Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (63 page)

By now Japan had total censorship. In March 1938 the Diet abdicated, passing a Military Law which placed all power in the hands of the generals and admirals. But there was not much police terror: it was unnecessary. The Japanese appeared united behind the war policy. At all events there was no open opposition. The British ambassador, Sir George Sansom, reported: ‘The difference between the extremists and the moderates is not one of destination but of the road by which that destination is to be reached and the speed at which it is to be travelled.’
²⁷
Already, by early 1938, Japan had a total war economy including control of labour, of prices and wages, and of all major industrial decisions. Many firms were in fact run by state boards, often under military men. As the army occupied the big Chinese towns and moved up the rivers, rapidly appropriating all industrial China, a board, mainly of army officers, was formed to run the Chinese economy. But these men did not know how to end the war or win it; or indeed what the war was for. Was it to bring Japan prosperity? It did the reverse. The
New York Times
correspondent in Tokyo, Hugh Byas, reported (31 July 1938): ‘Japan has reached the point where the length of a matchstick and the skin of a rat represent important economic factors in continuing the war with China.’ Rationing and shortages were now, he said, more severe than in Germany in 1918. Rat skins were being tanned to find a leather-substitute. Major commodities such as raw cotton, cloth, chemical, leather, metals, oil, wool and steel had been removed from the market. It was impossible to buy toothpaste, chocolate, chewing-gum, golf balls, frying-pans. Anything made of iron, he wrote, ‘is scarcer than gold’.
²⁸
Long before the European war broke out, Japan was a tense, underfed, increasingly desperate totalitarian country, which had alienated all its neighbours, abolished its constitutional and democratic system, abandoned the rule of law, had no long-term strategy which made any sense, and had adopted the expedient of
using force to smash its way out of its difficulties, which were increasingly self-created. Here, at the end of the 1930s, was one exemplar of relative morality in practice.

Another was Italy. Here again we see the process of mutual corruption at work. Mussolini’s
putsch
had been inspired by Lenin’s. From his earliest days as a political activist, Hitler had cited Mussolini as a precedent. His study in the Munich Brown House contained a large bust of Mussolini, and in a pamphlet published in 1935 Goebbels acknowledged in elaborate detail the debt of the Nazis to Italian fascism.
²⁹
Such compliments were not reciprocated – at first. Mussolini, who saw himself with some justice as an educated and civilized man, regarded Hitler as a vulgar mountebank and a dangerous gangster. Italy had a small, well-integrated and much respected Jewish community. Mussolini owed a lot to Jews, especially to one of his socialist mentors, Angelica Balabanov, to Enrico Rocca, founder of Roman fascism, and to Gino Arias, a theorist of Italian corporatism.
³⁰
Hence Hitler’s racism was at first repugnant to Mussolini, and he perceived the potential dangers of the Nazi regime earlier than even the French, let alone the British. In 1934 he described it as ‘one hundred per cent racism. Against everything and everyone: yesterday against Christian civilization, today against Latin civilization, tomorrow, who knows, against the civilization of the whole world.’ He thought the regime ‘drunk with a stubborn bellicosity’.
³¹
Italy had always feared invasion from the Teutonic north. Her hereditary enemy was Austria: and Hitler’s policy of
Anschluss
must involve German backing for Austrian attempts to recover Italy’s gains at Versailles. Italy had as much to lose from the unravelling of the Treaty as anyone; and when Hitler repudiated Versailles on 16 March 1935, Mussolini agreed to meet with Britain and France at Stresa (April 11–14) to form a ‘front’ against Nazi aggression.

But by this point Mussolini was already in the process of corruption. The audacity of the Roehm purge, and the lack of response to this state crime from any quarter, had impressed him; as had Hitler’s apparent success in raising the German birth-rate. He noted that Japan’s Manchurian conquest remained unpunished and that her repudiation of the 1930 London Naval Treaty, which meant she was building capital-ships and aircraft-carriers as fast as she could, had brought no urgent response from Britain. What he did not know, though he might have surmised, was that on 19 March 1934 the British cabinet had decided that Germany must be treated as ‘the ultimate potential enemy against whom our “long-range” Defence policy must be directed’. As a result desperate consideration was given to the possibility of making friends again with Japan; but the
idea was dropped as hopeless because of implacable American hostility.
³²
Mussolini did not know this. But he could look at a map; he could count. He knew it was inconceivable that Britain could maintain adequate naval and air power at home to contain Germany, in the Far East to contain Japan, and in the Mediterranean too. He felt that Britain and France ought to be willing to pay some price to reward his continuing friendship. In the spirit of totalitarian Realpolitik he wanted a free hand to deal with Abyssinia, where incidents on the Italian Somaliland and Eritrean borders had occurred on 5 December 1934. Two months before the Stresa Front was formed he had moved out troops. He had a case. Abyssinia was itself an empire, ruling subject and often migratory populations by force and terror, behind shifting or indeterminate frontiers. Most of the local issues of 1935 were to be resurrected in the post-colonial period, in the late 1970s – though by that time Abyssinia had found a more resolute, if sinister, ally, the Soviet Union, and so kept her independence and empire. In 1935 the crisis did not revolve around the local issues but the credibility of the League, of which Abyssinia was a member and to which she vociferously appealed when Italy attacked on 3 October 1935. Five days later the League declared Italy the aggressor and on 19 October it imposed ‘sanctions’.

The handling of the Abyssinian crisis, in which Britain was effectively in charge, is a striking example of how to get the worst of all possible worlds. Abyssinia was a primitive African monarchy which practised slavery; not a modern state at all. It should not have been in the League. The notion that the League had to guarantee its frontiers was an excellent illustration of the absurdity of the covenant which led Senator Lodge and his friends to reject it. The League should have been scrapped after the 1931 Manchurian fiasco. However, if it was felt worth preserving, and if the integrity of Abyssinia was a make-or-break issue, then Britain and France should have been prepared to go to war; in which case Italy would have backed down. The two Western powers would have lost her friendship, aroused her enmity indeed; but the League would have shown it had teeth, and could use them; and the effects might have been felt elsewhere, in central Europe particularly. But to impose sanctions was folly. Sanctions rarely work: they damage, infuriate and embitter but they do not deter or frustrate an act of aggression. In this case they made no sense because France would not agree to oil sanctions (the only type likely to have any impact on events) and America, the world’s greatest oil producer, would not impose sanctions at all. Britain would not agree to close the Suez Canal or impose a naval quarantine: the First Sea Lord, Chatfield, reported only seven capital-ships were available.
³³
While the cabinet argued about whether or not to try and impose oil sanctions, Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland on 7 March, making nonsense of both Versailles and the
Locarno pact. On this date Britain had only three battleships in home waters, scarcely sufficient to neutralize Germany’s ‘pocket battleships’. Mussolini took Addis Ababa on 5 May and annexed the country four days later. On 10 June the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, described the sanctions policy as ‘the very midsummer of madness’, and a week later the cabinet scrapped them.
³⁴

The only effect of the sanctions policy was to turn Mussolini into an enemy. From mid-1936 the Germans began to court him. There were visits to Rome by Frank, Goering, Himmler and Baldar von Shirach. On 1 November Mussolini spoke of the ‘Rome-Berlin Axis’. By 22 February 1937, a review by the British Chiefs of Staff noted, ‘The days are past when we could count automatically on a friendly and submissive Italy.’
³⁵
That meant existing plans to reinforce the Far East fleet in the event of a crisis with Japan by sending ships through the Mediterranean and Suez were impractical. Britain now had three major potential naval enemies: in home waters, the Mediterranean, and the Pacific—Indian Ocean theatre. There was also the possibility that they might operate in concert. Three weeks after Mussolini spoke of the Axis, Japan and Germany signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, aimed at Russia but signalling the possibility of groups of totalitarian powers acting in predatory wolf-packs. On 27 September 1937, Mussolini was in Berlin. He found Hitler’s admiration irresistible. Hitler called him ‘the leading statesman in the world, to whom none may even remotely compare himself’.
³⁶
No longer content with Abyssinia, he began to imitate Hitler in the search for targets of expansion, manufacturing claims to Nice, Corsica, Tunis and Albania. He reversed his previous opposition to race-policy and in November 1938 produced his own version of the Nazi Nuremberg Laws.
³⁷
He had already joined the Anti-Comintern Pact (6 November 1937) and left the League (11 December). In April 1939 he began a career of European aggression, invading and annexing Albania, and the process of corruption culminated the next month (22 May) when he signed the ‘Pact of Steel’ with the man he had considered a potential ‘enemy of civilization’ only five years before.

By this time Mussolini and Hitler had collaborated together in the first of the ideological proxy-wars. Their ‘opponent’ in this cynical ritual was Stalin. The theatre selected for their devastating performance was Spain, which had been virtually outside the European power-system since the early nineteenth century and which now became its agonized focus. This was itself extraordinary: Spain was aloof, self-contained, xenophobic, the European country most resistant to the holistic principle, the least vulnerable to the foreign
viruses of totalitarianism, of Left or Right, social engineering, relative morality. That is what makes the Spanish Civil War so peculiarly tragic. The infection entered through the Socialist Party
(PSOE
) and then spread. As Salvador de Madariaga put it, ‘what made the Spanish Civil War inevitable was the civil war within the Socialist Party’.
³⁸
In the 1920s, the Spanish Socialists had been sensible, pragmatic reformists. Their most important figure, the union leader Francino Largo Caballero, worked within the Spanish republican tradition. If he looked abroad at all, he admired the British Fabians. He thought the formation of the first Labour government in 1924 ‘the most important event in the entire history of international socialism’.
³⁹
He even worked, on a give-and-take basis, with the dozy, unadventurous dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923–30). He argued that regimes and dictators might come and go, but the object of socialism was to improve the material and moral conditions of the workers within capitalism.
⁴⁰
Socialist moderation made it possible to end the dictatorship without bloodshed and, the following year, to effect a peaceful transition from monarchy to republic.

To begin with, Caballero served the Republic well. Violence or illegality by the Left, he insisted, would provoke the army and lead to another military dictatorship. He prevented his followers from burning down the house of General Mola, cynosure of the militant Right. He helped to shape the reformist constitution, which permitted nationalization but within a strict framework of law and subject to proper compensation. His great pride was in building schools. Whereas only 505 a year had been put up, on average, in the period 1908–30, in the first year of the Republic over 7,000 had been built.
⁴¹
That was what socialist ministers were for. He insisted that political strikes incited by the anarchists and the small Communist Party, and violent rural unrest, be put down, if necessary by the use of artillery.
⁴²
Hence a military
coup
by the Right (August 1932) was a fiasco. A modest agrarian reform bill was passed. For a brief, hopeful moment, it looked as though Spain might achieve republican stability on a firm basis of gradual, humane modernization.

Then the vision fell to pieces. Caballero was the first victim of ‘entryism’ – the furtive penetration of party and union cadres by the organized ultra-Left. He lost control of the chief union federation (
UGT
), and began to move to the Left to regain it. Foreign analogies began to play their sinister role. Hitler’s triumph, the ease with which the German Social Democrats were destroyed, pointed the lesson that moderation did not pay: by July 1933 Caballero was asserting that the Socialists would seize power rather than accept fascism. Early in 1934 the Austrian Catholic Chancellor Dollfuss
smashed his local Socialist Party, bombarding its stronghold, the Karl Marx Hof, with field-guns. Comparisons were drawn with Spain. Warnings by central Europe socialists such as Otto Bauer and Julius Deutsch filled the Spanish socialist press.
⁴³
The infection of extremism struck deepest in the Socialist Youth, which began to form street-mobs and engage in systematic violence. They flattered Caballero by calling him ‘the Spanish Lenin’. The old reformer, rejuvenated by their adulation, allowed the militants to lead him by the nose deeper down the path of violence, enchanted by the term given to the new trend,
Caballerismo.
⁴⁴
If Mussolini was corrupted towards the Right, Caballero was corrupted towards the Left.