Black J. World War Two A Military History

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military high command. From the low base of 100,000 troops

permitted under the Versailles settlement, he, on 1 October 1934,

ordered a trebling of army size, as well as the creation of an air force,

which had been illegal under the Versailles terms. On 7 March 1936,

troops were sent into the Rhineland, unilaterally abrogating the

demilitarisation of Germany’s western frontier provided for under

the Locarno Pact. The Four-Year Plan, initiated the same year, was

designed to ensure self-sufficiency, by import-substitution plans,

which would secure Germany’s readiness to go to war in four years

and reduce her vulnerability to blockade.Yet again, this reflected the

experience of World War One, in which British naval power had

enforced a strict maritime blockade on Germany, harming her war

economy and hitting food supplies.

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Far from responding forcefully against the successive breaches of the

Versailles settlement, Britain and France took a largely passive posi-

tion. In hindsight, this encouraged Nazi expansionism, but, at the

time, it was not generally seen in such a stark light. Initially, the

British and French governments hoped that Hitler would be tamed

by the responsibilities and exigencies of power, or that he would

restrict his energies to ruling Germany. There was also a feeling in

Britain that the Versailles terms had been overly harsh on Germany

and that it was, therefore, understandable that Hitler should press for

revision. It was anticipated that German revisionism could be

accommodated, and that Hitler would prove to be just another

episode in European power politics, rather like Napoleon III in the

mid-nineteenth century. Both Britain and France were unsure

whether the Soviet Union, the sole Communist state and also a great

power, was not a more significant threat to the European system

than Nazi Germany. In 1920, a Soviet invasion of Poland had only

been thwarted with considerable difficulty. There was some support

in conservative circles for the view that a strengthened Germany

might keep the Soviet Union at bay.

Furthermore, pacifism was strong in both Britain and France, in

large part in response to the massive casualties in World War One.

Fiscal restraint limited rearmament, although, outside Europe, both

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powers used troops to sustain their imperial interests. This military

commitment, however, both lessened the forces available for opera-

tions in Europe and led to priorities in force structure, doctrine,

training and weaponry that were not appropriate for fighting the

German military. Furthermore, the very limited nature of Anglo-

French military co-operation over the previous decade and their

lack of military and political preparedness for war with Germany

were understood by contemporaries as a poor basis for joint action,

and neither felt that it was in a position to act on its own.

Hitler pressed on to occupy Austria on 12 March 1938, uniting it

with Germany in the Anschluss (union) of the following day. This

was seen as more than a revision of the Versailles settlement. It was a

fundamental redrawing of the map of Europe, and one that opened

the way for more radical changes. Opposition to Anschluss in Austria

had been limited, but Hitler’s subsequent goals were ones that could

only be achieved by serious intimidation, if not conflict.

Hitler then turned on Czechoslovakia (modern Czech Republic

and Slovakia). Created out of the Austro-Hungarian empire after

World War One, it included parts of Bohemia and Moravia where

there was a majority of ethnic Germans – the Sudetan Germans.

This was unacceptable to Hitler, who sought the union of all

Germans in one state, although, for him, that was only a prelude to

further gains. He was also determined to destroy Czechoslovakia, a

democratic state that looked to other great powers for support.

France, in particular, had followed an active policy of negotiating

agreements in Eastern Europe that were designed to support the

states of the region against Germany and the Soviet Union. Hitler’s

threat to attack Czechoslovakia, and the concern that this would

cause a major war, led to the satisfaction of his territorial demands in

a settlement negotiated with Britain, France and Italy, the Munich

agreement of 29 September 1938.This was seen as the apogee of the

policy of appeasement, the term used to describe the satisfaction of

the demands of the dictatorships.

The policy of appeasement rested on the belief that it was

possible to reach mutually acceptable settlements with the dictators.

There was a muted response to Japanese aggression in Manchuria

and to the Italian dictator Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia

(Ethiopia) in 1935–6. The British government thought it both

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necessary and feasible to negotiate with Hitler, and it took time for

the government to appreciate that this was both impossible and,

indeed, dangerous. Hitler wanted Germany to be a superpower, was

happy to destroy both the balance of power and collective security

in order to achieve this goal, and aimed at a new world order.

Nevertheless, it is too easy in hindsight to criticise the British and

French leaders of the period and, in condemning appeasement, to

underrate their difficulties, not least their genuine and understand-

able fear of causing a second ‘Great War’. Even if mobilised, Britain

could do little in Central or Eastern Europe to stop Hitler.

Commenting on the German threat to Austria, Harold Nicolson had

noted in 1934, ‘We cannot send the Atlantic fleet to Linz [in

Austria]’. In 1938, the British service chiefs urged caution. They

were conscious of Britain’s numerous global commitments and

warned about the dangers of becoming entangled in major military

action on the Continent. Concern about German aerial capability,

particularly the threat of bombing, reinforced this caution, as did

warnings from British and French intelligence about German mili-

tary capabilities.

Dominion leaders, such as the Prime Minister of Canada,

Mackenzie King, also urged caution, while the American govern-

ment under Franklin Delano Roosevelt made clear its unwillingness

to play a role in limiting German expansion: American policy

towards Europe was resolutely isolationist and this gravely weakened

the option of collective security as the USA was the world’s leading

economy. Lesser European powers, including Denmark, Ireland,

Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, also failed to lend support to the

opposition to Hitler.

Anglo-French fears may have been excessive given the weak-

nesses of the Nazi regime, not least a lack of enthusiasm among the

German generals for either Hitler or war. Lieutenant-General

Ludwig Beck, the Chief of the General Staff, who had protested

without success at the occupation of Austria, prepared a coup in the

event of war breaking out, and felt undermined by the Munich

agreement: he had resigned in August. The German army and air

force (Luftwaffe) were not prepared for a major war, and were far less

powerful than they were to be a year later. As yet, developments in

German tank capability were limited. Indeed, the strength of

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German armour when Poland was attacked in 1939 owed much to

the seizure of Czech tanks and military-industrial capacity.

The ability of Czechoslovakia to resist successfully in 1938 would

have been lessened by the hostility towards the Czech-dominated

government of much Slovak opinion, as well as that of other

minority groups, particularly Germans and Hungarians.

Furthermore, the country’s elongated shape and the length of its

common border with Germany made it vulnerable to a bisecting

attack. There were good fortifications along much of the common

border, but they did not extend to cover adequately its extension

following the Anschluss. A successful defence of the country would

have depended on international support, not only attacks by Britain

and France on Germany’s as yet poorly fortified western frontier, but

also backing from Poland and, even more, the Soviet Union. The

latter two, however, were not in a situation to mount a major offen-

sive against Germany, Poland had aggressive goals towards

Czechoslovakia of its own, and Anglo-French forces were not ready

to attack.

The Munich agreement led to a great increase in German influ-

ence in Eastern Europe, as other powers responded to the apparent

weakness of Britain and France. France had supported Yugoslavia and

Romania, and provided arms for their military, but, after Munich,

both powers moved towards Germany. Eventually, on 15 March

1939, Hitler destroyed his Czech victim, seizing Bohemia and

Moravia, and was able to do so without encountering armed resis-

tance, because Czechoslovakia had been much weakened by internal

dissent between Czechs and Slovaks, and by the Munich agreement,

which resulted in its loss of frontier fortifications in the areas

annexed by Germany.

The Germans also benefited greatly from the failure of the

Eastern European powers to unite against her. This disunity was the

result of attempts to gain the territories they felt they had lost

unfairly, or should have gained, as part of the Versailles settlement.

Hungary and Poland had used the Munich crisis to make gains at

Czechoslovakia’s expense in 1938, and, in March 1939, Hungarian

forces occupied Ruthenia, the easternmost part of Czechoslovakia,

overcoming popular opposition. Similarly, a failure of Scandinavian

unity was seen in 1939–40, in response, first, to growing German

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power and, subsequently, to the German attack on Denmark and

Norway: Sweden provided assistance to neither.

Also in March 1939, the Germans bullied Lithuania into ceding

the city of Memel (Klapeida), where there was a vocal German

minority, plus the surrounding area. In intimidating the other powers

in 1938, Hitler benefited from their fear of war. In many respects, the

Munich agreement was part of the legacy of World War One and the

desire to avoid a repetition of its heavy casualties.

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Germany may have been weaker than was thought, but Hitler,

nevertheless, was determined to gain his objectives. Once he seized

Bohemia and Moravia and renounced all the guarantees he had

earlier made in the Munich agreement, the situation was trans-

formed. It was now clear that Hitler’s ambitions were not restricted

to bringing all Germans under one state. Neville Chamberlain,

British Prime Minister from 1937 until 1940, and the architect of

Munich, lost confidence in negotiating directly with Germany.

Instead, at the prompting of Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary,

Chamberlain sought to create a collective-security alliance system

capable of intimidating Hitler and of deterring him from further

aggression. Despite the resulting guarantees of British support to

Poland and Romania, Hitler persisted with his plan for an attack on

Poland, which blocked German expansion to the east. He believed

that Britain and France would not fight, especially after he secured

a non-aggression pact with the Soviet leader Josef Stalin, signed on

23 August 1939, that reflected the failure of Britain and France to

negotiate an alliance with the Soviet Union. Such an alliance would

have been incompatible with the anti-Soviet policies of the Polish

government, and this reflected, and, in turn, exposed, the weakness

of the British diplomatic offensive in Eastern Europe. The

Nazi–Soviet Pact made it unlikely that, should deterrence fail,

Poland would be able to resist attack successfully, and it encouraged

Hitler to press forward with his plans for Poland. He was keen on

conflict and determined not to be thwarted of it, as he had allowed

himself to be in 1938. In turn, the Poles were determined not to

make concessions. The British Chiefs of Staff had advised that it

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would not be possible to offer Poland any direct assistance, although

Gamelin, the French Chief of Staff for National Defence, had told

the Poles that France would. The German attack on Poland on 1

September 1939 led Britain and France to declare war two days

later.

Winston Churchill, a harsh critic of appeasement, who now

entered the Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty, told the House

of Commons on 3 September:

This is not a question of fighting for Danzig or fighting for

Poland. We are fighting to save the whole world from the

pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defence of all that is most

sacred to man. This is no war for domination or imperial

aggrandisement or material gain; no war to shut any

country out of its sunlight and means of progress. It is a war,

viewed in its inherent quality, to establish on impregnable

rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish

and revive the stature of man.

Military background

Some of the conflicts that together were to constitute World War

Two had been planned for years. This was particularly true of war

between Japan and the USA and between France and Germany.

Others had received far less prior attention. The idea that the USA

would have to fight Germany by invading first North Africa, then

Italy, and then France was totally outside her experience in World

War One, and had not been prepared for.The idea of Britain and the

Soviet Union allying against Germany appeared improbable when

discussed in 1939.

Whether or not individual conflicts had been adequately

prepared, there had been, over the two previous decades, an attempt

to digest what were seen as the lessons of World War One, and then a

response to subsequent developments, particularly in weaponry but

also in doctrine and tasking. Like all major conflicts,World War One

could be variously interpreted, and this, in part, reflected personal,

factional and institutional interests and the politics of military

doctrine. The range of investment options in weaponry and force

structure increased with the additional claims of air power and

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armour, creating inter-service disputes over the division of limited

resources.

Tasking was also an issue. It is important to remember that the

term ‘inter-war’, with its suggestion of the need to prepare for World

War Two, is misleading, especially for the 1920s. Even in the 1930s,

the configuration of powers in a major war was still very unclear,

and this had implications for strategy, and thus for desirable force

structure. In the 1920s, with the Soviet Union checked by the Poles,

German armed forces limited by the Versailles Treaty, and Balkan

tensions containable without war, the most pressing military prob-

lems for Britain, France and the USA appeared to be imperial:

colonial rebellion in the case of the first two (for example in Syria

and French Morocco for the French), and within the informal

American empire in the Caribbean and Central America for the

third.

In none of these cases did the ‘lessons’ of World War One appear

particularly pertinent, because there seemed little reason to prepare

for conflict with another major power. Nevertheless, there was an

attempt among military thinkers to focus on the supposed lessons. In

doing so, the emphasis among some commentators, who were to be

seen as particularly influential for the future, was on the potential of

mechanised warfare, rather than the successes of the infantry–

artillery co-operation that had, in fact, played a crucial role in Allied,

largely British, success on the Western Front in 1918.

The British experience is enlightening. In the last stages of the

war, J.F.C. Fuller, a British colonel, had devised ‘Plan 1919’, an oper-

ational scheme for the defeat of Germany in 1919 based on a

large-scale tank offensive designed to penetrate deep into opposing

territory, rather than simply supporting an infantry attack on the

front line. Fuller saw this deep penetration as leading to the disinte-

gration of opposition cohesion, as well as an attendant

demoralisation that would compromise fighting quality. This offen-

sive strategy, by its impetus, was designed to provide effective

protection for the attacking power.

Following Fuller, Basil Liddell Hart, an ex-army officer turned

military correspondent and ardent self-publicist, developed notions

of rapid tank warfare; although he also argued that the infantry

retained an important offensive role. Publicly expressed in his pieces

for the Daily Telegraph and The Times, Liddell Hart’s ideas also had an

influence on British armoured manoeuvres in the 1930s, while he

and Fuller were cited by the Inspector of the Royal Tank Corps in

his report to the 1926 army committee on the reorganisation of the

cavalry.

Liddell Hart was particularly keen to advocate advances that did

not entail frontal attacks: the ‘indirect approach’ that emphasised

manoeuvre, not attrition. In The Decisive Wars of History (1929), he

pressed the case for attacking the enemy where they were not

expecting it, and for mechanised forces bypassing the flanks of

enemy armies in order to hit their communications and bases, a

theme he returned to in The British Way of Warfare (1932).

Liddell Hart and others claimed that his ideas, as well as reports of

British manoeuvres, influenced German Blitzkrieg tactics in World

War Two.

This was an exaggeration, as these tactics were a develop-

ment of mechanised warfare itself and of the offensive tactics

employed by the Germans in 1917–18, and also drew on the

emphasis on an effective combined arms doctrine developed under

Hans von Seeckt, Commander-in-Chief of the Reichswehr (German

army) in 1920–6.

In Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union, the USA and elsewhere in

the inter-war period, there was intellectual enquiry about the nature

of war-winning, attempts to develop operational doctrine, and

concern about ensuring manoeuvrability and what would later be

termed ‘deep battle’.There was also much interest in the potential of

tanks, mechanised transport, and air-to-land and air-to-sea warfare,

and in the enhanced communication capability offered by radio. In

the Soviet Union, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the talented

commander of the Red Army, was interested in mechanised warfare

and seizing the offensive, and was responsible in 1932 for the

creation of mechanised corps.

The Spanish Civil War of 1936–9 seemed to offer the possibility

of testing out new weaponry and tactics and of learning military

lessons. It also prefigured the war of ideologies that World War Two

became. Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union played a supporting

role in the conflict, each sending troops and supplies, the first two to

the right-wing Nationalist rebels under Franco, the last to the left-

wing Republican government. Other powers followed the conflict

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with close attention. In Spain, although to a more limited extent

than is often imagined, the Germans used close air-support tactics

and aircraft, including dive-bombers. They found that this required

an effective ground–air liaison system, and developed one. These

tactics were to be important in the early stages of World War Two.

Nevertheless, in practice, ideas advanced further than technolog-

ical capability and resource availability, as was to be shown in the

early land campaigns in World War Two.A lack of allocated industrial

capacity and/or of funds was a major factor, and, in part, reflected

the severity and global span of the Depression of the 1930s.The lack

of funds was particularly apparent in the USA, which was to be the

global military power of World War Two and which had the largest

economy in the world in the 1930s. Limited expenditure on the

American military, which reflected a lack of public and political will,

led to inadequate manpower and resources, as well as a failure to

stage major manoeuvres, and thus ensure operational training.

However, there were also limitations, if not deficiencies, in areas of

doctrine and equipment. For example, tank warfare was given little

role and no independence under the National Defence Act of 1920.

Instead, tanks were allocated to the infantry, an allocation only chal-

lenged in 1931 when light tanks were assigned to the cavalry. It took

the fall of France to the Germans in 1940 to lead to the rearmament

of the American army and to inspire the creation of the United

States Armored Force, although the navy had already begun to rearm

(but not to expand). Prior to 1940, the American army had made a

serious attempt to assess the lessons of World War One, and also

devoted much attention to the military education of officers, but the

failure to develop combined army doctrine affected the army in the

early stages of World War Two. In preparation for independence from

the USA, an army of Filipino conscripts had been created in the

Philippines, but it lacked funds, equipment and adequate training,

and its deficiencies were to be cruelly exposed by the Japanese when

they attacked in 1941–2.

New weaponry, related operational doctrines and the character of

military thought in the inter-war period are generally considered in

light of what was to happen in World War Two, but, before becoming

too judgemental, it is also necessary to note the lack of clarity about

what constituted military progress, the variety of responses, and the

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roles of political suppositions. Lesson-learning and doctrinal innova-

tion sound far more clear cut and easier than was the case; so also

with the evaluation of the process.

This can be seen with tank

offensives. Enthusiasm for tanks in fact became more contained than

it had been in the 1920s, and this was not foolish. By the 1930s, both

Fuller and Liddell Hart had come to appreciate that tank offensives

could be blunted by an effective defence, as, indeed, was to be shown

in World War Two.

Such defences were to cast a shadow over the claims made for

tank offensives, but that had only a limited impact on popular

perceptions. More generally, there was, and is, the problem of

assessing ‘anti-’strategies and tactics. They tend to lack the appeal of

action and apparent decisiveness seen in the offensive. Investing in

the defensive can be seen as defeatist, if not anachronistic. This is

underlined by the success of German offensive tactics, operations

and strategy in 1939–41, and the corresponding failure of the defen-

sive, particularly of the Maginot Line, the French fortress system

constructed along the German border in 1930–5. More positively,

however, a focus on defence can also be seen as a way to try to lessen

the impact of the offensive, and, in this view, can be seen as

prescient, or even forward-looking. The Maginot Line limited the

geographical range of the likely German offensive, and was far less

important in France’s failure than a mistaken strategy and an inability

to respond adequately to German breakthrough. Nevertheless, the

Maginot Line is used as a form of shorthand for a foolish French

doctrine.

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Aside from the likely response by the defence, mechanisation posed

problems of doctrine and training, as well as of equipment procure-

ment and maintenance, both of which were costly. Nevertheless, it

appeared to have much to offer if the methods of World War One

were to be supplanted. There was a search for a limited war that

could be effective, as opposed to what was presented as the ineffec-

tive total conflict seen in World War One. The search for a doctrine

of rapid victory through utilising the operational possibilities of the

new weaponry was, at once, a desire to respond to the apparent

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