Contents

Cover

About the Authors

Also by Richard Overy

List of Illustrations

Maps

Title Page

Preface to the Third Edition

Preface to the First Edition

Introduction: ‘Who Will Die for Danzig?’

1 Germany

2 Great Britain

3 France

4 Italy

5 The Soviet Union

6 Japan

7 The United States

Conclusion: ‘A War of Great Proportions’

Appendix: Comparative Military Expenditure and Military Strength

Picture Section

References

Acknowledgements

Select Bibliography

Index

Copyright

About the Author

Richard Overy is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He is the author of books on the Second World War, the European dictatorships and the history of air power. His latest titles include Why the Allies Won (2nd edn 2006), The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (2004) and The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars (2009). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and winner of the Wolfson History Prize in 2005. He is currently preparing a history of bombing in World War II.

Andrew Wheatcroft is the author of many pioneering books on early modern and modern history, including The Ottomans (1993) and The Enemy at the Gate (2008). He is based in Dumfriesshire and is Professor and Director of the Centre for Publishing Studies at the University of Stirling.

ALSO BY RICHARD OVERY

Why the Allies Won

Russia’s War

Interrogations: Inside the Mind of the Nazi Elite

Goering: The ‘Iron Man’

The Battle of Britain: the Myth and the Reality

The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia

The Air War: 1939–1945

The Times History of the World

The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars

List of Illustrations

All inset photographs are reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London.

List of Maps

Note

The maps have been compiled using the place names as standardized by The Times from 1926 to 1939. This reflects a usage familiar to contemporaries. In a few cases where there is a choice of place name we have sought to apply one consistently throughout the maps. The dates given in the title refer to the beginning and end of the period covered by each map.

RICHARD OVERY
WITH ANDREW WHEATCROFT

The Road to War

Preface to the First Edition

Twenty years ago, Professor Fritz Fischer published his War of Illusions.¹ His attempt, spread over many years, through a series of books and articles, to reinterpret the origins of the First World War produced an impassioned reaction. That debate continues, some of its arguments unresolved and its personal animosities still bitter. But now the focus has shifted from the First to the Second World War, inevitably perhaps, with the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of war in Europe now upon us. The parallels with the Fischer dispute are uncomfortable. There is a ‘conventional wisdom’, sanctified by the work of almost two generations of fine scholarship beginning with that most eminent of non-academic historians, Winston Churchill. But as historians have begun to mine the documentary resources, this traditional picture has been weakened at some points and strengthened in others. Only one major attempt – by A. J. P. Taylor – has questioned the basic assumptions of the tradition. He asked awkward questions. This book aims to ask different questions, but, the authors hope, equally awkward.

What is the traditional view? It has two aspects: the popular and the scholarly. The popular view is a morality tale of Good and Evil. One supremely evil madman, Adolf Hitler, captured the German nation and drove the world remorselessly towards war. Only two nations, France and Britain, stood against him, and then only after a shameful period of pandering to the dictator. That shame – appeasement – was redeemed by the two nations fighting in defence of freedom. One nation was beaten (France), the other fought on alone, inspired by one great man, Winston Churchill. And, eventually, the United States entered the war to create, with the Soviet Union and Britain, a great allied coalition which won ultimate victory over the powers of darkness. The final act was retribution, when at Nuremberg and Tokyo, the authors of the war were tried and executed.

The scholarly version tells roughly the same tale, less highly coloured, but with the same basic assumptions. It focuses a very great deal on Europe, and the struggle there between Britain, France and Germany. It accepts that cowardice and moral weakness among the Western powers allowed Nazi power to flourish, and it condemns the politicians of the West as ‘appeasers’, a word which they themselves chose to describe their activity.

But the evidence begins to tell a different tale. Firstly, each of the nations eventually involved in the war had complex motives for their policy in the years between the wars. Secondly, as the documents of the time make clear beyond ambiguity, there was a much larger cast of actors in the drama of international relations than the traditionalist’s three-hander: Britain, France and Germany. The shaping of policy looks very different when viewed from the perspective of Washington, Moscow, Rome or Tokyo rather than exclusively from London, Paris or Berlin. Each government, in a world still made up of nation states, felt the immediate pressures of national or domestic preoccupations. So US policy was framed in a context where a President had to seek re-election every four years; Britain and France were not just European states, but felt the daily burden of sustaining and defending their worldwide empires.

The aim of this book is to retell the story of the twenty years between the wars without the benefit of hindsight, without the knowledge that there was going to be a war, in which the West would eventually triumph. For the basic problem with the traditional view is that the reader knows the end of the story: that the events of the 1920s and 1930s led to war in 1939. To the participants, the picture was more uncertain, and other possibilities seemed more likely.

One part of the traditional picture does not change. Hitler was certainly not mad, but he was an evil and ruthless man, determined to enforce his will in a way which even those who had read his treatise Mein Kampf could scarcely credit. He stood outside the normal Western pattern of discussion, debate and compromise: such a creature was beyond the understanding of most of the statesmen who faced him. They had built an international system based on reason, or at the very least on the principles of political horse-trading. Hitler in Germany, and those who followed the ‘war path’ in Japan and Italy, were not traders but hunters, belonging in a sense to an earlier stage of human history. In the context of the 1930s they were radical, violent states seeking a new order at home and abroad. A strategy to confront these forces was difficult to formulate. There was no easy answer to the challenge.

We have tried to tell a long and complex story in a confined space. We seek to focus on the politics of the era in terms understood at the time, within the nations themselves. Each of the major actors has a chapter to itself; we could have extended the book to include many more. We have organized the chapters by the order in which the nations went to war, beginning with Poland and ending with the United States. The principle we have sought to follow throughout is that international relations are made by countries and statesmen who have their own unique perception of events. The relationship between this perception and the wider forces at play in the system help to build up, stone by stone, the Road to War.

March 1989

Richard Overy
Andrew Wheatcroft

Preface to the Third Edition

The third edition of The Road to War marks twenty years since the screening of the BBC television series with which the first edition was associated. A second edition appeared ten years ago. Each decade has given an opportunity to think again about the main outlines of the story of how eight major powers found themselves engaged in the largest and costliest war in world history. The second edition took some advantage of the new revelations made possible by the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989–90 and the outpouring of new historical studies of Soviet foreign and military policy. The third edition has no such milestone to exploit, but there has been a continuous process of rethinking or re-evaluation of much of the story behind the coming of war. What is most striking, however, is the decline in scholarly interest in the diplomacy and military policy of the 1930s. A trawl through the major journals reveals new and different historical priorities and interests. Much of what could be said about the eight different roads to war ten years ago still appears valid today.

There have, nevertheless, been a number of developments in the way issues of war and peace are treated by historians of the period. There is now much more interest in the popular attitude to war and peace, whether in democracies where popular opinion was deemed to matter, or in the dictatorships where mass mobilization was an important way of ensuring popular commitment to war. There has also been important additional research on Italian war-making in the 1930s in Ethiopia and Spain, and further important advances in understanding the nature of Soviet intentions and ambitions in the inter-war years. Japan’s ‘colonial’ wars in East Asia have also begun to be opened up to historical scrutiny, though much still remains to be done. All these perspectives complement rather than overturn the conclusions in the original edition of The Road to War and they have been included in this new version where appropriate.

The book deals, of course, with two separate wars. The first was begun by Japan in China in 1931, and escalated in 1937. The second began in Europe with the British and French decision to oppose the German invasion of Poland. The two spheres interacted in obvious ways, but not until 1941, with Soviet and United States participation, did the different paths to war coalesce into a single World War. The original purpose of setting up both television series and book as eight separate narratives was to show that every major state that became embroiled in the Second World War did so in different ways, informed by their own military, political and cultural circumstances. The war was not a simple question of ‘right’ against ‘wrong’. The inter-war years were years in which the apparently fixed points of the pre-1914 world all dissolved to be replaced by a profound disequilibrium and a heightened sense of popular anxiety, which shaped expectations about a second major war. In the twenty years since the first edition of this book was written, something of the same sense of anxiety has surfaced in the twenty-first century. This does not mean that a Third World War is in the making, but a reminder that the confidence of 1989, when ‘the end of history’ was being proclaimed, like the confidence evident in 1919 of a new era of peace, must be treated with the caution it deserves.

Richard Overy, March 2009

Introduction
‘Who Will Die for Danzig?’

On the Baltic coastline, at the mouth of the Vistula river, stands the chief port of modern Poland, Gdansk. It was given to Poland at the end of the Second World War as part of the post-war settlement of Eastern Europe. Until then it was known by its German name, Danzig. In 1939 a conflict between Poland and Germany over the future of the city led to open warfare. On the morning of 1 September, German troops invaded Poland on a broad front. The war for Danzig eventually engulfed the whole world and brought the death of more than fifty million people. Yet – to answer Marcel Déat’s question posed in May 1939 – hardly any of the victims died for Danzig. Like the Sarajevo assassination in 1914, Danzig became the trigger that set off a conflict already in the making, over issues far deeper and more dangerous than the fate of a Prussian port.

Danzig was ideal for such a role. Some kind of conflict over its future was almost certain when the victorious powers severed the city from Germany at the end of the First World War and gave it independent status as a ‘free city’. Since the eighteenth century Danzig had been part of Prussia. It was an ancient Germanic trading city, the rows of high-gabled merchant houses dating back three centuries or more to the time when Danzig was one of the most prosperous ports of Northern Europe. When Prussia absorbed the city in 1793 it was already in decline, as economic power shifted to the western seaboard of Europe. In 1871 it became part of the new German empire created by Bismarck. Up to the war of 1914 it remained a thoroughly provincial city, not sharing in the great burst of industrial expansion in the other major cities of the empire.¹ It was only by chance that Danzig became, at the end of the war, in 1919, an international issue.

It was geography that gave Danzig its new prominence. The victor powers intended to create an independent Poland. The commitment was enshrined, inauspiciously, in the thirteenth of American President Woodrow Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ for peace. To make the new state viable the powers promised ‘free and secure access to the sea’. Without an outlet on the Baltic Poland would remain landlocked, at the mercy of the German populations that lay between her and the shore. Danzig was the obvious answer. An Allied commission awarded the port and its hinterland, and a ‘corridor’ of territory through Prussia, to the Poles. There were loud protests from the German population involved. The Allies fell out among themselves over an issue that violated so clearly the principle of self-determination of peoples to which they were ostensibly committed. It was realized at the time that it might be a cause of real weakness for Poland to be faced with a sulky, resistant German minority across her main trade route. A second commission sat under the chairmanship of a British historian, J. Headlam-Morley. Searching Danzig’s ancient but more independent past, he was struck by an apposite compromise: Poland should keep the Corridor but Danzig would become a free city, neither part of Germany nor part of Poland, under the general supervision of an international committee of the new League of Nations. The Poles were given guarantees for their trade into and out of Danzig, the German population was given self-government. The settlement was agreed and was included in the Versailles Treaty signed on 28 June 1919.²

The outcome satisfied neither Germans nor Poles. It was a compromise that barely satisfied the draftsmen at Versailles. Danzig would remain, thought Lloyd George, a ‘hostile and alien element’. The new Polish state won its outlet to the sea, but only at the cost of an arrangement that stood as a permanent challenge to German national pride. Poland’s first premier, the pianist Ignace Paderewski, warned his countrymen prophetically that Danzig ‘ultimately will return’ to Germany. German nationalists hailed Danzig as the ‘open wound’ in the east.³ No German government, whatever its political complexion, would accept the Danzig solution as a permanent one. Berlin maintained close contacts with Danzig, supporting and subsidizing its economy, reproducing in miniature the politics of the German party system in Danzig’s parliament, keeping alive the flame of irredentism. Poland used Danzig only for what had been intended, the flow of Polish trade. In the 1920s almost all Poland’s exports to the outside world passed through the port. Yet to guard against the day when Germany might reclaim the city, the Polish authorities embarked on an unforeseen solution. The small fishing village of Gdynia, a few miles from Danzig, situated in what was now Polish territory in the Corridor, was rapidly transformed into a bustling port to rival Danzig. A new harbour was constructed which by the 1930s handled only a little less of Polish trade than its rival. Danzigers viewed the new development with alarm. During the 1920s their nationalism had abated. Fear of Poland and commercial good sense combined to produce a resigned acceptance of the status quo. The success of Gdynia was bought at Danzig’s expense. The diversion of trade challenged the viability of the Free City and provoked renewed nationalism among the town’s predominantly German population. In May 1933 the Danzig National Socialist Party assumed power, winning thirty-eight out of the seventy-two seats in the city assembly.

The Danzig solution was a typical outcome of the Versailles peace. A rational compromise between the liberal peacemakers of the West became another fiery ingredient in the cauldron of East European nationalism. From the view of Pole and German alike the problem was not solved, but simply postponed. Danzig was bound up in the whole network of national jealousies, political irredentism and hopes of vengeance that scarred the new post-war order in Eastern Europe. Poland knew this. Danzig mattered to her not just as an economic lifeline to the sea, important though that was, but because the survival of the Free City was, in the words of Marshal Pilsudski, ‘always the barometer of Polish–German relations’.⁴ Polish leaders realized that the loss of Danzig to Germany would compromise the rest of Poland’s gains in 1919 and might mean the slow economic strangulation of Poland. From the outset Danzig was an issue never distinct from the issue of Polish independence.

Poland’s own international position was just as precarious as Danzig’s. The new Polish state was carved out of the Polish territories of the three empires, German, Russian and Austrian, that collapsed at the end of the First World War. Polish leaders had no illusion that the independence of the new state was barely tolerated by the two major powers, Germany and the Soviet Union, on either side. Russia was only prevented from overrunning the infant state in 1920 by the Poles’ fierce defence of their newly won freedom and the military skills of Marshal Pilsudski, whose Polish legionnaires defeated the overstretched Red Army as it approached the suburbs of Warsaw. Almost twenty years later Soviet politicians were still eagerly awaiting ‘the time of reckoning’ with Poland.⁵ German leaders in the 1920s made no attempt to disguise their bitter hostility to the Poles. Many echoed General von Seeckt’s view that ‘Poland’s existence is unbearable … It must disappear … Russia and Germany must re-establish the frontiers of 1914.’⁶ Polish foreign policy boiled down to the simple equation of keeping a balance between the two threats. The ‘Doctrine of the Two Enemies’ was engraved in Polish strategy; every effort was made to keep an equilibrium between Moscow and Berlin, never making a move towards one that would alienate the other. In the 1920s this was relatively easy; Poland was more heavily armed than disarmed Germany, and the Soviet Union withdrew into socialist isolation. Under Marshal Pilsudski, whose military coup in 1926 brought the army to the centre of Poland’s political stage, the Polish economy recovered and domestic politics stabilized at the expense of the fragile democracy established in 1919. Poland began to see herself as one of the major powers of Europe.

The unreal situation in Europe, with Germany weakened and the Soviet Union in abstention, fuelled such delusions. In the small pond of Eastern Europe Poland was a big fish. Efforts were made to expand Polish military strength; by the mid-1930s over half of all government expenditure went on defence. A military effort of this size weakened Poland’s fragile economy, which was dominated still by an inefficient and numerous peasantry. Two-thirds of Poland’s population lived on the land. During the 1930s the state tried to speed up the industrial modernization of Poland, pumping money into a new Central Industrial Region set in the geographical heart of Poland away from the threat of German or Soviet forces. The cost of the effort to become a major military power and a modern economy in a mainly agrarian state, at a time of serious world recession, was permanent financial insecurity and low living standards. Poverty and unemployment provoked regular social unrest, industrial protest and peasant ‘strikes’. By the mid-1930s political conflict and social instability pushed the army into assuming virtual military control behind a political front organization, the Camp of National Unity. This loose alliance of conservative and radical nationalist groups dominated Polish politics up to the war. They were united by a fierce anti-communism and a powerful Polish nationalism that demanded ‘Poland for the Poles’.⁷

The Polish nationalism of the 1930s was a reflection of the fact that Poland was herself a multi-national state. Beside the two-thirds of the population who were ethnic Poles, there were Germans, Jews, Ukrainians, Russians, Lithuanians, Czechs and Belorussians. Friction between Poles and the non-Polish minorities was another source of weakness for the new state. Ukrainians looked to the formation of a Greater Ukraine, which alienated Poland’s powerful Soviet neighbour. Germans looked to the Reich, which they wanted to rejoin; Polish anti-German feeling alienated her powerful western neighbour. The issue of minority rights did not make Poland ungovernable, but it sharpened nationalist feelings on both sides and created a permanent source of tension in a state already weak economically and socially divided. Only anti-Semitism united the different races in Poland. During the 1930s Polish Jews, 10 per cent of Poland’s population, found themselves like their German cousins excluded from professional life and business, subject to special restrictions and deliberately pauperized through state policy. By 1938 one-third of Poland’s Jews lived on government relief, thousands emigrated. It was the Poles, not the Germans, who first suggested Madagascar as a place of exile for Europe’s Jews.⁸

Political conflict and economic weakness made Poland an unattractive prospect as an ally, but did little to blunt Polish pretensions to greatness. Pilsudski himself declared that ‘Poland will be a Great Power or she will not exist.’⁹ Pilsudski’s spirit lived on after his death in 1934. Poland deliberately pursued an independent course to give weight to this claim. Non-aggression pacts were signed with the Soviet Union in 1932 and with Hitler’s Germany in 1934. Polish dependence on Western goodwill was seen as a sign of weakness and the links with France and French interests in Eastern Europe, formalized in a Treaty of Friendship in 1921, were deliberately attenuated. Poland distanced herself from the League of Nations; she was among the first powers to recognize the Italian conquest of Ethiopia and Japan’s puppet state, Manchukuo, set up after the seizure of Chinese Manchuria, both outlawed by the League. Poland counted herself among the revisionist powers, with dreams of a southward advance, even a Polish presence on the Black Sea. The victim of the revisionist claims of others, she did not see the Versailles frontiers as fixed either. In 1938 when the Czech state was dismembered at the Munich conference, Poland issued an ultimatum of her own to Prague, demanding the cession of the Teschen region; the Czech government was powerless to resist. While Hitler was building a new German empire, Josef Beck, Poland’s Foreign Minister, had hopes of making Poland the heart of a ‘Third Europe’, a bloc of independent non-aligned states stretching from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, a counterweight to the German and Soviet colossi.¹⁰ The Third Europe never materialized; other states had a more sober assessment of Polish strength. Polish pursuit of an independent line led not to greater power, but to isolation.

It was at this point that Danzig re-entered the European stage. On 24 October 1938, a few weeks after digesting the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia handed to Germany at Munich, the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, invited the Polish ambassador, Josef Lipski, to call on him in Hitler’s Bavarian retreat at Berchtesgaden. In the course of the conversation Ribbentrop told him that the time had come to resolve the outstanding issues between Poland and Germany in a single, general settlement. Danzig, he said, should return to the German Reich; Germany should also have an extraterritorial rail and Autobahn link across the Corridor to join East Prussia once again to the homeland. The talks were conducted in a friendly way. Ever since Hitler had come to power in Germany in 1933 relations between the two states had steadily improved. German leaders always maintained that at some point the issue of Danzig would have to be resolved, and made this clear to Warsaw; but they also indicated that it was an issue that could be settled by agreement. Hitler hoped that Poland, in the front line of states hostile to communism, would eventually end the strategy of equilibrium and join the German bloc as a junior partner. For German ‘protection’ Poland would be compelled to give up the areas which had once been German assigned to her at Versailles, and to become an economic satellite of the Reich. Little of this was communicated directly to the Poles; relations were marked by a cordial exchange of expressions of goodwill. The other major powers took all this at face value, and assumed that the Poles had sold themselves to their powerful neighbour. Polish support for German aims at Munich, and the seizure of Teschen, confirmed for them where Polish sympathies lay. In fact the Polish government made no genuine move towards Germany during the 1930s, though they welcomed the abandonment of the fierce anti-Polish nationalism of the pre-Hitler days. The ‘Doctrine of the Two Enemies’ was not forgotten.

With Ribbentrop’s request for Danzig, the doctrine was rapidly rejuvenated. Lipski detected in the German demands, coming so soon after the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, the beginning of a German desire to bring Poland firmly under German influence, even domination. He told Ribbentrop that the loss of the Free City to Germany was not possible: Polish public opinion would not tolerate it.¹¹ Beck confirmed his ambassador’s instinctive reaction. The German proposals were flatly rejected. Beck was not even sure that Hitler himself knew what Ribbentrop was up to. He did not think the disagreement would lead to anything more than a ‘war of nerves’.

Beck instead sent proposals of his own: the League administration of the Free City should be eliminated and a joint Polish–German agreement arrived at over the future of the city which safeguarded the interests of both states. The return of Danzig to the Reich would ‘inevitably lead to conflict’.¹² Unknown to Beck, on 24 November, five days after his formal refusal was communicated to Berlin, Hitler instructed his armed forces to draw up plans for a surprise seizure of Danzig by force. German leaders still clung to the view that Poland would willy-nilly be compelled to come into the German camp on their terms. Beck was invited to come to meet Hitler in person. On 5 January 1939 a state visit was arranged; every courtesy was extended to the Polish Foreign Minister. But the meeting with Hitler marked a turning point. He was no longer friendly towards his Polish guest. ‘There were,’ Beck later wrote, ‘new tones in Hitler’s words.’¹³ Hitler insisted that Beck should seize the opportunity to embark with Germany on new solutions in Europe, forgetting the ‘old patterns’. He hinted at joint action over the Jewish question, even colonies. But he insisted that Danzig ‘will sooner or later become part of Germany’.¹⁴ Ribbentrop repeated the demand for Danzig on a return visit to Warsaw three weeks later, but Beck remained adamant.

German leaders were nonplussed. Ribbentrop regarded his proposals as very moderate and was surprised by Polish intransigence. In March the pressure was increased. Lipski was brusquely informed of Hitler’s disappointment. The proposals were turned into demands and Beck’s presence was requested in Berlin to thrash out the issue with Hitler. Beck did not come to Berlin; nor did Lipski speak with either Hitler or Ribbentrop again until 31 August, the eve of the German invasion. On 25 March the armed forces were instructed by Hitler to prepare not just to seize Danzig by force but for all-out war with Poland if she could be isolated politically and refused to see sense. On 3 April Hitler gave a direct order to prepare for war against the Poles under the codename ‘Case White’. War would ‘root out the threat’ from Poland ‘for all future time’; but it was an essential precondition that she should be isolated: ‘to limit the war to Poland’.¹⁵ The armed forces were directed to prepare a surprise assault and to make every effort to camouflage the preparations and final mobilization. Hitler concluded that isolation was certainly possible, with France facing internal turmoil for the foreseeable future, Britain unlikely to fight with a weakened France, and Soviet help for the Poles ruled out by Poland’s fierce anti-bolshevism. On 28 April the Polish–German non-aggression pact of 1934 was renounced publicly by Hitler. By force, or through fear, Poland was to be subdued during 1939.

Hitler’s assessment of the Poles’ meagre chances of assistance was solidly based. Of all the new states created at Versailles, Poland was almost certainly the most disliked and her Foreign Minister the most distrusted. Poland’s pursuit of an independent line left her bereft of any close friends by the end of 1938; to the outside world, Germany seemed the closest. The Western powers saw Poland as a greedy revisionist power, illiberal, anti-Semitic, pro-German; Beck was ‘a menace’, ‘arrogant and treacherous’.¹⁶ The West, anxious enough to avoid war themselves at Munich by giving away the Sudetenland, pilloried Poland for taking her share of the spoils. The French Prime Minister, Daladier, told the American ambassador in Paris that ‘he hoped to live long enough to pay Poland for her cormorant attitude in the present crisis by proposing a new partition …’.¹⁷ British diplomats attributed Poland’s delusions of grandeur to the fact that Beck was ‘full of vanity’, consumed with ‘ambition to pose as a leading statesman’. The Polish ambassadors in London and Paris found after Munich that their hosts were ‘cold and hostile’, showing ‘such obvious ill-will’ that prospects of support in the face of German power seemed remote. The French ambassador to Warsaw, Léon Noël, advised Paris in October 1938 to terminate once and for all any remaining agreements with Poland.¹⁸

The Soviet Union was so hostile to Poland over Munich that there was a real prospect that war between the two states might erupt quite separate from the wider conflict over Czechoslovakia. The Soviet premier, Molotov, denounced the Poles as ‘Hitler’s jackals’. Beck made conciliatory noises in Moscow and the affair cooled. In November 1938 Poland and the Soviet Union issued a joint declaration reaffirming the stance of mutual non-aggression and tidying up minor points of dispute, but neither side did anything to suggest that the Soviet Union would ever be a factor in restraining German demands on Poland.¹⁹ The smaller states of Central Europe were no more sympathetic. Hungary even promised Berlin that she would apply pressure in Warsaw to get the Poles to abandon not only Danzig, but the Corridor as well. Romania, Poland’s other neighbour, was now too alarmed by German strength to risk siding with the weaker Poles. Poland entered the contest with Hitler’s Reich almost entirely friendless.

Nor was the issue of Danzig likely to arouse much sympathy. Beck himself already considered the city a ‘lost post’ in 1938, though he would never say so publicly. The League of Nations Commissioner, the Swiss historian Carl Burckhardt, whose task it was to maintain the integrity of the Free City, was far from committed to its independent survival. Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Secretary from February 1938, thought the status of Danzig and the Corridor ‘a most foolish provision of the Treaty of Versailles’.²⁰ Moreover the city whose independence was to provoke a general European war was, by 1938, a Nazi city. The Danzig National Socialist Party had taken control of the Danzig parliament in May 1933; the process of Nazification was carried on energetically under the Gauleiter, Albert Forster. Despite League objections the Party by 1936 had established virtual one-party rule and had imported the repressive apparatus of the parent model. The full range of Nazi organizations and institutions was reproduced in Danzig, where the Party won the active support of many of the craftsmen and officials, shopkeepers and farmers that made up Danzig’s strongly nationalist population. From 1937 onwards an official anti-Semitic policy was pursued, again in defiance of the League. In November 1938 the notorious Nuremberg Laws, applied in the Third Reich against Jews since 1935, were promulgated in Danzig. Jews were forced into emigration, or made to accept impoverishment and loss of status at home. Most of Danzig’s Jewish population escaped to Palestine or Britain or Poland. In August 1939 the Gauleiter succeeded in getting himself approved as the head of state in Danzig, the Danzigers’ Führer.²¹

Without firm allies, Poland’s chances of persuading other powers to help her safeguard a Nazified Danzig against a predatory Germany seemed remote. Hitler had not chosen his moment idly. Poland was isolated and shunned, Danzig a Nazi outpost abandoned by the League. Two things transformed the situation: the Polish decision that they would fight rather than abandon the Free City, and the British decision to side with Poland if it came to a fight. Poland’s decision came first: from the start of negotiations with Germany Polish leaders made it clear that any unilateral German threat to Danzig was a cause of war. There was never any doubt in Beck’s mind that this was the right course. ‘If they touch Danzig,’ he told the Romanian Foreign Minister, ‘it means war … I am not the man to bow to the storm.’²² Beck was a committed patriot. He had fought on the German side in the First World War against tsarist armies, in the famous Polish Legions. He was a central figure in the contest to establish an independent Poland in 1919 and was a confidant of Pilsudski. He was not a popular minister in Warsaw, but was grudgingly respected. By 1939 he was the longest-serving foreign minister of any major power, a career that fed his confident optimism that he understood from experience how to handle foreign statesmen. He was certain that he had the measure of Hitler: ‘only firmness can be envisaged as the basis of our policy’. Beck was the first man in Europe to stand up to Hitler; this in itself encouraged him to think that the German reaction would be surprised withdrawal. Nor did he count Hitler as a real German, but as an Austrian. He claimed to understand ‘the Austrian mentality’ which ‘knew how to deal with weakness but became undecided when faced with the necessity of dealing with strength’.²³

Beck gambled that when Hitler saw the real risk of war he would stand back. He was dismissive of German strength: ‘the common exaggeration of German military power’, conquering Europe bloodlessly with ‘nine divisions’.²⁴ In his turn he greatly exaggerated Polish strength and was encouraged in that by the military circles in Warsaw. Polish military thinking was still dominated by the experience of the First World War on the Eastern Front. Poland’s cavalry was numerous, brave and obsolete. Her thirty infantry divisions simply lacked sufficient modern military equipment to fight either of her powerful neighbours effectively. Poland’s generals counted on other qualities: the courage and strategic skills of the officer corps, and the patriotic determination of the rank and file. In March 1939 Beck finally made the decision to fight if Germany would not back down. On 24 March he told his colleagues that the Danzig issue, ‘regardless of what [it] is worth as an object’, had become ‘a symbol’ which Poland was determined to stand and defend by force.²⁵ A few days later the Polish General Staff drew up Poland’s war plan. Polish armies would fight a defensive withdrawal in the face of Germany’s initial assault to prepared positions on the main rivers of Poland, where they would regroup and defend Warsaw until the winter rains or Western help brought the German offensive to a halt. They anticipated two weeks of military uncertainty, even chaos, to be followed by a stubborn defence.²⁶

There was an element of the hopelessly heroic in Poland’s stand. Up to the very outbreak of war the Polish leaders clung to the belief that Poland’s cause was not a lost one. This was not mere perversity. Beck recognized clearly that Danzig was not really the issue at all: ‘these matters only served as a pretext’.²⁷ The Poles had watched as Germany advanced into Austria, then Czechoslovakia, carefully preparing each step, starting with modest issues that turned inexorably into an ultimatum. After Munich they were well aware of the pressure put by Germany on the rump Czech state and the tactic of playing off one race against another, first Sudeten German against Czech, then Czech against Slovak. Beck needed no special insight to grasp that the ‘general settlement’ proposed by Ribbentrop in October 1938 was the likely prelude to a real challenge to Poland’s independence. Even if Beck had been willing to make concessions to Germany, Polish public opinion was overwhelmingly hostile to appeasement. Whatever else divided Poles, they were agreed on the fact that they did not want to be ruled by anyone else, German or Russian. When the American journalist William Shirer talked to Polish workers in Gdynia later in 1939, he found a strong resolution: ‘We’re ready. We will fight. We were born under German rule in this neighbourhood and we’d rather be dead than go through it again.’²⁸ During the course of German–Polish negotiations Polish nationalism erupted in violence. In Danzig German students fought Polish. In February anti-German demonstrations took place in all Poland’s main cities, Warsaw, Poznan, Lvov, Cracow. Polish authorities began to arrest German nationalists; from May German schools and businesses were closed down. Thousands of Germans fled from Poland to the Reich. Public opinion in Poland was solidly opposed to making concessions. Throughout the period up to the actual outbreak of war the Polish government made no departure from the stand declared by Beck in March. The choice was simply a question of Polish independence or ‘reduction to the role of a German vassal’.²⁹

The British decision to fight for Poland was for the most part taken independently of the Polish one. Until April the British did not even know clearly what was at issue between Poland and Germany, nor of the decisions taken by the Polish government and armed forces. The British view was governed not by the question of Danzig or Poland at all, but by the behaviour of Germany. Until March 1939 relations between Britain and Poland remained cool. But when Germany invaded and occupied the remainder of the Czech state on 15 March in defiance of the Munich agreement, the British government were determined to find an issue that would let them state clearly to Hitler that he would no longer be able to expand in Europe on his own terms. Ministers had already begun to think of some general eastern pact which would include both Poland and Russia, a tactic that indicated how little the British understood Polish politics. The Poles indicated their hostility to any agreement that included Russia, but since it seemed from secret intelligence that Poland might be Hitler’s next intended victim, the British arrived instead at the idea of a unilateral guarantee of Poland’s independence. The Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, announced the guarantee in Parliament on 31 March. It was intended to quiet domestic critics of British policy, as the Polish ambassador in Paris pointed out to Warsaw; and it was intended to show Hitler that Britain would tolerate no more.

The Polish reaction to the guarantee was wary. The Polish ambassador in London admitted in his memoirs that he had had virtually nothing to do with acquiring it, despite the congratulations that poured in. The fear in Warsaw was that acceptance of the guarantee would make war more certain, and would tie Poland too closely to the policies of a foreign power after all her efforts at independence. There was a subsidiary fear: that Britain was not in earnest and that Poland’s future was simply a plaything again in the political squabbles of the great powers. Beck took the guarantee, he told the Romanian Foreign Minister, as a ‘reinsurance’, in the hope that firm Western ties would constitute a further and powerful deterrence to German ambitions.³⁰ But to avoid the appearance of mere dependence on Western goodwill, Beck insisted on making the agreement a mutual one between equal partners, Poland in return guaranteeing the frontiers of Western Europe against aggression. A similar agreement was reached with a much less enthusiastic France, who only agreed to follow the British line on condition that Britain also guarantee Romania and begin peacetime conscription.

Poland’s sceptical view of Western assistance never entirely evaporated, but as the crisis with Germany deepened it became clearer that Britain was committed to her pledge in Eastern Europe. The Poles became convinced that if it came to war the West would actively intervene. Staff talks were undertaken between the two sides. In May the French promised to begin an offensive against Germany on the fifteenth day after a German attack on Poland ‘with the bulk of her forces’. Both Britain and France promised to begin bombing attacks on Germany immediately war broke out to weaken German morale.³¹ But in practice the West had no intention of giving Poland serious assistance. Even before the guarantee was given Halifax admitted that ‘there was probably no way in which France and ourselves could prevent Poland from being overrun’.³² The promise to bomb Germany was ruled out by the agreement between Britain and France to avoid provoking aerial counter-attacks on their own populations. The Royal Navy was needed elsewhere, Poland was told, to safeguard imperial sea routes. The agreement in May to start a French offensive was never formally accepted in Paris. In July, General Gamelin, who first made the promise to the Poles, told the British Chief of the General Staff: ‘we have every interest in the war beginning in the east and becoming a general conflict only little by little …’. Secret Anglo-French planning for war with Germany was based on the assumption of a long war in which Poland could only be saved after final victory over Germany. In July the two allies agreed that ‘the fate of Poland’ would ‘depend upon the ultimate outcome of the war … and not on our ability to relieve pressure on Poland at the outset’.³³ As a result the Polish requests for financial help and military equipment were either turned down or substantially reduced. Instead of a credit of £60 million requested by the Poles in May, the British government agreed in July to give only £8 million. Not until 7 September, a week after the German attack, did Britain finally agree to make cash sums available, and by then it was too late.³⁴

The failure to provide any real assistance to Poland, and the dishonesty of the Anglo-French strategic promises to the Poles, indicated how little Poland mattered in herself in the calculations of the great powers. Poland was buoyed up with promises of aid to prevent her from reaching a separate agreement with Hitler. Polish forces, which were regarded in the West favourably enough, were important to the extent that they contributed to the bargaining power of the Western powers as they tried to deter Hitler into compromise during 1939. Danzig mattered even less. Not until July did the British and French agree half-heartedly that a German seizure of Danzig alone was even a cause for war. The guarantees had talked only of the ‘independence’ of Poland, which the West viewed as a commitment which could be treated flexibly. During the whole period of crisis the Western powers assumed that a negotiated settlement of the Danzig problem on its own was a possibility. What the Western states would not tolerate was unilateral and violent action by German forces anywhere else in Europe, not because Poland in itself was a cause worth fighting for, but because German violence was thought to represent a profound threat to Western political interests, to the values of Western civilization and to the balance of power on which the Western position rested. The Western powers would have fought Germany for any other state in 1939. Polish interests were entirely subordinate to their own.

³⁵