The taking of Czechoslovakia
The Anschluss outflanked the next state on Hitler’s list, Czechoslovakia. Once again Hitler could make use of national self-determination to confuse the issue, as 3,500,000 German-speakers organized by another Nazi henchman, Konrad Henlein, inhabited the Czech borderlands in the Sudeten Mountains. Already on February 20, before the Anschluss, Hitler had denounced the Czechs for alleged persecution of this German minority, and on April 21 he ordered Keitel to prepare for the invasion of Czechoslovakia by October even if the French should intervene. Chamberlain was intent on appeasing Hitler, but this meant “educating” him to seek redress of grievances through negotiation, not force. He issued a stern warning to Germany during the spring war scare while pressuring Beneš to compromise with Henlein. Germany, however, had instructed Henlein to display obstinacy so as to prevent agreement. In August a worried British Cabinet dispatched the elderly Lord Walter Runciman to mediate, but Henlein rejected the program of concessions he finally arranged with Beneš. As the prospect of war increased, the British appeasers grew more frantic. In the spring the editor of the leftist New Statesman thought “armed resistance to the dictators was now useless. If there was a war we should lose it.” General Edmund Ironside, ruing the prime minister’s reluctance to rearm, sneered that “Chamberlain is of course right. . . . We cannot expose ourselves now to a German attack. We simply commit suicide if we do.” And a shocking Times editorial called for the partition of Czechoslovakia, a view shared by Hitler at the Nürnberg party rally, where he condemned “Czechia” as an “artificial state.” Chamberlain then journeyed to Berchtesgaden and proposed to give the Germans all they demanded. Hitler, nonplussed, spoke of the cession of all Sudeten areas at least 80 percent German and agreed not to invade while Chamberlain won over Paris and Prague.
The French Cabinet of Édouard Daladier and Georges-Étienne Bonnet agreed, after the latter’s frantic pleas to Roosevelt failed to shake American isolation. The Czechs, however, resisted handing over their border fortifications to Hitler until September 21, when the British and French made it clear that they would not fight for the Sudetenland. Chamberlain flew to Bad Godesberg the next day only to be met with a new demand that the entire Sudetenland be ceded to Germany within a week. The Czechs, fully mobilized as of the 23rd, refused, and Chamberlain returned home in a funk: “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.” But his sorrowful address to Parliament was interrupted by the news that Mussolini had proposed a conference to settle the crisis peacefully. Hitler agreed, having seen how little enthusiasm there was in Germany for war and on the advice of Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and the generals. Chamberlain and Daladier, elated, flew to Munich on September 29.
The awkward and pitiful Munich Conference ended on the 30th in a compromise prearranged between the two dictators. The Czechs were to evacuate all regions indicated by an international commission (subsequently dominated by the Germans) by October 10 and were given no recourse—the agreement was final. Poland took the opportunity to grab the Teschen district disputed since 1919. Czechoslovakia was no longer a viable state, and Beneš resigned the presidency in despair. In return, Hitler promised no more territorial demands in Europe and consultations with Britain in case of any future threat to peace. Chamberlain was ecstatic.
Why did the Western powers abandon Czechoslovakia, which, by dint of its geography, democracy, military potential (more than 30 divisions and the Škoda arms works), and commitment to collective security, could rightly be called “the keystone of interwar Europe”? No completely persuasive answer is possible, but this height of appeasement can be accounted for by politics, principles, and pragmatism. There is no question that the Munich settlement was extremely popular. Chamberlain returned to London claiming “peace for our time” and was greeted by applauding throngs. So was Daladier. The relief was so evident even in Germany that Hitler swore he would allow no more meddling by “English governesses” to cheat him of his war. Of course, the euphoria was not universal: aside from the Czechs, who wept in the streets, Churchill spoke for a growing minority when he observed that the British Empire had just suffered its worst military defeat and had not fired a shot.
Could Czechoslovakia have been defended? Or was Munich a necessary evil to buy time for Britain to rearm? Certainly British air defenses were unready, while France’s scarcely existed, and the strength of the Luftwaffe, so recently discounted by the British Cabinet, was now exaggerated. The French and Czech armies still outnumbered the German, but French intelligence also magnified German strength, while the army had no plans for invading Germany in support of the Czechs. The Munich powers were criticized for ignoring the U.S.S.R., which had claimed readiness to honour its alliance with Prague. The U.S.S.R., however, would hardly confront Germany unless the Western powers were already engaged, and the ways open to them were few without transit rights across Poland. The West discounted Soviet military effectiveness in light of Stalin’s 1937 purge of his entire officer corps down to battalion level. The Soviets were also distracted by division-scale fighting that broke out with Japanese forces on the Manchurian border in July–August 1938. At best, a few squadrons of Soviet planes might have been sent to Prague.
Of course, the moral cause of liberating the Sudeten Germans was ludicrous in view of the nature of the Nazi regime and was far outweighed by the moral lapse of deserting the doughty Czechs. (French ambassador André François-Poncet, upon reading the Munich accord, choked, “Thus does France treat her only allies who had remained faithful to her.”) That betrayal, in turn, seemed more than outweighed by the moral cause of preventing another war. In the end, the war was delayed only a year, and whatever the military realities of 1938 versus 1939, the appeasement policy was an exercise in self-delusion. Chamberlain and his ilk did not begin their reasoning with an analysis of Hitlerism and then work forward to a policy. Rather, they began with a policy based on abstract analysis of the causes of war, then worked backward to an image of Hitler that suited the needs of that policy. As a result, they gave Hitler far more than they ever gave the democratic statesmen of Weimar and, in the end, the freedom to launch the very war they slaved to prevent.
Hitler had no intention of honouring Munich. In October the Nazis encouraged the Slovak and Ruthene minorities in Czechoslovakia to set up autonomous governments and then in November awarded Hungary the 4,600 square miles north of the Danube taken from it in 1919. On March 13, 1939, Gestapo officers carried the Slovak leader Monsignor Jozef Tiso off to Berlin and deposited him in the presence of the Führer, who demanded that the Slovaks declare their independence at once. Tiso returned to Bratislava to inform the Slovak Diet that the only alternative to becoming a Nazi protectorate was invasion. They complied. All that remained to the new president in Prague, Emil Hácha, was the core region of Bohemia and Moravia. It was time, said Hácha with heavy sarcasm, “to consult our friends in Germany.” There Hitler subjected the elderly, broken-spirited man to a tirade that brought tears, a fainting spell, and finally a signature on a “request” that Bohemia and Moravia be incorporated into the Reich. The next day, March 16, German units occupied Prague, and Czechoslovakia ceased to exist.
Technology, strategy, and the outbreak of war
Rearmament and tactical planning
The Anglo-French defection from east-central Europe doomed the balance of power of interwar Europe. That the Western powers were unwilling and unable to defend the balance was in part the product of inadequate military spending and planning over the course of the decade. Still, decisions were taken in the last 24 months of peace that would shape the course of World War II.
The central problem posed for all defense establishments was how to respond to the lessons of the 1914–18 stalemate. The British simply determined not to send an army to the Continent again, the French to turn their border into an impregnable fortress, and the Germans to perfect and synthesize the tactics and technologies of the last war into a dynamic new style of warfare: the Blitzkrieg (“lightning war”). Blitzkrieg was especially suited to a country whose geostrategic position made likely a war on two fronts and dictated an offensive posture: a Schlieffen solution made plausible by the internal-combustion engine. Whether or not Hitler actually planned for the type of war with which the general staff was experimenting is debatable. Perhaps he only made a virtue of necessity, for the Nazis had by no means created a full war economy in the 1930s. Since Blitzkrieg attacks by tank columns, motorized infantry, and aircraft permitted the defeat of enemies one by one with lightning speed, it required only “armament in width,” not “armament in depth.” This in turn allowed Hitler to mollify the German people with a “guns and butter” economy, with each new conquest providing the resources for the next. Blitzkrieg also allowed Hitler to conclude that he might successfully defy other Great Powers whose combined resources dwarfed those of Germany. After Munich, German rearmament accelerated. Hitler may have been right to launch his war as soon as possible, on the calculation that only by seizing the resources of the entire continent could the Reich prevail against the British Empire or the Soviet Union.
After Versailles the British government had established the Ten-Year Rule as a rationale for holding down military spending: Each year it was determined that virtually no chance existed of war breaking out over the next decade. In 1931 expenditures were cut to the bone in response to the worldwide financial crisis. The following year, in response to Japanese expansion, the Ten-Year Rule was abolished, but Britain did not make even a gesture toward rearmament until 1935. These were “the years the locust hath eaten,” said Churchill. Understandably, British strategy fixed on the imperial threats from Japan and Italy and envisioned the dispatch of the Mediterranean fleet to Singapore. But Britain’s defensive posture, budgetary limits, and underestimation of Japan’s capabilities, especially in the air, made for a desultory buildup in battleships and cruisers rather than aircraft carriers. The British army in turn was tied up in garrisoning the empire; only two divisions were available for the Continent.
After March 1936 the Defence Requirements Committee recognized that home air defense must become Britain’s top priority and commanded development of a high-speed, single-wing fighter plane. But two years passed before Sir Warren Fisher finally persuaded the Air Ministry to concentrate on fighter defense in its Scheme M, adopted in November 1938. At the time of Munich, therefore, the Royal Air Force possessed only two squadrons of Spitfires and Hurricanes, lacked oxygen masks sufficient to allow pursuit above 15,000 feet, and had barely begun deployment of that new wonder, radar. Only after Hitler’s occupation of Prague was conscription reinstated (April 27, 1939) and a continental army of 32 divisions planned. Throughout the era of appeasement the British expected to resist Japan and come to terms with Germany. Instead, by dint of the mistaken choices in naval technology and the eleventh-hour attention to air defense, Britain would be humiliated by Japan and withstand Germany.
Of all the Great Powers, France most expected the next war to resemble the last and so came to rely on the doctrine of the continuous front, the Maginot Line, and the primacy of infantry and artillery. The Maginot Line was also a function of French demographic weakness vis-à-vis Germany, especially after military service was cut to one year in 1928. This siege mentality was the polar opposite of the French “cult of the attack” in 1914 and ensured that Colonel Charles de Gaulle’s 1934 book depicting an all-mechanized army of the future would be ignored. As late as 1939 the French war council insisted that “no new method of warfare has been evolved since the termination of the Great War.” Even though French military spending held steady through the Depression, France’s army and air force were ill-designed and not deployed for offense or mobile defense, even if their aged and hidebound commanders had had the will to conduct them.
Soviet preparations and technical choices also presaged the defeats to come in the early years of the war. Communist doctrine decreed that matériel, not generalship, was decisive in war, and Stalin’s Five-Year plans concentrated on steel, technology, and weapons. Soviet planners also benefited from the work of some outstanding aviation designers, whose experimental planes broke world records and whose fighters performed well in the early days of the Spanish war. But Stalin’s obsession with domestic security outweighed rational planning for national security. In 1937 Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and his weapons research teams were liquidated or consigned to the gulag. Then Stalin ordered the 1936-vintage fighter planes into mass production at the very time the Germans were upgrading their Messerschmidts. The Soviets were sufficiently impressed by Douhet’s theories to invest in heavy bombers that would be of marginal use against a Blitzkrieg and defenseless without fighter cover. Stalin’s advisers also misunderstood the use of tanks, placing them in the front line rather than in mobile reserves. These mistakes almost spelled the death of Bolshevism in 1941.
Little need be said of Italian preparations. Italy’s industrial base was so small, and its leaders so inept, that Mussolini had to order local Fascists to make a visual count of airplanes on fields around the country to contrive an estimate of his air strength. In August 1939, Ciano appealed to Mussolini not to join Hitler in unleashing war, given the deplorable state of Italian armed forces. This apprehensiveness was shared by the Italian generals and indeed by most military leaders of the 1930s. The Great War had revealed the vanity of planning, the vagaries of technical change, and the terrible cost of industrial war. In 1914 the generals had pushed for war while civilian leaders hung back; in the 1930s the roles were reversed. Only in Japan, which had won easy victories at little cost in 1914, did the military push for action.
