Democracy and World Wars

Published on 10 March 2026

One of my biggest concerns that few share is that I think it’s quite likely Western democracies will blunder into a world war. The reason more people don’t take this seriously is they’re unaware of how badly democracies have performed in the past. So I thought I’d give a case-study, namely the lead-up to WW2 in Europe. My angle is realist and if I spend little time assigning ‘blame’ it’s because I view it as irrelevant.

My original intent was to cover the US as well but this became far too long anyway. As I have a day-job most of this is derived from secondary sources, although for reasons I elaborate at the end I believe historians have done a poor job synthesising their research (or making it known to the general public).

Timeline

  • March 1936: Remilitarisation of the Rhineland
  • July 1936: Start of Spanish Civil war
  • March 1938: Anschluss
  • October 1938: Occupation of Sudetenland post-Munich
  • 15 March 1939: Hitler takes rest of Czechoslovakia
  • 31 March 1939: British guarantee of Poland
  • 23 August 1939: Molotov-Ribbentrop pact
  • 25 August 1939: Anglo-Polish mutual assistance agreement
  • 1 September 1939: Invasion of Poland
  • 3 September 1939: France and GB declare war on Germany
  • 17 September 1939: Soviet invasion of Poland

Diplomacy

Timing

Before going through the chronology of possible intervention points, we must first consider with the benefit of hindsight what the best timeline was.

Germany started off partially disarmed due to Versailles, and then engaged in a program of rapid rearmament after 1933. This rearmament was speed-limited by natural resource / foreign currency constraints, and as Germany had a weaker economic base meant that France and GB could more-or-less keep up once they responded (even though each was spending a much lower % of GDP). The net-result is that the optimal time for the war from Germany’s perspective was probably sometime around 1937-1940, taking into account only the arms build-up. However Germany also benefitted from the remilitarisation of the Rhineland and the occupation of the Sudetenland which greatly improving its defensive position, while the later annexation of Prague delivered vital war materiel and Škoda’s factories. This enhanced German diplomatic influence allowing it to secure access to Romanian oil and Soviet raw resources.

With this in mind, let’s go through some events in detail.

Remilitarisation of the Rhineland

If ever there was a good time to intervene early, it was when Hitler remilitarised the Rhineland. It was this move which ended at a stroke the Locarno system which had integrated Germany into the world system and normalised relations between it and its neighbours. This move was a bold gamble; Hitler was bluffing and had no forces to fight even a limited engagement, he had instructed the troops to retreat if they met any resistance.

On the British side, not only was there no appetite for a war, many positively supported Hitler’s decision, feeling that the Germans had been treated unfairly by Versailles. In France the public opposed the move in principle, but mostly felt the response should be economic sanctions moved through the League of Nations.

France did consider unilaterally policing Germany with an invasion, despite the lack of public support, but there were obstacles. Gamelin, chief of the Army Staff, pointed out that it could be done but that it would be expensive as it would require a full mobilisation. France was already financially teetering, and the threat of a war combined with the precarious budget situation caused fears over capital flight, inflation and rising taxes. This made the prospect extremely daunting, especially in an election year.

In reality it would not have required a full mobilisation, but the intelligence services had largely been repurposed to provide internal propaganda to justify further budget appropriations for the military. On the one hand the French military really did need more budget to keep up with German rearmament, but the result was that the intelligence greatly inflated the strength of Germany which repeatedly hampered decision-making.

Another issue was the state of the cordon sanitaire. Because the democracies had put so much faith into multilateralism and the League of Nations in the interwar period, the bilateral alliances which provided a fallback were also insufficient. France could not rely on Poland, because their alliance did not require it, and Poland were at the time aligning themselves with Hitler1 with whom they had signed a non-aggression pact.

It’s hard to blame politicians alone for emphasis given to the League of Nations at this time. Voters overwhelmingly believed the key to avoiding another European war was the sort of consensus-based decision-making it represented, which they hoped would allow for a policy of disarmament and increased social spending using the freed-up budget. Predictably this meant that the League of Nations had no teeth, as too many nations needed to be consulted and powers like France and Great Britain lacked the requisite hard-power to bring rogue nations into line. Voters then blamed politicians for the failure brought about by their own paradoxical demands.

Perhaps the best demonstration of this was when Italy invaded Abyssinia. If the League didn’t want war, then the best it could do were economic sanctions with bite, but Italy considered an oil embargo itself to be an act of war. No solution here would have satisfied voters. One reason I bring this episode up is that it contains just about the only instance in the 1930s where the allies attempted realpolitik; the infamous Hoare-Laval Pact giving Mussolini most of Abyssinia so that he might remain in the anti-Hitler Stresa Front. The pact was leaked to the press, causing immense reputational damage to both governments2, and may partly explain why the British ceased pursuing a sane foreign policy thereafter.

Spanish Civil War

After the outbreak of the Spanish civil war, all sides signed up to a non-intervention pact, which Italy, Germany and the Soviet Union proceeded to violate quite openly.

Blum, the French premier, was willing to send arms to the Republicans, despite the potential to stoke internecine conflict within the third republic (the catholic right backed the nationalists and the centrists in the popular front were chary about sending arms that might ultimately equip communists). In any case, he was strongly dissuaded by Britain, who feared that such involvement would lead to a series of escalations and ultimately war with the fascist powers.

The political situation in Great Britain at this time needs some elaboration. In the early 30s the electorate was very pacifist (as evidenced by the 1933 Fulham by-election). Ramsay McDonald had taken with him some of the more pragmatic Labour statesmen with him into the national coalition, so that the Labour opposition ended up led by a Christian pacifist, George Lansbury, until late 1935. Stanley Baldwin, head of the conservatives and PM, cynically recognised that he was hardly going to be flanked on the right by a party which advocated for unilateral disarmament in the face of fascist aggression, so he took a ‘peace platform’ to the 1935 election easily capturing the median voter. There were no more elections until 1945. The appeasers could always, with truth on their side, claim that there was no electoral mandate for a hawkish line re: Germany.

There was at the same time a great hysteria about the threat posed by airpower. Many planners believed that, despite the strategic weakness of Germany, it might be able to bomb London into submission at the very outset of a war. These unfounded fears were motivated by competing factions each with their own concerns: the disarmament movement sought to rationalise their stance, figures like Churchill tried to come up with continental threats to break Britain out of its isolationism, and politicians like Baldwin and later Chamberlain realised these fears complemented the appeasement line they wished to take due to electoral calculations.

As the 30s progressed, better-informed MPs and journalists started to criticise the government for its ultra-dovish line. These attacks were perceived as politically opportunistic, and the net-effect of the sniping from the likes of Churchill was to negatively polarise the government into hardening its stance. Instead of moving to a substantively more hawkish outlook, the government instead spent ever more energy pretending to take the threat from Hitler seriously, so as to blunt the accusations of inaction. This resulted in a rapid proliferation of committees with no commensurate improvement in preparedness.

To give a specific example, Baldwin decided to appoint a minister for coordination of defence, in response to widespread criticism that the rearmament lacked direction. Baldwin appointed to this post Thomas Inskip, a barrister hopelessly out of his depth, in ‘the most cynical appointment since Caligula made his horse consul’. The appointment was made with domestic political calculations front-of-mind, namely to deny a potential hawk a pulpit from which to criticise the government further, while still pretending to take war preparation seriously. The Potemkin political machinery for war-preparedness would later frustrate genuine attempts to prepare for war.

Munich

The next plausible trigger-point was over Czechoslovakia.

The French were genuinely torn. They were the ones who had a treaty obligation to the Czechs, not Great Britain3. But their ability to provide support had relied on the demilitarised Rhineland allowing for a Western offensive, something they’d been well-aware of at the time. Great Britain was stridently opposed to any war over the Sudetenland, and Poland was greedily eyeing Czech territory.

The French understood the dreadful cost of ceding the Sudetenland, an obvious prelude to dismantling the whole nation. From there Germany would dominate central and eastern Europe. After this there would be no way to provide assistance to Poland if Germany attacked, and if Germany thus managed to secure both its southern and eastern fronts France itself would be in peril, especially if the Italians aligned themselves with the Germans.

The principal problem in France was political paralysis. During the Rhineland crisis it had been under the caretaker government of Sarraut, replaced by Blum who led the socialist-dominated Popular Front to electoral victory June 1936. He governed for a year and introduced much left-wing legislation before being replaced by Chautemps of the radicals (the centrists within the populist front), who was eventually replaced briefly by Blum again before Daladier (another radical) becomes PM in April 1938.

The lower house (the Chamber of Deputies) was in a state of chaos due to the breakdown of the left, while the senate was naturally conservative. The radicals did not have a stable majority, rather they were the natural party of compromise between a growing far-left and far-right. Daladier’s hold over his own party was also extremely precarious, forcing him to appoint competitors to cabinet, with Reynaud pushing for a more aggressive foreign policy, and Bonnet pushing for conciliation with Germany. The only reason France wasn’t entirely ungovernable was that occasionally Daladier received delegation from parliament to rule-by-decree, a work-around to deal with the fact that parliamentary politics was unworkable.

Daladier’s own inclination was to stand by France’s treaty commitments to the Czechs; his calculation was that it was better to fight with them in 1938 than without them in 1939. He knew that Britain would likely be compelled to join a French-German war if it occurred, despite the vehement denials from the British that this was the case. Unfortunately he lacked support from the electorate, an overly-pessimistic military establishment, any potential allies (besides the Soviets), and much of his own cabinet. In the event, he did everything short of war to try to get the best deal possible for the Czechs, including mobilising after the humiliating terms dictated by Hitler at Bad Godesberg. This was probably the only way he could keep his job, by taking the most hard-line position short of war and allowing himself to be presented a fait-accompli by Chamberlain.

Perhaps the decisive factor in this was Bonnet, who headed the peace faction as foreign minister. His stance was that it was too late to try to contain Hitler, and that the most prudent course of action was to encourage him to attack in the East rather than the West. For this reason he’s lumped in as an appeaser, although unlike Chamberlain his policy was grounded in good-sense. During the despond post-Munich, his policy was momentarily ascendent with most of the military chiefs conceding that France lacked the strength for containment, which led to the December 1938 French-German Declaration.

Unlike the French, the British seemed blissfully unaware of the strategic issues at stake. This isn’t to say that Chamberlain entirely trusted Hitler4, he just didn’t assign much importance to the loss of the Czechs as a potential ally. While I’ll explain his own idiosyncratic views later, there were also institutional reasons for this. The post-war retrenchments fell on the Army the hardest, and Britain maintained a policy of avoiding any continental commitment until 1939 (a policy Labour supported even more strongly than Chamberlain). Consequently Britain didn’t have much interest in the balance of land-forces on the continent, it was a problem for the French to worry about.

Chamberlain claimed that appeasement was part of a dual policy, giving diplomacy a chance while also gaining time for rearming. This was mostly to nullify potential future criticism; in truth British rearmament was sluggish, with Chamberlain seizing on the most hawkish lines from Treasury to argue against a more rapid build-up. In any case the focus of this rearmament was air-defence including the Chain Home, an early-warning system utilising the recently-invented radar. If the war had gone as intended, the principal result of this would have been to redirect German bombers to hit unprotected French cities instead. How was this to compensate the French for the loss of one million men in a modernised army sitting in well-built mountain-forts jutting into the belly of Germany?

I’ll skip the play-by-play of what happened in the negotiations, suffice it to say that it’s a matter of interpretation as to who ultimately won. Judged as an ordinary instance of great-power politics, it was a humiliating capitulation by the western democracies. On the other-hand, Hitler really was eager for war, and Chamberlain for peace at any cost, so on that basis Chamberlain accomplished his aims and Hitler was outplayed. Hitler himself was quite angry after the conference, and would later claim that an earlier outbreak of WW2 would have been more to his advantage.

Prague and the Polish Guarantee

Less than half a year later, Germany annexed the rest of the Czech state, divvying up some of the spoils with Hungary and Poland and leaving a Slovak rump-state. Chamberlain’s statement to parliament on the 15th of March in response was curiously apathetic, much to the consternation of the government’s supporters. His immediate instinct, expressed in cabinet as well, was to make a legalistic argument that Britain had not formally reneged on any obligations from Munich as the Czechs hadn’t tried to resist the invasion. Naturally this outraged many of his colleagues.

An MP (an anti-appeasement conservative) wrote in this diary on the 17th: “The feeling in the lobbies is that Chamberlain will have either to go or completely reverse his policy. Unless in his speech tonight (in Birmingham) he admits he was wrong, they feel that resignation is the only alternative…”As it would happen, Chamberlain did take a much tougher-line in that speech, which anticipated a sudden reversal of government policy…

Before presenting my own view, it’s worth explaining the historiographical situation to the lay-reader. There is an immense amount of documentation about what happened in March 1939, and this topic has been the subject of a great deal of research. And yet historians do not agree on the basic facts. The problem, I’m convinced, is that historians seek the rational strategic basis for the unilateral guarantee of Poland given on the 31st of March, but there was none, and there’s a superabundance of evidence that confirms this and refutes all of the laboured attempts by historians to provide one.

To return to the narrative, Chamberlain faced a near revolt from the backbench and there was a sea-change in public opinion. This was mirrored overseas with Chamberlain coming under diplomatic pressure. Joseph Kennedy, the ambassador, said that the American public doubted whether the British government ‘really meant business’ (the opinion of the isolationist US shouldn’t have had so much weight, but both Chamberlain and Halifax the foreign minister cared a great deal about the UK’s moral standing on the world stage.) This added to growing concern from over the channel, as French opponents to Bonnet’s appeasement warned that if Britain didn’t make a decisive commitment to containing Germany then Bonnet’s faction would win out.

So there were innumerable reasons for why the government decided it must do something (not least of which was the personal betrayal felt by Chamberlain), however the form this would take was unclear. Early proposals mooted a large international conference to set up an anti-German eastern alliance, which invariably would have involved concessions from Poland in return for any guarantees from the Western allies (e.g. to ally with Romania which was beginning to cave to German’s importunate demands for their oil). The Poles, sensing this, counter-offered by suggesting a bilateral agreement with Britain.

As this was occurring, a Romanian diplomat falsely claimed that Germany was planning an imminent invasion of Romania in the 17th. Germany demanded and received Memel from Lithuania on the 23rd of March. Rumours circulated about movement against Romania or Poland, which culminated in a News Chronicle correspondent giving an account directly to Chamberlain and Halifax on the 29th that Germany was imminently about to invade Poland. Ordinarily the wild story provided would have provoked more scepticism, but in the febrile atmosphere which prevailed it was enough to push Chamberlain and Halifax over the edge.

On the 31st Chamberlain gave a statement to Parliament, unilaterally guaranteeing the independence of Poland. The precise wording suggested that it was up to Poland to decide what constituted such a threat. Chamberlain himself didn’t realise this, believing he had not guaranteed Poland’s territorial integrity but merely its independence, although the final draft reflected more Halifax’s bolder views. The press, helpfully trying to make the guarantee more sensible, suggested that Chamberlain had not committed Britain to the defence of Danzig, which angered the Poles who demanded a foreign office clarification which, published in a communique on the 3rd of April, confirmed that Poland was in the driver’s seat.

The guarantee was intended to be a stop-gap until the Eastern bloc could be established on more solid grounds. But the binding agent for this bloc would have been the promise of a commitment from Britain. Having given that up for free before any negotiations started, Halifax now found that he had little leverage. The Poles returned to their obstinate uncooperativeness which had long-characterised Franco-Polish relations (Daladier was furious upon finding out about the guarantee, Bonnet had signed off on it without consulting him. Gamelin rued that the guarantee had not been made conditional on allowing the Soviets to pass through Polish territory to help fight in the event of war.)

The British had lost leverage with everyone else as well. Stalin had naturally feared that Germany would go through Warsaw to get to Moscow, but now he was in position to choose if or when to ally with either side. The French, while upset that Chamberlain had made such a blunder, were nonetheless now in a much stronger position to make demands on the UK, which resulted in the introduction of conscription in April and the promise of a substantial British Expeditionary Force.

The biggest issue with the guarantee was that although Chamberlain had hoped to ‘buy time’ with it while Britain rearmed, it was not a credible threat of deterrence. Poland could only hold out for a few months at most without Soviet assistance, as was recognised by the German, French and British generals (but not by the Poles themselves). The Chiefs of Staff had recommended against issuing the guarantee for this reason, but Halifax not only ignored their advice, but misrepresented the military value the Poles could provide to cabinet.

Because guaranteeing Hitler’s next target without any feasible hope of defending it makes so little sense as a means of ‘buying time’, a whole school of thought sprung up that actually Chamberlain was cynically baiting Germany into a war earlier than Hitler intended. This is hard to square with his private correspondence, but the fact that many historians have seriously entertained the possibility shows that Chamberlain’s strategy was, in the very literal sense, incredibly stupid.

Soviet Negotiations

Once the Polish guarantee had been given, it was agreed widely agreed, across faction lines, in both governments, that it was an urgent priority to negotiate an alliance with the Soviet Union. While many held doubts about the effectiveness of the Red Army, their allegiance would guarantee a deep second-front while denying Germany access to their natural resources. Even many anti-communists who opposed the polish guarantee and had hoped Hitler would strike eastwards recognised that, the guarantee having been given, it was necessary to make a deal with Stalin.

More sceptical was Chamberlain, Halifax and elements of the foreign office. They had a deep ideological distaste working with communists, they were concerned about Russian designs on the Baltics, and perhaps most importantly they didn’t understand the strategic value in the relationship. They were mostly focused on the extent to which Russia might help defend Poland at the very outset of the war, which was difficult because they no longer had any bargaining chips to induce Poland to allow Soviet troops to reach that border.

The opening of Soviet archives has since shown that the failure of the negotiations was almost entirely due to the British. Molotov’s lack of diplomatic etiquette didn’t help, and he was certainly willing to make full-use of the bargaining power afforded to him by the Polish guarantee, but the Soviets still really did want an alliance with the West. Stalin was still somewhat concerned that Hitler might attack the USSR through the Baltics, coordinating with Japan. Only at the end of negotiations did they start entertaining German counter-proposals. The French had always been alert to the possibility of a Russian-German deal, and reports of it reached the British, but they assumed Stalin had planted the rumours of German cooperation to improve his negotiating position.

The British dragged their feet at every opportunity in the negotiations, were slow to respond to proposals, and tried to add clauses that would make the agreement unworkable (Chamberlain wanted to make action contingent on League of Nations approval). The Soviets signalled that they’d like to speak with someone senior to know that the British meant business, but Chamberlain refused this repeatedly despite the pleading of MPs and colleagues that someone of ministerial rank be sent. The final straw was when the British belatedly agreed to send a military delegation. They sent the delegation the slowest way possible, using a merchantman (overriding strong objections by the French), with no plenipotentiary powers and with instructions to negotiate slowly. Stalin and Molotov drew the correct inference, and sided with Germany.

Nor were they the only ones who suspected that Chamberlain was doing his utmost to at least delay, if not sabotage negotiations5. The reason he was so often discomfited in parliament by questions about the negotiations is because many MPs believed he was running his own foreign policy. These fears were reinforced when talks leaked between a high-ranking German trade official and Chamberlain’s aide, demonstrating that he’d reverted to his old appeasement ways (and further signalling weakness to Hitler that undercut his own deterrence stance). This was not an isolated instance, Chamberlain pursued a variety of back-channels that we know about, and almost certainly a lot we don’t know about, circumventing the foreign office and even Halifax.6

To give an indication of the level of mistrust, the deputy opposition leader moved to limit the August recess, saying: “I want to put it quite bluntly. A considerable number of Members of this House, not confined to my colleagues on these benches, do not trust this Government. That is the root of the matter to-day. Because of that feeling of distrust we have thought it right to ask for an earlier meeting of this House than the Government propose.”Or to give another MP’s take: ‘The Prime Minister’s attitude this afternoon has confirmed the worst fears of all those who think that directly Parliament is up there will be a tremendous move in the direction of appeasement, and that he will use all his powers to bring about a situation that will place us in the gravest danger and alter the foreign policy upon which we are united at the present time. Some of us hold grave suspicions with regard to what he is doing about Russia… We know that he does not want an Anglo-Soviet pact, that he will only consent to it if it is forced upon him against his will. His personal antagonism to Russia is well known throughout the country.”Judging by the number of abstentions by the rebel conservatives (and other evidence), these sentiments were shared by many of Chamberlain’s own party.

Final Days

Hitler after Prague was confident that he could take Poland without Western intervention, even more so with the successful conclusion of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact His views are reasonably well-expressed in this version of the Obersalzberg speech, which I would recommend to the reader. Of note is the claim that post-Munich he decided to attack in the East instead of the West next, which accords with various other decisions he made (like approving plan Z in January, an ambitious naval rearmament program that only made sense if war with Britain was many years away).

The day before the invasion, on the 25th of August, the Polish-British Common Defence Pact was announced, which convinced Hitler there was a serious risk of intervention. He delayed the invasion by five days in the hopes that Ribbentrop might be able to negotiate a Western backdown to no avail. There was at this point no deal possible7, dexterous diplomacy might possibly have delivered a Munich 2.0 with Hitler taking Danzig and the Polish corridor, but he was concerned that this would leave a vengeful Poland which would simply attack when German armies were occupied elsewhere, ergo he needed the liquidation of the state. That was never going to be politically palatable to the allies after the guarantees they’d made in March and afterwards.

Given Hitler didn’t want war with France and Britain in September 1939, and they didn’t want war with him, a miscalculation certainly occurred. Principally the problem was that Hitler assumed the allies were strategically rational, in which case the Polish guarantee could only be a bluff8. This had precedent: Bismarck had once correctly called the bluff of Palmerston over Denmark. Hitler failed to recognise that the politicians were just responding to the change in public opinion which had occurred in March. Hitler also believed that even if war was declared, he’d be able to come to terms with the Western powers after the invasion was successfully completed, as a broader war would make no sense. This failed to recognise that the war itself would further polarise western voters against him, making such a deal untenable for an elected leader.

Chamberlain was somewhat surprised by the news of the invasion on September the 1st (many were quietly hoping that Hitler had been bluffing). He gave a statement to parliament which, repeating his post-Prague performance, was so insipid it disgusted many MPs who thought he was trying to avoid war. Chamberlain would later claim he was forced into this because he was trying to synchronise the declaration of war with France, which has some truth to it, but the event shows how little trust he commanded among parliamentarians.9

War

Strategy

Before going through events in detail, a quick description of the general war strategy must be provided. The standard account is that French and British planners envisioned a ‘guerre de longue durée’. In the first phase, the allies would be on the defensive while maintaining an economic blockade of Germany (which would be organised by the British), and then in the following phase, after having accumulated a sizable lead in armaments, the allies would take the offensive.

Historians are being charitable when they describe this as a considered strategy. For one thing, the French would have preferred a guerre brève back in 1936 if they’d had British and Polish support. For another, French planners had always assumed that Germany would be fighting a two-front war, which would prevent the Germans from concentrating too many forces on the Western front and keep them from accessing the resources of Eurasia. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact had blown French strategic calculations to smithereens; their subsequent rapid disillusionment with this strategy must be viewed in this context.

Chamberlain’s own views are sufficiently idiosyncratic and important that they can be considered separately. He drew on the ideas of Liddell Hart, who over-extrapolated from WW1, and then combined this with an incredibly selective reading of the intelligence coming out of Germany re: the economy and public opinion. I would go so far as to say his views were delusionally optimistic:

  • Offensive operations in the West were impossible and that the British should participate in the war principally through the RAF (he belatedly abandoned this strategy in 1939 due to French pressure)
  • Hitler understood this, and wouldn’t even attempt a Western offensive. If he was mad enough to try, he would be dissuaded by his generals or fall in a coup.
  • The German people, once they realised the war was unwinnable and suffering under rationing, would spontaneously rise and overthrow the Nazi regime. Then the war would fizzle out without the Nazis in charge, so that the war would likely last less than a year and there would be no large-scale combat.10

The misguided nature of British policy makes much more sense once realises the PM who dominated his government held these beliefs. For instance, his relative indifference to the loss of the Czechs and Russians, his obsessive focus on air-defence, the dilatory nature of rearmament and war planning, and his priority of avoiding escalation during the Phoney war (he still intended to come to peace with the Germans, just not with Hitler).

It’s remarkable how confident he was in both his understanding of the war, and his ability to predict Hitler’s decision-making despite abundant evidence that he could not. Hitler had chosen September to launch the invasion as it was fairly late in the campaigning season, anticipating the possibility of a potential western counter-offensive. As such, a lull after the invasion of Poland was always expected (besides the need to reorganise, repair tanks etc.), and bad weather further delayed German plans. This was universally understood by military men, who repeatedly warned Chamberlain that they were in the calm before the storm. Chamberlain, who rejected much of their advice through the war, was sceptical and every day where nothing happened further entrenched his view that the war was all but over and that he alone understood the situation. He was sufficiently certain of this that he expressed his views in public, saying on the 4th of April that Hitler had ‘missed the bus’ in words that would soon haunt him in parliament. Five days later Germany invaded Norway and Denmark.

Naturally the war planners in his government couldn’t assume the war would just go away like the PM did, but they did have to rationalise the resulting policy to some extent. This is a very important point: policy creates its own justification in a democracy. If the understanding of the war among the allies became incoherent during the phoney war, it was because planners had to reconcile insane policy pushed by politicians with available evidence.

The most obvious example of this was a tremendous faith in blockading, that was only very partially shared by The Ministry of Economic Warfare. MEW did an admirable job of enforcing the blockade in difficult circumstances, but they had to temper expectations11. The blockade was certainly not going to deliver a knock-out blow, rather it would gradually deliver a small but significant advantage to allied war efforts over German ones. This was a difficult pill to swallow because no-one had any plans for what offensive operations would occur in later phases of the war, and yet even the ‘pessimistic’ planners assumed the war would only take 3 years despite the absence of a credible approach to doing so.12

Saar Offensive

At the outset of the war while Germany was occupied in Poland, France had a force ratio of around 5:1 on the Western front versus Germany, although with a more considerable advantage in armour and artillery. By all accounts, a major offensive on the Saar front would have caused the German line to collapse within a week or two. This would not have won the war, as the Polish invasion went so successfully that the French only had a few weeks to act before redeployments from the East (most especially the Luftwaffe) would neutralise their tremendous advantage. But it would have been enough time to occupy the industrially-important Saar region, seize the contents of warehouses, disrupt the coal mines, strip the Siegfried line, and so forth.

While many have criticised Gamelin for being overly-defensive and missing this opportunity, I think this is slightly missing the point. He had 10 divisions sally forth from the Maginot line and then meander about in minefields for a month between the two defensive lines under ever-present threat of German air-attack. ‘Defensive’ is not the word that first comes to mind.

The offensive was for show, but for whom? The Poles were being wiped off the map. It’s hard to see how neutral observers like the Americans would be impressed by the limp-wristed faux-offensive. The soldiers involved in the farce became dispirited. The intended audience was the French journalist and voter, who read confected communiques from the front about great battles being waged in an effort to assist the Poles. The Germans were astonished at the outright falsehood of these press reports, which General Wagner called ‘unworthy of a great nation’.

The purpose of the publicity stunt isn’t hard to fathom, the guarantee of Poland meant they had to pretend to try to pre-empt political pressure that they weren’t doing anything. Gamelin did not need persuading, he had only survived so long in his position despite the political turmoil in the civilian government by being well-attuned to the political sensitivities back in Paris. He possessed the virtues of a civil servant rather than a general. His role especially required delicacy because civilian-military relations in the Third Republic were always uneasy (they had no recovered since the Dreyfus Affair), so he was forever playing a carefully balancing-act between his own subordinates and the politicians.

While the fake offensive was for political reasons, why not a real one? Partly this was because Daladier calculated that a bloody offensive would be politically disastrous and lead to accusations that they had learnt nothing since WW1. But it also aligned with interwar planning, the French had long dreaded another slugging-match with Germany on their territory so their aim was a guerre ailleurs, a war elsewhere. This meant no combat on the Saar front, an advanced defensive front in the low countries, but ideally combat would be relegated to other theatres where the body-toll could be more equally shared between Britain, France and the colonies. Insofar as France was trying to minimise the fraction of casualties which were theirs, rather than win the war, there was some logic in avoiding a major offensive at this juncture.

Ruhr Bombing

If the allies weren’t willing to shed any blood to damage the German economy, they could perhaps have bombed the Ruhr while the Luftwaffe was occupied in Poland, a suggestion repeatedly made by Bomber Command. It’s debatable how effective this would have been; despite the British thinking that future wars would be decided by strategic bombing, and despite having five years to prepare, they entered the war with a small number of medium bombers without the equipment and training to make much effective use of them. The Germans who had no doctrinal interest in bombing cities had perhaps better capacity to do so, so German retaliation might have been worse than the damage that the British could do.

Regardless of the strategic calculus, Chamberlain would have vetoed any attempt to use them on the basis it would make Britain look bad on the international stage. Roosevelt had asked all nations to avoid bombing civilians and this chimed with Chamberlain’s desire to avoid escalation and France’s concern that the retaliation would be directed at their cities. That this was a political decision is demonstrated by how quickly it was reversed under a new government, with both Churchill and Attlee favouring bombing in mid-1940.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the decision to avoid bombing reflects the fact that British and French elites were still not taking the war seriously. Responding to a proposal to drop incendiary bombs on the Black Forest which was suspected of concealing munitions, the Air Secretary reportedly responded ‘Are you aware it is private property?’.

The Nordic misadventure

The French were eager from the outset to open up peripheral theatres which would move the fighting away from the French homeland. Originally they were eager to start a second front in the Balkans, however the British were concerned this would alienate Mussolini and favoured instead an operation in the North with the ostensible purpose of cutting Germany off from Swedish iron ore. Chamberlain and Halifax opposed this as it would violate the neutrality of Sweden and Norway.

When the Soviet Union attacked Finland13, the public outrage in both countries gave additional impetus to the project, which was amended with plans to send an allied expeditionary force to Finland (even if this meant war with the Russians). This folly may seem nonsensical to the modern reader, and it certainly was when assessed in strategic terms, however the political motives were very strong, namely:

  • The voters were growing restive with the ‘bore war’, having anticipated exciting news-reels upon the declaration of war. The false accounts during the Saar offensive had not sated this demand. This put immense political pressure, especially on Daladier, to make something happen.
  • The allies were in the embarrassing position that, having started a world war, they couldn’t articulate any war aims. Obviously they couldn’t make the liberation of Poland an objective as it was partially occupied by the Soviets. Over time this was sure to drain support for the war, and on both sides of the channel elites worried that a second peace offensive14 from Hitler might prove rather effective when they didn’t even have a starting negotiating stance.Going to war with the Soviets would solve this problem.
  • The French right were unconvinced the war was against the right enemy. To their mind, a large-scale war with Germany would principally benefit Stalin who would be able to conquer an exhausted Europe in the aftermath. They equally recoiled at the state-intervention required for war mobilisation.By making Russia a co-belligerent it ensured that the war in ideological terms could be viewed as democracy vs tyranny, thereby unifying the French polity in a way that a war against fascism never could.
  • Some figures viewed the war with the Soviets as more of a necessary risk than a positive good (e.g. Churchill). Those who wanted the project for other reasons decided that tying it in with Finnish support would get it past the war cabinet, who were uninterested in strategic arguments but might be persuaded based on the sob-stories coming out of Finland.

The War cabinet finally approved the project but later that day the Finns accepted peace terms. Temporarily the project was off. However Daladier did not survive the blowback, the French polity was outraged he had not started a second-front against the Soviet Union, and he was replaced by Reynaud who promised a more vigorous prosecution of the war. Reynaud was elected by a margin of only a single vote having lost the support of the right. Seven months into the war and France barely had a parliamentary majority for war; Germany could survive economically a lot longer than France could politically.

Reynaud’s new pet-project, one which already had wide-support on both sides of the channel, was to bomb the oil refineries at Baku, in another attempt to start a war with the Soviets. This would have had a temporary impact on German fuel supplies while likely drawing Stalin and Hitler into a closer alliance.15

The change in France also meant even more pressure on the British from their ally to do something, which was combined with a similar backlash from the British electorate. Chamberlain leaves no doubt as to why he changed his mind on the Nordic operation: ‘The appetite of the public for spectacular operations remained, and this psychological factor could not be ignored. Any blow which we could deliver at Germany would encourage our own people and would be admirable for propaganda purposes.’16

The plan was to mine the port of Narvik, which if it prompted a German invasion would be followed-up with a multitude of landings on the Norwegian west-coast. Narvik was the only useable port for the export of much-needed iron ore during the winter, so its mining would have been strategically valuable when the project had been proposed in September. By the time it was approved in April it made less sense as Luleå would shortly be opening up.

At the same time, Germany put into play its own Norwegian invasion plan which caught the British unawares17 in its audacity. The British counter-invasion was a fiasco. The men were unprepared, ill-trained and ill-equipped. There was no coordination between the forces, in one instance the admiral and general of the invading party received directly contradictory orders as their chains-of-command were not communicating with one another. Decision-making was based on whim in London mostly by Churchill. They could not decide the priority of different landings because he had no overarching plan and the frequent changes-of-mind further confused things.

But this operational incompetence masks just how foolish the campaign was strategically. From early on it became clear that the Germans would have air supremacy with which it could harass the supply lines (i.e. the ships travelling up the fjords which were sitting ducks). As such the flawed execution was almost a blessing in disguise, as it prevented an over-commitment to an invasion which was doomed from the outset. One hardly needs to mythologise the competence of the German armed forces to see why they succeeded here, British incompetence was so extreme few modern great powers in history could have lost to them (there were similar failures across the war which I will not go into, like the fall of Singapore).

Fall of Chamberlain

Chamberlain’s acrimonious ouster during this operation has always perplexed casual readers. Ostensibly it was in response to the failures of the Nordic campaign, which raises the question why Churchill, who was almost single-handedly responsible for it18, came to be PM.

To understand what occurred it’s first necessary to dispel some widely-held illusions about Chamberlain’s character, i.e. that he was a kindly old man who was out of his depth when dealing with Hitler. In reality he was a ruthless strongman who concentrated an incredible amount of power in his hands. He manipulated the media, wire-tapped his political opponents, and destroyed the political careers of fellow-conservatives who disagreed with him. It was only thanks to these Machiavellian tactics that he held on to power so long despite the obvious failings of his policy program.

It was his pragmatism as a political operator that conned so many MPs into believing he’d pursue a pragmatic foreign policy. His failure to do so was not due to any principled pacifism (he was blasé about attacking the Soviets, and he voted with Churchill to continue a nearly-hopeless war after the fall of France), but rather an obsession with maintaining the moral high ground in international relations. Hitler was nearer the mark, when in one of his rants he claimed that Chamberlain’s policy was aimed at making sure Hitler would be blamed for the war, rather than averting war. This same concern for moral rectitude explains why he vetoed anything which would impinge upon the sovereignty of neutral nations and why he opposed making an alliance with the Soviets.

His speeches and writings demonstrate he thought almost entirely in moralistic terms19; words such as ‘conscience’ appear frequently while strategic thinking was entirely absent. Even Halifax often mentions in passing the strategic implications of the policies they were pursuing, but these thoughts never once appear to trouble Chamberlain. To be clear I’m not saying he was a bad strategist (one might accuse Churchill of this), rather he had no interest in strategy and did not think strategically.

His concern with principles rather than facts explains his disdain for debate. A man who cares about strategy, even if he believes he has sound judgement, might be concerned that he is proceeding from faulty premises and thus seek a second opinion. Chamberlain made no effort to keep parliament even informed of his policies much less debate them, inspiring a seething hatred among the opposition and his own rebel backbenchers. Any disagreement was seen as a personal attack, and the men of ability who should have been rising up the conservative ranks were sidelined for less disagreeable men. This explains why Churchill was such an obvious successor, there was little other talent at the top of the conservatives thanks to Chamberlain, and Churchill had cultivated crossbench relations so that he alone could unify government.

Chamberlain’s critics had long suspected that Britain had failed to take the war seriously, either before or after he had declared it20. But they had no concrete evidence until the shambolic Nordic campaign suddenly brought home to everyone that Britain was in the “the worst strategic position in which this country has ever been placed”. Consider the words of a labour MP re: the Nordic expedition:

‘…but the more I hear, “We had to go there and do something about it,” the more I begin to wonder whether the Government, instead of taking this business seriously as an essential part of our war policy, were merely discharging what they considered to be a moral obligation in order to protect themselves from possible criticisms on moral grounds. I ask in all seriousness, was this a serious and properly organised expedition or a demonstration for the purpose of satisfying the moral conscience of some or all the members of the Government and of the outside world?’

Of course he was quite right, it was a demonstration, for the voters, the French and for parliament. And this more or less describes every decision described in this post, the Saar offensive was for show, the talks with the Soviets had been for show (at least from the British side), the guarantee of Poland had been for show, the neutrality agreement over Spain had been for show and the appointment of Inskip had been for show. Even if senior leadership wanted to turn things around, it would take time to regear a governmental apparatus which only cared about political optics rather than results.

Fall of France

As mentioned earlier, French interwar planning revolved around the idea of an advance defence in the low countries, to avoid a repeat of WW1 where the fighting was on French soil. This plan was made more difficult because, after the French allowed the Germans to reoccupy the Rhineland in 1936, the Belgians had adopted a policy of neutrality. As such the overriding obsession of the French general staff through the winter of 1940/41 was how best to rush to the defensive line along the river Dyle after the Germans crossed the border with Belgium.

Whether or not it made much sense to respect Belgian neutrality given that they were obviously going to be invaded by Germany perhaps hasn’t received enough scrutiny. In the event, the Belgian King bizarrely insisted even after Germans had invaded that Belgium was still neutral and so couldn’t welcome in French troops, he then refused to leave with the government in exile, and would later suggest a Vichy-style arrangement in 1942. If he wasn’t sympathetic to the fascists his behaviour was indistinguishable from one who was.

Gamelin also wanted to provide support to the Dutch who were also neutral. The motivation here, again largely political, was that the British were afraid (irrationally so) of German air raids from Dutch airfields, besides which Gamelin hoped to incorporate both Belgian and Dutch units into the Western front to boost the pool of manpower. This led to the fateful decision to pull the choice units from the centrally-placed strategic reserve to the far north at Breda where they could remain in contact with Dutch forces, in what historians call the ‘Breda-variant’ of the Dyle plan.

Gamelin deserves all the criticism he’s received for this decision, which meant that the Schwerpunkt which would strike through the Ardennes had to face only a B-series division of older poorly-trained reservists at Sedan to forward the Meuse after which there’d be little between them and Paris.21 However it’s unclear if this decision changed the outcome of the campaign; the reserves would likely not have reinforced in time to prevent the river crossing.

The Dyle plan itself was risky and long-predated Gamelin, it should have been reconsidered after the Belgians declared neutrality. When you defend a static-line you have certain advantages; you know where your units are at the beginning of the battle and can be guaranteed that they’ll be in good order. By starting the ‘defence’ with a frenetic rush to the Dyle the French forwent those advantages, effectively turning the campaign into one of manoeuvre from the get-go which greatly advantaged the Germans. The confusion and inability to counter-attack in a timely manner were in large part a consequence of this decision.

To give a specific example, consider armour. The French did, contrary to popular wisdom, believe in massed-armour, especially to counter the Panzer divisions. However as speed was of the essence, the three armoured divisions of the cavalry were committed to the van of the attack into Belgium. They performed well in this task, but having dug in and spread out to defend the line they’d seized and then repelling the German diversionary attack, they were in little condition to move south to counter-attack the main thrust of the Germans. The French also had three heavier tank divisions at the outset, which if anything which had too many tanks and too little support to perform effectively.

The Germans had struggled to keep their own tanks going during the Polish offensive and learnt many valuable lessons in sustainment in the process. The French had no time to learn from their mistakes. Unlike the Germans in Poland, the French were retreating, so when their tanks ran out of fuel or broke down it often resulted in them being captured without a fight. The Dyle plan greatly exacerbated this problem because many divisions had to cover a lot of ground unnecessarily by first rushing north then rushing back south again (breakdowns largely being a function of distance travelled).

If the Breda variant of the Dyle plan was partly a case of political objectives overriding military sense, it was far from the only instance. In truth is the French army looked a lot better on paper than in reality, and the same was true of the Royal Navy22. During the halcyon days of collective security, there’d been serious spending cuts in both nations. Politicians wanted these spending cuts without a commensurate decline in nominal fighting capacity, ergo the cuts were more to ‘readiness’ which hollowed out the services.

With respect to the French army this hollowness was especially due to the 1928 conscription law, which meant that the army largely consisted of poorly trained, low-morale reservists. The aforementioned unit holding down Sedan comprised reservists who had been called up for one year, often in the 20s, and had received little training since (they’d been mostly doing things like fortification work during the phoney war). The French could hardly make big innovative changes to doctrine and expect it to be carried out by units like that; the staleness of their doctrine23 was the direct result of lack of training. The lack of initiative and focus on extremely detailed orders also stemmed from this dynamic: professional officers commanding a reserve-army.

Even insofar as high command was the problem, this can be construed as a failure of the political system. Gamelin represented almost the ideal type of a general cum bureaucrat who thrived in the third republic. In Britain the armed services removed the war secretary, Leslie Hore-Belisha, partly due to antisemitism. Contrast this to Germany; Hitler pushed out Blomberg and Fritzsch (the former due to an affair, the latter on a false accusation of homosexuality, in an attempt to conceal the power-grab). He accelerated the rise of figures like Guderian, the self-proclaimed mastermind of blitzkrieg, while someone like Rommel almost owed his career to the Nazis. No doubt Hitler’s adroitness here was in part due to his military background, and his decision-making later in the war was poor, but his moves early were a lot better than that of the allies.

If the French high command wasn’t up to the task, it was a task much harder than historians ordinarily admit. The Germans had air superiority, better training and morale, and importantly recent combat experience. Even the German decoy attack in the North was extremely successful, although not breaking the main defensive line (having been repulsed with heavy losses at Gembloux), suggesting that German superiority extended far beyond battle-planning. In an effort to scapegoat French high-command historians have tended to understate the strengths of the Germans.

Perhaps the most important take-away of the battle for France is that the Germans understood that their plan was risky, but it was a calculated risk which was rational in the broader strategic context. Conversely the allies were entirely insensible to the risk; the British hadn’t wanted to send substantive ground-forces over until mid-1939, Gamelin had spent the phoney war batting away proposals which would have pulled forces off the Western front into pointless peripheral operations, and ultimately he decided to seriously deplete the central strategic reserve despite fighting a foe already famous for rapidly exploiting breakthroughs with fast-moving armour. Having spent half-a-decade pretending to take the Nazi threat seriously, the allies only truly apprehended the danger mere weeks before Hitler was in Paris.

Post-mortem

“The redeeming feature of war is that it puts a nation to the test. As exposure to the atmosphere reduces all mummies to instant dissolution, so war passes supreme judgment upon social systems that have outlived their vitality.”

Even if the French army hadn’t rapidly collapsed (as well as the Belgians and Dutch), the strategic position of the allies was poor and likely to get worse. The Battle of France at least prevented France from carrying out its plans of starting a second war with the Soviet Union. All indications suggested the German economy was going to hold up a lot longer than the French political system24. Even focusing on the economic war, events would demonstrate that the UK was vulnerable to trade interdiction by submarines and strategic bombing. The Germans never fully exploited this weakness as they didn’t prioritise economic warfare like British war planners.

When considering all phases, the build-up, the phoney war and the French campaign, it becomes obvious that there was a comprehensive institutional dysfunction in both France and Britain. It was not a coincidence that the allies were terrible at combat, intelligence, diplomacy (more so the British), war strategy, political mobilisation and economic mobilisation (more so the French). Hitler did not dominate Europe in June 1940, after having come to power in a bankrupt and disarmed Germany in 1933, merely due to tricking Chamberlain at Munich, or because Gamelin wasn’t very good at his job.

The more interesting and provocative question is if the allied strategy could have feasibly worked. Chamberlain’s scruples about working with the Soviets or violating the neutrality of minor powers guaranteed that the blockade could be only very partially successful. It was only a matter of time before the Nazis acquired, in addition to Soviet resources, oil from Romania, iron ore from Sweden, chromite from Turkey, nickel from Finland, bauxite from the Balkans etc. Only a deus ex machina could have decided the war on the timescale that allied war planners were assuming (some British leaders wrongly believed that the US might enter the war early on).

Historians during the cold-war understandably shrank from blaming democratic dysfunction for the failure of the allies to come up with a feasible strategy. Insofar as historians are willing to do so, they tend to confine their criticism to France’s political paralysis and ideological polarisation. In my view it performed at least as well as the UK and their system had its own advantages, e.g. Chamberlain’s outré opinions would have led to his rapid downfall in the more competitive French system where leaders had to defend their positions and persuade others of them.

Certainly little attention has been given to public opinion, even though it was largely responsible for the incoherent strategy. Voters had maintained an absurd faith in the League of Nations and believed it was a substitute for hard-power through the 30s, before rapidly changing their mind and supporting a punitive war against a better-prepared Germany. Allied policy ultimately followed the contours set by public opinion which all but guaranteed failure.25

Perhaps the biggest issue with the historiography though is that historians took the superficial, politicised takes of contemporaries as the starting-point of their analyses. So for instance the reductionist understanding of appeasement is that all politicians sit on a spectrum of dovish to hawkish, and Chamberlain was too dovish at Munich, although he partly made amends by guaranteeing Poland later. This is moronic. Both of those decisions were strategic mistakes, the latter far more obvious and profound. The democracies failed because their understanding of the world had grown unmoored from reality. If historians perpetuate their misapprehensions then modern democracies are likely to repeat the same mistakes.

  1. Relations with Poland were extraordinarily difficult for a variety of reasons. Their bellicosity alienated any potential allies in the region, e.g. they threatened to declare war on Lithuania in 1938 unless Lithuania renormalised relations (which they hadn’t done since Poland annexed Vilnius in 1920).

    Germany also really did have a legitimate cause for complaint over the Danzig corridor, which made it difficult for France to sign a close defensive alliance because that would embolden the Poles in any negotiations (not that they needed it, they seemed to consider themselves a great-power), and Great Britain certainly didn’t want an alliance with a power so entangled with the Poles. ↩

  2. Laval would later lead the Vichy government, for which he was shot after the war. One wonders if his eagerness to throw his lot in with the Germans was partly due to his first-hand experience of the inability of democracies to execute a rational foreign policy. ↩

  3. The USSR also had a treaty obligation to come to the aid of the Czechs if France did, and evidence strongly suggests they were willing to fulfil their duty. To get Soviet troops through Romania would have likely required some diplomatic work in the League of Nations by the western nations though. ↩

  4. The claim that he was tricked due to public words like ‘peace in our time’ is absurd. This is what any politician would have said in that circumstance, as all politicians simply try to get the best headlines in the short-term. ↩

  5. Cadogan’s diary, May 20: ‘In his present mood, P.M says he will resign rather than sign alliance with Soviet’. This proves that early on, at the very least, the talks had been conducted in bad-faith.

    Shortly thereafter even Halifax turned decidedly in favour of the alliance, and some historians credulously believe that Chamberlain himself relented, but he had a long habit of keeping silent when out-numbered while continuing to pursue his own objectives. ↩

  6. This is why Chamberlain should certainly have resigned after Prague. Not because it was a repudiation of his approach to diplomacy (although it was), but because thereafter there was an unbridgeable divide between Chamberlain’s views on Germany and the war, and the general public, parliament, the civil service, the chiefs of staff, and even his own cabinet. How much of the confusion during the rest of his premiership was because he was silently undermining official government policy, it’s impossible to say. ↩

  7. Although no deal was possible, it’s distressing how little attempt was made. Only Bonnet and the Italians seemed to understand the gravity of the situation. Bonnet’s diplomacy was undercut by conniving officials who convinced Daladier that Hitler was bluffing and not to trust his own foreign minister. Daladier would forever blame the war on said officials, as well as Chamberlain. ↩

  8. There’s a general problem in democracies that a guarantee has immediate upsides (looking strong to the electorate) with deferred downsides (a potential war), which makes it overly appealing to politicians who have a short-time horizon. It’s also the case that politicians generally don’t realise how much their current actions politically constrain their future ones; Chamberlain made the Polish guarantee thinking he’d be able to weasel out of it. ↩

  9. To deflect criticism that he was responsible for the failure of the negotiations, Chamberlain decided that the government would publish a blue-book outlining how they did everything possible to achieve an alliance (i.e. to lie). However after Russia invaded Finland public opinion turned against the Soviets, so the angle taken in the work switched to ‘it’s a good thing we didn’t cave to the Soviets’. Of course the French had genuinely wanted an alliance, and so didn’t want the documents published because it might be suggested that they had been more willing to horse-trade the Baltics for an agreement.

    Strident objections from Daladier managed to (barely) halt publication, although the fact it was nearly published is nonetheless remarkable. Having started a world war Chamberlain was willing to publish internal propaganda that would outrage Paris, Moscow and the Polish-government in exile, solely to mislead domestic audiences about his diplomacy in 1939. This goes to show just how badly strategy and foreign policy was being subordinated to political calculations. ↩

  10. While Chamberlain’s views were indefensible in general, his notion that the war would likely be decided on the home-front was widely held. Russia and Germany hadn’t been defeated on the battlefield in WW1, so it was reasonable to expect something similar with the next war. It is remarkable in hindsight how resilient the populations of Britain, Germany, Russia and Japan during WW2.

    I suspect the home-front will be a bigger issue come WW3, because Western nations are more ideologically-divided, less nationalistic and more anti-war. Consider that land distribution undermined Russian unity in WW1 and then consider how young people are faring re: housing in the West today. ↩

  11. During the course of the phoney war the allies lost faith in the effectiveness of the blockade, but this tendency conceals a more interesting phenomenon: the near-schizophrenic assessments of German economic strength. Without any concrete anchor people oscillated between two extremes: the German economy was about to implode, and also the Germans had perfected a war-economy that would make them unbeatable. This should sound familiar to the contemporary reader, given the same phenomenon has existed re: Russian strength, where many simultaneously believes that slightly strengthening sanctions will topple the regime, but also that defence spending needs to skyrocket as Russia is about to imminently conquer Europe.

    One partly rational explanation for this behaviour vis-à-vis Germany is that Schacht’s ingenious system of price controls, foreign exchange controls and monetary financing had allowed the German economy to seemingly defy gravity during the great depression. The orthodox hard-money types (the same midwits who’d kept the UK on the gold-standard too long) had thus predicted the German house of cards would fall for many years, while others concluded that the Germans had figured out something these economists hadn’t (arguably true). One suspects the same thing will happen in a war with China, as western economists have never properly understood the Chinese growth model. ↩

  12. Planners greatly under-estimated how long WW1 would take, but this has typically been attributed to the fact that they were over-indexing on previous wars like the Franco-Prussian war. No such excuse can be made for WW2. ↩

  13. Famously Molotov denied that the Soviets were bombing Helsinki, insisting the bombers were instead dropping food-packages, so that the bombs thereafter were known as Molotov bread-baskets. The Finns expressed their gratitude by greeting the T26s with improvised anti-tank weapons that were thus christened Molotov cocktails. ↩

  14. One issue was that German propaganda was proving much more effective than allied propaganda. While partly a question of competence, the allied propagandists had been given a nearly unsaleable pitch. No-one cared about Poland which was beyond saving anyway. They didn’t want to frame the war as an ideological one against fascism because it would wedge the left and right and push Italy into the German camp. They were forced to choose the angle: ‘France and GB have an obligation to keep their word’, which could only appeal to amnesiacs who’d forgotten Munich. ↩

  15. If the allies wanted to expand the war there was a much better target: Italy had the same resource deficiencies as Germany and the blockade meant that this was the key bottleneck for arms production. Industrial capacity is a poor substitute for natural resources, so the additional Italian factories would have done little for the German war effort, indeed if they were less efficient and diverted resources from German factories they might have been a net-loss to the war effort.

    This was recognized by planners on both sides; Hitler encouraged Mussolini to stay neutral in early 1940 because he would have been more of a liability than an asset. Unfortunately the allied leaders never seemed to fully understand this logic. As a consequence Italy was allowed to build up its armaments while neutral and then time their entry into the war when it best suited them.

    The fact that Italy was considered a more valuable partner than Russia says a lot about the confusion about strategy. While the USSR did outperform and Italy underperform during the war, their basic attributes were obvious to all observers. Russia had immense reserves of natural resources and manpower, a decent base of heavy-industry and good prospects for mobilization. Italy had some useful Mediterranean assets at the outset and some manufacturing which would be largely redundant on the Axis side, and not a lot else going for it. It did not require much foresight to see which would do better in a prolonged state of total war.

    The same basic error persists to this day. A lot of observers think you can measure the contribution of a nation to WW3 based of strength of the armed forces at the outset. This is wrong. The US was producing more than twice as many aircraft per month by the end of the war as the Luftwaffe possessed at the outset of the war. WW3 will potentially see even more rapid scaling (consider dark-factories). If WW3 goes for years then the fractional contribution from deindustrialized western nations will be approximately nil except for raw resources from the likes of Canada and Australia. ↩

  16. Politicians wants to maximize their popularity in the short-term and tend to get pushback from subordinates when this leads to harmful policy prescriptions. One big danger is when politicians realize they can justify their popularity-maximizing measures as ‘good for morale’ and override said objections.

    During the covid pandemic public health officials were concerned that measures to stop the spread of the virus largely depended on voluntary compliance, which in turn relied on the maintenance of public spirits. Politicians used this as an excuse to ignore public health expertise for the rest of the pandemic in the name of boosting public morale. E.g. long after it was known by experts that the virus spread through aerosols, government bodies made a big deal of wiping down surfaces in ‘covid theatre’ which did nothing to halt the spread of the virus but helped the re-election campaigns of politicians. ↩

  17. This was a major intel failure given that everyone knew the Germans would likely attempt something and the war cabinet had been told that they’d receive adequate forewarning when the Germans did. In general the intelligence early in the war was poor, especially so in the use of the intelligence gathered. The role of intel was more to provide support for policies senior figures already supported, so scraps of evidence was provided in a fragmentary way up the chain. It was not synthesized into a coherent narrative that was robust enough to contradict superiors, which was what was needed to prevent the blunders made by Churchill or Gamelin. This was the same failure-mode as with the war-planners; evidence did not drive policy although it was selectively adduced to support policy desired by superiors. ↩

  18. If the first lord of the admiralty, already world-renowned for his inability to orchestrate successful amphibious campaigns, can push through an amphibious campaign which makes most of the senior military men blanch, then you have bigger problems than the first lord of the admiralty. Three factors are important:

    • Many expected that the plan would never be realised because Chamberlain and Halifax preferred complete passivity, and that Chamberlain was intentionally talking it to death in cabinet. This was probably an accurate assessment… until the tide of public opinion turned and Chamberlain’s mind with it. Then the absurd hypothetical invasion became a real one with little time for critics to organise opposition.
    • Churchill was increasingly dominating government and purging naysayers out of the admiralty. It could only hurt your career to contradict him given his waxing power.
    • The joint planners would sometimes draft warnings about why the plan was bad. They advised the chiefs of staff. The chief of the air staff thought the scheme was ‘hare-brained’ but made little effort to block it. The chief of the naval staff was in ill-health and spent his energy intriguing against Churchill’s other idiotic schemes like sending the fleet into the Baltic. The chief of the imperial general staff had been appointed thanks to lobbying from Churchill, and shared his temperamental aversion to a defensive strategy. The chiefs were incompetent, divided and overly deferential to civilian leadership.They advised the war cabinet, however there was an additional layer of the Military Co-ordination Committee made up of the service ministers with the chiefs assisting, which Churchill both chaired and dominated, which re-examined their counsel. This committee, by having both the chiefs and the service ministers in the same room, ended up de-facto running the Nordic campaign even if ultimate authority lay with Chamberlain. Churchill thus was the loudest voice in the war cabinet and controlled the most important advisory body. Given the war cabinet was profoundly ignorant on matters of war, they could scarcely raise even specious objections to his mad plans. In summary: this set-up meant the connective tissue between the genuine strategists (the joint planners) and the ultimate decision-maker (Chamberlain) was remarkably thin. The committee system allowed Churchill, a strategic dilettante, to insert himself in-between and control the narrative. While Churchill exploited this situation before becoming PM, he both destroyed the architecture and fired most of the people involved in it after becoming PM as he understood how dysfunctional it was. His military judgement may have been poor but he certainly understood more about executive decision-making than Chamberlain.

    ↩

  19. Viewing foreign policy in moral rather than strategic terms, and prioritizing Britain’s moral standing above its national interest, has long been the hallmark of the foreign office. People with this mindset are said to have a ‘foreign-office mind’. Chamberlain and Halifax had foreign-office minds. Judging by the likes of the Chagos deal, the foreign office mindset is going strong, and probably metastasized to the rest of Western Europe and the Commonwealth. ↩

  20. Chamberlain wrote to his sister seven days after declaring war that he had ‘nothing to do’. Even those elements of government dedicated to the war effort took things at a leisurely pace. ↩

  21. This was commanded by Huntziger. His defence was very poor. Upon retreating he decided to go southwards rather than covering the approach to Paris, a decision sufficiently dubious that some have questioned his loyalty. He then ruined the possibility of a counter-attack from the South with one of the reinforcing heavy armour divisions by ordering them to disperse their tanks (contrary to doctrine). Nonetheless he was politically well-connected so the French decided to scapegoat Corap instead, then De Gaulle would recommend during the campaign that Huntziger be promoted to replace Weygand (Gamelin’s successor). He was later minister of war under Petain’s regime. ↩

  22. Casual observers will note that the Royal Navy didn’t not contribute all that much to the pacific war. It suffered greatly under the ’10 year rule’ but even when budget was forthcoming, it was spent more on flashy things like battleship modernization. The result was that in WW2 it was seriously short when it came to escorts, supply ships, anti-submarine weapons, anti-air weapons, and naval aviation more broadly. The comparison here is obvious, the pentagon also spends a huge fraction of its budget on modernization schemes for legacy weapon systems and underspends on the sort of weapons which will be used in WW3. It’s too politically-risky to downsize in order to modernize, hence the hollowing-out. ↩

  23. Doctrinal deficiencies were overrated as a problem in any case. The American method in Italy, with a similar focus on overwhelming firepower employed in a methodical fashion, would have been recognizable to French commanders. The French army just wasn’t very good.

    Early accounts focused on the difference between German and French doctrine, which was a somewhat unfair comparison. The German operational approach was downstream of Hitler’s Bismarckian strategy of opportunistic wars which needed to be won quickly and decisively. You can’t invent Blitzkrieg if your job is to defend the Maginot line. The Germans also learnt through doing; they were quicker to understand and exploit the advantages of massed armour and close-air support because they had more experience in using them than their adversaries. ↩

  24. One of the lessons of WW2 that no-one learns because the phoney war was memory-holed is that democracies need a good reason to go to war if they’re to mobilise sufficiently. Pearl Harbour galvanized the American republic and it responded well. The British and French went into war for unclear reasons which politically constrained how much sacrifice could be demanded by politicians and also failed to seal long-standing political divisions between the left and right. I’m sceptical a war over Taiwan would be a ‘good reason’. ↩

  25. Walter Lippman presciently identified this exact problem in the 1920s. Voters are much too pacific in peace-time, too bellicose in war-time, and ultimately governed entirely by their emotions which swing wildly based on whatever is in the news-press.The timing is worth noting as well. Although elections had occasionally been fought on foreign policy (e.g. the Midlothian campaign), in general diplomacy was considered the purview of gentlemen rather than voters until after WW1. Lippman became disillusioned with the democratic revolution in foreign policy while working for the Wilson administration and seeing first-hand how unworkable it was. As such the 1930s is the only the only period of ‘democratic’ foreign policy against comparably powerful peer-nations outside of the cold war, its failure is very important to understand if we’re returning to a multipolar world. ↩