While imprisoned along with other German generals and admirals after the Second World War, Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb wrote in his diary on December 10,1945: “After the experiences of this war, we shall, in view of the enormous numerical superiority of the English fleet, have to give priority in a future naval construction program to U-boats, destroyers, mine layers … above all to the strongest naval air arm in order to be able to search out and destroy the English fleet in its hidden bases.”

Here is a conservative and generally moderate German military leader so fastened to perceptions of a world which had vanished that he quite auto-matically assumes that World War II will be followed after an appropriate interval by World War III in which Germany will fight essentially the same enemies as in the two preceding struggles but will, of course, attempt to do better by applying the lessons learned in the war that had just ended.

If one of those whose reputation as a skeptic about National Socialism was strong enough for him to be rudely retired in the housecleaning of February 4, 1938, could express himself in the manner quoted after World War II, it should be easier to understand how completely a new conflict was thought likely, perhaps assumed inevitable, during World War I.