On Good Friday, April 7, it was Chamberlain’s turn to be jolted. Italy invaded Albania and sent King Zog packing.
Mussolini’s attitude toward Hitler has been described as “that of a cat who had given birth to a tiger.”8 Jealous of Hitler’s Prague coup, Il Duce
complained to Ciano: “every time Hitler occupies a country he sends me a message.” He [Mussolini] dreamed of creating an anti-German front, based on Hungary and Yugoslavia. By the evening he had recovered his temper: “we cannot change our policy now. After all, we are not political whores.”9
Mussolini did not sulk long. Three weeks after Hitler motored into Prague, Mussolini sent his army into Albania, setting off alarms in Paris and London. Was Greece next? Was Rumania next?
Chamberlain took the invasion of Albania personally. He wrote to his sister Hilda that Mussolini had behaved “like a sneak and a cad. He has not made the least effort to preserve my friendly feelings.”10
Saturday morning, Churchill telephoned Chamberlain to urge him to call an Easter Sunday emergency session of Parliament and to launch an invasion of the Greek island of Corfu. “Hours now count to recover the initiative in diplomacy,” said Churchill.11 He knew his history. When an Italian delegation, sent to deal with an Albanian border dispute, had been assassinated on Greek soil, August 27, 1923, Mussolini had bombarded Corfu and landed marines until retribution was exacted. Churchill was anticipating Mussolini’s next move and urging preemption.
Paris was receiving its own intelligence that Rumania was next on the Nazi menu and an attack imminent. Stealing a march on Chamberlain, who had led with the British guarantee to Poland, Daladier informed the British that France was issuing war guarantees to Rumania and Greece. “Though some officials in Whitehall questioned the wisdom of these additional guarantees,” writes Ernest May, “Chamberlain and his Cabinet decided to go along with Daladier.”12
Chamberlain explained that he did not think it important to distinguish among states being guaranteed or to make calculations about whether a particular state could be protected by Britain and France. “The real issue,” he said, “was that, if Germany showed signs that she intended to proceed with her march for world domination, we must take steps to stop her…. We should attack Germany not in order to save a particular victim but in order to pull down the bully.”13
Chamberlain here makes three assumptions. The first is that any further German attempt to reclaim lost peoples or provinces meant a “march for world domination.” The second is that it was Britain’s duty to “stop” Hitler in Central and Eastern Europe, where no British army had ever fought before. The third is that Britain had the strength “to pull down the bully.”
Chamberlain had lost touch with reality. He began handing out war guarantees all over Europe. Barnett compares him to a “bankrupt passing out dud checks.” On April 13, Chamberlain “informed a startled House of Commons that His Majesty’s Government had decided to guarantee the frontiers of Greece, Turkey and…Rumania.”14 British foreign policy had become one of wild improvisation. Writes Shirer,
Stung, as he was, by Hitler’s deceit, the peace-loving Prime Minister now proceeded recklessly to add guarantees to other countries in Eastern Europe that felt threatened by Nazi German ambitions….
How could Britain, it was asked in Paris, help Poland or Rumania—or for that matter, France—when it had no army?15
Here is a list of the war guarantees the British government issued in that springtime of madness in 1939:
On March 23, Britain declared she would intervene militarily to stop any German attack on Holland, Belgium, or Switzerland.
On March 31, the British gave the war guarantee to Poland.
On April 13, Britain gave war guarantees to Rumania and Greece.
On May 12, Britain concluded a treaty of mutual assistance with Turkey.16
When one considers that in April of 1939 Britain had no draft and only two divisions ready for combat in France, this is an astonishing list of security guarantees. It was at this point that Lloyd George exploded:
Without Russia, these three guarantees to Poland, to Rumania and to Greece are the most reckless commitments that any country has ever entered into…. These are demented…madness…. did the General Staff advise the Government before they entered into these commitments…? If they ever did, they ought to be removed from the War Office and confined to a lunatic asylum.17
In a conversation with Churchill on April 6, Lord Halifax agreed that Yugoslavia might also be a worthy recipient of a war guarantee. But, as Andrew Roberts writes, Lord Halifax “may have wondered whether he had gone too far…when the Liberian Ambassador solemnly requested a British guarantee of Liberia.”18
Seeing his nation declare its readiness to fight wars to defend regimes across Europe, many of which were holding land to which they had no valid title, other than in the unjust peace of Paris, historian E. H. Carr wrote, “[T]he use or threatened use of force to maintain the status quo may be morally more culpable than the use or threatened use of force to alter it.”19
Two-thirds of a century later, these war guarantees still call forth the words Lloyd George used, “madness” and “demented.” From 1914 to 1918, Britain and France, with millions of soldiers, had barely been able to keep the German army out of Paris. Two million Americans had been needed to crack the German lines. Now, with a tiny fraction of the British army of 1918, with former allies Russia, Japan, and Italy now hostile, and with America now neutral, Britain was handling out war guarantees not only to Belgium and Holland, but also to Poland and Rumania.
“While Chamberlain was busily engaged in extending promises of aid that he could not possibly deliver,” wrote Tansill, “Hitler was preparing for war.”20
On April 12 the chief of the German General Staff had a talk with the American chargé d’affaires in Berlin. He was not backward in intimating that “unless fewer obstacles were placed in the way of Germany’s eastern expansion it would be necessary for Hitler to end the opposition…in the West.”21
On April 24, Hitler announced the termination of his Anglo-German Naval Agreement and, more ominously, of his nonaggression pact with Poland. Message to Beck: Rather than return Danzig and join us against Stalin, you intend to keep our city and have joined England against us. Poland will pay for your rejection of our offer of friendship and alliance.
SECOND THOUGHTS AT NUMBER 10
EVEN BEFORE HITLER HAD announced the scrapping of the naval pact, however, Chamberlain was having second thoughts about his alliance with Poland. Indeed, he had begun to regret it. For, on April 3, just three days after Chamberlain issued the war guarantee, Jozef Beck, “swaggering, chain-smoking and leering at young women,” arrived in London, where Chamberlain and Halifax pressed him to join in a war guarantee to Rumania.22 Thanks to Tilea’s wild reports, the Cabinet had concluded that Rumania was Hitler’s immediate target.
Beck flatly refused his British allies.
Any Polish guarantee to Rumania, Beck told his startled hosts, would precipitate an alliance between Germany and Hungary that would threaten Poland, and Poles were not going to die for Transylvania or the Ploesti oil fields. Chamberlain suddenly began to realize the rash and reckless decision he had made.
“[T]he more he listened to Beck,” writes Manchester, “the more alarmed he became. Chamberlain—apparently grasping for the first time the implications of Britain’s commitment to Warsaw—expressed anxiety that a German invasion of Poland might involve Great Britain.”23 Exactly. And yet:
On 6 April, the Polish and British delegates agreed on the terms of what amounted to a mutual security pact…. The terms of the final agreement were as follows:
a) If Germany attacks Poland His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom will come at once to the help of Poland….
c) Reciprocally, Poland gives corresponding assurances to the United Kingdom.24
Goaded by Halifax, stampeded by Tory backbenchers and a jingo press into issuing his war guarantee, C
hamberlain would get the war he never wanted, and Churchill would get the war he had sought to bring about. To them both belongs the responsibility for what happened to Britain. But what Chamberlain did to the Poles, issuing a war guarantee he knew was worthless, was far worse than what he had done to the Czechs. At least he had told the Czechs the truth: Britain would not fight for the Sudetenland. But Poles put their trust in their war guarantee and security pact with Great Britain. They were repaid for that trust with abandonment and half a century of Nazi and Soviet barbarism.
“In 1938,” writes A.J.P. Taylor, “Czechoslovakia was betrayed. In 1939, Poland was saved. Less than one hundred thousand Czechs died during the war. Six and a half million Poles were killed. Which was better—to be a betrayed Czech or a saved Pole?”25
After six years of war, Warsaw had been reduced to rubble. Prague was barely touched, “almost the only European capital to escape any serious measure of aerial destruction.”26 Eduard Benes?, who had fled after Munich, would say from his palace in Prague at war’s end: “Is it not beautiful? The only central European city not destroyed. And all my doing.”27
In May 1945, little that was beautiful remained of Warsaw.
Trusting in Britain and France, the Poles defied Hitler and refused to negotiate. Had they known the truth—Britain and France would abandon them—the Poles might have accepted the return of Danzig to the Germans, whose city it had always been. Historian Norman Davies accuses the British leaders of deceiving the Poles into making their defiant stand:
The British Prime Minister must surely have known that in terms of practical assistance to Poland nothing was in fact possible. His purpose in making this gesture, unparalleled in the whole course of British history, was to deter Hitler, not to assist the Poles. He knew perfectly well that the British forces did not have the means available, either in men, ships, or planes, to intervene in Central Europe, and that he could not count automatically on the French Army to march on his behalf. Hitler smelt the phoney nature of the Guarantee.28
The British guarantee to Poland that solidified Polish determination to fight Nazi Germany in suicidal defiance, in anticipation of British military assistance Neville Chamberlain knew would never come, was the most cynical act in British history.
On April 28, 1939, there appeared an opening for a settlement of the Danzig dispute. “Hitler for the first time published the terms on which he was prepared to come to an agreement with Poland. They were widely recognized as mild.”29 Alan Bullock describes Hitler’s offer to Poland of April 28:
With Poland, too, Hitler declared, he had been only too anxious to reach a settlement. Poles and Germans had to live side by side, whether they liked it or not, and he had never ceased to uphold the necessity for Poland to have access to the sea. But Germany also had legitimate demands, for access to East Prussia and for the return of the German city of Danzig to the Reich. To solve the problem, Hitler had made an unprecedented offer to Poland, the terms of which he now repeated, with the careful omission of the German invitation to join in a bloc directed against Russia.30
Hitler also declared that the London-Warsaw pact of April 6 had destroyed the basis of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement and of the Hitler-Pilsudski agreement of 1934. He renounced both. However, as Bullock writes, Hitler “was careful to add…that the door to a fresh agreement between Germany and Poland was still open, and that he would welcome such an agreement, provided it was upon equal terms.”31
On May 5, Colonel Beck rose in the Polish Diet and rejected both the German version of negotiations and Hitler’s offer to start anew. Still, the German press “was kept under restraint.”32 As the French ambassador in Berlin wrote to Paris, the Germans were serenely confident Britain and France would persuade the Poles to negotiate on Danzig, as the Allies surely realized that “Danzig is not worth a European war.”33
Nothing happened. No one talked. After Hitler’s April 28 offer, “there were no further negotiations with the Poles before the outbreak of war and none with the British until the middle of August.”34
And so London, Paris, Berlin, and Warsaw all drifted on toward the greatest cataclysm in human history.
The British ambassador in Berlin, Nevile Henderson, “thoroughly upset” that he had not known of this offer that Hitler had made to Beck, wrote in anguish to Chamberlain’s close adviser, Sir Horace Wilson:
I must…admit that I regard Hitler’s proposals as a fair basis of negotiation and in my innermost heart I regard the Poles as exceedingly unwise to make enemies of Germany and as dangerous allies for us. The Prague coup has affected our whole outlook towards Hitler but it has not altered the merits of the Danzig-Corridor case in themselves. I may be wrong but I am personally convinced that there can be no permanent peace in Europe until Danzig has reverted to Germany. The Poles cannot be masters of 400,000 Germans in Danzig—ergo Germany must be. I am sorry that I feel that way, but I fear that we are again on a bad wicket as we were over the Sudeten.35
Beck would refuse even to discuss Danzig with the Germans, and the British would refuse to press Beck to negotiate. Hitler thus concluded that Britain was behind Poland’s intransigence, and that Britain was committed to war to prevent Danzig’s return. The conclusion is understandable. The conclusion was wrong. For Chamberlain still believed Germany’s case for Danzig was her strongest territorial claim and favored the return of the city, if only Hitler would go about it peacefully—which was exactly what Hitler, at that point, was still trying to do.
In the final fateful week of August 1939, as Hitler desperately cast about for a way to keep Britain out of his war with Poland, British leaders were desperately casting about for a way to convince the Poles to effect a peaceful return of Danzig to Germany.
It was the war guarantee—that guaranteed the war.
CHAPTER 11
“An Unnecessary War”
WAR WINS NOTHING, cures nothing, ends nothing…. [I]n war there are no winners, but all are losers.1
—NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN, 1939
My only fear is that some bastard will propose a peace conference.2
—ADOLF HITLER, 1939
REALITY SOON INTRUDED on Britain after the war guarantee had been gratuitously given to Colonel Beck. If the Allies were to have any hope of saving Poland, the Red Army was indispensable. So began the six-month courtship of the men Churchill in 1919 had called the “foul baboonery of Bolshevism…a pestilence more destructive of life than the Black Death or the Spotted Typhus.”3 No sooner had the courtship begun, however, than Chamberlain came face-to-face again with the old arguments against any alliance with Stalin’s Russia—to save Poland.
First, Britain had no vital interest either in Danzig or the Corridor, and Germany had as strong a claim to Danzig and the Corridor as France had had to Alsace and Lorraine. As Lloyd George had written years before,
The British people…would not be ready to be involved in quarrels which might arise regarding Poland or Danzig…. The British people felt that the populations of that quarter of Europe were unstable and excitable; they might start fighting at any time and the rights and wrongs of the dispute might be very hard to disentangle.4
On April 13, 1933, two months after Hitler assumed power, Churchill himself had declared in Parliament:
Many people would like to see, or would have liked to see, a little while ago—I was one of them—the question of the Polish Corridor adjusted. For my part, I should certainly have considered that to be one of the greatest practical objectives of European peace-keeping diplomacy.5
A second argument against a Russian alliance was that Chamberlain believed he had read Stalin right:
I must confess to the most profound distrust of Russia…. I distrust her motives, which seem to me to have little connection with our ideas of liberty, and to be concerned only with getting everyone else by the ears. Moreover, she is both hated and suspected by many of the smaller states, most notably Poland, Rumania and Finland.6
Third, the nations wedged betw
een Russia and Germany feared a Red Army rescue more than a German invasion. They had heard the screams of Stalin’s victims.7
Fourth, as a condition of alliance, Moscow was demanding the right to impose protectorates over Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia and to march into Poland and Rumania to meet the German army. No European nation would agree to this.
Fifth, if Moscow were to commit to war if Hitler attacked Poland, Stalin wanted full reciprocity: a British commitment to go to war if Hitler attacked the Soviet Union.
The British were now in the box Chamberlain had sought to avoid. Men of honor, they could not let Stalin, whose record of mass murder far exceeded Hitler’s as of 1939, march into the Baltic countries. That would surrender millions of innocent people to a terrorist regime, a crime far worse than Munich. At least the Sudetendeutsch had wanted to join the Reich. The Baltic peoples feared and hated Stalin. Events would show they were justified in their fears. William Henry Chamberlin describes the strategic and moral dilemma Chamberlain now confronted:
Whether the Soviet Union would have entered the war even if its demands had been granted is doubtful. But it was politically and morally impossible to accede to these demands. For this would have amounted to conceding to Stalin that very right of aggression against weaker neighbors which was the ostensible cause of fighting Hitler. Such glaring inconsistencies may be tolerated in war, as the records of the Teheran and Yalta conferences testify. But the coercion of friendly powers to part with sovereignty and territory was impossible in time of peace.8
Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War Page 28
