History

Oct 24, 2022 - Dr. Michael Neiberg, Professor of History and Chair of War Studies in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the United State Army War College, served as the 2022 Carls-Schwerdfeger History Lecturer on October 24. Neiberg presented two lectures related to recent books he has written about the two world wars. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of 21 books on modern warfare and diplomacy and the winner of several book awards.

In the afternoon, Neiberg spoke to 175 people about “Reconstructing Europe after World War I: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919.” After noting that the Paris Peace Conference has a poor reputation among historians, Neiberg used the lecture to explain the process of the conference, its importance in the reconstruction of Europe and areas beyond, and the factors in its failure to achieve the goal of making World War I the war to end all wars. The three most important players at the conference – French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George – had the power to redraw the borders of Europe, but they also had divergent goals which made the negotiating process much more difficult. As for Wilson, he had little interest in foreign affairs when World War I erupted in 1914, but by 1919, now deeply immersed in the subject, he had a plan to reconstruct Europe for all time, one based on a League of Nations and national self-determination. There was a major overlap of ethnicities in many areas of Europe, however, which meant that there would be winners and losers in a redrawn map of Europe based on ethnicity. And a reconstructed Europe based on ethnicity would not necessarily correlate well with the economic or defense needs of the redrawn areas. To underscore the hasty shift of America’s attitude toward Europe between 1914 and 1919, Neiberg mentioned William Linn Westermann, a University of Wisconsin professor skilled in how to read Egyptian hieroglyphics, who in late 1917 became part of an Ivy-League dominated think tank that advised Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference. Neiberg, emphasizing the group’s lack of training for such an undertaking, stated: “In 1917 he’s [Westermann] reading Egyptian hieroglyphics. In 1919, he’s so important that he’s in the room in Paris when they make the decision whether Constantinople – Istanbul, this great important city in Turkey – should go to Turkey or Greece.” In regard to Asia in the treaty settlement, Neiberg focused on the Shandong Peninsula in China, which was under German control prior to World War I, but which the Japanese sought to control economically after the war. Wilson initially resisted the Japanese effort at the peace conference since it would violate his principle of self-determination – the peninsula was 99% Chinese. The Japanese countered by threatening to call for a global racial equality clause in the Treaty of Versailles with Germany. As the leader of a country with racial segregation, Wilson secretly negotiated a Japanese withdrawal of their racial equality clause in exchange for Japanese economic control over Shandong. Neiberg pointed out that this decision resulted in the birth of Chinese nationalism in the form of the May Fourth Movement (1919) and a Chinese refusal to sign the Treaty of Versailles. Neiberg concluded by citing three things that he believed went wrong in Paris in 1919. First, the negotiators’ attempt to redraw completely the map of the world was beyond the powers of any three men to do so; there were representatives of 81 nations present, and there was no way that they were all going come away happy. Secondly, the Paris negotiators wrote a static treaty for a world in constant flux; the Allies learned from this by deciding at the end of World War II not to have another major peace conference and instead to deal with problems as they arose. Thirdly, and most importantly for Neiberg, the Paris peace negotiators failed to grasp how much trauma the First World War had engendered, failed to understand that the trauma of the war was so deep that it would go well beyond World War I to fuel the Second World War, fuel a Holocaust, and fuel a Cold War. According to Neiberg, “the First World War is so important because the Europe that it broke never really got put back together, and the peace treaty that tried to do that failed miserably.”

Neiberg’s evening lecture, attended by 450 people, was titled “Perilous Times: America’s Search for Security after the Fall of France in World War II.” He began by emphasizing the shock of the Americans when France’s army fell to Hitler’s German forces in a mere six weeks in the spring of 1940. The United States had based its military decisions up to then on the assumption that the French would hold off the Germans just as they had in World War I. When the French signed an armistice with Germany in June 1940, France was divided into a German-occupied zone in the north and along the Atlantic seaboard and a technically neutral France called Vichy which also claimed control over France’s vast colonial empire. But the Germans were now in control of Paris, and they could potentially pressure Vichy into doing whatever they wanted. Suddenly, with France’s defeat, American national security appeared at risk. The United States responded in part with some unprecedented actions to beef up the country’s military apparatus. One of these was passage of the Two-Ocean Navy Act – the single most expensive piece of legislation in American history to that point while another was the Burke-Wadsworth Selective Service Act that introduced for the first time in U.S. history a military draft in peacetime. Neiberg pointed out that America’s misplaced assumption regarding French military strength in 1940 was “the last time in American history that Americans are willing in effect to subcontract their defense out to somebody else.” The United States also opted to give diplomatic recognition to Vichy, which was clearly collaborating with the Germans, in the hope that Vichy could be pulled to the American side. The American decision angered the British who backed the anti-Vichy Free French movement of General Charles de Gaulle. Neiberg indicated that the Anglo-American divide over Vichy was “the single-most consistent element of tension between the United States and Great Britain in the entire Second World War.” He also stated that the Americans’ decision to launch their first offensive in the European war by invading Vichy-controlled territories in North Africa was based on a realization that their Vichy policy was failing and that they needed to do something else. Their hope was that Vichy officers stationed in North Africa would swear allegiance to the Americans and help them fight the Germans. Right after the offensive began in late 1942, the Americans signed a deal with the Vichy regime’s senior French officer on the scene, the much-hated Admiral François Darlan. The Darlan deal proved incredibly unpopular after it appeared in U.S. newspapers since the Americans were yet again dealing with the pro-German Vichy people. The assassination of Darlan on Christmas Eve in 1942 gave the United States a new opportunity to reset its foreign policy with France. Instead, the Americans made a deal with another Vichy official that left the Vichy regime in control of North Africa, thereby angering both de Gaulle and the British. The American relationship with de Gaulle never recovered from this during the rest of the war. In fact, de Gaulle proved a difficult ally for the United States for the rest of his life, in large part because of the enduring mistrust he developed toward America for its embracement of Vichy and its mishandling of him during the war.

Phi Alpha Theta student members Breanna Edmiston, Abbie Hobson, and Nicholas Palmer served as ushers at Neiberg’s evening lecture.

Other activities that Neiberg participated in while in Jackson included a visit to Pinson Mounds State Archaeological Park, a coffee time with history department faculty members, a special dinner in his honor in Union’s Chapman Dining Room, and a stop at Union’s art gallery to see an exhibition of original works by internationally known artist Marc Chagall.

This year marked the 25th anniversary of the Carls-Schwerdfeger History Lectureship Series which has included Pulitzer Prize winners, recipients of the Pritzker Military Museum & Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing, winners of American Historical Association book prizes, Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize awardees, and Bancroft Prize recipients. Speakers have come from such institutions as Brandeis University, Harvard University, MIT, Princeton University, the University of Virginia, UCLA, Yale University, and the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.