Fundamentally the answer to the question of why France did not attack Germany in September was probably best stated by Churchill. “This battle,” he wrote, “had been lost some years before.”7 At Munich in 1938; at the time of the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936; the year before when Hitler proclaimed a conscript army in defiance of Versailles. The price of those sorry Allied failures to act had now to be paid, though it seems to have been thought in Paris and London that payment might somehow be evaded by inaction.
