were driven to the conclusion…that there was a serious risk, as in 1914, of the French Government going to war over an eastern European quarrel and thereby causing a conflict in western Europe from which the British could not afford to remain aloof. Accordingly, Chamberlain gradually and reluctantly came to take charge of the crisis…. Then, during September, the British Prime Minister assumed the responsibility of negotiating with Hitler and coercing the Czechs into surrender.50
So it was that Neville Chamberlain made three trips to Germany in September 1938: first to Berchtesgaden, then to Bad Godesberg, finally to Munich. But who and what precipitated the crisis of September 1938?
BENEŠ HUMILIATES HITLER
WHAT CAUSED HITLER TO turn with sudden ferocity on the Czechs and President Eduard Beneš, and risk war with Britain and France so soon after his triumph in Austria?
The triggering event occurred two months after Anschluss, while Hitler was still celebrating. Rumors began to fly of an imminent German invasion of Czechoslovakia. The rumors were false, and there is reason to believe the Czechs had planted them with the knowledge of Beneš, who ordered mobilization. As the rumors ricocheted around Europe, London warned Berlin that Britain would not sit still for an invasion. Paris and Moscow renewed their commitments to Prague. Hitler was suddenly in a major crisis not at all of his own making.
Confronted by a united Europe, Hitler was forced to renounce any intent to invade Czechoslovakia. German officers escorted British military advisers along the Czech border to prove there were no preparations for war. When no attack came, the Czechs bragged and brayed about how they had forced Hitler to back down, showing the world how to face down the bully. “It was apparent to Hitler that Beneš had precipitated the crisis to humiliate Germany,” wrote Tansill. “To be falsely accused by Czech officials was to Hitler the supreme insult.”51
[Hitler] convinced himself, Jodl reported, that he had suffered a loss of prestige, and nothing could put him in a blacker, uglier mood. Swallowing his pride, he ordered the foreign office in Berlin to inform the Czech Minister in Berlin on Monday, May 23, that Germany had no aggressive intentions toward Czechoslovakia and that the reports of German troop concentrations on her borders were without foundation….
Hitler, it was believed in the West, had been given a lesson by the firmness of the other great European powers and by the determination of the small one that seemed threatened.52
The Fuehrer was now gripped by “a burning rage to get even with Czechoslovakia and particularly with President Beneš, who, he believed, had deliberately humiliated him.”53 He called in his generals and ranted: “It is my unshakeable will that Czechoslovakia shall be wiped off the map.”54 Hitler ordered up Case Green, the plan for invading Czechoslovakia, and rewrote it to read, “It is my unalterable decision to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in the near future.”55 What did Hitler mean by “in the near future”? Keitel explained in a covering letter: “Green’s execution must be assured by October 1, 1938 at the latest.”56 Henderson believed that the Czech provocation and exploitation of the May crisis, and the ridicule that was heaped upon Hitler for backing down to the Czechs, led directly to Munich:
The defiant gesture of the Czechs in mobilizing some 170,000 troops and then proclaiming to the world that it was their action which had turned Hitler away from his purpose was…regrettable. But what Hitler could not stomach was the exultation of the press…. Every newspaper in America and Europe joined in the chorus. “No” had been said and Hitler had been forced to yield. The democratic powers had brought the totalitarian states to heel, etc.
It was, above all, this jubilation which gave Hitler the excuse for his…worst brain storm of the year, and pushed him definitely over the border line from peaceful negotiation to the use of force. From May 23rd to May 28th his fit of sulks and fury lasted, and on the latter date he gave orders for a gradual mobilization of the Army.57
Many “advocates of appeasement” considered the phony crisis of May “a grave blunder and blamed President Beneš for his ‘provocative’ action, while Chamberlain determined never to run so grave a risk of war again,” writes Hitler biographer Alan Bullock.58
For a week [Hitler] remained at the Berghof in a black rage, which was not softened by the crowing of the foreign Press at the way in which he had been forced to climb down. Then, on May 28, he suddenly appeared in Berlin and summoned another conference at the Reich Chancellery…. Spread out on the table in the winter garden was a map, and on it Hitler sketched with angry gestures exactly how he meant to eliminate the State which had dared to inflict this humiliation on him.59
Foolish as was the fake crisis created by Prague in May 1938, it must be seen in the same light as Schuschnigg’s rash plebiscite. Both were desperate cries of imperiled prey who sensed the predator was close at hand.
Yet by painting the phony crisis of May 1938 as a showdown where Hitler had capitulated to their brave defiance, Czechoslovakia and Beneš set in motion the events that would lead to Munich, the end of Czechoslovakia, and Herr Beneš fleeing for his life.
WHY NOT TELL HITLER “NO!”?
WHY DID CHAMBERLAIN NOT reject Hitler’s demands? Why did Britain not elect to fight, rather than abandon the Czechs?
First, as he had written his sister, Chamberlain “didn’t care two hoots whether the Sudetens were in the Reich, or out of it.”60 He did not believe that maintaining Czech rule over three million unhappy Germans was worth a war. As the British saw the German demands as reasonable, they came to see the Czechs as obdurate. Nevile Henderson, the British envoy in Berlin, thought it necessary, in the interests of peace, to be “disagreeable to the Czechs,” for they were a pig-headed race and President Beneš “not the least pig-headed among them.”61
Many British believed justice was on the German side. The Sudeten Germans, a privileged minority in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, hated the Prague regime and had no loyalty to a nation where they were second-class citizens. Under Wilson’s principle of self-determination, they should have been left under Vienna. Granted a plebiscite, like the people of Schleswig and the Saar, the Sudetendeutsch would have voted to stay with Austria or join their German kinsmen. But this had been unacceptable to the Allies at Paris, especially the French, who had been operating on the principles of realpolitik. Wilsonian principles be damned, France was determined to separate Germans from Germans. And from the standpoint of France’s security, the Allies had been right. Graham Stewart explains their dilemma:
Self-determination had been a great cry of the liberal diplomat for a century, but strategic necessities prevented the Sudeten question being framed in these singularly uncomplicated terms. If the Sudetenland, much of which was mountainous, was absorbed into the German Reich, then the remaining rump Czech state would become virtually indefensible against invasion.62
Strict application of the principle of self-determination would have meant that all Germans in Eupen, Malmédy, Alsace, Lorraine, South Tyrol, Austria, the Sudetenland, Danzig, the Corridor, and Memel must be allowed to secede and join the Reich. But that would resurrect a Germany more populous and potentially powerful than that of the Kaiser.
At Paris, the principles the Allies professed clashed with the security interests they had come to protect. They resolved the question with no small cynicism and hypocrisy, granting self-determination to peoples who wished to be free of German rule, while denying it to Germans. Wilsonian self-determination was sacrificed on the altar of realpolitik and French security. The problem now was that Adolf Hitler was singing Wilson’s song, demanding that Germans in the Sudetenland be granted the same right of self-determination that had been granted at Paris to Poles and Czechs. By 1944, Walter Lippmann realized the insanity of Versailles in elevating the principle of self-determination to infallible doctrine:
To invoke the general principle of self-determination, and to make it a supreme law of international life was to invite sheer anarchy….
None knew this better than Ado
lf Hitler himself: the principle of self-determination was his chief instrument for enlarging the Reich by annexation, and for destroying from within the civil unity of the states he intended to attack. Hitler invoked this principle when he annexed Austria [and] dismembered Czechoslovakia.”63
What also made the prospect of a war for Czechoslovakia repellent to Chamberlain was that he believed that, as a people, Czechs were “not out of the top-drawer.”64 As he memorably told the nation on the eve of Munich, when war seemed inevitable,
How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing….
However much we may sympathize with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbor, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in a war simply on her account. If we have to fight, it must be on larger issues than that.65
In 1914, Britain had gone to war to save France, and the British had followed Asquith, Churchill, and Grey in when Belgium was violated. But while France and Belgium were just across the Channel, the Czechs were in Central Europe. Why should British soldiers die so Czechs could hold on to three million unhappy ethnic Germans who had lived under Habsburg or Hohenzollern rule for centuries? Thus British principles (supporting the right of self-determination) and British policy (building a permanent peace by rectifying the injustices of Versailles) seemed to dictate pressuring Beneš to give the Sudetenland to Germany, where the Sudetenlanders wished to be.
Thus it was that Munich was regarded, as historian Taylor wrote in 1961, as “a triumph for all that was best and most enlightened in British life; a triumph for those who had preached equal justice between peoples, a triumph for those who had courageously denounced the harshness and short-sightedness of Versailles.”66
Finally, Britain lacked the military power and strategic reach to save Czechoslovakia, and Chamberlain knew it. As he wrote to his sister,
The Austrian frontier is practically open; the great Skoda munitions works are within easy bombing distance of the German aerodromes; the railways all pass through German territory; Russia is a hundred miles away. Therefore we could not help Czechoslovakia—she would simply be a pretext for going to war with Germany. That we could not think of unless we had a reasonable prospect of beating her to her knees in a reasonable time, and of that I see no sign.67
In September 1938, Britain was utterly unprepared for war. She had two combat divisions ready for battle in England, none in France, no draft, no Spitfires, and no allies save a reluctant France. Only five of her twenty-seven fighter squadrons were equipped with the new Hurricanes. The RAF “cannot at the present time be said to be in any way fit to undertake operations on a major war scale,” the Air Ministry concluded.68
General Ironside, inspector-general of overseas forces, confided, “Chamberlain is of course right. We have not the means of defending ourselves and he knows it…. We cannot expose ourselves now to a German attack. We simply commit suicide if we do.”69 “In the circumstances,” warned Lord Gort, the new chief of the Imperial General Staff, “it would be murder to send our forces overseas to fight against a first-class power.”70
Even John Lukacs, who regards Churchill as the savior of Western civilization, believes he was wrong in thinking Britain and France could have saved the Czechs by going to war in the fall of 1938:
Churchill was wrong. It would have been disastrous for the Western democracies to go to war in October of 1938. He may have been right morally speaking; practically, he was wrong….
He was wrong, too, in his conviction that in 1938 Stalin’s Russia would have gone to war on the side of the Czechs. He wrote this as late as 1948, in volume 1 of his Second World War. Yet Stalin was even less inclined to honor his military pact with the Czechs than were the French.71
Churchill was also wrong in his wild exaggeration of the martial spirit and fighting prowess of the Czech army. On September 15, two weeks before Munich, Churchill wrote:
Inside the Czechoslovakian Republic there is an absolute determination to fight for life and freedom. All their frontiers, even that opposite Austria, are well fortified and guarded by a strong and devoted army…. [T]he Czechoslovakian army is one of the best equipped in the world. It has admirable tanks, anti-tank guns and anti-aircraft artillery. This resolute people have long prepared themselves for the ordeal.72
This was hyperbole. After Munich, when Britain and France told the Czechs to let the Sudetenland go, the Czechoslovakian army folded without firing a shot. Herr Beneš fled.
WHERE FDR STOOD AT MUNICH
COULD BRITAIN HAVE RELIED on America had she defied Hitler?
In September 1938, the month of Munich, FDR disabused Europe of any such notion: “Those who count on the assured aid of the United States in case of a war in Europe are totally mistaken…. Toinclude the United States in a Franco-British front against Hitler is an interpretation that is 100 percent false.”73 That month, America informed France that, in the event of war, America could not, under the Neutrality Act, transfer to her the warplanes she had already purchased. FDR’s message: This is your war, not ours.
Britain’s lack of an army, France’s lack of will, and lack of support from America, Australia, Canada, and South Africa meant Britain and France could not prevail against Germany. In May 1938, in the un-kindest cut of all, Belgian troops maneuvered on the French frontier, as the Belgian foreign minister put it, to “show you that if you come our way in order to support Czechoslovakia, you will run up against the Belgian army.”74
Even should Britain and France together fight Germany to a standstill in France, what would be the purpose of the war? To restore the status quo ante and return the Sudeten Germans to a Czech rule 80 percent of them wished to be rid of? That would only replicate the folly of Versailles and set the stage for yet another crisis. As the British minister in Prague, Basil Newton, wrote, should Britain go to war, the most that could be accomplished was to “restore after a lengthy struggle a status quo which had already proved unacceptable and which, even if restored, would probably again prove unworkable.”75
The brutal truth: The Sudeten Germans wanted to be reunited with their kinsmen and could not forever be denied. And as Britain now believed the decision to deliver them to Prague had been a blunder, why fight a war to perpetuate a blunder? Neither the British nation nor empire, wrote Henderson, would have supported war on Germany to deny Germans the right of self-determination the Allies had so loudly preached at Paris.76
Chamberlain had another motive in going to Munich. He believed the key to peace lay in addressing the grievances of Germany and rectifying the wrongs of Versailles, and he wanted to be the British statesman who restored Germany to her rightful position as a Great Power and converted her into a partner in peace. If this required the return of all German lands and peoples, should they wish to return, Chamberlain would facilitate it, if done peacefully. This is why historian Taylor came in 1961 to plea-bargain on behalf of the appeasers he had opposed at the time of Munich:
Historians do a bad day’s work when they write the appeasers off as stupid or as cowards. They were men confronted with real problems, doing their best in the circumstances of their time. They recognized that an independent and powerful Germany had somehow to be fitted into Europe. Later experience suggests that they were right.77
Had Hitler gone about the in-gathering, by negotiation and plebiscite, of all the lost peoples and provinces of Germany and Austria—the Saar, the Rhineland, the Sudetenland, Danzig, the Corridor, Memel—Britain would have accommodated him. A war to block the unification of the Germans in a national home would not have been acceptable to the British people. Wilson had preached his doctrine of self-determination all too well.
Nor was Chamberlain alone in this conviction. While appeasement is today a synonym for craven cowardice in the face of evil, appeasement as a policy predated Chamberlain. As Andrew Roberts writes in
his biography of Halifax, “Although today it is considered shameful and craven, the policy of appeasement once occupied almost the whole moral high ground. The word was originally synonymous with idealism, magnanimity of the victor and the willingness to right wrongs.”78
Henderson described appeasement as “the search for just solutions by negotiation in the light of higher reason instead of by resort to force.”79 Eden, a four-year veteran of the trenches and the toast of the League of Nations Union, who had lost two brothers in the war, described his policy as “the appeasement of Europe as a whole.”80 By appeasement, Eden meant
what liberal opinion had endorsed since Versailles—the removal of the causes of war by the remedy of justified grievances. Thus Eden acquiesced in Germany’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936. True, it was a violation of the Versailles Treaty—but who now defended its one-sided and obsolescent provisions, denying Germany full control of its own territory? True, it had been achieved by force—but who wanted to take back from Hitler what would otherwise have been conceded to him across the conference table with a handshake from a smiling Eden?81
WHY DID FRANCE NOT FIGHT?
BELATEDLY, FRANCE HAD AWAKENED to the realization that her eastern allies might not be strategic assets at all, but potentially lethal liabilities. Having lost her great ally, Czarist Russia, France had looked on Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia as new allies who would fight on her side if Germany invaded Alsace. She now began to realize that France could be dragged into a war with Germany to defend them. The French had always asked, “How can our eastern allies help us?” not “How can we help them?”
Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War Page 22
