Appeasement in Russian, Chinese,

and American Foreign Policy, 1931-1941

Teddy J. Uldricks

University of North Carolina at Asheville

         While the term appeasement is normally associated with Britain and France, a policy of appeasing aggressors prior to World War II was not limited to London and Paris, but was pursued at some time and in one form or another by all of the non-Axis powers, including the United States, Nationalist China and the Soviet Union.[1]   Moreover, all five of them appeased the Axis aggressors for essentially similar motives.  Those reasons include misunderstanding the character and/or degree of the Axis threat, the global extent of the threat (i.e., dealing with Japan as well as Germany and Italy), ideological hostility to other non-Axis potential alliance partners (anti-communism/anti-imperialism), bitter memories of past war devastation coupled with a strong desire to avoid a repetition of that havoc, and desperation to buy time in order to rectify inadequate military preparations.  Of course, the timing, objects and specific manifestations of appeasement differed in each of the non-Axis states and none of the five powers practiced appeasement consistently and without contradiction as its sole response to Axis aggression.  Instead, each pursued intertwined policies of appeasement and resistance to one or more of the aggressor states – with the proportion of each of these elements varying through time.

The United States

                Appeasement was also practiced by the United States, but on this side of the Atlantic it was better known as isolationism, which sprang from a widespread disenchantment with American participation in the First World War and with the peace treaty which ended it.  Many Americans came to believe that their country had been drawn under false pretenses into a European conflict which was none of their business.  The unsavory picture of the victors at Paris squabbling over the spoils combined with Bolshevik revelations of secret Allied treaties to undermine the image of the war as a moral crusade for democracy and national self-determination.  In 1934-1935 a Senate investigating committee, under the chairmanship of Gerald P. Nye, claimed to have unearthed evidence showing that the United States had been drawn into the Great War by greedy bankers and arms manufacturers.  The general public lost interest in foreign affairs, reverting to an attitude of smug and disdainful superiority toward the outside world.  Above all, the vast majority of Americans were determined not to let the nation be lured into the quagmire of European war again.  In government, the isolationist impulse expressed itself as a firm refusal to enter into alliances or most types of binding commitments, whether a guarantee of French security or membership in the League of Nations.  Ultimately, isolationism entailed refusal to assume responsibilities in world affairs which America’s wealth and power thrust upon it – responsibilities Britain and France, severely weakened by the First World War, could no longer fully shoulder.

                Menacing developments in the early 1930s – the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the rise of Hitler to power in Germany, and Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia – convinced Americans that another major war might soon break out in Europe or Asia.   Congress was especially anxious that the sort of violations of American neutral rights which had led to the US declaration of war in 1917 not recur.  For that reason it passed a series of Neutrality Acts between 1935 and 1937 which banned the sale of arms and ammunition or the granting of loans to belligerent powers, prohibited US ships from sailing into war zones, warned Americans that they could travel on vessels of warring states only at their own risk, and required any nation at war to pay cash for American goods and to transport those purchases in their own ships.  This neutrality legislation was to be applied uniformly to all parties at war, aggressors and victims alike.  The intent of these laws was merely to keep the United States out of war, but they sometimes worked to the advantage of the already well-armed predator nations by cutting off American supplies from any country which had been attacked.

                Similarly, public opinion polling throughout the 1930s demonstrated that, while more and more Americans disapproved of the atrocious behavior of the Nazis, Italian Fascists and Japanese militarists, few wanted to risk American lives to stop it.  After the fall of Poland in October of 1939 only 3.5% of Americans polled favored an American declaration of war with Germany, while 96.5% opposed that step.  The following year, after the fall of France, 85% of Americans opposed going to war with Germany and Italy, with only 15% favoring the measure.  By 1941 the spectacular Nazi victories in the Balkans, Russia, and North Africa had begun to alarm Americans.  At this point 57% of respondents identified the defeat of Germany as a more important goal than keeping the US out war.  In contrast, as late as August of 1941 76% of Americans still wanted to avoid hostilities with Japan.[2]  Sentiment among Senate Republicans and some Democrats was even more averse to war.

                Franklin Roosevelt was considerably more realistic in his assessment of Hitler than was British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. But the president was constrained in foreign and defense policy by the need to focus on fighting the Great Depression and also by his personal aversion to war.  Nevertheless, as early as 1935 FDR told some of his cabinet officers privately that the Führer was an international gangster, a bandit who would someday have to be stopped.  The president was similarly outraged by Japanese and Italian aggression, but he was hindered from taking firm action against the aggressors by the pervasive anti-interventionist sentiment among the public and especially in Congress.[3]  Roosevelt had hoped, for example, that the neutrality statutes would be framed so as to give the president discretionary power to apply them against aggressor states but not against countries legitimately defending themselves.  Congress refused.  FDR could invoke the arms embargo in good conscience during the Italo-Ethiopian war because only the Italians had any possibility of buying significant amounts of American armaments.  The situation was different in Asia.  There China desperately needed war materiel from the United States to defend itself from the Japanese attack.  Fortunately the legislation did grant the president authority to determine where and when a state of war existed.  Roosevelt took advantage of the technicality that the “China incident” was an undeclared war to avoid invoking the Neutrality Acts and thus cutting off aid to China.

                The isolationists argued that America could defend itself, secure between two broad oceans, and that the most dangerous threat to the United States was the Roosevelt administration’s interventionist inclinations.  This viewpoint was notably championed by Charles Lindbergh who, in his “Air Defense of America” speech, proclaimed that, “Our danger in America is an internal danger.  We need not fear a foreign invasion unless the American peoples bring it on through their own quarreling and meddling with affairs abroad.”[4]

                The efforts of President Roosevelt to oppose aggression were severely hampered by isolationist sentiment, by the multifaceted threat of war in both Europe and Asia, and by American military weakness.  The land forces, in particular, had been allowed to atrophy after 1918.  The interwar US Army numbered only about 110,000 men and it was so poorly equipped that recruits sometimes had to drill with wooden rifles.  Although the US Navy constituted a powerful force, American air power was as yet little developed .  Moreover, Anglo-French appeasement gave the president little scope for effective American intervention against Nazi treaty violations and aggression.  There was, in fact, a vicious dialectic at work here; Anglo-French appeasement and American isolationism reinforced each other.  Chamberlain’s assurances that a reasonable settlement with Hitler could be reached confirmed for many Americans the belief that US intervention on the Continent was neither necessary nor prudent.  Similarly, the British belief that America could not be mobilized for effective action in Europe strengthened the conviction in London that appeasement was the only viable option.  Chamberlain commented at the end of 1937 that, “the power that had the greatest strength was the United States of America, but he would be a rash man who based this considerations on help from that quarter.”[5]

                Beyond isolationism, anti-communism fostered appeasement.  Like their counterparts in Britain and France, American conservatives at first saw Mussolini and then Hitler as powerful bastions against the spread of the revolutionary contagion.  The Soviet Union’s self-appointed leadership of the anti-fascist movement tainted that crusade in the eyes of many.  Hatred of the New Deal, antipathy toward the American left, suspicion of the Republican cause in Spain, and deep distrust of the Soviet collective security campaign combined to reinforce the isolationist impulse.  Before Hitler’s victories in 1940 and 1941 threatened the global balance of power, any anti-fascist bloc between the western democracies and the USSR seemed premature at best and an invitation to communist subversion at worst.

                Saddled with these handicaps, the president initially had no effective means of blocking the aggressors.   His caution (in a few cases, timidity) has led some historians to conclude mistakenly that Roosevelt was, himself, an isolationist.[6]  Politics, it is said, is the art of the possible and FDR was the consummate political artist.  He realized that he had neither the public support nor the military power to halt Nazi or Japanese expansionism.  Given the strength of isolationism, to move too boldly would have diminished his own political popularity and undermined support for his anti-depression domestic reforms.  Roosevelt was too smart a politician to take on a fight that could not be won.  For the time being all he could do was struggle to strengthen the nation's defenses and begin the painfully slow process of remolding public opinion, alerting it to the serious danger which Nazi Germany posed for American security.  Roosevelt had inherited the previous administration’s non-recognition response to the Japanese take-over of Manchuria in 1931.  Although Japanese aggression in China violated the long-standing American open door doctrine, FDR could do little but continue that ineffectual policy.  In 1935 the president requested the nations’s first peacetime billion dollar defense budget.  Roosevelt justified expansion of the armed forces as a deterrent to would-be aggressors.  “The American nation,” he told Congress, “is committed to peace and the principal reason for the existence of our armed forces is to guarantee our peace.”  The administration also mutually reinforced its foreign and domestic policies by using Public Works Administration money to build the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Yorktown, four cruisers, more than a hundred planes for the army, and some fifty military airports.

                Persuading the American public to support a more vigorous stance against aggressors proved to be no easy task.  Congressional isolationists and such public pressure groups as the American First Committee and the No Foreign War committee rose in a storm of protest any time US policy veered too closely parallel to that of the League of Nations or of Britain and France.  In support of League sanctions against Mussolini, in 1935 Roosevelt proclaimed a “moral embargo” to persuade Americans voluntarily not to supply the Italian war machine.  The effort failed as American oil companies scrambled for lucrative Italian oil contracts.  Similarly, after the Marco Polo bridge incident in China, American firms continued to provide the petroleum products and scrap metal on which the Japanese war effort depended.  However, Roosevelt’s deliberate failure to define Sino-Japanese conflict as a war, thus circumventing the Neutrality Acts, permitted the sale to China of 86 million dollars worth of American munitions between July and November 1937 while only one and a half million dollars worth of arms went to Japan.  In contrast, FDR, willingly followed the Anglo-French policy of non-intervention in the Spanish civil war in the vain hope of preventing a wider European conflict.

                The president made his boldest attempt yet to sway public opinion and influence foreign governments in his “quarantine speech” in Chicago on October 5, 1937, in which he decried a spreading “epidemic of world lawlessness.”  Roosevelt’s words remained an empty gesture, however, because he could not back them with firm action.  They certainly did not deter the aggressors.  Hitler, in particular, despised the American president as the ineffectual, Jew-ridden head of a mongrelized nation.  Nor did FDR’s entirely verbal encouragements stiffen the resistance of Britain and France to Nazi encroachments.  Japanese atrocities in China, Hitler’s belligerence, and the anti-Jewish horrors of Kristallnacht deepened American hostility to the aggressors and bolstered support for increased defense spending, but did not alter the nation’s resolve to avoid US participation in foreign wars.  Moreover, in 1937 the economy deteriorated once more and the president’s political opponents massed for an attack on his domestic programs.  Under these circumstances he could do little to hinder Hitler’s plans.  During the Munich crisis FDR could only make personal pleas to the dictators for a negotiated settlement.  As Robert Dallek has suggested, “Hitler and Mussolini probably viewed Roosevelt’s appeals as gestures by a powerless man.”[7]

                The president was able to take firmer action against the menace of Nazi subversion in the western hemisphere.  Under US prodding the Pan-American Conference issued the Declaration of Lima in December 1938, pledging the American republics to take concerted action against the fascist threat to hemispheric security.  Roosevelt also overcame considerable opposition to providing the French air force with new Douglas DB-7 bombers.  However, even the German absorption of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, which convinced a majority of Americans that the US ought to provide arms for the western democracies, did not enable FDR to push a revision of the Neutrality Acts through Congress.  His congressional opponents even accused him of seeking foreign adventures to buoy up the sagging New Deal at home.  The president was once more thrown back on rhetoric in lieu of more substantive responses to aggression.  In April he asked Hitler and Mussolini to promise publicly that they would not attack thirty-one specified nations for at least ten years.  Predictably, the dictators treated this gambit with contempt.  Since the president had been forced to reassure Congress that he would under no circumstances send American troops to Europe, Berlin and Rome dismissed the United States as an inconsequential factor in world politics.  Roosevelt took this and similarly purely verbal initiatives primarily for their domestic effect in order, as he phrased it, to “put the bee on Germany.”  As long as Berlin and Rome regarded the USA so contemptuously, nothing the president said could deflect them from the path of conquest.

                Not until the Axis victories threatened the global balance of power did the shift of American public opinion toward interventionism accelerate and the Roosevelt administration gain the congressional support (though just barely) for more effective measures against aggression.  German conquests of France, the Balkans, western Russia, and North Africa together with Japanese occupation of the China coast and of Indo-China raised the horrifying possibilities that both Britain and the USSR would be defeated, the Axis gain hegemony over most of the earth, and America be left genuinely isolated in a fascist/militarist world.  The lend-lease agreement, the sale of destroyers to Britain, the transfer of the Pacific fleet to Pearl Harbor, the freezing of Japanese assets in the US, the embargo on selling petroleum products to Japan, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s refusal to agree to Japanese demands in the fall of 1941 (even though the American leadership knew that such a refusal meant war), all indicate a gradual turning away from isolationism and appeasement by the American people and their government.  But even then, with London bombed nightly and Panzer spearheads approaching Moscow, the American people and Congress still opposed the entry of the United States into the war.  It took a surprise attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and a foolish declaration of war on America by Hitler to accomplish that necessary end.

The Soviet Union

                The Soviet Union, like the western powers, at first had hoped that it could do business as usual with the Nazi regime, maintaining the Rapallo relationship of political, economic, and even limited military cooperation that it had enjoyed with Weimar Germany.  As Deputy Foreign Commissar Nikolai Krestinskii wrote soon after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, “We want the present government to keep to a friendly position in relations with us.  We are counting on this – that the Hitler government is dictated by the necessity of not breaking with us....”[8]  Berlin, however, rejected every Soviet overture and even signed a non-aggression pact with Moscow’s long time antagonist, Poland.  In response, the Politburo authorized a dramatic reversal of Soviet foreign policy in December of 1933.[9]

                Under the new collective security doctrine, while the democracies attempted to avoid or at least postpone war through appeasement, the USSR pursued the opposite policy.  Moscow labored to construct a new Triple Entente which would deter Hitler from the path of aggression by taking a strong stand against German advances. The Soviet Union attempted to reinvigorate the collective security procedures of the League of Nations, negotiate bilateral mutual defense pacts with the western powers, and gain broad support for this orientation through the Popular Front line in the Comintern.

                Although collective security was pursued with vigor throughout the decade, the Kremlin continued to hope that Hitler would turn from his anti-Soviet course and normalize relations with Russia.  Even Maksim Litvinov, that apostle of collective security, proclaimed that Russo-German relations could be rebuilt if the security interests of the USSR were respected by the Reich.[10]  There were a few tentative Soviet attempts in the 1930s to suggest a rapprochement with Berlin, but they were rebuffed by the Germans.[11]  Collective security remained both the doctrine which most closely approximated Soviet security interests in this decade and the only course apparently open to the Kremlin in the face of implacable Nazi hostility to Russia.

                There was, of course, a faction in the Soviet leadership which clung to the Anglophobia that had prevailed among the Bolsheviks from 1917 to 1933.  It had been an article of faith for most of them that Great Britain was the center of a global, anti-communist, anti-Russian campaign which might renew at any time the military intervention of 1918 to 1922 against Soviet Russia.  Among top level Soviet leaders, Viacheslav Molotov and Andrei Vyshinskii seem to have advocated to this position.[12]  Historian Silvio Pons has suggested that their concept of Soviet security was essentially “isolationist.”[13]  Hitler’s rise to power, the rearmament of Germany, and the anti-Soviet orientation of Berlin’s foreign policy convinced Stalin, Litvinov, and the majority of the Politburo that Third Reich had replaced Britain as the most menacing threat to Soviet security.  Nonetheless, the failure of Britain and France to respond positively to repeated, intensive Soviet initiatives for a new Triple Entente revived fears within the Kremlin that what the bourgeois democracies really wanted was a mutually destructive Russo-German war.  Molotov would later praise Stalin for “...unmasking the intrigues of those Western European politicians who tried to throw Germany and the Soviet Union into conflict with each other.”[14]

                The Munich debacle, together with the continued unwillingness of Britain and France to commit themselves to a clearly defined alliance with the Soviet Union, finally caused Stalin to abandon the collective security campaign in favor of the Nazi-Soviet collaboration embodied in the Non-Aggression Pact of 24 August 1939, the Boundary and Friendship Treaty of 28 September 1939, and the secret protocols appended to both of those agreements.[15]  It is a tragic irony that, precisely when Britain and France began to shift from appeasement to resistance, Soviet policy was moving in the opposite direction.

                The Non-Aggression Treaty did not merely establish the USSR as a neutral state.  It, together with its secret protocols and the Russo-German commercial agreement signed four days earlier, constituted a quasi-alliance between Stalin and Hitler.  The pact lacked an escape clause, normally found in non-aggression treaties, invalidating it if either party were to commit aggression against a third power.  The omission was deliberate, for Stalin certainly knew that the Wehrmacht was poised to invade Poland.  Each side also pledged not to join any alliance directed against the other.  In essence Stalin had given Hitler permission to attack Poland without fear of a significant two-front war.  A month after the pact Stalin even reassured German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, that, if the tide of war should turn against Germany, the USSR would come to its aid![16]

                The Soviet contribution to the Nazi war effort went far beyond this beneficial non-belligerence, however.  Just as Hitler – and Stalin – had suspected, Britain and France did not follow their declaration of war on Germany with significant military operations.  Their "guarantee" of Poland had never been more than a political gambit.  Anglo-French military strategy was shaped by their vast overestimation of German military power and by their desperate desire to avoid another ghastly war of attrition á la 1914.  The Allies had no desire for a decisive, frontal engagement with the Wehrmacht in 1939.  Instead, they intended to fight a primarily economic war.  Their strategy involved prolonging the war as a low-intensity conflict for more than two years during which time they, supported by their empires and the United States, would grow far stronger while Germany's resources would be depleted.  As part of this strategy the Allies employed their overwhelming naval superiority to mount a blockade of the Reich.  Allied strategists believed that two years of blockade would completely disrupt the German war economy and bring Hitler to his knees.  In practice, however, the blockade was much less effective than Western planners had expected.  In addition to trade with Axis partner Italy and neutral Sweden, the steady expansion of Russo-German trade enabled Berlin to obtain vitally needed stocks of food, fuel and raw materials from the USSR.  From January 1940 to June 1941 the USSR shipped the following quantities of food and raw materials to the Reich:  1.5 million tons of grain, 100,000 tons of cotton, 2 million tons of petroleum products, 1.5 million tons of timber, 140,000 tons of manganese and 26,000 tons of chromium.[17]  The Soviets also procured for Germany on the world market many commodities the USSR did not produce, such as tin, rubber and soy beans.  These goods were then transshipped across the USSR to the Reich.  Moreover, the terms of the trade agreement gave Germany a substantial advantage by providing that Soviet deliveries of raw materials and agricultural products should start immediately.  In contrast, German shipments of manufactured goods to the USSR were to be based on subsequently negotiated orders.  This meant that the Soviets actually supplied great quantities of material to the Reich, while the Germans found many excuses to delay and thereby limit the shipment of orders to the USSR.

                In addition to economic support for the Nazi war machine, immediately after signing the Non-Aggression Pact Stalin appeased Hitler by dramatically reversing the public, official Soviet view of the international situation.  From 1934 to 1939 Moscow vigorously and continuously denounced the menace of Nazi aggression, while appealing to the Western democracies for mutual support against that threat.  After the Pact, it was Britain and France which were denounced as warmongers, not Germany.[18]  This campaign to avoid giving offense to the Germans was carried to the extent of immediately removing anti-fascist movies from theaters and even replacing German communist periodicals with Nazi publications in some public libraries![19]  At the same time the Soviet media denounced Britain and France with the animus of a lover spurned.

                Soviet appeasement of Nazi Germany was also manifested in some limited military and political collaboration.  Soviet military cooperation with the German war effort included the provision of a radio navigational beacon for German bombers attacking Poland, the use of Murmansk as a port of refuge by German ships, and the temporary establishment of a German submarine base in Zapadnaia Litza Bay near Murmansk.[20]  The Soviet invasion of eastern Poland on September 17, 1939 had characteristics of both appeasement and resistance.  On one hand, it responded to a request by Ribbentrop on September 3rd that the Soviets secure the zone of Poland ascribed to them in the secret protocols,[21] it concluded in a joint Russo-German appeal for peace with the Allies (a document couched in terms extremely critical of the Allies),[22] and, most importantly, in the eyes of the Western powers it firmly identified Moscow and Berlin as comrades in arms.  On the other hand, the Soviet move into Poland led to some fighting between Red Army and Wehrmacht forces and it did augment Soviet defenses against Germany by pushing the border farther away from the main military and political centers of administration in the USSR.  There was also appeasement via political collaboration of a particularly disreputable sort, namely the exchange of prisoners by the NKVD and the Gestapo.  The Soviet security service actually handed over German communist refugees to the Nazis.[23]

                Finally, there was considerable Soviet appeasement of Nazi Germany by diplomatic means.  Moscow tried to avoid even the appearance of collusion with the Anglo-French camp so as not to offend Berlin.  As the British ambassador in Moscow, Sir Stafford Cripps, reported at one point, "not only Stalin, but even Molotov avoided me like grim death.  Stalin...did not want to have anything to do with Churchill, so alarmed was he lest the Germans find out."[24]  Similarly, American diplomats found the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Konstantin Umanskii, hostile and evasive.  He also appeared to be making frequent reports to the German embassy (presumably that his government was not conniving with the United States).[25]  Two more examples from May of 1941– the USSR extended diplomatic recognition to the pro-Nazi Rashid Ali regime in Iraq and then subsequently expelled from Moscow the representatives of the Norwegian, Belgian and Yugoslav governments in exile.  This campaign of diplomatic appeasement intensified so that by November of 1940 the Soviets were even willing to join the Axis.[26]

                Soviet policy toward Germany from 1939 to 1941 was, of course, not solely a policy of supine appeasement; there were some elements of resistance to Nazi aggression in it, too.  The most important part of resistance was the crash campaign, already underway in 1939, to build Soviet military strength.  The aspects of that program – pushing forward the borders of the Soviet Union, vastly expanding numerical strength of the Red Army, reequipping the Soviet forces with modern armaments, and developing new operational plans to meet a German attack – were certainly unwelcome in Berlin.   In the period between the signing of the Non-Aggression Pact and Operation Barbarossa, the Soviet armed forces grew by almost three and a half million men.  Its weapons inventory expanded by almost 10,000 tanks and 3,000 modern aircraft.[27]  This substantial buildup of Soviet military power might have provoked the Germans, but the risk had to be taken, since the whole point of the appeasement policy was to buy time to enhance Soviet defenses.

                Stalin was also capable of offering diplomatic resistance to German advances.  This was especially true in the Balkans.  The Soviet-Yugoslav Treaty of Friendship and Non-Aggression of 5 April 1941 was obviously an attempt to block the consolidation of German influence in Southeast Europe, despite Moscow's quick abandonment of Belgrade once the Wehrmacht attacked.  Molotov's famous meeting in Berlin with Hitler and Ribbentrop is an even better example.  The Soviet foreign commissar refused to be distracted by vague promises of imperial advances toward the Indian Ocean and, instead, repeatedly insisted on bringing up thorny issues in Russo-German relations – Finland, Rumania, Bulgaria and the Straits.  Similarly, the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact of 13 April 1941 was another powerful diplomatic blow struck against Germany.  Though, it was, at the same time, another measure of appeasement toward Japan in its campaign to conquer China.

                Thus, Soviet behavior toward the Third Reich in the period from the Non-Aggression Pact to Operation Barbarossa was characterized by sustained attempts to forestall a German attack on the USSR through appeasement, combined with at least some measures of resistance.  Stalin certainly never misunderstood the ultimate nature of the Nazi threat as Neville Chamberlain did.  The Soviet dictator seems to have realized that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact only postponed an inevitable conflict with the Reich.  As he said in October of 1939, "A German attack is also possible.  For six years German fascists and the Communists cursed each other.  Now an unexpected turn took place; that happens in the course of history.  But one cannot rely upon it.  We must be prepared in time.  Others who were not paid the price."[28]  Yet, Stalin did misunderstand the degree and imminence of the threat.  He seems to have counted on a substantial campaign in Poland and then a prolonged war of attrition on the Western front, similar to that of 1914-1918.[29]  Such a war would materially weaken both Nazi Germany and the western Allies and also give the USSR until 1942 or even 1943 to perfect its defenses.

                Ideological hostilities contributed to appeasement in Moscow just as they had in London and Paris.  The conviction that the Western democracies had fostered the rise of Hitler and the rearmament of the German war machine and that the Western powers were intent on pushing the Wehrmacht against the USSR was held not only by Stalin, but widely shared within the Soviet political elite.  Ideologically based mutual fear and hostility between Moscow on one side and London and Paris on the other had been one of the primary factors preventing the reestablishment of a Triple Entente against Nazi aggression in 1939.  The lack of a common Soviet-German frontier before 1939 had also been a factor in western strategic calculations, but not necessarily an insoluble problem.[30]  The assumption that Britain and France, as imperialist powers, were implacably hostile to the Soviet Union was the analog of the anti-communism which blighted Western diplomacy toward the USSR.  Thus, for example, the flight of Rudolf Hess to England and the clumsy handling of the incident by the British government quite predictably set off alarms in the Kremlin.  Soviet fears may have been unfounded in this case, but they were real. The imperialist states, even though nominally at war, seemed in Moscow's view to be up to their anti-Soviet plotting again.[31]  Even more alarming, of course, were the Allied plans to come to the aid of Finland with an expeditionary force and to bomb the Baku oil fields – plans which the Germans captured when they overran France and were only too glad to pass along to Moscow, though the Soviets already strongly suspected as much.  Moreover, even after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and even after the British and French declarations of war on Germany, the Kremlin continued to fear a "second Munich" – that is, a new agreement between Hitler and the Western democracies, this time at the expense of the USSR.  This fear gave added impetus to the Soviet desire to placate Hitler.

                Fear of the certain devastation brought by war was probably less of a motive for Stalin's appeasement of Hitler than it had been for Chamberlain or Daladier.  After all, in the collectivization of the peasantry and in the Great Purges Stalin had not shown himself much concerned over the human costs to the Soviet peoples of his policies.  However, it is also probable that the awesome victories of the Luftwaffe and the Panzers in Poland and France may have changed his attitude, if not about human sacrifice, then at least about the likely widespread destruction of the Soviet industrial and communications infrastructures in a German attack.

                Finally, military unpreparedness was an important motive for Soviet appeasement of Hitler.  Kremlin propaganda trumpeted the strength of the supposedly unbeatable Red Army, but Stalin knew better than anyone to what degree the Great Purges had ravaged the officer corps as well as vital cadres of defense industry scientists, engineers and managers.  The inept performance of the Red Army in the Winter War against Finland as well as its problems occupying the Baltic, eastern Poland, and Bessarabia demonstrated the reality of these concerns.[32]  Although Soviet forces fought very well in two major border incidents in 1938 and 1939 against the Japanese, the humiliation in Finland must have suggested to Stalin, as it did to the Germans, how unprepared the Soviet Army was.  These fears were certainly reinforced by the results of the January 1941 war games.  In those exercises the aggressor side (i.e., the side representing the Germans) overcame Soviet defenses and won the campaign.[33]  Hence Stalin desperately needed to postpone as long as possible that awful day when his forces would have to face the Wehrmacht.  Appeasement was thus designed to buy space and time – additional space in which to absorb the anticipated German blow and more time to build a modern army to meet it.

                As is so often the case in human affairs, means subvert ends.  The end goal of Stalin's appeasement policy was to prepare his forces adequately for the German attack that was sure to come.  Yet, Stalin became so reliant on the strategy of appeasement that he was not prepared for the blow when it actually fell.  He seems to have convinced himself that Hitler would not attack until after he had defeated England in the West.  After all, Hitler had stated and written on many occasions that he would not repeat the Kaiser's error of trapping Germany in an unwinnable two-front war.  With England still unbowed in June of 1941, it seemed that the policy of playing for time and space was still viable.  Stalin was not unaware in the months leading up to Barbarossa of the growing evidence of German offensive deployments.  Under the circumstances, however, he chose to interpret these moves as the prelude to new demands by Hitler for further Soviet concessions, or possibly even a provocation by conservative German generals unauthorized by Hitler.  Further appeasement, he hoped, would postpone war until 1942 or 1943, that is, until his own military preparations were perfected.  Stalin might even have gone as far as giving up Lithuania to the Germans in order to buy a bit more time.  The growing weight of evidence from British Ultra sources and from his own intelligence service of a pending German attack was not enough to offset Stalin's desperate faith in the continuing efficacy of appeasement.  After all, the full-scale alert and deployments which some of his generals were urging on him might, in themselves, provoke a German attack.  Failure to take these measures until far too late (in fact, just hours before the attack) was Stalin's last – and nearly fatal – attempt at appeasement.[34]

Nationalist China

                The Nationalist Chinese regime of Chiang Kai-shek, though operating in a far different environment and facing different sorts of threats, followed a policy of appeasement toward Japanese aggression up to 1937 which paralleled the appeasement policy of the western powers.  Manchuria and parts of costal China had come under Japanese influence even before the creation of the Republic of China in 1912.  In September of 1931 officers of Japan's Guandong (or Kwantung) Army precipitated a terrorist incident in Manchuria which they in turn blamed on the Chinese and used as a pretext to attack Manchurian and Chinese military garrisons and seize control of Manchuria.

                Chiang Kai-shek did not want to expand the limited fighting in Manchuria into a full-scale Sino-Japanese war, although the Manchurian warlord Zhang Xueliang had formally accepted Chinese Nationalist sovereignty over his region in1928 and certainly most Chinese regarded Manchuria as an integral part of their homeland.  For Chiang, fear of massive casualties among his people probably played no more a role in his decision-making than it had for Stalin.  Military weakness, however, was a prime consideration. Although the total forces available to Chiang exceeded two million troops, approximately three fifths of that total consisted of provincial soldiers whose discipline, equipment, training, and political loyalties left much to be desired.  Later, American General Albert Wedemeyer would characterized the Nationalist army as merely a “loose coalition” of forces.[35]  Even the central army, directly under Chiang’s command, was no match for the tanks, heavy artillery and modern aircraft of the Japanese army.  Chiang did not want a military confrontation with Japan before he had the opportunity to train and equip massive forces.[36]

                Anti-communism and underestimation of the Japanese threat also combined in Chiang's thinking to reinforce a policy of appeasement. Arguing the necessity of "unification before resistance," he was intent upon eliminating his communist rivals, Mao Zedong and the CCP, before dealing with the foreign enemy.   His famous remark that the Japanese were a disease of the skin, while the Chinese communists were a disease of the heart, suggests that Chiang both miscalculated the menace of Japanese imperialism and also failed to understand that a weak Guomindang (or Kuomintang) response to Japanese aggression could discredit the KMT in its domestic struggle with communism.[37]  Chiang, therefore, committed the best of his armies to five anti-communist extermination campaigns in south China between 1931 and 1934, rather than deploy them against the Japanese in Manchuria.[38]

                Judging the magnitude and immediacy of the Japanese threat to China was understandably difficult for Chiang.  Whereas Hitler dissimulated about his firmly established  aggressive intentions, Japanese “policy” in regard to China as constantly shifting and amorphous – as likely to be made by low-ranking officers in the field as by responsible leaders in Tokyo.[39]  While Japanese diplomats spoke of conciliation and pursuing shared interests with China, Imperial officers in Manchuria and Tianjin talked of Chinese banditry and the need to teach their Chinese “little brother” a severe lesson.  The Guomindang had declared its intention in 1928 to invalidate all of its unequal treaties with the imperialist powers.  This was a threat to the special privileges in China which most Japanese considered both vital and inadequate in their current form. What was common in Japanese policy was that no one in Tokyo or in the field saw China as anything more than a junior partner in a Japanese dominated East Asia.

                Moreover, the Republic of China lacked some of the core characteristics of a modern nation-state.  The Guomindang “unification” of China in 1928 had been an incomplete victory.  In actuality, Chiang and the central government only reliably controlled five provinces around Nanjing .  Outside that region, dissident factions within the Guomindang and local warlords (even though they wore KMT uniforms) exercised effective control.  Zhang Xueliang’s acceptance of unification had been more like an alliance than a submission to central authority.  A rival Guomindang government established itself in Canton and sporadically fought battles with forces loyal to Nanjing.  The Japanese take-over of Manchuria stimulated more cooperation among the Chinese (for example, uniting long time party rivals Chiang and Wang Jingwei), but the fragmentation of power faced by Chiang Kai-shek made Roosevelt’s problems with the US Senate pale in comparison.[40]

                The western powers undertook no effective action to block Japanese expansion either.  China appealed to the League of Nations for assistance and a League Commission of Inquiry condemned Japan's aggression. The League could not go beyond moral censure, however, unless the western powers were ready to impose effective sanctions on Tokyo.  Hopes for collective security against aggression foundered on this point.  France was too preoccupied with European affairs.  Great Britain was unwilling to risk war in a region where Japan's military and naval forces were far stronger than its own, especially since London could not count on American support.  The United States simply declared its non-recognition of any abridgment of American rights or Chinese sovereignty in Manchuria, but took no further action.

                The Soviet Union, its rearmament program not yet completed and its forces locked in a bloody struggle to collectivize the peasantry, chose to acquiesce in the Japanese absorption of Manchuria.  Far from resisting aggression, Moscow let the Japanese army use the Chinese Eastern Railway (which was then under its control) and hinted at the possibility of selling the railroad to Japan.  The Soviet Union even proposed a non-aggression pact with Tokyo.

                While the great powers gestured ineffectively, the Guandong army proceeded to extend its sway over more of China.  Under pressure from Tokyo not to precipitate an open war in China, Japanese commanders adopted the tactic of piecemeal subversion in north China and Mongolia.  They bribed and intimidated local officials and warlords, stirred up regional separatist movements, and sometimes resorted to naked violence, always justified as defensive reactions to Chinese provocations.  Chronic, if low intensity, warfare spread south of the Great Wall.  In spite of growing popular pressure to resist this renewed invasion, Chiang continued to appease the aggressors.  He and his foreign minister, Wang Jingwei, negotiated a series of truces with the Japanese from 1932 to 1935, each requiring Chinese concessions and each soon violated by the Guandong army.[41]  Chiang even went so far as to propose a Sino-Japanese treaty of friendship in 1935.   But, as long as Nanjing was unwilling to recognize Manchukuo, relinquish north China, and become nothing more than a Japanese client state, no diplomatic solution was possible.

                Continuing Japanese aggression pushed Chiang to consider an accommodation with the USSR and even with the Chinese communists.  There was high level internal opposition to any such initiative.  Wang Jingwei, for example, denounced it as “drinking poison to quench thirst.”[42]  The Moscow-Nanjing negotiations foundered, however, on mutual suspicions and the intractable problem of the Chinese communists.  The extraordinary Sian Incident in December of 1936 (Chiang’s kidnaping by Zhang Xueliang) finally forced the KMT leader to establish a “united front” with Mao Zedong, but that shotgun marriage was soon annulled in practice.  Only the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in the summer of 1937, which Chiang interpreted as a Japanese grab for all of north China, finally motivated him to confront Japan in full scale war.

                Appeasement of aggression, motivated more by weakness than principle, had made its first, but certainly not its last, appearance in the Far East in the 1930s.  If anything, the barrage of western denunciations followed by no effective action tended to stifle criticism of the Manchurian affair within Japan and to unite the nation in support of a more aggressive policy.

Conclusion

                These few examples suggest that appeasement of Axis aggression was a policy common to all the non-Axis powers and was motivated by a common set of factors:  namely, misperception of the character and extent of the Axis threat, ideologically based hostility to some potential alliance partners, a heightened fear of armed conflict stemming from painful experiences in the Great War, and military unpreparedness.  Although the nature, extent and timing of appeasement differed among the five non-Axis powers, their common reaction to Axis aggression suggests that broader themes in global history were operating beneath the surface events of the diplomatic struggle.

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