Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [3]
The disarmament of Germany was predicated on the idea that there would be a general disarmament after World War I. The prewar arms race was widely regarded as one of the major contributing causes to the Great War, and there was a strong movement to get rid of arms and armaments manufacturers—the “merchants of death”—after the war ended. This movement resulted in the usual series of conferences.
The most famous of these was probably the Washington Conference of 1922. Most of the disarmament movement came to be concentrated on naval strengths. This was ironic, because the mythology of militarism tends to regard navies as defensive and democratic, and armies as offensive and autocratic. Perhaps because ships are more visible than tanks, perhaps because they are more readily countable, more likely because the leaders of the movement were the British and the Americans, both naval powers, the conferences generally dealt with naval strengths first.
The Washington Conference was held essentially because the British could not afford a naval race with the United States. The American government, before it got involved in World War I, had launched a massive naval-building program. During the war this had been shelved, and the United States built escort vessels rather than battleships to beat the submarine menace. After the war, the big-ship building program was dusted off, and work on the battleships was begun again. The British protested vehemently; they had not defeated Germany only to end up playing second fiddle to the United States. Finally, a conference was convened at Washington, to which all the major naval powers were invited.
Some small progress was made. The conference agreed to the famous 5:5:3 ratio for capital-ship tonnage—the United States and Britain being 5, the Japanese 3. France and Italy both came out as 1.75; neither liked the idea. There was also an agreement that the United States would not fortify its holdings in the Pacific west of Hawaii, nor the British east of Singapore, a concession to Japanese pride and the British and American taxpayer that would be paid for in 1942.
In 1927, the Allied Control Commission stopped overseeing Germany. Another naval conference was held at London in 1930. The idea at this one was to extend the 5:5:3 ratio to other classes of vessels, but not much was accomplished. The British, Americans, and Japanese all had different imperial requirements, and wanted different classes and types of ships to meet them. Some watered-down provisions were accepted. The Russian delegation, led by Maxim Litvinov, proposed complete and immediate disarmament for everybody; this was rejected out of hand as a Bolshevik trick.
In 1932, a commission of the League of Nations produced a preparatory draft for a general scheme of disarmament. The proposal, however, left untouched all previous treaties that dealt with arms limitations. Among these, the French insisted on including the Versailles treaty, with its provisions about German strengths. This meant there could be no German rearmament; that meant there could be no equality of arms, and that in turn, by the convoluted logic of politics, meant there could be no disarmament.
There was another try in 1935, but by then Hitler was in power in Germany, and the talk was more of the need for rearmament, rather than disarmament. For practical purposes the movement was dead. Strengths and weapons-systems would now increase instead of decrease. How far this would go, and what direction it might take in any given state depended upon a variety of factors: geographical, economic, and political. For in pre-World War II Europe, each state had its own