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 1939-45 war without an appreciation of the issues not wholly answered in the conflict of 1914-18. 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 Japan's incursion into Manchuria. The strategic thought of the interwar years is therefore especially instructive in assessing the prosecution of WWII, 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.

List of contents

Introduction 1. Diplomatic Failure and Military Catastrophe 2. Naval Theory in London and Berlin 3. Armistice 4. Appeasement and Rearmament 5. The Launch of World War II in Europe 6. The Asia-Pacific War 7. Defence and Offence, Land and Sea 8. The Allied Offensives. Conclusion

About the author

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

Summary

This book interprets the World Wars as a single unit in modern history. The interwar decades were a period of rearmament based on assumptions about the probability of a future war and the nature of its prosecution. The result was a conflict exponentially more violent than that of 1914–1918.

Product details

• Authors: Carl Cavanagh Hodge, Carl Cavanagh (University of British Columb Hodge, Hodge Carl Cavanagh
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 26.09.2022
• EAN: 9780367721015
• ISBN: 978-0-367-72101-5
• No. of pages: 214
• Series: Routledge Studies in Modern History
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Regional and national histories; Non-fiction book > Politics, society, business > Politics; Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900, HISTORY / General, HISTORY / Modern / General, HISTORY / Military / General, HISTORY / Europe / General, HISTORY / World, military history, HISTORY / Military / Naval, HISTORY / Military / Strategy, General & world history, Warfare & defence, c 1500 onwards to present day, General and world history, Warfare and defence, HISTORY / Wars & Conflicts / World War II / General, HISTORY / Wars & Conflicts / World War I