fruits of victory, the victory parades accompanied
by champagne and other luxuries looted from
France. Hitler’s megalomania was Germany’s
undoing. Its defeat then was so complete that it
is easy to overlook the fact that four years earlier
it had been a much more close-run thing.
Germany’s defeat of Poland was rapid.
Surrounded, Warsaw resisted until 27 September
- Badly led, the Poles bravely fought the
Wehrmacht, which enjoyed overwhelming
strength. In the earliest days of the war, the
Luftwaffe destroyed the Polish air force, mostly
on the ground. Any chance the Poles had of
holding out a little longer was lost when the
Russians on 17 September invaded from the east
in accordance with their secret agreement with
Germany of the previous August. Still it was no
walkover. The Poles inflicted heavy casualties and
the Wehrmacht was in no fit state to switch
immediately to the west and to attack France in
November 1939 as Hitler desired.
Hitler’s public ‘peace’ proposals to Britain and
France early in October 1939, after the victorious
Polish campaign, were almost certainly meant for
German public opinion. He would not, of course,
have rejected the idea that Britain should accept
and withdraw from involvement on the continent.
Then France could not have continued the war
on its own and would have been in his power
even without a battle. Did Britain contemplate
any sort of peace? Whatever differences of opinion
may have existed, peace terms involving the even-
tual abandonment of France were unthinkable in
Militarily, on land and in the air, the war
scarcely got started in terms of real fighting on
the western front. The French were not ready to
take quickoffensive action against the weak screen
of German troops facing them behind the incom-
plete fortifications of the Siegfried Line. By the
time the army was fully mobilised and in a state
of readiness for offensive action – had the
commander-in-chief, Maurice Gamelin, desired
it – the Polish campaign was drawing to its close
and the German high command was rushing
reinforcements westwards from Poland. The mil-
itary inaction on land corresponded to the doc-
trine, Poland notwithstanding, that the army that
attacked would be forced to suffer huge casual-
ties. All the advantage was believed to lie with the
defence behind such powerfully constructed for-
tifications as the Maginot Line. In preparing the
defence of France, one section of the front – the
Franco-Belgian frontier to the Channel – had
been left ‘open’, designed to act as a limited
region for offensive manoeuvre. But when the
Belgians returned to a position of complete neu-
trality in 1936 this strategy was more difficult to
execute. The Anglo-French campaign plan of
1939–40 was nevertheless designed to meet the
expected German advance through Belgium, by a
forward movement of their own into Belgium the
moment the Germans attacked that country; no
earlier move was possible as the Belgians fearfully
clung to absolute neutrality.
These military assumptions about how best to
conduct the war were paralleled by political
assumptions held by Chamberlain about the war
and its likely outcome. It would be ended, if possi-
ble, without great sacrifice of life by imposing a
strict blockade on Germany. The British and
French governments even considered blowing up
the sources of Germany’s oil supplies in Romania
and the Soviet Caucasus. With neutral Scandinavia,
the Balkan states and the Soviet Union delivering
oil and other essential raw materials, the British
blockade by sea was far less effective than during
the First World War. It did not seriously impede
Hitler’s intended lightning strikes against the
West. For fear of massive reprisals, the French and
British dropped nothing more lethal than pam-
phlets on the industrial Ruhr. But then
Chamberlain did not believe that the war would be
won by military force. In December 1939 he wrote
to the archbishop of Canterbury, ‘I feel before
another Christmas comes the war will be over, and
then the troubles will really begin!’. What was in
his mind when he wrote that? Was it that he
expected reasonable negotiations and a peace
treaty? He certainly thought that the war would
end in a stalemate and that, once the Germans
were convinced that they could not win, they
would negotiate for peace. The war would be won
on the home front. Chamberlain was certainly anx-
ious whether the British people would stand for a
long stalemated kind of war. He feared there was