|
What caused World
War Two?
What caused the Second World War was aggression by the three revisionist fascist powers
- Germany, Italy and Japan - bound together by various treaties from the middle 1930s.
We can look at the milestones on the road to war from two perspectives
- The aggressive actions taken by the fascist powers
- The failure of the countries opposed to fascism to take action against them
- From the first perspective, the milestones on the road to war were:
- Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931
- Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935
- German and Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War of 1936 - 39
- German invasion of Austria in early 1938
- German crippling of Czechoslovakia later in 1938.
- German occupation of what remained of Czechoslovakia in March 1939.
- German invasion on Poland which actually led to the outbreak of war.
From the second perspective, the milestones were:
- Failure of the League to act against Japan
- Failure to take effective measures against Italy in 1935
- Failure of Britain and France to respond to the unilateral German denunciation of the
Treaty of Versailles, and notably its military reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936
- Refusal of Britain and France to intervene in the Spanish Civil War
- Failure to respond to the occupation of Austria
- Retreat before German blackmail over Czechoslovakia - the 'Munich Agreement' of 1938.
- Refusal of the USSR to continue opposing Hitler in 1939 - Hitler - Stalin pact of August
1939.
|