Was there much public anti war sentiment or cynicism from WW1 veterans in the lead up to WW2?

by Shikatanai
CptBuck

This is not an expertise of mine and I personally cannot, nor do I think it is possible to given the number of people involved and the polling techniques available at the time, not to mention the impossibility of definitively discussing something as complex as culutral memory, speak for an entire generation of people, but I can bring to bear a number of salient examples that point me towards suggesting that the answer to your question may be "No."

  1. In her book Troublesome Young Men, Lynne Olsen observes, about the clique that formed around Churchill in opposition to Hitler in the 1930s, that Churchill's "hawkish" tories were in large part WWI combat veterans, including Churchill himself, but also Harold MacMillan, Anthony Eden, Leo Amery, and Lord Robert Cranborne, among others. Meanwhile she notes that the most ardent doves or appeasers, chiefly Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, had not served.
  2. There is a mirror effect of this in Germany. Of the books that I have read on the rise of the Nazis, for instance, Ian Kershaw's Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris or Richard Evans The Coming of the Third Reich, the strongest supporters of the Volkisch movement and then later Hitler and the Nazi movement were either WWI veterans who felt they had been stabbed in the back and that Germany had never been defeated and that Versaille was a betrayal of their sacrifice, or the younger generation that had been too young to fight but who wanted to honor the fatherland. As a result it's no coincidence that the leaders of the Beerhall Putsch were almost all veterans. While the primary German veterans organization, the Stahlhelms, was in theory a-political, it did not prove difficult to co-opt them and eventually to gain their out-and-out support for the incoming fascist regime.

That's not to say there was not war cynicism or anti-war sentiment, but I think you could make a case that that war cynicism was embraced after the horrors of the Second World War, not the first.

So for example, we have of course the artistic works of Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front) or the anti-war expressionist painting of Otto Dix produced in the inter-war period. While of course successful in their own right, these works and others like them are denounced and ultimately expelled from and destroyed in Germany by the Nazis.

Even in Britain, although I admit to being on less-firm ground here in terms of my own knowledge, it's my understanding that as revered as the Wilfred Owens and Siegfired Sassooons of the WWI poets may have been in the inter-war period, it's not until after the second world war that they get added en-masse to school curriculums (and therefore popular consciousness about the relative output of anti-war sentiment by the war's participants) as part of a cultural canon of the First World War.