Diplomatic Failure of Will
America’s absence left the economically distressed, wobbling, and weak-willed European democracies to deal with the aggressive dictator. None of the Western allies wanted the burden of military expenditures added on top of existing public works and socialist outlays. Diplomatic gymnastics were employed to concoct alliances that would substitute fantasies of mutual support for genuine martial power: France and the Italians discussed military cooperation if Hitler invaded Austria, and the “Little Entente” of Yugoslavia, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, backed by France, seemed to offer hope of uniting to stop Hitler in the East. Each of these alliances collapsed under clever negotiating by German diplomats or as a result of economic pressures brought by the Third Reich. Indeed, it did not take long for Mussolini to abandon France and throw in with Hitler.
When local Nazis killed Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in his office, reaction by the democracies was swift in condemning the assassination and threatening action, and Mussolini actually moved four divisions to the Austrian border to support the Austrian army in the event of an invasion from Germany. Though not yet ready to provoke armed confrontation, Hitler publicly announced the following March that the German army had already expanded to more than double the size permitted by the Versailles Treaty, and soon cast aside all secrecy surrounding the Luftwaffe. Hitler also admitted Germany’s treaty-busting naval expansion. Shocked emissaries from France, Italy, and Britain quickly met at Stresa, Italy, in April 1935 to present a united front and denounce Germany’s military buildup. Like League protests, the Stresa Front lacked any teeth whatsoever, pledged no specifics, and was washed away by Hitler’s May 1935 speech proclaiming that Germany “wants peace and desires peace.” Western papers, such as the London Times, accepted Hitler’s words at face value, saying they showed his “sincerity and peaceful intentions.”78 Britain foolishly leaped into negotiations to “limit” the German fleet through the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, which “held” the Nazis to 35 percent of the Royal Navy’s power—a ceiling that the Germans would never reach. The agreement represented a diplomatic coup for Hitler that scrapped the last remnants of Versailles between Britain and Germany, and created a wedge between Britain, Italy, and Japan.
At every critical point, comprehensive resistance to Hitler foundered on confusion about his character and goals. There was the parade of British elites who trekked into Germany as apologists for Hitler’s positions, foremost among them David Lloyd George and Neville Chamberlain. To them, Hitler seemed rational and sane, just another politician doing his best for his people. British ambassador Nevile Henderson even proposed giving Germany certain African territories that belonged to Belgium and Portugal, though he was careful to exclude British territories in Africa from discussions.79 His 1939 book, Failure of a Mission, offers an interesting study in delusion. “For two years I hoped against hope that the Nazi revolution, having run its course, would revert to a normal and civilized conduct of internal and international life,” he stated. “Even today I do not regret having tried to believe in Germany’s honor and good sense.”80 The Western press was generally helpful to the Nazis, and sympathizers such as Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the Times of London, wrote a correspondent in Germany in 1937, “I do my utmost, night after night, to keep out of the paper anything that might hurt [German] sensibilities.”81
Of course, German colonies in Africa—should they have actually been transferred—would have left Hitler with the ever-present problem of supply lines being subject to interdiction by the British Royal Navy. A more rational sphere of influence—because it did not involve confronting the Royal Navy, but was well within range of the Luftwaffe—was eastern Europe and the Balkans, and leaders in those states knew it. If they didn’t, British diplomats were quick to remind them: in 1938, Romania’s King Carol II was bluntly informed that German economic dominance of the region was “inevitable” and was a “German monopoly field.”82 Talk of that kind unnerved Mussolini, who scrambled all the more frantically to form a “Third Europe” coalition of Yugoslavia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Italy.
The Dictator’s Ball
Italy had remained quite independent from German ambitions throughout most of the 1930s, finally throwing in with Hitler in the May 1939 “Pact of Steel.” The traditional view that Hitler and Mussolini were bosom buddies was accurate only after the Munich Agreement of September 1938, where the Western allies handed over the Czech Sudetenland to Germany without a fight. Mussolini, always alert to who was gaining and losing power, sized up the allies as weak. Until that time, however, the Italians flitted incessantly on the fringes of various alliances with Britain, France, Czechoslovakia, and other states.
What instigated the separation of Italy from the Western democracies was not Hitler’s shrewd diplomacy, but Mussolini’s land grab in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in October 1935. Dating back to the humiliation of Italian forces by natives at Adowa in 1896, a succession of Italian governments had claimed Abyssinia as Italian territory, and as a “big power,” the Italians felt they possessed the same right to colonies in Africa as the British and French. In December 1934, shooting broke out in southeast Ethiopia between Ethiopian troops and Italian forces from nearby Italian Somaliland, in what became known as the Wal Wal Incident. Italy invaded, presenting the League of Nations a chance to redeem itself from its earlier failure in 1932 to stop the Japanese in Manchuria. Stanley Baldwin, the British prime minister, bravely promised to save Abyssinia through “peace by collective security,” which meant little more than economic sanctions. The League imposed sanctions on Italy on October 19, convincing Mussolini (correctly) that different rules were being applied to him from those that governed imperialism by England and France. It further convinced him (also correctly) that a permanent alliance with the Western powers would never involve Italy as a full and equal partner, and he began to shift his stance toward Germany.
The Abyssinian/Ethiopian conflict demonstrated every pitiful frailty of the League of Nations. Committing itself to protecting backward nations such as Abyssinia, a quasi-state which still permitted slavery and could not police its own borders, the League saw legitimacy and equality where none existed. No one wished to send troops to aid the Ethiopians, and indeed the British would not even close the Suez Canal or impose a naval blockade against the transport of Italian forces. Even the United States refused to impose a specific sanction on oil sales, and when Addis Ababa fell on May 5, 1936, all sanctions were lifted. A new British-French overture—the Hoare-Laval Pact of December 1935—offered Mussolini whatever territory the Italians already held in Abyssinia. Word leaked to an outraged public, and both Pierre Laval, the French prime minister, and Samuel Hoare, the British foreign secretary, resigned. It was classic appeasement. The Abyssinian episode brought out in sharp relief the weaknesses of the League, the dominance of realpolitik and self-interest (as opposed to upholding the principles of the League) in both Britain and France, and—to Mussolini—the untrustworthiness of Western allies. Ethiopia, however, was instructive in demonstrating what the totalitarians had in mind for their new subjects should they win. Mussolini told his top general there to gas, shoot, or otherwise exterminate anyone who resisted.
Mussolini’s ruthlessness never came close to matching that of the Nazis, in large part because of the Italian military’s incompetence but more frequently because of his interference with military planning. Despite a victory at Adowa on October 6, 1935, the Italians’ advance slowed. Under international pressure, Mussolini demanded a quicker pace, leading General Rodolfo Graziani to douse the Ethiopians with gas sprayed from aircraft, further increasing calls from abroad to end the conflict. By the spring of 1936, the Italians held Addis Ababa and declared victory, but it had taken a modern nation armed with machine guns, artillery, airplanes, and poison gas a year to subdue the poorly armed Ethiopians, many of them possessing no weapons other than spears or bows.
The prowess of the Italian military had hardly improved by 1939
when Mussolini invaded Albania. Filippo Anfuso, the assistant to Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, observed that if the Albanians “had possessed a well-armed fire brigade they could have driven us back into the Adriatic.”83 But both the German and Italian dictators understood the Ethiopian lesson with great clarity: the unwillingness of the League or the democracies to resist at all illuminated the “green light for further acts of aggression.”84
Certainly not everyone in the West was oblivious to the impression of weakness created by the Ethiopian war. In England, British foreign secretary Anthony Eden predicted in June 1936 that Hitler would use Ethiopia to fracture the Treaty of Versailles (as if it were not already defunct). Some feared the affair would push Mussolini into Hitler’s arms, which it certainly did. Prior to Ethiopia Il Duce had maintained a skeptical view of Hitler: “He’s a nut,” he told his confidants after their initial meeting in June 1934.85 Hitler now saw an opportunity, and sent top officials, including Göring and Himmler, to Rome to woo Il Duce. Mussolini stated in January 1936 that his nation and Germany shared a common fate, and during the year Mussolini placed Italy alongside Germany politically.86 Given what Britain had to lose if she alienated the Italians—namely vessels available for home defense since the Royal Navy would have to assign more ships, men, and supplies to the Mediterranean—it was, as historian Correlli Barnett noted, “highly dangerous nonsense to provoke Italy.”87 Nevertheless, by 1937, British war planners were forced by Mussolini’s belligerence to treat Italy as an unfriendly power.
One of the indicators the British had already lost Mussolini was the issue of his own “Manifesto of Race” in July 1936, in which the Italian fascists joined the Nazis in the persecution of Jews (although Mussolini also specifically targeted Africans). The Manifesto (which did not go into effect until July 1938) reflected less Mussolini’s own anti-Semitism than it did his desire to cozy up to Hitler. Indeed, briefly Il Duce tried to convince Hitler that racism was unproductive, but introduced the Manifesto as “evidence of his good faith…. calculated to solidify the Italo-German Alliance [sic].”88 Despite the Manifesto, Italian fascism never absorbed the same racial anti-Semitism the German variant had. Few publications appeared, and even fewer Italian fascist leaders believed in the premise of race traits—even for Italians. But the Manifesto drew the dictatorships together, and in October 1936, Mussolini spoke of a “Rome-Berlin Axis” intended to be only the rump of a much larger alliance network. Visiting Berlin in September 1937, Mussolini was enthralled by the man he once labeled a “nut,” and der Fuehrer reciprocated the praise by labeling Il Duce “the leading statesman in the world.”89 Joining the Anti-Comintern Pact in November 1937 (which a year earlier had bound Japan and Germany to cooperate in opposing the spread of communism), Mussolini sealed his fate by becoming not only a German ally, but, in the minds of the democratic West, just another miniature Hitler.
Nazi Aggression, Democratic Reaction
While the Western powers were frenetically absorbed with Ethiopia in early 1936, scurrying to meetings, issuing sanctions, and generally being wholly distracted, Hitler sent German troops into the demilitarized Rhineland in violation of the Versailles Treaty. Once again, Britain and France issued protests, but did nothing, despite the fact that along with other continental powers, they could call on a “collective security” force of 140 fully operational divisions to the Germans’ five ill-equipped and dispersed divisions. Many in both countries believed that Hitler was only going into his own “backyard,” that in recovering German territory Hitler had a just case, and therefore the invasion of the Rhineland did not pose an adequate reason for standing up to the Fuehrer. A willingness to excuse current misbehavior on the basis of the Versailles Treaty’s wrongs was widespread and deep. Such thinking opened the door to further violations so long as they were “justified”—and Hitler, if anything, could always produce a justification.
Instead of deploying forces against the Germans, France hunkered down, ratifying its previously negotiated treaty of mutual assistance with the USSR. Britain accelerated its arms program—although an April 1934 report had already erroneously noted it would take five years from that point to catch up to the Germans. Further, concerns remained that Britain could be sucked into a conflict through the back door: Anthony Eden, then lord privy seal, cautioned “great care must be taken that [we in Britain] did not put ourselves in a position where the French were able to bring [us] into action automatically as [if] it were pressing a lever.”90
Part of the wishful fog of thinking that kept the British from reciprocating military mobilization derived from the “ten year rule,” a budgetary guideline that assumed Great Britain would not have to go to war in the next decade. Originally promulgated in 1919, the “ten year rule” had been blithely updated each year until 1932. Churchill had even argued in 1928 for making the rule perpetual, to automatically update itself each year (he would later disavow making the proposal). But even after Britain abandoned the rule in March 1932, it lived on in spirit. Coupled with the effects of the Depression, Britain minimized its defense expenditures until the German rearmament program was well advanced in the late 1930s. Later, British politicians would excuse the appeasement at Munich by alleging that Britain needed time to “close the gap” with Germany, while in fact it was their own policies that had opened the gap in the first place. It would not be the last time a Western democracy locked itself into bad policies based on wrong assumptions, then clung to them for dear life rather than admit its error.
Then there was the very structure of British government, which enabled it to ignore common sense when it came to Hitler. Under this government framework, the Commons and the cabinet were controlled by the same party, while the monarchy, the House of Lords, and the civil service supposedly (but ineffectually) acted as checks on their power. Until the 1930s, Conservative governments often controlled all five of those parts, while Labour could count on holding, at the most, two. Parliament, despite the name “House of Commons,” was reserved for the wealthy and, especially, the educated: over 40 percent of the Conservative members went to Eton College or Harrow School, the two premier private schools in the country. Labour, on the other hand, was entirely in the grip of the unions. Of a total membership in 1936 of 2.4 million, the Labour Party counted 2 million union members, and seventeen of the twenty-five executive committee members were union appointees. In short, there were few in British government who could genuinely speak to the concerns of average people, and certainly not the nonunion middle class who would experience the bulk of wartime hardships if Hitler’s aggression was not stopped early.
Studying the reactions in Britain and France, both Hitler and Mussolini discovered the key to getting their way: quick, unapologetic military action that produced the desired result before the waffling democracies could react. The Spanish Civil War (1936–39) gave them the opportunity to test their weapons and tactics. When the young Spanish Republican government drifted into chaos and anarchy in 1936, generals led by Francisco Franco attempted to seize power and were opposed for the next three years by the Communist-supported Popular Front. Although Franco was no fascist in the mold of Mussolini—and certainly not an ideologue like Hitler—the two fascist dictators supported him out of their loathing for communism. Both Italy and Germany volunteered arms support to Francisco Franco’s coalition of Carlists (Royalists), conservative Catholics, Nationalists, and the Falange (fascists) against the Popular Front, whose members were predominantly radical Socialists and Communists.
Spain’s Noche Triste
Francisco Franco, who emerged from the Spanish Civil War as Spain’s strongman of the era, is often unfairly lumped in with Hitler and Mussolini as a fascist from the beginning. While some of his policies had a fascist tinge, and he certainly enjoyed the support of the Germans and Italians, Franco was first and foremost a general, a junta leader possessing exceptional timing and survival skills. Spain’s road to dictatorship, though, did not begin with Franco but with the government of M
iguel Primo de Rivera from 1923 to 1930. When Primo de Rivera stepped down in January 1930, two months before he died, Spain’s political situation fell into chaos. King Alfonso XIII abdicated in 1931, and a Spanish republic under Premier Niceto Alcalá-Zamora was established with the usual multiple parties unable to work with one another.
Spain had civil rather than common law, with no articles resembling an American-style bill of rights and little understanding of democratic forms of government. It had endured authoritarian regimes for hundreds of years, almost all of that time under a monarch, or, briefly, an Islamic caliphate that governed part of Spain. Adding to the chaos after Alfonso’s abdication, the Republican government ominously formed a new special police called the Guardia de Asalto (Assault Guards), which functioned separately from the traditional police, the Guardia Civil (Civil Police), left over from the monarchy.
The new government consisted of radical republicans and anticlericals, including the minister of war, Manuel Azaña; Socialists, represented by Francisco Largo Caballero, secretary-general of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), and Indalecio Prieto, leader of the middle-class Socialists; and some Catholics who nevertheless hoped a Spanish republic could work.91 This was not the view of more traditional Catholics, such as Cardinal Pedro Segura y Sáenz, archbishop of Toledo and primate of the Spanish Church, who openly attacked the new republic in a pastoral letter as too tolerant of Protestants, before being exiled in 1931. Meanwhile, the anarchists in Catalonia, the semiautonomous northeastern region whose capital was Barcelona, had increased their numbers to over a million and a half out of a total population of about twenty-five million in all of Spain. About half of the Catalonian population was anarchist, and some fifty thousand were members of a secret society unwilling to compromise with any other political faction.92
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