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Appeasement
Brad Delong, thinking outside the box, concludes that Neville Chamberlain made a mistake in standing up to Nazi aggression against Poland. If I knew anything about World War II besides stuff about code-breaking and the A-bomb I might know the answer to the question this has raised in my mind -- what happens in the possible world where Chamberlain (and whoever was running France at the time) don't make their much-criticized decision to appease Hitler at Munich? Instead, they say that if Germany invades Czechoslovakia, they will come to the aid of the Czechs. Does Hitler back down? Then what? Or does he attack? The Czechs had ten divisions, I think, and some solid defensive fortifications. France and Britain still lack the capacity to go on the offensive. Does Hitler invade Poland en route to Prague to try and avoid the Sudeten mountains? Does Stalin invade Poland to "assist" the Czechs? Would combined Soviet-Czech forces have beaten Germany while the West plays phony war and France eventually mounts a last-ditch effort to seize the Rhineland before they wind up with Reds on their border?
Assuming combined Franco-British-Soviet forces defeat Germany without US assistance and prove that the isolationists were right, the US presumably sits out the Cold War having learned the lessons of Munich -- that France and Britian can look after themselves. Or, with Japan ascendant in Asia, do the US and USSR form an informal alliance to block the France/UK/Japan imperialist troika?
October 21, 2004 | Permalink
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» Alternative Scenario from Lawyers, Guns and Money
One of the best reasons for trying to face down the Germans in 1938 instead of 1939 is the presence of Russia in the Allied coalition. Unfortunately, the Red Army of 1938 was incapable of doing much of anything beyond getting its officers shot. [Read More]
Tracked on Oct 21, 2004 2:14:39 PM
Comments
Hey, mista, it's not just Czechs there were Slovaks there too, you know.
Posted by: abb1 | Oct 21, 2004 12:57:13 PM
And what if Charles Lindbergh were the PRESIDENT?
Seriously, though, the hard part of all this stuff is that Hitler was not a rational actor. Invading the Soviet Union was simply dumb, dumb, dumb. Decisions like that make it nearly impossible to develop plausible alternative scenarios.
Posted by: praktike | Oct 21, 2004 1:01:17 PM
I believe I remember reading an account in Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (for whatever that's worth these days) about the impressions of Wehrmacht officers who inspected the Czech fortifications after the (for the most part) peaceful occupation of the Sudetenland. I'm too lazy to crack open Shirer's book, but my impression was that the German officers believed the Czech fortifications were, indeed, formidable, and could have resulted in a disaster of sorts for the Wehrmacht. Not an inevitable defeat, mind you, but a staunch enough defense (with significant casualties) that could've (and perhaps would've) blunted Hitler's momentum altogether. (If I remember correctly, the best time to challenge Hitler would have been during Germany’s unopposed occupation of the Ruhr Valley, in violation of the terms of Versailles. The consensus was that the Wehrmacht would have been routed.)
What kind of effect could this have had on a German population by and large entranced by Hitler? Perhaps formidable: He already had the Anschluss under his belt, but the annexation of the Sudetenland was his biggest diplomatic coup-d'etat. I can well imagine that many German people came to view Hitler as nothing short of a magician after pulling that one off. Of course, Hitler's control over Germany at this point was near-absolute, so I'm not sure that disaster in the Sudetenland would've had any far-reaching effects in the Heimat. But how would it have affected the Wehrmacht's support for Hitler? Like the Democrats in Congress, the Wehrmacht’s willingness to kowtow to Hitler was largely determined by (a) his rabid support among a majority of the populace and (b) his diplomatic and economic success. If (a) was to some extent staunched and (b) was open to question, what, then, would the Wehrmacht have done? In so military a state as Germany, one of Hitler’s biggest sources of legitimacy (in the eyes of the German people, anyway) was the support of the Wehrmacht.
And to what extent did Hitler's peaceful move into the Sudetenland -- and the extra year it gave the Wehrmacht to arm for the invasion of Poland -- help cement the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact in August of 1939? Would the Soviets have been as keen to deal with a weakened Germany? Could Hitler have eventually been contained – especially if the allies initiated arms build-ups of their own?
Aside from not exactly addressing your question, this is probably far more than you wanted on this subject, and -- I know -- hopelessly confused. Anyway, I had some time to kill here at work (I'm, ah, self-employed. :)
Posted by: Charles Kinbote | Oct 21, 2004 1:04:13 PM
Had England and France stood with Czechoslovakia, Hitler planned to attack (he was supposedly angry that Munich spoiled his "splendid little war"), and the German generals ALLEGEDLY were going to overthrow him. One can never be sure how far to trust their special pleading, but the Received Version is that the kowtow by England & France was a huge blow to the anti-Hitler cabal, and did a lot to convince them that, wow, Hitler really did know what he was talking about.
Absent a coup, as Matt implies, neither England nor France had much more hope than they did re: Poland. France had stupidly allowed Hitler to retrieve the Rhineland in 1936, thus making more difficult a French march into Germany. I suspect their assistance to the Czechs would've been more financial and moral, with maybe some bombing.
The nub of this counterfactual is how utterly difficult it is to imagine the French standing up to Hitler and using military force. The English weren't much better. Had it been conceivable to the French in 1938 to invade Germany, probably they wouldn't have let Hitler steal the Sudetenland. But because they couldn't conceive of it, they rolled over.
(I very much doubt Hitler goes to war w/ CZ and Poland at once; in fact, he threw Poland a scrap of territory from CZ, and if he'd had to use their territory, he would've brought them in on his side. His generals really would've freaked at the prospect of fighting Poland AND the Czechs.)
Posted by: Anderson | Oct 21, 2004 1:04:18 PM
All right, someone crack out the Axis and Allies. We aren't resting until we have this one figured out.
Posted by: psetzer | Oct 21, 2004 1:05:06 PM
Invading the Soviet Union was simply dumb, dumb, dumb.
I bet his CIA told him they'd be greeted with flowers and little Nazi flags.
Posted by: abb1 | Oct 21, 2004 1:05:13 PM
I read someone a long time ago that suggested that if Great Britain had successfully intimidated Germany into not invading Poland in 1939, Germany would have enjoyed a much bigger military advantage a few years later. The hypothesis was that the Germans had a significant technological advantage and were developing even better weapons; with a few more years to develop nuclear weapons, long range rockets, etc. they could have become actually able to win WWII. The article said that by making the Germans underestimate them, the British had made them attack too soon, before they were actually ready.
Posted by: Carlos | Oct 21, 2004 1:07:46 PM
Come on, people, you can't be serious.
The premise of this is totally without merit. The whole idea of 'Hitler' was for him to be a weapon of the Brits, Americans and French against the USSR. True, it didn't work out exactly as planned, but why would anyone want to prevent the Germans from going East - that was the whole idea.
Posted by: abb1 | Oct 21, 2004 1:12:55 PM
The soc.history.what-if newsgroup has discussed this scenario a number of times; here's one example. And here's John Lukacs' view.
Posted by: Russil Wvong | Oct 21, 2004 1:14:57 PM
Oops, I mangled that first soc.history.what-if link; here's the corrected link.
Posted by: Russil Wvong | Oct 21, 2004 1:16:32 PM
I will be very glad when this election is over. The sight of normally mild left-wingers actually positing that Chamberlain was right to make sure they don't agree with the wingnuts in even the smallest degree is extremely depressing.
Guys, if the Freepers say 2+2=4, they're right. Live with it.
Posted by: Tina | Oct 21, 2004 1:28:25 PM
I don't know what Bard DeLong is saying, really. The Brits and French had absolutely no choice but to declare war on Germany once Poland was invaded. The security guarantee was not a bluff, and it could not be because their national honor and credibility was on the line. They sold out Czechslovokia under the theory that Hitler would be satisfied (and as one poster noted, to increase the counterbalance against the more feared Soviet Union).
But once Hitler signed the Non-Agression Pact with Stalin, the Allies woke up to their huge blunder. They simply could not let a Polish invasion stand under those circumstances. If Hitler was willing to invade a country the French and British had guaranteed the security of, then Hitler was obviously willing to challenge them on colonial possesions or to invade France itself when he got strong enough (as he did after months of the "phony war").
Also, the Brits and French had good reason to believe that Hitler had overreached big time in 1939 because France by itself had a bigger army than Germany, more tanks, more planes and what they thought were impenetrable defenses. Combine that with 300,000 British troops and equipment and it seems like a no-brainer to take Germany down. The only thing they didn't have were creative and bold military leaders able to take and maintain the initiative and unfortunately Germany had those in spades.
As for confronting Germany at Munich or the Rhineland and forcing an invasion if necessary, obviously we know that would have been better in hindsight. But, I have a lot of sympathy for the French and British decision makers at the time. While this is more complicated as I note below, fundamentally I believe Appeasement was an effort to learn from the mistakes of the past.
The great powers had rushed into WWI without really stopping to think about the consequences of mechanized war because everyone had their own cutting edge technology, everyone thought they had the clear advantage. The horrors of WWI gave pause to guys like Chamberlain who tried to learn lessons but ended up applying those lessons in a way that led to disaster all because of the personality of one cocksucker with a G-d complex.
It was easy for Britain and France to misunderstand Hitler since history is full of leaders who are raving demogogues in front of their countrymen but rational actors when it comes to running foreign affairs. Everyone complains that Hitler laid out his whole agenda in Mein Kempf, which is true but again, no one in the West thought that Hitler was a true believer in that stuff and hundreds of years of history and diplomacy backed up that assumption.
Stalin was much more of a concern to them, legimately so since we saw what he did with Poland and Eastern Europe when he got the chance. And facists hated communists, the non-Agression Pact was inconceivable to anyone with a brain in the West, and that was really Hitler's biggest coup.
Posted by: UofAZGrad | Oct 21, 2004 1:42:47 PM
Seriously, though, the hard part of all this stuff is that Hitler was not a rational actor. Invading the Soviet Union was simply dumb, dumb, dumb. Decisions like that make it nearly impossible to develop plausible alternative scenarios.
It certainly turned out to be dumb, but did it seem that stupid at the time? At least one WWII book I read said that most Allied intelligence services had almost no faith in the Soviets' ability to rebuff the invasion, and that most of them thought it'd be over--with Germany winning--in 3 or 4 months' time. In terms of what everyone thought at the time, I could be wrong--maybe everyone did think Hitler was tying the noose around his neck by diving into the USSR like he did. But my impression from the few sources I've seen addressing that point is the opposite.
Posted by: Haggai | Oct 21, 2004 1:49:06 PM
Counterfactual history is an awfully tempting study. In the case of the Munich conference, it is a matter of whether time benefited the Axis or the Allies. Britain began to get serious about rearming around 1938 when Hitler created the Sudetenland crisis. Most historians that I've read seem to believe that Chamberlain wasn't totally wrong to use appeasement.
German and Italian rearmament plans called for peak strength to come around 1945. That suggests that an earlier war would have helped the Allies but it is also said that the German economy could not have sustained the pace past 1939.
I believe that the surrender hurt the immediate Allied prospects. Not only was the Sudetenland a strong fortress line but it contained most of the Czech armament works. (I say Czech because ethnic Czechs were concentrated in the west with Slovaks in the East.) Many of the tanks that overran Western Europe were built in those works.
It's also difficult to figure all of this out because of the military changes that took place between 1938 and 1939. Most of the German tanks that invaded Czechoslovakia suffered terrible mechanical problems. If there had been a strong defense, that could have led to a bloodbath and tactics that resembled World War One.
The real strategic defeat for Germany came from fighting both the United States and the Soviet Union at the same time. In World War One style fighting, the Germans would have had a demographic advantage while the Allies would have had the advantage of a blockade.
If the war had not taken place, it is possible that the US and USSR would not have replaced European nations as world powers.
Had Hitler been deposed in 1938, there would still have been a likelihood of war. After all, the Germans had started preparing in the 20s before the Great Depression hit. A more capable leader might have taken up the anti-Semitic extremist mantle.
Posted by: John | Oct 21, 2004 2:00:15 PM
From what I remember of my history courses:
Many historians think that the missed opportunity to stop Hitler was after the decision by Hitler to remilitarize Rhenania (in violation of German obligations under the treaty)in 1934.
The French government could probably have called Hitler's bluff and decided to occupy militarily Rhenania (a neighboring region). At that time Germany had not yet enough military capability to resist and Hitler probably would have lost power.
Of course, it would have created a lot of nationalist resentment in Germany.
But France did notdo it because:
- it had a divided government,
- public opinion traumatised by WW1 was largely pacifist,
- the UK did not want to do anything and France was very reluctant to act unilaterally with the risk of alienating a key ally.
The problem in 1938 (as indeed it became obvious after august 1939), was that France had a defensive military strategy and capability (the famous "ligne Maginot"). So it would not have been able to do much to prevent the invasion of Thecoslovakia (and the British navy would also have been of little use).
De Gaulle was an exception as a theorician of offensive tactics(based on tanks). Unfortunatelately he was rejected by the French military establishment because the superiority of defensive strategy was the obvious lesson of WW1 (most offensives of WW1 resulted in useless carnage). However De Gaulle's work did not go unnoticed by German and Soviet military strategists.
Posted by: amusedfrog | Oct 21, 2004 2:16:40 PM
If the British had come to the call of the French in 1936 when Germany re-militarized the Rheinland, in contravention of the Versailles treaty, all of WWII would probably have been averted. I guess the British, who, along with the French, were supposed to enforce the Treaty, were involved elsewhere. Hitler's success in the Rheinland initiative, which was opposed by all of his counsellors in and out of the military, emboldened him to proceed elsewhere, with disastrous consequences.
Posted by: raj | Oct 21, 2004 2:17:18 PM
Ok, totally betraying my small minded world view and completely out of sync with MY's point and interests here, but I can't help thinking about what the domestic impacts of the situation described above would be fore U.S. culture: no civil rights movement, no women's movement, no GI Bill, no baby boom...the list goes on, depending on the line you take on the questions posted/answered/commented on above. Or would these social changes have taken place anyway without the catalyst of WWII, women taking over work on the homefront, post-war prosperity, overseas experiences and service of African Americans, new sense of American obligation and moral righteousness? Can you think of any bad social evolutions in the U.S. culture that took place at home as a result of WWII?
Posted by: flip | Oct 21, 2004 2:26:16 PM
Keep in mind that the French had in fact confronted Germany (not yet Hitler) militarily over the Rhineland in the 1920s, when the French army occupied it. Didn't work out so well -- among other things, the german hyperinflation was a direct result. (Horace Schacht, Reichsbank prez at the time, created deliberately as a tool of resistance to the French occupation.) So there was a reason they didn't confront Hitler there 10 years later....
More generally, I think abb1 makes a key point, which is that for many (most?) allied decisionmakers, the USSR was viewed as a bigger threat than Germany.
Posted by: lemuel pitkin | Oct 21, 2004 2:28:35 PM
flip | October 21, 2004 02:26 PM
Just to let you know, the US would have found itself embroiled in a war irrespective of what went on in Europe. The Japanese began their war in the Pacific in 1931 or so. Indeed, the Japanese Rape of Nanking, the "forgotten Holocaust" occurred in 1937, two years before the Nazis invaded Poland, and four years before the US officially entered either war.
Posted by: raj | Oct 21, 2004 2:35:54 PM
Sounds as if Matthew wants to collaborate on a novel with Harry Turtledove. I am sure Harry would be delighted as long as you do all the research and his name appears first!
Shades of Newt Gingrich?
Cranky
Posted by: Cranky Observer | Oct 21, 2004 2:39:06 PM
Interesting set of posts above: I would like to point out some historical coincidences, for whatever they are worth.
1. It is reported widely that the Germans WERE generally welcomed when they arrived in the USSR, especially in the Ukraine where Stalin’s repression was severely felt. There had been a major famine there in the early 30’s, due to the collectivization of agriculture. The Germans were welcomed with bread and salt (traditional tokens) as they rolled in to many villages. This lasted only a short time (days?), until the Germans started shooting Commissars, village elders, and of course Jews. The Ukraine soon was conquered, but the people, like the rest of the Soviet Union, resisted mightily.
2.The Germans, also had a “Catastrophic Success” in their initial drive into the Soviet Union. They were at the gates of Moscow by Christmas of 1941. That fall, many observers (in the US and elsewhere) wrote the USSR off, and had good reasons for doing so. Not good enough reasons, as it turned out.
Note: I have always thought that the American invasion of Iraq was not the “central front of the War On Terror”, but the eastern front of the War On Terror.
Posted by: Michael C | Oct 21, 2004 2:48:30 PM
abb1: I bet his CIA told him they'd be greeted with flowers and little Nazi flags.
As Michael C points out, the Nazis WERE welcomed in the Ukraine, until their murderous untermensch policies became evident. "Smart Nazis" would have played to the separatist instincts aroused by the disastrous Soviet policies of the 1930s, and forged an unbeatable coalition of anti-Soviet nationalities. But there were no smart Nazis.
Posted by: Ralph Hitchens | Oct 21, 2004 3:14:16 PM
I don't think I would say that Chamberlain made a mistake: I'm not sure. I do know it is not something that I would have done: to enter a war to aid a country that you are not sure how you are going to aid still seems strange to me, even if you have committed yourself to and are honor bound to do it...
Posted by: Brad DeLong | Oct 21, 2004 3:59:41 PM
A couple of points re:Munich
1) the biggest difference with 1939 is that Stalin will be allied with the western powers. How much effective aid he would be able (or willing) to give to the Czechs remains unclear. The Poles would likely remain neutral at first, but if the Czechs are not immediately overrun, they probably have to intervene as well...
2) Hitler certainly would've gone to war anyway if the west had stood up to him. The problem is that the west never had any real intention of standing up to him. At Berchtesgaden a few weeks before, Chamberlain had already given Hitler almost everything he wanted. Hitler upped his terms at Godesberg the next week because he wanted a war. He almost got it, but even his complete assholishness was not enough to defeat Chamberlain's (and to a lesser extent Daladier's) will to appease him.
3) 1936 in the Rhineland simply could not have been the time to stop Hitler, because just about nobody anywhere really thought that what Hitler was done was good cause for war.
Posted by: John | Oct 21, 2004 4:10:07 PM
The year to have stopped Hitler was 1936, when Germany reoccupied the Rhineland without a shot fired; he would have backed down had the French made clear they were willing to fight. 1936 was also the year Hitler concluded alliances with fascist Italy and Japan; diplomacy might have headed off the formation of the Axis. The Spanish Civil War broke out that year; Germany invested in it robustly as a proving ground and proxy conflict with democracy, while democracies, notoriously our own, let Spain fall to the Falangists -- who could have been stopped with the help of the Royal Navy and a French division or two. At some point in the 30s, the German economy became self-sufficient to the degree it could do without trade with the Atlantic democracies (Prescott Bush's ministrations notwithstanding :D); before that, economic sanctions against Nazi Germany might have increased the popular resentment that supported Hitler, but still hobbled German rearmament and war-making capacity. So '39 was too late, in my view, to have stopped Hitler on the cheap; but if WWII had begun that spring, it might have ended in '44 instead of '45. Wouldn't it have been better to get it over with?
Posted by: Dabodius | Oct 21, 2004 4:30:34 PM
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