To what extent can the Treaty of Versailles be blamed for WW2?

That there is a clear link between the Treaty of Versailles and WW2 is pretty clear. Certainly, the 1920 cartoon ‘Peace And Future Cannon Fodder’ by Will Dyson, an Australian who had been an official artist on the Western Front but who was working for the Daily Herald, a left-leaning British newspaper, in 1920, leaves us in no doubt as to what he, and the Daily Herald, thought. And we should note that the cartoon was published at the time the terms of the treaty became known so the cartoon is an immediate reaction to those terms and the conference that had produced them.

It is a famous cartoon and you will find it in many textbooks and it has been used in past exam questions.

The cartoon has the title, ‘Peace And Future Cannon Fodder’, and shows David Lloyd George, Vittorio Orlando, Georges Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson, the British, Italian and French Prime Ministers and the American President, as they leave the Peace Conference. We can deduce this because they are leaving a grand building and there is a copy of the terms of the treaty discarded on the floor.

Hidden from the Big Four is a child weeping who we can presume has read or heard the terms. Above the child are the words: “1940 Class”. Because the child is weeping we are also encouraged to presume that he is German (though in truth he could also be from any of the Big Four’s countries). He is weeping (and he is a “he”) because the terms of the treaty are harsh on Germany and because, being the “1940 Class”, he will be graduating that year and is expecting to face another war in which he will be the “cannon fodder”, i.e. amongst the troops to be slaughtered by the deadly artillery of WW2 as they had been in the recent war.

The caption at the foot of the cartoon reads: “Curious! I seem to hear a child weeping” It is attributed to “The Tiger”. Clemenceau’s nickname was ‘the Tiger’ which gives a clue as to his personality. He had earned the nickname because of his determination in resisting the German attack. And it was known that he had made the strongest argument to treat Germany harshly.

That it is such an off-hand remark leads us to think that Clemenceau in particular, but the Big Four collectively, haven’t really thought-through the likely long-term consequences of such a harsh treaty. In particular, that it would certainly anger Germans and could well lead to another world war.

This cartoon is pointing to the Treaty of Versailles as the cause of a likely future war. It shows us how astute political cartoonists were (and still are today). The message they send out to their readership is, in its details, subtle (but can be deduced with some background knowledge) but its overall message is pretty clear.