1.1 The Point of No return
The October Campaign
1. The Point of No Return
1. The Point of No Return
"These two pacts [the nonaggression pacts with Germany and the USSR] are like two chairs. We cannot remain seated upon both of them for long. We must be able to forsee which one we will fall from first, and when." - Joseph Piłsudski, officially Chief Inspector of Poland's Armed Forces and de facto dictator of Poland, to his inner circle, c. 1934
The name of the Lightning War is a simple translation of the German word Blitzkrieg, the popular designation of the method of mobile warfare which the Third Reich unleashed upon Europe in 1939. The fact that the Germans themselves used different designations for their tactics didn't prevent the term from being so widely used that it eventually gave the entire war its name. Alternative names such as the Second World War proved less popular and eventually fell into disuse. By the present day only Soviet historiography insistently differs and calls the fighting of the period the Anti-Fascist War. This naming reflects a genuinely different appraisal of the fighting on the distant fronts and their relation to the main European conflict, but also the audacity with which Moscow rewrites history in the service of its propaganda. In 1939, before the course of the coming war could have been known, Stalin was ready to co-operate with the fascists if only as a temporary measure. It should be noted that a great many of the countries which the Soviet Union plotted or fought against during this period can not properly be considered fascist. Imperial Japan, for instance, while undoubtedly a monstrous and totalitarian regime, was considerably different from Italy and Germany, while the Finnish Republic was a model preliberal democracy. The identification of fascism as the Soviet Union's principal enemy was largely retroactive.
Contemporary accounts often reveal surprise at the way how, like a summer storm forming on a clear day, the Lightning War seemed to descend upon Europe unexpectedly and with little warning. As late as the beginning of 1939 optimists could have still convinced themselves that Europe would remain at peace. They could have (correctly!) pointed out that Hitler had gained so much through diplomacy, and stood to lose so much through war, that military aggression would be irrational. Despite this, as if to demonstrate the folly of attributing one's own motives to bandits, Hitler would plunge Europe into war within a few short months.
But even storms are not quite as unpredictable as many laymen believe. A meteorologist may be incapable of predicting the exact place where lightning may strike but he is able to recognize the danger of a coming storm where a layperson sees only a deceptively clear sky. In his monumental Vienna and Versailles: The Creation and Destruction of Two International Orders (1986) Henry Kissinger sets out to try to provide advice to such political meteorologists in the hope of better preparing them for future crises. From his analysis of the diplomacy of the nineteenth century he concludes that the international system established in the Treaty of Vienna eventually failed because it became too rigid. A decade before 1914 Europe's key players had already arranged themselves in the configuration in which they would go to war. The subsequent decade of arms race and international crises only consolidated the two alliances and exacerbrated the tension to the point where the outbreak of war at first seemed almost to be a relief. Considering the conflict to be the result of the destruction of the international order rather than its cause, Kissinger pays little attention to the war itself and proceeds to analyze the new European system which was established in the Treaty of Versailles to replace its defunct predecessor. In their eagerness to avoid the mistakes of the past the victorious powers constructed a system which went to the other extreme, opposite but no less dangerous. After 1919 Britain, France and the briefly engaged USA would distance themselves from involvement in European affairs and from each other in the hope that the institutional framework of the League of Nations could resolve international conflicts. The manifold flaws in the design of the League's institutions prevented it from fulfilling that purpose to any extent. France did briefly pursue alliances of the traditional type with Poland and Czechoslovakia in the hope that they would serve as an ersatz Russia to replace the monstrosity into which France's old ally had degenerated, but even though the combined potential strength of Poland and Czechoslovakia was such as to make such an alliance potentially viable, France seemingly lost interest within a few years. At the time of Hitler's rise to power the closest thing to an alliance among any two leading European powers was the broad Anglo-French understanding of a certain mutual interest in preserving the status quo in western Europe which was sadly lacking in terms of clear provisions. (Poland and Romania, the two allies that made up the so-called Cordon Sanitaire, are often treated as a fourth bloc if only for the sake of simplicity. In terms of military power they were a distant fourth, and politically they were less cohesive than the previous three. But they were already in a state of alliance, they were relatively favourably disposed to the status quo and to the Western Powers and therefore unenthusiastic at best about the Axis, and their critical geographical location would at least temporarily enhance their importance. They would also go on to follow almost the same path from the interwar period through the Lightning War and on into the times of the Warsaw Pact.) As late as 1939 the pair of Western Powers, Germany and the Soviet Union resembled a strange configuration of three distant magnetic poles, each regarding the other two with considerable dislike and distrust. In their disunity the powers were uncertain of everyone else's intentions and reluctant to act alone, creating the conditions for German resurgence.
The infamous Appeasement of Germany was therefore the logical result of the complacence inherent in the system. Unwilling to oppose Germany even in its still-disarmed state the future Allies would make a virtue out of their indolence by deluding themselves that Hitler was fundamentally a trustworthy partner who would respond to friendly gestures in kind. Being a skilled liar Hitler took care to tell European politicians what they so badly wanted to hear, posing as a politician one could do business with rather than a war lord. He therefore presented his actions within Germany such as the remilitarization of the Rhineland as necessary reactions to provocations such as the alleged encirclement of Germany following the Franco-Soviet negotiations of 1935. Once Hitler went on to claim territory outside Germany's borders he assured the world that he only desired the regions which were mostly inhabited by Germans in the spirit of ethnic self-determination and repairing the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles. This assurance was enough for the governments of the Western Powers to continue with their wishful thinking about Hitler's true nature until Germany had expanded and rearmed to the point of achieving parity with (if not superiority over) themselves. Scarcely any provisions were made for the contingency in which the author of Mein Kampf (published in 1925, long before Hitler even came to power) might decide to carry out the threats he had issued there once given the opportunity to try. This is not to say that everyone was fooled. Politicians such as Churchill would explain the folly of appeasement in their parliaments to no avail. Artists such as Capek who, by presenting his message as the fantastical parable of The War with the Newts (1936) ensured that it would remain as relevant today as at the time of its writing, were no more successful. Despite all those warnings, within a year of the outbreak of the Lightning War the gathering storm remained at the stage in which the imminent change of the weather was discernable to astute observers, but not clear enough to attract the attention of most.
Enthusiasts of Lateral Time Speculation are often impressed by the fact that, from a purely material perspective, Germany's warmaking power at this stage was still clearly inferior to the combined forces of the states which Hitler explicitly or implicitly threatened. Had, say, France held up its residual treaty obligations to Czechoslovakia at the time of the Czech Borderlands Crisis in 1938, the still-underarmed Germany would have been clearly outmatched. These two allies together could have prevailed on their own, but had they gone to war they might have well received the support of the increasingly disillusioned Britain, as well as that of Poland which had already suggested the concept of a pre-emptive war against Germany to France in the past. (French support would have also activated the Czechoslovak-Soviet alliance, but its utility in this scenario would have been debatable. The Red Army could only have reached Czechoslovakia by crossing the territory of Poland or Romania, but those countries' justified distrust of the Soviet Union would have made any such movement problematic, and rightly so since the example of the Baltic Republics suggests that the presence of ostensibly fraternal Soviet forces would have likely led to the sovietization of Czechoslovakia). Elements of the German army were so disturbed by this disproportion of forces between Germany and its potential opponents that they contemplated a coup against Hitler, suggesting that an adequate show of determination in 1938 might have potentially ended Hitler's career without the shedding of a drop of blood besides his own and perhaps that of his most loyal Nazis. But Lateral Time Speculation requires not only the readiness to deal with controversy but also the discipline necessary to prevent one's speculations from drifting into the realm of complete fantasy. Resisting Germany at this stage may have been realistic from a material perspective, but it proved psychologically impossible. The French government chose to negotiate instead of maintaining a firm stance, and the French people, their will undermined by the trauma of the years 1914-1918 and the fact that Hitler's demand was entirely justified in the spirit of ethnic self-determination, accepted this course. The negotiations held at Munich resulted in the Franco-British recognition of Hitler's demands - and France in particular was the one country which the prospective anti-German alliance could not have done without. Without the support of the Western Powers the Czechoslovaks had little intention of fighting a hopeless and lonely war merely in order to weaken Germany in preparation for some possible future conflict. Witnessing this show of French duplicity Poland and the Soviet Union, which had not been invited to the Munich Conference at all, unsurprisingly showed little interest in preserving Czechoslovakia. Stalin could scarcely have expected Poland to allow the passage of the Red Army through its territory, and the Polish decision to stand by Czechoslovakia if the West did not would in all likelihood have led to a Nazi-Soviet alliance of convenience against it. Once the results of the Munich Conference became known Poland presented Czechoslovakia with an ultimatum of its own demanding the immedate return of the ethnically Polish region of Zaolzie which Czechoslovakia had seized from it 20 years previously taking advantage of Poland's struggle against the Red Army. Stalin issued complaints but otherwise did nothing. "Peace in our time" seemed to have been preserved.
Nevertheless, each emerging storm must eventually reach the point at which atmospheric moisture forms visible clouds which leave no doubt in anyone's mind that a storm may be coming. Up to this point Hitler had given no definite proof that he had ambitions beyond uniting the German-inhabited regions on the Reich's borders with the Fatherland. But he had now reached the point where no such regions remained besides relatively minor items such as the Free City of Danzig. German power could now only be increased through open imperialism. On March 17, 1939, the Czechoslovak president Emil Hacha was asked to come to Germany immediately and, upon having arrived, was forced to sign an act of complete capitulation and submission. Since the Treaty of Munich had rendered Czechoslovakia unable to pose meaningful resistance, and the Western Powers had not even attempted to make any promises to guarantee it, he complied.
The German occupation of the reminder of Czechoslovakia did not merely provide Germany with that rich country's very considerable resources and armaments for the price of the fuel needed to drive the occupying troops into the country. Equally significantly, that move finally made it clear to all that Hitler could not be trusted and this realization of the approaching storm brought a time of feverish activity. Up to this point many of Europe's powers great and small had remained ambiguous in their choices leaving many possible courses of future events. But this time of uncertainty was coming to an end for the spring of 1939 would be a time of many rapid and critical decisions. Those decisions and their timing would finally lock the disparate pieces of the European puzzle into the arrangement that would determine where the first lightning would strike. And, perhaps no less importantly, when - for the weather in which two armies are to fight, or the state of their deployment at the start of the campaign, are notable factors in the success or failure of any operation. The destruction of Czechoslovakia, left defenseless by the Treaty of Munich, had come so swiftly that the Western Powers found themselves presented with a fait accompli. But they would not tolerate farther German aggression. After years of relative indifference to the affairs of Central and Eastern Europe the two Western Powers now realized just how vital it was. If there was still any hope in preserving peace, it lay in drawing as many of the region's relevant players as possible into their alliance. If presented with the threat of a two-front war against overwhelming odds, the politicians in London and Paris reasoned, Hitler might still refrain from farther expansion.
Despite their inexcusably late start the Western Powers might perhaps have still attained their objective if not for...
(EDIT: I added a few short sentences which seemed to fit in.)
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