could world war 2 have been prevented essay

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How Could WW2 Have Been Prevented

Categories: Treaty of Versailles

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I. introduction, ii. failure of the treaty of versailles, a. overview of the treaty of versailles, b. analysis of how the harsh terms of the treaty may have contributed to the rise of adolf hitler and the nazi party, c. discussion on how a more lenient or balanced treaty could have prevented the economic hardships and resentment that led to wwii.

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World War II Was Avoidable

Introduction.

World War II was a global war that lasted between 1939 and 1945. It was fought between two military alliances that included the Allies and the Axis. The Axis alliance comprised Japan, Italy, and Germany while the Allies alliance constituted France, the United States, Great Britain, and China. The war broke out two decades after World War I, which set the stage for another global conflict that would be more devastating.

The rise of Adolf Hitler to power created the foundation for the conflict. He became the leader at a time when Germany was economically and politically unstable. His National Sociality (Nazi) Party enhanced the nation’s military capacity, and Hitler entered into strategic agreements with Italy and Japan to support his world domination agenda. The conflict lasted for 16 years and led to millions of deaths and the massive destruction of property. Approximately 45-60 million people were killed, including the 6 million Jews that were murdered during the Holocaust. Despite its dire ramifications, World War II could have been avoided had the Allies stopped Hitler from expanding his empire.

The Treaty of Versailles

One of the major reasons given as a contributing factor to World War II was the Treaty of Versailles that was signed on 28 June 1919 in order to bring an end to World War I. It concluded the five-year bloody conflict between the Allied Powers and Germany and laid the foundation for what later became the Second World War (Freeman 34). Germany was viewed as a major antagonist in World War One and on the losing end.

Therefore, the Allied Powers included certain clauses in the Treaty of Versailles to punish the Germans for the atrocities that they had committed in the previous war. Moreover, the Allied Powers held the belief that Germany and its allies were responsible for the war and they would rearm their military and cause more damage if stringent measures were not implemented to avoid such an outcome (Overy 44). The terms of the treaty required Germany to give up 10 percent of its territory, undergo disarmament, pay reparation in ships, gold, securities, and commodities, and relinquish its overseas empire to the Allied powers (Freeman 35).

Germany gave up several empires and suffered a ruined economy after paying the reparations, according to the requirements of the “War Guilt Clause” (Overy 46). The financial depression that ensued thrust the government into chaos and the nation faced starvation as it was incapable of affording enough food for its population. Conscription was proscribed and the size of the German military was greatly limited (Freeman 35).

Clauses that demanded Germany to take responsibility for the war were included in the agreement. These clauses attained the intended objectives of their inclusion: reparations for the destructions cast Germany into a huge debt and consequent depression. As a result of the poor economic state, Germany had to find a way to revive the economy. War is a profitable endeavor, and Germany initiated a war to remedy its poor economic situation. World War II was caused by a myriad of factors. However, one of them was the Carthaginian peace that emanated from the Treaty of Versailles.

Impact of the Treaty

The treaty was aimed at ending the war and resolving the disputes that had led to the First World War. However, it prevented cooperation among European nations and intensified the underlying issues that had led to the conflict. The Germans, Austrians, Bulgarians, and the Hungarians viewed the Treaty as punishment (Overy 48). Therefore, they violated the limiting provisions of the agreement. The situation created a fertile ground for the rise of Hitler to power as his party promised the people that they would rearm the military, reclaim German territory, and gain prominence in international politics (Freeman 40). The promise to restore the economy and Germany’s prominence in international politics led to the election of Hitler, whose actions contributed to World War II.

Some historians argue that had the Treaty of Versailles not been as harsh to the Germans as it had been, the Second World War could have been avoided. Hitler was against the treaty because it had crippled Germany by placing numerous restrictions that hampered its economic and military expansion. The moves to rearm Germany, sign treaties with Italy, and expand his empire originated from a need to restore Germany (Overy 51).

Many Germans were against the radical tenets that the Nazi party held. However, the promise to restore Germany’s prominence among world powers motivated them to vote for Hitler. Had the Treaty of Versailles been fair to both Germany and its allies, the Second World War would never have occurred. Probably, Hitler would not have ascended to power because his election was founded on the hope of economic restoration that he offered to the people.

Adolf Hitler’s Rule

Hitler’s promise to restore Germany was his claim to power as the Germans wanted someone to revive the economy, empower the military, and reclaim the nation’s dignity. It was clear from the early days of Hitler’s rule that his major goal was to conquer the world and dominate. As mentioned earlier, the Allies created the Treaty of Versailles to punish Germany for its involvement in World War I. They pushed Germany into desperation and laid a foundation for future conflicts. The Allied powers did not respond accordingly when Hitler’s intentions of global domination became apparent. They should have stopped him and prevented the massive loss of lives and destruction of property that ensued from the Second World War.

Hitler’s actions were planned and strategic since the beginning of his rule, and his intentions became clearer as the years passed. For example, Germany violated the Treaty of Versailles regarding military training and armament, enlarged the army, nullified the treaty, and withdrew from the Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments (Freeman 56). In 1936, Hitler invaded and demilitarized Rhineland, thus violating the Locarno Pact that had been signed in 1925 (Overy 57).

These moves should have signaled Hitler’s aggression to the Allies. However, they ignored the overt violations of the treaties and overlooked his move to annex Austria into Nazi Germany. A preventive war against Hitler could have prevented the Second World War.

The Munich Agreement was another failure on the side of the Allies. It involved France, Germany, Great Britain, and Italy, and it allowed Germany to annex Sudetenland, without attacking Czechoslovakia (Overy 63). Hitler announced that the conquest would be his last bid to expand the German empire and the agreement was lauded as a peace milestone. However, several months later, Hitler took over Czechoslovakia, Slovakia, and the port city of Klaipeda (Freeman 58).

The Allied Powers foresaw Hitler conquering Poland because by this time, his intention of dominating the world had been made clear by his acts of aggression. However, they did not stop him as they chose to avoid a recurrence of the events of World War I. They adhered to a policy of appeasement as weaker nations suffered under the ruthless rule of Hitler. His actions were supported by the declaration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt that each nation had a right to determine its destiny (Overy 73). A war against Hitler was declared too late after he invaded Poland in 1939. ermany conquered Norway and Denmark and invaded France and Russia. During these invasions, the US ignored the conflicts but joined in later.

Anschluss in 1938

The annexation of Austria into a Greater Germany is one of the occurrences that could have been prevented, and as a result, avoided World War II. The annexation was an overt violation of the Treaty of Versailles that Hitler had unsuccessfully tried earlier, but failed because he had a weak army (Overy 77). In 1938, Hitler had a stronger army that was ready for war. Moreover, he did not meet with resistance from Italy because he had united with Mussolini and signed the Anti-Comintern Act a year earlier. Therefore, he was prepared for Anschluss. Hitler rallied the Nazi party in Austria to cause riots while demanding unity with Germany.

As the riots continued, Hitler pressured Chancellor Schuschnigg into giving in to his demands. Unsure of the decision to make, he reached out to France and Britain for assistance (Overy 91). However, the two nations made it clear that they were proponents of unity. After being ignored, the Chancellor held a vote so that the Austrian people could decide on the matter. Hitler gave the responsibility of overseeing the vote to German soldiers, whose main goal was to intimidate the voters. 99.75% of the people who participated in the practice voted to have Austria and Germany unite (Freeman 67).

The win was proof enough to Hitler that he was powerful enough to expand his empire and that the Allied powers would not oppose his moves to contravene the statutes of the Treaty of Versailles. If France and Britain had offered military assistance to Austria in order to stop the annexation, they would have stopped Hitler from advancing his agenda of conquering the world and creating tensions that caused another war. The outcome would have been different had the Allies declared war on Hitler during this moment rather than after he invaded Poland because by then, it was too late.

Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939 was followed by a 6-month period of the Phoney War that was characterized by conflicts on a minor scale. During this period, no bombs were dropped and fighting was minimal. Hitler had successfully expanded his empire without much opposition. Therefore, he did not expect the Allies to declare war on him after invading Poland (Freeman 76). At this time, Germany was not prepared for a major war, and Hitler could have been stopped.

World War II could have been avoided had the Allied Powers declared war on Hitler at this point. He would have probably backed down and signed peace treaties because his army was not strong enough to fight a major war. The Allies should have used their power to compel Hitler to adhere to the stipulations of the Treaty of Versailles. This could have led to a shorter and less disastrous war as Germany would probably fight back. The Phoney war was an indication that Germany was unwilling to fight after recovering from the aftermath of World War I. The Allies should have taken that as an indication that Germany was ready to avoid another war at all costs for purposes of self-preservation.

World War II was one of the most destructive global wars that could have been avoided. Millions of people were killed, including more than 6 million Jews. After the defeat of Germany in World War I, clauses were appended to the Treaty of Versailles to punish Germany as one of the main aggressors. The treaty was aimed at bringing peace. However, it treated Germany harshly, and as a result, destroyed its economy and military. The people starved and the economy disintegrated.

Hitler was elected because he gave the people hope by promising them to restore the economy and the nation’s former glory. The Allies could have stopped the War had they acted on Hitler’s infringement of the Treaty. However, they allowed him to rearm and expand his military, as well as invade other countries. They should have opposed his agenda of conquering the world, which was evident from the actions he took during the early years of his rule. World War II could have been avoided had the Allied Powers declared war on Hitler before he had rearmed his military and gained confidence by conquering other nations. For example, the Anschluss could have been stopped by France and Britain ignored Austria’s requests for assistance.

Works Cited

Freeman, Richard Z. A Concise History of the Second World War: Its Origin, Battles, and Consequences . Merriam Press, 2016.

Overy, Richard. The Origins of the Second World War . 4th ed., Routledge, 2017.

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World War II showed that war must be avoided at all costs and democracies must resist aggression, says Stanford historian

could world war 2 have been prevented essay

World War II provided two contradictory lessons: war must be avoided at all costs and democracies must resist aggression, says Stanford historian James J. Sheehan .

On the 75th anniversary of “Victory in Europe Day” – the day when people from across the world celebrated the acceptance of Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender to the Allied forces of the United States, the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union on May 8, 1945 – Sheehan discusses the difficult challenges ahead, despite war in Europe being over.

Sheehan is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History emeritus in the School of Humanities and Sciences. He is the author of Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe, a history of war and peace in 20th-century Europe.

Are there any elements to VE Day that you think have been largely forgotten, overlooked or misunderstood?

It is important to realize what actually occurred on May 8, 1945. Most wars end when one side either surrenders or agrees to a cease-fire. That is what happened on Nov. 11, 1918, when the representatives of the German government agreed to an armistice and then, seven months later, signed a peace treaty. On May 8, 1945, there was no German state recognized by its enemies. In three different places, the commanders of the German armed forces surrendered unconditionally. Civil and military authority in what had been the German state was assumed by the allies. Germany was divided among them. Although peace treaties were signed with Germany’s allies in 1947, a final treaty that recognized Germany as a fully sovereign state did not take place until 1991. One of the ironies of the postwar settlement is that, despite the absence of a formal peace treaty, it turned out to be so durable.

You have studied how, for centuries, war defined Europe’s narrative and affected every aspect of political, social and cultural life. How did World War II change Europe’s relationship to war?

In many ways, Europeans’ view of war was transformed by the First World War, which demonstrated the full destructive potential of modern combat. Pacificism, which had always been a fringe movement, now became much more widespread. Unfortunately, there were still those, like Adolf Hitler, who saw war as a necessary means of expanding their state and reorganizing their societies. Without Hitler, and the resources of Europe’s most powerful state, a second European war would not have happened. In 1939, when the war began in Europe, there was very little popular enthusiasm, even in Germany. People knew what modern war could mean, although few imagined just how devastating it would be.

How did World War II transform views on pacifism and militarism?

The war provided two contradictory lessons: the first was that war was to be avoided at all costs, the second was that democracies had to be ready to resist aggression. The second lesson led most western European states, including Germany, to rearm and join the Atlantic alliance. Gradually, as the European system evolved into a stalemate between the United States and the Soviet Union, each armed with nuclear weapons, the first lesson prevailed. By the 1970s, many Europeans feared a war between the two global superpowers, but few believed that war among the European states could ever happen again.

James Sheehan

Skip to Main Content of WWII

The great debate.

From our 21st-century point of view, it is hard to imagine World War II without the United States as a major participant. Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, however, Americans were seriously divided over what the role of the United States in the war should be, or if it should even have a role at all. Even as the war consumed large portions of Europe and Asia in the late 1930s and early 1940s, there was no clear consensus on how the United States should respond.

Top Image Courtesy of the Associated Press

The US ambivalence about the war grew out of the isolationist sentiment that had long been a part of the American political landscape and had pervaded the nation since World War I. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were either killed or wounded during that conflict, and President Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic plan to ensure permanent peace through international cooperation and American leadership failed to become a reality. Many Americans were disillusioned by how little their efforts had accomplished and felt that getting so deeply involved on the global stage in 1917 had been a mistake.

Neither the rise of Adolf Hitler to power nor the escalation of Japanese expansionism did much to change the nation’s isolationist mood in the 1930s. Most Americans still believed the nation’s interests were best served by staying out of foreign conflicts and focusing on problems at home, especially the devastating effects of the Great Depression. Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts in the late 1930s, aiming to prevent future involvement in foreign wars by banning American citizens from trading with nations at war, loaning them money, or traveling on their ships.

But by 1940, the deteriorating global situation was impossible to ignore. Nazi Germany had annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia and had conquered Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. Great Britain was the only major European power left standing against Hitler’s war machine. The urgency of the situation intensified the debate in the United States over whether American interests were better served by staying out or getting involved.

Isolationists believed that World War II was ultimately a dispute between foreign nations and that the United States had no good reason to get involved. The best policy, they claimed, was for the United States to build up its own defenses and avoid antagonizing either side. Neutrality , combined with the power of the US military and the protection of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, would keep Americans safe while the Europeans sorted out their own problems. Isolationist organizations like the America First Committee sought to influence public opinion through print, radio, and mass rallies. Aviator Charles Lindbergh and popular radio priest Father Charles Coughlin were the Committee’s most powerful spokesmen. Speaking in 1941 of an “independent American destiny,” Lindbergh asserted that the United States ought to fight any nation that attempted to meddle in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere. However, he argued, American soldiers ought not to have to “fight everybody in the world who prefers some other system of life to ours.”

Interventionists believed the United States did have good reasons to get involved in World War II, particularly in Europe. The democracies of Western Europe, they argued, were a critical line of defense against Hitler’s fast-growing strength. If no European power remained as a check against Nazi Germany, the United States could become isolated in a world where the seas and a significant amount of territory and resources were controlled by a single powerful dictator. It would be, as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it, like “living at the point of a gun,” and the buffer provided by the Pacific and Atlantic would be useless. Some interventionists believed US military action was inevitable, but many others believed the United States could still avoid sending troops to fight on foreign soil, if only the Neutrality Acts could be relaxed to allow the federal government to send military equipment and supplies to Great Britain. William Allen White, Chairman of an interventionist organization called the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, reassured his listeners that the point of helping Britain was to keep the United States out of the war. “If I were making a motto for [this] Committee,” he said, “it would be ‘The Yanks Are Not Coming.’”

Female isolationists from the America First Committee, Keep America Out of War, and the Mothers’ Crusade picket British Ambassador Lord Halifax in Chicago, May 8, 1941. (Image: Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Stock Photo, F2AWAM.)

"We well know that we cannot escape danger, or the fear of danger, by crawling into bed and pulling the covers over our heads."

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Public opinion polling was still in its infancy as World War II approached, but surveys suggested the force of events in Europe in 1940 had a powerful impact on American ideas about the war. In January of that year, one poll found that 88% of Americans opposed the idea of declaring war against the Axis powers in Europe. As late as June, only 35% of Americans believed their government should risk war to help the British. Soon after, however, France fell, and in August the German Luftwaffe began an all-out bombing campaign against Great Britain. The British Royal Air Force valiantly repelled the German onslaught, showing that Hitler was not invincible. A September 1940 poll found that 52% of Americans now believed the United States ought to risk war to help the British. That number only increased as Britain continued its standoff with the Germans; by April 1941 polls showed that 68% of Americans favored war against the Axis powers if that was the only way to defeat them.

Like this article? Read more in our online classroom.

From the Collection to the Classroom: Teaching History with The National WWII Museum

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, ended the debate over American intervention in both the Pacific and European theaters of World War II. The day after the attack, Congress declared war on Imperial Japan with only a single dissenting vote. Germany and Italy— Japan’s allies—responded by declaring war against the United States. Faced with these realities and incensed by the attack on Pearl Harbor, everyday Americans enthusiastically supported the war effort. Isolation was no longer an option.

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"DEAR FRISKY," President Roosevelt wrote in May 1940 to Roger Merriman, his history professor at Harvard and the master of Eliot House. "I like your word 'shrimps.' There are too many of them in all the Colleges and Universities -- male and female. I think the best thing for the moment is to call them shrimps publicly and privately. Most of them will eventually get in line if things should become worse."

To designate young isolationists, who deluded themselves into believing that America could remain aloof, secure, and distant from the wars raging in Europe, Roosevelt liked the amusing term "shrimps"-- crustaceans possessing a nerve cord but no brain. In that critical month of May 1940, he finally realized that it was probably a question of when, not if, the United States would be drawn into war. Talk about neutrality or noninvolvement was no longer seasonable as the unimaginable dangers he had barely glimpsed in 1936 erupted into what he termed a "hurricane of events."

On the evening of Sunday, May 26, 1940, days after the Germans began their thrust west, as city after city fell to the Nazi assault, a somber Roosevelt delivered a fireside chat about the dire events in Europe.

Earlier that evening, the president had distractedly prepared drinks for a small group of friends in his study. There was none of the usual banter. Dispatches were pouring into the White House. "All bad, all bad," Roosevelt grimly muttered, handing them to Eleanor to read. But in his talk, as he tried to prepare Americans for what might lie ahead, he set a reflective, religious tone.

"On this Sabbath evening," he said in his reassuring voice, "in our homes in the midst of our American families, let us calmly consider what we have done and what we must do." But before talking about his decision to vastly increase the nation's military preparedness, he hurled an opening salvo at the isolationists.

They came in different sizes and shapes, he explained. One group of them constituted a Trojan horse of pro-German spies, saboteurs, and traitors. While not naming names, he singled out those who sought to arouse people's "hatred" and "prejudices" by resorting to "false slogans and emotional appeals." With fifth columnists who sought to "divide and weaken us in the face of danger," Roosevelt declared, "we must and will deal vigorously." Another group of isolationists, he explained, opposed his administration's policies simply for the sake of opposition -- even when the security of the nation stood at risk.

The president recognized that some isolationists were earnest in their beliefs and acted in good faith. Some were simply afraid to face a dark and foreboding reality. Others were gullible, eager to accept what they were told by some of their fellow Americans, that what was happening in Europe was "none of our business." These "cheerful idiots," as he would later call them in public, naively bought into the fantasy that the United States could always pursue its peaceful and unique course in the world.

They "honestly and sincerely" believed that the many hundreds of miles of salt water would protect the nation from the nightmare of brutality and violence gripping much of the rest of the world. Though it might have been a comforting dream for FDR's "shrimps," the president argued that the isolationist fantasy of the nation as a safe oasis in a world dominated by fascist terror evoked for himself and for the overwhelming majority of Americans not a dream but a "nightmare of a people without freedom -- the nightmare of a people lodged in prison, handcuffed, hungry, and fed through the bars from day to day by the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents."

Two weeks after that fireside chat, on June 10, 1940, Roosevelt gave another key address about American foreign policy. This time it was in the Memorial Gymnasium of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, to an audience that included his son Franklin, Jr., who was graduating from the Virginia Law School. That same day, the president received word that Italy would declare war on France and was sending four hundred thousand troops to invade the French Mediterranean coast. In his talk, FDR deplored the "gods of force and hate" and denounced the treacherous Mussolini. "On this tenth day of June, 1940," he declared, "the hand that held the dagger has plunged it into the back of its neighbor."

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But more than a denunciation of Mussolini's treachery and double-dealing, the speech finally gave a statement of American policy. It was time to "proclaim certain truths," the president said. Military and naval victories for the "gods of force and hate" would endanger all democracies in the western world. In this time of crisis, America could no longer pretend to be "a lone island in a world of force." Indeed, the nation could no longer cling to the fiction of neutrality. "Our sympathies lie with those nations that are giving their life blood in combat against these forces." Then he outlined his policy. America was simultaneously pursuing two courses of action. First, it was extending to the democratic Allies all the material resources of the nation; and second, it was speeding up war production at home so that America would have the equipment and manpower "equal to the task of any emergency and every defense." There would be no slowdowns and no detours. Everything called for speed, "full speed ahead!" Concluding his remarks, he summoned, as he had in 1933 when he first took the oath of office, Americans' "effort, courage, sacrifice and devotion."

It was a "fighting speech," wrote Time magazine, "more powerful and more determined" than any the president had yet delivered about the war in Europe. But the reality was actually more complicated.

On the one hand, the president had taken sides in the European conflict. No more illusions of "neutrality." And he had delivered a straightforward statement of the course of action he would pursue. On the other hand, he was not free to make policy unilaterally; he still had to contend with isolationists in Congress. On June 10, the day of his Charlottesville talk, with Germans about to cross the Marne southeast of Paris, it was clear that the French capital would soon fall. France's desperate prime minister, Paul Reynaud, asked Roosevelt to declare publicly that the United States would support the Allies "by all means short of an expeditionary force." But Roosevelt declined. He sent only a message of support labeled "secret" to Reynaud; and in a letter to Winston Churchill, he explained that "in no sense" was he prepared to commit the American government to "military participation in support of the Allied governments." Only Congress, he added, had the authority to make such a commitment.

"We all listened to you last night," Churchill wired the president the day after the Charlottesville address, pleading, as he had done earlier in May, for more arms and equipment from America and paring down his request for destroyers from "forty or fifty" to "thirty or forty." "Nothing is so important," he wrote. In answer to Churchill's urgent appeal, the president arranged to send what he cleverly called "surplus" military equipment to Great Britain. Twelve ships sailed for Britain, loaded with seventy thousand tons of bomber planes, rifles, tanks, machine guns, and ammunition-- but no destroyers were included in the deal. Sending destroyers would be an act of war, claimed Senator David Walsh of Massachusetts, the isolationist chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee. Walsh also discovered the president's plan to send twenty torpedo boats to Britain. Flying into a rage, he threatened legislation to prohibit such arms sales. Roosevelt backed down -- temporarily -- and called off the torpedo boat deal.

Even as Nazi troops, tanks, and planes chalked up more conquests in Europe, the contest between the shrimps and the White House was not over. On the contrary, the shrimps still occupied a position of formidable strength.

The glamorous public face and articulate voice of the isolationist movement belonged to the charismatic and courageous Charles Lindbergh. His solo flight across the Atlantic in May 1927 had catapulted the lanky, boyish, 25- year- old pilot onto the world stage. "Well, I made it," he said with a modest smile upon landing at Le Bourget airfield in Paris, as thousands of delirious French men and women broke through military and police lines and rushed toward his small plane. When he returned to New York two weeks later, flotillas of boats in the harbor, a squadron of twenty- one planes in the sky, and four million people roaring "Lindy! Lindy!" turned out to honor him in a joy-mad city, draped in flags and drenched in confetti and ticker tape. "No conqueror in the history of the world," wrote one newspaper, "ever received a welcome such as was accorded Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh yesterday."

On May 19, 1940, a week before the president gave his fireside chat denouncing isolationists and outlining plans to build up American defenses, Lindbergh had made the isolationist case in his own radio address. The United States was not in danger from a foreign invasion unless "American people bring it on" by meddling in the affairs of foreign countries. The only danger to America, the flier insisted, was an "internal" one.

Though the president had explained that the Atlantic and Pacific oceans could no longer provide safe boundaries and could not protect the American continent from attack, Lindbergh insisted that the two vast oceans did indeed guarantee the nation's safety. "There will be no invasion by foreign aircraft," he stated categorically in his reedy voice, "and no foreign navy will dare to approach within bombing range of our coasts." America's sole task, he underscored, lay in "building and guarding our own destiny." If the nation stuck to a unilateral course, avoided entanglements abroad, refrained from intervening in European affairs, and built up its own defenses, it would be impregnable to foreign incursions. In any case, he stressed, it was pointless for the United States to risk submerging its future in the wars of Europe, for the die had already been cast. "There is no longer time for us to enter this war successfully," he assured his radio audience.

Deriding all the "hysterical chatter of calamity and invasion," Lindbergh charged that President Roosevelt's angry words against Germany would lead to "neither friendship nor peace."

Friendship with Nazi Germany? Surely Lindbergh realized that friendship between nations signifies their mutual approval, trust, and assistance. But so starry- eyed was he about German dynamism, technology, and military might and so detached was he from the reality and consequences of German aggression and oppression that even on that day of May 19, when the headline in the Washington Post read, "NAZIS SMASH THROUGH BELGIUM, INTO FRANCE" and when tens of thousands of desperate Belgian refugees poured across the border into France, Lindbergh said he believed it would make no difference to the United States if Germany won the war and came to dominate all of Europe. " Regardless of which side wins this war ," he stated in his May 19 speech without a whiff of hesitation or misgiving, "there is no reason . . . to prevent a continuation of peaceful relationships between America and the countries of Europe." The danger, in his opinion, was not that Germany might prevail but rather that Roosevelt's antifascist statements would make the United States "hated by victor and vanquished alike." The United States could and should maintain peaceful diplomatic and economic relations with whichever side won the war. Fascism, democracy-- six of one, half a dozen of the other. His defeatist speech could not have been "better put if it had been written by Goebbels himself," Franklin Roosevelt remarked two days later.

As the mighty German army broke through French defenses and thundered toward Paris, the dominance of Germany in Europe seemed obvious, inevitable, and justified to Lindbergh. Why, then, he wondered, did Roosevelt persist in his efforts to involve the nation in war? "The only reason that we are in danger of becoming involved in this war," he concluded in his May 19 speech, "is because there are powerful elements in America who desire us to take part. They represent a small minority of the American people, but they control much of the machinery of influence and propaganda." It was a veiled allusion to Jewish newspaper publishers and owners of major Hollywood movie studios. He counseled Americans to " strike down these elements of personal profit and foreign interest." While his recommendation seemed to border on violence, he was also reviving the centuries-old anti-Semitic myth of Jews as stateless foreigners, members of an international conspiratorial clique with no roots in the "soil" and interested only in "transportable" paper wealth.

"The Lindberghs and their friends laugh at the idea of Germany ever being able to attack the United States," wrote radio correspondent William Shirer, stationed in Berlin. "The Germans welcome their laughter and hope more Americans will laugh." Also heartened by Lindbergh's words was the German military attaché in Washington, General Friedrich von Boetticher. "The circle about Lindbergh," von Boetticher wrote in a dispatch to Berlin, "now tries at least to impede the fatal control of American policy by the Jews." The day after Lindbergh's speech, the defiant Hollywood studio heads, Jack and Harry Warner, wrote to Roosevelt to assure him that they would "do all in our power within the motion picture industry . . . to show the American people the worthiness of the cause for which the free peoples of Europe are making such tremendous sacrifices."

Who could have foreseen in 1927 that Lindbergh, whose flight inspired a sense of transatlantic community and raised idealistic hopes for international cooperation, would come to embody the fiercest, most virulent brand of isolationism? Two years after his feat, Lindbergh gained entrée to the Eastern social and financial elite when he married Anne Morrow, the daughter of Dwight Morrow. A former J. P. Morgan partner and the ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow would be elected as a Republican to the United States Senate in 1930, just before his death in 1931. Charles and Anne seemed to lead charmed lives-- until their 20- month- old son was snatched from his crib in their rural New Jersey home in March 1932. Muddy footprints trailed across the floor in the second-floor nursery to an open window, beneath which a ladder had stood. "The baby's been kidnapped!" cried the nurse as she ran downstairs. The governor of New York, Franklin Roosevelt, immediately placed all the resources of the state police at the disposal of the New Jersey authorities. Two months later, the small body was found in a shallow grave. A German- born carpenter who had served time in prison for burglary, Bruno Hauptmann, was charged with the crime; Lindbergh identified his voice as the one he heard shouting in the darkness of a Bronx cemetery when he handed over $50,000 in ransom.

Carrying a pistol visible in a shoulder holster, Lindbergh attended the trial in January 1935, sitting just a few seats away from the accused. After Hauptmann's conviction and move for an appeal, Eleanor Roosevelt oddly and gratuitously weighed in, second- guessing the jury and announcing that she was a "little perturbed" that an innocent man might have been found guilty. But the conviction stood, and Hauptmann would be executed in the electric chair in April 1936.

In December 1935, in the wake of the trial, Charles and Anne, harassed and sometimes terrified by intrusive reporters as well as by would- be blackmailers, fled to Europe with their 3-year-old son, Jon. "America Shocked by Exile Forced on the Lindberghs" read the three-column headline on the front page of the New York Times .

Would the crowd- shy Lindbergh and his wife find a calm haven in Europe? The Old World also has its gangsters, commented a French newspaper columnist, adding that Europe "suffers from an additional disquieting force, for there everyone is saying, 'There is going to be war soon.'" The Nazi press, however, took a different stance. "As Germans," wrote the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung with an absence of irony, "we cannot understand that a civilized nation is not able to guarantee the safety of the bodies and lives of its citizens."

For several years the Lindberghs enjoyed life in Europe, first in England, in a house in the hills near Kent, and later on a small, rocky island off the coast of Brittany. In the summer of 1936, the couple visited Germany, where they were wined and dined by Hermann Goering, second only to Hitler in the Nazi hierarchy, and other members of the party elite. Goering personally led Lindbergh on an inspection tour of aircraft factories, an elite Luftwaffe squadron, and research facilities. The American examined new engines for dive bombers and combat planes and even took a bomber up in the air. It was a "privilege" to visit modern Germany, the awestruck Lindbergh said afterward, showering praise on "the genius this country has shown in developing airships." Photographers snapped pictures of Charles and his wife, relaxed and smiling in Goering's home. Lindbergh's reports on German aviation overflowed with superlatives about "the astounding growth of German air power," "this miraculous outburst of national energy in the air field," and the "scientific skill of the race ." The aviator, however, showed no interest in speaking with foreign correspondents in Germany, "who have a perverse liking for enlightening visitors on the Third Reich," William Shirer dryly noted.

In Berlin, Lindbergh's wife, Anne, was blinded by the glittering façade of a Potemkin village. She was enchanted by "the sense of festivity, flags hung out, the Nazi flag, red with a swastika on it, everywhere , and the Olympic flag, five rings on white." The Reich's dynamism was so impressive. "There is no question of the power, unity and purposefulness of Germany," she wrote effusively to her mother, adding that Americans surely needed to overcome their knee-jerk, "puritanical" view that dictatorships were "of necessity wrong, evil, unstable." The enthusiasm and pride of the people were "thrilling." Hitler himself, she added on a dreamy, romantic note, "is a very great man, like an inspired religious leader-- and as such rather fanatical-- but not scheming, not selfish, not greedy for power, but a mystic, a visionary who really wants the best for his country and on the whole has rather a broad view."

On August 1, 1936, Charles and Anne attended the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games in Berlin, sitting a few feet away from Adolf Hitler. As the band played "Deutschland über alles," blond- haired little girls offered bouquets of roses to the Führer, the delighted host of the international games. Theodore Lewald, the head of the German Organizing Committee, declared the games open, hailing the "real and spiritual bond of fi re between our German fatherland and the sacred places of Greece founded nearly 4,000 years ago by Nordic immigrants." Leaving the following day for Copenhagen, Lindbergh told reporters at the airport that he was "intensely pleased" by what he had observed. His presence in the Olympic Stadium and his warm words about Germany helpfully added to the luster and pride of the Nazis. Also present at the Olympic games, William Shirer overheard people in Nazi circles crow that they had succeeded in "making the Lindberghs 'understand' Nazi Germany."

In truth, Lindbergh had glimpsed a certain unsettling fanaticism in Germany, but, as he reasoned to a friend, given the chaotic situation in Germany after World War I, Hitler's achievements "could hardly have been accomplished without some fanaticism." Not only did he judge that the Führer was "undoubtedly a great man," but that Germany, too, "has more than her share of the elements which make strength and greatness among nations." Despite some reservations about the Nazi regime, Lindbergh believed that the Reich was a "stabilizing factor" in Europe in the 1930s. Another visit to Germany in 1937 confirmed his earlier impressions. German aviation was "without parallel in history"; Hitler's policies "seem laid out with great intelligence and foresight"; and any fanaticism he had glimpsed was offset by a German "sense of decency and value which in many ways is far ahead of our own ."

In the late spring of 1938, Lindbergh and his wife moved to the tiny Breton island of Illiec, where Charles could carry on lengthy conversations with his neighbor and mentor, Dr. Alexis Carrel, an award-winning French scientist and eugenicist who instructed the flier in his scientific racism. In his 1935 book Man, the Unknown , Carrel had laid out his theories, his criticism of parliamentary democracy and racial equality. Asserting that the West was a "crumbling civilization," he called for the "gigantic strength of science" to help eliminate "defective" individuals and breeds and prevent "the degeneration of the [white] race." In the introduction to the German edition of his book, he praised Germany's "energetic measures against the propagation of retarded individuals, mental patients, and criminals."

In the fall of 1938, Charles and Anne returned to Germany. In October, at a stag dinner in Berlin hosted by the American ambassador and attended by the Italian and Belgian ambassadors as well as by German aircraft designers and engineers, Goering surprised the aviator by bestowing on him, "in the name of the Führer," Germany's second- highest decoration, a medal-- the Service Cross of the Order of the German Eagle-- embellished with a golden cross and four small swastikas. Lindbergh wore it proudly that evening. Afterward, when he returned from the embassy, he showed the medal to Anne, who correctly predicted that it would become an "albatross."

The Lindberghs wanted to spend the winter in Berlin, and Anne even found a suitable house in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. They returned to Illiec to pack up for the move, but changed their plans when they learned of Kristallnacht. "My admiration for the Germans is constantly being dashed against some rock such as this," Lindbergh lamented in his diary, expressing dismay at the persecution of Jews at the hands of Nazi thugs. Concerned that their taking up residence in Berlin might cause "embarrassment" to the German and American governments, he and Anne rented an apartment in Paris instead. And yet, Lindbergh's deep admiration for Germany was not seriously dampened. On the contrary, crossing the border from Belgium into Germany in December 1938, Lindbergh was captivated by the fine-looking young German immigration officer whose "air of discipline and precision," he wrote, was "in sharp contrast to the easygoing pleasantness of Belgium and France." Germany still offered the striking image of the virility and modern technology he prized. The spirit of the German people, he told John Slessor, a deputy director in Britain's Air Ministry, was "magnificent"; he especially admired their refusal to admit that anything was impossible or that any obstacle was too great to overcome. Americans, he sighed, had lost that strength and optimism. Strength was the key to the future. It appeared eminently rational and fair to Charles Lindbergh that Germany should dominate Europe because, as he wrote, "no system . . . can succeed in which the voice of weakness is equal to the voice of strength."

In April 1939, Lindbergh returned to the United States, his wife and two young sons following two weeks later. A few years earlier he had discussed with his British friends the possibility of relinquishing his American citizenship, but now he decided that if there was going to be a war, he would remain loyal to America. Even so, on the same day that he and Anne discussed moving back to America, he confessed in his diary that, of all the countries he had lived in, he had "found the most personal freedom in Germany." Moreover, he still harbored "misgivings" about the United States; critical of the shortsightedness and vacillation" of democratic statesmen, he was convinced that, in order to survive in the new totalitarian world, American democracy would have to make "great changes in its present practices."

Back on American soil in April, Lindbergh immediately launched into a tireless round of meetings with scientists, generals, and government officials, spreading the word about the remarkable advances in aviation he had seen in Germany and pushing for more research and development of American air and military power. Though he believed in American isolation, he also believed in American preparedness.

On April 20, 1939, Lindbergh had a busy day in Washington: first a meeting with Secretary of War Harry Woodring and then one with President Roosevelt at the White House. After waiting for forty-five minutes, the aviator entered the president's office. "He is an accomplished, suave, interesting conversationalist," Lindbergh wrote later that day in his diary. "I liked him and feel that I could get along with him well." But he suspected that they would never agree on "many fundamentals" and moreover sensed that there was "something about him I did not trust, something a little too suave, too pleasant, too easy. . . . Still, he is our President," Lindbergh concluded. He would try to work with him, he noted, cautiously adding that "I have a feeling that it may not be for long."

Emerging after half an hour from a side exit of the executive mansion, Lindbergh found himself besieged by photographers and reporters. The boisterous scene was "disgraceful," the camera- shy aviator bitterly judged. "There would be more dignity and self-respect among African Savages." After their meeting, neither Lindbergh nor the White House would shed any light on what had been discussed. Rumors would later surface that, at that April meeting or several months later, the president had offered the aviator a cabinet appointment, but such rumors were never substantiated.

From the White House that April day, Lindbergh went to a session of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and spoke about the importance of establishing a program to develop technologically advanced aircraft. While he backed the NACA's recommendation that the government allocate $10 million for a West Coast research center, not even that represented sufficient progress in Lindbergh's mind. It would still leave the United States "far behind a country like Germany in research facilities," he wrote in his diary. "We could not expect to keep up with the production of European airplanes as long as we were on a peacetime basis."

Lindbergh was unrelenting in his message about military preparedness. One scientist who listened carefully to him was Vannevar Bush, the chairman of the NACA and head of the Carnegie Institution, a research organization in Washington. After several more meetings that spring, the two men agreed that a plan was needed to revive the NACA. Bush "soaked up" Lindbergh's opinions, wrote Bush's biographer G. Pascal Zachary. Indeed, so impressed was Bush that he offered Lindbergh the chairmanship or vice chairmanship of the NACA-- an offer he aviator declined. Early in 1940 Bush received another report from Lindbergh that repeated his alarm about a serious lack of engine research facilities in the United States and called for "immediate steps to remedy this deficiency."

Deeply concerned after reading Lindbergh's recommendations, Bush drafted a proposal for the creation of a National Defense Research Council (NDRC), an organization that would supervise and fund the work of American engineers and scientists. On June 12, 1940, Bush met for the first time with President Roosevelt in the Oval Office. He handed him his memo--four short paragraphs on a single sheet of paper. It was enough, one of Bush's colleagues later wrote, to convince the president of the need to harness technology for possible war. Taking out his pen, he wrote on the memo the magical words, "OK-- FDR."

During the war, two thirds of the nation's physicists would be working under Vannevar Bush. One of the secret projects he supervised until 1943, when it was turned over to the army, was known as Section S1. The S1 physicists sought to unlock energy from the fission of atoms of a rare isotope of uranium. And among the starting places for that work as well as for Bush's creation of the NDRC were his informative and disturbing conversations with Charles Lindbergh.

In June 1940, as France fell to Nazi troops and planes, Lindbergh turned to memories of his father for reassurance and wisdom. "Spent the evening reading Father's Why Is Your Country at War? " he wrote in his diary. That 1917 book justified the son's alarm at the prospect of America's entry into another European war. Charles Lindbergh, Sr., a progressive Minnesota Republican who died in 1924, had served in the House of Representatives from 1907 to 1917. His young son, Charles, ran errands and addressed letters for him and occasionally was seen in the House gallery, watching his father on the floor below. Although Lindbergh, Sr., had been a follower of Theodore Roosevelt, on the question of American participation in the First World War, he and the bellicose TR parted company.

Why Is Your Country at War? was a long- winded, turgid antiwar tract, arguing that the United States had been drawn into the war by the machinations of "cowardly politicians," wealthy bankers, and the Federal Reserve Bank. The senior Lindbergh did not oppose the violence of war per se. Rather, this midwestern agrarian railed against the injustice of a war organized and promoted as a for-profit enterprise by the "wealth grabbers" of Wall Street, people like the Morgans and the Rockefellers. Ironically, the men of the "power elite" whom he most despised might have included his son's future father- in-law, Dwight Morrow, a Morgan partner-- though Lindbergh, Jr., later told an interviewer that he believed that his father and Dwight Morrow would probably have liked each other. At bottom, the elder Lindbergh's screed was a rambling, populist, socialist primer that offered radical remedies for the twin evils of war and capitalism.

When his book appeared in print, Lindbergh, Sr., had to defend himself--not against the charge that he was anticapitalist, which would have been true, but rather against the charge that he was pro- German. He was hung in effigy and taunted as a "friend of the Kaiser." Though there was nothing pro-German in the book, the accusations contributed to his defeat when he ran for governor of Minnesota in 1918. "If you are really for America first," he wrote in his own defense, "then you are classed as pro-German by the big press[es] which are supported by the speculators."

Like his father, Charles Lindbergh, Jr., would also face allegations that he was pro-German. But in his case the indictment rang true.

In the aviator's mind, Germany had it made. In England there was "organization without spirit," he would tell a radio audience in August 1940. "In France there was spirit without organization; in Germany there were both." Indeed, the more Lindbergh had lived among the English people, the less confidence he had in them. They struck him, he wrote, as unable to connect to a "modern world working on a modern tempo." And sadly, he judged that it was too late for them to catch up, "to bring back lost opportunity." Britain's only hope, as he once mentioned to his wife, was to learn from the Germans and to adopt their methods in order to survive. Nor did he have confidence or respect for democracy in the United States. On the American continent, he felt surrounded by mediocrity. Writing in his diary in the summer of 1940, he bemoaned the decline of American society--"the superficiality, the cheapness, the lack of understanding of, or interest in, fundamental problems." And making the problems worse were the Jews. "There are too many places like New York already," he wrote, alluding to that city's Jewish population. "A few Jews add strength and character to a country, but too many create chaos. And we are getting too many."

Was Lindbergh a Nazi? He was "transparently honest and sincere," remarked Sir John Slessor, the Royal Air Force marshal who met several times with Lindbergh. It was Lindbergh's very "decency and naiveté," Slessor later said, that convinced him that the aviator was simply "a striking example of the effect of German propaganda." One of Lindbergh's acquaintances, the journalist and poet Selden Rodman, also tried to explain the aviator's affinity for Nazi Germany. "Perhaps it is the conservatism of his friends and the aristocratic racial doctrines of Carrel that have made him sympathetic to Nazism," Rodman wrote. "Perhaps it is the symbolism of his lonely flight and the terrible denouement of mass-worship and the kidnapping that have driven him to the unpopular cause because it is unpopular; that always makes the Byronic hero spurn fame and fortune for guilt and solitary persecution."

For his part, Lindbergh knew that many of his views were unpopular in certain circles, but, as he told a nationwide radio audience in 1940, "I would far rather have your respect for the sincerity of what I say than attempt to win your applause by confining my discussion to popular concepts." Mistaking sincerity for intelligence and insight, he considered himself a realist who grasped that German technological advances had profoundly and irrevocably altered the balance of power in Europe. The only issue, he once explained to Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, was "whether this change will be peaceably accepted, or whether it must be tested by war." Priding himself on his clear- eyed understanding of military strength, he darkly predicted in June 1940, before the Battle of Britain had even begun, that the end for England "will come fast." The playwright Robert Sherwood, whom FDR would draft in the summer of 1940 to join his speechwriting team, may have come closest to the truth about Lindbergh. The aviator, he dryly commented, had "an exceptional understanding of the power of machines as opposed to the principles which animate free men." As Sherwood suggested, Lindbergh may simply have been naive about politics, ignorant about history, uneducated in foreign policy and national security, and deluded by his infatuation with German technology and vigor. Perhaps he did not fully appreciate, Sherwood said, the extent to which the German people "are now doped up with the cocaine of world revolution and the dream of world domination."

Despite his exuberant enthusiasm for Germany, his disenchantment with democracy, the zealous applause he received from fascists in the United States and in Germany, his admiration for the racial ideas of Alexis Carrel, his increasingly extremist and anti- Semitic speeches, and the fact that his simplistic views mirrored Nazi propaganda in the United States, Lindbergh seemed to want what he believed was best for America. And yet Franklin Roosevelt may have been instinctively correct in his own less nuanced view.

"I am absolutely convinced that Lindbergh is a Nazi," FDR said melodramatically to his secretary of the treasury and old Dutchess County neighbor and friend, Henry Morgenthau, in May 1940, two days after Lindbergh's May 19 speech. "If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this." The president lamented that the 38-year-old flier "has completely abandoned his belief in our form of government and has accepted Nazi methods because apparently they are efficient."

Others in the White House shared that assessment. Lindbergh, Harold Ickes sneered, pretentiously posed as a "heavy thinker" but never uttered "a word for democracy itself." The aviator was the "Number 1 Nazi fellow traveler," Ickes said. The delighted German embassy wholeheartedly agreed. "What Lindbergh proclaims with great courage," wrote the German military attaché to his home office in Berlin, "is certainly the highest and most effective form of propaganda." In other words, why would Germany need a fifth column in the United States when it had in its camp the nation's hero, Charles Lindbergh?

This is an excerpt from 1940: FDR, Willkie, Lindbergh, Hitler--the Election amid the Storm , by Susan Dunn, published by Yale University Press, 2013.

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World War II showed that war must be avoided at all costs and democracies must resist aggression, says Stanford historian

On the 75th anniversary of World War II ending in Europe, Stanford historian James Sheehan discusses the challenges that persisted and the legacies that remained at the end of the war.

World War II provided two contradictory lessons: war must be avoided at all costs and democracies must resist aggression, says Stanford historian James J. Sheehan .

James Sheehan (Image credit: L.A. Cicero)

Sheehan is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History emeritus in the School of Humanities and Sciences. He is the author of Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe , a history of war and peace in 20th-century Europe.

Are there any elements to VE Day that you think have been largely forgotten, overlooked or misunderstood?

You have studied how, for centuries, war defined Europe’s narrative and affected every aspect of political, social and cultural life. How did World War II change Europe’s relationship to war?

How did World War II transform views on pacifism and militarism?

As the world remembers 75 years since VE Day, what legacies remain today?

On May 8, 1945, the Allied forces of the United States, the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union officially accepted the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany. “Victory in Europe Day,” commonly known as “VE Day,” was celebrated across Europe, America and other parts of the world. (Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

VE Day has a different meaning in each of the countries involved in the war. For Americans, it recalls a moment of triumph, a time to remember the accomplishments and sacrifices that made victory possible. The Second World War has a moral clarity for Americans that is not shared by the other participants, in large part because the U.S. was the only one to emerge from the war with greater wealth and power. Britain remembers the resolve personified by [Prime Minister Winston] Churchill, but the cost of the war was great and the immediate postwar years were dreary. For the British, the legacy of 1945 is less potent than that of 1918. For them, Nov. 11, not May 8, is the most important day of national commemoration. In France, the war left a complicated legacy. After the French armies were defeated in a matter of weeks in 1940, France was allied with Germany. French president Charles de Gaulle managed to transform this dismal record into a legacy of resistance and regeneration, but the truth of France’s wartime role keeps intruding on this legend. For Germans, the war ended in the midst of enormous destruction and death. Only as Germany (especially in the western half) began to recover could May 1945 seem like a new beginning rather than a catastrophic end. May 8, 1945, is especially important for Russians, whose suffering was greatest and whose contribution to the German defeat was the most significant. This is why Putin planned to have a great celebration in Moscow this year that was designed to remind Russians of what they had done and what they could do again.

What would you say to your current students about VE Day?

May 8, 1945, began the longest period of peace in European history. We should not take the absence of war for granted, nor should we lose sight of the policies that made a peaceful Europe possible and the vigilance that is still necessary to preserve it. The establishment of peace, the British historian Michael Howard wrote, “is a task which has to be tackled afresh every day of our lives … no formula, no organization and no political or social revolution can ever free mankind from this inexorable duty.” The Second World war reminds us how essential this task remains.

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Churchill and the Rhineland: “They Had Only to Act to Win”

By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH
| September 14, 2023
Category: Churchill Between the Wars Explore

“We dedicate ourselves to achieving an understanding between the peoples of Europe and particularly an understanding with our Western peoples and neighbors. After three years, I believe that, with the present day, the struggle for German equal rights can be regarded as closed…. We have no territorial claims to make in Europe.” —Adolf Hitler to the Reichstag after reoccupying the Rhineland, 7 March 1936. Following this speech, Hitler dissolved the Reichstag.

The Rhineland challenge

The Rhineland in western Germany is bordered by the River Rhine in the east and France and the Benelux countries in the west. It includes the industrial Ruhr Valley, the famous cities of Aachen, Bonn, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Essen, Koblenz, Mannheim and Weissbaden, and several bridgeheads into Germany proper.

After the end of the First World War, the Rhineland was occupied by the victorious Allies. Though the occupation was set to last through 1935, military forces withdrew in 1930 as a good-will gesture to the Weimar Republic. 1 The Allies retained the right to reoccupy the Rhineland should Germany violate the Treaty of Versailles .

In March 1936, a few thousand German troops marched into the Rhineland while the populace waved swastika flags. The soldiers had orders to “turn back and not to resist” if challenged by the all-dominant French Army. Hitler later said that the forty-eight hours following his action were the tensest of his life. 2

Since the occupied Saarland had been returned to Germany after a plebiscite in January 1935, the Rhineland was Hitler’s first foray into territory where he was not permitted. Churchill’s defenders correctly cite the Rhineland as confirming his warnings about Hitler. But what Churchill actually proposed to do about it is not as clear. 3

“Confronted by terrible circumstances”

Two months before Hitler’s action, Churchill predicted that a Rhineland incursion would raise “a very grave European issue, and no one can tell what would come of it…. The League of Nations Union folk, who have done their best to get us disarmed, may find themselves confronted by terrible circumstances.” 4

Hitler’s future foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop , recorded how Hitler conceived of slipping the occupation past the Western allies. Summoning Ribbentrop in January, Hitler said: “[I]t occurred to me last night how we can occupy the Rhineland without any friction. We return to the League!” 5 Germany had left the League of Nations in 1933.

Ribbentrop said he too (of course) had just had this very idea. He suggested they strike while the French and British were on one of their weekend holidays. Hitler acted on Saturday March 7th. France, he said had abrogated the Rhine agreements by a military alliance with Russia: “The Locarno Rhine Pact has lost its meaning and ceased in practice to exist.” 6

True to plan, Hitler added a sweetener, proposing “a real pacification of Europe between states that are equal in rights.” Germany would return to the League of Nations, provided her colonies, stripped at Versailles, were returned.

Would France march?

The question turned on France. Would she now reassert control of the Rhineland? Or just dither and do nothing? Anthony Eden , Britain’s foreign secretary, was sanguine: Great Britain would stand by France, and he offered military staff conversations.

Unfortunately for staff conversations, the French military was led by General Maurice Gamelin , a “nondescript fonctionnaire .” Under pressure, “he became everything a commander ought not to be: indecisive, given to issuing impulsive orders which he almost always countermanded, and timid to and beyond a fault.” 7 The French government may have yearned for a way to stop Hitler. Gamelin and his military colleagues were more worried about stopping him from invading France proper. 8

British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin believed France was unwilling to act—with or without Britain. Churchill doubted this, given the resolve of French Foreign Minister Pierre Flandin . Four days after Hitler’s action Flandin visited London. Churchill recalled:

He told me he proposed to demand from the British Government simultaneous mobilisation of the land, sea, and air forces of both countries, and that he had received assurances of support from all the nations of the “Little Entente” [Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Yugoslavia] and from other States. He read out an impressive list of the replies received. There was no doubt that superior strength still lay with the Allies of the former war. They had only to act to win. 9

Baldwin’s reluctance

Churchill urged Flandin to press his views with Baldwin, who was unsympathetic. He knew little of foreign affairs, he said, but he did know the British people wanted peace. Flandin replied that if Germany could tear up Locarno, what use were treaties? The French people were resolved, he said: “everything was at stake.” All Flandin asked of his British ally was a “free hand.” 10 But Baldwin doubted that Flandin had the support of his cabinet in Paris.

Flandin modified his plea. Suppose the Anglo-French “invite” Hitler to leave, pending negotiations, which would probably restore the Rhineland to Germany anyway? Even this was too much for Baldwin. “I have not the right to involve England,” he said. “Britain is not in a state to go to war.” Flandin was deflated, and as Baldwin suspected, the French cabinet was divided. 11

Some have suggested that Flandin never really wanted French military action—merely sanctions by the League of Nations . But sanctions were not forthcoming. Perhaps Flandin merely proposed to convene the League Council and adopt “sanctions by stages.” 12 Baldwin remained unmoved.

The pressure in Britain to avoid action was strong. At a dinner of ex-servicemen in Leicester, one of Churchill’s supporters, Leo Amery , gave a fiery speech. Britain’s very existence was threatened, he exclaimed. To the amazement of one observer, the ex-servicemen sided with the Germans. They said in effect: Why shouldn’t they have their own territory back? It’s no concern of ours. 13

“No fresh perplexities”

Publicly, Churchill was being cautious. “I was careful not to derogate in the slightest degree from my attitude of severe though friendly criticism of Government policy,” he wrote. The friendliness is more evident than the severity. Neville Chamberlain recorded that Churchill had “suppressed the attack he had intended and made a constructive and helpful speech.” 14

Churchill did urge a “coordinated plan” under the League of Nations to help France challenge the German action. This was denied. Sir Samuel Hoare replied that the necessary participants in such a plan were “totally unprepared from a military point of view.” This, one observer noted, “definitely sobered them down.” 15

Churchill had political reasons for treading lightly. He had been urging creation of a Ministry of Defense or Supply, which he hoped to be named to head. Baldwin duly announced a “Minister for the Coordination of Defense,” which was something less entirely. Worse, the job went to Solicitor General Sir Thomas Inskip , who knew nothing of the subject. At least, remarked, Chamberlain, this “would involve us in no fresh perplexities.” A British general added: “Thank God we are preserved from Winston Churchill.” 16

Inskip’s appointment disappointed Churchill, who, hoping to be called to office, had carefully avoided public criticism of the government. Baldwin, Churchill reminisced, “thought, no doubt, that he had dealt me a politically fatal stroke, and I felt he might well be right.” 17

Churchill as peacemaker

Churchill could not have office, but he still had an audience. He now began a series of fortnightly articles on foreign affairs for the Evening Standard . In the first, “Britain, Germany and Locarno,” he renewed his call for League of Nations intercession on the Rhineland. He insisted that there was a peaceful way to resolve the problem:

The Germans claim that the Treaty of Locarno has been ruptured by the Franco-Soviet pact . That is their case and it is one that should be argued before the World Court at The Hague. The French have expressed themselves willing to submit this point to arbitration and to abide by the result. Germany should be asked to act in the same spirit and to agree. If the German case is good and the World Court pronounces that the Treaty of Locarno has been vitiated by the Franco-Soviet pact, then clearly the German action, although utterly wrong in method, can not be seriously challenged by the League of Nations. 18

This is not Churchill the defiant critic of appeasement, but Churchill the statesman. At this point he was urging prudence and adjudication. He did warn that if the League failed in its duty, it might cause events to “slide remorselessly downhill towards the pit in which Western civilization might be fatally engulfed.”

He continued to urge talks, while also stating—as he always did over negotiating with adversaries—that the Germans must be confronted with supreme strength and resolution: “I desire to see the collective forces of the world invested with overwhelming power. If you are going to depend on a slight margin, one way or the other, you will have war.” 19

Collective Security

Churchill’s next article returned to his theme of unified action. This was no task for France and Britain alone, he declared. It was a task for all: “There may still be time. Let the States and people who lie in fear of Germany carry their alarms to the League of Nations at Geneva.” 20 In the absence of French military action he was falling back on Collective Security.

Aside from political considerations, Churchill was attempting to see things from the view of Britain’s closest ally. The French were “afraid of the Germans,” he wrote to The Times ; France had joined the sanctions against Italy over Mussolini ’s 1935 invasion of Abyssinia, and the resulting estrangement had given Hitler this Rhineland opportunity:

In fact Mr. Baldwin’s Government, from the very highest motives, endorsed by the country at the General Election, has, without helping Abyssinia at all, got France into grievous trouble which has to be compensated by the precise engagement of our armed forces. Surely in the light of these facts, undisputed as I deem them to be, we might at least judge the French, with whom our fortunes appear to be so decisively linked, with a reasonable understanding…. 21

Did Churchill waver?

Winston Churchill favored a collective response to the Rhineland, recognizing its implications. One event followed the other, as the hardline Member of Parliament Robert Boothby recorded later:

The military occupation of the Rhineland separated France from her allies in Eastern Europe. The occupation of Austria isolated Czechoslovakia. The betrayal of Czechoslovakia by the West isolated Poland. The defeat of Poland isolated France. The defeat of France isolated Britain. If Britain had been defeated, the United States would have been given true and total isolation for the first time. 22

Churchill certainly would have backed French reoccupation of the Rhineland, at least bridgeheads in places like Cologne. 23 With France unwilling, he fell back on Collective Security. Consistently he believed that firmness would cause Hitler to recoil.

Evidence suggests that Churchill knew the League was toothless. One critic suggests that he proposed League intervention “to cloak his balance-of-power politics in the context of the international body.” 24 But Churchill’s theme did not dramatically change in 1936; it merely evolved. As early as 1933 he had declared:

I believe that we shall find our greatest safety in cooperating with the other Powers of Europe, not taking a leading part, but coming in with all the neutral States…. Whatever way we turn there is risk. But the least risk and the greatest help will be found in re-creating the Concert of Europe…. 25

That was not to be. The failure of a concerted response over the Rhineland was to be repeated. Each time western statesmen hoped the latest Hitler inroad would be his last. 26

Prudence and statesmanship

It is the belief of many thoughtful historians that Churchill said and did nothing about the Rhineland, even in the weeks after he had been denied office. 27 Clearly, his actions are more complex than that. He did give mixed signals, but he also proposed solutions. When France refused unilateral action, he favored collective action. His public declarations were hardly a clarion call. But we must bear in mind also that he was not in office.

Churchill never admired Hitler, except in the narrow sense of Hitler’s political skills. There is no doubt that he spoke well of Mussolini, up to 1940. 28 But was this because he admired Fascism, or because he hoped to influence the Italian dictator? Until the mid-1930s, Italo-German relations were precarious.

The Rhineland marked Churchill’s final disillusionment over the League of Nations. It impelled his efforts to secure Collective Security through “a coalition of the willing” (to use a more recent and perhaps uncomfortable phrase). The problem was that the willing were few—and demonstrably unwilling to cooperate.

Author’s note

This essay appeared in longer form in my book, Churchill and the Avoidable War: Could World War II Have Been Prevented? (2015). It was prompted years before, by Robert Rhodes James ’s argument that Churchill said and did nothing to stop Hitler over the Rhineland (endnote 3). I argued otherwise, and he patiently agreed to hear me out. Alas my essay appeared too late for his lifetime, and cost me his almost certain, learned response. I miss my friend. RML

1 Richard M. Langworth, Churchill by Himself (New York: Rosetta Books, 2016), 438.

2 Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 588.

3 Manfred Weidhorn: “Churchill would have called Hitler’s bluff, but he was in no position to do so. All he could do was virtually to shriek in the press, concerning the ‘hideous drift’ to war, ‘Stop it! Stop it! Stop it now!” Sir Robert Rhodes James: “Churchill said nothing about the Rhineland—nothing at all. He was hoping for Cabinet office and he kept quiet.” Transcripts, “Churchill as Peacemaker,” a symposium at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C., 29 October 1994.

4 Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC) to his wife, 17 January 1936, in Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 13, The Coming of War 1936-1939 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2009), 15-16.

5 Michael Bloch, Ribbentrop (New York: Crown, 1993), 84.

6 Anthony Eden, Facing the Dictators (London: Cassell, 1962), 339.

7 William Manchester, The Last Lion, 2, Alone (Boston: Little Brown, 1988), 581.

8 A.J.P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 387-88.

9 WSC, The Gathering Storm (London: Cassell, 1948), 152.

10 Keith Middlemas & John Barnes, Baldwin: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 919.

11 Ibid., 919-20.

12 Maurice Ashley, Churchill as Historian (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 163-64.

13 Ronald Tree, When the Moon was High (London: Macmillan, 1974), 64-65.

14 Robert Rhodes James, Churchill: A Study in Failure 1909-1939 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970), 262-63.

15 Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (London: Heinemann, 1991) , 552.

16 Study in Failure, 262-63.

17 WSC, Gathering Storm, 157.

18 WSC, Jewelers Association dinner, Birmingham, 14 March 1936, in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, 8 vols., (New York: Bowker, 1974), VI: 5704-05.

19 WSC, Arms and the Covenant (London: Harrap, 1938), 301.

20 WSC, “Stop it Now!,” Evening Standard, 3 April 1936, reprinted in Step by Step (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939), 19.

21 WSC to The Times, London, 20 April 1936, in Gilbert, Documents 13, 101.

22 Robert Boothby, Recollections of a Rebel (London: Hutchinson, 1978), 93.

23 See for example Henry Pelling, Winston Churchill , ed . (Ware, Dorset: Wordsworth, 1999), 375.

24 John Charmley, Churchill: The End of Glory (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993), 307.

25 WSC, Arms and the Covenant, 101-02.

26 John Charmley, Chamberlain and the Lost Peace (London: John Curtis, 1989), xiii: “The lack of concerted response from the Versailles Powers revealed what was already apparent, that where the threat of defeat had brought unity, the reality of peace had engendered disunion.”

27 Sir Robert Rhodes James to the author, 15 November 1994.

28 Churchill complimented Mussolini at a 1927 press conference in Rome where he had hoped to collect the Italian war debt (he attempted this several times during the 1930s), as well as in his 1940 appeals to Mussolini not to turn on the collapsing Allies. It was only after Mussolini had declared war that he went from “greatest law-giver” to “whipped jackal” in the Churchill lexicon. Langworth, Churchill by Himself, 169-70, 364-65.

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Could the US Prevent the Start of World War II? Essay

It is clear to modern people, as well as many people who lived in the 1930s, that the Second World War was inevitable. Some believe that the United States of America could prevent the outbreak of the war. However, this could hardly be possible due to several reasons. The American government maintained an isolationist foreign policy in the 1930s. The period was challenging as all countries had to address severe economic issues (Corbett et al., 2021). Americans wanted to concentrate on domestic matters, including a threatening spread of communist ideas (Russett, 2019). It is noteworthy that the USA could hardly interfere and have a considerable impact on European affairs due to the country’s comparatively low economic might. The United States was not a financial leader at that period, so its influence was limited.

Moreover, the USA alone could not prevent the world war because it was outbroken as a result of the clash between European countries. The outcomes of the Treaty of Versailles laid the ground for the new war, as almost all stakeholders were dissatisfied. Germany accumulated resources and developed alliances with other dictatorships, so any country could not play a decisive role in this conflict. No nation could prevent the start of the new war as the regimes that emerged in Europe (the communist USSR, Nazi Germany, and fascist Italy) were likely to start a new military conflict that would inevitably grow into a world war. Therefore, it is possible to assume that the USA could not have prevented the start of the Second World War even if the American government had abandoned its isolationist foreign policy. At that, the country made a tremendous contribution to stopping the war and establishing a new world order.

Corbett, P. S., Janssen, V., Lund, J. M., Pfannestiel, T., Waskiewicz, T., & Vickery, P. (2021). U. S. history . OpenStax College.

Russett, B. M. (2019). No clear and present danger . Routledge.

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Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, January 10). Could the US Prevent the Start of World War II? https://ivypanda.com/essays/could-the-us-prevent-the-start-of-world-war-ii/

"Could the US Prevent the Start of World War II?" IvyPanda , 10 Jan. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/could-the-us-prevent-the-start-of-world-war-ii/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Could the US Prevent the Start of World War II'. 10 January.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Could the US Prevent the Start of World War II?" January 10, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/could-the-us-prevent-the-start-of-world-war-ii/.

1. IvyPanda . "Could the US Prevent the Start of World War II?" January 10, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/could-the-us-prevent-the-start-of-world-war-ii/.

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IvyPanda . "Could the US Prevent the Start of World War II?" January 10, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/could-the-us-prevent-the-start-of-world-war-ii/.

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International History, 1945-1991

World War I: Could it have been avoided?

J.P. Shivanandan

Western Civ – 6 th period

May 30, 2007

Through out the course of history, Europe has experienced two wars that have affected both society and government in the modern era. The First World War in 1914 and the Second World War in 1941 dramatically changed Europe. During the Second World War, it was easy to distinguish between good and evil. On the other hand, during the First World War, the lines were not as clearly drawn. Though people view the Germans as the instigators of the First World War, this is not entirely true. The clarity of which country started what was mixed up between varieties of different circumstances during the time. Before the First World War, many new ideas about government and views had been preached and they were beginning to take root. Countries such as Austria-Hungry were threatened by nationalism and other ideas. On the other hand, nationalism, militarism, and imperialism helped the new German nation, created in 1871 by the Franco-Prussian wars, grow stronger militarily (Online: German Notes). Countries had been introduced to the concept of developing foreign relationships to receive aide from allied nations if they were attacked by a common enemy. These new alliances contributed greatly to the First World War because it enabled countries with the minimal means to engage in a world war. The First World War could have been prevented, but European countries witnessed the creation of a system of alliances, nationalism, militarism and imperialism, which had an impact on the outbreak of war in 1914.

Though the First World War occurred due to several different factors, the most significant factor was the creation of an intricate system of alliances between countries in Europe. Before the First World War, there were two sets of alliances between the most powerful nations in Europe. The two alliances were called the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente. The Triple Alliance was composed of Germany, Austria and Italy and was created in 1882 (Online: Tonge) . Britain, France and Russia created the Triple Entente in 1907 (Online: Tonge) . Germany created a strong alliance with Austria because they anticipated war and they wanted someone to guard their eastern side (Simkins, 11). France and Russia had created alliances with each other in 1892 because they saw the growing threat from the new German nation (Simkins, 11). Britain had not yet made a military pact with Russia and France, but soon felt threatened by the growing German navy since Britain could not expand their navy under the Naval Defense Act in 1899 (Simkins, 12). These major alliances could create a World War because the countries had military treaties between each other and if one attacked the other, most of Europe would be at war. Before the First World War, the alliances proved to be dangerous during two situations; the Algeciras (1905) and Agadir (1911) Incidents (Gibson, 9). These two incidents almost started the First World War but they were resolved peacefully. They showed that Europe could easily be thrown into a World War. Ignoring these previous warnings, the two alliances did not weaken and they kept their relationships strong. This proved deadly when all of Europe entered into a World War on July 25, 1914 when Austria declared war with Serbia becuase Serbia did not comply with all of Austria’s demands in an ultimatum (Gibson, 13). By attacking Serbia, Austria brought Russia in the war due an alliance created between the two countries (Perry, 512). Once Russia had entered, Germany felt threatened by the partial mobilization of the Russian troops, so Germany decided to fully mobilize their troops and declare war on Russia (Perry, 513). “This action caused France to mobilise and set in motion the remaining cogs in the intricate machine of European alliances” (Simkins, 23). Germany then started its plan to take over France, which required them to go up through Belgium and then into France (Simkins, 24). Belgium was unwilling to allow the German army to pass, which resulted in the conquest of Belgium after Germany declared war (Simkins, 24). Britain felt inclined to help Belgium and to protect its superior power on the water, so they declared war on Germany (Perry, 513). This declaration of war by the Britain’s officially brought the Triple Alliance against the Triple Entente. The system of alliances brought the major countries of Europe into a war against each other. The system of alliances was a major cause of the First World War because it brought the major countries of Europe against each other.

This is a preview of the whole essay

Nationalism in Europe was another major cause of the First World War because it had different affects on the people and government of Germany and Austria. Historians today believe that nationalism was "the most powerful spiritual force of the age" (Perry, 503). Nationalism gave people pride for their country and the people were inspired for their countries to become a world power (Crowe, 274). Germany believed that if they wanted “to have a voice in affairs of the larger oceanic world she must be made a ‘World Power,” so Germany needed to find some way of achieving this (Crowe, 274). Since nationalism was very heavily practiced in Germany, this aided and drove their dream of becoming a world power and entrance into the war because the people were not afraid to fight for their country. Germany viewed the time of peace before the war as "a national misfortune for Germany" and "the preservation of peace can and never shall be the aim of politics" (Scheidemann, 279). The Germans took advantage of this patriotic population and entered into the war to achieve a world power status. Once Germany had entered the war, the people felt "that they belonged together," and it was "what they should have felt in peace time" (Zweig, 277). Nationalism helped unify the people and make them feel like a team instead of an individual during the war. Unlike Germany, the Austria-Hungry Empire was threatened by the growth of nationalism in small groups and attempted to repress the threat. With its diverse cultural of Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, Romanians, and more, Austria-Hungry faced difficulties satisfying the citizen's needs and containing the nationalist minorities because of the diversity (Online: The Corner, "Nationalism"). Serbia only heightened this problem by attempting to unite the minorities in Austria and overthrow the Austrian government (Perry, 511). Once Gavrilo Princip, a member of a Serbian nationalist group called the Black Hand, assassinated Archduke Francis Ferdinand, who was next in line for the throne, on June 28, 1914, Austria was unable to ignore this nuisance anymore (Simkins, 22). On July 23, 1914, Austria presented an ultimatum to Serbia who agreed to all but one of the demands. Nevertheless, Austria still declared war on Serbia (Perry, 511). Nationalism contributed to the First World War because it unified the people of the new German nation but, attempted to destroy the Austria-Hungry Empire in Europe.

Militarism was another factor that influenced the countries of Europe to enter into the First World War because of an increase in the use of new weapons and an interest in expanding countries' borders. During this time period, many new technologies, weapons and machines were introduced for warfare. The rifle and a new quick-firing machine gun replaced the previous guns that were slow and hard to reload (Gibson, 6). Tanks and artillery were invented, which made generals apply new methods of warfare and introduced stronger forces on the battle fields (Gibson, 6). Also, the invention of steam power brought about trains, which were able to carry troops and supplies farther and faster (Gibson, 6). These new advances in warfare excited the German ruler, Wihelm II, and he developed the country's industrial power to support their production (Simkins, 11). Germany believed that " the union of the greatest military with the greatest naval Power in one state would compel the world to combine for the riddance of such an incubus” (Crowe, 275). Germany was able to build up a massive army, which threatened the European countries adjacent to Germany (Simkins, 11). As Germany built up its army, France and Russia were inclined to match the power of Germany and build up their armies. This build up of armies went back and forth and they all slowly built up their power and size in Europe. This was a cause of the war because all of the countries were ready to attack each other with their new and large armies (Online: The Corner, "Militarism"). Germany not only built up their land force but, they also built up their naval power. This started a race between Germany and Britain to have the largest naval fleet in order to control the North Sea (Online: The Corner, "Militarism"). The two countries went back and forth but in the end Britain achieved dominance over Germany for the largest naval fleet in Europe (Simkins, 12). Not only did Germany have a large fleet and army, they had generals and politicians that promoted war passionately. " Statesmen were generally more willing to solve international disputes by military rather than diplomatic means” (Simkins, 14) and “the military-political-industrial elite … were full prepared to contemplate war … as the quickest way of realising their ambitions” (Simkins, 15). Germany’s government did not want to solve their problems by negotiations but rather by using military force. Militarism influenced the First World War because it provided countries with new weapons, larger armies and the mindsets that the only way to acquire something was to take it with force and war.

Though imperialism was regarded as a less important factor of the First World War, it influenced European countries economies and Germany’s interest in expanding into a world power. Since the creation of their nation in 1871, the Germans wanted to expand into China, Africa and Europe to access the supplies that they needed to fund their growing industries, naval fleet and army (Gibson, 6-9). This caused conflicts between Germany and other European nations, such as France and Britain, because Germany was capturing areas held by the other countries (Online: The Corner, “Economic Rivalries”). The tensions between European countries were the highest during the Bosnian Crisis. Countries close to the Balkans, roughly around Turkey, attempted to unite the area to get a good staging area into the Mediterranean (Gibson, 11-12). Countries fought over the land because this area would provide trade and other advantages that came from being connected to the Mediterranean (Perry, 510). Not only did Germany want the land for supplies, but a British official, Eyre Crowe, observed that, “a healthy and powerful State like Germany, with its 60,000,000 inhabitants, must expand, it cannot stand still” (Crowe, 274). Germans declared that they “must have real Colonies, where German emigrants can settle and spread the national ideals of the Fatherland” (Crowe, 274). Germany was looking for a way to spread their culture to the world in order to obtain power worldwide. Germany also believed that if they want “to have a voice in affairs of the larger oceanic world she must be made a ‘World Power’” (Crowe, 274). Imperialism was affecting Germany because they believed that the only way to be heard was by being a great empire like the British. Since the world’s amount of land for sale was declining, Germany had little choice but to acquire the land by militaristic means and Austria helped them by declaring war on Serbia. The tensions between Germany and other Europe countries and Germany’s increasing demand for land and supplies caused the country to go to drastic measures in order to achieve their goal of being a “World Power”.

If the alliance system, nationalism, militarism and imperialism had not been used, then Europe may not have experienced the First World War. The alliance system had brought about the war because it obliged countries to enter into the fight. The alliances between the powerful nations divided Europe in two; the people on the Triple Alliance and those on the Triple Entente. Similarly, nationalism helped accelerate the war because it encouraged countries to fight for their nation. Also, nationalism threatened empires such as Austria-Hungry because of the diverse interests and the country could not satisfy the needs of all the different people. Militarism also had an impact on the First World War because of the powerful armies and the production of new weapons, such as rifles and tanks. It gave power to the generals, who thought the solution to everything was using force. Finally, imperialism influenced the war because Germany needed to spread its culture and obtain the supplies necessary for them to maintain their army and navy. Alliances, nationalism, and militarism all contributed to the start of the First World War and if these developments in society had been avoided, there may not have been history of the horrific events of the First World War.

Bibliography

Crowe, Eyre. “Germany’s Yearning for Expansion and Power” quoted in Perry, Marvin et al., Sources of the Western Tradition , third ed. (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995). 273-275

Duffy, Michael. “The Causes of World War One.” 2004. April 25, 2007 <http://www.firstworldwar.com/origins/causes.htm>

Gibson, Micheal. Spotlight on the First World War. ( England, Wayland Publishers, 1985). 4-15.

German Notes. Causes of World War 1 . 2007. April 25, 2007 <http://www.germannotes.com/hist_ww1_causes.shtml>

Perry, Marvin. Western Civilization: A Brief History. 4th ed. (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001). 502-506, 510-515.

The Corner. Economic Rivalries. 2007. May 14, 2007. <http://www.thecorner.org/hist/wwi/military.htm>

The Corner. Militarism. 2007. May 12, 2007. <http://www.thecorner.org/hist/wwi/military.htm>

The Corner. National Rivalries. 2007. May 12, 2007. <http://www.thecorner.org/hist/wwi/national.htm>

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Treitschke, Heinrich von. “The Greatness of War” quoted in Perry, Marvin et al., Sources of the Western Tradition , third ed. (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995). 269-270.

Scheidemann, Philip. “Berlin: ‘The Hour we Yearned for’” quoted in Perry, Marvin et al., Sources of the Western Tradition , third ed. (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995). 278-279.

Simkins, Peter. The First World War: The Western Front 1914-1916 (Great Britian, Osprey Publishing, 2002). 8-24.

Zweig, Stefan. “Vienna: ‘The Rushing Feeling of Fraternity’” quoted in Perry, Marvin et al., Sources of the Western Tradition , third ed. (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995). 277-278.

World War I: Could it have been avoided?

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From “The New York Times,” I’m Sabrina Tavernise, and this is “The Daily.”

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So it was Friday night around 8:30 Moscow time that we started seeing reports about a terrorist attack at a concert hall just outside Moscow. I frankly wasn’t sure right at the beginning how serious this was because we have seen quite a lot of attacks inside Russia over the last two years since the full scale invasion of Ukraine, and it was hard to make sense of right away. But then within a few hours, it was really looking like we were seeing the worst terrorist attack in or around the Russian capital in more than 20 years.

On Friday night, Crocus City Hall was the venue for a concert by an old time Russian rock group called Picnic. It was a sold-out show. Thousands of people were expected to be there. And before the start of the concert, it appears that four gunmen in camouflage walked into the venue and started shooting.

We started seeing videos on social media, just incredibly awful graphic footage of these men shooting concertgoers at point blank range. In one of the videos, we see one of them slitting the throat of one of the concertgoers. And then what appears to have happened is that they set the concert hall on fire. Russian investigators said they had some kind of flammable liquid that they lit on fire and basically tried to burn down this huge concert hall with wounded people in it.

Some of these people ended up trapped as the building burned, as eventually, the roof of this concert hall collapsed. And it seems as though much of the casualties actually came as a result of the fire as opposed to as a result of the shooting.

The actual attack, it looks didn’t take more than 15 to 30 minutes. At which point, the four men were able to escape. They got into a white Renault sedan and fled the scene.

It took the authorities clearly a while to arrive. The attackers were able to spread this horrific violence for, as I said, at least 15 minutes or so. So among other things, there’s a lot of questions being raised right now about why the official response took so long.

And you said the perpetrators got away. What happened next?

So it looks like they were caught at some point hours after the attack. On Saturday morning, the Kremlin said that 11 people had been arrested in connection to the attack, including all four perpetrators. They were taken into custody according to the Russian authorities in the Bryansk region of Russia, roughly a five-hour drive from the concert hall in southwestern Russia, also pretty close to the border with Ukraine.

Obviously, we have to take everything that the Russian authorities are saying with a grain of salt. And as we’ve been reporting on this throughout the weekend, we have very much tried to verify all the claims that the Russian authorities are making independently. And so our colleagues in the visual investigations unit of the times have been working very hard on that.

And what we can say based on the footage of the attack that was taken by many different individuals and posted to social media, it very much looks like the four men who were detained who Russia says were the attackers, in fact, are the same people who were seen doing the shooting in those videos of the attack judging by their clothes, judging by their hairstyle, judging by their build and other identifying characteristics that our colleagues have been looking at. So it does appear that by Saturday morning, the men who directly carried out this attack had been taken into custody.

Wow. So the Russian government actually apprehended the perpetrators, according to our reporting work that our colleagues have done. So who are these guys?

We don’t know much about them. The Russian government says that none of them are Russian citizens. After the arrest, throughout the weekend, videos, short clips of interrogations of these men have been popping up on the Telegram social networks, clearly leaked or provided by Russian law enforcement. You see these men bloodied, hurt.

And is this Russian interrogators abusing them?

Yes. That is very much what it looks like. And it’s also notable that the Russian authorities aren’t even hiding it. Two of the suspects in those videos are heard speaking Tajik. So that’s the language spoken in Tajikistan, a Central Asian country, but also in some of the surrounding countries, including Afghanistan.

At the end of the day, this is still very much a developing situation, and there’s a ton that we don’t know. But hours after the attack, the Islamic State, ISIS, took responsibility. And they then really tried to emphasize this by even releasing a video on Saturday showing the attack taking place as it was filmed apparently by one of the attackers. And US intelligence officials have told our colleagues in Washington that they indeed believe this to be true, that they believe that this ISIS offshoot did carry out this attack.

Wow. So the Americans actually think that ISIS, the extremist group that we know so well from Iraq and Syria, carried out this attack.

Yes. And all of this is really remarkable because just a few weeks ago, on March 7, the United States actually warned publicly that something just like this could happen. The US embassy in Moscow issued a security alert, urging US citizens to avoid large gatherings over the next 48 hours. They said that the embassy is monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow to include concerts.

Crazy. That is a very specific warning.

Absolutely. And of course, the statement mentioned that specific 48-hour time frame. But nevertheless, it feels really significant.

And did the Russian authorities respond to that?

They did, and frankly, they responded mostly by ridiculing it. This is all obviously happening against the backdrop of the worst conflict between Moscow and the West since the depths of the Cold War. And so Vladimir Putin actually publicly dismissed this warning. He called it blackmail in a speech that he gave just three days before the attack last Tuesday.

So despite the specificity publicly at least, the Russian authorities did not take it seriously.

That is remarkable. And so three days later, this huge attack happens. Where is Putin in all of this? And who is he blaming? What’s his version of events?

So he’s coming off this Russian election season, as you know, where he declared this very stage managed victory and after that had been taking a victory lap of sorts. But Putin doesn’t appear on camera until around 19 hours after the attack. At that point, Russian state television airs a five-minute speech by Putin.

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

He’s sitting at this nondescript desk surrounded by two Russian flags, but it’s not clear where he is located at that point. It doesn’t look like he’s at the Kremlin.

And Anton, what does he say?

So he describes the horror of this attack. He declares Sunday a national day of mourning. He says the most important thing is to make sure that the people who did this aren’t able to carry out more violence.

He also says that the four men who carried out the attack were captured as they were moving toward Ukraine. And he claims that based on preliminary information, as he put it, there were people on the Ukrainian side who were going to help these men cross the border safely. And remember, this is an extremely dangerous militarized border given that Russia and Ukraine have been in a state of full scale war for over two years now.

And as he ends the speech, He. Says that Russia will punish the perpetrators, whoever they may be, whoever may have sent them.

So what’s important about all that is first of all, that Putin did not mention the apparent Islamic extremist connection here that Western officials have been talking about, and that is in front of all of us given that Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack. But he does set the stage for blaming Ukraine for this horrific tragedy, even though it seems that Putin and the Russian government may be alone in thinking that.

We’ll be right back.

So Anton, the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for this attack, but Putin ignores that and kind of obliquely points the finger at Ukraine. What do we actually know about who did this?

Well, let’s start with the group that claimed responsibility for this attack. That’s ISIS, the Islamic State. And in particular, US officials are talking about a branch of ISIS called ISIS-K or Islamic State Khorasan, which is an Islamic State affiliate that’s primarily active in Afghanistan and that in recent years has gained this reputation for extreme brutality.

They might be best known in the US for being the group behind the Kabul Airport bombing back in 2021 right after the Taliban took over when thousands of Afghans were trying to escape. That was a bombing that killed 13 American troops and 171 civilians, and it really raised ISIS case profile.

So this terrorist group is mainly based in Afghanistan. What do they want with Russia?

So what’s notable is our colleague Eric Schmitt in Washington talked to an expert over the weekend who said ISIS-K has really developed an obsession with Russia and Putin over the last two years. They say Russia has Muslim blood on its hands.

So it looks like the primary driver in this enmity against Russia is Russia’s alliance with Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, who is also a sworn enemy of ISIS. And Russia intervened, of course, on Assad’s behalf in the Syrian civil war starting back in 2015. But it’s not just Syria. So the experts we’ve talked to say that in the ISIS-K propaganda, you also hear about Russia’s wars in the Southern region of Chechnya in the 1990s and the early 2000s.

And also even about the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s. There’s this really long arc of Russia’s and the Soviet Union’s wars in Muslim regions that appears to be driving this violent hatred of Russia on the part of ISIS-K.

OK. So ISIS-K is pointing not only to Russia’s actions in Syria but actually further back into Russian history, even Soviet history, to its war in Chechnya and then to the Soviet’s war in Afghanistan. Yet Putin in his speech ignores the group entirely and instead points in the direction of Ukraine. Is there a chance that this attack could have been carried out by Ukraine?

Well, look. It is true that Ukraine has carried out attacks inside Russia that put Russian civilians at risk. There have been several bombings that American officials have ascribed to parts of the Ukrainian government. Perhaps most famously, there was the bombing that killed Darya Dugina, the daughter of a leading Russian ultranationalist back in the summer of 2022.

That was a bombing that happened just outside Moscow. And of course, there have been various drone strikes by Ukraine against things like Russian energy infrastructure even just in the last few weeks. But we really don’t see any evidence right now of any connection of the Ukrainian state to this attack. US officials tell us they don’t see anything, and we haven’t in our own reporting come across such a connection either.

And there is, of course, the context of the US has said very clearly that they don’t want to see Ukraine carrying out big attacks inside Russia. American officials have said that doing so is counterproductive, could lead to the risk of greater escalation by Putin in his war. And we’re in an extremely sensitive time right now when it comes to US support for Ukraine.

The US, of course, has given all these weapons, tens of billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine. But right now, $60 billion in aid are stuck in US Congress. And you would think that Ukraine wouldn’t want to do anything right now —

That could risk that.

That could risk that. Exactly. I mean, also, let’s just say, I mean, this was an incredibly horrific attack, and we haven’t seen anything from Ukraine in the way they’ve carried themselves in defending against Russia in this war that would make us think they would be capable of doing something like this.

Anton, just to step back for a moment. I mean, it’s interesting because this attack, it really doesn’t remotely fit into Putin’s obsession about where the threat is coming from in the world to Russia, right? His obsession is Ukraine. And this kind of short circuits that.

Absolutely. I mean, Russia has had a real Islamic extremism problem for decades going back to the 1990s to those brutal wars against Chechen separatists that were a big part of Putin coming to power and developing his strongman image.

So it’s really remarkable how we’ve arrived at this turning point here for Putin where he used to be someone who really portrayed himself as the man keeping Russians safe from terrorism. Now the threat of terrorism coming from Islamic extremists doesn’t really fit into that narrative that Putin has because now Putin’s narrative is all about the threat from Ukraine and the West and that the most important thing to do now for Russian national security is to win the war against Ukraine.

And does the security failure here have anything to do with Russia actually being obsessed with Ukraine? Like it’s kind of taken its eye off the ball?

Well, look. The Russian domestic intelligence agency, the FSB, they’re the ones who are supposed to keep the country safe from terrorism. But that has also been the agency that has been charged with asserting control over the territories in Ukraine that Putin has occupied, and the FSB has been spending all this time hunting down dissidents of Putin.

Just a few hours before the attack on Friday, Russia officially classified the so-called LGBT movement, as they put it, on their list of terrorists and extremists. So terrorists in the current Putin narrative are anyone who disagrees with him, who criticizes the war, and who doesn’t fit into the Kremlin’s conception of so-called traditional values, which has become such a big Putin talking point.

So the FSB has been pretty busy but not in terms of Islamic terrorism. In terms of its own people.

Exactly. We don’t know for sure obviously how the FSB is apportioning its resources, but there’s a lot of reason to believe that as the leadership of that organization has been looking at Putin’s priorities in Ukraine and in terms of cracking down on dissent domestically, they could well have lost sight of the risks of actual terrorism inside Russia.

Which is pretty remarkable, right, Anton? Because you and I know and we’ve spoken a lot about on the show, a big part of the reason that Putin actually appeals, his argument to Russians is that he’s the security guy. Think what you will about him. He’s the guy who’s fundamentally going to keep you safe. And here we have this attack.

That’s right. And so he needs to continue making the case that he knows how to keep Russia safe. And that’s why my colleagues and I have been watching a lot of Russian state TV this weekend. And this ISIS claim of responsibility barely comes up. And when it does come up, it’s often being referred to as fake news. Instead, Russian propaganda is already assuming that it was Ukraine and the West that did this. We’ll see if the Russian public buys that.

But if you look at the way the last two years have gone in Russia, I think you have to draw the conclusion that Russian propaganda is extremely powerful. And I think if this message continues, it’s quite likely that very many Russians will believe that Ukraine and the West had something to do with this attack.

And so the worry now, as we look ahead, is that Putin could end up using this to try to escalate his war even further, which shows us why this is such a tenuous and perilous moment because at the same time, this attack reminds us that Russia faces other security risks. And as Putin deepens that conflict with the West, he may be doing so at the cost of introducing even more instability inside the country.

Anton, thank you.

Thank you, Sabrina.

Late Sunday night, the four men suspected of carrying out the concert hall attack were arraigned in a court in Moscow and charged with committing an act of terrorism. All four are from Tajikistan but worked as migrant laborers in Russia. They range in age from 19 to 32 and face a maximum sentence of life in prison. Also on Sunday, Russian authorities said that 137 bodies had been recovered from the charred remains of the concert hall, including those of three children.

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In January, I underwent major abdominal surgery in London, and at the time, it was thought that my condition was non-cancerous. The surgery was successful. However, tests after the operation found cancer had been present.

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This, of course, came as a huge shock, and William and I have been doing everything we can to process and manage this privately.

In her message, Middleton did not say what kind of cancer. She had or how far it had progressed but emphasized that the diagnosis has required meaningful time to process.

It has taken me time to recover from major surgery in order to start my treatment. But most importantly, it has taken us time to explain everything to George, Charlotte, and Louis in a way that’s appropriate for them and to reassure them that I’m going to be OK.

Today’s episode was produced by Will Reid and Rachelle Bonja. It was edited by Patricia Willens, contains original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano, and translations by Milana Mirzayeva and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Special thanks to Eric Schmitt and Valerie Hopkins. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. See you tomorrow.

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Warning: this episode contains descriptions of violence.

More than a hundred people died and scores more were wounded on Friday night in a terrorist attack on a concert hall near Moscow — the deadliest such attack in Russia in decades.

Anton Troianovski, the Moscow bureau chief for The Times, discusses the uncomfortable question the assault raises for Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin: Has his focus on the war in Ukraine left his country more vulnerable to other threats?

On today’s episode

Anton Troianovski , the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times.

In the foreground is a large pile of flowers. In the background is a crowd adding more flowers to the pile.

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In Russia, fingers point anywhere but at ISIS for the concert hall attack.

The attack shatters Mr. Putin’s security promise to Russians.

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We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.

Translations by Milana Mazaeva .

Special thanks to Eric Schmitt and Valerie Hopkins .

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson and Nina Lassam.

Anton Troianovski is the Moscow bureau chief for The Times. He writes about Russia, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. More about Anton Troianovski

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World War II showed that war must be avoided at all costs and democracies must resist aggression, says Stanford historian

Churchill and the Rhineland: “They Had Only to Act to Win”

The Rhineland challenge

“Confronted by terrible circumstances”

Would France march?

Baldwin’s reluctance

“No fresh perplexities”

Churchill as peacemaker

Collective Security

Did Churchill waver?

Prudence and statesmanship

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