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RR's avatar

Well argued article, David.

I take a slightly different tack on Chamberlain's military guarantee (with the consent of the French) to Poland. The key to it was the protocol limiting its application solely to Germany, that was kept secret from the world. That secrecy rendered the guarantee non-credible (as explained in Hitchens' book Phony Victory), because a prima facie blanket guarantee (against for example the USSR) was simply irrational. Thus Germany could not and did not take it very seriously - which in my view was the entire point.

Chamberlain in his time was both lauded and derided as "The Great Rearmer" due to the extreme unpopularity of his modernization of the RN and RAF (famously the Hurricane and Spitfire) and general rearmament policies. But at Munich the relatively new PM had no option but to agree, as the relatively disarmed UK otherwise would have been defeated. This point is argued strongly in an extensive "rationality" case study by Mearsheimer and Rosario in their book "How States Think", explaining that Munich was the turning-point at which a previously irrational UK foreign policy became rational.

In 1938 Chamberlain may or may not have been taken in by Hitler, it's arguable either way. But in March 1939 something else rather interesting happened. Not just Germany, but also Poland, attacked and seized Czechoslovakia's land in conjunction with Germany. Almost as bad, at Munich Poland had refused Stalin's request for military access to come to the aid of Czechoslovakia. For the UK and France, that reasonably could have been explained away by Polish paranoia, but the invasion was a second Polish "betrayal" of their active military co-operation and informal defensive alliance with Poland. Certainly the French military and political classes, with their closer ties with Poland than the UK's, were livid.

My view is Chamberlain noticed that Poland's army (the nation remaining in effect a military autocracy even though the dictator had died) had seized more land than had been agreed with Germany, and refused to give it back to Germany. Hitler let it ride, and thus put up with the minor humiliation and betrayal, but effectively Poland had become a serious irritant if not outright enemy of three great powers at a single ill-advised stroke: UK, France, and Germany.

It is submitted the guarantee was a fake. Its existence emboldened Poland to fight Germany over its relatively tiny demands, while its inherent implausibility (due to the secrecy of the protocol) encouraged Hitler to discount it as yet another "guarantee" that Britain traditionally would never honor against Germany (as had happened in the nineteenth century, on one occasion prompting Bismarck's quip "if the British Army lands in North Germany, I'll send a policeman to arrest it"). If that analysis is right, then Chamberlain successfully mouse-trapped two enemies into going to war with each other, while giving the UK and France the opportunity to enter a war "defensively", thus preserving a liberal halo. In other words, from at latest March 1939, the UK and France decided that they would fight Germany (the reasons being for current purposes irrelevant, however varied and tragicomic the possibilities), and looked for the best way to achieve this while remaining "the good guys".

There isn't any publicly available direct evidence, but plenty of circumstantial evidence, starting with Yalta. Likewise the refusal of the UK and France to lift a finger to support their official ally during its defeat and annexation, and after that the Phony War, as a US politician infamously but arguably accurately described it. Likewise the Polish government-in-exile in London was pretty much ignored by everyone. Even its attempt to secure British support for a post-war final solution to the Poles' own "Jewish problem" failed to enlist any comment at all.

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Lee Pollock's avatar

I confess I've never encountered Col. Pyne until reading this post. I thank him for his service but this is crackpot garbage "history".

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