Second World War

Background

Quigley denies the war was inevitable in any cosmic sense but argues it was inevitable given the choices made in the inter-war period. The Treaty of Versailles left Germany humiliated but not disarmed in the long run; the Dawes Plan (1924) and Locarno Pacts (1925) stabilized the continent only as long as American credit continued to flow; the Crash of 1929 and the deflation of 1930–1933 destroyed the political center in Germany and brought Hitler to power; and Anglo-French diplomacy between 1933 and 1939 — what Quigley analyzes as the Milner Group's appeasement strategy — refused to organize the collective security that might have deterred German expansion until it was too late (T&H 580–620; AAE 220–272).

The immediate detonator was the Hitler–Stalin Pact of 23 August 1939, which removed the threat of a two-front war and freed Germany to invade Poland on 1 September. Britain and France declared war on 3 September. Quigley treats the timing as the result of Hitler's miscalculation about British resolve, which he had every reason to doubt after Munich (T&H 632–636; AAE 268–272).

Quigley's framing

Quigley's analysis of the war is unusual in two respects. First, in The Anglo-American Establishment he reads the war's first phase (1939–1940) through the lens of the Milner Group's compromised position: Chamberlain, Halifax, and the Cliveden Set had spent the late 1930s reassuring Hitler about British acquiescence to German expansion east, and were psychologically unprepared to fight an offensive war (AAE 230–238). The 'phony war' of 1939–1940 is, in Quigley's reading, the Milner Group's continued search for a negotiated settlement — a search that only ends with the Norway debate of May 1940 and the replacement of Chamberlain by Churchill (AAE 264–270).

Second, in Tragedy and Hope Quigley reads the war as the moment that finally completes the shift of civilizational leadership from the European core to its peripheral derivatives. The war breaks France, exhausts Britain, and shows definitively that the management of Western Civilization has passed to the U.S. and (in adversarial form) to Russia (T&H 695–720). The post-war world is bipolar because the war made it so: it killed every alternative.

Conduct of the war

Quigley's military analysis emphasizes that the offensive had recovered its dominance over the defensive — the inverse of 1914–1918. The combination of mechanized armor, tactical airpower, and radio coordination (what the Germans synthesized as Blitzkrieg) made breakthrough operations possible again, and meant the war would be decided not by attrition in trenches but by industrial production at continental scale (T&H 678–690; Quigley, 'Weapons Systems,' 1960). On those terms the Axis was structurally doomed once the war became global. Germany could not match American + Soviet + British industrial output combined; Japan could not match American output alone.

The war's pivot points, in Quigley's narrative, are: the German invasion of the USSR (June 1941), which made the conflict continental; the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (7 December 1941), which made it global (T&H 583, 310); the Battle of Midway (June 1942) and Stalingrad (winter 1942–1943), the two simultaneous turning points; the Anglo-American invasion of France (June 1944); and the use of atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 1945) which both ended the war and inaugurated the nuclear era Quigley analyzes in Weapons Systems and Political Stability.

Outcomes

The war killed approximately fifty million people — the largest single human catastrophe in recorded history — and produced four institutional facts that govern the post-war order. First, the Bretton Woods system (July 1944) established the IMF and World Bank and put the U.S. dollar at the center of international finance, completing the displacement of London by New York that the First World War had begun (T&H 796, 809). Second, the United Nations charter (San Francisco, June 1945) replaced the failed League of Nations with an organization explicitly built around great-power consensus. Third, the partition of Germany, of Korea, and (de facto) of Europe along the Iron Curtain produced the geography of the Cold War. Fourth, the demonstrated atomic bomb produced what Quigley analyzes as a 'mutual stalemate' weapons system whose political consequence was the Cold War itself (T&H 873–880; Quigley, 'Weapons Systems,' 1960).

The Anglo-American institutions Quigley tracks throughout AAE were central to the post-war settlement: Group members and CFR/RIIA personnel staffed the planning bodies, the Bretton Woods delegations, and the early UN secretariat (AAE 282–290; T&H 952). What had been an inter-war network became a post-war establishment.

Consequences

Quigley reads the war's consequences on two registers. Civilizationally, it confirmed that Western Civilization had entered its Age of Conflict (the second paroxysm following 1914–1918), with the U.S. and the USSR as the two surviving great powers and the old European core reduced to managed dependents. The Marshall Plan (1948–1952) and the Cold War institutionalized this dependency (T&H 567, 891).

For the Milner Group, Quigley argues, the war was both vindication and end. Vindication: Group members staffed the wartime cabinet (the senior figures around Churchill — Amery, Halifax, Lothian as ambassador to Washington) and the post-war institutions. End: the Empire the Group had organized to preserve liquidated itself in the post-war decade. India became independent in 1947, the African colonies followed in the late 1950s and 1960s, and Britain's economic position made an independent foreign policy increasingly impossible (AAE 290–300).

More broadly, Quigley insists the war's deepest consequence was psychological: the Western confidence that had survived 1914–1918 in attenuated form did not survive 1939–1945. The decade of Hitler and Stalin had shown that totalitarian collapse was a real possibility for advanced industrial societies. This is the 'tragedy' of his book's title — and 'hope' is the residual confidence that the Cold War stalemate, plus the technocratic management developed during the war, might be enough to give the West time to recover (T&H 1310–1311).