Why did the second world war begin

[bemildred]

---

The true character of the second world war was a three-pronged attack on these Asian empires. Hitler's goal, as he had repeatedly said since Mein Kampf, was to acquire "living space" in the east. He renounced the earlier dream of German colonies overseas; what Germany needed was contiguous land extending as far east as the Volga. That implied not just the disappearance of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland as independent states – that was merely the first phase – but also the destruction of Russia as a European power with the annexation of Ukraine, the Baltic states, Byelorussia and conceivably parts of the Caucasus.

The second prong of the attack on the Asian empires was Japan's. It must be remembered that by the time war began over Poland, Japan already controlled a large part of eastern China. But as the Japanese got bogged down there, they looked for alternative prizes. Having experienced a heavy defeat at the hands of Soviet forces at Nomonhan in August 1939, the Japanese opted to strike south against the French, Dutch and British empires in Asia. American sanctions (particularly the oil embargo of July 1941) then forced them to attack the United States too. Though Pearl Harbor was less successful than the Japanese needed it to be, their attacks on Europe's eastern outposts were triumphs, symbolised by the humiliating British surrender of Singapore in February 1942.

The third prong of the Asian attack on European dominance was internal. Encouraged by Japan's initial crushing victories, many Asian nationalists in India, Indochina and Indonesia felt emboldened, if not to join the axis side (as Subhas Chandra Bose did), then at least to redouble their efforts to achieve independence after the war. In this they were largely successful, to the extent that very little remained of European power in Asia after 1950, aside from those vestiges the United States sought to preserve.

For all these reasons, the events of September 1939 look less like the beginning of a world war and more like a critical moment in the escalation of an ongoing global conflict. It was a war, above all, for dominance in Eurasia. It was a war begun by the "have-nots" – Japan, Italy and Germany – but won by the least deserving of the "haves" – the Soviet Union, which had begun on the wrong side in 1939, and the United States, which entered the war more than two years later. It was a war that was not really over until 1953, by which time its two most hotly contested zones – central and eastern Europe and Manchuria-Korea – had been divided in two, with deadly, impassable borders dividing each of them.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/05/second-world-war-background-causes

[Aragorn]

1. all true

but not news. I presume you infer current similarities.

[bemildred]

4. Well, it does cause one to consider the current implications of this sort of thinking.

And I do consider this sort of thinking about history much more illuminating than the various hagiographies produced by various governments etc.

The 20th Century was a lousy one for empires, and I assume the 21st Century is going to be no better in that regard. Still the impulse to rule over others by force seems to be far from dead. I think there is a warning there for the USA, Russia, China, India, to name a few among many. The interesting point that Mr Ferguson makes is that the process is driven by a restoration of balance in technical means, an issue that has significance not just for empires, but for all who would rule by force alone.

[The Magistrate]

2. A Pretty Good Analysis, My Friend

Mr. Ferguson is no favorite of mine, being very much a Tory wretch politically and economically, but he is quite sound here....

[bemildred]

6. Tory wretchs can sometimes be good historians Sir.

Taking the long view of history seems to correlate with being a Tory wretch for some reason. Mr Ferguson & I have our ups and downs also. Usually the downs involve disputes about current events. There might be something in that.

[The Magistrate]

9. True, Sir...

But having recently seen him on a panel discussing the present economic situation, and actually referring to the 'stimulus package' as Communism, he is solidly on my 'outs' list for the present, at least until that sorry spectacle fades from the fore-front of recollection.

The centrality of Asia to all this, though, is a sound point, as is the time scale suggested. Pushing his analysis a bit further, one could press an argument that the external and internal attack on Asian empires features he posits can be observed in fairly continuous operation from the early nineteenth century; in China, for example, with the Opium Wars of 1839 followed in short order by the Taiping Rebellion of 1850, continued almost two decades and encompassing the Nain rebbelion and the Arrow War, the Sino-French War of 1884 in the south and the Sino-Japanese War of 1994 in the north, and the Boxer outbreak of 1900, which, for all the concentration on the episodes at Peking and Tientsin, was full-bore war between Romanov and Ch'ing in Manchuria, bringing us up neatly to the suggested commencement of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. Similar chronologies concerning the Ottoman, and even the Raj, could be readily laid out.

[bemildred]

12. LOL. Understood Sir.

I think your argument is sound. I think the European empires generally failed to consolidate themselves, and I think that one can link that to their failure to follow the Roman model in regard to equal opportunity for the conquered masses. Of course details vary from place to place.

[The Magistrate]

18. Well, It Does Get a Bit Unwieldy, My Friend, To Date the Commencement Of 'World War Two' To 1839

Most people will simply think you struck the wrong key, and did not proof the piece, and should they persevere, will find themselves reading of matters they know little of and are accustomed to thinking peripheral and quaint and thoroughly un-important save as curios. And of course, if you take a view from inside the Asian empires, the thing has a very different aspect. Then, the Chinese sequence above, for example, becomes a dynastic collapse of unusually prolonged nature, exacerbated by foreign influences which operated both to prolong the existence of the falling dynasty and the interegnum between its collapse and the rise of a new ruling house, and complicated further by great changes in economic activity and weaponry introduced amid the turmoil; from this point of view, events in Europe are of little or no importance.

Your point about the Roman style of consolidation is a sound one. The French came the closest to adopting it, with Algeria being, on its legal face, anyway, absorbed in the Metropole. France can hardly be considered more successful as an imperium than the rest, however.

[bemildred]

22. I don't know if you remember the book I mentioned a while back:

"The Decline and Fall of the British Empire", but he dates it to 1781 and the loss of the N. American colonies, so apparently he thinks like Mr Ferguson.

Algeria came to my mind as one of the better attempts. There was some success in India too. I think it was really the ingrained racism or ethnic bigotry - whatever one wants to call it - that was the problem, the failure to internalize the notion of "different but equal". It is an interesting question why that was not an issue in Rome, were people different then?

[The Magistrate]

24. It Had Slipped My Mind, Sir, Regrettably

It sounds like an interesting work. That seems a bit early to date decline from, as expansion certainly continued apace, but it did rear up what proved the main rival and supplanter.

A couple of factors seem relevant to the Roman question. One is that the subject people were mostly contiguous by land, and so popular rebellon had potential to strike directly into the hearty of the empire. An Afghan or a Zulu in the nineteenth century could be as angry as he pleased with England; London was out of reach. A second is that the moderns seem to have felt themselves a good deal more superior to the subjects than the Romans did. Romans certainly felt themselves superior to other peoples, but Rome's advantages in war were more organizational than technical, and there was seldom any appreciable color difference between Romans and the peoples they overcame. So there were no ineradicable marks of inferiority; behaving like a Roman was enough, more or less, for acceptance as a Roman.

[bemildred]

25. Well, his thesis, if I remember it right, was that the flaws of governance were already present

and effective in bringing about the American rebellion.

Your points about how things were different in Rome run along the lines of my own speculations. I would add that the lower population of those times made those differences that there were less a matter of day to day concern. One was either in a large city where everyone was "different", or a small place where everyone was the same.

[Chef Eric]

3. What a poorly written article.

Let me get this straight... the USA is the "least deserving" of the victors, because it didn't enter the war until 1941? What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Who cares who the most or least deserving victor is?

[bemildred]

8. One of the "two least deserving", the other being the USSR.

One assumes he means because they were late comers to the party, only getting involved when they were themselves attacked, unlike say the UK or France which jumped in to save Poland.

[Chef Eric]

16. Yes, I get what he means.

But how can any self-respecting adult bring himself to argue that one victor had been less deserving than another? The writer sounds like some frustrated child who is struggling with the fact that military "glory" (whatever the fuck that means) is not always distributed in an equitable manner.

[bemildred]

17. Well good then, I just wanted to clarify that, if it was needed.

It certainly is a questionable statement, it slowed me down for a second, but I can see Churchill thinking that way, for example, and I don't find it necessary to agree with everything Mr Ferguson says in order to appreciate his main thesis.

[mudplanet]

10. Trying to analyze why WWII began in a three paragraphs

is pretty difficult. At least the author made a stab and covered many good points.

From the West's perspective, WWII began because Germany invaded Czechoslovakia and GB was bound by treaty to declare war.

From Russia's perspective, Germany invaded, period. The result was 25 million Russian dead and a Soviet Union that was so paranoid it occupied all of Eastern Europe for fifty years.

I agree that "deserve" has nothing to do with it (William Penny) but certainly the Soviet Union's principal role in winning the war is way overlooked in our history books. The war in the west was almost a sideline by comparison. The US and GB lost a little over 1 million men, while the Soviet Union lost many more millions (they lost approximately one million in Leningrad alone). I'm a little surprised, given the extent of the devastation and wholesale slaughter the Germans wreaked upon the Soviet Union, that the Soviets didn't insist at Yalta upon razing Germany to the ground and killing the population.

The two greatest human achievements of that war, IMHO, were the Yalta Conference and the Marshall Plan. They successfully created a stable and peaceful Europe.

As to expansionism: if they'd wanted to, the Soviets could have continued the war and conquered all of Western Europe within a year and there probably wouldn't have been much we could have done about it apart from continue to carpet bomb. The two advantages we possessed were complete superiority in heavy bombers and the support of the populace (which, at that stage, wasn't worth much). The Soviets probably had something like 10 million men in the field at the end of the war and had figured out how to supply them and lead them by that time.

[proteus_lives]

23. Nukes.

"if they'd wanted to, the Soviets could have continued the war and conquered all of Western Europe within a year and there probably wouldn't have been much we could have done about it apart from continue to carpet bomb."

We would have used to nukes on them and the air strikes would have very effective because the Soviets already had supply problems. Plus their mass-attack style would have suffered against US troops.

[RedCloud]

5. USA was involved earlier than it says. Our cons back then financed Hitler.

Pretty smart thinking, huh?

[bemildred]

7. Sometimes it takes a while to figure out who you want to be the enemy of.

US foreign policy has a long and illustrious history of blowback.

[TomClash]

14. This is the . . . .

. . . wisest message of all the posts here, including the OP.

[bemildred]

15. Aw shucks. nt

[The Magistrate]

11. Some Day, Sir, Someone Will Provide Numbers, Dollar Amounts, For that Claim

And they are going to have to be in amounts appreciable in comparison to the sum of economic activity in Germany at the time....

[gopiscrap]

13. Prescott Bush started it

[Daveparts still]

19. The short answer is World War one caused World War two.

The short answer is World War one caused World War two.
The bleeding of France and Britain made them hesitant to stop German militarism. The treaty of Versailles encouraged German militarism by its harsh terms and the economic collapse in Germany made possible the rise of Hitler. The lesson is leaders who ignore the sufferings of the masses will find themselves replaced by those who pander to them.

It was a war of resources as Japan sought to fulfill her needs in the good old-fashioned way of taking by military force. I have seen it implied that the west should have done more, sooner to try and stop Japanese expansion but I’ve never understood given 1930’s technology how that could have been done. Manchuria was a long way from America and Europe and if they were unwilling to fight for Czechoslovakia what was Manchuria to them? Roosevelt embargoed steel and oil and forced the Japanese to attack the Dutch East Indies.

The Germans sought to avenge Versailles and to establish a German empire in central and Eastern Europe. Hitler’s political argument to the German people was the reestablish their greatness in Europe. Germany had lost land and colonies after World War one and he never bothered to mention to them that Germany had gained land in the east after the collapse of the Czarist armies.

The German attack to wards Stalingrad was intended to quickly take the city then to branch off to wards to Caucus oil fields and so it could be considered as one of the first oil wars.

The allies joined hands with Joseph Stalin to fight German territorial ambitions and in the end fed Stalin’s territorial ambitions so in that regard World War two was a fifty-year war.

[Cirque du So-What]

20. I always thought of WW II as WW I, Part Deux

because it was grievances over war reparations on the part of Germany that led directly to the rise of Hitler.

I realize that's an oversimplification, but I wonder if Hitler would have been able to seize power if the WW I allies hadn't imposed such draconian reparations upon Germany?

[leveymg]

21. Interesting that there's not a word here about the role of banking, American vs European

The 19th Century wars, as well as both world wars, owe a great deal to the process of acquisition and assimilation of state debt by international banking houses. The Rothschilds dominated international finance of war debts by the crown states during the period of the 1780s through the outbreak of WWI, while the House of Morgan and allied firms grew out of financing American Civil War debt. This was followed by the even more massive public debts and fortunes built up by the Great War and Germany's Reparations payments. Wall Street took over progressively bigger chunks of the British and European financial empires with the destruction of the old regimes of Europe during the 20th Century.

The beginning of the 21st Century was marked by another spike in war debt followed by the literal collapse of the great Wall Street firms, and the rise of the post-modern skylines of Jeddah, Dubai, Hong Kong and Shanghai. That too, shall pass.

This is a parallel history that isn't much taught in American schools, where the fate of individual states really matter little, and war is an agency of private wealth.

[DavidDvorkin]

26. Because of bad people

Which people get the label "bad" -- well, that's where the arguments start.