Chapter 9.1 An Unstable Peace

The attempts by Western nations to build a structure of world peace with the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations ultimately unraveled during the 1930s. National and international grievances, competing ideologies, and economic self-interest all hammered away at the fragile international order.

Asia for Asians

Some historians debate when exactly World War II began. Some insist that it began when Japan invaded China in the early 1930s. The spark may have been Japan’s long-standing perception of Western racism, dating back to the nineteenth century and shown more recently in the rejection of Japan’s proposed racial equality amendment to the Treaty of Versailles. This had been done at the insistence of Australia and the British delegation. Part of Japan’s underlying thinking was to rid Asia of Western colonial influences, although it also clearly saw itself as the new leader of the region.

Since the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, Japan had held the right to lease the South Manchuria Railway in northeastern China, a privilege previously held by Russia. However, Japan now claimed rights to control extensive territory in northeastern China outside the railway zone and stationed its troops in the region. In 1931, these troops detonated explosives along the track of the South Manchuria Railway and blamed the act on Chinese saboteurs. This gave Japan an excuse to invade and annex Manchuria (also called Manchukuo) on the pretext that it was defending Japanese interests. To deflect international attention from this incident, commonly known as the Mukden Incident, the Japanese provoked some sharp clashes with Chinese troops in Shanghai. A cease-fire on May 5, 1932, concluded the First Shanghai Incident. The United States opposed the aggression and in January 1932 US Secretary of State Henry Stimson sent a note to the governments of Japan and China declaring the non-recognition of international territorial changes imposed by force. This policy became known as the Stimson doctrine. The League of Nations, dominated by Britain and France, also opposed Japan’s moves but—in the first major crisis it faced and after lengthy discussion—failed to defend China, a responsibility implied by its covenant. It imposed sanctions only to have Japan withdraw from the League. Europe’s failure to act effectively seemed only to embolden Tokyo.

Simultaneously, the Imperial Japanese Kwantung Army in Manchukuo continued to expand its operations and control. The army pushed southward to the Great Wall, absorbing more Chinese territory into its zone of control. Eventually, on May 22, 1933, the Japanese and China’s Guomindang government (GMD, also spelled “Kuomintang”) concluded the Tanggu Truce, forming a demilitarized zone that stretched one hundred kilometers south of the Great Wall and essentially detached Manchukuo from the nation of China. Thereafter, Manchukuo, which had rich coal and iron ore deposits, was developed as an economic engine for the Japanese Empire, securing North China, countering any spread of communism or Soviet influence, and preparing the way for a wider conflict (Figure 9.4).

The nationalist GMD government and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had been fighting a civil war since 1927. In 1934, GMD troops displaced from Manchukuo by the Japanese had repositioned themselves south of the Great Wall when President Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi)1 ordered them to attack the Chinese communists under Mao Zedong at their nearby base in Yan’an, Shaanxi Province. Chinese public opinion rejected the idea of Chinese fighting Chinese in the face of Japan’s aggression. In December 1936, during the so-called Xian Incident, Chiang Kai-shek was taken prisoner in Xian, China, by Manchurian forces and forced to negotiate a cessation of the Civil War and the creation of the Second United Front—unifying the GMD and the CCP against Japan.

Tensions in North China escalated early in July 1937, as Japanese troops were conducting night exercises near the Marco Polo Bridge ten miles west of Beijing and firefights erupted between them and Chinese troops. The Japanese quickly overcame the Chinese forces and secured their control of the area around Beijing and Tianjin.

Chiang Kai-shek^[1] then decided to shift the fighting to the Shanghai region, where he had better forces and a seeming numerical advantage. The Japanese responded by mounting a major offensive, and by November 1937, the GMD forces had been badly mauled. After losing 250,000 troops, they retreated westward to China’s capital in Nanjing. Japanese forces closed in on Nanjing, and Chinese troops continued to retreat westward. On December 12, 1937, Chinese resistance at Nanjing ceased, and Japanese troops entered the defenseless city, commencing a terrifying seven-week reign of terror and plunder. Foreign witnesses in the city estimated that twenty thousand Chinese women and girls were raped. Some thirty thousand Chinese soldiers who could not be evacuated were executed, and perhaps as many as twelve thousand civilians were also killed. Other historians put the number of dead at 300,000. (Such discrepancies in numbers occur because historians may disagree on which deaths can be attributed to an event.) The tragedy became known as the “Rape of Nanking” (the older spelling of Nanjing) and was taken up at the Tokyo War Crimes trials after the war.

Japan redoubled its efforts to subdue China. Having retreated farther west to defend the GMD’s new provisional capital at Chongqing, some GMD armies put up stiff resistance in places, but by 1938, they had been pushed back significantly. To prevent further Japanese advances, Chiang Kai-shek ordered the opening of the dikes on the Yellow River, flooding large portions of central China, killing an estimated 400,000 people and dislocating ten million more. In December 1937, the Japanese sank the USS Panay, a gunboat on the Yangtze River that was extracting American and Chinese civilians from Nanjing at the time. The Japanese government accepted responsibility and apologized for the Panay incident, paying restitution of more than $2 million (at least $37 million in today’s money). Through all this, public opinion in the United States, while increasingly shifting in favor of China, was still undecided about entering any war.

The Great Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe seemed to signal the decline of the older Western-dominated world order. Japanese intellectuals, politicians, military leaders, and mass media envisioned that Japan could fashion a “new order” of regional supremacy for itself. In an August 1940 radio address, Japanese foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka broached his vision for a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere as a blueprint for Japan’s ascent to world-power status. A year later, he published a book further developing his ideas for liberating Asians from European domination and expelling the “white race bloc” suppressing Asia’s destiny. By 1941, creating the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere had become the publicly articulated objective of Japan’s Asian aggression, and it remained so until Japan’s defeat in 1945.

Eventually, finding themselves in a stalemate in China and needing more natural resources to sustain the war and the goal of creating the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the Japanese military and civilian governments began to consider a thrust into Southeast Asia. Such a move would inevitably mean a confrontation with the United States and its colony the Philippines. Japan conceived a desperately hopeful plan of war against the United States and an initial knockout strike on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Peace in Our Time

In furtherance of his promise to revive Italian glory, Benito Mussolini (popularly known as Il Duce, “the leader”) sought to expand the Italian protectorate of Somali in East Africa. A border dispute with Ethiopia, which Italy had long sought to colonize, arose in November 1934, and the Ethiopians took the matter to the League of Nations on January 5, 1935. When a full-scale Italian invasion of Ethiopia began on October 3 of that year, the League Council immediately declared Italy the aggressor, and fifty-one member nations approved sanctions against Italy. Unwilling to defy Mussolini, however, the British and French undermined the League in a secret agreement permitting Italy to absorb Ethiopia into a special economic zone. In May 1936, Italian forces took the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, and shortly thereafter, Italy formally annexed the country. In Italy, Mussolini’s popularity grew, especially among Italian youth.

Britain and France were even more reluctant to confront Germany. Adolf Hitler had often pledged to scrap the Treaty of Versailles. His first step came just nine months after becoming chancellor when he conducted a referendum to let the German people decide whether they wanted to remain in the League of Nations. The result was predictable, and in October 1933, Germany withdrew from the League.

By the 1930s, some in Britain and elsewhere had come to view Hitler as a deeply patriotic German seeking merely to serve the interests of his battered nation. Others saw him and his politics as potentially dangerous and unsettling to European stability. The British government did, however, negotiate with Germany to contain the size of the German navy, and France sought a Treaty of Mutual Assistance with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Using the French-Soviet cooperation as an excuse, in March 1935 Hitler publicly announced that Germany had already secretly begun to rearm in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles. On March 2, 1936, about three thousand German troops reoccupied the Rhineland, a part of Germany demilitarized by the Treaty. France feared protesting this too strongly because it did not want and was not ready to fight another war. The British public did not see the move as overtly hostile.

Though the Versailles Treaty specifically prohibited unification of Austria with Germany, Hitler moved to accomplish this anyway. Austria’s prime minister attempted to stave off unification by calling for a referendum in March, but the next day Hitler preemptively sent troops into Austria. When the referendum was held, the people voted for union with Germany. Flush with his victory over Austria, Hitler continued to “gather the German people,” and his eyes turned to those portions of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland, containing some three million ethnic Germans, including many who had been folded into that nation by the Treaty of Versailles (Figure 9.5).

The Czechoslovaks, in the only real democracy created by the Treaty of Versailles, pinned their hopes for defense against Germany on the western nations and on treaties for mutual defense signed with France in the 1920s and early 1930s. Sudeten Germans had organized their own Nazi Party, however, and began agitating to join Germany. By 1938, it seemed that Britain and France were most concerned with avoiding another major war, so to defuse the situation, the Czechoslovak government granted the Sudeten Germans self-government. Tensions grew. As Hitler pressed for full inclusion of the Sudetenland in Germany and war seemed on the horizon, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Germany to meet with him. Hitler seemed prepared for war. Instead, Chamberlain proposed to hold a general conference to address the crisis over the Sudetenland, and Hitler agreed.

The Munich Conference was attended by Chamberlain, Hitler, French prime minister Édouard Daladier, and Mussolini (ostensibly a neutral party but one who had already assured Hitler of his support). On September 30, they produced the Munich Agreement in which Czechoslovakia granted territorial concessions to Germany, Poland, and Hungary. Fiercely negotiated by Hitler, Chamberlain agreed to the terms with the primary goal of avoiding war with Germany, in what has since been called appeasement (Figure 9.6). The hope of Great Britain and France was that Hitler would be satisfied and cease to be aggressive.

The Western world had not yet decided which was the greater threat to world peace, a fascist Germany or the communist Soviet Union. Some political conservatives in England and France hoped for a German alliance against the Soviets, as did Hitler. The British military was not confident of its preparedness for war, and the isolationist policy of the United States diminished the hope of any aid from Washington. With anxiety growing in London over Britain’s possessions in Asia and Japanese aggressions there, domestic support for negotiated solutions was widespread among liberals, and a bargain with Hitler seemed a reasonable policy. In the ensuing weeks, German troops entered the relinquished areas, and by the spring of 1939, Germany had gone on to absorb the rest of Czechoslovakia.

During these years, the Nazis were progressively implementing increasingly severe persecutions of Jewish people. First, a law enacted on April 7, 1933, banned them from positions in the civil service. That same year, the first and longest-surviving Nazi concentration camp, Dachau, was set up near Munich, intended for political prisoners (Figure 9.7). Several laws collectively known as the Nuremberg Laws were promulgated in 1935, institutionalizing Nazi racial theories and discrimination against Jewish people. A Jewish person was defined as anyone with three Jewish grandparents, regardless of whether they were active in the Jewish religious community or how deeply they identified as German. Jewish people were denied citizenship in the new Nazi-led German empire, called the Third Reich, and were forbidden to marry or have sexual relations with ethnic Germans, designated as “Aryans.” They lost the right to vote and most other political rights.

Germany was becoming legally structured as an “us” versus “them” nation, and the treatment of its Jewish people demonstrated the fearsome power of the state. Two days of violent attacks on them in November 1938, ignited by the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a Polish Jewish man, became known as Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass.” Almost every synagogue in Germany was torched during the rampage, as well as 90 percent of Jewish-owned businesses. Some thirty thousand Jewish males were taken into custody and sent to Dachau, which by then had been augmented by camps at Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald. All but about two thousand were released in 1939.

Kristallnacht caused a severe deterioration in Germany’s international standing. In Britain, an outraged public pressured Parliament into allowing unaccompanied Jewish children under seventeen to take refuge in England. During the nine months before the war, this Kindertransport may have rescued as many as ten thousand children. Across Europe, many Jewish people became refugees as they fled the oppressive politics of the Nazis. A thirty-two-nation international conference was held in France during the summer of 1938 to solve the Jewish refugee crisis, but no country stepped forward to accept any such immigrants. In February 1939, a bill was introduced into the U.S. Congress to allow ten thousand Jewish children to enter the country in 1939 and another ten thousand in 1940. Though popular, the bill failed due to lukewarm political support.

In Asia, Shanghai was an option for Jewish refugees looking for a new home. The city, along with Franco’s Spain, was unconditionally open to Jewish migration. Nominally still a German ally in 1939, the Nationalist government in the southwestern corner of China formulated a plan to provide a haven for European Jewish refugees. It had multiple reasons for doing so, including attracting international Jewish support and gaining favor with Britain and the United States against Japan. A number of schemes were hatched, both by members of the GMD government and by private individuals, one even gaining the support of scientist Albert Einstein. GMD diplomats in Europe like Feng Shan Ho, consul general in Vienna, issued visas to Jewish refugees seeking to relocate to Shanghai. A Jewish community of more than twenty thousand displaced persons had reached the city by the end of the war.

In May 1939, almost one thousand Jewish refugees escaping Nazi persecution took passage on the MS St. Louis, a German ocean liner, heading for sanctuary in Cuba. But Cuba refused to admit them. The ship’s captain then tried to get Canada or the United States to accept the refugees, but that effort failed as well. While the ship sailed around to no avail, conditions on board deteriorated to the point that it came to be called the “voyage of the damned.” Finally, after a month, the ship was forced to return to Antwerp, Belgium, where most of the passengers disembarked. Ultimately, England accepted about three hundred of them, France took some, and a few more went to Belgium and the Netherlands. Of the original passengers, 70 percent survived the war, but more than two hundred were killed by the Nazis.

The ambition to expand eastward had motivated Germany for some time. The hunt for Lebensraum, or living space, had fueled its search for overseas colonies in the late 1800s and was an express goal of World War I. In the lands seized from countries in eastern Europe, Hitler envisioned German families settling and producing large numbers of children, supplanting the native Slavic populations. In this way, physically and culturally “superior” Germans would reclaim Europe from “inferior” Jewish and Slavic peoples. Similar ideologies meant to rationalize the displacement of a territory’s residents by a supposedly superior population have appeared in history before, like Manifest Destiny in the United States and Japan’s expansionist policies in Korea and Manchuria. To the east of Germany, the Treaty of Versailles had created an independent Poland and awarded parts of Germany to Poland in the process. This “Polish Corridor,” in an area where many Polish people already lived, was intended to give Poland access to a port, and the German city of Danzig (Gdańsk), bordering it, was made a semi-independent city-state with its own parliament (Figure 9.8). Poland was a prime target of the Nazis as they looked for Lebensraum. The lessons learned from Hitler’s violation of the Munich Agreement spurred Britain and France to take action to protect Poland.

The key to whether Germany could be boxed in was the attitudes of Stalin and the Soviet Union. As early as the summer of 1938, Stalin began to think of making some sort of deal with Germany. During the following summer, relations between Germany and the Soviet Union began to improve. Stalin, aware of Hitler’s musings in his book Mein Kampf, understood the long-term threat Germany posed and sought to buy time to prepare for possible war. For his part, Hitler wanted to avoid Germany’s World War I mistake of fighting on two fronts simultaneously. The result was the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939. In this pact, Germany and the USSR agreed not to attack one another or to assist other nations in attacking the other.

Included in the agreement were secret protocols that essentially divided eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union. Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and parts of eastern Poland were allocated to the USSR as a reward for cooperating with Germany in the dismemberment of Poland.  Seeing the pact as an ominous green light for a German eastward thrust, two days later Britain signed a mutual defense agreement with Poland. All things seemed ready for the German onslaught, which was launched on September 1, 1939. Britain and France fulfilled their commitment to Poland and declared war on Germany, forming the partnership known as the Allies, but not on the Soviet Union. About two weeks later, Soviet forces invaded Poland from the east. Crushed from two sides, Poland essentially ceased to exist. The European fires of World War II had been ignited.

BEYOND THE BOOK

The Question of U.S. Neutrality

In the 1930s, many in the United States were reluctant to find themselves embroiled in another war. As Hitler’s power grew in Europe and Japan expanded its empire in the Pacific, the United States thus adopted a policy of neutrality. This continued even after Japan invaded China and Germany invaded Poland and ultimately western Europe. Although President Franklin Roosevelt favored aiding the British, his opponents in Congress feared the potential consequences. The political cartoonist Clifford Berryman created a number of cartoons in the 1930s and early 1940s whose subject was U.S. neutrality.

Examine the two cartoons that follow. In the first (Figure 9.9), Uncle Sam proclaims, “Lafayette, we are here!” words spoken by Colonel Charles E. Stanton at the tomb of the Marquis de Lafayette after U.S. troops joined the British and French in fighting World War I. (Lafayette had famously fought on the side of the colonists in the American Revolution.) In the second image, Uncle Sam is working as a hod carrier, someone who carried bricks (Figure 9.9).

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• What is Berryman saying in these cartoons about the U.S. policy of neutrality? Does he favor it? What does he think will be its consequences?
• How does Berryman convey his ideas in the cartoons?

In the first two days of the campaign, two thousand Soviet planes were destroyed on the ground. The speed of the German attack was greater than anticipated, and within weeks, Belorussia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia had been occupied by the German army, which was called the Wehrmacht (“defense power”). By August, the Germans had captured Kyiv, an industrial center that contained a large portion of the Soviet economic infrastructure at that time. By November, Hitler had gone farther into Russia than Napoleon had. The German army stood at the gates of Leningrad, on the outskirts of Moscow, and on the Don River. Of the 4.5 million troops with which the Soviets had begun, 2.5 to 3 million were lost; of their fifteen thousand tanks, only seven hundred were left. Moscow was in panic, and a German victory seemed imminent.

But serious problems arose that came back to haunt the Germans. The speed of the advance had strained the delivery of supplies. The force advancing on Moscow needed nearly thirty train shipments of fuel each day to maintain its pace, but by November, it was receiving only three. In August, a shortage of clean water had spread dysentery and cholera among the troops. When the late summer rains came, German soldiers found that they could neither drive fast (because of mud) nor keep themselves and their equipment dry. Once the Russian winter began, it became so cold that bread rations froze and had to be chopped into portions with axes.

The siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days and was one of the longest and deadliest in world history. In early 1942, nearly 100,000 people in the city starved to death each month, and some of the remaining residents resorted to cannibalism to survive. Overall, a million and a half people perished. Facing this, Stalin seems to have momentarily faltered. By the end of 1941, his head of security was instructed to send feelers to the Germans through the Bulgarian ambassador to Moscow, broaching the possibility of peace.