A Grim Anniversary

Seventy years is a long time, three generations, long enough to erase a lot from the popular consciousness. So I doubt there will be much notice given to the coming seventieth anniversary of the most disastrous single event of the 20th Century, the fall of France in the late spring of 1940. The Great War of 1914-1918 was more consequential, making possible and leading to much of the decline, horror, and disaster that followed including the calamities of 1940, but it was not a single event. It took four gruesome years to have its full effect. The collapse of France in 1940 took just six weeks.

Even after the Great War, there had been a hope and perhaps even a possibility that things in Europe could return to something like normal. Superficially the world of 1925 was in many ways not so different from the world of 1910. Europe remained the world’s center of science, art, and scholarship. The British Empire was intact with all its overseas possessions. So were the French, Dutch, and all the others except the German. The Royal Navy continued to rule the seas. Outside Russia, there had been few deep changes to the social order. London and Paris still enjoyed their preeminent positions. World civilization was seen mainly as European civilization as was world power.

The fall of France changed all that. Coupled with the character of the Nazis, it guaranteed that however the war might end, post-war Europe would be something very different from even the 1930’s. Those six weeks were a turning point in world history.

Afterward came the Battle of Britain, Lend Lease and the arming of the United States, the war between Germany and the Soviet Union, Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war, the Nazis’ horrific crimes, the Soviets’ conquest and enslavement of Central Europe, the rise of the United States as a world power, the dissolution of the British, Dutch, and French empires, the Cold War, and the Europe we know today.

We can conjecture what might have happened if France had not fallen - if its army had held out as it did in 1914. It is probable that Italy would had stayed cautiously neutral, resulting in no war in Africa or the Mediterranean. Since Japan might have been reluctant to take on both the United States and the intact British and French empires in the Pacific, the United States might never have entered the war and might not have become the power it is today. The Nazis and the Soviets might never have fought. The Nazi government, if defeated or stalemated in France, might even have fallen before it could commit its worst crimes. Or something much worse than the actual events could have happened, such as the war in France dragging on until an unconquered Nazi Germany got the atom bomb first.

We can never know,but we can see what those six weeks in the spring of 1940 caused and in what terrible danger they placed civilization. We can also see our rather minor problems in better perspective by making a comparison to the world situation during the awful summer and fall of 1940. The Nazis with the world’s strongest army were the masters of continental Europe. Imperial Japan with the world’s strongest navy was their formal ally. The Soviet Union with the world’s second strongest army was their partner and de facto ally. Only Britain with a poorly armed and defeated army remained against them. That really was a crisis of civilization.