IB History: The Road to War — notes, maps and essay questions

Chapter 1: The World the Slump Made

The Depression discredited the open world. World trade fell by roughly two-thirds in value between 1929 and 1933, and every industrial country retreated behind tariffs — America’s Smoot–Hawley (1930), Britain’s imperial preference (1932). For have-not powers without empires to retreat into, autarky became a strategic argument: if the world is closing into blocs, seize a bloc of your own. Japanese planners called Manchuria a “lifeline”; Hitler would call the east “living space.” Same syllogism, five thousand miles apart.

The Washington order had no enforcer. The 1920s Pacific ran on the Washington treaties: naval ratios, the Open Door in China, consultation. But the system assumed good faith and provided no policeman — the United States would not commit force, Britain could not afford to, and the League of Nations had no army at all. The order was real enough to constrain governments that believed in it, and invisible to soldiers who did not. In 1931 the Kwantung Army ran the experiment.

Japan’s army answered to no cabinet. By constitutional custom the Japanese army reported to the Emperor, not the prime minister — and its field commands increasingly reported to no one. Officers of the Kwantung Army, garrisoning Japan’s railway concession in Manchuria, had already assassinated the local warlord Zhang Zuolin in 1928 and gone unpunished. The civilians in Tokyo knew another plot was coming in 1931; the army minister sent a general to restrain it, and he began by telling the plotters he was coming. Insubordination that succeeds becomes policy.

China looked weak enough to bite. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government had unified China on paper in 1928, but in 1931 it was fighting communist bases in the south, feuding warlords everywhere, and — that summer — catastrophic Yangtze floods. Tokyo’s radicals judged, correctly in the short run, that Nanking would answer an invasion with lawyers rather than armies. What they misjudged was the long run: humiliation is a renewable resource, and Chinese nationalism fed on every concession.

Chapter 2: Mukden: The First Unpunished Gamble

A railway empire wanted a landward one. Japan had held southern Manchuria’s railway zone since defeating Russia in 1905, with the Kwantung Army there to guard it. The zone gave Japan coal, soy and iron — and a standing temptation: every officer posted there could see that the hinterland, run by the warlord Zhang Xueliang, was defended by troops distracted elsewhere. Ishiwara Kanji, the operation’s planner, preached that total war with America was inevitable and Manchuria’s resources were the precondition; the invasion was, in his mind, defensive procurement.

Tokyo could not discipline its own army. The government of Wakatsuki Reijirō learned of the plot beforehand and sent General Tatekawa to stop it; the conspirators dined him drunk and lit the fuse that night. Each subsequent escalation was presented to the cabinet as accomplished fact, and ministers who objected faced a stark arithmetic: the army could bring down any government by withdrawing its minister. In May 1932 naval officers assassinated Prime Minister Inukai in his residence — the last party politician to head a Japanese government before 1945. The gamble at Mukden was also a coup in slow motion.

China chose the courtroom over the battlefield. Chiang’s “first internal pacification, then external resistance” doctrine judged that fighting Japan in 1931 meant losing to Japan in 1931 — his best armies were mid-campaign against the communists. Non-resistance preserved the army and framed Japan as the unambiguous aggressor before world opinion, but it also taught the Kwantung Army that conquest was cheap, and it cost Chiang legitimacy at home that a decade of student protest would keep billing him for.

The League was built for a different quarrel. Geneva’s machinery assumed disputes between governments that both wanted settlement. It had no procedure for a member state whose army was off the leash, no force to send, and members — Britain above all — with Asian empires of their own, vulnerable navies, and Depression budgets. The Lytton Commission took a year to report because thoroughness was the only weapon available. Justice arrived, accurately and completely, after the conquest was finished.

The perimeter, then the tide. Japan’s six months ran almost exactly to Yamamoto’s schedule: Malaya, Singapore (the empire’s worst capitulation, February 1942), the Indies and the Philippines all fell. Then Coral Sea checked the advance in May 1942, and at Midway in June the carriers missed at Pearl sank four of the six that had attacked it. The war this atlas ends by starting is told in the WW2 atlas — this map hands its final snapshot to that one’s first.

The arsenal opens both doors. Germany’s declaration let Roosevelt pursue “Europe first” with public consent. Lend-Lease, already flowing to Britain and the USSR, became the bloodstream of a global coalition. By war’s end it had supplied some $50 billion in matériel. That aid ranged from Studebaker trucks on the road to Moscow to the food shipments that kept Britain fed.

Asia’s empires never come back. The tan on this map’s southern half did not survive the demonstration that European empires could be beaten by an Asian power in weeks. The colonial restorations of 1945 were rearguard actions; India was gone by 1947, Indonesia by 1949, Indochina after wars that fill the Cold War atlas. Japan’s war of conquest, defeated, still ended the world it attacked.