Article I Have Written On Axis Powers and Why They Went to War in The 1930s and 1940s

2 min readApr 12, 2023

The reasons range from ideological, practical, political and geopolitical; the role of this article is to understand the motivations of Nazi Germany (1933 to 1945), Imperial Japan (1894 to 1945), and Mussolini’s Italy 1922 to 1943).

This is a guest post by writer Jonathan Riley. Find out more about him on his Medium page, as well as his LinkedIn and his blog.

This article will focus on practical, geopolitical and political reasons behind the motivations of the imperial ambitions of the three Axis powers; this does not mean ignoring or undermining the atrocities committed by the Fascists and imperialists during and before World War II.

The Italian peninsula, the Japanese islands, and Germany do have similarities, these being mountainous terrains that make it harder to expand their populations. With Germany’s third of its territory, mountains can be seen in an inverted V on maps.

Japanese islands are mountainous; about three-fourths of the national land is mountains, and long mountain ranges form the backbone of the archipelago. For Italy, 40% of its land mass is also mountains.

To understand the reasons behind the actions of the Axis powers, it must be strongly emphasized that the economic free trade and globalization as we know it only existed in the creation of the American security blanket after World War II.

What this meant for most nations with access to the materials of industrialization was that the only way to survive was to secure trading markets by conquering territories.

This means that in the political orthodoxy of the time, the only real option for Germany, Japan and Italy was to go for and conquer new territories.

These are the motivations of the French, English, Dutch, and American Western expansion connecting America from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

If you would like to read the full article, please view this link to the History On The Net to read the full Article Axis Powers and Their Motivations to Go to War