What prompted Great Britain and France to declare war on Germany in WWII?
After roughly i.five million German language soldiers, more than 2,000 airplanes and more than 2,500 tanks crossed the Shine edge on Sept. ane, 1939, the British gave Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler an ultimatum: pull out of Poland, or else. Hitler ignored the need, and two days later, on Sept. 3, 1939, Britain and France alleged war. Thus began World War Ii, and this weekend Vice President Mike Pence will travel to Poland to mark the anniversary of that event.
But the invasion of Poland wasn't the offset fourth dimension German language forces had been put to work for Hitler'south goal of European domination. Previously, however, the other European powers had pursued a strategy of appeasement, giving Hitler what they accounted reasonable concessions, in order to avert all-out war. That strategy reached its apex when the three parties signed the Munich Agreement on Sept. 30, 1938, giving Hitler the German language-speaking part of Czechoslovakia, known as the Sudetenland, on the status that he would not invade any more territory. Simply six months later, in March of 1939, Hitler violated the Munich Agreement by absorbing all of Czechoslovakia.
The war didn't begin then. Rather, it took some other half a year.
Rumors started swirling that Hitler was eyeing Poland next. With French support, Uk promised on March 31, 1939, that if Germany fabricated aggressive moves toward Poland, they would come to Poland'due south defence. By the time that happened, not only had Hitler broken yet another promise, something else had shifted too. "When Hitler invades Poland in '39 there is no political back up whatever longer for appeasement," explains Rob Citino, Senior Historian at The National WWII Museum.
Though French republic urged Britain to await, says Tim Bouverie, author of Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to State of war, many British politicians feared the implications of non keeping the promise to Poland, and they were done giving Hitler the benefit of the doubt.
"Hitler had proven, by vehement up the Munich agreement and invading Czechoslovakia in March of that yr, that he could not be trusted and that he had to exist stopped," Bouverie says. By falsely claiming that he merely wanted to ready harm done to Germany from World War I and restore German lands to German people, Hitler had previously been able to convince his counterparts—already wary of state of war—to hold off. "Both of these claims are proven as lies when he invades Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and the British authorities realizes that he is intent upon wider European conquest—possibly domination."
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Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain laid out the argument for ending the appeasement strategy in a Sept. four radio address aimed at the High german people: "He gave his word that he would respect the Locarno Treaty; he broke it. He gave his word that he neither wished nor intended to annex Austria; he broke information technology. He alleged that he would not incorporate the Czechs in the Reich; he did so. He gave his word subsequently Munich that he had no further territorial demands in Europe; he broke it. He has sworn for years that he was the mortal enemy of Bolshevism; he is now its ally."
Hitler's propaganda endorsed the theory of Lebensraum (oftentimes translated as "living infinite"), his idea that the Germany needed more room. Citino points out that Poland was geographically the logical next stride after Czechoslovakia, in terms of the application of that theory. In addition, the dictator believed that the Polish population was racially inferior to Germans, and thus would exist easily overrun and enslaved. (On Sept. 17, the Soviet Spousal relationship also invaded Poland, in accord with a non-aggression agreement Hitler and Stalin had come to that summer; that agreement would end on June 22, 1941, when the Nazis invaded Soviet territory.)
"Information technology seems Hitler tin no longer be appeased [in 1939], but attempting to appease him was wrong all along," Citino says. "He would just keep to make demands and threaten his neighbors advertising infinitum."
Here'south how Fourth dimension described the Nazi invasion of Poland in its Sept. 11, 1939, issue:
Earth War II began terminal week at 5:20 a. m. (Polish time) Fri, September 1, when a German bombing plane dropped a projectile on Puck, line-fishing village and air base in the armpit of the Hel Peninsula. At 5:45 a. chiliad. the German grooming ship Schleswig-Holstein lying off Danzig fired what was believed to be the first beat: a directly hit on the Smoothen underground ammunition dump at Westerplatte. It was a grey day, with gentle rain.
In the State of war's first five days, hundreds of Nazi bombing planes dumped ton after ton of explosive on every city of any importance the length & breadth of Poland. They aimed at air bases, fortifications, bridges, railroad lines and stations, merely in the process they killed upward of ane,500 noncombatants. The Nazi ships were mostly big Heinkels, unaccompanied by pursuit escorts. Germany admitted losing 21 planes to Polish counterattack by pursuits and antiaircraft. They claimed to have massacred more than half of a 47-plane Smooth squadron which tried to bomb Berlin.
Out of a welter of sketchy bulletins, counter-claims and unpronounceable names flowing from Poland, the broad outlines of Deutschland'south assault began to accept shape. Recapture of what was Deutschland in 1914 was the first objective: Danzig, the Corridor, and a hump of Upper Silesia. It is believed that Adolf Hitler, if allowed to take and keep this much, might have checked his juggernaut at these lines for the time beingness. When U.k. & France insisted that he withdraw entirely from Polish soil or consider himself at war with them, he determined on the consummate shattering and subjugation of Poland…
Heroes this week were a handful of Shine soldiers left in charge of the Westerplatte munitions dump. Under steady bombing and beat out fire, they held out as a suicide squad in the thick-walled fortress, replying from its depths with machine gun fire, resolved to blow upward the dump and themselves with information technology before surrendering.
Another pocket-size band of Poles took and held the Danzig postal service office until artillery was drawn up to blow away the building's face, gasoline poured on from above and ready afire.
On "Black Sunday"—the day Britain and French republic declared War—the President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt announced, "This nation will remain a neutral nation, merely I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well. Even a neutral has a correct to take account of facts. Fifty-fifty a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or his censor."
As TIME pointed out, the sentence was "the most striking sentence in the broadcast" because of the contrast with President Woodrow Wilson's 1914 edict that Americans must remain "impartial in thought every bit well as action" in the early on years of World State of war I. The Roosevelt version suggested to the mag that the president might exist priming Americans to go ready to take upward arms—and after the assault on Pearl Harbor in 1941, they did.
The pb-up to World State of war Ii, Bouverie says, was near "what bad people are able to do when they call back that the good people aren't prepared to fight." The fighting, withal, would come up in the end.
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Source: https://time.com/5659728/poland-1939/
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