Veterans Day/ Thank You and OP/ED

[Thumpalumpacus]

Hitler, according to some historians, didn't even instigate WWII; they reserve that "honor" to the Japanese invasion of China; the point being that that world diplomacy was so broken and antagonisms so heated that it would have broken out somewhere. In this view, which I'm not sure is right, WWII dates to 1937 or even as far back as 1931.

But they're extremely fringe. Hitler did, knowingly, start a war. He was out for blood and at one time said, every generation should experience war to harden them. What he didn't want was another world war. At least not at this point. He thought, he could get away with a localized conflict, but his ultimate goal was what he called "Lebensraum". Conquest to the east.

It is fringe, and while I don't agree fully (as noted above) I do think there's justice to their point that the world was so fraught with tension that it wasn't a matter of if but when -- and the when in the view of received history might be a little Eurocentric.

But when Britain and France declared war on Germany, he was at a loss. His creature Ribbentrop had promised him that they would protest his invasion of Poland, but they wouldn't act. Paul-Otto Schmidt, his chief interpreter, was present when he got the declarations of war and reported later that Hitler was rather surprised and asked "What now?"

I know all this; this is where Hitler was called a carpet-chewer, for his anger at Britain's declaration.

Also, the German people was not ready to got to war. They still remembered WWI, the hunger years and the losses and, as opposed to Hitler's expectations, they didn't cheer as they did in 1914. Only when it seemed to turn into a victory run against the opponents of the first war, they got excited. Beating France into submission was where the old resentment of 1918 and the treaty of Versailes came in.

I certainly wasn't trying to argue that the Germans wanted the war. But the fact is that Hitler capitalized on the discrepancy between the Fourteen Points and the Versailles Treaty, not to mention in particular France's diligence in enforcing the treaty clauses in the Ruhr.

As far as the actual treaty is concerned, the main resentment stemmed from being branded as the only culprit for the war. Which was incorrect right from the get go. It was Austria-Hungary, which handed in the first declaration of war. Against Serbia. Russia was already mobilising and the German decision makers panicked. Mainly because they only had one plan in stock. The Schlieffen plan, which assumed an already existing alliance between France and Russia would attack Germany on two fronts. It was designed, going by the assumption, that the Russians would mobilise slowly. So, Germany had to beat the French quickly, in order to move their whole army to the East to counter a Russian attack. But Russia mobilised quicker than expected. And so Germany declared war on Russia, before the Russians declared war on Germany. Had they waited one or two days longer, the Russians would have declared the war anyway, since the mechanics of alliances were already in motion. At least that's what most historians agree on nowadays, having full access to all the archives.

While I agree with your analysis of the mechanics of the outbreak -- it was an unfolding of alliances and railway timetables, interacting to force politicians to act ahead of their game -- I was not making any point about the outbreak of war in 1914, but rather 1939 -- or 1937, or 1931.

Last, it's important to remember that WWI wasn't a war of liberty against opression. It was the last imperial war. All the nations involved had their parliaments and all the nations involved were colonial empires. And all the empires involved used up their colonial troops as cannon fodder before sacrificing their mainland citizens. The Germans, not out of good intentions, but because they lost their colonies early, weren't able to. But in German East Africa, they held the Entente troops at bay till 1918. Again, mostly sacrificing the native population.

And let's not forget, we're talking about ruling houses closely related to each other. The German emperor being a cousin of the Russian czar and a cousin of the british king, grandson of queen Victoria. Granted, the british royals were much more powerless compared to their German relative, but they were a German house, which only changed their family name from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor in 1917. Renaming themselves after one of their residences.

No argument here. It was, in the final analysis, internecine warfare, or, in Tuchman's phrase, "Europe committing suicide."