The Coming of World War II 1051

Prisoners of the war between China and Japan over the Japanese invasion of

Manchuria, 1931.

nese forces began to conquer chunks of northern China to establish a buffer
zone between Manchukuo and the Soviet Union. Japan then embarked on
a major naval expansion program, exceeding~hoth in number and size the
limits stipulated by the Washington Naval Conference (1921-1922) to
which Japan, among the other powers, had agreed. The United States was
entrenched in isolationism and still suffering the Depression. Angered by
Japanese aggression and Japan’s alliance with Nazi Germany, Britain joined
the United States in imposing an embargo on the sale of oil and other vital
raw materials to Japan.

German Aggression and British and French Appeasement

In November 1937, Hitler unveiled to his generals plans to absorb Austria
and Czechoslovakia, perhaps as early as the next year. Hitler’s confidence
derived partly from information he had received that Neville Chamberlain,
the new Conservative British prime minister, who in a speech had once
called Hitler’s National Socialism “a great social experiment,” might accept
Germany’s annexation of Austria and the Czech Sudetenland as inevitable.
Chamberlain was concerned only that the annexation occur without strife.
The British prime minister feared that if Britain went to war against Ger­
many, Hitler’s allies Italy and Japan would strike British imperial interests
in the Middle and Far East—for example, in Egypt and Burma. Furthermore,