Without tragedies and disasters we learn nothing, and 1939-1945 is arguably the greatest man-made disaster to ever afflict civilization. Not that there weren’t plenty of horrors leading up to ’39, in theatres such as Abyssinia, Spain and Nanking.
In his pithy new book ‘1939 – Countdown To War’ Richard Overy examines the factors that led to Britain declaring war on Germany on 3 September 1939 (he views France’s subsequent declaration as something of an anticlimax).
What is surprising is how well Neville Chamberlain comes out of it. History hasn’t often been so kind to the ‘arch-appeaser’ Conservative Prime Minister, who was 70 at the time, and due to die of cancer the following year.
What seems to emerge from Overy’s account, however, is that Chamberlain had no illusions about what he was facing, and merely did his best to avert war for as long as possible. If he had an Achilles heel, it was simply the fact that he wasn’t a warmongering psychopath like Hitler and Stalin.
The real villain of the piece is Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister - a hateful bully whose despicable machinations were calculated to curry favour with his beloved Fuhrer. It’s some small consolation to know that this brute was hanged six years later, after ending up on the losing side of the war he did more than anyone else to start.
The other surprise is just how weak were the ties between Britain and Poland. Created in 1919 at the Treaty of Versailles, the modern Polish state had a reputation for belligerence. It had scored a major victory in seeing off a Red Army invasion in 1920, and had participated in the 1938 carve-up of Czechoslovakia. To some, Poland’s natural place was as part of a pro-Nazi, anti-Soviet bloc in Europe.
And yet it was Chamberlain’s decision to honour Britain’s treaty with Poland that led to his declaring war on Germany - although Britain and France gave virtually no aid to Poland, and never intended to join the fray immediately. Poland’s determination to fight lent some backbone to the Allied powers, but at an almost unimaginably devastating cost to Poland itself.
Abdul Hannan, our manchild in New York, writes:
ReplyDeleteCool. There’s also an interesting thought that appeasement didn’t lead to war, but war led to appeasement. As you mention, there were wars in Abyssinia, the Balkans, Manchuria, Spain, and lots of other places breaking out from the mid-1930s. The world was already at war before the Brits reluctantly signed up in 1939 (see Niall Ferguson’s ‘War of the World’). By that time of course, the cost of maintaining the colonies was already breaking the back of the Treasury and under these circumstances, efforts to keep the Reich at bay made quite a lot of sense.
It wasn’t so much Hitler’s thing for Czechoslovakia or Poland that punched a hole in Chamberlain’s strategy, but the fear that the German navy would cut off Britain’s maritime route to India. Fear of German fingering of British maritime interests went back further than this of course. About 15 years ago I did some policy work for the Bangladesh Forest Department and came across documents from the colonial administration dating back to 1860 and 1878 (the years of Britain’s first two forest policies for India). These policies aimed to disenfranchise local communities and establish monopoly government control over traditional forest lands. In the north of the sub-continent, including the Bengal Presidency, deforestation of softwood groves accelerated to make sleepers for the railways. In the Mysore Presidency to the south, trees were cut down in massive numbers to build ships. Ships to fight Bismarck. This story closed a loop in 1947, when that almighty twit Lord ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten accelerated Atlee’s plan for withdrawal from the sub-continent after WW2 had (as Chamberlain always feared) bankrupted the UK government.