Quick questions on Growth of European tensions 1935-1939: HSC Modern History Peace and Conflict

The League of Nations had been founded in 1920 to provide collective security through arbitration and sanctions. It had limited successes in the 1920s (Aaland Islands 1921, Upper Silesia 1921) but no military force and no participation by the United States.

Italian forces invaded Abyssinia from Eritrea and Somaliland on 3 October 1935. The campaign used aerial bombing and mustard gas. The League imposed limited sanctions on 18 November 1935 (arms and credits but not oil) which hurt Italy without stopping the war. Italian forces took Addis Ababa on 5 May 1936; Emperor Haile Selassie addressed the League at Geneva on 30 June 1936 with his famous warning, "It is us today; it will be you tomorrow."

Germany announced rearmament publicly in March 1935: conscription (16 March), the Luftwaffe (9 March). The Anglo-German Naval Agreement (18 June 1935) authorised a German fleet of 35 per cent of British tonnage, with submarine parity, validating violation of Versailles.

The Spanish military rising began on 17 July 1936; the Civil War followed. Hitler and Mussolini backed General Franco's Nationalists; the USSR backed the Republican government; Britain and France ran the Non-Intervention Committee (September 1936) that produced no intervention.

The Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany and Japan (25 November 1936) was joined by Italy in November 1937. The Pact had limited operational content but signalled the diplomatic alignment of the three revisionist powers.

Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg attempted to call a plebiscite on Austrian independence for 13 March 1938. Hitler issued an ultimatum on 11 March; Schuschnigg resigned. Austrian Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart "invited" the Wehrmacht in. Hitler entered Vienna on 14 March.

The Prague occupation ended British public support for appeasement. Chamberlain announced a unilateral British guarantee of Polish independence on 31 March 1939. France joined the guarantee. Romania and Greece received guarantees shortly after.

Britain and France opened negotiations with the USSR in April 1939 for a three-power alliance against Germany. The talks dragged through the summer. The British and French delegations sent to Moscow in August lacked authority to commit; the Polish government refused to permit Red Army transit through Poland in the event of war. Stalin concluded that the western powers were not serious.

The German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was signed in Moscow by Foreign Ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov on 23 August 1939. The Pact: - Pledged non-aggression between Germany and the USSR. - Provided for arbitration of bilateral disputes. - Included secret protocols dividing Eastern Europe into spheres of influence: Estonia, Latvia, Finland, eastern Poland, and Bessarabia to the USSR; western Poland and Lithuania to Germany.

A staged "Polish" attack on the Gleiwitz radio station (31 August 1939) gave Hitler his pretext. The Wehrmacht crossed the Polish frontier at 4.45 am on 1 September 1939. Britain and France issued ultimatums; on 3 September they declared war. The USSR invaded eastern Poland on 17 September.

Richard Overy (The Origins of the Second World War, 1987) is the modern consensus: war was driven by Hitler's ideology of Lebensraum and racial conquest.

The Abyssinian crisis was the test the League failed; before 1935 it retained some credibility. The Hoare-Laval Pact was a choice.

It aligned the dictators, divided them from the democracies, and prefigured tactics (terror bombing, mechanisation).

23 August 1939, not 1 September.

He is the most famous revisionist, but Overy's intentionalist account is now dominant.