Read Online The Second World War by John Keegan - Free Book Online Page B

that honour and prudence demanded that they should not allow Czechoslovakia to be dismembered, they could see no way of protecting her except by military action of their own in the west, from which government and people in both countries shrank. Neither had yet modernised their forces, though they had begun reluctantly to rearm; more to the point, neither had yet developed the will to back protest with force, as was lamentably demonstrated by their succession of failures to implement collective action against aggressors through the League of Nations machinery – against Japan for its aggression in Manchuria in 1931 and in China in 1937, against Italy for its aggression against Ethiopia in 1936. Edouard Daladier and Neville Chamberlain, the French and British Prime Ministers, therefore counselled President Eduard Beneš of Czechoslovakia to acquiesce in Hitler’s demands, even though the cession of the Sudetenland meant the cession also of the country’s frontier fortifications; once surrendered, Czechoslovakia would have no protection whatsoever against further German demands. Nevertheless Benesβ felt obliged to agree, since the Western democracies would not stand by him. The crisis seemed to be settled, but on 22 September Hitler decided to harden his terms. Instead of waiting for an international commission to delimit the revised frontier, he demanded the Sudetenland at once. It was this turning of the screw which provoked the crisis called ‘Munich’, since it was there that Chamberlain and Daladier went to treat with Hitler again on 29-30 September, in a series of craven meetings that conceded him even more than he had initially demanded.
    Munich, it is generally said, marked ‘the end of appeasement’; certainly it sent Daladier and Chamberlain home, superficially relieved, but convinced – Chamberlain more strongly than Daladier – that rearmament must henceforth proceed apace. More accurately, however, Munich marked the moment when Hitler abandoned caution in his campaign of aggressive diplomacy and began to take the risks which would stiffen the will of the Western democracies to meet challenge with firm response and eventually force with force. The turning-point was Hitler’s treatment of browbeaten Czechoslovakia. Having seized the Sudetenland only six months before, on 11 March 1939 he arranged for the pro-German separatist party in the Slovakian half of what remained of the country to announce their secession and request that he become their protector. When the new Czech President, Emil Hacha, arrived in Berlin to protest, he was physically bullied into requesting a German protectorate over the whole of Czechoslovakia. The following day, 15 March, German troops marched into Prague just in time to form a guard of honour and a protective screen for Hitler when he entered the city on their heels.
    The rape of Czechoslovakia drove the democracies to act. The French cabinet agreed that when Hitler next moved he must be stopped. On 17 March Chamberlain publicly announced that if there were further attacks on small states Britain would resist ‘to the utmost of its power’, a clear warning that Hitler now risked war. Hitler did not believe or did not fear the threat. Since January he had been menacing Poland, to which belonged the largest slice of territory that had been German before 1918, in particular the ‘corridor’ which divided East Prussia and the German-speaking Free City of Danzig from the Reich heartland. The Poles doggedly resisted his threats and continued to do so even when on 23 March, as an earnest of intentions, he occupied the port of Memel, a former League of Nations territory on Poland’s border which had been German until 1918. They were chiefly sustained by the knowledge that Britain and France were now preparing to extend them a guarantee of protection; and on 31 March, eight days after publicly announcing that they would defend Belgium, Holland or Switzerland against attack, Britain