Global war 1914-45

RICHARD OVERY

The most remarkable aspect of the two global wars that dominated the thirty-year period from 1914 to 1945 was the contrast between their modest origins in political disputes in south-east and eastern Europe between just two states and the worldwide dimension that both wars quickly assumed.

No-one in July 1914 could have predicted that the crisis between Serbia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire would result by 1918 in a war that embraced every continent and every ocean over its four-year course. Few people in August 1939 could have imagined that the imminent German-Polish war, ostensibly over the status of the Free City of Danzig, would by 1942 have led to a global conflict in sites as far apart as the Aleutian Islands, Madagascar and Dakar.

In the case of both World Wars there were factors that explain how local disputes became interlocked with wider conflicts, at both a regional and international level, capable of transforming local war into global war. In late-nineteenth-century Europe, the emergence of a great power system in which national identity and national interests came to supplant any wider commitment to a peaceful European order, created the circumstances in which national rivalry came to be regarded as a natural product of the modern age and warfare, either alone or in alliance, as the most likely way in which those rivalries would be expressed. The growth of large permanent armed forces, equipped with the sophisticated military products of modern science and industry, and the emergence of mass nationalism as a feature of European political culture, together created conditions in which the possibility of restraint in international crisis became progressively reduced.

National rivalry was also sustained by economic competition. In the mid nineteenth century, when British industrial and commercial strength had helped to precipitate widespread international co-operation and a reduction in economic restrictions on trade and production, market competition did not directly stimulate national rivalry.

By the late nineteenth century, with widespread European industrialization and increasing pressure to secure the consumer interests of the new industrial, urban workforce and the emerging business classes, economic restrictions surfaced once again, while European states began to see wider global markets and sources of raw materials as an arena in which government protection and national self-assertion would be needed to preserve or enlarge national well-being at the possible expense of other states.

There has always been debate about whether these European historical developments explain the upsurge of the so-called ‘New Imperialism' in the last third of the nineteenth century, but there is no doubt that imperialism did play a major part in turning regional European rivalries into global tensions. In 1917, Lenin famously defined World War I as the product of an imperialism which he titled ‘the highest form of capitalism'.¹ Competition for markets, secure trade routes and trading bases, valuable raw materials or military outposts characterized much of the expansion of European economic and political interests between the 1870s and the outbreak of war in 1914. The link with empire became explicit as the areas of the globe not yet occupied by European powers, or brought under European suzerainty, were remorselessly eliminated, leaving Ethiopia as the only independent polity in Africa, and Siam (Thailand) the only independent state in south Asia and the South Pacific. For those states with old-established empires (Britain, France, The Netherlands, Spain, Portugal) the new wave of imperialism promised some advantages, but also compelled them to define the territories they controlled more closely, and to extend influence in areas which they regarded as strategically vulnerable, such as Egypt, or Indo-China (present-day Vietnam/Cambodia/Laos). For states now searching for empire for the first time (Germany, Italy, Belgium), or for Russia and the United States - after the Spanish-American war of 1898 - extending their influence and political control over wide areas of Asia and the Pacific, the old empires were a barrier to be challenged.

The ‘New Imperialism', which generated endless conflicts with indigenous societies, now assumed a more pronounced European dimension and the regular crises in the years before 1914 reflected that reality. Empire, for all its costs and problems, came to be seen as a way of protecting national interest and an expression of national vitality and economic strength.^{^[495]} ^{^[496]}

The role of European imperialism (or rather of European illusions about what imperialism represented) in creating conditions for exacerbating national rivalry and the possibility of global war should not be underestimated. As the possibility of acquiring new territories disappeared, so the European states were encouraged to look to the failing empires in China or the Ottoman Middle East for possible compensation. British intervention in Egypt, occupied in 1882, French annexation of Algeria and Tunisia, and the Italian-Turkish war of 1911 brought the Ottoman Empire to crisis point, while the intervention of European and American expeditionary forces in China from the Opium Wars of the 1840s to the suppression of the ‘Boxer Rebellion' in 1900 accelerated the decline of the Chinese imperial system while opening up apparently boundless commercial possibilities. The extension of European political and economic interests worldwide, part cause, part consequence of the crisis of traditional empires and political systems, not only failed to bring enhanced security for the new imperial powers, but created a web of fragile and unstable regional security zones in which it was difficult to project metropolitan power effectively. It also explains how local crises in 1914 and 1939 came immediately to have worldwide implications because the threat to the metropolitan power in Europe meant the automatic involvement of the network of dominions, settler states, protectorates and colonies that circled the entire globe.

The place of empire in explaining the origin of the World War and defining its global scale was not confined only to the coming of war in 1914.

Indeed, issues of empire arguably played a larger part in the outbreak of World War II. In 1919 the Allied peacemakers created a situation in which British and French imperial interests were protected and enlarged by the peace settlement, in particular through the addition of mandated territories taken from the former German colonies and the collapsed Ottoman Empire and held loosely on behalf of the League of Nations.^{^[497]} Yet in reality the settlement after World War I created the prospect of further instabilities in the worldwide European empires with the spread of European ideas of nationalism to colonial peoples and the imagined threat from international communism, following the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 and the consolidation of Communist power in what became, in 1922, the Soviet Union. Safeguarding the security of the empire, even at its territorial zenith, permanently strained the capacity of Britain or France, as the two states dominating the League, to act effectively in Europe or Asia. The post-1919 settlement at the same time created powerful national resentments among states that felt they had not received their due in 1919 or had been unfairly penalized. In the 1930s Germany, Italy and Japan each tried to extend their own imperial interests in defiance of an international system that seemed designed to benefit Britain and France and to limit their national aspirations. They were also aware that the Soviet Union and the United States, though playing little part in the League order, might soon exert their great economic and military potential at their expense unless they could secure greater regional power. The idea of a ‘New Order' in which Germany, Italy and Japan would build their own regional empires defined the military and economic ambitions of all three and was agreed in the Tri-Partite Pact signed in September 1940 which divided the Old World into three new spheres of imperial influence in Europe, the Mediterranean basin and Africa, and mainland Asia.

In this sense, the global competition for empire did not disappear with the end of World War I but was reconfigured as a result of the deficiencies of the post-1919 settlement and the rise of neo-imperialist and radical nationalist ideologies.

World War I and the failure of internationalism

Empire was not the only explanation for the failure of the international order to prevent the outbreak of a major European war in August 1914 and the subsequent inability to find a way to end it.^{^[498]} The pre-1914 world was, for all the confident belief in progress, a world in a state of rapid flux, in which new political and social forces were being released through mass education and economic modernization, which challenged the established order in Europe and in the wider world. The instability that these new historical forces created were evident in the Young Turk Revolution, launched in 1908 to try to modernize the ailing Ottoman Empire, or the collapse of Manchu China and the rise of a national revolutionary movement signalled by the Sun Yat Sen revolution in 1912, or the revolutionary ferment in the Russian Tsarist Empire which resulted in the 1905 revolution and a struggle for constitutional reform in the decade that followed. The other European states did not face revolution before 1914, but the rise of mass politics, both liberal and socialist, compelled regular concessions from the established ruling classes and a growing emphasis on patriotic and imperial symbolism to divert some of the demand for political reform into popular nationalism. The attraction of imperial and nationalist propaganda can be explained by the search for new forms of identity by an increasingly literate and mobile population for whom the established conservative order held little appeal. The aristocratic and military elite in Europe still held on to political and social power where it could, but in 1914 part of the price to be paid for its nationalimperial rhetoric was an exaggerated sense of threat and a population easily swayed by national fervour.

The crisis in 1914 exposed all these structural defects and insecurities. Otherwise it is difficult to make sense of how a minor crisis in the Balkans could spark within five weeks a conflagration involving all the major European empires. It has often been argued that the heart of the crisis lay in German ambition and insecurity, but a better case can be made for the argument that the problems confronting the ageing Habsburg Empire, and its ageing emperor, Franz Joseph, were decisive. Like the Russian and Ottoman Empires, the Habsburg Empire was faced with internal paradoxes it could not resolve. The semi-autonomy of Hungary in 1867 made it hard to justify the suppression of other national aspirations in a multi-national empire; the search for liberal constitutional reform merely fed the appetite for more radical solutions, while nationalism in Bohemia, Austrian Poland, Slovakia and among the south Slavs drove the Germans of the empire into strident Pan-German movements, with strong anti-Slav and anti-Semitic sentiments. The collapse of Ottoman power in the Balkans and the emergence of independent states created a power vacuum that both the Habsburgs and the Romanovs hoped to fill, but at the same time success here encouraged revolutionary nationalism inside the Habsburg Empire. The Balkan Wars against Turkey (and each other) in 1912-13 cemented independence and created a larger Serbia, the national representative of south Slav aspirations inside the Austrian territories. In Vienna, Serbia was seen as the principal threat and a solution to the south Slav question came to be seen as the one factor that would permit the Habsburg Empire to survive in more or less its existing form. Annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908 was one step; extending some kind of godfatherly supervision over Serbia might be the next. When the Habsburg heir, Franz Ferdinand, and his wife Sophia were assassinated by Bosnian nationalists on 28 June 1914, the military leadership in Vienna saw this as an opportune moment to extend that supervision. When Serbia refused to allow her recently won sovereignty to be compromised by allowing Habsburg officials to monitor the murder investigation, Austria declared war.

This war might have been just another Balkan conflict had the crisis not had the unfortunate effect of immediately triggering the other insecurities of Europe. The major states were divided into loose alliance blocs, not necessarily to threaten each other, but to restrain alliance partners. There was nothing certain about how the major states would react to a crisis generated by one side or the other. Britain had an ambivalent relationship with Russia following the 1907 entente, while France was locked into a financial relationship with the burgeoning Russian economy that made support for Russia more certain. Germany was anxious that its principal ally, the Habsburg Empire, should not create major instability by an aggressive policy in southeast Europe as long as Russia, whose industrial modernization had made possible a large-scale military build-up, remained an uncertain factor.^{^[499]} Italy, an unnatural ally for Germany and Austria, remained neutral in 1914 and then switched sides in 1915 on the Allied promise of territorial gains at Austria's expense. The Serb crisis created a collective paranoia among the capitals of Europe and immediately mobilized popular patriotism, as all crises did. Germany tried to restrain Austria once the possibility of a broader crisis emerged, but the German military were worried that Russia and France would seize a sudden opportunity to stifle German power. The Tsar wanted to make a clearer statement of Russian determination to protect Serbia in order to allay domestic criticism and to divert popular feeling to a national cause. He approved a risky mobilization and when Russian leaders refused German demands to stop, Germany mobilized and launched a pre-emptive campaign against France and Russia. Britain responded to the violation of Belgian neutrality not from any great love for the Belgians but from fear that defeat of France would swing the European balance of power heavily against British interests. By 4 August a general European war had emerged from the Austro-Serb crisis and Britain and France rallied their empire populations across the globe. In October 1914, the Ottoman Empire, hoping to reverse the recent losses of territory to Serbia, Greece and Italy, joined the so-called Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary, turning the Middle East into a war zone as well, where the principal Allied states, Britain and France, had further interests to defend.

Two battles ensured that the war would not be ended in a single campaign in 1914. The Battle of the Marne in September in France checked the onrushing German armies and created a long defensive front through north-eastern France, the Western Front. In the east the Russian armies were defeated at Tannenberg in late August 1914, preventing a Russian march on Berlin. Although war was more mobile on the Eastern Front, fixed defensive lines were also built here. When Italy joined the war on the side of the Allies in May 1915, more trenches appeared on the Italian-Austrian border in north-east Italy. The stalemate that resulted on all the European fronts resulted from the development of a military technology that favoured the defence - machine-guns, heavy artillery with a sophisticated range of deadly ammunition, and poison gas. The defensive trench was protected by minefields and barbed wire; breaching fixed defences required heavy sacrifice of manpower. Armoured vehicles were almost unknown until the last year of war and aircraft were in their technical infancy, duelling in the sky to no very great effect.

It was nevertheless possible to restore peace by agreement. The few explorations of a possible peace broke down on the intransigence of both sides, neither willing to accept concessions or to abandon the prospect of a favourable settlement. The high casualties and the heavy industrial commitment soon required, locked the major nations into a conflict in which the sacrifices had to be justified in some way by success, however ill-defined. What began as an ill- conceived conflict fuelled by mutual distrust was soon rationalized as a struggle for survival, drawing on a generation of social-Darwinist thinking which saw human conflict as the inevitable reflection of the wider struggle for survival in nature.^{^[500]} Defeat of the Allies was seen as the precondition for the continued existence of the German, Austrian and Turkish empires, while defeat of the Central Powers was seen as the precondition for the establishment of a more stable and liberal international order. The intensity with which the war was fought and the triumph of a narrow nationalist, even racist, ideology among all the combatant powers ensured that the war would be fought to the death if it could be. The war in this sense developed its own momentum and its own bloodthirsty rationale, related to but increasingly distant from the values and interests of the pre-war world.^{^[501]}

The war was not, however, a unitary conflict. The massive bloodletting against fixed defences that characterized the war on all the major European fronts, or in the failed British assault on Gallipoli against Turkey from April 1915 to January 1916, was accompanied by a global conflict against Germany's overseas colonial possessions and a naval war involving Japan (Britain's ally) in the Pacific, and the British, French and Italian fleets in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Germany's colonies were soon overrun except in German East Africa (Tanganyika), where the garrison held out until the end of the war in 1918. Japan in 1914 seized the German colony of Jiaozhou in China and the Mariana, Marshall and Caroline Islands, giving the Japanese a foothold in the central Pacific. The most important naval theatre was the Atlantic. The German battle fleet was bottled up in the North Sea by the larger British navy, but German submarines could operate in the Atlantic against British trade. The object was to cut off British overseas supplies, on which Britain was dependent and so force Britain to withdraw from the war. InJanuary 1917 the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, agreed to the introduction of unrestricted submarine warfare to ensure that all vessels, even those of the neutral United States, could be sunk. In July 1917 this undersea assault was accompanied by a bombing campaign against London and coastal towns using the first heavy bombers developed in the war. The attempt to fight the war away from the European front lines proved disastrous. The bombing achieved little but prompted the British to found the Royal Air Force and to begin preparing the bombing of German industrial cities, which began in the summer of 1918. The anti-shipping campaign finally provoked the neutral United States, whose sympathies were broadly with the Western Allies, into a state of war against Germany. This decision, taken by President Woodrow Wilson in April 1917, turned the war into a truly global conflict and brought into the scales the overwhelming economic strength of the world's largest industrial and agricultural producer.

Entry of the United States did not make the defeat of the Central Powers inevitable but made it probable. Given the tight economic blockade imposed on Germany and Austria and the escalating cost of the war in men and industrial resources it is remarkable that they sustained combat for as long as they did. The war imposed severe social strains and widespread hunger, with declining health, shortages of fuel and flourishing black markets. These pressures proved too great for the Russian Empire, since its industrial base was more fragile and its organization of the war corrupt and incompetent. In February 1917 the Tsar was overthrown and a revolutionary state proclaimed, though the war continued to be fought to prevent a harsh peace. The costly war effort broke the new revolutionary state as well. The radical Marxist ‘Bolsheviks' seized power from the Provisional Government in late October 1917 and sought ways to end the war. The subsequent treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed under duress in March 1918, gave the Central Powers control of large areas of Ukraine and Belorussia and freed precious manpower to be moved to the Western and Italian Fronts. A final German fling in Operation Michael on the Western Front in March 1918 was halted after a few weeks and with the addition of fresh American troops, the German army was slowly driven back from its front lines. In Italy an Allied victory at Vittorio Veneto in late October 1918 broke the Austrians' resistance while Turkish forces were routed in Palestine and Syria. The domestic alliance that had kept the Central Powers fighting collapsed. The Habsburg Empire fragmented into its ethnic fractions while in Germany working-class militancy broke out into open confrontation with the old regime which was by now secretly negotiating a ceasefire. On 29 October mutinies began in the German fleet. On 9 November the Kaiser abdicated and a day later an armistice was agreed, to come into effect at 11 a.m. on the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Separate agreements were reached with Austria-Hungary and Turkey some weeks before.

An armistice for twenty years

The war was the central event of the twentieth century. The prolonged and savage nature of the conflict directly touched the lives of millions of men and indirectly affected tens of millions of war-workers, farmers, sailors and officials. Families across Europe bore losses exceptional even in a world where the death of children and the premature death of adults was commonplace. Some 8.4 million soldiers were killed from both sides and 22 million wounded out of the 65 million men (and some women) mobilized, a casualty rate of 47 per cent.^{^[502]} Millions of civilians - the exact number will never be known with precision - lost their lives through hunger, disease, bombing, shelling, racial violence and wartime atrocities. The dislocating effect of the conflict was evident at every level - political, social, economic, cultural and demographic.^{^[503]} Yet in 1919 the victorious Allies (now no longer including Russia, whose Communist revolutionaries rejected bourgeois peacemaking, even had they been invited) assumed that it would be possible to build a better world, based on collaboration and mutual respect, a liberal internationalism that would bring to an end the domination of ethnic minorities by larger dynastic empires and encourage the democratization of politics through the principle of self-determination. These ambitions lay at the core of the so-called Fourteen Points outlined by President Wilson to the American Congress in January 1918 and reiterated in September. The better world was to be supervised by a new League of Nations, the product of British and American idealist thinking during the war about how to overcome the threat of alliance systems, economic restrictions and the wasteful expenditure on armaments.

It would be easy to dismiss these ambitions to solve the whole world's problems as deluded in the light of what subsequently happened. There were important political and geopolitical achievements made possible as a consequence of war.^{^[504]} The German, Russian, Habsburg and Ottoman empires all disappeared to be replaced by republics, though only Germany and Austria were democratic republics, and even there only for a little over a decade. In central and Eastern Europe new states were created, loosely based on self-determination and temporarily democratic - Austria, Hungary, Poland, Finland, the Baltic States, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. New states were carved out of the collapsed Ottoman Empire in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia but all but Arabia were put under the control of Britain and France and none was remotely democratic (though Iraq won its independence in 1926). These rearrangements helped to shape the map of what are now modern Europe and the modern Middle East.

The effort to reach a settlement in the Allied conference at Versailles in 1919 that would confirm and support these changes resulted in the formation of a League of Nations and a notional commitment to universal disarmament, both enshrined in the Treaty of Versailles forced on Germany in June 1919. The subsequent treaties of St. Germain and Trianon with Austria, Hungary and Bulgaria, and the Treaty of Sevres with Turkey (replaced by a new Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 confirming a new sovereign Turkish nation in Anatolia) elaborated the settlement in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The League met for the first time in 1920 in London before moving to its permanent seat in Geneva. All disputes between member states were to be submitted for discussion with the object of arriving at a judicious settlement without resort to arms.

The long catalogue ofhalf-resolved issues that resulted from the political and social upheaval of war shows the extent to which the peacemakers and League activists lived an illusion. The years after the war were punctured by continued violence, in Ireland (where the British government had to agree to self-determination in 1922), in a savage war between Greece and Turkey, and an equally savage and prolonged civil war in Russia which saw the mobilization of armies on the scale of the World War. The bitter war between the Red Army and the counter-revolutionary ‘Whites' scarred Soviet development in the 1920s and 1930s and encouraged the development of a militaristic and terroristic dictatorship. An attempted invasion of Poland by the victorious Red Army was repulsed outside Warsaw in 1920 by the narrowest of margins. In China the collapse of imperial rule prompted the fragmentation of Chinese territory into rival warlord territories, and growing Japanese intervention in the economic development of the north. Chinese instability was exploited by European and American traders, who competed, as they had done before 1914, for special favours.

The League could do nothing about these conflicts and was weakened immediately by the failure in 1920 of the United States Congress to ratify the treaty, cutting America off from the experiment Wilson had pioneered. The League was dominated by British and French interests; Germany became a member for seven years from 1926 to 1933, and the Soviet Union for five years, from 1934 to 1939. Japan left it in March 1933, Italy in December 1937. With only two of the major powers as continuous members, the League's political ambitions were doomed. Nor were Britain and France the model liberal internationalists the system needed. The commitment to disarm was not ignored entirely, but both states remained heavily armed throughout the 1920s and 1930s, while for years denying Germany the right to rearm. Selfdetermination was not offered to the French and British colonies and protectorates, or to India, though they had all supplied men and resources for the World War. Imperial rule came to be seen as oppressive and unjust as nationalist ideals were imported into the empire areas and demands for independence or self-government articulated in European terms. Anticolonial politicians could point to the paradox of a World War for liberty and their continued subjection. Although liberal trade policies were talked about in 1919, Britain and France continued to practise restrictions on trade and made little effort to reconstruct the pre-war trading and financial system on which a flourishing world economy depended. Economic stabilization in the 1920s owed much to the United States, which rescued the German and Central European currencies in 1923-4 and extended large loans to sustain growth in Europe, while not insisting on the full repayment of wartime credits.¹¹

These structural economic and political defects might have been overcome if a liberal willingness to create more open trade and political partnerships had really been manifested, or the paradoxes of British and French dominance, itself the product of chance rather than intention, properly addressed. There remained, however, other legacies of war that were more damaging to the prospect of a liberal reconstruction. The revolutionary movements at the end of the war in Germany, Italy, Austria and Hungary, which drew inspiration from the Bolshevik example, provoked bitter ideological feuding. In China the warlord conflicts of the 1920s became distilled into a central and violent conflict between the Nationalists led by the young soldier Chiang Kai-shek, and the Chinese Communists. The Japanese government and military detested communism, a hatred that prompted their intervention in Siberia in 1919 against the Red Armies. The 1920s witnessed an incipient Cold War against the Soviet state and against the attempt by the Communist International, set up in Moscow in 1919, to spread the revolutionary movement worldwide. The most conspicuous reaction against the radical left was the emergence of a radical nationalism in the 1920s, led by embittered veterans of the World War who saw the struggle still in terms of national survival and self-assertion, and believed their sacrifice to be dishonoured by the internationalism and pacifism of the left. Where they could, these veterans mimicked wartime ceremonial (with all its religious overtones), adopted political uniforms and titles, engaged in routine street violence and rejected collaboration with other parties of the right. Their radical nationalism flourished best in a context where the traditional conservative forces were weakened by the war and its aftermath, as in Germany or Italy or Austria.^{^[505]} ^{^[506]} In the absence of a powerful but more moderate conservatism, the revolutionary nationalists of the trenches appealed to all those frightened of communism and still susceptible to the crude patriotic appeals of the war years. Without the conditions created by war and the embedded hatreds and fears it engendered it is unlikely that Benito Mussolini's Italian Fascist Party would have come to power in Italy in 1922, or Adolf Hitler's National Socialists in Germany in 1933, or the quasi-Fascist Fatherland Front of Engelbert Dollfuss in Austria in 1934.^{^[507]} Without the legacy of war and the growing resentment at Western claims on Asia that the postwar settlement prompted, it is unlikely that young Japanese militarists would have become the driving force of Japanese anti-communism and imperialism in the 1930s.

It is important to recognize that the generation that experienced the war at first hand -wounded like Mussolini, or gassed like Hitler, or a prisoner like Dollfuss - grew up by the 1930s into the politicians, officials and senior officers that ran the political and military establishment. Their reference points were the experiences of war and its aftermath and their sense of personal commitment to comrades and their shared prejudices and resentments, were the product of these years. Hitler gave speeches in 1920 on the elimination of the Jews in Europe, who he blamed for ‘stabbing Germany in the back' at the end of the war, and he was making similar speeches twenty years later on the eve of launching the deliberate genocide of the Jews. Fumimaro Konoye, Japanese representative at the Versailles Conference, expressed his resentment at the treatment of Japanese interests in an essay in 1918 on rejecting the ‘Anglo-American centred peace' and twenty years later as Japanese prime minister declared a ‘New Order' in Asia to exclude the Western powers from Japanese affairs in China.^{^[508]} Radical nationalism, whether in Germany or Italy or Japan, was nourished on the belief that the World War had opened up opportunities to remodel domestic politics and to remodel the world system.

It was not, of course, inevitable, as the French Marshal Ferdinand Foch warned in 1919, that there would only be an armistice for twenty years and then another war.^{^[509]} But with the passage of time it is evident that no explanation for the descent into a second World War in the late 1930s can ignore the dysfunctional effects of the conflict of 1914-18 with its messy and violent aftermath and its lingering psychological and ideological legacies. Even among those who campaigned against war in the 1920s and 1930s, chiefly in Britain and France, there was a demoralizing expectation that the drift to a new war was irresistible, driven by forces that civilization could not restrain.^{^[510]} ^{^[511] ^[512]} The probability of a new war was exacerbated by the economic crisis that destroyed the fragile world economy in 1929-30, itself the product of the failure to restore a more liberal trading and financial order in the 1920s, or to compensate for the economic damage sustained by the war and, in the case of Germany and Austria, a punitive peace treaty. Britain and France survived the Slump more effectively than economies that relied on favourable export markets and open trade, such as Germany and Japan. The failure of economic multilateralism resulted in as many as 40 million unemployed worldwide and crippling poverty in the weaker economies. Protectionist trade regimes in Britain, France and the United States convinced other states that the Western economic system was bankrupt and that the narrow self-interest of Britain and France, made evident by their possession of large territorial empires, was a barrier to the successful national self-expression of other states. The result was a deliberate search for a ‘New Order' both economically and politically that would challenge Western dominance and create the conditions for national self-assertion stifled by the war and its aftermath. 1⁷

In truth the ‘New Orders' were not new at all, but were rooted in old- fashioned mercantilist economics and the search for empire, connected much more with a world well before 1914 than with any new age. The ambitions formulated in Japan, Italy and Germany - the Axis states - in the 1930s were closely linked to the idea of empire. InJapan and Italy, both of which already had territorial empires, the object was to consolidate these and to expand further, using territorial conquests as a means to secure both a high degree of economic self-sufficiency (autarky) to protect military production and an exalted international status. In 1931 the Japanese army seized control of Manchuria in northern China and embarked on a course of territorial expansion that was to end with the launching of war in the Pacific and South East Asia in December 1941 in order to secure the further resources necessary to sustain a new Asian empire against Western efforts to challenge it.1⁸ In Italy, Mussolini had consolidated his personal dictatorship by 1926 and now looked for opportunities to exploit what he regarded as Western decadence by embarking on a programme to extend Italian imperial power in Africa and eventually in the Mediterranean basin. The war against Ethiopia, waged between October 1935 and May 1936, was the first step; war against Britain and France declared in June 1940 saw Italian forces threaten the Suez Canal, expel the British from Somaliland and embark in October 1940 on a war against Greece. Hitler was also obsessed with issues of empire. He could remember by heart the population size and territorial extent of the British and French Empires. His ambition to conquer Eurasia was clearly imperialist in a conventional sense: ‘What India was for England, the territories of Russia will be for us', he remarked in August 1941.^{^[513]} The drive to extend German power into central Europe with the acquisition of Austria, the Czech lands, and then Poland in 1939, was to open the way to building an integrated German-dominated empire in Eastern Europe where colonial forms of government could be imposed and the economic resources exploited for a self-sufficient ‘large area economy' [Grossraumwirtschaft].^{^[514]} Nevertheless, all three of these ‘New Orders' could only be constructed at the expense of those states which wished to preserve as much of the ‘Old Order' as they could. The result was a rush to rearm from the mid-1930s on a scale that dwarfed the military preparations of pre-1914.^{^[515]} In 1914 most states devoted around 3-5 per cent of the national product to military purposes; by 1939 Germany devoted 30 per cent, Britain 22 per cent and France 23 per cent of the national product. All three states began an arms race from the same point, 1936-7. Soviet military expansion followed the same trajectory; even in the neutral and isolationist United States President Roosevelt was able to persuade Congress to accept limited rearmament for defence in 1938-9.

World War II: from one New Order to another

The war that broke out on 3 September 1939 after Germany ignored British and French ultimatums to withdraw from the invasion of Poland, begun two days before, was only part of this wider project pursued, though not coordinated, by the three Axis states to overturn the existing international disorder and to impose their own version of international stability. Japan began a war against Nationalist China in July 1937 which was soon extended to the whole of northern, central and eastern China. In 1938 and again in 1939 large operations were conducted against Soviet forces on the unstable border with Soviet-dominated Mongolia. Japan took advantage of the German war in Europe, which had resulted in a spectacular defeat over France and a British Expeditionary Force in May/June 1940 (what was supposed to happen in 1914), to extend influence into French Indo-China and to think about a southern campaign to seize the oil, rubber, tin and bauxite of the European empires in South East Asia. Mussolini occupied Albania in April 1939 and built up Italian forces in Libya before releasing them against a weakened British Commonwealth defence in September 1940. Hitler consolidated his hold on Eastern Europe in 1939-40, defeated France and hoped that blockade and bombing, the hope of 1917, would bring Britain to the negotiating table. On 27 September 1940 the three Axis powers signed the Tri-Partite Pact in Berlin (with another ceremony in Tokyo) declaring their intention to construct a New Order in each of their areas of imperial interest.

There was in all this much unfinished business. Indeed, the analogies between the two World Wars are striking. The German Schlieffen Plan of 1914 - to defeat France first and then turn to deal with Russia - was repeated, apparently successfully, by the autumn of 1941 when Hitler believed that Russia, invaded by four million Axis and co-belligerent forces in June, was close to imminent defeat. Once more German submarines tried to blockade Britain while the Royal Navy imposed blockade on Germany and German- occupied Europe. Once again bombing was used by the German armed forces to try to force Britain out of the war, and once again Britain responded as in 1918 by planning a large-scale bombing campaign against German industrial cities. The Middle East, because of Italian aggression this time, became a major theatre for British Commonwealth troops. Once again German unrestricted submarine warfare targeted American ships and pushed the American President, Franklin Roosevelt, to a strategy of economic and financial assistance for the Allies. For many of those involved at command and managerial level, this was the familiar architecture of world war. Only Turkey succeeded in avoiding a repetition of the conflict.

There were nevertheless important differences. The German expectation that war against the Soviet Union would resemble war against the ramshackle Tsarist empire, encouraged by German racial and ideological prejudices, proved woefully misjudged and German and Axis forces found themselves bogged down, often literally so, in a long war of savage attrition. To prepare for the new German Empire, the rear areas under German control were the site of a vast ethnic and political cleansing, predominantly of Jews (who were seen as a world enemy by Hitler and his entourage), but also of Poles and Czechs who were displaced to make way for German settlers, and Ukrainians, Belorussians and Russians who were left to starve or were deported for forced labour or killed as partisan sympathizers.^{^[516]} The Jews throughout the area of the New Order were the target from 1941 of death, deportation, ghettoization and slave labour. The genocide was an expression of the National Socialist conviction that a second war, against world Jewry, had to be fought to ensure success in the wider military conflict. The result was the murder by shooting, gassing or starvation of 5.7 million European Jews.

While this cruel colonial project was being realized, German forces found that the industrialization of the Soviet Union under Stalin had fostered the material means for an effective military revival, while the thoughtless violence meted out to the conquered peoples created just the conditions for stubborn Soviet resistance and a widespread partisan terror. Unlike the Tsarist system, the Stalin dictatorship organized a centralized military and economic effort, accepted the need for reform of Red Army operational doctrine, tactics and technology, and mobilized popular support for a crusade against the German invader. From December 1941, when the German advance on Moscow was reversed, it was evident that Hitler had miscalculated the prospects for Soviet resistance; in 1942 most of the front line in the East was static, but the one major campaign undertaken by the Axis armies to seize the Caucasus oil and cut the Volga River trade route ended in the disaster at Stalingrad. After that German forces foundered on Soviet revival and were forced into a slow but relentless retreat.

Something similar happened to the Japanese effort to conquer Asia from the east. What was viewed in Tokyo as a straightforward contest with the poorly prepared and racially inferior Chinese, turned into a long war of attrition in which Japanese soldiers, like their German counterparts, found themselves taking high losses in distant, inhospitable terrain. They were threatened by Chinese partisans, warlord armies, Chinese Communists and by the chinese Nationalist Army that refused to admit defeat, though it was too poorly resourced to imitate what the Soviet Red Army was able to do in Europe.^{^[517]} The war for Asia, from east and west was characterized by an exceptional level of military brutality, with routine atrocity committed by both sides, little respect for the status of prisoner-of-war, and the widespread targeting and killing of civilians. Millions died in the Soviet Union and China from starvation (and disease) brought about by the seizure of food supplies, the disruption of transport and the decline of medical facilities. An estimated 16 million civilians died in the Soviet Union, perhaps as many again in China.

Britain, the British Commonwealth, the United States and more than thirty other states that joined the United Nations (as they were known from January 1942) fought a different kind of war, reliant on weaponry and equipment that maximized the engineering, scientific and production skills of the Western Allies. The Western war effort relied on the sea above all, and the truly global dimensions of the war owed most to the worldwide network of sea communications and supply established by Allied navies in every major ocean, including essential American resources sent to China, the Soviet Union and Britain under the Lend-Lease scheme begun in March 1941. For Britain and the United States the most effective way of projecting power against all three Axis states was by sea and air, and this is where the largest portion of the Western Allied war effort was devoted. In the Pacific, Japan's weak island garrisons stretched out along the perimeter of the new Japanese empire, though they fought tenaciously and, when they had supplies, effectively, were no match for the large American naval, army and Marine Corps presence once the Japanese fleet carriers had been destroyed at the Battle of Midway in early June 1942. In the Atlantic, high-level secret intelligence, radar and long-range air-power combined to defeat the German submarine threat, which at its peak in 1942 sank 7.8 million tons of Allied shipping.^{^[518]} Britain became the base for two major air offensives against German occupied Europe, first by RAF Bomber Command by night from May 1940 to the final raids in April 1945, second by the US Eighth Air Force flying from British bases (joined later by the Fifteenth Air Force flying out of Italy), which between them destroyed German Air Force resistance and German supplies of oil in 1944, hastening German defeat in all combat theatres. Sea and air power were central to the successful amphibious operations in Sicily in July 1943, mainland Italy in autumn 1943 and the invasion of Normandy in June 1944. Defeat of German armies in France relied heavily on massive air power and the ability to bring seaborne supplies and reinforcements for Allied ground armies.^{^[519]}

As in World War I, there were no short cuts to peace. German hopes that Britain in summer 1940 or the Soviet Union in autumn 1941 would ask for an armistice were frustrated not only by their continued capacity to fight back in the most adverse of circumstances, but principally by the rejection of German domination, which was regarded as far worse than the high costs of continued belligerency. This meant finding ways to keep the home population committed to war and able to work in the Soviet Union, where food was scarce and death from starvation common among non-workers, a situation very different from the conditions in the United States, where incomes rose over the war and food was relatively plentiful. Forcing Axis surrender was equally difficult, except in the case of Italy, where an exasperated population protested the failures of war in 1943 and encouraged army and Fascist party leaders to get rid of Mussolini in July. An Italian surrender followed on 8 September 1943. In Germany and Japan, both fearful of what would happen if they lost, and hampered by the Allied call for ‘unconditional surrender', laid down by Roosevelt at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, fought with a savage fatalism to put off the hour of defeat. In both states the populations shared the anxieties about the cost of peace, while the security forces punished any expression of defeatism or political dissent. When a group of army officers tried to kill Hitler in July 1944, they were caught and executed. Secret police reports showed evidence of widespread relief at Hitler's survival and endorsement from the population of the punishment meted out to the conspirators. German surrender in May 1945 and Japanese surrender in August came only after the urban area had been reduced to ruins, an estimated 500,000 civilians killed by conventional bombing, 200,000 killed by the atomic attacks, the transport system wrecked and around eight million soldiers killed, five million of them German, three million of them Japanese.^{^[520]}

The aftermath of World War II did not repeat the mistakes ofWorld War I, although violence continued long after 1945 in the messy conclusion to civil wars in Greece, Ukraine, Poland and China, and confrontations between local populations and the British, French and Dutch imperialists who tried, unsuccessfully in the end, to re-impose the imperial system in Indonesia, Indo-China, Malaya, India and Burma.^{^[521]} In 1945 all empires were either destroyed or in the throes of terminal dissolution. The last fling of traditional territorial imperialism tried by Germany, Italy and Japan contributed not only to their own defeat but to the unravelling of the other European empires in the twenty years that followed. The defeat of Japan was in many ways the more significant because it destroyed the old international order in the region and opened the way for different world powers, the United States, Communist China, India and a reformed Japan, to become key players in Asian, Pacific and world politics. In Europe the hatreds prompted by two World Wars did not evaporate, but after the impact of a second war even more deadly and destructive than the first, and dominated by two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, European radical nationalism melted away and the circles that had sustained it became marginalized politically, most of the leaders dead or imprisoned.

The most important contribution to a more permanent global peace (local wars have remained an endemic feature of international politics ever since) was the willingness of the United States, now immensely wealthy in comparison with the stricken economies of Asia and Europe, to play a central part in constructing a new economic order in which general agreement on financial, currency and trade policies could be introduced and in which economies in crisis could be helped by the collective efforts of the others through the IMF and the World Bank. In the Communist bloc, which by 1949 stretched from the German Democratic Republic to North Korea, deep distrust of the capitalist West did not create the conditions for a third global war, partly due to the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons, partly from divisions that soon opened up between the major Communist states themselves, partly from the belief that capitalism would collapse of its own accord.

The age of global war reflected profound instabilities in the existing world order with the decline or collapse of important parts of the traditional structure, and the social and political consequences of large-scale and rapid economic modernization and urbanization. Empire and imperial competition was seen in Europe as one way of resolving the problems posed by rapid social and political change, just as the pursuit of resources and land drove Russia across Siberia and American and Canadian settlers across North America. The attempt to stave off political change but at the same time to try to keep abreast of economic and technical competition and to satisfy popular appetites for new forms of national identity created before 1914 a dangerous mix if ever a crisis occurred that could not easily be regulated by great power collaboration. The crisis in July 1914 could not be contained, and the subsequent war, on an unprecedented scale and across much of the globe, fought principally in the very part of the world that had boasted of exporting civilization to the rest, created antagonisms of a profound and dangerous kind which exploded after 1919 in irreconcilable ideological conflict between popular forces many of whose members had been through the violence and deprivation of frontline service. To many, war seemed the normal condition of modern society, both between ideological enemies and between nations or peoples. More dangerously there were political leaders who assumed that the crises generated by the distorting effects of modernization could be resolved by the very unmodern resort to empire building. The result was a second world war whose consequences brought the long age of empire to an end, but at a cost in lives now estimated as anything between 55 and 80 million.

Global war 1914-45

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