Controversy Among Historians: What Caused WWII?

In most history textbooks, the beginning of WW2 is placed either at Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939, or more accurately, at Japan’s 1937 invasion of China. Some more nuanced authors might even assign it to Japan’s 1931 invasions of Manchuria.

In any case, the starting point of the war is one thing; its causes are another.

Many authors simply identify the war’s causes as irrational militaristic national socialism on Hitler’s part, and as irrational militaristic imperialism on Japan’s part. These explanations seem simplistic, a sort of deus ex machina, and attribute the world’s most horrifying war to mental illness among a very small handful of people.

Reflection will hint at the notion that there must be more to the story. Millions of people aren’t mobilized based on a dozen people’s mental illness. The scores of other nations involved in the conflict didn’t declare war simply because of psychological illness among a tiny number of people.

By analyzing the diplomatic interactions between various nations in the late 1930s, historian A.J.P. Taylor argues that WW2 could have been avoided, had British diplomats taken certain steps. Taylor’s book is controversial — some scholars disagree passionately with Taylor — and the academic study of history generally abstains from counterfactual speculation. Nonetheless, Taylor’s writings are fascinating.

In the final days before the war in Europe began, diplomats were working feverishly to avoid armed conflict. On August 30, 1939, the Nazi government offered a compromise solution to Poland; the disagreement had been over city of Danzig, a German city which the Poles had annexed in the wake of WW1.

The compromise offer extended by Hitler’s government on August 30, called for the Poles to release Danzig to return to Germany, but offered the Poles continued economic rights in the city. The countryside surrounding the city would have a referendum, an election allowing it to decide for itself whether it would stay with Poland or return to German citizenship.

Had Poland even considered the offer — not necessarily accepted it — it would have bought more time for diplomats to seek further compromises and negotiations. But Poland rejected the offer outright.

The grave complicating factor was Britain’s treaty with Poland, signed in early 1939, which guaranteed British support should Poland find itself in a war with the Nazis. Had Britain not signed such a treaty in the first place, or had it found a way out of the treaty in the second place, Poland would have had a motive to find a peaceful solution to the Danzig situation. As it was, Poland felt confident that it could take on the Nazis, and the Soviet Union as Hitler’s ally, because it expected that both France and Britain would defend against Nazi and Soviet attacks on Poland.

In the wake of Poland’s refusal to negotiate, the Nazis declared war on Poland, and military action began on September 1, 1939.

Had the war remained a local conflict between Germany and Poland, it would have been small and brief.

Britain, however, faced a momentous decision: would it abide by its agreement to defend Poland? Would France do the same? The British government briefly considered alternatives, e.g., a negotiated ceasefire with Germany. In the end, Britain declared war on Germany. France did likewise.

French diplomat Georges Bonnet worked, in the very last hours, to stop the declaration of war. He hoped to draw Mussolini, who at the time was not strongly bound to Hitler, to apply pressure on Germany. France, like Britain, was bound by treaty to Poland, and Poland expected the French to launch a major military offensive against Germany’s western border. Such an attack would have diverted German troops from the attack on Poland. But the French had no intention of mounting such an attack.

Bonnet’s frantic, last-minute efforts are chronicled by A.J.P. Taylor:

Yet both the British and French governments, the French especially, went on believing in a conference which had vanished before it was born. Hitler had initially replied to Mussolini that, if invited to a conference, he would give his answer at mid-day on 3 September. Therefore Bonnet, and Chamberlain with him, strove desperately to postpone a declaration of war until after that time, even though the Italians no longer intended to invite Hitler or anyone else. Bonnet conjured up the excuse that the French military wanted the delay in order to carry through mobilisation, undisturbed by German air attack (which, they knew, would not occur anyway — the German air force was fully employed in Poland). Chamberlain conjured up no excuse except that the French wanted delay and that it was always difficult to work with allies. In the evening of 2 September he was still entertaining the House of Commons with hypothetical negotiations: “If the German Government should agree to withdraw their forces then His Majesty’s Government would be willing to regard the position as being the same as it was before the German forces crossed the Polish frontier. That is to say, the way would be open to discussion between the German and Polish Governments on the matters at issue”.

Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. It was, at that point in time, a largely symbolic act. Britain had few combat-ready military units, and none were near Poland, nor could they be in Poland soon. No significant French or British military action began immediately.

The debate inside the British government was intense. Neville Chamberlain spoke indecisively in Parliament. When Chamberlain was done speaking, Arthur Greenwood rose to speak, encouraged by fellow MP Leo Amery, demanding more decisive action.

Thus it was possible for both France and Britain to continue to seek a diplomatic solution, although they did so clumsily. So even after a declaration of war, before major hostilities commenced, communications between the countries continued:

This was too much even for loyal Conservatives. Leo Amery called to Arthur Greenwood, acting leader of the Opposition: “Speak for England”, a task of which Chamberlain was incapable. Ministers, led by Simon, warned Chamberlain that the government would fall unless it sent an ultimatum to Hitler before the House met again. Chamberlain gave way. The objections of the French were overruled. The British ultimatum was delivered to the Germans at 9 a.m. on 8 September. It expired at 11 a.m., and a state of war followed. When Bonnet learnt that the British were going to war in any case, his overriding anxiety was to catch up with them. The time of the French ultimatum was advanced, despite the supposed objections of the General Staff: it was delivered at noon on 8 September and expired at 5 p.m. In this curious way the French who had preached resistance to Germany for twenty years appeared to be dragged into war by the British who had for twenty years preached conciliation. Both countries went to war for that part of the peace settlement which they had long regarded as least defensible. Hitler may have projected a great war all along; yet it seems from the record that he became involved in war through launching on 29 August a diplomatic manoeuvre which he ought to have launched on 28 August.

Winston Churchill emerges, in A.J.P. Taylor’s account, as having blundered England into war — a war that might have been avoidable. Under closer examination, Churchill emerges as a mixed figure: on the one hand, his moral instincts were outraged at Hitler’s aggressiveness, and he also nobly wished to preserve the British empire; but on the other hand, Churchill’s irrational hatred of Germany, which predated Hitler by many decades, may have propelled him, and Britain with him, too hastily into war, a war which turned out to be a pyrrhic victory for Britain, which proceeded to lose its empire in the immediate postwar years, having overextended itself in the war.

Some British historians have opposed Taylor’s account of the events of the 1930s, because this narrative would mean that Britain, and to a lesser extent France, was in a position to avert, or at least diminish the war.

If Taylor is correct, the war could have been contained, and would have been a local conflict between Germany and Poland. The Soviet Union wouldn’t have been pulled in.

The world will probably never know whether or not Taylor is correct. Counterfactuals do not belong to the realm of documented or evidential history. But Taylor’s investigations and detailed narratives, in any case, direct attention to often-ignored aspects and events of the late 1930s.

South Korean Passiveness and Chinese Elusiveness Fuel North Korean Human Rights Violations

In 1910, Japanese soldiers had invaded and occupied Korea. At the end of WW2 in 1945, the United States Army liberated the southern half of the Korean peninsula, and Japan withdrew its armies from Korea. The Soviet Socialists invaded and occupied the northern half of the Korean peninsula.

Since that time, the two countries of North Korea and South Korea have lived next to each other in a very uneasy arrangement. In June 1950, North Korea attacked and invaded South Korea, beginning the Korean War.

North Korea calls itself the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK.

The United Nations organized a coalition of at least sixteen nations to help defend South Korea. That coalition included Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Greece, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and others.

North Korea was supported by China and by the Soviet Socialists.

In July 1953, an armistice was signed. An ‘armistice’ is something like a ‘ceasefire’ agreement. The fighting stopped, but the war was not officially ended. A peace treaty between the two countries has not been signed, so the Korean War has been continuing for over seventy years, even though there has been no combat for over sixty-seven years.

The political and social structures which developed in North Korea constituted one of the harshest totalitarian dictatorships in the world. The Soviet Socialists installed Kim Il-sung to be the country’s absolute ruler, as historian Doug Bandow writes:

During the Soviet occupation, religious persecution in the northern half of the peninsula went from bad to worse. The Bolsheviks waged war on Christianity in the USSR and were no more friendly when occupying Korea. The Soviets chose Kim Il-sung, an anti-Japanese guerrilla leader, to rule the occupation zone. Once the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was established in 1948, “the regime suppressed religious freedom by arousing the sense of struggle against anti-revolutionary elements and spreading anti-religious sentiments far and wide to strengthen the socialist revolutionary force,” write Yeo-sang Yoon and Sun-young Han, of the North Korean Human Rights Archives and Database Center for North Korean Human Rights, respectively.

Kim Il-sung ruled the country with an iron hand until his death in 1994. His son, Kim Jong-il, inherited the power and was no less ruthless than his father.

After decades of tyranny, the people of North Korea were among the very poorest in the world. Malnutrition was rampant, and many died of starvation. The DPRK is utterly indifferent to its people’s human rights. In this midst of poverty and misery, however, Kim Jong-il lived a life of luxury. United States President George Bush took office in early 2001, and describes what he learned during his first interactions with the North Korean government:

Meanwhile, Kim Jong-il cultivated his appetite for fine cognac, luxury Mercedes, and foreign films. He built a cult of personality that required North Koreans to worship him as a godlike leader. His propaganda machine claimed that he could control the weather, had written six renowned operas, and had scored five holes in one during his first round of golf.

President Bush worked with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to deal with North Korea. Any agreements made by Kim Jong-il were not to be trusted.

North Korea had signed a treaty called the ‘Agreed Framework’ in 1994. It immediately became clear that it had no intention of living up to the promises it made in the treaty. Condoleezza Rice explains how she and President Bush understood the North Korean government:

As noted before, the President had rejected any return to the Agreed Framework with North Korea because he — and all of us — believed it to be flawed. The North Koreans had taken the benefits, including $4.5 billion to build two light-water reactors, but by late 2002 they were once again threatening to expel all nuclear inspectors and restart plutonium-reprocessing facilities at Yongbyon. That was a familiar pattern with the North Koreans. As President Bush put it, “He [Kim Jong-il] throws his food on the floor, and all the adults run to gather it up and put it back on the table. He waits a little while and throws his food on the floor again.” It was an apt description, but, given the consequences of conflict on the Korean peninsula, there didn’t seem to be many alternatives.

In violation of its own promises, as well as global diplomatic consensus, North Korea began to work with Syria on a project to build a nuclear reactor at a location known as al-Kibar. This reactor would have produced the materials needed to build atomic bombs.

The thought that North Korea and Syria would each have an arsenal of nuclear weapons caused concern throughout the world. Yet it was an entirely predictable development, given North Korea’s pattern of behavior. At the time, in the year 2002, Richard “Dick” Cheney was the Vice President of the United States. He explains:

By the time we came into office, the North Koreans had an established pattern of behavior. They would make an agreement about their nuclear sites, pocket the benefits of the agreement, and then continue on with their weapons programs. They were masters of brinksmanship — creating problems, threatening their neighbors, and expecting to be bribed back into cooperation. It had usually worked for them. In 1994, with Bill Clinton in the White House, they agreed to freeze their plutonium production program in exchange for 500,000 metric tons of fuel oil a year and two reactors of a type that cannot easily be used to produce weapons material. But they secretly pursued a second route. In 2002, with the North Koreans having received millions of tons of fuel oil and with the al-Kibar reactor construction under way, an American delegation confronted them with evidence of their deception, and they admitted they had been developing a second way to produce nuclear weapons — by enriching uranium.

Not only did the North Korean government routinely violate its own treaties and break its promises, but it delighted in shocking the world through unpredictable behavior and by threatening neighboring nations with its military weapons.

In July 2006, North Korean suddenly tested its long-range missiles. These “tests” weren’t only a way to measure the missile’s technical abilities. They were threats to nearby countries. Donald Rumsfeld was the United States Secretary of Defense at that time, and recalls:

The leaders of the so-called Hermit Kingdom had a penchant for rattling sabers around American holidays. In the weeks running up to July 4 there had been some speculation that the North Korean regime might fire a long-range missile. No one was certain of their intentions, but the possibilities included a simple test, a demonstration firing, or a launch to place an object in space. The North Koreans could do something even more provocative, and our allies in South Korea and Japan didn’t want to be ill prepared in case missiles were aimed toward their territory. The erratic Kim Jong Il might even swing for the fences and attempt to hit our country.

By late 2006, North Korea succeeded in building its first atomic bomb. In 2007, Israel would destroy the al-Kibar nuclear facility in the course of fighting between Syria and Israel.

In 2011, Kim Jong-il died, and his son, Kim Jong-un inherited the power.

The United Nations, and individual countries around the world, have often looked to China to help manage North Korea. China is not exactly an ally of North Korea, but it is the nation with the least bad relationship to North Korean.

On the one hand, China isn’t exactly friendly with North Korea. On the other hand, China isn’t exactly friendly with most of the world’s other nations. So while China can sometimes help negotiate with North Korea, it isn't strongly motivated to do so.

At the time of the 1994 Agreed Framework, U.S. military analysts speculated about what China might do in the event that North Korea would become involved in a war. If the war were instigated and begun by North Korea, it was presumed that China would not lend military support to North Korea, would work to end hostilities, and could pressure the DPRK by reducing or ending Chinese exports to North Korea.

If, on the other hand, a war in the mid-1990s had begun because of a South Korean or American action, or if such a war had included the movement of South Korean or American troops across the border into North Korea, then the Pentagon concluded that China might well send forces to support the DPRK.

American military strategists reached those hypothetical conclusions in the mid-1990s. But how might China act now, twenty or forty years later? In 2013, Robert Wampler wrote:

Whether that would still be the case today is an open question, but China’s perspective does seem to have changed recently. Whereas it refused to back U.N. sanctions two decades ago, last month it supported (and in fact helped the United States draft) new U.N. sanctions in response to North Korea’s recent nuclear test. That suggests it sees an increased need to rein in the North Korean regime and has a decreased tolerance for destabilizing actions. In public, Beijing has stressed that it will not accept "troublemaking on China’s doorstep." While it is not likely that China will abandon its North Korean ally given its fear of unknown consequences, its analysts may well be scratching their heads (as their American counterparts are), asking what Kim Jong Un’s endgame is — or whether he even has one. And, if a war breaks out, will prior consultations between Washington and Beijing reassure the Chinese that our own endgame does not threaten their core interests or require military action to keep trouble away from their doorstep?

While North Korea continues to develop its missiles and the atomic weapons which they carry, the people of North Korea continue to starve, as Frank Jannuzi writes:

Amnesty International has long chronicled the DPRK's endemic human rights abuses, under which millions suffer. That suffering takes many forms. Food insecurity and malnutrition are widespread, and there are persistent reports of starvation, particularly in more remote regions. The country's famines have been under-reported inside and outside the DPRK because of severe restrictions of movement and a near-total clamp-down on expression, information, and association.

Some observers argue that South Korea has been unwilling to confront North Korea. Often it has been the United Nations, the United States, China, or some coalition of other nations putting pressure on the DPRK.

Edward Luttwak conjectures that a more active, and more courageous, role for South Korea could be essential in persuading North Korea to behave better. He describes a pattern in which the DPRK bullies South Korea into funding North Korean activities, and in which South Korea passively endures DPRK aggressiveness. Luttwak cites the South Korean naval ship Cheonan, the sinking of which is often though not unanimously attributed to the DPRK:

Unwilling to deter North Korea — which would require a readiness to retaliate for its occasionally bloody attacks and constant provocations, thereby troubling business and roiling the Seoul stock market — South Korea has instead preferred to pay off the regime with periodic injections of fuel and food aid, but most consistently by way of the North-South Kaesong industrial zone, in which some 80,000 North Korean workers are paid relatively good wages by South Korean corporations. The workers themselves receive very little of their salaries, of course, the majority of which gets funneled back to Pyongyang and makes up the North’s largest consistent source of foreign currency. Even under supposedly “hard-line” South Korean presidents, the Kaesong transfer has continued. It was not shut down when the North sunk South Korea’s Cheonan warship, killing 46 sailors; nor when the North opened artillery fire on a South Korean island, killing two soldiers and two civilians; nor when the North tested a nuclear device and launched a long-range ballistic missile. Even as the present crisis has unfolded, it was the paying South that feared an interruption of production at Kaesong, not the North, which reaps the benefits. And when media in South Korea noted with much relief that Kaesong was still open, the North Koreans promptly shut it down.

The nations of the world, then, divided as they are by questions of ideology and economics, are united in their frustration with Kim Jong-un. Any interaction with the DPRK is an exercise in futility. Agreements are signed by the North Koreans, and afterwards, it becomes clear that the DPRK had no intention of keeping its word.

Even though countries differ greatly by culture and religion, diplomacy still relies on some manner of trust and promise. In this sense, diplomacy with North Korea has proven, thus far at least, impossible.

The international community looks to China, as the one nation which has the least bad relationship with the DPRK, to steer these troubled diplomatic relationships. Whether China can do it is one question; whether China wants to do it is another.

In this uncomfortable and murky status quo, South Korea passively endures North Korean bullying while the citizens of the DPRK suffer poverty and malnutrition to degrees barely imaginable. North Korean citizens still die of malnutrition and starvation, their human rights ignored. Active military combat ended in 1953, but there is no doubt that a war is still going on.