Category Archives: war

by Joel | 13 May 2009 · 6:13 am

Ferguson on the Origins of World War II

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 312-314:

For obvious reasons, we tend to think of the years from 1933 to 1939 in terms of the origins of the Second World War. The question we customarily ask is whether or not the Western powers could have done more to avert the war – whether or not the policy of appeasement towards Germany and Japan was a disastrous blunder. Yet this may be to reverse the order of events. Appeasement did not lead to war. It was war that led to appeasement. For the war did not begin, as we tend to think, in Poland in 1939. It began in Asia in 1937, if not in 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria. It began in Africa in 1935, when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia. It began in Western Europe in 1936, when Germany and Italy began helping Franco win the Spanish Civil War. It began in Eastern Europe in April 1939, with the Italian invasion of Albania. Contrary to the myth propagated by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg that he and his confederates were its only begetter, Hitler was a latecomer to the war. He achieved his foreign policy objectives prior to September 1939 without firing a shot. Nor was it his intention to start a world war at that date. The war that broke out then between Germany, France and Britain was nearly as much the fault of the Western powers, and indeed of Poland, as of Hitler, as A. J. P. Taylor contended forty-five years ago in The Origins of the Second World War.

Yet Taylor’s argument was at best only half-right. He was right about the Western powers: the pusillanimity of the French statesmen, who were defeated in their hearts before a shot had been fired; the hypocrisy of the Americans, with their highfaluting rhetoric and low commercial motives; above all, the muddle-headedness of the British. The British said they wanted to uphold the authority of the League of Nations and the rights of small and weak nations; but when push came to shove in Manchuria, Abyssinia and Czechoslovakia, imperial self-interest trumped collective security. They fretted about arms limitation, as though an equality of military capability would suffice to avoid war; but while a military balance might secure the British Isles, it offered no effective security for either Britain’s continental allies or her Asian possessions. With withering irony, Taylor called the Munich agreement a ‘triumph for British policy [and] … for all that was best and most enlightened in British life’. In reality, war with Germany was averted at the price of an unfulfillable guarantee to the rump Czechoslovakia. If handing the Sudetenland to Hitler in 1938 had been the right decision, why then did the British not hand him Danzig, to which he had in any case a stronger claim, in 1939? The answer was that by then they had given another militarily worthless guarantee, to the Poles. Having done so, they failed to grasp what Churchill saw at once: that without a ‘grand alliance’ with the Soviet Union, Britain and France might find themselves facing Germany alone. As an indictment of British diplomacy, Taylor’s has stood up remarkably well to subsequent scholarship – though it must be said that he offers few clues as to why Britain’s statesmen were so incompetent.

Where Taylor erred profoundly was when he sought to liken Hitler’s foreign policy to ‘that of his predecessors, of the professional diplomats at the foreign ministry, and indeed of virtually all Germans’, and when he argued that the Second World War was ‘a repeat performance of the First’. Nothing could be more remote from the truth. Bismarck had striven mightily to prevent the creation of a Greater Germany encompassing Austria. Yet this was one of Hitler’s stated objectives, albeit one that he had inherited from the Weimar Republic. Bismarck’s principal nightmare had been one of coalitions between the other great powers directed against Germany. Hitler quite deliberately created such an encircling coalition when he invaded the Soviet Union before Britain had been defeated. Not even the Kaiser had been so rash; indeed, he had hoped he could avoid war with Britain. Bismarck had used colonial policy as a tool to maintain the balance of power in Europe; the Kaiser had craved colonies. Hitler was uninterested in overseas acquisitions even as bargaining counters. Throughout the 1920s Germany was consistently hostile to Poland and friendly to the Soviet Union. Hitler reversed these positions within little more than a year of coming to power. It is true, as Taylor contended, that Hitler improvised his way through the diplomatic crises of the mid-1930s with a combination of intuition and luck. He admitted that he was a gambler with a low aversion to risk (‘All my life I have played va banque’). But what was he gambling to win? This is not a difficult question to answer, because he answered it repeatedly. He was not content, like Stresemann or Brüning, merely to dismantle the Versailles Treaty – a task that the Depression had half-done for him even before he became Chancellor. Nor was his ambition to restore Germany to her position in 1914. It is not even correct, as the German historian Fritz Fischer suggested, that Hitler’s aims were similar to those of Germany’s leaders during the First World War, namely to carve out an East European sphere of influence at the expense of Russia.

Hitler’s goal was different. Simply stated, it was to enlarge the German Reich so that it embraced as far as possible the entire German Volk and in the process to annihilate what he saw as the principal threats to its existence, namely the Jews and Soviet Communism (which to Hitler were one and the same). Like Japan’s proponents of territorial expansion, he sought living space in the belief that Germany required more territory because of her over-endowment with people and her under-endowment with strategic raw materials.

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Filed under Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, nationalism, Poland, U.S., USSR, war

by Joel | 12 May 2009 · 12:45 pm

Mercenaries and Norms in Chinese History

The Mercenaries and Military Manpower blog got underway with a multipart review (still unfinished) of Mercenaries: The History of a Norm in International Relations by Sarah Percy (Oxford U. Press, 2007), which latter appears to be rather too Eurocentric, leading the reviewer to summarize the vicissitudes of mercenary use in the history of China. The following excerpt omits notes and references.

For over two thousand years, Chinese mandarins trained in the Confucian classics often shared an ideological preference for conscription of farmers rather than the employment of foreigners to fill the ranks of the Middle Kingdom’s armies, but despite this, they very frequently employed nomadic warriors from their borderlands during times of crisis, or whenever they felt it was necessary, regardless of idealistic norms. Even in the mid-nineteenth century, when Chinese court officials dreamed of raising hundreds of thousands of farmer-soldiers to fight the Taiping rebels, hard-headed realists such as Zeng Guofan realized the need to employ well-trained, well-paid troops rather than temporarily mustered militias, and it was with these professional troops whose loyalty was primarily to their paymasters rather than to the Chinese state, who were most effective in defeating the huge Taiping armies. In cities like Shanghai, merchants and other wealthy notables employed foreign mercenaries to establish what came to be called “The Ever Victorious Army,” which also played an important part in defeating the Taiping rebels.

What impact did the anti-mercenary norm of Chinese mandarins have on the composition of the armies in the nineteenth century? It delayed an effective response to the almost fatal threat to the Taiping army, and it failed to prevent a switch from reliance on almost completely ineffective hereditary soldiers and amateur militiamen to well-paid local or foreign mercenary soldiers. At the turn of the twentieth century, the venerable ‘founding father’ of both Communist China and Taiwan, Sun Yatsen, used money collected from numerous overseas Chinese communities to hire mercenaries to launch numerous attacks on Chinese imperial outposts that he hoped would spark a revolution. After the 1911 Revolution finally toppled the Qing dynasty, Sun Yatsen felt compelled to employ mercenaries once again to establish and maintain a local government in southern China which he hoped to use as a base to unite China again, in the form of a republic. It was only when the Chinese communists finally united the country in 1949-50 and imposed a monopoly on the use of force, that the market for military labor declined sharply in China.

The anti-mercenary norm of Chinese mandarins has never effectively or permanently prevented the use of professional soldiers or mercenaries during crises in Chinese history. When new dynasties won ‘the Mandate of Heaven’ and expanded to impose their monopoly on the use of force over large territories, or when governments face serious rebellions, they frequently used mercenaries. Once empires stopped expanding and stability was achieved, the employment of mercenaries diminished. When empires disintegrated, mercenaries flourished. The fluctuating use of mercenaries in the history of China, a country whose leaders have frequently shared an ideological hostility to the use of mercenaries, supports the view that, when states face military crises, anti-mercenary norms do not prevent the turn to a more realist policy of hiring whoever they can, if need be, to address the challenge at hand. To ignore such evidence and restrict one’s vision to Europe since the 12th century is very problematic, to say the least, for a book making theoretical claims about the impact of norms in international relations.

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by Joel | 4 May 2009 · 7:54 pm

Prussianizing Latin American Armies

The latest issue of Journal of World History (on Project MUSE) contains an enlightening (to me) review by Andrew Kirkendall of a book with too broad a title, Neorealism, States, and the Modern Mass Army by João Resende-Santos (Cambridge U. Press, 2007).

The book is narrowly focused on the attempts by the Argentines, Brazilians, and Chileans to imitate German military practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries…. The author is certainly correct to argue that it was success on the battlefield in 1870 and 1871 against the hitherto much admired French that generated the urge to emulate the Prussian army (these countries had already adopted British naval practices)….

The author’s main achievement is that he makes clear how much their actions were motivated by perceived security threats from the other two countries. He shrewdly notes that it was their own successes (Chile in its wars with Bolivia and Peru, and Brazil and Argentina in their war against Paraguay) that revealed to them how much their militaries needed reforming. Chile took the lead even before the War of the Pacific (1879–1884) was over amidst fears that war with Argentina was imminent. The author makes clear how territorial gains resulting from these wars made these countries less secure, in large part because they increased their neighbors’ hostility. Argentina’s unprecedented prosperity at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries made it possible to follow Chile’s example, though many Argentines distrusted Germany by this point because of its strong ties to Chile. Argentina’s wealth helped make it the major military power on the continent by the outbreak of World War I. Brazil was the slowest to reform. This failure seems ironic considering the fact that the first two presidents following the establishment of the republic in 1889 were military men who were all too aware of how inadequate the armed forces were. Long-standing civilian distrust of the military and the weakness of the national government during the Old Republic made it possible for state governments, when given a chance, to make it impossible, for example, to institute obligatory military service. (Decades later, Brazil’s alliance with the United States in World War II, combined with pro-Axis sympathies in Argentina, transformed the balance of power on the continent.) It should be noted that one long-term result of changes introduced by civilian governments was the weakening of civilian authority over the military.

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by Joel | 2 May 2009 · 10:55 pm

The League of Nations vs. Japan

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 301-303:

Despite its poor historical reputation, the League of Nations should not be dismissed as a complete failure. Of sixty-six international disputes it had to deal with (four of which had led to open hostilities), it successfully resolved thirty-five and quite legitimately passed back twenty to the channels of traditional diplomacy. It failed to resolve just eleven conflicts. Like its successor the United Nations, it was capable of being effective provided some combination of the great powers – including, it should be emphasized, those, like the United States and the Soviet Union, who were not among its members – had a common interest in its being effective. Remarkably, given Manchuria’s role as an imperial fault line earlier in the century, this was not the case in 1931. So uninterested was Stalin in the Far East at this point that in 1935 he offered to sell the Soviet-owned Chinese Eastern Railway to Japan and to withdraw all Soviet forces to the Amur River. If the Soviets were not interested in Manchuria, it was hard to see why Britain or the United States should be, especially at a time when both were reeling from severe financial crises.

On September 30, 1931, the Council of the League issued a resolution calling for ‘the withdrawal of Japanese troops to the railway zone’ where they had originally and legitimately been stationed. However, it set no deadline for this withdrawal and added the caveat that any reduction in troop numbers should only be ‘in proportion as the safety of the lives and property of Japanese nationals is effectively assured’. Eight days later Japanese planes bombed Jinzhou on Manchuria’s south-western frontier with China proper. On October 24 a new resolution was passed setting November 16 as the date by which the Japanese should withdraw. At the end of that month Japanese ground forces advanced towards Jinzhou. In early December, at the Japanese delegate’s suggestion, the League Council decided to send a commission of inquiry under the chairmanship of the Earl of Lytton, the former Governor of Bengal (and son of the Victorian Viceroy). Without waiting for its report, the us Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, warned Japan that the United States would refuse to recognize any separate agreement that Tokyo might reach with China; in his opinion, Japan was acting in breach not only of the Kellogg-Briand Pact signed in Paris in 1928 (under which the signatories had made ‘a frank renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy’) but also of the earlier Nine-Power Agreement to maintain the Open Door system in China.

The Japanese were unimpressed by American ‘non-recognition’. In March 1932 they proclaimed ‘Manchukuo’ as an independent state, with the former Chinese Emperor, Puyi, as its puppet ruler – another initiative by the men on the spot which was ratified by Tokyo only after a six-month delay. A week later Lytton submitted his voluminous report, which dismissed the Japanese claim that Manchukuo was a product of Manchurian self-determination and condemned Japan for ‘forcibly seiz[ing] and occupy[ing] … what was indisputably Chinese territory’. The Japanese pressed on with their policy of conquest. They bombed targets in the province of Rehe in the summer of 1932. In January 1933 there was yet another ‘incident’ at Shanhaiguan, the strategic pass where the Great Wall reaches the sea. After a few days it too was in Japanese hands. A week’s fighting added Rehe to Japan’s domain. In February 1933 the League of Nations Assembly accepted Lytton’s report and endorsed all but unanimously his proposal to give Manchuria a new autonomous status. Once again Japan was politely asked to withdraw her troops. In March the Japanese finally announced their intention to withdraw – from the League. Two months later they concluded a truce with Chinese military representatives that confirmed Japan’s control over Manchuria and Inner Mongolia. It also created a large demilitarized zone running through Hebei province, which the Japanese were soon running on an informal basis.

It is sometimes said that this was a fatal turning point in the history of the 1930s; the beginning of that policy of appeasement which was to culminate in 1939. But that is to misread the Manchurian crisis. It was unquestionably a turning point in Japan’s domestic politics. But internationally all that had happened was that the Japanese had achieved their long-standing objective of being treated as an equal by the other imperial powers.

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by Joel | 15 April 2009 · 6:16 am

No Plebiscites for Germans, 1919

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 160-161:

Applying the principle of self-determination proved far from easy, however, for two reasons. First, … there were more than thirteen million Germans already living east of the borders of the pre-war Reich – perhaps as much as a fifth of the total German-speaking population of Europe. If self-determination were applied rigorously Germany might well end up bigger, which was certainly not the intention of Wilson’s fellow peacemakers. From the outset, then, there had to be inconsistency, if not hypocrisy, in the way Germany was treated: no Anschluss of the rump Austria to the Reich – despite the fact that the post-revolutionary governments in both Berlin and Vienna voted for it – and no vote at all for the 250,000 South Tyroleans, 90 per cent of whom were Germans, on whether they wanted to become Italian, but plebiscites to determine the fate of northern Schleswig (which went to Denmark), eastern Upper Silesia (to Poland) and Eupen-Malmédy (to Belgium). France reclaimed Alsace and Lorraine, lost in 1871, despite the fact that barely one in ten of the population were French-speakers. In all, around 3.5 million German-speakers ceased to be German citizens under the terms of the Versailles Treaty. Equally important, under the terms of the 1919 Treaty of St Germain-en-Laye, more than 3.2 million Germans in Bohemia, southern Moravia and the hastily constituted Austrian province of Sudetenland found themselves reluctant citizens of a new state, Czechoslovakia. There were just under three-quarters of a million Germans in the new Poland, the same number again in the mightily enlarged Romania, half a million in the new South Slav kingdom later known as Yugoslavia and another half million in the rump Hungary left over after the Treaty of Trianon.

The second problem for self-determination was that none of the peacemakers saw it as applying to their own empires – only to the empires they had defeated.

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Filed under Austria, Belgium, democracy, Germany, Hungary, Italy, nationalism, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, U.S., war, Yugoslavia

by Joel | 14 April 2009 · 8:11 pm

Aboard the Yasukuni Maru to London, March 1939

From Orwell’s Diaries (On Board SS. Yasukunimaru (NYK) Crossing Bay of Biscay, 28.3.39):

Yasukuni is 11,950 tons. Do not yet know, but from the vibrations judge that she is a motor-ship. Apart from the bridge, only 3 decks above water-level. Cabins and other appointments pretty good, but certain difficulties in that [the] entire crew and personnel are Japanese and apart from the officers the majority do not speak much English. Second-class fare Casablanca-London £6.10. As the boat normally goes straight to London from Gibraltar & on this occasion went out of her way to deliver a load of tea, fare from Gilbraltar would probably be the same. P. & O. tourist class is £6.10 London-Gibraltar. Food on this ship slightly better than on the P. & O. & service distinctly better, but the stewards here have the advantage that the ship is almost empty. Facilities for drinking not so good, or for deck games, owing to comparatively restricted space.

Do not know what the accomodation° for passengers would be, but presumably at least 500. At present there are only 15 in the second class, about 12 in the third, & evidently not many in the 1st, though I don’t know how many. One or two of the 2nd & 3rd classes are Danes or other Scandinavians, one or two Dutch, the rest English, including some private soldiers who got on at Gibraltar. It appears that for its whole voyage the ship has been as empty as this. Since the Chino-Japanese war English people from the far east will not travel on the Japanese boats. All the P. & O. boast said to be crowded out in consequence.

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by Joel | 13 April 2009 · 9:37 pm

Commissar Trotsky’s Military Tactics

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 145-148:

Between May and June [1918], the Czechs swept eastwards, capturing Novo-Nikolaevsk, Penza, Syzran, Tomsk, Omsk, Samara and finally Vladivostok. Meanwhile, Russia’s former allies sent expeditionary forces, whose primary aim was to keep Russia in the war. The British landed troops at Archangel and Murmansk, as well as at Vladivostok; the French sent men to Odessa, the Americans to Vladivostok. The Allies also supplied the White armies with weapons and other supplies. The Japanese seized the opportunity to march across the Amur River from Manchuria. Meanwhile, the cities that were supposed to be the headquarters of the Revolution emptied as factories closed and supplies of food and fuel dried up. When Denikin called on all the White forces to converge on Moscow in July 1918, it seemed more than likely that the Bolshevik regime would be overthrown.

On August 6, 1918, White forces in combination with the renegade Czech Legion captured Kazan. The Bolshevik 5th Army was haemorrhaging deserters. Ufa had fallen; so too had Simbirsk, Lenin’s own birthplace. Another step back along the Volga would bring the forces of counter-revolution to the gates of Nizhny-Novgorod, opening the road to Moscow. Having resigned his post as Commissar for Foreign Affairs in favour of Military Affairs, Trotsky now had the daunting task of stiffening the Red Army’s resolve. He was, as we have seen, by training a journalist not a general. Yet the goatee-bearded intellectual with his pince-nez had seen enough of war in the Balkans and on the Western Front to know that without discipline an army was doomed. It was Trotsky who insisted on the need for conscription, realizing that volunteers would not suffice. It was Trotsky who brought in the former Tsarist NCOs and officers – many of them hitherto languishing in jail – whose experience was to be vital in taking on the Whites.

Trotsky had two advantages. Firstly, the Bolsheviks controlled the central railway hubs, from which he could deploy forces at speed. Indeed, it was from his own specially designed armoured railway carriage that he himself directed operations, travelling some 100,000 miles in the course of the war. Secondly, though the Bolsheviks lacked experience of war, they did have experience of terrorism; like the Serbian nationalists, they too had employed assassination as a tactic in the pre-war years. It was to terror, in the name of martial law, that Trotsky now turned.

When he arrived at Kazan, the first thing he did was to uncouple the engine from his train; a signal to his troops that he had no intention of retreating. He then brought twenty-seven deserters to nearby Syvashsk, on the banks of the Volga, and had them shot. The only way to ensure that Red Army recruits did not desert or run away, Trotsky had concluded, was to mount machine-guns in their rear and shoot any who failed to advance against the enemy. This was the choice he offered: possible death in the front or certain death in the rear. ‘We must put an end once and for all’, he sneered with a characteristically caustic turn of phrase, ‘to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.’ Units that refused to fight were to be decimated. It was a turning point in the Russian civil war – and an ominous sign of how the Bolsheviks would behave if they won it. In the bitter fighting for the bridge over the Volga at Kazan, Trotsky’s tactics made that outcome significantly more likely. The bridge was saved, and on September 10 the city itself was retaken. Two days later Simbirsk also fell to the Reds. The White advance faltered as they found themselves challenged not only by a rapidly growing Red Army, but also by recalcitrant Ukrainians and Chechens to their rear. The Czechs were weary of fighting; the Legion disintegrated as it was driven back to Samara and then beyond the Urals…. By the end of November Denikin had lost Voronezh and Kastornoe.

The end of the war on the Western Front was well timed for the Bolsheviks. It undermined the legitimacy of the foreign powers’ intervention, especially as they now had left-wing outbreaks of their own to deal with. Only the Japanese showed any inclination to maintain an armed presence on Russian soil, and they were content to stake out new territorial claims in the Far East and leave the rest of Russia to its fate.

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by Joel | 13 April 2009 · 6:27 pm

Novelties of Turning States into Nations

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 74-77:

Nation states were a comparative novelty in European history. Much of the continent in 1900 was still dominated by the long-established and ethnically mixed empires of the Habsburgs, Romanovs and Osmanli. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was another such entity. Some smaller countries were also ethnically heterogeneous: Belgium and Switzerland, for example. And there were numerous petty principalities and grand duchies, like Luxembourg or Lichtenstein, that had no distinct national identity of their own, yet resisted absorption into bigger political units. These patchwork political structures made practical sense at a time when mass migration was increasing rather than reducing ethnic intermingling. Yet in the eyes of political nationalists, they deserved to be consigned to the past; the future should belong to homogeneous nation states. France, which had nurtured in the Swiss political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau the prophet of popular sovereignty, also provided a kind of model for nation-building. A republic forged and re-forged in repeated revolutions and wars, France by 1900 seemed to have subsumed all its old regional identities in a single ‘idea of France’. Auvergnais, Bretons and Gascons alike all considered themselves to be Frenchmen, having been put through the same standardized schooling and military training.

Nationalism at first had seemed to pose a threat to Europe’s monarchies. In the 1860s, however, the kingdoms of Piedmont and Prussia had created new nation states by combining the national principle with their own instincts for self-preservation and self-aggrandizement. The results – the kingdom of Italy and the German Reich – were no doubt very far from being perfect nation states. To Sicilians, the Piedmontese were as foreign as if they had been Frenchmen; the true unification of Italy came after the triumphs of Cavour and Garibaldi, with what were in effect small wars of colonization waged against the peoples of the south. Many Germans, meanwhile, lived outside the borders of Bismarck’s new Reich; what historians called his wars of unification had in fact excluded German-speaking Austrians from a Prussian-dominated Kleindeutschland. Nevertheless, an imperfect nation state was, in the eyes of most nationalists, preferable to no nation state at all. In the late nineteenth century other peoples sought to follow the Italian and German example. Some – notably the Irish and the Poles, to say nothing of Bengalis and other Indians – saw nationhood as an alternative to subjugation by unsympathetic empires. A few, like the Czechs, were content to pursue greater autonomy within an existing imperial structure, keeping hold of the Habsburg nurse for fear of meeting something worse. The situation of the Serbs was different. At the Congress of Berlin (1878), along with the Montenegrins, they had recovered their independence from Ottoman rule. By 1900 their ambitions were to follow the Piedmontese and Prussian examples by expanding in the name of South Slav (Yugoslav) national unity. But how were they to achieve this? One obvious possibility was through war, the Italian and German method. But the odds against Serbia were steep. It was one thing to win a war against the crumbling Ottoman Empire (as happened when Serbia joined forces with Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece in 1912) or against rival Balkan states (when the confederates quarrelled over the spoils of victory the following year). It was an altogether bigger challenge to take on Austria-Hungary, which was not only a more formidable military opponent, but also happened to be the principal market for Serbia’s exports.

The Balkan Wars had revealed both the strengths and the limits of Balkan nationalism. Its strength lay in its ferocity. Its weakness was its disunity .The violence of the fighting much impressed the young Trotsky, who witnessed it as a correspondent for the newspaper Kievskaia mysl. Even the peace that followed the Balkan Wars was cruel, in a novel manner that would become a recurrent feature of the twentieth century. It no longer sufficed, in the eyes of nationalists, to acquire foreign territory. Now it was peoples as well as borders that had to move. Sometimes these movements were spontaneous. Muslims fled in the direction of Salonika as the Greeks, Serbs and Bulgarians advanced in 1912; Bulgarians fled Macedonia to escape from invading Greek troops in 1913; Greeks chose to leave the Macedonian districts ceded to Bulgaria and Serbia by the Treaty of Bucharest. Sometimes populations were deliberately expelled, as the Greeks were from Western Thrace in 1913 and from parts of Eastern Thrace and Anatolia in 1914. In the wake of the Turkish defeat, there was an agreed population exchange: 48,570 Turks moved one way and 46,764 Bulgarians the other across the new Turkish-Bulgarian border. Such exchanges were designed to transform regions of ethnically mixed settlement into the homogeneous societies that so appealed to the nationalist imagination. The effects on some regions were dramatic. Between 1912 and 1915, the Greek population of (Greek) Macedonia increased by around a third; the Muslim and Bulgarian population declined by 26 and 13 per cent respectively. The Greek population of Western Thrace fell by 80 per cent; the Muslim population of Eastern Thrace rose by a third. The implications were distinctly ominous for the many multi-ethnic communities elsewhere in Europe.

The alternative to outright war was to create a new South Slav state through terrorism. In the wake of the annexation of Bosnia, a rash of new organizations sprang up, pledged to resisting Austrian imperialism in the Balkans and to liberate Bosnia by fair means or foul….

The Black Hand’s leader was Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic, nicknamed ‘Apis’ (Bee), one of seven officers in the Serbian army who were among its founders. It was Dimitrijevic who trained three young terrorists for what was from the outset intended to be a suicide mission: to murder the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne when he visited Sarajevo. The assassins – Nedjilko Cabrinovic, Trifko Grabez and Gavrilo Princip – were sent across the border with four Browning M 1910 revolvers, six bombs and cyanide tablets. As if to entice them, the Archduke chose to visit Sarajevo on the anniversary of the fourteenth-century Battle of Kosovo – the holiest day in the calendar of Serbian nationalism, St Vitus’ Day (Vidovdan).

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by Joel | 24 March 2009 · 9:06 pm

Kakania or Russia as “Versuchsstation des Weltuntergangs”

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 13-15:

Czechs in particular chafed at their second-class status in Bohemia, and were able to give more forthright political expression to their grievances after the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1907. But schemes for some kind of Habsburg federalism never got off the ground. The alternative of Germanization was not an option for the fragile linguistic patchwork that was Austria; the most that could be achieved was to maintain German as the language of command for the army, though with results lampooned hilariously by the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek in The Good Soldier Švejk. By contrast, the sustained Hungarian campaign to ‘Magyarize’ their kingdom’s non-Hungarians, who accounted for nearly half the population, merely inflamed nationalist sentiment. If the trend of the age had been towards multi-culturalism, then Vienna would have been the envy of the world; from psychoanalysis to the Secession, its cultural scene at the turn of the century was a wonderful advertisement for the benefits of ethnic cross-fertilization. But if the trend of the age was towards the homogeneous nation state, the future prospects of the Dual Monarchy were bleak indeed. When the satirist Karl Kraus called Austria-Hungary a ‘laboratory of world destruction’ (Versuchsstation des Weltuntergangs), he had in mind precisely the mounting tension between a multi-tiered polity – summed up by Kraus as an ‘aristodemoplutobarokratischen Mischmasch’ – and a multi-ethnic society. This I was what Musil was getting at when he described Austria-Hungary as ‘nothing but a particularly clear-cut case of the modern world’: for ‘in that country … every human being’s dislike of every other human being’s attempts to get on … [had] crystallized earlier’. Reverence for the aged Emperor Francis Joseph was not enough to hold this delicate edifice together. It might even end up blowing it apart.

If Austria-Hungary was stable but weak, Russia was strong but unstable. ‘There’s an invisible thread, like a spider’s web, and it comes right out of his Imperial Majesty Alexander the Third’s heart. And there’s another which goes through all the ministers, through His Exellency the Governor and down through the ranks until it reaches me and even the lowest soldier,’ the policeman Nikiforych explained to the young Maxim Gorky. ‘Everything is linked and bound together by this thread … with its invisible power.’ As centralized as Austria-Hungary was decentralized, Russia seemed equal to the task of maintaining military parity with the West European powers. Moreover, Russia exercised the option of ‘Russification’, aggressively imposing the Russian language on the other ethnic minorities in its vast imperium. This was an ambitious strategy given the numerical predominance of non-Russians, who accounted for around 56 per cent of the total population of the empire. It was Russia’s economy that nevertheless seemed to pose the biggest challenge to the Tsar and his ministers. Despite the abolition of serfdom in the 1860s, the country’s agricultural system remained communal in its organization – closer, it might be said, to India than to Prussia. But the bid to build up a new class of thrifty peasant proprietors – sometimes known as kulaks, after their supposedly tight fists – achieved only limited success. From a narrowly economic perspective, the strategy of financing industrialization by boosting agricultural production and exports was a success. Between 1870 and 1913 the Russian economy grew at an average annual rate of around 2.4 per cent, faster than the British, French and Italian and only a little behind the German (2.8 per cent). Between 1898 and 1913, pig iron production more than doubled, raw cotton consumption rose by 80 per cent and the railway network grew by more than 50 per cent. Militarily, too, state-led industrialization seemed to be working; Russia was more than matching the expenditures of the other European empires on their armies and navies. Small wonder the German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg worried that ‘Russia’s growing claims and enormous power to advance in a few years, will simply be impossible to fend off’. Nevertheless, the prioritization of grain exports (to service Russia’s rapidly growing external debt) and rapid population growth limited the material benefits felt by ordinary Russians, four-fifths of whom lived in the countryside. The hope that they would gain land as well as freedom aroused among peasants by the abolition of serfdom had been disappointed. Though living standards were almost certainly rising (if the revenues from excise duties are any guide), this was no cure for a pervasive sense of grievance, as any student of the French ancien regime could have explained. A disgruntled peasantry, a sclerotic aristocracy, a radicalized but impotent intelligentsia and a capital city with a large and volatile populace: these were precisely the combustible ingredients the historian Alexis de Tocqueville had identified in 1780s France. A Russian revolution of rising expectations was in the making – a revolution Nikiforych vainly warned Gorky to keep out of.

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Filed under Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, nationalism, Russia, war

by Joel | 12 March 2009 · 9:14 pm

The Failed Soviet Invasion of Romania, Spring 1944

From Red Storm over the Balkans: The Failed Soviet Invasion of Romania, Spring 1944, by David M. Glantz (U. Press of Kansas, 2007), pp. 372-378 (reviewed here and here):

Strategic Implications

Every officially sanctioned Soviet and, more recently, Russian history of the Soviet-German War published since war’s end categorically asserts that, immediately after the Red Army completed its successful winter campaign in the Ukraine during mid-April 1944, Stalin ordered his Stavka and General Staff to begin preparations to conduct a series of successive strategic offensives through Belorussia and Poland during the summer of 1944, which, from a military and political perspective, were designed to hasten the destruction of the Wehrmacht and Hitler’s Third Reich in the shortest possible time by exploiting the most direct route into the heart of Germany. Only after completing these more important offensives, these sources argue, did Stalin finally unleash the Red Army on an invasion of Romania and the Balkan region. According to this strategic paradigm, when the Red Army actually implemented the Stavka’s plan, it began its offensive into Belorussia in late June, its offensive into southern Poland in mid-July, and its offensive into Romania in late August.

Furthermore, these same histories argue that, just as the Balkan region was a secondary strategic objective for Stalin during the Red Army’s summer-fall campaign of 1944, it remained of secondary importance when the Red Army conducted its offensives during the winter campaign of 1945. Therefore, just as the Red Army invaded Romania in late August 1944, but only after its offensives in Belorussia and eastern Poland succeeded, likewise, during its winter campaign of 1945, the Red Army captured Budapest and western Hungary and invaded Austria in February and March 1945, but only after its offensive through Poland to the Oder River succeeded.

However, the “discovery” of the Red Army’s attempt to invade Romania in mid-April and May 1944 casts serious doubts on this prevailing strategic paradigm. In short, the precise timing, immense scale, complex nature, and obvious objectives of the Red Army’s offensive into Romania during April and May 1944 now clearly indicate that Stalin and his Stavka were paying considerable attention to strategic imperatives other than those described in this prevailing strategic paradigm. Simply stated, vital military, economic, and political factors prompted Stalin to order his Red Army to mount a major offensive of immense potential strategic significance into Romania between mid-April and late May 1944….

In addition to these purely military considerations, there were also strategically vital economic and political motives for Stalin and his Stavka to mount an invasion of Romania during April and May 1944. Economically, for example, as von Senger pointed out, if successful, a full-fledged Red Army invasion of Romania could deprive the Axis of its vital oilfields in Romania, thereby seriously degrading Germany’s ability to continue the war. More important still from a political standpoint, a successful invasion of Romania would likely topple the pro-German Romanian government and drive Romania from the war, and perhaps even force Bulgaria to abandon its looser ties with Hitler’s Germany. In fact, the loss of a significant portion of Romania to the Red Army would shake if not shatter the Axis’ defenses throughout the entire Balkans, inject a sizeable Red Army presence in the region, and end all hopes by Stalin’s “Big Three” counterparts, Roosevelt and Churchill, that they could halt the spread of Soviet influence into the Balkan region.

In short, since Stalin’s Western Allies were already planning Operation Overlord to land their forces on the coast of France, the Red Army’s entry into Romania would end, once and for all, Stalin’s anxiety over his Allies establishing a “second front” in the Balkans. Ever the realist, Stalin judged that the potential political gains associated with the Red Army’s advance into Romania during April and May 1944 more than outweighed any associated military risks. Nor was it coincidental that, after his spring 1944 venture failed and the Red Army’s summer offensives to the north succeeded, Stalin unleashed the Red Army forces on a new invasion deeper into Romania and the Balkans during August 1944.

Furthermore, although it will be the subject of a future book, it is now quite clear that Stalin continued to pursue a similar “Balkan strategy” during the winter of 1945 after his Allies assured him at the Yalta Conference in early February that Berlin would be his for the taking. As a result, within hours after receiving these assurances, Stalin abruptly halted the Red Army’s advance on Berlin along the Oder River, only 30 miles from Berlin, and instead shifted its main axis of advance—first, into western Hungary and, later, into the depths of Austria—for essentially the same political reasons that had motivated him to invade Romania during April, May, and August 1944. Just as Stalin had altered his strategy for a drive on Berlin by attempting to invade Romania in April and May 1944 only to resume his advance along the Berlin axis in June, a year later the Red Army began its final drive on Berlin on 16 April 1945, the day after Vienna fell. Therefore, the Red Anny’s failed offensive into Romania during April and May 1944 is remarkably consistent with Stalin’s strategic behavior during 1945.

Lesson Learned

Regardless of Stalin’s motives for authorizing the offensive into Romania, for a variety of reasons, the Red Army’s first Iasi-Kishinev offensive ended as a spectacular failure. After failing to overcome Axis defenses from the march during mid-April, Konev’s 2nd Ukrainian Front was equally unsuccessful in its better-prepared offensive aginst Axis forces defending in the Tirgu-Frumos and Iasi regions in May. During the same period, although Malinovsky’s 3rd Ukrainian Front was able to seize some bridgeheads across the Dnestr River in early April, its twin efforts to expand those bridgeheads later in the month achieved little more. Complicating the Stavka’s strategic plans, while Konev and Malinovsky were organizing a third effort to capture Iasi and Kishinev during mid-May, for the first time since late 1942, counterattacking German forces actually managed to inflict serious defeats on major Red Army forces defending bridgeheads across a major river….

The defending German forces had also been fighting for as prolonged a period as their Red Army counterparts and had suffered many serious and costly defeats and heavy losses in men and equipment. Furthermore, when Konev’s and Malinovsky’s forces invaded Romania, in many sectors they faced green and poorly motivated and equipped Romanian troops. Despite this fact, fighting with a determination born of desperation, the Axis forces were able to hold firmly to most of their defenses in April and early May and, thereafter, mount successful counterstrokes of their own during early May and early June.

Difficult spring weather conditions and the adverse effect of the heavy rains and flooding on the terrain also certainly exacerbated the already significant logistical problems the two fronts were experiencing as they operated at the end of their overextended lines of communications characterized by a rickety patchwork logistical network that was just being constructed. First, the two Ukrainian fronts were conducting offensive operations in a region whose hilly, broken, and often lightly wooded terrain differed substantially from the rolling grass-covered flatlands of the Ukraine to which their troops were long accustomed.

Second, for the first time in the war, the two fronts were attempting to conduct offensive operations after warmer weather melted the icy surface they had exploited to conduct mobile military operations in previous winters. Predictably, the rasputitsa proved as formidable an obstacle to the two fronts’ advancing forces as the Germans’ resistance and, in some cases, even more formidable.

Third, compounding the problems cited above, pursuant to orders, as they conducted their fighting withdrawal, the Germans systematically destroyed everything of value both for destruction’s sake and to create obstacles to the Red Army’s forward movement. They blew up railroads, beds, tracks, and culverts alike; they cratered roads and demolished dams; and they destroyed every building or installation regardless of military value. In short, they left a vast wasteland for the Red Army to traverse in their wake.

As a result, whether attacking or defending, in addition to experiencing customary shortages of food, which made soldierly foraging an essential art, and the normal effects of prolonged combat attrition, virtually every formation and unit within the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts suffered significant losses in weaponry and heavy equipment and experienced severe ammunition and fuel shortages. For example, archival documents indicate that, prior to its offensive along the Tirgu Frumos axis on 2 May, the 2nd Ukrainian Front’s 2nd Tank Army was supplied with between two and five combat loads of ammunition and two to two and one-half refills of gasoline and diesel fuel, which was not excessively low to conduct such an operation. However, it would be disingenuous to offer these realities as excuses for Konev’s and Malinovsky’ offensive failures, since, as was always the case, the two front commanders, as well as their subordinate officers and soldiers alike, frequently relied on sheer ingenuity or “native wit” to resolve their logistical dilemmas.