Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [4]
2. The European Democracies
IN ANY DISCUSSION of World War II, the first question that arises is why the democracies of Europe did not stop Germany before it was too late. In a sense, this question is no more than the usual Monday-morning quarterbacking. One answer must obviously be that if the democracies knew what lay ahead, and if they knew that they could have stopped Hitler, then of course they would have done so. They knew neither of these things at the time, though perhaps they should have. Hitler had spelled out his program for all the world, provided anyone were sufficiently persevering to wade through Mein Kampf; but like most political testaments, it was not taken seriously until its author was in a position to carry it out. We now have sufficient evidence not only that Hitler could have been stopped, but also that the Western Powers knew he could have been stopped, had they had the will to do it when it could be done short of war. They remained, however, resolutely preoccupied with their own difficulties, of either a general or a specific nature.
In general terms, it is fair to say that the victors of World War I were as demoralized by their victory as the losers were by their defeats. They may even have been more demoralized—they, after all, had won; then they discovered how little their victory had brought them. The costs of winning were enormous, both in material terms and in manpower, and the truth was that relatively few of the great powers of 1914 were able to sustain them.
At the start of the Great War, the myth of the “Russian steamroller” was still alive and well. It was German fear of the increasing power of Russia that had been one of the factors in her decision for war in 1914. Yet by 1916, not only had the steamroller failed to materialize, but Russia was on the verge of collapse, a collapse that occurred dramatically but not surprisingly in 1917. Both Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire followed in 1918 at the end of the war. Though Italy was spared outright military defeat, her political institutions were so strained by war that they did not outlast the immediate aftermath of it. France had neared the edge of the precipice in 1917 when her army mutinied, and when the United States entered the war in the same year, Great Britain was six weeks away from starvation at the hands of the U-boats and even closer to financial bankruptcy. The fact that France and Britain did go on to win the war preserved their great-power status, but to a very considerable extent they were great powers by default, and their appearance of strength and solidity was no more than an illusion.
This was particularly true of France. In 1919, Russia was in revolution, Germany was in anarchy, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire had finally split up into its component parts. The British went back to insisting they were not a continental power. France therefore reclaimed the position she had held from 1648 to 1870, of being the pre-eminent power on the Continent, which had been challenged by the Germans after the unification of Germany and the Franco-Prussian War. It was a position that France was not really entitled to in a modern industrial world. France’s iron and steel production was below that of her neighbors, her coal output was lower, her financial base was less secure, and her birthrate was declining.
Aware though they might be of the grim outlook presented by these basic statistics, Frenchmen were reluctant to recognize the logical conclusion to be drawn from them: that France was well on the way to becoming a second-class power. The official view was that as long as Germany could be kept down, France would retain her primacy. The French therefore became the most obstinate supporters of the status quo as enacted at Versailles. It was they who supported Rhenish separatism, they who occupied the Ruhr Valley in 1923 when Germany fell behind in her war reparations. This backfired, as did most of the measures of the period. The French