The New Federalist April 1, 1988 Pages 5 & 8

American Almanac

Appeasing Your Enemy After the War Has Begun:

September 1938-June 1940: Part 2

by Molly Hammett Kronberg

1938: Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler 1988: Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan

In the previous article in this series (New Federalist, Vol. II, No. 12, March 25), we recounted how during the course of 1938 and still more in 1939, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his Cabinet, and the French

government of Eduard Daladier, managed to conduct their diplomacy in such a way as to guarantee the outbreak of World War II.

We described ever-more frantic attempts by these governments to appease Adolf Hitler, Fuehrer of Nazi Germany, and to buy "peace for our time" at the price of strengthening and emboldening Nazi Germany's war machine. And we saw how this appeasement led precisely to the outcome the Appeasers sought to avoid: war.

The lesson we drew for today, for the Appeasers' government called the Reagan administration (now deep into its love affair with the dictators of the Kremlin) is that appeasement brings war. This is no less true today, as we confront the aggressions of the Soviet Empire, than it was 50 years ago.

At the end of the last article, we left the Appeasers in the frightful position of having brought about, by their cowardice and deceit, that which they dreaded most, Hitler's invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. The Appeaser governments in Britain and France were tied to Poland and her defense by treaties which established beyond a shadow of a doubt that, if Hitler invaded Poland, Britain and France would be compelled to declare war on Germany. In fact, Britain's mutual defense pact with Poland had been signed on Aug. 25, 1939—only one week before Hitler hurled his armies across the Polish border.

Bound as she was by this week-old treaty to defend Poland, did Britain do so? Not at all. In the last seven days leading up to Hitler's decision to abandon diplomacy in favor of blitzkrieg, the British and French did every-thing they could imagine—and, as we saw in the previous article, many things no sane person could imagine—to pacify Hitler and abandon Poland to Nazi conquest.

Yet, as we also saw, the Appeasers were not successful. Hitler grew angry, and then angrier: Britain and France had promised him repeatedly (if secretly) that they would give the Nazi Reich its territorial claims in Poland— the Free City of Danzig, and a land strip across the Polish Corridor. At the same time, Britain and France promised their Polish allies that they would defend Poland's claims, not Hitler's, in these matters.

Hitler Gets Impatient

Hitler waited, increasingly impatient, for the Appeasers to deliver, as they had done so resoundingly a year before, at the time of the Munich Pact.

When their pace of appeasement did not seem to him fast enough, the Fuehrer struck, invading Poland at dawn on Sept. 1 with (as he had warned Danzig High Commissioner Karl Burckhardt in August) "the full force of a mechanized army, of which the Poles have no conception."

But as we also saw, Hitler was certain that the Appeasers would not take even this brutal invasion as a casus belli—a cause for war. He could not believe that Britain and France would honor their treaties with Poland, and come to her defense. Nor did he believe that Britain and France would declare war on him, simply because he was taking by force what London and Paris had already agreed were his just demands in Poland.

In his assessment of the Appeasers, Hitler was fundamentally right. Britain and France had no intention—had never had any intention—of militarily defending the Polish allies with whom they had signed such explicit defense treaties. The Appeasers meant to use their treaties with Poland as a way to rein in the intractable Fuehrer; but as far as any commitment to Poland herself was concerned, the Appeasers meant to sell her out as gracefully and discreetly as possible.

All this the British and French diplomats had made pretty plain to Hitler, in secret dealings with him which were forbidden by their treaties with Poland. The British waited no more than a few hours after signing the Anglo-Polish Treaty on Aug. 25, before they subverted it and flouted its terms, by having their diplomats tell Hitler the treaty had no teeth in it.

After all, the Appeasers thought, Hitler had a more compelling argument than the Poles: he disposed of the resources of the Greater German Reich, and a powerful army. That Reich now included almost all the areas stripped from Germany by the criminally stupid Versailles Treaty that ended World War I. Since Hitler had come to power in 1933, Germany had retrieved the Saarland; remilitarized the Rhineland; made Austria a province of Ger-many; absorbed the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia; turned the remainder of Czechoslovakia—Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia—into protectorates of the Reich; and gotten back the port city of Memel, far away in Lithuania.

The French had not marched when Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936; neither France nor Britain had quibbled when Hitler abolished the Austrian state in 1938; France and Britain both attended with indecent enthusiasm Hitler's destruction of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and early 1939.

By the summer of 1939, the only areas that had been taken from Germany in 1919, and not yet returned, were Danzig (inside, but not part of, Poland) and the Polish Corridor. With a view to "annihilating Poland" (as he explained to his sympathetic listener Sir Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador in Berlin), on Aug. 23, 1939 Hitler had concluded with Josef Stalin the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which would come into operation during the invasion of Poland. It is with the invasion of Poland that we pick up the thread of our story.

War had begun—but not for the Appeasers. At 5:30 a.m. on Sept. 1, Brit-ain's General Lord Gort told his country's Cabinet that "The Germans are through" the Polish border areas. Ten minutes later Hitler spoke on the radio from Berlin, announcing that his soldiers were fighting for "the honor and vital rights" of Germany, which he vowed to secure "against no matter what adversary." By 6 a.m. Cracow and Katowice were being bombed. By that time, too, the shape of the front and the battle had become clear. Germany had invaded Poland at many points. Danzig was not the issue, manifestly, nor the Corridor; Poland was.

By her Aug. 25 Treaty with Poland, Britain was bound to act immediately. She did not. The British Foreign Office, communicating with Nevile Henderson in Berlin, wondered if Germany "could . . . limit the hostilities until you had been to London." In other words, Nazi invasion of Poland was not a reason for war-even if last week's Anglo-Polish Treaty said it was.

As German troops overran Polish territory, Henderson continued to urge the arrival in Berlin of a Polish plenipotentiary, to submit at gunpoint to all of Hitler's demands. For a second time that week, Henderson made a ludicrous suggestion: that the Polish negotiator be Marshal Edward Rydz-Smigly, commander in chief of Poland's army, whose men were now battling the Nazi columns. It still did not strike the Englishman as strange, that Poland's top military man should leave his country as it was torn apart by invasion, in order to travel to the capital of the invader and give in.

The wires between London and Paris hummed appeasement that morning of Sept. 1; discussion revolved around the possibility of allowing the Germans to withdraw from Poland, preparatory to a peace conference, at which Brit-ain and France would sponsor Hitler's "peaceful" takeover of Danzig and the Corridor. As Polish cities were bombed by the Luftwaffe, the Appeasers dreamt of a second Munich conference to pacify Hitler as the first Munich conference had, clearly, failed to do.

Again, as before Munich, the Western allies turned to Italy's Benito Mussolini to mediate. They still hoped Mussolini could exercise enough restraint on his Axis partner, to convince the Fuehrer to abandon his war against Poland in order to get the same spoils, without the war.

For his part, as his armies stormed Poland, Hitler on Sept. 1 apprised Swedish businessman Birger Dahlerus of "his anxiety not to bring about a world war." Hitler's words were aimed at London, the next destination of the Swede, who was the principal back-channel intermediary between the two capitals. Hitler declared that he "was not bent on a war of conquest," and was prepared "to discuss matters with Great Britain." All he wanted first, was to crush Poland.

Dahlerus communicated the Fuehrer's thoughts to London. At lunchtime Sept. 1, the British Cabinet concluded gratefully that Hitler's invasion of Poland was no cause to operate British treaty obligations to the invaded country.

But one thing the British Cabinet, and even Neville Chamberlain, were clear on. There could be no negotiations, no mediation, "while German troops are invading Poland." To permit that would prove to the world how worthless the Appeasers' treaty ties were. Therefore, Chamberlain asserted that Ger-man withdrawal must be a precondition for the conference which, he hoped, could realize Hitler's Polish ambitions. Yet no time limit for German with-drawal was suggested.

In Their Own Words: The Language of Appeasement

David Lloyd GeorgeBritain's World War I Prime Minister

On Hitler, 1937: "A magnetic, dynamic personality with a single-minded purpose. . . . I only wish we had a man of his supreme quality at the head of affairs in our country today."

Sir Horace WilsonIntimate of Neville Chamberlain

On Munich, 1938: "If we two, Great Britain and Germany, can come to agreement regarding the settlement of the Czech problem, we shall simply brush aside the resistance that France or Czechoslovakia herself may offer to the decision."

Sir Nevile HendersonBritish Ambassador to Berlin

On propaganda, 1938: "I do wish it might be possible to get at any rate The Times, Camrose, Beaverbrook Press, etc., to write up Hitler as the Apostle of Peace. It will be terribly shortsighted if this is not done."

George OrwellBritish Author

On Hitler's Mein Kampf, 1940: "I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. . . . The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. . . . One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can't win, and yet that somehow he deserves to."

Poland Asks for Help

While the Appeasers' Cabinet in London pondered its situation, Polish leader Col. Josef Beck called in from Warsaw (in the middle of an air raid whose clangor was clearly audible over the telephone line) to demand that Britain take some action. For example: how about an air raid on western Germany, to take pressure off the Poles? Beck reported that the Nazis were bombing many towns, with high civilian casualties.

The Anglo-Polish Treaty was clear, Beck said. His country was being invaded, and Britain was compelled to act. Beck demanded that Britain deliver Hitler an ultimatum. Instead, the Appeasers, in the person of British Foreign Secretary Edward Lord Halifax, sent Hitler a note.

The diplomatic difference was not lost on Hitler; he knew it meant that, although what he called his "First Silesian War" against Poland was frowned upon in London, his bad taste in having started a war could be overlooked, if he modified his behavior. The British note warned that Hitler must suspend aggressive action against Poland and withdraw his troops—but no time limit for suspension of action, or withdrawal, was set. Paris and London were afraid that any mention of a deadline would exasperate Hitler, and harden his heart still more against the "peace conference" the Appeasers desired.

But a strange phenomenon was beginning to sweep Britain, and shake to the core the foundations of Neville Chamberlain's foreign policy. That phenom-enon was a stirring in what is called public opinion. Britons were demand-ing action against Hitler. The British public, polled and interviewed across the Isles, had expected war to be declared, if not on Sept. 1, certainly by the morning of Sept. 2. After all, that was the clear, precise meaning of the Anglo-Polish Agreement. And yet no such declaration was forthcoming. This seemed all the stranger, as the scope of the German invasion became clear; because by Saturday morning, Sept. 2, no one in the world doubted that Hitler was the aggressor, determined to conquer all of Poland.

But, since Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax had in his note to Hitler set no time limit for a reply, Hitler did not reply. He simply went on attacking. As Nazi panzer units decimated Polish cavalry, as Nazi dive bombers pounded Poland's cities—the indefatigable British and French organizers of the elusive peace conference threw themselves into renewed action. There was after all a hope that Hitler could be induced to accept at the bargaining table from them, what he seemed determined to take with his own hands.

Indeed, Italian Foreign Minister Count Ciano told French Foreign Minister Bonnet, he had it on good authority that Hitler merely wanted until Sunday noon, Sept. 3, to "work out and consider the question of an armistice and conference." This produced what was called in the diplomatic dispatches "lively satisfaction" in Paris.

But in London, the prospects were growing dimmer for a "peace conference" as the encore to Hitler's assault on Poland. Even in the government, there were voices warning that Chamberlain's program was doomed. Secretary for War Sir Leslie Hore-Belisha told the Cabinet that "I was strongly opposed to further delay, which I thought might result in breaking the unity of the country. Public opinion was against yielding an inch."

Again that new consideration, public opinion. In Britain's parliamentary system, a government could fall on the instant, if a no-confidence vote were taken. Haunted by that prospect, as the streets of London began to fill with angry crowds, Chamberlain's Cabinet finally agreed to Hore-Belisha's proposal of an ultimatum to be handed to Hitler—the thing Beck had wanted, but could not get. The ultimatum the Cabinet sought, was to expire at midnight, Sept. 2-3.

But, despite the vote of the Cabinet, no ultimatum was issued. True to his and Chamberlain's vision of taming Hitler, Lord Halifax refused. Instead, he issued more "warnings." Hitler ignored them.

'Symbolic Withdrawal'

The French Cabinet finally met to consider its own position the night of Sept. 2. And that meeting evolved a new approach. Since Hitler would reject utterly the British demands for withdrawal, the French asked, "Could there not be a third solution . . . a symbolic withdrawal of a few miles?" In other words, how would it be if France and Britain, Poland's treaty allies, gently requested the Fuehrer to withdraw his troops a few miles, still leaving them deep in Polish territory?

At that very moment, Neville Chamberlain was addressing the British House of Commons. There he astonished all its members by failing to issue an ultimatum, or announce a state of war. Rather, he spoke of new negotiations with Hitler. Contemporary eyewitness accounts are revealing. "One and all were keyed up for the announcement that war had been declared," one Member later wrote. But no time limit was given, no ultimatum issued. "The House was aghast . . . oozing hostility" at Chamberlain's government,

another recalled. "For two whole days the wretched Poles had been bombed and massacred, and we were still considering within what time limit Hitler should be invited to tell us whether he felt like relinquishing his prey!"

His speech ended, Chamberlain sat down to silence. Not a cheer was raised for him by any Tory Party supporter. Had a vote been taken then, his government would have toppled. So tense was the mood that the House's Chief Whip, Capt. Margesson, feared physical violence.

That same night, Sir Howard Kennard, British ambassador to Poland, wired desperately from Warsaw, "I trust I may be informed at the earliest possible moment of our declaration of war." Chamberlain and Halifax ignored his plea. The Germans, Halifax wired back, must "have as much time as possi-ble to consider their reply" to Halifax's note. But Hitler had no intention of replying.

Soon, the Polish ambassador in London was telling Halifax the Poles were being pommeled, their military situation worsening by the minute. Still, Halifax imposed no time limit.

Britain's Ultimatum

Meantime, the Cabinet, horrified by Chamberlain's performance in the House, demanded to meet again. At length, an ultimatum was decided upon, forced on a reluctant Chamberlain and Halifax by a furious Cabinet. Still hoping against hope, Halifax contrived not to transmit it until 10 hours after the Cabinet meeting ended. Perhaps Hitler would do something helpful, Halifax mused—like announce his decision to withdraw.

It was not to be. Finally, a heavy-hearted Halifax transmitted his govern-ment's ultimatum to Berlin. It arrived at the British embassy there, in Nevile Henderson's hands, on the sunny Sunday morning of Sept. 3. Before he transmitted it, Halifax had idiotically wired Kennard, "In the meantime it is accepted Germans are attacking only military objectives." The Poles had already reported that civilians were dying in the thousands from German bombs, but no one in London seemed to have heard this report.

The British ultimatum to Hitler was set to expire two hours after its delivery to the German government. If, by then, Hitler had not agreed to withdraw his invading army from Poland, then Great Britain would consider herself in a state of war with Germany.

Nevile Henderson took down his cane and his natty bowler hat, and dressed with care for what was to be his final meeting with the Fuehrer. He omitted (as he himself reported in his deluded book, "Failure of a Mission") the red carnation he customarily wore in his buttonhole. The occasion, he thought, was too grave to warrant such a touch.

Henderson went directly to Hitler's office in the Reichschancellery, there to find Hitler himself, his Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, and translator Paul Schmidt. Henderson stood before Hitler's desk and read, in German, the text of the ultimatum.

Hitler sat motionless, hands folded on the desktop, face expressionless, staring straight ahead. For what seemed an eternity he was silent. At length, he turned toward Ribbentrop and demanded ("savagely," it was said), "What next?" Ribbentrop could only answer: "I believe we can expect a similar ultimatum from the French within the hour."

Hitler said nothing to Henderson, and Henderson withdrew. The two hours ticked away, and World War II began.

That night, Adolf Hitler left Berlin for the Polish front. He would be on hand in person, for the rest of his First Silesian War.

But now that war had become a continental war. And there is no doubt that Hitler was shocked by this result. Had not Britain and France promised him, at every turn, that Danzig was his, the Corridor his? Had he not been en-couraged in every possible way, up to his invasion of Poland and beyond, to make his demands known that they might be fulfilled? And finally, had he not been told, in every possible way, that Britain and France would not fight for Poland?

He had gambled, as he had so often before, and this time he had lost. He was infuriated at the British. He thought they had misled him into a general war, which his defiance would not let him duck.

Still, even with the victorious powers of World War I lined up against him, Hitler could not believe that France and Britain would fight for Poland. And he was right. Declare war, they might, to save their tattered honor; fight war, they would not.

Was This War?

Britain's behavior was rather surprising for a country at war. BBC, for example, banned broadcasts by Sir Horace Rumbold, a former British ambassador in Berlin, and Member of Parliament Harold Nicholson, because they were considered too anti-German! With the war only three weeks old, the tireless Dahlerus was back in action, shuttling between London and Berlin. Hitler told Dahlerus to communicate to London that his only condition for peace was "an entirely free hand in Poland." "Beyond this," the Fuehrer said, he was "entirely prepared to join in guaranteeing the status quo of the rest of Europe." Perhaps France or a neutral country should take the first step in setting up a conference to that end. Hitler proposed Mussolini. The British, in talks with Dahlerus, suggested the Queen of the Netherlands instead.

Thus, as back-channel talks continued among Germany, France, and Britain, Hitler, in the field in Poland, could assure his generals that their rear in western Germany was secure. France and Britain would not invade. Not one Allied soldier was sent against Germany's Westwall fortifications. No action from the West compelled Hitler to pull troops from the Polish front. Poland suffered and died alone, in five weeks' time, because her allies did nothing to relieve her; not even when, on Sept. 17, she was invaded a second time—this time from the east by Hitler's treaty partner, Soviet Russia.

Strangest of all, Britain and France never even declared war on the Soviet Union. The West's treaty ties to prostrate Poland still operated, one might have supposed. London and Paris had at least made the gesture of declaring war on Hitler. But when the Red Army entered a Poland already defeated by Hitler's troops, London and Paris deplored the action, and no more.

The French government plumbed new depths of perfidy. It flouted in every particular France's treaty obligations to Poland, which specified that "as soon as the principal German effort develops against Poland, France will launch an offensive action against Germany with the bulk of her forces, starting on the 15th day after the first day of the general French mobilization." No such action ever took place. General Gamelin, French commander in chief, told his government that he could not mount a serious offensive against Ger-many's undermanned Westwall "in less than about two years . . . in 1941-42." Even then, he said, he could do it only with the most massive material assistance from Britain and the United States.

Yet Germany had only 23 divisions in the West. In the same sector, France and Britain together disposed of 110.

Were not other options open to the Western Allies? Bombing? From the outset the French had insisted that Britain not bomb Germany's industrial Ruhr region, for fear of German reprisals against France. Too, the British Air commanders did not approve of it. "Bomb the Black Forest?" cried one. "But that's private property. Next you'll be asking me to bomb the Ruhr."

Warsaw fell on Sept. 27, 1939—fell into a nightmare symbolized by Ausch-witz. The Western governments' thoughts turned to peace. What point in fighting Hitler, when the object of the French and British treaties had been wiped from Europe's map?

Hitler thought the same. He returned triumphant to Berlin. There, on Oct. 6, before the Reichstag, he made his "peace offer"—the last of those Great Peace Speeches that had bewitched the West since 1933.

Why should this war in the West be fought? For restoration of Poland? The Poland of the Versailles Treaty will never rise again. . . . It would be senseless to annihilate millions of men and to destroy property worth millions in order to reconstruct a state which at its very birth was called an abortion by all those not of Polish extraction. . . .

Germany has no further claims against France. . . . At no time and in no place have I ever acted contrary to British interests. . . . I believe even today that there can only be real peace in Europe and throughout the world if Germany and England come to an understanding. . . .

One thing is certain. In the course of world history there have never been two victors, but very often only losers. May those peoples and their leaders who are of the same opinion now make their reply. And let those who consider war to be the better solution reject my outstretched hand.

But, Hitler warned the group around Winston Churchill, the new First Lord of the Admiralty in Chamberlain's Cabinet,

If . . . the opinions of Messrs. Churchill and followers should prevail, this offer will have been my last. Then we shall fight.

Chamberlain and Daladier finally replied; both demanded guarantees and specifics before their countries would lay down their arms. They were wary, at last, of the promises and offers of this man. Yet still they longed for an understanding with him. British Home Office Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare wrote Lord Lothian, then Britain's ambassador to Washington, that the British should try to discover Hitler's position "rather than to meet his speech with a curt and immediate refusal."

When Chamberlain finally did refuse Hitler's offer (neither immediately nor curtly), Britain's former Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, attacked Chamberlain for doing so. A few days after Chamberlain made his public response, Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs R.A. Butler confided to the Soviet ambassador to London, Ivan Maisky, that "The British govern-ment would be ready to make peace even tomorrow, if it received assurance that the understanding reached would ensure peace for 20 or 25 years. . . . In such an event the British government would be prepared, in the event of a lasting peace, to make important concessions to Germany even in respect to colonies."

Poland had been massacred: Britain had looked the other way. Now, Britain was prepared once again to put "'important concessions" into Hitler's bloody hands.

Not only that. In communicating this to Maisky, the representative of the Soviet government which was Hitler's partner in destroying Poland, the Foreign Office was conveying in the most cynical way possible to Hitler and Stalin, that Britain still wanted a deal.

The deep desires of the Appeasers were well conveyed in a New York Times lead editorial written a day or so after Hitler delivered his Peace Offer. "We have no reason to doubt Herr Hitler's word," the Times wrote. If he says he wants peace, of course he means it.

And, of course, Hitler did mean it. Why should he want war? When he desired another piece of European real estate, he could always fight another "Silesian War" to get it.

This the Times omitted to say. Instead, the great liberal paper urged the governments of Britain and France to take Hitler's outstretched hand, and chided them for seeming reluctant.

The price they paid for peace: total war

Just as he promised, Hitler annihilates Poland.

Polish Jews being deported after the Nazis take Warsaw.

Nazi troops marching into Denmark.

Hitler and his troops at Le Bourget Airport after the fall of France.

Hitler's Final Solution: the concentration camp ovens.

Sitzkrieg

But, at long last, Chamberlain and Daladier were coming to understand something the Times did not. Their governments could not survive the political explosions that would be set off, if Hitler's Peace Offer were accepted.

They would not lay down their arms—but neither would they use them. Militarily, they did nothing. It was an eerie period—France, Britain, and Germany, the greatest powers of Europe, at war, but no war was waged. This is the period the Germans called the Sitzkrieg, the British, "The Phony War."

French and German troops faced each other across the Rhine. And the peace campaign devised by Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry did its work on the morale of the French soldier. "Why do you fight in the West?" Nazi leaflets and French-language broadcasts demanded. "Nothing to fight about. You are fighting a war for the British Empire."

France and Britain waited and did nothing. But Hitler did not wait, not even for Chamberlain's reply to his Oct. 6 Peace Speech. Instead, on Oct. 10, he called together his military chieftains, read them a memorandum on the state of the war and the world, and slapped on the table Directive No. 6 for the Conduct of the War.

In the directive Hitler ordered:

a. Preparations are to be made for an attacking operation . . . through the areas of Luxembourg, Belgium, and Holland. This attack must be carried out as soon and as forcefully as possible.

b. The purpose will be to defeat as strong a part of the French operational army as possible, as well as allies fighting by its side, and at the same time to gain as large an area as possible in Holland, Belgium and northern France as a base for conducting a promising air and sea war against England.

The memorandum Hitler read to the generals declared:

The German war aim is the final military dispatch of the West, that is, destruction of the power and ability of the Western Powers ever again to be able to oppose the state consolidation and development of the German people in Europe. . . .

By no treaty or pact can a lasting neutrality of Soviet Russia be ensured. . . . The trifling significance of treaties has been proved on all sides in recent years. The greatest safeguard against any Russian attack lies . . . in a prompt demonstration of German strength.

By Oct. 12, when Chamberlain made his response to Hitler's Peace Speech, Hitler's directive and memo had been German Army policy for two days. The future was grim for the Appeasers—but, characteristically, they were optimistic.

And Blitzkrieg

We may move ahead from Oct. 12, to that day six months later, in the spring of 1940—April 9, at dawn—when the German army blasted into Norway and Denmark. The other targeted lands soon followed: Belgium and the Netherlands were invaded May 10, and fast overrun by soldiers and machin-ery fighting the new kind of war called Blitzkrieg. On that same day, Neville Chamberlain was driven from the head of Britain's government, to be replaced by Winston Churchill.

To the dying day of his government, Neville Chamberlain and his fellow Appeasers had not given up hope of an understanding with Nazi Germany. In April 1940, as Hitler's armies ravaged Norway and Denmark, Lord Halifax communicated to the German opposition the British government's position: if Hitler were removed, the British would accept a Nazi Germany under the leadership of Hermann Goering.

Furthermore, Halifax made clear, Britain would recognize the status quo in Czechoslovakia and Poland (total German control of the former, and German/Soviet control of the latter)—the spoils of Hitler's wars of nerves and conquest. These were points on which Chamberlain explicitly expressed himself. Hitler would certainly have to go—he had proven himself far too troublesome. "He must either die, or go to St. Helena, or become a real public works architect," Chamberlain wrote. But Goering and the rest of the Nazi hierarchy could stay.

May 1940 brought more than the invasion of Belgium and the Netherlands. It also brought the Battle of France—which raged for just six weeks, from May 10 until June 21, when Hitler dictated his terms to a beaten, demoral-ized nation. The despair and cynicism of the Appeasers, infected France's military commanders and civilian leaders alike. On May 15, Britain's new

Prime Minister Winston Churchill was awakened by a desperate call from his French counterpart (by now Paul Reynaud held the post). "We have been defeated! We are beaten!" Reynaud cried. Churchill later wrote that he could not believe the great French Army had been beaten in five days. Nevertheless, it was so.

Next day, Churchill flew to France. In company with Reynaud and General Gamelin, he asked the latter, "Where is the strategic reserve? Ou est la masse de manoeuvre?" Gamelin, Commander in Chief of the Allied Armies in Europe, shook his head and shrugged: "Aucune—there are none."

As has often been said, in the Second World War, France refought the First. She did so because her leaders had supposed they would never again have to fight; had crafted all her foreign policy and diplomacy to the end of Ap-peasement, and declined to learn the most basic lesson of statecraft: that in order not to risk war, one must be prepared to make war.

And so, because her policy was Appeasement, her fate was defeat.

There is to France's sad story an honorable and great exception: a young military man whom Churchill met at Gamelin's headquarters on that visit to France, an expert in tank warfare whose book had revolutionized war-making. (Alas, it had been read, not by his superiors in the French Army, but by his adversaries—chief among them Adolf Hitler, Gen. Heinz Guderian, and Gen. Fritz Manstein, the three men who planned the Battle of France.) In Gamelin's tent, Churchill approached the young man and whispered, "L'homme de l'heure"; "Man of the hour." The young man's name was Charles de Gaulle.

France had lost the war long before the Wehrmacht invaded. But what of Britain? Her policy too had been Appeasement. Chamberlain and Halifax and all the rest, made sure of it. And yet Britain did not fold.

There are many reasons for this, told and retold in the history books. There is only one that need interest us here, because it bears on Appeasement and its opposite.

Before the Battle of Britain had begun, the Chamberlain government had fallen, and the rock on which it had foundered, was outraged public opinion. When, on May 8, Hitler's armies took Norway, Member of Parliament Leo Amery rose in Britain's House of Commons and turned to Neville Chamber-lain, who was presiding. Amery began, "This is what Oliver Cromwell said

to the Long Parliament when he thought it was no longer fit to conduct the affairs of the nation: 'You have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"'

That was the sentiment in Britain—far different from France's demoraliza-tion. There existed in Britain the potential to mobilize her people to fight. And even Neville Chamberlain understood, at long, long last, that his day was done. On May 10, as Germany invaded Holland, Belgium, and France, Chamberlain resigned his office.

Afterword

As historians have commented, Adolf Hitler won the war of 1939—the war that ended in the railway carriage at Compiègne, on June 21, 1940, when France's leaders surrendered. Hitler had indeed been correct: if he had not expected the Western powers to declare war on him Sept. 3, he was surely right in insisting that they would not wage that war seriously.

The war that followed after June 1940, was a different war. But Old Europe, for whose preservation the Appeasers had striven so mightily, and for whose doom they were so utterly responsible, died forever in June 1940, when Hitler conquered France.