The Routledge History of the Second World War

Paul R. Bartrop, Paul R. Bartrop

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429848476
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Histoire
• Categoría: Seconde Guerre mondiale

The Routledge History of the Second World War sums up the latest trends in the scholarship of that conflict, covering a range of major themes and issues.

The book delivers a thematic analysis of the many ways in which study of the Second World War can take place, considering international, transnational, and global approaches, and serves as a major jumping off point for further research into the specific fields covered by each of the expert authors. It demonstrates the global and total nature of the Second World War, giving due coverage to the conflict in all major theatres and through the lens of the key combatants and neutrals, examines issues of race, gender, ideology, and society during the war, and functions as a textbook to educate students as to the trends that have taken place in how the conflict has been (and can be) interpreted in the modern world. Divided into twelve parts that cover central themes of the conflict, including theatres of war, leadership, societies, occupation, secrecy and legacies, it enables those with no memory of war to approach it with a view to comprehending what it was all about and places the history of this conflict into a context that is international, transnational, and institutional.

This is a comprehensive and accessible reference volume for anyone interested in the most up to date scholarship on this major conflict.

Chapter 18 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com

PART 1
Outbreaks

War to world war

1
Avoiding war? British diplomacy and the outbreak of war in 1939

Paul R. Bartrop

DOI: 10.4324/9780429455353-2

On 3 September 1939, a photograph was snapped of a newspaper vendor in London. The day was auspicious; at 11:00 a.m. a British ultimatum to Germany had expired, and the two countries were at war. The man was holding a bulletin, half his own size, that read “WAR DECLARED (OFFICIAL).” The newspaper was the News of the World, but the words “News of the” were obscured; for generations since, the photo appears to read “WORLD WAR DECLARED.”

Germany had been at war with Poland for two days already; with Britain and its empire from 11:00 a.m.; and with France from 5:00 p.m. That was all. While Japan and China had been waging their own bitter conflict from 1937, this had had not spread elsewhere. On 3 September 1939, however, there was no world war. At least, not yet.

The assumption has most often been made that the events of September saw the beginning of the Second World War. While this was not the case on the day itself, it was nevertheless a start, and from this moment on things escalated into the greatest conflict the world had (or has) ever seen.

The years of appeasement by Britain and France have been discussed, debated, and dissected ever since the appearance of A.J.P. Taylor’s remarkable revisionist work The Origins of the Second World War in 1961.¹ Vast libraries have since appeared attempting to explain why war broke out in September 1939, with three major studies appearing in 2019 alone – each offering a specific pathway to understanding.²

Of interest in the current context, however, is not so much why the war broke out, as to what happened when it did so. What were the steps leading up to the actual outbreak? Were any of the actors involved more central than others? Indeed, can the crisis be viewed through the lens of a single individual – and would doing so add anything? This chapter will examine the events leading up to 3 September 1939 from the perspective of the British ambassador to Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, with a view to tracing the war’s outbreak via a focused study of one of the principal players in this most critical of dramas.

Born on 10 June 1882, Nevile Meyrick Henderson came from a wealthy manufacturing background. His father had been a director of the Bank of England and owned a large estate at Sedgwick Park, near Horsham, Sussex. The young Henderson attended Eton and joined the Foreign Office in May 1905. After several junior postings at St. Petersburg, Tokyo, Paris, and Constantinople, he was sent to Belgrade (1929) and Buenos Aires (1935) as ambassador before being assigned to Berlin in March 1937.

The story of Henderson’s early tenure in Berlin has been recounted in detail by his biographer, Peter Neville, and will not be repeated here.³ It is sufficient to say that from the start he showed a marked sympathy not only with the objectives of Hitler’s Germany⁴ but also to avoiding war in Europe. Before he left Buenos Aires for Berlin, he wrote later, he felt that he had been “specially selected by Providence” to help preserve the peace of the world.⁵ He was convinced that “the peace of Europe depended upon the realisation of an understanding between Britain and Germany,”⁶ and “who was I to condemn the Nazis off-hand or before they had finally proved themselves incurably vicious?”⁷ He thus saw it as his duty “to try to cooperate with the Nazi Government to the best of my ability.”⁸

As Henderson’s subsequent positions were to show, his support for Germany’s foreign policy objectives often blinded him to the realities of dealing with an expansionist dictator like Adolf Hitler. In the prologue to his post-outbreak memoir Failure of a Mission, he was at pains to point out what he saw as the two “commandments” of a diplomat: first, “faithfully to interpret the views of his own Government to the Government to which he is accredited” and, second, “to explain, no less accurately, the views and standpoint of the Government of the country in which he is stationed to the Government of his own country.”⁹ His conduct as ambassador at Berlin often found itself at variance with his definition of the diplomat’s duties.

Throughout the crucial year of 1938, during which Germany annexed Austria in March and brought Europe to the brink of war over the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in September, Henderson advocated continually in favor of what he saw as Germany’s “legitimate claims” based on the principle of national self-determination. This was not always to his advantage. Regarding the German takeover of Austria, the Foreign Secretary, Viscount Halifax, cautioned him “not to go beyond any instructions given or diminish in subsequent conversation force of any protest you may be instructed to make.”¹⁰ Regarding the Sudetenland crisis in September, Henderson pushed hard for the Czechs to be cowed into submission. As he wrote on 4 September, “only direct compulsion” of Czech President Edvard Beneš “would ever induce” him to “see realities.”¹¹ Earlier, he had written that the Sudeten Germans, “have, in my opinion, a moral right at least to self-determination. It is morally unjust to compel this solid Teuton minority to remain subjected to a Slav central Government at Prague.”¹² While he had little role to play due to the negotiations having been taken over personally at Munich by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Henderson’s views were in lock step with Chamberlain’s – as distinct from many at the Foreign Office, who found themselves in a constant struggle with Downing Street over the execution of foreign policy.¹³

On 18 October 1938, Henderson returned to London for medical treatment and surgery for the cancer that would eventually take his life in 1942. He remained for just under four months, during which he took time for reflection. When he returned to Berlin on 13 February 1939, he was somewhat optimistic as to the future of Anglo-German relations: the Sudeten crisis of the previous September was long over, and Hitler had guaranteed the new frontiers of what remained of Czechoslovakia. “Germany’s radical ambitions,” Henderson wrote, “had now been satisfied,” and what remained “seemed small questions”¹⁴ that could be resolved through negotiation. He also believed that Hitler was on the road to respectability, writing to Halifax that “My definite impression since my return here is that Herr Hitler does not contemplate any adventures at the moment and that all stories and rumours to the contrary are completely without foundation.”¹⁵

The Czechoslovakia that was left following Munich was far smaller than it had been beforehand, and the Czechs and Slovaks had little regard for each other. The Czechs, industrialized, urbanized, and highly educated, dominated the rural, backward Slovaks. Hitler now sponsored the Slovaks in their calls for greater autonomy and eventual self-determination. By early March 1939, small incidents began to break out between Czechs and Slovaks whilst, with Hitler’s full encouragement, “The Vienna radio was busily inciting Slovaks against Czechs.”¹⁶ On 10 March, Czech President Emil Hácha, in response to these incidents, dismissed Slovak Prime Minister Jozef Tiso, occupied the Slovak capital Bratislava with Czech troops and police, and installed a more friendly administration.

Summoning Tiso to Berchtesgaden, Hitler prompted him to proclaim, on March 14, a breakaway “Slovak Free State.” The next day, the German army marched into Prague and occupied the Czech lands, now called the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

Henderson considered that the fault lay with the Czechs, who had engineered a crisis ready-made for a Hitler response. He saw, however, that Hitler had finally proven to the world the type of man he was, his earlier views regarding German righteousness now shaken. In a dispatch to Halifax, he wrote that

The utter cynicism and immorality of the whole performance defies description. Nazism has definitely crossed the Rubicon of purity of race and German unity and answer to this form of Pan-Germanism can only in the end be Pan-Slavism. It is difficult to believe that the fate of the Czechs will not induce the remaining Slav branches to take counsel together… . The annexation of Bohemia and Moravia … is entirely contrary to right of self-determination and utterly immoral.¹⁷

He also made clear his wish that the British government would “consider what attitude to adopt towards a Government which has shown itself incapable of observing an agreement not six months old and which is apparently set on domination by force of the whole of the Danube basin.”¹⁸

Instructed by Halifax to protest to the German government,¹⁹ Henderson had already done so to the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Ernst von Weizsäcker, state secretary at the Foreign Office, by the time the directive arrived. By far the greatest form of protest, however, came on 17 March, when Henderson was ordered to return to London for an indefinite period “to report.”²⁰

After five weeks’ absence, he returned on 25 April. In the meantime, the pace of developments had quickened. Germany had submitted stiff demands to Poland concerning Danzig and the Polish Corridor, which had been rejected; German-speaking Memel, in Lithuania, had been annexed; Britain and France had concluded pacts of mutual assistance to Poland, Greece, and Romania; and Albania had been invaded and annexed by Italy. And, for the first occasion in peacetime, Britain decided to introduce a measure of compulsory military service.

Henderson walked straight into the Polish–German crisis over Danzig. On 26 April, Hitler addressed the Reichstag with an offer to Poland concerning a rearrangement of existing arrangements in the Free City, calling for Danzig to be returned to the Reich and extraterritorial access for Germany through the Polish Corridor. Upon Poland rejecting these demands, he terminated the German-Polish Agreement of 1934; for good measure, he also denounced the Anglo-German Naval Treaty of 1935.

Henderson had long regarded the return of Danzig to Germany as “a foregone conclusion.”²¹ In a letter to Halifax dated 4 May, he wrote that did not think this was a cause for which Britain should go to war:

The German case … is very far from being either unjustifiable or immoral. If an impartial Martian were to act as arbitrator I cannot believe that he would give judgement otherwise than more or less in accordance with Hitler’s offer… . My thesis has always been that Germany cannot revert to normalcy which, under pressure of public opinion, she might well yet do, until her legitimate (in German eyes) aspirations have been satisfied.²²

Using the same reasoning as he had during earlier crises, he asked himself:

whether, if we are going to fight Germany, is it well-advised to do so on a ground on which the world will not be united as to the immorality of Germany’s case? Will even our Empire be united? … I am appalled at the thought of Danzig being even the ostensible cause [of war], and I am even more appalled at our fate being in the hands of the Poles. Heroic no doubt but foolhardy and ask anyone who knows them whether they can be trusted.²³

In the days following, he was under no illusions regarding the future, as he concluded in a private letter to Halifax:

there is little hope … for peace unless fate steps in and somehow...