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The Origins of the Two 'World Wars': Historical Discourse and International
Politics
David Reynolds
Journal of Contemporary History 2003; 38; 29
DOI: 10.1177/0022009403038001962

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Journal of Contemporary History Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and
New Delhi, Vol 38(1), 29–44.
[0022–0094(200301)38:1;29–44;029962]

David Reynolds
The Origins of the Two ‘World Wars’:
Historical Discourse and International
Politics

War is the most wrenching of all political transitions. From peace to war and
from war to peace — this double movement can have vast geopolitical, ideo-
logical and social consequences. The labels we apply to such transitions are as
important as the events themselves. Sometimes these concepts are developed
retrospectively; often they are taken from the vocabulary of the time. But the
labels are rarely neutral, either in their political bias or their analytical impli-
cations. Although as historians we now live in an Age of Discourse, scholars
have been selective about the concepts they choose to scrutinize as historical
artifacts. One major blind spot is the two ‘world wars’.
It is now almost impossible to imagine the twentieth century without the
categories of ‘the first world war’ and ‘the second world war’. Together they
define the first half of the century — with ‘pre-war’ and ‘inter-war’ eras as
punctuation marks. They also conjure up the ultimate horror — world war
three — lurid imaginings of which helped to prevent the Cold War from turn-
ing hot. Yet, use of the term ‘world war’ for these conflicts was by no means
axiomatic. While some countries applied this label to the war of 1914–18,
others did not. Something like consensus only developed in the 1940s. In con-
ceptual terms, therefore, it took the ‘second world war’ to create the first. But
use of the latter term was by no means a foregone conclusion. As we shall see,
only in 1948 did the British government formally decide that the country had
just been fighting the ‘second world war’. Other major belligerents, notably
the Soviet Union, China and Japan, continued to use quite different language.
To a large extent, the discourse of world war was a German and American
construction — foreshadowed in their conflict of 1917–18 and its aftermath,
and then confirmed in the ideological struggle between Roosevelt and Hitler in
1939–41. As such, it may be understood as both product and procreator of
globalization.
These terminological issues have attracted surprisingly little attention from
scholars. Most histories of the two great conflicts usually take their titles for
granted.1 In this short article I can only be suggestive — raising questions

For comments on a draft version the author is grateful to Cambridge colleagues Christopher
Clark, Richard J. Evans, Emma Rothschild, John Thompson and Robert Tombs.
1 For a rare exception see the brief but suggestive comments about 1914–18 in Hew Strachan,
The First World War, vol. I: To Arms (Oxford 2001), 694–5.

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30 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 38 No 1

rather than resolving them. Much more work can profitably be done in the
secondary literature and in national archives.
This article will look first at the how the conflict of 1914–18 was conceptu-
alized in the years that followed; then at some language shifts in the 1930s.
The next section deals with conceptualization of the war of 1939–45, before
offering some final comments about why this business of labelling matters for
our understanding of political transitions and twentieth-century history.
The problem can be grasped quickly by anyone seeking to follow up refer-
ences to the two conflicts in those putative newspapers of record, The Times of
London and The New York Times. Each publishes an annual index. From
August 1914 The Times indexed the conflict under the heading of ‘War,
European’, before shifting from April 1917 (the month of US entry) to ‘War,
The Great’. It retained the latter terminology in its quarterly indexes right
through the 1920s and 1930s, but dropped it from April 1940 in favour of
‘War (1914–1918)’. The new conflict of 1939–45 was indexed from the start
as ‘War, 1939–’. After the Axis powers were defeated, The Times adopted the
parallel categories of ‘War (1914–18)’ and ‘War (1939–1945)’, and these it
retains to the present day. Strictly speaking, the two world wars do not exist in
The Times indexes.
They do, however, in those of its transatlantic counterpart. From August
1914, The New York Times’ half-yearly index adopted the term ‘European
War’, and this remained its main heading into the 1930s. From July 1919,
however, it started offering a cross-reference to the main entry under the head-
ing ‘World War’. In January 1935, ‘World War’ itself became the main entry,
and ‘European War’ the subsidiary cross-reference. September 1939 saw
‘European War’ revived as a functional heading for the current conflict. In the
index for July-December 1941 Soviet participation was absorbed into this,
now massive, entry under the sub-heading ‘Eastern Front’. But ‘World War’
had now been amended to ‘World War I (1914–18)’ and there was a new
cross-reference ‘World War II (December 7, 1941)’, directing readers to the
entries listed under ‘European War, Far East’. From January 1942, ‘European
War’ disappeared and the main headings were simply ‘World War I’ and
‘World War II’. This has been the practice of The New York Times ever since.

This simple comparison hints at a broad pattern. We find Britain and generally
France on one side of the conceptual divide, and America and Germany on the
other.
In the 1920s and 1930s, British writing about the conflict of 1914–18 usu-
ally adopted the titles ‘the War’ or ‘the Great War’ — the latter with echoes of
the 20-year war against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Thus the
collection of official documents edited by G.P. Gooch and Harold Temperley
was entitled British Documents on the Origins of the War 1898–1914.
C.R.M.F. Cruttwell’s standard overview, first published by Oxford University
Press in 1934, was called A History of the Great War, 1914–1918. A very rare

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Reynolds: The Origins of the Two ‘World Wars’ 31

exception in the immediate postwar years was the two-volume study by

Charles Repington, published in 1920. This was entitled The First World War
(1914–1918). But Repington did little to exploit that theme in the book itself
— largely an edited version of his diary as a war correspondent. The term
‘World War’ is used in the third volume (1927) of Winston Churchill’s
memoir-cum-history, The World Crisis, but is not evident in the first two
(1923) or the last two (1929 and 1931).2
In France, ‘la Guerre’ or ‘la Grande Guerre’ were the most widely-used titles
for memoirs and studies. Examples are Victor Giraud’s Histoire de la Grande
Guerre (1920), and Marshal Foch’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la
Guerre de 1914–1918, which appeared in 1931. Again there were some excep-
tions. The Paris-based ‘Société de l’Histoire de la Guerre’, founded in 1918,
began publishing its own quarterly academic journal from April 1923, under
the title Revue d’Histoire de la Guerre Mondiale. Its principal editor was the
diplomatic historian and war veteran Pierre Renouvin, whose teaching respon-
sibilities at the Sorbonne included a course on ‘l’étude critique des sources de
l’histoire de la guerre mondiale’. Funded by the Society, this was offered from
December 1922 and was billed as the first of its kind in Europe. From it came
Renouvin’s study of the immediate origins of the war, published in French in
1925 and in English translation three years later.3 But ‘la Guerre’ or ‘la Grande
Guerre’ remained the most common labels.
What, then, of Germany and America? It is instructive to see what happened
to book titles in the process of translation. The Gooch and Temperley volumes
of British Documents on the Origins of the War 1898–1914 became Die
Britischen Amtlichen Dokumente über den Ursprung des Weltkriegs 1898–
1914. The memoirs of the US Commander in Europe, General John J.
Pershing, were published in France in 1931 under the title Mes Souvenirs de la
Guerre. But the original American edition had appeared as My Experiences in
the World War. It is to Germany and America, in different ways, that we must
look for the origins of ‘the world war’.
In Germany, the term ‘Weltkrieg’ was used from the start to define the con-
flict, and it was also overwhelmingly the preferred title for memoirs. This is
understandable when we recall that Germany’s lack of status as a world power
(Weltmacht) had become an obsession in the Wilhelmine era. The concept of

2 Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, 1916–1918 (London 1927), e.g. 9, 96, 252. I have
also found one reference in idem, The Eastern Front (London 1931), 222. According to
Churchill’s official biographer, the title The World Crisis was forced on him by his American
publisher, Scribners — Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 4 (London 1975), 754. In 1916,
when out of office, Churchill had written four articles on aspects of the conflict for The New York
Tribune, which that paper unilaterally entitled ‘Four Great Chapters of the World War’; see
Churchill papers CHAR 8/34 (Churchill College Archives Centre, Cambridge, henceforth CCAC).
3 Revue d’Histoire de la Guerre Mondiale, 1 (1923), esp. 94, 288–95; cf. Pierre Renouvin, trans.
Theodore Carswell Hume, The Immediate Origins of the War (28th June–4th August 1914) (New
Haven, CT 1928), viii-ix. The title ‘La Grande Guerre’ was used from 1915 for the serial publi-
cation of official communiqués from the various belligerents: La Grande Guerre: Recueil des
Communiqués Officiels (Paris 1915–17).

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32 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 38 No 1

Weltmacht has been traced right back to 1809. Although by the end of the
nineteenth century it was almost a synonym for ‘Grossmacht’ (Great Power),
the word did have distinctive referrents — notably the idea that a large navy
and numerous colonies were the marks of a true world power. Supremely
Britain fell into this category: as early as 1833 Leopold von Ranke had spoken
of it as ‘eine kolossale Weltmacht’.4
Anglo-German rivalry in the decade or so before 1914 turned on Britain’s
imperial and naval hegemony and Germany’s bid for world power. Logically,
then, the ensuing war was a world war. This was the line taken in the postwar
memoirs of Germany’s 1914 élite. Thus the former Chancellor, Theobold von
Bethmann Hollweg, in his Reflections on the World War (completed just as
the Treaty of Versailles was being signed), blamed Russia for turning the pan-
Slav issue in the Balkans into a European crisis. But, he argued, this European
conflict only developed into ‘world revolution’ because of the participation of
Britain, which, in turn, drew in her colonies from India to Canada, and also
the USA. None of these countries was bothered about the Straits or the
Balkans, but they all had an interest in ensuring that Britain’s world empire
(Weltimperium or Weltreich) was not weakened by the struggle. With Britain’s
ally, Japan, also an active participant in the early stages, claimed Bethmann,
‘under pressure from England the war became a campaign of annihilation
(Vernichtungskampf) by the entire world against Germany’.5 The same line
may be found in the 1919 memoirs of the pre-war Foreign Minister, Gottlieb
von Jagow: ‘Through England’s entry the conflict became truly a world war.’6
And the former Austrian Foreign Minister, Count Czernin, while more critical
of ‘Prussian tendencies’, offered a similar analysis of the globalization of the
conflict. ‘Belgium and Luxembourg were treated on the Bismarckian principle
of “Might before Right” and the world rose against Germany. I say world,
because England’s power extended over the world.’7
From this perspective, the term ‘world war’ therefore seemed entirely apt.
Germany was a ‘middle power’, encircled in Europe and denied ‘world power’
across the seas. The term Mittelmacht connoted both geography and size.8
Even a vehement critic of the Wilhelmine regime, such as the socialist Karl
Kautsky, employed the vocabulary of ‘world war’ and ‘world revolution’ for
his own polemic.9
‘World War’ was also the preferred term in the USA, albeit for very different
reasons. As we have seen, The New York Times adopted it once America
4 Otto Brunner et al., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historische Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen
Sprache in Deutschland (Stuttgart 1978), vol. 3, esp. 932–3.
5 Theobold von Bethmann Hollweg, Betrachtungen zum Weltkriege (Berlin 1919), vol. I,
189–90.
6 Gottlieb von Jagow, Ursachen und Ausbruch des Weltkrieges (Berlin 1919), 194.
7 Count Ottokar Czernin, In the World War (London 1919), 15.
8 Cf. Dr Kurt Jagow, Daten des Weltkrieges: Vorgeschichte und Verlauf bis Ende 1921 (Leipzig
1922), 49–50.
9 Karl Kautsky, Wie der Weltkrieg entstand (Berlin 1919). Note that the translation into English
was entitled The Guilt of William Hohenzollern (London 1920).

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Reynolds: The Origins of the Two ‘World Wars’ 33

entered the conflict in April 1917, and it became the standard terminology for
popular and official accounts of the conflict in the USA.10 The explanation was
partly geographical. In 1914–16 the term ‘European War’ seemed entirely
appropriate since the major belligerents were all European. Japan’s active
involvement occurred only in the opening weeks of the conflict. By contrast,
1917 saw the entry of America (April), China (August) and Brazil (October)
and this gave the war new global dimensions.11
But ideology also played a part. For nearly three years President Woodrow
Wilson had sought to keep out of the European conflict, despite his country’s
deepening economic ties to Britain which German U-boat warfare was
intended to sever. He had been at pains to distance America morally from the
warring parties, speaking of ‘Peace without Victory’ and outlining principles of
disarmament, anti-imperialism and freedom of the seas which were a critique
of the Entente as much as the Central Powers. In many ways April 1917 was
therefore a humiliating defeat for the President. He thus took pains to insist
that he was not simply being dragged into the European war but was becoming
a belligerent to implement his own vision. This was nothing less than ‘to make
the world safe for democracy’. Not just Europe but ‘the world’ — because the
European conflict, in Wilson’s eyes, was symptomatic of the interconnected
global problems of modernity to which he had frequently alluded in statements
on both foreign and domestic policy. ‘Lacking guidance from the American
diplomatic tradition, he internationalized the heritage of his own country.’12
Wilson saw the League of Nations as nothing less than an instrument of
world peace. This implied that the preceding conflict was nothing less than a
world war. In America as in Germany, therefore, the terminology grew out of
the war aims. For the Kaiserreich this was a world war because the root issue
was world power; for Wilsonians the conflict was defined as a world war
because the goal was world peace. Germany and the USA were both second-
rank players seeking international influence, albeit in very different forms. In
both cases ideology, as much as geography, shaped their vocabulary. The story
would be similar a quarter-century later.

By the 1930s there were signs that the term ‘world war’ was becoming more
popular in France and Britain. The Paris publisher Jules Tallandier issued a
series of popular paperbacks under the title ‘La Guerre Mondiale: Pages
Vécues’. In 1933 Camille Bloch, one of Renouvin’s colleagues at the Sorbonne
and in La Societé de la Grande Guerre, published a short book entitled Les
Causes de la Guerre Mondiale: Précis Historiques. In 1930 the British military

10 Again there were exceptions, e.g. Charles G. Dawes, A Journal of the Great War (2 vols,
Boston 1921).
11 Cf. Marc Ferro, The Great War (London 1973), 205.
12 Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty
Fight in Perspective (Cambridge 1987), chap. 1, quoting 14; cf. Patrick Devlin, Too Proud to
Fight: Woodrow Wilson’s Neutrality (London 1974), esp. 670–88.

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34 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 38 No 1

journalist, Basil Liddell Hart, brought out a study of wartime strategy, rather
misleadingly called The Real War. The revised edition, four years later,
appeared under the new title A History of the World War 1914–1918.
Although Liddell Hart did not explain the reason for his second choice, it
seems to have reflected the flood of twentieth-anniversary reflections in 1934
on the war and its significance.13 This may also account for the parallel shift in
The New York Times indexing, mentioned earlier, whereby the main heading
from 1935 became ‘World War’ rather than ‘European War’.
Intimations of a future conflict as well as anniversaries from the past were
also important. In 1931–2 Japan occupied Manchuria, in 1933–4 Hitler’s
Germany was rearming. In autumn 1934 the journalist ‘Johannes Steel’
(pseudonym for Herbert Steel) published The Second World War, his ‘bird’s-
eye view of the political situation in Europe’. He predicted a second world war
by the middle of 1935, sparked in Europe by Franco-German conflict over the
Saarland, Austria and hegemony in Eastern Europe. This, he forecast, would
prompt Japan to conquer the Soviet Far East while Russia was still weak and
the world distracted. Although his prophecy was unfulfilled, such talk was
now in the air. In China both communist and nationalist writers spoke fre-
quently from 1931 about an impending ‘second world war’. ‘How many years
do we have to prepare for the Second World War?’, the Nationalist leader
Chiang Kai-shek asked in 1932 in a speech to the Army Staff College. Like
many, he forecast that it would start in 1936. Even though that proved
premature, the renewal of Sino-Japanese war on a far larger scale from July
1937 revived such predictions. The communist theorist Zhou En-lai wrote in
February 1938 that the fascist ‘aggressor nations’ were so ambitious that they
would ‘start the second world war without thinking’.14

Despite such prophecies, however, it was by no means axiomatic that the

conflict of 1939–45 should be termed ‘the second world war’. That term has
never been officially adopted by several of the major belligerent countries.
Throughout the history of the Soviet Union, for instance, the conflict was
always known as ‘The Great Patriotic War’ — the title coined by Pravda, the
party newspaper, on 23 June 1941, the day after Hitler’s invasion began. This
phrase linked the conflict with the struggle against Napoleon (‘The Patriotic
War’) and established from the start the prevailing theme of Soviet domestic
propaganda, namely to play down the ideological aspects of the struggle and
highlight national history and culture. For the Soviet regime the war of
1914–17 was, by contrast, a tsarist and capitalist war, to be marginalized
in history and memory. Churchill’s 1931 study of the Eastern Front was

13 On the original title see Hew Strachan, ‘“The Real War”: Liddell Hart, Cruttwell, and Falls’
in Brian Bond (ed.), The First World War and British Military History (Oxford 1991), 46–7.
14 Johannes Steel, The Second World War (New York 1934), esp. xv, 150–1, 156–7, 214–16;
Youli Sun, China and the Origins of the Pacific War, 1931–1941 (New York 1993), 15–17, 99.

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Reynolds: The Origins of the Two ‘World Wars’ 35

published in America as The Unknown War. The war remained equally

‘unknown’ within the Soviet Union, despite 2,000,000 dead, in ironic contrast
to the intense memorialization of the Great War in the West.15
In China, too, the discourse of war has been circumscribed. The preferred
term for 1937–45 is The War of Resistance against Japan (Kang Ri Zhan-
zheng). This also reflects both geography and ideology. Japan was China’s only
direct enemy, occupying vast tracts of the country from 1937. Assistance from
Britain and America was of limited significance — political symbolism more
than substantial aid. Moreover, the communist regime that came to power in
1949 chose to celebrate its own victory rather than the inter-capitalist conflict
that made victory possible. Like Soviet Russia, it focused on the October
Revolution rather than the war of 1914–17. Not until the waning of commu-
nist ideology in the 1980s did Beijing start encouraging a new interest in the
war of 1937–45, although still under the label ‘War of Resistance against
Japan’.16
Nor was the concept of world war employed in Japan. Its brutal and
massive invasion of China was undeclared and was therefore dubbed, in a
characteristic Japanese euphemism, ‘The China Incident’. After the conflict
expanded in December 1941 to include the USA and the European colonial
powers, it was described as the ‘Greater East Asian War’ (Dai Tōa sensō).
Under the American occupation after 1945 the ‘Pacific War’ (Taiheyō sensō)
became the official title, but nationalist revisionist writers revived the earlier
term in the 1960s.17
Of course, none of these belligerents was involved globally. Japan and
China did not join in the European conflict, and Stalin did not break the
Soviet-Japanese neutrality pact of 1941 until a few days before the Japanese
surrender in August 1945. France was in a different category from 1914 to
1918, having been knocked out of the war after nine months in June 1940.
From London, Charles de Gaulle tried to rally the French by declaring that the
battle of France was not the end because this was ‘une guerre mondiale’,
involving the British Empire and the industrial might of the USA.18 But de
Gaulle’s ‘Free French’ were now bit players in the conflict, marginal to both
events and discourse. Great Britain, a full participant for whom this was truly
a world war, did not readily adopt the term.
A few weeks after war broke out, the British politician, Duff Cooper, who

15 Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in
Russia (New York 1994), 61; Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia
(London 2000), 122–7.
16 Arthur Waldron, ‘China’s New Remembering of World War II: The Case of Zhang
Zizhong’, Modern Asian Studies, 30 (1996), 869–96.
17 Saburō Ienaga, The Pacific War, 1931–45 (New York 1978), 247–56.
18 Address of 18 June 1940 in Charles de Gaulle, Mémoires de Guerre: L’Appel, 1940–1942
(Paris 1954), 267. In the English translation of Jean Lacouture’s biography, ‘une guerre mondiale’
has been rendered ‘a worldwide war’, which is true to de Gaulle’s emphasis but obscures his exact
use of words. See Lacouture, trans. Patrick O’Brien, De Gaulle: The Rebel, 1890–1944 (New
York 1990), 225.

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36 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 38 No 1

had resigned from Chamberlain’s Cabinet after Munich, published his

speeches for the period October 1938 to August 1939 under the title The
Second World War: First Phase. He claimed that the invasion of Poland and
the Anglo-French declaration of war brought to an end ‘the period of un-
opposed aggression and bloodless victory’, and ‘the second World War
entered upon a new phase’.19 But official statements usually referred simply
to ‘the War’. Certainly, most people saw it as a continuation of the former
struggle against Germany. From October 1939 the Amalgamated Press in
London started publishing an illustrated fortnightly magazine on the conflict
entitled The Second Great War. And in August 1940 Churchill, by then Prime
Minister, spoke of ‘this second war against German aggression’.20 On 12 June
1941 he referred more specifically to ‘the war against Nazism’. It was not until
14 July, after the invasion of Russia, that he used the term ‘a great world war’.
And on 26 December 1941, nearly three weeks after Pearl Harbor, he told the
US Congress: ‘Twice in a single generation the catastrophe of world war has
fallen upon us.’21
The predominant British label, however, was still ‘the War’. In June 1944
the publishers, Macmillan, asked for an official government ruling, noting that
a good many American publications were already using the terms ‘First World
War’ and ‘Second World War’. The Cabinet Secretary, Sir Edward Bridges,
commented:

The phrase ‘Great War’ certainly seems pretty inappropriate now. The alternatives which
first occur to one are:
‘War of 1914–18’ and ‘War of 1939–?’
‘First World War’ and ‘Second World War’
‘Four Years’ War’ and ‘Five (or six, or seven) Years’ War’.

Asked for his opinion, Churchill circled ‘First World War’ and ‘Second World
War’, but Bridges decided not to make any official statement. ‘After all, this is
a matter which is going to be decided by popular judgment. This is not really
one for a Government decision and I do not think it would be right to go
beyond informal guidance when occasion offers.’22 And Churchill himself
equivocated. When embarking on his war memoirs in April 1946 he used the
working title ‘The Second Great War’. It was not until September 1947, little
more than seven months before serialization was to begin in America and
Britain, that he committed himself to the title ‘The Second World War’.23
Norman Brook, Bridges’ successor as Cabinet Secretary, favoured a firmer

19 Duff Cooper, The Second World War: First Phase (London 1939), quoting p. 339.
20 Into Battle: War Speeches by the Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill, compiled by Charles Eade
(London 1941), 252.
21 The Unrelenting Struggle: War Speeches by the Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill, compiled by
Charles Eade (London 1942), 169, 187, 339.
22 Bridges to Martin, 24 June 1944, and Bridges to Laithwaite, 10 July 1944, CAB 103/286,
Cabinet Office papers, Public Record Office, Kew (henceforth PRO).
23 See papers in CHUR 4/41A, esp. folios 52, 84, 127, 130 (CCAC).

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Reynolds: The Origins of the Two ‘World Wars’ 37

official nod toward the term ‘Second World War’. When the question was
raised again in the Commons in October 1946, Prime Minister Clement Attlee,
following Brook’s advice, replied:
I rather doubt whether it is necessary to prescribe an official designation for use on all occa-
sions. On the whole, I think that the phrase ‘Second World War’ is likely to be generally
adopted. But there may be occasions, as for example for inscriptions, when the addition of
the years will be regarded as appropriate.24

The issue was not decided unequivocally until the turn of 1947–8 when the
first volumes of the British official histories of the war were ready for publica-
tion and it became urgent to agree on a formal title for the series. Llewellyn
Woodward, the Oxford historian who was editing the Foreign Office docu-
ments, told Brook bluntly:
I think ‘Second World War’ is much the best term. There is the important point that this term
or more briefly ‘World War II’ is already used, universally, in the United States. It would be
convenient for us to use the same term (and very inconvenient to use a different one).

Many Commonwealth countries were writing their own official war histories
and it was necessary to consult them. Canada, New Zealand, South Africa,
India and Pakistan all agreed with the term ‘Second World War’. But Australia
dissented, on the grounds that ‘there have been more than two wars that
spread as widely as the war of 1914–18’.25
In January 1948, the Cabinet’s ‘Committee for the Control of the Official
Histories’ was formally asked to adjudicate. Rejecting alternatives such as ‘the
Six Years War’, it agreed to the title ‘History of the Second World War’. In
discussion it was noted that Churchill intended to use that phrase as the title of
his war memoirs. The Committee’s decision was endorsed by the Prime
Minister on 27 January 1948.26 British publication of the first volume of
Churchill’s memoirs in October 1948 served to consecrate the phrase, but two
other surveys of the conflict published earlier that year in London also used
the same title.27 And in France the Société d’Histoire de la Guerre resumed
operations in November 1950 with the first issue of what it called Revue
d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale.28

24 House of Commons, Debates, 30 October 1946, 5th series, vol. 428, col. 608; cf. Brook to
Bridges, 26 October 1946 and Bridges to Attlee, 28 October 1946, CAB 103/286.
25 See CAB 103/286, esp. Woodward to Brook, 20 October 1947, and Govt of Australia to
Cab Office, 26 November 1947. The Australian official series is entitled ‘History of the War of
1939–45’, following the pattern of its predecessor series ‘History of the War of 1914–18’.
26 See CAB 134/105, esp. meeting of 21 January 1948, minute 7, and Attlee endorsement of 27
January 1948.
27 Cyril Falls, The Second World War (London 1948) and J.F.C. Fuller, The Second World War
1939–45: A Strategical and Tactical History (London 1948).
28 The final issue of Revue d’Histoire de la Guerre Mondiale was published in October 1939. A
slip was inserted informing readers that publication was being temporarily suspended, ‘en raison
de circonstances’, but promising that it would resume as soon as possible. Revue d’Histoire de la
Guerre Mondiale, 17/4 (octobre 1939), opposite p. 305.

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38 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 38 No 1

As Llewellyn Woodward in effect observed, the ‘Second World War’ was

another American victory. This was the preferred term in the USA, and most
of the western world followed suit. It might seem in retrospect that for
Americans its adoption was a natural response to Pearl Harbor: after Japan
attacked America it was truly a world war, as The New York Times index
suggested. But, in parallel with 1914–18, geography alone was not decisive. In
fact, the shift in American terminology was happening months before Pearl
Harbor. Once again, the crucial actors were Germany and the USA or, more
precisely, Adolf Hitler and Franklin Roosevelt.
Hitler, a war veteran, shared the German propensity to describe 1914–18 as
a world war. In Mein Kampf, published in two volumes in 1925–6, the fifth
chapter of volume one is entitled ‘Der Weltkrieg’. In the foreign policy chap-
ters at the end of volume two, Hitler asserted that ‘Germany will either be a
world power or there will be no Germany’. But he gave the conventional Welt-
vocabulary his own racist twist. Behind British policy and that of Bolshevik
Russia he discerned the ubiquitous, malevolent power of world Jewry. He even
wrote contortedly of ‘the Marxist shock troops of international Jewish stock
exchange capital’. During the war, he insisted, it was the Jews who ‘systemati-
cally stirred up hatred against Germany until state after state abandoned
neutrality and, renouncing the true interests of the peoples, entered the services
of the World War coalition’. He spoke of ‘the leaders of the projected Jewish
world empire’ committed to ‘the annihilation of Germany’. The original
German version of the book referred to the Jews as ‘the world enemy’
(Weltfeind).29
It is a commonplace that Mein Kampf is in no way a ‘blueprint’ for the war
that eventually followed. But the book was the seedbed of some of Hitler’s
most virulent ideas. After the Kristallnacht pogroms of November 1938 had
revived in his mind the supposed linkage between Jewish conspiracy and inter-
national war, he delivered his notorious ‘prophecy’ on 30 January 1939 — the
sixth anniversary of his ‘seizure of power’. He told the Reichstag: ‘If the inter-
national finance Jewry (Finanzjudentum), both inside and outside Europe,
should succeed in plunging the nations once again into a world war, the result
will be not the bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry,
but the annihilation (Vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe!’30
Among Hitler’s many reasons for the speech may well have been Franklin
Roosevelt, who was engaged in a long battle to persuade his countrymen that
isolationism was no longer a credible policy. He pitched his argument on two
levels. One was geopolitical — the claim that in the age of air power America’s

29 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Mannheim (London 1972), quoting 597, 568, 583;
cf. the single-volume German edition (Munich 1933), 725.
30 Max Domarus (ed.), Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen 1932–1945 (4 vols, Munich 1965),
1058. The passage remains controversial. Ian Kershaw attaches great importance to it in his recent
biography Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis (London 2000), 152–3. For an alternative interpretation,
depicting it as more propaganda than substance, see Hans Mommsen, ‘Hitler’s Reichstag Speech
of 30 January 1939’, History and Memory, 9 (1997), 147–61.

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Reynolds: The Origins of the Two ‘World Wars’ 39

oceanic barriers were no longer insuperable. Events in Europe could therefore

impinge on American security. FDR’s other theme was ideological — as he put
it in his annual message on 4 January 1939: ‘God-fearing democracies of the
world . . . cannot safely be indifferent to international lawlessness anywhere.’
In late 1938 Roosevelt had been involved in efforts to promote Jewish emigra-
tion from Europe; Hitler mentioned this issue on 30 January just before utter-
ing his lurid prophecy. Next day FDR told Senators that for the last three years
there had been ‘in the making a policy of world domination between
Germany, Italy and Japan’ which, he claimed, now amounted to ‘an offensive
and defensive alliance’.31
By January 1939, therefore, the ideological battlelines had been drawn
between Roosevelt and Hitler. The Führer was prophesying a new world war
unleashed by Jewish money power; the President was globalizing events to
prod his countrymen out of their regional cocoon. For the moment, Hitler’s
gaze was concentrated on Europe — Poland in 1939, France in 1940, the
Balkans and Russia in 1941. ‘Weltkrieg’ was usually absent from his speeches,
except at moments of stress.32 As the struggle over American neutrality reached
its climax in the spring of 1941, it was Roosevelt who introduced the term
‘second world war’ into the lexicon of American politics.
On 31 May 1940, the President had warned of the danger of ‘a world-wide
war’, and on 3 January 1941 he spoke of the reality of ‘a world at war’. But
Roosevelt took a huge step further on 8 March 1941, the day on which the
Lend-Lease bill was finally approved by the Senate. In a radio address he
spoke of ‘the first World War’ and then started a sentence with this phrase:
‘When the second World War began a year and a half ago’. A week later,
addressing press correspondents, he referred to ‘the first World War’ and ‘the
present war’. And in another radio speech on 27 May 1941, he also made
reference to ‘the first World War’ and ‘this second World War’, arguing that
‘what started as a European war has developed, just as the Nazis always
intended it should develop, into a world war for world domination’.33
Why did Roosevelt begin using the term ‘second World War’ in public from
the spring of 1941? Firm evidence is lacking but at least three reasons may be
inferred. In part, it was probably a response to signs of growing Axis collabo-
ration. The assertions in his 30 January 1939 speech about a virtual alliance
had been given credibility by their Tripartite Pact of September 1940. Second,
the President may now have judged that it was no longer politically necessary

31 The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1939 (London 1940), 3; Donald
B. Schewe (ed.), Franklin D. Roosevelt and Foreign Affairs, 1937–1939 (14 vols, New York
1979–83), vol. 13, 200.
32 For instance, in his anti-British tirade on 8 November 1939 — the annual celebration of the
1923 putsch: ‘In the first World War England was not the victor, but rather others were the
victors. And in the second — of this I can assure you — England will be even less the victor!’
(Domarus, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, op. cit., 1412).
33 Roosevelt, Public Papers, 1940 (1941), 250, 651, and Public Papers, 1941 (1942), 45, 61,
181, 187.

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40 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 38 No 1

to shy away from analogies with 1917. The 1930s had been dominated by a
‘never again’ mentality, but the fall of France and the Battle of Britain aroused
a growing popular conviction that America’s security and values were bound
up with British survival. Passage of Lend-Lease had given Congressional
endorsement to that new mood. Third, FDR’s public talk of a ‘second World
War’ may have reflected the mounting intelligence evidence that Hitler was
about to invade the Soviet Union. Operation Barbarossa on 22 June opened up
a massive new front across Eastern Europe and Eurasia. From then on ‘world
war’ became a recurrent theme in Roosevelt’s speeches.34
While redefining international events as part of a world war, Roosevelt was
already anticipating the world peace that must follow. In January 1941 he had
set out his vision of ‘a world founded on four essential human freedoms’. He
claimed that this was ‘no vision of a distant millennium’ but a ‘world order’
that was ‘attainable in our own time and generation’.35 In August 1941, meet-
ing with Churchill off Newfoundland, he developed the Four Freedoms in the
eight-point Atlantic Charter. For Churchill the meeting was something of a
disappointment. He had been hoping for a US declaration of war; instead he
had to be content with a declaration of war aims.36 But the Axis powers, un-
certain of what secret agreements lay behind the rhetorical façade, were con-
vinced that this was a huge forward step towards American belligerency. To
claim that the Atlantic meeting was the trigger for Hitler’s decision to embark
on Endlösung, the ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish problem, may well be an
exaggeration, but in August 1941 the Führer told Josef Goebbels that his
January 1939 prophecy of world war was coming true with ‘a certainty to be
thought almost uncanny’. And it was in this mood, in September, that he sanc-
tioned the deportation of German and Austrian Jews to the east — in Ian
Kershaw’s words, ‘a massive step’ towards the Final Solution.37
Of course, Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 transformed
international affairs. Geographically this was now truly a world war. But, as
in 1914–18, ideology played a significant role in establishing the term. For
Hitler, as for the apologists of the Kaiserreich, the goal was world power —
with the novel twist that this time the real obstacle was not the British Empire
but the underlying global Jewish conspiracy. For Roosevelt, like Wilson, the
goal was a new world order. But whereas Americans had defined the conflict

34 For instance, his press statement of 24 July on oil exports to Japan: ‘There is a world war
going on, and has been for some time — nearly two years’ (Public Papers, 1941, 280). For fuller
discussion of FDR’s possible reasons see David Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor:
Roosevelt’s America and the Origins of the Second World War (Chicago 2001), 131–2, 182–3.
35 Roosevelt, Public Papers, 1940, 672, speech of 6 January 1941.
36 David Reynolds, ‘The Atlantic “Flop”: British Foreign Policy and the Churchill–Roosevelt
Meeting of August 1941’ in Douglas Brinkley and David Facey-Crowther (eds), The Atlantic
Charter (New York 1994), 129–50.
37 Tobias Jersak, ‘Die Interaktion von Kriegsverlauf und Judenvernichtung: Ein Blick auf
Hitlers Strategie im Spätsommer 1941’, Historische Zeitschrift, 268 (1999), 311–74; cf. Kershaw,
Hitler 1936–1945, op. cit., 472–81, 960–1, quoting from 474 and 479.

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Reynolds: The Origins of the Two ‘World Wars’ 41

of 1914–18 as a world war after they entered it, Roosevelt was already using
that terminology before Pearl Harbor in order to prod Americans out of isola-
tionism into belligerency. Hitler and Roosevelt were both waging ‘world war’,
in fact and in name, for their own ends. Hitler lost, Roosevelt won. In doing so
he established America as the dominant superpower for the remainder of the
twentieth century. Less often noticed, he also established a dominant para-
digm for conceptualizing the century’s two greatest conflicts.

I have sketched out a case study in the redesigning of the past. What are its
larger implications for understanding political transitions? In this brief space,
let me offer two pairs of conclusions — one about our understanding of the
conflicts of 1914–18 and 1939–45, the other about the relationship between
these two conflicts and our conceptions of globalization.
First, to talk of the two world wars may blur our awareness of differences
between those conflicts. Linking the two, of course, is the ‘German question’
— one thinks of Marshal Foch’s comment that 1919 was ‘an armistice
for twenty years’ and of the aphorism that the period 1914–45 constituted
another thirty years war in Europe.38 In both wars, too, what is loosely called
the Middle East was a major theatre of operations, but, in the first, the theatre
of operations was more narrowly confined to the Eastern Mediterranean
crescent from the Dardanelles through Palestine to Suez. The period 1940–3,
by contrast, saw a more intensive and extensive series of campaigns along the
whole North African littoral as well as, especially in 1941, in the Levant and
East Africa. The sharpest contrasts were in ‘the Far East’. In 1914–18 the
Asian dimension was limited — Japan was active at the beginning, China at
the end, but in general this was not a vast Asian conflict. The war of 1939–45,
by contrast, was profoundly Asian — extending from the eastern half of
China, through south-east Asia and across much of the western Pacific in
massive bloodbaths and appalling famines. Moreover, Japan’s spectacular
victories in 1942, though eventually reversed, undermined the edifice of
European rule across Asia. Independence for India and Burma was conceded
in 1947, for the Dutch East Indies in 1949 and, partially, for French Indochina
in 1954. In China the destruction of Nationalist power in the Sino-Japanese
war paved the way for communist victory in 1949.39
If linking the two conflicts may blur our sense of their differences, their
global label can equally dull our sensitivities to regional distinctions within
each. In the case of Asia in 1939–45 this observation applies on two levels —
the ideological and the geopolitical. The search for ideological uniformity,
encouraged by Roosevelt’s globalism, has resulted in a tendency to subsume all
three Axis powers under the title ‘fascist’ or ‘totalitarian’. Yet fascism was

38 P.M.H. Bell, The Origins of the Second World War in Europe, 2nd edn (London 1997), 16.
39 For a contrary view, insisting that ‘the First World War was global from its outset’, see
Strachan, First World War, vol. I, op. cit., xvi.

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42 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 38 No 1

born in 1920s Italy. Use of the label is debatable even in the case of nazi
Germany; it is certainly problematic when we look at 1930s Japan, whose
traditional society remained under the control of various élite groups and
much less susceptible to radical mass politics.40 Geopolitically, the Asian
dimension of the war has also suffered from a putative globalism that is really
centred on Europe and America. One can see this in the transposition of the
term ‘Pacific War’ for ‘Greater East Asian War’ in post-1945 Japanese termi-
nology. Yet the Pacific conflict of 1941–45 was really part of a larger Sino-
Japanese war that extended back to the Marco Polo bridge in 1937 and the
Manchurian ‘Incident’ of 1931. Hence the tendency of postwar Japanese
historians to write of a ‘fifteen-years war’. It is only in the last decade that we
have begun to appreciate the magnitude of the Soviet war (perhaps 28 million
dead), but the Sino-Japanese war remains obscure even though the death
toll may have been as much as 15 million.41 This war in turn must be located
within a larger struggle for mastery of China that takes us back to 1911 and
forward to Mao’s triumph in 1949. In other words, by trying to encompass
events in the ‘second world war’ box we miss out important ideological and
geopolitical features of the Asian conflict, not least the most important politi-
cal transition of twentieth-century China.
Turning to globalization — widely viewed as an essentially contemporary
transition — the labels World War I and World War II can reinforce our
parochialism. ‘One vanity of the twentieth century’, writes historian Geoffrey
Blainey, ‘is the belief that it experienced the first world wars, but at least five
wars in the eighteenth century involved so many nations and spanned so much
of the globe that they could also be called world wars.’ In his quantitative
analysis of wars over five centuries, Jack Levy makes a similar point about
‘general’ or ‘world’ wars, drawing particular attention to the War of Austrian
Succession (1739–48), the Seven Years War (1756–63), and the French
Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars of 1792–1815.42 Although centred on
the rivalry of the great powers in Europe, each of these involved worldwide
struggles for colonies and trade. Together they decisively shaped the future of
India, North America and the Caribbean. The Australian official historians
had this in mind in 1947 when, alone in the British Commonwealth, they
rejected the label ‘second world war’ for the conflict of 1939–45. It is also
interesting to note that Winston Churchill used the term ‘The First World
War’ repeatedly in Marlborough — his 1934–8 account of the ‘Grand
Alliance’ against Louis XIV — and as the title of his chapter on the Seven

40 Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (London 1997), esp. 208–10, 353–4; see
also Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 3rd edn
(London 1993), chap. 2.
41 Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge
1994), 894.
42 Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War, 3rd edn (London 1988), chaps 13 and 15, quoting
from p. 228; Jack S. Levy, War in the Great Power System, 1495–1975 (Lexington, KY 1983),
esp. 75 and 189 (notes 33 and 35).

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Reynolds: The Origins of the Two ‘World Wars’ 43

Years War in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, published in 1957.43

Of course, we must acknowledge differences as well as similarities. The death
tolls from the conflicts of 1914–18 and 1939–45 were, in absolute terms,
unique — perhaps 10,000,000 from the first and 50,000,000 from the second.
Yet as proportions of the total populations of their time, some of the earlier
conflicts, particularly the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, may
well have been as deadly. Just as historians rightly remind us that globalization
did not begin in 1945,44 so we should remember that global wars were not
peculiar to the twentieth century.
The material discussed in this article also has relevance for our thinking
about globalization itself. Throughout, I have emphasized the ideological
thrust behind use of the term ‘world war’, particularly in the USA. Woodrow
Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt both sought global answers to specific inter-
national problems. FDR in particular employed ‘world war’ as a deliberate
political instrument to break the intellectual bonds of American isolationism.
At the same time, other American internationalists were adopting similar
ploys. In February 1941 Henry Luce published his celebrated article on ‘The
American Century’, in which he globalized the US Pledge of Allegiance and
spoke of humanity as ‘for the first time in history, one world, fundamentally
indivisible’. Attacking American isolationism, Luce offered a breathtaking
agenda for what he called ‘the first great American century’: America’s duties
included deciding whether or not ‘a system of free economic enterprise’ would
prevail across the world, acting as ‘the Good Samaritan of the entire world’
and, above all, serving as the ‘powerhouse’ and not merely the ‘sanctuary’ of
‘the ideals of civilization’.45 Two years later, in April 1943, Wendell Willkie,
the unsuccessful Republican candidate in the 1940 presidential election, pub-
lished his book One World. This was an account of his whirlwind 50-day
world tour in the summer of 1942, visiting international leaders and global
hotspots. Willkie struck a chord with his affirmation that ‘the world had
become small and interdependent’ and his injunction that ‘our thinking of the
future must be world-wide’. One World became America’s biggest non-fiction
bestseller to date, disposing of its first million copies in only seven weeks and
topping 4.5 million by the time of Willkie’s death in October 1944.46
The language of ‘one world’ is a familiar trope of globalization. Luce and
Willkie were developing the Wilsonian vision of a globe reformed in America’s

43 Winston S. Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times (London, Folio Society edn 1991),
e.g. vol. I, 2, 212, 298, 404; idem, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, vol. 3 (London
1957), chap. 5. That chapter title was used as early as the 1938 draft of the book (CHAR 8/790,
CCAC). More recently, the popular historian Tom Pocock has called 1756–63 ‘the very first First
World War’, with 1914–18 and 1939–45 as the second and third — Battle for Empire: The Very
First World War, 1756–63 (London 1998), 13, 258.
44 Cf. A.G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History (London 2002).
45 Henry R. Luce, ‘The American Century’, Life, 17 February 1941, 61–5.
46 Wendell L. Willkie, One World (New York 1943), 1–2. For sales figures see Joseph Barnes,
Willkie (New York 1952), 315, and Ellsworth Barnard, Wendell Willkie: Fighter for Freedom
(Marquette, MI 1966), 412.

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44 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 38 No 1

image. Less familiar is the effect of the ‘world wars’ on mental globalization.
Making Americans think in terms of a unified global conflict was the essential
counterpart to selling them on an integrated global peace. FDR was engaged in
both processes months before Pearl Harbor made the term ‘second World
War’ into a reality. In the origins of the two ‘world wars’ we find some
neglected impulses towards globalization and a term worthy of much closer
attention from conceptual historians.47

David Reynolds
is a Fellow of Christ’s Church College, Cambridge. He is the author
or editor of eight books, the most recent of which are One World
Divisible: A Global History since 1945 (London 2000) and From
Munich to Pearl Harbor: Roosevelt’s America and the Origins of the
Second World War (Chicago 2001). He is currently completing a
book about Winston Churchill’s war memoirs.

47 On this genre, see Melvin Richter, The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical
Introduction (New York 1995).

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