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By Root 1109 0

War, General von Blomberg, and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, General von Fritsch, were both sacked. It was a particularly sordid business, designed not only to replace the commanders, but also to strike at the army’s sense of self. Blomberg was a widower; he made a second marriage, to his secretary; it turned out she had once been arrested for prostitution. The misalliance was sufficiently shocking, in the social context of the German officer class and 1938, to cause Blomberg’s fall. Von Fritsch, next in line, was accused of homosexuality. The matter was allowed to drag on for some weeks. While the army fumed and fretted about its honor, Hitler made a clean sweep of the upper echelons. He also annexed Austria, so that his personal stock skyrocketed. By the time von Fritsch was cleared, the Army High Command was now dominated by Hitler’s representative, Keitel, and its Commander-in-Chief was General von Brauchitsch. Twist and turn as it might from then on to escape, the army was securely in Hitler’s pocket. As for Fritsch, a colonel-general leading an artillery regiment, he was killed by a Polish machine gun in September of 1939.

In the words of the slogan, Germany was now truly, Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Fuehrer (“One state, one people, one leader”). Hitler was ready to roll.

Clouds were gathering in Asia as well as in Europe. Like Italy, Japan had been an Allied power and one of the victors in World War I. She had not been invited in, but had insisted on joining, and the Japanese had used war as an opportunity to take over the scattered but useful German imperial holdings in the north Pacific and on the Chinese mainland. Japanese expansion went back actually before World War I, to the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. She was interested especially in the Korean Peninsula, the Yellow Sea, and the great underdeveloped hinterland of Manchuria. Her ambitions had brought conflict with China, and then with Russia, both of whom she was in the process of displacing. World War I led to a boom in the Japanese economy and unrest after it ended. Overpopulated and over-productive, the Japanese believed they needed room for economic exploitation and for territorial expansion.

Like most of the secondary powers, they left Versailles dissatisfied. Japan wanted to insert in the League Covenant a statement on racial equality, but the other powers refused this. In 1920, Japan took over as formal mandates the islands granted to her by the League—the Carolines, Marshalls, and Marianas—mere names on the map at that time, and not nearly as much as Japan wanted. The country felt humiliated at being only three to five of the United States and Britain in the naval treaties, and further offended by the American policy in the twenties of exclusion of Japanese immigration on the West Coast.

By the late twenties a short era of liberalism in Japan was coming to an end. Emperor Hirohito acceded to the throne in 1926, marking the beginning of the Showa period. The population was increasing by more than a million a year, to more than sixty million by 1930. In a desperate search for solutions to their national problems, the Japanese turned increasingly to militarism and the manly virtues that so strongly infused the national character anyway. Army men were coming more and more to the forefront, as seems to be a norm in a crisis period.

In 1931, soldiers of the Kwangtung Army were involved in the “Mukden incident.” This army, garrisoning the Liaotung Peninsula and Port Arthur, fruit of the Russo-Japanese War, was the most militaristic of all the forces of Japan. When several soldiers on night maneuvers were hurt in an explosion, the Japanese used it as an excuse to invade the Chinese-held territories of Manchuria. The weak Chinese forces were able to offer no resistance and withdrew to the south, toward China proper. The Chinese responded with a boycott on Japanese imports, but the army went ahead, and by early 1932 had occupied most of Manchuria. In February of 1932, Japan announced the independence of a new