Were we wrong in 1939? Britain and France declared war on Hitler fifty years ago this month. Should we be ashamed at not having leapt to the defense of plucky little Poland? - includes related article

National Review, Sept 29, 1989 by David Carlton, John P. Roche

Britain and France declared war on Hitler fifty years agO this month. Should we be asbamed at not having leapt to the defense of plucky little Poland? David Carlton and John Rocbe argue the point.

N THE fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of what

is perhaps too readily called the Second World War,

the world's press is filled with articles recalling the supposedly noble decision of Great Britain and France to come to the assistance of gallant little Poland. Inevitably Americans are likely to feel rather left out of the nostalgia. And some will even be plagued with a sense of retrospective shame that their own country stood aside, leaving others to fight the good fight.

But in the view of this writer, who is British, Americans need entertain no such feelings, for close study of the historical record suggests that the circumstances in which the British in particular came to get involved in a war over an Eastern European issue were not such as to support the contention that nobility had much to do with it. Rather, Poland became a political football among British political factions at a time when a general election was looming.

If this thesis is valid, then clearly Americans, who were simply ignored by the British and the French in the immediate run-up to the war over Poland, can scarcely be reproached for not having gotten involved. Whatever may have been the case for the United States resisting Adolf Hitler at some point, neither President Roosevelt nor the Senate could be expected to allow British domestic politics to play a decisive role in their decision.

A European war over an East European issue broke out in September 1939 quite simply because there had occurred in the previous spring one of the most spectacular U-turns ever seen in British political history: for in various stages between March 31 and April 13 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain came round to the position that the British government, in conjunction with the French government, would lend "all the support in their power" if Poland, Rumania, or Greece considered it necessary to use armed force to resist any threat to their independence.

The Anglo-French attempt to "appease" Nazi Germany, which had reached its apogee the previous September at Munich, was thus dramatically abandoned. So too was an axiom of British policymakers going back as far as Palmerston and even perhaps the Younger Pitt, namely that Britain should never go to war for an Eastern European cause. (It seems to have been an axiom of American policymakers, too, and not one, incidentally, that changed with the end of so-called isolationism," as events in 1944-48, 1956, and 1968 amply demonstrate.) As British Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain had put it in 1925: "For the Polish Corridor, no British government ever will or ever can risk the bones of a British grenadier."

How, then, are we to explain the breaking of this long tradition? And how could it be that of all men it would be Austen Chamberlain's half-brother who would be the prime minister responsible? For had not Neville Chamberlain hitherto seemed the most fanatical supporter of in effect giving Hitler a free hand in Eastern Europe? The public was subsequently led by Chamberlain himself to believe that he simply experienced a personal road-to- Damascus when the Germans invaded Prague on March 15 in defiance of the terms of the Munich agreement. He was supposed to have recognized the error of his ways and accepted that he had been gullible in trusting Hitler to maintain "peace in our time." In short, the "guarantees" represented his sincere, if belated, conversion to the Churchillian view that any further unambiguous German aggression anywhere in Europe must be resisted by Great Britain and any allies who could be found-among whom, needless to say, the Americans were not expected to be numbered, at least at the outset.

It seems unlikely, however, that the great U-turn came about as a result of disinterested intellectual reflection on Chamberlain's part. It is surely more plausible to see him primarily as a professional politician fighting to retain his place and, if possible, to win the next general election. Most of his crities, too, may have been more interested in playing the "great game" of domestic politics than in acting on compassion for Hitler's victims or pursuing noble

visions of a better future for their country, let alone Europe as a whole.

It is generally conceded that to understand what happened in 1939 it is necessary to go back to the autumn of 1938. But those with little grasp of how polities actually work tend to focus on the Munich conference itself. They stress that Hitler gave his word that the detachment of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia represented his last territorial demand, and that Chamberlain committed his country to "guaranteeing" the remainder of Czechoslovakia. Hence, according to this view, the invasion of Prague six months later inevitably triggered a volte-face in British policy.

But something else happened in the autumn of 1938 that may have been of greater importance in explaining what happened to British foreign policy during 1939. For Chamberlain, given a hero's welcome on his return from Munich, had to decide whether to call an immediate general election. Influenced by his foreign secretary, ford Halifax (later an ambassador to Washington), he resisted the temptation to do so. It was probably the single most important blunder of his entire premiership. For he could surely at that stage have secured re-election with a massive majority.