Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Mending a broken world: coal and steel diplomacy between the wars
- 2 The greater and lesser wars
- 3 From Morgenthau Plan to Schuman Plan: the Allies and the Ruhr, 1944–1950
- 4 Neither restoration nor reform: the dark ages of German heavy industry
- 5 The end of the war against Germany: the coal–steel pool as treaty settlement
- 6 The success of a failure: the European Coal and Steel Community in action, 1952–1955
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - The greater and lesser wars
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Mending a broken world: coal and steel diplomacy between the wars
- 2 The greater and lesser wars
- 3 From Morgenthau Plan to Schuman Plan: the Allies and the Ruhr, 1944–1950
- 4 Neither restoration nor reform: the dark ages of German heavy industry
- 5 The end of the war against Germany: the coal–steel pool as treaty settlement
- 6 The success of a failure: the European Coal and Steel Community in action, 1952–1955
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
There was a lesser and a greater Second World War. Hitler started the first of the two in September 1939 in an attempt to conquer Europe by defeating opposing armies piecemeal in short Blitzkrieg campaigns in which the tank, supported by mechanized infantry, was the main element of attack. To wage warfare on this scale was not economically painful for the Reich. Though stocks of raw materials had to be built up and national self-sufficiency increased in fuel and other war-critical supplies, it was only necessary to mobilize industry and agriculture partially; guns and butter could be kept in reasonable equilibrium and battle done with the technologies of the past. Hitler did not have to reorganize Germany in order to sustain a new type of combat; however radical his aims, his approach to waging war was socially conservative. The United States launched the greater war in summer 1940, actually a year and a half before either of the two simultaneous strategic turning points, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the Wehrmacht's defeat at Rostovon-Don, had been reached. The American war against fascism was total in character: global, fought in the air and at sea as much as on land, technology-driven, and potentially revolutionary in its political, social, and economic implications. Success in this greater war depended less on diplomatic or military strategies than on vast industrial and agricultural power that made it possible to conduct hostilities on a scale far more immense than anything Hitler could have imagined in 1939.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Coal, Steel, and the Rebirth of Europe, 1945–1955The Germans and French from Ruhr Conflict to Economic Community, pp. 45 - 96Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991