The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (48 page)

Hitler’s memorandum was primarily an emphatic repudiation of the earlier New Plan favoured by Hjalmar Schacht, which had aimed at replenishing Germany’s depleted hard currency reserves through a complex system of export subsidies, import restrictions and bilateral trade agreements. Hitler dismissed brusquely Schacht’s arguments for a slower pace of rearmament and a strategy of stockpiling raw materials and hard currency. The memorandum was also an explicit threat to German industry that state control would be stepped up if the private sector failed to meet the targets set by the government:

It is not the task of the governmental economic institutions to rack their brains over production methods. This matter does not concern the Ministry of Economics at all. Either we have a private economy today, and it is its
task to rack its brains about production methods, or we assume that the determination of production is the task of government; in which case we no longer need the private economy at all… The ministry has only to set the tasks; business has to fulfil them. If business considers itself unable to do so, then the National Socialist state will know how to resolve the problem by itself… German business must either understand the new economic tasks or else they will prove unfit to exist any longer in this modern age, when the Soviet state builds up a gigantic plan. But in that eventuality, it will not be Germany who will be destroyed, but only some industrialists!

However, the most important point in the entire report was the timetable it established. Hitler’s two conclusions could not have been more explicit:

I. The German armed forces must be ready for combat within four years.
II. The German economy must be fit for war within four years.

Historians have long debated whether this should be treated as evidence of a concrete Nazi plan for war. Of course it should. By decisively sanctioning an acceleration in the pace of rearmament and overriding Schacht’s warnings of another balance of payments crisis, Hitler’s Four-Year Plan memorandum significantly increased the likelihood that Germany would be at war by 1940. In the words of Major-General Friedrich Fromm of the Army’s Central Administrative Office: ‘Shortly after completion of the rearmament phase, the Wehr-macht must be employed, otherwise there must be a reduction in demands or in the level of war readiness.’ The interesting thing to note is that, by aiming for war in late 1940, Hitler was being relatively realistic about how long his proposed strategy of autarky could be sustained. By 1940 at the latest, in other words, Germany would need to have begun acquiring new living space.

The concept of
Lebensraum
, or living space, had been devised in the late 1890s by Friedrich Ratzel, Professor of Geography at Leipzig, and developed by the Orientalist and geopolitical theorist Karl Haus-hofer, whose pupil Rudolf Hess may have introduced the term to Hitler in the early 1920s. We can now see that the argument was based on an excessively pessimistic view of economic development. Since 1945 gains in both agricultural and industrial productivity have
allowed ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ alike to sustain even larger populations than they had in 1939. By the end of the twentieth century, Italy’s population density was 17 per cent higher than sixty years before, Britain’s 28 per cent, France’s 42 per cent, Germany’s 64 per cent and Japan’s 84 per cent. As a result of decolonization, all these countries had been ‘have nots’ (in the inter-war sense) for most of the intervening years, yet their economies had grown significantly faster than in the periods when some or all of them had been ‘haves’. Clearly, living space was not as indispensable for prosperity as Haushofer and his disciples believed. Yet in the context of the 1930s the argument had a powerful appeal – and particularly in Germany, Italy and Japan. In the late 1930s, as Figure 8.1 shows, Germany had the fourth-highest population density of the world’s major economies (363 inhabitants per square mile), after the United Kingdom (487), Japan (469) and Italy (418). Under the Treaty of Versailles, however, Germany had been deprived of her relatively few colonies, whereas Britain had added to her already vast imperium, as had France. If, as Hitler had learned from Haushofer, living space was essential for a densely populated country with limited domestic sources of food and raw materials, then Germany, Japan and Italy all needed it. Another way of looking at the problem was to relate available arable land to the population employed in agriculture. By this measure, Canada was ten times better endowed than Germany and the United States six times better. Even Germany’s European neighbours had more ‘farming space’: the average Danish farmer had 229 per cent more land than the average German; the average British farmer 182 per cent more and the average French farmer 34 per cent more. To be sure, farmers in Poland, Italy, Romania and Bulgaria were worse off; but further east, in the Soviet Union, there was 50 per cent more arable land per agricultural worker.

Living space had a secondary meaning, however, which was less frequently articulated but in practice much more important. This was the need that any serious military power had for access to strategic raw materials. Here changes in military technology had radically altered the global balance of power – arguably even more so than post-1918 border changes. Military power was no longer a matter of

Figure 8.1
Population per square mile, 1938

‘blood and iron’, or even coal and iron, as it had been in Bismarck’s day. Just as important were oil and rubber. The production of these commodities was dominated by the United States, the British Empire and the Soviet Union or countries under their direct or indirect influence. American oilfields alone accounted for just under 70 per cent of global crude petroleum production; the world’s next largest producer was Venezuela (12 per cent). The Middle Eastern oilfields did not yet occupy the dominant position they enjoy today: between them, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf states accounted for less than 7 per cent of total world production in 1940. The critical point was that oil production in all these countries was in the hands of British or American firms, principally Anglo-Persian, Royal Dutch/Shell and the successors to Standard Oil. Nor was modern warfare solely a matter of internal combustion engines and rubber tyres. Modern planes, tanks and ships – to say nothing of guns, shells, bullets and the machinery needed to make all these things – required a host of sophisticated forms of steel, which could be manufactured only with
the admixture of more or less rare metals like antimony, chromium, cobalt, manganese, mercury, molybdenum, nickel, titanium, tungsten and vanadium. Here too the situation of the Western powers and the Soviet Union was dominant, if not monopolistic. Taken together, the British Empire, the French Empire, the United States and the Soviet Union accounted for virtually all the world’s output of cobalt, manganese, molybdenum, nickel and vanadium, around three-quarters of all chromium and titanium, and half of all tungsten. The former German colony of South-West Africa, now securely in British hands, was practically the only source of vanadium. The Soviet Union, followed distantly by India, accounted for nearly all manganese production. Nickel was virtually a Canadian monopoly; molybdenum an American one.

The case that Germany, Italy and Japan lacked living space was therefore far from weak. Germany had abundant domestic supplies of coal and the biggest iron and steel industry in Europe, but before the 1930s needed to import all its rubber and oil. Japan relied on imports for 100 per cent of its rubber, 55 per cent of its steel and 45 per cent of its iron. Around 80 per cent of Japanese oil was imported from the United States in the 1930s and 10 per cent from the Dutch East Indies; the nearest other source was on the Soviet-controlled island of Sakhalin. Italy was not much better off. A crucial consequence of Hitler’s Four-Year Plan memorandum was therefore a huge investment in new technologies capable of producing synthetic oil, rubber and fibres using domestic materials such as coal, as well as the creation at Salzgitter of a vast state-owned factory designed to manufacture steel from low-quality German iron ore. Yet by the time Hitler addressed his senior military leaders on November 5, 1937 – a meeting summarized by Colonel Friedrich Hossbach – it had become apparent that this enormously expensive mobilization of internal resources could not possibly deliver the level of rearmament the service chiefs regarded as necessary before 1943–45. It was for this reason that Hitler turned his attention to the possibility that living space and the resources that came with it might be acquired sooner rather than later, and without the need for a full-scale war with the Western powers or the Soviet Union.

He had good reason to think this. Italy had acquired new living space in Abyssinia without having to fight a wider war. Even more impressively, Japan too seemed well on her way out of the ignominious category of ‘have nots’. But whereas Hitler and his acolytes looked eastwards for their living space
*
and the Italians looked southwards, the Japanese looked westwards – to China.

Japan had much in common with Great Britain, besides high population density. An archipelago of islands located not far from a well-developed continent with a longer-established civilization, Japan had emerged from an era of civil war to embrace constitutional monarchy. Japan was Asia’s first industrial nation, just as Britain was Europe’s. Both rose to economic power by manufacturing cloth and selling it to foreigners. Victorian Britain was famous for its stuffy social hierarchy; so too was Meiji Japan. The English had their state religion, propounded by the Church of England; the Japanese had theirs, known as Shinto. Both cultures engaged in what looked to outside eyes like emperor- (or empress-) worship. Both cultures venerated and romanticized the chivalric codes of a partly imagined feudal past. The enduring power of Second World War propaganda still makes it hard for Western observers to acknowledge these similarities; we prefer to accentuate the ‘otherness’ of inter-war Japan. To ignore them, however, is to miss the essential legitimacy of the basic Japanese objective after 1905: to be treated as an equal by the Western powers. To the Japanese this meant more than the share of the Chinese market that was on offer under the system of unequal treaties. The British had acquired a large and lucrative empire, the core of which was their total control of the defunct Asian empire of the Mughals but which also afforded them vast tracts of living space in North America and
Australasia. The Japanese saw no reason why they should not build an empire of their own, complete with living space, in the ruins of the no less defunct Qing empire. The biggest difference between Japan and Britain was one of timing. Economically, at least in terms of per capita gross domestic product, Japan was around a century and a half behind, if not more. Strategically, too, Japan was roughly where Britain had been in the first half of the eighteenth century. Her opponents, however, were more numerous and more formidable than Hanoverian Britain’s had been.

The First World War presented Japan with an ideal opportunity not only to expand her production of heavy industrial goods like ships, which she did prodigiously, but also to enlarge her living space in Asia. Japan was able to take the side of the Entente powers at minimal cost, seizing the German outpost of Tsingtao, on the Shandong peninsula, as well as the Marshall Islands, the Carolines and the Marianas in the North Pacific. Apart from sending a naval squadron to the Mediterranean, Japan contributed nothing to the war effort that was not directly to her own advantage. This was also true of her intervention in the Russian civil war, which merely gave the Japanese a pretext to seize Russian territory in the Far East. Meanwhile, under cover of war, Japan pressed China to make a whole range of economic and political concessions known as the Twenty-one Demands. These included the transfer to Japan of economic rights over the Shandong peninsula, the expansion and extension of Japanese rights in southern Manchuria and eastern Mongolia, the exclusion of other foreign powers from any future coastal concessions and the granting of various privileges to Japanese-owned railway and mining companies. The most radical, however, were for the appointment of Japanese advisers to the Chinese government, as well as of Japanese representatives to assist with the ‘improvement’ of the Chinese police. These last demands the Chinese – with British and American support – refused to accept. But the rest were acceded to with minimal modifications; the alternative, as the Japanese had made abundantly clear, was war.

The line the Japanese now took was that China was on the verge of disintegration. ‘A civil war or collapse in China may not have any direct effect on other nations,’ Special Ambassador Ishii Kikujirō had
explained to the American Secretary of State Robert Lansing in 1917, ‘but to Japan it will be a matter of life and death. A civil war in China will immediately be reflected in Japan, and the downfall of China means the downfall of Japan.’ Privately, however, some Japanese leaders increasingly coveted China as a potential source for the vital raw materials Japan herself lacked. The Western powers were under no illusions as to Japan’s intentions. ‘Today,’ wrote the British ambassador to China, ‘we have come to know Japan – the real Japan – as a frankly opportunist, not to say selfish, country, of very moderate importance compared with the Giants of the Great War, but with a very exaggerated opinion of her own role.’ This was a very British way of saying that Japan should leave the exploitation of China to Asia’s traditional European masters. Other British observers were even more perturbed. Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, who had commanded the expedition to relieve Beijing in the Boxer Rebellion, suspected that the Japanese ultimately aimed at creating a ‘greater Japan which will probably comprise parts of China and the Gateway to the East, the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, and the Malay States’.