A Critique of Vincent J. Esposito's "The War in Brief" (Part 01)
Vincent J. Esposito Colonel, United States Army Head, Department of Military Art, United States Military Academy
http://gi.grolier.com/wwii/wwii_1.html
This post attempts to spell out the problems surrounding WWII origins in a simple and straightforward manner. I decided to take a barebones synopsis of the argument by Vincent J. Esposito and show why nearly every paragraph is flawed, distorted, or outright incorrect. Esposito's argument is in my opinion the one teachers offer young people at school. The structure of my post is simple. I cite a paragraph and then demonstrate the weaknesses.
My again refined thesis now reads: London and Paris chose to declare war on Hitler's Germany during the first days of September 1939 and officially unleashed what later became known as WWII. The western Allies used the German invasion of Poland as the pretext to initiate a preventive war. The governments of Britain and France quite simply aimed at preventing the further development of German geostrategic power. The two states wanted to contain the Hitler menace. [This menace does not mean the following: (1) German rearmament was illegal, (2) German actions in the Rhineland, Austria, Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia or Poland were evil or dangerous or illegal, or (3) that the Allies cared about the previous points.] They declared war in 1939 to stop Hitler from fulfilling his dreams of empire. [Declaring war is not necessarily a bad thing, guys] Poland was unimportant...a pretext. Poland was never freed. Stalin simply altered the Nazi-Soviet Pact and took all of it under his control.
(A) Para 01: "At the end of World War I the victorious nations formed the League of Nations for the purpose of airing international disputes, and of mobilizing its members for a collective effort to keep the peace in the event of aggression by any nation against another or of a breach of the peace treaties. The United States, imbued with isolationism, did not become a member. The League failed in its first test. In 1931 the Japanese, using as an excuse the explosion of a small bomb under a section of track of the South Manchuria Railroad (over which they had virtual control), initiated military operations designed to conquer all of Manchuria. After receiving the report of its commission of inquiry, the League adopted a resolution in 1933 calling on the Japanese to withdraw. Thereupon, Japan resigned from the League. Meanwhile, Manchuria had been overrun and transformed into a Japanese puppet state under the name of Manchukuo. Beset by friction and dissension among its members, the League took no further action".
Esposito cites the League of Nations to set the tone of his little paper. He writes that the League was devoted to the "collective effort to keep the peace". The League Charter spells it out slightly differently. The group wanted to "promote international co-operation and to achieve international peace and security". Nobody takes issue with the need for peace. But the Charter's emphasis was on creating the conditions for peace and not just one of military reaction.
The problems arise elsewhere. Esposito points out that (1) the United States was not a member and (2) that the group was ineffectual in Manchuria. What he does not tell the reader is that the League of Nations' membership list was very limited. The group of nations did not include Germany, the Soviet Union, the United States, or Japan by the end of the 1930s. The League therefore did not have any real coercive capabilities or the legal right to bind non-members to their own whims.
(B) Para 02: "In 1933 also, Adolf HITLER came to power as dictator of Germany and began to rearm the country in contravention of the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. He denounced the provisions of that treaty that limited German armament and in 1935 reinstituted compulsory military service. That year the Italian dictator Benito MUSSOLINI began his long-contemplated invasion of Ethiopia, which he desired as an economic colony. The League voted minor sanctions against Italy, but these had slight practical effect. British and French efforts to effect a compromise settlement failed, and Ethiopia was completely occupied by the Italians in 1936".
Hitler first of all did not begin rearming until over one year later and rearmament during the early phase was geared to the expansion of civilian industries. We can dismiss this little factual error. Esposito glosses over one important issue, however. Global disarmament existed as one of the prerequisites or official excuses for keeping Germany disarmed. During the 1930s, at the disarmament talks in Geneva, the League participants discarded this policy and held onto the right to produce aircraft and other weapons systems. German diplomats (this policy was developed prior to Hitler) raised the point that the unwillingness to disarm invalidated the Versailles Treaty. They then left the conference and the League itself. The League had reneged on a primary condition of their own policy. German rearmament was therefore NOT illegal. Hitler rescinded the Versailles Treaty (using the pretext that the Allies had failed to fulfill their obligations) and then pursued outright rearmament. Esposito should have concentrated on Hitler's aims and not try to trick his reader into believing a lie.
Esposito is also instinctively placing German rearmament on the same level as the Japanese invasion of Manchuria or the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. That trick is a farcical ploy often used by historians. He also forgets to mention the Polish invasion of the Soviet Union in 1919, the Lithuanian attack on Germany (Memel) in 1923 at the height of the Ruhr crisis (where the French invaded the Ruhr once again), The Polish seizure of Wilna from the Lithuanians after WWI, etc.