ABSTRACT
The author of the pessimistic prediction in the title to this chapter was Marshal Ferdinand Foch, Commander-in-Chief of all the Allied armies on the Western Front from 3 April 1918 until 11 November (Bell, 1997: 16). His contemporary judgement on the Versailles Settlement was to prove all too accurate. But did this twenty-year armistice have to be such? Strategic history does not follow a preordained linear path, and those who write about it have to beware lest they reason backwards from a great event, such as World War II, to identify the causes that allegedly made it ‘inevitable’. A great second round was always a possibility, given the terms and conditions that concluded hostilities and sought to stabilize the post-war world. But what had been only a distant possibility, and a rather implausible one at that, in the 1920s became a rock-hard certainty in the 1930s, specifically after 30 January 1933. However, one must recognize the powerful influence of contingency, including the role of such an extra-political and extra-strategic event as the Great Depression. In addition, personalities can matter critically: people do make history. By far the most potent force for war in the 1930s was, of course, the character, ideology and policy pursued by Germany’s Chancellor, Adolf Hitler.
