World War II- The Prelude

By far, the Second World War, ranging from 1939 to 1945, and several years before and after that, considering the concomitant conflicts that broached it up and its prolonged aftermath, has been deemed as the most cataclysmic conflict in human history. It claimed around 75–80 million lives, which was nearly 3% of the world’s population at that time. Out of these 50–60 million directly got obliterated during wartime, and 15–20 million in its wake from war-related ailments or injuries, famines, impoverishments, bankruptcy, and multifarious crimes. Also, it has been the costliest one the world has ever seen. Taking into consideration, the economic tools, and inflation factors, the cost can be extrapolated to a modern equivalent of nearly 4 trillion US dollars. It had shaped and reshaped economies, altered fiscal structures, changed modes of income, and had dramatically metamorphosed how the common masses perceived income and means of livelihood.

This has been a fascinating element of interest for many over generations, I am not an exception. A plethora of literature, media presentations, talks, and works have been rife everywhere. Smidgeons and truckloads of information and memoirs have been littered nearly all over the world. But ironically enough, the entire epoch of tensions, devastations, fracas, turmoil, misery, bloodshed, and loss has been imputed to a handful of power-hungry, vengeful, conniving, powerful, and gluttonous men, who strategically orchestrated the whole drama like strings of a puppet to satiate their desires, burgeon their clout and embolden their ideals. However, not to forget, another villain in this scenario is the First World War itself, which was extant from 1914 to 1918 and claimed millions of lives. World War I is the most crucial precursor to World War II. Some historians even argue that these two momentous milestones, or rather gravestones in modern human civilization are actual two successive episodes of the same set of conflicts that repeated, unfortunately, both times as tragedy. The contentious Treaty of Versailles, termed as the “war to end all wars”, actually became the starting gun triggering the developments in the path to The Second World War.

Treaty of Versailles, signed in June 1919, was reckoned as the ‘happy’ denouement of the vehement unrest panning for 4 years between the Allies Powers (The United States, France, Great Britain, Japan, and Italy) versus the infamous Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkish-Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria), termed as World War I. This warfare claimed nearly 80,00,000 lives and impoverished countless. The Central powers were dwarfed in front of the untrammeled and colossal Allied Powers who ravaged their adversaries with all their might and insuperable resources. The German military was miserably pulverized by the merciless Allied strength. This enervated Germany, killing 3 million at the very least, and left its growing economy in shambles. So, defeated, they were at the mercy of the Allied Powers and what they had to offer with no other choice. One of the biggest inclusions in the Treaty of Versailles was Article 231, or the War Guilt Cause, where the Allies put duress on the defeated Central Powers, chiefly Germany, to make hefty expiations for the unrest, which according to the former, were brewed by them. This included disarmament of German forces, giving up occupied territorial land, and most importantly, pay fiscal compensations for “wartime damage”, which translated into modern valuations, amounted to around three hundred billion dollars. The prodigal reparations slated out in the Treaty warranted Germany to pay for seven to eight decades until the 1980s under the ensuing socio-economic framework which they subsisted on. Moreover, Germany was forced to give up 13% of its territory to the newly recurved Polish State, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia, sacrifice the territories of Alsace and Lorraine to France, and renounce all its occupied colonies in China, Africa, and various places in the Pacific, demilitarization of the German vantage point Rhineland, thanks to the victorious Allied intervention spearheaded by the United States under the “peacemaker” President Woodrow Wilson with his ‘fourteen points’ apropos. The crux of this peace negotiation was an end to all hostility and achieve furtherance through democracy and mutual succor. However, under the visage of this overtly idealistic arrangement, lurked a draconian slap on Germany, which was already reeling under its humiliating defeat, and those slews of terms etched in the so-called “idealistic” treaty was more than enough to cripple the once-booming and industrializing economy.

Another cornerstone of the Versailles Treaty, presided by the quadric powers of the US, Britain, France, and Italy was the adoption of the League of Nations, an internal collaboration ostensibly committed to abstinence of all forms of warfare and profession of harmony. This was another great loophole as in those periods of turmoil, with Europe and most of the Western world in instability and discombobulation, such a state of equanimity shall never be palpable in the long run, let alone thrive. Firstly, there was a great deal of refuge and mixing amongst the populations, for instance, immigrant Germans in Poland and Czechia, Hungarians in Romania, etc. Britain and France continued with their power-grubbing foray of infringing and hunting down regions from German and Ottoman regions. Thereafter, in 1920, the United States was itself in a state of nonplus when their Senate ironically rejected the Treaty. This emboldened Britain and France, the then forerunners of the Allies in the run-up to the next decade’s War, who had scoffed on the peace-making dreams of the United States, wanted to usurp prodigal swathes of territories by muscle power, and wanted to tighten the moose further on Germany and Austria-Hungary, the war wagers of World War-I. This made the annals of the treaty flimsier. The Paris Peace Treaty of Versailles also virtually alienated one of their significant Allies, Japan. Japan had played a pivotal role for the Allied Powers in the war and their demand was the advocacy of Equality and more cogent Racial Rights which would endow them to be treated at par with the rest of the Allies in the new world order of governance and also equal recognition of their immigrants shifting to the United States. However, the US, along with racist support from Australia, silently kept it under the table. The Japanese delegates were tactically silenced during the negotiations by the dominant Western powers. This estranged Japan from the Allied arrangements and imbued in them a sense of resentment, which would well up in the run-up to the Second World War when they flipped sides and joined hands with Germany and the Axis powers in a brutal crusade to avenge the Allies’ propaganda and establish their dominance over large parts of Asia. Another similar scenario occurred with Italy, which fought with the Allies during the Second War, despite having a tenuous military might and logistics. Notwithstanding its neutral stance at the beginning of the First World War in the summer of 1914, Italy soon became a party to the Allies and declared war on Austria-Hungary during May 1915, despite not being arch enemies like France or Britain. Though it would be slightly inaccurate to say that the Allied Powers inveigled Italy into the war, since they had voluntarily agreed to join on their terms, one can say they were greatly influenced by a lot of promises endowed by the Allies. Italy, unlike Britain or the United States, was grappling with an economic downturn and needed expansion of territories to garner more prosperity. So, in the Treaty of London, signed in 1915 before they made their advent into the all-out war, they were vowed to be given large parts of their lost territories, now corralled within Austria-Hungary and even the Ottoman Empire. However, they did not receive the expected succor from the rest of the Allies, and imputing to their inferior forte as compared to the Central Powers combined, they suffered a loss of nearly six million lives by the end of the war. The most harrowing was the Battle of Caporetto. However, at the Treaty of Versailles, they were given only a fraction of what they were promised, most of their claims repudiated by the other Allies. Moreover, the Italian Government was not given an equal say as the other Allies. This created a schism between Italy and the rest of the Allies and fueled the rise of fascist sentiments promulgated by Benito Mussolini. The apparent gift of pacifism and equability seemingly endowed upon by the all-supreme, omnipresent, and valiant Allied powers had embittered many, from the defeated powers to members on their own. This paved the way for the second, bloodier rendition of the war after two decades of a portentous lull before a storm.

The grueling and debilitating pwnage of the Central Powers by the clobbering hands of the Allied Powers had left everlasting vengeful impressions on many. One of them was Adolf Hitler, a Viennese connoisseur of art with skyrocketing political ambitions, who had enrolled in the German Army after being ejected by his motherland, Austria, and had indomitably fought on the front lines as a cavalry troop during the First War and was a mute witness to the devastations caused by the Allied Powers. One British troop by the name of Henry Tandey was purportedly at a spitting distance of killing wounded Hitler at a French village of Marcoing during a ghastly encounter in 1918. Tandey did not shoot. If he had, the world would perhaps be a better place.

Germany’s economy fell like a house of cards. The proletariat and the working middle-class were plunged into looming poverty. Industrializations got badly affected and all growth envisaged at the turn of the century was stymied. But Hitler was unabated in his quest to burgeoning his political and ideological clout to establish absolute Totalitarianism in Germany, the most viable alternative to the unstable and weak government. And the culmination of all his relentless efforts would sow the seeds for him to spark off a deadly spree that will cancer his own country and also foment a nightmare for most of the World.