New Series: Prelude to War
How the World Stumbled into Global Catastrophe
On September 1st, 1939, German forces crossed the Polish border, unleashing a war that would consume the world for six years and claim over 70 million lives. The tanks rolling into Poland that September morning were the inevitable conclusion of two decades of diplomatic failures, economic disasters, bitter resentments, and fateful miscalculations.
The question that haunts historians is not simply how World War II started, but rather how the world allowed it to happen. The answers are more disturbing than any single villain’s ambitions. They reveal a cascade of failures by democratic leaders, a paralysis born of trauma from the previous war, and a series of gambles that each seemed reasonable at the time but collectively guaranteed catastrophe.
World War II did not begin in 1939. Its seeds were planted in the ashes of World War I, nurtured by a punitive peace, watered by economic collapse, and allowed to flourish through the wilful blindness of those who should have known better. This is not simply the story of Adolf Hitler’s rise, though that remains central. It is the story of how an entire international order failed, how democracies chose comfort over confrontation, how economic catastrophe bred political extremism, and how the victors of one war created the conditions for an even more terrible one.
A Twenty-Year Countdown
Between 1919 and 1939, the world had countless opportunities to prevent the worst conflict in human history. At every critical juncture, leaders faced clear choices: confront aggression or appease it, enforce international law or ignore it, stand by threatened allies or abandon them. Time and again, they chose the path that seemed safer, easier, more prudent in the moment.
Each choice made the next crisis worse. Each surrender emboldened the next act of aggression. Each miscalculation narrowed the remaining options until finally, in September 1939, there were no options left but war.
This series examines those twenty critical years, not as distant history, but as a case study in how civilisations fail to recognise danger until the moment has passed. Preventing World War II was neither impossible nor even particularly difficult in its early stages. What made it inevitable was a combination of exhaustion, miscalculation, economic chaos, and the mistaken belief that reasonable people could negotiate with unreasonable ideologies.
The story is more relevant than you might think.
What We Will Explore
Germany’s Transformation: How Democracy Dies
We begin in Germany, where you will witness one of history’s most dramatic and disturbing transformations. In 1919, Germany was a defeated but civilised nation with a new democratic government. By 1939, it had become a totalitarian war machine bent on conquest and racial extermination.
This was not inevitable. The Weimar Republic had moments of genuine stability and cultural brilliance. But it was born in defeat, humiliated by a punitive peace treaty, and then devastated by economic catastrophes that destroyed its citizens’ faith in democracy itself. When you understand how hyperinflation in 1923 evaporated life savings overnight, or how six million unemployed workers in the Great Depression created a generation without hope, Hitler’s rise stops being mysterious and starts being a warning.
You will follow Hitler from an unknown agitator scribbling in prison to absolute dictator of Europe’s most powerful nation, not through some inexplicable mass hypnosis, but through a series of rational calculations by people who thought they could control him. Conservative elites believed they could use Hitler to destroy the left, then discard him. Business leaders funded the Nazis to prevent communism. Generals thought they could manage him whilst rebuilding Germany’s military might.
They were all wrong. Their miscalculation changed history.
The Appeasement Trap: When Reasonable People Enable Catastrophe
The policy of appeasement is often mocked today, but in the 1930s it seemed like wisdom. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was neither a fool nor a coward. He was a man desperately trying to prevent another generation from dying in trenches. The memory of World War I’s carnage haunted European leaders. Surely, they thought, even Hitler’s demands had limits. Surely compromise was possible. Surely war could be avoided.
You will watch as Hitler tested the Western democracies step by step, learning with each success that threats and aggression worked whilst diplomacy and restraint were weaknesses to exploit. The remilitarisation of the Rhineland in 1936 was a bluff that would have collapsed if France had responded. The annexation of Austria in 1938 was accepted with barely a protest. The betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich sacrificed a democracy to purchase “peace for our time.”
Each surrender was justified as pragmatic. Each was meant to be the last. Each made the next crisis worse.
Winston Churchill watched from the political wilderness, warning anyone who would listen that appeasing Hitler would only feed his appetite. Few listened until Poland burned.
Stalin’s Cold Calculation: The Pact That Shocked the World
One of history’s most stunning diplomatic reversals came in August 1939 when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, sworn ideological enemies, signed a non-aggression pact. To understand why requires understanding how Western democracies consistently excluded and insulted the Soviet Union throughout the 1930s.
Stalin watched as Britain and France negotiated away Czechoslovakia at Munich without inviting him. He saw Western conservatives who seemed to view Nazi Germany as a useful bulwark against communism. He concluded, perhaps correctly, that the West hoped Germany and the Soviet Union would destroy each other.
Stalin made his own cynical calculation: buy time with a deal that carved up Eastern Europe between the two totalitarian powers. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact gave Hitler what he needed to invade Poland without fear of Soviet intervention. It was realpolitik at its most brutal, enabled by years of Western diplomatic failures.
Spain: The War Before the War
Before Poland, there was Spain, and the world should have been paying attention. From 1936 to 1939, Spain became the testing ground where every element of the coming global conflict played out in miniature.
Nazi Germany sent the Condor Legion to perfect bombing tactics. The destruction of Guernica previewed the horror of total war against civilians. Fascist Italy sent tens of thousands of troops. The Soviet Union sent weapons and advisers whilst settling old scores within the Republican ranks. Meanwhile, Britain and France paralysed themselves with a “non-intervention” policy that only prevented the democratic Spanish government from defending itself.
The International Brigades, volunteers from around the world who saw Spain as the place to stop fascism, fought bravely but without the support needed to win. When Franco’s Nationalists triumphed in March 1939, the lesson was clear: fascist powers act decisively, democracies do not, and aggression pays.
Six months later, Germany invaded Poland.
The League of Nations: When International Law Has No Teeth
The League of Nations was supposed to make World War I “the war to end all wars” by creating a system of collective security. Instead, it became a symbol of how good intentions without enforcement mechanisms accomplish nothing.
Japan invaded Manchuria. The League condemned it. Japan left the League and kept Manchuria. Italy used poison gas in Ethiopia. The League imposed half-hearted sanctions. Italy conquered Ethiopia anyway. Germany violated the Treaty of Versailles with impunity. The League protested. Germany kept rearming.
Each failure taught potential aggressors that international law was a toothless joke. The League’s collapse is a cautionary tale about the difference between wanting peace and being willing to enforce it.
America’s Absence: The Superpower That Looked Away
The United States might have been the one power capable of deterring Hitler. Instead, America deliberately chose isolation.
The trauma of World War I, combined with the Great Depression’s economic devastation, convinced Americans that Europe’s problems were not their concern. Congress passed Neutrality Acts tying President Franklin Roosevelt’s hands even as he watched fascism spread. Roosevelt personally understood the threat but faced overwhelming public opposition to involvement.
Hitler calculated, correctly, that he could invade Poland without American intervention. By the time America finally entered the war after Pearl Harbour in December 1941, Europe had been at war for over two years and millions were already dead.
Japan’s Parallel Path: The Other Axis
Whilst Europe descended towards war, Japan pursued its own imperial ambitions in Asia. The invasion of China in 1937 bogged down into a brutal war of attrition. Western embargoes, particularly of oil, created a ticking clock for Japanese planners: seize the resource-rich territories of Southeast Asia or watch the military machine grind to a halt.
Japan’s militarist government, dominated by young officers frustrated with civilian leadership and Western obstruction, saw opportunity in Europe’s distraction. The alliance with Germany and Italy formalised what was already clear: this would be a global conflict, with theatres of war across multiple continents and oceans.
Poland: The Nation That Refused to Surrender Without a Fight
Poland’s tragedy was not weakness but geography. Reborn after World War I, Poland found itself caught between two expansionist powers that had secretly agreed to divide it between them.
When Hitler demanded the return of Danzig and extraterritorial access through the Polish Corridor, Poland’s leaders refused. They had fought too hard for independence to surrender it without resistance. Britain and France had guaranteed Poland’s borders. Surely that meant something?
It meant declarations of war after Poland was already being destroyed. It meant watching helplessly as German forces crushed Polish resistance whilst Soviet forces invaded from the east. It meant learning that guarantees without the capability or will to enforce them are just words on paper.
Polish forces fought bravely against overwhelming odds, but they were fighting two superpowers simultaneously whilst their supposed allies could offer only moral support.
Why This History Still Matters
These are not just stories about events long past. The patterns that led to World War II, the failure to confront aggression early when the cost is low, the belief that unreasonable actors can be appeased with reasonable concessions, the paralysis that comes from trauma and fear of conflict, the way economic crisis can shatter democratic norms, these patterns did not die in 1945.
Understanding how World War II became inevitable requires understanding how a series of individually defensible decisions collectively guaranteed catastrophe. It requires understanding how leaders can be simultaneously well-intentioned and catastrophically wrong. It requires recognising that the worst outcomes do not always announce themselves with obvious warning signs. Sometimes they arrive through a sequence of choices that each seemed prudent at the time.
The interwar period is a masterclass in how international order collapses, how democracies fail from within, and how the space between peace and war can disappear faster than anyone expects.
The Journey Ahead
This series takes you through the critical twenty years between World War I and World War II, examining not just what happened but why it happened and why it mattered. You will meet the leaders who made fateful choices, witness the moments when different decisions might have changed everything, and understand how the most destructive war in history became nearly impossible to prevent.
We begin with Germany’s transformation in the chaotic aftermath of World War I, then expand to examine the international failures that allowed Nazi aggression to flourish unchecked. Each article builds on the last, but each can also stand alone. You can read them in order or jump to the topics that interest you most.
By the time we reach September 1st, 1939, you will understand not just that German tanks crossed into Poland, but why they crossed, why Poland stood alone, and why the world that had worked so hard to avoid war found itself in an even more terrible conflict than the one it had barely survived twenty years earlier.
The story of how World War II began is ultimately a story about choices, about the difficulty of standing firm when compromise seems easier, about how economic desperation makes people embrace dangerous ideologies, and about how even intelligent, well-meaning people can catastrophically misjudge threats until confronting them becomes far more costly than it needed to be.
These are lessons worth learning, because the circumstances that made them necessary did not disappear with Nazi Germany’s defeat. They remain part of how nations and leaders behave under pressure, waiting for the next crisis to test whether we have actually learned anything from history’s darkest chapter.
The road to war was not inevitable. It was built, decision by decision, compromise by compromise, surrender by surrender.
Let us trace how it was built, so we might recognise when we are on similar roads.
Coming in Part 1: Germany’s Descent (1918-1933)
Seven articles exploring the revolution, chaos, economic catastrophe, and political collapse that transformed Germany from defeated empire to Nazi dictatorship, and why millions of ordinary Germans embraced Hitler as their salvation.
Join Me on This Journey
If you share my fascination with World War II history and want to explore the events, decisions, and people that shaped this defining period, please subscribe and share. Each article will arrive as it is published, taking you deeper into the stories that shaped the outcome of WW2.