Wars and Technology
Europe's balance of power, carefully crafted in the previous century, was shattered by World War I. While Europe and the United States were involved in this war, Russia saw all the old ways of life violently swept away by the 1917 Russian Revolution. New battle technologies such as mustard gas and chlorine gas, and the unprecedented amount of bloodshed, lent a particular horror to World War I that previous wars had never known, leading some to call it "the War to End All Wars." However, it would become clear that the "War to End All Wars" had ended nothing.
During the uneasy interval between the first and second world wars, the United States experienced a period of high prosperity that was almost immediately undercut by the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression. This depression, which lasted for more than a decade, was felt around the industrialized world and would be a factor in the rise to power of both the Fascist Benito Mussolini in Italy and the Nazi Adolf Hitler in Germany. During this time, Japan invaded China’s Manchuria and by 1938 was fighting the Soviet Army on the border of Mongolia. In Spain, conflicts between ultraconservatives and those who wanted a democratic form of government led to the Spanish Civil War. Nazi Germany saw this war as a chance to test battle equipment. The war was ultimately won in 1939 by fascist General Francisco Franco, who set up a dictatorship.
Fatigued by the First World War, European countries did not at first confront Hitler's grabs for territory. Germany defied the Versailles Treaty by occupying the demilitarized Rhineland, enfolded Austria in the Anschluss, and declared a crisis in the Sudetenland in order to gain control of northern Czechoslovakia. The first real overture of the Second World War was Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939. The invasion of Poland began a six-year struggle between the Allied forces of France, Great Britain, and, later, the United States and the Soviet Union, and the Axis forces of Germany, Italy, and Japan.
