So Britain and France drew a line along the irregular frontier of Poland and challenged Hitler to step over it. The weakness of this challenge was that the western powers were no more able to help Poland directly than they would have been able to help Czechoslovakia six months earlier. The veteran statesman David Lloyd George put his finger on the fragility of the guarantee when he said in Parliament after the Government’s announcement:
“If war occurred tomorrow you could not send a single battalion to Poland.”
Lloyd George added: “I cannot understand why, before committing ourselves to this tremendous enterprise, we did not secure the adhesion of Russia.”
But this was more easily said than done. A hopeless dilemma was involved in any practical attempt to implement the guarantee to Poland. That country was not able to resist the German attack successfully with its own strength. But it was impossible to obtain Soviet aid on terms compatible with Poland’s sovereignty and independence. The devious course of Soviet diplomacy, leading up to the bombshell of the Soviet-German pact, fully justified the reflections of Neville Chamberlain, expressed in a private letter of March 26:
I must confess to the most profound distrust of Russia. I have no belief whatever in her ability to maintain an effective offensive, even if she wanted to. And I distrust her motives, which seem to me to have little connection with our idea of liberty, and to be concerned only with getting everyone else by the ears. Moreover, she is both hated and suspected by many of the smaller states, notably by Poland, Rumania and Finland.
Did American influence contribute to this British decision to take a step which, as Winston Churchill, himself a vehement critic of Munich, remarks in retrospect “meant in all human probability a major war in which we should be involved”?11 Churchill further comments on this decisive step on the British road to war:
“Here was decision at last, taken at the worst possible moment and on the least satisfactory ground, which must surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people.”12
The evidence on the Roosevelt Administration’s prewar dealings with Britain and France is by no means all available. But in the documents published in The German White Paper the Polish Ambassador to France, Lukasiewicz, is credited with a report of an interesting conversation with American Ambassador William C. Bullitt on March 24. Lukasiewicz expressed discontent with what he considered a trend in British policy to expose Poland to the risk of war without making adequate commitments or taking suitable preparedness measures. Said Lukasiewicz:
“It is as childish as it is criminal to hold Poland responsible for war or peace . . . a great deal of blame for this falls on England and France whose insensate or ridiculously weak policy has provoked the situation and events which are now transpiring.”13
Bullitt, according to Lukasiewicz, was so much impressed by this reasoning that on the following day he informed the Polish diplomat that he had used his special powers to request Joseph P. Kennedy, Ambassador in London, to present these considerations to Chamberlain. Bullitt at this time was in high favor with Roosevelt and enjoyed the privilege of special access to the President by telephone. How he used his influence may be judged from records of other conversations included in the documents the Germans claimed to have found in the archives of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Polish Ambassador in Washington, Jerzy Potocki, is credited in these same documents with the following summary of part of a long conversation with Bullitt on January 16, 1939, when the latter was about to return to Europe.
It is the decided opinion of the President that France and Britain must put an end to any sort of compromise with the totalitarian countries. They must not let themselves in for any discussions aiming at any kind of territorial changes.
They have the moral assurance that the United States will leave the policy of isolation and be prepared to intervene actively on the side of Britain and France in case of war. America is ready to place its whole wealth of money and raw materials at their disposal.14
Lukasiewicz is credited with reporting Bullitt as saying to him in February 1939:
One can foresee right from the beginning the participation of the United States in the war on the side of France and Britain, naturally after some time had elapsed after the beginning of the war.15
It is improbable that the expansive Bullitt concealed these opinions in his talks with French and British officials,16 and these opinions, coming from a man known to possess the President’s confidence, would naturally have carried considerable weight. We do not know whether or how far this or that step of British and French policy was influenced by representations or hints from Washington. It seems safe to say that the whole direction of Anglo-French policy would probably have been different if the occupant of the White House had been known as a firm and sincere opponent of American involvement in European wars.
The code name for the German attack on Poland was “Case White.” The first direction for planning this operation, with September 1 as the suggested date, was issued by General Keitel, Hitler’s Chief of Staff, on April 3, three days after the announcement of the British guarantee to Poland. A visit to London by Colonel Beck was followed by an Anglo-Polish communiqué of April 6, announcing that “the two countries were prepared to enter into an agreement of a permanent and reciprocal character to replace the present temporary and unilateral assurance given by HMG to the Polish Government.”
The alliance foreshadowed in this statement was only drawn up in final form on August 23, the eve of the outbreak of war. There was little the British Government could have done to give reality to its guarantee. But even that little was not done. After leisurely negotiations a very modest credit of eight million pounds for the purchase of munitions and raw materials was arranged in July. Only a small part of the goods ordered under this credit ever reached Poland.
The Poles were no more fortunate in their French allies than in their British. The Polish War Minister, General Kasprzycki, arrived in Paris in May to work out the practical application of the Franco-Polish alliance. He received an assurance from General Vuillemin, commander of the French Air Force, that “the French Air Force can from the outset act vigorously with a view to relieving Poland.” He also signed a protocol with the French Commander in Chief, Marshal Gamelin, promising a French offensive in force against Germany, to begin on the sixteenth day after the French mobilization.17 Neither of these promises was kept.
Meanwhile a scheme for crushing Poland in the jaws of a totalitarian nutcracker was already in process of development. Hitler delivered a defiant speech on April 28, denouncing both the German-Polish declaration of amity of 1934 and the Anglo-German naval agreement. Still more significant in this speech was the omission of any hostile reference to the Soviet Union. The rapprochement between the Nazi and Soviet leviathans, stimulated by the British guarantee to Poland, had already begun. A further hint of this trend ensued on May 3, when Maxim Litvinov was abruptly replaced as Commissar for Foreign Affairs by V. M. Molotov.
Litvinov as Soviet spokesman in the League of Nations had identified himself for years with a crusading attitude against fascism and aggression.18 He had argued that peace is indivisible.
How far the Soviet Government would have backed up Litvinov’s eloquence is open to question. It was good Leninist strategy to take advantage of divisions in the camp of the “imperialist” and “capitalist” powers. If war had broken out on some such issue as Ethiopia, Spain, or Czechoslovakia, there is a strong probability that the Soviet Union would have behaved exactly as it acted when war broke out over Poland in 1939. It might have been expected to bow itself out of the conflict and look on with satisfaction while its enemies destroyed each other.
However, Litvinov was at least a symbol of antifascism. He was also a Jew. On both counts he was distasteful to the Nazis. His dismissal was an indication that an important shift in Soviet foreign policy was in the making.
As early as March 1939, Stalin had publicly intimated his willingness to come to an understanding with Germany. Addressing the Congress of the Communist