Edition published in 1961 with a preface for the American Reader and Second Thoughts
Come for Taylor’s history, stay for his prose.
p. x “I do not believe that a historian should either excuse or condone. His duty is to explain.”
p. 231 Taylor quoting British historian F. W. Maitland: “It is very hard to remember that events now long in the past were once in the future.”
p. 104 “The war of 1939, far from being welcome, was less wanted by nearly everybody than almost any war in history.”
The immediate and enduring explanation for the cause of World War Two was that Adolf Hitler was an evil madman whose goals had always been obvious: to conquer Europe and wipe out the Jewish race and other undesirable peoples. Tragically, the appeasers, led by Neville Chamberlain, might have stopped Hitler had they not willfully blinded themselves to Hitler’s intentions. The appeasement policy was to avoid war at all costs, and so the appeasers clung to the vain and foolish hope that they could satiate Hitler with enough concessions to prevent him from fulfilling his awful destiny. Instead, per Shakespeare, “it was as if increase of appetite grew by what it fed upon.” And, predictably, Hitler plunged the world into five years of unparalleled horror.
In 1960, the eminent British historian A.J.P. Taylor published The Origins of the Second World War. Taylor confined his examination to the origins of the European war that started in September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, followed a few days later by declarations of war against Germany by Britain and France. In the concluding sentence of the book, Taylor called this European war, “a matter of historical curiosity” in contrast to the global conflict that subsequently engulfed the world until 1945 and still reverberates today.
Taylor’s central thesis was that the 1939 European war was accidental, the result of a series of blunders and miscalculations by statesman of the various countries involved. Further, Taylor viewed Hitler to have behaved, in matters of diplomacy, mostly how one would expect any leader of German foreign policy in the 1930s to have behaved, albeit one with an uncommon amount of patience and one possessed of the nerves of a gambler willing to bluff and go all-in, again and again.
Taylor’s Origins is an invaluable example of how to study the past. Taylor’s achievement was to set aside what he knew in 1960 about events after September 1939 so he could reach back to accurately judge and intuit the contemporary mindset of people living in the “present of the past.” No one will argue against the proposition that all past events were once in the unknowable future. Very few can have the discipline of mind to write history having disabused themselves of that foreknowledge, practicing a sort of intentional forgetting.
In writing about what foreign leaders decided to do in the period between the world wars, one cannot “know” that Germany would conquer France in six weeks or that Germany and the USSR would sign a pact of non-aggression, or that Germany would invade its once staunch ally Poland. Or know the extent of the horrors of the Holocaust and other mass deaths.
The mostly still accepted story of the origins of WW2 satisfies the human desire for simplicity and for patterns, but it teaches us precisely nothing. In contrast, reading Taylor’s Origins will help anyone become a shrewder judge of history as well as current events. Taylor also happens to be a wonderful writer with a particular talent for unforgettable epigrams and metaphors.
Structure: A Few Highlighted Topics and a Conclusion
Following is a taste of Taylor’s thoughts on some of the more important topics in his book. The selection is entirely of my own creation and is not meant to be comprehensive in any respect. I think of these highlights as a series of amuses bouches, tasty on their own, but chiefly designed to whet the reader’s appetite to read the entire book.
At the end of this review are my conclusions on Taylor’s central thesis and some applicable takeaways from his methods.
p. xx “The one thing [Hitler] did not plan for was the great war often attributed to him. Pretending to prepare for a great war and not in fact [preparing for] it was an essential part of Hitler’s political strategy; and those who sounded the alarm against him, such as Churchill, unwittingly did his work for him.”
p. xx “Hitler gave orders, which Germans executed, of a wickedness without parallel in civilized history. Same page, later: “Hitler would have counted for nothing without the support and the cooperation of the German people.”
p. xxviii “In international affairs, there was nothing wrong with Hitler except he was a German.”
Taylor’s take on Adolph Hitler’s role in causing the war that started in September 1939 is central to his method, to his thesis, and to the controversy his book caused. Taylor made a number of points that led many to disparage him as an apologist for Hitler.
First, Taylor “disaggregated” Hitler in both time and function. Recall that Taylor’s book is specifically about the origins of the European war that started in September 1939 so it should not be surprising that his treatment (and so his judgment) of Hitler’s actions ends precisely when that war started. Moreover, in terms of function, Taylor is concerned with Hitler’s foreign policy as the leader of Germany in relation to other countries, not his pre-war domestic policy, no matter how wicked. This disaggregation is not an attempt to take the measure of the whole of Hitler, but to assess only those actions that explain why war in Europe came when it did.
Second, Taylor disputes as simplistic the explanation that Hitler, through his evil will to power, was single-handedly responsible for causing the September 1939 war. Taylor points out that after the war was over, with Hitler dead and evidence everywhere of Hitler’s unparalleled wickedness, it was easy and convenient to blame Hitler, and Hitler alone, for everything associated with the war. Easy for historians, convenient for those who might otherwise share some of the blame.
Third, Taylor takes issue with the idea that Hitler pursued foreign policies that were unusually aggressive for a German leader in the 1930s. The Versailles Treaty after World War One left Germany intact, but inflicted reparations, blame, and humiliating restraints on a country that remained the most latently powerful in Europe. The Treaty was hated by the mass of the German public, and it’s hard to imagine any German statesman not pursuing a foreign policy animated by violating the Treaty clause by clause and restoring Germany to dominance of Central Europe.
Finally, Taylor does not believe that Hitler planned or wanted the war that started in September 1939. This is different than most historical takes of the years leading up to the war’s outbreak, namely that Hitler planned all along to pick off the countries of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland by whatever means possible as steps along the way in his long held and well-developed, plans to dominate all of Europe. By that reckoning, Hitler was an evil genius of inhuman proportions and every effort to dissuade him except through armed confrontation was doomed to fail.
One can find proof of Hitler’s intent in Mein Kampf, in his public speeches, in the records of his private rantings, and in the memoranda of war plans he instructed his military to prepare. To that, Taylor would say that in the leadup to the war, Hitler’s style was to use words to threaten, yet his actions were characterized by extreme patience, an uncanny instinct of how to extract maximum concessions with a minimum of expenditure, and a knack for knowing when his adversaries would fold. At Munich, Chamberlain rewarded Hitler’s threats and patience by forcing Czechoslovakia to “give” Germany the Sudetenland (the western, Germanic region of Czechoslovakia.)
As for German war plans, Taylor asks rhetorically of what use are war planning departments if not to game out wars against opponents likely and unlikely.
The Hitler of the 1930s, who was nervous about re-arming the Rhineland in 1936, was made overconfident by his sudden conquest of France in 1940. It filled him with hubris. When we think of Hitler, we think of the madman invading the USSR in June 1941, declaring war on the United States that December after Pearl Harbor, and leading Germany to commit the genocide of the Holocaust. But it is the Hitler of the 1930s that Taylor seeks to understand and explain.
p.115 “As a matter of fact, the French campaign [Germany’s swift defeat of France in 1940] proved nothing except that even armies adequately prepared for defense can be destroyed if they are led badly enough. Later on, the great coalition of Great Britain, Soviet Russia, and the United States had to wait for a superiority of five to one before defeating Germany.”
Central to Taylor’s method to understanding the origins of the war is to actively forget what actually happened once war came, and, instead, to focus on what men believed would happen if a war came. In this regard nothing is more important to forget than the six-week conquest of France by Germany in the early summer of 1940.
Given the relative ease of that conquest, it is tempting to look everywhere for signs of French military weakness prior to September 1939. And while it is true that the French posture was clearly defensive, most notably in building the fortresses of the Maginot Line, all expectation was that in a war of Germany against France and Britain, the French-Anglo defense would hold its own. On paper, France alone seemed militarily just as strong as Germany. Given the experience of World War One, it was assumed that a war on the Western Front would resemble the long slog of war fought between 1914 to 1918. There was no reason to expect that France would fall as rapidly as it did.
As Taylor repeats a number of times, because it is so important, neither France nor Britain feared defeat; they feared war. Part of that fear was the expectation of a new, horrible, and decisive era in air warfare against innocent civilians. The new and horrible parts proved true, but not the decisiveness. In the words of Stanley Baldwin, British PM prior to Chamberlain, “the bomber will always get through.”
This fear was magnified by Hitler’s false claims of vast air superiority. Hitler consistently exaggerated German armaments in general and German air capability specifically. To Britain and France, exaggerating rather than soft pedaling armaments was completely unfamiliar and contrary to past experience. Britain in particular had a history minimizing their military spending so as not to provoke enemies.
Therefore, Britain and France had every reason to believe Hitler’s claims. This false belief was unwittingly aided by Winston Churchill who consistently argued against appeasement and used the German claims of air superiority to bolster his arguments. Fear that “the bomber will always get through” certainly contributed to the Allies’ fear of war.
If French military capability was overrated, then Soviet military capability was underrated. Given Stalin’s military purges of the 1930s and the overall notion that Communists were interested chiefly in revolution, not war, the value of USSR military strength was heavily discounted. The USSR had suffered a complete defeat in 1917 at the hands of Germany and had given up vast swaths of its territory in return for peace. In a future war, there was no reason to expect a different result. As well, Soviet military arrangements were, in Churchill’s famous general formulation about the USSR, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”.
Therefore, well into the 1930s, Britain and France considered Stalin and Communism to be more of a danger, at least ideologically, than they did Hitler and Nazism. “Better Hitler than Stalin” was a notion shared by right wing politicians in both Allied countries. And some French conservatives took it one step further to say, “Better Hitler than Blum,” referring to Leon Blum, the left wing, Jewish French leader in the mid 1930s. No one would have imagined that during World War Two, the USSR would end up being responsible for around three-quarters of all German battlefield deaths. Or that it would emerge from the war as both the country chiefly responsible for the defeat of Nazi Germany as well as the dominant military power on the continent of Europe.
Mistaken beliefs and estimates informed European foreign policy throughout the 1930’s and led to many surprises and blunders. Taylor’s point is not to criticize the fact that European leaders did not possess magical foresight about the shape of the war that happened. Rather, he seeks to explain how contemporary assumptions formed policies and actions.
Note: A.J.P. Taylor was himself an anti-appeaser in the 1930s.
p. 189 “The settlement at Munich was a triumph for British policy, which had worked precisely to this end; not a triumph for Hitler who had started with no such clear intention. Nor was it merely a triumph for selfish or cynical British statesmen, indifferent to the fate of far-off peoples or calculating that Hitler might be launched into war against Soviet Russia. It was a triumph for all that was best and most enlightened in British life; a triumph for those who had preached equal justice between peoples; a triumph for those who had courageously denounced the harshness and short-sightedness of Versailles.”
Is Taylor being sincere or sarcastic/ironic? I think both.
Sincere in that British appeasement (conciliation) of Germany had been a consistent policy for a decade and a half, up to and, most of all, including Munich. Sincere in that Taylor believed that conciliation was a misguided, yet genuine and even noble policy. Chamberlain was willing to gamble for peace. Or, expressed by Chamberlain’s foreign minister Halifax in probabilistic terms, Britain refused to sympathize with “an argument in favour of a certain war now, against the possibility of war, perhaps in more unfavorable circumstances later (p. 172.)”
Sincere also in that Taylor believed the worst of all policies was vacillation between confrontation and appeasement, an inconstancy which he believed was most likely to result in war. Using a current idiom, he might have said, “Pick one lane or the other.”
France, having borne the devastation of Germany’s invasion of its territory in the first world war, was more naturally opposed than was Britain to a policy of conciliation. But given Britain’s protected island geography and Britain’s global naval dominance, France needed Britain to protect French national security far more than Britain needed France. So, France was the de facto junior partner of the two and followed Britain’s lead. Taylor memorably expressed an early episode of Britain tutoring a reluctant France in the art of appeasement.
p. 52 “…much as a small child is lured into the sea by assurances that the water is warm. The child discovers that the assurances are false; but he gets used to the cold and soon learns to swim.”
Taylor’s comments at the beginning of this section can also be taken as sarcastic/ironic in that ultimately the policy of appeasement failed to prevent war. Taylor is skeptical that it could ever have succeeded. Not in a democracy like Britain, where public opinion matters a great deal and can be decisive. Six months after the Munich settlement, Hitler brazenly violated it by occupying the rest of Czechoslovakia. The Munich Settlement and Chamberlain’s claim of “peace with honour,” were shown to be a sham and the public outcry was explosive. Appeasement was discredited and its opponents were seen to be proven right. Hitler was seen as someone who could not be trusted and must be opposed.
Poland and Chamberlain’s Lurch
Hitler had taken Austria and Czechoslovakia without firing a shot. Poland was perceived as next, because of its dispute with Germany over the future of the Free City of Danzig (now Gdansk), a port which gave Poland access to the Baltic Sea and was commercially important to Poland. However, Danzig was populated mainly by Germans and was ruled by a High Commissioner appointed by the League of Nations. Hitler fully expected that the issue of Danzig would eventually be settled in Germany’s favor. And that if Britain and France became diplomatically involved in the question of Danzig, the ultimate settlement to Germany of the Polish issue would be even more generous. The precedent of Munich was very powerful and perhaps even intoxicating to Hitler.
Chamberlain’s reaction to the Munich Settlement’s failure, however, was to lurch away in the opposite direction of appeasement, clumsily and fatefully. Public attitude in Britain had undergone a sea change, Chamberlain was a politician, and a politician’s instinct is to stay in power.
Chamberlain hastily gave Poland an unconditional guarantee of support if Poland became involved in a war with Germany, in this case Britain dragging France along to sudden firmness as a co-guarantor. This guarantee invested Poland with great leverage over all the parties. Moreover, it was not backed up by any practical or actionable military preparations. Its effect on Poland was to puff up Polish illusions of being a Great Power, able to chart their own destiny and resist German’s demands to their heart’s content.
Writing of Chamberlain and his Cabinet, Taylor observed that “Men cannot change their nature, however much they change their words. The British statesmen were trying to strike a balance between firmness and conciliation; and being what they were, inevitably struck the wrong note. (p. 245).”
p. 247 “It is pointless to speculate whether an Anglo-Soviet alliance would have prevented the second World war. But failure to achieve this alliance did much to cause it.”
p. 226 “Chamberlain was a good hater [at least] …in domestic politics…and when [he] peered across the distance towards the Kremlin, he saw faces there which reminded him of [his domestic political opponents.]”
After Britain unconditionally guaranteed Poland’s borders, the anti-appeasers and the Labour opposition called on Chamberlain to seek an alliance with the USSR. There were serious issues that stood in the way. Britain did not want to be dragged into a war by the USSR, a Communist country they didn’t trust and whose military seemed of dubious value at the time. Another issue was the enmity between Poland and the USSR; the two countries had fought a war in 1919-20 (mostly in territory that is now part of Ukraine). Poland refused to agree to allow Russian troops to enter their country unless invited by Poland. Finally, as the second quote above references, domestic politics militated against an Anglo-Soviet alliance since Chamberlain did not want to hand his opponents a victory. For all these reasons, British attempts to secure the Soviet alliance were slow and equivocal and the terms offered to the USSR unattractive. The British proposal was essentially an alliance contingent on their asking the USSR for help. Per Taylor, like “a tap that could be turned on and off.”
The USSR was deeply suspicious that the goal of Britain and France was to involve Germany and the USSR in a war that would weaken both. This was a flawed suspicion as the Allies were convinced that, as happened in the first World war, Germany would easily smash the USSR. Afterwards, Germany more powerful than ever would turn against the Anglo-French.
The barriers that prevented an Anglo-Soviet alliance, however, were absent in German-Soviet negotiations. The non-aggression Pact between Germany and the USSR was signed on August 23rd, 1939, just about a week before the war came.
Hitler was confident that he had achieved a master stroke of diplomacy with the Pact. Although he had fixed an invasion date of Poland for September 1, he logically expected that Poland, now caught in a vise between Germany and the USSR would provide him with another diplomatic victory. And if Poland remained foolishly obstinate, then Britain, having lost the contest for a Soviet alliance, would certainly pressure Poland to back down. Poland did no such thing. As for Britain, in Taylor’s words:
“On any rational calculation, the Nazi-Soviet Pact ought to have discouraged the British people….[instead], the Pact produced a resolution such as the British had not shown for twenty years. …to universal applause, the Cabinet determined to stand by their obligation to Poland. (p.266)”
The calendar ticked ahead, Hitler felt he could not back down empty handed of any concession. So, on September 1st, 1939 war came.
Some general takeaways from Taylor about history and war:
1) The course of actual events leads us to overestimate the extent to which governments and their leaders act upon firm, well-thought out plans vs. reacting in real time to events, some expected, many surprising.
2) We also overestimate the certainty of outcomes. “Man plans, god laughs” is a Yiddish aphorism we would do well to always hold close to mind.
3) In no field of human endeavor should the unexpected be more expected than in war.
4) In diplomacy, democracies and dictatorships differ significantly in that democratically elected leaders will always take account of domestic public opinion in their decision making. This can either be a welcome constraint or a recipe for inconstancy in policy.
5) Inconstancy, whether by democracies or dictatorships, naturally leads to inaccurate assessments by adversaries, which in turn can lead to war.
How well has Taylor’s take on the cause of the September 1939 war held up? After all, troves of documents not available to Taylor in 1960 have been released, and history generally becomes clearer with the perspective of more time.
Taylor’s assertion that Hitler did not seek the specific war that started in 1939 holds up well. Hitler had so many different war plans that it’s impossible to know with certainty what he intended to do and when.
Taylor was careful not to claim that Hitler could have been prevented from starting any war. And on this point, I think it is correct to go beyond the confines of Hitler as a statesman in the 1930s and recognize the messianic nature of Hitler’s hatred of Jews and Slavs. It seems clear to me that if war had been averted in 1939, the chances that any European war could have been avoided are slight, and that in all likelihood war would have been started by Hitler. Holding aside the chance of no war at all, the question remains where, when, and with whom would a different war have been fought. Perhaps a different war would have saved millions of lives; perhaps it would have been worse, although hard to imagine.
However that may be, as Winston Churchill so poignantly and beautifully said in his eulogy for Chamberlain in late 1940:
“It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting.”