The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  THE WAR NOT FOUGHT

  All of this makes it tempting to follow the conventional line that the events that led to Munich were the greatest failure of diplomacy in modern British history. Yet, as A. J. P. Taylor said, Munich was at least in one respect a triumph – for Chamberlain. Not only did he outwit his opponents in England, he also outwitted Hitler himself. After all, what was agreed at Munich was much closer to what Chamberlain had proposed initially at Berchtesgaden than to what Hitler had demanded at Bad Godesberg. As a result of Chamberlain’s diplomacy, Hitler had been obliged to abandon his design to ‘smash Czechoslovakia by military action’, which he had been harbouring since the end of May. In most British accounts of the crisis, it is Hitler who seems to set the pace. Yet in Goebbels’ diary, it is Chamberlain – the ‘ice cold… English fox’ – who ‘suddenly goes to get up and leave as if he has done his duty, there is no point continuing and he can wash his hands innocently’. At the beginning of September, according to Goebbels, Hitler had felt confident that London would not intervene, but four weeks later he was driven to ask Chamberlain’s aide Horace Wilson ‘straight out if England wants world war’. Goeb-bels himself, who six days earlier had still been confident that London was ‘immeasurably frightened of force’, was forced to conclude that ‘we have no peg for a war… One cannot run the risk of a world war over amendments.’ Gö ring took the same view.

  The decisive breakthrough had come on the evening of September 27, when Hitler sent a note to Chamberlain effectively dropping his earlier threat to use military force by 2 p.m. the next day. In this note Hitler agreed that German troops would not move beyond the territory the Czechs had already agreed to cede; that there would be a plebiscite; and offered to make Germany a party to any international guarantee of Czechoslovakia’s future integrity. Evidently, Wilson’s warning (‘more in sorrow than in anger’) had been more effective than it had appeared at the time. As Hitler said to General Alfred Jodl, Chief of the Army Leadership Staff in the German High Command (OKW), he could not ‘attack Czechoslovakia out of a clear sky… or else I would get on my neck the whole world. I would have to wage war against England, against France, which I could not wage.’ This explains why he so eagerly accepted Mussolini’s suggestion of a 24hour suspension of mobilization. That was why he so hastily sent a message to London inviting Chamberlain to attend a four-power conference in Munich. Had Mussolini not become involved, Hitler would presumably have seized with equal readiness the French proposal for a compromise. Looked at from this point of view, the Munich agreement’s short-lived popularity among MPs – only forty Tories abstained when it was put to the vote – becomes more intelligible. Chamberlain really had averted a war.

  But was he right to have done so? For all this goes to show how weak Hitler’s position had become, and how foolish it was to let him off the hook. It was Chamberlain, after all, who prompted Mussolini to suggest a last-ditch diplomatic solution. But why involve the Italians at all, when they made their sympathy for the German side quite explicit? Why exclude the Czechs at this pivotal moment? Why once again leave the Soviets out of the negotiations? Had Chamberlain pressed home the advantage, rather than rushing off to Munich, the pressure on Berlin would have been intense. For – and this is perhaps the crucial point – Germany was simply not ready for a European war in 1938. Her defences in the West were still incomplete; in the words of Jodl, there were only ‘five fighting divisions and seven reserve divisions on the western fortifications, which were nothing but a large construction site to hold out against one hundred French divisions’. No senior German military officer dissented from this view. Nor could Germany count on Stalin’s repudiating the Soviet commitment (made in 1935) to defend Czechoslovakia; Red Army units in the military districts of Kiev and Byelorussia were in fact brought to a state of readiness during the Czech crisis. It is not inconceivable that the Romanian government would have granted them passage to the Czech frontier. Moreover, the Soviet Foreign Secretary Maxim Litvinov repeatedly stated that the Soviets would honour their commitments to Czechoslovakia if the French did so too, or would at least refer the matter to the League of Nations. Indeed, on September 24, Litvinov explicitly told the British delegation to the League that, if the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia, the ‘Czechoslovak-Soviet Pact would come into force’ and proposed a conference between Britain, France and the Soviet Union to ‘show the Germans that we mean business’.

  For these reasons, only a part of the Wehrmacht’s seventy-five divisions – the British military attaché in Paris estimated just twenty-four, though the Czechs were ready for all seventy-five – could have been deployed in an attack on Czechoslovakia. Nor were the Czechs to be dismissed lightly; the British military attaché fully expected their thirty-five well-equipped divisions to ‘put up a really protracted resistance’ against an attacker who would have enjoyed neither decisive numerical superiority nor the element of surprise. In 1939 German reserve officers confessed to a British journalist that the Czech defences had been ‘impressive and impregnable to our arms. We could have gone round them, perhaps, but not reduced them.’ Hitler himself later admitted that he had been ‘greatly disturbed’ when he discovered the ‘formidable’ levels of Czech military preparedness. ‘We had run a serious danger.’ Operation Green, the planned pincer movement by the 2nd and 10th Armies, might have ended in disaster had it been launched. As General Sir Henry Pownall put it, even if the Germans had left only nine divisions along the Siegfried Line in the West and five to defend East Prussia against the Red Army, what Hitler was contemplating was ‘certainly a bit risky’.

  This was vintage understatement. German naval preparations were also woefully behindhand; in all there were just seven destroyers, three ‘pocket’ battleships and seven ocean-going submarines available. Moreover, the Germans could count on no effective support from abroad. Poland might possibly have come in on the German side for a share of the Czech carcass, though she might equally well have jumped the other way. The same could be said of Hungary. Mussolini might conceivably have sided with Hitler. But none of these countries posed a significant threat to the Western powers. On the contrary, it would have been relatively easy for the British and French to inflict heavy losses on the Italian Mediterranean fleet. As for Japan, it is highly unlikely that her government would have chosen this moment to pick a fight with the Western empires, given the difficulties they were encountering in China and the growing preoccupation of her generals with the Soviet threat from the north.

  Finally, Germany’s capacity to bomb London was largely a figment of the British imagination, the result of a grave failure of intelligence gathering and interpretation. In fact, the Germans preferred to see bombers in a tactical role, supporting ground forces (hence the small dive-bombers like the Junkers Ju-87 ‘Stuka’ developed in the mid-1930s and ‘tested’ in the Spanish Civil War). Their investment in bombers capable of cross-Channel operations was far smaller than the British feared, and when they did launch the Battle of Britain they initially targeted airfields and other military targets, not urban centres. There was no plan whatever to bomb Britain in the event of a war in 1938, despite Göring’s brazen threat to Henderson that the Luftwaffe would leave ‘little of London… standing’. That was a bluff. As General Helmuth Felmy, commander of the 2nd Air Fleet, admitted in late September 1938, ‘given the means at his disposal a war of destruction against England seemed to be excluded’. British preparations for possible German attacks were thus pointless. A more likely target of Luftwaffe attacks would have been Paris, though here too the threat was exaggerated.

  German military unreadiness had important political implications within the Third Reich. No one was more aware of Germany’s military weaknesses than Ludwig Beck, the Chief of the General Staff since 1935. Beck was convinced from the moment the idea was first bruited that Hitler was playing with fire in contemplating an attack on Czechoslovakia. In his view, Hitler’s strategy of building up the diplomatic tension and then presenting the great p
owers with a fait accompli was fraught with danger. Such a move might well lead to a general European war that Germany could not hope to win. Unlike others who had ventured to doubt Hitler’s wisdom as a strategist – notably the Minister for War, Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army Werner von Fritsch – Beck survived the purge of January 1938. Hitler had certainly strengthened his control over the German military by replacing Blomberg with himself as Commander-in-Chief and Keitel as his obedient instrument, and putting the supine Walther von Brauchitsch into Fritsch’s former post. Beck’s resignation in late August therefore removed what was probably the biggest political threat to Hitler’s position. But it did not end the possibility of military opposition to Hitler. Beck urged his successor, General Franz Halder, to involve himself in the coup against Hitler that was now being seriously discussed by Lieutenant-Colonel Hans Oster, director of the Central Department of the Abwehr (military intelligence), and Hans Gisevius, an official in the Interior Ministry. Halder later claimed that he, Beck, the retired General Erwin von Witzleben and others had conspired to overthrow Hitler, but that Chamberlain’s decision to fly to Germany had deprived them of their opportunity.

  To be sure, the anti-Hitler elements within the German military and civilian elites were diverse and disorganized. We have no way of knowing if a coup might have succeeded had Hitler suffered a major diplomatic reverse over Czechoslovakia. Yet the refusal of the British authorities to heed the signals reaching them – even from such impeccable sources as Ernst von Weizsäcker, State Secretary in the German Foreign Office – was, to say the least, strange. After Munich, the chances of a regime change in Berlin faded swiftly. The misnamed ‘opposition’ did not abandon attempts to establish dialogue with London. Carl Goerdeler, the former Price Commissioner and Mayor of Leipzig, visited England at Christmas 1938. Six months later Adam von Trott zu Solz, a well-connected former Rhodes Scholar, met with both Chamberlain and Halifax. Other visitors included Lieutenant-Colonel Count Gerhard von Schwerin, who urged that Churchill be brought into the government. But the moment had passed.

  Nor should we overlook a further dimension to German weakness at that time. As Hitler was disgusted to discover, the German people, the Volk whose living space he was striving to enlarge, had little appetite for war. The British were well aware of this. Junior officials at the Berlin embassy reported that public opinion was ‘much alarmed at German military measures’; there was ‘a general fear that an attack on Czechoslovakia may lead to a European war which Germany would be likely to lose’. Henderson himself noted that ‘not a single individual in the streets applauded’ when a mechanized division paraded through Berlin on September 27. ‘War would rid Germany of Hitler,’ Henderson remarked on October 6, in a rare moment of perspicacity. ‘As it is by keeping the peace, we have saved Hitler and his regime.’

  The tragedy of 1938 is that the British and French governments so completely misread the balance of power at the very moment it tipped most strongly against Germany. Cadogan was convinced: ‘We must not precipitate a conflict now – we shall be smashed.’ The Chiefs of Staff shared this view. ‘Chamberlain is of course right,’ General Edmund Ironside, head of the Eastern Command, wrote in his diary: ‘We have not the means of defending ourselves… We cannot expose ourselves now to a German attack. We simply commit suicide if we do.’ Gamelin was equally in awe of the Germans. Like the British, the French were convinced that the Germans had the capacity to bomb their cities ‘to ruins’. One of his senior staff officers envisaged such rapid mobilization in Germany that fifty divisions would quickly be available for deployment against France. The result – incredibly – was that no Anglo-French military talks were held at any point during the Sudetenland crisis; the most the Chiefs of Staff were willing to contemplate was the dispatch of just two ill-equipped Field Force divisions to France in the event of war. Generals are often criticized for planning to fight the last war instead of the next one. In 1938 British generals did not even plan to fight the last war. If they had, things might have turned out very differently. For it was the Germans, not the British and French, who risked being ‘smashed’ in 1938. All the British had to do was to commit unequivocally to a joint Anglo-French defence of Czechoslovakia, instead of blowing hot and cold, and to expedite talks between the British and French general staffs, instead of waiting until February 1939. Rather than flying back and forth like a supplicant, Chamberlain should have sat tight in London, declining to take calls from Germany. We cannot, of course, say for sure what would have happened. But the chances of a German humiliation would have been high. Almost any outcome, even war itself, would have been preferable to what in fact happened. For although he himself had wanted to get Czech territory by force, Hitler was actually better off getting it peacefully.

  Time, as Vansittart had said, was crucial. The Chiefs of Staff argued, on the basis of the RAF’s fears of a German knock-out blow, that ‘from the military point of view the balance of advantage is definitely in favour of postponement… we are in bad condition to wage even a defensive war at the present time’. Certainly Fighter Command had been woefully neglected up until this point and much more had to be done to get British air defences ready to withstand an assault by the Luftwaffe. The British army too could only become stronger after Munich; it could scarcely have got any weaker. But time is relative. Its passage no doubt did allow the British to bolster their defences. But it simultaneously allowed Hitler to increase his offensive capability too. It is true that German rearmament had to be reined in towards the end of 1938. It is also true that the Germans became convinced that time would be against them if they delayed war much after 1939. But, on balance, time was more on Germany’s side than on Britain’s in the year after September 1938. As Table 10.1 makes clear, the German army grew significantly more than the British and French armies combined between 1938 and 1939. In naval terms, Germany stood still while the British and French added substantially to their fleets, but in the air, which contemporaries tended to see as crucial, the rivals were at best neck and neck. German additions to first-line Luftwaffe strength were somewhat exceeded by British additions to the Royal Air Force reserves. In combination, the British and French had more first-line aircraft than the Germans in 1939, but the difference had been larger in 1938 (589 compared with 94). Another way of demonstrating this is to compare figures for military aircraft production in 1939. Germany built 8,295, Britain 7,940 and France 3,163. The Soviet Union out-built all three with 10,565 new aircraft. But in 1938 the Western powers could consider the Soviets as potential allies. By 1939 Stalin was Hitler’s ally.

  What was more, Hitler gained immediately from Munich. With Czechoslovakia emasculated, Germany’s eastern frontier was significantly less vulnerable. Moreover, in occupying the Sudetenland, the Germans acquired at a stroke 1.5 million rifles, 750 aircraft, 600 tanks and 2,000 field guns, all of which were to prove useful in the months to come. Indeed, more than one in ten of the tanks used by the Germans in their Western offensive of 1940 were Czech-built. The industrial resources of Western Bohemia further strengthened Germany’s war machine, just as the Anschluss had significantly added to Germany’s supplies of labour, hard currency and steel. As Churchill put it, the belief that ‘security can be obtained by throwing a small state to the wolves’ was ‘a fatal delusion’: ‘The war potential of Germany will increase in a short time more rapidly than it will be possible for France and Great Britain to complete the measures necessary for their defence.’ ‘Buying time’ at Munich in fact meant widening, not narrowing, the gap that Britain and France desperately needed to close. To put it another way: it would prove much harder to fight Germany in 1939 than it would have proved in 1938.

  Table 10.1: The balance of military forces, 1938 and 1939

  Notes: Battleships includes German pocket battleships, of which there were three; British estimates for Luftwaffe first-line strength were August 1938, 2,650; September 1939, 4,320.

  THE ECONOMIC CASE FOR WA
R

  It was not just in military terms that Germany was weak in 1938. Of equal importance was her acute economic vulnerability. Schacht’s New Plan had been abandoned two years before because his system of bilateral trade agreements could not deliver the amounts of raw materials needed for the rapid rearmament Hitler wanted. But the Four-Year Plan could not possibly have improved matters much by 1938. Domestic iron ore production had certainly been boosted, but the increment since 1936 was just over a million tons, little more than a tenth of imports in 1938. No more than 11,000 tons of synthetic rubber had been produced, around 12 per cent of imports. The rationale for annexing Austria and Czechoslovakia – as Hitler had made clear to his military and diplomatic chiefs on November 5, 1937 – was precisely to address the shortages of raw materials that were continuing to hamper German rearmament. Had war come in 1938, the journalist Ian Colvin had it on good authority that Germany had only sufficient stocks of gasoline for three months. In addition, the economy was by now suffering from acute labour shortages. The irony was that German problems were in large measure a consequence of the upsurge in arms spending that had been set in train by the Four-Year Plan. Göring himself had to admit that the German economy was now working at full stretch. By October, German economic experts were in agreement that a war would have been a catastrophe.

  As Colvin’s testimony suggests, Germany’s economic problems were no secret. Indeed, their financial symptoms were highly visible. Schacht’s resignation as Economics Minister – which he submitted in August 1937, though it was not accepted until November – was widely seen as a blow to the regime’s fiscal credibility, although he stayed on as Reichsbank President. Aside from his objections to the Four-Year Plan, Schacht had two concerns: the mounting inflationary pressure as more and more of the costs of rearmament were met by printing money, and the looming exhaustion of Germany’s hard currency reserves. These problems did not go away. In volume terms, German exports were 15 per cent lower in 1938 than in the year before. In July 1938 Germany had to give in when Britain insisted on a revision of the Anglo-German Payments Agreement and the continued payment of interest due on the Dawes and Young bonds. The anti-appeasing commercial attaché in the British embassy in Berlin had a point when he argued for cancelling the Agreement. By further reducing Germany’s access to hard currency, that would have struck at the German economy’s Achilles’ heel. Small wonder the German stock market slumped by 13 per cent between April and August 1938; the German Finance Minister Schwerin von Krosigk warned that Germany was on the brink of an inflationary crisis. In a devastating Reichsbank memorandum dated October 3, 1938, Schacht said the same. Hitler might brush aside these arguments, urging Gö ring to step up the already frenetic pace of rearmament, but by now the goals had entered the realm of fantasy: an air force with more than 20,000 planes by 1942; a navy with nearly 800 vessels by 1948. Even if there had been enough steel for such feats of engineering, there would not have been enough fuel for half the bombers to fly or half the ships to sail. The Reichsbank was now manifestly struggling to finance the government’s mounting deficits by selling bonds to the public; its hard currency reserves were exhausted. When Schacht and his colleagues repeated their warnings of inflation Hitler fired them, but he could no longer ignore the need to ‘export or die’.