Great Powers Paid Price for 'Peace'

Insight | March 27, 2003 | Stephen Goode

Even before they were over, people started calling the 1930s "the locust years." Sir Thomas Inskip, Britain's minister for coordination of defense at the time and a man who knew his Bible, first used the phrase, borrowing it from the Old Testament prophet Joel, who described a hard and ugly era as "The years that the locust hath eaten."

Winston Churchill picked the phrase up for The Gathering Storm, his book on the prelude to World War II. For Churchill, it described the years 1931 to 1935, when in the great English statesman's memorable words, "the entire situation on the continent of Europe was reversed" for the worse. It was a "dismal period" when "horrors and miseries ... beyond comparison in human experience" became inevitable, Churchill wrote.

What rankled -- no, what deeply frustrated and angered -- Churchill and Inskip about the 1930s was that both men believed the great powers of the time (Great Britain, France and the United States) could have taken steps during those years that would have averted World War II and its horrors. But the great powers did not take those steps. Indeed, they did very little at all to tame the aggression of the world's three rogue nations of that day -- Japan, Italy and Germany. Each of these bellicose countries might have been reined in, many historians now believe, long before they visited on the globe the vast and horrible disaster that was World War II.

The great powers did more than merely fail to act. French, British and U.S. leaders often looked the other way, ignoring clear signs of the impending horror. They hoped, perhaps, that what was not seen and acknowledged would go away and not have to be dealt with even by force of character.

Or they were obsessed with an equally dangerous notion, a belief -- against all evidence and common sense -- that by disarmament and through frequent calls for world peace they could persuade the aggressive powers to forget their ambitions, sheathe their swords and make war no more. Instead those powers chose to rearm, grew militarily strong and answered every call for peace and disarmament with stunning acts of aggression that should have made their intentions clear to the world but didn't. The United States, pursuing a policy of isolation, stood aloof. In 1935, Congress passed the Neutrality Act to underline that stance.

Today, the willingness with which the West refused to understand the intentions of its enemies is dumbfounding. In the early 1930s, for instance, Churchill was shouted down in Parliament when he described Adolf Hitler's plans for conquest outlined in Mein Kampf.

The same willful ignorance also was astride in France. A Parisian court ordered a translation of Hitler's book destroyed. After that, only expurgated editions of Mein Kampf were to be had in French, presumably free of the German führer's extreme bellicosity and hatred for France.

The antiwar crowd showed a phenomenal capacity to be blind to, or simply not to care about, Hitler's already evident persecution of Jews, which grew ever more ferocious when few spoke up in opposition.

The advocates of disarmament and peace met every example of Hitler's aggressiveness with dismissal. The Treaty of Versailles, which reordered Europe after World War I, was unfair to Germans, they said, and Hitler was just setting things right. Once he got what he wanted, he'd stop, they promised. As for Italy, well it wasn't a serious threat, and Japan simply was too far away to matter.

In his widely admired book Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties, historian Paul Johnson calls the 1930s "an era of international banditry in which the totalitarian states behaved simply in accordance with their military means." Weak when the decade began, but ferociously ambitious, Japan, Germany and Italy were powerful at its end. By 1937, Germany had 800 bombers to Great Britain's 48. That same year observers calculated that the German and Italian air forces could drop 600 tons of bombs a day on anyone who stood in the way of their ambitions.

In the Far East, Japan had built an impressive war machine whose great power already had been unleashed on Manchuria and China and soon would be visited on Pearl Harbor. What was tragic was that France, Great Britain and the United States had stood by while these nations grew strong, and then had to fight them after they had risen to their most potent and the West was at its weakest.

The desire for peace was understandable, of course, particularly in France. During the 51 months of World War I, between 1914 and 1918, an average of 1,000 Frenchmen were killed each day of the war, a death toll higher than that of any other combatant nation. Altogether, 1.4 million Frenchmen lost their lives. Of the 6.5 million French soldiers who survived the war, half were in some way injured. But while those horrible figures help us comprehend the French reluctance to go to war, they hardly explain why the country stood completely paralyzed by the threat of Hitler's Germany and could not find the wherewithal to say "no" to the German dictator when saying "no" might have meant something.

Indeed, it all began in far-off Asia. The first world crisis the great powers failed to meet was Japan's invasion of Manchuria, a province of China, in 1931. Early the next year, Japan created out of Manchuria the puppet state of Manchukuo and proceeded to carry its war of aggression deeply into China.

The Republic of China was a member of the League of Nations, the U.N.-like organization created at the end of World War I. The Japanese invasion violated League of Nations rules, and Great Britain called for an inquiry. An inquiry was forthcoming -- but that was all.

The League of Nations declined to recognize Manchukuo, but it also refused to place any sanctions on Japan's behavior, in part because neither Great Britain nor any other member nation was strong enough to enforce them. The United States had not joined the League of Nations, nor did it support sanctions. The result: Japan continued to occupy Manchukuo and to make war in China. And it removed itself from membership in the League.

The failure to put an end to Japanese aggression had ramifications beyond the Far East. Benito Mussolini, dictator in Italy since 1922, noted the failure of the League of Nations to say "no" to Japan. In October 1935, Italy invaded Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia), creating the second major crisis of the 1930s. His aim was to create an overseas Italian empire and avenge the Italian failure 40 years earlier to seize the African country, an effort in which 5,000 Italians lost their lives at Aduwa.


World opinion was outraged when Italy attacked Abyssinia. Here was a modern European country armed with modern weapons, including poison gas, warring against a desperately poor nation that could in no way match Italy's firepower. Abyssinia was a member of the League of Nations and its emperor, Haile Selassie, made an eloquent and passionate appeal for League help. But none was forthcoming. Great Britain urged sanctions. But Pierre Laval, the French foreign minister, didn't want to antagonize Italy, and the only kind of sanctions that would have mattered -- sanctions on oil that would have starved oil-poor Italy -- never were brought to bear. Mussolini remained in Abyssinia.

But the worst failure of the great powers was their failure to check the power of Germany when they could. Hitler's aims were clear. There was, first of all, Mein Kampf. Then there were his actions. In 1933, he removed Germany from the League of Nations. In 1935, he repudiated the Versailles Treaty. But it was his March 7, 1936, reoccupation of the Rhineland that was his most daring act.

Hitler had watched as the world did nothing when Japan took provinces of mainland China and Italy seized its African province. His goal, which he openly had declared many times, was to restore Germany's pre-World War I greatness -- a greatness that had been stolen from it unfairly, he contended, by Jews and others who had betrayed Germany. So he took the Rhineland area, where France and Germany meet, which had been neutralized after World War I. There were no German troops there until, suddenly, there were many -- right up next to France. What's more, once the Rhineland had been reoccupied, Hitler began to rearm Germany with a vengeance.

Once again, nothing was done. Said Hitler at the time, no doubt smugly, accurately having read the pusillanimity of the West: "If the French had marched into the Rhineland we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs."

It's an assessment with which many historians agree. Similarly, many historians believe that Japan might have been stopped in 1932 if Britain and the United States together had stood up against her aggression. And many argue Mussolini could have been nipped in the bud had France and Great Britain joined in combination to say "no" to the conquest of Abyssinia.

Why the failure to say "no"? Why the inability to act together for common defense? In part the war-weariness engendered by World War I was to blame. In part it was the the economic problems caused by the Great Depression. But a major player was the pacifist movement of the 1930s, and the havoc it created cannot be overestimated. Hitler, Mussolini and the military leaders of Japan took comfort in the pacifism of the Western nations and made cynical use of it to advance their own causes. Instead of bowing before the moral superiority the pacifists claimed for themselves, the aggressor nations interpreted pacifism as weakness and exploited it.

In February 1933 the venerable debating group known as the Oxford Union famously voted 275-153 in favor of a motion that declared that, "This House refuses to fight for King and country." Coming from students at a great university, noted Churchill, it was likely to plant "the idea of a decadent, degenerate Britain" in Germany, Italy, Japan and with anyone else who wished Britain ill.

It wasn't just students who were pacifists. Writing to a party member running for office in early 1933, British Labour Party leader George Lansbury described what he would do if he held power: "I would close every recruiting station, disband the army and disarm the air force. I would abolish the whole dreadful equipment of war and say to the world: 'Do your worst.'" Clement Attlee, who replaced Lansbury as head of Labour later that year, agreed: "We are unalterably opposed to anything in the nature of rearmament."

Prominent English clerics joined in. During the Manchurian crisis, three pastors -- the Revs. Herbert Grey, Maude Royden and Dick Sheppard -- offered to go to Manchuria and place themselves unarmed between the opposing forces.

William Temple, the Anglican archbishop of York, observed that in his opinion Hitler was making "a great contribution to the secure establishment of peace." The Methodist Rev. Donald Soper averred that "pacifism contains a spiritual force strong enough to repel an invader," a message that perhaps the Manchurians and Abyssinians might have made use of had they known it before the Japanese and Italian invasion of their countries. Sheppard, who had wanted to be a human shield in Manchuria, later founded the Peace Pledge Union, a group that collected signatures from well-known literary figures who had concluded that peace should be given a chance. Among those who signed were Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon and Vera Brittain.

Pacifism held similar powerful sway in France. Indeed, it was a Frenchman who had invented the words "pacifism" and "pacifist" in the 1890s. At the Universal Peace Congress held in Glasgow they were officially adopted as the words of the movement. After the Oxford Union had voted to refuse to fight for king and country in 1933, students in France offered similar sentiments. When laying a wreath at France's War Memorial in May 1934, a group of normaliens -- students at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, France's most prestigious school -- made use of the the Oxford words. The following year, nearly 200 normaliens and other students staged a protest against the two-year compulsory military service some responsible government leaders were trying to establish.

Some of the most effective pacifists were schoolteachers. French schoolteachers were among those whose numbers had been decimated in World War I. Between the wars, their ranks having lost the bravest and best, the shirkers and replacements were among the most outspoken of those advocating disarmament and peace at any cost.

Textbooks underwent revision to reflect pacifist views and in some cases were outright rejected if regarded as too nationalistic. The unions joined in the movement. "Most teachers' unions were dedicated to warning children away from chauvinism and any glorification of war," Eugen Weber says in his book, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s. "Talk of heroism had been overdone; now it was dismissed as a big lie."

Weber, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles, notes that while the books labored to instill a respect for mankind and a love for peace they also rejected images of Germany as militaristic and bellicose, not wanting to instill prejudice against France's neighbor.

Even more striking, notes Weber, French children, who once were taught about the glory of France and to relish the nation's martial past, now were "being taken, class by class, to see antiwar films and then invited to give their impressions." Weber cites two examples: an 11-year-old boy who in 1937 declared that "war is a scourge"; in the same year, one of the students asked their opinions was a 9-year-old girl who said, "War is a horror." Both statements of course are absolutely true but beside the point when a nation is faced with catastrophe, Weber notes.

The British at least had Churchill, who warned about the menace posed by Japan, Italy and Germany throughout the 1930s. France had no one of similar stature. The French left (with some exceptions) was riddled with pacifism. And the French right, with its frequent anti-Semitism, chose to see Hitler, that most anti-Semitic of anti-Semites, as less of an evil than he appeared to many others throughout the world.

Even as late as 1938 many still believed peace possible, despite all evidence to the contrary. In September of that year, French postal and teachers' unions organized a petition that declared: "We want no war!" It was signed by 150,000 peace advocates.

When British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from his meeting with Hitler and other world leaders at Munich in the fall of 1938, he famously promised that the settlement he had secured with "Herr Hitler" offered "peace in our time." He was wrong. That promise made Chamberlain and the umbrella with which he seemed always to be photographed the very symbol of appeasement. Within a year, World War II had begun.

Could that war have been avoided? Many are certain it could have. No less a figure than Pope Pius XI told the French ambassador to the Vatican that if the French had acted at the time Germany reoccupied the Rhineland, Hitler would have been stopped. And the Germans themselves thought so, too.

It is interesting to see how much Hitler was betting on the unwillingness of Great Britain, France or the United States to offer him serious challenge. At a meeting with chief aides in February 1933, the month after he became chancellor of Germany, Hitler promised to overthrow the Treaty of Versailles. He also promised to make the Third Reich the strongest nation in the world. Hitler told aides that his plans would meet their biggest test when he began to rearm Germany. It was then, he said, that "we shall see if France has statesmen. If she does, she will not grant us time, but will jump on us."

France had no nerve. It had no statesmen.

The West's spectacular failure of nerve came up again among Nazi leaders in April 1940 -- just before Germany's invasion of Norway -- when Joseph Goebbels met with a carefully selected group of German journalists. Hitler's minister for propaganda told the reporters that the Nazis could have been stopped at several points. The Weimar Republic (the German government that preceded Hitler) might have "suppressed us in 1925 -- but didn't." That's exactly how it was in foreign policy, too, Goebbels went on. "In 1933, a French premier ought to have said, and if I had been the French premier, I would have said it: 'The new Reich chancellor is the man who wrote Mein Kampf, which says this and that. This man cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we march!'"

But, Goebbels noted, with what must have been a mixture of amazement and glee, "They didn't do it. They left us alone and they let us slip through the risky zone, and we were able to sail around all dangerous reefs." Then an incredulous Goebbels concluded: "And when we were done and better armed -- better armed than they were -- then they started the war!"

Surely one of the most poignant regrets ever expressed was written in the late-1930s by one prominent French man of letters to another: "We should have gone to war at the end of 1935 [just before Hitler's occupation of the Rhineland], and we would have had 50 years of peace."

Yes, perhaps. But more importantly, Hitler would have been checked.