Talking About Military History: Was World War II a continuation of World War I?

British paratroopers make a combat jump in Operation Market Garden. Photo Credit: Imperial War Museum 

Someone on Quora asks:

Was World War II a continuation of World War I?

In many ways, yes.

In fact, I’ve read (in Antony Beevor’s 2012 one-volume history, The Second World War, I believe it was) that some historians consider the European war of 1939–1945 to be the conclusion of a single European conflict that began in August of 1914 and, after a two-decade intermission in which both sides rearmed and reconsidered their strategies, resumed in September of 1939, ending only with the destruction of Germany and the old European world order and the rise of the Soviet Union and the United States as the dominant superpowers.

There are even convincing theses floating out there that suggest that if you add the Cold War to the mix, you can connect most of the chaos and misery of the 20th Century to the yin-and-yang struggle between the Left and the Right that began with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and continues to this day. 

The reason why World War II is often considered to be a continuation of its precursor is simple: the vanquished nation that lost the most - Germany - wanted to reverse the results of the 1914–1918 war. Revanchism was one of the core reasons why the average German citizen supported Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, and that is why the bulk of the German generals acceded to Hitler’s mad quest to create a New Order in Europe.

Furthermore, many of the world powers that fought in the First World War also fought in the Second, with Great Britain and France once again facing off against their old German adversaries. Some of the World War I allies switched sides, especially Italy and Japan, and joined Germany in her drive to build an empire by military conquest. Russia, aka the Soviet Union, began the war as a quasi-ally of Germany but became an Allied power by default when Hitler invaded the USSR on June 22, 1941. And the United States repeated its role as an ostensibly neutral country which did not enter the war right away, but eventually joined the Allied cause “in the nick of time,” as it were.

In addition, many of the battles and campaigns fought in Europe were fought in the same countries and sometimes even the same battlefields as in the First World War. The big difference, though, is that the War in the West went pretty much in Germany’s way in 1940, mainly because the Manstein Plan for Fall Gelb (Case Yellow) was the antithesis of the Schlieffen Plan on which the German campaign of 1914 was based.