When did the Great War end and the Second World War begin? Defining the Interwar Period
World War Wednesdays
Welcome to World War Wednesday, a weekly dive into the continuous, thirty-year epoch of global conflict from 1914 to 1945. Here, I strip away popular myths to analyze the dynamics of industrial warfare, institutional behaviors, and the ideologies that shaped the world we inherited.
Periodization is what we call it when historians divide up the timeline into “eras” and ages. It works differently for historians than for geological studies. Terms like “age”, “era”, and “period” have formal codified uses in geology whereas in history they are more defined by a consensus of feeling and attachment about the meaning of a time-frame.
The idea is that naming a time period should tell us something useful about what happened at that time, and connect a narrative in a way that has real meaning for how humans understand that time now, and sometimes as it was happening. But you can usually only name an era retroactively.
Historians are the proballers of hindsight.
We tend to call the years from 1919-1939 the Interwar Period.
When did the Great War end and the Second World War begin? It is more of an open question when you move beyond Europe; after all, world wars should consider the globe.
The traditional European version is that the First World War ended November 11, 1918 and round two started September 1, 1939. However this is too simple for my taste, and looking back, both Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill and General Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle, called the era from 1914-1945 a second thirty years war, likening it to the great catastrophe of Central Europe that lasted from 1618-1648.
La guerre de trente ans! To de Gaulle the period 20th century global war was one where France fought against German hegemony with only a truce in between.
A truce for France perhaps.
The Russian Civil began as part of the First World War, and the people of the old Russian Empire bled from Ukraine to Central Asia until the Bolshevik victory in 1922. Likewise while the Ottoman Empire was defeated by the British and French in 1918 the Greeks immediately attacked in 1919, fighting until 1922. At the end of that war two sides mutually expelled their rival’s ethnic population in one of the largest population transfers in history.
After World War I, the United States Army occupied the German Rhineland and did not leave until 1923. Poland had to fight off the Red Army in 1920. The “Big Fella” Michael Collins led the Irish fight for independence against the British Empire in a war that ended in 1921, leaving the British in control of the Protestant-majority counties in most of historic Ulster. That led to the Irish Civil War, which lasted until 1923 and during which Collins was assassinated by the anti-Treaty Irish who wanted to keep fighting the British.
Ireland went to war in 1914 and did not know peace until 1923.
Perhaps the interwar period should begin in 1923? But then the Arab Middle East resisted the British and French occupation of the former Ottoman territories for the next decade in various conflicts.
For many Africans the return of world war began when the fascist Kingdom of Italy invaded the ancient Christian lands of the Ethiopian Empire in 1935.
In Asia many historians date the beginning of the Second World War in 1931 with the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. However, the Japanese were in part provoked by Joseph Stalin’s fight against China’s warlord the “Young Marshal” Zhang Xueliang in 1929, during which the Chinese and Soviets deployed a combined 300,000 troops. Of note, the territory captured by the USSR during that conflict was not returned to China by Vladimir Putin’s Russia until 2008.
When I examine the World Wars, I follow Churchill and de Gaulle in seeing a global conflict where participants dropped in and out of combat until a real peace was established in 1945.
Americans ended World War One disappointed in the Wilson administration and in their allies. Eager for “normalcy” they elected Warren Gamaliel Harding of Ohio in 1920. But “normalcy” did not return to the world until 1945 or perhaps even 1989 or 1991 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
We are still living with the consequences of three decades of war and revolution. This series is about learning about what happened when the old world exploded in 1914 but the new modernity was not reassembled until 1945.
Next week I’ll look at Interwar Mexico.