1 - Total War: The Global Dimensions of Conflict

Summary

When should we consider that World War II began? I will operate with the view that the Italian attack on Abyssinia was a resumption of the sort of colonial war that Italy and other Europeans had waged in prior times. Similarly, it seems to me that the war Japan started in China in 1937 belongs in the series of wars that Japan had initiated beginning with that against China in 1894 for the expansion of its empire in East Asia. The very traditional expansionist nature of these two conflicts in their initial stages helps explain why both Italy and Japan switched sides after World War I. They had snatched from the Central Powers all that could be taken from them, so further expansion of the traditional kind could come only at the expense of their allies in the Great War. They imagined that the opportunity to do so was provided for them by the war Germany began in September 1939, and it is therefore with the German invasion of Poland that World War II should be seen to begin.

In spite of some confusion on this subject among such authors as John Lukacs, the conflict that Germany started in September 1939 was global from the very beginning. The participation of Canada, the Union of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand guaranteed this. And the global character of warfare was real, not nominal. With Soviet assistance, the Germans moved an auxiliary cruiser into the Pacific Ocean in 1940; there it sank or captured some 64,000 tons of Allied shipping before returning to Germany.