Looking back at “The Good War”, Pat Buchanan wonders why Britain backed Poland and declared war on Germany:
After all, the war guarantee was given in response to the destruction of Czechoslovakia, but the Polish colonels had themselves participated in that destruction and seized a slice of Czechoslovakia.
Second, despite the guarantee, Britain had no plans to come to Poland’s aid.
Third, Britain lacked the means to stop Germany. When Hitler bombed Warsaw, British bombers dropped leaflets on Germany.
If Britain had no ability to save Poland and no plans to save Poland, why encourage the Poles to fight by offering what the British knew was a worthless war guarantee? Why declare a European and world war for a country Britain could not save and a cause, Danzig, in which Britain did not believe, in an Eastern Europe where Britain had no vital interest?
Said British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, “(We must) throw all we can into the scales on the side of law as opposed to lawlessness in Europe.”
And throw it all in they did. And what became of Poland?
At Tehran and Yalta, another prime minister, Winston Churchill, ceded Poland to Stalin’s empire, in whose captivity she remained for a half-century.
By the spring of 1939, the British cabinet had become convinced that Hitler would only be stopped by war.
It was not possible to merely declare war and invade Germany. Therefore a reason was required. Poland was to act as a trip-wire. If it stopped Hitler then all well and good. If not, then the British public would be more likely to accept the turnaround from the policy of “peace at any price” to war if the invasion of a “small” country was the reason.
The British knew perfectly well that it would not be possible to assist Poland militarily. If they knew then the Poles would have known also. In any event, to think that the Poles would have just rolled over and allowed the Germans to occupy their country is absurd. Do you know any Poles? Think about Finland.
The deterrent effect almost worked in any event.
People present when Hitler heard the news that Britain and France had declared war as promised, say that Hitler was visibly shaken and asked ‘What do we do now?’ After so many bloodless victories he had believed that the West was bluffing.
The primary aim of the Polish Guarantee was to stop Hitler at some stage — either then or later. Poland was, in the circumstances, a secondary consideration.
Certainly Britain and France wanted Germany stopped before it grew too strong to stop, but setting a trip-wire to launch a war you’re unprepared for seems questionable. If all goes well, you stop Germany from expanding without having to fight. If everything goes to hell though, you’re in another World War.
Buchanan makes the claim that the guarantee to Poland was a mistake. He believes that it was the guarantee that led to war.
The point which I am trying to make is that the decision that a war was necessary unless Hitler backed down had already been taken. The guarantee was the means of launching that war.
Whether that was the right decision at the right time is a different matter.
Setting a trip wire to launch a war you’re unprepared for is questionable. However, the nation most guilty of that oversight in September 1939 was Germany. Even Poland might have caused Germany more heartburn if it wasn’t for the Soviet stab in the back. The Polish plan called for retreating to a more defensible position along the Romanian border.
Considering Poland was attacked on two fronts by forces that lopsidedly outnumbered them, the five weeks they held out compares well with the length of the six weeks it took to overrun France.
The French, British, Germans, and everyone else except Hitler assumed that the Franco-British conventional military advantage would gradually crush Germany in two or three years. The Wehrmacht’s procurement office assumed that German rearmament wouldn’t reach sufficient levels till 1942. Hitler had to force the Wehrmacht to draw up a plan for attacking France, which the General Staff thought was madness. If the Germans hadn’t lost the original plan, a lame retread of the Moltke Plan of 1914, and been forced to draw up a new plan and some near end battles on the Meuse, the Germans might have folded quicker than they did in 1940.
Which might explain the curiously forward positions of those Soviet forces that Comrade Suvorov keeps writing about.
I suppose I take Hitler’s brinksmanship for granted — he’s Hitler, after all.
Now certainly few expected the Wehrmacht to tear through French defenses so spectacularly, but France and Britain had to know that German forces were (somewhat) mobilized and blooded, and Russia wasn’t (yet) going to open up an eastern front, so, at the very least, this next World War was going to cost France and Britain plenty of blood and treasure.
Shouldn’t their priorities have been (a) re-arming, and (b) bringing Russia into the war? I can accept that the point of the guarantee to Poland was not to defend Poland, so we shouldn’t measure its success or failure by that metric, but it doesn’t make much strategic sense as a trip-wire either. It wasn’t a credible threat from Britain’s position of weakness, so Hitler didn’t take it seriously, but Britain followed through and got a war it shouldn’t have asked for.
Britain did not trust itself to pursue a long-term policy like this. It is a democracy after all. Likely a new wave of politicians would talk about how accommodation is possible, nothing has happened since Poland, and there is no need for all of the sacrifices to support a rising military.
In any case, given the Allies’ expectation of a static front and a blockade of Germany, it made sense that they could build their military faster relative to Germany in war time than in peace time. Certainly being at war makes it a lot easier to ramp up the budget, impose rationing, and increase conscription in a democracy.
Allied rearmament massively increased in 1938 and 1939. Combined, the Franco-British forces in September 1939 and May 1940 outnumbered the Germans.
Allied plans made before the outbreak of war estimated that Poland could hold out for 4-5 months. Poland itself estimated it could hold out for up to six months. Soviet intervention, coupled with the Wehrmacht’s unanticipated performance, threw these plans in the toilets.
The Western front was thrown into disarray when King Leopold of Belgium declared Europe’s scenic invasion speedway neutral territory. The overall French plan prior to Leopold’s action assumed that French and British units could be forward deployed into Belgium to meet the anticipated Schlieffen-Moltke Plan II. The missing northern section of the much maligned Maginot Line was the Belgian fortress system between Belgium and Germany. The Belgian actions meant that Allied forces would have to wait until after a German attack to move into Belgium, meaning they would be in motion rather than dug in behind prepared fortifications as assumed. This left a gap that would slow their response to a German movement through the Low Countries and leave the Belgian fortress system undermanned and vulnerable to a coup de main like Eben-Emael.
This doesn’t excuse the lack of preparation or attention to the French center in the Ardennes, where there wasn’t enough aerial recon, defensive works, or regular non-reservist troops. Al Nofi once pointed in a StrategyPage podcast about out how vulnerable traffic was if caught in the open along the four narrow roads that went through the Ardennes. If Allied airpower had caught the enormous traffic jam in the open along those roads during the German buildup in the Ardennes in 1940, it’s likely those units, the best units of the Wehrmacht, would have been savaged to the point that moving forward at the clip they did in the race to the channel would have been impossible. If the Germans couldn’t counter Franco-British numerical supremacy through maneuver and had been forced into attritional battles that early in the war, they were in deep trouble.
The key date when Chamberlain and Daladier realized they couldn’t appease Germany any more was not 9/1/1939 but 3/15/1939 when Hitler peed all over the Munich agreement by seizing the rest of Czechoslovakia. If it wasn’t Poland it would have been something else in 1939 or 1940.
So, democratic Britain couldn’t fully prepare for war until it declared war, and once it unleashed its navy to blockade German, the balance of industrial power would tip to Britain’s favor. (How much did German industry depend on overseas imports, anyway? To what degree did the Brits think, going into the war, that they would have air superiority and their strategic bombing would hamper German industry?)
So, the British and the French make their commitments to Poland with the understanding that (a) the Soviets won’t work with Hitler, so Poland should be able to hold out for months, and (b) when the Germans turn back to the west, they won’t waltz through a poorly defended gap and achieve a masterful Blitzkrieg victory.
I assume they hoped that their threat to Germany was credible, and it would never come to war, but what did they think they would do if Germany invaded Poland and Poland held out for a few months? Did they expect to mobilize fast enough to join the Poles? To attack Germany from the west while it was still committed to the east?