Joseph A. Maiolo

The outbreak of war in Europe: a failure of diplomacy?

This essay explores the nature of diplomacy before examining the political aims and foreign policies of the major European powers. It demonstrates that three of the five great powers, the USSR, Italy and Germany, desired to overthrow the inter-war international system. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy both pursued war as an aim in its own right. Given these conditions, there was no hope that peace could be preserved through diplomacy. The coming of the Second World War in Europe cannot therefore be attributed to a failure of diplomacy.

The British Empire, 1939–1945

‘A great Victory Parade was held in Colombo, at which some 3,500 representatives of all the services marched past in 35 minutes’, wrote Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten in his diary for 25 August 1945. As Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia, Mountbatten was proud of the size of his command, headquartered near Kandy in the highlands of Ceylon: ‘At this rate the 1,380,000 men in SEAC [South East Asia Command] would take nearly 9 days and 9 nights to march past!’, he noted with boyish pride. Ken Waterson, a lowlier member of the Royal Navy, was also in Ceylon at the time of the Japanese surrender and described the ‘unreal atmosphere’ that pervaded that memorable evening. When the news of the capitulation came through, he was on the middle watch aboard the destroyer Relentless, at anchor in Trincomalee harbour. The crew ‘got up a singing party and took the ship’s piano onto the quarterdeck’, he recalled. ‘There were rocket (distress flare) displays, jumping jacks and concerts. . . Ships were dressed, every colour of flag was flown. . . The dark night showed up illuminated Vs made up of coloured lightbulbs’. All the ships in harbour that night sounded their sirens, some spelling ‘VJ’ in Morse code; sailors got drunk and ships started firing rockets at each other and at the aircraft lined up on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Small fires broke out as awnings and gun covers caught fire, and this, in turn, led to hoses being used to dowse fires and the crews of neighbouring warships. Joyous sailors clambered the superstructure of a British battleship in Sydney Harbour that same day; Swazi troops heard the news in North Africa; and crowds of civilians and service personnel thronged the streets of Ottawa and Toronto, as across the British Empire final victory was

The Axis: Germany, Japan and Italy on the road to war

In a famous speech in Milan’s cathedral square in November 1936, the leader of Fascist Italy, Benito Mussolini, used a metaphor first invented by Hungary’s former Prime Minister, Gyula Gömbös, to describe the newly intensified German-Italian relations: an ‘axis’ had been forged between Berlin and Rome, he insisted, with a reference to the Treaty of Friendship signed between the two powers on 25 October 1936, ‘around which all those European states which are animated by a desire for collaboration and peace can revolve’. In Italian and German propaganda, the ‘axis’ was celebrated as the joining of forces between two long suppressed but now re-emerging empires, with shared histories and superior cultures, as well as common foes who sought to prevent them from assuming their rightful place among the world’s great powers. For the West, the axis promised anything but ‘peace’. Instead, it raised the spectre of a combined threat to European collective security by two expansionist powers under the leadership of dangerous dictators. The threat became global when, within weeks of the formation of the Axis, Hitler entered into a further pact with Japan that was soon to be known as the Anti-Comintern Pact. Despite Hitler’s racial prejudices against the Japanese as an Asian people allegedly incapable of ‘creating culture’, he viewed the country as having similar geopolitical (and predominantly anti-Soviet) interests. On 27 November 1936, Hitler formally approved the