The History Buff's Guide to World War II Read Online Free PDF Page B

grants and loans eventually gave Germany more money than it ever paid, but the damage had been done. Americans and Britons believed France was irresponsibly greedy. The French believed Germany escaped punishment. Many Germans felt cheated by democratic governments, including their own. The issue was never resolved; Germany simply stopped paying. 44
In 1929, Germany was scheduled to make reparations payments in gold until the year 1988.
    4 . THE GREAT DEPRESSION
    In 1920, only two European countries were dictatorships. By 1937, there were sixteen. The primary cause of this migration to extremism was, in the words of economist John Maynard Keynes, the “greatest economic catastrophe…of the modern world.” 45
    In 1929, a combination of overproduction, reduced consumption, and grossly overoptimistic stock prices led to a commercial implosion in the United States. Had the United States been a small player in the world market, the problem might have contained itself. Unfortunately, by the 1920s, America had become one of the largest creditor and trade nations on the planet. 46
    Within a year, international investments and trade began to dry up. Work orders plummeted and joblessness soared. Unemployment reached 25 percent in the United States, Japan, and Britain; 30 percent in France; 33 percent in Germany; and almost 50 percent in Eastern Europe. 47
    Banks crumbled in Austria, Britain, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Poland, Romania, and the United States, killed off by unstable currencies and multiplying loan defaults. Grain production—the foundation of nearly every national economy—fell by a fourth. Families lost their life savings, homes and businesses, pensions, and in many cases the ability to buy food. 48
    Out of deprivation came polarization. Normally moderate sections of societies, especially the middle class, became increasingly receptive to radical solutions. 49

    This bread line was in New York, but the forlorn scene appeared throughout the Western world for several years running.
The fragile democracy of Weimar Germany survived riots, armed rebellions, foreign occupation of the Rhineland, governmental scandals, political assassinations, and a total collapse of its monetary system—but it did not survive the Great Depression.
    5 . THE RISE OF ECONOMIC AUTARCHY
    In the 1930s, Germany and Britain received most of their iron ore from Scandinavia and France. Japan was barely self-sufficient in food and almost entirely dependent on the United States for metals and petroleum. The United States imported most of its manganese, rubber, chromium, and practically all of its tin from East Asia. 50
    Such interdependence would logically oblige states to be cooperative with their suppliers. But memories of the largest war ever, coupled with lingering global economic depression, did not exactly create an environment of trust between capitals. Rather than engage in free trade, the richest states intensified their competition for raw materials.
    As early as 1929, there were talks of European union, mostly to fend off “imperialist America.” In a 1932 Commonwealth trade conference held in Canada, Britain declared it would exercise “imperial preference” when buying and selling anything. To secure sources of raw materials in Asia, the United States increased its military presence in the Philippines. Benito Mussolini declared he wanted to make North Africa, of all things, a wheat basket for Italy. In 1936, Japan announced the creation of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, insinuating first rights to oil and ores in the region. Outdoing the rest, Germany reoccupied the industrial Ruhr Valley in 1936 and solidified designs for acquiring Lebensraum (“living space”) in the east. 51
    Fittingly, some of the most intense offensives in World War II involved targets of raw material: grain in Manchuria and Russia; oil in the Dutch East Indies, Arabia, and the Caucasus; and coal in the Ruhr of Germany.
In a 1939 poll in Fortune