Thus, on March 30, an astonished Colonel Beck received the British ambassador, who inquired whether Warsaw would object if Britain gave an unconditional guarantee of Poland’s independence in the event of an attack by Germany. Beck accepted.
On March 31, 1939, Chamberlain rose in the House of Commons to make the most fateful British declaration of the twentieth century:
I now have to inform the House that…in the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power. They have given the Polish Government an assurance to that effect.55
In words drafted by Halifax, Neville Chamberlain had turned British policy upside down.56 The British government was now committed to fight for Poland. With this declaration, writes Ernest May,
a government that a half-year earlier had resisted going to war for a faraway country with democratic institutions, well-armed military forces, and strong fortifications, now promised with no apparent reservations to go to war for a dictatorship with less-than-modern armed forces and wide-open frontiers.57
“Englishmen who possessed strategic vision were, with few exceptions, appalled,” writes Manchester.58
“This is the maddest single action this country has ever taken,” MP Robert J. G. Boothby told Churchill.59
We are undertaking “a frightful gamble,” said Lloyd George.60 Told by Chamberlain the pact with Poland would deter Hitler, the former prime minister “burst out laughing.”61 If the British army general staff approved this, said Lloyd George, they “ought to be confined to a lunatic asylum.”62
Liddell Hart agreed. The Polish guarantee was “foolish, futile, and provocative…an ill-considered gesture [that] placed Britain’s destiny in the hands of Polish rulers, men of very dubious and unstable judgment.”63
Chamberlain’s “reversal was so abrupt and unexpected as to make war inevitable,” wrote Liddell Hart:
The Polish Guarantee was the surest way to produce an early explosion, and a world war. It combined the maximum temptation with manifest provocation. It incited Hitler to demonstrate the futility of such a guarantee to a country out of reach from the West, while making the stiff-necked Poles even less inclined to consider any concession to him, and at the same time making it impossible for him to draw back without “losing face.”64
To dramatize his protest of Chamberlain’s folly, Liddell Hart resigned as military correspondent for the Times.65
Duff Cooper, who had resigned as First Lord in protest of Munich, wrote in his diary, “Never before in our history have we left in the hands of one of the smaller powers the decision whether or not Britain goes to war.”66
Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office, echoed Lloyd George, calling the guarantee a “frightful gamble.”67
“The whole point is that we cannot save these eastern nations,” Sir Maurice Hankey, retired secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defense, wrote Ambassador Phipps in Paris.68
Half a century later, Sir Roy Denman called the war guarantee to Poland of March 31 “the most reckless undertaking ever given by a British government. It placed the decision on peace or war in Europe in the hands of a reckless, intransigent, swashbuckling military dictatorship.”69
Nevile Henderson reported from Berlin that Germans were telling him Chamberlain had made the same blunder as the Kaiser in July 1914. He had given Poland a “blank check” to start a European war.70 As for the French, “they thought the British pledge madness and endorsed it only because they had no alternative.”71 The gravest problem with the war guarantee, writes Paul Johnson, was that
the power to invoke it was placed in the hands of the Polish government, not a repository of good sense. Therein lay the foolishness of the pledge: Britain had no means of bringing effective aid to Poland yet it obliged Britain itself to declare war on Germany if Poland so requested.72
The legendary military strategist and historian Major-General J.F.C. Fuller, in The Second World War, related a comment he heard from a veteran American newspaperman in Germany:
When in Berlin, shortly after the guarantee was given, I asked a well-known American journalist what he thought of it. His answer was: “Well, I guess your Mr. Prime Minister has made the biggest blunder in your history since the Stamp Act.” Further he said, and he had known Poland for thirty years, “There is no reason why you should not guarantee a powder factory so long as the rules are observed; but to guarantee one full of maniacs is a little dangerous.”73
One statesman, however, thought the war guarantee a splendid idea. Declared Winston Churchill to Parliament: “The preservation and integrity of Poland must be regarded as a cause commanding the regard of all the world.”74 There is, Churchill added, “almost complete agreement” now between the prime minister and his critics: “We can no longer be pushed from pillar to post.”75
“This approached a blanket endorsement,” says Manchester.76 “It is also fair to add that within a week Winston was raising doubts about the Polish guarantee.”77
Indeed, four days after Chamberlain handed Poland the war guarantee, the rashness and potential consequences of the act seemed to have sunk in on Churchill. He wrote publicly that Polish concessions to Hitler on Danzig and the Corridor might still be welcomed: “There is…no need for Great Britain and France to be more Polish than the Poles. If Poland feels able to make adjustments in the Corridor and at Danzig which are satisfactory to both sides, no one will be more pleased than her Western allies.”78
Unfortunately, now that Warsaw had her war guarantees from the two great Western democracies, any Polish concessions were out of the question.
Nine years later, in The Gathering Storm, Churchill would cover his spoor by expressing amazement at the audacity and rashness of Neville Chamberlain’s radical reversal of British policy:
And now…Great Britain advances, leading France by the hand to guarantee the integrity of Poland—of that very Poland which with hyena appetite had only six months before joined in the pillage and destruction of the Czechoslovak State….
Moreover, how could we protect Poland and make good our guarantee?…Here was a decision taken at the worst possible moment and on the least satisfactory ground, which must surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people.79
To call Churchill’s 1948 words disingenuous is understatement. By March 1939, he had been hounding Chamberlain for a year to draw a line in the sand and go to war if Hitler crossed it. Now Chamberlain had done what Churchill had demanded—threatened Germany with war over Poland. The guarantee to Poland, which Churchill had applauded, would force Britain to declare war on Germany five months later.
Yet here is Churchill in 1948 asking in feigned innocence: “[H]ow could we protect Poland and make good our guarantee?” Answer: There was no way Britain could protect Poland, and there was no plan to protect Poland. But though that war guarantee “must surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people,” Churchill, in the spring of 1939, had applauded it. Why? Because, as he put it in his inimitable style,
[I]f you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.80
Churchill’s 1948 depiction of Britain’s situation on the day of the war guarantee to Poland is absurd. On March 31, 1939, Britain was not facing a “precarious chance of survival.” Hitler had neither the power nor desire to force Britons to “live as slaves.” He wanted no war with Britain and showed repeatedly he would pay a price to avoid such a war. It was the Poles who were facing imminent war with “only a precari
ous chance of survival.” It was the Poles who might end up as “slaves” if they did not negotiate Danzig. That they ended up as slaves of Stalin’s empire for half a century, after half a decade of brutal Nazi occupation, is a consequence of their having put their faith in a guarantee Chamberlain and Churchill had to know was worthless when it was given.
Liddell Hart, in his history of World War II, comes close to charging Churchill with rank intellectual dishonesty for his crude attempt to foist all responsibility for the “fatally rash move”—the guarantee to Poland—onto the dead prime minister.81 Of Churchill’s reflections in 1948 on that war guarantee of March 31, 1939, Liddell Hart writes:
It is a striking verdict on Chamberlain’s folly written in hindsight. For Churchill himself had, in the heat of the moment, supported Chamberlain’s pressing offer of Britain’s guarantee to Poland. It is only too evident that in 1939 he, like most of Britain’s leaders, acted on a hot-headed impulse, instead of with the cool-headed judgment that was once characteristic of British statesmanship.82
Historian Gene Smith writes that to a world “seeing Armageddon in the offing,” it appeared “that the pledged word of the West, of democracy, of the future, was in the hands of the unstable and irresponsible leaders of a country…no less authoritarian, nationalistic, totalitarian and racially intolerant than Germany and Italy.”83
The war guarantee to Poland tied Britain’s “destiny to that of a regime that was every bit as undemocratic and anti-Semitic as that of Germany,” adds Niall Ferguson.84
Thus did Neville Chamberlain, who never believed Britain had any vital interest in Eastern Europe, become the first British prime minister to issue a war guarantee to Eastern Europe. Nowhere in British diplomatic history is it possible to discover a more feckless and fateful act. The guarantee to Poland, writes Luigi Villari, was “the most disastrous single diplomatic move” of the interwar era.85
It rendered the second World War almost inevitable, for a quarrel between Germany and Poland, even if capable of a peaceful settlement, might now be converted into Armageddon at the caprice of whoever happened to be in power in Poland at the time…. Chamberlain, by no means a warmonger, had evidently been driven into this act of madness by the followers of Churchill and the Labourites whose program was to make war inevitable.86
Paul Johnson calls the guarantee a “hysterical response” to what had happened in the previous two weeks, and describes the panic that gripped Neville Chamberlain and turned that statesman into a Hotspur.
The German occupation of Prague…followed swiftly by the seizure of Memel from Lithuania, six days later, convinced most British people that war was imminent. Fear gave place to a resigned despair, and the sort of craven, if misjudged, calculation which led to Munich yielded to a reckless and irrational determination to resist Hitler at the next opportunity, irrespective of its merits.87
In his book on that fateful year September 1938 to September 1939, How War Came, historian Donald Cameron Watt writes of the astonishing gamble the prime minister had just taken:
Mr Chamberlain…left no option whatever for the British Government. If the Poles took up arms, then Britain fought too. The decision, war or peace, had been voluntarily surrendered by Chamberlain and his Cabinet into the nervous hands of Colonel Beck and his junta comrades-in-arms. It was unprecedented. It was also unconstitutional. It is also clear that Chamberlain…did not understand what he had done.88
Halifax, who had been alarmed by the sensational reports of Colvin, played the pivotal role in having a Cabinet meeting called to deal with the nonexistent crisis. Writes historian Graham Stewart:
Intelligence reports backing up Colvin’s claim that Hitler was poised to invade Poland particularly concentrated Halifax’s mind. Requesting and being granted an emergency meeting of the Cabinet, he argued for issuing an immediate British guarantee to Poland in the hope of making Hitler rethink a quick strike. Here was an example of sudden events bouncing a government into action contrary to its long-term strategy.89
Thus did the British government, in panic over a false report about a German invasion of Poland that was neither planned nor prepared, give a war guarantee to a dictatorship it did not trust, in a part of Europe where it had no vital interests, committing itself to a war it could not win. Historian Johnson’s depiction of Chamberlain’s decision as reckless and irrational is an understatement.
To assess the recklessness of the guarantee, consider:
In the Great War, Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Japan, and the United States together almost failed to prevent Germany from occupying Paris. Now, without Russia or America, and with Japan and Italy hostile, Britain and France were going to keep the German army out of Warsaw. Writes British historian Capt. Russell Grenfell, “[A] British guarantee of Poland against Germany was about as capable of implementation as a guarantee of Mexico against the United States.”90
“When one keeps in mind that the British Government could not put one soldier in the Polish Corridor in the event of war between Poland and Germany, the dubious quality of this Chamberlain assurance is clearly evident,” writes Tansill.91 As for Colonel Beck, “By turning his back on Hitler he invited a swift destruction that no European power could avert.”92
Kissinger agrees. Britain’s “drawing the line made…little sense in terms of traditional power politics,” for the “seizure of Prague [had] changed neither the balance of power nor the foreseeable course of events.”93
To British historian Peter Clarke, the war guarantee to the Poles, after the British had abandoned the Czechs along with their army and mountain fortifications, was an act of sheer irrationality: “If Czechoslovakia was a faraway country, Poland was further; if Bohemia could not be defended by British troops, no more could Danzig; if the democratic Czech Republic had its flaws, the Polish regime was far more suspect.”94
In defense of the Polish guarantee, Henderson wrote in his memoir:
[A]fter Prague no nation in Europe could feel itself secure from some new adaption of Nazi racial superiority and jungle law. In twelve months Germany had swallowed up Austria, the Sudeten Lands, and Czechoslovakia. Verbal protests were so much waste paper; and a firm stand had to be taken somewhere and force opposed by force; otherwise, in the course of the intoxication of success, Hitler, in the course of another twelve months, would continue the process with Poland, Hungary, and Rumania. The principles of nationalism and self-determination, which had served Hitler to create Greater Germany…had been cynically thrown overboard at Prague and world dominion had supplanted them. If peace were to be preserved, it was essential that it should be made crystal clear what limit Germany would not go without provoking England to war.95
Nothing in this passage explains why it was Britain’s duty to fight and die for Poland, which, as Churchill reminds us in his war memoir, had joined in the rape of Czechoslovakia. Henderson himself, in the last days of August, would urge a deal on Danzig. And while Poland had reason to fear “Nazi racial superiority and jungle law,” Britain did not. She had no vital interest in Eastern Europe to justify a war to the death with Germany and no ability to wage war there. A German march to the east might imperil Stalin’s Russia; it did not imperil Chamberlain’s Britain. And if preserving peace was Britain’s goal, was a threat to set Europe ablaze if Hitler clashed with the Poles the way to preserve it? Six months earlier, Chamberlain had written to his sister that he had been reading a life of George Canning and agreed with that nineteenth-century statesman that “Britain should not let the vital decision as to peace or war pass out of her hands into those of another country.”96 Yet Chamberlain had now done exactly that. Writes William Shirer:
Now, overnight, in his understandably bitter reaction to Hitler’s occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain…had undertaken to unilaterally guarantee an Eastern country run by a junta of politically inept “colonels” who up to this moment had closely collaborated with Hitler, who like hyenas had joined the Germans in the carving up of Czechoslovak
ia and whose country had been rendered militarily indefensible by the very German conquests which Britain and Poland had helped the Reich to achieve.97
A.J.P. Taylor describes how Beck received word that Great Britain would defend Poland to the death:
The [British] ambassador read out Chamberlain’s assurance. Beck accepted it “between two flicks of the ash off his cigarette.” Two flicks; and British grenadiers would fight for Danzig. Two flicks; and the illusory great Poland, created in 1919, signed her death warrant. The assurance was unconditional: the Poles alone were to judge whether it should be called upon. The British could no longer press for concessions over Danzig.98
Two flicks of the ash off the colonel’s cigarette and the fate of the British Empire and fifty million people was sealed.
“In such panicky haste,” writes Barnett, “did the British finally and totally reverse their traditional eastern European policy by giving to Poland the guarantee.”99 What did this tough-minded chronicler of Britain’s decline think of the guarantee?
Yet it was an incautious guarantee. It was unconditional; it was up to the Poles, not the British, to decide when and whether the time had come to fight. It was one-sided; for Poland was not asked to give a reciprocal assurance.
Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War Page 26
