WWII as the First Global Conflict
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The Second World War was not, in spite of its name, the second general war to be fought on a global scale. The previous war that gave it its name, the war of 1914-1918, was in fact only marginally a "world" war, and indeed in the interwar years it was known simply as "the Great War." Eighteenth-century wars had been at least as global in scope as the First World War; the Seven Years war and the war that grew out of the American Revolution had both involved fighting from North America to India. Going back another two centuries, we might even argue that the Anglo-Spanish war that culminated in the Armada was the first "world" war; Drake's voyage in the Golden Hind had literally carried military action against Spain around the globe. In a deeper sense, the Second World War was the first truly global conflict, in that it was really a conflagration of several wars, from China and the Pacific, to the Eastern Front, to the Atlantic, which grew together to the point that in terms of grand strategy, if not of military operations, they became one war raging around the planet. Although these various sub-wars involved various participants, and broke out at various times, the central war was the one that broke out in Europe in 1939, and the central issue was Nazi Germany. In evaluating the origins of the Second World War, we are thus led first and foremost to consider what happened in Central Europe in the second half of the 1930s. The following essay evaluates a series of book
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ighlighting a fundamental aspect of the broader question of the origins of the Second World War. Was Hitler fundamentaly drifting, taking opportunities as they were offered, but with no grand plan beyond strengthening Germany's relative position in Europe (which any German stateman would probably have sought to do), or did he in fact have a conception of Germany's place that was so sweeping that his attempt to achieve it made a general war inevitable? In dealing with the specifics of the Hossbach Memorandum, Wright and Stafford challenge the reader to consider that question.
It has already been remarked that the Second World War was in important respects a confluence of several wars which began at different times and were fought between different parties. The works considered so far have dealt with the war between Nazi Germany and the Western Allies, i.e., primarily, at the outset, Britain and France. The United States was a late entrant into this war, and became a belligerent in the Second World War as a whole only by an odd indirection, by way of the attack on Pearl Harbor. That attack directly launched a sub-war of the whole that was nearly independent of the European war. The Japanese never linked hands militarily with
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Approximate Word count = 5215
Approximate Pages = 21 (250 words per page)
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