The Similarities Between the World War One and the U.S. Civil War

Picture trenches. Miles of trenches with knee-deep mud. Pulverized trees and rusty barbed wire. These are just a few images that bring World War One or the Great War to mind. Others show endlessly firing machine guns, mowing down soldiers as they charge toward their opponents.

However, the Great War was foreshadowed by the U.S. Civil War. Matt Whittaker explains.

A German trench occupied by British soldiers in World War One at Ovillers-la-Boisselle, July 1916 during the Battle of the Somme. The men came from A Company, 11th Battalion, in the Cheshire Regiment.

Sadly, many of these battles started this way. Troops went “over the top,” using mass infantry tactics, and suffered. An often-cited example is the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Between all the machine gun fire and more, some 19,000 British soldiers died on the first day. Technology simply moved faster than tactics had evolved.

Yet, some fifty years before the American Civil War provided a glimpse of what would come. In that war, new thinking was required, too.

But in this solely American war, what prompted such a change? There wasn’t just one reason but a combination of technology, tactics, a shift to total war, and perhaps the biggest foretelling – trench warfare.

The American Civil War began after much complex political, economic, and social issues boiled over in April 1861. With the bombing of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, the war started.

Trench warfare

Though a significant point, trench warfare occurred later in the Civil War. The first similarity was industrialized warfare. America’s industrial industry capacity built up faster than most countries, Britain aside.

How is this important? Such capability allowed rapid technological advancements like railroads, ironclads, and repeating weapons.

Both sides in the war would depend on railroads for supplies and movement. With good rail lines, troops could be moved quicker and in more significant numbers with their stores. The North used its great network to move troops swiftly for battles or offensive build-ups.

In 1914, the French used trains to rush troops to stop the German Army at the Battle of the Marne. Like this, the 1862 First Battle of Bull Run demonstrated what rail lines and a clever commander could do.

Confederate General Beauregard's 20,000 troops faced a Union army of 35,000. Beauregard utilized cavalry to screen a second Union force to his west, allowing trains to hurry 11,000 soldiers east and attack almost immediately. The Union troops, surprised, fled after a sharp battle with these unexpected reinforcements.

Gatling gun

A more ominous omen came with the Gatling gun, a six-barreled hand-cranked precursor to the machine gun like the Maxim or Hotchkiss. Patented in 1862, the Gatling was not a common sight. In 1865, Union commander General Butler purchased twelve to defend positions during the siege of Petersburg.

Any movie aficionado knows that movies about the Great War show troops getting mowed down by machine guns. Like the new Gatling, using the rifled musket and repeating rifles ended the smooth-bore, single-shot musket era. Their greater range or sustained fire proved to be game changers.

The dated tactic of double infantry rows formed up to blast away at their opponents ended. Soldiers got wounded or killed by their foes before being in effective range. Beyond sixty yards, musket balls simply were not accurate. The new Minie ball used with a rifled musket could be effective out to 500 yards, though either side rarely took advantage of this.

Besides rifled muskets, the Civil War pioneered repeating arms like the seven-shot Spencer or fifteen-shot Henry rifle. Soldiers no longer had to halt, pull out powder to pour down the barrel, followed by a slug. The next step meant ramming all down the barrel. The soldier put a percussion cap to ignite the black powder.

At best, a soldier could fire three or four times during the Civil War. During the Great War, the Royal Army trained their regulars to fire a brisk fifteen rounds per minute. Now, that means quite a lot of lead going out. Ouch.

Charges

In another ill-omened battle for the future, repeating arms demonstrated what Great War soldiers would face. At the 1863 Battle of Hoover's Gap in Tennessee, the famed Lightning Brigade squared off against five Confederate brigades.

The Southerners charged against the Brigade’s defenses, only to be cut down by the constant stream of gunfire. They bravely charged into a hail of lead using the same bad tactics. The Confederate colonel leading this attack thought he was outnumbered 5 to 1. A flanking attack on both sides met the same, losing 250 men in the first five minutes. The retreat became a rout, and Chattanooga rejoined the Union.

Beyond all these battles, the nature of this war changed and continued with the Great War. The philosophy of "hard war” was termed. Similar to total war, the concept is the same. In April 1863, President Lincoln decided on total war to shorten the conflict.

Like Imperial Germany decades later, the Confederates reeled under its impact. Lincoln instructed his commanders like Grant and Sherman to “do what was necessary.” Like the Royal Navy’s four-year blockade crippling the German economy, the South’s economy withered.

In a tough march, Sherman’s 1864 March to the Sea campaign cut a sixty-mile-wide path from Atlanta to the sea. He directed his men to burn, loot, destroy whatever they could, and live off the land. Germany, too, by 1918, became an economic mess, suffering from food shortages, astronomical inflation, and political turmoil.

Sadly, total war worked, wreaking havoc on the defeated that would take years to recover.

Trenches

The last Civil War peak into the World War One future was the most terrible – the trenches. The Civil War trench war began at Petersburgh, Virginia, in 1864. Generals Grant and Lee battled constantly around Richmond, the Confederate’s capital.

Despite Grant’s great numbers and big guns, each fight ended in a deadlock. In a switch, Grant made a go for Petersburg – a critical regional supply hub. However, Lee fought the North to a standstill. Let the siege begin!

Most of the fighting around Petersburg ended in stalemates, with no room to maneuver. More than forty miles of trenches appeared, the most of any Civil War campaign. Grant’s best option was to batter his way in to capture this vital hub. Terrible fighting, like the Battle of the Crater, resulted in much death.

Attempting to end the stalemate, the Union detonated explosives under a big trench redoubt, leaving a massive crater and stunning the defenders. Northerners rushed into cavity, attempting to climb into the trenches, followed by the city. The Confederates rallied and bloodily pushed back the invaders, leaving the status quo of back and forth intact.

Like all trenches in World War One, the Petersburg ones became filthy pits filled with muddy water, empty ammunition boxes, and trash. Diseases followed next, making both sides miserable. Eventually, the Union Army forced Lee to give up the city, ending the siege and losing the war. All told, the trench warfare around Petersburg killed or wounded 70,000 men.

The American Civil eerily predicted much of the despair that ensued during the Great War. Whether death tolls from obsolete infantry tactics to the wholesale change to “total war,” few predicted this in their rush to win.

What do you think of the similarities between World War One and the U.S. Civil War? Let us know below.

A Great Boat Tragedy in New York: General Slocum Disaster

As soon as the fire became visible beyond the ship, bystanders from nearby boats and on shore rushed to aid the stricken steamer. One rescuer story that got extensive newspaper coverage was that of teenager Mary McCann, a recent immigrant from Ireland who was recuperating from an illness at the isolation hospital on North Brother Island. Mary ran to the shore and swam out time after time to pull as many children as she could to safety. Reports of the number she saved range from six to twenty depending on the newspaper account.

Here, Richard Bluttal looks at the June 1904 General Slocum disaster in New York City in which over 1,000 people died.

A picture of the General Slocum.

The New York Times wrote about the staff at the North Brother Island hospital, who immediately rushed to aid the beached ship. They not only pulled people from the water using ladders and human chains, but also resuscitated victims and provided medical care. The New-York Tribune described a story similar to Mary’s, in which a hospital employee named Pauline Puetz swam out multiple times to pull victims ashore, even rescuing a child who had been caught in the ship’s paddlewheel.

The New York Evening World wrote about 12-year-old Louise Galing, who jumped into the water with the toddler she was babysitting and managed to keep ahold of the child until they were pulled from the water. The World also recounted that when young Ida Wousky would have fainted, 13-year-old John Tishner kicked his friend in the shins to wake her up. John then managed to find a life preserver and put it on Ida, pushing her into the water when she wouldn’t jump. He held onto her by her n hair until they were rescued by a boat. 

It was, by all accounts, a glorious Wednesday morning on June 15, 1904, and the men of Kleindeutschland—Little Germany, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side–were on their way to work. Just after 9 o’clock, a group from St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church on 6th Street, mostly women and children, boarded the General Slocum for their annual end-of-school outing. Bounding aboard what was billed as the “largest and most splendid excursion steamer in New York,” the children, dressed in their Sunday school outfits, shouted and waved flags as the adults followed, carrying picnic baskets for what was to be a long day away.

A German band played on deck while the children romped and the adults sang along, waiting to depart. Just before 10 o’clock, the lines were cast off, a bell rang in the engine room, and a deck hand reported to Captain William Van Schaick that nearly a thousand tickets had been collected at the plank. That number didn’t include the 300 children under the age of 10, who didn’t require tickets. Including crew and catering staff, there were about 1,350 aboard the General Slocum as it steamed up the East River at 15 knots toward Long Island Sound, headed for Locust Grove, a picnic ground on Long Island’s North Shore, about two hours away. The Slocum headed out from its berth at 3rd Street on the East River at about 9:30 am with a band playing and the passengers joyously celebrating the smooth ride and beautiful weather. The excursion vessel had been chartered to take the group—almost all of them women and children—from Manhattan to picnic grounds on Long Island.

The Fire

As the ship reached 97th Street, some of the crew on the lower deck saw puffs of smoke rising through the wooden floorboards and ran below to the second cabin. But the men had never conducted any fire drills, and when they turned the ship’s fire hoses onto the flames, the rotten hoses burst. Rushing back above deck, they told Captain Van Schaick that they had encountered a “blaze that could not be conquered.” It was “like trying to put out hell itself.”  A fire began in the forward cabin, the steamboat General Slocum caught fire in the East River of New York City, including many children. In the course of 20 minutes an estimated 1,021 people died, mostly women and children.

In the neighborhood of Little Germany families were decimated, many losing a mother and two or more children. In some cases entire families were killed. At the Lutheran Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens, over 900 victims were buried, including 61 in a mass grave for the unidentified.

Addressing the disaster

Onlookers in Manhattan, seeing the flames, shouted for the captain to dock immediately. Instead, Van Schaick, fearing the steering gear would break down in the strong currents and leave the Slocum helpless in midriver, plowed full speed ahead. He aimed for a pier at 134th Street, but a tugboat captain warned him off, fearing the burning ship would ignite lumber stored there. Van Shaick made a run for North Brother Island, a mile away, hoping to beach the Slocum sideways so everyone would have a chance to get off. The ship’s speed, coupled with a fresh north wind, fanned the flames. Mothers began screaming for their children as passengers panicked on deck. As fire enveloped the Slocum, hundreds of passengers hurled themselves overboard, even though many could not swim.

The crew distributed life jackets, but they too were rotten. Boats sped to the scene and pulled a few passengers to safety, but mostly they encountered children’s corpses bobbing in the currents along the tidal strait known as Hell Gate. One newspaper described it as “a spectacle of horror beyond words to express—a great vessel all in flames, sweeping forward in the sunlight, within sight of the crowded city, while her helpless, screaming hundreds were roasted alive or swallowed up in waves.”  Although the captain was ultimately responsible for the safety of passengers, the owners had made no effort to maintain or replace the ship's safety equipment. The main deck was equipped with a standpipe connected to a steam pump, but the fire hose attached to the forward end of the standpipe, a 100 ft (30 m) length of "cheap unlined linen", had been allowed to rot and burst in several places. When the crew tried to put out the fire; they were unable to attach a rubber hose because the coupling of the linen hose remained attached to the standpipe. The ship was also equipped with hand pumps and buckets, but they were not used during the disaster; the crew gave up firefighting efforts after failing to attach the rubber hose.   The crew had not practiced a fire drill that year, and the lifeboats were tied up and inaccessible. (Some claim they were wired and painted in place.) 

Survivors reported that the life preservers were useless and fell apart in their hands, while desperate mothers placed life jackets on their children and tossed them into the water, only to watch in horror as their children sank instead of floating. Most of those on board were women and children who, like most Americans of the time, could not swim; victims found that their heavy wool clothing absorbed water and weighed them down in the river.

Passengers trampled children in their rush to the Slocum‘s stern. One man, engulfed in flames, leaped over the port side and shrieked as the giant paddle wheel swallowed him. Others blindly followed him to a similar fate. A 12 year-old boy shimmied up the ship’s flagstaff at the bow and hung there until the heat became too great and he dropped into the flames. Hundreds massed together, only to bake to death. The middle deck soon gave way with a terrific crash, and passengers along the outside rails were jolted overboard. Women and children dropped into the choppy waters in clusters. In the mayhem, a woman gave birth—and when she hurled herself overboard, her newborn in her arms, they both perished.

The captain beached the burning vessel on North Brother Island, but the stern of the ship, where most of the passengers had been forced by the fire, was left in ten to thirty feet  of water. Though there were life preservers  and lifeboats aboard, poor maintenance and neglect had made many of them useless. 

Unlike the Titanic which sank eight years later, where the crew was organized and disciplined in evacuating the ship, most of the Slocum crew of thirty six men pushed passengers out of the way and abandoned ship. The crew had never been trained in a fire drill and the few lifeboats on board were never lowered – they were wired down.

The panicked passengers were left to fend for themselves. The life preservers were strapped to the ceiling of the ship’s deck and were out of reach of many of the women and children. Those who could grab a life preserver had a nasty surprise waiting for them.

The Slocum and its life preservers had “passed inspection” only weeks before, without ever actually being checked. In reality the life preservers were rotten – filled with dried, pulverized cork.

When some passengers tried putting them on, they disintegrated in their hands. Others  who managed to jump into the water wearing the “good” life preservers, sank like a boulder was weighted around them.

Not only was the pulverized cork filling of the life preservers waterlogged without an iota of buoyancy, it seems some of the life preservers had metal weights added to them to bring their weight specifications up to standards. Fire hoses of the cheapest kind were also rotten from age and neglect, ruptured when activated and were rendered useless.

Women who strapped life preservers onto their children and tossed their small, loved ones overboard, watched in horror as they disappeared without ever coming back to the surface.

Weighed down by their heavy clothing and struggling against a strong tide, 400-600 passengers drowned after the ship was beached. Though estimates vary, a government report commission  into the disaster reported 955 passenger deaths—or about 70 percent.

Van Shaick was believed to be the last person off the Slocum when he jumped into the water and swam for shore, blinded and crippled. He would face criminal charges for his ship’s unpreparedness and be sentenced to 10 years in prison; he served four when he was pardoned by President William Howard Taft on Christmas Day, 1912.

Aftermath

 Within an hour, 150 bodies were stretched out on blankets covering the lawn and sands of North Brother Island. Most of them were women. One was still clutching her lifeless baby, who was “tenderly taken out of her arms and laid on the grass beside her.” Rescued orphans of 3, 4 and 5 years old milled about the beach, dazed. Hours would pass before they could leave the island, many taken to Bellevue Hospital to treat wounds and await the arrival of grief-stricken relatives.

At Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island, where patients with typhoid and other contagious diseases had been quarantined, staff spotted the burning vessel approaching and quickly prepared the hospital’s engines and hoses to pump water, hoping to douse the flames. The island’s fire whistle blew and dozens of rescuers moved to the shore. Captain Van Schaick, his feet blistering from the heat below, managed to ground the Slocum sideways about 25 feet from shore. Rescuers swam to the ship and pulled survivors to safety. Nurses threw debris for passengers to cling to while others tossed ropes and life preservers. Some nurses dove into the water themselves and pulled badly burned passengers to safety. Still, the heat from the flames made it impossible to get close enough as the Slocum became engulfed from stem to stem.

Since there was no manifest of passengers the final death toll will never be exact, but it was probably more than 1021.  The official police report put the number at 1031 and The Brooklyn Eagle newspaper listed 1204 as dead or missing.

In the neighborhood of Little Germany families were decimated, many losing a mother and two or more children. In some cases entire families were killed. At the Lutheran Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens, over 900 victims were buried, including 61 in a mass grave for the unidentified.

The owners of the General Slocum, The Knickerbocker Steamboat Company escaped jail time for negligence. Knickerbocker President Frank Barnaby was indignant at people wanting to sue him or his company. Knickerbocker filed suit that a limit be fixed to their liability claimed by the plaintiffs as the number of suits grew for loss, damage and injury.The liability limit they wanted was not to exceed the value of the boat. That is the value of the boat after the fire and beaching and termination of the excursion should not exceed the sum of  for all the victims collectively — $5,000. That would amount to less than $5 paid per fatality and injured.

The owners then had the gall to claim that under maritime law that sum should be subject to the fees of the salvage and wreckage services performed. Essentially, they were claiming they should be limited to the current value of their wrecked boat which would be close to nothing. Sure enough, besides a fine they had to pay, Knickerbocker ended up paying nothing to the survivors or the victims’ families.

Ship safety inspectors Henry Lundberg and John Fleming who had passed the General Slocum despite numerous violations were indicted. Lundberg was tried three separate times for manslaughter but was never convicted.

Eight people were indicted by a federal grand jury after the disaster: the captain, two inspectors, and the president, secretary, treasurer, and commodore of the Knickerbocker Steamship Company.

Most boatmen felt that Van Schaick "was unjustly made a scapegoat for the resulting tragedy, instead of the owners of the steamer or the effectiveness of the life saving and fire fighting equipment then required — and the inspections of it by government inspectors". He was the only person convicted. He was found guilty on one of three charges: criminal negligence, for failing to maintain proper fire drills and fire extinguishers. The jury could not reach a verdict on the other two counts of manslaughter. He was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. He spent three years and six months at Sing Sing prison before he was paroled. President Theodore Roosevelt declined to pardon Van Schaick. Van Schaick was finally released when the federal parole board under the William Howard Taft administration voted to free him on August 26, 1911. He was pardoned by President Taft on December 19, 1912; the pardon became effective on Christmas Day. After his death in 1927, Schaick was buried in Oakwood Cemetery (Troy, New York).

The neighborhood of Little Germany, which had been in decline for some time before the disaster as residents moved uptown,  almost disappeared afterward. With the trauma and arguments that followed the tragedy and the loss of many prominent settlers, most of the Lutheran Germans remaining in the Lower East Side eventually moved uptown. The church whose congregation chartered the ship for the fateful voyage was converted to a synagogue in 1940 after the area was settled by Jewish residents.

What do you think of the General Slocum Disaster? Let us know below.

Now read Richard’s article on the role of baseball in the US Civil War here.

A Brief History of Russian Museums - From Stalin to Putin

Russia has a very rich cultural history, and its museums have played an important role in the country. Here, Tim Brinkhof considers how Russia’s museums helped bring down one dictatorship only to build up another.

Soviet troops by the portico of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) during the Siege of Leningrad in 1943.

One of the most shocking museum exhibits to ever take place in Russia was about…underwear. “Memory of the Body: Underwear of the Soviet Era” opened at the City History Museum in St. Petersburg in 2000, offering an intimate look at life under communism by way of bras and boxers. Protests from embarrassed officials reinforced the curators’ message: that socialist prudishness survived the fall of the USSR itself.

There is more to museum exhibits than meets the eye. This is true everywhere, but especially in countries obsessed with (or haunted by) their own history. They not only preserve cultural memories from the past, but also reveal how that culture wishes to be perceived in the present. A change in exhibits, writes German historian Karl Schlögel in his newly translated book The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World, means “an alteration has taken place, a revision, a revaluation or a change in perspective.” Numerous revaluations happened inside Russia’s museums over the past century, and – when viewed in succession – they mirror the transformations of Russian society at large.

Bolsheviks

When the Bolsheviks took charge in 1917, they didn’t know what do with museums. According to his wife, Vladimir Lenin “was no great lover” of them, seeing them for what they arguably were at that point: trophy rooms of the fallen elite. Instead of disbanding museums, however, the revolutionaries opted to organize exhibits of their own.

For better or worse, Russia’s museum culture was reimagined along socialist lines. For better, because the Communist Party took collections from Saint Petersburg and Moscow and redistributed them across the countryside in an effort to decentralize cultural goods. (“This,” Schlögel writes, “is how masterpieces by Boris Kustodiev or Kazimir Malevich can still be found in remote locations where no one would ever expect to find them.”) For worse, because museums became places not of learning, but indoctrination. There were exhibits about atheism, railways, the Great Patriotic War, but not the Terror or the Holodomor. These topics were removed from museums, just as they were removed from schools.

Where Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Joseph Stalin permitted criticism of Stalinism in particular, Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika policies of the mid-1980s normalized criticism of the Soviet system in general. A “Ten Years Khrushchev” exhibit in Moscow’s Komsomol'skiy Prospekt confronted visitors with their own, uncensored past, from daily life inside the kommunalka or communal apartments, to the return of inmates from Stalin’s gulags. Many exhibits from this period featured objects from mass graves which were, at long last, allowed to be opened up.

Post-Soviet era

Of all chapters in the history of Russian museums, the one situated between the USSR’s collapse and the country’s return to contentious order under the Russian Federation is the foggiest. Dwindling political and financial security led to a boom in antiques smuggling, just as it had in 1917. Many museums were closed, while others issued massive layoffs. As Christianity returned to Russia, so did calls to convert locations like Petersburg’s St. Isaac’s Cathedral (turned into a museum by Bolsheviks) back into churches. On the other side of the spectrum was the progressive “Memory of the Body” exhibit, which had visitors giggling at how uncomfortable and unsexy their state-issued undergarments used to be.

Museums in Vladimir Putin’s Russia heavily resemble their Soviet counterparts. Not just in their choice of subject – exhibits applaud military campaigns in Afghanistan and Chechnya while museums dedicated to LGBTQ history are closed – but also in their approach. Rather than letting visitors loose and allowing them to draw their own conclusions from the exhibits, as they are in western countries, Russian museums have – as Schlögel’s puts it – “an order of their own, much like that of old-time school textbooks, so that whoever follows the narrative line cannot really go astray. They follow the red threat and at the end of the trail, having successfully negotiated all the vicissitudes and dangers, arrive at an end point, which is indispensable in any historical narrative.”

Under the Communist Party, this narrative was Marxism: the preordained process of dialectic materialism that guided humanity from prehistory to feudalism to capitalism and finally, following the USSR’s example, towards communism. Under Putin, Marxism has been replaced by a new narrative of Russian exceptionalism, in which the proudly illiberal country – a civilization onto its own – is destined to become the world’s one and only superpower. It is, as historian Ian Garner shows in his new book Z Generation: Into the Heart of Russia's Fascist Youth, a narrative full of inconsistences and contradictions, but which – thanks to state-owned television, social media, and museums – is accepted by a frightening number of Russian citizens.

What do you think of Russian museum culture? Let us know below.

Can Neville Chamberlain’s Career be Defined his Failed Appeasement Policy?

Neville Chamberlain will without a doubt continue to be a controversial figure in British history. His tenure as a British Prime Minister will be always overshadowed by his last seven months in that position as German forces swept across France and Belgium forcing the British and French evacuation from Dunkirk. His appeasement policy has been portrayed as a weak and ineffective Prime Minister who sold out to Hitler. This perspective has been allowed to stand as the defining feature of his career but there was more to Chamberlain than his appeasement policy and the disaster that ensued.

Steve Prout looks at Neville Chamberlain’s career.

Neville Chamberlain holding the signed Munich Agreement in 1938 after meeting Hitler. The agreement committed to peaceful methods.

Lloyd George and the First World War

Chamberlain first started out in life as a successful businessperson before serving as the Lord Mayor of Birmingham between 1914-16. Afterwards he took the post as Director-General of National Service during the First World War under David Lloyd George. It would not be a successful start in his political career because he was often at odds with Lloyd George who was particularly critical of Chamberlains’ techniques. Chamberlains and his supporters would argue that he frequently lacked the support and clarity needed from Lloyd George to be successful in that role.

Both would harbour mutual dislike of each other that would continue up to Chamberlains death. Lloyd George would state that Chamberlain was “not one of my most successful selections” and in later added, ‘When I saw that pinhead, I said to myself, he won’t be of any use.’ Chamberlain in return referred to Lloyd George as "that dirty little Welsh Attorney.” Suffice to say it was a relationship that would never repair and resurface much later at when Chamberlain was at his most vulnerable.

Not all of Chamberlain’s peers agreed with Lloyd George’s comments. John Dillon, an Irish Nationalist MP, stated in a rather flowery fashion that "if Mr. Chamberlain were an archangel, or if he were Hindenburg and Bismarck and all the great men of the world rolled into one, his task would be wholly beyond his powers".  Bonar Law in a more succinct manner called Chamberlain’s role an "absolutely impossible task" and would later rescue Chamberlain’s career. Meanwhile Chamberlain's successor Auckland Geddes received more favor and support than Chamberlain ever received.

In 1918 when Chamberlain became a Member of Parliament he refused to serve under Lloyd George and in 1920 he refused a junior appointment offered by Andrew Bonar Law in the Ministry of Health. In October 1922, the situation changed when Lloyd George’s Coalition Government collapsed and presented Chamberlain new opportunities and a succession of top-level posts would follow.

Despite Lloyd George’s disparaging comments Bonar-Law was impressed with Chamberlain’s administerial abilities and appointed him as Postmaster-General. A promotion to Minister of Health in March 1923 soon followed and his advancement would continue. In August 1923 Bonar Law was forced to resign due to his ill health and Stanley Baldwin who took over as Prime Minister appointed Chamberlain as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

His ascent to the top levels of government was as fast as it was brief. Within five months Baldwins Conservative government was defeated in the December 1923 general election and the first Labour government took power in January 1924. Chamberlain’s contribution almost went unnoticed, but renowned historian AJP Taylor said of Chamberlain “nearly all of the domestic achievements of Conservative governments between the wars stand to his credit.”  The work he did in the interwar years was considerable.

Domestic affairs – politics in the interwar period

Neville Chamberlain was highly active in all the offices he held. He possessed a drive to reform and promote efficiency. By 1929 he had presented twenty-five bills to Parliament of which twenty-one of this number had become enacted into law and practice. Despite this Opinion remains divided concerning Chamberlains effectiveness as politician and Prime Minister. His achievements were numerous.

The introduction of the Local Government Act of 1929 abolished and reformed the obsolete poor laws in Britain that were not fit for purpose. The administration of poverty relief was placed in the hands of local authorities. One aspect of this act made medical treatment of the infirmaries free to those who could not afford it. In a pre-1945 Welfare State Britain this was a forward-thinking piece of legislation.

The Housing Act in 1922 addressed another set of issues. The necessity for this piece of legislation arose due to the shortfall in housing created by the previous Liberal Government, who under Christopher Addison had promised “homes fit for heroes” for the returning soldiers but the reality was that this promise had not delivered upon. Chamberlain was tasked to address this shortfall. He was of the belief that Government high subsides were the reason building costs were remaining too high and so stunted progress. Being a former businessperson and quintessential conservative, he believed the private building sector would perform the task more efficiently and so reduced these subsides. He was not entirely wrong because by 1929 438,000 houses were built. This was in the words chosen by AJP Taylor’s “the one solid work of this (Baldwins) dull government.” But critics viewed the Housing Act as only helping the lower middle classes and not the industrial workers giving the impression that he was the “enemy of the poor”. This perception would contribute to losing the Conservatives a substantial number of votes.

The introduction of the Widows', Orphans' and Old Age Contributory Pensions Act 1925 lowered the age for entitlement to receive the old age state pension from 70 to 65 (there has been little change since until the twenty first century), and it allowed provisions for dependents of deceased workers. Although it was met with criticism for not extending far enough it was still nevertheless a progressive step forward for pre-welfare state Britain. Chamberlain’s justification to his critics was that the act was not intended to replace private thrift and that the sum was the” maximum financially feasible” within budgetary means.

The Factory Act of 1937 was another successful and progressive piece of legislation for the time. Whether the motive out of altruistic reasons or due to a growing, effective opposition from the Labour Party and the unions it still was particularly far reaching. This Act set various standards factory working condition which addressed working hours, sanitation, lighting, and ventilation. This had significantly improved working conditions set by an earlier Act in 1901. The official wording by the Home Office, signed by Samuel Hoare was that the act presented an “important milestone on the road to safety, health and welfare in Industry.” The Holiday Pay Act of 1938 would follow which allowed workers one full week’s holiday pay. By modern times this seems paltry, but in the context of the time it was a significant move forward for the working population.

Chamberlain had his supporters although much of this support came posthumously. AJP Taylor said that “Chamberlain did more to improve local government while serving as Health Minister than did anyone else in the 20th century” and from an American perspective, according to Bentley Gilbert, Chamberlain was "the most successful social reformer in the seventeen years between 1922 and 1939… after 1922 no one else is really of any significance."

Dutton considers, later in 2001, that Chamberlain's accomplishments at the Ministry of Health were "considerable achievements by any standards" and of Chamberlain himself “a man who was throughout his life on the progressive left of the Conservative Party, a committed believer in social progress and in the power of government at both the national and local level, to do good” - but the war clouds that were gathering above Europe and his domestic achievements would be forgotten.

Munich, Churchill, and the road to war

In his last few months as Prime Minister Chamberlain and his appeasement policy was attacked from his own party and opposition parties with accusations of being blinkered, narrow and supporters of appeasement were now labelled cowards whereas before they were saviours for averting war. This is not entirely fair as for Chamberlain’s government these were not normal times and the problems placed before his government left his few alternatives that sat comfortable or palatable with little or no alternative but to acquiesce to Hitler’s demands.

Chamberlain’s bellicose opponents were either suffering from a delusion that Britain could face the many growing threats abroad alone. There were no suitable allies to form effective alliances with, the USSR was as untrustworthy as Germany, and therefore any containment from the east for the time being was unlikely. There were other threats outside of Europe such as Japan which threatened Britain in the Asia. The USA, a power in the Pacific, was following an isolationist policy. Adding to this were Italian aspirations for empire building in North Africa, and there Britain needed a cautious approach.

Churchill would ignore all of this, re-write history, and instead portray Chamberlain in a poor light whilst at the same flattering his own place in history. On the one hand he said “I have received a great deal of help from Chamberlain. His kindness and courtesy to me in our new relations have touched me. I have joined hands with him and must act with perfect loyalty.”  Then on the other hand he said "Poor Neville will come badly out of history. I know, I will write that history" and he ensured that this happened in his memoirs, The Gathering Storm, in 1948 by referring to Chamberlain as “an upright, competent, well-meaning man fatally handicapped by a deluded self-confidence which compounded an already debilitating lack of both vision and diplomatic experience”.

For many years, his version of events remained unchallenged, but we wonder how much of this can be taken as a gospel of those times. We forget that whereas Chamberlain sought to work with Hitler and was later reviled for doing so, Churchill had no qualms with working with other dictators as we would see for example with Stalin in 1941 and in the 1930s his praise of Mussolini. Stalin’s relationship with the democracies would prove equally toxic. After the war Eastern Europe would be subjected to further totalitarian rule which would last longer than Hitler’s domination of Europe.

Chamberlain was not fooled by the outcome of Munich affair, and he knew by that point in time that Hitler could not be contained nor trusted. He immediately started in earnest an ambitious rearmament programme. This programme was on no small scale and challenges the accusations of complacency that history critics accuse him of. In May 1938 after four months elapsing since Munich agreement, Chamberlain told the annual Conservative Women’s Conference that “we have to make ourselves so strong that it will not be worthwhile for anyone to attempt to attack us”.

Rearmament

Chamberlain began a vast expansion in Britain’s armed services. Whilst doing so he was attacked by the Labour Party for ‘scaremongering, disgraceful in a responsible politician’ because of his support of expansion of Britain’s military capacity. By April 1939, rearmament was swallowing 21.4 per cent of Britain’s Gross National Product, a figure that reached 51.7 per cent by 1940. War was delayed but it was to no avail to “a man of no luck.” The failure of the Norwegian campaign and the subsequent invasion of the Ardennes quickly changed the political landscape for Chamberlain, eroded the support of his own party and of the majority of as in May 1940 British troops were being evacuated off Dunkirk.

The results of Chamberlain’s rearmament programme were not immediately appreciated but the advances made in Air Power and Sonar were vital for the Battle of Britain. The British Spitfire for instance was one of the most up to date fighter planes of the time. The British expeditionary force at the time of its mobilisation was one of the most modern and mechanised armies in the world. Within the disaster of the Norway there was one redeeming feature - that naval battles crippled the German Navy so much it could not be relied upon by Hitler in his plans to invade Britain. All these subtle factors brought Britain a chance, albeit a hairs breadth, of resisting an invasion if nothing more. The realists also knew there was little chance of an offensive and Britain could only consider her meagre defensive options.

Although Chamberlain was assigned the blame for the failure to hold Norway he was not the architect of the plan. This plan was in fact devised and supported by Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty who made many unpunished errors in the matter. He had the diminished confidence of his Conservative peers owing to his costly actions in The First World War and India. Some feared that Norway would be a repeat of Gallipoli. In the debate in The House of Commons in May 1940 when questioned about the campaign Churchill said “I take complete responsibility for everything that has been done by the Admiralty, and I take my full share of the burden” only to be rebuffed by Lloyd George who vented his criticism out on Chamberlain whose fate was already sealed.

Chamberlain was not alone in his naivety that Germany was economically stretched and that a simple naval blockade would deprive her of her natural resources. Churchill even displayed lack of foresight over Germany’s strategic position when the Soviet Union invaded Poland when he immediately proclaimed, “Hitler’s Gateway the East was closed.” Under the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Soviet Union was providing vast quantities of war materials to Germany. It was a spoken folly equal to “Hitler has missed the bus.”

The war materials the Soviet Union provided to Germany throughout the early years of the war were enough to render any Allied blockade ineffective. Whether Churchill knew the quantities and the extent is not known but it is likely that this would have been available via the British intelligence services. The true extent of the aid the Soviets gave was over 820,000 metric tons (900,000 short tons; 810,000 long tons) of oil, 1,500,000 metric tons (1,700,000 short tons; 1,500,000 long tons) of grain and 130,000 metric tons (140,000 short tons; 130,000 long tons) of manganese ore. This considerable amount of material excludes rubber and other industrial outputs that enabled Germany’s war machine. If Chamberlains political judgements were flawed then equally so were Churchills, but he was not in the Premier’s seat and so escaped much of the fallout.

Critics

Old adversaries and new would be particularly visceral in the debates that followed in parliament. It is interesting how some of Chamberlain’s most vocal and loudest critics were also the most hypocritical. Leo Amery famously quoted “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!". Leo Amery was a supporter in the 1930s of Italian aggression in Abyssinia and Japanese ambitions in Manchuria. Lloyd George, who held a deep dislike of Chamberlain, also could not resist but he also conveniently forgot his courting of Hitler in September 1936 and his praising of a “pro-English Hitler”. Chamberlain’s premiership ended but he continued to serve in the higher levels of government until his death.

Chamberlain’s political career continued long after Munich and it was not yet over. He still served cordially under Churchill in the war cabinet. Despite the war controversy Chamberlain, in Churchill’s absence due to Prime Ministerial duties, still deputised and chaired the war cabinet meetings until cancer finally forced him to resign in 1940.

Chamberlain spoke of Churchill, “Winston has behaved with the most unimpeachable loyalty. Our relations are excellent, and I know he finds my help of terrific value to him.” Churchill reciprocated: “I have received a great deal of help from Chamberlain. His kindness and courtesy to me in our new relations have touched me. I have joined hands with him and must act with perfect loyalty.” And upon Chamberlains death he said. “What shall I do without poor Neville?,” as Churchill admitted that he “was relying on him (Chamberlain) to look after the Home Front.” Chamberlain had remarkable administrative skills Churchill recognised and still was of value to Britain’s war effort. Churchill himself admitted that the two men could work respectfully and professionally with each other.

In a eulogy in the House of Commons Churchill spoke highly in praise “He had a precision of mind and an aptitude for business which raised him far above the ordinary levels of our generation. He had a firmness of spirit which was not often elated by success, seldom downcast by failure and never swayed by panic…He met the approach of death with a steady eye. If he grieved at all, it was that he could not be a spectator to our victory, but he died with the comfort of knowing that his country had, at least, turned the corner.”

Churchill would conveniently forget this in the post war period and be one of many to blight Chamberlain's career and reputation. Dr Adam Timmins, reviewing the book Appeasing Hitler by Tim Bouverie sees that too much emphasis was put on one event and one person and no other factors that guided that decision which at the time appeared the only sensible option only hindsight offers other alternatives. Without the benefit of hindsight, the phenomena of Hitler were something that had never been witness or confronted before, and with that it is of no surprise that the states people of the 1930s failed to accurately judge him.

Conclusion

Neville Chamberlain’s presence in British history will always be overshadowed by Munich and the road to war. This will always continue to be enforced by surviving accounts such as Michael Foot’s Guilty Men or Churchill’s post war memoirs, which places the failure to contain Hitler together with the early misfortunes unfairly on his shoulders.

When we remove all of this from the emotional equation Neville Chamberlain has been unjustly criticised and maligned by political opportunists of the time who failed to understand the limitations Britain faced. Chamberlain was proof of the adage that “history is written by victors”, a phrase invented by Churchill who did just that when writing about Chamberlain. He conveniently chose to omit his own failures and ill judgement in the early days of the war. It is that context that the Director of Military Operations, Major-General J.N. Kennedy, remarked on later during the campaign in North Africa. "He (Churchill) has a very keen eye to the records of this war”, Kennedy wrote in his diary, “and perhaps unconsciously he puts himself and his actions in the most favourable light.” Churchill’s contradictions and self-aggrandization are unhelpful and misleading.

Chamberlain was the unfortunate victim of circumstances. AJP Taylor terms him a man of no luck whom the cards always ran against. He had a shaky start against Lloyd George and his humiliation at Hitler’s hands bookended his political career. The tide of the war would turn against Hitler and deliver Churchill two titanic allies with immense resources, the USA and T=the USSR, to form a formidable alliance. It was a matter of fortunate timing that Chamberlain would be denied and that Churchill would enjoy.

Chamberlain’s other work, which brought about significant and successful social reform, went unnoticed. At the outbreak of war, he said in Parliament "Everything I have worked for, everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life, has crashed into ruins." Chamberlain’s legacy would be marred by his unwavering desire to avoid war that was further tainted and twisted by the hypocrisy of his critics. Neville Chamberlain will always be a subject of polemical debate and his reputation will continue to be blighted.

When do you think of Neville Chamberlain’s career? Let us know below.

Now read about Britain’s relationship with the European dictators during the inter-war years here.

References

Stuart Ball - Professor of Modern British History at the University of Leicester. Portrait of a Party: The Conservative Party in Britain, 1918–1945 (Oxford, 2013).

Leo McKinstry - In Defence of Neville Chamberlain – Article the Spectator Nov 2020

David Dutton – Reputations – Neville Chamberlain – May 2001 – Bloomsbury Academic

AJP Taylor English History 1914-45 and Origins of The Second World War

Graham Hughes, history graduate (BA) from St David’s University, Anglo-Nazi Alliance Debate

Paraguay’s 1936 February Revolution and its Lessons for the Paraguayan Left

Like most of Latin America, Paraguay is a nation whose history has been sadly tarnished by social inequities, reactionary politics and civil war, but also one where exceptional circumstances have resulted in the emergence of leaders with bold programmes of reform and the drive to carry them through to the bitter end. One such event was the February Revolution of 1936, which led to the coming to power of a reformer by the name of Rafael Franco.

Vittorio Trevitt explains.

Rafael Franco

This 1936 February Revolution, which saw the old establishment being overthrown and replaced by a military leader, was the culmination of a series of unfortunate events. From the time of its independence from Spain in 1811 Paraguay had been led by a mixture of dictators and civilian leaders who presided over a nation often racked by injustice and instability. In 1883, a law was passed under which land that had previously been universally accessible was enclosed and transformed into large private estates, with peasants, as noted by historian Peter Calvert, “either forced to leave or to work for a pittance.” A bloody war involving Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina lasting from 1864 to 1870 proved a traumatic one, with Paraguay losing an estimated 50% of its people not just through fighting, but also as a consequence of famine and disease. Nor would this usher in a brighter age. In the five decades following the war’s end 32 presidents assumed and were deposed from office in a series of revolts and coups, while the two parties that came to dominate politics for most of that period, the Colorados and Liberals, had little to distinguish themselves in their management of the country.

In 1932 a conflict between Paraguay and Bolivia erupted owing to a dispute over territory that ended in 1935 after much suffering. Criticism was levelled against the government for its handling of the war, with José Félix Estigarribia, a noted hero of that conflict, claiming that at the war’s first major battle his men fought without adequate arms, food, medical supplies or ammo. The authorities had aroused the ire of the army by refusing to provide pensions to disabled war veterans, with the country’s legislature (dominated by the Liberals, one of the main parties that had led Paraguay since independence) rejecting this proposed measure in a 1935 vote, “pleading an exhausted treasury,” as noted by one study. Economic difficulties led to thousands of troops being demobilized; a decision that resulted in many unemployed and disaffected former soldiers wandering aimlessly around the capital. The seeds of revolution were therefore sown long before Franco’s ascension.

The end

The end of the old establishment came in February 1936 when a coup (an event that became known as the February Revolution) brought to power a nationalist coalition. Rafael Franco, the man who headed this alliance, was a war hero and officer of the Chaco War whose fair treatment of soldiers had earned him their support. The social measures rolled out by the new administration seemed to indicate a clear break from the past. A public health ministry was inaugurated, along with the first labor code in Paraguayan history. A National Labor Department was set up to handle matters such as the regulation of women’s employment, and new labor rights were rolled out including a day off on Sundays, an 8-hour workday, bonuses and paid holidays.

Other spheres of life fell under the umbrella of the government’s radical agenda. Public works were introduced, together with a National Patronage of Indigenous People to improve conditions for the nation’s aborigines. To widen land tenure in a nation where only 5% of the people owned land, a law was passed under which the government was given authority to expropriate up to five million acres of uncultivated land and divide it into plots of 25 to 250 acres to sell on favourable terms to farmers without land. By December 1936, over 200,000 acres of land had been expropriated; benefitting thousands of families. Perhaps affirming the faith Franco’s men had in him during his time as a soldier, the revolutionary government devoted much of its time to helping former combatants. Pensions were awarded to Chaco War veterans unable to work due to service-related illness and injury, while those who were crippled were entitled to necessary orthopaedic parts. For a population long accustomed to war and injustice, Franco’s presidency appeared to mark a turning point for the better.

The Franco administration’s tenure was not an isolated incident. Instead, it was part of a trend in Latin America at that time that saw the coming to power of radical reformers committed to policies geared towards the masses instead of the elites. In Colombia, an election in 1930 saw a conservative party being voted out after 70 years in power and the election of a liberal administration that over the course of a decade would roll out a social and economic reform programme akin to the American New Deal. In neighbouring Chile, a similar agenda was pursued by a reform-minded Popular Front following elections in that country in 1938. Further north in Mexico, a populist socialist came to power in 1934 by the name of Lázaro Cárdenas, whose tenure would become legendary amongst the Mexican Left with his radical reforms in areas like land distribution that won the hearts and minds of many.

Short-lived

The administration Franco led, however, did not last as long as the aforementioned governments, with certain actions contributing to its downfall. The administration lacked, for instance, a commitment to democratic values, as demonstrated by decisions made to abolish all political parties and implement press censorship. Also, while the revolutionary period brought tangible gains to workers, the functioning of labor organizations was prohibited at the same time. Nor was the government an ideologically homogeneous one, with socialists, fascists, and individuals harbouring Nazi sympathies amongst its ranks; an attempt on Franco’s part to bring together the different factions within the revolution under one umbrella. This turbulent situation allowed a successful coup to take place in August 1937, one that enabled the Liberals to return to office once more.

Although the return of Paraguay’s traditional hegemonic party seemed to spell the end of a dream for a fairer Paraguay, Franco’s revolution had, in the words of historian Paul H. Lewis, “unleashed expectations of change that couldn’t be ignored.” Traditional Liberals were put to one side and in 1939 a former hero of the Chaco War, José Félix Estigarribia, assumed office. Reflecting the reform impulses of a generation of “New Liberals,” positive measures reminiscent of the Franco era such as agrarian reform were pursued. At the same time however, Esitgarribia responded to unrest (such as conspiracies among some military cliques) following his restoration of political freedoms by suppressing opposition after he declared himself a temporary dictator. Following his death and that of his wife in an airplane crash, his successor Higinio Morínigo clamped down on civil liberties while relying on the army to rule. Pressure from the United States to democratise Paraguay’s political system, however, resulted in Morínigo putting together a new cabinet including the Febreristas (followers of Franco), who during the Forties succeeded in accumulating a support base amongst labor unionists and students. It seemed that the Febreristas had an opportunity to replicate the social justice ethos of the Franco years, but this wasn’t to be. Protests against the president, combined with conflict between backers of the 3 main parties in the cabinet (the Colorados, Liberals and Febreristas), led to Morínigo removing the Febreristas from their posts and allying himself alone with the Colorados. Partly due to violence conducted by a Colorado group who sought to use force to return their party to power, numerous opposition groups rallied to support Franco, who instigated a revolt backed by the overwhelming majority of Paraguay’s army officers and enlisted men. The Colorados, however, mobilised a force strong enough to beat Franco, whose revolt ended in August 1947. In an ironic case of political intrigue, Morínigo would still end up being forced from office. Despite joining the Colorados and endorsing its victorious candidate in elections held the following year, Colorado-leaning officers uncertain of promises made by Morínigo giving up the presidency forced him to leave Paraguay. For the next 6 decades, Paraguay would know the rule of no party other than that of the Colorados.

Lugo

Paraguay would not again see a Franco-esque reformer come to power until 2008 when that year a priest by the name of Fernando Lugo, who headed a broad-based left-right alliance that included the Febreristas won the presidency; marking the end of Colorado hegemony. Despite divisions in his alliance (with echoes of Franco’s), Lugo was able to initiate bold reforms like free dental care, pensions for elderly persons on low incomes, and school snacks. His alliance however, lacked a majority in the legislature, plaguing Lugo’s ability to advance much in the way of meaningful reform. He was also plagued by scandals over paternity claims from his time as a bishop, and was eventually impeached in 2012 on numerous grounds, such as failure to tackle increased insecurity. Much controversy surrounded Lugo’s impeachment, but this failed to generate enough support for a leftist alternative to win the next election, which instead saw the return of the Colorados, who have remained in power to this day.

The Franco interlude provides two worthwhile lessons. The first is that when elites fail to meet the needs and aspirations of its citizenry certain individuals will take drastic measures such as attaining power by force. The second is that acquiring power in this way is doomed to failure, as authoritarian administrations are prone to corruption and, in the case of Franco’s government, badly divided. Achieving a peaceful revolution through the ballot box, with a leadership united with clear goals and progressive values, is the best chance Paraguay has of a brighter future.

What do you think of Paraguay’s 1936 February Revolution? Let us know below.

War Photography Through the Ages

War photography and Photojournalism are an essential part of war reporting and have been in every conflict since the art of photo-taking was invented. As Susan Sontag notes in her seminal work Regarding The Pain of Others, ‘war-making and picture-making are congruent activities.’ But why do we have such a fascination with photos and footage of war? What is Photojournalism? And how has Photojournalism changed over the years? Let us first put photojournalism into context.

Chris Fray explains.

Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima by Joe Rosenthal.

A photojournalist is a reporter who uses photos or film to tell a news story. Every war since the first photographed conflict - the Mexican-American War (1846-48) - has been photographed and recorded by images.(1) Images can have a decisive effect on public opinion and perceptions of war. A photograph is a snapshot of a memory, frozen in time, allowing those un-connected to the situation to view the conflict up close and personal.

I would like to take you on a journey spanning over a century, detailing the way in which Photojournalism has progressed and what this means for war photography and for us, the public. I will touch on photography in the major conflicts of the 20th and 21st Centuries, beginning with the First World War (1914-18). We will then explore the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), the Second World War (1939-45), Vietnam (1959-75), the Gulf War (1990-91) and finally the use of photojournalism is our own time using the devastating examples of the ongoing Syrian and Ukrainian conflicts.

First World War

At the start of the 20th Century, cameras were large and cumbersome. Immobility was an issue and the heavy camera required tripods. The fragile glass negative plates were easily broken and darkroom chemicals were required by the photographer to be immediately on hand in order to develop the negative quickly after exposure.(2) Obviously, this did not lend itself to conflict photography.

By the start of the First World War, however, handheld cameras such as the Vest Pocket Kodak were being produced, a favourite of soldiers in the First World War.(3) The quality of the images produced was poor and the camera was prone to blurring, but the negatives had much quicker exposure times than before and most importantly it was small enough to carry in an army pack. War photography was progressing at a fast pace yet the command structures of both sides of the conflict were suspicious of the technological progress.

Almost as soon as war was announced, both the Allies and Germany set hardline policies in place to limit photographer’s abilities to publish images related to conflict and access conflict zones. Each side were deeply concerned with the effect that photography could have on spy-work and espionage as well as domestic morale. Professional photographers were restricted from war zones and could only gain access with written and signed agreements of the war council although censorship was lightened later into the war. The images which were taken have had a lasting impact on the memory of the war and shows the value of photography as a means of mass communication- elements of which have been replicated in every conflict since.(4)

Servicemen were banned from owning or using cameras. But as we know, as soon as rules are made, there are those who are willing to break them. The pictures taken by servicemen on the front lines, in the trenches make up some of the most haunting and evocative photos of the First World War. Many photos show the horror of war in the trenches, soldiers staring up at the camera amongst the mud and barbed wire. Some pictures on the other hand depict daily life- soldiers making tea and playing cards showing that life went on as well, even under the rattle of machine gun and crack of artillery shells.

Spanish Civil War

It was only in the 1920s following the invention of small portable 35mm cameras such as the Leica and Ermanox that war photography fully developed (no pun intended). These cameras were faster and more compact, permitting exposure without a flash which allowed for night time and indoor photos to be taken.(5) With the technological developments of photographic equipment, quick, fast-paced snapshots of battle became possible, revolutionising photography. As a result, audiences were able to experience the heat of battle in their own living rooms.(6) Wireless transmissions of photos and the introduction of affordable, high quality printing paper also allowed photojournalists to have their work published in a matter of days. This quick turnaround was essential to the public relations effort for both sides.(7)

The Spanish Civil war, therefore took place at a turning point for modern photography. The impact of ‘in conflict’ photos on the audiences in Britain, France and the United States should not be understated. Action shots of war had rarely been seen and certainly not on a scale such as this. ‘Photographs of Spain became images not just of conflict but in conflict.’ This was a shocking statement and certainly caught the attention of the world.(8) The war also came at the height of the picture magazines of the 1930s, such as Vu, Life, Picture Post, Regards and Match. These magazines focused mainly on images and adverts. These magazines had an exceptionally far-reaching readership and all of them featured the civil war to some extent, making the Spanish Civil War the first war to be covered and photographed for a mass audience.(9)

Left leaning photojournalists such as Robert Capa, David Seymour and Augusti Centelles began to use their platforms as photographers in the picture magazines to influence readers in the UK, France and the USA to contribute to the Republican war effort. Photographs were becoming weapons of influence. A number of photographs taken during the Civil War have taken on iconic roles in representations of the fight against fascism. Possibly the most famous is Robert Capa’s ‘Fallen Soldier.’ It depicts a Republican soldier at the instant of death, as a bullet hits him in the head, knocking him backwards. It is a tragic depiction of the brutality of war, so close you can almost hear the fatal shot. By the end of the Civil War, war photography was firmly established and exceptionally popular. Due to the way in which Nationalism was progressing in Europe, however, many Europeans were to themselves face conflict, not only through the pages of a magazine but at their own front doors.

Second World War

Many of the Civil War photographers who had cut their teeth in the 1930s were seasoned photojournalists by the start of the Second World War in 1939, with strong links to well-read magazines. However now the scene of conflict was not just a single country, but now spanned across the whole world as photographers from Europe to Africa, Russia to Asia were capturing unbelievable pictures of worldwide conflict. With more people shifting between countries than ever before, war was now a global affair, and therefore so to was photography.

The Spanish Civil War photographers were taking photos and sharing with audiences as a call to action. Now war was first and foremost in the public mind. Western photographers were using their skills in support of the Allied mission against the evil Nazi threat. This was a war in which both sides would employ photography effectively as a propaganda tool; as General Dwight Eisenhower wrote, ‘Correspondents have a job in war as essential as the military personnel.’ Media and reporting had an enormous effect of public opinion, and ‘public opinion win wars.’

Censorship of photography was considered highly important and only certain photos were published in the press. Photos such as dead or dying Allied soldiers were considered bad for moral and suppressed for the majority of the war. It was only towards the end of the conflict that President Roosevelt, faced with strikes and opposition to Americans fighting and dying in Europe, decided to allow a clearer and more violent image of the war to be published. Real images of dead and wounded soldiers were shown to the public which roused US citizens to overwhelming support of the war.

In the 1940s, along with the advancement of weapon technology came the improvement of photographic technology. Long-range cargo planes could transport thousands of rolls of films and negatives between Europe and America, allowing the pictures to be shown in papers and magazines within days. Cameras in the 1930s which took 4 X 5 inch negatives were superseded by smaller and faster 35mm, 2 ¼ X 2 ¼ Rolleiflex, Contax rangefinder and Leica cameras. Not only this, but they could be fitted with telescopic lenses, allowing for close-up and zoom shots. More photographers than ever before were braving the battlefield to capture battlefield heroics. As Robert Capa famously remarked, “if your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”

Perhaps some of the most moving photos from the Second World war are those of Robert Capa’s landing on Omaha Beach in the first wave of troops. As the only photographer to land on the beach, we have direct and close-up documentation of the landings. The pictures are blurry, as Capa himself admits, because his hands were trembling so much with fear on the mortared beach.

Vietnam

At the end of the Second World War in 1946, around 8,000 American households owned a television set. By 1960, just under 45 million households had a television.(10) The war which raged in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos captured the public and was beamed to millions of households all over the world, giving the Vietnam war the epithet, ‘the living room war.’ The prominence of television had started to push the press photographers from their prime reporting position. Viewers were now able to see much more than a snapshot of conflict. They were able to see the true horror of the uncompromising cruelty of war, frame by frame in video.

As images of US soldiers fighting for freedom in the previous war had mustered public support, their portrayal in Vietnam had an entirely opposing effect. An American public, expecting images of democratic US Marines fighting Communists were faced with a continuous tirade of film and images showing the mud, squalor and death their sons and fathers encountered, every day on the news. Photographers and journalists were given such freedom in Vietnam never seen before, or since. There was little to no censorship. Instead, the US army command intended to recruit the press into sharing their own perspective of the war. However, as the war developed into the 1960s, more US servicemen were losing their lives in a decade long conflict which many at home found hard to relate to. A cultural and moral revolution in the USA swung much of the public towards peace and as the US high command rapidly lost control of the situation in Vietnam, conditions in the army worsened, professionalism laxed and this was all captured on camera.

Many have claimed that the media were responsible in some part for the defeat of the Vietnam war. One of the key photos in this debate is the Saigon street execution, taken by Eddie Adams in 1968. It shows a prisoner seconds away from a shot to the head, at point blank range. It sums up the lawless and brutal nature of the conflict, even away from the battlefield.

It was in the Vietnam conflict that the idea that war photography could have a harmful impact on the perceptions of war at home. The more advanced technology became and the more skilled the photographers became in depicting horror- the more the public came to view war as a sickness. In essence, war reporting moved too far for the public. It presented the tragic truth of conflict.

Falklands & The Gulf War

If Vietnam was over-reported, sickening the public with gore and grit and eventually ending in defeat, conflicts in the subsequent decades were decidedly, and intentionally, under-reported. As a leading member of Britain’s Ministry of Defence asked rhetorically on the announcement of the Falklands War, “are we going to let the television cameras loose on the battlefield?”(11) The Falklands war took place in the 10 weeks between April and June, 1982 in response to the invasion and occupation of the British islands in the South Atlantic by Argentinian forces.

The British Ministry of Defence exercised extreme control over coverage from the conflict. In polar opposition to Vietnam, the images and footage of the conflict hardly featured in British newspapers and only two of the 29 accredited media professionals were photographers. Governments were clearly learning lessons from Vietnam. By the time the conflict was over, only three batches of film had been returned to London.(12) Although by the 1980s, technology had dramatically improved, the press were unable to use it. In a 10-week conflict in which 255 Britons were killed, 777 wounded and an estimated 2,000 Argentine casualties, no images were released. This only fuelled the public’s suspicion of the Ministry of Defence.(13)

In a very similar vein and probably still scarred by the public reaction to the media surrounding Vietnam, when the Gulf War began in 1990, the utmost care was taken in photographic and film representations of the conflict. Subsequently to the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein, the US led a 42 Nation coalition intervention against Iraq. In the 1990s, photographic technology was incredibly advanced. The coverage of the war however was heavily sedated. Press focus was made on the mechanised technology of war, the enormous guns and steel cannisters, firing bullets and shells from slick fighter jets. Yet there was no indication of what damage these bullets and shells were doing upon impact. It was presented to the public as a ‘painless war of precision.’(14) For the first time a conflict was being told from the perspective not of soldiers, but of weapons.(15)

Reports and briefings from the war council were kept secret from reporters and although there were around 1,600 Western photographers and reporters in the area, they were all isolated from the conflict and supervised by public-affairs managers who made sure they saw only a sanitised view of the conflict. The pictures presented a white-washed version of war which distracted from the real brutalism involved in conflict. Removing the people from the pictures also removed the empathy for the casualties.

There is a belief that over saturating the public with images of death and destruction will ultimately dull society into accepting these images as the norm, gradually shocking less and less until they are ignored altogether. However as Torie Rose DeGhett says, never showing these images at all absolutely guarantees that understanding of the images will never develop. (16)

Syria & Ukraine

So where does this leave us now? Are we able to trust the photographs we see of conflict? With the invention in the past 20 years of social media and camera phones in every pocket, it could easily be argued that each person recording and sharing material could be considered a photojournalist. The process of free un-filtered, un-sanitised and un-censored material being captured by millions per day in various perspectives, angles and mediums provides an overwhelming change to what was previously considered photojournalism. Of course, photojournalists still exist and provide the world with moving images of conflict and pain all around the world. However, the range of material is so large now, that photojournalists are a tiny proportion of those on the ground, experiencing war.

When the Syrian conflict began in March 2011 and turned into a full blown Civil War in 2012 to 2013, foreign photographers and journalists were banned from entering the country. The danger was exceedingly high following the deaths of several foreign reporters including Marie Colvin of The Sunday Times and so the images and footage which was released was shot by local people. Amateur photographers and the average person- anyone with a camera-phone, expressing themselves through photography and film and appealing to the wider world for help. This produced a revolution in photojournalism, with minute by minute live-reporting of conflict via Facebook and Twitter. This is something which was never before possible.

Is this a positive outcome for war journalism? We might be tempted to say, yes. The wider the audience, the more likely the world is to see and connect with the pain of those living through war. However as Swiss photographer, Mattias Bruggmann has said, lack of journalists and increased use of public media opened the floodgates to propagandism from every side in Syria. “Every opposition group and every rebel battalion set up its own unit to produce photographs and videos.”(17)

The most recent and equally harrowing world conflict, the invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces in February 2022 has also produced a tidal wave of images and videos. Again, as technology improves, so does the capacity for ordinary people and individual soldiers on the ground to document their own personal perspective of the conflict. Courageous acts of covert filming of Russian soldiers and troop movements by occupied Ukrainians are being used by the Ukrainian military in some cases and shared on social media, giving the conflict the epitaph, ‘the first tik-tok war.’

The nature of this is certainly not as fun as it sounds. Given the brutalness of this current invasion and the overwhelming number of alleged war crimes committed, organisations such as the United Nations are already compiling photographs by renowned photographers, military footage, local amateur photographers and footage from social media to be used as evidence for prosecuting these crimes in the future.

Throughout its history, war photography has contributed to a truly humanitarian mission. Photographs stand as a testament to conflict. A snapshot of History which says, “this happened,” and “this cannot be forgotten.” It holds those in the wrong, accountable and has always provided a voice to those who are unable to provide their testament. It is the hope of many organisations that these photos will result one day in the prosecution of the perpetrators of war crimes, providing justice for those who were at the receiving end and for the families of those who died. Photos are therefore an essential element, not just to war reporting but to justice and humanity.

What do you think of war photography in different periods? Let us know below.

References

1 Payne, Carol and Brandon, Laura. Guest Editors’ Introduction: Photography at War. P.1.

2 Griffin, Michael. ‘The Great War Photographers: Constructing Myths of History and Photojournalism.’ P.135.

3 https://blog.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/the-vest-pocket-kodak-was-the-soldiers-camera/#:~:text=One%20of%20the%20first%20and,years%20ago%2C%20in%20April%201912.&text=The%20Vest%20Pocket%20Kodak%20camera,model%20was%20discontinued%20in%201926.

4 https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/photography

5 Brothers, Caroline. War Photography: A Cultural History. P.6

6 Payne, Carol and Brandon, Laura. P.3.

7 Faber, Sebastiaan. Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War: History, Fiction, and Photography. (2018). p.16-17.

8 Brothers. p.2.

9 Brothers, Caroline. p.2.

10 https://www.elon.edu/u/imagining/time-capsule/150-years/back-1920-1960/#:~:text=Approximately%208%2C000%20U.S.%20households%20had,million%20had%20them%20by%201960.

11 Brothers, p.205

12 Brothers, p.206

13 Brothers, p.209

14 Brothers. p.211

15 Bruce. H. Franklin, ‘From Realism to Virtual Reality.’ P.110

16 https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/the-war-photo-no-one-would-publish/375762/

17 https://newlinesmag.com/photo-essays/shooting-the-war-in-syria/

The Modern Greek State: 1941–1949 – War & A New Divide

On March 25, 2021, the Modern Greek State celebrated the 200th anniversary of the War of Independence, which ultimately led to its establishment. It is thus an excellent opportunity to reconsider some of the main events of Greek history over these 200 years and how they shaped the character of modern Greece.

This series of articles on the history of modern Greece started when the country was celebrating the 200th anniversary of the War of Independence. Now, when fascist Italy invaded Greece in October 1940, the Greeks put aside the issues of clientelism and united delivered a formidable fight and resistance against the Axis. This did not last long though. The rise of the Communist party as a significant political factor supported by a strong military branch reshuffled the balance of power and led to yet another civil war and yet another socio-political schism. Thomas Papageorgiou explains

You can read part 1 on ‘a bad start’ 1827-1862 here, part 2 on ‘bankruptcy and defeat’ 1863-1897 here, part 3 on ‘glory days’ 1898-1913 here, and part 4 on ‘Greeks divided’ 1914-22 here, and part 5 on the issues of clientelism here.

Greek troops during the Italian Spring Offensive, March 1941.

I United against the Axis

The Italian Invasion of Greece was proven another significant failure for Mussolini. It was repulsed by the Greeks who immediately counterattacked. The Greek army demonstrated extraordinary skills in mountainous warfare and by the end of 1940 thanks to its heroic efforts the Italians were forced to retreat 50 km behind the Albanian borders along the entire length of the front. For several months 16 Greek divisions managed to nail in Albania 27 Italian ones. (Churchill, The Second World War (Vol. I), 2010, pp. 510, 513)

When the Germans came to the rescue at the beginning of April 1941, they offered overwhelming support to the Italians, whereas the British, estimating that the loss of Greece and the Balkans would not constitute a big loss, if Turkey remained neutral, were more reserved. (Churchill, The Second World War (Vol. I), 2010, pp. 544 - 545) Thus, on the 27th of April the axis forces were in Athens. The last stand took place on Crete which was invaded on the 20th of May 1941 by German paratroopers, who, after paying a very heavy death toll, took it by the end of the month. The king and the Greek government together with the British Expeditionary Force and the remnants of the Greek Army fled to Egypt.

II Occupation, resistance and first signs of division

Although their performance at the battlefield was questionable, the Italians were left with the control of most of the Greek territory. A chunk was also reserved for Bulgaria, that finally found exit to the Aegean through Eastern Macedonia and Thrace. The Germans retained Thessaloniki under their control though, together with the most strategically important areas in Central Macedonia, the Greco – Turkish border, several Aegean islands including most of Crete, the port of Piraeus and the capital Athens.

As we have seen, the Italian attack in October 1940 found Greece’s economy in a fragile state with the country relying heavily on imports to cover the needs of its people. (Papageorgiou, History is Now Magazine, 2023) Now the invasion destroyed a significant amount of Greece’s infrastructure and the triple occupation put the external trade to a stop. Soon, especially the urban population, faced food shortages and by the end of 1941 starvation. During the tragic winter of 1941-42 approximately 300,000 people lost their lives. (Tsoucalas, 2020, pp. 89 - 90) Overall, Greece paid one of the heaviest tolls among the allied forces losing 7 – 11 % of its 1939 population during the Second World War. (Wikipedia, 2023)

This situation pushed the Greeks towards struggle rather than passivity. They needed to resist in order to survive. The first resistance group under the name National Liberation Front (in Greek Ethniko Apeleftherotiko Metopo - EAM) was created by the Communist Party in September 1941. Its military branch was the Greek People’s Liberation Army (in Greek Ellinikos Laikos Apeleftherotikos Stratos - ELAS). This was not only the first, but also the biggest resistance group. Indeed, by 1944 ELAS numbered 50,000 fighters in the Athens – Piraeus area only, whereas estimations for EAM members reach up to 2,000,000 (total population 7,000,000). (Tsoucalas, 2020, pp. 91, 99) (Heneage, 2021, p. 188) The most important resistance groups with non-communist leadership were the National Republican Greek League (in Greek Ethnikos Dimokratikos Ellinikos Sindesmos – EDES) and the National and Social Liberation (in Greek Ethniki Ke Kinoniki Apeleftherosi – EKKA). These did not have the size of EAM-ELAS though as the latter dominated most of the country whereas EDES’ bastion was restricted to Epirus and EKKA’s in the mountainous area of Parnassus in Boeotia. (Tsoucalas, 2020, pp. 92 - 93)

For some time , the different resistance groups worked together and with the help of the Allies they managed to carry out formidable operations, like Operation Harling, which destroyed the heavily guarded Gorgopotamos viaduct in Central Greece in November 1942, stemming the flow of supplies through the Balkans to the German Afrika Korps. (Wikipedia, 2023) As a result, 9 divisions of the Axis powers were stuck in Greece to maintain some order, with questionable results, especially away from the main cities and transportation arteries, and that only after intense fighting. As a German report with the title ‘The political situation in Greece. July 1943’ put it:

‘90% of the Greeks today are unanimously aligned against the Axis powers and ready to go into open rebellion’. (Tsoucalas, 2020, pp. 95 - 96)

The pressure the resistance groups exercised on the Axis forces and before that the army’s performance during the Italian invasion in October 1940 showed once again what the Greeks could do when standing united. In the following though, we will describe several open issues tackled by the Greek political establishment of the time in such a way that once again tore the Greeks apart.

As we have seen, before the war Greece was ruled by Metaxas’ dictatorship. (Papageorgiou, History is Now Magazine, 2023) Metaxas died in January 1941, but the government that fled to Egypt together with the king, after Greece’s occupation by the Axis forces, appeared officially as a continuation of this dictatorship. (Tsoucalas, 2020, p. 97) Back home in Greece though, contrary to the anti-Communism sentiments of the government, EAM seemed to have the upper hand and ELAS could field thousands of guerrilla fighters. As the German report of 1943 mentioned above continues:

EAM and its militant organizations have borne the brunt of the resistance against the Axis. Most resistance groups belong to EAM. Politically, it is the leading force and because it is highly active and has a coordinated leadership, it represents the greatest danger to the occupation forces. (Tsoucalas, 2020, p. 96)

But how did the communists gain such an advantage in building the resistance? First, they were already experienced in building illegal networks of operation as they were outlawed by Metaxas’ dictatorship already before the war. (Tsoucalas, 2020, p. 91) Second, the remnants of the Greek Army, whose officers could have been the core of the resistance movement, escaped to Egypt with the king and the government. And it is further suggested that the latter (king and government) did not want to encourage resistance in occupied Greece! (Gerasis, 2013, pp. 90 - 91) We should not forget that Venizelos’ failed coup of 1935 gave the royalists the opportunity to purge the army from elements supporting unreigned democracy and restored the dynasty that was exited in 1924. (Papageorgiou, History is Now Magazine, 2023) Now, the king and the government did not want to risk the return of the democrats under arms within the ranks of a resistance movement that could eventually hinter their return to Greece at the end of the war.

Although the King succumbed to the British pressure and abolished the dictatorship in February 1942 (Tsoucalas, 2020, p. 97), the perceived threat for him and his entourage became more imminent when, in March 1944, EAM formed the Temporary Committee of National Liberation. The latter called for the formation of a government of national unity challenging the legitimacy of the exiled government in Egypt. The call was positively received by a significant amount of the Greek army serving under allied command in Africa. Their demand that the request be accepted by the government in Cairo was vigorously met with the help of the British and 20,000 service men were sent to concentration camps in Libya and Eritrea. (Tsoucalas, 2020, pp. 105 - 110) It is difficult to assume that 50% of the Greek army in the Middle East had suddenly turned communist. It is more likely that these were the democratic elements of the army.        

At the same time, back home, in occupied Greece, the situation was also becoming more and more difficult and complicated. Italy had surrendered to the Allies already in September 1943. As the Italians were occupying most of Greece, this created a control gap. To fill this gap, Hitler replaced the Italians with troops transferred from the collapsing eastern front. These men, brutalized by their experiences fighting the Russians, brought with them a different kind of warfare. Fifty Greeks were to die for every German soldier killed, ten for every wounded German, with no distinction made between guilty and innocent. The massacres at Kommeno (Wikipedia, 2022), Kalavryta (Wikipedia, 2023) and Distomo (Wikipedia, 2023) are characteristic of this self-defeating approach, as the Greeks left their burning villages and joined the resistance in the mountains. This together with the weaponry of the 90,000 Italian soldiers that surrendered in Greece in 1943 made ELAS even stronger. (Heneage, 2021, pp. 190 - 191)

To make up for this loss Hitler’s reinforcements from the eastern front were not enough. Thus, the Germans turned for help to the … Greeks! The Security Battalions were set up to act against the resistance and maintain order in 1943 by the quisling government in Athens. Denounced at the time as ‘fascists’ and ‘collaborators’ these people, nevertheless, also included moderates who feared the communists’ post-war intentions and can surely have been no more ideologically attracted to the doctrines of Hitler than most of the ELAS fighters to the doctrines of communism. (Heneage, 2021, p. 194) (Beaton, 2021, p. 437) Indeed, considering that the Communist Party was getting no more than 5-6% of the votes in the national elections before the war (Papageorgiou, History is Now Magazine, 2023), it is natural to assume that most of the rank-and-file EAM-ELAS little knew or care about communism. After all, as we have seen, Greece was a country of smallholders who believed fervently in property ownership (Papageorgiou, History is Now Magazine, 2023) and most of the people who joined EAM-ELAS did it following a message not about class struggle but national liberation. (Heneage, 2021, p. 188)  This way the Communists were able to impose their leadership but not their ideology on a significant part of the Greek people. (Tsoucalas, 2020, p. 95)

Thus, all sides were simply fighting to survive in a failed state and to preserve what they could of what they valued, when even the forces of occupation could barely keep order outside the major cities, and only by terrorizing the citizens with arbitrary arrests and mass executions. (Beaton, 2021, p. 437) Towards the end of the occupation then the Greeks had once more started to fight against each other with the resistance groups exchanging accusations for collaboration with the Security Battalions and the Germans. (Tsoucalas, 2020, p. 98) The assassination of EKKA’s leader Psaros by the communists in April 1944 was one of the most striking events of this time and indicative of what was about to follow. (Tsoucalas, 2020, p. 101)

Another part of the puzzle, and a very significant one, was the intentions of the Allies. After all, Greece was a defeated country and its future depended on the overall outcome of the war and the negotiations between the Great Powers of the time. And the decision was that Greece will remain under the sphere of influence of the Western Powers. It was taken during a meeting between Churchill and Stalin in Moscow in October 1944. The exchange of views was done using a rough sheet of paper [there is even talk about a napkin (Heneage, 2021, p. 193)] on which Churchill wrote who would get what. The British prime minister found the whole process, affecting the lives of millions of people, so cynical that he suggested to burn the sheet of paper at the end of the negotiation. But Stalin continued cynically and said: ‘No, you keep it’. (Churchill, The Second Worls War (Vol II), 2010, pp. 1154-1155) It has been suggested that the Soviets informed EAM about their intentions to give up Greece already before Churchill’s visit to Moscow. (Tsoucalas, 2020, pp. 112 - 115)

III Liberation and … another civil war!

Now, with all these in mind, what could have, ideally, be done? The Communists should realize that their military superiority was becoming doubtful, in the long term, without Soviet support and with Greece left under the influence of the Western Allies. After all, most of the ELAS fighters were not actually communists. They should try, nevertheless, to capitalize on the fight they put up against the Axis as leaders of the most massive resistance movement and ‘cash out’, so to say, any positive appeal this might have to the people by getting more votes and seats in the parliament compared to the pre-war period. The king and the government, on the other hand, should play down the communist threat, especially after the decision of the Allies, and work for a smooth transition to the post-war period and for the recovery of Greece that suffered heavy human and material losses during the war. To this end, both parties should lay their guns down, when the Germans fled from Greece in October 1944, and stand united at the peace negotiations claiming effective support for their country.

Ideally yes. But what did really happen? The truth is that at the beginning the Communist Party made some concessions. Instead of using its military superiority to take Athens and the power, after the withdrawal of the Germans, it accepted to participate in a government of national unity under Georgios Papandreou, head of the exiled government in Cairo, and set ELAS under British command. The king’s fate and consequently the form of the state system (reigned or unreigned democracy) would once again be decided by referendum. (Kalyvas, 2020 (3rd Edition), p. 158)

Nevertheless, violent events between the opposing factions did not stop and the mutual suspicion remained obvious. Thus, when the government ordered the dissolution of the guerrilla groups, including ELAS, that were to be replaced by a national army, a crisis erupted. The problem was that the national army was to have the heavily armed Greek brigade, that fought under allied command and the exiled government brought with it, at its core. After the purge of its democratic elements in the Middle East we saw earlier though, this was fanatically pro-royal and the Communists demanded its dissolution as well. Papandreou denied. (Tsoucalas, 2020, p. 117) The Communists then left the government of national unity, withdrew ELAS from British command and organized a general strike and a large rally in Athens. (Kalyvas, 2020 (3rd Edition), p. 159)

The later took place on the 3rd of December 1944 and was drowned in blood when the security forces started firing against the crowd. It is not clear if the order came from the government, the British or if the Security Battalions, whose members at that time were laying low following the developments, were involved in the incident, but hundreds of the demonstrators lost their lives or were wounded. (Tsoucalas, 2020, pp. 120 - 122) In response, the communists chose to resort also to violence and the crisis culminated to the Battle of Athens, that started after the rally and lasted for 33 days. The visit, in the midst of the fighting, of the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, in Athens was indicative of the latter’s determination to keep Greece under the sphere of influence of the western allies. (Churchill, The Second Worls War (Vol II), 2010, pp. 1172 - 1184) His interventions have actually been heavily criticised as triggering the devastating all out civil war that would shatter all hope for post war unity in Greece (Heneage, 2021, p. 197), and it is a fact, that with the help of the British forces that landed in Greece after the withdrawal of the Germans, the government was able to draw the Communists to sign in February 1945 the Agreement of Varkiza. The latter provided for the demobilisation and disarmament of ELAS, general amnesty for ‘political’, but not criminal, offenses, the holding of general elections and the referendum for the fate of the king. (Kalyvas, 2020 (3rd Edition), p. 161)

Nevertheless, as atrocities were carried out by both factions, during all this time, many issues remained open. (Tsoucalas, 2020, p. 133) Things were made worst by the participation in the Battle of Athens of many members of the quisling militias who collaborated with the Germans on the side of the government against the communists. This way, the battle acted as a legitimizer for these organizations, as it seemed to confirm the view that the quisling militias were nothing more than a means of dealing with the communist threat. (Kalyvas, 2020 (3rd Edition), p. 162) With the tolerance of the government these people infiltrated into the ranks of the security forces and continued to terrorize anyone who was or was perceived to be communist. After all, the fact that criminal offences could still be prosecuted even after the compromise reached at Varkiza offered a good pretence. This was also admitted by Nikolaos Plastiras that returned to Greece after 10 years in exile to replace Papandreou in the premiership, before the Varkiza truce. (Tsoucalas, 2020, p. 136) His Venizelist past (Papageorgiou, History is Now Magazine, 2023) was hoped to work conciliatory for the warring factions. (Tsoucalas, 2020, p. 133) To no avail. According to EAM in the year between the Varkiza agreement and the elections set for March 1946 1,289 people were murdered, 6,671 were seriously wounded, 31,632 tortured and 84,931 arrested. (Tsoucalas, 2020, p. 137)

This political climate led the communists and a significant part of other left and centrist parties to abstain from the elections set for the 31st of March 1946. When they realized that this way they would lose any chance they had to co-shape the political establishment after the end of the war, they revised their position, but this was two days after the deadline for submitting nominations. Thus, they asked for the postponement of the elections, but prime minister Sofoulis, leading the fourth government formed after the replacement of Plastiras in April 1945 (Kostis, 2018, p. 296), declined. Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary in the Labour government of Clement Attlee, that replaced Churchill in the premiership in July 1945, is supposed to have exercised the influence ensured by the presence of the British army in Greece towards this direction. As a result, voters abstention reached 50%, but the elections gave legitimacy to the right-wing government and cemented the re-emergence of the royalists. Indeed, in the September 1946 referendum on the fate of king George, the system of government was confirmed as a reigned democracy with 68,9% of the votes. (Tsoucalas, 2020, pp. 140-141)

The decision for abstention from the elections of the left and centrist parties and its exploitation from the parties of the right would prove to be a fatal error. The only option left was the extra-parliamentary opposition. Encouraged by the hardening of the Soviets’ attitude already during the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, where they stated their disagreement and protest against the ways of the British in Greece based on Stalin’s ‘old and vague authorization’ to Churchill (see above), and later, in January 1946, during the first session of the UN Security Council, where they demanded the withdrawal of the British forces from Greece, the Communist Party commissioned General Markos Vafiadis to set up the Democratic Army in the mountains in August 1946. (Tsoucalas, 2020, pp. 143-145) Nevertheless, support was to come mainly from the neighbouring Communist countries, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania, that pledged to fully support the operations of the Democratic Army, during a conference in the Slovenian city of Bled in August 1947. (Kalyvas, 2020 (3rd Edition), p. 163) Thus, in the summer of 1947, Greece was, yet again, engaged in an all-out civil war with incalculable consequences.

IV Fighting among themselves … almost

At the end of the First World War, Greece continued the fighting for another 4 years in an attempt to increase its territorial gains in Asia Minor. The undertaking resulted in the catastrophe of 1922. (Papageorgiou, History is Now Magazine, 2022) At the end of World War Two the modern Greek state had once more territorial gains (its last): the Dodecanese. On the 31st of March 1947, the British surrendered the islands to a Greek military commander although the law on the annexation of the Dodecanese to Greece was published in the Government Gazette on 9.1.1948 with retroactive effect from 28.10.1948. (Divani, 2010, pp. 683-685) Nevertheless, instead of focusing on the rebuilding of the country like most of the winners, and losers, of WWII, the Greeks, once more, continued the fighting. This time it was not about further territorial expansion. It was a fight for power among themselves.

Among themselves? Almost. As I commented before (Papageorgiou, History is Now Magazine, 2023), division invites foreign intervention. Indeed, after the Battle of Athens, Churchill’s remark was that at the time when 3,000,000 men on both sides fight in the western front and massive American forces line up in the Pacific against the Japanese, the Greek crisis might seem of minor importance. But the country is at the nerve center of power, law, and freedom of the Western world. Consequently, he wouldn’t back off easily from the deal he made with Stalin (see above). The problem was that the British Empire was on the retreat after WWII. It was not the British who were to conclude the mission in Greece. It would take the persistent efforts of the one who would soon constitute the united power of the English-speaking world: Uncle Sam. (Churchill, The Second Worls War (Vol II), 2010, p. 1184)

In March 1947 the USA adopted a diplomatic policy, under the ‘Truman Doctrine’, which stipulated that any threat from the Left to a non-communist country would be deterred even by force. The size of military and economic support to Greece thanks to the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan (Wikipedia, 2023) was tremendous. Three hundred million dollars were granted by the US Congress in 1947 only and much more later. The effect of the American support on the army was huge. It reached 200,000 men including well trained mountain troops. It was equipped with modern weapons, artillery and fighting aircraft. A modern communications network was built. The airfields, roads, bridges, and ports that had fallen into disuse during the occupation were repaired. American military advisors were working together with the Greek General Staff for the planning of the operations against the Communists. (Tsoucalas, 2020, pp. 151-152, 157)

The latter on the other hand were in a tough spot. As we have seen they were getting some support from the neighboring communist countries, but only against concessions in Macedonia, which made their cause very unpopular in the rural areas in the north, in view also of recent atrocities of the Bulgarians there during the occupation. (Tsoucalas, 2020, pp. 159-160) Their networks in the cities were also gradually being neutralized by the police as the Communist Party was outlawed and thousands of its members were sent to exile. (Tsoucalas, 2020, p. 158) Additionally, for most of the Greeks 6 years of fighting was already enough. Recovery and financial stability were now the imperative. Any attempt for further unrest met their disapproval and dismay. (Tsoucalas, 2020, p. 148) Thus, the Democratic Army had soon problems in finding new conscripts. Eventually, 25% of the fighters in its ranks were women and the voluntary conscription was replaced by a forced one. (Tsoucalas, 2020, p. 155) This was followed by terror tactics like hostage taking. A striking case was that of young children at the age of 3 to 14 years and their expatriation to Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. (Tsoucalas, 2020, p. 159) All these were exploited of course by the government propaganda.

Things got worse for the Communists because of internal disputes. In view of the problems in conscription, training, and equipment, Vafiadis resorted more to guerilla tactics, but the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Nikos Zachariadis, wanted to turn to more conventional ways of war. (Tsoucalas, 2020, p. 160) Vafiadis was finally replaced by the General Secretary in the leadership of the Democratic Army, but the decisive turn came in June 1948, when Yugoslavia’s leader Tito disagreed with Stalin and his country was expelled from the Cominform. (Wikipedia, 2023) Despite the fact that the Soviet Union offered little practical support during the war, it was the ‘mother’ to which communist hard-liners, and especially Zachariadis, had to obey. (Tsoucalas, 2020, pp. 158-159) Thus, a year later, in July 1949, Tito closed the border and the Democratic Army lost access to the rear of Yugoslavia where it used to withdraw in times of danger in order to regroup and resupply. At the same time, the imminent threat of an invasion of the Greek army in Albania forced the Communist Party to declare a cease fire on the 16th of October 1949. (Kalyvas, 2020 (3rd Edition), p. 166) (Tsoucalas, 2020, p. 162) This is 5 years after the Germans left Athens in 1944.

V The aftermath: A new schism

At the end of the Second World War the magnitude of the disasters that Greece had suffered could only be compared with those of Yugoslavia, Poland, or the Soviet Union. From 1940 till 1944 550,000 people were killed (corresponds to 8% of the total population) and 34 % of the national wealth was lost. 401,500 houses were destroyed and the number of the homeless reached 1,200,000. 1,770 villages were set on fire, whereas the big ports, the railway lines, the locomotives, the telephone network, the civil airports, and the bridges were in ruins. 73% of the capacity of the merchant fleet and 94% of the capacity of the passenger fleet was sunk. 56% of the road network, 65% of privately owned vehicles, 66% of trucks and 80% of the buses was also lost. The number of horses was reduced by 60%, of small animals by 80% and 25% of forests was burned. By 1944 the production of cereals was down by 40%, of tobacco by 89%, and that of currant by 66%. (Tsoucalas, 2020, p. 134)

And yet, in front of all this devastation, the Greeks continued fighting a civil war for another 5 years! This brought more dead (40,000 according to official statistics, 158,000 according to unofficial calculations), hundreds of thousands of additional homeless and material damages comparable to that estimated at the end of 1944. Moreover, 80,000 to 100,000 Greeks branded as communists back home fled or were forcibly taken across the country’s northern border and would have to make new homes in eastern Europe’s communist countries. The largest such Greek community was established in the city of Tashkent in Uzbekistan. (Tsoucalas, 2020, p. 163) (Beaton, 2021, p. 438)

This ‘exodus’ was a manifestation of a new schism in the Greek society that was realized by 1949 and replaced that between Venizelists and anti-Venizelists (and of course others before that): the schism between ‘nationalists’ (ethnikofrones) and ‘communists’. In a nutshell, the nationalists stood on the winning side of the civil war and professed the defence of the ‘Greco-Christian’ tradition against the subversive dispositions of the loosing side, that is the ‘communists’. The distinction was rather blur (e.g. we saw – see above – that many ELAS members were not actually communists) and thus served for the prosecution of many whose political convictions did not suit the state at the time. Indeed,  postwar Greece was very far from being a liberal paradise (although neither was it, as we will see, Stalinist Russia). (Heneage, 2021, pp. 205-206) In fact, this schism, in a much milder form though, is carried to this day between the ‘conservative’ or ‘right-wing’ and the ‘progressive’ parties that continue to fail to collaborate even under severe conditions, like the current economic crisis, with devastating consequences for the country.

VI Conclusion: Who’s fault was it?

Greece is probably the only country in the world that does not have a celebration for the victory in the First World War whereas victory in the Second World War is (strangely) celebrated at the date that marked the entrance of the country to the deadliest conflict the world has ever seen and not that of its liberation and exit. The reason, obviously, is the fact that in both cases the Greeks continued the fighting undertaking a disastrous campaign in Asia Minor in the first case and engaging in a protracted civil war in the second. Nothing to celebrate then.

If we were to ask the question who’s fault was it that Greece fought yet another civil war, a popular narrative is that the war was the result of the pressure that the government, supported by the British, exercised on the communists in an attempt to eliminate their influence on the social and political life which was significantly increased as a result of their leading role in the resistance against the axis forces that occupied Greece.

Some of this narrative, implying that the Communist Party was in ‘self-defense’ was carefully presented in the previous sections. And caution is indeed necessary as there is also harsh criticism of the communist leadership’s stance at that time from former party members. There were indeed incomprehensible positions and decisions of the party like (i) the adoption of the slogan for an independent Macedonia and Thrace, particularly unpopular to the Greek general public, (ii) the compromise with the exiled government in Egypt and avoidance of taking the power by force, when ELAS had overwhelming military superiority at the end of the occupation in 1944, followed by (iii) a turn to military means at an unfavorable time, when the government and its army returned and established itself in the country, with the help of the British and later the Americans. These are interpreted as the implementation, by the internationalist leadership of the party, of the decisions and commands of the Soviet Union that were based on the latter’s conflicts, agreements and overall power play with the British and the Americans in the region and elsewhere. (Lazaridis, 2022 (8th Edition), pp. 21-22, 77-82, 84-86 ) In a nutshell, it is suggested that the communist leadership was working for the Soviet interests.

I believe that the developments that culminated to the civil war can be readily understood within the concept of clientelism, which was described in detail in the previous article of this series on the interwar period. (Papageorgiou, History is Now Magazine, 2023) Once again two rival factions used their audiences (clients) to collide for power. Continuing the devastation of the Second World War they worked against the country’s recovery and had to resort to foreign support (intervention) to achieve their goals. The communists lost because they did not get the lavish support that the government enjoyed from the British and the Americans. Additionally, their real audience was much smaller whereas some of their positions made their cause even more unpopular to the public, as unpopular was already the continuation of the war by both factions, after the end of the Second World War. What needs to be stressed here is that clientelism is not something that is restricted internally in a state. When clientelism is in place the state itself becomes a client. The price of American largesse was that Greece effectively became a client state. (Heneage, 2021, p. 204) If the communists had won, Greece would correspondingly become a client state of the Soviets.

In fact, retrospectively thinking, if we were to find a positive element in the events of the period, this is undoubtedly the avoidance of the fate of Greece’s northern neighbors that ended up in the Soviet sphere of influence. On the contrary, Greece remained firmly connected to the West, it managed to benefit from the Marshall Plan and, after the civil war, it followed the amazing economic course of the Western European countries, finally achieving an unprecedented leap in economic development that put it far ahead of its Balkan neighbors. (Kalyvas, 2020 (3rd Edition), p. 170) More on this in the articles to follow.   

What do you think of the 1940s in the Modern Greek State? Let us know below.

References

Beaton, R. (2021). The Greeks, A global history. New York: Basic Books.

Churchill, W. S. (2010). The Second World War (Vol. I). Athens: Govostis (in Greek - The work is also available in English by Penguin Classics).

Churchill, W. S. (2010). The Second Worls War (Vol II). Athens: Govostis (in Greek - The work is also available in English by Penguin Classics).

Divani, L. (2010). The Territorial Completion of Greece (1830-1947), An Attempt at Local Lore. Athens: Kastaniotis (in Greek).

Gerasis, G. (2013). The Chronicle of a National Tragedy. Athens: Roes (in Greek).

Heneage, J. (2021). The shortest history of Greece. Exeter: Old Street Publishing ltd.

Kalyvas, N. S. (2020 (3rd Edition)). Catastrophies and Triumphs, The 7 cycles of modern Greek history. Athens: Papadopoulos (in Greek, in English under the title Modern Greece: What everyone needs to know by Oxford University Press).

Kostis, K. (2018). History’s Spoiled Children, The Formation of the Modern Greek State. London: Hurst & Company.

Lazaridis, T. (2022 (8th Edition)). Fortunately, We Were Defeated Comrades. Salonika: Epikentro (in Greek).

Papageorgiou, T. P. (2022, May 20). History is Now Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.historyisnowmagazine.com/blog/2022/5/20/the-modern-greek-state-19141922-greeks-divided?rq=Papageorgiou#.Yw-AoxxBy3A

Papageorgiou, T. P. (2023, March 22). History is Now Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.historyisnowmagazine.com/blog/2023/3/22/the-modern-greek-state-19231940-the-issues-of-clientelism#.ZDj9i_ZBy3A

Tsoucalas, C. (2020). The Greek Tragedy, From the liberation to the colonels. Athens: Patakis (in Greek, originally published in English by Penguin in 1969).

Wikipedia. (2022). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Kommeno

Wikipedia. (2023). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

Wikipedia. (2023). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Harling

Wikipedia. (2023). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalavryta_massacre

Wikipedia. (2023). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distomo_massacre

Wikipedia. (2023). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan

Wikipedia. (2023). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito%E2%80%93Stalin_split

The 1936 Summer Olympic Games: Nazism on the World Stage

The Olympic games have been around since the time of the ancient Greeks, being a showcase of physical feats and sport prowess. After Germany won the bid for the Olympic games in 1931, the Nazis would unfortunately be able to use it to showcase the country’s technological and economic prowess to the world. In the process they would also set the precedent for all Olympic games to come.

Kyle Brett explains.

The torch relay for the Summer Olympic Games, 1936. Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1976-116-08A / CC-BY-SA 3.0, available here.

Germany wins the Olympic bid

Germany originally won the Olympic bid to host the summer games in Berlin in 1908. This would not come to fruition as the advent of the first World War led to the games being canceled. Organizers of the event wanted to have the games continue to run during wartime like the ancient Greeks had done, but the brutality of the war made the games unfeasible. Thus the next Olympic games would be held in Antwerp, Belgium in 1920.

Germany, after the First World War, was broken, its economy was in tatters and its people left unhappy with their leadership. These problems were further exacerbated by the advent of the Wall street crash and the Great Depression. The 1924 Olympic games in Paris had even banned Germany from participating in the games, which followed the general public sentiment that people were not fond of Germany for their actions during the first World War. This would all change with Dr. Theadore Levalde and his lobbying for Berlin in the International Olympic committee.

The 1930 and 1931 meetings of the International Olympic committee saw much debate on which city would be the one to host the 1936 summer games. Levalde would spend much of these debates proposing Berlin as the host city and defending Germany in these meetings. Levalde was Germany’s Olympic representative since 1904 and was  a very well respected member of the International Olympic Committee community. That gave Germany a good chance to win the bid and host the Olympics. There was also a rising sentiment of utilizing the games to bring the world together. The past 20 years saw much division in the world, and the IOC sought to help right that with the Olympic games. At the end of the 1931 meeting 2 cities had to be chosen: Barcelona and Berlin. In the end it came down to an uncertainty surrounding the Republic of Spain and their ability to host the summer Olympics in Barcelona. This left Germany the winner and thus the 1936 bid for the Olympic games went to Germany and to the failing Weimar Republic.

A new Ideology rises to claim the Olympics

The Nazi party rose out of the failure of the Weimar Republic to capture the public's trust, thus the people of Germany yearned for a leader who would change the country for the better. To this end saw an ever growing support for the Nazi party and its very strong ideological values and economic solutions. This culminated in 1933 with the Nazi party seizing power from the Weimar Republic and becoming the leaders of Germany as well as the inheritors of the Olympic Games.

Originally Germany’s leader Adolf Hitler was apprehensive about the Olympic games as he saw no real need to host them or to participate in them. His opinion was swayed by the chief propagandist for the Nazi party Paul Joseph Goebbels. Goebbles convinced Hitler that the Olympics could be an opportunity to put Nazism and Germany’s achievements on the world stage, and thus construction of the Olympic stadium in Berlin began.  The Olympic games were to be a showcase of the success of Germany and how their new ideology was to be spread around the world.

Problems fueled by hate

The German government’s state sponsored anti-semitism was not unknown by many of the participating countries. It was originally decided that for the games that no Jewish athletes would be allowed to participate, however facing backlash that rule was lowered to appease the other countries that would be in the games. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws declared that all German Jews were no longer citizens of Germany and thus they were no longer allowed to participate in the games for the German team. These ideas of hate would not leave the games as many countries would sideline their Jewish athletes to appease the German hosts.

There was one problem with the games actually happening and that was the participation of the United States of America. The US would be the largest presence at the games and if they chose to stay out of the games many other countries might also back out. As for if they were to join, there were 2 people responsible for deciding if the US would participate in the games. Those 2 people were Avery Brundage and Jerimiah Mahoney. Avery was an Olympian himself as well as being a self made millionaire. He also saw what was happening in Germany and had no real problems with it, even aligning himself with Nazi values. Mahoney on the other hand would be the opposite, he was a judge who served on the supreme court and he was very staunchly anti-Nazi. His main point on his disdain for the Nazis was their anti-Christian stance on religion in society and that would drive his position against them.

Mahoney was against the games and Brundage was all for US participation, so in a bid to rally support for his position Brundage would travel to Berlin to make sure that the Jewish athletes were being treated fairly. His trip to Berlin, which was very controlled and deceptive, had shown no mistreatment of Jewish athletes by the Germans and had actually shown Germany to be a fair and equal place for all athletes. In reality Brundage was shepherded around by Hitler and taken to talk to actors. It also did not help that Brundage did not speak any German and would need a translator the entire trip. Nonetheless Brundage returned to the US and with his evidence was able to convince the organizers of American athletics that Germany was fit for the Olympics.

Olympic preparations

Germany began their preparations for the 1936 Olympics with the building of the Olympiastadion, a large neoclassical oval stadium that could house 100,000 spectators. This was only the start of Germany’s display of the opulence of the Third Reich.  They would do a tremendous amount of cleanup in Berlin for the upcoming games. One of the main things they would do is remove all forms of hate from the streets. They cleaned up all signs of anti-semitism and would replace them with either the swastika, or with the Olympic flag. This was in an effort to make Germany seem much more liberal than they were in reality. They would also set out to arrest and ship off all of the Romani people in the area around the venue to try to make the stadium seem more opulent and refined. Shops near the stadium were also told to lower the prices drastically in an effort to make the economy of Germany seem much better than it was. There was also a major campaign to repaint and fix up any buildings that were looking run down. This extended out of Berlin to any building along the train lines that lead to Berlin. All of these efforts culminated in a fresh and beautiful city perfect to host the Olympics.

Technology was another major point of focus for the Nazis and something they proudly displayed at the Olympic games. They built 6 large international transmitters so that the journalists could report back to their home countries about the games. They also put cameras in the stadium so that this could be the first ever televised Olympic games. On top of that they showed off other technological achievements like the Hindenburg which was a huge airship as well as various military technologies.

Let the Games begin

The 11th Olympiad began with an opening ceremony and with a new tradition that would become a staple of the modern Olympics. That tradition would be the Olympic flame and its journey from Olympia in Greece to the Olympic brazier. The tradition was treated as if it were an ancient tradition; however it was made up for the Olympics by the Nazis. It was followed by the entrance of Hitler and his entourage which was played up to show the extravagance of the German leadership. The marches of the 49 different countries would follow Hitler’s entrance, with each country showing off their flag and their teams. The opening ceremony continued with a flyover from the Hindenburg and with much more fanfare, really playing up the glory of the Third Reich. With that the games were underway and the first televised Olympics was on for the world to see.

Hitler made sure to provide the journalists and reporters with all the equipment they would need, along with nice living quarters to keep their opinions about Germany good and to keep their reports about the games in good spirits. The eyes of the world were on Germany as the games commenced. There were a few athletes that the public were eager to see like Jesse Owens from the US. The stands would be filled up for most of the games as people were eager to see this worldwide event in person.

The main goal of the Nazis in the Olympics was to show off the Aryan race and their superiority. When all was said and done, Germany led with the most gold medals and with the most medals overall. There were instances, such as Jesse Owens, a black athlete from the US, beating the German champion Luz Long in the long jump that may have hindered their aspirations. However when all was said and done the Germans came out of the Olympics the leaders of the world in athletic prowess, which ultimately was their goal.

The Olympics comes to a close

When the games came to a close and all of the spectators filtered out the hate and discrimination that surrounded the Nazi party before the Olympics had resumed. They returned to persecuting Jews and anyone who was Jewish through what the Nuremberg laws had dictated. Many Jewish families were invited back to Germany before and during the games in an attempt to show the liberalization efforts the Nazi party was trying to showcase. These families were persecuted along with every Jewish person under the Third Reich. The Olympics had generally been a pause for hate and discrimination, but once they had left Germany so too did the facade of a liberal society.

The 1936 summer Olympics was a major success for the Nazi party. They had turned the public perception of Germany from a hateful and downtrodden country, into a much more economically wealthy and liberalized society. They succeeded in showing their technological and economic prowess off to the world and painting the picture of a new and improved society.

What do you think of the 1936 summer Olympics? Let us know below.

Sources

Bachrach, Susan D. The nazi olympics: Berlin 1936. Little, Brown, 2000.

Walters, Guy. Berlin Games: How Hitler stole the Olympic Dream. London: John Murray, 2007.

Winston Churchill’s Anti-Appeasement Views in the 1930s

British politician Winston Churchill was famously against the appeasement of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s. However, a public who still remembered World War One, were not altogether sympathetic towards these arguments. Here, Bilal Junejo looks at this period.

Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain in 1935.

“Appeasement” refers to “the response of British foreign policy makers in the 1930s to the rise of the dictator powers, especially Nazi Germany … it is seen as a policy of making one-sided concessions, often at the expense of third parties and with nothing offered in return except promises of better behaviour in the future, in a vain attempt to satisfy the aspirations of the aggressor states (Dutton, 2007).”

Appeasement arose as “an attempt to adjust the balance between the victorious and vanquished powers of the peace settlement of 1919 by concessions based on the widely held feeling that the terms of that peace had been unacceptably harsh (Dutton, 2007).” It would also be helpful to remember what is meant linguistically by the word “appease” — “to pacify or placate someone by acceding to their demands”, as per the Oxford English Dictionary. The meaning implies the presence of a choice for the appeaser. One does not “accede” to a demand when one does not have a choice in resisting it — one simply acquiesces therein! Since the application of the word “appeasement” to British foreign policy in the 1930s implies that there was nothing inevitable about that policy — that it could have been different, had its makers so chosen — we must consider the reasoning which was propounded at the time (i.e. without the benefit of hindsight) in favour of that policy, if we are to be at all able to determine just how realistic, in the sense of being practicable, were the arguments which Churchill put forward against it.

The doctrine of collective security, which was laid down in Article 16 of the League of Nations’ Covenant, stipulated that the League must present a united front in the face of unprovoked aggression against any member. However, “the basic premise of collective security was that all nations would view every threat to security in the same way and be prepared to run the same risks in resisting it (Kissinger, 1994, page 52).” In an organisation which boasted 60 different members from around the world at its greatest extent in the mid-thirties, this was never likely to be the case, least of all after the Great Depression’s advent in 1929, when the economic woes of Great Britain, one of the League’s principal ‘policemen’, not only precluded the imposition of meaningful economic sanctions by her upon an aggressor, but also necessitated the reduction of expenditure upon defence to the barest minimum required for national and imperial security. The League was only as strong as the collective will of its members, and since collective security, by definition, did not envisage unilateral action by a member, the stage was set for Great Britain, already riddled with moral doubts as to the peace settlement of 1919 and weakened by the Depression, to embark upon appeasement.

Japan - 1930s

First came Japan, in 1931. Then Italy, in 1935. Churchill, however, was selective in his opposition to appeasement. Whilst he adamantly opposed any manner of compromise with Hitler’s Germany to the last, he exuded no similar sentiment when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia, “[remaining] out of the country during the autumn of 1935 so as to avoid having to pronounce for or against Italy (Taylor, 1964, page 123).” Even after Mussolini’s assault upon Albania in April 1939, Churchill was able to say that the invasion was “not necessarily a final test … [since it appeared], like so many other episodes at these times, in an ambiguous guise (The Daily Telegraph, 13 April 1939, page 14).” In believing that Italy should be appeased, so as to retain her crucial goodwill in dealing firmly with Germany, Churchill was not alone, his views finding harmonious echoes in the thinking of men such as Robert Vansittart, who was permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office from 1930-8. Churchill had two reasons for singling out Germany — her inherent economic and military strength, and the advent of Adolf Hitler.

Hitler’s rise

Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933. In October, Germany walked out of not only the otiose Disarmament Conference, but also the League of Nations, of which she had been a member since 1926! That she was able to do so with complete impunity was in itself a harbinger of what was to come — from the Anglo-German naval agreement of June 1935, to the Munich agreement of September 1938. In an early speech which, significantly, he delivered to his constituents at a fête in Theydon Bois, Essex — almost as though he were testing the mood of the people before he delivered the same remarks in the House of Commons and committed himself more palpably to the cause of anti-appeasement — Churchill warned that “at present Germany is only partly armed and most of her fury is turned upon herself. But already her smaller neighbours … feel a deep disquietude. There is grave reason to believe that Germany is arming herself … I have always opposed … all this foolish talk of placing [Germany] upon some kind of [military] equality with France … Britain’s hour of weakness is Europe’s hour of danger. I look to the League of Nations to rally the forces which make for the peace of the civilised world and not in any way to weaken them (The Times, 14 August 1933, page 12).” In other words, Germany could not be treated as an equal without resurrecting the military imbalance which had haunted Europe since 1871. There was no need for Great Britain either to ignore her own rearmament or to appease Germany by tolerating hers, least of all at the expense of France. Churchill’s principal apprehension was that a rearmed Germany would attack in the west — a fear which the British Government did not come to share until after the Nazi-Soviet Pact’s conclusion in August 1939, which explains why they reacted in the manner that they did to the subsequent invasion of Poland. But the fact remains that after remilitarising the Rhineland in March 1936, Hitler only moved eastwards. Would he have turned westwards after dismantling Poland, an Anglo-French ally, with Soviet help? In retrospect, Operation Barbarossa makes that seem somewhat unlikely.

If, as the appeasers believed, Hitler’s advent was only the culmination of German resentment at the invidious Treaty of Versailles, then the sooner that settlement was dismantled in favour of a more congenial one, the sooner would the wind be taken out of the Nazi sail, and stability return to Europe. But there was also the risk that alleviation of that resentment during the existence of the Nazi regime could actually fortify its national appeal. As a contemporary would eventually put it, “three main factors have militated against the growth of active opposition to the regime. In order of importance they are the success of German foreign policy, the absence of any apparent alternative to Hitlerism, and the success of the Government in combating unemployment (The Times, 2 January 1939, page 15).” As it was a catch-22 situation, Churchill saw no merit in strengthening a brutal regime with needless concessions, and was correct in fearing that appeasement would only send the wrong signal to Hitler.

Foresight

Churchill’s foresight, however, was not commonly appreciated. “It was partly Churchill’s extremely dangerous time on the Afghan-Pakistan border in 1896 and 1897, and in the Sudan in 1898, which had brought him up close to militant Islamic fundamentalism, that allowed him to spot the fanatical nature of Nazism that so many of his fellow politicians missed in the 1930s (Roberts, 2020, page 56).” As late as 1938, Anthony Eden, who had already resigned as Foreign Secretary over diplomatic differences with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, was arguing that “a settlement of the Sudeten German problem by conciliation is of the utmost urgency in view of the growing realisation of the far-reaching consequences of any resort to a decision by armed force in Central Europe (The Times, 12 September 1938, page 13)” — a settlement which was decried by Churchill as “a total and unmitigated defeat” on the floor of the House on 5 October 1938. The fact was that the appeasers not only believed that Nazi Germany would help counter what they considered was a bigger threat from Soviet Russia, but also remembered the horrors of the Great War — too vividly to recognise the import of caving in to Nazi bellicosity.

Conclusion

To conclude, acting upon Churchill’s counsel, the realism of which depended entirely upon the goals of its recipient, would have required rapid rearmament. Rearmament presupposed economic stability, which was already precarious at the time. But if the Government still believed, even in an era of Jarrow Marchers and an increasingly turbulent empire, that preserving a country which only (re)appeared on the map when both Germany and Russia were down and out in 1919 was vital to their own interests, then, with hindsight, it can be reasonably said that they should have issued an ultimatum when an infant regime committed its first act of overt “aggression” in March 1936 (Taylor, 1964, page 134). It might have averted another world war.

What do you think of Winston Churchill’s anti-appeasement in the 1930s? Let us know below.

Bibliography

Dutton, D. (2007) Proponents and critics of appeasement. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [Online]. Available at: https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-95646?rskey=aCl7MO&result=1 [Accessed on 22.11.22]

Kissinger, H. (1994) Diplomacy. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks.

Roberts, A. (2020) Leadership in War. Penguin Books.

Taylor, A. (1964) The Origins of the Second World War. Penguin Books.

The Times

The Daily Telegraph

How did Junior Military Officers Push Japan Into World War 2?

Of all of the ways in which Japan’s military was the most dysfunctional fighting force in modern history, Gekokujō was surely the strangest. Its origin is murky. All one Japanese encyclopedia could say was that; “since the medieval period, (mid-12th–14th centuries) writers have used the term to describe a variety of situations in which established authority was being challenged from below.”

Here, Daniel McEwen looks at Gekokujō and three key events in the 1930s that led Japan into war.

Japanese soldiers during the 1931 Mukden Incident.

Gekokujō: [translation; "the lower rules the higher" or "the low overcomes the high"]; someone of a lower position overthrowing someone of a higher position using military or political might.

Japan was an isolated nation of subsistence farmers and fishermen when Portuguese traders landed on its shores in 1540. Although initially welcomed, over the next century, these first Europeans wore out their welcome and were expelled by the shogunate in 1639 who then sealed their country off from the West for two hundred years! Then in the 1850’s, it was the Americans who forced Japan at gunpoint to throw open its doors to the world. The incoming rush of capital and technology transformed it into an industrial and military powerhouse. However, the accompanying influx of foreigners, government corruption, social unrest and widespread poverty left many feeling their country had sold it’s soul to the West. This head-on collision between Western modernity and Confucian tradition culminated in the 1930’s, with three “incidents” of Gekokujō that pushed Japan further down the path to Pearl Harbour.

1] The Mukden Incident [1931]

The most prestigious unit of the Japanese army, the Kwantung Army was the military muscle behind Japanese colonial expansion into Manchuria [present day Korea], China and Mongolia. Its field commanders often went rogue, violating orders from Army HQ in Tokyo without consequences. Most fatefully, in September of 1931, a group of its renegade officers staged-managed the bombing of a Japanese railway station in Mukden [present day Shenyang, China] which it then used as the excuse for occupying all of the Manchurian peninsula – despite specific orders to the contrary from Tokyo!

It is an act without equal among WW2’s combatant nations: rogue officers taking their country to war. A war they could not win. The Russians, also seeking power and influence in the western Pacific, took the occupation as a direct threat and attacked. Skilled only in massacring unarmed civilians, the Kwantung Army would fight several costly, losing battles with Joseph Stalin’s highly-mechanized battalions throughout the 1930’s before being routed decisively in 1939. Six years later, on August 8th, 1945 Red Army tanks stormed back into Manchuria, delivering a final stinging defeat to the Kwantung Army before the A-bombs ended the war.

It is telling that when their army’s treachery at Mukden was publicly revealed in 1933, rather than withdraw from the peninsula, Japan’s political leaders chose to withdraw from the League of Nations, officially endorsing the Kwantung Army’s insubordination. Many contend that the Mukden Incident was indeed the opening shot of WW2.

2] The May 15th Incident [1932]

In an act of cold-blooded treason, eleven young naval officers invaded the home of Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi and assassinated him before police could stop them. To a man, the eleven were followers of the Kōdōha or Imperial Way Faction, a cabal of influential military officers who envisioned a return to a pre-Westernized Japan in which a military dictatorship dedicated to aggressive expansion would purge the country of the corrupt elites in both government and industry who it blamed for all of Japan’s many ills. But it’s what happened at the officers’ public trial that proved so fateful. Incredibly, a  nation that should have been appalled by the death of their PM instead fell in love with his assassins! The officers’ eloquence in spinning the murder as an act of patriotism aimed at reforming a corrupt government, swayed public opinion in their favour. The court was deluged with over 100,000 petitions demanding clemency and caved in, handing out light sentences that would see the killers serve only a few years behind bars. Critics argue that this leniency weakened Japan’s democracy and made the third incident inevitable.

3] The February 26th Incident [1936]

Emboldened by the navy officers’ success, young army officers launched their attempt to violently purge the government of any and all opponents of Kōdōha. Calling themselves The Righteous Army, some 1,500 young officers and cadets fanned out across the city. Armed to the teeth and carrying Death Lists, they roamed the streets of Tokyo for three days, fighting running gun government troops, storming public buildings, often shooting it out with bodyguards to get at the people on their lists. British news correspondent Hugh Byas described it as "government by assassination".

Several government dignitaries including two former Prime Ministers were gunned down but the coup was too poorly executed and the government too well prepared. Eventually cornered by loyal Imperial soldiers, the rebels surrendered. This time there would be no public trials. All 1,500 were convicted by secret court martials and punished with prison terms and demotions. Only the 17 ringleaders were executed. Kōdōha was dead as a movement and yet surprisingly, its presence would be felt in the next election in that voters elected a more war-like government! Young officers would have one last shot at changing their country’s history.

Despite the American’s use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan’s War Council remained deadlocked on the issue of surrender. Enter Emperor Hirohito who had originally supported the Council’s imperialist ambitions, but now was aghast at the horrific destruction wrought by the A-bombs. He urged the Council to stop the insanity and grudgingly, the hard-liners agreed that he would record a surrender statement admitting only to the “futility of further resistance”, to be broadcast to the country. But a squad of young officers got wind of the plan and occupied the recording studio in an 11th hour attempt to prevent the broadcast. In this too they failed and on August 15th, Hirohito’s voice was heard by his subjects for the first time. They rejoiced that the war was over.

Was Gekokujō ever anything more than thuggery wrapped in a flag, domestic terrorism on     steroids, fascism disguised as patriotism? Too much blood had been spilled, too much pain inflicted to find anything enobling in the “challenge from below” those young officers presented their country.

What do you think of Gekokujō? Let us know below.

You can contact Daniel at danielcmcewen@gmail.com