A World at Arms (12 page)

Furthermore, the new posture of early firm public opposition to any new German aggression might rally other allies. It became increasingly evident that not only New Zealand but also Australia and Canada were reversing their neutralist positions of 1938; it is a revealing coincidence that on August 25, 1939, MacKenzie King, the Prime Minister of Canada who had met Hitler in 1937, warned the latter that Canada would join England if it came to war.
³⁸
Even the Union of South Africa was shifting toward a position more favorable to siding with England, though in the event only a change in the government there would bring a divided country into the war by a narrow margin. Even the return of port facilities vital to the protection of British commerce had made no impact on the Irish Free State’s determination to remain neutral, and new issues would come to the fore there during the war; but at first London did hope that there would be support elsewhere for a firm front against further German moves.

The signing of a formal treaty between England and Poland, whose terms had been worked out in the spring of 1939, had been postponed pending an agreement between the Western Powers and the Soviet Union, it being assumed that the treaty with Poland would be subordinate to that with Russia. No one in the British government or military circles had any faith in the Soviet Union’s ability to mount offensive operations into Central Europe, a view much laughed at in retrospect but perhaps not quite so inaccurate as often assumed. That the Red army in 1944–45 could move into Central Europe vast armored forces supported by an enormous array of American trucks is hardly proof that such operations were a plausible contingency in 1939. Obviously the Soviet leadership did not think so: Stalin’s repeated efforts at a rapprochement with Germany suggest that his assessment of the situation was not so different from London’s view, that Russia could provide supplies and support to Poland as well as defend herself against attack but was not in a position to launch offensive operations across the zone of poor communications of eastern Poland. It was precisely for such support of Poland that Britain and France hoped; and as the Soviet Union steadily raised its demand during the 1939 negotiations, the Western Powers wanted at least to restrain Moscow from siding with Germany. As has already been mentioned, these hopes were dashed; but Russia’s aligning herself with Germany did not alter the fundamental perception of the London government that Germany had to be confronted, preferably with allies to disperse German strength, but if necessary without them.

The United States government had obtained accurate information on the Nazi-Soviet negotiations, primarily from a member of the German
embassy staff in Moscow. For obvious reasons, that information was kept a carefully guarded secret in Washington; but as the signing of a German–Soviet agreement looked increasingly likely–as opposed to the one between the Soviet Union and the Western Powers Roosevelt had urged on Stalin–Washington did tip off the London government. There, because of incompetence or Soviet infiltration in the Foreign Office Communications Department, the relevant telegram was not decyphered for days, so that the British government was taken by surprise when the forthcoming trip of von Ribbentrop to Moscow for the signing of a Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was announced.
³⁹

The British government, however, saw in this development no fundamental change in the basic situation: Germany would be more dangerous, not less so, as a result of finding a new friend. To make certain that no one in the German or Italian government drew false conclusions about British policy from this spectacular event, messages were promptly sent to Berlin and Rome making it clear that there would be no change in the British commitment to fight alongside Poland if Germany attacked that country. It was these messages which in Rome contributed to the realization that a general as opposed to a local East European war would indeed be brought on by a German move East and hence to the Italian refusal to participate. In Berlin such messages had led Hitler to believe it worth trying to make one more attempt to detach England from Poland by the promise of an alliance offer.

It was to underline the point made in Chamberlain’s letter of August 22 to Hitler that Germany should have no doubt whatever about England’s willingness to go to war–with a reference to the alleged German uncertainty about British policy in 1914–that London now moved quickly to sign the alliance with Poland. Once it had become obvious that there could be no British alliance with the Soviet Union, there was no point in holding up action on the other one; and last-minute drafting changes were made as quickly as possible. This meant that the text was ready for signing on August 25, and an announcement of the signature was made public at 5:35 p.m. that day. Hitler received the news, therefore,
after
he had sent the British ambassador off to London with his new promises and
after
the final order to attack on the following morning had already been given.

The German dictator had been surprised to learn of Italy’s unreadiness to participate and England’s renewed expression of resolution implied in the freshly signed alliance. Hoping to try once more to separate the Western Powers from Poland, he asked his military leaders whether it was feasible to stop the military machine already set in motion or if it were already too late. He was quite willing to go to war the next
day if his advisors believed that it was no longer possible to call back the troops. They, however, told him that counter–orders could still reach all the units in time, and such orders were thereupon issued. Some incidents involving German border crossings took place, so that it was obvious to careful observers that war had been intended for the 26th, but the faked provocations involving concentration camp inmates as well as the massive invasion forces were halted in time.
⁴⁰

Hitler had originally set his military advisors the target date of September 1 for the war; he had then moved the date up to August 26 because he wanted to begin as early as possible. He now explained to his naturally somewhat confused army Commander-in-Chief that the attack on Poland would take place on September 1 after all and that he might wait one more day, but that September 2 was the latest possible date;
⁴¹
thereafter problems with the weather would in Hitler’s view have prevented a single brief campaign against Poland. The intervening days were now available for renewed diplomatic moves to separate Britain and France from Poland, though in the end Hitler did not use all the days available by his own assessment of the situation. As soon as it became clear to him that the Western Powers would indeed intervene, he ordered the attack for the morning of September 1. Since he wanted the war to start as early as possible, he could see no point in waiting even the one day his own timetable allowed; a small but revealing indication of his order of priorities.

The agitated discussions of the last days of peace need not be reviewed here. They only confirmed the picture already obvious by August 25–if not earlier. Italy was not prepared to join Germany, and Hitler’s expression of willingness to fight England and France if they supported Poland in no way reassured Mussolini; that was precisely what he was worried about. The Polish government was no more willing to sign away its independence now than earlier, and there was no disposition in London to urge them to do so. A fairly negotiated settlement of outstanding difficulties was desired by both Warsaw and London; but the fact that the British government would not pass on to the Poles a German demand for the immediate appearance of a Polish negotiator until
after
the German deadline for his appearance had passed showed that there was no interest for capitulation in either capital. The French government was understandably shaken and disappointed about the Soviet Union’s aligning herself with Germany, but the Daladier government was resigned to war; the French Foreign Minister still had hopes of a last-minute compromise, but he was by this time rather isolated in the Cabinet.

No appeals from prospective neutrals could move Hitler. He not only would not put off war for one day, he was in such a hurry that he gave the orders to begin hostilities hours earlier than the German military timetable required.
⁴²
To justify war in the eyes of the German public, he shared in the preparation of demands on Poland that might sound reasonable to his people–and that he ordered withheld until after they were no longer valid. He would not again run the “danger” of having his ostensible demands agreed to, or made the basis for real negotiations, or be met with counter-offers. Now that there was no longer any chance of splitting the Western Powers from Poland, his focus of attention was on the German home front in the coming war, a reflection of his belief that it had been the collapse there which had produced defeat in the preceding great conflict. When von Ribbentrop refused to give a copy of the German demands to the British Ambassador at midnight of August 30–31, the two almost came to blows. Ambassador Henderson, who had long advocated concessions to Germany, recognized that here was a deliberately conceived alibi the German government had prepared for a war it was determined to start. No wonder Henderson was angry; von Ribbentrop on the other hand could see war ahead and went home beaming.
⁴³

On the morning of September 1 the German offensive into Poland began. When Hitler spoke to the Reichstag, Germany’s one-party parliament, that day, he blamed the breakdown of negotiations–in which he had refused to participate–on Poland; recounted the incidents along the border–which he had ordered staged the preceding night; and contrasted these evil deeds of others with the great generosity of his own demands–which he had carefully withheld until they had lapsed. To the thunderous applause of the representatives of the German people, he announced that Germany was once more at war.
⁴⁴

Almost every nation eventually participated in the new war, some as victims of attack, some as eager attackers themselves, some at the last moment in order to participate in the post-war world organization. A flood of blood and disaster of unprecedented magnitude had been let loose on the world. If the details of military operations and the localities of combat were often vastly different from those of World War I, the fearful anticipation that a new war would be as horrendous or quite likely even worse than the last proved all too accurate. There would be, however, no agitated discussion this time, as there had been after the crisis of 1914, of the question of who was responsible for the outbreak of war. It was all too clear that Germany had taken
the initiative and that others had tried, perhaps too much, but certainly very hard, to avert another great conflict. There would be no second “war guilt” debate.

Some of the developments in the great upheaval which changed the world were initiated and directed by Hitler’s Germany, but many flowed from the initiatives and reactions of other countries. The concept Hitler wanted to implement, of a succession of wars, each started on his own initiative against victims of his choosing, each isolated from the other, but victory in each one facilitating a German victory in the next, fell short of realization from the very beginning when England and France declared war in support of Poland. The failure of the French to mount an offensive in the West in September 1939 almost enabled him to return to his original concept. Germany attacked in the West in 1940 very much the way Hitler had intended after crushing Poland in an isolated war; and his agreement with the Soviet Union enabled him to conduct the campaign in the West with all his forces on one front for the last time in the whole war. But then his thrust was halted by England and soon thereafter the dimensions of the conflict were increasingly out of his control. Even as he marched his armies to their destruction at the hands of the Red Army by invading the Soviet Union, the United States loomed ever more menacing on the horizon. Japan’s advance in East Asia, urged insistently by Germany as a means of defeating Britain and diverting the United States from Europe, only contributed to the eventual arrival of American troops on German soil.

A critical element in Hitler’s inability to adjust to the altering world balance around him was the fact that he had set out to change it dramatically himself and was prepared for his country and its people to perish in the attempt rather than turn back. Though some may consider him insane for attempting to implement the doctrine of
Lebensraum,
of living space, it was the essence of his policies at all times. Even the reality of internal German migration
westward
did not deter Hitler from attempting to lay the foundation for an external migration
eastward.
On February 1, 1939, he had felt obliged to issue an edict to try to reverse the process of migration within the existing borders which was denuding Germany’s eastern provinces of their “Germanic” population.
⁴⁵
But even such a grudgingly admitted engagement of current reality was not allowed to intrude upon his vision of long-term policy aims. As Hitler explained to his military commanders on May 23, 1939, the object of war was not Danzig but the expansion of Germany’s
Lebensraum.
⁴⁶

The concept of revising the peace settlement of 1919 in Germany’s favor, which he had ridiculed in his writings, remained for him a foolish
and rejected alternative even as he used it in his propaganda. In mid-October 1939, at a time when Germany and the Soviet Union were urging the Western Powers to make peace on the basis of an acceptance of what Germany and Russia had done to Poland, the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, a great admirer of Germany, visited Hitler. The Fuhrer explained that peace would be possible only if the British gave up “the foolish idea of a restoration of Czechoslovakia.”
⁴⁷
The vital point dividing him from the Western Powers was not that of Germany taking over areas inhabited by Germans or people of German descent but rather the seizure by Germany of lands hitherto inhabited by
other
peoples who were to be enslaved or exterminated and replaced by Germans. Under the diplomatic and geographic circumstances of the time, the Czechs were the first and the Poles the second of these peoples, but it was the process which was both the key point in Hitler’s program and the galvanizing element in making his attack on Poland the occasion for a war wider than he preferred at that moment.