Introduction
The Czechoslovakian crisis has generated controversy almost
from the moment the Munich Conference ended on September 30, 1938. One of the main areas of contention was
established by Winston Churchill early on: the military position of Britain and
France relative to that of Germany.
Churchill and other critics of the Munich settlement, in which the two
Western Allies agreed to allow Germany to annex the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia,
argue that September 1938 was the last chance for Britain and France to stand
up to Hitler before Germany became powerful enough to defeat France and nearly
defeat Britain. Defenders of British Prime Minister Neville
Chamberlain and his "appeasement" of Hitler at Munich argue that only
the year-long "breathing space" afforded by Munich allowed Great
Britain to build up strong enough defenses to stave off defeat by a bare margin
in 1940. That two such diametrically opposed
interpretations have continued to attract strong support for five decades is an
indication of the extreme murkiness of the issue, which rests in large part on
counter-factual history -- what would have happened if Britain and France had
gone to war with Germany over Czechoslovakia in September 1938 rather than over
Poland in September 1939? As such, the
question is ultimately unanswerable.
A more fruitful line of inquiry is to examine the reasons
the British government chose the course it did in 1938. Most writers have looked at the British role
in terms of what was done right and what was done wrong. A common criticism of Chamberlain's policy
is that he ignored the true military strength of Czechoslovakia. Milan Hauner, for example, takes this
approach in a recent article:
The overrunning of Czechoslovakia was . . . a foregone
conclusion for Chamberlain. From the
available military appreciation of the situation, he and his close associates
selected only those bits of information which seemed to confirm his preconceived
views.
However, the question that goes
unanswered is why Chamberlain and the
rest of the British Cabinet would choose to do such a thing. If British policy was so foolish and
misguided, why did they not recognize it?
A "personality" argument -- that Chamberlain was a coward, or
a naive idealist, or perhaps simply a peace-loving man for whom Hitler was
beyond comprehension
-- is often used, but this does not help explain the support of the other
Cabinet ministers. The Munich
settlement was in fact a triumph for Chamberlain's policy, to which the Cabinet
had agreed in March 1938 and to which the British government held fast, with
only last-minute wavering, throughout the Czechoslovakian crisis in 1938.
In this paper I will argue that Czech military strength was
only a minor consideration for the British in establishing their policy towards
Czechoslovakia in March 1938. This
policy was based on two major assumptions.
The first was that Germany could not be prevented from establishing
hegemony over Central Europe by any means short of a general European war. The second assumption was that any war with
Germany would soon involve Italy and Japan as well, and British military strength
was inadequate to fight all three simultaneously. This Czechoslovakian policy operated within the larger framework
of appeasement, which assumed that Hitler's goals were limited to the
reestablishment of Germany's influence in Europe on a scale corresponding to
its true power, a process which should be accommodated in order to prevent a
war from breaking out in the "friction" of readjustment.
I will also argue that the foundation of British
Czechoslovakian policy in 1938, the belief that German domination of Central
Europe could not be prevented without war, was in fact essentially
correct. Space does not allow the consideration
of the larger question of Britain's world-wide commitments, but I believe that
British planners were not overly pessimistic in their judgement that Britain
had a poor prospect for success in a world war against Germany, Italy and
Japan. A pre-war British statesman who
found himself suddenly transported to Great Britain in 1950 would probably be
unable to tell whether Britain had won or lost World War II -- the loss of the
Empire was the equivalent of defeat to British planners in the 1930s, and there
is little question that the war sounded the death knell for the empire of even
a "victorious" Britain. If a
war with Germany was the only way to preserve the independence of
Czechoslovakia, and a war with Germany was likely to lead to a world war which
would end in defeat for Britain, Chamberlain's policy of avoiding war over
Czechoslovakia at any cost makes perfect sense.
Fundamentally, Chamberlain's whole policy towards Hitler was
based on a flawed assumption -- that Hitler had limited goals which could be
met without compromising British security.
What is crystal clear today was not so clear in 1938, and I will not
attempt to debate whether Chamberlain should have known Hitler's plans for the
future. However, British policy towards
Czechoslovakia can be evaluated on its own terms, without benefit of
hindsight. From this perspective, the
most damning criticism of Chamberlain's policy is not that it was based on a
flawed military assessment, but that the British never examined the long-term
implications of that policy before adopting it.
The Anschluss
and the Debate Over Guaranteeing Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia was brought to the forefront of British
thinking by the Anschluss, the German
annexation of Austria in March 1938.
The Cabinet had discussed the possibility that Germany "aimed at
the absorption of Austria and part of Czechoslovakia" in December of 1937,
but most of its time was taken up worrying about relations with Italy and the
Spanish Civil War. Then the Anschluss brought Czechoslovakia
forcibly to their attention. The position of Czechoslovakia was now
clearly precarious, surrounded on three sides by Germany. It was widely assumed that Czechoslovakia
was "next" on Hitler's agenda.
Chamberlain reported a communication from "an official of a
well-known public company in Germany" to the effect that Czechoslovakia
was to be dealt with the same way as Austria -- "the Sudeten Deutsch were
to rise and that was to be an excuse for invasion." This was just one of many other signs in the
spring of 1938 that some German action against Czechoslovakia was
threatening. Lord Halifax put the
question to the Cabinet on March 12 at an emergency Saturday meeting to
consider the implications of the Anschluss:
"How were we to prevent similar action begin taken in
Czechoslovakia?"
The annexation of Austria in itself caused no European
crisis, partly because of the speed with which the situation developed, but
mainly due to the fact that neither France nor Britain had any intention of
going to war to prevent Germans from joining Germany. This argument was to be heard again in the Czechoslovakian
crisis. In 1935, Italy had joined
France in blocking a German threat to Austria, but this time Mussolini remained
indifferent. British Foreign Secretary
Anthony Eden suspected that Mussolini and Hitler had made an agreement giving
Germany a free hand in Austria in exchange for some quid pro quo in the Mediterranean, but Chamberlain was much more
interested in restoring friendly relations between Britain and Italy than in
issuing empty threats to Germany over Austria.
The significant difference between Austria and Czechoslovakia, from the
British perspective, was the existence of a treaty of mutual defense between France
and Czechoslovakia. Since Britain had a
treaty requiring it to come to France's aid if attacked, the dangerous
possibility existed that a German attempt to seize the Sudetenland by force
would result in a general European war.
At the March 12th Cabinet meeting, Chamberlain suggested
that "the only hope of saving Czechoslovakia from the German menace was by
creating an impression of force."
Lord Halifax, who had just replaced Eden as Foreign Secretary, was
instructed to prepare a report setting out possible measures to avert German
action against Czechoslovakia. On the following Monday, the French asked
for a joint statement that "the British and French Governments could not
remain indifferent to any German action against Czechoslovakia." On March 22, the Cabinet considered the
possibilities presented by Halifax: issuing a guarantee to Czechoslovakia
directly, or guaranteeing support to France if France went to war in defense of
Czechoslovakia. However, Halifax and
Chamberlain had now both come to oppose offering any kind of guarantee, given a
report from the Chiefs of Staff which the Foreign Secretary described as
"an extremely melancholy document."
Halifax instead proposed that Britain should, with French help, pressure
the Czechs to come to a "direct settlement with the Sudeten-Deutsch." After a rather lengthy debate, the Cabinet
agreed, accepting Halifax's policy as the "best available in the
circumstances." The French request
for a joint statement was refused.
The debate over the guarantee on March 22 deserves
examination in some detail, because it was here that the British essentially
made the decision to abandon Czechoslovakia to its fate. The British side of the September crisis
over Czechoslovakia (what is now known as the "Munich Crisis")
consisted mainly in facing up to the harsh reality of the course they had
already chosen in March. Halifax, at
least, clearly foresaw where his chosen policy would lead, although he too had
some second thoughts in September. As
he told the Cabinet during the March debate:
This policy was likely to prove unpalatable to the
French. Perhaps the Cabinet did not
realize how unpalatable. Nevertheless,
there was no escape unless we were going to adopt a course which he could not
recommend. Moreover, however upset the
French Government might be, he did not see what other alternative was open to
them than to acquiesce.
Sir Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador in Berlin and
an ideological soul-mate to Chamberlain, accurately summarized the available
alternatives in a letter to the Foreign Secretary:
A second obvious lesson to be learnt from the fate of
Austria is the futility of forcible protests unbacked by force or the fear of
force. Experience has taught Hitler
that only by jungle law can he achieve his objectives, and I hope that by now experience
will have taught the rest of Europe that jungle law can only be opposed by
measures equivalent to it. It follows
therefrom that if we are to intervene in the future with any prospect of
success in the affairs of Central Europe we must either forestall developments
by remedial action, having regard to the forces of evolution, or be prepared to
support our right of intervention by adequate military strength.
Up to this point, Winston Churchill
himself would not have disagreed with Henderson's assessment of the situation,
but the two certainly would have disagreed on which course to follow. The policy put forward by Halifax and
Chamberlain and endorsed by the Cabinet on March 22nd chose remedial action
over intervention: Britain should not guarantee to support Czechoslovakia, but
should instead pressure the Czechs to reach a settlement with the Sudeten
Germans. This was exactly the
"remedial action" called for by Henderson, and his reasoning is a
succinct summary of the logic behind the March 22nd decision and subsequent
British Czechoslovakian policy:
However immoral Germany's next action may be, it would be
the height of unwisdom to count on the co-operation of a single small Power in
Europe against her. Nor would I expect
Czechoslovakia in the unlikely event of such next action being directed against
any other country than herself. It is
tragic that the League of Nations and collective security should be reduced to
such as pass, but it is nevertheless the case. . . . What, however, matters at
the moment is that German hegemony east of the Rhine, down to the Brenner and
the Balkans in the south and as far as the Russian frontier on the east, is a
fact, however unpalatable it may be to admit it. Moreover, from the point of view of world peace it would be wiser
to recognize now the fact in one's mind and to leave the remedy to the disease
itself.
The assumption of German hegemony is certainly debatable,
but once that premise is accepted, Henderson's conclusion is inescapable. After the decision was made in March,
Chamberlain considered Czechoslovakia already lost -- precisely what his policy
required. At a meeting with the French
Ministers in April, Chamberlain replied to a plea by French Prime Minister Eduard
Daladier to try to save Czechoslovakia as follows:
The Czech army was no doubt a good one, as M. Daladier had
indicated, but the latter had admitted that Czechoslovakia's fortifications had
been turned as a result of the Anschluss. One had only to look at the map. Czechoslovakia was surrounded by German
territory on three sides. He could not
help thinking of the extreme rapidity and the effective organization with which
3,000 armed men had been landed by Germany near Vienna in half an hour. In such circumstances, how would it be
possible to save Czechoslovakia?
In this light, Chamberlain's view of
Munich as a great triumph is more comprehensible. His strenuous efforts in September to prevent Hitler from
attacking Czechoslovakia were not an attempt to save it, but only to prevent
the general European war which was likely to follow such an attack. At Munich, against all odds, he did in fact
succeed in averting what most believed was an inevitable German attack on
Czechoslovakia. To Chamberlain, the
cost to Czechoslovakia was of secondary importance, since he believed that the
Czechs would be better off to simply recognize German dominance than fight a
senseless war to try to prevent it.
The report which contributed to this grim outlook was titled
"The Military Implications of German Aggression Against
Czechoslovakia." Its main conclusion was most pessimistic
indeed:
No pressure that we and our possible allies can bring to
bear, either by sea, on land or in the air, could prevent Germany from invading
and over-running Bohemia and from inflicting a decisive defeat on the
Czechoslovak Army.
The Chiefs of Staff reported that
75% of Czech trade crossed German territory, and that by "abuse of tolls
and tariffs on the Danube and the railways" Germany could "force
Czechoslovakia into submission by economic pressure alone." The report's opinion of Czechoslovakia's
military value was quite low, apparently based on an outdated intelligence
report, but that was not the crucial point. The Chiefs of Staff believed that Germany
could be defeated only after a long war, probably prompting Italy and Japan to
take the opportunity to expand at Britain's expense, and a world war would
result. In an earlier report the Chiefs
had warned that British naval, military and air forces "are still far from
sufficient to meet our defence commitments." Furthermore:
We
cannot foresee the time when our defence forces will be strong enough to
safeguard our territory, trade and vital interests against Germany, Italy and
Japan simultaneously. We cannot,
therefore, exaggerate the importance, from the point of view of Imperial
defence, of any policy or international action that can be taken to reduce the
numbers of our potential enemies and to gain the support of potential friends.
Reducing the number of potential
enemies was clearly preferred over gaining the support of potential
friends. The report on Czechoslovakia
estimated that the small European countries might even be a liability as
allies, since Britain would be obligated to protect them from German invasion,
and that any attempt to organize an anti-German coalition might push Germany,
Italy and Japan into a formal military alliance. The Chiefs of Staff did not believe that the benefits to be
gained from guaranteeing Czechoslovakia were worth the risk of a world war
which, in their estimation, Britain could not win.
In a statement which has the appearance of being a
justification to history for a distasteful action, the Cabinet summarized their
reasoning for not issuing a guarantee to Czechoslovakia:
Even if we had the strength, we could not protect a country
in the geographical position of Czechoslovakia. Neither could the French, and the Russians were separated from
Czechoslovakia by the territory of Poland and Rumania. No one could help in time. After the fall of Czechoslovakia, the French
would remain behind the Maginot lines. . . . At least two months would elapse
before the United Kingdom could give any effective help to France. . . . It
would be a mistake to plunge into a certain catastrophe in order to avoid a
future danger that might never materialize.
Saving Czechoslovakia would
eliminate the threat of an increasingly powerful and aggressive Germany, what
the Cabinet regarded as only "a future danger that might never
materialize," but the cost would be a "certain
catastrophe." The last sentence
plainly shows that the Cabinet believed that the independence of Czechoslovakia
could not be preserved by any means short of general war. German hegemony in Central Europe was seen
as a fait accompli. Issuing a guarantee to Czechoslovakia would
not prevent a war. On the contrary, it
would ensure that war over Czechoslovakia became unavoidable, since Germany
would have no alternative but to use force to obtain its demands. This is a crucial point in understanding
British actions during the September Crisis.
The Cabinet did not accept all of this with complete
unanimity, however. Two main points
were brought up in favor of a positive commitment to Czechoslovakia. Although the minutes do not record who
advanced these arguments, Alfred Duff Cooper, First Lord of the Admiralty, and
Oliver Stanley, the President of the Board of Trade, both held similar views in
later Cabinet debates. First, the real
danger was to France, not Czechoslovakia.
France was committed to aid Czechoslovakia, the argument went, and might
be defeated before Britain could intervene.
Would it not be better "to recognise the inevitable and plunge in
at once to France's aid?" Second,
although the military position was poor at present, the relative position with
respect to Germany would become worse if Czechoslovakia and the other small
states of Europe were abandoned.
Under the hegemony of Germany, they would become an immense
source of strength to that country.
Today Germany was ill-prepared for a long war. Two years hence with this access of strength she might be much
better prepared for that contingency. . . . In fact, by abandoning
Czechoslovakia and the small nations, we should be assuming a new commitment
that would mature a few years hence, namely, to meet Germany either in
isolation or at least in co-operation with France.
Strangely, only the first of these points ever carried any
weight in subsequent debate over Czechoslovakian policy. As will be seen, the British ministers and
their military advisers seem to have focused almost exclusively on the
immediate military situation -- How does our air force stack up against the
German air force? Can France intervene
in time to prevent the Germans from crushing Czechoslovakia? etc. -- with
apparently little or no consideration of the contribution of Czechoslovakia to
the European balance of power and the long-term strategic implications of its
elimination.
British Strategy and Military Policy
The seeming indifference of British planners to the European
balance of power is better understood by looking at British strategy and
military policy from a broader perspective.
As Lawrence Pratt has pointed out,
Writers have tended to focus almost exclusively on the
German problem, as if it can be seen, or was seen, in a vacuum hermetically
isolated from the global crisis of the 1930s. . . . It is almost as if Britain
had suddenly abandoned its overseas interests and maritime traditions in order
to commit itself solely to a continental role; whereas, in fact, the tendency
(at least before the spring of 1939) was in precisely the opposite direction.
After the experiment with unilateral
disarmament in the 1920s, British rearmament had begun in the early 1930s based
on two principles which were under increasing strain by 1938. The first was that rearmament should not
interfere with "business as usual," which meant that Britain's
economic strength took priority over its military strength. This was by no means an entirely foolish
policy; one of the main lessons the British learned from the First World War
was that economic staying power was at least as important as standing military
power. As late as February 1938, the
Cabinet reaffirmed that rearmament was to proceed as fast as possible
"without disrupting the peace-time industrial system." As a result, British rearmament was
proceeding at a much slower pace than that of Germany (although by 1938 the
German economy was in a near-crisis due to the extremely rapid pace of
rearmament). Indeed, in the Cabinet review of the defense
budget in February, the services clamored for more than the £1,500 million that
had been set as an absolute maximum total military spending for 1937-1941 by
the Treasury. After the Anschluss, the Cabinet finally decided
to drop the restriction that rearmament should not impede the course of normal
trade. However, the British economy was not really
placed on a war footing until the German occupation of the remainder of
Czechoslovakia in March 1939, closely followed by the rumor of an ultimatum to
Rumania, finally convinced Chamberlain that Hitler was not going to be
appeased.
Poor relations with Italy compounded British strategic
problems by invalidating a second principle of rearmament. In 1933, Italy was deliberately excluded as
a possible enemy (along with France and the United States) in formulating
rearmament plans. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the navy was
preoccupied with the Japanese naval threat in the Far East, pouring resources
into their huge new base at Singapore while neglecting the Mediterranean. However, the Mediterranean was vital to the
defense of the eastern British empire, which "hinged on the dispatch of a
large battlefleet to Singapore to hold the Malay barrier" in the event of
war with Japan. The Mediterranean-Suez-Red Sea route was by
far the fastest route, and it was therefore critical that passage through the
Mediterranean be unimpeded. The
Abyssinian crisis in 1935, which suddenly added Italy to the ranks of potential
enemies, found the British extremely unprepared in the Mediterranean
theater. Hence, the plea by the Chiefs
of Staff for "any policy or international action that can be taken to
reduce the numbers of our potential enemies" was really an appeal that
good relations with Italy be restored.
Another feature of British defense policy bearing on the
Czechoslovakian crisis was the almost universal obsession with a German aerial
"knock-out blow." British
government and military officials feared that the Germans planned to open a war
with Britain by a massive air attack on military, industrial, and civilian
targets in an attempt to defeat Britain with one swift stroke. The origins of this idea are obscure. One commentator suggests that the Royal Air
Force's own exaggeration of the effects of strategic bombing contributed to
these fears. In 1936, the Air Staff estimated that the
Luftwaffe could deliver 600 tons of bombs a day against Britain, with up to
150,000 casualties in the first week of an air war. By 1939, the former figure had risen to 700 tons per day, with
the possibility of a "knock-out blow" of 3,500 tons in the first 24
hours. That these figures were far too
high is no longer in serious dispute -- as a point of comparison, the heaviest
air raid during World War II on Britain was 1,026 tons on London on April 19,
1941. Another element which figured into the
"knock-out blow" scenario was the confidence the British always had
that they would win a long war against Germany. They assumed that Germany also believed this, and would therefore
attempt to win quickly before Britain's resources could be mobilized and its
economic blockade could take effect.
Thus, the only conceivable means for Germany to defeat Britain appeared
to be by air attack.
The effects of this fear on rearmament policy was
clear. The RAF always received priority
over the other services, both because it was the only effective means to attack
Germany in a short war, and because it was believed to provide the
"biggest bang for the buck." However, in 1937, the civilian Air Minister,
Lord Swinton, forced the RAF to shift its emphasis away from its chosen mission
of strategic bombing and concentrate on building up a fighter force adequate to
meet a possible German attack. The
RAF's new priority was to be the defense of Britain against an aerial
"knock-out blow," while the defeat of the enemy was to be left to
naval power.
Belief in the effectiveness of air power also contributed to
the doctrine of limited liability, a feature of British defense policy which both
increased, and was a symptom of, the lack of interest in Continental
commitments in early 1938. The limited
liability advocates held that the main British contribution in a European war
should be with air and naval forces only, at least initially. The rearmament priority of air force, then
navy, then army, reflected the influence of this doctrine. The Cabinet officially endorsed limited
liability in its most complete form in December 1937 when it reordered the
strategic priorities of the army. The army was no longer to be organized to
send an Expeditionary Force to assist France on the continent. The Secretary of War, Leslie Hore-Belisha,
explained the army's new role in a report to the Cabinet:
In preparing the Army for war the menace of air attack is a
primary consideration. On the outbreak
of war defence against air attack may be the primary requirement: in this major
responsibility Home Defence is in the first category of importance, and in a
form unknown in 1914.
The second priority was imperial defense, which meant that
an expeditionary force would still be available, but on a much reduced
scale. Whereas previous plans had
called for four regular divisions and a mobile division to be ready to send to
France within fifteen days of mobilization, the new plan called for only two
divisions and a mobile division, "equipped for an eastern theatre,"
probably Egypt, to be ready within three weeks of mobilization. The report emphasized that the equipment and
reserves of this force were "not on a Continental scale."
Several factors explain this temporary abandonment of a
"continental commitment." It
is clear that Chamberlain, Hore-Belisha, and Sir John Simon, the Chancellor of
the Exchequer, all expected the new plan to result in a large savings, a
powerful argument within the Cabinet. Another argument often advanced was that the
British public was unwilling to send an army to the continent again on the
scale of 1914, so that attempting to equip any size Expeditionary Force for the
continent would raise a political firestorm.
Many of the Cabinet ministers themselves were in any case horrified by
the prospect of a repeat of the First World War, and one of Chamberlain's prime
motivations in appeasing Germany was to remove the need for any such
commitment.
The army itself was divided on the issue of a continental
versus a colonial role. Its
preoccupation with its Middle Eastern commitments may help to explain why it
did not put up more of a fight over the Expeditionary Force. During the Abyssinian crisis in 1935,
substantial numbers of men and tanks had been sent to Egypt and never recalled,
and in 1936 the Palestinian rebellion had become acute -- by 1938 the
equivalent of two divisions were stationed there and the General Staff feared
that more would be necessary in the event of war.
Very little in the military situation in 1938, therefore,
encouraged the British to accept any additional obligations, particularly in
Europe. British military planners
believed that Britain's obligations far exceeded its actual strength, and that
every effort must be made to avoid war.
This was especially true with regard to Germany, because the British
felt themselves to be most vulnerable to air attack. Budgetary constraints had forced the British to prioritize the
RAF over the other services, the army especially, and by the end of 1937 it
appeared financially, militarily and politically prudent to give up the idea of
having a large Expeditionary Force available to fight on the continent.
The Crisis Over Czechoslovakia
The Cabinet decided on a Czechoslovakian policy none too
soon, because tension between Czechoslovakia and Germany quickly escalated in
the months following the annexation of Austria. In late May, the Czechs began to mobilize, claiming that they had
detected suspicious German troop movements near their borders in Saxony and
Austria. Under the pressure of this
so-called "May Crisis," the British and French issued a public
warning to Germany. As no attack was
forthcoming, it appeared to the world that Hitler had been forced to back down
for the first time. It is now known
that the Germans did not have any plans for a surprise attack on Czechoslovakia
at the time, and Hitler was furious at this humiliation. Shortly thereafter, in fact, Hitler signed
the "Case Green" directive for the invasion of Czechoslovakia,
stating his "unalterable decision to smash Czechoslovakia by military
action in the near future."
For their part, the British Cabinet ministers were shaken by
the ease with which they had been drawn into making a public stand against
Germany, despite the policy decided upon only two months earlier. If anything, the May Crisis spurred on
British efforts to minimize the possibility of a general war erupting over
Czechoslovakia. On May 25, Halifax
described his policy for the upcoming months to the Cabinet. He noted that while they had "turned
the first corner successfully, [they] ought already to be getting ready for the
second." A settlement of the
Sudeten problem was unlikely, and a new incident was "quite
possible." What made the situation
so dangerous was the existence of the Franco-Czechoslovakian alliance, which
had been entered into "many years ago in totally different circumstances,"
with Germany disarmed and a convenient "back door approach" into
Germany available for the French.
"It was desirable, therefore, if possible, to obtain a release for
the French from their obligation and its contingent consequences," Halifax
told the Cabinet. "It was possible
that a firm attitude on our part might conceivably be successful again, but if
a really bad incident occurred again . . . there was the possibility of our
finding ourselves in trouble." He
hoped that the Czechoslovak President, Eduard Benes, could be persuaded to
either reach a mutually satisfactory settlement with the Sudeten Germans or
allow them to join Germany if they wished.
British diplomacy during the summer of 1938 failed to
accomplish either of Halifax's goals.
The French continued to argue that a firm stand against Germany, even if
it was a bluff, was preferable to openly abandoning their ally. The Czechs conceded more and more to the
Sudeten Germans as negotiations continued, but the Sudeten leaders' demands
continued to increase. By the end of
August, it had become clear that neither of these measures was going to avert
another crisis. The Germans announced a
"test mobilization" in Bavaria and Austria for September, which could
be used to camouflage a full mobilization of the bulk of the German army on the
Czech border, and the British were receiving information from a range of
sources that Hitler had plans for an invasion "towards the end of
September."
The Cabinet was recalled from the August recess to consider
the situation, and both Halifax and Chamberlain reiterated their support for
the established policy. The Foreign
Secretary noted again that the only effective way to deter Hitler from
attacking Czechoslovakia would be a statement promising to declare war if
Germany invaded. But, if that deterrent
failed, nothing could be done to save Czechoslovakia:
He agreed . . . that there was more in the present crisis
than the attempt to defend Czechoslovakia against Germany. We were, in effect, concerned with the
attempt of the dictator countries to attain their ends by force. But he asked himself whether it was
justifiable to fight a certain war now in order to forestall a possible war
later.
Rather than give Germany an explicit
warning, Halifax proposed that they should try to "keep the Germans
guessing" as to what they would do, while continuing to push for a
settlement. Chamberlain agreed that a
warning to Germany should not be made, and his reasoning clearly demonstrates
that his primary concern was to avoid war, not to prevent Hitler from invading
Czechoslovakia. He told the Cabinet
that he realized that many people in Germany and Britain believed that if the
British would make a promise to aid Czechoslovakia, war would be avoided and
Hitler would perhaps be overthrown:
He had been sufficiently impressed by this repetition of the
case for an immediate statement, to go over in his mind carefully, the
possibility of making such a statement.
But he always came back to the same conclusion. . . . No state . . . ought to make a threat
of war unless it was both ready to carry it out and prepared to do so.
Since Halifax obviously did not put much faith in the
deterrent power of a British warning, referring to war as "certain"
even if that course were pursued, his proposed policy to "keep the Germans
guessing" consisted of little more than avoiding any statement that would
obligate the British to intervene if the Germans did attack
Czechoslovakia. He apparently believed
that such an attack was inevitable, and warned the Cabinet of the political
recriminations that would (and did) follow if they held to his policy:
He wished it to be clearly understood that if this policy
failed, the Government would be told that if only they had had the courage of
their convictions they could have stopped the trouble. They would also be accused of destroying the
principle of collective security, and so forth. But these criticisms left him unmoved.
After some debate the Cabinet agreed to continue to follow
Halifax's policy, but the suggestion was first made that they were focusing too
narrowly on the immediate crisis. The
Lord Privy Seal, Earl De La Warr, while agreeing that no threat to Germany
should be made, thought that the Cabinet needed to give more consideration to
the general situation in Europe -- if Czechoslovakia was "crumpled
up" by Germany, the remaining Eastern European countries would be absorbed
into the German orbit. When the Cabinet met again two weeks later,
several other ministers were having second thoughts about the British
stance. Secretary for Air Sir Kingsley
Wood asked for "an up to date appreciation of the situation by the Chiefs
of Staff," and Oliver Stanley, the President of the Board of Trade,
proposed that the report should also include an appreciation of the position
within a year "if Germany was allowed to carry out a coup in Czechoslovakia this year and subsequently extended her
influence in South Eastern Europe."
The Chiefs of Staff submitted a revised military
appreciation within two days, but it appears that no study of the long-term
implications of British policy was ever completed before the Munich
conference. General Hastings Ismay, the
Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, prepared a draft report on this
topic on September 22, but it was probably read by no more than two Cabinet ministers. In any case, Ismay's report did not consider
the political or strategic effects of the elimination of Czechoslovakia from
the military balance, but continued to focus narrowly on the relative strengths
of Germany, France, and Britain. Ismay
conceded that postponing a conflict for a year would allow the Germans to
increase their relative land strength due to completion of their western
fortifications and additional training, and British prestige might suffer a
severe blow if Czechoslovakia was abandoned.
However, for him, relative air strength was the critical issue. He believed that Germany was currently in a
position to launch a successful strategic air attack on Britain. In six or twelve months' time, British air
power would be improved enough to prevent such an attack from succeeding. Therefore, he concluded that "from a
military point of view, time is in our favor, and . . . if war with Germany has
to come, it would be better to fight her in say six to twelve months' time than
to accept the present challenge."
The Cabinet as a whole continued to take a very narrow view
of the significance of the crisis. The
Lord Chancellor, Lord Maugham, serenely declared that "he had been
informed that British interests were not vitally affected by what happened to
the Sudeten Germans." Rather,
French interests were at stake, and France had no desire for war "to keep
three and a half million Germans under the Prague government." As late as September 17, during a discussion
on the merits of sending British troops to monitor a plebiscite in the
Sudetenland, Secretary of Defence Sir Thomas Inskip warned that "it would
be difficult to protect them from outside attack, for example, by the Czech
forces." What support there was for a firm stand
against Hitler stemmed mainly from the fear that submitting to Hitler's
blackmail once would only invite him to try it again, and it would be even
harder to justify not giving in the next time.
In the end, however, French refusal to "get on
board," combined with Hitler's extreme provocation, very nearly pushed the
British into deciding that their policy had failed and that war was
unavoidable. Cabinet support for
Halifax's and Chamberlain's policy first began to fray at the September 17
meeting. Three ministers openly agreed
with De La Warr's view that any further concessions to Hitler while the German
army was mobilized would be a humiliating surrender to force, and that if
unable to obtain "peace with honour . . . we must face the possibility of
war." Nevertheless, most of the Cabinet still
backed the Prime Minister's policy.
Viscount Halisham, Lord President of the Council, summed up his
reasoning:
It was in our interest to prevent any single power
dominating Europe; but that had come to pass, and he thought that we had no
alternative but to submit to what the Lord Privy Seal regarded as humiliation.
Duff Cooper also continued to
support Halifax and Chamberlain.
Although he had serious doubts as to Hitler's trustworthiness, there was
"almost no length to which he would not go to avoid war," and he
believed they had no choice but to "submit to a humiliation."
The Cabinet finally revolted when Chamberlain returned from
meeting with Hitler at Godesberg on September 24 with the news that Hitler had
rejected the Anglo-French offer which met his previous demands, and that he had
instead presented Chamberlain with a new ultimatum. Now even Halifax was unwilling to face the looming humiliation
which was, after all, the logical consequence of the policy adopted in March:
He [Halifax] could not rid his mind of the fact that Herr
Hitler had given us nothing and that he was dictating terms, just as though he
had won a war but without having to fight.
Now at least nine of the ministers
opposed Chamberlain, who continued to recommend that Czechoslovakia be
pressured to accept Hitler's terms. On the 25th, Chamberlain met with French
Prime Minister Daladier, who assured Chamberlain that "France would
fulfill her obligations of assistance" to Czechoslovakia. That evening the Czechs informed the British
that they could not accept the Godesberg terms. Chamberlain persuaded the Cabinet to permit one last appeal to
Hitler, and Sir Horace Wilson was dispatched to Hitler carrying a letter urging
him to accept the Anglo-French proposals, as well as an oral message as a last
resort:
The French Government have informed us that, if the Czechs
reject the [Godesberg terms] and Germany attacks Czechoslovakia, they will
fulfil their obligations to Czechoslovakia.
Should the forces of France in consequence become engaged in active
hostilities against Germany, we shall feel obligated to support them.
At this point, war appeared certain, and the Cabinet spent
the next day discussing the appropriate military measures that needed to be
taken. Their actions represented a
belief that their policy had failed rather than a rejection of the policy. Since France apparently intended to fulfill
its obligations, however reluctantly, the British had little choice but to
prepare for war, since they could not stand by while France fought Germany
alone. It seems likely that if
Chamberlain had not made his final appeal to Hitler which resulted in the
Munich conference, World War II would have broken out in 1938 rather than in
1939. By September 27, Chamberlain was
virtually alone in his belief that there was still a chance to prevent a war,
and he rightly believed that at Munich he had single-handedly snatched victory
for his Czechoslovakian policy out of the jaws of defeat.
Czech Military Strength and Plans
The prospect of war with Germany certainly came as no
surprise to the Czech Army in September 1938.
The Czechs had been preparing for war seriously for years -- one author
estimates that half of all Czech government spending from 1936-1938 was for
military purposes. In 1936
Czechoslovakia spent 12.5% of its GNP on its military, versus German spending
of 13% in 1936 and 17% in 1938 (Britain, by contrast, spent only 8% of its GNP
on the military in 1938). The British government received detailed
reports about Czech military preparations from their military attaché in Prague
throughout 1938, so they were not uninformed about the situation. Before examining what advice the British
government received and what they did with it, it will be helpful to evaluate
the actual Czech military strength in September 1938.
The Czech Army had a peacetime strength of seventeen
infantry divisions and four mobile divisions.
In September 1938 they were able to mobilize about twenty additional
reserve divisions. The British military
attaché, Lt.-Col. H.C.T. Stronge, believed the Czech Army to be "the best
of the smaller States of Europe, especially in regard to equipment and
weapons." Czechoslovakia had built up a large arms
industry, including the famous "Skoda" works at Pilsen and
"Zbrojovka" at Brno, which was not only able to completely supply the
Czech Army and equip its fortifications, but was also a major arms exporter. The Czech-built tanks, while scattered among
the infantry divisions rather than being concentrated into armored divisions as
were the German tanks, were actually superior in guns and armor to the German
tanks available in September 1938.
The foundation of Czechoslovakian military strategy was its
alliance with France. The Czech General
Staff was under no illusions as to their ability to hold off the Germans
indefinitely, and they based their plans on the assumption that French
mobilization would quickly divert a large part of the available German forces. The General Staff's greatest fear was that a
surprise German assault would overrun their defenses at the outset and
interfere with their mobilization. They
therefore had carefully prepared mobilization plans, and relied for advance
warning on their "very well-informed" intelligence service.
Up until late in September 1938, the Czechs were confident
that the French would honor their obligations, although many other observers
were not so sure. The Czech confidence
was based on their great effort in building up their military strength and arms
industry; they believed that the French could not ignore this contribution, and
at the very least could not allow it to fall into German hands. The French were well aware of the value of
Czechoslovakia in a war against Germany, but they were caught in their own
strategic dilemma. The remilitarization
of the Rhineland in 1936 had dramatically altered one of the basic assumptions
of the Franco-Czech alliance. The
French had previously counted on the mere threat of mobilization to be an
adequate safeguard against any displeasing German action in Central Europe,
since they could essentially march straight into the industrial heartland of
Germany and there was little the Germans could do to stop them. The remilitarization of the Rhineland raised
the prospect (which was at first only potential) of the French having to do
some actual fighting on the western German frontier before invading Germany, a
most unwelcome scenario for them.
The Czechs realized this, of course, and their response was
to step up the pace of fortification of their border with Germany, which they
hoped would hold up a German attack long enough for the French to mobilize in
strength. The fortifications were
started in 1934 when the political situation in Europe had begun to look
ominous, but a United States military attaché touring the Bohemian and Moravian
frontiers in 1936 reported little work completed. By 1937, however, "work was being carried out at a furious
pace which continued right up through September 1938." These fortifications are one of the most
controversial aspects of the Czechoslovakian crisis, with some arguing that
they constituted a second Maginot Line, and others claiming that they were
incomplete and would have offered little resistance to the Germans.
A detailed study of the Czech fortifications by Jonathan
Zorach has done much to clarify the issue.
The Czech fortifications resembled the famous Maginot Line only in their
careful, technically up-to-date construction.
Otherwise, the Czechs had no chance of matching the depth and strength
of the French fortifications. First,
the Czech frontier with Germany was over five times the length of the
Franco-German border. Even the entire
Basel-to-Dunkirk frontier was only 776 km, compared to 2,097 km of Czech-German
frontier (after the Anschluss). Second, the French could and did pour a far
greater amount of money into the Maginot Line than was possible for
Czechoslovakia; the Germans estimated that the French spent 30 times what the
Czechs spent on fortifications, on a far shorter line. A comparison of the depth of the two lines
shows the result: a typical sector of the Maginot Line had an average depth of
2-3 km, and in some places was up to 11 km deep; the strongest sectors of the
Czechoslovak line were 2-5 km deep, but in some areas the fortifications
consisted of only a single bunker line.
This is not to say that the Czech fortifications had no
value. High mountains and rugged
terrain along the Bavarian, Saxon and Silesian frontiers "offered
significant obstacles to military operations" even without fortifications,
an advantage the Franco-German border lacked. The Czech strategy was to use the
fortifications to protect their northern and southern flanks from a German
pincer attack which would cut the country in two, forcing the Germans to attack
along a northwest axis. This would
allow the Czechs to complete their mobilization without disruption. They planned to fall back eastward into the
mountains of Slovakia under German pressure, while waiting for the French to
draw off German strength.
The Anschluss in
March 1938 made this a much more difficult prospect for the Czechs. They now had a greatly extended southern
flank along which the Germans could launch their southern pincer attack, and
the terrain along the old Austro-Czech border was more favorable for offensive
operations than any other section of the Czech-German frontier. In addition, the Czechs had done very little
to fortify this section of the frontier, with only a few heavy fortresses
around Bratislava. Work on a new line
was carried out throughout the summer of 1938, but this section of the Czech
defenses was certainly the weakest.
Table I gives a numerical picture of the relative strength
of the different fortified areas. The smallest and most numerous type of
fortifications were machine gun positions, followed by pillboxes built to
withstand up to 10 cm artillery fire.
The strongest were the heavy fortresses which were designed to withstand
heavy artillery fire and aerial bombing.
In general, these heavy fortresses contained 47 mm anti-tank guns and 10
cm howitzers, food and ammunition for 2-3 weeks, and 20 men, although they
could not hold out for an extended period without assistance from a field
army. The largest, however, were
designed to withstand major attacks independent of outside support, and had
both tactical and strategic value.
The main weakness of the Czech fortified system was that it
was unfinished in September 1938. Table
I gives some indication of the disparities between different sectors of the
frontier fortifications. In studies
undertaken after the occupation of the frontier areas, German engineers were
generally impressed with the completed areas, and estimated that with another
year's work, the completed system would have presented a truly formidable
obstacle. However, in its unfinished
state, numerous weak points existed all along the long frontier, and only
opposite the Silesian border did the Germans feel that the defenses were strong
enough to have prevented breakthroughs completely. The Germans had extensive advance knowledge
of the weak areas in the defenses, due to the friendly Sudeten German
population and extensive reconnaissance. The wealth of information available to the
Germans was inadvertently revealed in a Luftwaffe intelligence planning report
which contained the comment, "unlike Czechoslovakia, there are relatively
very few aerial photographs of Western European targets available."
The Czech fortifications, then, did not present an
impenetrable defensive wall, but neither were they a negligible factor. No one, not even the Czech General Staff,
believed that Czechoslovakia could hold out alone indefinitely against the full
military weight that Germany could eventually mobilize, but the Czech
fortifications would certainly have played a large role in increasing the cost
and time for a German attack to succeed.
Even along the exposed Austrian frontier, the fortifications were enough
to delay the Germans temporarily and prevent "a clear run through" to
Prague.
An additional factor in the Czech military equation was its
air power. Czechoslovakia's industry
was very vulnerable to air attack, with 90% of its arms production within 30
minutes flight from the frontier. Of
course, German industry was similarly vulnerable to air attack from
Czechoslovakia, but the Czech air force had less than 200 modern bombers, and
there are no indications that they planned any strategic raids on Germany in
the event of war. Defensively, Czechoslovakia was in
significantly better shape. The
Luftwaffe expected serious difficulties from the Czech air force and strong
anti-aircraft defenses over the fortifications and industrial centers. This would have been especially true if the
Germans had actually invaded at the end of September 1938. The Czech air force was fully deployed to
its wartime airfields, so there was no chance of it being destroyed on the
ground by a surprise strike. In
addition, the weather during the projected invasion period was foggy and rainy,
which would have further complicated the Luftwaffe's operations. As a result, a recent study concluded that
the Luftwaffe "would have suffered serious losses that would have crippled
its ability to meet the demands of a European war."
British Assessment of Czech Military Strength
As noted previously, the British government received
detailed reports on the military situation in Czechoslovakia throughout 1938
from Lt.-Col. H.C.T. Stronge, the military attaché in Prague. These generally agreed with the assessment
given above. In a lengthy memorandum
dated March 29, Stronge reported favorably on the state of Czech military
readiness, but with some reservations.
He warned that the Czechs might not fight "if their defences are
overrun or turned at the outset and their mobilization is interfered
with." He also expressed concern
with the extreme vulnerability of the frontier defenses to Sudeten-German sabotage. His general conclusion was that the Czechs
would fight if France came to their assistance at once, but not otherwise. Stronge made it clear that the Czech General
Staff did not hope to withstand Germany indefinitely; "it is merely a
question as to whether they can offer any form of protracted resistance,"
which he believed was possible for any Czech forces which succeeded in
withdrawing into Slovakia. He noted
that the fortifications "possess definite delaying possibilities in the
north to large forces and for some time.
In the south delay would only be of a very temporary nature but possibly
for a day or two."
Stronge reported even more favorably on the situation in a
September 3 memorandum. After five more
months of work, the fortifications were now "well advanced, and even in
their weakest sectors must be of some defensive value." The Czechs had the advantage of a central
position, and would be defending their own country, "almost every yard of
which has been reconnoitered." The
greatest disadvantage was the Czech numerical inferiority to the Germans,
possibly 1:4.5. Stronge also noted that
Czech leadership, especially at the higher levels, was considerably inferior to
that of the German army. However, he
felt that none of these shortcomings "are of sufficient consequence to
warrant a belief that [the Czech army] cannot give a good account of
itself." He concluded:
In my view, . . . there is no material reason why they
should not put up a really protracted resistance single-handed. It all depends on their morale. If that gives way, the war cannot last more
than a week or two. If it holds, it may
drag on for months. The fall of Prague
should not be vital.
Later that month, Stronge reported that a colonel on the
Czech General Staff told him that they would not put up a "suicidal"
resistance if abandoned by France and Great Britain, the first indication that
the Czechs had begun taking this possibility seriously. On September 27, however, the British
minister in Prague passed on Stronge's continued belief that the Czechs
"have confidence in their cause, their leadership and their equipment. He thinks it not unlikely, if they have the
moral support of knowing that they possess powerful allies even if these cannot
immediately act on their behalf, that they may render a good account of
themselves." The next day Stronge again
emphasized that "confidence is felt that if the French take the offensive
reasonably early the German army cannot overrun Bohemia and Moravia."
The other main source of military reporting on
Czechoslovakia was Col. Mason-MacFarlane, the military attaché in Berlin. He was considerably more pessimistic than
Stronge. Early in May, Mason-MacFarlane
disparaged "the confidence which seems to exist in Czech, and to a certain
extent French circles, that the Czech Army will be able to resist any possible
German offensive against Czechoslovakia, so long as the French intervene
actively as soon as war should occur," a proposition which he found
"extremely doubtful." He
believed that Czech confidence along these lines "is largely artificial,
and designed both to bolster up morale, and to induce the French, and possibly
ourselves, to think in terms of the possibility of successfully preventing
hostilities more seriously than we might otherwise." The Germans "may well prove capable of
holding their own on the defensive in [the West], with comparatively small
forces, long enough to ensure the rapid overthrow of the Czechs." He conceded that Czech defenses "have
considerable value and may be relied upon to play an important role," and
that the German Army was "still very far short" of completing
rearmament. "On the other
hand," he wrote, "the German soldier is still the German soldier, and
the Czech the Czech."
During the September crisis, Mason-MacFarlane made a trip by
automobile from Prague to Berlin, and reported his observations on the state of
Czech military preparations directly to Halifax when he reached London on the
27th. In his written dispatch dated
September 26, the Berlin attaché reported that the roads were blocked and mined
5 km deep on the Czech side of the border, and that "Czech mobilization
appears to be proceeding smoothly."
He also noted, "Czechs' morale not very good. Certainly not if forced to fight
alone," an opinion which Stronge vehemently disputed the following day.
Czech morale during the September crisis, and the
circumstances under which they would or would not have resisted an invasion, is
still a subject of some contention, due to the intangible nature of the
question. The Germans, at any rate,
appear to have had little doubt that the Czechs would resist an attack, which
lends credence to Stronge's more optomistic view. The German minister in Prague reported on September 14,
"Population here getting ready for war . . . Outward behavior disciplined,
which points to readiness for war.
Scarcely any fear of war observed so far." On the 17th, the German military attaché
reported "Czech self-assurance increased," and two days later that
"completion of mobilization and deployment is being carried out in an
orderly manner." Just prior to the Munich conference, the
German chargé d'affaires described the situation in the Czech capital:
Preparations for war being made everywhere in Prague. Evacuation of the capital being
prepared. Total blackout in parts for
last three nights. Trenches in all
parts of the city. Population show
attitude of calm fatalism.
Even without the benefit of hindsight, the man on the spot
in Prague would seem a better source of information about Czechoslovakia than
the military attaché in Berlin, yet Halifax and Chamberlain apparently ignored
all but the most pessimistic reports on the Czech military situation. In a letter dated September 27, Halifax
outlined the latest military information, including the above-mentioned report
by Col. Mason-MacFarlane, to Sir Eric Phipps, the British ambassador in Paris:
General Gamelin [the chief of the French General Staff] made
it plain to us on Monday that, in his view, if German forces now invaded
Czechoslovakia, Czech resistance is likely to be of extremely brief
duration. This disturbing estimate is
confirmed by our Military Attaché in Berlin who has just returned from
Czechoslovakia and reports that he is convinced that morale is poor and
resistance will prove to be feeble.
While it is unknown what
Mason-MacFarlane told Halifax, the Foreign Secretary's description of General
Gamelin's interview is certainly misleading, if not simply false. The statement Chamberlain made to the
Cabinet describing the meeting with Gamelin gives exactly the opposite
impression from what Halifax told Phipps:
General Gamelin thought that the Czechoslovak army would
give a good account of themselves. . . . They would try to keep open the
bottle-neck at all costs, so that even if they were forced to retire their army
would still be able to pass out from the western frontier to the eastern part
of the country, and they would be able to maintain a fighting force.
Indeed, Halifax's telegram prompted
an incredulous reply from Phipps, who previously had been far from optimistic
about the military situation. He
reported that the head of French Military Intelligence believed Czech morale to
be quite high. Furthermore, he
described a conversation with General Gamelin's "most confidential Staff
Officer," who told Phipps that the Germans could not overrun
Czechoslovakia "without hard fighting and great losses, nor did he think
it would be done very quickly."
Phipps noted pointedly that "his opinions are certainly those of
his chief."
It is this seemingly willful twisting of the facts that
lends credence to some of the most scathing attacks on Chamberlain and his
advisers. Halifax certainly appears
guilty of bending the truth to fit his chosen policy in this instance at
least. But he was not alone in
downplaying Czech military strength.
British military planners continued to minimize the role that
Czechoslovakia would play in a possible war.
In an "Appreciation of the Situation in the Event of War Against
Germany," prepared for the Cabinet on September 14, the Chiefs of Staff
repeated their earlier warning that Germany could not be prevented from
destroying Czechoslovakia. They
estimated that the Germans could achieve "the occupation of the whole of
Western Czechoslovakia, including Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia" easily
"without any appreciable delay," and could "proceed . . . at
will" to "the elimination of Czechoslovakia from the war by the
defeat of the Czechoslovak Army."
While it now seems fairly clear that the British government
consistently failed to take proper account of Czech strength, what was the
significance of this misjudgment? As
suggested earlier, the actual strength or weakness of Czechoslovakia was not
the crucial issue in the British decision to hand it over to Hitler in
September. Chamberlain's goal was to
prevent a war from breaking out, and from this perspective Czech strength could
in some sense actually be seen as a liability for British policy. The stronger the Czechs were, the more
likely they were to try to resist the Germans, and the more prolonged would be
their resistance if they did fight.
Britain was likely to be drawn into any Czech-German war, a possibility
which increased the longer such a war dragged on.
At some point, of course, a very strong Czechoslovakia would
undermine one of the central assumptions of Chamberlain's policy, that German
hegemony in Central Europe could not be prevented short of a general war. If the Czechs were strong enough to defeat
or at least severely maul the attacking German army, perhaps the French and
British could quickly bring the Germans to heel. Even the Czechs did not believe that they could stand alone
against the full weight of German military might, but counted on their allies
to draw off a large proportion of German strength. Thus, a brief examination of the French role in the Czechoslovakian
crisis is in order.
French Military Plans
The French were the key factor in deciding the fate of
Czechoslovakia, for two reasons. First
and foremost, only France could provide the immediate, direct threat to Germany
necessary to draw off German strength from Czechoslovakia. The only other sizeable army in Europe
belonged to the Soviet Union. Although
impressively large, it was not viewed as a factor either by the Germans or the
British. Aside from the question of its
willingness to intervene, the Soviet Union possessed no common border with
either Czechoslovakia or Germany, and both Poland and Rumania had made it clear
that they would not allow Soviet troops to cross their territory. The German military and naval attachés in
Moscow believed that Soviet intervention would most likely be confined to air
and naval attacks on German shipping in the Baltic, while the British military
attaché agreed with both the French and Czech attachés that "passage
through Roumania would be very difficult as the country is unfavorable for the
operations of large forces." As one author recently summed up the
situation, "in geographic terms alone, it would have been almost
impossible for the Soviet Union to exert any important military pressure in
Central Europe in 1938."
The second reason for the importance of France was that the
actions of almost all the other countries involved depended on whether France
actively intervened or not. The Soviet
treaty with Czechoslovakia specified that the Soviets would intervene only if
France acted first. Britain had no
treaty with Czechoslovakia, but was likely to aid France if it went to war with
Germany. The other countries of Central
and Southeastern Europe -- Poland, Rumania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia --
resisted both German and British efforts to get them to commit to intervention
in the crisis, preferring to wait to see what action France would take and then
get in on the winning side.
We have seen that the Czech Army was counting on the French
to divert a proportion of the German military forces, but the French
willingness to fight for Czechoslovakia was doubtful. The trauma of the Great War shaped French strategy to a point
where offensive action on their part was almost impossible. Since French military plans envisioned
another long, drawn-out war of attrition, one of their first priorities was to
protect French industry, the majority of which was concentrated in the
vulnerable region between the Seine and the Belgian and German borders. Another key priority was to conserve
resources and soldiers, since Germany had begun to seriously outstrip France in
both those areas -- by the 1930s, Germany's population was 30% larger than
France's, and German industrial output was twice that of France.
Accordingly, the French high command planned for a two-stage
war. The first stage, which could last
for up to two years, would begin with a rapid advance into Belgium to provide a
territorial buffer against the expected German offensive through the same area. The French would then assemble their
resources behind a continuous defensive line from Switzerland to the sea, while
the Germans battered futilely against the French positions. Only after the Germans had exhausted
themselves and the French achieved crushing superiority in every respect --
three times the infantry, six times the artillery, twelve times the munitions,
etc. -- would the French move into stage two and launch a strategic offensive.
This strategy made some observers skeptical of France's
commitment to actively intervene if Czechoslovakia was attacked. The German plan for the invasion of
Czechoslovakia counted on a feeble French response, leaving only five regular
and four reserve divisions to man the largely illusory "Westwall,"
which consisted of little more than a single bunker line. By the fifth day of mobilization the French
could have 56 divisions in position to launch an attack, and one recent
commentator believes that "without reinforcements the Germans could have
lost the Saar and possibly the Rhineland, and a determined French thrust might
have reached the Ruhr." Such a bold step would have gone against the
whole French philosophy of careful preparation before an offensive, exactly
what the Germans were counting on, but perhaps a limited French offensive
designed to relieve German pressure on Czechoslovakia was not completely out of
the realm of possibility. General
Gamelin, the French commander-in-chief, described such a plan during a visit to
London on September 26:
He had no intention of sitting behind the Maginot line and
waiting for a German offensive but wanted to advance immediately into Germany
in view of the Germans only having eight divisions on their western
frontier. He would then withdraw under
the protection of the Maginot line only after he had met really serious
resistance, leaving the Germans to break their strength against the permanent
fortifications.
In any event, even the most vigorous
French offensive could not have defeated Germany at a single blow. At best, the Germans would have been forced
to transfer the bulk of their forces away from Czechoslovakia in order to deal
with the French, perhaps allowing the Czechs to hold out against the reduced
German attack. A recent study of the
probable course of a war in 1938 concluded:
In terms of numbers of divisions, economic resources,
industrial capacity, and naval forces, Germany would have faced overwhelming
Allied superiority in 1938 . . . Even so, the war against Germany would not
have been easy, nor would it have been quickly won.
Conclusion
In the end, then, British policy towards Czechoslovakia was
based on an essentially correct evaluation of the military situation. Chamberlain did not ask, "Can we save
Czechoslovakia?" but rather, "Can we save Czechoslovakia without a
general war?" The answer to the
second question was surely "No."
While the British leadership consistently ignored and downplayed
favorable estimates of Czech military strength, they were nevertheless correct
in their belief that Czechoslovakia could not be saved without a full-scale
European war. No one believed then, and
no one believes today, that Czechoslovakia could have stood alone against the
full weight of German military power.
Czech survival depended on active intervention by the French in order to
draw off the bulk of the German Army in defense of their western frontier. It seems likely that the French could have
dealt Germany a serious blow if they had been willing to take a vigorous
offensive early on, but action of this sort would have been antithetical to the
philosophy of the French Army. A major
war would still have been required to defeat Germany in even the most
optimistic assessments of French intentions.
This paper has evaluated British policy on its own terms,
but there are certainly other valid ways of looking at the Czechoslovakian
crisis. Critics of Chamberlain often
point to the September crisis as the last chance for Britain and France to
stand up to Hitler while they still had a significant military advantage. Indeed, it now seems fairly clear that
British fears of an aerial "knock-out blow" were far beyond the
capacity of the Luftwaffe in 1938, and it is likely that Germany could have
been defeated with far less cost if war had broken out in 1938 instead of
1939. It is, of course, easy with
hindsight to advise Chamberlain that he should have chosen war instead of peace
in 1938, since we now know that war broke out in 1939 despite his efforts. But there were plenty of voices at the time,
even within his own Cabinet, advising him to take just this course of action.
The most telling criticism of British Czechoslovakian
policy, and one that does not have to rely on hindsight, is that the British
failed to consider the long-term effects of the elimination of Czech military
power on the strategic balance in Europe.
British planners correctly estimated that German hegemony over Central
Europe could no longer be prevented without a major war, but they chose to
accommodate this state of affairs without any examination of what German
domination of Central Europe would mean to British security. This might be more excusable if the
Czechoslovakian crisis had erupted unforeseen, but that was not the case. Chamberlain and Halifax established their
policy in March, long before the situation had reached a stage where they could
only react to events as they happened.
Few "crises" in history can have been anticipated as far in
advance as the Munich crisis, yet the British apparently did not bother to
examine the implications of their policy outside of the immediate situation.
The reason for this failure is a question that is beyond the
scope of this paper. However, two
elements which contributed to British Czechoslovakian policy may also have
played a large role in its strategic failure: the British exaggeration of the
German air threat, and their implicit belief that Germany could not win a long
war. The British never feared that
Germany could defeat France on the ground; while they may have
questioned the offensive spirit of the French Army, they seem to have had no
doubt that the French could defend their own borders. Thus, the Czech army was not seen as a critical factor in the
military balance. British military
planners focused on what they saw as the overwhelming German superiority in the
air, and in this respect Czechoslovakia was unimportant. They believed that if they could survive the
initial German aerial onslaught, German defeat would only be a matter of time.
It would be extremely ironic if British confidence in
winning a protracted war against Germany blinded them to the significance of
Czechoslovakia in the European balance of power. The British anticipation of German hegemony became a
self-fulfilling prophecy, as the countries of central and southeastern Europe
began to accommodate themselves to the new situation following Czechoslovakia's
dismemberment. This process was greatly
accelerated by the German occupation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia in
March 1939, which delivered to the Germans vast quantities of Czech arms and
munitions, raw material stockpiles, industrial plants, and modern arms
factories. Munich opened the resources of Central
Europe and the Balkans to exploitation by Germany in wartime, allowing it to
fight a far more protracted war than the British had anticipated. British leaders and military planners had
considered the cost of defending Czechoslovakia, and deemed it too high. Their true failure was that they never
considered the cost of not defending Czechoslovakia before making that determination.
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