This is a survey of modern history from a global perspective. Part Two begins early in the twentieth century, as older ways of doing things and habits of thought give way. What follows is an era of cataclysmic struggles over what ideas and institutions will take their place. The course concludes in the present day, as communities everywhere are transitioning into a new era of world history. Again we work hard to grasp what is happening and ask: Why? Again we are drawn to pivotal choices made at key moments by individuals and communities.
Choosing Global War
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En provenance du cours de University of Virginia
The Modern World, Part Two: Global History since 1910
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À partir de la leçon
Total War and Aftermath (1940-1950)
Rencontrer les enseignants
Philip ZelikowWhite Burkett Miller Professor of History
Welcome back.
I'm going to start this week by focusing on a period
of only about a year and a half in this presentation,
between about June 1940 and the end of 1941.
This is a period in which the Second World War is transformed.
Think about it.
Beginning of this period, you've got two regional wars.
There is a war going on in Europe, the dictators are winning.
There is a war going on in East Asia.
Actually, that one started in 1937, with the Japanese all-out assault on China.
The dictators are winning there, though it's not over yet.
So, two big regional wars going on.
In this year and a half, between the middle of 1940 and the end of �41,
these two wars will merge, the United States
and the Soviet Union, both of which were not
in the war, are fully in it.
The entire world, and all the inhabited continents, are pulled into the fight.
How did this happen? You start in June 1940.
I said this was the dawn of a new era.
The totalitarian states are victorious all around.
The totalitarians between them hold the balance of world power.
Frankly, they can drive the action,
unless they start fighting each other, perhaps out of complacency.
Which is, thank goodness for the democracies,
precisely what they do.
How did that happen?
Let's break down, again, choices that will change the course of world history
that are made in a few world capitals. Starting with Berlin.
What's happening in Berlin? Well, they have ideas.
Remember Hitler's big ideas are about race
and space, in German lebensraum, living room,
in which the Germans are going to create
a gigantic Eurasian empire, mainly by expanding eastward at
the expense first of these countries in Eastern
Europe, but also looking outward at the Soviet Union,
subjugating and enslaving the inferior peoples, the Slavs,
pushing away and somehow liquidating his mortal
enemy, the Jews, and then, if necessary,
fighting his enemies in the West who will try to keep him from doing that.
So in the neighborhood of strategy, what are the big strategic ideas?
Well one big idea would be concentrate on
beating the British, concentrate on occupying their possessions,
running into the Middle East, Southwest Asia, work
with your Soviet allies to increase pressure on them.
Actually, the Italians, the Japanese, they all actually urged
Hitler to maybe even form a grand coalition, maybe
even including the Soviets in a cooperative effort in
which they'll start carving up the world between them.
But, of course, to Hitler, this kind of thinking conflicts
with his ideas about putting race and space foremost
and his itch to have that final reckoning with the Soviet Union,
with the Bolsheviks and the Jews that are over there to the East.
So what then is the process by which Hitler makes these fateful choices?
Well, there is a consultative process.
He needs his military to write plans.
But, this sure is a process dominated by one man.
But when we analyze these key choices, I've explained again and again,
it's useful to understand how people put
together their policy options, if you will.
Even if they know what it is they want
to do, they have to formulate some absolutely critical assessments.
So what are the key action judgments that the German High Command has to make?
First, okay, you want to attack the Soviet Union.
Well, is it feasible, militarily feasible?
That really is a key
assessment done by the German army.
They started doing this work in the summer
of 1940 for Hitler after the fall of France.
And a key assessment that the German army takes the lead in forming is
that they can beat the Soviets, indeed that they can beat them rapidly.
Are they confident? Yes.
Are they perhaps even a little bit overconfident?
Of course, they look back at what happened with France.
They had doubted their chances there.
The F�hrer�s wisdom had turned out to be prescient.
The F�hrer�s judgment now is something to which they're anxious to defer.
But they're also caught up in a sense of
confidence, even hubris, about what they've achieved so far.
That's their professional military judgment.
But there are other judgments that are going on.
Like how hard will it be to beat the British?
Because they're making this choice between
concentrating on the Soviets or concentrating on
the British, and another key assessment is the British problem is a difficult one.
Well, at least for now.
The Germans, in effect, launch a massive probe to check Britain's defenses.
To invade Britain, they've got to cross the English Channel.
The British army has lost a lot of it's heavy equipment.
It's relatively weak.
But, you have to cross that English Channel to get at it.
To cross the English Channel, the Germans have to control
the skies or else the British navy will block them.
If they can control the skies, they can sink the
British ships.
To control the skies, they have to beat the Royal Air Force.
What ensues, then, is a battle over Britain,
the Battle of Britain, fought in the skies
over England in the late summer and fall
of 1940, that turns out to be very important.
The German air force, the British air force lose
thousands of machines and pilots battling in the skies.
Fundamentally, the
German effort to knock out the Royal Air Force fails.
As Winston Churchill said, <Never in the course of human
events have so many owed so much to so few.>
And frustrated, and resentful, especially now that the British
are launching their own little pin prick bombing raids
into Germany, the Germans begin the wholesale bombing of
British cities, including London, beginning of the fall of 1940.
But in doing that, it's also a way of saying we're not
worrying so much about trying to get ready to invade Britain any more.
Though the British are still extremely worried about that danger well into 1941.
Instead, though, Hitler's primary attention is already
shifting away from England as he's focusing
more and more on his hopes for a plan to get at the Soviets.
He's made a tentative decision to move in that
direction by the end of July 1940, but his intentions harden in the
second half of 1940 to full determination by the end of the year.
Now it's time to look very hard
at the plans of Germany's critical strategic partner:
the Japanese, their allies in Tokyo.
They, too, have ideas about what it is they want to achieve.
That powerful
pan-Asian empire, in which Japan will, of
course, be the first among the Asian equals.
That empire will be based on huge
possessions on the Chinese mainland and perhaps even
on raw materials that might be available in
Southeast Asia in the old European colonies there.
That means the Japanese have to look at their strategies.
The Japanese hate the Soviet Union.
In fact, they'd had big border clashes with the Soviets in 1939, as
both sides tested each other's strength and the Japanese got a bloody nose.
The Japanese, though, were looking for their chance maybe to
get at the Soviets but, that's a tough nut.
In 1940, they're looking more at opportunities elsewhere,
in China and in Southeast Asia. They have a decision to make.
Do we go North against the Soviets?
Do we just concentrate on China?
Or do we also plunge south and try to pick
up some other low hanging fruit that might be there.
The Japanese also have a process for making decisions.
But there's no clear dictator who's in charge like there is in Berlin.
Instead their process is a highly bureaucratic
one, dominated above all by arguments between
their army and their navy, and then
the bureaucracies inside both of those huge organizations.
Deadlocked, both among them and between them, about what they
should do, it's very difficult for them to arrive at decisions.
The civilian rulers are in
favor of some sort of expansion, but people
like Prince Konoe are trying to tread very
cautiously for fear of getting into a war
with the United States, which he does not want.
So what are the key assessments in Tokyo in 1940?
First,
Germany's fortunes are rising. That's the side you want to be on.
That's the model they want to follow. China, frustrating.
They feel like the Chinese already should've surrendered by
now but they keep staying on in the war.
And the Japanese are irritated.
They think the only reason the Chinese keep staying in the
war is because people like the Americans and maybe the British
let supplies flow into them and keep their hopes alive.
That bothers them a lot.
China is swallowing up huge resources of the Japanese
empire and they can't bring it to a definitive conclusion.
Meanwhile, another key assessment, my goodness
look at the opportunities in Southeast Asia.
Why look at the Dutch East Indies, and where is the Dutch government right now?
Oh, sitting in exile in London.
And where's the French government right now?
Well, there's a German puppet government in Vichy, and
there's a French government in exile also in London.
So French Indochina looks ripe.
As for the British, well they're battered and overstretched.
So all of their rich, material possessions in Malaya and even
the naval base of Singapore might be open for the picking.
Their other key assessment, though, is, the big obstacle
to our plans now is the United States of America.
And the American problem for the Japanese, all
through 1940, is just a really difficult one.
They make a tentative first move.
They start moving into the northern part of French Indochina, around Hanoi.
The Americans already react with some moderate sanctions on the Japanese,
almost as a warning shot.
The stalemate in Tokyo over what to do next is
going to continue all the way into the summer of 1941.
And what
about the United States of America? This was a really divided country.
I'm struck, I read the diaries of the American
historian Arthur Schlesinger, who was a young man in 1940.
He'd lived through the huge protests and arguments over the Vietnam War later on.
But to Schlesinger, looking back on it, the protests
in the Vietnam War, how divided the country was then,
still not comparable to how bitterly and deeply America had been
divided in his youth, in this year, 1940 and in 1941.
The most intense political arguments of his entire lifetime as he remembers it.
Because there was a large group of Americans who believed,
passionately, that America had to stand up to the dictatorships.
And there was another really large group of Americans who believed passionately
that the Americans needed to stay out of those wars,
and in particular needed to stay out of the European war.
Indeed, those Americans formed an America
First Committee that had enormous public
support, including from some of the best and brightest of the United States.
Here is an example of an America First Rally.
And you can see American flags, American
flag bunting, hung everywhere before the crowd.
Concentrate on the United States, don't be the servant of the British.
Irish Americans who hated British were supporters staying out of the war.
The America Firsters crossed all party lines.
One important factor to keep in mind about the
American people, who had really become more isolationist after
the Depression hit in the 1930s,
is that they were deeply influenced by their reading of history.
Their reading of history was the reading of the history of World War One.
They looked back in the 1930s on World War One,
the way many Americans now look back on the Vietnam War.
They look back on that as having been a huge mistake.
And wanted to be sure we didn't do anything
that would get us involved in a conflict like
that again.
So they passed lots of laws, Neutrality Acts
to keep America from loaning money, from shipping arms,
to be sure that World War One was not going to happen again.
As you can see, memories of history, recent
history, including the First World War, are in
the heads of people in a lot of capitals in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
But the fall of France in June 1940 had been a terrific shock.
In fact, Roosevelt gave his great speech talking about
that shock right here where I'm sitting in Charlottesville, Virginia.
In his Charlottesville address, in the first week of June 1940, he made
it clear that America could not really be neutral in this kind of conflict.
America wasn't going to intervene militarily,
but it did care who won the war.
And it was going to do what it could to help the Allies
against the dictatorships. >> We will extend to the opponents
of force the material resources of this nation.
[APPLAUSE]. And at the same time, we will harness
and speed up the use of those resources in order
that we, ourselves, and the Americas,
may have equipment and training equal to the
task of any emergency and every defense. [SOUND].
>> Roosevelt then did this extraordinary thing.
He fired his Secretary of War. He fired his Secretary of the Navy.
And he reaches out and
forms a national unity of government.
Not too dissimilar from what the British are doing in London.
He takes the man who had been Herbert Hoover�s Republican Secretary of
State in the early 1930s, Henry Stimson, makes him the Secretary of War.
He takes the man who had been the Republican vice presidential candidate in
the last election, in 1936, Knox, and makes him the Secretary of the Navy.
In other
words, he puts two of the most prominent Republican
statesmen in America in charge of America's army and
navy as he declares a state of national emergency
and begins rushing to prepare America for what may come.
But part of the great argument in the United States in
1940 and �41 was what was the realistic thing to do?
Nowadays, you often hear lots of arguments in which the
contrast is offered, including by many scholars, between idealists and realists,
wooly-headed idealists and hard-headed realists in foreign policy.
I actually think this is a false distinction.
People on all sides are suffused with value judgments
that condition the way in which they filter reality.
Take this case in 1940 and �41.
You could be a realist and say, we have to
be willing to stand up to the dictators, or you could
be a realist and say, actually our oceans are giving
us a pretty good defense against the dictators.
If we'll stand aside, Hitler and Stalin will bleed each other to death,
and we'll end up being the winners from these foreign
quarrels, just as we've been the winners from foreign quarrels
for most of American history.
In fact, America's leading diplomatic historian at the
time, a man named Samuel Flagg Bemis, made
precisely this argument, that America had shown blessed
wisdom by staying out of these foreign controversies.
Bemis was an isolationist.
Naturally, the American position seemed irritating to all the foreigners.
In Britain, why, Winston Churchill, in his determination
to stand up to Hitler, had bet that America
would be in the war by the end of 1940.
That didn't turn out that way.
Frustrating, they were on his side, but couldn't
quite give him all of the support he needed.
But, from the point of view of the Japanese: they make these moves,
the Americans start putting sanctions on them, very irritating.
From the point of
view of the Germans, the Americans are starting
to try to find ingenious ways of getting military
supplies to their Allied friends, trying to get around
the confining Neutrality Acts passed by the isolationist Congress.
The Germans find that pretty irritating, too.
And Franklin Roosevelt, the President of the
United States, has some pretty serious dilemmas.
He's running for reelection in November 1940.
He's running for a third term, something
no American president had ever done before.
He's doing it because he thinks his presidency
is indispensable in this time of national emergency.
But in running for the presidency, Roosevelt's position is: We've got to
support the Allies, but we're going to stay out of the war.
Fortunately for Roosevelt, his Republican opponents are split in their attitudes.
They nominate a relative internationalist in their convention in the summer of 1940.
Roosevelt wins reelection.
And here is Roosevelt on Election Day in 1940.
Meanwhile, Roosevelt's leading advisers are keenly aware that they
no longer really have the ability to shape events.
They're frantically trying, both to
rebuild America's strength yet spare enough
supplies to get it somehow especially to support
the British and keep them in the fight.
Some of those advisers are men like this man, Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's
right hand man in both domestic affairs and increasingly in foreign policy.
Suffered from a series of illnesses, always in infirm health.
Nonetheless, he's the man masterminding the ways to
get supplies to the Allies short of war.
Fortunately, Hopkins has a terrific relationship with the general
who's the chief of staff of the American army.
This man on the left, General George Marshall.
One of Roosevelt's smartest appointments had been to
pluck the relatively unknown Marshall and put him
into the job as Army Chief of Staff,
alongside this man, the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson,
a stalwart Republican of the old progressive international school,
who had been the Secretary of State for Herbert Hoover.
These three men that I've shown you all assumed that
at some point America would probably get into the war.
America is already putting together staff plans for what
will happen if they do get into the war.
They're Plan D, or Plan Dog, concluded at the end of 1940 concludes:
If and when we do get into the war, Germany has to be our first priority.
Germany
First. It's the most dangerous enemy.
But moving back to Europe, let's study the deadly minuet
that's going on between the two dictators, Stalin and Hitler,
partners under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
They're still working on ways to carve up Eastern Europe
even though that causes some friction between the two of them.
Over on the left you see a map that shows
you the original plan for how they were going to partition
Europe between them.
The areas in orange were going to be in the Soviet's sphere of influence.
The areas in blue were going to be in the German sphere.
And here you see some of the adjustments that are being made.
The Soviets have had their war against Finland and picked up some territory here.
They've grabbed some of Moldavia from Romania.
They've also taken a little piece of Czechoslovakia over here.
The Soviets
have also gone ahead and formally
annexed the briefly independent countries of Estonia
and Latvia, but, irritating the Germans, they've
gone further and annexed Lithuania as well.
The Germans increasingly swallow their anger about
what the Soviets are doing, because they're
quietly making their own plans for what they're going to do to the Soviets.
Down here in the south, there's more going on.
Remember the Italian empire?
Mussolini hadn't given up his ambitions. He crosses the Adriatic and starts a
war to conquer Albania and invade Greece. But, the Greeks fight well.
The Italians are thrown back.
And this country right here, Yugoslavia, has a coup
in March 1941 that puts a pro-Allied government in power.
The Yugoslavs and the Greeks are now both opposed to the Axis.
Hitler makes an adjustment in his plans. The Germans invade the Balkans.
In March and April of 1941, they overrun all of Yugoslavia, all of Greece, and in
May even leap over with parachute forces and
conquer the island of Crete in the Eastern Mediterranean,
inflicting another terrible defeat on the British.
Through all this, what are Stalin's choices?
Should Stalin reach out now to
the British, and try to make common cause with them against Hitler?
Not his idea at all.
Instead what Stalin prefers to do is to continue his war against internal enemies,
including some of the Pols that he's now brought under his dominion.
And then Stalin continues to be a good friend to Nazi Germany,
shipping them tons and tons of raw materials for their war machine.
He doesn't regard himself as naive.
He's building up his armed forces.
He's making preparations for a possible war against the Germans.
But he's not looking for it.
He sends his envoy, Molotov, to Berlin in the
fall of 1940, with all sorts of ideas about a
deal in which the two countries might cooperate together for
expansion at the expense of the British and their allies.
The talks break down, nothing's coming of it.
Stalin's spies are telling him the Germans are getting ready to attack him.
He treats them as being British provocateurs.
So, if you look at the grand strategy of the Axis Powers, it's hard to find one.
Hitler had already made the decision not to work
with the Soviets because he's getting ready to attack them.
In other words, probably the two most powerful countries in the world in 1940
are getting ready to go to war with each other in 1941.
But even among his other allies, the Italians and the Japanese,
Hitler is doing very little to coordinate with them
and come up with some sort of coalition strategy.
From the point of view of the democracies, it did turn out to be a
good thing that someone who was borderline insane
was in charge of the leading enemy power.
Stalin is surprised
when the millions of soldiers the Germans have amassed
on his borders then do attack in June of 1941.
It's astonishing, in a way, that he was surprised.
He understood that the Germans were amassing forces, but couldn't really quite
believe that they would attack him, in part, perhaps, because from his point
of view, it didn't make sense to him that Hitler would want to
attack him at this stage, just when things were going so well for
Nazi Germany and for the Soviet Union.
The German attack on the Soviet Union then creates a whole new dimension
of calculation on the other side of the world for Washington and Tokyo.
And here assessments of what will happen in that
war mean everything for what will happen in East Asia.
See the way these global connections intertwine.
Let's say from the Japanese perspective, you think the Germans are going to win.
Well
one option would be, hey let's join in.
Let's attack the Soviets up from the south,
and help carve up some of the Soviet domains.
Or you can say hey, the Germans are about to win, everything's going our way.
Now is our moment to move south into Southeast Asia.
But either way, the Japanese are predicting
that the Germans are going to win.
The Americans actually
are divided about what's going to happen. But President
Roosevelt, aided by advice from Hopkins, comes
to the conclusion that the Soviets might hold on.
Well that's key, because if the Soviets might hold on, then that creates
a much better chance to be able to defeat Germany in the long run.
Therefore, if your grand strategy is Germany First, keeping the Soviets
in the war becomes a prime interest for the United States.
Hm, how can the Americans help keep the Soviets in the war?
Well, for one thing, they can try to
make sure the Japanese don't attack the Soviets.
So, when the Japanese take advantage of this new situation to move further
south, occupying the rest of French Indochina, the Americans take that as the
occasion to slap extreme sanctions on the Japanese.
Cutting off vitally needed supplies of oil.
That will help deter the Japanese from attacking the Soviet Union, and you
know what, it did help deter the Japanese from attacking the Soviet Union.
If you pull the tiger's
tail real hard, you may get him to turn around and look at you instead.
In the late summer of 1941 then, the Japanese
are debating how to take advantage of this new situation.
Do they move north or do they move south?
The United States has adopted their strategy.
They're going to put sanctions on the
Japanese and deter them from starting a war.
But, that's not the choice the Japanese end up making.
Instead, during a period of deliberations between about mid-
August and early September 1941, they decide it's war,
unless we can settle our differences with
the United States on terms favorable to us.
And it's war with the United States and everybody else
as we move south. The British, the Dutch, we're going to occupy
those areas of Southeast Asia, and since we think the
Americans won't leave us alone, we can't leave the Americans alone.
We have to get ready to attack them, too.
By the way, why were they so worried about the Americans?
And here, it's an ironic consequence of the
fact that the Americans had the Philippines and
also Hawaii. But especially the Philippines.
The Americans have bases in the Philippines.
If you leave those bases alone, they're right there next to Southeast Asia.
If the Americans hadn't been in the Philippines at all,
if McKinley hadn't decided to take them in 1898
and the nearest American bases were thousands of miles away,
it's not clear the Japanese would have felt they had to
go to war with the United States in 1941 at all.
Of course,
on the other hand, if America hadn't
annexed Hawaii in 1898, any capacity for America
to have interfered in events in the Far East would have been almost non-existent.
So as the Japanese make their choice,
this man, Prince Konoe, who had been worried about war with the United
States and feared where Japan was going, is pushed out of the lead.
Instead, taking his place,
is this man, General Hideki Tojo.
He can bring together the army and the navy, finally
reconciling their points of view in a lowest common denominator
position: that it's going to be war moving south, unless
the United States will go along with what the Japanese want.
The last critical stage that will lead to all out global war
is this question: Why no modus vivendi?
That is, the Japanese are reaching out for some sort
of negotiated settlement with the United States to avoid war.
The Americans understand that the Japanese
are looking for something, and the American's
have some interest in getting an agreement with the Japanese that will avoid war.
In other words, they want to find some way of just getting along.
A modus vivendi.
So why can't the Japanese and the Americans find some
way of kicking the can down the road?
Well part of it is, the Japanese want the Americans
to fundamentally go along with their continued expansion in China.
And frankly, from the very start, this issue of Japanese expansion
in China had been something the Americans were unwilling to accept.
The American commitment to China's future is an absolutely
critical cause of American entry into World War Two.
By the way, it's mainly for reasons of American attachment to Chinese hopes.
It's not because of American trade with China.
In fact, American trade with Japan is much larger than
its trade with China in the 1930s and early 1940s.
They also worry about discouraging their British and Chinese allies,
because they're anxious about Allied resolve to stay in the fight.
But the Americans weren't looking to have a war with the Japanese.
After all, remember, the American grand
strategy is Germany First, not Japan First.
So, if the Americans are getting into a war with Japan before they
get into a war with Germany, they've turned their grand strategy upside down.
Meanwhile on the Japanese side, they're just not willing
to compromise on the fundamental geopolitical ambitions of the empire.
And also the Germans are egging them on,
saying yeah, go have a war with the United States.
They've been irritating us a lot, too.
They've been interfering with our submarine
warfare in the Atlantic against the British.
And if you'll get into a war with the United States, we,
the Germans, we'll join in with you, we'll declare war on them, too.
So, no modus vivendi.
Well, that turns out to be really
important, because, for instance, you saw that I
pointed out how important it was that the Japanese thought
that the Germans were winning their war against the Soviet Union.
At the point the Japanese make these key decisions in the fall of 1941,
it's looking pretty good for the Germans in their war against the Soviets.
If those decisions had been kicked down the road for a few months,
say into early 1942, when German prospects
in the Soviet war don't look so good,
would the Japanese
still have made all the same decisions? Hard to say.
The Japanese were faced with a stark choice.
The Americans had placed sanctions on them such that either Japan reconciled
differences and tried to work for more cooperative approach in the Pacific.
Or, if Japan was determined to retain its alliance with Germany, determined
to remain on a path of imperial expansion, it faced the only other
choice available, which was all-out war,
even if the Japanese themselves couldn't quite figure out how,
in the long run, they'd be able to win it.
So the Japanese choose war.
They attack the United States on December 7, 1941.
Several days later, the Germans keep their promise,
and also declare war on the United States, too.
Let's just reflect for a moment on two
key gambles, dice rolls that are being made by the leading powers.
First, they're making a key judgment about the outcome of the German-Soviet war.
If you're sure the Germans are going to win, that's one set of policies.
If you think the Soviets can hold on, another set of policies.
The Japanese have gambled pretty heavily that
the Germans are going to do well there.
The Americans, in turn,
have made some important judgments that the Soviets might hold on.
And the other big gamble is on American capacity.
If the Americans get into the war, just how powerful can they be?
The Japanese are gambling that they can run wild long enough that
the Americans will find it too difficult to recover and get back.
It will take them too long, be too expensive.
The Germans
are gambling that they can knock out the Soviet Union, consolidate their
gains, before a substantial American military power can be brought to bear.
Distantly reminiscent of the gamble the Germans
made at the beginning of 1917, too.
We'll see how those gambles turn out, next time.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
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