History WorldWarII / PreludeToWar

Political elites proved willing to compromise with these new movements or institute their own dictatorial regimes to stave off the advances of [[RedScare 'The Red Hydra']]. This political environment allowed the ''Partito Nazionale Fascista'' (the National Fascist Party, or PNF for short) to come to power in Italy in the early twenties, setting a precedent for the rest of Europe. It was over a decade later that one of history's ([[AcceptableTargets least]]) favourite and most exclusive parties, the ''[[OverlyLongName Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei]]'' (the National Socialist German Workers' Party, better known as the Nazi Party or NSDAP for short), came to power in Germany by similar means. Under the leadership of the charismatic demagogue (and frontrunner for the title of "[[OverlyNarrowSuperlative Most Evil Painter Ever]]") UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler, the UsefulNotes/WeimarRepublic was reformed out of existence. Germany then set about violating every remaining provision of the Versailles Treaty, rearming its military and (after five years of testing the international waters) joining with Austria in a move called the ''Anschluss'' (joining) to create a unified German state in 1938.

* Afterwards, Hitler begins making territorial demands, including reuniting Germany with Austria in a move called the ''Anschluss'' and annexing the Sudentenland (part of Czechoslovakia). Initially, the Allies give him what he wants, but after Hitler breaks his promise to not annex the rest of Czechoslovakia and starts making further claims on Poland, they warn him that continuing will mean war. When Germany invades Poland anyway, Britain declares war on Germany and France makes an uninspiring declaration of war on Germany[[note]] The declaration, and the laws passed for the mobilisation of the reserves and the country's commercial-industrial resources, use all sorts of amusing euphemisms instead of the word 'War', which is not mentioned once.[[/note]]as well. Hitler and ordinary Germans alike are shocked and dismayed that the Allies have declared war upon them, but many Frenchmen—like Marshal Philippe Pétain, a popular [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarI WWI]] hero—also feel that Poland and Britain have forced France into a pointless and avoidable war that is not in France's interests at all...

* The United States, after the bad taste left in their mouths due to the First World War, has no interest in the conflicts of Europe. Despite an American President, UsefulNotes/WoodrowWilson, creating the UsefulNotes/LeagueOfNations, the American public and the isolationist wing in Congress wanted nothing to do with it, thinking that entering the League would obligate it to involve itself in conflicts that wouldn't serve American interests. While the 1920s and 30s, America isn't completely isolated from world affairs, it limits its foreign policy to economic aid. It does support symbolic peace gestures but does not provide the military force that would make them meaningful.

Nevertheless, many Germans considered the treaty an unforgivable national humiliation and continued to believe that Germany could have won the war, or at least could have avoided making such concessions had it been settled by soldiers on the battlefield and not the politicians. A "stab in the back" myth of betrayal grew up around the treaty of Versailles, centered on the incompetence and gutlessness of the German leadership, the betrayal of the German Socialists in abandoning all claims of international workers' solidarity to support the government's unwanted war, the Liberals and Democrats for screwing up the economy in the post-war period, communists and their sympathizers who were alleged to have infiltrated German industry and deliberately sabotaged war production, as well as the all-too-familiar scapegoating of the Jews. Anything and anyone to justify the "real" cause of their defeat and avoid the conclusion that apparently, against all logic, Germany had been bested, something that did not sit well with the Nationalist and Social Darwinist theories popular at the time. \\\

* The economic depression caused by the war and the post-war demobilisation led to a wave of revolution sweeping Europe from the last months of the war until about 1923, when the [[UsefulNotes/RedOctober Russian Civil War finally ended]] with Red Victory. By that time, militant Fascism had evolved and was being used by largely Authoritarian and anti-liberal governments to suppress the socialist and communist movements. Fascism fades away for a while as Europe prospers during the 1920s, but returns stronger than ever before as The Great Depression hits and socialist and communist movements come to the fore again. This time, however, the Fascists are around to stay; all of Europe's nation-states bar those of Scandinavia, France, Switzerland, the Lower Countries[[note]]The Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, called such because of their low elevation to sea level[[/note]], and Britain are dictatorships by 1939 [[note]]Czechoslovakia lasted till the Treaty of Munich in September 1938; when their Western allies let them down, its democracy, too, gradually crumbled[[/note]] and every single one of these governments either make use of or ''are run by'' Fascist parties.

* The United States, after the bad taste left in their mouths due to the First World War, has no interest in the conflicts of Europe. Despite an American President, UsefulNotes/WoodrowWilson, creating UsefulNotes/TheLeagueOfNations, the American public and the isolationist wing in Congress wanted nothing to do with it, thinking that entering the League would obligate it to involve itself in conflicts that wouldn't serve American interests. While the 1920s and 30s, America isn't completely isolated from world affairs, it limits its foreign policy to economic aid. It does support symbolic peace gestures but does not provide the military force that would make them meaningful.

The monetary cost of the war is literally incalculable; while Russia dodged its bill entirely by becoming a whole new country, the average cost to European human capital was about 6%, domestic assets about 11% and national wealth some 10-20%. Worse still, [[UsefulNotes/TheSpanishFlu the 'Spanish 'flu' Pandemic of 1918]]—the spread of which, among other diseases, was greatly aided by the mobilisation of so many troops—more than ''doubled'' the total loss of European human capital over the period 1914-1919. \\\

* The economic depression caused by the war and the post-war demobilisation led to a wave of revolution sweeping Europe from the last months of the war until about 1923, when the [[UsefulNotes/RedOctober Russian Civil War finally ended]] with Red Victory. By that time, militant Fascism had evolved and was being used by largely Authoritarian and anti-liberal governments to suppress the socialist and communist movements. Fascism fades away for a while as Europe prospers during the 1920s, but returns stronger than ever before as The Great Depression hits and socialist and communist movements come to the fore again. This time, however, the Fascists are around to stay; all of Europe's nation-states bar those of Scandinavia, France, Switzerland, the Lower Countries, and Britain are dictatorships by 1939 [[note]]Czechoslovakia lasted till the Treaty of Munich in September 1938; when their Western allies let them down, its democracy, too, gradually crumbled[[/note]] and every single one of these governments either make use of or ''are run by'' Fascist parties.

Hitler caught wind of Mussolini's "March on Rome" and hoped to do something similar in Germany. To that end, he adopted fascism as the NSDAP's official ideology and tried to organize an uprising in Munich, which came to be known as the "Beer Hall Putsch". The coup was quickly put down by the police. Hitler was arrested and spent a year in prison, where he dictated his manifesto, ''Literature/MeinKampf'', to Rudolf Hess. The book firmly established Nazism as a political ideology. Nazism borrowed heavily from fascism, but it placed an even stronger emphasis on the idea of race as being a defining factor. Nearly everything in Hitler's worldview boiled down to race[[note]]Or rather the more accurate German term, ''volk'', which literally translates to "folk" in English, but was more or less a hybridized concept of race, ethnic group, and nationality all rolled into one easy category[[/note]]. Hitler believed Germany lost UsefulNotes/WorldWarI due to weaker races conspiring to undermine it. Hitler believed the UsefulNotes/WeimarRepublic was weak because it allowed these weaker races to exist. He saw the world as a duel between races, all struggling to reach the top, and he believed that the so called "Aryan" Germans were destined to win that race. [[note]]While that may sound reductive, such racial pseudoscience was actually quite commonly believed at the time, and it was heavily intertwined with anti-semitic conspiracy theories such as "cultural bolshevism", the "Judeo-Bolshevik global conspiracy", and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.[[/note]] Many people incorrectly believe that Hitler had some ulterior motive to the war; that he desired power or conquest and simply used Nazism as a facade to control people. This, however, simply isn't true. Hitler so fervently believed in his worldview that he sabotaged his own war effort on the Eastern Front by using valuable resources not on fighting the Soviets, but on exterminating the Jews. Hell, it has often been suggested that if Hitler wasn't a genocidal maniac, he may have beaten the Soviets as the beleaguered Soviet population would've supported his war effort against the tyranny of Stalin. Instead, he ordered the extermination of entire villages, essentially forcing the Slavs to support the Soviet war effort or face assured annihilation.\\\

As for Japan across the way, the concept of "fascism" did not technically exist, but Hirohito's regime was decidedly fascist in nature, being a one-man dictatorship. Even concepts of racial superiority were emphasized, particularly when talking about other Asians. However, Hirohito's regime was definitely more of a military bent, and was more styled like a traditional nationalist dictatorship. Still, many people today choose to call its government fascist. Alternatively it is also sometimes seen as a military ''junta'', with the senior officers of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy exerting considerable control with Hirohito winding up as a leader whose power was chiefly symbolic. Said senior officers were generally of a highly militaristic, quasi-fascist mindset, so this technical quibble doesn't detract from the overall fascistic nature of the country.\\\

-->-- '''''Maréchal de France'' Ferdinand Foch''', on the Treaty of Versailles that concluded UsefulNotes/WorldWarI.

* In 1936, the populist Socialist-Communist-Anarchist coalition won the Spanish General Elections for a second time, after a brief period of being in opposition, since the country's weak military-dictatorship was toppled by a revolution in 1930 that had been organised by all the non-fascist parties working together. The Coalition is (by default, since they can't agree on ''anything'' else) anti-Catholic and anti-Monarchist, and the right wing and fascist parties capitalise on this. The military, whose leadership remains unchanged since 'the good old days' of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, organises a coup to make the country a military dictatorship again. They are discovered and race to implement their incomplete plan before they can be caught and executed for treason. The result is the UsefulNotes/SpanishCivilWar, with the Coalition on one side as 'The Republicans' and the Monarchists/Catholics/Military on the other as 'The Nationalists'. Germany basically gives the Nationalists, led by Generalisimo UsefulNotes/FranciscoFranco, everything they need to win, from Aeroplanes to Tanks to loans, whereas the Soviet Union bleeds the Republicans dry for all the assistance they buy from them—unsurprisingly, The Nationalists win[[note]]NSDAP Germany gave The Nationalists loans at 1% interest which effectively paid for 90% of their expenses, Fascist Italy giving them the other 10% at the same rate, and The Nationalists bought some 90% of their war-materials from Germany and Italy with the other 10% coming from companies like Shell (which was still a British company at the time, the company's transfer to American hands being a condition of American armaments-sales to Britain in 1940) and Texas Oil (which gave them special rates and free oil-tanker-trucks). The Republicans, on the other hand, were shunned by pretty much everyone and forced to sell the country's entire gold and silver reserves to The Soviet Union so they could buy their own war material[[/note]].

November 1918: At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the guns fall silent and everyone breathes a sigh of relief that [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarI The Great War]] has ended. The sigh of relief is justified: more than ten million soldiers were killed over the course of the four-year war (more soldiers died than quite a few ''countries'' had people), in addition to more than seven million civilian deaths and uncounted numbers of civilian and military wounded. These catastrophic death tolls resulted from military [[MoreDakka technology]] outstripping military [[ModernMajorGeneral thinking]]. The application of 19th-century tactics to 20th-century weapons led to a horrifying learning curve featuring many long, indecisive and [[WeHaveReserves horrendously inefficient]] battles. Even the battles that happened after the sides had learned were on scales few could imagine before the war.\\\

Fascism is central to World War II, however it is a topic that many people know surprisingly little about. The first enigma is the name. The term fascism comes from the Roman "fasces", a symbolic bundle of sticks with an axe buried in the middle. The Romans used the fasces as a symbol of unity. The individual sticks could be broken easily, but when bundled together, they were strong. The axe symbolized both strength, and a power over life and death (as well as being just a general symbol commonly used by the Greeks). Fascism was born initially from socialism [[note]]socialism of the more radical bent that was more similar to Marxist ideology than to the social democrats, who comprised the bulk of socialist movements after 1900[[/note]] but over time it lost most of its socialist qualities. Indeed, even the fascism adopted by Benito Mussolini was radically different than the very original, which was advocated in ''The Fascist Manifesto''. For example, Mussolini was decidedly anti-democratic [[note]]not just ''undemocratic'', but ''anti-democratic'', as in specifically seeking not just to end democracy within his own country, but abroad as well[[/note]] while the original ''Manifesto'' had advocated for universal suffrage. Really, the only defining principle of fascism that stuck since the beginning was corporatism, an economic model that was more akin to light forms of anarchism or syndicalism initially, but gradually devolved into the Nazi model in which the government closely cooperated with and coordinated private businesses to help accomplish their economic goals.\\\

What we know as fascism, however, wasn't dreamed up until the 1920s. A veteran from UsefulNotes/WorldWarI named Benito Mussolini came up with the concept after being ousted by the socialists upon returning home. The socialists had kicked out Mussolini due to his support of the war, which the socialists were firmly against. The war had warped his own radical socialist beliefs. He had always been against democracy and believed that a dictatorship would be far more effective, but the dictatorship he supported went from being a proletariat one to a nationalist one. He started to see socialism as a failure, and believed that national identity transcended any loyalty to a specific class.\\\

Benito Mussolini formed a new fascist party, but it was less a civilian political party and more a violent paramilitary movement. They became known as ''blackshirts'', as Mussolini had them dress in black uniforms like the Arditi, the elite mountain troops he served with in UsefulNotes/WorldWarI. On October 22nd, 1922, Mussolini and the blackshirts marched on Rome and demanded the resignation of the prime minister and the creation of a new fascist government. King Victor Emmanuel III demurred to their request and the fascists took power. [[note]]It is not entirely known why the King gave in so quickly, but it is suggested that he feared the communist and socialist elements in his country and planned to use the fascists against them. This idea of the establishment trying to use the fascists would crop up later in Germany, with similarly terrible results. [[/note]]Mussolini was appointed the new Prime Minister, and he quickly got the legislature to give him emergency powers, starting his dictatorship. Over the next few years, he started to dismantle Italy's democracy and place himself at the head as ''Il Duce''. By 1927, nothing remained of Italian democracy, and Mussolini was the sole ruler of the state, with his blackshirts enforcing his authority by any means necessary.\\\

Hitler caught wind of Mussolini's "March on Rome" and hoped to do something similar in Germany. To that end, he adopted fascism as the NSDAP's official ideology and tried to organize an uprising in Munich, which came to be known as the "Beer Hall Putsch". The coup was quickly put down by the police. Hitler was arrested and spent a year in prison, where he dictated his manifesto, ''Literature/MeinKampf'', to Rudolf Hess. The book firmly established Nazism as a political ideology. Nazism borrowed heavily from fascism, but it placed an even stronger emphasis on the idea of race as being a defining factor. Nearly everything in Hitler's worldview boiled down to race[[note]]Or rather the more accurate German term, ''volk'', which literally translates to "folk" in English, but was more or less a hybridized concept of race, ethnic group, and nationality all rolled into one easy category[[/note]]. Hitler believed Germany lost UsefulNotes/WorldWarI due to weaker races conspiring to undermine it. Hitler believed the UsefulNotes/WeimarRepublic was weak because it allowed these weaker races to exist. He saw the world as a duel between races, all struggling to reach the top, and he believed that the so called "Aryan" Germans were destined to win that race. Many people incorrectly believe that Hitler had some ulterior motive to the war; that he desired power or conquest and simply used Nazism as a facade to control people. This, however, simply isn't true. Hitler so fervently believed in his worldview that he sabotaged his own war effort on the Eastern Front by using valuable resources not on fighting the Soviets, but on exterminating the Jews. Hell, it has often been suggested that if Hitler wasn't a genocidal maniac, he may have beaten the Soviets as the beleaguered Soviet population would've supported his war effort against the tyranny of Stalin. Instead, he ordered the extermination of entire villages, essentially forcing the Slavs to support the Soviet war effort or face assured annihilation.\\\

Two years earlier, the Republic of Spain had descended into a heated [[UsefulNotes/SpanishCivilWar Civil War]]. After a rigged election which resulted in a government that the Army in particular found too socialist, there was a botched right-wing coup that ended up splitting the country more or less right down the middle with most of the Army on one side and the Government on the other. The Nationalists—Catholic conservatives with a predilection for monarchy and dictatorship—eventually found a leader in General Francisco Franco, the support of whose North African Army proved invaluable in the opening months of the war. The Republicans—taking after the ruling, liberal–socialist party at the time—were a motley mix of everything and everyone to the political left of the Nationalists. While one might think that France and Britain would be natural allies for the Republicans, this was not at all the case—both were deeply suspicious of the Republicans and their motives. The Republicans were sharply divided between three factions—the socialists, the communists, and the anarcho-syndicalists—and had both failed to implement effective reforms and persecuted the country's Catholics and Monarchists[[note]]Their coalition government had been unable to agree on passing any new laws except a few punishing FormerRegimePersonnel who had committed atrocities under the late General Primo de Riviera's dictatorship in the 1920s, and nationalized Church property, banned the Jesuits, banned priests and nuns from teaching children, and turned a blind eye to the extensive violence committed against them[[/note]]. \\\

Two years earlier, the Republic of Spain had descended into a heated [[UsefulNotes/SpanishCivilWar Civil War]]. After a controversial election which resulted in a government that the Army in particular found too socialist, there was a botched right-wing coup that ended up splitting the country more or less right down the middle with most of the Army on one side and the Government on the other. The Nationalists—Catholic conservatives with a predilection for monarchy and dictatorship—eventually found a leader in General Francisco Franco, the support of whose North African Army proved invaluable in the opening months of the war. The Republicans—taking after the ruling, liberal–socialist party at the time—were a motley mix of everything and everyone to the political left of the Nationalists. While one might think that France and Britain would be natural allies for the Republicans, this was not at all the case—both were deeply suspicious of the Republicans and their motives. The Republicans were sharply divided between three factions—the socialists, the communists, and the anarcho-syndicalists—and had both failed to implement effective reforms and alienated the country's Catholics and Monarchists[[note]]Their coalition government had been unable to agree on passing any new laws except a few punishing FormerRegimePersonnel who had committed atrocities under the late General Primo de Riviera's dictatorship in the 1920s, and some anti-Catholic and anti-clerical legislation[[/note]]. \\\

* The economic depression caused by the war and the post-war demobilisation led to a wave of revolution sweeping Europe from the last months of the war until about 1923, when the [[UsefulNotes/RedOctober Russian Civil War finally ended]] with Red Victory. By that time, militant Fascism had evolved and been used by largely Authoritarian and anti-liberal governments to suppress the socialist and communist movements. Fascism fades away for a while as Europe prospers during the 1920s, but returns stronger than ever before as The Great Depression hits and socialist and communist movements come to the fore again. This time, however, the Fascists are around to stay; all of Europe's nation-states bar those of Scandinavia, France, Switzerland, the Lower Countries, and Britain are dictatorships by 1939 [[note]]Czechoslovakia lasted till the Treaty of Munich in September 1938; when their Western allies let them down, its democracy, too, gradually crumbled[[/note]] and every single one of these governments either make use of or ''are run by'' Fascist parties.

* Japan experiences a shift towards democracy in the immediate post-war period, but this is limited as the Japanese constitution is based on that of Imperial Germany and is thus designed to prevent civilians from holding any real power. This becomes apparent after the accension of the military fanboy, the Showa Emperor Hirohito, in the 1920s, especially once The Great Depression hits Japan ''hard'' and extremists begin assassinating government officials who are deemed insufficiently patriotic. By 1930, the country is a ethnonationalist military dictatorship ruled by a faceless and constantly-changing Army-Navy junta that doesn't really understand economics and thinks it is necessary to carve out bits of China (while the country is still weak and divided) to make a 'captive market' for Japan to buy raw materials from and sell manufactured goods to. The Army in particular increasingly sees taking on China as a 'now or never' thing, and they are probably right to think that, as the Guomindang might actually become strong enough to win a defensive war against them within another decade.

[[ILied Sike! He wanted more.]] Not only was this followed by a lighting-fast invasion which saw the Czechs integrated into Greater Germany as Bohemians and the Slovaks being given their own, 'independent' country, but Hitler ''then'' started making claims on Poland and the "corridor" separating the bulk of Germany from the province of East Prussia, and in particular the Free City of Danzig. Poland refused because they saw Hitler's demands as a threat to their independence, citing the Danzig seaport as important to trade and losing this trade meaning subordinating themselves to the Axis and reducing themselves to near-servitude as their entire trade would be dependent upon Germany. Finally alarmed at this state of affairs, Britain and France declared their support for Poland and stated that any threats to Poland's independence [[ThisMeansWar would mean war]].\\\