Between the Wars?

1,920 words

You’re gambling with World War 3.
—President Trump to President Zelensky.

I was a miner,
I was a docker,
I was a railwayman
Between the wars.
—Billy Bragg, Between the Wars

***

Are we between World Wars? There have been rumors of another global war since Putin first invaded Ukraine, but the threat of World War 3 has been a scare tactic for some time. During the hiatus that ended in 1939, there had been no First World War. Until the Second World War, its predecessor had simply been termed “the Great War”, and was supposedly the war to end all war, which it managed to do for around a generation. It had also been the first mechanized war, as both Oswald Spengler and Wyndham Lewis saw in their respective ways. Much of the armament of World War 2 was, effectively, road-tested at Passchendaele and the Somme, and vastly improved upon for the second global conflict. Quite a stroke of luck, if you should happen to be in the arms business.

Air war was also crucial. In the First World War, tales abound of gentleman flyers smoking pipes in their reconnaissance biplanes, occasionally taking pot-shots at enemy pilots with a service revolver. The second aerial conflict was far more advanced, and it was the Italians who proved to be leaders in aircraft production. Warfare was no longer confined to the trenches.

According to one of England’s most famous historians, A. J. P. Taylor, the First World War caused the Second, and this is the opening quote in a book which recently and fortuitously came my way, The Second World War, by John Keegan. I rely on e-books generally, so I am always grateful to find a good-quality hardback, and the timing of this one could not have been more coincidental, with world war much on everybody’s mind after something of a spat in the White House.

Published in 1989, the book is a 600-pager, and I will take my time with it. I am relatively new to the study of history, but I have learned not to go at it as though reading a novel. I certainly won’t review the whole thing here. But Keegan’s arrangement divides the war into its different theatres, and the first section over the first 100 pages covers the war in the West from 1940 to 1943, and so includes the outbreak of war, Blitzkrieg and the Battle of Britain, as well as the battle for control over the Atlantic Ocean. So I could, at least, look at the causes of the Second World War.

The First World War seems inevitable in hindsight. The 19th century had seen huge improvements in militarization and a vast population rise across most of Europe. Soldiering changed very quickly. When armies not long before had begged lodgings where they could find them, or slept rough if they could not, the 19th century conscript was barracked in the field and fed on new, tinned rations. It was getting a lot more comfortable to be a soldier, albeit a lot more dangerous with the evolution of armaments.

It does seem that with the rise of technology and mechanization in the 20th century, it just became a lot easier to have wars. No more sending out to the shires to round up a ragtag army. Fighting became more professionalized, and far more mobile on land and sea, as well as the new arena of battle in the air. Also, communications advanced quickly between the Wars, and became a key factor in World War 2.

Industrialization also made World War 2 a question of economics (which war has always, of course, been in significant part), and production was paramount. At one point, the British were producing 500 Spitfires a month, but it wasn’t all planes and tanks. Keegan writes that:

It was in American boots and trucks that the Red Army advanced to Berlin. Without them its campaign would have foundered to a halt in Western Russia in 1944.

Although Germany had lost World War 1 and been harshly punished in a way that they bitterly hated – and which famously drove Hitler – World War in the 20th century seems in hindsight to have been a two-legged playoff, and Germany were far better equipped for the return match. Keegan quotes a young German officer referring to World War 1: “The great Battle of France is over. It lasted 26 years.”

If vengeance was Hitler’s prime motivation for his rise to power, as Keegan claims, it was potent fuel. He honed his public speaking to a level of rhetorical expertise. Given a five-year prison sentence for his part in the “Beer Hall Putsch” of 1923, the future führer served only nine months, time he used to dictate Mein Kampf to Rudolf Hess. He also built his team: Rohm, Ludenforff, Goering, and others. There is no question about the strength of Hitler’s personality as a driving force behind Germany’s sudden expansion in capabilities. “What followed,” writes Keegan, “was one of the most remarkable and complete economic, political, and military revolutions ever carried through by one man in a comparable space of time.”

The Reichstag fire gave Hitler his enemy, and the economy had been revitalized to the extent that Germany could re-arm. Unlike today’s Germany, these Germans produced their way out of humiliation and defeat. Hitler’s confidence made him unstoppable, as he effectively ripped up The Treaty of Versailles by creating the Luftwaffe.

Politically speaking, the reader is struck by the status of less powerful nations in Europe, and the fact that countries were used as pieces are in a board game. Europe – and, perhaps, all continents – are very well lampooned by the 1970s board game, Risk. Stalin, for example, waited for the fairly indeterminate military action Hitler had taken in Poland to take effect. The Wehrmacht actually suffered very heavy casualties in this phase of the war, and turned their attention to defending themselves from the British and the French. Stalin took advantage of this and, using the terms of the decisive Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, demanded his right to place troops in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. A few months later, Stalin annexed all three countries. The dice are thrown, the plastic figurines move in a global, real-size, real-time game of Risk. But the risk was somewhat greater than losing a 1970s board game, as much fun as it was. Hitler offered Stalin a slice of Poland like a good host offers a guest a slice of cake, and with the same sense of rewarding a good boy.

And the pieces were taken, one by one. Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, France; Hitler became more audacious in order to set up whatever was necessary to begin hostilities. One of the first things the Luftwaffe did was to decimate Poland’s air force. Several battled-hardened Polish pilots would later fly Spitfires above England in the Battle of Britain.

Growing ever bolder, Hitler did not wait for an international commission to ratify territory, he simply demanded the Sudetenland. This led to the crisis of Munich, the so-called “end of appeasement”, which in turn “marked the moment when Hitler abandoned caution”, and there was now little doubt that force would have to be met with force.

Hitler’s armies won early successes thanks to their tactic of Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war”. This was actually a media coinage, but it became immortalized in English history as the Blitz of June, 1940. This was the Battle of – and for – Britain, and it did not start well for Goering’s Luftwaffe. Given that this was the first major air battle in history, both sides knew that a lot of questions would be answered by the Battle of Britain, but a lot of lives, both on the ground and in the air, would be lost in answering them. On one German mission to destroy a Spitfire factory outside Birmingham, just 13 British planes were destroyed with the loss of 45 German aircraft. What soon became clear is that the British were out-producing the Germans in terms of aircraft production by a ratio of as much as five to one.

Politicians are often devious and deceptive about their genuine aims. Not so Hitler. Führer Directive No. 6 was rather straightforward about the leader’s aims and the reasoning behind them, announcing his plan as “the destruction of the predominance of the Western powers in order to leave room for the expansion of the German peoples.”

Putin has no such visions of global dominance, seemingly interested only in territory he considers to be Russian. He has, of course, been cast as Hitler – the go-to comparison for many on the left for anyone they dislike – while Zelensky is portrayed as the plucky hero whose small country is pitched against a fierce and fascistic dictator. But, despite having had his own way with Western leaders and their money for three years, the diminutive and ill-dressed Ukrainian President just came up against something of a brick wall. Trump and Vance’s tag-team fight with Zelensky was nothing if not entertaining political theatre. The alpha-male messaging is that Zelensky is no longer dealing with man-boys like Trudeau and Macron. But will the saber-rattling, the bluff and counter-bluff, lead to another World War?

As Keegan writes of World War 2, “the victory of 1918 now seemed merely an intermission.” Was the victory of 1945 something similar? Nuclear weapons ended the conflict, and the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have loomed darkly over history ever since. But is “Mutually Assured Destruction” enough of an incentive to peace? There are plenty of rumors of nuclear material going missing, and it would seem that the danger of a terrorist nuclear attack is greater than the likelihood of Putin going postal on a global scale.

Putin is not Hitler any more than Trump is, despite the chorus of voices comparing the three men. Zelensky seems to have plenty of actual Nazis in his ranks, and is also said to be thoroughly corrupt. His visit to the White House did not go as expected. Used to dealing with pliable leaders anxious to be seen supporting the current thing, Zelensky suddenly found himself up against Trump and the man rapidly becoming his attack dog, J. D. Vance. “You don’t have any cards”, Trump warned the Ukrainian leader. “With us, you have cards.”

Cards, but not necessarily money. The vast sums given to Zelensky by European nations are not vast enough for Trump, and the need for Europe to pay its way in terms of defense is a dominant theme of the outset of Trump’s second presidency.

So, I shall plough on with the Keegan book and review it more fully in due course. The edition I chanced across is illustrated, with many photographs. War photos are the most fascinating, I think, because the people in them believe, correctly and with an absolute devotion, that in a minute they could be dead. But is the tale of World War 2 one which must be considered predictive?

World War 2 and its causes, and today’s situation, don’t seem particularly comparable. As noted, Hitler’s aims were domination and Lebensraum (“space or room in which to live”) for the Germans, while Putin has no ambitions outside of the territorial claims he had made. If he had such ambition three years ago, his failure to subdue Ukraine will have finished them. It was De Gaulle who announced, in the fateful June of 1940, that the war was a World War, but it is not altogether clear how alliances would line up if the world suddenly found itself at war today. Things were somewhat more black-and-white in World War 2. Today, the picture is less clear.