Dan Snow's History Hit - How WWII Started

Episode Date: September 1, 2024

On September 1st, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Two days later, France and the United Kingdom declared war on the Third Reich. This was the beginning of what would become perhaps the most devastating clash in human history. By the end of the war, tens of millions of people had been killed, wounded or displaced, and the world order had been irrevocably altered. So how exactly did WW2 start?In this episode, Dan explains how and why the Second World War came about. He examines both the immediate triggers and the big substructural forces that pushed humanity into a devastating conflict that continues to shape our world today.Written and produced by Dan Snow, and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. It's 11.30pm on the 2nd of September 1939 and the skies above London are torn by thunderstorms.

Neville Chamberlain has presided over his last peacetime cabinet as Prime Minister. It was decided around that table that an ultimatum would be presented to Hitler in Berlin at nine o'clock the following morning. That ultimatum would expire just two hours later. The day before, on the 1st of September 1939, Germany had invaded Poland. The old battleship Schleswig-Holstein, with its mighty guns, had fired what were probably the first shots of the Second World War in Europe at a Polish military facility, a kind of depot really, on the mouth of the River Vistula. Aircraft from the German Luftwaffe had then struck at several Polish targets in the early hours of the 1st of September

and troops flooded across the border in the hours that followed. And troops flooded across the border in the hours that followed. After a series of compromises, patched together with the Western powers over things like German rearmament, the re-militarisation of the Rhineland, the invasion of Austria, parts of Czechoslovakia, Hitler now gambled that Britain and France would not declare war this time either. They would not plunge the world into a second terrible global conflict over his dispute with Poland. But this time, Hitler the gambler was wrong. At 11am on the 3rd of September, the ultimatum expired.

At 11.15, Chamberlain addressed the nation by radio, stating that the United Kingdom was now at war with Germany. We have, he said, a clear conscience. We have done all that any country could do to establish peace. But a situation in which no word given by Germany's ruler could be trusted, and no people or country could feel itself safe, had become intolerable. He finished off his address by saying it's the evil things that we should be fighting against. Brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution. He said he was certain that right will prevail. Later that afternoon, Chamberlain addressed the first Sunday session of the House of Commons

in over 120 years. It was a very sad speech in many ways. He pointed out simply that everything he'd ever worked for, everything that I've hoped for, everything I've believed in during my public life has crashed into ruins. That's because Britain and her empire was back at war with Germany. The Second World War would prove to be an even greater war than the First. And it was caused by many of the same underlying impulses that caused that First World War. And it was born out of the messy, unsatisfactory ending of that war, particularly according to Germany, Italy, and Japan, who felt that the end of the First World War had been unfair and deeply unsatisfactory.

You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit, and I'm going to talk you through how and why the Second World War came about. It's another one of my monologues, folks. It's another one of my monologues, folks, and it is, and I thought I'd do one especially because it's a big anniversary. It's the 85th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. So it's time to think about how that war came to be. And I'm going to focus on both the immediate triggers and the big substructural forces that impelled humanity to another devastating conflict. This is my attempt to explain why the Second World War came about. T-minus 10.

Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. The Second World War was one of the greatest catastrophes in our history. It's a disaster of such enormity that it's a hugely intimidating job to try and explain why it started. But it's also a really, really important job.

And it's a job that tragically felt academic and remote when I was growing up and studying history. But now it feels like understanding those causes and impulses, recognising them, recognising the rhetoric, the ideas, the messengers, working out how to stop great powers sliding into conflict, well, all that feels essential in the decades that stretch ahead of us. It feels vital and not just essential, but existential. History matters. This was a war in which 100 million men and women fought from 30 or so countries. The majority of those countries put their entire effort, economic, scientific, human,

industrial, political, and cultural effort into it. Perhaps 80 million people were killed. Millions more were brutalized, raped, wounded, traumatized, de-housed. There was genocide. There was biological. There was chemical warfare. Unimaginable destructive technology was unleashed, culminating in the use of atomic weapons, which were themselves almost undreamt of only five or six years before they were used on the battlefield. It wasn't just the power of the atom that was unleashed. The first jet aircraft took to the sky.

The first man-made object was launched into space. Centuries of giant strides forward in state power, in industry, in science. That advance led to the bloodiest war in our history. So why did it start? In some ways, it is actually perhaps a little bit easier with the Second World War to give a one or two sentence description of why it started than with many other wars in our history. The Thirty Years' War, the War of Jenkins' Ear, the Seven Years' War. What caused them can be hugely difficult to explain, but in some ways the Second World War feels more elemental. It was a twisted desire of a minority,

a tiny, tiny sliver of the world's population, to exercise dominion over their fellow man, to exploit people, both in their home countries, but particularly abroad, to usurp land and wealth, to enslave, to dominate. I think on one level it is as simple as that. And because those handful of people found themselves in charge of modern states with vast armed forces and complex industries and hugely effective bureaucracies, the intensity and scale of the wars they were able to unleash were unprecedented. And what's such an important precondition of both the First and Second World War is they occur in a world where war, where empire, is they occur in a world where war, where empire, dominion, those things have a legitimacy.

It was a truth universally acknowledged, to misquote Jane Austen. It was a truth universally acknowledged that a proud nation, buzzing with industry, developed, advanced with battleships, aircraft and tanks, a proud nation was in want of an empire. In the 1920s and 1930s, it was still a world of empires. In fact, it's strange. We think of the First World War being something of a catastrophe for the British and French empires, for example. But actually, on paper, technically, those empires had grown to their largest extent after the First World War. They'd gained possessions from defeated empires. Another great player on the world stage, the Soviet Union, was fairly imperial. It had been shorn of some of its czarist provinces like Finland, but it exercised a dominion over a vast portion of Europe and Asia. China was at the time still undergoing a deeply

painful transition from an imperial state to a kind of nation state at the time. But essentially, these were empires that ruled the world. They were the building blocks of the global system in a way that we think of as a nation state being today. And they were also thought to be not a bad thing. They're thought to be engines of development. They were thought to rein in the anarchy, the savagery of non-European peoples. They ensured that the world would be run in an orderly way,

conducive to trade and industry. In an empire, the apologists argued, land could be properly exploited. Minerals could be mined and then shipped elsewhere in the world, and they'd be turned into useful things. The world could be controlled, brought to order. White Europeans, and North Americans in particular, who thought they were biologically superior, believed it was their manifest destiny to govern over other races. And it was believed that that would be best for those other races. It was the best thing for the peoples of Africa and South Asia and the Pacific. They could thrive under this imperial system.

These imperial subjects would benefit from the blessings of imperial rule and if the rulers made a bit of money on the side, they made five percent on top of that, well then everyone was happy. That was their bonus. And so clearly because the world was divided into empires and those empires were thought to be good things and those empires had been amassed largely on the battlefield, violence was inherent within them. Violence was part of their DNA. War was legitimate. And therefore, there was huge potential for conflict in this global system. Because these empires, for the people at their heart, were a source of extraordinary pride. And they were also a source of materials, of food, of markets for your finished goods.

And that became particularly true, as we'll hear, after the global economic calamity of the late 1920s and early 1930s. On top of that, these empires are symbols of prestige. So empires are not just symbols of prestige, they're also thought to deliver wealth and security. And that's something that stretches way back, but it's very prevalent in this period. There's a couple of quotes I've stolen from Richard Overy's fantastic recent book on the subject. We've got the German Chancellor in December 1894 saying that an empire is an indication of our national reputation. Empire was essential to be a truly developed first rank nation. So for Germany to reach the pinnacle of nations, she had to have an empire. Italy,

another young nation like Germany, was emerging in the mid to late 19th century. The foreign minister of Italy claimed in 1885 that there was a steeple chase for colonial acquisition all over the world. And quote, its destiny as a great power depended on acquiring colonies of Italy's own. Later on, even after the First World War had shorn Germany of its colonies, the German foreign minister Stresemann made a speech in which he highlighted the contrast between other European empires like Spain and Portugal and the Germans, who he said pretty much uniquely in Europe, he called a people without space, without Raum, without room. And there's that phrase, Lebensraum, living space,

which you're going to hear a lot in this podcast. Adolf Hitler, who became leader of Germany in the early 1930s, was raised in this culture, imbibing these ideas. Before he ever rose to power, he wrote a book called Mein Kampf, in which he talked about the need for living space in Eastern Europe, the need for empire. Now, that was territory inhabited by people like Poles and Ukrainians and Russians, but he wrote a second book that he never published. It was in 1928, and he reflected on the British Empire, and he concluded that despite the way Brits like to talk about their civilising mission. In fact, he says the Brits needed markets

and sources of raw materials for its goods and had secured these markets through power political means. So Adolf Hitler is certain, he's one of those people who is absolutely certain in his own words that national prosperity depended on conquering an empire. The bread of freedom, he insisted, stems from the hardship of war. Hermann Goering, Hitler's charismatic but totally ridiculous deputy, he's the commander of the German air force, the Luftwaffe, he said to an English friend in 1937, we want an empire. And around the same time, Hitler's economics minister said in a speech, for an industrial state, the possession of colonial areas for raw material to expand the home economy is indispensable.

And so that's what empire was to these people. It was essential for the national project. It boosted national identity and pride in a world that celebrated this imperial competition. But it was also a place which would support your industry, make you rich. The peoples of the empire would buy the goods made by your skilled workers at home. In return, they would send you all their raw materials for your workers to fashion into those finished goods.

It would provide land for your country folk, your peasants, to go out and flourish and send back great cargos of beef and grain to keep your home populations fed and happy and fat. And now all that rhetoric around empire-seeking might have remained just rhetoric, were it not for a couple of enormous changes that the world was going through in the 1920s and 30s. And I think the first and very important change

is that Britain and France were two greatest global empires, and they were both in decline. Clearly, they just no longer had the money or the motivation to sustain vast global possessions. Those territories were becoming increasingly resistant to their rule. And importantly, because both Britain and France were going through the process of democratization or incorporating more and more of their own citizens in the democratic decision-making process, it was very apparent that the people, the voters, normal people in France and Britain, when given the choice to spend vast amounts of money on battleships to protect their Asian empire or have decent schools, pensions, hospitals, unemployment benefits,

well, clearly, they were choosing the latter. Britain and France were no longer able to support the expense of empire. And it was becoming more expensive because there was competition. There were new kids on the block. Germany, Japan, Italy, the United States, the Soviet Union, a very, very different field to the one in which Britain had amassed a vast empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. Times were different. States, the Soviet Union, a very, very different field to the one in which Britain had amassed a vast empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. Times were different. There were imperial competitors

now, and Britain was facing a situation where the costs of clinging onto this gigantic empire were no longer thought by many in Britain to be worth paying. And this is the interesting thing, just other nations were eulogizing empire. In Britain, there was a very mature conversation about what that empire actually meant. They had a huge empire. They could be realistic about its costs and benefits. What dividends was the empire actually bringing to Britain? And as Britain and France were having these debates, as they were cutting costs, other nations saw opportunities.

The Italian leader, Mussolini, the fascist, he described the UK and France as aged, weakened forces. And I don't think he was wrong about that. The British felt that. When you read the diaries, the letters of the political elite in the 1930s, you do get a sense of that decline, a sense of the terror of what's going to come next. The British realised that they would not be able to maintain their vast empire, to maintain this vast global system, this global status quo from which they were benefiting, partly because of this imperial competition and partly because of the domestic population in the UK, the demands for a welfare state or a proto-welfare state, competing with the demands of building battleships and tanks.

Frankly, the British had their hands full dealing with resistance from within the empire. For example, policing India, dealing with the massive Arab revolt in the 1930s in what is now Israel and Palestine. They've got their hands full. The British are busy before you even factor in great power conflict with nations such as Germany, Italy, and Japan. It's right there if you read Chips Channon, the wonderful diaries that have just been published. He's a gossipy politician. He writes everything down. Very close friend of Neville Chamberlain's in the 1930s. And as Britain is teetering on the edge of war in 1939, he attends a debate in the House of Commons. And he says the House was crowded, half hoping for peace, but determined really on war, which equals empire suicide. A few days before, he'd written another entry in his diary. He said, the weather was glorious, everyone was smiling,

but I feel that our world, or all that remains of it, is committing suicide while Stalin laughs and the Kremlin triumphs. Chips Channon felt the fragility of Britain's place in the world. It was a world that he liked, he recognised. It was a world in which Britain was clinging on to its hegemony. But it's a world in which Britain's ruling elite was being challenged. It was being challenged by competitor powers. It was being challenged at home by domestic socialism.

And he thought that would all be accelerated by a world war. It would be obliterated. And he was right. The world in 1945 was almost unrecognisable. So you've got the British holding on, trying to preserve this global system in the 1930s, trying to cling on to this massive empire, while other nations wanted a piece of it. Those nations we know, of course, Germany, Japan, Italy, foremost among them. And these three countries are all deeply dissatisfied by the results of the First World War. They were aggrieved by what they received

in the peace settlements, which we can loosely describe as the Versailles Settlement, the Treaty of Versailles, but in fact included all sorts of other treaties around the same time. And Versailles in Germany, it became a slogan. You only had to say the word and people knew exactly what you meant. At Versailles, Germany had been forced to take the blame for the outbreak of the First World War. The German Empire had been stripped. All its overseas territories had gone. Germany itself had lost provinces. It lost Alsace-Lorraine in the west of France. It lost Silesia, a fantastically wealthy province that Frederick the Great had seized from the Habsburgs in 1740. So it had been German for ages. It had lost that to Poland. It had lost bits of land to

Belgium, a slice to Denmark. It had been made to disarm completely. It couldn't have tanks, it couldn't have aircraft, it couldn't have great battleships or aircraft carriers, all the things you need to make modern war to be a great, proud nation state. It had to pay a gigantic reparations bill as well, billions of gold marks. And remember, for the Germans, this is important, the Germans came to believe that they'd never been defeated in the field. while soldiers on the front line in the west on the western front in late October and November 1918 well they knew just how imminent their complete collapse was but the enemy army never marched to Berlin normal Germans never saw their army retreating never saw the victorious allies German troops after the armistice well they've been allowed to go home their colours flying they marched in good order,

they'd gone back to their hometowns and cities. The fact that Germany then suddenly collapsed was deeply confusing for many people. They didn't understand the desperate situation that Germany had been in. And they were ready and willing to believe that Germany had been fine. And what had caused that collapse was, in fact, a stab in the back. Many Germans were able to convince themselves that things had been fine on the battlefield. They'd been undone. They'd been betrayed by socialists, communists, and Jews at home.

It had been they that had surrendered, while the brave men of Germany had been fighting proudly and had everything in hand on the Western Front. And thanks to their cowardice, thanks to their treachery, Germany had been shorn of its territory, of its empire. They'd been relegated to a second-ranked nation. They'd been buffeted by economic hardship. In Italy too, people were upset by the outcome of the First World War. The Italian front of the First World War, by the way, was something which, if you haven't looked into it too closely, you need to check out. It rivals, if not supersedes, the Western Front in terms of the horrors experienced by the men who fought there.

At the time, the Italians fought against their Austro-Hungarian enemies on the highest battlefields that humans had ever fought on. Thousands of men had died in avalanches at the top of mountain ranges in what we now call northern Italy. They had been exposed to shocking conditions. The gigantic offensives had led to the deaths and injuries of nearly two million Italians during the war. And yet, at the end of the war, Italy, which had fought on the side of the victorious allies, alongside Britain and France, they were disappointed by what they had received of the spoils. The Italians had wanted to start recreating, well, if not the Roman Empire, perhaps the

Venetian Empire. The Italians had wanted territory which had once had Italian rulers. They wanted lands right down the Dalmatian coast, what's now Croatia. They wanted Greek islands. They would have happily taken territory in Turkey. But in fact, the victorious allies gave Italy very little. And again, that became a clarion call for those on the right who believed that Italy's blood sacrifice in the First World War had earned them a place at the top table, earned them a place among the first ranked nations and empires in the First World War, and earned them a place at the top table, earned them a place among the first ranked nations and empires in the world. Japan, very similarly, they'd allied

themselves with Britain, France, and Russia in the war. They'd driven Germany out of certain Chinese bases, but in return they weren't given the big chunks of China that they'd wanted. They were not treated as a first rankedranked power in Paris in 1919. And Japanese leaders and the Japanese believed they ought to be a first-ranked power. They ought to be considered one of the world's great empires. And Japanese leaders, their politicians, they held a grudge and they found willing audiences in Germany ready to share that grudge, which is always handy when you're a politician, because that can sustain you in office. Japan believed it had been denied the fruits of victory,

which after all the British and French had helped themselves to following the First World War, when for example they'd carved up the Ottoman Empire or Germany's East African Empire between them. Japan was aggrieved and there were politicians, there were powerful voices within Japan, who took the lesson from the First World War as not waiting for European empires to deal them in, but to take what they wanted themselves. And these voices in Japan, in Italy and Germany, they might have been extremists, they might have been on the margins, and they might have remained a footnote in history, had it not been for the Great Depression.

In the autumn of 1925, there was a terrible crash. The Great Crash. The Wall Street Crash. It came at the end of the exciting 1920s, when it looked like the wounds of the First World War might heal. It looked like new prosperity might flood across the world and encourage people to look to the future, rather than hold grievances from the past. The roaring 20s. But on October 24th, 1929, Wall Street saw the largest sell-off of shares in American history. There were further collapses in share prices.

Together, these signalled the beginnings of what's become known as the Great Depression. It was an awesome, awful economic depression. The global economy, as we understand it, just came very close to collapse. The global financial system came very, very close to complete failure. And unsurprisingly, suffering populations, they turned against the sort of moderate politicians, the people who believed in maintaining the international system, the roughly liberal free trading ideas of international collaboration, the idea of the League of Nations. Well, that system had apparently delivered such hardship, such suffering, that those politicians, those voices had been pretty much swept from power. And these politicians were replaced in most cases by people considered to be formally way outside the political mainstream. As the British ambassador to Berlin wrote to his boss, the British Foreign Secretary in 1933, many of us have a feeling that

we live in a country where fanatics, hooligans and eccentrics have got the upper hand. The catastrophe of the Great Depression propelled into office those who had long critiqued the system, those with a ready-made alternative, an alternative that was based around self-reliance, imperial competition, war, securing resources. Not trading, not collaboration, not cooperation. These people came into power, they came into positions of influence and they gave birth to a new era of territorial acquisition. And you can understand it, you can understand that people turned to these extreme voices given the suffering that they were enduring. By 1932, in the world's leading industrial economies, there were 40 million unemployed people.

Tens of millions more were in part-time work struggling to make ends meet. In this recession, world trade, if you can believe this, fell by two-thirds. It's mind-blowing. There was the mother of all credit crunches. There were bankruptcies across every sector. Nation states themselves came very close to bankruptcy. So communists rubbed their hands together. They thought this was the end of Western capitalism as they had predicted. But on the other end of the spectrum, equally happy were nationalists who saw the Western capitalist trading system as an enemy to the world that they wanted to forge. A world of economic independence rather than interdependence. A world of, well, nationalism

rather than globalisation. And the sad thing is that conventional politicians, as they panicked, this was played into their hands really. British and American policymakers did quite a lot to dismantle the global economy. They pulled up the drawbridge. You can understand why, but they tried to protect domestic markets, protect their own voters. In June 1930, the Americans effectively cut themselves off from foreign imports, desperately hoping that might stimulate their own domestic economies. In November 1931, even Britain, the original, the OG free-trading nation, had abandoned great swathes of their attachment to liberal free trade. They imposed a range of tariffs, they bought in something called

imperial preference, and that's quite important. The British introduced the idea that they would give preferential treatments to goods sourced from across the British Empire. Now, for those other people around the world pointing to empires as essential to sustaining the national economy, to national prosperity, this looked like the British doing exactly that. France did the same by introducing tariffs on goods from outside their empire. France, America and Britain, who had so much to lose from the dismantling of this international system, well, they didn't do enough to protect it. They retreated into the mirage-like safety of economic self-sufficiency. In Japan, the moderate center collapsed. The great Japanese export, raw silk, which had been brought up by industrial countries all over the world, it

collapsed. It fell by more than 50%. Millions of peasants were left in crippling poverty. The idea that Japan could just work its way in, it could grow rich trading with these Western nations, well, that appeared to be a chimera. Nationalists came to power, promising the Japanese people their prosperity, their safety, their food security. We no longer depend on the whims of central bankers and policymakers in Washington and London and Paris. Similarly, in Germany, there was terrible unemployment, something like 40% unemployment, a 40% fall in industrial production. And meanwhile, Germany was expected, on paper at least, to keep paying its reparations, its fines from the First World War. And they'd been bitterly resented, even in good times.

And so all of that created such fertile ground for the rise of Adolf Hitler. In the late 1920s, he'd been such an absurd peripheral figure. He'd been polling in the low single digits, but now with the ruins of their economy around them, with suffering and hardship, this minority figure, with his simple nationalist message, a message that had seemingly remained unchanged, seemed perfectly suited for the times that Germany was now in. He'd always been hostile to global capitalism, its global trade. He'd always been hostile to a world in which the British, the French, the American empires were dominant. And in those torrid years of the early 1930s,

enough Germans came to agree with him. By 1932, his party was the largest in the German parliament. And by January 1933, he was offered the chancellorship of Germany. And very soon after that, he set about dismantling German democracy altogether, turning it into an authoritarian state. In Japan, in Italy, and Germany, nationalists, who often have been screaming into the void through the 1920s, talking about the importance of empire, the importance of taking back control,

they now found themselves, they thought, on the right side of history. The world looked like it was going in their direction. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. I'm talking about why the Second World War broke out. More coming up after this. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes.

Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Adolf Hitler believed that war was desirable. European war was necessary. Seizing territory to provide for the security of the German people, to give the German people land, living room, space, to move as British settlers had moved into North America, where they'd grown rich on huge farms. This is what the German people needed, Hitler believed. And so right from the beginning, he determined that there will be a general war in Europe. And Japan is not so very different. There were equivalents to Hitler in Japan. There were leaders who seized the opportunities presented by this global economic dislocation. And I think perhaps the first great spasm of this new era of imperialism

began on the 18th of September 1931, which has actually got a very good claim to be the beginning of the Second World War in an important way. It was started by Japanese engineers from the so-called Kwantung Army. Various nations, including Japan and European nations, had concessions on the Chinese coast. The most famous is Hong Kong. That was signed over in perpetuity to the British, but there were other ports that were signed over as bases for trade, as bases for the imperial powers. Now, the Kwantung Army is a police force, is a military force to support Japanese economic interests in Manchuria, which was an area that the Japanese had carved out to exploit. It was a security force, if you like, for their foothold in that part of China. The Kwantung Army took it upon themselves to engineer

a conflict in Manchuria. They sent engineers to blow up a stretch of railway. And on the 18th of September 1931, they blamed that explosion on the Chinese. In response for this act of Chinese aggression, the Kwantung Army burst out of their concessions on the coast, they captured the city of Mukden, and by early 1932 they'd occupied nearly the whole of Manchuria. This was the start of a Japanese war with China that would last until 1945. Just over a year after that explosion, by the beginning of 1933, the Japanese decided to expand the war to invade South. By 1935, they were at the gates of Beijing. This was the first great new territorial push undertaken by any power since the First World War, and the rest of the world were watching.

Manchuria was a hotbed of industry. It was actually one of the most advanced areas of the Chinese economy. And so sure enough, Japanese steel output rose from 2 million tonnes in 1930. Well, it almost tripled. In fact, in 1938, it was 6 million tonnes. Coal extraction went from 30 million tonnes to 50 million tonnes. These were the benefits of empire of direct territorial control. But the fly in the ointment here, and the catastrophe for everyone involved in this situation, from the victims, the people

who experienced conquest, to the leaders who pushed it themselves, is that these resources didn't come for free. You had to conquer the land. You had to hold it. You had to pacify the populations. You had to defeat your enemy who sought to take that ground back. To control and extract those raw materials sucked in ever more resources. More resources, in fact, than could be procured. So that rise in steel production was swallowed up instantly by the military, who insisted that in order to hold on to this giant empire and to expand it further, they needed ever more resources. By 1939, there were one million Japanese troops in China. That was costing about half the national budget of Japan to sustain them there. The answer for the nationalists was keep going, keep seizing more wealth and resources.

Nervous politicians who pointed out the insanity of this were jostled aside. The upper echelons of government and the military became full of people who insisted that there was a need to wage war on an ever larger scale to secure ever more resources, which at some point later in the future could then be enjoyed by the Japanese population. You can immediately see the problem with this theory, folks. And the problem was this Japanese invasion was a precedent. The League of Nations, which was a kind of forerunner of the United Nations, had been set up after the First World War, and it famously did very, very little in response to this Japanese aggression in Manchuria. This had been a far-sighted,

an optimistic, perhaps a naive experiment in some kind of global government. There was a theory that in future, international competition and arguments and points of conflict could be resolved through the League of Nations by a collaborative, consultative process. And eventually that would mean there was no more need for one nation to invade another. But Manchuria destroyed that dream. Not only did the League of Nations do nothing, but Britain and France, supposedly global hegemonic powers, had no appetite for war either. They had no appetite to enforce the international order, and therefore Italian, German, and Japanese politicians saw there were opportunities to be had.

There didn't appear to be any consequences for their obvious aggression. Hitler was emboldened. He decided to default on German debt in 1933. He repudiated reparations. He absolutely refused to pay any more money to the victorious allies of the First World War. He announced, in fact, he would not abide by any of the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. And in 1935, he began the rearmament of Germany. He would build a modern, gigantic German military. Expenditure went from 1.2 billion Reichsmarks in 1933 to 10 billion in 1936-37. The German military-industrial complex was back in business, and this is where I take a brief detour to point out that everyone's very rude about the Treaty of Versailles.

But in fact, by repudiating the Treaty of Versailles, the German treasury ended up spending nine billion marks on the military, money that could otherwise have gone on projects to improve the lives of the German people. If Germany had adhered to the Treaty of Versailles, there'd have been no Second World War. And by denying the German government the right to build a modern military, it ensured that the German government spent more domestically on other projects. But there we go, just one of the many tragedies of this episode of history. So by 1935, Germany's rearming. and also that year, Italy, closely following what's going on in Manchuria, decides it will make its own push for imperial greatness. Mussolini,

the absurd, strutting nationalist dictator of Italy, had made it clear for years that the British possessions in the Mediterranean, Malta, Suez Canal, the essential ownership of Egypt, Gibraltar, they'd allowed Britain, he said, to encircle, to imprison Italy. And he, Mussolini, was looking for spazia vitale, which is the same thing as Lebensraum, its living space. It was as common a phrase in Italy as it was in Germany. He wanted Italy to be the new Rome. And just as Rome's conquest of North Africa heralded its arrival as a regional superpower, so Mussolini's eyes fell on Libya, particularly the very fertile strip of land along the Mediterranean, which Mussolini believed would support up to six million Italian peasants who could go there and start farms and export the bounty of those farms back to Italy. Libya had been nominally controlled by the Italians since around 1911, but he fought

a series of brutal, costly, savage wars, basically counterinsurgencies, to try and bring Libya properly under Italian control. So Mussolini's been working away at that throughout his dictatorship. But in October 1935, he decides to go one step further. He makes his first big move in terms of seizing new territory, and he invaded Ethiopia, which extremely remarkably had remained independent during the so-called Scramble for Africa in the late 19th century, where European remarkably had remained independent during the so-called scramble for Africa in the late 19th century, where European nations had partitioned nearly the whole of Africa. They'd taken every piece of territory and incorporated it into their empires. But Ethiopia

had remained independent. But in October 1935, Italian troops invaded. Like the pacification of Libya, it was a much harder campaign than Mussolini had expected. It was brutal. Mussolini's forces used poison gas. Eventually, they did defeat the Ethiopians, and on the 9th of May 1936, he was able to announce to a crowd in Rome that Italy finally had its empire. So Italy and Japan are very much on the march. Germany was not far behind. In fact, at the same time that Italy had invaded Ethiopia on the 7th of March, 1936, Hitler had re-militarized the Rhineland. So that means he'd put troops and military vehicles

back into the Rhineland. The Rhineland is the stretch of German territory on the east bank of the Rhine. The French actually wanted to occupy it after the First World War as a buffer zone to insist on German good behaviour. But the British and Americans said, no, that was a step too far. But they had commanded the German government to leave it demilitarised, meaning no defences, no military units. And the purpose of that had been that if Germany ever did misbehave or breach the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, France in particular

would be able to enforce them. They'd be able to march straight back into the heart of Germany through undefended German territory. Remilitarization of the Rhineland was therefore a symbol of Hitler's repudiation of the Treaty of Versailles. He was reclaiming German soil by sending in the German military. Actually, he sent in a tiny force. And Albert Speer, who was his architect, he later said that was Hitler's most daring undertaking. Actually, he sent in a tiny force. And Albert Speer, who was his architect, he later said that was Hitler's most daring undertaking.

And Hitler later said it was the most nerve-wracking 48 hours of his life. The German troops were under orders to retreat if confronted by a large French force crossing the Rhine, but no French force materialised. They didn't have the stomach for it. And this was Hitler's first great success, wildly popular in Germany. And Critica placed Hitler as an individual in a greatly strengthened position when it came to confronting his more cautious generals. These generals who were unwilling to seek a war against the Western allies. Many of them remembered the defeats

on the battlefields of 1918. They did not want another war, but now Hitler was able to point to success, his daring. Luck was on his side. There is a tide in the affairs of man that leads on to greatness, he would have told them. He reoccupied the Rhineland. He'd faced the Allies down. In that spirit, he intended to continue. Later that summer, he wrote a big strategic memorandum on the military and economic future of the Third Reich, and he pointed out that the Soviet Union loomed very large. He always believed that there would be a time when there would be a showdown between his own fascism and Soviet communism. And he even put a time frame on it. He believed that he would be able to take on the Soviet Union in about 1942 or 1943. That's when Germany would have re-armed, they would have a massive modern military, and

they would be mobilised for total war. And Hitler would also take another lesson from the First World War. He had seen the damage done by the blockade, the British blockade in particular, of Germany. Germany had been cut off from raw materials and resources from all over the world and all of its industries, but munitions industries as well, had suffered terribly with the lack of raw materials. And so Hitler, like the Japanese, wanted Germany to be self-sufficient. Germany in the First World War, Germany had been cut off from the vital Chilean nitrates which go to make fertilizer and boost harvest yields. He now wanted Germany to be self-sufficient.

He put in place a command economy. Everything would be bent towards the national goals of self-sufficiency and seeking this empire in the East. And that meant expanding. It meant seizing more raw materials, controlling them directly. He doesn't want to buy food on the international market. He wants to make sure he owns it directly. He can always feed the German people. And so the desire to smash Soviet Bolshevism and control swathes of agricultural

land both led him, as he saw it, forced him to fight a showdown with Stalin's USSR. What was so neat about this plan, in Hitler's view, is that the lands he wanted to expand into, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, well, they were full of barbarous, uncivilised, undeveloped people. Just as previous empire builders had viewed the indigenous inhabitants of Australia or the African interior or the western plains of North America, that's how Hitler and his cabal viewed the peoples of the east. In October 1936, so soon after the remilitarization of the Rhineland, things happened so fast in the late 1930s, Germany and Italy came to an informal agreement known as the Axis. Mussolini later claimed it was called that because he said that all of Europe would now

revolve around the Axis between Rome and Berlin. A month later, in November 1936, Japan and Germany signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, basically an anti-communist alliance, which Italy would join a year later. Again, just a few months after that, in July 1937, Japan, boosted by its new empire-seeking allies, made its move in China. There was the so-called Marco Polo Bridge incident just outside Beijing, in which, this is a very bizarre story, a member of a Japanese unit went to the toilet, went to the bathroom. His commanding officer couldn't find him and believed that the Chinese had abducted him and he basically initiated a firefight with the Chinese. This was used as an inciting incident, a moment, to start another campaign, another war in northern China. Within a month, Beijing had been captured, but Japan was now sucked into a giant land war in central China. It would prove incredibly costly.

As I mentioned earlier, just a year or two later, a million Japanese soldiers would be involved, and a giant slice of the Japanese budget would be sunk into this never-ending war in China. Back in Europe, Hitler was also on the move. He had spotted an opportunity. There were many Germans living outside the borders of Germany, and so he thought it was rather a simple proposition to demand that all Germans ought to live inside Germany. And by the way, Germans as defined by him. First and foremost, that meant Austria. Austria was a German-speaking country. It was the remnant of the giant Austro-Hungarian Empire. It'd never been incorporated into the modern nation-state of Germany, but it was part of the German world. It had led the Holy Roman Empire, the First Reich. So Hitler said,

why should not be part of the Third Reich? And it became clear that Britain and France would not veto this happening. Lord Halifax was a very, very senior British politician. He was the leader of the House of Lords. He would shortly be made Foreign Secretary. He went to visit Hitler in November 1937, and he told Hitler that Britain would not stand in the way of Hitler incorporating Austrian Germans, and even Germans living in Czechoslovakia, into his Third Reich as long as that process was peaceful. Now that was at odds with Britain's official stance, but it did give Hitler the impression, quite rightly, that there was a sizable chunk of politicians in Britain, a sizable slice of the population in Britain, who would go to great lengths to avoid fighting

a second war against Germany. Britain was profoundly unwilling to fight again on the continent after the great bloodletting of the First World War. Would the British people stomach another great war because of some boundary changes between Germany and Czechoslovakia? other great war because of some boundary changes between Germany and Czechoslovakia? Halifax thought not. Hitler smelt an opportunity. He didn't wait long before acting. In early 1938, a month or two after Halifax's visit, he purged his cautious army leadership. He now felt powerful enough to do that. He made himself Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. He created a new command structure for the German army. It was called the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht.

And that was really the machine through which he controlled the armed forces. He made Joachim von Ribbentrop, who hated the Brits. He obviously had a bad time when he was the ambassador in London. He was a key member of the war party, the aggressive end of the Nazi party. He made him foreign minister. And after that bureaucratic restructure, on the 12th of the Nazi party. He made him foreign minister. And after that bureaucratic restructure on the 12th of March 1938, Hitler invaded Austria. It was known as the Anschluss. It was presented as the sort of willing union, the marriage of two countries. And there was

strong support from people within Austria and Germany for unification of these two countries. It did feel like unfinished business at the end of the First World War, but there was considerable opposition in Austria too that was brushed aside. Hitler made the argument that now the Austro-Hungarian Empire no longer existed, why not incorporate all German speakers into one German country, the country of Germany. Shortly after this invasion, there was a referendum, which of course officially ratified Austria's annexation by the Third Reich. Wasting no time at all, in the summer of 1938, Hitler turned his attention to the so-called

Sudeten Germans living in Czechoslovakia. These were also a holdover from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They were Germans living in what had been Austro-Hungarian Empire. They were Germans living in what had been Austro-Hungarian provinces, but after the collapse of that empire they found themselves living in the new country of Czechoslovakia, all part of the great redrawing of Central Europe that had occurred in 1919. Hitler made out these Germans to be brutally oppressed, but actually these Germans enjoyed civil and political rights that Germans in Germany did not enjoy because they were living under Hitler's dictatorship. But much was made of their plight as a minority people living in a Czech-dominated state. And Hitler and some Sudeten leaders told a story about how they were cruelly exploited. They were a dominated minority

who'd be much happier living with their fellow Germans in Germany. And it was Hitler's determination to forcibly include these Sudeten Germans within the Reich, around three and a quarter million of them, that precipitated the so-called Munich Crisis of September 1938. Britain and Germany came hours away from war. Germany insisted that they would incorporate the Sudetenland into the Third Reich. Britain said this was unacceptable. There was lots of to-ing and fro-ing, lots of shuttle diplomacy, and a compromise was reached. The Czech government

reluctantly agreed, under pressure from the British and French, to accede to German demands. The Sudetenlands, the Sudeten Germans, were incorporated in the Third Reich. This Munich Agreement has been held up as the single greatest example of the folly of exceeding to dictators' demands, of the short-sightedness of appeasement, because we know what came later. But at the time, the Munich Agreement looked like it had averted war. Chamberlain was invited to Buckingham Palace. There were cheering crowds in London. But it provoked a range of responses in Britain. There was a concern that by giving in to Hitler on this occasion,

you had made war inevitable. You might have bought a few months or even a few years, but war it would be. Hitler was emboldened. And around Munich, there is a hardening up that takes place in the British public, and I think among British politicians as well. There was a sense that Hitler's appetite for conquest was actually insatiable, and Hitler would have to be met sooner or later with violence. In the debate that took place in Parliament on Munich,

Winston Churchill, who'd been a senior minister during the First World War but looked to have reached the end of his career while he was on fine form, he said it was impossible to live with Germany, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution and uses with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force. But Rab Butler, an up-and-coming young Conservative MP, speaking for the government, said, well, we've got two choices. Either we settle our differences with Germany by consultation, or face up to the inevitability of a clash between the two systems of democracy and dictatorship. I must emphatically give my opinion as one of the

younger generation. Bit of shade thrown there against Winston Churchill. War settles nothing, went on Rab Butler, and I see no alternative to the policy on which the Prime Minister has so courageously set himself. In the end, Winston Churchill didn't vote against the government, but he did abstain. He was one of 25 MPs that abstained. And rather than going through the lobbies to vote, he just sat in a grump on the government benches in the House of Commons. So some people in autumn 1938 might have allowed themselves to believe that war had been averted. But in March 1939, I think that became very difficult indeed. That was the moment when everyone realised that it was inevitable. On the 15th of March, Czech President Emil Hacar was summoned to Berlin. He had a

meeting with Hitler, and at that meeting, according to one witness, he actually appears to have suffered a heart attack, which was induced by Göring's threat to bomb Prague into the ground. And he was forced, I mean, he was actually physically bullied into signing a capitulation for the rest of Czechoslovakia. The French ambassador reported that Hatcher collapsed after this possible heart attack, and he was kept going, I quote, kept going only by means of injections. And then he was forced into signing these papers that were laid in front of him by Goering and Ribbentrop in particular.

They kept shouting that hundreds of bombers were fuelled up, engines on, ready to take off. His city, his country would be pulverised unless he signed it over to Germany. And with that, with that stroke of the pen, Czechoslovakia ceased to exist. Germany annexed the Western part, Bohemia and Moravia. Slovakia was established in the East as a kind of puppet regime.

Now, this was really important because this is the first time that Germany had seized land that had not been taken from them at Versailles and didn't have a majority German-speaking population. They had just conquered Czechoslovakia. It was foreign territory. And it was now clear to nearly everyone, including Chamberlain, including Halifax in the UK, that Hitler simply could not be trusted. He was bent on a program of conquest and expansion

that would inevitably thrust Europe into war. Two weeks later, on the 31st of March 1939, it was announced in the British House of Commons that His Majesty's government had given Poland a security guarantee. This was the clearest of signals to the Germans, to Hitler, that invading Poland, which was the obvious next target, well that would mean war. Days after that, in April 1939, Italian forces invaded Albania. The wonderfully named King Zog was deposed and Albania was effectively incorporated into Italy. The British government was rearming now, speeding up its rearming. And for the first time in British history, at the end of April, weeks after Mussolini's invasion of Albania and a month after the Polish security guarantee, the British government introduced peacetime conscription.

Never before had young men been conscripted into the British army at a time of peace. It was certainly not too soon. If anything, the announcement came too late. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. On the 23rd of August 1939, there was a stunning diplomatic revolution. Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union signed a pact, a guarantee of peace made by each party towards the other. But in addition to the publicly announced affirmations of non-aggression, the treaty included all sorts of secret protocols. It broke up Eastern Europe into spheres of influence. There was a line that stretched through Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland. They were all divided up between the

Soviet and the German orbit. This meant that Hitler was now free to act against Poland, knowing that it wouldn't immediately precipitate a war against the Soviet Union, which he did not want at this time. Not yet. Hitler at this stage is a gambler on a winning streak. He is rolling the dice. He has a sense of certainty. He has a sense that he has been touched by fate. He has a sense that the wind is in his sails. He's gone from foreign policy success to success. He told Ribbentrop, his foreign minister, in August 1939, I have at last decided to do without the opinions of people who have misinformed me on a dozen occasions, and I shall rely on my own judgment, which has, in all these cases, given me better counsel than the competent experts. So Adolf Hitler, in 1939, had heard enough from experts. He decided

to invade Poland, sure, certain, that Britain and France would once again stand down, step back, compromise. Hitler's plan was, and I quote, that Poland would be depopulated and settled by Germans. At 4pm on the 31st of August, relying on his own judgment, Adolf Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland. It would begin the following day. He assured one senior commander that France and England will not march. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, wrote down in his diary that night, the Fuhrer does not believe England will intervene. In a grotesque emulation of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria in 1939, the German army planned a false flag operation to give their invasion some legitimacy.

A Polish attack on German frontier posts was faked. Six concentration camp prisoners were gathered up by the SS, they were dressed in Polish uniforms and killed on the German-Polish border. A Polish person was found, he was killed, and he was left in a German radio transmitting station, allowing the Germans to claim that the Poles had violated German territory, a pretext for war. At dawn on the 1st of September, an old pre-First World War battleship,

the Schleswig-Holstein, which had been on a friendly visit to the port of Danzig, sailed out of the port and opened fire on that military base at the mouth of the Vistula. The German Luftwaffe screamed into action. The first shots of the Second World War in Europe had been fired. There was consternation in Britain and France. There was high drama in the corridors of Whitehall and Westminster and Paris. But on the 3rd of September 1939, two days after that German invasion,

Neville Chamberlain made his BBC radio broadcast. He informed the British people that he had not received an undertaking from Germany to withdraw from Poland, and consequently, this country was at war with Germany. I always find it fascinating, when that news of the British declaration of war arrived in Berlin, Hitler was stunned. He looked at his foreign secretary, von Ribbentrop, he was white with rage, and he said simply, what now? Like so many wars, the Second World War had been precipitated by gamblers. Strutting, proud, confident after easy wins on previous hands. And this confidence had caused Hitler to radically misjudge the response of the British and French.

Rather than a limited quick war to incorporate bits of Polish territory into Germany, Hitler had plunged Europe into another great war against two, yes, aging empires, but two empires that could still marshal gigantic global resources against him. And behind them, America, which Hitler rightly assumed would end up coming in on their side. America, which Hitler rightly assumed would end up coming in on their side. And Hitler knew enough to be sure that against that gigantic military and industrial economic demographic coalition, Germany would face much the same odds as she'd faced during the First World War. Victory against those Western powers was almost inconceivable. Now it's true that in 1940, Hitler came, well, closer than anyone had believed before

the war to achieving that victory. But in the end, even the devastating, stunning advances on the battlefields of Western Europe were not enough. Even knocking France out of that coalition was not enough. British obstinacy, backed up eventually by the Americans, represented an existential threat to a German imperial project. But in 1941, Hitler tried to gamble himself out of that crisis by attacking his erstwhile ally Stalin and precipitated a gigantic war with the Soviet Union as well. But that, my friends, is a story for a different podcast. As probably is the eventual arrival of Italy and Japan as formal allies of Germany in the war. Italy interestingly sat on the sidelines weighing up its chances until the summer of 1940 and Japan would launch its own extraordinary lightning

attacks on the USA, Britain and other European empires at the end of 1941 and only with that were these conflicts in different theatres on different continents finally unified into one global war. And that war has shaped everything that's come since. From the space race, to our modern national boundaries, to the end of empires and nuclear weapons, down to the far more prosaic. I'm only the person I am today, like millions of others, because of my grandparents meeting among the chaos and tumult of war the chaos that threw them together

when otherwise there was absolutely no chance that a Welsh woman born in India would ever meet a Canadian medical student who grew up on a farm north of Toronto whether we like it or not the second world war made our world and made so many of us within it. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. I really appreciate all the kind comments that you leave in reviews

or the emails you send us. It keeps me going, folks. Remember, you can listen to so many other podcasts. So many elements that have been covered in this episode are expanded upon in different podcasts we've got, which you can access wherever you get your podcasts or by subscribing to History Hit, where you can also watch lots of wonderful historical documentaries about all this kind of thing. Thank you so much on this 85th anniversary

for listening to this podcast. See you next time. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes.

Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.