CHAPTER 4

Munich… Prague… Warsaw

CZECHOSLOVAKIA was a product of the disruption of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. It was a sturdy democracy with natural resources, modern skills and – except on its southern or Austrian side – strong frontiers. But this promising offspring of the doctrine of self-determination was also a negation of that doctrine. It was, like Great Britain at the end of the Middle Ages, a mixture of peoples not yet congealed into a nation. It had a population of 14 to 15 million, of whom 10 million were Czechs or Slovaks, 3 million were Germans and the remainder consisted of small but self-conscious Hungarian, Ukrainian and Polish minorities. Most of the 3 million Germans lived scattered along the Bohemian and Moravian borderlands and in the principal cities. They came to be known as Sudeten Germans, but this was a deliberate misnomer. The Sudetenland, properly so called, lay north and east of their homes, but for propaganda purposes it was convenient to attach a name to them and so give the impression that they constituted a compact and detachable ethnic group.

By its nature and origins Czechoslovakia was anchored to the peace settlement which had created it, and was opposed to the reconstitution of a Danubian empire and to the resurgence of German power, especially a German power which would include Austria and so outflank it at its weakest point. Its founder and first president, T. G. Masaryk (resigned 1935, died 1937), and his successor Edvard Beneš based their policies for survival on the military strength and strategic importance of their country. They did not expect to be able to stand alone against a powerful German enemy but they aimed to make Czechoslovakia valuable and perhaps even essential to the vital interests of western states which would see to it that the Czechs and Slovaks were not once more subjected to Germans. They wanted to ensure that an armed attack on Czechoslovakia would never be a local affair; an aggressor would have to reckon with allied powers and so would think twice before beginning what was, if pledges meant anything, bound to become a general war. In 1938 Czechoslovakia had one of Europe’s most noted armaments industries and an army which was almost the equal of the German army in men and equipment, though inferior in staying power because of Czechoslovakia’s smaller population and human reserves. It had also an alliance with France to counter this weakness: by holding a proportion of the German army in the west the threat of a French attack would prevent a German victory.

But in 1938 the threat did not work. Hitler did not believe it. France no longer gave the Czechoslovak alliance top priority. The chink in Czechoslovakia’s armour was Great Britain.

Great Britain had persistently refused to enter into commitments in eastern Europe, so that Masaryk and Beneš never succeeded in getting a British guarantee as well as a French one – until it was too late. Moreover, as the European situation got more menacing Great Britain began to work to demolish the French guarantee in the belief that it was not, as the French themselves had intended, a way of deterring Germany from going to war but had become a trap whereby a local war in central Europe would be expanded into a general European war. Great Britain hoped that the abrogation of the guarantee would remove this danger and provide a breathing space in which somehow war might be averted. The logic of British policy was to inflict the consequences of war and defeat on Czechoslovakia in the hope of saving everybody else. Czechoslovakia proved vulnerable because the French guarantee was not an Anglo-French guarantee and because, for France, the British alliance was more important than the French security system in central Europe of which the Czechoslovak alliance was a part. Since the evident revival of German power in Europe France had been on the defensive against Germany, and since the collapse of Franco-Italian relations in 1935–6 France had been left with no effective ally in the west except Great Britain. When therefore Great Britain required France to abandon Czechoslovakia, France did so.

British policy at this period has been summed up in the word appeasement. Appeasement describes a range of attitudes stretching from the desire to be fair and decent to a defeated foe to the policy of buying off a resurgent one. It covers the whole of the period between the wars, becoming more disreputable with time. The object of appeasement in the twenties was Weimar Germany, in the thirties Nazi Germany; its aim in the twenties was justice, in the thirties safety; the price in the twenties was the reduction of reparations (primarily to Great Britain) and equal rights for Germans, in the thirties the price was turning a blind eye to German ambitions and what these cost other people (primarily Czechoslovakia). Munich, where Czechoslovakia was sacrificed, became synonymous with betrayal, as Canossa with a similar kind of abasement.

The British ruling class had a propensity for seeing what was least admirable in Frenchmen and what was best in Germans, so that a subliminal distrust and dislike of France nourished pro-German sentiments which were often expressed in kith-and-kin terms – though without the excessive racialism of complementary German thinking. (There was also a number of fervent Francophiles who understood the French dilemma, but they were a minority and an increasingly lukewarm one.) This Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Prussian kinship was reinforced after 1919 by the radical Anglo-French disagreement about the right way to behave towards Germany. Where France felt cheated at not having secured the Rhine frontier, Great Britain felt that Germany was being cheated by the special restrictions imposed on German sovereignty in the Rhineland, by inordinate reparation claims and by the limitations on German armament. Great Britain’s vision was of a purged Germany playing its due part in European affairs, and too many British politicians retained this vision even when, with the Nazis, the purging ceased to be a cleansing and became an abomination. They persisted in regarding the change of régime in Germany in 1933 as something like a normal change of government in Great Britain. They were not men who found it easy to recognize abnormality and they persisted in regarding Hitler as a responsible statesman because he occupied the position of one. Even though British Ambassadors (Sir Horace Rumbold and Sir Eric Phipps) and other observers reported what was happening to the German Jews as early as 1933, they clung to a way of thinking and a way of doing business which were tragically inappropriate, to say the least. The efforts of Chamberlain and the language of a later Ambassador, Sir Nevile Henderson, betrayed an inability to understand Hitler which was based on a determination not to: Hitler’s ravings were passed over and he was regarded as a man who would make bargains and stick to them because it was difficult to see what to do if he was really a totally different kind of person.

In this way men who were pro-German before Hitler found too little difficulty in going on being pro-German with Hitler. Hence the extreme ludicrousness of their comments about Hitler, when they went to visit him or simply expressed themselves about him without that effort. They believed that there was a point at which Hitler, if given enough territory round his borders and some colonies, would become ‘reasonable’. They persuaded themselves that they were giving Hitler pieces of territory which Germany ought to have on the basis of the principle of national self-determination or equal rights and that, having done so, they would have turned Hitler into a man of peace. They had no objection to the absorption of Austria by Germany, and little compunction about bundling a small parvenu state like Czechoslovakia into the new German Reich. What they wanted was a version of the Anti-Comintern Pact, an Anglo-German understanding for which they were willing to give Hitler other people’s territory in central Europe and (in the mistaken belief that Hitler’s quest for living space was a hankering for lost lands overseas), British colonies and even mandated territories entrusted to Great Britain by the League, if these readjustments of real estate would remove the obstacles to a pax Anglo-Germanica. In the last years of peace British Ministers discussed among themselves how France might be persuaded to give some of its African territories to Germany in return for British territory in West Africa; or how the whole of tropical Africa might be re-partitioned, a throw-back to the nineteenth century’s method of allaying European rivalries by removing them into another continent and buying off the more dangerous and discontented Europeans with African coin.

In May 1937 Neville Chamberlain succeeded Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister. Chamberlain had been a highly successful provincial politician who, after being Mayor of Birmingham, had moved rather late in life into national politics and had there enhanced his reputation by his work as Minister of Health and Chancellor of the Exchequer. He had the strength, manifested in cabinet before he became Prime Minister as well as afterwards, of the man who sees one side of a case only. He was never the cleverest man in any of the cabinets in which he sat, but it so chanced that his cleverer colleagues were weaker in debate and less effective when it came to taking a decision. As Chancellor he won applause by introducing the lowest defence estimates of the inter-war years. He had the virtues and the limitations of a prosperous middle-class conservative and he had the misfortune which was also his country’s misfortune – to display his virtues in the earlier part of his career and his faults, which included stubbornness, during the last years of his life. He was a man of proven ability and impressive experience who suffered from the peculiarly English notion that there is nothing that a really intelligent man cannot tackle. It was in this spirit that he tackled foreign affairs and Hitler.

He began by getting rid of his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, who was pushed into resignation in February 1938 by the Prime Minister’s manners and, to a lesser extent, his policies. Chamberlain was determined to come to terms with Mussolini in spite of the conquest of Ethiopia and Italy’s continuing intervention in the Spanish civil war. There was something to be said for recognizing the conquest of Ethiopia once it was an accomplished fact. (Eden himself was in favour of recognizing Franco a year later.) There was also much to be said for repairing Anglo-Italian relations if a European war seemed likely: the Italian navy was a significant factor in world politics, especially before 1939 when Roosevelt, at British request, moved American naval forces from the Atlantic to the Pacific to counter possible Japanese designs against Australia and New Zealand, which the Royal Navy was pledged to protect. Eden, however, was in no hurry to seek Italian friendship so long as Mussolini went on helping Franco. Chamberlain on the other hand regarded the matter as urgent in order to keep Mussolini at least at arm’s length from Hitler. This issue -the timing of Anglo-Italian conversations – was the immediate occasion of Eden’s resignation. Behind it were both a larger issue and personal pique. Chamberlain was contemptuous of American statesmanship and, like many of his class, basically anti-American. Roosevelt, like Eden but unlike Chamberlain, was opposed to de jure recognition of Italy’s African conquests without a specific and simultaneous undertaking to take Italian forces out of Spain. Further, Roosevelt ventured to offer his services as a mediator in Europe’s affairs. Chamberlain, without telling Eden or consulting the Foreign Office, brushed this offer aside. Unlike Baldwin, Chamberlain was determined to play a leading part in international affairs, as a British Prime Minister has every right to do, but Eden was irked by this incursion into his special fief. Eden’s assessment of the forces which shaped European politics included not only the four powers which Chamberlain treated as the only ones that mattered, but also to some degree the USSR, the League and the United States. Yet their policies were at this time so little apart that Eden’s resignation was heard by some of his cabinet colleagues with astonished incredulity. In retrospect it seems an early indication of the instability that was to ruin his career after the war.

Chamberlain’s attempt to create a concert of four was in any case predoomed to failure. Mussolini privately assured Hitler that Anglo-Italian conversations and agreements would never be allowed to harm the Italo-German accord and when Chamberlain renewed his wooing of Italy after the Munich crisis neither Mussolini nor Ciano took the proceedings seriously. Chamberlain was no less anxious to come to some arrangement with Hitler. During most of 1938 the immediate obstacle to the British policy of appeasement was the so-called Sudeten problem. The Nazi Party had in Czechoslovakia a counterpart called the Sudeten German Party and led by Konrad Henlein, who adopted German Nazi doctrines and behaviour and received funds and instructions from Germany. Henlein was agitating for local autonomy for the German minority. His agitation was echoed by the lesser minorities. It created confusion and disorders calculated to call in question the authority of the central government in Prague at a time when this government was engaged in discussing the rights and status of minorities. At every turn in these discussions Henlein made increasingly unacceptable claims, backed by the undefined but inescapable menace of German military action. In April he demanded not only self-government for Germans in Czechoslovakia but also the subordination of Czechoslovakia’s foreign policy to Germany’s interests.

In the previous November, a few weeks after the Hossbach meeting in Berlin, British and French Ministers had conferred in London about whether and how to resist German moves in central Europe. They agreed that they should do nothing about a German annexation of Austria but, largely on the insistence of the French Foreign Minister Yvon Delbos, they accepted that a German attack on Czechoslovakia would involve France in a war pursuant to its treaty obligations. Since Great Britain could not risk seeing France engaged in war with Germany and defeated, Great Britain too faced war over Czechoslovakia. The only escape lay in a German-Czech settlement acceptable to, or at any rate accepted by, both Hitler and Benes, and this became the prime object of British policy. It entailed pressure on Prague rather than Berlin since Czechoslovakia was the weaker state, undoubtedly so if its allies could be eliminated from the equation, which Great Britain thought they could be: after the Anschluss France and the USSR had both reaffirmed their obligations to defend Czechoslovakia but the USSR was not judged to be in a position to do much and France was in no position to jeopardize Great Britain’s friendship. In the summer of 1938 therefore Chamberlain decided to intensify British pressure on Czechoslovakia which, supplementing German pressures, Great Britain had been exerting since the previous year. After consulting the German government about his proposed intervention but without informing France, Chamberlain sent a special emissary (Lord Runciman) to Czechoslovakia to get Beneš, under the guise of mediation, to accept whatever might be necessary to keep the peace. Runciman arrived in Prague at the end of July. He subsequently reported to the cabinet that Beneš was insincere, stubborn and too clever by half.

Yet it was by this date sufficiently clear that the Sudeten problem was not the real danger to peace and that the excision of this problem would not remove the danger of war. To the accumulating evidence on Hitler’s wider intentions there was added in June 1938 a specific warning. In that month Goering’s adjutant, General Karl Bodenschatz, officially informed the French assistant air attaché in Berlin that Germany was preparing to build a line of defensive fortifications from the North Sea to the Swiss border, that Germany had no aggressive intentions against France or Great Britain but that, having first secured its southern flank against any threat from Czechoslovakia, it intended to eliminate the ‘Soviet threat’ and simultaneously secure the living space which was indispensable to Germany. Bodenschatz specifically mentioned the Ukraine and compared Germany’s eastward expansion in Europe with the way in which France had secured its own needs by expanding into Africa. This was a clear enough indication of Hitler’s intention to overpower Czechoslovakia, make war on the USSR and protect himself in the west by a series of fortifications which could not be completed before the middle of 1939 at the earliest. It presented France and Great Britain with a choice between keeping out of a war in eastern Europe or joining in such a war. It ruled out the possibility of preventing a war in eastern Europe by appeasement.

At the beginning of September Beneš declared himself ready to accept all the demands of the Sudeten Germans for autonomy. On 12 September Chamberlain, under pressure from many sides – the French and American governments, the Vatican, the opposition in the House of Commons, Churchill – and in the hope of inducing Hitler to be less explosive than usual in the speech which he was due to make in Nuremberg on that day, decided to go to the lengths of reminding Hitler that France was bound to fight for Czechoslovakia and that Great Britain would fight with France, but from Berlin Henderson asked the cabinet to excuse him from passing this warning on. Henderson’s role in these years negates the view that Ambassadors no longer count. Whereas Chamberlain’s dominant aim was to keep Great Britain out of war, Henderson had a more positive policy. He did not want Great Britain to stand in Hitler’s way. It is impossible to read his statements and despatches or observe his conduct without concluding that he endorsed Hitler’s aims more than he deplored Hitler’s character and behaviour. He wanted an Anglo-German entente which would preserve Great Britain’s imperial position in the world and license Hitler to lay the USSR low, and he made no secret of his views, either privately or publicly. He even discussed them with Goering, at which point he found that he had gone further than Chamberlain would countenance.

During the summer and autumn of 1938 a violent anti-Czech campaign was in progress in Germany. Press and radio were presenting, with the utmost emotional mendacity, a picture of persecution of Germans in Czechoslovakia and at Nuremberg on 12 September Hitler spoke with such exceptional violence that his words provoked an abortive rising by Sudeten Germans and the imposition of martial law in parts of Czechoslovakia on the 13th. Henlein fled to Germany and with his departure the situation became more manageable. But this improvement at the storm centre was lost on observers further away and two days later Chamberlain unwittingly reversed it. He resolved to put into operation a plan which he had been preparing for some time. He would go and see Hitler. This plan had been discussed only with four Ministers separately (but not in cabinet), with Nevile Henderson and with two or three other close advisers. Like Eden nearly twenty years later in the Suez crisis Chamberlain kept his cabinet very much in the dark about his plans and policies. As with the Runciman mission France was not informed. Although he had hoped to influence Hitler’s tone at Nuremberg, he was also resolved to go and talk with Hitler whatever he said at Nuremberg and however he said it. He flew to Berchtesgaden on 15 September and on the same day he agreed in principle that the Sudetenland, an area still undefined, ought to be detached from Czechoslovakia and given to Germany. At no point does the difference between these two men, now meeting tête-à-tête to settle the fate of Europe, appear in retrospect more glaring: Hitler humouring his distinguished guest but keeping up his preparations to use force; Chamberlain returning to London to affirm his belief that Hitler was the sort of man who would be ‘rather better than his word’. The nearer the appeasers got to a settlement with Hitler the more they clung to this tattered premise – and the more they needed to still their consciences by working themselves up into a state of hatred against the Czechs as the people who might spoil the whole game.

Besides coercing the Czechs and coming to terms with Hitler, Chamberlain needed to cow France. His policy required him to scare France into dishonouring its treaty with Czechoslovakia. The British Ambassador in Paris, Sir Eric Phipps, had no great difficulty in scaring the French Foreign Minister, Georges Bonnet. He also fortified Chamberlain’s views by refraining from reporting to London what Frenchmen of another stamp were saying, until ordered by the Foreign Office to do so. Yet during the September crisis of 1938 the French government and even the pessimistic General Gamelin seemed resigned to going to war for Czechoslovakia and advancing into Germany. After the robber synod at Berchtesgaden however, to which they had not been invited, French Ministers were confronted with an accomplished and perhaps not wholly unwelcome fact. After a conference in London on the 18th they accepted the Anglo-German compact and joined with Great Britain in forcing the Czechs to agree to surrender all territories where half the inhabitants were German. Beneš, who had already conceded all reasonable German demands, at first refused but he had no real choice. He was told that France refused to fight without a promise of British backing and that Great Britain refused to back France in a war begun for Czechoslovakia. All he could get, with French help, was an Anglo-French guarantee of the independence and neutrality of the new Czechoslovakia in place of the discarded French guarantee for the old one. Great Britain reluctantly agreed to give this vulnerable and enfeebled state the promises which it had refused to give to a much more worthwhile ally.

But this was not the end. So far from removing an obstacle to peace the Czechoslovak surrender brought war nearer. Hitler, baulked of the military destruction of Czechoslovakia which he had been talking about, declared that the terms forced on Beneš by Great Britain and France no longer satisfied him. Chamberlain flew back to Germany where, at Godesberg on the 22nd, he discovered that Hitler now demanded even larger stretches of Czechoslovakia, a plebiscite in other areas and the entry of German troops into Czechoslovakia before the lines of partition had been settled. This second meeting was punctuated by a stream of reports of Czech outrages which Hitler caused to be concocted and brought to him while he and Chamberlain were conferring. Chamberlain, returning to London on the 24th, told his cabinet that he believed that he had established some influence over Hitler. He was for accepting Hitler’s terms and getting Beneš to accept them but the opposition within the British cabinet was hardening and was temporarily joined by Halifax. Daladier too, once more in London, was firmer; he seemed resigned to war. The Czechs had mobilized on the 23rd. Chamberlain wavered. On the 26th a last attempt by British emissaries to get Hitler to see ‘reason’ produced a scene of such fury that they fled without saying what they had been told to say. On the 27th Chamberlain, after some hesitation, authorized the mobilization of the British fleet which the First Lord of the Admiralty, Alfred Duff Cooper, had been urging for some days. On the 28th Chamberlain, while speaking in the House of Commons, received an invitation to go to Munich, the outcome of a British appeal to Mussolini to do something.

At Munich on the 29th the substance of the Godesberg demands was conceded – on the basis of proposals which were advanced by Mussolini as a compromise but had been drafted for him by the German Foreign Office. In substance Chamberlain and Daladier let Hitler have practically all he wanted, Mussolini being in attendance. The Russians were treated as irrelevant and neither invited nor consulted. Czechoslovakia, whose representatives came to Munich but were confined to the vestibule, chose acquiescence rather than slaughter. Beneš resigned. On the day after the conference Chamberlain, while taking leave of Hitler, produced a piece of paper on which he had drafted an Anglo-German declaration of friendship and of the determination of the two peoples never to go to war with one another. Hitler, who had no desire to fight the British, was delighted and the two leaders signed then and there. In London Duff Cooper resigned but cabinet colleagues who had talked earlier of doing so too decided not to: Chamberlain’s control over his cabinet and his large and still docile majority in the House of Commons was at this time more complete than that of any British Prime Minister since the eighteenth century. In France three Ministers who had resigned before Munich withdrew their resignations after it. In December a Franco-German declaration of friendship, similar to the Chamberlain-Hitler scrap of paper, was signed. Poland took the opportunity to seize in October the area of Teschen, dubiously Polish in character but undeniably a plum.

The Munich agreement was greeted with relief by everybody except the Czechs and Slovaks. So acute had been the fear of war that this relief burst out in scenes of enthusiasm which were particularly galling to the minority whose shame or apprehension overmastered their relief. For most British and French Ministers the surrender had at least staved off war. Chamberlain had enough faith in the piece of paper which he had got Hitler to sign to talk of having secured ‘peace for our time’. But some were considerably less sanguine. Soon after Munich Halifax, now Foreign Secretary in place of Eden, wanted to introduce conscription and in the following January – when there was a scare over reports that Hitler was about to invade Holland – he advocated staff talks with France and Belgium, consultation with Washington and soundings about the acceptability of British guarantees to Poland, Rumania, Greece and Turkey. Two months later, in March 1939, all lingering delusions were finally blown away when Hitler, in defiance of the Munich agreement, completed his conquest of Czechoslovakia.

The mutilated Czechoslovakia created in 1938 consisted of three federated provinces: Bohemia-Moravia, Slovakia and Ruthenia. In October Hitler directed his armed services to be ready to deal with the rest of Czechoslovakia and to seize Memel. On 14 March 1939, on orders from Berlin, Slovakia declared itself independent of Prague and asked to become a German protectorate. Hitler had a minor piece of luck over Slovakia. The union of the Slovaks with the much more numerous Czechs had not been a smooth one. When Czechoslovakia was created, Slovakia, formerly a dependency of Hungary, was much less developed than the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia which, under Austrian rule, had enjoyed considerable educational as well as industrial advancement. Consequently the Slovak parts of Czechoslovakia were largely administered by Czechs after independence and the Slovaks accused the Czechs with some degree of justice of being slow to remedy this imbalance. Although on nearly every occasion Slovaks gave more votes to Czechoslovak parties than to the specifically Slovak one, there was a significant autonomist movement led by Father Andrew Hlinka. In 1938 Hlinka died and his successor, Monsignor Tiso, abandoned autonomy in favour of separatism. This was a help to Hitler.

Besides turning Slovakia into a distinct German satellite Hitler completed the destruction of Czech independence. Beneš’s successor, President Emil Hácha, and his Foreign Minister took the road to Berlin where both were subject to such verbal bludgeoning that Hácha fainted. German troops were already marching on Prague. Under threat of a bombing of their capital the Czech Ministers submitted and Bohemia-Moravia too was declared a German protectorate. Ruthenia was annexed by Hungary in two bites. In November 1938 Hitler, who was not particularly fond of the Hungarians but was pressed by the Italians and Poles, had allowed Hungary to seize part of Ruthenia by what was called the Vienna Award. In March 1939 Hungarian troops occupied the rest of it. Great Britain and France did nothing. Five days before Hitler seized Czechoslovakia Chamberlain told the House of Commons that Europe was settling down and the British Government was turning its attention to disarmament and to more trade with Germany. When the blow fell on Prague both its western guarantors defected on the plea that the severance of Slovakia from Czechoslovakia had nullified their guarantee: the country guaranteed had ceased to exist. A week later Hitler extorted Memel from Lithuania by an ultimatum containing false accusations of Lithuanian brutality. Memel had been renounced by Germany by the treaty of Versailles – like Danzig, which now reached the top of Hitler’s agenda.

Danzig stood for different things. It was, in the first place, a largely German city to be recovered for the Reich. Secondly, as a bone of contention between Germany and Poland it was a possible cause of a German-Polish war. In that context it raised, thirdly, the two ultimate issues in Hitler’s European policy – the attitude of the western democracies to a German attack on Poland and the attitude of the USSR.

Immediately after the final partition and subjugation of Czechoslovakia Hitler seems to have been in two minds over his next move. If Danzig could have been acquired as easily as Memel Hitler’s obvious move was to proceed against Danzig. But Danzig could not safely be isolated in this way. So it was more than ordinarily desirable for Hitler to explore and exploit every possibility of securing Danzig, as he had secured the Sudetenland, by threats and cajolement and without war. He could, and in October 1938 did, push forward his planning for aggression in the west. He needed to be prepared for every contingency. But he also tried in the same month to do a deal with Poland: Danzig and a road across the Polish corridor to be surrendered to Germany, Poland to join the Anti-Comintern Pact. On these terms Poland could be reprieved, but this settlement could hardly be more than an interim one unless Poland were to be persuaded later, as Czechoslovakia had been constrained in its second round, to cede Polish Silesia too (Hitler had already talked of recovering the whole of Silesia) and to remain at least benevolently passive when Hitler decided that the time had come to seize his Lebensraum farther east.

Poland rejected the German offer and stood on its rights. It would neither endorse the incorporation of Danzig in the Reich nor would it join the Anti-Comintern Pact and so fatally embroil itself with the USSR and render itself dependent on its other neighbour, Germany.

Danzig, renounced by Germany by the treaty of Versailles but peopled chiefly by Germans, was a Free City with a government of its own under the protection of the League of Nations and with a resident League Commissioner to supervise the maintenance of its status and constitution and adjudicate disputes between the Free City and Poland. It was within the Polish customs area and Poland had rights of access to it along a route or corridor which traversed German territory. In elections in 1933 the local Nazi Party won, partly by force and fraud, just over half the votes. Thereafter it rapidly and illegally strengthened its control, while the League abdicated its responsibilities. The city was to all intents and purposes firmly under German and Nazi control for at least two years before it was forcibly incorporated in the Reich on the eve of war.

Polish foreign policy between the wars was a series of expedients designed to preserve a relatively small country from attack by stronger neighbours. It was based at first on the alliance with France. During the twenties this alliance seemed to serve its purpose but with Germany and Russia both recovering from their defeats in the First World War it was not really tested: Poland’s problem was postponed until the revival of German and Russian power. When this took place the French alliance began to look undependable, which it was. Poland then adopted a policy of self-preservation by making defensive treaties with its two big neighbours (the non-aggression pacts of 1932 and 1934 with Stalin and Hitler respectively) and by refusing to be drawn into alliance with the one against the other. This policy too seemed to work for a while but although a number of Polish-German issues were resolved the intractable problem of Danzig remained and Poland was in danger as soon as Germany under Hitler became strong enough to attack the USSR. During the thirties Poland’s strategic position was weakened by the declining efficacy of alliance with France and by the destruction of Austrian and Czechoslovak independence. Colonel Jozef Beck, Foreign Minister from 1932, clung to the policy of non-alignment between Germany and the USSR and also secured in 1939 a British alliance. He has been much criticized for failing to opt for the USSR against Germany. This refusal was influenced by his anti-communism, which was pronounced, and also by the fact that Poland had been at war with the USSR as recently as 1920, but alignment with the USSR would also have been a complete reversal of a policy which kept Poland reasonably safe so long as Germany and the USSR neither concluded between themselves any agreement overriding their several non-aggression pacts with Poland nor aimed to fight one another over Poland’s dead body. In the end Poland was undone because Germany and the USSR did conclude such an agreement. In running the risk that they might Beck was blinded by his own over-estimate of Poland’s importance and power.

According to Rauschning Hitler was thinking of partitioning Poland with the USSR even at the time of the German-Polish treaty of 1934 and regarded a German-Russian agreement as a way of safeguarding his eastern front during a war in the west which would be a necessary preliminary to a war against the USSR. Hitler’s anti-communism was no bar to an ephemeral deal with Stalin. He himself said on another occasion that treaties were only meant to be kept so long as they served the purpose for which they had been made in the first place. On this thesis the German-Polish treaty could be succeeded by a German-Russian agreement for the partition of Poland, and a German-Russian agreement could be a prelude to a German attack on the USSR. These were problems in timing and tactics. But in relation to the western democracies Hitler had a problem of a different order: whether to attack them or not. He had no direct interest in doing so; there was no sense in making war on states which showed neither the will nor the capacity to thwart his plans in eastern Europe. The risk of effective French interference was a declining one, and if necessary France could be defeated. Great Britain too would probably not interfere, but if it did it could not so easily be defeated. The Luftwaffe was not suited to an attack on Great Britain and at sea Germany was a secondary power. When Hitler thought about Great Britain he preferred to dwell on the reasons why it should be willing to come to terms with him than on what he would do if it did not. He aspired to appease Great Britain, not to defeat it. Mein Kampf presupposed friendship with Great Britain; the dispatch of Ribbentrop to London as Ambassador was a step, however misguided, to this end; the purpose of the Anglo-German naval agreement of 1935 had been not so much to detach Great Britain from France and Italy (although it had that welcome effect) or to sanctify breaches of the naval clauses of the treaty of Versailles (which Hitler had hardly yet begun), but to reassure Great Britain that Hitler intended no threat to Great Britain’s naval empire. But by 1939 it was doubtful whether Great Britain could be neutralized. It was also becoming possible that the western democracies might enter into an alliance with the USSR.

The disappearance of Czechoslovakia as an independent state automatically moved Poland and Rumania into the German firing line. Both these states had frontiers with the USSR and so in a sense Hitler’s entry into Prague on 15 March 1939 brought Germany and the USSR face to face. For five and a half months between that day and the signing of the Russo-German pact during the night of 23–24 August the pattern of European politics was, on the surface at least, uncertain, as the USSR, moving to escape from an isolation which had become particularly dangerous since Munich, hesitated which side to take. At first the western democracies and the USSR seemed to be trying to overcome their mutual antipathies and draw together. Following a scare in March of imminent German action against Rumania Great Britain made an approach to the USSR. London was at this point more worried about Rumania than Poland, but the Rumanian scare subsided almost at once and when the USSR suggested a conference between itself, the two leading western democracies and the two countries threatened by Hitler, the British took evasive action, being reluctant to rub shoulders so formally with the USSR. Poland was even more reluctant. But it was also the main point of danger. It had partially mobilized on 23 March, three days before rejecting Germany’s proposals for a settlement, and Chamberlain, afraid that Danzig was about to create a war at any moment, resolved to cast a British mantle over Poland. He offered it a guarantee and on 6 April, after a visit by Beck to London, the two governments publicly announced their intention to sign a treaty by which Great Britain would go to Poland’s aid if it were attacked. France promised to do so too. At the beginning of May Hitler, already enraged by Beck’s rejection of his proposals, secretly ordered his army to get ready to attack. Beck publicly proclaimed that peace was less precious than Poland’s honour.

Great Britain and France, having committed themselves to succouring Poland, were gambling on a negotiated Danzig settlement which would once more remove a threat to peace, that is to say, give Hitler what he wanted. In default of such an agreement they would almost certainly be called upon to redeem in arms the promises which they had made. But by making these promises Great Britain in particular, which had not before been under any obligation to Poland, had forfeited the power which it had wielded in similar circumstances over Czechoslovakia. Beck was emboldened to continue to refuse to negotiate over Danzig. The guarantee given to him was a guarantee of Poland’s national integrity, a guarantee therefore against attack by a dissident minority as well as from external aggression, and most exceptionally the Polish government was itself to judge if and when circumstances had called the guarantee into play. Thus Beck had a weapon which Beneš never had, although in the end it did him no good. The charge that can be made against Beck is that he did not see that the Anglo-French guarantee was worthless. Although aware of the unwillingness of his guarantors to fight for Poland, he did not believe that they would go so far as to dishonour their promises. But Great Britain and France did not mean to implement these promises. For them the guarantee was a means to gain time and to deter Hitler, while they continued to try to lever the Poles into concessions over Danzig: a military promise used as a diplomatic weapon. As such it was inept. The charge against Chamberlain, the principal author of the manoeuvre, is that by giving the guarantee he diminished the pressure that he was trying to exert on Poland over Danzig and at the same time improvidently and inopportunely deprived himself of his chance of an agreement with the USSR. Coupled with Great Britain’s known determination on a peaceful settlement of the Danzig question, the guarantee was weak support for Poland and weak deterrence of Hitler.

Similar events with similar consequences occurred in south-east Europe. Ever since the disruption of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires this area had been contested between the principal land and naval powers of Europe. Most of it became in the 1930s increasingly dominated by Germany but Greece fell within the British sphere of influence and Yugoslavia proved to be a joker in the pack. (This pattern was repeated after the war with the substitution of the USSR and USA for Germany and Britain.)

Greece’s principal concerns were Bulgaria and, secondarily, Italy. The Greek government wanted an alliance with Great Britain to counter the threat it perceived from Bulgaria but Great Britain, although more sympathetic to Greece than to Bulgaria, had reasons of its own for equivocation: it did not want to push Bulgaria irrevocably into the German camp. Still less did Great Britain want to offend the Duce whose neutrality in a war with Germany Great Britain hoped to secure. On the other hand Greece was not negligible in British strategic thinking since Greece would be a useful element in a war in which blockade of Germany and German-occupied Europe would play a significant part. This complex was further bedevilled by the fact that Greece had, in theory at least, an alternative policy in a revival of the Greco-Italian friendship treaty of 1928 – which was contrary to British interests since it would take Greece out of the British and into the Axis sphere of influence.

Mussolini’s invasion of Albania on 7 April 1939 forced these issues. Great Britain and France gave Greece, and a little later Rumania, guarantees of their integrity and independence, but these undertakings, given in the wake of events, had little power to forestall further events. They were little more than anti-Axis slogans shouted into the wind. They did not deter Mussolini from invading Greece or Hitler from overrunning both Greece and Rumania. Like the guarantee to Poland, they had no impact on the pattern of power in Europe although they may have had some impact on how Hitler played his hand.

Hitler was a man of moods and rage was one of them. He was in a state of rage between the Berchtesgaden and Godesberg meetings in September 1938 and it seems likely that Chamberlain’s guarantee to Poland affected him the same way. He riposted by denouncing not only his recently reaffirmed non-aggression pact with Poland but also the Anglo-German naval treaty. He ordered his forces to be ready to attack Poland at the end of August, and he now envisaged – although he still hoped to avoid – a war on two fronts. The essential thing was to keep the USSR out of such a war.

The Russians, like the Germans, feared a war on two fronts. Germany and Japan were allies by the Anti-Comintern Pact and there was already an undeclared war going on in Manchuria between Russian and Japanese forces. Stalin found it difficult to believe that the British and French ruling classes preferred Russian communism to European right-wing fascism. This not implausible judgement had been strengthened by the Anglo-French failure to solicit Russian support for the defence of Czechoslovakia and the transience of the British interest in cooperation for the defence of Poland and Rumania. In any case, what Great Britain and France wanted was not what the USSR needed. Great Britain and France were concerned about the independence and integrity of Poland and Rumania and might in an emergency welcome Russian help to safeguard these states, but Stalin cared nothing for the integrity of Poland or Rumania. He was worrying about the USSR and its vulnerability to German attack. He might welcome British and French aid to avert such an attack but so long as Great Britain and France wanted to strengthen Poland and Rumania and preserve their sovereignty, Stalin saw little chance of turning these states into a defensive glacis which was the only useful function that they could perform for him. Stalin needed help against Hitler and a free hand in the debatable lands between the USSR and Germany; Great Britain and France were looking for help for Poland and Rumania not for the USSR, and were unwilling to blackmail Poland into giving Stalin what he wanted in the way in which they had blackmailed Czechoslovakia into giving way to Hitler.

Stalin had made a mistake about Hitler several years earlier. He had viewed with equanimity the coalition between German conservatives, the German army and the Nazis. The conservatives and the army had a tradition of alliance with Russia, and Stalin believed that these would prove the dominating forces in a post-Weimar Germany. He regarded the Nazis as no more than ephemeral auxiliaries in the overthrow of Weimar and so instead of impeding Hitler’s rise to power by directing the German communists to make common cause with the socialists he incited the communists against the socialists and so played a part in destroying Weimar and making Hitler its heir. Stalin quickly realized his mistake and tried to rectify it. In 1934 he joined the League of Nations and in 1935 he made his ineffective alliance with France. The failure of this alliance and the obvious weaknesses of collective security forced him a couple of years later to seek with Nazi Germany the sort of accord which he would have liked to make with a military-conservative Germany. In 1937 he began the process of appeasing Hitler by dissolving the Polish Communist Party. Poland rekilled would, if necessary, seal the new compact. Stalin knew that Hitler was his enemy as much as Great Britain and France, indeed more so and more menacingly. But he also saw the basis for a business deal with Germany which could give him what he needed – time. Moreover if, like western conservatives, he too saw a world divided into communists and noncommunists, he could nevertheless draw some distinction between fascist anti-communists and democratic anti-communists. He despised and distrusted the latter and concluded in consequence that he would probably have to do a deal with the former, since the countries which had had no stomach to defend Czechoslovakia would be incapable of doing anything useful for the USSR even if they wanted to. But it is doubtful whether he finally made up his mind until August 1939. Until a few days before the signing of the Russo-German treaty he kept open the possibility of an agreement with Great Britain and France.

By their guarantees to Poland and Rumania, Great Britain and France had undertaken to help two countries whose ability to withstand Germany was clearly nil. The British estimate of Poland’s capacity to resist, measured in time, was two weeks – and Poland’s forty divisions constituted an army twice as large as Rumania’s. If Hitler invaded Poland, France and Great Britain could invade Germany, but unless the USSR were added to the alliance the Poles would fight alone and not for long. Thus east–west negotiations were dragged onto the political scene by the logic of events. The French government and, in London, the Foreign Office but not the Prime Minister were driven to seek an alliance with the USSR despite some well-founded doubts about its political value at this date. Political missions proceeded from Paris and London to Moscow in June. They did not give an impression of enthusiasm, but the real cause of their ultimate failure was not their attitude so much as the backlog of distrust between their countries and the impossibility of agreement on the crucial issue of a Russian right of entry into Poland. By the end of July a stalemate was reached when the western powers refused to give Stalin a free hand in the Baltic states. They felt that they were being asked to connive at the suppression of the independence of these countries, which was indeed so, but was not very different from what they had done at Munich. Stalin then reanimated the talks by suggesting the dispatch of military missions. These began discussions in Moscow on 12 August. The fact that they went by ship instead of by air has been the subject of some ridicule and again there was a display of an evident lack of enthusiasm (although Daladier at least wanted an agreement at almost any price), but there was a case for the chosen method of travel since it was only on board ship that the two missions got to know each other and were able to concert their plans.

It is impossible to say whether Stalin was by now merely playing with the western powers or was hoping to do a deal with them. He had been looking both ways since April when he initiated the first in a series of moves which eventually produced the Russo-German pact, and the replacement of Maxim Litvinov by Vyacheslav Molotov as Foreign Commissar on 3 May was regarded by the French Ambassador in Moscow as a step towards a Russo-German alliance. Hitler responded with further initiatives in June and then appeared to lose interest, but serious exchanges were renewed before the end of July, at which time the German Ambassador in Moscow was forecasting a Franco-British-Russian alliance. On 12 August, the day on which the military talks began in Moscow, Hitler was telling his Italian allies of his intention to make Stalin his ally; on 20 August he sent a personal telegram to Stalin to speed things up and on the 22nd, in an address to military and civilian chiefs, he spoke as though the attack on Poland were imminent and the Russian pact assured. In the intervening week the military missions had been pressed by the chief Russian delegate, Marshal Voroshilov, to answer the question whether Russian troops would be allowed by Poland to advance into Poland to meet the German armies. The British and French missions could not give a straight answer, for although Poland (and Rumania) had withdrawn initial objections to a Franco-British-Russian alliance, the Polish government still refused to permit any entry by Russian forces except upon request to be made at the time and it assumed that the request would be for air support and not for ground units. At the last moment a member of the French mission was sent to Warsaw to press the Poles to give way, but the Poles refused and it is probable that Stalin knew on 19 August of this refusal from intercepted cipher traffic. On the 21st Daladier cabled the French mission to sign anything they could get, but on the same day a Russo-German economic agreement was signed in Berlin. This agreement was regarded as portending something more spectacular and in Moscow a visit by Ribbentrop was openly spoken of. Stalin consented to a visit by the Nazi Foreign Minister a week after the signing of the economic agreement but this was too late for Hitler. Ribbentrop arrived in the afternoon of the 23rd and a few hours later, to the amazement of the rest of the world, Germany and the USSR signed a treaty of friendship and non-aggression by which each of them abjured the use of force against the other and undertook not to help any third party in an attack on the other and not to join any group oriented directly or indirectly against the other. The treaty was to endure in the first instance for ten years. It was supplemented by a secret protocol defining spheres of interest: to the USSR, Finland, Estonia, Latvia; to Germany, Lithuania including Vilna; in Poland, the division to run along the line Narev–Vistula–San, the continuance of an independent Polish state to remain an open question; in the south-east the USSR stressed its interest, and Germany its désinteressement, in Bessarabia. These arrangements were later altered to give Lithuania to the USSR and the Polish provinces of Lublin and Warsaw to Germany.

One of the unwitting authors of the Hitler-Stalin pact was Neville Chamberlain. His determination to come to terms with Mussolini and secure Italy’s neutrality, and his search for ways to avoid an Anglo-German war, are an example of labours which are not only in vain but carry within them the risks of multiplying misfortune. Chamberlain’s motives were the reverse of dishonourable. Yet the more he laboured to find common ground with the dictators, the more did he convince Stalin that he must do so too. And Stalin, perhaps because more cynical or perhaps because harder pressed, succeeded, so that Chamberlain’s diplomacy recoiled upon him. His overtures to Moscow, however distasteful to him personally, were genuine and by this date forced upon him, as they were too upon the French government.

But the deeper source of the Hitler-Stalin pact lay elsewhere. Whether or not in August 1939 Stalin was still considering an alliance with the western democracies or was merely playing for time, using the Anglo-French missions to needle Hitler into a Russo-German pact and incidentally seeing how much useful intelligence he could worm out of the British and French negotiators, it is in retrospect clear that an Anglo-French-Russian pact was of interest to Stalin only upon terms which Great Britain and France could not fulfil. These powers, having lost Czechoslovakia and a possible Russian alliance, were forced back onto a third and much weaker policy. On 25 August, the day after the Russo-German pact was made known, an Anglo-Polish treaty, implementing the Chamberlain-Beck declaration of April, was signed. It had been delayed by the Anglo-French-Russian conversations but by 22 August the British and French governments knew that the Russo-German entente was imminent. Chamberlain was still determined to avoid any provocation of Hitler and was hoping for a visit from Goering which would somehow prevent war, but he could no longer delay the formalization of his earlier undertaking, empty though it was. The treaty of August, like the declaration of April, was more an attempt to check Hitler than solid comfort for the Poles. The earlier pledge was embodied in a formal pact of mutual assistance against any act of aggression or any direct or indirect threat to the independence of the signatories. An indirect threat meant in fact a German seizure of Danzig. At the same time Great Britain both assured Hitler through diplomatic channels that British promises to Poland meant what they said, and intimated that Germany ought to have Danzig and Great Britain would like to see a peaceful cession of the city. France concluded a similar treaty with Poland, although it was not signed until 5 September, after Hitler’s attack.

The only chance of averting war, so it seemed to those who wanted to do so, was to call in Mussolini again and arrange another Munich. Great Britain tried once more to use Mussolini as a lifebelt and a means of appeasing Hitler with Danzig, but the French government, unaware of what Great Britain was doing, was trying to detach Italy from Hitler by emphasizing the dangers ahead without realizing that the Italians knew from their contacts with London that Great Britain was hoping to remove the dangers by giving way to Hitler. Mussolini was unwilling to lose credit with Hitler and with himself by urging a peaceful settlement which Hitler did not want. On the other hand he was not ready for war and knew it, and Ciano was telling him that a German attack on Poland would begin a general war. He told Hitler that Italy could not join in a war which brought Poland’s allies into the field unless Germany could supply the materials of war which Italy still lacked. Asked to specify Italy’s needs he submitted a huge list. This was tantamount to asking for the impossible. Privately Hitler accepted the conclusion that Italy would not fight. Mussolini resigned himself to the fact that Hitler would make war on Poland.

Hitler’s Japanese ally was also proving a disappointment. After Japan joined the Anti-Comintern Pact in November 1936 Hitler tried to get a promise of Japanese military assistance against any enemy of Germany and not merely against the communist USSR. By 1939 the Japanese army was keen on an alliance with Germany and Italy against Great Britain and France but the emperor, his Foreign Minister and the navy opposed such a commitment. Prolonged negotiations during the early months of 1939 ran into the sands and on 22 May Germany and Italy signed the Pact of Steel, which marked the end of hopes for a tripartite alliance against the western democracies. Six months later Japan was the more deeply aggrieved by Hitler’s pact with Stalin because Japan was actually engaged in hostilities against the USSR. Japan complained that the Russo-German pact was a breach of the Anti-Comintern Pact. A few days later its government fell and its attitude became more uncertain, but temporarily the Japanese alliance had become irrelevant for Hitler who had just given the order for the war against Poland in which the USSR was his ally.

On 25 August Hitler gave the order for Poland to be attacked before dawn the next morning. At the last moment he revoked his order – so late that one unit could not be reached in time, advanced across the frontier and was destroyed. Hitler’s change of plan may have been influenced by the behaviour of his Italian and Japanese allies or by the announcement – also on the 25th – of the Anglo-Polish treaty, but the guarantee to Poland was already an established fact and Hitler was more probably hoping that Chamberlain and Daladier, if given a few extra days to reflect upon the Russo-German pact, would either coerce Poland as they had coerced Czechoslovakia or abandon it. On the 25th he assured the British and French Ambassadors that he had no designs on the British Empire and was not hankering after Alsace-Lorraine, and in the days which followed he tried to get Great Britain and France to force Poland to send a plenipotentiary to Berlin to negotiate the reversion of Danzig to Germany and a plebiscite in the Polish corridor. Given the fate which had attended other plenipotentiaries who had visited Berlin, Beck (who had already agreed in principle to negotiate with Germany) refused and his allies felt unable to press him to accept.

Germany invaded Poland on 1 September. As a prelude a small SS party entered the German radio station at Gleiwitz and announced in poor Polish that it had been seized by Poles. This futile episode, in the course of which a German policeman who was not privy to the escapade was killed, was Germany’s attempt to give some colour of justification to the attack which began the Second World War. A few hours after the charade at Gleiwitz, Danzig’s Nazi Gauleiter declared the city to be a part of the German Reich; there was some fighting (there is an exciting account of the fight for the Post Office in Günther Grass’s novel The Tin Drum) but Danzig was not now what mattered. Hitler had taken a risk. He calculated, correctly, that he could dispose of Poland without fear of British or French intervention, and he was happy to know that his generals who feared a war on two fronts would again be proved wrong. But he also calculated, wrongly, that Great Britain and France would either not declare war or not fight if they did. The British and French governments hesitated, but in the House of Commons Chamberlain’s reluctance to declare war in response to Great Britain’s pledges and Poland’s plea for action against Germany in the west, produced tense and angry scenes. Chamberlain’s government, it was said, would fall if it did not declare war. On 3 September Chamberlain spoke the necessary words, but it was the Commons of England rather than the government which had taken the plunge. France followed suit.

The outbreak of war in September 1939 marked the failure of policies, for which British and French politicians have been amply criticized. The French recipe for peace and security in Europe had already broken down because it rested on incompatibles – a system of continental alliances plus an alliance with Great Britain to whom the continental alliances were obnoxious. As a result of the failure of the French recipe Great Britain came to be in a position to call the tune. It called it wrong. But why? The obtuseness of British politicians in the face of the fascist phenomenon is only a part of the answer.

It is a commonplace of history that France, denied the British and American guarantees which were its first requirement in 1919, had to fall back on second-best policies which were adequate in the twenties only because France was not then seriously threatened. The significance of Barthou and, in his different fashion, Laval was that these two Ministers tried a second time in the thirties to create an alliance system strong enough to contain Germany and that when this attempt too failed France’s isolation was manifest to foe, friend and itself. Thereafter France accepted the consequences of this isolation – inability to conduct an independent foreign policy.

It is no less a commonplace that the United States kept itself aloof from European affairs between the wars. How far the United States was truly isolationist and why will be discussed in a later chapter. American isolationism, unlike the French abnegation, was a matter of choice. But it too involved withdrawal.

What has been little, if at all, noticed is that Great Britain too was isolated. The difference in the British case was that, unlike France and the United States, Great Britain refused to abnegate and continued to try to play an active role. It was, however, reduced to playing the only role possible for a state with commitments but without allies – the role of a man who gives way on one thing after another until he finds he has his back to a wall. At the turn of the century Great Britain had been committed to that search for allies which eventuated in the agreements with Japan, Russia and France on the basis of which the First World War was fought. After that war the Japanese alliance was abandoned under American pressure, the Russian alliance disappeared with the ancient Russian state itself, and the French alliance became more of a problem than a support because of disagreements over German policy, the growing deficiencies of France as a military partner and the element of contempt and distrust in the British ruling class’s attitude to France. In this situation British governments, no less than French, would have liked to believe that the new system of collective security embodied in the League of Nations was the answer to their problems and they consistently gave a high priority to support for the League for this reason, but they also believed that the collective security of their day would not work. They were not unaware of their dilemma but in the first post-war decade it did not seem a pressing one. Then, just as the world came to look more menacing, they were struck by a catastrophe of a different kind which they did not understand and which they consequently greatly exaggerated. The economic crisis of 1931 terrified the governing class, reduced Ministers to a state of helplessness and convinced them that Great Britain had been permanently and irreparably weakened. This misjudgement was a major cause of the refusal to spend money on arms in the thirties, and this failure in turn reinforced the feeling of weakness. By the mid-thirties a combination of diplomatic isolation, economic nightmare and military unpreparedness had produced political and intellectual paralysis. And this paralysis produced wrong decisions. Munich was a wrong decision.

It contained three principal elements. These were: horror of war, unmanageable imperial burdens and miscalculation of the odds in Europe.

The men who sat in British cabinets in the thirties had known the First World War most of them had fought in it – and felt a compelling responsibility to prevent a second. Their generation had been horrified by the first war and was convinced that a second, in which they themselves would be too old to fight, would be even more frightful. They felt a compelling personal obligation to obviate war at almost any price. This motive does them nothing but credit.

Secondly, they thought in imperial terms and would have held it disgraceful not to do so: their heritage and their office constrained them to give the highest priority to the preservation of an empire whose material riches had placed Great Britain high in the world. Subconsciously too, the preservation of empire was a charge which could not be abandoned without impugning British vitality. This empire seemed to be challenged not so much by changing times as by a specific enemy – Japan – whose evident attempts to dominate China were assumed to entail similar designs in the spheres of influence established in Asia over the centuries by European powers. In 1937 the British government went to the length of giving formal undertakings at the Imperial Conference in that year to send a British fleet to the Pacific to stem or defeat Japanese ambitions. But this promise was incompatible with any policy in Europe that was likely to lead to war with Germany and Italy, since war in Europe could serve as a green light to Japan to despoil the British in Asia while conversely the dispatch of a substantial naval force to the east would negate Great Britain’s capacity to make war in Europe. Great Britain’s resources no longer matched its commitments as an imperial power which was also critically involved in European affairs. Short of a massive rearmament programme begun at a much earlier date (politically shunned and economically perhaps ruinous) there was no way out of this dilemma except by a retreat from empire or from Europe. The British government came near to the latter but, responding ultimately to Great Britain’s inevitable embroilment in Europe, bequeathed to its successors the unenviable and, in the thirties, virtually unthinkable alternative.

The third main factor in the calculations of British foreign policy in the thirties was a misreading of the military situation, beginning with the balance and practicalities of air power. British cabinets believed that on the outbreak of war London would be immediately and catastrophically bombed and Britain forced to capitulate. This belief was absurd. The Air Staff admitted that it could not bomb Germany. This admission should have prompted the question whether the Luftwaffe could bomb England. Yet astonishingly this question seems never to have been put. Had it been the answer must have been no. When the Luftwaffe did bomb England two years later (with much less catastrophic effect than anticipated) it did so from bases in France and Belgium which it did not have in 1938 and could not have conquered so long as Czechoslovakia remained an independent, hostile and well-armed state. The destruction of Czechoslovakia at Munich, completed in April the next year, was an essential precondition for Hitler’s air offensive against Great Britain. The betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich has been justified on the grounds that the only alternative was to fight Hitler and be defeated. This is a bad plea. In the event France was beaten anyway. Great Britain won the Battle of Britain but the correct conclusion to draw about Munich is not that Chamberlain there gained time to build up the R A F and so save his country but rather that Munich brought upon Great Britain a battle which it would not otherwise have had to fight.

In 1938 Czechoslovakia was the one country among the possible combatants which was ready for battle. Great Britain and France were not ready, nor was the USSR. More significantly, Germany was not ready. Nor of course was Italy. So any alliance with Czechoslovakia in it would have started with a peculiar advantage over its enemy. Czechoslovakia was not only ready but strong, as strong as Germany in all important departments except manpower. The Czechoslovak army of thirty-five divisions faced a German army which was about the same size or slightly larger but which, if the aggressor, needed to be twice as large as its defending antagonist. In 1938 Germany could just about match Czechoslovakia division for division with four or five regular (but imperfectly trained and incompletely officered) divisions over to guard its western front – where Czechoslovakia’s ally, France, mustered seventy-six divisions. The Czechs were better equipped than the Germans in a number of ways, notably in artillery and armoured fighting vehicles. The German armoured divisions which scattered and destroyed the French army and its allies in 1940 hardly existed in 1938; even in September 1939 Hitler had only six armoured divisions in place of the ten with which he made war in the west; four of these ten had Czech tanks.

Czechoslovakia was the sixth industrial power in Europe, possessed one of Europe’s most famous, extensive and efficient armaments industries and had made plans to remove it from the west to the comparative safety of Slovakia. After 1939 its output, which was roughly equivalent to Great Britain’s arms output, was added to Germany’s own capacity – not the least of Germany’s gains at Munich. Germany also secured the existing equipment of the Czechoslovak armed forces, including 1,500 aircraft. Czechoslovak mobilization plans were excellent. The government was ready to evacuate half the population of Prague. Morale was high. All Czechoslovakia asked in return for these substantial contributions was a declaration of war by France. Confident of its ability to hold the Germans for a matter of months, it did not even depend on an immediate French offensive in strength – unlike the Poles who required, and secured from France in the following year, a promise that the French army would commit the bulk of its forces against Germany within fifteen days of French mobilization.

But there was no equivalent confidence in France or Great Britain. The pessimism of French and British staffs and politicians arose largely out of the view held in the west that, since the Anschluss, Czechoslovakia’s soft underbelly had been exposed and its capital lay at the mercy of a German pincer attack. In fact Czechoslovakia’s southern defences were far from soft and the Germans did not plan a pincer movement. Hitler and his generals had decided that an attack on Prague from the south and the north-west would be held up for too long by the Czechoslovak army and fortifications and they therefore planned a thrust from the west. When, as bloodless victors, they were able to inspect the Czech defences they were awed by the strength and depth of a system which stretched back from the frontiers almost as far as Prague. Addressing 400 journalists a few weeks after Munich Hitler told them of his feelings when he inspected these fortifications and enthused over his success in getting hold of them without firing a shot.

What Stalin would have done in the event of war in 1938 still remains an enigma. The fact that the Russian obligation to act was dependent on French action provides no clue, since this clause in the Russo-Czechoslovak treaty of 1935 was inserted not by the Russians in order to provide a let-out but by the Czechs, on French insistence, in order to discourage the Russians from acting on their own. During 1938 and before Munich the USSR delivered aircraft to the Czechs (who were short of bombers). Moscow also warned Poland not to take action against Czechoslovakia, threatening to denounce the Russo-Polish treaty if Poland attacked Czechoslovakia. Two weeks before the Munich conference Rumania lifted its embargo on Russian aircraft flying over its territory and one Russian aircraft which made a forced landing in Rumania on its way from the USSR to Czechoslovakia was not only given emergency repairs but was allowed to fly on. An airfield in Slovakia was stocked with fuel and spare parts for various types of Russian aircraft. The French Ambassador in Moscow believed that the Russians intended to go to the help of Czechoslovakia. Russian ground and air forces were moved westward in considerable numbers, although for what purpose is uncertain. They could have been used as a contribution to collective action on behalf of Czechoslovakia, or their deployment may have been no more than a defensive precaution, or Stalin may have been keeping both his options open. Furthermore the possibility of Russian action was in itself a factor since it gave Hitler not merely two fronts to worry about but three. He was risking an attack on East Prussia and had no means of meeting it. When war came a year later over Poland this threat had been eliminated. From the Anglo-French point of view Stalin was a far from certain ally in the event of war over Czechoslovakia, but he was an all but certain non-ally in a war begun anywhere else in central Europe.

Hitler’s aggression against Czechoslovakia was based on a political calculation, not a military one. On a military calculation it was the lunacy which his generals held it to be. They, seeing only the military equation, were scared out of their wits and even conspired to overthrow him. Hjalmar Schacht too, the coolest of men – the financial genius who served many masters, financed German rearmament, mocked Hitler as he mocked everybody with his merciless drawing-room wit, but who did not leave the Nazi government until he was dismissed from it in January 1938 – bemoaned Chamberlain’s visit to Godesberg no less than the generals: Schacht said that Chamberlain could do nothing to prevent war and that Germany was therefore lost. It follows that Czechoslovakia’s allies’ own calculations were, militarily, wrong. Hitler’s political gamble came off not because France and Great Britain were militarily incapable but because they were strategically inept. The French army would have had little more on its hands than a promenade militaire, the one military performance which an out-of-date army can execute as well as an up-to-date one. In 1940 the French forces were destroyed in a few weeks by a weight of armour which in 1938 the Germans did not possess. It is moreover implausible to suppose that in 1938, with the Germans engaged in Czechoslovakia, with only five German regular divisions and seven others in the west, with the entire Luftwaffe committed in the east, with incomplete German defences described by General Jodl as a building site, and with the spur of a treaty obligation, the French army would have remained futilely static. However poor its leadership and equipment it could hardly have failed to do better than it did when war came; at least it could not have done worse.

The British case was different. The British army was irrelevant both in 1938 and 1940. Although its role in Europe’s wars in the twentieth century was to send troops and not, as in the past, find the money to subsidize the armies of other countries, Great Britain did not in fact equip itself with troops to send. It was therefore unable to contribute much more than a token to continental land warfare until it had raised a wartime army in wartime, fighting meanwhile defensive battles to gain the time to do this. Consequently the crucial issue was the defence of Great Britain itself and the crucial battle was the air battle of 1940.

The British case for Munich has to be tested at two points – in 1939 when war in fact came and in 1940 when the crucial battle was fought. Rearmament was accelerated after Munich, although without much intensity until the fall of France (and Chamberlain) in 1940. Between Munich, when battle was refused, and September 1939, when it was accepted, Great Britain’s expenditure on armaments was one fifth of Germany’s. British fighter production was about half Germany’s. There was therefore no improvement in the British position relative to the German during these twelve months; in these respects the British position actually got worse. At the time of Munich the vital radar screen was incomplete; so it was a year later. The supplementary screen against low-flying aircraft, wholly non-existent in 1938, was still wholly non-existent in 1939.

If the British government feared defeat in 1938 it had even more reason to fear it a year later when the country’s defences were still ineffective against air raids and its aircraft, though more numerous and more modern, had declined in proportion to the German air force.

By the spring of 1940, on the eve of the Battle of Britain, British aircraft production had begun to overtake Germany’s, so that the gap between the two forces had stopped growing and was beginning to close. In 1938 Great Britain had 600 fighter aircraft, of which 360 were immediately available for operations, but only one in five of these was modern. In 1940 all Fighter Command’s forty-three squadrons had Hurricanes or Spitfires (but the squadrons overseas had not). It is therefore plausible to argue that had the Battle of Britain been fought in 1938 the result would have gone the other way. But it is implausible to assume that anything like the Battle of Britain would have been fought in a war begun in 1938 with Czechoslovakia as an ally, for the essential prerequisite to the Luftwaffe’s attack on Great Britain was the possession of airfields in France and Belgium – airfields which had first to be captured by the German army which, on the 1938 hypothesis, would have been fully occupied in Czechoslovakia. Great Britain was woefully ill equipped in 1938 but it does not follow that it would have fought Germany at a greater disadvantage in that year than it did when, with Germany also better armed and above all unencumbered to the east, Great Britain was forced into war for Poland in 1939 and so forced to defend its own shores in 1940. On the contrary, there is reason to calculate that the avoidance of war in 1938 was not only a shameful act but an inexpedient and foolish one. The surrender at Munich, by postponing war, shaped its future course, ensured the defeat of France and, so far from buying time for rearmament, committed Great Britain to a battle which it nearly lost.

Munich was an over-optimistic, inadequately analysed, dubiously proper attempt to accommodate Hitler’s expansive Germany in the European states system and so stave off war, but the grounds for supposing that Hitler would be satisfied with what he got at Munich were a wilful delusion and the grounds for supposing that war postponed would be more easily won were little more defensible. Chamberlain had become convinced that Czechoslovakia could not be saved. He was intent upon preventing the so-called Sudeten crisis from developing into general war. Hitler’s aggressive plans were a threat to the peace, but so too – in Chamberlain’s eyes – was the Franco-Czech treaty: Hitler’s territorial claims might be satisfied but in order to keep the peace by satisfying them Chamberlain needed to prevent the occurrence of the casus foederis embodied in the treaty, or to ensure that it would be dishonoured if it did arise. This was an urgent issue since Daladier (but not all his colleagues) was prepared in the last resort to go to war if Czechoslovakia were attacked. For Chamberlain Munich was a victory because it defused the Franco-Czech treaty, but a defeat because the basis of his policy was unsound. He assumed, wrongly and implausibly, that Hitler could be satisfied by territorial concessions linked to alleged ethnic borders whereas, as the next few months showed, Hitler was determined to annex far more than the territories deemed to be German in character even by him and, ultimately, to fight the USSR for the Lebensraum which he had said in Mein Kampf Germany must have. At best Chamberlain’s policy might hope to disentangle – although it did not disentangle – Great Britain and France from war. It could not prevent the war or even much delay it, and Great Britain and France were quickly involved in the war by Chamberlain’s own action in guaranteeing the integrity of Poland, a complete reversal of his policy of engineering the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in order to keep the peace. For Hitler Munich was no more than a brief, if unwelcome, check which, six months later, had cost him nothing and had incidentally stifled opposition to his expansionist adventures from those, notably in the German army, who were scared by his willingness to risk war with Czechoslovakia.

The policy of appeasement, which culminated at Munich, ensured that Czechoslovakia would be eliminated from a war with Germany. With the effortless elimination of Poland too a year later, war on Germany’s eastern front was reduced to war against the USSR alone, so that Stalin, by 1945 sole combatant in the east and sole victor, became the virtually uncontrolled arbiter of the fate of central and eastern Europe.