Russia-Poland row over start of WW2 escalates

[Rev. Rye]

As someone who's pretty familiar with this area of history, I may as well explain a few things: Appeasement wasn't quite the idiotic move at the time as it seemed in hindsight. After WW1, the public did not really want to go into another war (the death of nigh on a million soldiers for almost no political gain will do that for a country, even if they were the victors) unless they felt it was absolutely necessary. And at that point, it didn't seem necessary. Hitler's image was nowhere near as negative then as it would be a few years later (Indeed, three years later Fritz Lang's Man Hunt, one of the first films based on an assassination attempt on Hitler, and the worst thing they could say about him was that he was a "strutting little Caesar" who reintroduced the death penalty. And bear in mind, at this point, Kristallnacht had happened, mass murders of Jews were really starting up, the death camps were being built, and the director had personal run-ins with the Nazi party that led him to get the Hell out of Dodge on 31 July 1933), the atrocities that cemented him and his goons as synonymous with pure evil were just ideas they were toying with and didn't even know how to pull off yet. And the parts of the Sudetenland Chamberlain gave to Hitler actually wanted to be absorbed into Germany. And most importantly, France had even less interest in trying to help Czechoslovakia than the British public did. And as for Chamberlain, in the earliest meetings at Berchtesgarden, he picked up early on that Hitler shouldn't be expected to keep his promise. And, a direct quote taken from my copy of Ian Kershaw's Hitler: Nemesis (page 111)

“If I've understood you correctly then you're determined in any event to proceed against Czechoslovakia. If that is your intention, why have you had me coming to Berchtesgaden at all? Under these circumstances it's best if I leave straight away. Apparently, it's all pointless.”

And he spent most of the rest of September similarly frustrated, if my re-reading of Kershaw and Evans' accounts of the events is any indication. It's really hard for me to think that Chamberlain could go from this to thinking that there was truly nothing left to worry about from Hitler.

So, overall, Munich was basically this:



with a side order of a very risky sacrifice of Czechoslovakia. And as far as September 1938 went, Chamberlain did pretty well. And he even helped build up Britain's armaments in the meantime (of course, Germany was also unprepared to the point where Hitler was actually facing a potential coup over a potential war with Britain before the Munich agreement made it unnecessary, and they actually did a better job of rearming in the intervening year.) However, he really dropped the ball a year later when he declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939 and spent the next eight months doing...




And I'm inclined to think of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in similar terms, just buying time for Hitler and Stalin to actually build up their armies. And this time, they did a Hell of a better job of doing it. Or at least Russia was better at their normal strategy of "Win by being fucking huge and sending a shitton of people to die for Mother Russia." Well, that and Hitler actually had the poor judgement to invade the USSR while they still had unfinished business on the Western Front. And dragging America into it on a whim after Pearl Harbor.