World War II (1939 – 45): Changing Interpretations

This entry is a subentry of World War II (1939 – 45).

For over half a century, a general consensus has existed on the fundamental cause of World War II in Europe: on 1 September 1939, Adolf Hitler attacked Poland without provocation in order to obtain Lebensraum (expanded territory for Germany), his stated goal from the time he wrote Mein Kampf (1925). Often corollary was the claim that Hitler not only preached aggressive war against France and the Soviet Union but followed a carefully timed blueprint of expansionism. As revealed in the Hossbach Memorandum of 5 November 1937, the Führer had made Austria and Czechoslovakia his immediate targets. Winston S. Churchill said in the House of Commons on 14 March 1938, well over a year before war broke out, “Europe is confronted with a program of aggression, nicely calculated and timed, unfolding stage by stage.” From the war crimes prosecutors at Nuremberg to Walter Hofer's book War Premeditated, 1939 (1955), few disagreed.

By the sixties, the matter of a timetable was being challenged. Only a minute group of people, often rooted in neo‐Nazism, took seriously David Hoggan's The Forced War: When Peaceful Revisionism Failed (1961; English translation, 1989), an attempt to absolve Hitler of all aggressive designs. Far more formidable was Origins of the Second World War (1961), written by the provocative British historian A. J. P. Taylor. Hitler—claimed Taylor—was governed primarily by opportunism and improvisation, a position challenged in the many works of Gerhard L. Weinberg, for example, The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany (2 vols., 1970, 1980). Many historians—such as Alan Bullock in his Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952) and Gordon Brook‐Shepherd in The Anschluss (1963)—long held that Hitler kept his options open until the last minute.

Even prominent German historians, however, share in the consensus that any ad hoc method to Hitler's diplomacy operated within such long‐standing goals as Germany's control of Europe, mastery of the seas, internal warfare against the Jews, and external warfare against the Slavs—see, for example, Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler's Weltanschauung (1969; English translation, 1972); Andreas Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie: Politik und Kriegfuhrung, 1940–1941 (1975); Klaus Hildebrand, The Foreign Policy of the Third Reich (1970; English translation, 1973); and Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship (1969; English translation, 1970). Some German historians, participating in the Historikerstreit (historians' debate) of the 1980s, sought to “relativize” Hitler's genocide by pointing to other global atrocities and stressing the anti‐Bolshevik nature of Nazism; see for example, Ernst Nolte, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, 1917–1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolshewismus (1987), a position strongly criticized in Richard J. Evans, In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (1989). Nonetheless, few historians took seriously Hitler's claim that the attack on Russia of 21 June 1941 was a mere preventive strike before Josef Stalin attacked; and a major 1995 study confirmed the traditional picture: James Barros and Richard Gregor, Double Deception: Stalin, Hitler, and the Invasion of Russia (1995).

As to Asia, rarely did historians ever see a Japanese master plan at work. If David Bergamini's Japan's Imperial Conspiracy (1971) asserted that Emperor Hirohito masterminded Japan's aggression of the 1930s, no serious historian today finds any specific blueprint in that decade to conquer all East Asia. Even the famous Marco Polo Bridge incident of 7 July 1937, an event near Peking (Beijing) that triggered the Sino‐Japanese War of 1937–45, did not result from any planned Japanese campaign.

If, however, Japan had blundered into the bridge incident, Japan's leaders increasingly perceived that their nation's security and prosperity, indeed very survival, depended upon domination of East Asia. To Japan's leaders, such mastery increasingly relied upon the ability ultimately to fight the Soviets and the Americans and to destroy Nationalist China. Michael A. Barnhart's Japan Prepares for Total War: The Search for Economic Security, 1919–1941 (1987) stresses the Imperial Japanese Army's desire for resources in Manchuria, northern China, and possibly the Southwest Pacific. By the 1970s, some Japanese historians were acknowledging their country's aggressive policies; see, for example, (Japanese contributors to Dorothy Borg and Shumei Okamoto, eds., Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese‐American Relations, 1931–1941 (1973), and James W. Morley, ed., Japan's Road to the Pacific War, 4 vols. (1976–84, translated from Taiheiyo senso e no michi, a multivolume work by Japanese scholars).

The historiographical debate over U.S. entry into World War II was in many ways a replay of the isolationist‐interventionist debate of 1939–41. During the pre–Pearl Harbor debate over such Roosevelt policies as Lend‐Lease and armed convoys in the Atlantic and embargoes against Japan in the Pacific, isolationist historians called the president's measures warlike and provocative, and their postwar histories were efforts to support their case—Charles A. Beard, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 (1948), and Harry Elmer Barnes, ed., Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Its Aftermath (1953).

The most extreme writers, a mere handful, argued without credible evidence that the Roosevelt administration possessed specific foreknowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but—seeking a “back door” to full‐scale U.S. participation in the European War—permitted the deliberate loss of American lives and ships: Charles Callan Tansill, Back Door to War: Roosevelt Foreign Policy, 1933–1941 (1952), and John Toland, Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath (1982). A British and an Australian writer recently levied a similar unsubstantiated accusation against the British prime minister, Winston Churchill: James Rusbridger and Eric Nave, Betrayal at Pearl Harbor: How Churchill Lured Roosevelt into World War II (1991). A less extreme argument by a respected scholar, Paul W. Schroeder, The Axis Alliance and Japanese‐American Relations, 1941 (1958), claimed that U.S. intransigence over China led to the conflict; this still finds adherents, but most scholars believe American leaders were less committed to liberating China than Schroeder suggests.

Interventionist historians were quick to supply rejoinders to the isolationist polemics, the standard work for many years being William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason's two‐volume The World Crisis and American Foreign Policy (1952–53). Waldo Heinrichs's Threshold of War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II (1988) in many ways updates their findings. Accusations of conspiracy and deceit concerning Pearl Harbor have long been rejected by all major scholars. Gordon W. Prange, At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor (1981), and Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (1962), emphasize communications and intelligence analysis failures. Currently debated are such matters as the wisdom of America's Far Eastern diplomacy, in particular, the levying of economic sanctions on Japan on 25 July 1941—Jonathan G. Utley, Going to War with Japan, 1937–1941 (1985); the responsibility of the American commanders in Hawaii—Edward L. Beach, Scapegoats: A Defense of Kimmel and Short at Pearl Harbor (1995); blundering diplomats—R. J. C. Butow, The John Doe Associates: Back Door Diplomacy for Peace, 1941 (1974), and Hilary Conroy and Harry Wray, eds., Pearl Harbor Reexamined: Prologue to the Pacific War (1990); and multinational oil companies—Irvine Anderson, The Standard‐Vacuum Oil Company and United States East Asian Policy, 1933–1941 (1975).

By the 1960s, the interventionist interpretation had so strongly swept the historical profession that not a single major professional historian defended the isolationists' conspiratorial view. Revisionism itself, however, did not die; rather, it took a different form. In 1959, William Appleman Williams's Tragedy of American Diplomacy (rev. ed. 1962) presented World War II as “the war for the American frontier,” an effort to preserve the U.S. democratic and capitalistic system by eliminating the closed economic blocs of Germany and Japan. A few economically oriented writers asserted that overproduction led the United States into the war in order to keep open foreign markets—Patrick J. Hearden, Roosevelt Confronts Hitler: America's Entry into World War II (1987)—or to secure the wealth of Southeast Asia—Jonathan Marshall, To Have and Have Not: Southeast Asian Raw Materials and the Origins of the Pacific War (1995).

The Cold War led to more bitter controversy about World War II, this time centering on wartime diplomacy. Over the years, four schools have emerged. Defenders of Franklin D. Roosevelt, if they differed with the president on particulars, saw the president's wartime diplomacy as usually pragmatic and realistic; he was a man much attuned to the realities of power. Examples include Robert A. Divine, Roosevelt and World War II (1969); James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: Soldier of Freedom, 1940–1945 (1970); and Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (1979). Conversely, a “realist” school portrayed the president understandably, if unfortunately, as too attached to universalistic and unattainable Wilsonian goals; see, for example, Gaddis Smith's American Diplomacy During the Second World War, 1941–1945 (1965; 2nd ed. 1985). A few right‐wing isolationist critics, such as William Henry Chamberlain, America's Second Crusade (1950), opposed unconditional surrender of Germany, saw Japan as a bastion against the USSR, and found FDR needlessly solicitous of Stalin, going so far as to betray Poland and China. Although such an isolationist critique never attained scholarly standing, it was long prevalent in right‐wing political circles. A left‐wing “revisionist” school, represented by Gabriel Kolko—The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945 (1968)—described the Roosevelt administration as relentlessly pursuing open capitalistic markets and sources of raw materials at the expense of Britain, the Soviet Union, and even the Third World. Although Kolko enjoyed some popularity in the 1960s, the pragmatic and idealist schools retained the most adherents. An important subdebate, prompted by the Cold War revisionist Gar Alperovitz, centered on the claim that the Truman administration undertook the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki primarily to intimidate the Soviets—Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (1965; 2nd, expanded ed. 1994)—a motive most historians see as decidedly secondary to winning the war as rapidly as possible.

The terms of debate over the war, however, are currently being altered by new forms of investigation, including comparative cultures—Akira Iriye, Power and Culture: The Japanese‐American War, 1941–1945 (1981); bureaucratic politics—Theodore A. Wilson, The First Summit: Roosevelt and Churchill at Placentia Bay, 1941 (1969; rev. ed. 1991), and Mark M. Lowenthal, Leadership and Indecision: American War Planning and Policy Process, 1937–1942 (1988); public opinion—Michael Leigh, Mobilizing Consent: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy, 1937–1947 (1976); and definitions of American national security—Lloyd C. Gardner, Spheres of Influence: The Great Powers Partition Europe, From Munich to Yalta (1993).

[See also Disciplinary Views of War.]

Bibliography

• Gerald K. Haines and J. Samuel Walker, eds., American Foreign Relations: A Historiographical Review, 1981.
• P.M.H. Bell, The Origins of the Second World War in Europe, 1986, Part 1.
• Mark A. Stoler, Historiography: U.S. World War II Diplomacy, Diplomatic History, 18 (Summer 1994), pp. 375–403.
• Barton J. Bernstein, Understanding the Atomic Bomb and the Japanese Surrender: Missed Opportunities, Little Known Near Disaster, and Modern Memory, Diplomatic History, 19 (Spring 1995), pp. 227–73.
• Justus D. Doenecke, Historiography: U.S. Policy and the European War, 1939–1941, Diplomatic History, 19 (Fall 1995), pp. 669–98.
• Michael A. Barnhart, The Origins of World War II in Asia and the Pacific, Diplomatic History, 20 (Spring 1996), pp. 241–60