Impossible Peace

After four years of fighting, World War I ends. The victorious nations assemble at Versailles to design the peace that they will impose on the defeated - Germany and Austria-Hungary. Russia's Bolshevik revolution has become a murderous civil war. The map of Europe is remade, with the dismantling and collapse of old empires. Everything throws dark and troubling shadows across the years ahead.

The peacemakers have gone home. America has rejected its president's peace settlement and withdrawn into its previous isolationist position. Europe wrestles with its debt, inflation destabilizes Germany. The first of the dictators - Benito Mussolini in Italy - rises to power and, in Soviet Russia, Lenin dies to be succeeded by Josef Stalin.

These are the best of times for the US. Prohibition doesn't stop anyone from having a good time, the country is on wheels or listening to the radio, welcoming the talkies or investing in the stock market. It's that brief spell they call the Jazz Age, the age of Charles Lindbergh and Babe Ruth. And in 1929, on Black Tuesday, it comes crashing down to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

What had seemed to be an economic recovery is revealed to have been at best fragile and the world enters a global depression of unprecedented and unmeasurable savagery. Unemployment, hyperinflation and despair are everywhere and dictators arise. Old empires - Britain and France - come under pressure throughout the extended territories that they can barely afford to police.

In different ways, in different places, new leaders take centre stage: Hitler in Germany, Roosevelt in the US. Militarism triumphs in Japan, which consolidates its invasion of China's north east. By the time the offices of president and chancellor have been combined into a single Fuhrer, Hitler has achieved absolute power in a one-party state without acting unconstitutionally.

In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic's repression, gulags, collectivization, and Five-Year plans are beginning to tally the human toll that will always be associated with Stalin's rule.

The power in Europe has finally and fatally shifted - the resurgent Germany of the Third Reich is the dominant force. War rips Spain apart as a three year civil war of terrible brutality starts.

Little more than 20 years after the guns fell silent, they roar back into life. Hitler annexes all of Czechoslovakia. Britain and France respond with promises to Poland.