manoeuvres in August were designed to provide
an alibi to put the Poles in the wrong and so
justify war to the German people. Furthermore,
Hitler almost to the last seemed to have had some
hopes that, if the Poles could be shown to be
unreasonable, then France and Britain would
refuse to live up to their alliance commitments.
But in the last resort he was prepared to risk war
with France and Britain rather than abandon the
war he was preparing to launch against Poland.
The first order to the Wehrmacht, to attack
Poland at 4.35 a.m. on 1 September, reached the
army high command at 6.30 a.m. on 31 August,
that is, several hours before the full text of the
‘moderate’ proposals was communicated to the
British and Polish ambassadors in Berlin. It was
finally confirmed by Hitler at 4 p.m., little more
than three hours after the full text of the sixteen
points was first revealed.
Hitler was driven by his conviction that the
Wehrmacht, navy and Luftwaffe needed a
Feuertaufe, a baptism of fire, to maintain their
fighting fibre. The German people too had to be
taught to accept a real war, not be softened into
believing that every victory would be bloodless.
Hitler did not hesitate for long. If war with
Poland risked a great European war, that risk had
to be taken. As Henderson later wrote in his
memoirs, the conclusion that Hitler did not want
to negotiate at all on the basis of these proposals
is inescapable.
The invasion of Poland began at 4.45 a.m. on
1 September. Now it is true that in both Paris and
London, while Poland fought back, the ministers
were still clutching at hopes of restoring peace
even less substantial than straws. Mussolini offered
again, as at the time of Munich, his mediation and
held out hopes that another conference of the
powers might be called. But the British Cabinet
made it a firm precondition that Germany should
first withdraw its troops from Poland. As Hitler
would never have accepted this, Mussolini told
the British and French that there was no point
in his attempting further mediation. Meanwhile,
between Paris and London, there was an extraor-
dinary lack of coordination on the very eve of the
war. On 1 September, Germany was warned about
the consequences of war on Poland only by
Britain. On 2 September, Chamberlain faced a
hostile and suspicious House of Commons. Was
another Munich in the making? But there was no
chance that Britain and France this time could
avoid war. On 3 September, separate British and
French ultimatums led to the declaration of war
on Germany, the French actually going to war a
few hours after the British, though they did not
start attacking Germany for a while longer, and
then only ineffectually.
There could be no other outcome but a
European war once Hitler had decided to attack
Poland. Not a single country in Europe wished to
attack Germany, but in September 1939 the
British and French governments were forced to
the conclusion that they must fight in their own
defence and not allow Hitler to pick off one
European state after another. There can be little
doubt that this is precisely what Hitler would
have done had he been allowed his war against
the Poles. Hitler’s aggression against Poland,
despite the clear warnings he received of its con-
sequences on the one hand and the perception of
the British and French governments of his real
intentions after the unprecedented concessions to
his demands in the previous year on the other,
thus led to the outbreak of the second great
European war within twenty-five years of the first.