A World at Arms (9 page)

Germany disregarded, first in secret and then in the open, those restrictions imposed on her by the peace settlement. Before 1933 there had been relatively minor violations, some of the more significant being assisted by the Soviet Union, where German officers could keep up with developments in air, armored, and chemical warfare in exchange for training Red Army officers. Now the new government’s big rearmament drive, creation of a large air force, reintroduction of conscription, and initiation of a huge naval building program, broke all prior dimensions and restraints. These steps were, to judge by all available evidence, enormously popular in Germany; whether the reaction they necessarily evoked abroad makes them the “successes” which they are still frequently called is a question not often examined with sufficient care.

In any case, the world was left in little doubt that a new Germany would adopt new policies. Germany left the League of Nations, repudiated all controls on her army and air force, and planned from the beginning to disregard the limitations on her navy which she nominally accepted in a 1935 agreement with England. In 1936 Hitler took advantage of Italy’s breach with the Western Powers over the invasion of Ethiopia to break the provisions of both the Peace Treaty and the Locarno Treaty of 1925, which called for the demilitarization of the Rhineland in exchange for guarantees against a repetition of the French 1923 occupation of the key Ruhr industrial region. An attempt in 1934 to overthrow the Austrian government had failed;
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but the German rapprochement with Italy, reinforced by joint intervention on the Nationalist side in the Spanish civil war, opened up the possibility of a takeover of Austria, combining pressure from the inside with military threats from the outside.

In the world of the 1930s it was by no means easy to decide what to do in the face of the German menace. The international institution created in the peace settlement, the League of Nations, had been crippled at birth by the absence of the United States and the exclusion of Russia as well as the defeated powers. When confronted by its first serious test in Japan’s 1931 seizure of Manchuria, it failed over a problem inherent in the concept of collective security, recurring monotonously in the 1930S, and of continuing difficulty today. In a world of separate states, the theory of averting the danger of war by the threat of universal or at least large-scale collective action requires for its implementation that in practice countries be willing to go to war if necessary over specific issues that might be, or at least appear to be, of only marginal significance to them. Not only does this require all involved to maintain substantial forces at all times, but it also makes every little war into a very big one. No power was prepared to do so over Manchuria.
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Hitler’s strategy of fighting a series of isolated wars would confront the powers with the same dilemma: the responsibility for converting his carefully delimited conflicts into a world war would be left to others–others who were peacefully inclined and who had begun their rearmament after and in response to Germany’s.

Under these circumstances the United States and the Soviet Union held to their isolationist stance. Insofar as they modified these positions, it tended to be in opposite directions. The American President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, increasingly thought that the Western Powers should be strengthened so that they could resist Germany and thus hopefully avert war from the United States. The most tangible expression of this approach had been an effort to assist in the building up of the French air force, that is, to help out in an area where the Western Powers were clearly especially weak and in which the use of American industrial capacity could benefit defence capabilities on both sides of the Atlantic.
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By 1939 Roosevelt’s policy culminated in attempts to revise the neutrality laws so that the United States could at least sell weapons to countries resisting Hitler, and in urging the Soviet Union to align herself with the Western Powers lest a Germany triumphant in Western Europe reach out to dominate the globe.
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If the first of these policies foundered on Congressional opposition, the second reached the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin when he had already decided that the way for the Soviet Union to avoid war was neither to join the anti-Hitler coalition nor remain neutral, but rather to nudge Hitler into war against others by promising to assist him.

The fact that Soviet archives for those years are only now beginning
to be opened a little, necessarily makes discussion of Soviet policy somewhat speculative. There are, however, some things which are known from materials published by the Soviet Union itself, from the archives of other nations, and from the open record of Soviet actions. It is known from Soviet and other publications that through espionage agents and other intelligence sources Moscow knew that Germany had refused to ally herself with Japan against Russia (as Tokyo wanted), and that Tokyo in turn had declined German efforts to secure an alliance with Japan against the Western Powers. Similarly, the Soviet government was informed of the German plan to secure either the subservience or the defeat of Poland.
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Finally, the fact that the Soviet Union had a spy in the code section of the British Foreign Office until his arrest in September 1939 suggests that, either by direct access to British documents or the reading of British codes, Moscow was fully informed on British policy.
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Under these circumstances, the knowledge that Germany intended to attack Poland–and thereafter the Western Powers–and was looking for allies in these ventures, while Britain and France could either fight Germany alongside Poland or after Poland was conquered, reopened for Stalin the possibility of an agreement with Hitler, something he had repeatedly but unsuccessfully attempted to obtain in prior years.
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Now Hitler might be interested, and his interest could be stimulated if public negotiations by the Soviet Union with Britain and France ran parallel to secret talks with the Germans. As Stalin would himself explain his view in July 1940: “the U.S.S.R. had wanted to change the old equilibrium . . . but that England and France had wanted to preserve it. Germany had also wanted to make a change in the equilibrium, and this common desire to get rid of the old equilibrium had created the basis for the rapprochement with Germany.”
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By steadily raising their demands on the British and French as earlier Soviet demands were met, the Soviets could use negotiations with the Western Powers to insure that Germany would pay a high price for Soviet cooperation, a project realized in the secret agreements between Germany and the Soviet Union of August 23, 1939, which partitioned Eastern Europe between them.
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Whether Stalin was wise to encourage and subsequently assist Germany, or whether the British, French, and American perception, that Germany could be held back from war or alternatively defeated in war only by a great coalition, was the sounder view, would be determined by events.
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The Italian government observed German moves toward war with a mixture of admiration and apprehension. Determined to expand Italy’s role in the world by the acquisition of control of the Mediterranean and as much of Southeast Europe, North Africa, and the Near East as possible, Mussolini was favorably impressed by the German threat to the positions of Britain and France, the two powers most obviously blocking his path. He was at least equally impressed by the signs of military and industrial might as well as of public unity which he had seen during his own trip to Germany in September 1937.

At the same time, there were two nagging causes of apprehension. There was always the possibility that Germany might move before Italy was ready, a concern which affected Italy’s last-minute maneuvers in the crises of both 1938 and 1939. Unprepared to cope with any serious offensive against Italy by Britain and France, her leaders were all too aware of another lesson of World War I: what had happened to Germany’s Austrian ally in 1914 when German concentration on the Western Front had exposed an unassisted Austria to disaster on the Eastern Front.

A second apprehension took the form of rivalry between the two. Would Germany secure gains out of all proportion to those falling to Italy? In 1939 the timing of Italy’s decision to end the independence of Albania in April was undoubtedly influenced by Germany’s seizure of most of what was left of Czechoslovakia in March. This pattern would subsequently be repeated.

The recognition by Mussolini in 1939 that a long and major war would certainly develop out of a German attack on Poland led him to listen to those of his advisors, especially his son-in-law and Foreign Minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, who argued that Italy was not ready for war and had no obligation to join Germany. Later events would bring a shift in these assessments.

Mussolini’s pride, however, left him reluctant to temper public and private expressions of sympathy for Germany by cautions appropriate to Italy’s unreadiness for war. This reluctance was reinforced by the desire to prevent the recurrence of German reproaches about Italy’s alleged unreliability as an ally stemming from Rome’s joining the Allies in World
War I, rather than maintaining her pre-war alliance with Germany and Austria–Hungary. The Italian unwillingness to reveal to Berlin that the verbal cheering from Rome would not be translated into military participation in war on Germany’s side would have the effect of surprising Hitler when he sounded the trumpet for battle–only to discover that Mussolini anticipated some years of peacetime concerts.

The first time this happened had been in 1938 when, at the last-minute, Mussolini’s urging of a peaceful settlement on Hitler had been a major factor in the latter’s last-minute reversal of a choice for war.
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That Italian reversal–as it seemed to Hitler-would make Hitler change his approach to the initiation of war as well as his reaction to a repetition of Italy’s last-minute reservations. The way for the 1938 reversal had been prepared by British policy, and Italian reluctance in 1939 would also be greatly influenced by Rome’s understanding of British determination.

The British, threatened like Russia in both East Asia and Europe, concentrated their attention, like the Russians and later the Americans, on what was perceived as the more dangerous threat in Europe. While beginning to rearm, their belief that a war anywhere would eventually involve them led the London government to try for local peaceful solutions of specific issues or, as an alternative procedure capable of simultaneous implementation, to secure a general settlement with Germany in which economic and colonial concessions would be exchanged for German acceptance of the essentials of the status quo in Central and Eastern Europe. Hitler invariably rejected out of hand all British efforts at a general settlement, in fact he would never allow them to become the subject of serious discussion, precisely because it was the status quo that he intended to destroy.
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As for the British alternative hope of securing the peaceful resolution of specific issues, this would be realized only once, to Hitler’s great disgust and everlasting regret.

In 1938 Hitler thought that he had with great care laid the groundwork for the first of his wars. Czechoslovakia would be destroyed in a war started over an incident ordered from Berlin, with the victim isolated politically by propaganda about the alleged grievances of the Sudeten Germans living in that country, isolated militarily by the deterrent effect on France of Germany’s western fortifications, and isolated diplomatically through the active participation of Hungary and Poland and the passive participation of Italy and Japan on Germany’s side. Once tricked into negotiations by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Hitler tried desperately to extricate himself; but then at the last moment funked at war when confronted by the doubts of his own people and advisors,
the warning of war with England and France, the reluctance of Mussolini, and the hesitation of Hungary. Reluctantly he settled for his ostensible aims rather than his real ambition; that is to say, he took the portions of Czechoslovakia adjacent to Germany and inhabited predominantly by Germans, but he refrained from the war to destroy Czechoslovakia and seize most of the country as he had originally intended.

While others thought of the Munich agreement of 1938 as a sign of German triumph and as a symbol of weak-kneed acquiescence in aggression, Hitler looked on it as a terrible disappointment then and as the greatest error of his career later.
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He had been cheated of war and, after destroying what was left of Czechoslovakia anyway, he would move toward war in a manner calculated to preclude what he considered the disappointing outcome of 1938.

The war for which in the winter of 1938–39 Hitler prepared Germany and sought appropriate relationships with other powers was one against Britain and France. They had threatened him in 1938, and they would in any case have to be defeated before Germany could safely turn to that conquest of the Soviet Union which would provide her with vast space for the settlement of her people. The preparations for this war were internal as well as externa1.
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Internally, the government began a major effort to remedy what seemed to be a reluctance of the population at the prospect of war itself, a reluctance all too obvious in 1938. Hitler attributed this in part to his own regime’s propaganda stress on the peaceful objectives of German policy, a propaganda designed to lull fears at home and abroad in the early years of National Socialist rule but now in need of reversal lest it undermine the resolution of the German public. The main organs of mass communications would have to be orchestrated to arouse war fever in the country.
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In addition, the anticipated war with the Western Powers required a substantial acceleration of the German armaments program. Since it was increasingly obvious that France was most reluctant to fight at all and that the backbone of Western resistance to Germany would come from Great Britain, it would be those portions of the German military machine most specifically needed for use against the latter country that would be given added emphasis at this time. In this framework of priorities, it will be easier to understand why it was precisely at this time that special orders were given for a great buildup of the German air force, with particular emphasis on the new two-engined dive bomber, the Junker-88, designed with England in mind.
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Similarly, in January 1939 the highest priority in the allocations of scarce raw materials and labor was assigned to the naval construction program.