Should Britain and France have guaranteed Poland in 1939?

The short answer

• Prague changes the British calculation. Britain’s earlier willingness to negotiate had rested partly on the idea that German demands concerned minorities, plebiscites and treaty grievances. Prague made that account untenable. Public opinion, the press and members of Parliament moved toward resistance, and even advocates of appeasement faced the loss of their premise. The government guaranteed Poland, then Romania and Greece. Since Britain could not deliver an army to each threatened country, the promises had to make Hitler expect a wider war. In September, the warning failed to deter him.
• The bargain in Moscow. Each dictator saw a use for the other. Hitler wanted to avoid a two-front war and thought a Soviet agreement might weaken British resolve; he reportedly called his opponents “our enemies are little worms, I saw them at Munich.” Stalin gained a prospective buffer, territory formerly held by the tsars and time before a German attack he expected eventually. A darker interpretation adds that he hoped the capitalist powers would exhaust one another. The alternative was an alliance with Britain and France. Their Moscow mission was real, but slow and low-ranking, and Poland refused passage to the Red Army. Later Soviet conduct at Katyń (Ch. 11) helps explain why Poles feared Soviet troops on their soil. A common danger was not enough to overcome the distrust that obstructed collective security.
• Danzig and the destruction of Poland. The public dispute concerned the Free City of Danzig and an extraterritorial road across the Polish Corridor. Hitler’s preparations reached much further. His April 1939 directive ordered the army ready “to destroy Polish military strength and create in the East a situation which satisfies the requirements of national defense”. The demands were made unacceptable and then withdrawn from negotiation as he pursued the war Munich had denied him. The secret protocol envisaged partition, leaving little room for Polish independence. Expulsions and the first ghettos followed under occupation; the later AB-Aktion murdered Polish elites. These measures attacked the Polish state and its people, not simply a disputed frontier.
• Poland rejects subordination. Poland’s leaders were not merely waiting for other powers to decide their fate. From 1934 to 1939 Warsaw repeatedly resisted a subordinate role in Hitler’s anti-Soviet plans, and in 1939 it refused demands from both dictators. Józef Beck’s policy had critics: Poland’s seizure of Teschen from Czechoslovakia in 1938 cost it moral standing. Yet the choice in 1939 was to resist subordination. The cost to the population was terrible: roughly twenty percent did not survive the war.

What it changed

The spheres become annexations. The secret protocol allocated spheres on paper; annexations soon gave them a place on the map. Eastern Poland was absorbed after a staged plebiscite, the Baltic states were garrisoned and annexed in June 1940, and Bessarabia was taken from Romania. The next snapshots show the changes. Germany and the Soviet Union expanded in parallel before they fought each other.

A quiet Western front. War was declared on 3 September, but Poland received no major Western offensive to relieve the pressure. The September advance into the Saar went about eight kilometres before withdrawing, and British aircraft dropped leaflets. French doctrine and British unreadiness help explain the limited action. The pause left Hitler with the initiative for the next attack in the west.

Japan reacts to the pact. Japan learned from newspapers that Germany had made a pact with the Soviet Union. This was a shock: Japan was fighting Soviet forces at Khalkhin Gol that month and had an Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany aimed at Moscow. The Japanese cabinet fell, and trust in Berlin suffered. The episode formed part of the background to Japan’s decision not to join the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 and to move south instead (Ch. 10).