Chapter 12: History: The Second World War
On the evening of 30 September 1938, an aircraft landed at Heston aerodrome outside London. Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister of Britain, stepped down holding a sheet of paper above his head. He had flown back from Munich, where he, Edouard Daladier of France, Adolf Hitler of Germany and Benito Mussolini of Italy had spent the previous day settling the future of a country none of them governed. Czechoslovakia had not been invited to the meeting that decided its borders. The four men agreed that the Sudetenland, the mountainous German-speaking districts along its frontier, would be handed to Germany. The paper Chamberlain waved was a separate declaration, signed by Hitler and himself that morning, promising that Britain and Germany would never again go to war. Outside his residence at Downing Street that night he told the crowd he had brought back ‘peace for our time’. Crowds cheered him in London and Paris. Not everyone agreed; in the House of Commons a group of members argued that Britain had bought a delay and called it a settlement. Less than six months later, German troops occupied the rest of the Czech lands. Chamberlain had not been choosing between war and peace at Munich. He had been choosing which risk to run — and within a year, Europe was at war again.
Map
Map 12.1 Caption: Europe as it stood in September 1938, on the eve of the Munich meeting. Brief: A political map of Europe with the international boundaries of September 1938; label Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria (already annexed by Germany in March 1938 and shown as part of Germany), the USSR, Spain, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal and Turkey; shade the Sudetenland districts of Czechoslovakia separately and label them; mark Munich. State on the map that these are the boundaries of 1938 and not the boundaries of today. This is a historical map, not a modern reference map, and must not be used to show present-day borders.
12.1 The Twenty Years Between The Wars
The First World War ended in November 1918. The Second World War began in September 1939. Between the two lay barely twenty years — less than the working life of a single soldier. A young man who came home from the trenches in 1918 was not yet forty when the next war reached his town.
That short gap is the puzzle this chapter begins with. The peace-makers who met at Paris in 1919 were not careless men. They believed they were building a settlement that would make another such war impossible. The Treaty of Versailles was meant to leave Germany unable to attack again. The League of Nations was meant to settle quarrels before they became wars.
Both were in place. Neither worked. A book that simply says the Second World War ‘broke out’ has explained nothing. The real question is why a Europe that had just buried millions of its people allowed itself to arrive at the same place a second time.
How Historians Weigh A Cause
Historians separate two different things when they explain a war. The event that sets the fighting off is the immediate cause. The conditions that had been building for years, and that made such an event dangerous rather than manageable, are the deeper causes.
The invasion of Poland in September 1939 is the immediate cause of the Second World War. But armies had crossed borders in the 1930s without a world war following. What mattered was that by 1939 the arrangements meant to contain such a crossing had already collapsed.
This is also a period historians can study unusually closely. Treaties survive in full. So do parliamentary debates, diplomatic despatches, cabinet minutes, newspapers and the private diaries of ministers. After 1945, the governments of Germany, Italy and Japan were defeated and their state papers were captured, so their internal arguments can be read as well as their public statements.
That richness has a limit. Almost all of this evidence was produced by governments, and governments record what they decided and how they wished the decision to look. What ordinary people in Berlin, Warsaw or Manchester actually believed in 1938 is far harder to recover, because most of them left no written record at all.
Six Causes, Not One
The chapter that follows sets out six causes of the Second World War. They are not six competing answers; they are six parts of one chain. Dissatisfaction with the Treaty of Versailles created the grievance. The rise of Fascism and Nazism produced governments willing to act on it. Appeasement removed the resistance. Japan’s expansion in China opened a second front of aggression. The failure of the League removed the machinery for stopping any of it. Hitler’s invasion of Poland struck the match.
Watch how each one weakens the barrier that the one before it had already cracked.
12.2 The Causes Of The Second World War
12.2.1 Dissatisfaction With The Treaty Of Versailles
The Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919. It was the settlement imposed on Germany at the end of the First World War, and Germany was not allowed to negotiate its terms. German delegates were summoned to sign a document already agreed among the victors.
The terms fell into four groups. Germany lost territory in Europe, including Alsace-Lorraine to France and a strip of land to Poland. All her overseas colonies were taken away and placed under the control of other powers. Her army was capped at 100,000 men, conscription was forbidden, and she was denied tanks, military aircraft and submarines. Finally, she was required to pay a war indemnity — a payment demanded from a defeated state to cover the winners’ losses in the war.
The territorial terms mattered most for what followed. Poland was given access to the sea through a corridor of land that ran between the main body of Germany and the German province of East Prussia. The port city of Danzig at the head of that corridor was not given to Poland. It was made a Free City under the protection of the League of Nations, with Poland granted the use of its harbour. Germans lived on both sides of the new lines, and German governments of every kind refused to accept them as permanent.
Underneath the specific clauses lay a single sentence that Germans found hardest to bear. Article 231 required Germany to accept responsibility for causing the war. Read it as a German reader in 1919 would have read it.
The clause is written in legal language, but its work is financial. By fixing responsibility on Germany, it established her liability to pay for the damage. In Germany it was read differently — as an official verdict that the German nation alone had been guilty, and it became known there as the war guilt clause.
Note carefully what this document can and cannot tell you. It records what the victorious governments required Germany to sign in 1919. It does not tell you what German ministers privately believed about responsibility for the war, and it certainly does not tell you whether the judgement it contains was fair. A treaty records the terms of a settlement, not the truth of the claims inside it.
The consequence was a grievance that any politician could use. Successive German governments of the 1920s tried to have the terms revised by negotiation, with some success. What changed in the 1930s was the arrival of a government that intended to overturn the treaty rather than revise it, and to do so by force if necessary.
12.2.2 The Rise Of Fascism And Nazism
You met Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany in the previous chapter, as movements that grew out of post-war disorder, economic distress and the rejection of parliamentary politics. Here they matter for one reason only: they placed in power governments whose stated purpose included expansion.
Mussolini established a dictatorship in Italy through the 1920s. He treated the Versailles settlement as an insult to Italy, which had fought on the winning side and felt cheated of its reward. He spoke of reviving the greatness of ancient Rome, and he sought territory to prove it. In October 1935 Italian forces invaded Abyssinia, in eastern Africa, which the country now called Ethiopia.
Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933. Within two years he had abandoned the military clauses of the Treaty of Versailles openly. In 1935 he announced rearmament and reintroduced conscription. In March 1936 German troops re-entered the Rhineland, the German territory bordering France that the treaty had required to be kept free of forces. In March 1938 Austria was annexed to Germany, and in 1939 the Czech lands were taken.
Each of these acts was a treaty violation, and each was met with protest rather than resistance. The two governments also drew together. Italy joined the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1937, having earlier agreed to work with Germany, and in May 1939 Italy and Germany signed a ten-year military alliance.
Two points must be kept apart here. Explaining why these regimes attracted support is not the same as approving of them, and this book does neither. What the chapter records is what they did: they rearmed, they invaded, and they made the treaty settlement unenforceable.
12.2.3 The Policy Of Appeasement
Appeasement is the policy of conceding to the demands of an aggressive power in the hope of satisfying it and avoiding war. Britain and France followed this policy towards Germany and Italy through the later 1930s.
It was a considered position, not simply weakness, and it rested on four calculations. First, many British and French politicians accepted that the Treaty of Versailles had been unjust, and thought some German demands were reasonable. Second, both countries had lost enormous numbers of men between 1914 and 1918, and their voters had no appetite for another war. Third, neither was militarily ready in the mid-1930s, and delay was thought to buy time to rearm. Fourth, both feared the spread of communism from the Soviet Union, and some saw a strong Germany as a barrier against it.
The policy had a logic, and it failed on its own terms. Each concession was treated by the German government as proof that the western powers would not fight, which lowered rather than raised the cost of the next demand. Rearmament, the Rhineland, Austria and the Czech lands were conceded in turn. By the time Britain and France did draw a line, in 1939, Germany had gained territory, resources and the confidence that the line would not hold.
12.2.4 The Japanese Invasion Of China
The Second World War is often pictured as a European war, but the aggression that led to it began in Asia, and began earlier. Japan had industrialised rapidly and depended on imported raw materials. Her governments came to see control of the Asian mainland as the answer to that dependence.
In September 1931 Japanese forces occupied Manchuria, the resource-rich north-eastern region of China. A separate state was set up there under Japanese control in 1932. China appealed to the League of Nations, which sent a commission of enquiry and eventually held Japan responsible. Japan’s answer was to leave the League in 1933.
The occupation did not stop. From July 1937 Japan and China were fighting a full-scale war, never formally declared, across northern and coastal China. Britain and France, whose own trading interests in China were considerable, protested but took no action. Map 12.2 shows how far Japanese control had spread by 1939.
Map
Map 12.2 Caption: Japanese expansion in East Asia between 1931 and 1939. Brief: A historical map of East Asia showing China, Japan, Korea, Manchuria, Taiwan and the coastline of the Pacific; shade the areas under Japanese control in 1931 and, in a second shade, those added by 1939; label Manchuria, Peking, Shanghai and Nanking; include a key. State on the map that these are the boundaries and controls of the years 1931 to 1939 and not the boundaries of today. This is a historical map, not a modern reference map.
The map shows extent, and extent alone. It cannot show how firmly any of this territory was held, how much of the countryside remained outside Japanese control, or what the occupation meant for the people living under it. A shaded area on a map is a claim of control, not a measure of it.
The consequences reached beyond Asia. A great power had used force, been condemned, and suffered nothing. Any government watching in Europe could draw the obvious conclusion.
12.2.5 The Failure Of The League Of Nations
The League of Nations had been created after the First World War for precisely this purpose — to settle disputes between states before they became wars. Its central principle was collective security, the idea that an attack on any member would be treated as a matter for all members, who would act together against the aggressor.
The League was weakened from the start. The United States, whose President had done most to propose it, never joined, because the American Senate refused to approve the treaty. Germany and Japan left in the 1930s, and Italy followed. The League had no armed force of its own and depended on its members to supply one.
Its main weapon was economic sanctions — a refusal by members to trade with an offending state. Sanctions worked only if members applied them fully, and members were reluctant to damage their own trade in order to punish someone else’s aggression. When Italy invaded Abyssinia, sanctions were imposed but oil was left out and the Suez Canal was left open, so the invasion succeeded.
The record can be read as a sequence. The timeline below sets out the acts of aggression the League met between 1931 and 1939, and it is worth reading as one continuous story rather than as separate incidents.
Notice what the last row records. By 1939 the League was not defied so much as ignored; the states that mattered had gone back to settling disputes through alliances and armies. Notice too what the timeline cannot show. Evenly spaced rows make the crises look like a steady drumbeat, when in fact the first four years were far quieter than the last four.
12.2.6 Hitler’s Invasion Of Poland
By 1939 Germany’s demands had turned to Poland, and specifically to the corridor and to Danzig. Three claims were pressed. Germany wanted the territory lost in 1919 returned; it argued that Danzig was a German city and that control of the corridor would reconnect East Prussia to the rest of the country; and it alleged that Germans living in Poland were being ill-treated. That last claim was made loudly in the German press in the summer of 1939, and it should be read as the justification a government offered rather than as an established fact.
One obstacle remained. An attack on Poland risked war with the Soviet Union on Germany’s eastern side. It was removed in August 1939, when Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact — an agreement between two states not to attack each other, and not to assist an enemy of the other. Two governments of openly hostile ideologies had agreed to keep out of each other’s way.
On 1 September 1939, German forces crossed into Poland. Britain and France sent an ultimatum demanding withdrawal. When no reply came, both declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939. Poland was overrun within weeks; no help reached her in time.
This is the point at which the chain in section 12.1 completes itself. The grievance was in place by 1919, the willingness to act on it by 1933, the absence of resistance by 1938, and the machinery for stopping it had failed long before 1939. Poland was where all four met.
12.3 The Course Of The War
12.3.1 The War In Europe
The war brought two groups of powers against each other. Germany, Italy and Japan fought as the Axis Powers, an alliance formally completed in 1940. Their opponents, led by Britain and France and joined later by the Soviet Union and the United States, were known as the Allied Powers. China had already been fighting Japan since 1937. A few European states — among them Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal and Turkey — stayed neutral throughout.
The opening months were misleading. After Poland was overrun in the autumn of 1939, the western front stayed almost silent until April 1940. Then the pattern of the war changed abruptly. Denmark and Norway were taken in April, Belgium and the Netherlands in May, and by 14 June 1940 German forces had entered Paris. France signed an armistice eight days later.
This method of attack was called blitzkrieg, a German word meaning ‘lightning war’. Instead of the slow siege warfare of 1914 to 1918, tanks and aircraft were used together to break through at one point and drive deep behind the defending army before it could re-form.
Britain now stood alone in western Europe. Through the summer and autumn of 1940 the German air force attacked British airfields and cities, aiming to force a surrender before any invasion. The Royal Air Force held, and no invasion was attempted. This air campaign is known as the Battle of Britain.
In June 1941 Germany broke the non-aggression pact and invaded the Soviet Union, which then joined the Allies. The eastern front became the largest theatre of the war. The German advance was halted at Stalingrad, an industrial city on the Volga, where the attacking army was surrounded and surrendered in February 1943. From that point the Soviet armies moved westward.
The last stage came in 1945. Allied forces advanced into Germany from the west and Soviet forces from the east, meeting at Berlin in April. Hitler died in the city as it fell. The German surrender took effect on 8 May 1945, which was marked across Europe as the day of victory. Map 12.3 shows how much of Europe the Axis had controlled only three years earlier.
Map
Map 12.3 Caption: The greatest extent of Axis control in Europe and North Africa, reached in 1942. Brief: A historical map of Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa; shade in one colour the territory of Germany and Italy, in a second the territory they occupied or controlled by late 1942, and leave the Allied and neutral states unshaded; label Britain, the Soviet Union, Stalingrad, Berlin, Paris, and the neutral states of Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal and Turkey; include a key. State on the map that these are the boundaries and controls of 1942 and not the boundaries of today. This is a historical map, not a modern reference map.
A map of control at a single moment is a snapshot, and a misleading one if read alone. It shows the position in 1942 and cannot show that the tide had already begun to turn, nor how thinly much of that territory was held, nor at what cost to the people living under occupation. Extent is not the same as strength.
This is only one thread. A second war was being fought at the same time across China, South East Asia and the Pacific, and the two locked together at the end of 1941, when the United States entered both at once.
12.3.2 The Attack On Pearl Harbour
The United States had stayed out of the fighting, though it supplied Britain and China with arms and materials on credit. The one force able to check Japanese expansion across the Pacific was the American Pacific Fleet, based at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii.
On 7 December 1941 Japanese aircraft, launched from carriers, attacked that base without warning. Battleships were sunk or disabled and aircraft destroyed on the ground. About two thousand four hundred Americans were killed.
The attack succeeded as a raid and failed as a strategy. The American aircraft carriers were at sea and untouched, and the repair yards and fuel stores at the base were left standing, so many of the damaged ships were rebuilt and returned to service. Above all, it ended American neutrality. The United States declared war on Japan the following day, and Germany and Italy declared war on the United States days later.
12.3.3 The Bombing Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki
Germany surrendered in May 1945, but Japan did not. American forces had recaptured territory across the Pacific at heavy cost, and planners expected an invasion of the Japanese home islands to be costlier still.
Meanwhile scientists working in the United States had built a weapon of a wholly new kind, the atomic bomb, first tested in the New Mexico desert in July 1945. In late July the Allies called on Japan to surrender. When no acceptance came, the decision to use the weapon was taken.
On 6 August 1945 an atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, and on 9 August a second on Nagasaki. Much of each city was destroyed. Tens of thousands of people were killed at once in each, most of them civilians, and many more died afterwards of injuries and of the effects of radiation. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan between the two attacks.
Japan announced its surrender on 15 August 1945 and signed the surrender document aboard an American warship on 2 September 1945. The Second World War was over after six years. More than fifty million people had died in it, and for the first time a majority of the dead were civilians rather than soldiers.
12.4 The Consequences Of The Second World War
The war left three results that shaped the rest of the century. The Axis Powers were defeated and occupied. A new world organisation was built to replace the one that had failed. And the two states that emerged strongest from the war turned on each other, which is the subject of section 12.5.
12.4.1 The Defeat Of The Axis Powers
Until the middle of 1942 the Axis Powers had been winning. Germany and Italy held most of continental Europe and a stretch of North Africa, and Japan had taken much of South East Asia. From late 1942 the position reversed, and by 1945 all three had been defeated.
Defeat was not settled by a negotiated peace, as in 1919. This time the victors occupied the defeated states and governed them directly, and the treatment of each differed.
Germany Divided
Germany was placed under the armies of the four leading Allied powers. It was split into four occupation zones, administered separately by Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union. The capital, Berlin, was divided in the same way, although the city itself lay well inside the Soviet zone.
The division was meant to be temporary, and it was not. In 1949 the three western zones were joined to form the Federal Republic of Germany, known as West Germany, with its capital at Bonn. The Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, with East Berlin as its capital. One nation now had two states, each attached to a different bloc.
Map
Map 12.4 Caption: The four occupation zones of Germany after 1945, with the divided city of Berlin. Brief: A historical map of Germany as bounded after 1945, shaded to show the British, French, American and Soviet zones, each labelled; add an inset of Berlin showing its four sectors; mark Bonn and Berlin; include a key. State on the map that these are the boundaries and zones of the years 1945 to 1949 and not the boundaries of today. This is a historical map, not a modern reference map.
The map shows lines drawn by armies at the moment the fighting stopped. It cannot show what those lines came to mean. In 1945 they were administrative boundaries between allies; within a few years they had hardened into the frontier between two hostile worlds, and the map looks the same either way.
Japan And Italy
Japan was treated differently. It was not divided into zones; American forces occupied the whole country until 1952, after which the Japanese resumed control of their own affairs. Emperor Hirohito kept his throne as a constitutional monarch, that is, a ruler who reigns under a constitution and does not govern personally. All the territories Japan had acquired since 1895 were taken away.
Italy lost its overseas possessions and, by a vote of its own people in 1946, replaced the monarchy with a republic. Both Japan and Italy emerged militarily weak and economically damaged.
The Wider Cost
The war killed more than fifty million people and consumed the wealth of the states that fought it. Britain and France, though victorious, emerged financially exhausted and no longer able to hold their empires by force.
That weakness accelerated decolonisation, the process by which colonies became independent sovereign states. India, Myanmar and Sri Lanka became independent within a few years of the war’s end, and one country of Asia and Africa after another followed. The war had been fought in Europe and the Pacific; one of its largest consequences was the ending of European empires elsewhere.
12.4.2 The Formation Of The United Nations
The failure of the League of Nations had been visible throughout the 1930s. The obvious response to a war on this scale was not to abandon the idea of a world organisation but to build a stronger one.
The Allied leaders began planning while the fighting continued. At Yalta, in February 1945, the leaders of the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union agreed to call a conference of all the Allied nations to draw up a charter. That conference met at San Francisco from April 1945, and the Charter of the United Nations was signed there in June.
The United Nations formally came into existence on 24 October 1945, a date still marked each year as United Nations Day. India was among the states that signed the Charter at San Francisco. The organisation’s objectives, membership and principal organs are the subject of the next chapter.
The comparison should not be pressed into a story of steady improvement. The United Nations was designed by the powers that had just won a war, and the arrangements that made it stronger than the League also gave those powers a permanent advantage within it. Whether that was the price of making it work at all is a question the next chapter returns to.
12.5 The Cold War
12.5.1 The Meaning Of The Cold War
The third consequence of the war was the quarrel between the two states that had won it. The United States and the Soviet Union had fought on the same side from 1941, but they had been allies against something rather than for anything. One was a democracy with a privately owned economy; the other was a one-party state in which the government owned and directed the economy. Each had regarded the other as a danger before the war, and the shared enemy had merely postponed the argument.
The argument returned as the fighting stopped, and it was mostly about eastern Europe. Soviet armies had driven the German forces out of these countries and remained there. By 1948, governments closely tied to Moscow held power across the region. The United States and Britain saw this as one state absorbing the independence of its neighbours. The Soviet government saw it as a belt of friendly states between itself and the country that had invaded it twice in thirty years.
Out of this came the Cold War — a state of extreme political tension and hostility between two powers and their allies, in which each side works to strengthen itself and weaken the other by every means short of direct armed conflict between them. The term was used in this sense by Bernard Baruch, an American financier and government adviser, in a speech in 1947, and it stuck.
Four features define it:
A settled state of tension, suspicion and hostility between the two sides.
The absence of direct armed struggle between them.
Ideological hostility and deep political distrust, carried on through propaganda.
Neither genuine peace nor open war, but a condition lying between the two.
What filled the space between peace and war was everything else: the piling up of arms, rival military alliances, economic and military aid to smaller states, spying, and support for opposite sides in wars fought elsewhere by other people.
12.5.2 The Two Power Blocs
The rivalry pulled most of Europe, and much of the world beyond it, into two groups. A bloc is a set of states that act together in international affairs under the leadership of one of them. One bloc was led by the United States and one by the Soviet Union.
Each bloc argued that the other’s political and economic system was a danger to the world, and each worked to hold its own members and to win new ones — chiefly through economic assistance, military aid and alliances. The dividing line ran across Europe, and through Germany itself, where the occupation zones had already become two states.
That last point matters, and the chapter on the Non-Aligned Movement takes it up. Refusing to join either bloc was itself a position in the Cold War, and by the mid-1950s a large number of states had taken it.
12.5.3 NATO And The Warsaw Pact
Each bloc turned itself into a military alliance, and the two alliances gave the Cold War its shape in Europe.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, or NATO, was created by a treaty signed at Washington in April 1949 by twelve states of western Europe and North America. Its meaning is straightforward: it is a military alliance for the common defence of its members, in which an armed attack on any one of them is treated as an attack on all.
The Warsaw Pact was the answer to it. In 1955 the western powers admitted West Germany to NATO. Within days, on 14 May 1955, the Soviet Union and seven communist states of eastern Europe signed a treaty at Warsaw, formally the Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance. Its meaning is the mirror of NATO’s: the signatories promised to defend one another against attack from outside, and placed their armed forces under a joint command headed by the Soviet Union.
The two pacts did not cause the Cold War; they were built out of it. But each confirmed the other’s fear. An alliance formed for defence looks, from the other side of a line, very much like an alliance formed for attack — and that difficulty sits at the centre of this whole period. The Warsaw Pact was formally dissolved in 1991.
12.6 Summary
Only twenty years separated the end of the First World War from the beginning of the Second. Historians separate the immediate cause of the war, the invasion of Poland in September 1939, from the deeper causes that had been building since 1919 and that made such an invasion impossible to contain.
Dissatisfaction with the Treaty of Versailles was the first of those deeper causes. The treaty was imposed on Germany without negotiation, and its terms fell into four groups.
- Loss of territory in Europe, including a corridor of land given to Poland, and the loss of all overseas colonies.
- Severe limits on the German armed forces, with conscription forbidden.
- A war indemnity that Germany was required to pay.
- Article 231, which fixed responsibility for the war on Germany and became known there as the war guilt clause.
The rise of Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany placed in power governments willing to overturn that settlement by force. Italy invaded Abyssinia in 1935. Germany announced rearmament in 1935, remilitarised the Rhineland in 1936, annexed Austria in 1938 and took the Czech lands in 1939.
Britain and France answered with the policy of appeasement — conceding to an aggressive power in the hope of satisfying it. It rested on the belief that Versailles had been unjust, on unwillingness to face a second war, on military unreadiness, and on fear of communism. Each concession made the next demand easier to press.
Japan’s expansion in Asia opened a second front of aggression. Manchuria was occupied in 1931, and from 1937 Japan and China were fighting an undeclared war. A great power had used force, been condemned, and suffered nothing.
The League of Nations failed to stop any of this. It had no armed force, the United States never joined, condemned states simply withdrew, and its one weapon — economic sanctions — depended on members willing to damage their own trade.
Germany’s demands then turned to Poland, to Danzig and the corridor. A non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union in August 1939 removed the last obstacle. German forces invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, and Britain and France declared war on 3 September.
Germany, Italy and Japan fought as the Axis Powers; Britain, France, and later the Soviet Union and the United States, as the Allied Powers. German advances used blitzkrieg, the combined use of tanks and aircraft to break through and drive deep at speed. France fell in 1940, Britain held in the Battle of Britain, and the German advance in the east was halted at Stalingrad.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 ended American neutrality and joined the European and Pacific wars into one conflict. Germany surrendered in May 1945; after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, Japan surrendered, and the war ended with more than fifty million dead.
The consequences of the war were far-reaching.
- The Axis Powers were defeated and occupied. Germany was divided into four occupation zones and became two states in 1949; Japan was occupied until 1952 and lost all territory taken since 1895; Italy lost its colonies and became a republic.
- Britain and France were left financially exhausted, which hastened decolonisation across Asia and Africa.
- The United Nations was founded on 24 October 1945, planned at Yalta and drafted at San Francisco, to succeed where the League had failed.
The third consequence was the Cold War — extreme political tension between rival states in which each works to weaken the other without fighting it directly. The world divided into two power blocs, one led by the United States and one by the Soviet Union, and each built a military alliance: NATO, formed at Washington in 1949, and the Warsaw Pact, formed at Warsaw in 1955.
12.7 Key Terms
- Allied Powers — the states that fought against the Axis, led by Britain and France and joined later by the Soviet Union and the United States.
- Appeasement — the policy of conceding to the demands of an aggressive power in the hope of satisfying it and avoiding war.
- Arms race — a competition between rival states, each building larger and more advanced weapons than the other.
- Axis Powers — the wartime alliance of Germany, Italy and Japan, formally completed in 1940.
- Blitzkrieg — a German term meaning ‘lightning war’; an attack using tanks and aircraft together to break through at speed and drive deep behind the defending army.
- Cold War — a state of extreme political tension between rival states, in which each works to strengthen itself and weaken the other without fighting it directly.
- Collective security — the principle that an attack on any member state is a matter for all members, who act together against the aggressor.
- Decolonisation — the process by which colonies ceased to be ruled by imperial powers and became independent sovereign states.
- Economic sanctions — a refusal by states to trade with an offending state, used as a penalty short of war.
- Non-aggression pact — an agreement between two states not to attack each other, and not to assist an enemy of the other.
- Power bloc — a group of states aligned with one great power and against a rival one.
- War indemnity — a payment demanded from a defeated state to cover the winners’ losses in a war.
12.8 Points to Ponder
The Treaty of Versailles was written to prevent another war and is usually listed among the causes of the next one. Can a peace settlement be both a settlement and a cause?
Every concession made under appeasement made the following demand easier to press. At what point should Britain and France have refused — and how could anyone standing in 1936 have known that this was the point?
The League of Nations failed largely because its members would not damage their own trade to punish someone else’s aggression. Would giving such an organisation more power solve that problem, or does the difficulty lie somewhere else entirely?
Almost everything we know about the decisions of the 1930s comes from records kept by governments. What kind of question about those years can that evidence never answer well?
The occupation zones of Germany were drawn as a temporary arrangement between allies and became a frontier between enemies. Why do arrangements meant to be temporary so often outlast the situation they were designed for?
The Cold War is called a war although the two powers never fought each other. What does the choice of that name suggest about how periods in history come to be labelled?
12.9 Objective Questions
Which of the following was the immediate cause of the Second World War?
- The Japanese occupation of Manchuria
- The German invasion of Poland
- The Italian invasion of Abyssinia
- The signing of the Treaty of Versailles [1 mark]
The Treaty of Versailles was signed in the year
- 1918
- 1919
- 1920
- 1923 [1 mark]
The policy of conceding to the demands of an aggressive power in the hope of avoiding war is called ______________. [1 mark]
State whether the following statement is true or false: The United States of America was a founder member of the League of Nations. [1 mark]
Match the events in Column A with the years in Column B. [1 mark]
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. Japan occupies Manchuria | i. 1935 |
| b. Germany invades the Soviet Union | ii. 1945 |
| c. The United Nations comes into existence | iii. 1931 |
| d. Italy invades Abyssinia | iv. 1941 |
- Select the option that shows the correct relationship between Statements (I) and (II).
- The League of Nations imposed economic sanctions on Italy after the invasion of Abyssinia.
- The invasion was abandoned and Abyssinian independence was restored. a. (II) contradicts (I) b. (II) is the reason for (I) c. (I) is true but (II) is false d. (I) and (II) are independent of each other [1 mark]
- Select the option that shows the correct relationship between Statements (I) and (II).
- Germany signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union in August 1939.
- Germany was able to attack Poland without facing an immediate war on its eastern side. a. (II) contradicts (I) b. (I) is the reason for (II) c. (I) is true but (II) is false d. (I) and (II) are independent of each other [1 mark]
- The Warsaw Pact is best described as
- an economic union of eastern European states
- a peace treaty ending the Second World War
- a military alliance of communist states led by the Soviet Union
- an agreement to limit nuclear weapons [1 mark]
12.10 Check Your Concepts
Define appeasement, and name the two powers that followed this policy in the 1930s. [2 marks]
What is meant by the Cold War? [2 marks]
State briefly what is meant by NATO and by the Warsaw Pact. [3 marks]
Give three reasons why the League of Nations failed to prevent aggression in the 1930s. [3 marks]
Explain, with an example from the 1930s, the difference between the immediate cause of the Second World War and its deeper causes. [4 marks]
Describe what happened to Germany after its defeat in 1945, and explain how this led to the creation of two German states. [4 marks]
Why did Britain and France concede to Germany’s demands for so long, and what did the policy cost them? [5 marks]
Trace the chain of events from the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 to the outbreak of war in September 1939, showing at each stage how one failure made the next possible. [6 marks]
12.11 Show Your Skills
- Read the following extract from a treaty and answer the questions that follow. “The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.”
- Name the treaty from which this clause is taken, the year it was signed, and the name by which the clause became known in Germany.
- Explain why this single clause caused more lasting resentment than many of the treaty’s other terms.
- State one thing this document tells you reliably, and one thing it cannot tell you at all. [6 marks]
- Study the cartoon described below and answer the questions that follow. A large figure in a military coat strides across a map of Europe with a bundle of territories under one arm. Beside him, a watchman in a chair labelled ‘League of Nations’ is asleep, a whistle hanging unused around his neck. A signboard behind the chair reads ‘Collective Security’.
- What is the cartoonist claiming about the League of Nations in the 1930s?
- Give two examples from the years 1931 to 1938 that the cartoonist could have had in mind.
- A cartoon states one opinion in one picture. What would you need to look at before deciding whether this opinion is fair? [6 marks]
- Read the following situation and answer the questions that follow. A museum in a European city displays a city street map printed in 1946. The map is divided into four shaded areas, each marked with the name of a different army, and a note beside it explains that the arrangement was expected to last only a short while. A second map, printed in 1955, shows the same city with a single hard line running through its middle, and the routes in from the west marked as controlled crossings.
- Which city is being shown, and why was it divided in this way after 1945?
- Explain what changed between 1946 and 1955 to turn four administrative areas into one hostile frontier.
- What does this pair of maps show about the difference between a decision’s purpose and its consequences? [5 marks]