The Great World War 1914-1945: Germany, Russia, Ukraine

Friday, 2 May 2025, 11:13 am
Opinion: Keith Rankin

On Anzac Day we remembered World War One and World War Two, or at least the peripheral little bits of those imperial wars that New Zealand was involved in. There was and is little context given to how New Zealand got involved with such far-away wars which need never have become world wars. There were the usual cliches about 'our' young men, invading the Ottoman Empire, somehow fighting for freedom and democracy; and, through making 'supreme sacrifices', establishing the invaders' national identities. There was very little context about what these anti-German and anti-Japanese wars were really about, and on why we thought anybody could possibly benefit from Aotearoa New Zealand contributing in its own small way to their escalation.

The Great World War 1914-1945

If we step back, we can see that there was really only one very big war; best dubbed as The Great World War 1914-1945 (the GWW, which itself morphed into another in 1945, The Cold War 1945-1990).

The Great World War is really the 1914 to 1945 Russo-German War, embedded in a wider state of conflict that might be called The Great Imperial War.

The subsequent Cold War, essentially the 'great hegemonic war', reframed world war; from 1945 it was between the United States imperium and the Communist powers of Russia and China; it was a 'proxy war' rather than a passive-aggressive 'cold war'. The years 1991 to 2021 may prove to have been an intermission, just as 1919 to 1939 was an intermission in the Great World War; and noting that, in the GWW, Russia and Germany became 'Communist' and 'Nazi' during that intermission. The most important early 'hot' conflict in the Cold War was the Korean War, a deadly proxy conflict – at its core between the 'Anti-Communist' United States and 'Communist' China – ending as a 'score-draw'; an armistice in 1953 which took the hostile parties back to an almost identical position as to where they started in 1950. For the second phase of the Great Hegemonic War, the 'Communist' factor was waned; the prevailing ideology in the west in 2025 is a distorted form of self-congratulatory 'democratic imperialism', not unlike the prevailing ideology in the west in 1914.

By looking at 1914 to 1945 in this way, as a single albeit complex conflict, we can more easily see that the essence of the struggle was a conflict between the waxing German and Russian Empires; and that the central prizes of that conflict were the Russian imperial territories of Ukraine and the Caucasus, and the waning Ottoman Empire: food, oil and sea-access in the strategic pivot of central Eurasia.

All (except one) of the world's 'great' empires of the early twentieth century became involved: the waxing empires of Germany, Russia, Japan, and the United States of America; and the waning empires of United Kingdom, France, Ottoman Türkiye, Austria-Hungary and Netherlands. And the would-be empire of Italy. (The exception was the empire of Portugal, a neutral party; in 1898 the United States had acquired Spain's remnant empire.)

The Result of the Great World War

Wikipedia has page entries for every war ever fought in reality or mythology. And the Wikipedia format likes to give a binary result, as if a war was a series of football matches with a grand finale. Winners and losers. It's not like that in reality: most wars formally end in an armistice; albeit an armistice in which one party – one nation or coalition of nations – has an advantage and is largely able to dictate terms.

The core war within the Great World War was the Russo-German War, which ended in 1945 with a victory to Russia; then Rusia was the imperium of the 'Communist' Soviet Union. The victor of the wider Great Imperial War was the United States; Imperator Americanus inherited a beaten-up world, much as Emperor Augustus inherited the Roman Empire in 27 BCE after about two decades of strife between warring would-be overlords.

The Great World War began in 1914, essentially as the Third Balkan War. The reasons this local war expanded from a part of the world politically and geographically distant from the British Empire – the empire of which New Zealand understood itself to be an integral part – related to a contested set of quasi-scientific socio-economic and supremacist utopias (which will only be addressed here in passing), and to a basic reality that an expansionist western 'civilisation' was confronting diminished returns.

Possibly the most important and least understood year of the whole GWW was 1918. The context here is that Russia – Germany's new great foe, the Russian Empire – had been defeated late in 1917, following both a successful democratic revolution (the February Revolution) and a German-facilitated 'Communist' 'Bolshevik' coup d'etat (the October Revolution). The formality of Russian defeat – the Brest-Litovsk Treaty – was signed by Leon Trotsky in March 1918. The problem for Germany was that there was still an unresolved western front, there was a British naval blockade of Germany, and that the United States had been persuaded in 1917 to enter the war as an Entente power. Nevertheless, in March 1918, the Germans were winning on the western front having already settled the more-important eastern front; but Germany had no thought-through exit strategy. They were in no position to occupy Belgium, let alone France.

After the trench warfare stalemate that had characterised the western front for more than three years, it was Germany that broke through in the winter of 1917/18; indeed, Germany advanced to just-about big-gun-firing distance from Paris. The western powers were in a state of panic, as Germany redeployed soldiers from the eastern front to the west.

The United States had entered the war in France, but their soldiers were green and initially of little help against battle-hardened Germans. But the American soldiers, without realising the significance, had brought with them a secret weapon, influenza. (The deadly strain of influenza in 1918 – popularly known as the Spanish Flu – was almost certainly a hybrid of the Kansas strain and an Asian strain already in France.) The tide of the war only turned against Germany in August 1918, mainly due to economic limitations but also due in some part to soldiers getting very sick. The sickness had a bigger military impact on Germany, given that Germany's soldiers (including one A. Hitler) were more hardened fighters than the Americans.

Germany went from winners to losers only in the last three months, from August to November 1918; it was like a basketball game in which defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory (or vice versa, from a western viewpoint!). But they were never losers in the absolute sense that they later were, in 1945. On 11 November 1918, Germany settled for an armistice in which they were on the back foot. It was not an absolute defeat, and should never have been seen as such. Nevertheless, that sensible armistice came to be treated by the Entente Powers (especially France, the United Kingdom and the United States) as an absolute victory; Germany, victor over Russia, was subsequently treated with great and unnecessary humiliation, creating the seeds for a resumption of the Great World War. Part of that humiliation was the stripping of the territories in the incipient Soviet Union that had been won by Germany (especially the loss of Ukraine); another important part was the imposition of a 'Polish Corridor', through Eastern Germany to the Baltic Sea at the then-German city of Danzig, physically dividing Germany.

A third humiliation was a set of reparations that were imposed using similar mercantilist logic to that which is upsetting the world economic order today; Germany was supposed to pay France in particular huge amounts of gold, but the only way Germany could acquire that gold was for Germany to run a trade surplus and for the Entente Powers to run trade deficits. But the 'victorious' powers wanted to run trade surpluses, not trade deficits; they wanted Germany to increase its debt to the west while claiming that they wanted Germany to pay off its debt to the west.

(Today, the United States wants its Treasury to accumulate treasure in the same way that it and France sought to do in the 1920s, not realising that the countries they want to extract 'modern treasure' from – China and the European Union – can only get that treasure if they run trade surpluses. The great 'modern treasure' mine is actually in Washington, not in Eurasia.)

One result of all this mercantilism imposed upon the 1920s' world order by the liberal Entente powers was the Great Depression; that was probably the number-one catalyst towards the resumption of the Great World War in 1939 and the Russo-German War in 1941. This 'liberal mercantilism' was the first of the pseudo-scientific utopias to fail. Other aggravating factors were the intensification of the contradictions of the other two 'scientific utopias': the unachievable 'Communist' experiment in Russia, and the exacerbation of the supremacist eugenics which was widely subscribed to throughout Europe and which reached their apotheosis in Hitler's Germany.

A defeated Russia played no part in the formal hostilities of the GWW in 1918. Likewise, when the Great World War resumed in 1939, Russia appeared to be on the sideline; though that's another story. The true nature of the resumed GWW – known as World War Two in the west – became apparent in June 1941. The war continued for nearly four terrible years, with Soviet Russia prevailing over Nazi Germany in 1945, with some help from the western powers. Russia will celebrate Victory Day in a few days on 9 May; the end of the Russo-German War, though the Great World War continued until 15 August of that year. As regards the result of the Russo-German War, the western Entente powers were kingmakers rather than kings.

Overall, freedom and democracy were casualties of the GWW, not outcomes. By 1950, there were many more unfree people in the world, and few (India notwithstanding) who were more free than they had been in 1913. Indians' post-GWW freedoms came at a huge cost in damaged and lost lives. And they were freedoms from Britain, not freedoms fought for by Britain.

Ukraine

Chief among the territories won-and-lost by Germany was Ukraine. Considered in its entirety, Ukraine was the number-one prize and the number-one battleground of the Great World War.

The territory of Ukraine had been occupied by Germany for five years: 1918, and 1941 to 1944. In 1918, Germany lost Ukraine because of events on the western front; in 1945 the Soviet Union recovered Ukraine on the battlefield. Soviet Russia was helped by three imperial nations throughout the active phases of the GWW; by the British, the French, and the Americans. Otherwise, Germany – the Prussian Empire – would have almost certainly prevailed in its quest for Ukraine, and the oilfields around the Caspian Sea (and possibly the so-called 'Middle East', though that may have been permanently lost to Germany in 1918).

With Ukraine once again being centre-stage in geopolitics – the contested ground between conflicting quasi-academic narratives – the world may be set for a resumption of both the Cold War (especially in its mercantilist Sino-American guise) and the Russo-German war. Together, these have the makings of 'World War Three'; especially if we add in the Levantine conflict, the present supremacist conflict in the 'Middle East'.

In the geopolitics of early 2025, the 'elephant in the room' is Friedrich Merz, who will (eventually!) become Chancellor of Germany on 6 May. Merz is a military hawk, who has already shown all the signs that he would like to take the Ukraine War to Russia (ref. Berlin Briefing, DW, 24 April 2015), and elite public opinion in Germany seems to be staunchly 'pro-Ukraine'. In the event of a new global Great Depression – or the Geoeconomic Chaos Crisis that seems to be starting – could Merz become the new Führer, a 'willing' militarist leader of the Fourth Reich? At age 69 he's a young man compared to Donald Trump, and he looks to be fighting fit. Germany has many of the same issues today that it had in 1910 and in 1930; a people seeking to re-flex their nationalist muscles while severely constrained, within their German and EU boundaries, in terms of natural resources. Will Merz try to shore up (and militarize) the flagging European Union, much as Trump has been trying (unsuccessfully to be sure) to unite the whole of the Americas under his triumphalist banner? (Q. How do you get to run a small superpower? A. Get yourself a large superpower, and wait.) The battle for Ukraine may have a while to run yet; possibly as a European 'civil' war, a new Russo-German War.

Anzac Day

My sense is that if there's one thing that Aotearoa's post-2023 leadership are even more attracted to than fiscal austerity, then that's a good geopolitical scrap. We start to see war as glorious rather than ugly. We bring out all the false clichés and narratives, we extoll the likes of Winston Churchill, we self-suppress the inconvenient truth that war is a nasty, nasty, nasty business; indeed, we self-suppress this truth even when we see war's brutality – or could see it if we choose to watch Freeview Channel 20 – unfolding every day.

Now that the 80th anniversary of the Great World War has nearly passed, Anzac Day risks becoming a day of martial geo-nationalism, and not a day of remembrance.

Anzac Day has already become a day of highly selective remembrance; probably it always was. I visited Würzburg (the German firebombed city that suffered more than any other on a per capita basis) in 1974, and I visited West and East Berlin (via Checkpoint Charlie) that same year. I visited Arras in 1975, near to where my father's first cousin died in November 1918. I visited Derry and Belfast in 1976, cities in a then-active civil war zone. I visited the magnificently-sited Khartoum in 1978, now the capital-centre of the world's most complicit and under-narrated tragedy. I visited Cassino in 1984, the 40th anniversary of the battles that pointlessly took so many lives, including Kiwi lives such as that of my mother's first cousin. I visited Dandong and Seoul in 2008, gaining a first-hand insight into the Korean War, including a walk on the American-destroyed bridge and an oversight of the North Korean city of Sinuiju. (And I visited Port Arthur – Lüshun – key site and sight of the Russia-Japan War of 1905, with its natural harbour and its extant Russian train station.)

And in 2014, on the day after Anzac Day, I visited Nagasaki, site of the first plutonium bomb ever dropped over a city; and, that same month, I visited Ginza and Asakusa in Tokyo, rebuilt sites of the worst example every of a conventional fire holocaust; 100,000 mostly civilian deaths in one March night eighty years ago. (I was also lucky to get to walk through unbombed streets to the northwest of Ueno Park, getting a sense of what the neighbourhoods of Asakusa were once like.)

Lest we forget. Mostly, we have forgotten. (Including the worst of The Holocaust. Who commemorates Treblinka today? Or Minsk? Only Poland and Russia and Belarus.)

Our amnesia extends to one place New Zealanders fought in. This week Al Jazeera has done a series of news vignettes and a longer documentary, to remember the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. This anniversary has not been prominent in New Zealand's Anzac Day media-scape. (RNZ did run a Reuters-syndicated website-only story on 30 April: Vietnamese celebrate 50 years since end of Vietnam War. And, to its credit, TV3 News ran an overseas-sourced story yesterday, not a story about New Zealand's largely-forgotten participation.) By-and-large, the still-living anti-Vietnam-War generation is now silent, apparently forgetful.

When martial narratives are not sufficiently contested, then wars – big wars – happen, almost by accident. That's how the Great World War began in the first place.

- Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

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Keith Rankin

Political Economist, Scoop Columnist

Keith Rankin taught economics at Unitec in Mt Albert since 1999. An economic historian by training, his research has included an analysis of labour supply in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and has included estimates of New Zealand's GNP going back to the 1850s.

Keith believes that many of the economic issues that beguile us cannot be understood by relying on the orthodox interpretations of our social science disciplines. Keith favours a critical approach that emphasises new perspectives rather than simply opposing those practices and policies that we don't like.

Keith retired in 2020 and lives with his family in Glen Eden, Auckland.

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