A 20-Year Ceasefire

Military aircraft fly in formation dropping hundreds of bombs while the ground smokes from the impacts — The Second World War brought unprecedented destruction and death.

The purpose of this lesson is to know the causes and basic features of the Second World War.

A 20-Year Ceasefire

After reading the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, French Marshal Ferdinand Foch famously said, “This is not a peace. It’s a 20-year ceasefire.” He expressed the views of many that the treaty did not resolve the war and would not prevent the same nations from fighting again.

Twenty years and 65 days later, the Second World War broke out, involving many of the same nations, though some former allies had become bitter enemies.

Despite Foch’s uncanny prediction, there were significant differences between the First and Second World Wars. Both were imperialistic, but the Second World War was more ideological. Fascist Germany, for example, was motivated by Hitler’s desire to destroy communism. Both wars were driven by nationalism, but some of the nationalisms of the Second World War had deeper connections to racial ideologies.

The evolution of mass media (radio and cinema) gave governments much tighter control over what their people saw and thought. Despite the horrific nature of the First World War, by the 1940s the advancement of weapons enabled carnage and destruction at levels few could have predicted. Finally, the destruction of civilians - something that is usually an unintended consequence of war - was deliberately carried out on a massive scale by both sides in this conflict. World War II saw the full realization of Total War, where the boundary between the 'home front' and the 'battlefront' vanished. Cities became targets, and civilian populations were mobilized or targeted as part of a strategy to break the enemy’s will to fight.

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