Russia-Poland row over start of WW2 escalates

[Pat Mustard]

This is all news to me - I thought it was a universally accepted truth that Hitler started WW2 by invading Poland   also, let sleeping dogs lie? Stalin's army ENDED WW2 by seizing Berlin, no? So tarring them with the dirty end of the stick now over the start seems, er, beyond unhelpful to me.

Nazi Germany and the USSR signed the Molotov Ribbentrop Agreement in 1937 (IIRC on the year), a 10 year non-agression pact with a secret provision that when Germany invaded Poland the USSR would join in, gaining eastern Poland (which is now largely Belorussia, with some of North-Western Ukraine to balance it out).

While strictly speaking Germany started WW2, the USSR was an equal participant in carving up Poland and was only stopped from joining in against Poland on day 1 because of their agreement with the Germans.

In WW2 commemorations this chapter (up until 1941 the USSR was "neutral in favour of the Germans" to misquote a phrase describing Irish neutrality*) of its history is largely hushed up, so as not to embarrass the Soviets, and later the Russians, but it is a part of the war.

*The Free State's position in the war has been fairly described as "neutral in favour of the Allies".

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They came, they saw, they hesitated, and finally they capitulated at Munich 11 month before, in the process chamberlain turned himself into caricature of delusion by waving a piece of paper with hitler’s signature, proclaiming it to mean “peace for our time”.

Chamberlain had good reason to capitulate at Munich, actually. The French had chickened out prior to the conference and were unwilling to back the Czechs and British rearmament was not yet complete. In fact the army had pretty much told him that they weren't yet ready for war.

A bigger argument for not backing down was that Germany was actually even less ready, in the middle of an army expansion and not even close to having modernised its forces (despite the whole myth of blitzkrieg, the German Wehrmacht was still very dependant on horses for transport, much more than any of the other major participants). Add that to the problems of invading a modern, well armed Czecho-Slovakia who had strong defensive lines and defensive territorial advantages, it is likely that a war in 1938 would have gone bad for Hitler from the start. But Chamberlain didn't know any of that, and didn't realise that his bad hand was better than Hitler's terrible hand.