Opposition to World War II

• 1. Introduction

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  Opposition to World War II took many forms. Few were stranger than May 1941, when Rudolf Hess parachuted alone into Scotland, carrying a peace proposal from inside Hitler's inner circle. The British did not negotiate. Hess spent the rest of the war as a prisoner, his full motives never entirely resolved.

  What made his flight worth noting was not its peculiarity but what it revealed. Every combatant nation also contained people who wanted the war stopped, or had never wanted it started. Some organized mass movements with millions of supporters. Others resisted individually, paying a steep personal price. The opposition was not confined to any one political tradition. Pacifists, fascists, communists, colonial nationalists, and ordinary citizens with no ideological allegiance all pressed their cases. How did those movements form? What happened to the people who led them? And why, despite their numbers, did they mostly fail to stop the war or shorten it?

• 2. American Isolationism

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  In the first days of September 1939, a Gallup poll posed a direct question to Americans. Should the United States declare war on Germany in support of England, France, and Poland? Ninety percent said no. Eight percent said yes. Even among that minority, enthusiasm for actual combat was limited. A separate question about deploying forces abroad to fight Germany drew 84% opposed.

  By March 1940, during the stalemated Phoney War, 96% of Americans were against going to war with Germany. A September 1940 survey from Fortune Magazine found that 40% of business leaders favored appeasing Japan. Less than 20% supported any embargo or threat of force against Japan.

  The Keep America Out of War Congress was founded on the 6th of March 1938. For most of its existence, it was the only national organization opposed to any foreign intervention whatsoever. It brought together six pacifist groups plus the Socialist Party of America. Among those groups were the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the Fellowship for Reconciliation, and the War Resisters League. The KAOWC drew primarily liberals and socialists; conservatives tended toward a separate organization, the No Foreign War Committee. By the fall of 1940, the America First Committee had become the most prominent isolationist voice in the country. Students at UC Berkeley mounted a large protest against the war in 1940.

  Charles Lindbergh was perhaps its most famous representative. Isolationist sentiment ran deepest in the Midwest, where large German-American communities had settled. At its most theatrical, the German-American Bund marched down the avenues of New York City demanding that America stay out. A smaller group, the Committee on Pacific Relations, was organized in 1941 by Orland K. Armstrong, a conservative politician from Missouri. Its members ranged from those who simply opposed a US-Japan war to those who were outright pro-Japanese.

  Henry Ford, a committed pacifist, refused before Pearl Harbor to manufacture airplanes or other war materials for Britain. Father Charles Coughlin urged Americans to keep out and to allow Germany to conquer both Britain and the Soviet Union. Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota went further, blaming the Great Depression itself on America's economic expansion during World War I.

  The Mothers' movement, led by Elizabeth Dilling, opposed American involvement on the grounds that Nazi domination of Europe was preferable to Communist domination. These activists also believed the war would destroy Christianity and accelerate the spread of atheistic Communism across Europe.

  Groups like the American Peace Mobilization put their objections in vivid terms. Of the Lend-Lease Act, they declared: "Roosevelt needs its dictatorial powers to further his aim of carving out of a warring world, the American Empire so long desired by the Wall Street money lords."

• 3. Britain's Divided Home Front

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  Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists argued that another war with Germany was not in Britain's national interest. Their newspaper, Action, ran editorials and cartoons contending that the British Empire needed to prepare for a defensive war against Japan, not Europe. War with Germany, they warned, would place Britain's Asian interests in jeopardy.

  Mosley directed all of the party's resources toward what he called the "Peace Campaign." He demanded a referendum on the continuation of the war and advocated a negotiated settlement with Germany. That effort ended in May 1940, when Mosley and many senior members of the British Union of Fascists were interned under Defence Regulation 18B.

  Throughout the British Empire, pacifists who expressed antiwar sentiment were jailed. Britain's Independent Labour Party carried a strong pacifist element. That commitment sat in tension with a competing strain of militant anti-fascism in the broader socialist movement. The British left found itself divided on how to respond.

  Mahatma Gandhi led the Quit India Movement from British India. His goal was to obstruct the British war effort and to demand complete independence from colonial rule. Gandhi's aim was to prevent India from being drawn into a war he considered Britain's own to fight.

  France's swift defeat by Germany in 1940 strengthened the hand of those who wanted Britain to negotiate. Many French politicians actively encouraged the British to seek an end to the conflict.

• 4. Voices Within the Axis

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  Inside Germany, opposition to the war reached its height in the German military. The Oster conspiracy was a plot to remove Hitler from power. Its specific condition was the pressure Hitler was placing on Czechoslovakia: the plotters planned to act if that pressure led to war. No comparable plan is known for the invasion of Poland.

  In Japan, Admiral Yamamoto belonged to a military faction that argued against attacking the United States specifically. Once war was decided upon, Yamamoto became a key contributor to the Japanese war effort.

  Wataru Kaji had violated the Peace Preservation Law, served his sentence, and then turned to building organized anti-war activity in China. In July 1939, Kaji persuaded the Nationalist government to construct a detention facility. He selected eleven captured Japanese soldiers from that facility. They traveled to the battlefield with megaphones, urging their former comrades to stop fighting. Japanese, Chinese, and Korean communists conducted similar activities in the same period.

  Within Japan before the war, the politician Kijuro Shidehara had been among those opposing the invasions of Manchuria and Ethiopia. His resistance was an early instance of dissent within an aggressor nation.

  The Japanese diplomat Terasaki Hidenari was dispatched to the United States with a precise aim. He was to stir up isolationist and pacifist sentiment there and work to prevent the country from entering the war.

• 5. The Communist Reversal

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  In August 1939, the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler. That agreement transformed the political landscape for Communist parties around the world. Organizations that had been part of the anti-fascist Popular Front became opponents of the Allied war effort.

  Communist activists working inside Congress of Industrial Organizations labor unions tried to slow the flow of munitions from the United States to Britain. Britain's Daily Worker, in 1940, described the Allied war effort as "the Anglo-French imperialist war machine." At the same time, Joseph Stalin ordered a series of military attacks on Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania. He used communist parties and front organizations to obstruct military preparations in other countries. This weakened Allied resistance to aggression and worked to keep the United States out.

  The reversal came on the 22nd of June 1941. Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, changed everything overnight. Communist parties that had opposed the Allied war effort became its most vocal supporters. They called for full material support to be extended to the Soviets.

  Leon Trotsky had drawn up the Proletarian Military Policy, which combined continued opposition to the war with support for industrial action during it. A small number of socialists maintained this position even after June 1941. Very few Comintern members joined them; most obeyed Moscow.

  Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade had protested against the war, the draft, and the Lend-Lease Act during the period of non-intervention.

  The Communist Party of the United States held to an anti-fascist position throughout the war, even when Moscow pointed elsewhere.

• 6. Minority and Colonial Resistance

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  Over 125 African Americans were imprisoned for resisting the draft or for sedition during the war, among them Elijah Muhammad. Many were affiliated with the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World or the Nation of Islam. Both organizations viewed Japan as the champion of non-white peoples worldwide.

  The Indian National Army drew members from nationalists who considered British colonial rule a greater enemy than the Axis. Its members fought alongside Japanese forces, going further than Indian movements that pursued the same anti-colonial goal through non-cooperation.

  The Ceylonese garrison on the Cocos Islands mutinied, a decision influenced in part by the Trotskyist Lanka Sama Samaja Party. That party had been building anti-war sentiment within colonial military structures.

  Nationalist movements in other colonial territories declined to take part in a conflict they saw as the colonialists' own making.

  In the postwar period, communities in former colonial territories would assess the conflict's outcome very differently from the Allied nations that had claimed victory.

• 7. After the War

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  At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Allied powers agreed that only unconditional surrender would be accepted from the Axis. That decision reduced the options available to those within the Axis who hoped to negotiate an end. Japan in particular had been seeking to negotiate a conditional surrender with the Allies in 1945, but that path was not open.

  In Allied nations, the war was later referred to informally as the "good war." In the Soviet tradition, it was called the Great Patriotic War. The prevailing view was that the conflict had been both necessary and morally justified, particularly in comparison with World War I.

  Germany and Japan each framed the war as a source of national shame. Germany's response took the form of a subdued nationalism. Japan moved toward formal pacifism as a political identity. The smaller Axis nations, Italy and Hungary, occupied a more ambiguous position. The extent to which they had been victims of the war rather than perpetrators remained open to debate.

  The League of Nations had been founded after World War I specifically to prevent another global conflict. Its failure to do so left the postwar world with an institutional question that years of new diplomacy would attempt to answer.