Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War
Page 27
The circumstances in which so fateful a guarantee was given, together with the rashness and looseness of its wording, serve to show that, although Chamberlain and his colleagues had at last recognised what kind of game they were playing, it did not follow that they could play it very well.100
How rash a commitment the war guarantee to Poland was may be seen by considering the balance of power on the day it was given. As of April 1, 1939, Britain and France retained an advantage in naval power over Germany, Italy, and Japan. On land, where any war to defeat Germany must be fought, the French were outmanned two-to-one by the Germans, who were conscripting soldiers from a far larger population. The British situation was hopeless.
On land, as of 1 April, France and Britain were now overwhelmingly out-numbered. Britain herself could put no divisions at all into the field in Europe by the eighteenth day after mobilization, but 3 in Egypt. France would initially field 54 divisions (including one armoured and five mobile) to Germany’s 96 (including five armoured); and later 76 to 106. Italy could field a total of 76 divisions.101
Looking back at century’s end, Roy Denman saw the guarantee to Poland as the fatal blunder that led to the collapse of the British Empire. The war guarantee, he writes, was
an even greater British folly [than Munich]…. The fear that after Poland Hitler would have attacked Britain was an illusion. As he had made clear in Mein Kampf, Hitler would have marched against Russia. As it was, Britain was dragged into an unnecessary war, which cost her nearly 400,000 dead, bankruptcy, and the dissolution of the British Empire.102
Again, in Denman’s prose the phrase appears: “an unnecessary war.”
WHY DID BRITAIN DO IT?
WHY DID CHAMBERLAIN, who never believed Britain had a vital interest in Eastern Europe, give the first war guarantee in British history to Eastern Europe?
Deceived and betrayed by Hitler, his Munich pact made a mockery, Chamberlain appears to have acted out of shame and humiliation at having been played for a fool, out of fear of Tory backbenchers who had turned against Munich in disgust, and out of panic that Hitler was out to “dominate the world.”
“It is impossible,” writes Liddell Hart, “to gauge what was the predominant influence on his impulse—the pressure of public indignation, or his own indignation, or his anger at having been fooled by Hitler, or his humiliation at having been made to look a fool in the eyes of his own people.”103
Lloyd George believed that Chamberlain’s “hare-brained pledge” had been an impulsive reaction to his humiliation:
Hitler having fooled him, he felt he must do something to recover his lost prestige, so he rushed into the first rash and silly enterprise that entered his uninformed mind. He guaranteed Poland, Roumania and Greece against the huge army of Germany….
I denounced it as sheer madness to give such a pledge in the absence of military support from Russia.104
In his 1976 book March 1939: The British Guarantee to Poland, Simon Newman concludes that “the critical decisions in March 1939 were made in an atmosphere of panic, humiliation, and moral hysteria. A frantic urgency to do something—anything—replaced calm consideration of the alternatives.”105
In Six Crises, Richard Nixon warns that “the most dangerous period” in any crisis is “the aftermath. It is then, with all his resources spent and his guard down, that an individual must watch out for dulled reactions and faulty judgment.”106
Chamberlain thought a war guarantee to Poland might block a Polish-German deal, force Hitler to think about a two-front war, give Britain an ally with fifty-five divisions, and enable Britain to avoid the alliance with Stalin being pressed upon him by Churchill, Lloyd George, and the Labour Party. Newman believes the prime mover behind the guarantee was Halifax, who had come to believe that if Hitler continued with his bloodless victories, Germany would dominate Europe economically and no longer be at the mercy of a British blockade. That would mean Britain’s end as a world power. When the German-Rumanian Trade Treaty was announced on March 24, Halifax feared Poland would also strike a deal. Rather than have Poland become a partner of Germany, Newman argues, Halifax preferred war. He pushed the guarantee on Chamberlain to stiffen the Polish spine, knowing the guarantee would harden Polish resistance to any deal over Danzig. Halifax preferred war, and the sacrifice of Poland to Hitler’s war machine, to seeing Britain yield her preeminence in Europe and the world. By March 1939, writes Newman, war with Germany had become
the only real alternative to Britain’s relegation to second-class status. As Halifax described this dilemma to the Foreign Policy Committee, the choice was between “doing nothing” which would mean a “great accession of Germany’s strength and a great loss to ourselves of sympathy and support” and “entering into a devastating war.” He [Halifax] preferred the latter course.107
Andrew Roberts credits Halifax with being the decisive force behind the guarantee. After Hitler entered Prague, Halifax told the Cabinet, “The real issue was Germany’s attempt to obtain world domination.”108
Yet, Halifax admitted, “there was probably no way in which France and ourselves could prevent Poland and Roumania from being overrun.”109
Knowing Poland could not be saved from a Nazi onslaught and occupation, Halifax nevertheless wanted to give Poland a war guarantee, which he knew could precipitate a suicidal Polish policy of defiance.
For Halifax, writes Roberts,
the issue had long moved beyond the rights and wrongs of individual claims and towards the “great moralities” which he had declared his willingness to fight for at the time of Munich. The fear which materialized in late March was that Poland might disclaim Danzig and allow herself to be neutralized in return for not fighting, thus chalking up yet another bloodless coup for Hitler.110
Rather than see Poland return Danzig to the Reich, Halifax preferred that Poland fight Germany to the death in a war Halifax knew Poland could not win, because the British could not help. To Halifax, Poland’s suicide was preferable to having Hitler chalk up “yet another bloodless coup.” The Holy Fox appears to have had no reservations about pushing Poland to its death in front of Hitler’s war machine—to exhibit “his willingness to fight for…the ‘great moralities.’”
Such is the morality of Great Powers.
WAS CHAMBERLAIN MISUNDERSTOOD?
WHAT CHAMBERLAIN’S WAR GUARANTEE wrought was the bloodiest war in all of history. But what was its literal meaning to the prime minister who had issued it?
As one inspects Chamberlain’s words of March 31, they do not bind Britain to fight for Danzig or the Corridor. It is not a commitment to defend the territorial integrity of Poland. It is only a commitment to repel an attack “which clearly threatened Polish independence.”
What was Chamberlain up to? Graham Stewart explains:
The Polish guarantee was not intended to make war with Germany inevitable…. On the contrary, the commitment was intended to give Britain leverage in forcing Poland to come to terms with Hitler’s demands over the Danzig and Corridor questions. In this way, Hitler could be satisfied without Poland being subjected either to a full-scale invasion (forcing a Europe-wide war) or succumbing to a treaty that reduced her to vassal status.111
In a letter to his sister, April 3, Chamberlain concedes as much. The guarantee of March 31, he wrote, was “unprovocative in tone, but firm, clear but stressing that the important point (perceived alone by the Times) that what we are concerned with is not the boundary of States, but attacks on their independence. And it is we who will judge whether this independence is threatened or not.”112
What had the Times written for which the prime minister had given its editor such high marks for his perceptiveness and insight?
On April 3, an alarmed Churchill rose in the House to point to a “sinister passage in the Times’s leading article on Saturday [April 1], similar to that which foreshadowed the ruin of Czechoslovakia.”113 Saturday was the day following Chamberlain’s declaration. In that editorial by Times edit
or Geoffrey Dawson, the limited nature of the war guarantee is discerned and defined. Here is Manchester:
Dawson had written: “The new obligation which this country yesterday assumed does not bind Great Britain to defend every inch of the present frontiers of Poland. The key word in the statement is not ‘integrity’ but ‘independence.’” The prime minister’s statement, the editorial continued “involves no blind acceptance of the status quo…. This country…has never been an advocate of the encirclement of Germany, and is not now opposed to the extension of Germany’s economic pressure and influence, nor to the constructive work she may yet do for Europe.”114
Dawson had either been privately informed or had ferreted out the truth. Appeasement was not dead! Chamberlain had not declared that Britain would fight to keep Danzig from Germany, only that Britain would fight for Poland’s “independence.” Chamberlain was signaling Hitler that the return of Danzig was not opposed by Britain and she would go to war only if he tried to destroy Poland as an independent nation. The British war guarantee had not been crafted to give Britain a pretext for war, but to give Chamberlain leverage to persuade the Poles to give Danzig back.
Chamberlain seems to be signaling his willingness for a second Munich, where Poland would cede Danzig and provide a road-and-rail route across the Corridor, but in return for Hitler’s guarantee of Poland’s independence—so there would be no repeat of the Czech debacle.
Unfortunately, the diplomatic subtlety was lost on Hitler. To him, and to the world, it appeared that a now-defiant prime minister had drawn a line in the sand and warned Hitler not to cross it. To Hitler this was a virtual ultimatum: If you try to take back Danzig, you will be at war with Britain.
Donald Watt describes how Hitler received the news:
Then on March 31 came the news of the British guarantee to Poland, clearly involving British support for the Polish position over Danzig. As the news reached Hitler, he was sitting in front of the great marble table in the new Reichs Chancellery. With clenched fists he hammered on its marble top, enraged…. “I will brew them a devil’s drink,” heshouted.115
The Poles, too, read Chamberlain’s declaration as a solemn British commitment to stand by them in their resolve never to return Danzig. From that day forward, the Poles refused even to discuss Danzig with Germany.
ALTERNATIVES TO THE WAR GUARANTEE
WHAT ELSE COULD Great Britain have done? So it is asked.
Her prime minister had been humiliated and the Munich accord treated as a scrap of paper. Hitler had imposed Nazi rule on a non-Germanic people. He had smashed the only democracy in Central Europe and was on the road to conquest. He had to be stopped, and Britain and France, as the greatest democracies in Europe, had a moral duty to stop him.
So runs the argument for the war guarantee to Poland.
Hitler’s ambitions will be dealt with in a subsequent chapter. Let us deal here with the question: What else could Chamberlain have done after Hitler seized Prague? What was the alternative to giving a war guarantee to Poland?
Quite simply, it was not to give a war guarantee to a nation wedged between Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia. By 1939, Britain and France no longer had the power to save any nation of Eastern Europe, if ever they did, and they did not save any. As W. H. Chamberlin argued half a century ago:
[T]here was an alternative to the policy which the British and French governments followed after March 1939. This alternative would have been to write off eastern Europe as geographically indefensible, to let Hitler move eastward, with the strong probability that he would come into conflict with Stalin. Especially in light of the Soviet aggressive expansion that has followed the war, this surely seems the sanest and most promising course western diplomacy could have followed.116
Hanson Baldwin, military writer for the New York Times, seconded Chamberlin:
There is no doubt whatsoever that it would have been to the interest of Britain, the United States, and the world to have allowed—and, indeed, to have encouraged—the world’s two great dictatorships to fight each other to a frazzle. Such a struggle, with its resultant weakening of both Communism and Nazism, could not but have aided in the establishment of a more stable peace. It would have placed the democracies in supreme power in the world, instead of elevating one totalitarianism at the expense of the other and of the democracies.117
In 1995 in Missed Chances, Sir Roy Denman, who considered the war guarantee an “even greater folly” than Munich, echoed the late American historian:
If Chamberlain had not committed the two monumental blunders of his personal involvement and then humiliation in the Czechoslovak affair and then the guarantee to Poland—if he had backed isolation on these issues but accompanied it with a firm emphasis on rearmament and drawn a realistic line in the sand, Britain, the sea routes, the Empire, France and the Channel ports, then he would have faced a rising tide of doubt and discontent in the press and more eloquent speeches by Churchill, but would have had no serious difficulty in carrying with him a massive House of Commons majority in favour of staying out of a German-Polish war. Churchill would never have become Prime Minister. Germany, after Poland, would have turned on Russia.118
BY MARCH 1939, France, having failed to keep the Wehrmacht out of the Rhineland, had lost her military superiority over Germany and adopted a Maginot Line strategy. Paris would have welcomed Britain’s recognition that an Eastern Europe of new nations that had been ruled by czars, kings, or emperors before 1918 could not be defended, and the two Allies should draw Denman’s “realistic line in the sand” before France and the Channel ports.
What else could Chamberlain have done after Hitler’s Prague coup? Tell Britons the truth: Hitler was not to be trusted and he was on the march. Chamberlain could have imposed conscription, stepped up the production of aircraft, begun buying munitions from the United States, and waited. Rather than commit Britain to a war she could not win, he could have done what Truman did when another ruthless totalitarian seized an indefensible Prague. Adopt a policy of containment.
When I wrote in A Republic, Not an Empire that this was the proper course, and sent the book to a man I admired, I received a letter in return. I have “read extensively” into your book, wrote George F. Kennan. You and I, he continued, “have a large number of views in common, and some of them, particularly those on the history of American foreign policy, ones on which not many others would share with us.”119 Kennan went on:
[Y]ou make a strong case, in my view, for the thesis that the British guaranty to Poland…was neither necessary nor wise. The British government could not improve anything by offering to the Poles a support they were quite unable to give. They would have done better to shut up, to rearm as speedily as possible, and to avoid further formal commitments of any sort, while waiting the further turn of events.120
So wrote George Kennan, sixty years after Chamberlain issued the war guarantee that changed the history of Britain, its empire, and the world. But instead of a tough-minded appraisal of British vital interests, and what was needed to defend them, Chamberlain, with Churchill egging him on, now began to hand out British war guarantees across the continent of Europe.
CHAPTER 10
April Fools
FOR THE POLISH CORRIDOR, no British government ever will or ever can risk the bones of a British grenadier.1
—AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN, 1925
STUNNED AND STUNG by the British war guarantee to Poland, Hitler took it as a direct challenge to him and to Germany, and executed his own volte-face. Wrote F. H. Hinsley in his 1951 Hitler’s Strategy: “[T]he Anglo-Polish Declaration not only forced [Hitler’s] hand, but also led him to lose his head.”2
Within hours, he had ordered up plans for Case White, the invasion of Poland. “The first direction for planning this operation, with September 1 as the suggested date, was issued by General Keitel, Hitler’s Chief of Staff, on April 3, three days after the announcement of the guarantee to Poland.”3
Before March 31, “it h
ad been Nazi policy to offer Poland the role of a satellite ally in an ultimate move against the Soviet Union,” writes historian William Henry Chamberlin.4 Indeed, in late March, Hitler had issued a strict directive that he did not want the Danzig issue settled by force.
As the war guarantee stood British policy on its head, it had the same effect on German policy. The two nations, neither of which wanted war with the other, were now on a collision course to war. False intelligence and a false reading of Hitler’s intentions had caused Britain to panic and issue the war guarantee. A false reading of British motives and intentions had caused Hitler to start the ball rolling toward war with Poland, which now meant war with Britain and France.
Spines stiffened by their British alliance, the Poles now became even more intransigent. From March to August, to the amazement of a British Cabinet that believed Danzig should be returned to Germany, the Poles refused even to discuss the city with Berlin. By rejecting negotiations, Colonel Beck was deciding not only the fate of Poland but of Europe and the British Empire.
At the greatest cross roads in all history, [Colonel Beck] rejected a ride in the German war machine that promised Poland power and plunder as a satellite state. Instead, he and the Polish Cabinet followed the lead of Chamberlain and chose the road that led to war with Germany and the consequent destruction of the Polish State.5
On April 6, Chamberlain had the Foreign Office issue a declaration that Britain and Poland were “prepared to enter into an agreement of a permanent character,” a security pact requiring each nation to declare war, if the other were attacked.6 In one week, “Beck had pushed Poland far down the road to war and national destruction. Such a policy pointed directly to disaster.”7