After the Munich Conference, Adolf Hitler regretted having recalled his order to initiate hostilities. His “lesson” from Munich was never to pull back from war again, but to initiate hostilities in 1939. To keep his eastern border quiet while fighting Britain and France, he wanted the countries in the east to subordinate their policies to Germany. In the winter of 1938–39, he succeeded with Hungary and Lithuania. Poland’s leaders, though they considered substantial concessions in serious negotiations, were unwilling to surrender this country’s recently regained independence without a fight. Early in 1939 Hitler therefore decided to attack Poland in the fall and not to become involved in negotiations that might make it difficult to initiate hostilities, as he believed had happened in 1938. If Britain and France held to Poland, they would be fought at the same time; if not, their turn would come the following year. To avoid any danger of a peaceful settlement, his ambassadors in London, Paris, and Warsaw were kept from their posts in the critical days of August; and the final demands on Poland, designed to rally the German public, were withheld until they could be declared lapsed.

Rather than the initiatives of Japan in seizing Manchuria in 1931 or Italy in attacking Ethiopia (Abyssinia) in 1935, the war initiated by Germany on September 1, 1939 is taken as the beginning of World War II, because Japanese and Italian actions were continuations of prior expansionist policies, not the implementation of truly new policies. As Hitler had explained to his military commanders days before the invasion of Poland, this was a war for the annihilation of Poland and its people, not the attainment of some new border. His backdating his October 1939 authorization for the systematic killing of the handicapped and his moving forward the January 1939 public announcement of the intent to murder the Jews, in both cases to September 1, 1939, illuminate how Hitler saw the conflict as the beginning of the demographic revolution on a German-dominated globe. Neither the Italians nor the Japanese understood that this was not a war for specific pieces of land, bases, colonies, or status, like prior global conflicts such as the Seven Years War or World War I. This discrepancy in the purpose of the war contributed to the unwillingness and inability of the three nominal allies to develop substantial coordination in military operations and diplomacy.

JAPAN's OFFENSIVE

The Japanese launching of war in East Asia was designed to secure control of the resources of Southeast Asia as rapidly as possible; the attack on the United States navy at Pearl Harbor being designed to shield the flank of this operation from American interference, as the neutrality treaty with the Soviet Union and the maintenance of substantial forces in Manchuria were to protect its rear from Soviet intervention. These were, however, subsidiaiy moves. The major objective was a rapid seizure of the Philippines and Malaya as a preparatory step for the conquest of the Netherlands East Indies. Combined with an occupation of Burma and the seizure of added portions of New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Marshall and Gilbert Islands, this new empire would assure Japan both control of the oil, rubber, and tin producing lands she coveted and a perimeter of bases from which to defend that empire against any who might try to wrest it from her.

The detailed military plans to implement this program had been carefully worked out in the fall of 1941, but while they included careful schedules for the offensive operations, they were totally deficient in two critical ways. There was no agreed plan for going forward thereafter if the planned conquest succeeded and there was no plan to go back if it failed. As the Germans had, earlier in 1941, assumed that the war on the Eastern Front would end when their armies had reached the Archangel- Astrakhan line, so the Japanese assumed that their war would end when it had reached the perimeter of their newly won empire. But there was never any prospect of this happening; had there ever been one, they had themselves eliminated it with the attack on Pearl Harbor, because the calculation that the Americans would never expend the blood and treasure to reconquer for others a whole host of islands and other places most of them had never heard of, and did not care about if they had, was invalidated by the way in which the Japanese had started war with the United States. It took them until 1945 to discover their error because, even after the tide of battle had turned against them, they invariably returned to the same fundamentally erroneous strategic concept of trying to raise the cost for the Americans to a level the latter would not pay.

AXIS HOPES AND PLANS

As the German leaders looked toward the future in the early spring of 1943, there were both good and bad prospects. The good prospects were of two types. They had stalled off disasters and they were bringing on new weapons. After the great defeat at Stalingrad, they had reversed the tide temporarily with a counter-stroke which offered at least the hope of their being able to launch a new offensive in the East. In North Africa, the outlook was grim for the Axis forces in March—the month of German victory at Kharkov in the East—but at least they had prevented a quick Allied victory which would quite probably have paved the way for a summer or fall 1943 landing in the West. Even if a successful Allied offensive in Tunisia were followed by other such operations in the Mediterranean area, a substantial amount of time had been gained.

Furthermore, new weapons were beginning to come off the assembly lines in large numbers. The production of submarines was at last reaching the levels required to keep about one hundred at sea at any one time. The new Tiger heavy tanks were getting their early troubles fixed; the new Panther medium-heavy tanks were beginning to be delivered; and there was every prospect that, during the course of the year, monthly output of these and other critical weapons—assault guns in particular— would steadily increase. Perhaps of greatest importance was the effect of manpower mobilization. The combination of rationalization in industry and massive employment of prisoners of war and slave laborers was making it possible to provide added manpower to the army, so that by the summer of 1943 the army in the East was at least close to its size two years earlier.

The efforts of the Finns, Hungarians and Romanians to discover an exit from the war had been effectively squelched by the Germans. The submarine war was expected to keep the Western Allies immobilized in 1943; and there was the expectation that during that year the recovery on the southern part of the Eastern Front, combined with the resources freed by the withdrawals from the Demyansk and Rzhev salients would make possible a great attack on at least one section of the Eastern Front.

When a German warship opened fire on the Polish garrison in the special area reserved for them within the Free City of Gdansk (Danzig)—and German troops and airplanes attacked Poland—a terrible conflict began that was quickly called “The Second World War.” This name implies some relationship to the great prior conflict of 1914-18. At the beginning of September 1939, when German actions started this new war, however, there was already fighting in two other areas of the globe. Since the Japanese had struck in northern China in July 1937, there had been hostilities between the two East Asian nations; that war had reached something of a stalemate by the fall of 1939, but no end to it was in sight. In addition, since May 1939, Japanese and Russian troops were engaged in bitter fighting on the border of their respective puppet states in a conflict called after its location the Nomonhan Incident by the Japanese and the Khalkhin-gol Incident by the Russians. Diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and Japan continued even while their forces clashed, and a cease-fire in this struggle on September 16, 1939, followed upon Japan's defeat in battle. The continuing East Asian conflict between Japan and China would, however, have remained isolated, like the war those two nations had fought in 1894-95, had not events in Europe led Japan to join the hostilities begun there. It is thus entirely appropriate to think of the Second World War as having been initiated by Germany and eventually embroiling the whole globe. How did this come about? Was not one world war enough?

The war which ended with the armistice of November 11, 1918, had been horrendous in its impact on the participants. In more than four years of bloodshed and destruction, vast portions of Europe had been wrecked and the domestic institutions of the continent transformed. The capacity of the modern state for mass mobilization had drawn human and material resources out of each belligerent to an extent no one had previously imagined possible, and these human and material resources had been consumed in the furnace of war.