Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World

by Patrick J. Buchanan

On March 29, Ian Colvin, a twenty-six-year-old News-Chronicle correspondent in Berlin with excellent sources inside Hitler’s regime, came to London with “hair-raising details of [an] imminent [Nazi] thrust against Poland.”52 Like Tilea’s report, Colvin’s was a false alarm. Four days earlier, March 25, Hitler had issued a secret directive to his army commander in chief: “The Fuehrer does not wish to solve the Danzig question by force. He does not wish to drive Poland into the arms of Britain by this.”53 Hitler did not want war with Poland, he wanted an alliance with Poland. But Halifax and Chamberlain believed Colvin and feared that Beck might cut a deal with Hitler, which was what Hitler had in mind—a deal, not a war. Immediately after the meeting with Colvin, as Chamberlain wrote to his sister, “we then and there decided” Poland must be guaranteed.54 Thus, on March 30, an astonished Colonel Beck received the British ambassador, who inquired whether Warsaw would object if Britain gave an unconditional guarantee of Poland’s independence in the event of an attack by Germany. Beck accepted. On March 31, 1939, Chamberlain rose in the House of Commons to make the most fateful British declaration of the twentieth century: I now have to inform the House that … in the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves bo...