Strategic Planning, Civil Wars and Environment between the World Wars

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Major attention has recently been paid to the environmental dimensions and legacies of World Wars I and II. This leads to global consideration of the “interwar” years: the complex environmental dynamics of military operations and strategic planning, and the various local wars that ultimately contributed to a second global conflagration. In the aftermath of the “Great War” both Germany and Japan understood that they were threatened by the worldwide British and American control of critical natural resources. Even in the 1920s both countries planned strategic campaigns to change that. Then, in the Depression years that followed, as war clouds developed again, military rearmament had major environmental consequences. The “civil war” in Spain, in which the opposing Powers were deeply enmeshed, highlights the ominous entanglements between regional and global conflicts. The participants in this panel probe these dimensions of that era, and a tentative map of the middle period of the Twentieth Century’s “Thirty Years War” emerges.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Timber Famine: German Anxiety over Wood Scarcity after the First World War - Jeffrey Wilson, California State University, Sacramento

• Concrete, Forests, and Farming: Mobilizing Imperial Peripheries for Japan after the Roaring ‘20s - Jack Hayes, Kwantlen Polytechnic University and University of British Columbia Center for Chinese Research

• Planning for Prosperity, Planning for War: The New Deal and War Mobilization in the Pacific Northwest - Katherine Macica, Loyola University, Chicago

• The Ebro River as a Weapon of War: Dams, Floods and Pontoons in the Final Battle of the Spanish Civil War (1938) - Santiago Gorostiza, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Chair

• Richard Tucker, University of Michigan

Commentator

• Colin Duncan, Queens University and McGill University