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.
...In consequence, the French were forced back on a fourth choice—allies to the east of Germany.
The chief steps in this were the creation of a "Little Entente" to enforce the Treaty of Trianon against Hungary in 1920-1921 and the bringing of France and Poland into this system to make it a coalition of "satisfied Powers."
The Little Entente was formed by a series of bilateral alliances between Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.
This was widened by a French-Polish Treaty (February 1921) and a French-Czechoslovak Treaty (January 1924).
This system contributed relatively little to French security because of the weakness of these allies (except Czechoslovakia) and the opposition of Britain to any French pressure against Germany along the Rhine, the only way in which France could guarantee Poland or Czechoslovakia against Germany.
In consequence, France continued its agitation both for a British guarantee and to "put teeth" into the League of Nations...