It was 70 years ago on March 31 when Great Britain committed the fatal blunder that led to World War II: issuing a war guarantee to Poland. This was the war, as Pat Buchanan says in his recent book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, that “led to the slaughter of the Jews and tens of millions of Christians, the devastation of Europe, Stalinization of half the continent, the fall of China to Maoist madness, and half a century of Cold War.” Buchanan’s book is essential for understanding why World War II was so unnecessary.

Poland was a creature of the Versailles Treaty. After being partitioned several times in history by Prussia, Russia, and Austria, Poland was reconstituted after World War I at the expense of a defeated Germany. But as Buchanan says: “Versailles had created not only an unjust but an unsustainable peace.” To give Poland a port on the Baltic, the city of Danzig, which was 95-percent German and had never belonged to Poland, was detached from Germany and made a Free City administered by the League of Nations. A "Polish Corridor" connected Poland to the Baltic and severed East Prussia from Germany.

The regime in Poland, according to contemporary British historian Niall Ferguson, was “every bit as undemocratic and anti-Semitic as that of Germany.” Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, the dictator in Poland who had come to power in a coup, considered making a preemptive strike against Germany before signing a 10-year nonaggression pact with Hitler in 1934. Poland had joined in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia after the Munich Agreement, seizing the coal-rich region of Teschen. Hitler’s offer to Polish foreign minister Jozef Beck — a man known for his duplicity, dishonesty, and depravity — to guarantee Poland’s borders and accept Polish control of the Corridor in exchange for the return of Danzig and the construction of German roads across the Corridor was rebuffed.

Britain did not object to Danzig being returned to Germany, knowing that a plebiscite would result in an overwhelming vote in favor of return. Lord Halifax, the British foreign secretary, deemed Danzig and the Polish Corridor to be “an absurdity.” Hitler wanted an alliance with Poland, not war. He issued a directive to his army commander in chief: “The Fuehrer does not wish to solve the Danzig question by force. He does not wish to drive Poland into the arms of Britain by this.”

But then, after false alarms about an imminent German attack on Poland, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain addressed the British House of Commons:

I now have to inform the House that ... in the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power. They have given the Polish Government an assurance to that effect.

It was March 31, 1939. Germany terminated its nonaggression pact with Poland on April 24, and Poland would cash this “blank check” on September 1, when Hitler invaded Poland. Chamberlain had repeated the blunder made by Kaiser Wilhelm on the eve of World War I.

Former prime minister Lloyd George considered the war guarantee “a frightful gamble” and “sheer madness.” The British army general staff “ought to be confined to a lunatic asylum” if they approved this, said Lloyd George. Former First Lord of the Admiralty Cooper recorded in his diary: “Never before in our history have we left in the hands of one of the smaller powers the decision whether or not Britain goes to war.” It was “the maddest single action this country has ever taken,” said a member of Parliament. Newspaper military correspondent Liddell Hart wrote that the Polish guarantee “placed Britain’s destiny in the hands of Polish rulers, men of very dubious and unstable judgment.” Only the warmonger Churchill seemed to think the war guarantee was a good idea, foolishly asserting: “The preservation and integrity of Poland must be regarded as a cause commanding the regard of all the world.” Buchanan simply calls it “the greatest blunder in British history.”

Buchanan refers to modern British historians Roy Denman, Paul Johnson, and Peter Clarke about the folly of the Polish war guarantee:

The most reckless undertaking ever given by a British government. It placed the decision on peace or war in Europe in the hands of a reckless, intransigent, swashbuckling military dictatorship.

The power to invoke it was placed in the hands of the Polish government, not a repository of good sense. Therein lay the foolishness of the pledge: Britain had no means of bringing effective aid to Poland yet it obliged Britain itself to declare war on Germany if Poland so requested.

If Czechoslovakia was a faraway country, Poland was further; if Bohemia could not be defended by British troops, no more could Danzig; if the democratic Czech Republic had its flaws, the Polish regime was far more suspect.

Britain could not save Poland any more than it could have saved Czechoslovakia. As Buchanan wrote elsewhere:

Britain went to war with Germany to save Poland. She did not save Poland. She did lose the empire. And Josef Stalin, whose victims outnumbered those of Hitler 1,000 to one as of September 1939, and who joined Hitler in the rape of Poland, wound up with all of Poland, and all the Christian nations from the Urals to the Elbe. The British Empire fought, bled and died, and made Eastern and Central Europe safe for Stalinism.

Neither Britain nor France had the power to save any nation of Eastern Europe. Yet, Britain was willing to go to war rather than allow Germany to dominate Europe economically, unaffected by a British blockade.

It is the Polish war guarantee for which Neville Chamberlain should be forever judged harshly, not the Munich Agreement for which he is often castigated. (The Munich Agreement essentially ceded to Hitler large sections of Czeckoslovakia in order to reduce the possibility of a European War. This has often been referred to as Chamberlain's "appeasement" of Hitler. Many believe this agreement gave Hitler the resolve to invade Poland, setting off WWII.)  It is March 31 that ought to be a day that will live in infamy. The bloodiest conflict in human history was neither good nor necessary.

Laurence M. Vance is the author of Christianity and War and Other Essays Against the Warfare State.
 

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Christof said:

Quick question Can you cite some sources for this: "Poland was a creature of the Versailles Treaty. After being partitioned several times in history by Prussia, Russia, and Austria, Poland was reconstituted after World War I at the expense of a defeated Germany. But as Buchanan says: “Versailles had created not only an unjust but an unsustainable peace.” To give Poland a port on the Baltic, the city of Danzig, which was 95-percent German and had never belonged to Poland, was detached from Germany and made a Free City administered by the League of Nations. A "Polish Corridor" connected Poland to the Baltic and severed East Prussia from Germany. The regime in Poland, according to contemporary British historian Niall Ferguson, was “every bit as undemocratic and anti-Semitic as that of Germany.” Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, the dictator in Poland who had come to power in a coup, considered making a preemptive strike against Germany before signing a 10-year nonaggression pact with Hitler in 1934. Poland had joined in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia after the Munich Agreement, seizing the coal-rich region of Teschen. Hitler’s offer to Polish foreign minister Jozef Beck — a man known for his duplicity, dishonesty, and depravity — to guarantee Poland’s borders and accept Polish control of the Corridor in exchange for the return of Danzig and the construction of German roads across the Corridor was rebuffed." Thank you, Christof

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March 30, 2009
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Joshua said:

	TO Mac Skiba Are we talking about the same Hitler?? Hitler idolized the British. He worked tirelessly to avoid war with the british. In fact, he chose to turn on his own ally, Stalin, rather than go to war with Britain. Likewise, he viewed the US in these terms. There is no reason Britain should have EVER been in that war.
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March 31, 2009
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Ancient Pistol said:

	I'm with Joshua, even if he's not with me.... Hitler, imho, was a British agent, like Goering,and Canaris, though the trio remained mutually ignorant of the others' treachery to the German nation. Churchill, though, was NOT a British agent. When you can SEE this, things begin to fall into their accustomed and present places.
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March 31, 2009 | url
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Phonk said:

	How about present days Iraq war Should Britain join US imperial war?
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March 31, 2009
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alzurzin said:

history repeats All wars are necessary or unnecessary, depending upon the view of the agressor. The winners in WW2 were the financial capitalists, who funded and hedged both sides. There are many lessons to be learned from WW2. A most obvious one is the alliances. Today, by backing Israel, the USA is at greater risk than the UK was. We have not truly moved onwards from WW2 conditions prior or aftermath.

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April 01, 2009
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Bruno said:

This is anti-Polish racism, I've reported you to Polish American rights groups Mr. Vance: You write Danzig was never part of Poland. This is a lousy, schoolboy error. Just try google or wikipedia to check facts. Teschen was militarily annexed by Czekoslovakia shortly after WW1 - so the Poles took it back again. As to the idea that Poland was as anti-Semitic as Nazi Germany - this is a racist slur against Polish people of both Jewish and gentile origin. In Poland 1939 there were Jewish officers, doctors and lawyers. The Chief Rabbi of the Polish Army was executed by the Soviets at Katyn. And the war caused the Holocaust? Nonsense, Hitler writes in Mein Kampf that he wanted Lebensraum and war in the East at any cost. Mr Vance - you ought to be fired so you can go back to school. As to Buchanan, I think "Never let the facts get in the way of a good story" must be your motto. Poor guy needs to sell trash to get by these days.

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April 01, 2009
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islander said:

	... So Bruno, there were no anti-Semites in Poland? Must be nice to live in a fantasy world. I'm reporting you to the Stupid Police.
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April 01, 2009
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Michael Hardesty said:

Danzig Never Part of Poland Danzig had been German since 1308. See The Forced War by David L. Hoggan. Probably the best revisionist of the origins of WW2, based on Dr. Hoggan's 1948 Ph.D thesis at Harvard under William L. Langer. German support made it possible for Poland to recapture Teschen from the rump Czech state, an artificial amalgamation of mostly non-Czechs created at Versailles. Hitler never advocated expansion at any cost nor extermination of the Jews nor world conquest in Mein Kampf or anywhere else. This is simply lying Communist inspired agit-prop. See James J.Martin's American Liberalism and World Politics, 1931-1941, two volumes, Devin-Adair. Try Amazon or Alibris or Abe Books for all titles recommended above. Poland's leaders behaved in a criminally stupid manner because Hitler was the only one who could guarantee their borders. The UK never said boo when the Soviets occupied eastern Poland. As a result the Poles had to live under Soviet Communism for 44 years. Jack's comments are so laughable as to verge on absurdity. It was exactly the UK-Franco declaration of war that started the process of turning it in to a world war. The Poles were never capable of fighting Germany alone and it was unnecessary had the they been reasonable on Danzig & the Corridor highway. They have themselves to blame for living under Communism for almost half a century. To try to whitewash the extreme anti-semitism of the Poles won't do. Buchanan's book on the unnecessary war is good for 99% of the population. A.J.P. Taylor's The Origins Of The Second World War and Charles Callan Tansill's Back Door To War are excellent sources which Buchanan frequently cites. Tansill was a contributor to American Opinion before his death in late 1964.

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April 03, 2009
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Mannstein said:

... Before the outbreak of WWII a map was published in the Newspaper „Dziennik Poznanski" on 26th June 1939. It stated the „Historic Borders" of Poland to be Hamburg, Kiel, Erfurt, Braunschweig, Dresden, Berlin, Rostock etc. All were claimed to be Polish, even the Czech cities (Prague and Brünn). It is remarkable that 70 years hence there are still Polish nationalists who hold this view. Uncle Adolf would have been guilty of dereliction of duty had he not acted as he did in September 1939.

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April 06, 2009
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Bruno said:

islander islander - for your information I am a Polish Jew and I live in Poland and I know a thing or two about this subject. Yes there was anti-Semitism in Poland before the war, as there is today, just as there is anti-Semitism in the USA today. There are also plenty of ignorant Jews and Americans who wrongly associate Polish gentiles with Nazism, or stupidly claim Poland was some kind of fascist state before the War. Prejudice is prejudice whether it is directed at Jews or Poles. As a matter of fact I wouldn't be alive today if it weren't for Polish Righteous Among Nations saving my grandparents. My point is that prejudice, ignorance and a lack of factual accuracy should be criticized as bad writing - whether the author is Jewish or gentile. Poland had the biggest population of Jews before the war because they were welcome to live there and wanted to live there.

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April 10, 2009
Votes: +2

pratt said:

... To those "bloggers" who remain staunch in their anti-Semitic views, you should be ashamed. With all the terror in our past, past and future, can you find a better more productive way to channel your destructive energy. Please find another hobby. Volunteer at an animal shelter, help feed the homeless, raise money to help fund research about a disease. Why don't you do something positive on this planet, act as a positive role model for your children, niece, nephews, friends.

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April 12, 2009
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