Rearmament

During the 1930s many of these issues came sharply into focus. The collapse of international co-operation during the Slump, and the drift towards exaggerated nationalism that economic crisis provoked, ushered in a new wave of international tension and rearmament. At the centre lay Germany, ruled from 1933 by Adolf Hitler’s popular nationalist movement the NSDAP, committed to overturning the Versailles settlement, and asserting German hegemony, violently if necessary, in continental Europe. But Germany was not the only player. The Soviet Union began a massive programme of industrial and military modernization in the late 1920s, and by the mid-i93os had laid the foundation for the military superpower that dominated the international order down to the 1980s. Soviet rearmament encouraged Japan and Germany to convert their economies in the late 1930s to an emphasis on ‘strategic’ industries and high levels of military production. When British airmen planned a new generation of heavy bombers in 1936, they were designed not only to reach Germany but to fly to the industrial regions of the western Soviet Union and the oil of the Caucasus. The twin threats of reviving Germany and a heavily armed USSR were enough to stampede the rest of Europe. Britain and France began to rearm in 1934, and accelerated the programmes in 1936. Mussolini’s Italy rearmed from the early 1930s, and the Italian economy by the end of the decade was dominated by war preparation. The world trade in arms doubled between 1932 and 1937. In 1935 the major powers produced some 10,000 military aircraft between them, mostly low-powered biplanes. In 1939 they produced 42,000, mostly fast new monoplanes.

The arms race fuelled the very disequilibrium it was supposed to alleviate. The popular anti-war sentiment of the 1920s gradually gave way to the reluctant recognition that major war was once again a serious possibility. Few welcomed this prospect, even in Germany, whose ambitions in central and eastern Europe did more than anything to dissolve the existing international order. The concept of total war came home to roost. Governments everywhere were forced to recognize that they ran unacceptable risks unless they prepared for all-out war. Military advice, based on the experience of the Great War, emphasized economic preparation and plans for national mobilization. In Germany Hitler launched in 1936 a Four Year Plan whose object was to transform the German economy so that Germany could be supplied by the i940s with the military hardware necessary to become a European superpower. By 1939 two-thirds of all industrial investment went into war-related industries, one-quarter of the industrial workforce was employed on war orders, and the armed forces were completing national registers of labour and industrial resources in order to convert the civilian economy to war tasks smoothly and rapidly. Military spending reached 23 per cent of the national product; at the height of the Cold War in the 1960s the figure was only 5 per cent. In Britain and France plans for total mobilization were well advanced by 1939, and current military spending absorbed half the government’s budget. The view that war between great states could be won only by the fullest exertion of national energies became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The decade of rearmament presented the armed forces with all kinds of problems. During the 1920s military technology changed very slowly; much of it was left over from the Great War. In the 1930s the scientific threshold suddenly accelerated, spurred on by the urgent search for new means of military protection. So rapid were the technical strides that countries with poor resources and a small science community were left behind. Even for resource-rich states the unstable scientific frontier presented a bewildering array of projects from which the most militarily useful had to be selected. At the beginning of the decade aircraft were flimsy biplanes of limited range and carrying power. By 1939 German aircraft designers were working on bomber aircraft to fly to New York with a ton of bombs; rocket research was well advanced; and in Germany and Britain the first jet engines were being developed. More significant in the long term was the work done in theoretical physics to pave the way for the first atomic weapons. On the ground, developments were just as marked. In 1930 tanks were slow and light, often little more than glorified armoured cars. By 1939 the new generation of heavy, fast tanks with improved armour and fire-power were in place, supported by an array of self-propelled guns, armoured carriers, and specialized military vehicles. Radio, too, made rapid strides. In 1935 the first primitive radar sets were developed. By the outbreak of war Britain was defended by a chain of radar warning stations, and radar was installed in ships.

Radio was used to guide aircraft to distant targets, and radio interception became the key element in building up an intelligence picture of enemy intentions and strengths. Refined and improved, these were the weapons that dominated military strategy for the rest of the century.