So When Should We Have Gone to War Against Hitler, Then, Eh?

I'm being asked, yet again, when we should have gone to war against National Socialist Germany, if not in September 1939?

 

How could I possibly say? Those who ask this simply do not understand just how momentous the Anglo-French guarantee to Poland was.

 

1. It committed two reluctant nations, ill-equipped for such a struggle, to go to war pretty much when Poland told them to. Thus it bound Britain to France, and both to Poland. 

2.This was profoundly futile, as it did no good, and could not possibly do any good. Why not? Neither Britain nor France had the forces to fulfuil their promise. Nor did they have the slightest intention of doing so. They knew this. Their military commanders knew this, and made sure the politicians knew that they knew. Equally important, the Germans, being well aware of our military capacity, or rather non-capacity,  also knew it and were not in any way deterred from putting pressure on Poland for concessions over Danzig.

3. This was positively dangerous, as it was clear then (and is clear from documents) that the Poles *did* believe it. Indeed, they expected material help from us right up till the end. 

And thus, while it did not prevent German pressure, initially friendly, to negotiate over Danzig, it led directly to Poland's refusal to renew (as offered by Berlin) its 1934 non-aggression treaty with Germany; to Poland's subsequent refusal to negotiate over Danzig and the corridor, and so to Germany's agreement with the USSR, which was a direct consequence of Poland's refusal to negotiate. 

 

So, no guarantee, no Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, no Polish partition, no British or French declaration of war, no advance of German forces to the Bug, no guarantee of Soviet oil and raw materials to the Third Reich (so negating our ability to blockade). No Norway fiasco, No Fall of Chamberlain, no fall of France, no Dunkirk, no invasion of the Low Countries, no Battle of Britain, no lend-lease.

 

What happens next? German pressure on Romania? A Soviet invasion of Finland and the Baltic States?  Who knows? I don't, any more than Roosevelt knew when he was going to be drawn into a European war. The Polish guarantee changed everything. It is the hinge of the whole crisis. Begin there, and you'll begin to see what I'm on about. Begin at September 1939, or at May 1940, and you'll miss the whole point of the argument. 

 

Who knows what conditions might have combined to bring us into war had we not given the guarantee to Poland? I don't.  Who could? 

 

One point, however. It is being argued by some that our intervention in 1939 in some way helped to save European Jews from Hitler's mass murder programme. I cannot see how.

 

Before the guarantee, the Jews of Poland, though they suffered severe anti-semitism from their own state, were beyond Hitler's reach. So were the Jews of France, Norway, Denmark and the Low Countries, and many Jewish refugees from Hitler in those countries. The declaration of war, and the subsequent defeat, put all those Jews under Hitler's control. 

Those Jews still in Hitler's power, who were being robbed, persecuted and sometimes attacked and killed but not subjected to the later campaign of systematic mass murder,  could still leave Germany until September 1939, if they could find anyone to take them in ( a major problem at that time was that they could not find such refuge, though some Jewish children could find homes abroad through the Kindertransport scheme, which ended as soon as Britain and France declared war ).

The National Socialists' official extermination programme did not begin in 1939, when official policy was still severe harassment, lawless brutality and deportation (about which we had done more or less nothing) . Systematic mass murder began with the Wannsee Conference of 1942. The unofficial and informal mass murders of Jews can be said to have begun with the partition of Poland in 1939, and then to have intensified with the German invasion of the USSR.