Agreed, Mark. Mussolini was a minor malefactor in comparison to Hitler, Stalin, and the Japanese. He was an unsavory, brutal man in many ways, and an abuser of power, but he was not in that same class of being a major committer of war crimes.

There was a strong tendency toward fascism in all the western nations in the 30's...as well as in Japan...and the Soviets had their own form of what I would call extreme socialist fascism too, which was as bad as any of the others, maybe worse. I regard the British, French, and American societies of the late 30's as having had quite strong fascist undercurrents, instincts, and sympathies...but when war broke out between them and the Germans (who were even considerably more fascist) then the Allies took upon themselves the righteous mantle of official anti-fascism, as if they had no such tendencies themselves! ...and they've been wearing that fig leaf over their own naked ambition ever since.

That was convenient in a propaganda sense, but it was far from totally honest or true.

The present British-American Axis in the world is decidedly fascist in my opinion, and it is behaving quite a bit the way Hitler did in the late 30s with its illegal little wars in small countries and its illegal prison and torture facilities for prisoners that it holds without trial, and its increases in domestic surveillance of its own populations, and its abrogations of civil rights in that regard.

All wars are unnecessary (at the inception), but they happen because people abuse power and try to take things that are not rightly theirs. At a certain point in the process...from the point of view of those being attacked...the war then becomes both necessary and absolutely unavoidable.

For the Poles, obviously, in September '39, that was the case. They had to fight to protect themselves against German aggression, and the whole rest of the sorry mess proceeded from there like a house of cards falling down.

It must have been quite a surprise to Hitler, because I don't think he had any notion that the French and British would fight him on behalf of Poland. Particulary the British!   Hitler had always seen them as his natural future allies in a world dominated by an Anglo-German alliance. He figured that the British would help him annihilate the Soviets, and together they would run the world.

The period of the "Phony War" that followed the Polish campaign was interesting, in retrospect. The British and French had declared war on Germany after the Polish invasion, but they didn't really do much about prosecuting that war. Leaflets were dropped by their airplanes on German land. No significant land actions were taken against the Germans by the powerful French army which had the Germans very badly outnumbered in the West until the conclusion of the Polish campaign.

This must have emboldened Hitler considerably in late '39 and early '40, as he would have felt that the western allies were showing weakness and lack of resolve. Still, he was quite nervous about the chances of his 1940 offensive in the West. When it succeeded beyond his wildest expectations, he must have felt invincible...and such hubris would later lead him to do absolutely irrational things such as the attack on Soviet Russia, and the declaration of war on the USA within days after Pearl Harbour. He sealed his country's fate with those decisions.