What Is It Good For?
Pretty big anniversary today. On September 1, 1939, exactly 80 years ago, Germany invaded Poland and started World War II. There's not much I can add to the countless volumes written about that war, though I do have some ground level questions.
When did they start calling it a world war?
When did they start calling World War I by that name?
How far ahead was Germany planning? Were they expecting to take on so much of the world, or did they expect to win some ground and be left alone? (I apologize for showing my ignorance--I'm sure plenty of WW2 experts know the answer to this one.)
Was war in the Pacific inevitable in 1939? And did it have to be folded into the World War? Can't you have two major wars going on at once?
What did America expect when the war started? And what did they expect when they entered?
Did World War II end the age of all-out war, at least in the Western world?
posted by LAGuy @ 8:03 AM
6 Comments:
I'm not a historian, nor do I play one on TV. But at least I'm an American, so I don't say "an historian". I can answer the questions about the name:
The term "world war" first appeared in 1848, when a journalist wrote, "A war among the great powers is now necessarily a world-war."
In September 1914, Ernst Haekcke wrote that the war which had just broken out "will become the first world war in the full sense of the word." So the term "first" was there from the beginning!
In Europe, WWI was usually "the Great War" until the early 1940s, although Churchill called it "the World War" in a 1927 book. In America it was "the European War" until 1917, when Wilson called it "the War to End All Wars" -- but I doubt many other people used that term unironically. After that, it was usually "the World War" in America.
Already in 1919, pessimistic pundits warned of a future "World War II".
In June 1939, Time used the term "World War I" for the war of 1914-18, and "World War II" for the impending war in Europe. After it broke out, it was called "the Second World War" within the first week by some journalists.
But "the Second Great War" was also common in the first months of the war, and that alternative didn't completely die out until 1960.
When America joined, FDR tried to rename it "the War of Survival", but that name didn't catch on.
In the 1980s, some historians were pushing to expand the term, counting as "world wars" any war that included both Europe and the Americas. That would include the Seven Years' War, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution / Napoleonic / 1812 wars. But that never caught on.
And of course, some Americans dubbed the Cold War and/or the War On Terror as "World War III".
In September 1938, England and France agreed to let Hitler seize a piece of Czechoslovakia, in return for his promise not to take any more. Then in March 1939, he invaded Czechoslovakia and annexed half of the remaining territory... and England and France did nothing.
In Summer 1939, when Hitler threatened to invade Poland, England and France said they would go to war if that happened. Hitler did not believe them. Some of his generals did, but he ignored them, and they quickly learned that disagreeing with the Fuhrer ended your career.
Hitler's long-range plan, ever since the 1920s, was to expand eastward into Poland and Russia. After Poland fell, he said to England and France, "You declared war on me to save Poland, but Poland has been conquered, and Germans haven't yet entered battle with England or France. So let's have peace." They refused. So then he conquered France, and again offered England peace, but they again refused.
During all this time, Hitler and Stalin were allies; they had divided up several countries: Hitler got 3/4 of Poland, while Stalin got 1/4, plus Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. Except the Finns refused to cooperate, and there was a long Finnish-Soviet War. Historians don't always include that as part of WWII, because that makes it too confusing to specify which side the USSR was on.
A war between Japan and the USA was looming -- not inevitable, but hard to avoid. Between the 1850s to the 1910s, we had annexed Hawaii and the Philippines, while Japan had annexed Korea. In 1931, Japan invaded China. In September 1940, Japan publicly allied with Germany and Italy, and invaded Vietnam, and America put an oil embargo on Japan.
It could be imagined that there could have been a European war and a separate US-Japan war. But by that point, America was already supplying arms to England and embargoing Germany. So four days after Pearl Harbor, Germany declared war on the USA, and we in return declared war on Germany and Italy.
So then there was one big war.
But Spain refused to recognize that fact. Franco asserted that there were three distinct wars: "Germany versus the Soviet Union (where we are rooting for Germany), America versus Japan (where we are rooting for America), and Germany versus Britain and America (where we are neutral)". By 1945, both sides hated Franco's Spain, but neither side hated it enough to go to war with it, which was Franco's goal.
Thanks. Some fascinating stuff.
Of course, Spain had had its own war in the 1930s, so (not making any excuses) it didn't want more trouble. For that matter, the Allies knew that dealing with De Gaulle after the war would be trouble.
While I can't read Stalin's mind, I assume he was playing everyone. All sides have their own interests, of course, but FDR and Churchill were actual friends who honestly tried to work things out, even though they had disagreements.
The pact Stalin made with Hitler was there for a number of reasons, including Stalin's desire to gain control over other lands. But many believe Stalin was also buying time, postponing the inevitable invasion from Hitler.
Then Stalin turned to FDR and Churchill. And while he tried to charm them, nothing he promised could be believed. He--understandably--wanted them to open up another front with the Germans, which they eventually did. (I think he promised to join in the fight against Japan, though by the time he did I think America had already dropped an atom bomb.) But anything he said to FDR or Churchill about allowing Eastern Europe (much less the Soviet Union) to be free democracies after the war was nonsense.
The Soviets were dedicated to a repressive system that would kill (and starve) millions of its own citizens. Imagine what the world might be like if instead they looked at how well democratic, capitalist countries were doing and decided that was the way to go?
Two excellent docs on Acorn, "The Churchills" and "Rise of the Nazi Party" shed a lot of light on these questions.
I agree that Stalin is an enigma -- much more so than Hitler, because plenty of Hitler's comrades kept diaries, or survived the war and told their stories. Plus, Hitler wrote a long book outlining his plans and his hatreds.
Hannah Arendt claimed that Stalin actually trusted Hitler. One piece of evidence in favor of that theory is that when the German army began staging right next to the Soviet border, Stalin's generals told him that Germany was going to invade, and he told them they were mistaken. When the invasion actually happened, Stalin went incommunicado for a while (hours? days?) and the generals actually considered replacing him.
But I think there's just not enough data to make Arendt's conclusion believable, especially in light of the absolute insanity that would be required for Stalin to trust Hitler (who had been promising to annihilate Bolshevism for two decades).
Post a Comment
<< Home