The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (68 page)

In 1934 and 1935, however, such a dilemma seemed disturbing but not acute. If Hitler’s regime was clearly an unpleasant one, he had shown himself surprisingly willing to negotiate a settlement with Poland; in any case, Germany was still considerably weaker in military terms than either France or Russia. Furthermore, the German effort to move into Austria following Dollfuss’s assassination in 1934 had provoked Mussolini to deploy troops on the Brenner Pass as a warning. The prospect of Italy being associated with the status quo powers was especially comforting to France, which sought to bring an anti-German coalition together in the “Stresa Front” of April 1935. At almost the same time, Stalin indicated that he, too, wished to associate with the “peace-loving” states, and by 1935 the Soviet Union had not only joined the League of Nations but had instituted its security pacts with Paris and Prague. Although Hitler had made plain his opposition to an “eastern Locarno,” it looked as if Germany was nicely contained on all sides. And in the Far East, Japan was quiet.
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By the second half of 1935, however, this encouraging scene was disintegrating fast without Hitler having lifted a finger. The differing Anglo-French perceptions of the “security problem” were already revealed in the British unease at France’s renewed links with Russia on the one hand and the French dismay at the Anglo-German naval agreement of June 1935 on the other. Both measures had been taken unilaterally
to gain extra security, France desiring to bring the USSR into the European balance, Britain eager to reconcile its naval needs in European waters and the Far East; but each step seemed to the other neighbor to give a wrong signal to Berlin.
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Even so, such contradictions were damaging but not catastrophic, which could not be said of Mussolini’s decision to invade Abyssinia following a series of local clashes and in vain pursuit of his own ambition to create a new Roman Empire. This, too, was a good example of a regional quarrel having extraordinarily broader ramifications. To the French, aghast at the idea of turning a new potential ally against Germany into a bitter foe, the whole Abyssinian episode was an unmitigated disaster: to allow a flagrant transgression of the League’s principles was disturbing, as was Mussolini’s muscle-flexing (for where might he strike next?); on the other hand, to drive Italy into the German camp would be an appalling act of folly in strictly
Realpolitik
terms—but the latter consideration was unlikely to sway the idealistic British.
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Yet Whitehall’s dilemma was at least as large, since it not only had to handle even greater public unease about Italy’s blatant transgression of League principles, but also had to worry about what Japan might do in the Far East if the West was engaged in a Mediterranean imbroglio. Whereas France feared that quarreling with Italy would tempt Hitler into the Rhineland, Britain suspected that it would encourage Japan to expand farther into Asia, the more especially since, at that exact time, Tokyo was on the point of denouncing the naval treaties and going for an unrestricted fleet buildup.
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In a larger sense, both were right; the difficulty, as usual, was in reconciling the immediate problem with the longer-term implication.

The French fears were proved correct first. The 1935 Anglo-French offer of a territorial readjustment in Northeastern Africa to Italy’s favor (the Hoare-Laval Pact) had caused British public opinion in particular to explode in moral indignation. Yet while the London and Paris governments were torn between responding to that mood, and still in private facing the overwhelmingly plausible strategic and economic reasons why they should not go to war with Italy, Hitler chose to order a reoccupation of the demilitarized Rhineland (March 1936). In strictly military terms, that was not such a blow; it was highly unlikely by then that France could have launched an offensive strike against Germany, and quite impossible for the British to have done so.
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But this further weakening of the Versailles settlement—and the total abandonment of the Locarno Treaty—raised the general issue of what was, or was not, an internationally acceptable way of altering the status quo. Because of the failure of its leading members to halt Mussolini’s aggression in 1935–1936, the League was now pretty much discredited; it played little or no role, for example, either in the Spanish Civil War or in Japan’s open assault upon China in 1937. If further
changes in the existing territorial order were going to be checked, or at least controlled, that could only be done by determined moves against the “revisionist” states by the major “status quo” powers.

To none of the latter, however, did the threat to resort to arms seem a practical possibility. Indeed, just as the fascist countries were coming closer together (in November 1937 Germany and Japan signed their anti-Comintern pact, shortly after Mussolini had proclaimed the Rome-Berlin axis), their potential opponents were becoming even more introspective and disunited.
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Despite American resentments at the Japanese invasion of China and the bombing of the U.S.S.
Panay
, 1937 was not a good year for Roosevelt to take decisive steps in overseas affairs even had he wished to: the economy had been hit by a renewed slump, and Congress was passing ever tighter neutrality legislation. Since all Roosevelt could offer was words of condemnation without any promise of action, his policies merely “tended to strengthen Anglo-French doubts about American reliability.”
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In a quite different way, Stalin also was concentrating upon domestic affairs, since his purges and show trials were then at their height. Although he cautiously extended aid to the Spanish republic in the Civil War, he was aware that many in the West disliked the “redshirts” even more than the “blackshirts,” and that it would be highly dangerous to be pushed forward into an open conflict with the Axis. Japan’s actions in the Far East, and the signing of the anti-Comintern pact, made him more cautious still.

Yet the Power worst affected of all in the years 1936–1937 was undoubtedly France. Not only was its economy sagging and its political scene so divided that some observers thought it close to civil war, but its own elaborate security system in Europe had been almost totally destroyed in a series of shattering blows. The German reoccupation of the Rhineland removed any lingering possibility that the French army could undertake offensive actions to put pressure upon Berlin; the country now seemed dangerously vulnerable to the Luftwaffe, just as the French air force was becoming obsolescent; the Abyssinian affair and the Rome-Berlin axis turned Italy from a potential ally into a most unpredictable and threatening foe; Belgium’s retreat into isolation dislocated existing plans for the defense of France’s northern frontiers, and there was no way (due to the cost) that the Maginot Line could be extended to close this gap; the Spanish Civil War raised the awful prospect of a fascist, pro-Axis state being created in France’s rear; and in eastern Europe, Yugoslavia was tacking closer toward Italy and the Little Entente seemed moribund.
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In these gloomy, near-paralyzing circumstances, the role of Great Britain became of critical importance, as Neville Chamberlain (in May 1937) replaced Baldwin as prime minister. Concerned at his country’s economic and strategical vulnerability and personally horrified at the
prospect of war, Chamberlain was determined to head off any future crisis in Europe by making “positive” offers toward satisfying the dictators’ grievances. Suspicious of the Soviet Union, disdainful of Roosevelt’s “verbiage,” impatient at what he felt was France’s confused diplomacy of intransigence and passivity, and regarding the League as totally ineffective, the prime minister embarked upon his own strategy to secure lasting peace by appeasement. Even before then, London had been making noises to Berlin about commercial and colonial concessions; Chamberlain’s contribution was to increase the pace by being willing to consider territorial changes in Europe itself. At the same time, and precisely because he saw in Germany the greatest danger, the prime minister was eager to improve relations with Italy in the hope of detaching that country from the Axis.
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All this was bound to be controversial—it caused,
inter alia
, the resignation of Chamberlain’s foreign secretary (Eden) early in 1938, criticism from the small but growing number of anti-appeasers at home, and increased suspicion in Washington and Moscow—but on the other hand it could well be argued that so many bold moves in the past history of diplomacy were also controversial. The real flaw in Chamberlain’s strategy, understood by some in Europe but not by the majority, was that Hitler was fundamentally
unappeasable
and determined upon a future territorial order which small-scale adjustments alone could never satisfy.

If that conclusion became clear by 1939, and still more by 1940–1941, it was not evident either to the British or even the French government in the crisis year of 1938. The takeover of Austria in the spring of that year was an unpleasant instance of Hitler’s fondness for unannounced moves, but could one really object to the principle of joining Germans with Germans? If anything, it merely intensified Chamberlain’s conviction that the issue of the German-speaking minority in Czechoslovakia had to be settled before that crisis brought the Powers up to, and over, the brink of war. Admittedly, the question of the Sudetenland was a much more contentious one—Czechoslovakia, too, had rights to a sovereignty which had been internationally guaranteed, and the western Powers’ desire to satisfy Hitler now seemed more influenced by negative selfish fears than by positive ideals—but the fact was that the Führer was the only leader at this time prepared to fight, and was indeed irritated that the prospect of smashing the Czechs was removed by the concessions he gained at the Munich conference. As ever, it took two to make a Great Power war; and in 1938 there was no willing opponent to Hitler.
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Because the political and public will for war was lacking in the west, it makes little sense here to enter into the long-lasting debate about what might have happened had Britain and France fought on Czechoslovakia’s behalf, although it is worth noting that the military balance was not as favorable to Germany as the various apologists of
appeasement suggested.
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What is clear, however, is that that balance swung even more in Hitler’s favor following the Munich settlement. The elimination of Czechoslovakia as a substantial middleweight European force by March 1939, the German acquisition of Czech armaments, factories, and raw materials, and Stalin’s increasing suspicion of the West outweighed the factors working in favor of London and Paris such as the considerable increases in British arms output, the more intimate Anglo-French military cooperation, or the swing in British and dominion opinion in favor of standing up to Hitler. At the same time, Chamberlain failed (January 1939) to detach Italy from the Axis, or to deter it from its own aggressions in the Balkans—even if Mussolini, for urgent reasons of his own, would not fight immediately alongside his fellow dictator in a Great Power war against the western nations.

When Hitler began to apply pressure upon Poland in the late spring of 1939, therefore, the possibilities of avoiding a conflict were less than in the previous year—and the prospects of an Anglo-French victory should war break out were
much
less. Germany’s annexation of the “rump” state of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and Italy’s move into Albania a month later had led the democracies, under mounting public pressure to “stop Hitler,” to offer guarantees to Poland, Greece, Rumania, and Turkey, thus tying western Europe to the fate of eastern Europe to a degree which the British at least had never before contemplated. Yet Poland could not be directly assisted by the western countries, and any
indirect
assistance was going to be small in a period when the French army had assumed the strategic defensive and the British were concentrating so much of their resources upon improved aerial defenses at home. The only direct aid which could be given to Poland must come from the east, and if Chamberlain’s government was unenthusiastic about agreements with Moscow, the Poles for their part were adamantly opposed to having the Red Army on their territory. Since Stalin’s overwhelming concern was to buy time and avoid a war, and Hitler’s need was to increase the pressure upon the western nations to abandon Poland, both dictators had a secular interest in doing a “deal” at Warsaw’s expense, whatever their own ideological differences. The shock announcement of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (August 23, 1939) not only enhanced Germany’s strategical position but also made a war over Poland virtually inevitable. This time “appeasement” was not an option open to London and Paris, even if the economic and military circumstances pointed (perhaps more than in the preceding years) to the avoidance of a Great Power conflict.
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The outbreak of the Second World War thus found Britain and France once again opposing Germany, and, as in 1914, a British expeditionary force was dispatched across the Channel while the Anglo-French navies imposed their maritime blockade.
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In so many other
respects, however, the strategical contours of this war were quite different from the previous one, and disadvantageous to the Allies. Not only was there no eastern front, but the political agreement between Berlin and Moscow to carve up Poland also led to commercial arrangements, so that an increasing flow of raw materials sent from Russia steadily obviated any effects which the blockade might have had upon the German economy. It was true that in the first year of the war, stocks of oil and other raw materials were still desperately low in Germany, but ersatz production, Swedish iron ore, and the growing supplies from Russia helped to bridge the gap. In addition, Allied inertia on the western front meant that there was little pressure upon German holdings of petroleum and ammunitions. Finally, there were no encumbrancing allies for Germany to prop up, like Austria-Hungary in the 1914–1918 war. Had Italy also joined in the conflict in September 1939, its own economic deficiencies might have posed an excessive strain upon the Reich’s slender stocks and, arguably, dislocated the chances for the German westward strike in 1940. To be sure, Italy’s participation would have complicated the Anglo-French position in the Mediterranean, but not perhaps by much, and Rome’s neutrality made it a useful conduit for German trade—which is why many of the planners in Berlin hoped that Mussolini would remain on the sidelines.
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