ABSTRACT
The world embarked on the road to war even earlier than 1935, as Japan, Italy, and Germany set in motion events that would culminate in the outbreak of a global conflagration, beginning in the Pacific in 1937. The civil war in Spain provided Hitler with a chance to deploy his new weaponry. Italian and German intervention violated a Non-Intervention Agreement brokered by the League of Nations a month after the outbreak of civil war in Spain. The war in Spain sparked a dramatic anti-fascist response in many countries across the world. The communist-fascist proxy war exposed the weaknesses of the French and British empires and the unwillingness of their leaders and metropolitan populations to take action against fascism. The Nazis' swift defeat of France prevented colonial forces from playing as large of a role in the fighting as they had in the First World War – at least, initially.
