Carl Cavanagh Hodge - Political and Military Leadership in the World Wars: The Closest Concert

This book approaches the World Wars and the decades between them as a single unit in modern history. It is impossible to understand either the cause or conduct of the 193945 war without an appreciation of the issues not wholly answered in the conflict of 191418. Bridging the World Wars was the establishment, revision, and ultimate collapse of the Versailles settlement and the League of Nations system between 1919 and 1939. The 1919 settlement was contested in the 1920s by Fascist Italy and began to unravel irreparably in 1931 with Japans incursion into Manchuria. The strategic thought of the interwar years is therefore especially instructive in assessing the prosecution of World War II, as the military ventures of these two revisionist powers pointed toward future developments even before Germany thrust a new way of war upon Eastern and Western Europe. Meanwhile, Britain, France, and the United States began an incremental conversion to new approaches to war in the air and on the sea in particular. The interwar decades are best understood as a period of calibrated rearmament by all the powers based on assumptions about the probability of a future war and the nature of its prosecution.

Carl Cavanagh Hodge is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of British Columbia-Okanagan.

Ruler Personality Cults from Empires to Nation-States and Beyond

Edited by Kirill Postoutenko and Darin Stephanov

Embassies in Crisis

Studies of Diplomatic Missions in Testing Situations

Edited by Rogelia Pastor-Castro and Martin Thomas

Redefining Propaganda in Modern China

The Mao Era and its Legacies

Edited by James Farley and Matthew D. Johnson

War and Semiotics

Signs, Communication Systems, and the Preparation, Legitimization, and Commemoration of Collective Mass Violence

Edited by Frank Jacob

German-East Asian Encounters and Entanglements

Affinity in Culture and Politics Since 1945

Edited by Joanne Miyang Cho

Corporate Policing, Yellow Unionism, and Strikebreaking, 18901930

In Defence of Freedom

Edited by Matteo Millan and Alessandro Saluppo

American Planters and Irish Landlords in Comparative and Transnational Perspective

Lords of Land and Labor

Cathal Smith

Political and Military Leadership in the World Wars

The Closest Concert

Carl Cavanagh Hodge

The Ending of Tribal Wars

Configurations and Processes of Pacification

Edited by Jrg Helbling and Tobias Schwoerer

Neo-Confucianism and Science in Korea

Humanity and Nature, 17061814

Sang-ho Ro

International Society in the Early Twentieth Century Asia-Pacific

Imperial Rivalries, International Organizations, and Experts

Edited by Hiroo Nakajima

For a full list of titles, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/history/series/MODHIST

First published 2021
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2021 Taylor & Francis

The right of Carl Cavanagh Hodge to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested

ISBN: 978-0-367-72099-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-72101-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-15344-3 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by SPi Global, India

I would like to thank Robert Langham, Max Novick, and Yassar Arafat for their assistance in bringing this book to press. In addition, I am in the debt of Joan Irvine, Helen Cooper, and Hattie Voss for their patient assistance with the writing and editing of the manuscript. Above of all, I thank my wife, Jane Everett, for her intelligent commentary throughout the writing process.

The World Wars of the first half of the twentieth century and the twenty years of armistice separating them are properly pondered as a single unit in political and military history. World War I was the greatest trauma of modern European history. In scale and carnage it was nonetheless eclipsed by WWII, the greatest tragedy in human civilization. It is impossible to understand either the cause or the conduct of the 193945 war without an appreciation of the issues joined, yet not wholly answered, in the conflict of 191418. Whereas WWI ultimately drew in thirty-two nations and claimed fifteen million lives, WWII killed five times as many people and wrought destruction on a vastly greater scale.

In the two decades preceding WWI, all the great powers devoted extraordinary fiscal, scientific, and industrial resources to the development of military power. When the Allied and Central Powers went to war in August 1914, their comparative strengths cancelled each other out. Within weeks of its outbreak WWI degenerated into four years of mutual bloodletting without a shift in the fortunes of war tilting decisively in one direction or the other. The armistice of 1919 then established an unstable peace. Its terms were politically unsatisfactory to all the participants. Yet they were held to be so much more outrageous in Germany, Italy, and Japan that each contrived to amend or overturn them. In addition, each of these countries devoted much more attention than the victors of 1919 to providing diplomatically and militarily for the prosecution of a future war. As a consequence, the opening phases of WWII tilted the military advantage radically in their favour. Thereafter, the conflict shifted almost as quickly against them, so that by 1943 the Axis powers had virtually no chance of surviving as powers, much less prevailing over their adversaries.

The outcome of both wars was in large part the product of the superior material resources that Allied powers were able to apply to protracted military conflict. But it was also the result of superior political and military leadership. What Winston Churchill claimed of WWII that their strategy was conducted so that the best combinations, the closest concert1 characterized their conduct of fighting was also true, despite obvious circumstantial differences, of WWI. The Allied powers achieved not only a higher degree of cooperation in their combined efforts, each of them also managed a higher level of coordination between political and military leaders in determining political goals and matching strategic vision to available resources. This book therefore focuses most forthrightly on the relationship between civilian and military leaders during the World Wars and, just as critically, over the twenty-year truce between them. It is a study of the partnership of civilian political