The South Manchuria Railway had been controlled by Japan since the end of the Russo-Japanese War, but the relationship between the local Chinese population and the Japanese soldiers who guarded the line was tense. Following the onset of the Great Depression, some renegade members of the Japanese Kwantung Army believed that a conflict in the area would be beneficial for Japan.
Japanese troops detonated a small quantity of dynamite near the tracks at around 10.20pm on the evening of 18 September. The explosion caused such little damage to the railway line that a train was able to travel over the same section of track ten minutes later without any problems. Despite having carried out the explosion themselves, the Japanese blamed Chinese rebels for the blast. Within hours the resident Japanese forces had driven a nearby Chinese garrison from their barracks in apparent retaliation for the alleged attack.
Over the next few days the Japanese army took control of towns and cities along the entire railway line, acting independently of the government in Tokyo. The politicians, unable to rein in the army, eventually lent their support and sent additional troops to support the invasion.
The Chinese government appealed to the League of Nations for assistance, and the League promptly passed a resolution calling for the withdrawal of Japanese troops. Japan ignored the League, and ruled Manchuria as a puppet state.
The United States had broken off diplomatic relations with Russia shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Woodrow Wilson refused to recognise the new government due to its seizure of American property in Russia, alongside its refusal to pay back debts incurred by the Tsar or honour existing international treaties.
As the Bolshevik government consolidated its power in the Civil War, America remained concerned that the new Soviet Union was a threat to American values. Nevertheless the two countries maintained and expanded commercial links throughout the 1920s, with the Ford Motor Company even collaborating with the Soviet government to provide parts and establish the Gorky Automobile Plant.
Shortly after taking office in March 1933, President Roosevelt began to explore establishing formal diplomatic relations. Hoping to limit Japanese expansion in Asia and develop American commercial interests in the Soviet Union, he commissioned a survey that showed 63% of the public in favour of recognizing the USSR. Consequently he called on advisor Henry Morgenthau and Russian expert William C. Bullitt to initiate contact.
The following month the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, travelled to Washington to meet with Roosevelt. He agreed to religious and legal rights for U.S. citizens living in the Soviet Union, and promised not to aid the U.S. Communist Party. Meanwhile both sides agreed to return to the debt question in the future. Roosevelt announced the establishment of formal diplomatic relations with the USSR on 16 November, and appointed William C. Bullitt as the first Ambassador to the Soviet Union.
On 27 February 1933, the Reichstag building in Berlin was set on fire in an arson attack.
Adolf Hitler had been appointed Chancellor of Germany on 30 January, but had demanded new elections for the Reichstag. These were scheduled to take place across Germany on 5 March. Hitler hoped that they would increase the Nazis’ share of the seats and therefore allow him to pass the Enabling Act to take control of political decisions for himself.
Shortly after 9pm on the evening of 27 February, Goebbels was informed that the Reichstag was on fire. Although the blaze was extinguished before midnight, the inside of the building was destroyed. Communists were blamed for starting the fire, and Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe was found and arrested.
The following day Hitler persuaded President Hindenburg to pass the emergency Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State. This suspended many civil liberties and allowed the Nazis to arrest their opponents. Thousands of communists, liberals and Social Democrats were rounded up by the SA and placed in so-called ‘protective custody’. Van Der Lubbe was tried, convicted, and executed.
Although there is debate over the exact circumstances surrounding the fire, historian Sir Ian Kershaw says there is a general consensus among the vast majority of scholars that van der Lubbe did set the fire.
There is no argument, however, that the fire was exploited by the Nazis who used it as the first step in the creation of a single-party state.
The move by Hitler effectively merged the offices of both the President and Chancellor into one role, and therefore completed what the Nazis referred to as Gleichschaltung (or ‘Co-ordination’) by establishing Hitler as both Germany's head of state and head of government.
Interfering with the post of President was illegal under the terms of the 1933 Enabling Act, and although merging the two positions under Hitler removed any political checks and balances of his personal domination of Germany, a plebiscite held seventeen days later on 19 August saw 90% of people approving of the change.
Hitler’s assumption of the role of Führer also allowed the Nazi Party to more actively pursue its promotion of the ideology of Führerprinzip. This stated that Hitler possessed absolute control over the German government. Supported by a propaganda machine that relentlessly pushed the slogan "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer!" which translates as ”One People, One Empire, One Leader”, the Führerprinzip also confirmed the Nazi Party’s complete control over every element of German society.
Nazi influence ranged from local government to factories and even to the management and control of schools, although in terms of government it sometimes meant that officials were reluctant to make decisions without Hitler’s personal input or approval. The Führerprinzip was also used by Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials to argue that they were not guilty of war crimes since they were only following orders.
On 13 January 1935 the Territory of the Saar Basin voted to reunite with Germany.
In 1918 the Saar Basin was a heavily industrialised area that boasted a large number of coal mines. Following the Treaty of Versailles the area was occupied and governed by France and Britain under the auspices of the League of Nations. France was also given exclusive control of the area’s rich coal mines as part of the reparations agreement. The Treaty called for a plebiscite to decide the long-term future of the Saar region after a period of fifteen years.
By the time of the plebiscite Adolf Hitler had secured his position as the supreme leader of Germany. This had caused a number of people who opposed Nazi policies to move to the Saar Basin since it was the only part of Germany free from their rule. These people were keen for the area to remain under the League’s administration, but maintaining the status quo was unpopular with many other Germans in the area.
The Nazis launched an intensive pro-Germany campaign in the area that was led by propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. As early as 1933, complaints that the Nazi campaign amounted to a ‘reign of terror’ had been noted by American political scientist Sarah Wambaugh who was one of the members of the commission sent to oversee the plebiscite. Although the Nazis did restrain their tactics by the end of 1934, the League of Nations still provided a peacekeeping force to monitor the plebiscite.
Voter turnout was 98% of all eligible voters, and 90.8% of them chose to re-join the German Reich. The overwhelming result surprised many observers, and acted as powerful propaganda for the Nazi Party.
On 26 July 1936 Adolf Hitler informed General Francisco Franco that Germany would support his Nationalist rebellion in Spain.
The Spanish Civil War broke out on 17 July, when an army uprising against the Second Spanish Republic that began in Morocco spread to the mainland. In the face of early rebel gains, the Republican government sought assistance from France and the USSR. Meanwhile the Nationalists turned to the right-wing governments of Germany and Italy.
Benito Mussolini, the leader of Italy, agreed to intervene in the war on the Nationalist side after being encouraged to do so by Hitler. Although both countries later signed the Non-Intervention Agreement, they continued to send troops and equipment to support Franco’s forces.
Hitler in particular had a number of reasons for getting involved. As well as it giving him the opportunity to take action against what he called ‘communist barbarism’, assisting Franco would win Germany an important ally and preferential access to Spain’s natural resources. Militarily, German involvement also provided an opportunity to test the new equipment developed since the Nazi rearmament programme began in 1933.
Both Hitler and Mussolini were concerned about the risk of the Spanish Civil War escalating into a European-wide conflict, so at first their support for the Nationalists was small-scale and consisted mainly of transporting existing Spanish troops from Morocco to the mainland. As the war progressed their involvement grew. The German Condor Legion in particular began to take an active role in the aerial bombing of Republican areas, most notably the Basque town of Guernica on 26 April 1937.
On 7 March 1936 the German Army under control of Adolf Hitler violated international agreements by remilitarising the Rhineland.
The Rhineland area of Germany, which lay on the border with France, had been banned from containing armed forces within a 50km-wide strip under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Germany was also unable to maintain any fortifications within the area.
This agreement had later been confirmed by Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann in the Locarno Treaties of 1925. However, by 1936 Hitler had come to power and had begun to break the terms of Versailles by increasing the number of German weapons beyond the agreed limits and reintroducing conscription.
The Western powers had failed to respond to these moves with anything more than diplomatic grumbling, so Hitler felt emboldened to further test the limits of the Versailles settlement. After France and Russia signed the 1935 Franco-Soviet Pact, Hitler chose to send three battalions, or approximately 22,000 German troops, into the Rhineland. They entered on the morning of Saturday 7 March in what he claimed was a defensive move against ‘encirclement’.
Hitler’s own generals were expecting retaliation from France, and had even been ordered to stage an immediate withdrawal if the French army made a move. Despite Hitler’s concerns, however, France refused to move against Germany without the support of Britain. Having been severely weakened by the impact of the Great Depression and distracted by the unfolding Abyssinia Crisis, Britain sympathised to an extent with the German desire to defend its own border and refused to intervene. Hitler therefore successfully remilitarised the area.
The Battle of Shanghai (淞滬會戰) was the first of the twenty-two major engagements fought between the National Revolutionary Army (NRA) of the Republic of China (ROC) and the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) of the Empire of Japan at the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War. It lasted from August 13, 1937, to November 26, 1937, and was one of the largest and bloodiest battles of the entire war, and even regarded by some historians as the first battle of World War 2. After over three months of extensive fighting on land, in the air and at sea, the battle concluded with a victory for Japan. Both sides accused each other of using chemical weapons during the battle, both without evidence.
Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November Pogrom(s), was a pogrom against Jews carried out by SA paramilitary forces and civilians throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938. The German authorities looked on without intervening. The name Kristallnacht ("Crystal Night") comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings and synagogues were smashed.
Jewish homes, hospitals and schools were ransacked as the attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. The rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland. Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. British historian Martin Gilbert wrote that no event in the history of German Jews between 1933 and 1945 was so widely reported as it was happening, and the accounts from foreign journalists working in Germany sent shockwaves around the world. The Times of London observed on 11 November 1938: "No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults on defenceless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday."
The pretext for the attacks was the assassination of the Nazi German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old German-born Polish Jew living in Paris. Estimates of fatalities caused by the attacks have varied. Early reports estimated that 91 Jews had been murdered. Modern analysis of German scholarly sources puts the figure much higher; when deaths from post-arrest maltreatment and subsequent suicides are included, the death toll climbs into the hundreds, with Richard J. Evans estimating 638 suicide deaths. Historians view Kristallnacht as a prelude to the Final Solution and the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust.
.1938-10-30: The War of the Worlds radio play, Orson Welles → terror - HiPo > .The Mercury Theatre on the Air was a series of weekly one-hour radio plays created by Welles and broadcast on the CBS Radio network. ‘The War of the Worlds’ was the seventeenth episode of the radio show, and was adapted by American playwright Howard E. Koch who is probably best known for later co-writing the film Casablanca starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.
For the radio play of ‘The War of the Worlds’ Koch took the general story arc from H. G. Wells’ original novel but substituted 19th Century Europe for 20th Century America by changing the names of locations and personalities to ones that were more familiar and contemporary. He was only asked to write the script a week before the broadcast and earned $50, but was permitted to keep the rights to the finished script.
Before the live broadcast had even finished on the night of 30 October, CBS began to receive telephone calls from concerned listeners. Announcements were made before, during and after the performance that the events were fictitious, but it was clear that these warnings went unheeded by many.
Although the listening figures were relatively small, news of the alien invasion spread through a country nervous about impending war. Within hours of the broadcast the billboards in New York’s Times Square flashed with reports of mass panic caused by the play, although most reports were based on anecdotal accounts from the Associated Press. Subsequent research suggests that the public response was nowhere near the scale claimed at the time.
On 22 April 1915 poison gas was first used effectively in the First World War at the Second Battle of Ypres.
A form of tear gas had previously been used by the Germans fighting the Russians at the Battle of Bolimów in Poland at the end of January, but it had proved wholly unsuccessful. The freezing temperatures meant that a lot of the gas failed to vaporise, and that which was successfully released was blown back towards the German trenches due to a change in the direction of the wind.
At Ypres, near the small Belgian hamlet of Gravenstafel, the situation was dramatically different. 5,700 gas canisters weighing over 40kg each were released by hand over a 4 mile (6.5km) stretch of the front line. Every canister contained highly poisonous chlorine gas. Despite the improved organising, the rudimentary system of release still depended on the wind to blow the gas towards the enemy. Some Germans were killed or injured in the process of releasing the gas but the attack was terribly effective as the gas successfully vaporised and sank into the enemy trenches.
Over five thousand French Algerian, Moroccan and territorial troops died within ten minutes of the gas being released. A further five thousand were temporarily blinded, with nearly half of them becoming prisoners of war.
The Germans didn’t expect the gas to be as effective as it was, and so didn’t fully exploit their initial advantage. However, by the end of the battle on 25 May, the Germans had certainly scored a tactical victory. They had compressed the size of the Ypres salient and had demonstrated the effectiveness of chemical warfare. The Allies soon developed their own poison gas, making chemical warfare part of the offensive strategy for the rest of the war.
On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in which he said: “From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an ‘iron curtain’ has descended across the continent, allowing police governments to rule Eastern Europe.”
On 5th March 1946 Winston Churchill described the post-war division of Europe as an ‘Iron Curtain’ in his ‘Sinews of Peace’ address at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri.
Churchill, as the British Prime Minister, had led Britain to victory in the Second World War but suffered a landslide defeat to Clement Attlee’s Labour Party in the General Election of July 1945. Despite being in opposition he continued to be highly respected abroad and visited the United States in 1946. During this trip he was invited to deliver a speech to an audience of 40,000 people at Westminster College in the 7,000-person town of Fulton.
Churchill was introduced at Fulton by President Harry Truman, and opened his speech by complimenting the United States as standing ‘at the pinnacle of world power’. As the speech progressed, he became increasingly critical of the Soviet Union’s policies in Eastern Europe.
Churchill was not the first to use the term ‘Iron Curtain’ as a metaphor for a strong divide and versions of it had been in use for many centuries. Nor was the ‘Sinews of Peace’ speech the first time that he himself had used the term. However, his use of the term in a speech with such a large audience thrust it into wider circulation and associated it directly with the post-war situation.
Often interpreted as a key event in the origin of the Cold War, Churchill’s speech played a significant role in changing western perceptions of their former Soviet ally. Meanwhile, Stalin accused Churchill of warmongering, and defended the USSR’s relationship with Eastern Europe as a necessary barrier to future attacks.
"When the Dutch track star Fanny Blankers-Koen appeared at the 1948 London Olympics, soon to become the first woman to win four gold medals at a single Games, she was not the only welcomed and urgent arrival from the Netherlands.
A hundred tons of fruit and vegetables were also sent from the Low Countries to help feed Dutch and other athletes in a still-battered city during the first Summer Olympics held after World War II. Finland provided timber for the basketball court. Switzerland donated gymnastics equipment. Canada felled two Douglas firs to make diving boards.
The Austerity Olympics, they were nicknamed. They represented a renewal of the world’s biggest sporting event following the wartime cancellation of the Winter and Summer Games of 1940 and 1944 — a disruption deadlier and longer than a yearlong postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics because of the coronavirus pandemic."
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"Much of London remained devastated by the Blitz. Some critics saw the Olympics as an obscene waste in a nearly bankrupt Britain. But the government lent its support to signal postwar rejuvenation and to secure the desperate lifeline of hard currency from foreign tourists."
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"In an era of amateurism, Blankers-Koen was a rarity. It was difficult for any athlete to sustain an Olympic career across multiple Games when the ability to earn money from sport was prohibited. But she persevered through a gap of 12 years as the world went to war. Fanny Koen (pronounced COON), unmarried at the time, competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics as an 18-year-old, finishing tied for sixth in the high jump and fifth with the Netherlands’ 4x100-meter relay team. She met the great African-American sprinter Jesse Owens, who subverted Hitler’s notion of Aryan supremacy. In awe of his four gold medals, she asked for his autograph and had a drink with him, she told me in an interview in 2000."
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"Eventually, she would match Owens’s haul of four gold medals, but not before an interruption of more than a decade. In May 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands. Although the country was occupied, some domestic sports competitions continued. Koen trained intermittently but still set a handful of world records and married her coach, Jan Blankers, who had competed in the triple jump at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics. They had a son, Jan Jr., and, when food became scarce, they survived on potatoes and watery milk from an uncle who had a farm."
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"At war’s end, Blankers-Koen had a daughter, also named Fanny. For many women of that era, one child, much less two, would have meant the end of their athletic careers. But Blankers-Koen persisted, consulting her doctor, who told her, “You are breastfeeding, but try it.”"
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"As her nickname “The Flying Housewife” suggested, Blankers-Koen accommodated her training to her domestic responsibilities, working out twice a week, for two hours at a time, and only on Saturday afternoons during the winter. She was said to have pedaled to practice with her two children in a bicycle basket. While she ran and jumped, they played in the sand of the long-jump pit.
Blankers-Koen arrived at the 1948 London Olympics at age 30. By some accounts, she was also three months pregnant. Of the nine track-and-field events for women, she won four: the 100 meters, the 200 meters, the 80-meter hurdles and the 4x100-meter relay. She might have won five or six gold medals if athletes had not been restricted to three individual events. The winning distance in the long jump, for instance, fell nearly two feet short of her world record."
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"She died a year later, on Jan. 25, 2004, at age 85 from heart problems and Alzheimer’s disease. Blankers-Koen is not well known today, but three-quarters of a century after her triumphs in London, she remains the only female track and field athlete to win four gold medals in a single Olympics."
Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had nationalised the Suez Canal on 26 July, 1956. He had been careful to pay compensation to shareholders of the Suez Canal Company after the nationalisation, but both Britain and France were concerned about the potential economic and political problems that might ensue if Egypt chose to limit their access to the canal. They were particularly worried about access to oil from the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, Israel was angry that Egypt had closed the canal to their shipping and blockaded the Gulf of Aqaba.
Months of tense negotiations failed to reassure Britain and France who secretly began preparing a military response to take back control of the canal in alliance with Israel. An agreement between the three allies was concluded at Sèvres in France on 24 October. The Protocol of Sèvres called for a full-scale Israeli assault on Egyptian Sinai on 29 October, which would be followed the next day with calls from Britain and France for the two sides to withdraw from the Canal Zone. Their troops would then move in to the area and place it under Anglo-French control.
The Israeli invasion took place on 29 October as agreed, and Nasser rejected the demands to withdraw his troops from the canal. In response British and French forces invaded the Egyptian city of Port Said on the night of 5-6 November.
The invasion was met with international condemnation that pressured British Prime Minister Anthony Eden into calling a ceasefire just a day later.
The Suez Crisis, or the Second Arab–Israeli war, also called the tripartite aggression in the Arab world and Sinai War in Israel, was an invasion of Egypt in late 1956 by Israel, followed by the United Kingdom and France. The aims were to regain Western control of the Suez Canal and to remove Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had just nationalised the canal. After the fighting had started, political pressure from the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Nations led to a withdrawal by the three invaders. The episode humiliated the United Kingdom and France and strengthened Nasser.
On 29 October, Israel invaded the Egyptian Sinai. Britain and France issued a joint ultimatum to cease fire, which was ignored. On 5 November, Britain and France landed paratroopers along the Suez Canal. The Egyptian forces were defeated, but they did block the canal to all shipping. It later became clear that Israel, France and Britain had conspired to plan out the invasion.
The three allies had attained a number of their military objectives, but the canal was useless. Heavy political pressure from the United States and the USSR led to a withdrawal. U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower had strongly warned Britain not to invade; he threatened serious damage to the British financial system by selling the US government's pound sterling bonds. Historians conclude the crisis "signified the end of Great Britain's role as one of the world's major powers". The Suez Canal was closed from October 1956 until March 1957. Israel fulfilled some of its objectives, such as attaining freedom of navigation through the Straits of Tiran, which Egypt had blocked to Israeli shipping since 1950.
As a result of the conflict, the United Nations created the UNEF Peacekeepers to police the Egyptian–Israeli border, British prime minister Anthony Eden resigned, Canadian external affairs minister Lester Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize, and the USSR may have been emboldened to invade Hungary.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis .
Operation Musketeer (Opération Mousquetaire) was the Anglo-French plan for the invasion of the Suez canal zone to capture the Suez Canal during the Suez Crisis in 1956. ... Israel, which invaded the Sinai peninsula, had the additional objectives of opening the Straits of Tiran and halting fedayeen incursions into Israel. The Anglo-French military operation was originally planned for early September, but the necessity of coordination with Israel delayed it until early November. However, on 10 September British and French politicians and Chiefs of the General Staff agreed to adopt General Charles Keightley's alterations to the military plans with the intention of reducing Egyptian civilian casualties. The new plan, renamed Musketeer Revise, provided the basis of the actual Suez operation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Musketeer_(1956) .
