How Much Does the Present Resemble the Unpreparedness Before WWII

In a 1933 speech, lamenting the rise of Hitler, British member of parliament Winston Churchill  complained that “Not one of the lessons of the past has been learned, not one of them has been applied, and the situation is comparably more dangerous.” A year earlier, he identified the pillars of peace as the strength of the French Army and the prevalent anti-war sentiment but warned that all of this could be undone if no one intervened against German rearmament. In 2024, with persistent threats of escalation by Russian President Vladimir Putin in his war in Ukraine, and associated Chinese intimidation of Taiwan and Iranian menacing of the Straits of Hormuz, an observer can be forgiven if they sense a similarity in the unpreparedness of the democracies to the events of the 1930s. There are important differences. Whereas France and Russia were the primary states concerned and militarily prepared for a resurgent Germany in the 1930s, today only the U.S. is ensuring that it is making the necessary investment in its navy, nuclear deterrent, aircraft and missiles, commensurate with China’s naval threat. The rarity of conscription, low levels of defense spending, and the prevalent political complacency across Europe, Canada, and even in Taiwan, has given Russia and China a greater than the two-year lead enjoyed by Hitler in his rearmament. 

Both biographer John Toland and journalist William L. Shirer depict German leader Adolf Hitler as demonstrably more intelligent and calculating that either Russian President Vladimir Putin or Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping. Hitler was particularly effective, at least in the short term, of securing popularity in Germany by exploiting fears of unemployment and grievances of weakness and war humiliation. Untravelled Hitler, like Putin and Xi Jinping, suffered from a poor appreciation of what inspired and united the liberal democracies, especially among the Anglo-Saxon countries, and, like Putin, was overly-sensitive and reactive to criticism by the international press. However, unlike Putin and Xi’s lack of coherence between their poorly timed military provocations and faltering economies, Hitler used a six-year rearmament program, camouflaged behind a mollifying diplomatic strategy, to solve unemployment, build the world’s most innovative army with a two-year lead over its adversaries, and engage in territorial aggrandizement, without stumbling into war (1936 reoccupation of the Rhineland, 1938 Anschluss with Austria, and September 1939 Munich Agreement). Hitler was careful never to eclipse the mutual distrust of Western Europe and the USSR, thereby short-circuiting repeated attempts by both parties to form an anti-Nazi coalition. He also masterfully manipulated democratic fears of inadvertent war, by constantly emphasizing the powder keg of ethnic conflict in the Sudeten and then in the Danzig Corridor, which he covertly instigated while claiming they were beyond his control.  

The essential differences between 1933 and 2024, is that while “peace at any price” was a far more prevalent sentiment in the period before the Second World War, states were also more materially prepared for a large conflict. Unlike the First World War, the Anglo-American fleets far outweighed the combined Axis vessels of the Germans, Japanese, and Italians. Though the Soviet Union and China were widely viewed as militarily inefficient, they had vast reservoirs of soldiers, and if supplied by a coalition, were unconquerable. In contrast, in 2024, China and Iran’s brown water navies are serious rivals for the U.S., Japanese and European blue water navies. Most democratic citizens view the Russian and Chinese threats as a continuation of the Cold War, ignoring that both Moscow and Beijing are far more desperate and likely to use military force to arrest regime decline.

In 2024, the democracies live in the complacently triumphalist aftermath of the successful Containment and collapse of the USSR in the Cold War. In the 1930s, the impact of the losses of the First World War (900,000 killed in Great Britain, and 1.3 million killed out of 37 million in France) on political sentiment in Great Britain and the U.S., was to create a heightened caution against being dragged into another European conflict, and manifested itself as a commitment to multilateral institutional pacifism, disarmament, and condemning the type of capitalist war profiteers that allegedly caused the First and Second Boer Wars. British foreign policy became bifurcated between militarily backing France, and its constellation of Eastern European allies (Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Poland) against German and Soviet resurgence, and backing the League of Nations as both a proto-NATO enterprise in collective security, and a UN-like effort in disarmament. In 1933, Churchill bemoaned that on the one hand peace depended on the grandiose combined armies of France, Poland and Czechoslovakia, but on the other hand Great Britain had proposed an unwise disarmament initiative to France in which it dismantles half of its air force and reduces its army from seven-hundred to four hundred thousand. In 2024, there is far less hope for the success of UN mediation, and far more reliance for security on the escalation dominance of NATO’s coordination of conventional to nuclear retaliation. 

Persistent British sympathies for Germany, and the later 1937 Appeasement Policy of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, had their origins in three factors. First, many prominent English, like economist John Maynard Keynes, believed that peace could only emerge if war reparations were cancelled, and if a robust middle class was nurtured in Germany through trade. Second, the repeated failure of French punitive efforts against Germany, like the 1923 occupation of the Ruhr, and the imperative of maintaining Germany as a bulwark against the widespread fear of Moscow-inspired labor unrest, meant that London was reluctant to pre-emptively impose a change of government in Berlin. Third, the Great Slump (as the Great Depression was known in England), combined with the results of the pivotal October 1933 East Fulham election, alerted the British political parties of the consequences of neglecting the widespread pacifist sentiment in Great Britain. Ultimately Keynes was correct that peace with Germany depended on middle class prosperity through commerce, but so was Churchill who observed in 1933 that it would first depend on the German people needing to be humiliated through mass bombardment, defeat, territorial dismemberment, expulsion, and occupation. A similarly optimistic liberal ideology drove the rapid integration of post-Soviet Russia and China into the world of capitalist finance and trade, and while not at fault, failed to create a pacific middle class sufficiently strong to suppress nationalist revanchism.

According to John F. Kennedy’s 1940 Why England Slept,  the British public’s rising disgust with the totalitarian nature of Germany’s Nazi regime, the rising public fear of defencelessness against bombardment by Germany’s growing air power around 1935, the disappointment with the 1932-34 disarmament conference, and the continuously humiliating failure of the League of Nations in challenging Japan’s 1931 incursion in Manchuria, Italy’s 1935 invasion of Abyssinia, and in overseeing the 1935-1940 Spanish Civil War, speeded British rearmament. Chamberlain announced Appeasement in 1937 not as submission, as is widely believed, but as a final offer to Germany’s unending territorial demands. However, intervention against Germany was impossible as long as all of the Commonwealth Dominions of Australia, Canada and South Africa, pressed for inaction, even as late as during the Munich Crisis of September 1938. War was widely viewed as inevitable in Great Britain by March of 1939, when Nazi Germany marched into Prague and the protectorate of Slovakia.

U.S. public sentiments were very similar to the UK, with a strong pacifist emphasis on de-militarisation, which was often counter-productively pushed on France. Unlike the UK, anti-isolationist sentiment in the U.S. was triggered by the conjunction of the primarily anti-Soviet 1936 Anti-Comintern Pact between Nazi Germany and Japan. This linked the power politics of Europe with Japanese attempts to unify Asia by the conquest of China, and so by 1938 U.S. public opinion perceived Germany as a threat. Repeated Anglo-American and U.S.-encouraged British-French-Russian attempts at coordination against Germany, were undermined by volatile domestic politics and mistrust. Italy’s accession to the Pact in November of 1937, rising German financial penetration of South America in the late-30s (although on a much smaller scale than prior to the First World War), and the Anglo-French sacrifice of democratic Czechoslovakia during the September 1938 Munich Crisis, made war in Europe look inevitable to most Americans. The unexpected political shock of the rapid German defeat of France in June of 1940, and the Japanese occupation of French Indochina in September of 1940, gave President Franklin D. Roosevelt the political space to compromise U.S. neutrality and back the anti-fascist coalition.   

France, which faced a more powerful and intractably vengeful Germany, depended heavily on preserving its prickly friendship with disarmament-focused Great Britain, and unsuccessfully pursued American security guarantees. The U.S. had concluded the First World War with a joint British guarantee of French security at the Rhine, but then abandoned it when the League of Nations was not ratified by the U.S. Senate. Class feuding brought French labor activist and pacifist Prime Minister Léon Blum, into power, where in response to the prospect of German leader Adolf Hitler’s rearmament of Germany, was quoted as saying, in reference to France: “If a nation thus undertook to disarm, it would not in reality incur any risk, because the moral prestige which it would acquire would render it invulnerable to attack and the force of its example would induce all other States to follow." (NYT February 21, 1932). France never recovered its military production in time to match Nazi Germany’s rapid buildup from seven to 51 division between 1934 and 1939. Class-based conflict was a further disuniting cause in undermining the morale of the French army to resist the six-week German invasion in 1940.

War appeared inevitable to the British and French when Germany occupied Prague in March of 1939. Surprisingly, in his 1960 Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer noted that even Adolf Hitler, who was relying on a long-established outline on how to secure an elusive one-front war in Mein Kampf, prevaricated for months in the spring of 1939, on whether to invade Poland. He was seen by a number of his military entourage grappling obsessively with Great Britain’s intangible historical ability to form coalitions and concluded that there was no scenario where London could be placated. But, it was not until he was provoked in a fit of rage by Britain’s March 31 1939 unilateral security guarantee to Poland, that he secretly implement, on April 3, his Case White directive to invade on September 1. Hitler spent the remaining months securing the neutrality of the USSR. Putin’s decision to invader Ukraine likely took place in October of 2021, after consultations with Xi Jinping. In December of 2021, the administration of U.S. President Joseph Biden sent CIA Director William Burns to warn Putin directly in his Kremlin office against invading Ukraine, without effect. Even if both decisions were not reversed by warnings, it does demonstrate that authoritarian leaders often decide for war on impulse, and that in principle they can be deterred.

On April 15, President Roosevelt confronted Hitler with a letter asking him if he had an intention to attack any of 31 countries listed. In a pivotal and provocative two-hour speech in the German Reichstag on April 28, 1939, broadcast by radio across the world including the U.S., Hitler recklessly abandoned moderation for the satisfaction of sarcasm. His accusation of hypocrisy at the U.S. conquest of the Sioux tribes, of the British and French occupations of Palestine and Syria respectively, his criticism of the international press, his allegations of encirclement, were popular with Germans, but evaporated any remaining sympathy in the democracies for Germany. This speech is not unlike innumerable declarations on Taiwan by Xi Jinping reported by the Chinese state press, and most similar to Putin’s July 12, 2021 essay on the historical justification of Russian geopolitics.

In the final week before the war, on August 25, 1939, German citizens were asked to evacuate and return to Germany, and France and Great Britain reciprocated. The same day, Roosevelt called for peace between Germany and Poland. On August 31, Berlin lied to the German people about ongoing negotiations with Warsaw. On September 1, 1939, the German Wehrmacht invaded Poland.

The 1930s and 2024 share a commonality in public and political complacency, resulting in deficient levels of defense spending, limited industrial rationalization and no mass mobilization planning. Like Hitler, both Putin and Xi have sealed off their societies from abroad, used propaganda to justify calls for territorial conquest, and ramped up military spending. The West’s false sense of security is based in part on the conviction that Russia’s and China’s under-35 cohort will be unwilling to support a war, but rests mainly on a resumption of the Cold War reliance on nuclear deterrence. First, Shirer noted in his conversations with everyday Germans in the streets of Berlin the evening before Germany invaded Poland, that there was unanimity against war, but he concluded that Hitler’s popularity was such that he would be followed blindly, regardless. Putin, or Xi, may yet trick Russians to fight his war. Second, the confidence in deterrence is not unlike the apocalyptic public fear of air-dropped chemical weapons in the 1930s. In the words of Churchill in 1933, it was widely believed that “…air power may either end war or end civilization.” That the major belligerents proceeded to fight the Second World War without resorting to nerve gas or anthrax, demonstrate that weapons of mass destruction do not automatically deter war. The incidence of small-scale military clashes under a nuclear umbrella, first in 1969 between the Soviet Union and Communist China, and then in 1999 between India and Pakistan, may lead Putin and Xi to believe they are free to attack.

Dr. Julian Spencer-Churchill is associate professor of international relations at Concordia University, and author of Militarization and War (2007) and of Strategic Nuclear Sharing (2014). He has published extensively on Pakistan security issues and arms control and completed research contracts at the Office of Treaty Verification at the Office of the Secretary of the Navy, and the then Ballistic Missile Defense Office (BMDO). He has also conducted fieldwork in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and Egypt, and is a consultant. He is a former Operations Officer, 3 Field Engineer Regiment, from the latter end of the Cold War to shortly after 9/11.