216. An event-packed year (1)

This episode is our first look at the exciting year of 1936. It was a time when some British politicians tried to appease one dictator, Mussolini, by taking no action to stop invading Abyssinia, in order to have his support against a far worse one, Hitler. As it happens, the effect was only to let Mussolini get away with occupying Abyssinia, leaving the League of Nations even more discredited, and making Britain and France looking pretty foolish.

Indeed, that result only encouraged Hitler, who sent troops into the Rhineland which, though German territory, the Treaty of Versailles had demanded should remain demilitarised. It would have been a great moment to block Hitler without fighting a world war, but neither France nor Britain had the will to take military action.

Meanwhile, following a military mutiny and uprising, a Civil War had broken out in Spain. The Western powers and the Soviet Union responded with a non-intervention policy, so that all foreign states would stay well out of the war. The reality was that Germany and Italy provided colossal assistance, including military forces, to the Nationalist side of the war, while the Soviet Union provided limited and heavily conditioned assistance to the Republicans. Britain and France kept the pretence of non-intervention, while Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the Soviet Union were intervening the heck out of the place.

In passing, since those three nations were major players in the Second World War in Europe, it strikes me that, just as we should date the start of the war generally to September 1931 rather than September 1939, so we should date the start of the war in Europe to the start of the Spanish Civil War, on 17 July 1936.

Meanwhile, in Britain Clement Attlee, new leader of the Labour Party was gradually moving the party towards accepting the need for rearmament. What’s also striking is that, like Churchill, he was looking for some kind of collaboration with the Soviet Union if it came to war with Germany, but even more the United States, which both felt should take the leadership of a Western alliance to defend democracy.

Illustration: Italian anti-tank gun at the battle of Guadalajara in the Spanish Civil War. CC BY-SA 3.0 de. Photo by H.G. von Studnitz, from Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-2006-1204-500, Spanien, Schlacht um Guadalajara.jpg

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License