their
own ships. Thus, the United States was not to acquire a
stake in the victory of any side or expose its merchant
ships to submarines. (See the video.) The effect of these
acts, however, was to preclude American aid to Abyssinia,
Spain, and China, and thus hurt the victims of aggression
more than the aggressors.
The United States did take steps in the 1930s, however,
to mobilize the Western Hemisphere for the purposes of
fighting the Depression and resisting European, especially
German, encroachments. Roosevelt gave this initiative a
name in his first inaugural address: the Good Neighbor
Policy. Building on steps taken by Hoover, Roosevelt
pledged nonintervention in Latin domestic affairs at the
Montevideo Pan-American Conference of 1933, signed a
treaty with the new Cuban government (May 29, 1934)
abrogating the Platt Amendment, mediated a truce in the
Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay in 1934 (with a
peace treaty following in July 1938), and negotiated
commercial treaties with Latin-American states. As war
approached overseas, Washington also promoted pan-
American unity on the basis of nonintervention,
condemnation of aggression, no forcible collection of
debts, equality of states, respect for treaties, and
continental solidarity. The Declaration of Lima (1938)
provided for pan-American consultation in case of a
threat to the “peace, security, or territorial integrity” of
any state.
Japan’s aggression in China
The first major challenge to American isolationism,
however, occurred in Asia. After pacifying Manchukuo,
the Japanese turned their sights toward North China and
Inner Mongolia. Over the intervening years, however, the
KMT had made progress in unifying China. The
Communists were still in the field, having survived their
Long March (1934–35) to Yen-an in the north, but
Chiang’s government, with German and American help,
had introduced modern roads and communications,
stable paper currency, banking, and educational systems.
How might Tokyo best round out its continental interests:
by preemptive war or by cooperating with this resurgent
China to expel Western influence from East Asia? The
chief of the operations section of the Japanese general
staff favoured collaboration and feared that an invasion
of China proper would bring war with the Soviets or the
Americans, whose economic potential he understood.
Supreme headquarters, however, preferred to take
military advantage of apparent friction between Chiang
and a North China warlord. In September 1936, when
Japan issued seven secret demands that would have
made North China a virtual Japanese protectorate,
Chiang rejected them. In December Chiang was even
kidnapped by the commander of Nationalist forces from
Manchuria, who tried to force him to suspend fighting
the Communists and to declare war on Japan. This Sian
Incident demonstrated the unlikelihood of Chinese
collaboration with the Japanese program and
strengthened the war party in Tokyo. As in 1931,
hostilities began almost spontaneously and soon took on
a life of their own.

An incident at the Marco Polo Bridge near Peking (then

known as Pei-p’ing) on July 7, 1937, escalated into an
undeclared Sino-Japanese war. Contrary to the Japanese
analysis, both Chiang and Mao Zedong vowed to come to
the aid of North China, while Japanese moderates failed
to negotiate a truce or localize the conflict and lost all
influence. By the end of July the Japanese had occupied
Peking and Tientsin. The following month they blockaded
the South China coast and captured Shanghai after brutal
fighting and the slaughter of countless civilians. Similar
atrocities accompanied the fall of Nanking on December
13. The Japanese expected the Chinese to sue for peace,
but Chiang moved his government to Han-k’ou and
continued to resist the “dwarf bandits” with hit-and-run
tactics that sucked the invaders in more deeply. The
Japanese could occupy cities and fan out along roads and
rails almost at will, but the countryside remained hostile.

World opinion condemned Japan in the harshest terms.

The U.S.S.R. concluded a nonaggression pact with China
(Aug. 21, 1937), and Soviet-Mongolian forces skirmished
with Japanese on the border. Britain vilified Japan in the
League, while Roosevelt invoked the Stimson Doctrine in
his “quarantine speech” of October 5. But Roosevelt was
prevented by the Neutrality acts from aiding China even
after the sinking of U.S. and British gunboats on the
Yangtze.

On March 28, 1938, the Japanese established a

Manchukuo-type puppet regime at Nanking, and spring
and summer offensives brought them to the Wu-han
cities (chiefly Han-k’ou) on the Yangtze. Chiang
stubbornly moved his government again, this time to
Chungking, which the Japanese bombed mercilessly in
May 1939, as they did Canton for weeks before its
occupation in October. Such incidents, combined with the
Nazi and Fascist air attacks in Spain and Abyssinia, were
omens of the total war to come. The United States finally
took a first step in opposition to Japanese aggression on
July 29, 1939, announcing that it would terminate its
1911 commercial treaty with Japan in six months and
thereby cut off vital raw materials to the Japanese war
machine. It was all Roosevelt could do under existing law,
but it set in train the events that would lead to Pearl
Harbor.

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Anschluss and the Munich Pact
The German-Austrian union
Heightened assertiveness also characterized foreign
policies in Europe in 1937. But while Hitler’s involved
explicit preparations for war, Britain’s consisted of explicit
attempts to satisfy him with concessions. The
conjuncture of these policies doomed the independence
of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, and set Europe on
a slippery slope to war.

By the end of 1936, Hitler and the Nazis were total

masters of Germany with the exceptions of the army and
the foreign office, and even the latter had to tolerate the
activities of a special party apparatus under the Nazi
“expert” on foreign policy, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Nazi
prestige, bolstered by such theatrics as the Berlin
Olympics, the German pavilion at the Paris Exhibition,
and the enormous Nürnberg party rallies, was reaching
its zenith. In September 1936, Hitler imitated Stalin again
in his proclamation of a Four-Year Plan to prepare the
German economy for war under the leadership of
Hermann Göring. With the Rhineland secured, Hitler
grew anxious to begin his “drive to the east,” if possible
with British acquiescence. To this end he appointed
Ribbentrop ambassador to London in October 1936 with
the plea, “Bring me back the British alliance.”
Intermittent talks lasted a year, their main topic being the
return of the German colonies lost at Versailles. But
agreement was impossible, since Hitler’s real goal was a
free hand on the Continent, while the British hoped, in
return for specific concessions, to secure arms control
and respect for the status quo.

Meanwhile, Stanley Baldwin, having seen the abdication

crisis through to a finish, retired in May 1937 in favour of
Neville Chamberlain. The latter now had the chance to
pursue what he termed “active appeasement”: find out
what Hitler really wants, give it to him, and thereby save
the peace and husband British resources for defense of
the empire against Italy and Japan. By the time of Lord
Halifax’s celebrated visit to Berchtesgaden in November
1937, Hitler had already lost interest in the talks and
begun to prepare for the absorption of Austria, a country
in which, said Halifax, Britain took little interest. Hitler
had also taken measures to complete the Nazification of
foreign and defense policy.

On November 5, Hitler made a secret speech in the

presence of the commanders of the three armed
services, War Minister Werner von Blomberg, Foreign
Minister Konstantin von Neurath, and Göring. The Führer
made clear his belief that Germany must begin to expand
in the immediate future, with Austria and Czechoslovakia
as the first targets, and that the German economy must
be ready for full-scale war by 1943–45. On November 19,
Hitler replaced Schacht as minister of economics. Two
months later he fired generals Blomberg and Werner von
Fritsch in favour of the loyal Walther von Brauchitsch and
Wilhelm Keitel and replaced Neurath with Ribbentrop.
Historians have debated whether the November 5 speech
was a blueprint for aggression, a plea for continued
rearmament, or preparation for the purges that followed.
But there is no denying that the overheated Nazi
economy had reached a critical turn with labour and
resources fully employed and capital running short. Hitler
would soon have to introduce austerity measures, slow
down the arms program, or make good the shortages of
labour and capital through plunder. Since these material
needs pushed in the same direction as Hitler’s dynamic
quest for Lebensraum, 1937 merely marked the
transition into concrete time-tables of what Hitler had
always desired. Nazification of the economy, the military,
and the foreign service only removed the last vestige of
potential opposition to a risky program of ruthless
conquest.

German intrigues in Austria had continued since 1936

through the agency of Arthur Seyss-Inquart’s Nazi
movement. When Papen, now ambassador to Vienna,
reported on Feb. 5, 1938, that the Schuschnigg regime
showed signs of weakness, Hitler invited the Austrian
dictator to a meeting on the 12th. In the course of an
intimidating tirade Hitler demanded that Nazis be
included in the Vienna government. Schuschnigg,
however, insisted that Austria remain “free and German,
independent and social, Christian and united,” and
scheduled a plebiscite for March 13 through which
Austrians might express their will. Hitler hurriedly issued
directives to the military, and when Schuschnigg was
induced to resign, Seyss-Inquart simply appointed himself
chancellor and invited German troops to intervene. A
last-minute Italian demarche inviting Britain to make
colonial concessions in return for Italian support of
Austria met only “indignant resignation” and Anthony
Eden’s irrelevant complaints about Italy’s troops in Spain.
A French plea for Italian firmness, in turn, provoked Ciano
to ask: “Do they expect to rebuild Stresa in an hour with
Hannibal at the gates?” Still, Hitler waited nervously on
the evening of March 11 until he was informed that
Mussolini would take no action in support of Austria.
Hitler replied with effusive thanks and promises of
eternal amity. In the nighttime invasion, 70 percent of the
vehicles sent into Austria by the unprepared Wehrmacht
broke down on the road to Vienna, but they met no
resistance. Austrians cheered deliriously on the 13th,
when Hitler declared Austria a province of the Reich.

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The taking of Czechoslovakia
The Anschluss outflanked the next state on Hitler’s list,
Czechoslovakia. Once again Hitler could make use of
national self-determination to confuse the issue, as
3,500,000 German-speakers organized by another Nazi
henchman, Konrad Henlein, inhabited the Czech
borderlands in the Sudeten Mountains. Already on
February 20, before the Anschluss, Hitler had denounced
the Czechs for alleged persecution of this German
minority, and on April 21 he ordered Keitel to prepare for
the invasion of Czechoslovakia by October even if the
French should intervene. Chamberlain was intent on
appeasing Hitler, but this meant “educating” him to seek
redress of grievances through negotiation, not force. He
issued a stern warning to Germany during the spring war
scare while pressuring Beneš to compromise with
Henlein. Germany, however, had instructed Henlein to
display obstinacy so as to prevent agreement. In August a
worried British Cabinet dispatched the elderly Lord
Walter Runciman to mediate, but Henlein rejected the
program of concessions he finally arranged with Beneš.
As the prospect of war increased, the British appeasers
grew more frantic. In the spring the editor of the leftist
New Statesman thought “armed resistance to the
dictators was now useless. If there was a war we should
lose it.” General Edmund Ironside, ruing the prime
minister’s reluctance to rearm, sneered that
“Chamberlain is of course right. . . . We cannot expose
ourselves now to a German attack. We simply commit
suicide if we do.” And a shocking Times editorial called
for the partition of Czechoslovakia, a view shared by
Hitler at the Nürnberg party rally, where he condemned
“Czechia” as an “artificial state.” Chamberlain then
journeyed to Berchtesgaden and proposed to give the
Germans all they demanded. Hitler, nonplussed, spoke of
the cession of all Sudeten areas at least 80 percent
German and agreed not to invade while Chamberlain
won over Paris and Prague.

The French Cabinet of Édouard Daladier and Georges-

Étienne Bonnet agreed, after the latter’s frantic pleas to
Roosevelt failed to shake American isolation. The Czechs,
however, resisted handing over their border fortifications
to Hitler until September 21, when the British and French
made it clear that they would not fight for the
Sudetenland. Chamberlain flew to Bad Godesberg the
next day only to be met with a new demand that the
entire Sudetenland be ceded to Germany within a week.
The Czechs, fully mobilized as of the 23rd, refused, and
Chamberlain returned home in a funk: “How horrible,
fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging
trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a
quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom
we know nothing.” But his sorrowful address to
Parliament was interrupted by the news that Mussolini
had proposed a conference to settle the crisis peacefully.
Hitler agreed, having seen how little enthusiasm there
was in Germany for war and on the advice of Göring,
Joseph Goebbels, and the generals. Chamberlain and
Daladier, elated, flew to Munich on September 29.

The awkward and pitiful Munich Conference ended on

the 30th in a compromise prearranged between the two
dictators. The Czechs were to evacuate all regions
indicated by an international commission (subsequently
dominated by the Germans) by October 10 and were
given no recourse—the agreement was final. Poland took
the opportunity to grab the Teschen district disputed
since 1919. Czechoslovakia was no longer a viable state,
and Beneš resigned the presidency in despair. In return,
Hitler promised no more territorial demands in Europe
and consultations with Britain in case of any future threat
to peace. Chamberlain was ecstatic.
Why did the Western powers abandon Czechoslovakia,
which, by dint of its geography, democracy, military
potential (more than 30 divisions and the Škoda arms
works), and commitment to collective security, could
rightly be called “the keystone of interwar Europe”? No
completely persuasive answer is possible, but this height
of appeasement can be accounted for by politics,
principles, and pragmatism. There is no question that the
Munich settlement was extremely popular. Chamberlain
returned to London claiming “peace for our time” and
was greeted by applauding throngs. So was Daladier. The
relief was so evident even in Germany that Hitler swore
he would allow no more meddling by “English
governesses” to cheat him of his war. Of course, the
euphoria was not universal: aside from the Czechs, who
wept in the streets, Churchill spoke for a growing
minority when he observed that the British Empire had
just suffered its worst military defeat and had not fired a
shot.

Could Czechoslovakia have been defended? Or was

Munich a necessary evil to buy time for Britain to rearm?
Certainly British air defenses were unready, while
France’s scarcely existed, and the strength of the
Luftwaffe, so recently discounted by the British Cabinet,
was now exaggerated. The French and Czech armies still
outnumbered the German, but French intelligence also
magnified German strength, while the army had no plans
for invading Germany in support of the Czechs. The
Munich powers were criticized for ignoring the U.S.S.R.,
which had claimed readiness to honour its alliance with
Prague. The U.S.S.R., however, would hardly confront
Germany unless the Western powers were already
engaged, and the ways open to them were few without
transit rights across Poland. The West discounted Soviet
military effectiveness in light of Stalin’s 1937 purge of his
entire officer corps down to battalion level. The Soviets
were also distracted by division-scale fighting that broke
out with Japanese forces on the Manchurian border in
July–August 1938. At best, a few squadrons of Soviet
planes might have been sent to Prague.

Of course, the moral cause of liberating the Sudeten

Germans was ludicrous in view of the nature of the Nazi
regime and was far outweighed by the moral lapse of
deserting the doughty Czechs. (French ambassador André
François-Poncet, upon reading the Munich accord,
choked, “Thus does France treat her only allies who had
remained faithful to her.”) That betrayal, in turn, seemed
more than outweighed by the moral cause of preventing
another war. In the end, the war was delayed only a year,
and whatever the military realities of 1938 versus 1939,
the appeasement policy was an exercise in self-delusion.
Chamberlain and his ilk did not begin their reasoning
with an analysis of Hitlerism and then work forward to a
policy. Rather, they began with a policy based on abstract
analysis of the causes of war, then worked backward to
an image of Hitler that suited the needs of that policy. As
a result, they gave Hitler far more than they ever gave the
democratic statesmen of Weimar and, in the end, the
freedom to launch the very war they slaved to prevent.

Hitler had no intention of honouring Munich. In October

the Nazis encouraged the Slovak and Ruthene minorities
in Czechoslovakia to set up autonomous governments
and then in November awarded Hungary the 4,600
square miles north of the Danube taken from it in 1919.
On March 13, 1939, Gestapo officers carried the Slovak
leader Monsignor Jozef Tiso off to Berlin and deposited
him in the presence of the Führer, who demanded that
the Slovaks declare their independence at once. Tiso
returned to Bratislava to inform the Slovak Diet that the
only alternative to becoming a Nazi protectorate was
invasion. They complied. All that remained to the new
president in Prague, Emil Hácha, was the core region of
Bohemia and Moravia. It was time, said Hácha with heavy
sarcasm, “to consult our friends in Germany.” There Hitler
subjected the elderly, broken-spirited man to a tirade
that brought tears, a fainting spell, and finally a signature
on a “request” that Bohemia and Moravia be
incorporated into the Reich. The next day, March 16,
German units occupied Prague, and Czechoslovakia
ceased to exist.

Learn More!
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.

Learn More!
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.

Learn More!
World War II, 1939–45
War once again broke out over nationality conflicts in
east-central Europe, provoked in part by a German drive
for continental hegemony, and it expanded, once again,
into a global conflict whose battle zones touched the
waters or heartlands of almost every continent. The total
nature of World War II surpassed that of 1914–18 in that
civilian populations not only contributed to the war effort
but also became direct targets of aerial attack. Moreover,
in 1941 the Nazi regime unleashed a war of
extermination against Slavs, Jews, and other elements
deemed inferior by Hitler’s ideology, while Stalinist Russia
extended its campaign of terror against the Ukrainians to
the conquered Poles. The Japanese-American war in the
Pacific also assumed at times the brutal aspect of a war
between races. This ultimate democratization of warfare
eliminated the age-old distinction between combatants
and non-combatants and ensured that total casualties in
World War II would greatly exceed those of World War I
and that civilian casualties would exceed the military.

Once again the European war devolved into a contest

between a German-occupied Mitteleuropa and a
peripheral Allied coalition. But this time Italy abandoned
neutrality for the German side, and the Soviet Union held
out in the east, while France collapsed in the west. Hence
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin took France’s place in
meetings of the “Big Three,” together with Franklin
Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. The Japanese chose to
remain neutral vis-à-vis the U.S.S.R., while the Grand
Alliance of anti-Fascist states simmered with conflicts
over strategy and war aims. World War II, therefore,
comprised several parallel or overlapping wars, while the
war in Europe became a kind of three-way struggle
among the forces of democracy, Nazism, and
Communism. As soon as German and Japanese power
were effaced, the conflicts among the victors burst into
the open and gave birth to the Cold War. World War II
completed the destruction of the old Great Power
system, prepared the disintegration of Europe’s overseas
empires, and submerged Europe itself into a world arena
dominated by the Soviet Union and the United States.

The last European war, 1939–41

Poland and the northern war
At first glance Germany might have seemed the underdog
in the war launched by Hitler. The Wehrmacht numbered
54 active divisions, compared to 55 French, 30 Polish, and
two British divisions available for the Continent. But the
combination of German Blitzkrieg tactics, French
inactivity, and Russian perfidy doomed Poland to swift
defeat. The German army command deployed 40 of its
divisions, including all six panzer (armoured) divisions
and two-thirds of its 3,500 aircraft in the east. The so-
called Siegfried Line in the west, manned by 11 active
divisions and reserve units as they became available,
sufficed to block a French advance. Beginning on
September 1, 1939, General Fedor von Bock’s northern
army corps pinched off the Polish Corridor from East
Prussia and Pomerania, while General Gerd von
Rundstedt’s more powerful southern army corps drove
across the border from Silesia and Slovakia. Polish
Marshal Edward Śmigły-Rydz tried vainly to defend
Poland’s industrial regions along the frontier, increasing
his army’s vulnerability to Blitzkrieg. German tanks
quickly burst into the rear, while dive-bombing Stukas
disrupted Polish supply and reinforcements. The Polish
air force was destroyed in 48 hours. Within a week two
panzer corps advanced 140 miles to the outskirts of
Warsaw and the Bug River line to the south. Śmigły-
Rydz’s order for a general retreat on the 10th came too
late; most Polish forces were already outflanked on the
north by General Heinz Guderian’s rapid thrust to Brest-
Litovsk and on the south by Paul von Kleist’s panzers
advancing from Lvov. On September 17 the pincers
closed, the Soviet army invaded from the east, and the
Polish government fled to Romania, whence it made its
way to London as the first of many European
governments-in-exile. The Warsaw garrison surrendered
on the 27th.

In a protocol of May 15, 1939, the French had promised

to take the offensive two weeks after mobilization.
Instead, General Maurice Gamelin contented himself
with a brief sortie into the Saar, after which the French
withdrew to the Maginot Line. The regime most upset by
the German walkover in Poland was Hitler’s new ally, the
Soviets. On September 10, Stalin ordered partial
mobilization and loudly boasted of the Red Army’s “three
million men.” Since a callup of reserve troops was
scarcely needed merely to occupy Moscow’s share of
Poland under the German-Soviet pact, this maneuver
must have reflected Stalin’s fear that the Germans might
not stop at the prearranged line. Stalin told the German
ambassador on September 25: “In the final settlement of
the Polish question anything that in the future might
create friction between Germany and the Soviet Union
must be avoided.” Three days later Molotov signed a new
agreement granting Germany a somewhat larger share of
Poland as well as extensive Soviet trade in return for a
free hand in Lithuania. Only after this second German-
Soviet pact did Communist parties in the West fully
embrace their new Nazi ally and oppose Western military
resistance to Hitler. Henceforth, Stalin was a fearful and
solicitous neighbour of the Nazi empire, and he moved
quickly to absorb the regions accorded him. By October
10, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia had been forced to
accept Soviet occupation. When Finland resisted Soviet
demands for border rectifications and bases, Stalin
ordered the Red Army to attack on November 30. He
expected a lightning victory of his own that would
impress Hitler and increase Soviet security in the Baltic.
Instead, the Finns resisted fiercely in this “Winter War,”
holding the fortified Mannerheim Line in the south and
cutting off the road-bound Soviet columns in the north
with their mobile ski troops. The disorganized Red Army,
by contrast, showed the effect of the recent military
purges. In some cases only the machine guns of NKVD
(political police) units kept the soldiers at the front.
Soviet military prestige suffered a devastating blow.

No major fighting broke out in the West during this

period, sardonically dubbed the “Sitzkrieg,” or “Phony
War.” After the fall of Poland, while hope still existed that
a repetition of World War I might be avoided, Hitler
sought to persuade Britain to renege on its commitment
to Poland’s defense. In secret contacts and in his “Peace
Address” to the Reichstag of October 6 he even hinted at
the possibility of restoring a rump Polish state. The
Chamberlain Cabinet, betrayed so often by Hitler, refused
to acknowledge the demarches, however, and Hitler
ordered preparations for an attack in the west by
November 12. The army high command protested
vigorously against a winter campaign, and bad weather
did force a postponement first to January 1940 and then
to the spring. Since the French and British were loath to
take initiative, the Phony War dragged on. Gamelin’s
lame proposal of an advance through the Low Countries
was moot given the Dutch and Belgian commitments to
neutrality. Combat occurred only at sea. In 1939 alone
Germany’s U-boats sank 110 merchant vessels as well as
the aircraft carrier Courageous (September 17) and the
battleship Royal Oak (October 14). The battle cruisers
Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and pocket battleship
Deutschland eluded British pursuit and returned safely to
port. The Graf Spee, however, caught in the South
Atlantic, sank nine merchantmen before sustaining
damage from British cruisers. It then put in at
Montevideo, Uruguay, causing a diplomatic crisis for the
South American states. The naval situation, therefore,
came quickly to resemble that of World War I, with the
British fleet maintaining a distant blockade in the North
Sea and the Germans waging a submarine war against
British shipping.

The Russo-Finnish War, however, suggested that

Scandinavia might provide a theatre in which to strike a
blow at the German-Russian alliance. Beyond the feckless
expulsion of the Soviet Union from the League of Nations
on December 14, Britain and France contemplated
helping the brave Finns—even at the risk of war with
Russia—and perhaps cutting the flow of Swedish iron to
Germany. The French wanted to send several divisions to
Narvik in Norway and thence by land to Finland. The
British demurred at such a violation of neutral rights, but
Churchill, now first lord of the Admiralty, insisted that
“humanity, rather than legality, must be our guide.” In
the event, the Allies dithered (as did the United States,
which debated granting a loan to Finland, the only nation
to pay interest on its World War I debt) until a massive
Soviet offensive broke the Mannerheim Line in February.
Stalin had given a hint of the future by setting up a
Finnish Democratic Republic during the war, under the
Comintern agent Otto Kuusinen, but he settled for a
treaty with Helsinki on March 12, 1940, in which Finland
ceded the Karelian isthmus and leased a naval base to
the U.S.S.R. on the Hangö peninsula.

The Finnish fiasco toppled Daladier’s government in

favour of a Cabinet under Paul Reynaud. He and Neville
Chamberlain hoped at least to deny the Germans
possible U-boat bases by mining or occupying Norwegian
ports. But the German navy, too, had persuaded Hitler of
the strategic importance of Norway, and on April 9, the
day after British minelaying began, the Germans suddenly
seized the ports from Oslo to Narvik in a brilliant sea and
air operation, and occupied Denmark by Blitzkrieg. British
troops contested Norway and managed to capture Narvik
on May 27, but by then greater events were unfolding on
the Continent. The British evacuated Narvik on June 6,
and Vidkun Quisling’s collaborationists assumed control
of Norway.

Learn More!
The Western front
The Allies’ bungling in Scandinavia lost Chamberlain the
confidence of Parliament, and King George VI selected
Winston Churchill to head the War Cabinet. In the first of
many ringing speeches that would sustain the British
spirit, Churchill told his nation: “I have nothing to offer
but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”
In eight months of warfare all the belligerents had vastly
expanded their frontline strength. In May 1940 the
German army concentrated 134 divisions on the Western
front, including 12 panzer divisions, 3,500 tanks and
5,200 warplanes. The French army totalled 94 divisions,
the British 10, and the neutral Belgians and Dutch 22 and
eight respectively. The French army possessed some
2,800 tanks, but less than a third were concentrated in
armoured units. The French air force, disrupted during
the Popular Front, was in any case antiquated, and 90
percent of the artillery dated from World War I. More
important, French morale was low, sapped by the
memory of the first war’s carnage, by political
decadence, and by over-reliance on the Maginot Line.
Britain’s Royal Air Force had become a prodigious force
thanks to 1,700 new planes, but commanders were loath
to deflect them from home defense to the Continent. The
German plan of attack in the west, meanwhile, had
evolved since the previous autumn. Originally favouring a
Schlieffen-type attack with the mass concentrated on the
right wing in Belgium, the Führer had been won to
General Erich von Manstein’s scheme for a panzer attack
through the rugged Ardennes Forest of southern Belgium
and Luxembourg. Either route bypassed the Maginot
Line, but the latter plan took advantage of the panzer
army’s ability to pierce French defenses, disrupt the
enemy rear, and split Allied forces in two. The
concomitant risk was that Allied counterattacks might
pinch off and destroy the armoured spearheads at a
blow.

The German offensive struck with devastating effect on

May 10. Within days the Dutch surrendered. Göring’s
Luftwaffe did not get the message and proceeded to
devastate the central city of Rotterdam, killing numerous
civilians and sending a signal to the city of London.
Meanwhile, General Gerd von Rundstedt’s panzer army
picked its way through the Ardennes and emerged in
force at Sedan. By May 20, German tanks reached the
coast at Abbeville and cut the Allied armies in two. On
the 28th, King Leopold III instructed the Belgian army to
surrender, while the British government ordered Lord
Gort, commanding the British Expeditionary Force, to
make for Dunkirk and prepare for evacuation by sea.
As the Blitzkrieg in Poland had shocked Stalin, so the
German victory in France shocked Mussolini. For 17 years
he had preached the necessity and beauty of war,
believing that a neutral Italy would cease to be regarded
as a Great Power and that he needed war in order to
fulfill his expansionist fantasies and permit the full
triumph of Fascism at home. Yet in August 1939 he
demanded from Germany 6,000,000 tons of coal,
2,000,000 tons of steel, and 7,000,000 tons of oil before
he could honour the Pact of Steel. In fact, war
preparations under the corrupt and incompetent Fascists
remained feeble, and during these months of
nonbelligerence, Mussolini himself took sick and at times
even considered joining the Allies. On March 18 he met
Hitler at the Brenner Pass and was told that the Germans
did not need him to win the war but that he would be
allowed to participate and thus escape second-rate status
in the Mediterranean. Still Mussolini tried to have it both
ways, telling his military chiefs that Italy would not fight
Hitler’s war, but a “parallel war” to forge “a new Roman
Empire.” In reality, he would enter the war only when it
seemed clear the Allies were finished and his regime
would not be put to the test.
That moment seemed to arrive in June 1940. With French
defeat assured, Mussolini declared war on France and
Britain on the 10th. “The hand that held the dagger,” said
President Roosevelt, “has struck it into the back of its
neighbor.” As Mussolini put it to Marshal Pietro Badoglio,
“All we need is a few thousand dead” to win a place at
the peace conference. The Italian offensive on the Alpine
front met contemptuous resistance from the French—
Italy’s gains were measured literally in yards—but
Mussolini was right about the proximity of victory. With
German forces streaming east and south, the French
government fled on the 11th to Bordeaux and debated
three courses of action: request an armistice; transfer the
government to North Africa and fight on from the
colonies; ask Germany for its terms and temporize. The
choice was complicated by a French promise to Britain
not to exit the war without London’s consent. Churchill,
concerned that the French fleet not fall into German
hands, went so far as to offer Anglo-French political
union on June 16. Reynaud wanted to continue the war
but was outvoted. He resigned on the 16th, whereupon
the ancient Marshal Pétain asked for an armistice. From
London, General Charles de Gaulle broadcast a plea to
the French people to fight on and set about organizing
Free French forces in France’s sub-Saharan colonies. But
the armistice was signed at Compiègne, in the same
railway car used for the German armistice of 1918, on
June 22. The Germans occupied all of northern France
and the west coast—60 percent of the country—and the
rest was administered by Pétain’s quasi-Fascist
collaborationist regime at Vichy. The French navy and air
force were neutralized. In another meeting of dictators
on the 18th, Hitler disappointed Mussolini with his talk of
a mild peace lest French forces be driven to defect to
Britain. Instead, Pétain broke relations with London on
July 4, following a British attack on the French fleet
moored at Mers el-Kebir in Algeria. Hitler at once toyed
with the notion of winning the Vichy French to an active
alliance, thrusting Mussolini farther into the background.

Britain’s refusal to give up frustrated Hitler, especially

since his ultimate goal—Lebensraum—lay in the east.
The chief of the army general staff quoted Hitler on May
21 as saying that “we are seeking contact with Britain on
the basis of partitioning the world.” But when the carrot
failed, Hitler tried the stick, authorizing plans on July 2 for
Operation Sea Lion, the cross-Channel invasion. Such an
operation required complete air superiority, and Göring
promised that the Luftwaffe could smash British air
defenses in four days. The Battle of Britain that followed
in August 1940 was a massive air duel between
Germany’s 1,200 bombers and a thousand fighter escorts
and the RAF’s 900 interceptors. But the British Hurricanes
and Spitfires were technically superior to all the German
fighters except the Me-109, which was restricted in its
range to the zone south of London. The British radar
screen and ground control network permitted British
fighters to concentrate on each German attack. On
September 7 Göring made the fatal error of shifting the
attack from airfields to London itself (in retaliation for a
September 4 raid on Berlin). For 10 days the blitz
continued night and day over London, the climax coming
on the 15th when nearly 60 German planes were shot
down. Two days later Hitler granted that air superiority
was not to be had and postponed Operation Sea Lion.
For a full year—June 1940 to June 1941—the British
Empire fought on alone (though with growing U.S. aid)
against Germany, Italy, and the threat of Japanese action
in Asia. Frustrated on sea and in the air, Hitler pondered
how his overwhelming land power might be used to
persuade Britain to call it quits. A Mediterranean strategy
based on the capture of Gibraltar, Malta, and the Suez
Canal, did not seem likely to be decisive, nor did it satisfy
the Nazis’ Blut und Boden (“blood and earth”) lust for
Lebensraum. To be sure, the Germans raised the prospect
of an occupation of Gibraltar numerous times with
Franco, but the latter always found an excuse to remain
neutral. In fact, Franco knew that the Spanish were
exhausted after their civil war and that Spain’s Atlantic
islands would be lost to the British if it joined the Axis. A
Catholic authoritarian, he was also contemptuous of the
neo-pagan Fascists. After their last meeting, Hitler
confessed that he would rather have his teeth pulled
than go through another bout with Franco. Hitler also
negotiated with Pétain in July and October 1940 and May
1941, in hopes of enticing France into alliance. But
Pétain, too, played a double game, pledging “genuine
collaboration” with Germany but reassuring the British
that he sought a “cautious balance” between the
belligerents.

Hitler’s troublesome ally Italy, however, ensured that

Germany would be involved in complications to the
south. On July 7, 1940, Ciano visited Hitler seeking
approval for an expansion of the war to Yugoslavia and
Greece. The Führer instead encouraged the occupation of
Crete and Cyprus, which would further the war against
Britain. But three days later Italy’s inability to chase the
British out of the Mediterranean became apparent when
a British convoy off Calabria bumped into an Italian force
that included two battleships and 16 cruisers. The Italian
commander broke off the action after one hit on one of
his battleships, whereupon the Fascist air force arrived to
bomb indiscriminately friend and foe alike, doing little
damage to either. Frustrated in the Balkans and at sea,
Mussolini ordered his Libyan army to cross the Western
desert and conquer Egypt. This adventure soon turned to
disaster
Origins of American belligerence
From neutrality to active aid
The outbreak of war brought a swift change of mood to
the United States. While isolationism was still
widespread, the vast majority of Americans were
sympathetic to Britain, and Roosevelt did not follow
Wilson in asking Americans to be neutral in thought as
well as deed. Instead he set out to lead public opinion
and gradually expand his ability to aid the Allies. On
September 21, 1939, his brilliant speech to Congress laid
the groundwork for passage of the Pittman Bill, which
became law on November 4 and repealed the arms
embargo on belligerent nations. Henceforth, the United
States might trade with Britain and France, but only on a
“cash and carry” basis. Senator Arthur Vandenberg rightly
noted that the United States could not “become the
arsenal for one belligerent without becoming the target
for another.” Still, the President made clear to Churchill
(with whom he struck up close relations by
correspondence) his desire to aid Britain in every way
consonant with the American mood. Only once did
Roosevelt make a feint at mediation: In March 1940 he
sent Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles to Europe on
a fact-finding mission that revealed “scant immediate
prospect” of peace. When Hitler’s Western offensive
followed, even that dubious prospect disappeared, and
Churchill assured his House of Commons that Britain
would fight on “until, in God’s good time, the New World,
with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue
and liberation of the Old.”

In January 1940, Roosevelt asked for a mere

$2,000,000,000 in defense spending, a slight increase
over the year before. But the fall of France pushed the
pace of U.S. rearmament up to $10,500,000,000 by
September. Opinion polls showed the American public
heavily favouring a policy of “all aid short of war” to
Britain. On May 15, Churchill sought to capitalize on the
shifting sentiment with an emergency request for 40 or
50 overage destroyers with which to counter German U-
boats. Roosevelt hesitated because of the legal
complications, while continuing his efforts to shape
opinion by encouraging William Allen White’s Committee
to Defend America to foster the idea that “Between Us
and Hitler Stands the British Fleet!” On September 2 the
United States transferred 50 warships to Britain in return
for long-term leases on British naval bases in the Western
Hemisphere. Despite Roosevelt’s public relations,
isolationist sentiment remained strong. On September 4
the America First Committee arose to challenge
Roosevelt’s deceptive campaign for intervention, and
Wendell Willkie charged during the presidential
campaign that Roosevelt’s reelection would surely mean
war. The president responded that “your boys are not
going to be sent into any foreign wars,” gliding over the
fact that if the United States were attacked, it would no
longer be a foreign war.

The next step in U.S. involvement stemmed from

Churchill’s warning of December 9, 1940, that Britain was
near bankruptcy. Roosevelt responded with lend-lease, a
plan to “eliminate the dollar sign” by lending, not selling,
arms. If your neighbour’s house is on fire, he argued, you
do not sell him a hose, you lend it to him until the fire is
out. “If Great Britain goes down,” he warned, “all of us in
the Americas would be living at the point of a gun…. We
must be the great arsenal of democracy.” Churchill added
his own ringing appeal on February 9, 1941: “Give us the
tools and we will finish the job.” Willkie asked
Republicans to back lend-lease, which became law on
March 11.

Unknown to the public, Roosevelt authorized joint U.S.–

British staff talks. The two countries also collaborated on
how to meet the U-boat menace. Admiral Karl Dönitz’s
wolfpack technique, by which eight to 10 U-boats would
strike a convoy from the surface at night (thereby
avoiding the British Anti-Submarine Detection
Investigation Committee device [ASDIC sonar]), cost the
British and Americans 320,048 tons of shipping in
January 1941 and 653,960 tons in April. American
Admiral Harold R. Stark considered the situation
“hopeless except as [the United States] take strong
measures to save it.” In Hemispheric Defense Plan No. 1
(April 2) Roosevelt authorized the navy to attack German
submarines west of 25° longitude and by executive
agreement with the Danish government-in-exile placed
Greenland under American protection (April 9). U.S.
marines also occupied Iceland in July.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union posed the

problem of whether to extend lend-lease to the U.S.S.R.
Only 35 percent of Americans polled favoured
underwriting the Communist regime, but Roosevelt,
supporting his acting secretary of state, Sumner Welles,
said “Of course we are going to give all aid we possibly
can to Russia,” on the theory that anything that
contributed to the defeat of Germany enhanced the
security of the United States. Aid to the Soviet Union
began in July, and a formal agreement followed on
August 2. But the initial supplies were too meagre to
affect the battles of 1941. Roosevelt meanwhile pressed
for amendments to the Selective Service Act to remove
the ceiling of 900,000 men on U.S. armed forces and the
ban on use of troops beyond the Western Hemisphere
and to permit the president to retain draftees in service.
This provoked the last great Congressional debate on
isolationism versus interventionism; the House passed
the bill by a single vote on August 12.
It was during this debate that Roosevelt and Churchill
met secretly off the coast of Newfoundland and drafted a
manifesto of the common principles that bound their two
countries and all free peoples. In this eight-point Atlantic
Charter (announced on August 14), reminiscent of
Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the signatories renounced
territorial aggrandizement and endorsed the restoration
of self-government to all captured nations and equal
access to trade and raw materials for all. According to
Churchill, Roosevelt also promised to “wage war but not
declare it” and to look for an incident that would justify
open hostilities. When the Congress voted on November
7 to arm merchant ships and allow them into the war
zone, it seemed that submarine warfare would again be
casus belli for the United States. U-boats had already
torpedoed the destroyers Kearney and Reuben James
(the latter was attacking the submarine, but sank with
115 hands on October 31). But in fact it took dramatic
events in another theatre altogether to make Roosevelt’s
undeclared war official.
The turning point, 1942
Within a year after American entry into the war Axis
power crested and began to ebb, for critical battles were
fought in 1942 in every major theatre. The year also saw
the forging of a Grand Alliance among the United States,
Britain, and the U.S.S.R. and the first sign of
disagreement on strategy and war aims.

After Pearl Harbor, Churchill requested an immediate

conference with Roosevelt. The two met for three weeks
at the Arcadia Conference in Washington after December
22, 1941. They reaffirmed the “Europe first” strategy and
conceived “Gymnast,” a plan for Anglo-American landings
in North Africa. They also created a Combined Chiefs of
Staff Committee and issued, on January 1, 1942, the
United Nations Declaration in the spirit of the Atlantic
Charter. But Sir Anthony Eden had traveled to Moscow in
late December and returned with troubling news: Stalin
demanded retention of all the territory gained under the
German–Soviet Nonaggression Pact and grumbled that
the Atlantic Charter was apparently directed against him,
not Hitler. The Soviets also first made what was to
become their incessant demand that the Allies open a
second front in France to take the pressure off the Red
Army. Roosevelt sent Army Chief of Staff George C.
Marshall to London to argue for a cross-Channel invasion
by April 1943, but the British deemed it impossible.
London reassured Molotov by concluding an Anglo-Soviet
alliance (May 26, 1942) to last for 20 years. In late June,
Churchill and Roosevelt met again in Washington, D.C.,
and confirmed plans for a joint operation in Africa
despite the misgivings of American generals, who
suspected the British of being more concerned for the
defense of their empire than the rapid defeat of Hitler. In
the end the British won, and on July 25 the Allies
approved the renamed operation “Torch”—a combined
invasion of North Africa planned for the autumn.
Churchill then traveled to Moscow in August 1942, where
Stalin berated him for postponing the second front and
suspending Arctic convoys because of German naval
action. Despite his suspicions and fears, Stalin could take
grim satisfaction from the events of 1942, for by
December of that year the German advance into the
Soviet Union had been stopped, though at enormous
cost.
The Allied landings in North Africa, where British forces
had finally turned back General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika
Korps at el-Alamein, were targeted for Casablanca, Oran,
and Algiers. (Hence, the first American initiative in the
war was to be an unprovoked and undeclared attack
against neutral territory.) Vichy France promptly severed
diplomatic relations with Washington and ordered French
forces in North Africa to resist. Brief but serious fighting
resulted at Oran and Casablanca. The allies had been
seeking a French leader with the prestige and willingness
to rally French Africa against the Axis, but the nominal
commander was Admiral François Darlan, an ardent
collaborationist in the Vichy Cabinet. The Allies preferred
General Henri Giraud, a heroic escapee from a prison
camp, but he insisted on being given command of the
whole Allied invasion force. When Darlan surprisingly
turned up in Algiers, U.S. Ambassador Robert Murphy
negotiated a deal whereby Eisenhower recognized Darlan
as political chief of North Africa in return for Darlan’s
ordering French forces to cease resistance. The
Americans soon escaped the embarrassment of having
bargained with a leading Fascist when a French royalist
shot Darlan on December 24. De Gaulle was able to
outmaneuver the vain but inept Giraud to become de
facto leader of Free French forces.

In the Pacific, the naval Battle of Midway in June, the

landing of U.S. forces on Guadalcanal in August, and the
creation of an “island-hopping” strategy against Japan’s
sudden and far-flung empire similarly blunted the string
of the Axis’ early victories. Meanwhile, General Douglas
MacArthur rallied Allied forces in Australia in anticipation
of fulfilling his departing promise to the Filipinos: “I shall
return.” A Japanese invasion force landed near Gona at
the southeastern end of New Guinea in July 1942 and
drove Australian troops back to within 32 miles of Port
Moresby. But MacArthur executed a series of landings
behind the Japanese and secured the entire Papuan coast
by late January 1943. Thenceforth Japan, too, went on
the strategic defensive.

The economic and scientific wars

How could the Axis powers have imagined that they
might win the war, given their narrow base of land area,
population, and production, and the size and strength of
the enemies they themselves forced into the war? The
answer was Blitzkrieg, which involved more than simply a
set of tactics for mobile combat but was rather an
encompassing theory of total war. The theory posited a
strategically mobilized and organized economy meant to
avoid a repetition of the war of attrition that wore
Germany down in 1914–18. By overrunning their
neighbours one by one in swift assaults, the Germans
constantly added to their own manpower and resource
base while shrinking that available to the enemy. In
addition, armament in breadth rather than depth
provided the flexibility necessary to shift production from
one set of weapons to another depending on the needs
of the next campaign, and it permitted constant
innovation of weapons systems. Most tellingly, Blitzkrieg
shifted the burdens of war from Germany to the
conquered peoples. By June 1940 the British were unable
to budge a Nazi empire that drew on the resources of the
entire continent. But Hitler also realized by late 1940 that
all the resources of America would eventually be made
available to Britain; hence his decision to break the
stalemate by unleashing Blitzkrieg against the Soviet
Union. Soviet survival, however, turned the Blitzkrieg into
a gigantic war of attrition after all, one in which Germany
could never prevail.