Stalin survives a coup attempt in Moscow led by Chief of Secret Police Beria with the support of old-timer Soviet politicians Kalunin and Bukharin. For several days Stalin's position is rocky but when on 12th January Molotov rallies to the regime and the leader of the Moscow garrison, Zhukov, brings his forces into Red Square the conspiracy is broken. Kalunin flees to the Ukraine but Beria commits suicide rather than surrender and Bukharin, his health already ruined, dies soon after his imprisonment. Stalin embarks upon a vicious and far-reaching purge of party and army offices.
March 1939 sees a similar event in Tokyo where the government of Konoe is overthrown in a violent coup by Count Hisaichi Terauchi who assumes the position of Prime Minister, appointing General Hideki Tojo as War Minister and General Yoshijiro Umezu as Foreign Minister. This ultra-nationalist militarist government moves to take control of the armed forces, removing generals and admirals it considers to be of dubious loyalty and acting to take control of many aspects of social life.
Seeing a crisis developing U.S. President William J. Donovan sends his Secretary of State , Edward Reilly Stettinius , to the Dutch East Indies for urgent talks with the Dutch authorities in Jakarta and review progress made in the construction work at Surabaya. In addition , special ambassador Henry L Stimson is sent to The Hague for urgent talks with the Dutch government and to look into the progress of the construction of new Dutch warships.
May 1st 1939 the Italian Duke D'Aosta, newly-appointed governor of Italian East Africa, enters Addis Ababa several months after its capture by the Italian army and proclaims the war over. Former Abyssinian emperor Haile Selassie is in exile in French Djibouti, and apart from a small number of guerillas continuing to cause trouble in Tigre province the whole of the country is now securely under Italian control. In Rome the Legion d'Italia declares a public holiday in celebration of its triumph.
In France First Consul Pierre Laval's League Nationale government announces the Defence & Rearmament Act which combines the patchy programmes of the latter years of Sarrail's admistration and the promises of the first weeks of LN rule into a cohesive programme. Substantial funding is diverted to the military in a series of measures designed to modernise the airforce, develop the armoured divisions of the army into a modern independent fighting force, and initiate an ambitious naval construction programme including the building of a class of four new battleships and three fleet carriers, as well as substantial numbers of submarines, destroyers and modern cruisers.
Bastille Day, 14th July , 1939 sees a large Socialist protest in Paris against the militaristic policies of the League Nationale. This leads to running battles in the streets and several days of rioting , fighting and severe civil disorder. Eventually Laval uses paramilitary units of the gendarmerie to quell the riots and imposes martial law upon the French capital, an event which is greeted with consternation in many other European capitals.
The 80 year-old Kaiser Wilhelm II makes a state visit to Vienna where he meets with Kaiser Karl and the imperial prime minister, as well as three out of five of the autonomous kingdom's prime ministers (Austria's and Poland's being the exception). At a review of Imperial Cavalry on a cold August night the aged German emperor catches a chill. This soon turns to pneumonia and by the end of the month he is dead.
Kaiser Wilhelm II's funeral in Berlin is one of the most extravagant events of the period ; attended by the ruling heads of almost all the monarchies of Europe, and not a few from beyond, as well as Prime Ministers, Foreign Ministers and Ambassadors from all the nations of the world. New German Emperor Wilhelm III plays the prominent role in what is both a mourning of the passing of a great man and a celebration of his life and achievements. In the words of Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria, Wilhelm II is lauded as 'probably the greatest man this century will see'. Some wags among the foreign delegates note the conditional spin on that statement and only half-jokingly say that the Bulgarian monarch still yet hopes to achieve that accolade for himself.