history was not going to permit that. Genuine or illusory, the progress achieved in the
1920s towards international reconciliation and cooperation was brutally halted by an
appalling change in the economic context. That change altered the political context,
which – inevitably – shifted the strategic context. The French nightmare became a reality.
In the 1930s, France was alone as the policeman for the status quo of a European order
that was challenged by a potentially, and predictably, unmatchably powerful revisionist
Germany.
The structure of the strategic history of the 1920s and 1930s could hardly be simpler.
With France as the only senior player on the erstwhile victors’ team available to police
the peace settlement, it looked to a strategic future wherein the principal loser of 191 8
would be the strongest power on the Continent. France could try to persuade or bribe
Britain to join in the policing role, it could seek allies among the small states of East–
Central Europe, and it could try to conciliate – appease – Germany on matters that were
less than vital to French security. Fundamentally, though, France could not escape a
strategic context wherein eventually it must be on the wrong side of an imbalance of
power vis-à-vis a revisionist Germany.
There is little profit pursuing some intriguing ‘what ifs’ of history. The fact is that the
1930s were strategically radically different from the 1920s. One might try to argue
that another world war would have occurred anyway, at some time, virtually regardless
of the course of events in the 1920s and 1930s, and that view merits serious consider-
ation. It is anchored by the proposition that there was a redundancy of possible causal
factors for war, but it is unduly deterministic. What separated the two decades was the
Great Depression, with its political, economic and eventually strategic consequences.
The collapse of the New York stock market on 29 October 1929 was a panic that both
reflected and signalled a traumatic loss of business confidence. It had knock-on effects
that damaged most countries’ economies, though some more than others, and some more
immediately than others. The two countries hit the hardest were the United States itself
and Germany. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party were the products of the Great War, though
in the 1920s not very significant ones. Hitler’s assumption of the chancellorship of
Germany on 30 January 1933 is attributable almost wholly to the social, economic and
political effects of Germany’s economic meltdown and the associated political disarray.
Germany had 6 million unemployed in 1932. That was the most potent fact contributing
to a 1930s drastically different from the 1920s. Hitler and the Nazis came to power on
the back of economic chaos and popular economic anxiety. He promised to restore
stability, confidence, jobs and in general a condition of, and status for, Germany in which
Germans could take pride.
‘The Hitler factor’ is considered in detail in Chapter 11. The strategic history of the
1930s is the tale of a German regime determined to effect a revolutionary transformation
in the map of Europe. Needless to say, perhaps, few people in the 1930s, at least until
1939, realized that in Hitler and his Third Reich they were not dealing with a normal, if
unusually bold, statesman who was seeking only to improve his country’s geostrategic
position and remove the evidence of the humiliation of defeat in 191 8 –19.
Hitler’s political and strategic achievements in the 1930s were impressive indeed.
In only six years, 1933 to 1939, Germany changed from being strategically among the
weaker states of Europe to being the strongest. In fact, by 1939 Germany was already the
dominant state. The Versailles Settlement was dead and essentially buried, except as a
The twenty-year armistice, 1919–39 109