In any number of European history books, 1939 is the year when ‘the world went again to war’, or words to that effect. In all chronologies except those once published in the USSR, it marks the ‘outbreak of the Second World War’. This only proves how self-centred Europeans can be. War had been on the march in the world for eight years past. The Japanese had invaded Manchuria in 1931, and had been warring in central China since 1937. From August 1938 they were embroiled in fighting on the Mongolian frontier against the Soviet Red Army. As part of this conflict, Japan had joined Germany and Italy as one of the Axis Powers. What happened in 1939, therefore, was simply the addition of Europe to the existing theatres of war. It gave a second, European dimension to campaigns which hitherto were summarized, to quote the Japanese slogan, as ‘Asia for the Asiatics’. In this sense, it turned a regional war into a global one. It has also been called ‘Hitler’s War’. This too is inaccurate.
By 1939 general rearmament was greatly adding to the strains. All the powers were rearming. Two years before, on Churchill’s insistence, Britain had taken the decision to expand and to re-equip the RAF. This was the decision which would ensure her survival. At the same time France had created a new Ministry of Defence, and had nationalized the great Schneider-Creusot concern. This was a sign that European governments were preparing for a protracted conflict in which industrial strength would be every bit as decisive as trained men. On this score, specialist studies indicated the dramatic changes which had occurred in the last decade.
| | USA | UK | France | Germany | USSR |
| Production (1938) (1932 GNP = 100%) | 153 | 143 | 108 | 211 | 258 |
| Relative manufacturing strength(World output = 100%) 1929 | 43.2 | 9.4 | 6.6 | 11 | 5 |
| 1938 | 28.7 | 9.2 | 4.5 | 13.2 | 17.6 |
| Military expenditure (1933–8) (£ million) | 1,175 | 1,201 | 1,008 | 3,540 | 2,808 |
| Relative war potential (1937) (World = 100%) | 41.7 | 10.2 | 4.2 | 14.4 | 14.0 56 |
Estimates no doubt varied. But the British figures underlined several stark facts. The totalitarian powers had suffered from the Depression much less than the Western democracies had. Their military expenditure was twice as great as that of all the Western Powers put together. Their ‘relative war potential’—which was a calculation based on the ability to translate industrial strength into military power through indices such as machine-tool levels—was roughly equal, and was separately equivalent to that of Britain and France combined. Italy hardly entered the reckoning. The RWP of Japan, was put, somewhat derisively at 3.5 per cent. All the other countries in the world added up to barely 10 per cent.
It took no genius to draw the conclusions: Stalin and Hitler were already in possession of war machines that far outstripped anything else in Europe. If the USA remained aloof, the Western Powers would be hard pressed to contain either Stalin or Hitler. If Stalin and Hitler joined forces, the West would be powerless to stop them. All eyes were, or should have been, on Stalin and Hitler, and on the unhappy countries trapped between them. Everything else was secondary.
Stalin’s intentions in 1939 were governed by factors which are not always fully discussed. Professional historians, since they never gained access to the documentation, have often pretended that the subject does not exist. But it is not impossible to reconstruct its outlines. Generally speaking, the internal revolution of the USSR was reaching a plateau of relative stability, and the
Vozhd’
could look forward with confidence to more active foreign involvement. The most vulnerable years of the first Five-Year Plans and Collectivization had been passed; the Great Terror was drawing to a close; and a rearmed Red Army could already be rated as one of Europe’s mightiest formations. However, two important inhibitions remained. The last phase of the Purges, which had been directed against the officer corps, was still incomplete; in 1939 the killing of the old military cadres was still in progress. And the Red Army was still engaged against the Japanese in Mongolia. Stalin, forever cautious, calculating, and secretive, was unlikely to commit himself to a major adventure in Europe until the new army cadres were trained and the Japanese conflict had been resolved. His obvious objective in the first instance was to lure Germany into a war with the Western Powers, whilst the USSR garnered its strength.
57
Hitler’s position was not so cramped. He had recently gained full control of the Wehrmacht, and he had no military commitments. He now held the offices of both War Minister and Commander-in-Chief. He had cut out all opposition in the General Staff; and after the dismissal of Dr Schacht had taken direct control of German industry. His protégé in Spain was poised for victory, and his own triumph at Munich had wrecked the defence plans of his Eastern neighbours. His minions were stirring up trouble all along the line—in Klajpéda (Memel) in Lithuania, in the Free City of Danzig, in Poland’s German community, and in Slovakia, where a local nationalist movement was looking to Berlin for assistance. He had no definite war plans for the coming season; but as he pored over the outspread map in front of the plate-glass window of the ‘Eagle’s Nest’ at
Berchtesgaden, it must have seemed that Europe was full of opportunities. On which miserable prey would the Eagle choose to swoop?
Early in 1939 Hitler’s preference was still for some sort of deal with Poland. Three weeks after Munich he had called the Polish Ambassador to Berchtesgaden and had outlined the possibilities. It was the culmination of long preparations which had taken Göring on several hunting trips to the Polish forests, and which had led communist propaganda to assume that a Nazi-Polish alliance was already in existence.
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Hitler’s proposals centred on the idea that if the Poles would cede their rights in Danzig, and permit the building of the Berlin-Königsberg autobahn across Polish territory, they could join in a favourable political and economic association directed against the Soviet Union. The unspoken threat did not have to be spelled out. If the Poles were foolish enough to refuse, then Hitler would take Danzig anyhow and might seek a political and economic realignment with the USSR, directed against Poland. One has to assume that Hitler’s well-known racial and ideological prejudices would have led him to expect an early acceptance. After all, since the Polish colonels had to contend with the largest Jewish community in Europe, and since Poland was fiercely anti-communist, it must have seemed to him that Poland and Nazi Germany were natural partners.
Unfortunately, neither Hider nor those who advised him knew much about Poland’s mettle. They did not know that Polish nationalism was every bit as hostile to Germany as to Russia. They did not know that Polish colonels could feel defensive about their handling of the Jewish Question, especially when foreigners interfered. Above all, they did not understand that the response of Marshal Pilsudski’s heirs would be completely different from that of Chamberlain and Beneš. The colonels were not going to bow and scrape to an ex-Austrian ex-corporal. Their instinct was to fight, and to go down fighting. Every single Polish official who had to deal with Nazi and Soviet threats in 1939 had been reared on the Marshal’s moral testament: ‘To be defeated, but not to surrender, that is victory.’
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So the Fiihrer was kept kicking his heels. The weeks passed; Poland pointedly opened ‘trade and friendship talks’ with the USSR; Berlin’s proposals were left unanswered. On 21 March 1939, a week after the collapse of Czechoslovakia, the Polish Ambassador was called in again and told that the Führer was furious at the lack of progress. On 28 March Germany renounced the non-aggression pact with Poland. Nazi propaganda switched to the Danzig problem, and complained of the intolerable oppression of the German minority in Poland. On 31 March Poland received from Great Britain an unsolicited Guarantee of its independence. Hitler’s response, on 3 April, was to issue confidential directives for planning the seizure of Danzig and for possible war with Poland, [
SUSANIN
]
In the mean time, prize after prize fell into the Führer’s lap. On 10 March the autonomous Slovak Government was declared deposed by the central Czechoslovak authorities in Prague; and the offended Slovak leader, Father Tišo, appealed to the Führer for protection. Then the Czechoslovak President begged for an interview at Berchtesgaden. After a terrible drubbing before the plate-glass
window, and one of Hitler’s most histrionic performances, during which the unconscious visitor had to be revived by injections, President Hācha meekly accepted that the break-up of his country was unavoidable. Bohemia and Moravia were to be turned into a Nazi Protectorate; Slovakia was to be a sovereign republic; Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia was to be ceded to Hungary. Hitler drove in triumph into Prague, as he had driven to Vienna, without a shot being fired. On the 21st German troops seized Lithuanian Memel. This was the point at which Chamberlain finally grasped the truth that Hitler was not’a man of his word’. The British Guarantee of Poland, an act of bluff taken from a position of weakness, was the product of his belated realization. To cap it all, the Hungarians seized Ruthenia without anyone’s permission. On Good Friday, 2 April, the Italian army invaded Albania. Europe was already at war.
SUSANIN
O
N
26 February 1939 the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow resounded to a lavish revival of Russia’s most popular opera. Glinka’s
A Life for the Tsar
(1836) had lain dormant since the Bolshevik Revolution; and a brief production of it in 1924, under the title of
For Hammer and Sickle
, had not prospered. But re-equipped with a politically correct libretto and yet another title,
Ivan Susanin
, it could now recover the vast popularity of pre-revolutionary decades.
1
It was the clearest sign that the Party’s line had shifted to embrace traditional Russian nationalism.
Glinka’s opera had been an ideological creature from the start. Described as a ‘patriotic, heroic-tragic opera’, it had been composed in the aftermath of the Polish Rising of 1830–1, reflecting the composer’s ‘determination to embody state ideology in symbolic sound’.
2
The libretto is set in the year 1613, at the moment when the founder of the Romanov dynasty was struggling to bring order from the chaos of the Time of Troubles (see p. 557). In the best tradition of ‘rescue opera’, it tells the tale of a good Russian peasant, Susanin, who saves the Tsar from the clutches of the dastardly Polish invaders. In this, it closely follows a patriotic textbook,
Russian History for the Purposes of Upbringing
(1817), compiled by the composer’s brother.
Glinka’s aesthetic concept was to use the dichotomy of Russian heroes and Polish villains throughout the spectacle. There are two sets of leading characters, two alternating choruses—Polish and Russian: two contrasting scenographic and musical styles. The faceless Poles are characterized by excess, singing and dancing exclusively in a formal collective to the melodies of the
polonez
, the
mazurka
, and the
krakowiak
. The Russians sing either charming folk-songs or romantic lyrics in the fashionable ‘Italo-Russian style’. Nothing is spared to stress the political message.
After Susanin’s murder, the epilogue reaches a climax with the scene of Mikhail Romanov’s triumphant entry into Red Square. Here the music changes to that of a sacred ‘hymn-march’, the words to those of a super-patriotic anthem:
Slav’sya, slav’sya, nash ruskiy Tsar’,
Gospodom danniy nam Tsar-gosudar.
Da budet bessmyerten tvoy tsarskiy rod.
Da im blagodenstvuyet russkiy narod.
(Glory be to our Russian Tsar, | To our God-given Tsar-Ruler. | May thy imperial clan be deathless! | May the Russian nation grant them blessing.)
In the 1939 production the anthem was duly modified:
Slav’sya, Slav’sya ty Rus’ moyal
Slav’sya ty, russkaya nasha zemlyal
Da budet vo veki vekov silna
Lyubimaya nasha rodnaya strana.
(Glory be to Thee, my Rus’ | Glory to Thee our Russian land | May our beloved native country | For ever and ever be strong.)
The power of opera harnessed to nationalism is most frequently discussed in relation to Wagner. But with Glinka the connection is still more explicit. Indeed, sensitivity to Russian nationalism determined where and when the opera could be staged. In Tsarist Russia it became the automatic choice for the opening night of each operatic season in Moscow and St Petersburg. By 1879 it had attained its 500th performance. It was staged in Prague, in Czech, in 1866; in Riga, in Latvian, in 1878; and at the German Theatre in Posen, Prussia, in 1899. But it never found an audience in Warsaw or Cracow. Most significantly, in February 1940, on the first anniversary of its revival in Moscow, it received its première under Nazi auspices in Berlin.
Faced with a specific commitment to Poland, the Western Powers now sought to put some practical measures into place. In April and May an inter-Allied mission visited Warsaw. It established a firm understanding that, in the event of a German attack on Poland, the task of the Polish army was to hold back the Wehrmacht whilst an Allied counter-attack was prepared in the West. General Gamelin was quite specific: on the fifteenth day after mobilization at the latest, ‘le gros de nos forces’, ‘the bulk of our forces’, would be thrown across the Franco-German frontier. Another military mission was sent to Moscow, to discuss cooperation with the Red Army. Long before they sailed on 5 August on a slow boat to Leningrad, in blissful ignorance of the main play, Hitler and Stalin had decided to settle the Polish Crisis on their own.