I believe that Adolf Hitler was, while not the sole cause of World War II, a key figure that ensured devastating conflict tore across the world on 1st September 1939. Having established himself as a strong leader and earned the support of the German citizens, he made several advancements on neighbouring countries that were illegal under the Treaty of Versailles, and completely disregarded Britain and France’s warning to declare war on his country if he invaded Poland. At this stage he knew the consequences of his actions, and yet still took over Poland – opposing the Allies and showing that he wanted war. However, I have come to the conclusion that a dictator such as Hitler was inevitable considering the events that took place before his rise to power and, as such, he is not entirely to blame.

The Treaty Of Versailles

The Treaty of Versailles could be considered to be the initial trigger of World War II. Following the tragic losses suffered by WWI, Germany was forced to agree to the terms of the Treaty, which first and foremost made the country admit that it was to blame for the war. Following this was £6,600 million of economic reparations, the disarmament of the army and strips of land being taken away from Germany and given to other countries. Following hyperinflation the Germans must have felt cheated and angry with the other countries for the harsh Treaty. I feel that if even if Hitler had not stepped up and offered to steer the country out of chaos, another strong and convincing leader would have done so instead: Germany was desperate for hope and change. In order to satisfy the citizens, the next leader would need to be nothing short of extreme, or else would be too weak to circumvent the regulations imposed upon the economically ruined country. In this way I believe the Treaty was fairly significant in causing an outbreak of war.

It is easy to forget, however, why the Treaty was ever fashioned and signed in the first place – Germany’s involvement with WWI. Germany had played a large part in the war, which then led to the Treaty being directed at them. If Germany had been innocent to start with, there would have been no economic reparations and deprivation of land and militia – and thus hyperinflation and public anger would not have taken hold. If this was the case, then either Hitler would have felt no need to create his Nazi party and lead Germany out of a crisis, or he would have set his eyes on the chancellorship anyway and nobody would have voted for him – Hitler used the country’s despair to his advantage, and I believe that without it, such an extreme and fascist candidate would never have been elected. In other words, I feel that Germany itself was largely responsible for starting World War Two: following its own history of war, it was made to suffer the punishments imposed by the Treaty – except that the Germans did not accept it, and instead resorted to a drastic measure – Hitler.

Adolf Hitler

At the centre of the war was der Führer himself. Despite my belief that Germany’s dictator was nothing more than an irrevocable response to the public anger over the Treaty, there is no doubt that Hitler was a warmonger. He was not afraid to blatantly break the country’s Versailles restraints, marching into Austria and forming a forbidden alliance with Austria (Anschluss) by means of a rigged vote. After agreeing to appeasement – peace in return for the Sudetenland – Hitler broke his promise and invaded the whole of Czechoslovakia anyway. This tells us a fair amount about Hitler – he couldn’t have cared less about the other countries and their sanctions on Germany. The last straw was when the Nazi-Soviet pact was made between Germany and the USSR. It was made clear that invading Poland would result in the Allied Forces declaring war on Germany; nevertheless he went ahead with the offensive on 1st September 1939, and two days later Neville Chamberlain declared war.

“This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.” – Neville Chamberlain, 3rd September 1939

All these aggressive and rebellious moves may have stilled the public anger in Germany, but in its place cropped up fury around the world, as politicians began to realise that the only way to fight fire is with fire – Germany’s ever-growing empire could only be stopped by force. By giving the Axis’ enemies no other option but war, I believe that Hitler was the biggest fundamental cause of World War II.

The League Of Nations

Many people point a finger at the League of Nations, which was thought up by US president Woodrow Wilson. The entire aim of the League was to avert war, yet it did not manage to do so. Italy and Japan both betrayed the LoN, but Britain and France did not bat an eyelid. The League’s biggest issue was that it had no authority – America, an isolationist country, refused to join, as did Russia for its communist beliefs and hate of the Allies, while Germany was not allowed to join. Considering that three of the richest powers at the time were not in the League, there was very little that could be done in the event of a breach of the agreements, as the remaining powers had been hit hard by WWI. However, this was mainly the fault of America and Russia for not joining, so I do not believe it is fair to blame the League, except for the mistake of denying Germany entry. I think that the USA was at considerable for a fault for refusing to jump in and avert war – as the world’s most powerful country they had had the largest influence, and therefore should have done more to stop WWII from breaking out.

Other Countries

Aside from America, Italy and Japan were also partly to blame. Japan, once powerful, had been devastated by the economic downturn. Both countries showed signs of hostility – Italy invaded Abyssinia in 1935 and Japan invaded China in 1931 for resources. These acts of violence angered the west, and to make matters worse, both made treaties with Hitler. Italy’s “Pact of Steel” with Germany guaranteed that the two countries helped each other should a war break out – but by signing in the first place, Italy was demonstrating that it expected war to break out. Japan was no better, spending lots of money on its army (that would have been more useful in sorting out the country’s state of economic ruin). The two friends that Hitler made gave him even more confidence, and so they are partly to blame for the war.

Another country that played a part in the outbreak was the USSR. In August 1939 it signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact with Germany, which not only ensured that the two powers would not fight each other, but also stated that Poland would be divided up between them. It was this invasion a month later that triggered WWII. The Soviet Union was powerful – like America, I condemn it for not trying to stop the war. However, while America stayed away because of its isolationism, the USSR was simply selfish and greedy – it was more concerned about its own country, and Poland was a healthy addition to its empire. As a result, Hitler had no need to worry about invading it, which was a major obstacle out of his way. As with Italy and Japan, I consider the USSR to have played quite a large part in the outbreak of war.

Neville Chamberlain

Chamberlain’s policy on appeasement has often been noted as a bad move. In order to try and prevent the impending war, the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia was given to Germany in return for peace, which was agreed in the Munich Agreement that was signed on 30th September 1938. It is argued that giving Hitler the Sudetenland only made him stronger, and encouraged him to go on to take the whole of Czechoslovakia. Also, when Britain and France did not stand up to Hitler, the Soviet Union became worried about Germany’s strength, and began thinking about making treaties with it. However, I think it extremely unfair to blame the appeasement for the outbreak. The Munich Agreement was signed specifically to satisfy Germany and avert the war – and whenever I consider the appeasement’s culpability, I remember that the only reason the Allies needed to conciliate Germany in the first place was because Hitler himself was threatening war – without such a danger the Agreement would never have needed to take place in the first place, and therefore the blame rests again with Hitler.

Conclusion

In conclusion, my analysis of the causes of World War Two leads perpetually back to Germany. The havoc it caused in World War One caused the Treaty of Versailles to be discussed and signed, which in turn angered the German citizens – in particular, fascist Adolf Hitler. The dictator, closely followed by the countries that were selfish, greedy or foolish enough to form alliances with him, led the world straight into war, ignoring sanctions, condemnations and warnings against the country that he wanted to be so pure and great. I believe that that he was ultimately responsible for causing the outbreak of WWII in September 1939, a war that damaged the world’s perception of Germany substantially. However, I doubt that if Hitler had not been there to take control of an irate and battered country, another great yet vicious leader would not have inexorably stepped up instead, to overthrow the unpopular Weimar government and satisfy the German people, who had no idea how much of an impact their anger was going to have over the next 5 years, 11 months and 15 days.

Sources:

• www.en.wikipedia.org
• www.historyonthenet.com
• www.timeanddate.com

• Normally the two longer joints of the instrument are held together by a metal pin when assembled. But the piece of metal that holds the pin on one joint has come off, meaning the two pieces won’t hold togetherproperly.
• One of the keys has lost the rubber cork lining underneath it (it fell off of its own accord, I was careful with it honest).

The former is more serious, and I will have to consider sending it off to be repaired. In the meantime, I am getting bugged by the music department to buy my own bassoon, instead of renting a school one. “Hmm”, I always say. “I’ll have to look into that”. Unfortunately these things don’t come cheap, at thousands of pounds for a decent new one. Hmm, I’ll have to look into that.

No I am not enjoying this one little bit

Oh dear oh dear oh dear. I look like Father Christmas, or my Grandad, or both (maybe they are the same person). When I’m king.. man wird sich nicht rasieren dürfen. I think that’s how you say it.

WW1 Weapons Wiki

At first we installed the TikiWiki Content Management System using Fantastico Deluxe, an application within cPanel. Installation was very simple, although we had a default style, not the Wikipedia template.

The actual Wikipedia template is based on MediaWiki, usefully called Tikipedia. We downloaded this, unzipped and extracted it with 7-Zip and uploaded it over FTP into the styles folder, with the CSS file in a higher-level directory.

Going into the admin panel, we set the wiki to use the tikipedia.css stylesheet, which implemented all of the graphics on this page. Several adjustments were required, mainly margin adjustments and font sizes (the default was much too small).

The logo was created on Photoshop. We implanted the headerbg.jpg background within the logo image, which aligned perfectly within the page because the logo was being shown at exactly (x,y) (0,0) so it was in the top-left hand corner. We found the JPEG format on Low compression worked well, while maintaining a low file size. Use of PNGs were impossible, due to the lack of support on Internet Explorer 6.

It started to go downhill after the permissions got messed up, meaning everybody had access to the admin panel. When we tried to correct it, it disabled viewing permissions for everyone, including registered users and admins. We decided to scrap TikiWiki and install MediaWiki instead.

The content was extracted from the MySQL database and saved as plain HTML. Next, MediaWiki was downloaded and then uploaded to the Mr. Xav server. Installation was problematic due to some MySQL username issues, but eventually it was installed.

A new logo had to be made, this time 135 x 135 pixels, which was uploaded and set using $wgLogo. Finally, the content needed to be re-inserted into the wiki.

I installed an extra two instances of WordPress in subdomains ”dan” and “lizzie” using Fantastico Deluxe on cPanel. To date there are only a handful of posts on each (so it fits with the Mr. Xav theme then!) but they don’t look half bad, after I uploaded some nice free templates from the WordPress website.

Mr. Dan

Daniel’s blog/site can be accessed at: Mr. Dan

Mr. Lizzie

Yes, Lizzie is a girl. Her blog/site can be accessed at: Mr. Lizzie

Which was great, until I caught a cold a few days later. Here we go again. I will keep you posted.

For a few months now I have had some breathing problems. It felt like a very heavy cold… except blowing my nose didn’t help. The doctor did some allergy tests, put me on antibiotics, but nothing worked.

Eventually my doctor, Mr. Habashi, booked me in for a CT scan. Yes, the one where you lie down on a stretcher and go through a revolving tunnel to scan your insides. The one that costs thousands of pounds per scan - good thing for private healthcare, eh?

So I had a CT X-Ray scan done of my sinuses and nose. A week later, Mr. Habashi called me in and showed me the damage. Essentially, there were two problems with my upper breathing system:

1) My sinuses (little pockets of air behind your cheeks) had become blocked with extra flesh. There was also some sort of infection there, causing some nasty pus to build up as well (nothing you can see from the outside).

2) My nose septum (the bone bit that separates my nose passages from each other) was slightly large on one side, which was restricting my air flow in one of my nostrils (higher up in my nose).

Of course, this meant an operation. Luckily, Mr. Habashi assured me he would perform both pieces of surgery in one sitting. The big snag was that I wasn’t allowed to interact with other people for 10 days after the operation, which meant missing school, as well as all the other activities I do. Therefore, we timed it so that I would miss the last four days of school before half term, plus the whole of the half term itself. That way, no-one gets hurt (except for my nose).

I am writing this two days after the operation. On Tuesday (the first day I wasn’t in school) I arrived at BMI North London Hospital (I am told this is the nicest hospital around our area) at 7:00 AM. I was given a lovely little cosy room to myself, with my name on the door. There were a couple of other younger children also going in for surgery, so I had to spend quite a lot of time waiting around.

In the meantime, I had to put on a hospital gown and the nurse(s) applied special cream to the backs of my hands to make them numb, in preparation for the tube they were going to insert there in order to quickly be able to inject any medicines or anything they needed to. I had two nurses - both of them called Sue. One did the day shifts, the other did the night shifts. My weight, blood pressure etc. were checked - and no I am not fat.

Then the operation came. They raised the sidebars of my hospital bed and wheeled me into a lift, down to the operating theatre. We stopped in a little room outside the op theatre, chock full of medical instruments. The nurse wired me up to check my oxygen levels and whatnot, then they inserted a tube into my numbed hand. This was the fun part - they injected the anesthetic into my arm (I couldn’t feel it, I was numbed remember?) and I was off to the land of nod. I was told I would feel something cold running up my arm - I felt nothing.

After about eight seconds, my eyes started going out of focus (just like they do on television) and then it went black. My dad later told me that my eyes were still half open after this, but I couldn’t remember anything after this.

When I woke up, dizzy and confused, I was in the recovery room (the room that the patients sit in before they are ready to return to their room). Once again, the nurse (this was day-time Sue, by the way) clipped a sensor to my index finger and checked my oxygen levels. A short while later, I was carted off back into a new room, where I was to sleep.

I was very, very dizzy and could hardly keep my eyes open, thanks to the anesthetic. But the op was a success… so I am told. We just have to trust doctors, eh?

From then on, the nurse (day-time Sue still) checked my oxygen levels every hour, and gave me several pills to swallow; antibiotics, paracetamol, that kind of stuff. Luckily for me, I was used to taking pills from the doses I had before the CT Scan, so it wasn’t a problem for me.

The meals looked nice, but I couldn’t taste much, thanks to two large, rubbery things stuffed up my nose to stop it from bleeding too much. Don’t ask what they looked like. I had a cheese and tomato toastie for lunch (my operation was about 10:30) and then my family came to visit me. Before this, it was just my mum there, but now school had finished, and my two sisters, dad and grandparents turned up.

We talked a bit, then it was dinner time. My family went downstairs to the canteen to eat, leaving me to try and get some shut-eye in my room. Unfortunately, the waitress decided to barge in and present me with a plate of salmon, peas and new potatoes, with a biscuit-and-cheese platter for dessert. Shame I just wanted to sleep.

I had a cute little TV mounted to the wall with a DVD player, on which I played a pirate copy of Mr. Bean’s Ultimate Disaster Movie. The nurse had trouble leaving the room, her eyes were fixed to Mr. Bean comically trying to shag the toilet handryer.

Night-time was hell. I had to continually breathe through my mouth, as I had the rubbery things in my nose (the nurse called them “packs”. I didn’t.), which meant my mouth kept getting dry. This, combined with the fact the nurse kept coming in every single hour to check my oxygen levels, guaranteed I didn’t sleep.

In the morning I had some rice crispies, a yoghurt and I’ve forgotten the third thing. The nurse (the other one now, as the shift had changed) removed the tube from my hand and the “packs” from my nose. I still couldn’t breathe, my nose was chock-a-block with bloody mucus.

We were given various creams and other bits and bobs to use at home, then I was dispatched. Once at home, I felt pretty grisly, so I just played on the computer all day (I managed to install this blog system, for instance). Later I watched Ratatouille with Leila and Maia, and then an early night. Zzzzzzz….

Sleeping was still difficult. I fell asleep at about 11:30, then woke up again at 2:00 in the morning. After a quick dash to the toilet and some more paracetamol, I slept again until 7:00. Which brings us to Thursday - today, as I write this. Miss Fradley photocopied me some sheets so I wouldn’t miss anything, so I spent some of the day working through “speed, distance time”, “speed, distance, time”, “speed, distance, time”.

Meanwhile, my nose has not yet shown any signs of clearing. Mr. Habashi did say that it would feel as though I had a heavy cold until it had cleared, so I am feverishly waiting to be able to breathe properly through my nose. For the first time in almost a year.