PART I
CHAPTER 1
“Too few babies, too few arms, too few allies”: such was Pétain’s first stab at accounting for France’s defeat in 1940. That was in a radio address of 20 June, four days after he had become premier. Pétain made a second go of it five days later, once again in a radio speech, although this time he laid greater weight on the nation’s moral failings: “Our defeat was due to our laxness. The spirit of pleasure-seeking brings to ruin what the spirit of sacrifice has built.” And the Marshal’s voice carried weight. Not only was he France’s prime minister: he was the nation’s greatest living war hero, the victor of Verdun, for France the costliest battle of the Great War. Demographics do not get the same play today as they did in Pétain’s time, but otherwise, the explanation for France’s collapse has not changed much since. France just wasn’t ready to go to war.
In certain respects, France was indeed in “an unfavorable strategic situation” when the war began in September 1939.1 In contrast to the Great War, there was not much of an Eastern Front to speak of. French diplomacy in the 1930s had flirted with a Soviet alliance but never followed through, hobbled by anti-communist apprehensions. The Soviets in the end gave up on the anti-fascist cause, signing a non-aggression pact with the Germans in August. France had made an effort to cultivate substitute eastern allies in Czechoslovakia and Poland, but that effort fell short. France sold out her Czechoslovak ally at Munich in September 1938, and the following March, Hitler swallowed up what remained of an independent Czechoslovakia. Britain answered back, promising to guarantee Polish territorial integrity against Nazi depredations, and the French took steps to reaffirm an already long-standing commitment to Poland. The two Allied powers made good their pledges when Hitler moved on Poland in September, but in the event France did little to supply the Poles with much substantive military assistance, in effect leaving them to fend for themselves. But even had the French wanted to do more, they faced a major logistical problem. Italy stood in the way between France and Poland, literally, and Italy was bound by alliance to the Germans. Rapprochement between the two dictatorships had begun in the fall of 1936, culminating in a full-fledged military alliance, the Pact of Steel, concluded in May 1939. The Rome–Berlin axis, as it came to be called, had not been an inevitability. In 1934 a Hitler still new to power had menaced Austria. Italy stood up to Hitler and forced him to back down, a show of resolve that led to a warming of relations between Italy, France, and Great Britain too. But the three-power entente that resulted, the Stresa Front, had been allowed to unravel, such that Mussolini (as Stalin would do later) deemed it wiser to make a deal with Hitler rather than to oppose him.
France, however, did have one friend among Europe’s great powers, and that was Great Britain, but how difficult it had been to bring the British around. In March 1936, Hitler had remilitarized the Rhineland in contravention of the Versailles Treaty. The French contemplated action but took none, deterred in part by Britain’s refusal to help out. Later that year, General Francisco Franco mounted a military coup against the Spanish Republic. France’s Popular Front, led by the Socialist Léon Blum, wanted to come to the aid of its sister Republic but once again did little. Britain had made clear it would not stand by France in case of a war over Spain, and so Blum backed off, seeking instead to coax the interested powers—Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union—to agree to non-intervention. Yet for a third time, during the Munich crisis, the French bent to Britain’s will. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain wanted to pursue a policy of appeasement, and the French, ever the junior partners, went along. Unkind critics have characterized Britain today as a “poodle,” taking its lead from a bossy United States, but things were different in the 1930s. Then Britain was the imperious “governess” and France her sometime restive but on the whole compliant charge.2
So, yes, there is a strong case to be made that France’s strategic position in 1939 was unfavorable. Just think about it in comparison to 1914. At that time, the Germans had faced a formidable Eastern Front opponent in Imperial Russia. In 1939 the Soviet Union was more co-conspirator than enemy. All that stood in the Germans’ way was Poland, which had the pluck to put up a gallant fight but not the means to do more than that. In the Great War, Italy wound up on the side of the Entente. In the Second World War, it took Germany’s part. Then there is Great Britain. It got into the Great War at the very last minute, but once in, it did not hold back, dispatching an initial expeditionary force of six divisions that ballooned to twenty within a year. In the run-up to the Second World War, Britain committed itself sooner (a commitment to send troops was firmed up in the wake of Munich, almost a year before the actual outbreak of hostilities) but in the event never mustered more than a smallish army for continental service—ten divisions in all as late as May 1940.3 How was it that France found itself in such a predicament? For many historians, the answer is a simple one: bad policy, a diplomacy that was hesitant, short-sighted, and spineless.4
It is possible, however, to read France’s diplomatic record in less negative terms. To be sure, it took precious time for French policy-makers to catch on to the nature of the Nazi threat, but they did in the end and took the lead in assembling an anti-German coalition, patching together the strongest alliance possible in conditions that were difficult, to say the least. And while the French may have been slow to grasp the true state of affairs, others were slower still, sticking to policies of appeasement and neutralism up to the last minute, if not beyond. This is not to say that the French themselves were blameless, not at all, just that there was plenty of guilt to go around and that the French don’t deserve to be singled out.
It is not difficult to see why France took so long to face up to the Nazi threat. First of all, the French already had a policy in place to deal with the Germans—Briandism—that, into the early 1930s, appeared to be working just fine. At Locarno in 1925, France’s Foreign Minister Aristide Briand had played a pivotal part in negotiating a series of international agreements that confirmed the basic tenets of the Versailles Treaty in the West. Germany itself was among the signatories. The Germans still harbored ambitions to revise the Versailles settlement in the East, but France built up a network of regional alliances there to deter any potential aggression. In the aftermath of Locarno, Germany was step by step rewoven into the fabric of international life. It joined the League of Nations in 1926. The Young Plan of 1929 readjusted German war reparations debts to a more manageable level. As the 1930s began, the French might well congratulate themselves that Germany, Gulliver-like, was enmeshed in a web of collective agreements of sufficient strength to hold its revisionist impulses in check.5
The Nazi seizure of power in January 1933 upset the order of things. With little delay, Hitler set about shredding the bonds that pinned Germany down. He pulled Germany out of the League in October. He threatened military intervention in Austria the following year and then in 1935 repudiated the provisions of the Versailles Treaty constraining German rearmament.
France, however, was not without an answer to such challenges. The “spirit of Locarno” was dead, but there was still the possibility of containing Germany through regional alliances and international pressure. France came to an agreement with Italy and Great Britain in April 1935, the Stresa Front, with the goal of guaranteeing Austrian independence. Just weeks after that, France signed a mutual assistance pact with the Soviet Union, a reminder to the Germans that they were hemmed in on all sides. Containment and deterrence remained the order of the day in French policy, and for a moment the strategy seemed to work: Hitler backed down over Austria.
Then things began to come unstuck. Britain first of all went freelancing, working out a bilateral agreement with the Germans in June 1935 that regulated tonnage ratios between the two nations’ navies. The British did not consult the French on the matter, making plain Britain’s willingness to act alone in areas, like naval policy, where it felt that its vital interests were at stake.6 More consequential still was the Ethiopian crisis. In October, Mussolini ordered the invasion of the independent and sovereign kingdom of Ethiopia, a barefaced and brutal territorial grab. The League of Nations imposed economic sanctions on the Italians, but to no avail. Behind the scenes, Britain and France maneuvered to find a negotiated way out of the imbroglio. In the interests of maintaining anti-German solidarity, however, they were at the same time anxious not to ruffle Mussolini, and so the Franco-British “solution” tilted toward the Italians, in effect rewarding them for aggression. When the terms of the deal were leaked to the press, the British dissociated themselves from it, at one and the same time leaving the French in the lurch and irritating the Italians. Italian policy henceforth began to veer away from Stresa Front solidarity. Then in the first week of March 1936 came yet more bad news. France and Belgium had signed a mutual defense pact in 1920, which the Belgian government now repudiated. It was internal politics that determined the decision. The centrist Van Zeeland government wanted to rearm, but it faced resistance from anti-militarist socialists and from anti-French Flemings. Abrogation of the 1920 treaty, it was hoped, would mollify opponents and smooth the path to an overhaul of the nation’s military.7
This was the background to the Rhineland crisis. On 7 March 1936, the very day after Belgium pulled out of its partnership with the French, Hitler marched German troops into the Rhineland in violation of the Versailles Treaty. Who was in a position to come to France’s material aid? Not the Italians, who were edging into the German orbit, an evolution consummated over the coming summer months by concerted German-Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War. Not the Belgians, who had backed out of an alliance with France en route to a policy of neutralism. And not the British, who continued to view the French as troublemakers all too willing to snarl Britain in unwelcome continental entanglements. As for the international community, it had demonstrated its impotence during the Ethiopian affair (and would soon do so again in 1936 in its failure to enforce non-intervention in Spain). There was, of course, the option of taking on the Germans alone. But France, as it happened, was in the midst of a wrenching election campaign, not a propitious moment for a military venture. That venture, moreover, as France’s commanding generals made clear, would not be a minor one. The nation had no plans for a partial mobilization, so it was all or nothing. Into the bargain, the Chief of the General Staff, Maurice Gamelin, counseled caution. The Germans were well prepared as he saw it (Gamelin overestimated German strength) and the French were not. The remilitarization of the Rhineland in the end went unopposed.8
The events of 1935–6 left French diplomacy in a shambles. They were “the wrecking of French foreign policy,” in William Shirer’s vivid phrasing.9 Germany had always harbored revisionist ambitions in the East, but now, as Hitler’s Rhineland gambit made all too clear, it had its sights set on overturning the Versailles order in the West as well. France stood in imminent danger, and it had few partners it could count on. The regional alliances in the East remained in place, but that was about it. The prospects of an entente with Italy had collapsed, killed off by fascist power-grabbing in Ethiopia and Spain. Belgium and Britain, in pursuit of unilateral advantage, had turned their backs, and international institutions had proven themselves useless. Briandism was dead. It was an estimable package of policies but ill adapted to deal with a Hitler, and that was plain enough by mid-decade.
French policy-makers, however, were not at a complete loss. They maintained appearances in the East, preserving treaty ties to Poland and Czechoslovakia and keeping the option of a Soviet alliance open, and now efforts were redoubled to persuade Britain to abandon its splendid isolation and commit itself to keeping the peace on the continent by military means if necessary. This choice for Britain was as fateful as it was puzzling: fateful because anti-communist British policy-makers would in due course put a damper on France’s already tentative efforts to cultivate the Soviet Union as an ally, and puzzling because Britain made no secret of its reluctance to get involved in continental affairs, a reluctance already in evidence in its hands-off conduct at the time of the Rhineland crisis.
Yet the British option was not in fact as mysterious as all that. Memories from Great War days of the entente cordiale had not yet faded, and Britain was, like France itself, a democracy, an ideological kinship that carried all the greater weight in a Europe more and more dominated by dictatorships. Not least of all, for all its obvious hesitations to get involved on the continent, Britain was not immovable on the issue. In the aftermath of the Rhineland setback, the British agreed to send two divisions to France in case of an unprovoked German attack (provided, of course, that the British government at that time still judged the gesture worthwhile).10
This was something, albeit not much, and for the moment, that was as far as the British were prepared to go. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, the Blum government made known to London policy-makers its intention to help the Spanish Republic; the British made it just as clear that they would not back up the French should intervention escalate into something more serious. It was at this juncture that Blum abandoned his initial, interventionist impulse to pursue instead an international non-intervention pact. Yet, still the British continued to hold back. Neville Chamberlain became prime minister in the spring of 1937, and in the following months the new government made clear that it had no more interest in preserving Czechoslovakia’s territorial integrity than the outgoing Baldwin administration. Nor were the British above meddling in French affairs to advance the careers of appeasement-minded politicians to their liking. Blum left office in the summer of 1937 and then made a brief one-month comeback the following March. He appointed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Joseph Paul-Boncour, an advocate of a firm policy vis-à-vis the Germans. But then Blum’s majority collapsed, and Blum himself was succeeded as prime minister by Edouard Daladier. The British embassy in Paris agitated to block Paul-Boncour’s reappointment. London wanted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to go to the more temporizing Camille Chautemps. In one sense, Britain did not get its way: the job went to Georges Bonnet. In another it did, for Bonnet turned out to be a hard-core appeaser.11
France needed an ally and set its sights on Britain, but the response was half-hearted at best. The British were not so much bossy, which the “governess” metaphor might suggest, as they were reticent and hard to pin down. British attitudes, however, began to unfreeze in the wake of the Munich fiasco.
How disastrous the Munich crisis was for French diplomacy is all too clear. Hitler bullied Czechoslovakia, a French ally, into handing over the Sudetenland, a chunk of borderland territory essential to Czechoslovakia’s defense. The French, following Britain’s lead, acquiesced to Nazi terms at the Munich conference in September 1938. This is a story of sell-out, no doubt, so why did the French go along?
It was Hitler’s annexation of Austria in March 1938, the so-called Anschluss, that first stoked French fears about German intentions vis-à-vis Czechoslovakia. French policy-makers worried, and with good cause, that Czechoslovakia might be next on Hitler’s list and invited the British to issue a joint declaration guaranteeing Czech territorial integrity. The British demurred, and the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, explained why: “Quite frankly, the moment is unfavorable, and our plans, both for offence and defense, are not sufficiently advanced.”12 In the weeks following, much as the French had anticipated, Hitler began to beat the drums about the Czech borderlands. Daladier traveled to London in April to try to induce the British to make common cause against the German threat, laying out in the plainest terms what he thought was at stake. Hitler did not just seek territorial advantage in Czechoslovakia, but far, far more: “the domination of the Continent in comparison with which the ambitions of Napoleon were feeble.” The British remained unpersuaded. Chamberlain didn’t think the “picture was really so black.” Hitler didn’t want to destroy Czechoslovakia and, even if he did, there was no way to prevent him from doing so.13
And so France, as in March 1936, faced the prospect of war against Germany without back-up from a great-power ally (though the Czechs, with an army of thirty-five divisions, were far from a negligible partner). Daladier hesitated. He was not certain public opinion was ready for all-out war, and France’s military chiefs were discouraging. The Luftwaffe, the French premier was told, outclassed France’s air arm by a wide margin. The British favored a negotiated settlement. Perhaps then it was best, given the unfavorable circumstances, to let the British take the lead.14
Yet however profound the setback, Munich did advance the cause of Franco-British rapprochement, and from the French point of view this was compensation of a sort. Daladier grasped the extent of the defeat and took steps to right the situation. He was not an appeaser in the way Chamberlain was. Chamberlain believed that Munich would bring, as he put it, “peace for our time,” but Daladier had no such illusions. As he flew back to Paris from Munich, he expected the crowds waiting at Le Bourget airport to be enraged—Munich had been a failure after all—but they were in a cheering mood instead, prompting Daladier to a derisive snort: “Ah, les cons [the fools],” he is supposed to have exclaimed. He understood that Munich did not mean an end to the German menace, and the French took positive steps to get themselves ready for any future showdown. In December 1938, Daladier sent a delegation to the United States to purchase up to a thousand aircraft. Munich had got Roosevelt’s attention, and the US president was disposed to work with the French.15 Nor did the French play such a passive role as all that during the Munich crisis itself. They persuaded Britain to make a double promise: to guarantee the borders of the Czechoslovak rump and to side with France in case of a war with Germany, and plans were made to back up such commitments. The British and French militaries entered into staff talks in January 1939. Britain added Holland and Switzerland to the list of continental countries it was pledged to defend. And soon there was discussion of expanding Britain’s continental commitment in the event of war from a meager two divisions to an army several times that size. It’s not that Chamberlain had given up on hopes of appeasing Hitler but that British public opinion had begun to harden against the Nazis, creating pressure on British policy-makers to get tougher. The policy-making establishment itself, moreover, was growing anxious that it was the French who might now be getting cold feet and so felt some inclination to make gestures toward deepening an alliance about which it had once harbored so many second thoughts.16
Munich then at last got the French what they wanted: a serious continental commitment from the British. There was an added bonus in America’s apparent willingness to mobilize its productive capacity on France’s behalf. Hitler’s decision to take over all of Czechoslovakia in mid-March 1939—the Prague coup—solidified the new line-up. Another round of Anglo-French staff talks beginning in May resulted in an agreement as to how the two powers planned to coordinate military efforts in the event of war with Germany. More than that, Britain now seemed prepared not just to go along but to take the initiative, promising to guarantee Poland’s territorial integrity.17 The British acted on their own, unbidden by the French. What a contrast with the year preceding, when France had tried but failed to elicit just such a gesture in defense of a beleaguered Czechoslovakia. The diplomatic stage was set for war, and Hitler put the machinery in motion. He threatened Poland in the summer of 1939, which in turn activated French and British commitments. To be sure, there was lingering hope that war might yet be averted by a last-minute deal. Mussolini proposed calling an international conference to hash out some kind of settlement, a Munich conference redux. The British didn’t bite, however (though Chamberlain was tempted), and neither did the French. When the matter was brought up in a cabinet meeting by Foreign Minister Bonnet, who was well disposed to the idea of another conference, Daladier, “bristling with anger and contempt, turned his back.”18Hitler wanted a fight, and this time Britain and France were ready to oblige.
Yet one important piece to the story is still missing. France in 1935–6 turned to Britain as its best hope, but the British reaction was foot-dragging. Why didn’t France at this juncture go all out in pursuit of a Soviet alliance? The Soviets themselves were willing. Stalin was at the time encouraging Communist Parties across Europe to enter into Popular Front alliances while, at the diplomatic level, negotiating with potential anti-fascist partners. Well, it’s not as though the French cold-shouldered the Soviets outright. In the summer of 1939, the two powers (along with Britain) entered into substantive talks to coordinate military planning vis-à-vis the Germans, but there were always anti-communist elements in the French establishment, civil and military, which were opposed to any formal alliance. It was fine to go through the motions of negotiation—this might deter Hitler—but it was another matter to clinch the deal.19
But even had the French shown more follow-through, it’s not at all clear that the Soviet alliance was a workable option. The British were against it and said as much.20 They were opposed in part because of deep-seated suspicions of communist intentions but also because they doubted the military value of the Red Army. Stalin had conducted a massive and none too secret purge of senior officers in 1937–8, expelling or executing outright thousands, leaving the institution stripped of its most experienced commanders. What value was there working with such a partner? From the French point of view, a military pact with the Soviet Union would alienate Britain and might not bring much military advantage.
Not just that: Poland was a problem. The Poles did not get on with the Czechs, and hated the Soviets. When Hitler gobbled up the Sudetenland in the wake of the Munich crisis, Poland profited from the occasion and snatched a piece of Czech territory for itself—Těšina (Teschen in German). In the months following, as we have seen, France and Britain engaged in intensive military talks with the Soviet Union. But for show to become reality, provision had to be made for the transit of the Red Army through either Romanian or Polish territory, and this the Poles would not tolerate under any circumstances.21 They did not trust the Soviet Union, and it is well worth pondering whether the Soviet Union was in fact trustworthy. Consider, for example, the impact of Soviet intervention in Spain during the Civil War. The USSR alone among foreign powers came to the aid of the Spanish Republic, but aid also afforded the Soviets leverage. They did not take as much advantage of it as is sometimes supposed, but their outsized presence on the scene empowered local communists who engineered a quasi-takeover of the republican cause, and woe to non-communist loyalists who got in the way. The Poles no doubt feared that a similar fate awaited them. Lord Halifax understood all too well why Poland had balked at the prospect of welcoming Soviet forces onto Polish territory. “An intelligent rabbit,” he later wrote, “would hardly be expected to welcome the protection of an animal ten times its size, whom it credited with the habits of a boa constrictor.”22 Neither Polish policy-makers nor Halifax were that far wrong in their assessment of what the Soviet Union was capable of. In August 1939 the USSR abandoned its diplomatic efforts to build an anti-fascist front and elected instead to negotiate a non-aggression pact with the Nazis. Stalin and Hitler agreed to carve up Poland between them, and the Soviets got Finland, Estonia, Latvia and a piece of Romania into the bargain. Why the Soviets entered into the deal will be discussed in a moment. The point, though, is that it was not unreasonable on the part of the Poles—or of the French for that matter—to suspect Soviet motives.
There is much to criticize in the conduct of French diplomacy in the 1930s. Forceful action at the time of the Rhineland and Czech crises would have stopped Hitler, but the French did not take it. All the same, France’s diplomatic record was not entirely dismal. The battering of events prompted policy-makers to rethink the Briandist commitments of the 1920s. By 1935 or 1936 at the latest France had shed its illusions about the effectiveness of collective security and begun casting about for military allies to face down the Nazis. There were flirtations with Italy and the Soviet Union, but in the end Britain was fixed upon (rightly, as it turned out) as the most promising partner. The British made small gestures of reciprocation, enough to keep the French interested, but did not get serious until after Munich. The alliance gained momentum thereafter, especially in the wake of the entry of German troops into Prague in March 1939. It was in due course buttressed by material assistance from the United States, such that when Hitler next threatened—over Poland—the Allies, as they may now be called, were ready to step up.
The French may be reproached for not having acted with greater urgency, but then again, if the French were slow-moving, what about the British and the Americans? The French may be reproached for not pursuing the Italian and Soviet options with more determination, but then again, were Mussolini and Stalin, both of whom ended up as territory-grabbing cronies of the Nazis, such reliable prospects? They weren’t, of course, and it is a hard thing to scold France for hewing to its Anglo-American friends rather than supping with dictators.
And in any event, it is well worth asking who in the 1930s boasted a foreign policy more far-sighted and effective than that of France. Not the Belgians and Dutch, to be sure, who hunkered down in an ostrich-like neutralism. The case of Great Britain is more complicated. It was a vast, imperial power with interests in the Mediterranean and Far East. In the era of the Great Depression, Britain’s resources were stretched and what it wanted most was a quiet continent, not one divided into quarreling blocs. In the 1920s the French might well have seemed the most troublesome cross-Channel power, so inflexible were they when it came to the application of the Versailles Treaty. Hitler’s rise made France look less unreasonable, but the British went on believing that the best course lay incalming tensions down. Hence appeasement, which made eminent sense to a power that felt its real interests lay outside of Europe. Munich, followed by the German march into Prague, compelled a major reassessment, however, and now the French alliance began to seem like a more attractive proposition. All the same, British policy-makers remained reluctant to engage troops on the continent; they meant to commit as small a force as possible, leaving it up to the French to handle the Wehrmacht almost by themselves. Chamberlain, moreover, remained at the helm of British policy, and, though infuriated by German duplicity at Munich, he continued to be an appeaser at heart. It is understandable why British policy-makers, so empire-centered, took such a long time to grasp fully what was happening on the continent. Britain, moreover, sobered by memories of the Great War, was bound to think many times over before sending armies of any substantial size to France’s side. Whatever the explanation, the point is this: Britain was slower than France to take the measure of the Nazis, and even when it did, it still hesitated to commit ground forces in large numbers.23 The country was able to imagine engaging itself in a war of “limited liability”—a concept dear to the military strategist Basil Liddell Hart—but no more.
What is true of the British is true a fortiori of the Americans. It is not quite right to label US policy in the 1930s as isolationist. Policy-makers looked on the Western hemisphere as America’s backyard, a sometime unruly neighborhood that required periodic pruning and care. The United States had interests in the Pacific as well. Hawaii was US territory, the Philippines a dependency, and China a friend of long standing, all of which prompted policy-makers to react with alarm to Japanese encroachments in the region. Even in its relations with Europe, the US was not altogether hands-off. To be sure, rising tensions on the continent moved Congress in 1935 to pass the first Neutrality Act, banning the sale of arms to any and all belligerents in the event of war. The legislation was renewed and revised several times in the years following. The 1937 version, however, included a clause authorizing the sale of non-military supplies to buyers on a cash-and-carry basis, a provision helpful to well-heeled powers such as Great Britain.24
What the United States did not want, however, were extra-hemispheric military complications. America was not ready to take the Japanese on head to head, and the thought of sending troops to Europe remained anathema. The Great War had soured the United States on direct intervention in European affairs, and even Munich, which changed much in US thinking, did not change this. Roosevelt began to frame hemispheric defense in more expansive terms, necessitating an American naval and air build-up that wouldpersuade potential enemies to keep at a safe distance. The president, moreover, was more and more determined to facilitate French and British rearmament, finding ways to enable the French in particular to tap into America’s stepped-up arms production. Once the war got under way, of course, America’s oft-proclaimed “neutralism” remained an obstacle to such deals, but Roosevelt managed to finesse the problem by redefining neutrality. Yet one more Neutrality Act was passed in November 1939, but this time the bill featured a cash-and-carry provision that sanctioned the sale, not just of non-military materiel, but of arms as well. Jean Monnet, the French statesman and future Father of Europe, dubbed the United States the “arsenal of democracy,” a flattering sobriquet. Yet arms provision was as far as America was prepared to go. No American Expeditionary Force was contemplated. In June 1940 a France on the verge of defeat came pleading to the United States for a military boost. Roosevelt, though sympathetic, still answered with a firm no. America was not as isolationist as is sometimes thought; under the president’s constant prodding, its “neutralism” took on a more and more pro-British and pro-French slant. Nevertheless, America was several steps behind the British, not to mention the French, in catching on to the true nature of the Nazi threat. As for what to do about it, the US, up to the outbreak of the war in Europe and beyond, never imagined it would have to do more than build up its defenses and retail weaponry. The Battle of the Atlantic and Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 would, like Munich, mark a turning point, deepening US engagement. France, of course, was well out of the war by then.25
The events of the 1930s caused the major Western democracies to give up on obsolete diplomatic paradigms—appeasement, neutralism. This happened at varying speeds, France budging first, followed by Britain and, last of all, the United States. The Soviet Union also charted a diplomatic volte-face over the course of the decade, but it moved in the opposite direction, casting aside a much-heralded anti-fascism in favor of constructing a Soviet sphere of influence of sufficient strategic depth to guarantee the homeland of the Revolution against invasion in whatever form. The first principle of Soviet diplomacy was a generalized suspicion of the West. The capitalist powers were imperialist in constitution, an assumption confirmed early on by multiple Western interventions—all anti-Bolshevik in objective—at the time of the Russian Civil War (1918–21) and then by subsequent Western efforts to impose a diplomatic quarantine on the fledgling Soviet state. In the 1920s the Soviets tried to find a way out of the box, sidling up to Germany that nurtured its own grievances against the post-war diplomatic order. Hitler’s advent and the Nazis’ easy destruction of the once-powerful German Communist Party prompted the Soviets to reconsider. The Germans now seemed the most immediate threat, and a policy of seeking out anti-fascist alliances the most promising avenue of self-protection. But then how did the Soviet Union’s putative anti-fascist partners, Britain and France, end up conducting themselves? They bargained with the Soviet Union but would not close the deal, all the while treating the Germans with an appeasing prudence. Stalin knew that capitalism meant war. The British and French had meddled in Russian affairs, and now there was Nazi Germany, which missed no chance to saber-rattle and threaten. A conflagration was coming, and Stalin did not want the Soviet Union to be the first target of attack. Yet, as he came to see it, that is just what Britain and France intended. To be sure, they talked with the Soviets about a deal but always found one obstacle or another to clinching the bargain, and all the while they went on conciliating the Germans. What was Stalin to conclude but that the French and British weren’t serious about an anti-fascist coalition and harbored unstated hopes that Nazi aggression would turn eastward toward the Soviets. In the summer months of 1939, even as negotiations with France and Britain bumped along, Stalin prepared an about-face, entering into secret talks with Hitler’s emissaries. The result was the Nazi-Soviet pact, announced in August, which struck the European diplomatic scene like a thunderbolt.26
The pact was, from Stalin’s point of view, a stroke of genius. The imperialist powers would still fight but now among themselves. In the event that Germany emerged victorious, Stalin did not doubt it would attack the Soviet Union next, but the Germans would by then be exhausted and much less dangerous, and the Soviets would have rearmed in the meantime. One more thing: the Nazi-Soviet pact, as we have seen, defined spheres of influence, assigning a large swath of Eastern Europe to Soviet control. In an addendum to the pact, the Germans acknowledged a Soviet interest in Lithuania as well. In short order, Stalin translated “sphere of influence” into military occupation, marching into eastern Poland in September 1939. Things did not go so well in Finland. The Soviet dictator first attempted to blackmail the Finns into territorial concessions, but they refused to cooperate. Stalin then launched an invasion in November, which ran into difficulties. In the end, the Soviets got all the territory they wanted and more, but the adventure had been a good deal more costly than anticipated. The setback, however, did not dissuade Stalin from striking again in mid-1940, annexing the three Baltic states and browbeating Romania into yielding Bessarabia. The Soviet Union’s borderlands were now that much deeper. This might not deter a German attack, but it would reduce the Germans’ chance of success.
France’s defeat up-ended all Stalin’s calculations. He had the territorial buffer he desired, but the Germans were not exhausted. The Soviet Union needed to accelerate its rearmament program, and so, much like France at Munich, it bought time by appeasing. The Germans moved into Yugoslavia on 6 April 1941. The Soviet Union had signed a non-aggression pact with the Yugoslav government earlier that very day but, nonetheless, took no action. That is not in fact quite right: the Soviets did do something, but what they did was intended to placate Germany and its friends. The Soviet Union signed a neutrality pact with Japan in April 1941 and in May extended recognition to the anti-British regime in Iraq.27 None of this, of course, slowed German preparations for an invasion. Stalin’s generals took note of the concentration of German forces on the Soviet border and requested that the Red Army be put on full alert. Stalin refused, fearing the Germans might interpret the move as a provocation—this in June 1941 on the very eve of Operation Barbarossa.28
Neutralists and appeasers, France among them, abounded in the 1930s. France was among the first, however, to begin looking for alternatives to appeasement, taking “the lead,” as Peter Jackson has put it, “in diplomatic attempts to build an anti-German front in Europe.”29 The front cobbled together, however, did not include the Soviet Union. Western anti-communism explains Soviet isolation but only in part: the Soviets themselves did not trust the imperialist powers, opting instead for a “sphere of influence” bargain with Germany that proved to be catastrophic, leaving them just as vulnerable, if not more so, to the German war machine as the Western Allies.
No one got it right when it came to facing down Hitler, but France’s record was not as dismal as often portrayed. It was the first among Western powers to jettison appeasement, and in the aftermath of Munich, it succeeded in coaxing a reluctant Great Britain into an anti-German alliance. Poland remained a friend, and there was hope Belgium and Holland might come around too in the event of actual war. The Soviets, of course, were never welcomed into the anti-German fold as full-fledged partners, and the reasons why have been catalogued. That may well have been a mistake, but it is an understandable one. As for the Soviets themselves, they made a high-stakes bet in August 1939 when they broke off talks with France and Britain to enter into a pact with Hitler. That wager turned out to be a losing one. French diplomacy does not deserve kudos for prescience or imagination, but French policy-makers did well enough in trying circumstances—and who, for that matter, did any better?