WWII : began and ended September 2nd 1939, at 11 pm ....

Is it not a good general rule that Great Powers, once they had finally and formally declared war on another Great Power (as opposed to simply invading and gobbling up various small powers ) do not withdrawn from that fight until they themselves were either defeated or successful ?

Recall how WWII almost never began:

After an extremely hostile reception in the British parliament to his last minute attempts to avoid fulfilling his promise to go to war with whoever invaded Poland, Neville Chamberlain and his cabinet met in a mood of grim determination , abetted by an ominous thunderstorm from Mother Nature.

They finally voted, late on that evening of September 2nd 1939, to send Hitler a blunt ultimatum --- one with a very short response time, after which they would immediately declare war on Germany.

This turned a local war between a Great Power and a small power, one not greatly different from Hitler's smoothly successful earlier invasion of the rump of Czechoslovakia on March 15th 1939, into a full blown global war.

The UK actually declared war on September 3rd, but almost all historians agree that it was this cabinet decision the evening earlier that really launched WWII.

WWII, they say, certainly didn't begin with the Japanese invasion of China in 1931, or the invasion of Eithopia by Italy in 1935.

A world war needs formal war declarations between at least two Great Powers to truly make it so.

A formal war declaration between two fairly equally sized Great Powers ensures that the resulting conflict would be long, fiercely fought and a global fight.

So they see WWII as growing by a few key dates :

In 1939 the French empire joins the British empire in declaring war on the German empire.

In 1940, the Italian empire declares war on the British and French empires.

In 1941, the German empire declares war on the Russian and American empires, and Japan declares war on the American, British and French empires.

The Russian empire declares war on the Japanese empire in the dying moments of WWII, in August 1945.

But I will argue that there was in fact only one key date : September 2nd 1939.

If Great Powers don't seek a compromise peace after formally going to war with another Great Power - and WWI and WWII certainly suggests this to be the case - then WWII began with this formal war declaration of the UK to Germany which had to end with the defeat of one or the other side.

But could we predict which one would win on September 2nd 1939 ?

I say yes : the UK.

In 1939, the UK's global strength was not really its Empire.

Instead it was really anchored by several - distantly remote  from Western Europe - clusters of British-oriented but nominally independent Dominions.

 In the White Dominions, most of the population in control were fairly recent immigrants from the UK : think of them as the UK abroad rather than as reluctant colonies ever willing to change sides to go with the new winner.

India, for example, might have abandoned Britain if she was really on her uppers.

The white Dominions really being (at least in 1939) extensions of Britain itself, would not give up so readily.

So Germany would first have to defeat all of the British Isles and Eire --- perhaps a fairly do-able task in 1940.

But then they would soon have to take on all of Canada and Newfoundland, filled with fleeing diehards from the UK, if they wanted to feel permanently secure.

(And probably America  too, if at some point it seemed Germany might defeat Canada.)

And then South Africa and the nearby White dominated British African colonies.

And then Australia and New Zealand and their mandate territories.

It was as if Napoleon thought he could defeat four (4) different Russias in succession.

Churchill or Britons of his ilk (and there were many of them) if they did lose the UK to Germany, would not just give up.

Instead they would fight a slow delaying rear guard action from Dominion to Dominion confident that Hitler's racist policies would wear out his welcome fairly quickly, no matter how much of the world he held by force of German arms.

But if Hitler had attacked only the French empire and Britain for some reason had remained neutral, would the French overseas territories have fought on and on after the Fall of France?

Not in 1940 , they won't have had.

But those three Dominion clusters, each the size of Western Europe, were the anchors that would have ensured that some British-led coalition would have ultimately defeated Hitler regardless of how luck and his decisions had worked out.

He lost his war the day it began : it just took six years to make it official ....

What would the Commensal Story of WWII look like ?

Can the entire story of WWII ever be accurately and exhaustingly told, except from the point of view of the winning Great Powers like the USA, the UK and the USSR ?

Must Estonian historians be forever limited to writing only of WWII's localized impact on Estonia ?

Must we have authors from "BIG-LAND" only talk of the the BIG and writers from "small-land" only talk of the small ?

Or is there a theory that allows anyone (and everyone) to write insightfully about the interactions between the BIG and the small in WWII, interactions that did not ,in fact, all go the way the BIG would have wanted ?

I believe the theory of "involuntary commensality" , the claim that all Life must dine involuntarily at the common table that is Lifeboat Earth,  is just that window ....

Islands and WWII : did anything else important happen (yawn) ?

For hundreds of millions of avid newspaper readers during WWII, an atlas was essential to follow the conflict's global course.

Never more so because of the fact that most of the battles - yes, most of the battles - took place over, around and on islands - with some of the most heavily fought-over islands being almost incredibly tiny.

(The battle for Tarawa Atoll saw almost 10,000 casualties spread over its meagre 500 acres.)

An atlas (and a magnifying glass) was essential to make sense of it all.

Admittedly, the Eastern Front can be understood completely without once referencing a single island but no other major war front can say the same.

Consider, just for one example, why bombers were based in Yorkshire to bomb Hamburg.

It was because this maximized the amount of "Flak-free" water between the bomber base on the island of Britain  and its target on the coastline of the mainland.

So, a war decided by actions involving hundreds of strategic but tiny islands scattered all over the globe in the most unlikely of places.

That isn't something easy to blend with the popular view of WWII was holds it was all about the clash of a few Titans going at it, head to head.

Only a commensal history of 1939-1945 can blend the story of the Great Powers with the stories of the tiniest of powers, to make a truly coherent account of those years.....

a Commensal history of WWII includes the small and the great, the hubristic and the nimble

To render the sprawling activities of WWII palatable to digestion (because even the most devoted of readers have their limits) the tendency of authors is to show the war as seen through the eyes of the Great Powers and the Great Men.

And as seen through the eyes of those wisest of Wise Men, the scientists.

A commensal history of 1939-1945 should also start with a war between a handful of Great Men and Great Powers, because that is the way it all began.

But, to be fully accurate, it should also end in a confused co-mingling of the actions of the decisive small as well as those of the chastened great.

It should end, in other words, as a salient shock to the majority of the world who, in 1939 , were reluctantly convinced it was simple a natural fact that Bigger was always Better and that Might was always ultimately Right.

It should even shock at least some of the youngest of the scientists, those not yet set in their ways , to look again at the supposed science behind the claim Bigger is Better....

Modernity : "Might is Correct"

Modernity's claim that "Might was Right" (and correct) is a significant expansion from the Bible's mere temporary linking together of the two separate entities, the Mighty and the Wise, for the purpose of  warning of hubris.

Now, under Modernity, the Mighty were (and invariably were) the Wise, by definition, simply for being mighty.

"Hubris will write the definitions from here on in, thank you very much."  (!!!)

To be wise is not to be the truth, but to be able to seek it out and successfully separate it out from the non-truth and thus to be worthy.

The wise could triage truth from non-truth, could put truth and non-truth in a clearcut, eternal and universal vertical hierarchy of worthiness.

In addition, by definition, to be weak and small (beings) was to be foolish, unwise , unable to discern truth from non-truth, unworthy.

Under Modernity, big nations would indeed have more Nobel price winners, per capita, than small nations.

But for Modernity, small physical nonliving objects like atoms were the core of The Truth, seen as something able to be reduced to a few simple explanations about the motions of a very small number of very small, very simple, very stable, objects.

Truth was seen as eventually being contained in a short simple all-encompassing "Theory of Everything" : a few laws of physics would explain and predict everything in the past, present and future Universe, up to and including the workings of the human mind.

Modernity's Universe of Worthiness saw a tiny number of very big objects (the Great Powers nations : perhaps only Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia) and a tiny number of very small objects (perhaps only the atoms of the most usually elements : oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and iron, because the others could be atomically transmutated upon request.)

First those humans and nations unworthy of life were dispatched, then plants, animals and microbes regarded as weeds and pathogens.

Finally all plants, animals and microorganisms were dispatched, defined as useless competitors, competing over limited space and valuable atoms.

Now, working on a surface as sterile and as wide-open as the surface of Mars, Modernity could really start with a clean slate.....