(3) AXIS COLD WAR (1931-1941)

 

“Up to now, we’ve succeeded in leaving the enemy in the dark concerning Germany’s real goals…No, they let us through the danger zone. That’s exactly how it was in foreign policy too…They left us alone and let us slip through the risky zone and we were able to sail around all dangerous reefs. And when we were done, and better armed than they, then they started the war.”

That statement by Joseph Goebbels – transcribed by a participant in a secret briefing to selected German journalists and quoted in Paul Johnson’s A History of the Modern World – “is, on the whole, an accurate summary of what happened in the 1930s”.

My previous special mention entry for the Cold War within the Second World War (or vice versa) overlooks that there was, in effect, another cold war that was far more entangled with the Second World War – the three-sided cold war in which Nazi Germany and other fascist states, the western democracies, and the Soviet Union all maneuvered with or against each other.

Indeed, the conventional depiction of the Second World War from 1 September 1939 to 2 September 1945 overlooks that this was simply the ‘hot war’ as the culmination of the longer cold war before that, from 1933 to 1939 for Germany and from 1931 to 1941 for Japan.

And, as the statement by Goebbels indicates, it was a cold war that Germany largely won, outmaneuvering and wrong-footing Britain and France to a remarkable extent.

Yes, it’s arguable – as some historians have argued – that it was the Soviet Union that won it, with the subsequent outbreak of war fought on Stalin’s terms and to his intentions. While there’s some substance to this, I think it overlooks his catastrophic miscalculation that war between Germany and the western democracies would be more protracted and exhausting for the combatants to the advantage of the Soviet Union.

Back to Germany, it reflects my own belief that Germany has only succeeded in foreign policy or war when it has, knowingly or otherwise, followed Bismarckian strategy – with Germany’s diplomatic or political successes in the thirties essentially replicating Bismarck’s strategy unifying Germany under Prussia, down to Germany’s successes in annexing Austria and Czechoslovakia mirroring Bismarck’s victories in the Austrian-Prussian and Franco-Prussian Wars, except through diplomatic rather than military force.

Of course, Nazi Germany failed the fundamental part of Bismarck’s strategy – avoiding general war as opposed to a carefully limited one – which ultimately undid all their Bismarckian successes. Even then, Germany managed to succeed coasting on the fumes of Bismarckian strategy – friendly relations with Russia and limiting the scope of the war to successive individual campaigns that resembled Bismarck’s small wars – until 1941.

It has been observed that had Hitler concluded his ambitions with Munich, he might well have been hailed as one of Germany’s greatest statesmen. That certainly accords with my view that the occupation of Prague and what remained of Czechoslovakia was perhaps his fatal mistake, prompting as it did Britain’s guarantee to Poland and dashing any prospect of reclaiming Danzig and other German territory from Poland without war.

Of course, as it turned out, Hitler’s ambitions were not limited to reclaiming former German territory, and given the Germany he led resembled a Ponzi or pyramid scheme that relied on ongoing conquest, it is not at all clear to me whether he could have stopped even if he wanted to do so. I have read that Germany’s need for gold and foreign reserves, as well as the Czech armaments industry, drove Germany’s occupation of Czechoslovakia as much as Hitler’s sense of buyer’s remorse that – extraordinarily – Britain and France had cheated him of complete victory at Munich.

Azar Gat has also observed that conflict between the western democracies and the fascist nations was one of cold war. Indeed, he observes it to be part of the standard trajectory of liberal democracies facing hostile non-democratic states – “a pattern progressing on an upward scale from isolationism to appeasement, to containment and cold war, to limited war, and, only reluctantly, to fully fledged war”.

The diplomatic and political confrontation of Britain and France with Germany in the 1930s essentially corresponded to evolving from appeasement to containment and cold war within that standard trajectory, except that they didn’t pull the latter off as well as the Americans in the Cold War because they lacked a credible deterrent, particularly that of strategic airpower and the nuclear deterrent the Americans had.

Their deterrent was essentially that of the threat of war, ultimately enacted in the guarantee to Poland. In fairness to Britain and France, that should have been a credible deterrent, as they saw what Hitler did not, that war would ultimately be self-destructive for all of them, reinforcing their decline to the Soviet Union and the United States as the two superpowers.

That standard trajectory flows from the tendency of liberal democracies to eschew preventive war – something the Romans or other pre-modern states would happily do without qualms. “Historically, they have chosen not to initiate war even when they are under threat, hold the military advantage, and are in danger of losing it”.

In effect, the observation of Gat dovetails with the statement of Goebbels in that it is harder to imagine a more clear-cut example of this than against Germany in the 1930s. “The remarkable thing is that the western liberal democracies did not intervene by force during the 1930s to prevent Hitler’s Germany from rearming, even though this meant that the complete military superiority that they held over Germany would be lost, making it possible for Hitler to embark on his radical expansionist policy.”

It remains that Britain or at least certainly France and even Poland – both of which should have been strongly motivated to keep Germany from rearming to attack them – could easily have intervened against Germany without any serious repercussions from 1933 to 1935 when Germany broke the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles restricting its military forces, such as when it introduced conscription or its air force.

That window of opportunity for intervention without serious repercussions probably remained open to France (and Britain) until 1936, when it could – and should – have intervened against Germany remilitarizing the Rhineland, which would have decisively defeated Hitler’s regime and may well have seen its collapse. That’s even more striking given that France (and Belgium) had no issue intervening to occupy the Ruhr industrial area when a weakened Weimar Germany sought to resist reparations in 1923. The same action probably would have won the war without fighting in 1936.

Much the same observations might be made of the Soviet Union, particularly in its choice of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact without which Germany could not have started the war – as opposed to any other choice, such as collective security with Britain and France or even just neutrality, that would have deterred Germany from war.

Thereafter however, Britain and France faced the prospect of war when it came to opposing Germany, once Germany had rearmed and fortified its western borders sufficiently to move to the next phase of occupying its two neighbors, Austria and Czechoslovakia. The latter – with the Munich Agreement that accompanied it – has become synonymous with appeasement, particularly as a pejorative term. That seems somewhat unfair, particularly for Britain and Neville Chamberlain. It might well have been better for Britain and France to declare war on Germany over Czechoslovakia, but the competing arguments seem finely balanced to me and it is easy to imagine the potential outcome might have been even worse than what happened with Poland a year later.

It just illustrates the various ironies or paradoxes that can be argued with respect to appeasement. One is that Britain and France enforced the wrong provisions of the Treaty of Versailles (reparations as opposed to military restrictions), or appeased the wrong Germany (Nazi Germany as opposed to Weimar Germany). Another is that they practised appeasement from a position of military superiority or strength when it made no sense, only to abandon it from a position of weakness when they could not effectively deter Germany, let alone effectively defend Czechoslovakia or Poland, at least without Soviet participation.

Yet another irony or paradox is that they appeased the wrong nation, alienating Japan and Italy, allies against Germany in the first world war, to the extent that those nations allied with Germany against them instead.

The alienation of Japan as an ally commenced as early as the 1920s, with perhaps one of the worst foreign policy mistakes by Britain – failing to renew the Anglo-Japanese alliance. Japan is of course the reason this entry commences prior to the Nazi regime in 1933, with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, and continues after the start of the European war in 1939, as the various nations opposed to Germany – increasingly and primarily the United States – also faced off Japan until 1941.

The response to Japanese expansionist policy deserves as much attention as that for Germany – and each could well be the subject of its own top ten list. The failure to respond effectively to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 – which was at least possible by Britain and the United States in combination – was arguably as much a mistake as the failure to renew the Anglo-Japanese alliance and certainly compounded it.

Thereafter, a large part of Britain and France being out-maneuvered by Germany in Europe arose from their need to deal with Japan in Asia at the same time, particularly after Japan expanded its aggression to China in 1937. That continued to confront the allies with tough strategic choices after the commencement of war in Europe, obviously even more so once the allies also had to divide their resources between that war and the war with Japan. At very least, the war with Japan added a year to the war in Europe.

Britain and France repeated much the same errors with Italy in the 1930s, continuing to 1940 when Italy joined Germany to declare war on them allied – again to ultimate effect that the war with Italy or war in the Mediterranean arguably added a year or so to the war with Germany. Italy’s support also arguably made Germany’s war possible in the first place, by opening up Austria and Czechoslovakia to German occupation. Fortunately, that was offset to some degree by Italy’s weakness as strategic liability to Germany. Amusingly, the British War Cabinet considered whether they were better off with Italy as neutral or with Italy as actively allied to Germany, before concluding (probably correctly if only just) that it would be better if Italy remained neutral.

The errors alienating Italy to ally itself with Germany are even more striking as Mussolini’s Italy was strongly aligned towards the allies against Germany well into the thirties – and arguably remained so at the level of its populace and institutions, a large part of why its performance as German ally was so mediocre. Indeed, Italy was initially a stronger opponent to Germany’s expansionism than Britain or France, successfully blocking Germany from taking over Austria in 1934.

The turning point was the response of Britain and France to Italy’s conquest of Abyssinia, which saw them get the worst of both worlds – initially opposing Italy, antagonizing Italy without showing any real teeth (such as by the use of naval forces or use of sanctions on oil, to which Italy was particularly vulnerable), which they then compromised by the secret but abortive Hoare-Laval Pact to appease Italy by partitioning Abyssinia.

Thereafter, while Italy still aligned itself with Britain and France against the German remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, it increasingly and inevitably began to align itself with Germany.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD-TIER)