Hans van de Ven

The wars after the war, 1945–1954

Most of the wars in Europe and Asia after 1945 grew out of ideological divides that had been created by the Russian Revolution of 1917. In almost all countries around the world, a minority of educated elites had started to believe that only a society patterned on the Soviet Union could create wealth while doing away with injustice and the oppression of peasants and workers. They had good reasons for their belief. While technological progress in the nineteenth century had created a world in which products could be created faster, better, and with more ease than before, the social gap between the working class, which produced the new material wealth, and the bourgeoisie, which consumed it, had grown ever wider. In rural areas, which dominated all the countries where wars continued after World War II, new forms of travel and communications exposed the age-old oppression of the peasantry and made it harder to bear. While the spread of the capitalist market in the early part of the twentieth century had held out the promise that people would improve their lot quickly through hard work or luck, the crises of the late 1920s and 1930s crushed many of these hopes. By the 1940s, with great parts of both continents in ruins after another devastating war unleashed by the dominant powers, time seemed ripe for revolutionary transformation of the Soviet kind. The attractiveness of the Soviet model had been confirmed by the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany and its decisive intervention against Japan in 1945. Prior to World War II, Stalin’s domestic purges, his willingness to enter into a pact with Hitler, and the brutal destruction of Poland and the Baltic republics had held back enthusiasm for the Soviet Union, even among leaders of left-wing organizations. In the postwar era, however, the skepticism dramatically diminished. Many socialist and left-wing nationalist groups wanted to ally themselves with the Soviet Union in order to defeat their enemies, but Stalin was cautious in giving them grounds for optimism. In his view, neither Europe nor the colonial world was, with a few exceptions, ready for communist revolutions. The Soviet Union therefore became an inspiration and a model more than a helper for much of the left.

War, technology, and industrial change, 1850–1914

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Dick Diver, a self-appointed historian, captured the great changes in warfare before 1914. A “beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up with a great gust of high explosive love,” Diver tells a party of American tourists, who were poking around the old trenches on the Somme. By “love,” he meant the obsessive, competitive way in which the great powers had built vast armies, fleets, infrastructure, and arsenals that ensured their mutual destruction in a conflict that Friedrich Engels had predicted (in 1887) would “telescope all of the devastation of the Thirty Years War into three or four years” and gnaw Europe bare “in a way that a swarm of locusts never could.” Aware of the awful risks, European militaries plunged ahead in a general lust for armaments and military organization. Napoleon Bonaparte had launched warfare into the modern age, and Helmuth von Moltke drove it into the industrial age. Napoleon and his revolutionary colleagues had discovered the merits of general staff work, march tables, army divisions, ordre mixte (alternating shock and fire tactics), and mobile field artillery. Every major army had adopted those Napoleonic “lessons” by the mid nineteenth century, and most assumed that, in so doing, they had done enough. Moltke was not so complacent. Named chief of the Prussian general staff in 1857, he gaped at Prussia’s vulnerabilities. Prussia was a flat, sandy kingdom with growing industries, and surprising quantities of coal, but no natural frontiers. The Rhineland territories that Prussia had acquired in 1815 bordered France but were divided from Brandenburg-Prussia by hostile or unhelpful states like Hanover and Hesse. The Austrian Empire overshadowed (and coveted) Prussian Silesia. Russia flanked Prussia’s eastern heartland from its outposts in Poland and the Baltic. Whereas some of Moltke’s colleagues recommended a pacific foreign policy and continued subordination to Austria and Russia, Moltke, supported by Prussian Minister-President Otto von Bismarck, carried out a military-technological revolution designed not only to solidify Prussia’s defenses, but also to give Prussia the weapons to beat any great power in Europe.

The arms race

Analyses of the arms race that preceded World War I typically focus on quantity, and with good reason. The numbers of weapons and personnel which each alliance could mobilize were enormous indeed, and numbers always matter. As Clausewitz noted, numerical superiority is the “most common element” in tactical and strategic victory, while pointing out it is not always decisive. Although it is common practice to represent the arms race in terms of quantitative comparisons, doing so overshadows the race’s qualitative dimensions, which are just as important to an accurate understanding of the nature of military competition during this period. The quarter-century before the war saw more qualitative advances, defined as technological innovations, than any previous era. The industrial revolution, for all its emphasis on mass production and efficient distribution, also created numerous opportunities for innovation, many of which were actively sought by military establishments. In fact, the pursuit of technological and tactical innovations had become integral to the dynamics of military competition by the turn of the century. Qualitative advances are, in other words, as much hallmarks of the prewar arms race as are its unprecedented numbers of weapons and personnel. As a result, this chapter gives equal attention to the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the prewar arms race. An arms race is defined here as a competition between two or more parties for military supremacy, which is sought by amassing a greater quantity or quality of weapons, or both. There is an ongoing debate as to whether such competitions tend to become ends in themselves, and the extent to which they then lead to war. An examination of the events of the arms race that preceded World War I suggests the race neither became an end in itself, nor led directly to war. Admittedly, the major competitors at times seemed to embrace the basic impulse to outpace their rivals militarily, thereby giving apparent credence to the idea that arms races tend to become ends in themselves. However, this basic impulse still generally served each of the major powers’ larger political goals, which were as vague as they were inherently competitive.