Seventy years ago, Poland was stuck between hostile nations:
Hitler wanted Danzig, which was 95 percent German, and the Polish Corridor, to which the Poles were more attached. The Soviet Union was even more intimidating. Hitler’s immediate goal was an alliance with Poland, ultimately against Bolshevik Russia and to negotiate the return of Danzig. In response to Germany’s ambitions, Chamberlain, now convinced by Churchill’s warnings, preempted any possible deal between Germany and Poland.On March 31, 1939, he rose in the House of Commons to make the most fateful British declaration of the century: “[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.”
It was this guarantee, Buchanan argues, that sealed the fate of the Western world:
Poland, a dictatorship that had benefited from the divvying up of Czechoslovakia, was far less a strategic interest to Britain and France than the Rhineland and Sudetenland. By guaranteeing to defend Poland against Nazi aggression – which Britain could not do directly, and in fact did not do throughout the war – Britain guaranteed there would be war with Germany. The only way it could back up its guarantee was by declaring war on Germany from the west, ensuring the Nazis would attack the Western democracies.Chamberlain thought the war guarantee “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.” This is not what ultimately happened.
Emboldened by the war guarantee, the Polish refused to negotiate with Hitler, and so Hitler sought an alliance with Stalin. The two totalitarians would invade Poland in September 1939, meet in the middle, and partition the country, and Britain and France would indeed declare war from the west.
Buchanan’s main thesis: Had Britain kept itself armed and neutral instead of giving a guarantee to Poland it couldn’t meaningfully fulfill, it could have avoided a war in Western Europe.