The Grand Illusion Essay Example

The Grand Illusion Essay Example The Grand Illusion Essay The Grand Illusion Essay To wage a modern war is to fuse into a gigantic machine the resources of our most advanced technologies. Petroleum, rubber, and a host of other chemicals are the fuel of War; light and heavy materials its armor. Without aluminum, magnesium, tin, tungsten, molybdenum, quinine those looking to wage a total war cannot survive very long. The buttress of the Allied strategy rested secure in the knowledge that they, not Germany, controlled these resources and could therefore restrict German access to them. Blockade enforced by British dreadnaughts and backed by the US navy had been the basic element of Allied hope to thwart the German menace. Simple in its grandeur and apparent impregnability, this barricade of the sea lanes had the semblance of a wall which a mailed fist could never breach. In 1914, the Schleiffen Plan called for a swift and overpowering march to Paris as the coup de gri ce to end the war. However, since the Schleiffen Plan was not diligently obeyed, the Great War lasted longer than originally expected and resulted directly in a German defeat, a complication the axis powers did not account for. The tourniquet of the British Royal Navy constricted the German arteries of supply. By 1917, the German resource coffer that was needed to fuel its war machine was sucked dry and her people were withering away from starvation. Forced at last to surrender to the Allies, Germany studied this imprisoning cordon with great detail. With the cunning and aggression of Germany militancy eliminated from the world stage, the Allied forces finally relaxed. As the world order was gradually restored, science and technology forged ahead. In the early 1920s, German industry became evermore integrated and as a result, its dependence on the outer world for resources increased dramatically. However, with every addition to the myriad of materials NOT found within the Reich, it seemed to the Allied powers that the German threat was virtually eliminated. Without the necessary materials essential to technological progress, Germany was bound to her Allied captors. To begin with, Germany had absolutely no oil reserves; for a new war to be waged she would require a fathomless amount of petroleum. Conversely, the United States and Britain commanded more that half of the worlds oil supply. Germany had no rubber; Britain controlled a significant proportion of the world supply. From the context clues surrounding Germanys economic and financial state of affairs, the Allies concluded that it would be impossible for Germany to engage in rearmament and to escape the strangulation brought about by a dearth of strategic resources. The Great War revealed vital weak spots in the German armor the difficult task of rearming would be futile unless any new war could be started with a wider margin of advantage than it did in 1914. This requisite superiority required that Germany become an absolute autarky with the ability to provide for all its domestic needs. Was this economically possible when the Nightmare of Versailles continually haunted Weimar Germany? The Treaty emaciated the German military machine, slapped crippling monetary reparations on her, removed swathes of land from the German Empire, and left her in no viable economic position for wage any future wars. Of course, this was the consensus in the short run; Germany knew it had to focus on domestic policy and the rebuilding of its devastated country in the short-run. However, in the long run, Germany harbored a devious hidden agenda In hindsight, it can be assumed that the sweep of German aims in the early 20th century had but one reoccurring theme: world domination. Viewed by its captors as the have-not power on the Continent, Germany could not have asked for a better predicament to become a fortress of self-sufficiency. Hitler had the ruthlessness and cold, cruel realism to consolidate a position of power out of the collapse of the German economic structure. Resultantly, the vast centralized cartel organization which characterized German industry became a tool in the hands of a disillusioned dictator who no longer embraced private profit, but operated solely to serve his ruthless political ambitions. Thus, Hitler shouldered the conquest of the continent on the German industrialist. The First World War should have taught democratic nations that Germany used international cartels as the spearhead of aggression. Stronger in 1933 than 20 years prior, Germanys cartel brethren took back control of crucial industrial fields despite all the constraints imposed by Versailles to prevent their from doing so. With Hitlers compulsive determination to rearm, German controlled cartels simply served as the economic puppets of German interests. Neither before 1914 nor 1939 did Allied industrialists and financiers discover the truly destructive connotation of this outlook. Rather, to the savvy turn-of-the-century industrialist, cartels were considered as an efficient means of guaranteeing domestic monopoly. The industrialists operating businesses outside of the Third Reich thought of cartels in terms of low output, high prices, and maximized profits. However, the cartels of democracy were easy dupes and did not suspect that Germanys output was growing by leaps and bounds. These industrialists who consorted with German economic arrangements during the interwar period knew not what they did. Of course, history tells us that Germany lost WWI, but neither by this loss nor by the period of social unrest and inflation slowed the production of German industrial cartels. The failure of the allies to recognize that these cartels were not disarmed was their biggest mistake. This fait accompli, possibly due to the political myopia of the Allied powers, had repercussions in the war to come. Germanys consortium of cartels concealed from prying eyes what it could of its real operations. Armed with patents and secret know-how, the German cartels laid siege to the economies of prospective antagonists. These bold tactics, interlocked perfectly in design, are evident in the succession of maneuvers which characterized German policies in the 1920s. For example, rampant inflation liquidated the costs of the First World War and with a stabilized Mark in the mid 1920s, Germany extended an alluring invitation for foreign capital. The victors, not the vanquished, unknowingly provided the capital that helped fund Germanys reconstruction and later her massive rearmament program. In the late 1920s Germany made a portentous discovery: coal could be made into oil and oil could be made from rubber. The obstructions on the road to Armageddon were slowly being removed. While the rest of the world floated into oblivion, in Germany, war became certain. Lulled into a state of sleep, the world did not detect the direst omens of catastrophe. Sporadically, embedded in academic science journals and business reports, hints of German economic plans could be found. However, clouded in a haze of polysyllables the smattering of German blueprints evaded the eyes of the outside world. The Allied forces had characterized the German nation as economically dependent, unable to stand without the Allied crutch of raw materials and supplies.