If Germany had to force both France and Britain into submission, then by any reasonable reckoning, the prospect of a campaign of conquest in the East receded into the distant future. Our knowledge of the Wehrmacht’s sweeping Blitzkrieg victory in 1940 tends to cloud our thinking on this point. In 1938 no one–neither the Germans nor their opponents–anticipated the Blitzkrieg. To reasonable German strategic planners, the French and British empires with friends in Eastern Europe and backing from across the Atlantic looked like truly formidable opponents.
