The Second Thirty Years' War

How the First World War led to the Second

Hi everybody. I was working on the next installment of The Peculiar Institution when I got an email from a student named Isaac Hayward asking for advice on an essay he’s been assigned. The topic - “To what extent did World War 2 result from the outcome of World War 1?” - is one I’ve been thinking about lately, so I thought I’d use his prompt to write a post on it.

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First, we should split the question up by phrasing it in two different ways:

1. If World War 1 had not happened, would there have been a world war some time later?

2. If World War 1 had not happened, would World War 2 have happened?

The minor change of wording alters the meaning of the question. There is a short answer to both versions, and we’ll get those out of the way first.

If World War 1 had not happened, it is entirely possible that the same pressures would have eventually led to a confrontation between some combination of the same belligerents. The problems that led to the First World War are not likely to have been resolved by the passing of a few more peaceful decades. There were many potential triggers, but at root just one real cause of the war. The triggers include the nationalist aspirations of the subject peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia’s ambitions in the Balkans, France’s grudge against Germany over the 1870-71 war, and many others. The real cause, though, was that Germany had become the strongest power on the continent, but, since it emerged too late to benefit much from colonialism, had the least to show for it. Britain, France, Russia, and Austria-Hungary ruled over hundreds of millions of subject peoples around the world, while Germany had nowhere to grow without stepping on the toes of an already-established power.

A stable geopolitical order is one that roughly matches the recognized power relations between the various players, but things are destabilized when power relations change and the geopolitical order isn’t adjusted to reflect that. We are in a period like that today. The end of the Cold War left the United States as the only superpower on earth. We used that position to do some good, some bad, but in every case we did what we wanted, when we wanted, how we wanted, and we didn’t much concern ourselves with how other countries felt about it. Eventually, it became natural for American leaders to assume that we should have more say than Russia over what happens on Russia’s border, and more say than China over the South China Sea. It sounds absurd in a vacuum, but for 20 years no one objected because no one doubted that the US was strong enough to get its way. As Russia and China got stronger, though, the US foreign policy establishment continued to behave as if we were the only cat with claws. Could the US Navy really defend Taiwan from China if the chips were down? Maybe we could. It’s possible we’d wipe the floor with them. But 10, 20, 30 years ago, when we took the position that China’s near abroad was more our business than theirs, there was no maybe about it. As Russia has learned in Ukraine, you can’t predict the course of a conflict with spreadsheets and war games, sometimes you have to find out the hard way what’s really what. So it is possible, even likely, that a major settling of accounts was in store for Europe, one way or another.

Still, the shape of that hypothetical conflict is hard (but fun) to imagine. We’re left to wonder, for example, what might have happened if the Ottoman Empire had remained intact for another 20 or 30 years, long enough to realize that it owned all the vast oil deposits in the Middle East? It’s possible the newfound wealth would have cured the “sick man of Europe,” and that the Turkish caliphate would have been one of the dominant powers of the 20th century. Or what if Russia, which was industrializing more rapidly than any country on earth by 1914, had had a few more decades to develop, and to benefit from the vast oil deposits in the southern part of its empire? The what ifs are endless.

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On to the second question, which, I think, is the real question Isaac was asking: To what extent was the Second World War - the one that actually happened - a result of the outcome of First World War? The short answer is easy: World War 2 absolutely would not have happened if the first one had not happened, or had ended differently. Rather than describe the thousand reasons why it would not have happened, though, let’s discuss how the war of 1914-18 led to the war of 1939-45.

There’s a famous story about a high society dinner party at the home of Waldorf and Lady Astor in the 1930s. Someone at the table asked where Adolf Hitler was born, and, in a demonstration of her quick wit, Lady Astor immediately answered, “At Versailles.” She was referring, of course, to the Treaty of Versailles that was Germany’s punishment for having lost World War 1.

Germany had faced the combined forces of three great empires, and very likely would have won if not for American intervention. In 1917, the Russian Empire fell, freeing up German forces to reinforce the Western Front. That same year, in the wake of the Battle of Verdun, the French army reached its limit, experiencing strategic-level mutinies so widespread that France would not go on the offensive again until the very end of the war. If the Americans had not joined the war in April, it is very likely that the French and British would have had to accept a negotiated peace with the Kaiser in 1917. But with the Americans on the way, Britain and France knew that they just had to hold on long enough for the US to tip the balance.

By 1918, Germany had very little effort left to give. Millions of her best men had been killed or wounded, the British hunger blockade was causing mass starvation in Germany and Austria-Hungary, and strikes led by communists and social democrats were breaking the military supply chain. Admitting that their days were numbered, the German leadership requested an armistice based on Woodrow Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points. In January 1918, Wilson had told Congress, and the world, that the United States did not intend to help one side vanquish the other, but to create a new and lasting peace system in Europe:

The terms of the immediate peace agreed upon will determine whether it is a peace for which such a guarantee can be secured. The question upon which the whole future peace and policy of the world depends is this: Is the present war a struggle for a just and secure peace, or only for a new balance of power? If it be only a struggle for a new balance of power, who will guarantee, who can guarantee, the stable equilibrium of the new arrangement? Only a tranquil Europe can be a stable Europe. There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace. . . .

. . . it must be a peace without victory. . . .Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last, only a peace the very principle of which is equality and a common participation in a common benefit.

Given the war-altering significance of the American intervention, the Germans hoped that Wilson’s demands would prevail over the imperial ambitions of Britain and France. After all, both France and Britain were broke, and hopelessly in debt to the United States, and it’s no exaggeration to say that American money, supplies, and troops were the deciding factor in the war. The Germans had reason to believe that America would get its way. Also, while the Germans had sued for peace, they had not been defeated on the battlefield. The entire line remained within French and Belgian territory, and other than a brief Russian incursion into East Prussia in the first months of the war, no foreign boot had stepped on German soil. When the leadership requested an armistice, the army was exhausted, but its lines remained intact and, whatever the economic and political situation on the home front, the soldiers did not feel they’d been beaten. Given the effort it would take, even with American support, to drive the German lines all the way back into their own territory, the Germans, while they were to accept defeat, believed they had some leverage to negotiate. When the armistice went into effect on November 11, 1918, both the Germans and the Americans thought that peace would be negotiated along the lines laid down by President Wilson. It didn’t take long to disabuse everyone of that naive assumption.

Great Britain clamped down a hunger blockade in 1915, and by the final year of the war people in Germany and Austria-Hungary were literally starving to death. In all, some 800,000 Germans, mostly children and elderly, would actually die of starvation or of complications directly resulting from malnutrition. That is over 1% of the total population of Germany in 1914, so, adjusting for population, it would be like 3.5 million people starving to death in the United States. It affected everyone, including the rich and the aristocracy. I remember reading an entry from the diary of a German princess who was living on thin turnip soup and having trouble finding even basic necessities for the last year and a half of the war. People moved through the streets listlessly, with distended bellies and emaciated faces, all the signs you’ve seen in videos and pictures of modern famines. When the armistice was announced, the first thought on every German’s mind was that the hunger blockade would finally be lifted. They would be disappointed.

German children lining up to receive a bit of food from the Salvation Army

Although the Germans voluntarily demobilized and marched under arms back to Germany, the Allies surprised them by keeping the hunger blockade in place. It’s hard to describe, but maybe not so hard to imagine, how disillusioned and betrayed the German people felt. When the Kaiser abdicated and his empire was replaced by a republic, many patriotic Germans who had supported the Kaiser during the war accepted, even celebrated, the change because they assumed the Allies would have no more reason to punish the German people. After all, it’s not as if the German people had voted for war in 1914, they were thrust into it by the Kaiser’s imperial government. Regardless, despite heroic efforts by American and international relief organizations, the British would keep the blockade in full force for another eight months after the war was over.