So it is argued at TAC:
Had Britain not given a war guarantee to Poland in March 1939, then declared war on September 3, bringing in South Africa, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, and the United States, a German-Polish war might never have become a six-year world war in which fifty million would perish.A false report? Here's what I could gather from Wikipedia:
Thus did the British government, in panic over a false report about a German invasion of Poland that was neither planned nor prepared, give a war guarantee to a dictatorship it did not trust, in a part of Europe where it had no vital interests, committing itself to a war it could not win.
There is some debate towards the claim that Poland had, in 1933, tried to get France to join it in preventive attack after Nazis won in Germany[2] Tensions had existed between Poland and Germany for some time in regards to the Free City of Danzig and the Polish Corridor. This had been settled in 1934 by a non-aggression pact but in spring of 1939, tensions rose again. Finally, after issuing several proposals, Germany declared that diplomatic measures had been exhausted, and shortly after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had been signed, invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Britain and France had previously warned that they would honor their alliances to Poland and issued an ultimatum to Germany: withdraw or war would be declared. Germany declined, and what became World War II was declared by the British and French, without entering the war effectively. The Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east on September 17.So folks at TAC believe that the Polish dictatorship should have been left to its own devices against Hitler and the Soviet Union in mid 1939? What would have happened next? Would the rest of Europe would have been safe? For how long?
Let's review more of what happened:
In March 1938 Germany annexed Austria, again provoking little response from other European powers.[27] Encouraged, Hitler began pressing German claims on the Sudetenland, an area of Czechoslovakia with a predominantly ethnic German population; France and Britain conceded this territory to him, against the wishes of the Czechoslovak government, in exchange for a promise of no further territorial demands.[28] However, soon after that, Germany and Italy forced Czechoslovakia to cede additional territory to Hungary and Poland. In March 1939 Germany invaded the rump of Czechoslovakia and subsequently split it into the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the pro-German Slovak Republic.I don't see how you can stop this train by being more appeasing of Nazi Germany and letting them split Poland with the USSR unopposed.
Alarmed, and with Hitler making further demands on Danzig, France and Britain guaranteed their support for Polish independence; when Italy conquered Albania in April 1939, the same guarantee was extended to Romania and Greece.[29] Shortly after the Franco-British pledge to Poland, Germany and Italy formalized their own alliance with the Pact of Steel.[30]
In August 1939 Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact.[31] This treaty included a secret protocol to split Poland and Eastern Europe into separate spheres of influence.[32]
On September 1, 1939, Adolf Hitler launched his invasion of Poland and World War II broke out. France, Britain, and the countries of the Commonwealth declared war on Germany but provided little military support to Poland other than a small French attack into the Saarland.[33] On September 17, 1939, after signing an armistice with Japan, the Soviets launched their own invasion of Poland.[34] By early October, the campaign ended with division of Poland among Germany, the Soviet Union, Lithuania and Slovakia,[35] although officially Poland never surrendered.
At the same time as the battle in Poland, Japan launched its first attack against Changsha, a strategically important Chinese city, but was repulsed by early October.[36]
Following the invasion of Poland, the Soviet Union began moving troops into the Baltic States. Finnish resistance to similar pressure by the Soviet Union in late November led to the four-month Winter War, ending with Finnish concessions.[37] France and the United Kingdom, treating the Soviet attack on Finland as tantamount to entering the war on the side of the Germans, responded to the Soviet invasion by supporting its expulsion from the League of Nations. Though China had the authority to veto such an action, it was unwilling to alienate itself from either the Western powers or the Soviet Union and instead abstained. The Soviet Union was displeased by this course of action and as a result suspended all military aid to China.[38] By June 1940, the Soviet Armed Forces completed the occupation of the Baltic States.[39]
In Western Europe, British troops deployed to the Continent, but neither Germany nor the Allies launched direct attacks on the other. The Soviet Union and Germany entered a trade pact in February of 1940, pursuant to which the Soviets received German military and industrial equipment in exchange for supplying raw materials to Germany to help circumvent a British blockade.[40] In April, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway to secure shipments of iron-ore from Sweden which the allies would try to disrupt. Denmark immediately capitulated, and despite Allied support, Norway was conquered within two months.[41] British discontent over the Norwegian campaign led to the replacement of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain by Winston Churchill on May 10, 1940.[42]
The TAC piece says:
..Hitler never wanted war with Britain. Hitler wanted absolute power in Germany. Hitler wanted to overturn the Versailles Treaty. Hitler wanted to restore lands to Germany. Hitler wanted to enlarge the German empire to the east. Hitler wanted to cleanse Germany of Jews. Hitler wanted to destroy Bolshevism. Hitler wanted Germany to achieve economic self-sufficiency in Europe. Hitler wanted to go down in history as “the greatest German of them all.” But Hitler never wanted war with Britain. To Hitler: “Great Britain was Germany’s natural ally and the nation and empire he most admired. He did not covet British colonies. He did not want or seek a fleet to rival the Royal Navy. He did not wish to bring down the British Empire. He was prepared to appease Britain to make her a friend of Germany.”Right--so is TAC ok with not stopping the train? As long as Britain and the US were safe, we shouldn't intervene? TAC would tolerate Germany and the USSR controlling the rest of Europe—or at least Eastern Europe—and effectively say "c'est la vie, we're being good non-interventionists!".
..Hitler was not a threat to the United States. The German Luftwaffe lost the Battle of Britain to the Royal Air Force; the German Navy was no match for Britain’s Royal Navy (”The Navy – what need have we of that?,” said Hitler in 1936). At the start of the war, Germany had only two battleships. The Bismarck had not been built yet – and it would be sunk on its maiden voyage. There were no troopships, landing barges, or transports for tanks and artillery. If Hitler could not cross the English Channel and conquer Great Britain, how could he possibly have been a threat to America? Buchanan dismisses Germany’s supposed plans “to build a massive surface fleet, develop a trans-atlantic bomber, and procure naval bases” as “comic-book history.” The historical truth is that “there are no known German plans to acquire the thousand ships needed to convey and convoy such an army and its artillery, tanks, planes, guns, munitions, equipment, fuel, and food across the Atlantic.” And as Buchanan points out about German bombers: “A trip over the Atlantic and back would require twenty hours of flying to drop a five-ton load on New York.” And if even today the U.S. Air Force doesn’t have a bomber that can fly round trip from the Midwest to Germany without refueling, how could German bombers in the 1940s have possibly bombed the United States and returned to Germany when air-to-air fueling had not yet been invented?
Hmm. Perhaps in this scenario Germany would have split Eastern Europe with the USSR and then had its own protracted conflict with the Soviets. I'm not sure what Italy would have done, absent the Pact of Steel. Assuming Japan went forward with Pearl Harbor, the War in the Pacific would still have happened. But maybe TAC thinks that in this scenario Japan would somehow have been content to rule China and other Pacific lands.
I do take TAC's points about Germany being no threat to Britain and the US in 1939, but I think they've got a lot more explaining to do if they want us to believe that leaving Poland to its own devices would have saved lives and prevented the war from escalating as far as it did.
Shallow thinking by Pat Buchanan. There are all kinds of alternative history science fiction works that have looked into various World War Two scenarios with quite a bit more thought than Buchanan.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with that kind of speculation is if you change the base circumstances that led to a particular future, you initiate an entirely new chain of events. It is quite possible that Hitler would have become a far greater threat to the U.S. if war had not occurred in 1939. Look at the damage he managed to inflict even though Germany wasn't really even prepared for war in 1939.
Given the nature of Hitler & Nazism, it is likely that had war not occurred in 1939, some other crisis might have triggered one later. And at that time we may have faced a far stronger Germany. U.S. power expanding massively during WW2, and we were able to meet the threat of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Would we have been better off facing a gigantic, nuclear-armed Nazi Empire ruling the European continent in 1946?
People with an ideological agenda like Buchanan only look at alternative histories that fit their preconceived notions, and ignore other possibilities that don't fit their theories.