European diplomatic history:
Circles and Counter-circles, 1935-1939
Laval's agreement of January 1935 with Mussolini had been
intended to bring Italy to the side of France in the face of
Germany, a goal which seemed perfectly possible in the light of
Mussolini's veto on Hitler's coup in Austria in July 1934.
This result would have been achieved if Ethiopia could have been
taken by Italy without League action. In that case, Mussolini
argued, Africa would have been removed from the sphere of League
action as North America had been in 1919 (by the Monroe Doctrine
amendment to the Covenant) and Asia had been in 1931 (by the
failure to take action against Japan). This would have left the
League as a purely European organization, according to
Mussolini.
This view was regarded with favor in France where the chief, if not
the sole, role of the League was to provide security against
Germany. This view was completely
unacceptable to Britain, which wanted no
exclusively European political organization and could not join one
herself because of her imperial obligations and her preference for
an Atlantic organization (including the Dominions and the United
States). Thus, Britain insisted on sanctions against Italy.
But the British government never wanted collective security to
be a success. As a result, the French desire for no sanctions
combined with the British desire for ineffective sanctions to
provide ineffective sanctions.
Because there were sanctions, France lost Italian support
against Germany; because they were ineffective, France lost the
League system of collective security against Germany as well. Thus
France had neither bread nor cake. Worse than that, the Italian
involvement in Africa withdrew Italian political power from central
Europe and thus removed the chief force ready to resist the German
penetration of Austria.
Still worse, the hubbub of
the Ethiopian crisis gave Hitler an opportunity to declare the
rearmament of Germany and the reestablishment of the German air
force in March 1935 and to remilitarize the Rhineland on March 7,
1936.
The remilitarization of the Rhineland in violation of the
Versailles Treaty and the Locarno pacts was the most important
result of the Ethiopian crisis and the most important event of the
period of appeasement. It greatly reduced France's own security and
reduced even more the security of France's allies to the east of
Germany because, once this zone was fortified, it could decrease
greatly France's ability to come to the aid of eastern Europe.
The remilitarization of ';he
Rhineland was the essential military prerequisite for any movement
of Germany eastward against Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, or the
Soviet Union. That such a movement was the
chief aim of Hitler's policy had been clearly and explicitly stated
by him throughout his public life.
German rearmament had proceeded so slowly that Germany had only
twenty-five "paper" divisions in 1936, and the German generals
demanded and obtained written orders to retreat if France made any
move to invade the Rhineland. No such move was made, although
Germany had less than 30,000 troops in the area.
This failure arose from a combination of two factors: (1) the
expense of a French mobilization, which would have required the
devaluation of the franc at a time when France was working with
desperate energy to preserve the value of the franc; and (2) the
objections of Britain, which refused to allow France to take
military action or to impose any sanctions (even economic) against
Germany or to use Italy (against whom economic sanctions were still
in force) in the field against Germany as provided in the Locarno
pacts.
In a violent scene with Flandin on March 12th, Neville
Chamberlain rejected sanctions, and refused to accept Flandin's
argument that "if a firm front is maintained by France and England,
Germany will yield without war.” Chamberlain’s refusal to enforce
the Locarno pacts when they fell due was not his personal policy or
anything new.
It was the policy of the Conservative Party, and had been for
years; as early as July 13, 1934, Sir Austen Chamberlain had stated
publicly that Britain would not use troops to enforce the Rhineland
clauses and would use its veto power in the Council of the League
to prevent this by others under the Locarno pacts.
The remilitarization of the Rhineland also detached Belgium from
the anti-German circle. Alarmed by the return of German troops to
its border and by the failure of the British-Italian guarantee of
Locarno, Belgium in October 1936 denounced its alliance with France
and adopted a policy of strict
neutrality.
This made it impossible for France to extend its fortification
system, the Maginot Line, which was being built on the
French-German border, along the Belgian-German border. Moreover,
since France was convinced that Belgium would be on its side in any
future war with Germany, the line was not extended along the
French-Belgian border either. It was across this unfortified border
that Germany attacked France in 1940.
Thus Barthou's efforts to
encircle Germany were largely but not completely destroyed in the
period 1934-1936 by four events:
(1) the loss of Poland in January 1934;
(2) the loss of Italy by January 1936;
(3) the rearmament of Germany and the remilitarization of the
Rhineland by March 1936; and
(4) the loss of Belgium by October 1936.
The chief items left in the Barthou system were the French and
Soviet alliances with Czechoslovakia and with each other. In order
to destroy these alliances Britain and Germany sought, on parallel
paths, to encircle France and the Soviet Union in order to dissuade
France from honoring its alliances with either Czechoslovakia or
the Soviet Union.
To honor these alliances France required two things as an
absolute minimum: (1) that military cooperation against Germany be
provided by Britain from the first moment of any French action
against Germany and (2) that France have military security on her
non-German frontiers. Both of these essentials were destroyed by
Britain in the period 1935-1936, and, in consequence, France,
finding itself encircled, dishonored its alliance with
Czechoslovakia, when it came due in September 1938.
The encirclement of France
had six items in it. The first was the
British refusal from 1919 to 1939 to give France any promise of
support against Germany in fulfillment of the French alliances with
eastern Europe or to engage in any military commitments in support
of such alliances.
On the contrary, Britain made clear to France, at all times, her
opposition to these alliances and that action under them was not
covered by any promises Britain had made to support France against
a German attack westward or by any military discussions which arose
from any Anglo-French efforts to resist such an attack.
This distinction was the motivation of the Locarno pacts, and
explains the refusal of Britain to engage in military conversations
with France until the summer of 1938. The British attitude toward
eastern Europe was made perfectly clear on many occasions. For
example, on July 13, 1934, Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon
denounced Barthou's efforts to create an "eastern Locarno" and
demanded arms equality for Germany.
The other five items in the encirclement of France were:
(1) the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of June 1935;
(2) the alienation of Italy over sanctions;
(3) the remilitarization of the Rhineland by Germany with
British acquiescence and approval;
(4) the neutrality of Belgium; and
(5) the alienation of Spain.
We have already discussed all these except the last, and have
indicated the vital role which Britain played in all of them except
Belgium.
Taken together, they changed the French military position so
drastically that France, by 1938, found herself in a position where
she could hardly expect to fulfill her military obligations to
Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. This Noms exactly the position
in which the British government wished France to be, a fact made
completely clear by the recently published secret documents.
In May of 1935 France could have acted against Germany with all her
forces, because the Rhineland was unfortified, and there was no
need to worry about the Italian, Spanish, or Belgian frontiers or
the Atlantic coastline.
By the end of 1938, and even more by 1939, the Rhineland was
protected by the new German fortified Siegfried Line, parts of the
French Army had to be left on the unfriendly Italian and Spanish
frontiers and along the lengthy neutral Belgian frontier, and the
Atlantic coastline could not be protected against the new German
fleet unless Britain cooperated with France.
This need for British cooperation on the sea arose from two
facts:
(a) the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of June 1935 allowed
Germany to build a navy up to 35 percent of the British Navy, while
France was restricted to 33 percent of Britain's strength in the
chief categories of vessels; and
(b) the Italian occupation of the Balearic Islands and parts of
Spain itself after the opening of the Spanish War in July 1936
required much of the French fleet to stay in the Mediterranean in
order to keep open the transportation of troops and food from North
Africa to metropolitan France.
The details of the Spanish War will be discussed in the next
chapter, but at this point it must be realized that the shift in
the control of Spain from pro-French to anti-French hands was of
vital importance to Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union
as a factor in determining
whether the French alliances with these two would be fulfilled when
the German attack came.
Parallel with the
encirclement of France went the encirclement of the Soviet Union
and, to a lesser extent, of Czechoslovakia.
The encirclement of the Soviet Union was known as the
Anti-Comintern Pact. This was a union of Germany and Japan against
Communism and the Third International. It was signed in November
1936 and was joined by Italy a year later. Manchukuo and Hungary
joined in February 1939, while Spain came in a month after
that.
The last counter-circle was that against Czechoslovakia. Hungary on
the Czechoslovak southern frontier and Germany on its northwestern
frontier were both opposed to Czechoslovakia as an "artificial"
creation of the Versailles Conference.
The German annexation of Austria in March 1938 closed the gap in
the anti-Czech circle on the west, while the aggressive designs of
Poland after 1932 completed the circle everywhere except on the
insignificant Romanian frontier in the extreme east.
Although the Czechs offered the Poles a treaty and even a
military alliance on three occasions, in 1932-1933, they were
ignored, and the Polish-German agreement of January 1934 opened a
campaign of vilification of Czechoslovakia by Poland which
continued, parallel to the similar German campaign, until the
Polish invasion of Czechoslovakia in October 1938.
Of these three
counter-circles to Barthou's efforts to encircle
Germany, the most significant by far was the
encirclement of France which alone made the other two possible. In
this encirclement of France the most important factor, without
which it could never have been achieved, was the encouragement of
Britain.
Accordingly, we must say a word about the motivations of Britain
and the reactions of France...
... In the meantime, both the people and the government were
more demoralized in France than in England. The policy of the Right
which would have used force against Germany even in the face of
British disapproval ended in 1924.
When Barthou, who had been one of the chief figures in the 1924
effort, tried to revive it in 1934, it was quite a different thing,
and he had constantly to give at least verbal support to Britain's
efforts to modify his encirclement of Germany into a Four-Power
Pact (of Britain, France, Italy, Germany).
This Four-Power Pact, which
was the ultimate goal of the anti-Bolshevik group in England, was
really an effort to form a united front of Europe against the
Soviet Union and, in the eyes of this group,
would have been a capstone to unite in one system the encirclement
of France (which was the British answer to Barthou's encirclement
of Germany) and the Anti-Comintern Pact (which was the German
response to the same project).
The Four-Power Pact reached its fruition at the Munich Conference
of September 1938, where these four Powers destroyed Czechoslovakia
without consulting Czechoslovakia's ally, the Soviet Union.
But the scorn the dictators
had for Britain and France as decadent democracies had by this time
reached such a pass that the dictators no longer had even that
minimum of respect without which the Four-Power Pact could not
function.
As a consequence, Hitler in 1939 spurned all Chamberlain's
frantic efforts to restore the Four-Power Pact along with his
equally frantic and even more secret efforts to win Hitler's
attention by offers of colonies in Africa and economic support in
eastern Europe.
As a result of the failure of the policy of the French Right
against Germany in 1924 and the failure of the "policy of
fulfillment" of the French Left in 1929-1930, France was left with
no policy.
Convinced that French security depended on British military and
naval support in the field before action began (in order to avoid a
German wartime occupation of the richest part of France such as
existed in 1914-1918), depressed by the growing unbalance of the
German population over the French population, and shot through with
pacifism and antiwar feeling, the French Army under P้tain's
influence adopted a purely defensive strategy and built up
defensive tactics to support it.
In spite of the agitations of Charles de Gaulle (then a colonel)
and his parliamentary spokesman, Paul Reynaud, to build up an
armored striking force as an offensive weapon, France built a
great, and purely defensive, fortified barrier from Montm้dy to the
Swiss frontier, and retrained many of its tactical units into
purely defensive duties within this barrier.
It was clear to many that the defensive tactics of this Maginot
Line were inconsistent with France's obligations to her allies in
eastern Europe, but everyone was too paralyzed by domestic
political partisanship, by British pressure for a purely western
European policy, and by general intellectual confusion and crisis
weariness to do anything about bringing France's strategic plans
and its political obligations into a consistent pattern.
It was the purely defensive nature of these strategic plans, added
to Chamberlain's veto on sanctions, which prevented Flandin from
acting against Germany at the time of the remilitarization of the
Rhineland in March 1936.
By 1938 and 1939, these
influences had spread demoralization and panic into most parts of
French society, with the result that the only feasible plan for
France seemed to be to cooperate with Britain in a purely defensive
policy in the west behind the Maginot Line, with a free hand for
Hitler in the east.
The steps which brought France to this destination are clear;
they are marked by the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of June 1935;
the Ethiopian crisis of September 1935; the remilitarization of the
Rhineland in March 1936; the neutralization of Belgium in 1936; the
Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939; the destruction of Austria in March
1938; and the Czechoslovak crisis leading up to Munich in September
1938. Along these steps we must continue our story.
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