Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [23]
Rather than thinking of intervention, the United States thought more in terms of how to stay clear of the mess. In August of 1935, in February of 1936, and definitively in May of 1937, Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts. They prohibited the export of arms and ammunition to belligerents. Strategic materials designated as such by the President had to be paid for in cash before leaving the United States, and they had to be carried in foreign ships, rather than U. S.-flag vessels. All other materials must be paid for in cash. No American citizen was to take passage on the ship of a belligerent, and there were to be no American loans to any state at war.
The acts illustrated graphically how the Americans thought they had been dragged into World War I, and even more important, how the United States had no intention of being led down the garden path a second time. If Adolf Hitler, out of ignorance, thought he could count the United States out, most Americans completely agreed with him. Once burned, twice shy.
5. The Prewar Series of Crises
BY EARLY 1938, Adolf Hitler had put the German house in order. He had assessed the opposition, internal and external, and found it weak and vacillating. He had retaken the Rhineland, and elicited no real response. He was now ready for greater things.
It is customary to look at the series of crises that preceded World War II, and blame them almost exclusively on Hitler and his ambitions. For nearly a generation after the war, the simplest explanation of why World War II happened was that Hitler caused it. It is only fair to point out that since the sixties there has been considerable challenge, and some revision, to this thesis. The challenge came with an intriguing book by the eminent British historian A. J. P. Taylor called The Origins of the Second World War. Taylor’s argument, somewhat oversimplified, was that Hitler was doing what politicians are supposed to do, i.e., he was asserting the interests of his state. It was therefore the duty of the other European politicians, especially Prime Minister Chamberlain in Britain and Premier Daladier in France, to assert the claims of their states equally forcefully. Taking the view that politics is basically amoral, there was little difference between Hitler and the others, and the basic fault—and therefore the blame for causing World War II—lay not in Hitler’s overassertion of Germany’s status but in Daladier and Chamberlain’s underassertion of France and Britain’s status. Needless to say, this view was widely attacked in Britain, France, and the United States. It was rather more welcome in Germany. Its importance lay in the fact that it did spur a great deal of argument, ranging from table-thumping to the more philosophical proposition that there are moral ends to politics after all, and out of this argument came a perhaps more balanced view of the causes, and especially their complexity, of World War II. One can still assert that Hitler did cause the war, but no longer so dogmatically or so unqualifiedly. He has become a cause rather than the cause.
The first overt external act on the road to war was the takeover of Austria, the Anschluss of early 1938. The nation of Austria was a strange creation, with a rather bizarre history. In 1272, at the end of the Great Interregnum in German history, the crown of the German empire was given to an obscure Austrian nobleman, Rudolf of Hapsburg. He and his descendants built up a great medieval empire, a conglomeration of peoples and territories that lasted until 1806 when Napoleon tore it apart. At its