The Twenty Years’ Truce
3.1. Powers, Aspirations, and Attitudes
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France, in particular, was barely able to mask its continuing relative decline. Finally Italy, despite Mussolini’s grandiose pretensions and aggressive posturing, was still the smallest and weakest power of all.
Faced with limited raw materials and energy sources, and having a relatively small industrial base to support its armed forces, the country remained rmly enclosed within its Mediterranean prison.
Outside Europe, too, the geopolitical change that nine and a half million dead soldiers bought was limited. The greatest powers were, and continued to be, the United States and Japan. The former had done much to pay for the war. As a result, it became a creditor nation for the rst time, and its economy was able to lead the world. In 1929, America’s share of world manufacturing output stood at no less than 43.3 percent. Ten years later, with the US in the grip of the Great Depression and after Germany and the Soviet Union had fully recovered from the war, it still accounted for 28.7 percent—a gure almost equal to those of the other two combined.1 In other ways, though, the United States seemed to return to its previous geopolitical stance. As had been the case after the Spanish- American War, Washington all but dismantled its wartime army and relied almost exclusively on the navy for defense, occasionally sending the marines to places few people had ever heard of.
Japan’s involvement in the war was marginal, with the result that the human and material losses it su ered were even smaller than those of the United States. Yet for its e orts, it was able to gain some fresh colonial possessions in East Asia (at Germany’s expense)
—and was clearly bent on acquiring even more. The British decision, made under American pressure, to terminate its alliance with Japan should perhaps have suggested caution. In the event, so incompetent did the civilian and military leaders in Tokyo prove that, within a decade and a half, they had quarreled with all their major neighbors both in Asia and across the Paci c: China, the USSR, and the US. Only in September 1940 did Japan, by joining the Tripartite Pact, nd itself new allies in the form of Germany and Italy.
After the war, the powers, being powers, continued to do what powers always did. They intrigued, allied themselves, armed themselves, and, perhaps most importantly, felt afraid of one another almost to the exclusion of anything and anybody else.
During the 1920s, Britain’s greatest concern was preventing the Continent from coming too much under the domination of its own former ally, France. Germany formed a sort of quasi-alliance with the new Soviet Union from which both sides drew great bene ts, the former by being allowed to build up clandestine forces, the latter by gaining access to militarytechnical expertise.2 Much as had been the case before the war, France sought to contain Germany by means of an alliance system while also preparing to resist Italian pretensions in both Europe and Africa. The United States withdrew from Europe and focused mainly on Japanese attempts to expand in the Paci c and East Asia. The US Navy in particular soon became obsessed with the need to prepare for war in the Paci c, including, until at least 1932, plans for action against the Royal Navy.
Of course the sums spent on defense declined very sharply, in most cases to less than 5 percent of GDP. As a result, the international market was ooded with huge inventories of surplus weapons, some going to the scrap yards, some to second-rate militaries in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, and a few into the hands of anti-colonial resistance movements from Morocco to Burma. Germany was compelled by the victors to all but dismantle its armed forces.3
Meanwhile, the United States and Britain returned to their prewar military systems:4 strong navies and small, professional ground forces that depended on volunteers to ll their ranks. The armed forces of France, Italy, and Japan remained largely intact. Finally, no sooner had the worst damage resulting from World War I, the Civil War, and the Soviet-Polish War been put aside than the Red Army began to be rebuilt, and by the late 1920s was again the largest in Europe, though its quality left something to be desired.5
If in 1914 most people welcomed the war, nowhere was the change in public opinion after 1918 more evident than in Britain.6 There, the replacement of the Liberals by Labor in 1919–20 was accompanied by the emergence of a powerful anti-militarist, anti- imperialist sentiment. And once the initial euphoria of victory had passed, the middle classes, too, turned their faces against anything vaguely resembling militarism. Writing from personal experience, authors such as Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves described the war as an exercise in futility lled with endless su ering, vain slaughter, and generals so obtuse that they sent hundreds of thousands to die in muddy swamps they had never even set their eyes on. From interviewing shell-shocked soldiers, Rebecca West presented the war as a mad episode that generated more madness.
By 1933 Oxford students, hardly the kind of people from whom one would expect revolutionaries to emerge, were solemnly promising one another not to ght for king and country. The idea of appeasement was well on its way. Should it be any wonder then that, when Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich waving a piece of paper and promising peace in our time, he was given a hero’s welcome?
In the United States, the decision to enter the war soon came to be regarded as a huge mistake,7 brought about by the nefarious machinations of industrialists and bankers. Worse still, and even though Germany and Austria-Hungary had been defeated, the war had failed to bring about the kind of better world President Woodrow Wilson had promised. Feeling that their idealism had been betrayed, most Americans wanted nothing more to do with Europe. The Neutrality Laws of 1936–39, which prohibited the sale of weapons to belligerents, capped the process. Far from being the handiwork of a few politicians, isolationism was so popular that when the time came to reverse course, doing so proved anything but easy.
Partly because the hereditary enemy had nally been brought down, and partly because the war led to the return of Alsace- Lorraine, such regrets were less often expressed in France. During
the rst years after the armistice, people celebrated the victories and the sacri ces that had led to war, holding parades and listening to speeches. At this time, the French army was the largest and most powerful in the world, a fact that itself made for a certain reluctance to consider change.
Yet by 1925, the popular mood began to change. In terms of both people and material, French losses had been devastating. Whereas other countries recovered, in France a declining birthrate did not permit these losses to be made good. Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that, during the interwar years, a higher proportion of women worked than in any other country8 Female or male, most French citizens came to think of war as an evil necessity at best, a horror to be avoided at almost any cost at worst.
During the 1930s, as the German threat increased, the rise to power of the left-wing Popular Front created a rift between the armed forces and the population. At the same time, the strongest supporters of the military in French society, the conservative right, became alienated from the Republic. As the slogan went, “Better Hitler than [socialist prime minister] Blum.” Thus both ends of the political spectrum, each for its own reasons and in its own way, became rmly committed to paci sm, setting the stage for the
“strange defeat” of 1940.
Russia, now transformed into the Soviet Union, entered the 1920s in a state of weakness. First World War I, then the Civil War, left the economy devastated, society in tatters, and the country subject to a new and entirely unprecedented form of government. Communist leaders, even more than their socialist comrades, had spent their entire apprenticeship denouncing armed forces as instruments of militarism, imperialism, and every other wicked cause they could think of. Now, seeking to emphasize their own uniqueness, they hit on the idea of calling themselves “peace loving.” Unlike France, though, the Soviet Union, by its sheer size and by using the most brutal means imaginable, had what it took to pull itself up by its bootstraps. It resumed its march toward Great Power status and, in
the end, emerged much stronger than before; as a result, its retreat from militarism also proved temporary.
Perhaps the most interesting cases were those of Italy, Germany, and Japan. Italy emerged from World War I as one of the victors.
Although it did not succeed in realizing its territorial ambitions in Anatolia, it was the only belligerent to gain territory in Europe that had never previously belonged to it—a fact that might have turned it into a “satis ed” nation. This, however, did not happen, and the Italians soon decided that they had been betrayed by their allies—
all fuel for the fascist regime that seized power in 1922.
During the rst eighteen years of his rule, Mussolini threatened to wage war against virtually the entire world, sometimes citing reasons, sometimes simply because he believed, or professed to believe, that ghting was a nice way to spend one’s time.9 However, as World War II was to show, the slogan “Credere, ubbidire, combattere” found an echo only among a very small number of adventurous youths. Neither the aristocracy, which remained loyal to the king, nor the settled bourgeoisie, whom Mussolini called
“slipper wearers,” nor the broad masses were persuaded by his propaganda.
Germany entered the postwar world by undergoing a revolution of sorts, doing away with the kaiser but leaving power, for the most part, in the hands of the center and the moderate right. Once conditions had settled down, and in uenced by best-selling writers such as Erich Maria Remarque and Ludwig Renn, much of German society seemed to retreat from war in the same way Britain had. Yet Germany di ered from Britain in that, even during the heyday of the Weimar Republic, it had a number of right-wing, powerful, and politically very active veteran organizations with a membership in the millions. They did not content themselves with celebrating the past, assuring each other of the horrors of war, and promoting their members’ interests. Instead they called for a war of revenge—
Germans often spoke of “the Day”— to reverse its consequences, including both disarmament and territorial loss.
In Germany, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front was a huge best seller, but it was also an exception; far more numerous were writers, the most famous of whom was Ernst Juenger, who relished war and glori ed it. Nowhere else was willingness to engage in paramilitary activities and nostalgia for the so-called Schutzengraben-kameradschaft (comradeship of the trenches) as strong. Hitler himself built on these feelings, dressing in the uniform coat of a simple soldier with only one decoration and thus separating himself from his entourage of generals with their glittering arrays of epaulets, ribbons, and medals. Making full use of the German tendency toward discipline, the Nazi attempt to remilitarize society made use of every available medium to send the message, including painting, sculpture, and lm.
Japan had been ruled by a military caste for centuries, and its social values, trickling down from the top, had prepared it for war.
Though the Meiji Restoration of 1868 terminated Samurai rule, the new Japanese system of government was in many ways modeled on the German one and created a situation where only the emperor (or, since he did not meddle in day-to-day a airs, those who claimed to act in his name) commanded the army and the navy. This arrangement, as well as the series of military successes the country enjoyed from 1895 on, enabled the armed forces to play a decisive role in social and political life (though still not su ciently so for some extremists who, in 1932 and 1936, attempted to mount mini coups).10 Japanese leaders tended to be self-e acing—then as now, it was the collective that counted, not the individual. They were also less given to military display than their German counterparts. Still, in 1941, the year when the American political scientist Quincy Wright published his massive Study of War, he ranked Japan as the second most “aggressive” nation of all.”11
In summary, compared with the years before 1914, the situation that prevailed between 1919 and 1939 showed both continuities and change. Practically all the armed forces on earth still remained in the hands of seven so-called Great Powers. Of the seven, six were populated by Caucasian people professing Christianity (even though
one, the USSR, no longer acknowledged religion) and ve were located in, or focused on, Europe. Taking various factors such as economics and politics into account, some of the powers were becoming relatively stronger, others weaker. However, the nature of relations among the Great Powers remained essentially as it had been, a fact that neither the creation of the League of Nations nor the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 was able to change. The great di erence lay in that the rulers who had seized power in the
“totalitarian” countries were neither aristocratic, nor cosmopolitan, nor moderate. As self-declared have-nots, these countries openly announced their dissatisfaction with the status quo and their determination to alter it even at the cost of all-out war. Still, there is little doubt that, in 1939, not even Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, was able to make the majority of his fellow Germans show much enthusiasm for the renewal of hostilities. If anything the spirit was one of resignation, a hope for some miracle that might save them at the last moment.12
The Soviet Union purged its armed forces (one of the Bolsheviks’
greatest fears had always been “Bonapartism”) and at the same time rebuilt and reequipped on an impressive scale, glorifying the military as the workers’ bulwark that would one day liberate the earth from its nefarious capitalist exploiters.
Finally, the great democracies’ retreat from any kind of enthusiasm for war proved permanent. In 1939–41, and to a very considerable extent thereafter, they went to war only reluctantly and expected the worst.