That was because I took my news from the mainstream media.
Now thanks to the internet you can follow Jeffrey Sachs to understand what is happening and Christopher Caldwell and John Mearsheimer. My work here is almost done.
No incident ever resembles Munich 1938. In this short clip Professor Sachs points out that America has used analogies with Munich for 50 years for a series of things and, even if they were apt, which they never were, Hitler thought the Munich agreement had been a trap into which he fell.
By disregarding his promise of no more territorial demands in Europe, when he invaded Czechia in March 1939, he exposed his hand and brought down disaster on his head.
Churchill said 'History will be kind to me because I intend to write it'. So he did and so it has been, but his view of the period between 1933 to 1939, as you would expect of the view of any politician talking about his record, is very partial and very misleading.
It is a myth (Chamberlain as Vortigern to Churchill's King Arthur) which I learnt at 8 and it is a myth that everyone still believes.
It's the foundational myth of the American empire, though it was not America but only Britain and France (Chamberlain and Deladier) who, in historian Maurice Cowling's words, were 'crazy enough to go to war with Germany without having to'.
The history of the Western world since 1945 is a meditation on the powerful legend of Munich and Hitler.
Had Churchill died in 1941 he'd have died an eccentric failure. Had Franklin Roosevelt left office in 1939 after two terms as President of the United States he'd have been a failure too. The New Deal was a failure. Instead they have been transmuted.
Was the name Czechia used in 1938? Is it that clear that the Wehrmacht would have had a walk-over had Germany invaded rather than negotiating? Some qualified judges thought not.
ReplyDeleteAs for the beginning of the American empire, you give insufficient credit to Admiral Dewey, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt.
No, there was no Czechia. That's the modern made-up name for a rump portion of a made-up country, a former province of the Austrian Empire known as Bohemia, famous for Good King Wenceslas. You are right about the Wehrmacht not having an easy walk-over. The Sudetenland was fortified and mountainous. The Czechs had the defensive advantage on their home territory, behind those mountain ranges, and also an exquisite position with "interior lines," as Jomini would say. The war would have been like the ongoing Ukraine fiasco, except Bohemia was much better situated topologically, and a Czecho-German scrum couldn't have gone on for more than a couple of months, even without any assist from France or the Soviets.
ReplyDelete"A Czecho-German scrum couldn't have gone on for more than a couple of months" or could?
DeleteAh, you have a taste for proofreading and know it's quite possible to write 'couldn't' when meaning 'could.' No, I did indeed mean 'couldn't': the pocket war in the Sudeten mountains would have lasted a few weeks and that's it. The Germans could have won outright only if they bombed and blasted the fortifications and maybe even Prague to smithereens. That is a faint 'if', because it wouldn't be a one-time showcase raid over Guernica, it would have to be persistent, as with Warsaw and Krakow. And the Czech situation was not like Poland. It was small, compact, naturally fortified, and had an ultra-modern army. The Germans almost certainly would have stood down...within two months at most.
DeleteI have not read nearly enough but I have read that Daladier would not have fought Germany even if Chamberlain wanted to - even though France was Czechoslovakia's ally England was not. Gamelin advised that the Czechoslovak Army (30 divisions against the Germans' 40) could hold out in Moravia but Daladier and Chamberlain were not swayed by this.
DeleteAccording to AJP Taylor Chamberlain, who had refused to guarantee the borders of Czechoslovakia when she was strong, guaranteed the borders of Czechoslovakia when she was weak and by implication all the borders of Eastern Europe - leading therefore to war in 1939. "Daladier had built better than he knew. He had committed Great Britain to opposing Hitler's advance in the east; and six months later the commitment came home to roost. At about 7.30 p.m. on the night of 18 September 1938 Daladier gave Great Britain the decisive , though delayed , push which landed her in the Second World War.'
(The Origins Of The Second World War 1961)
Franklin Roosevelt's second term ended in January 1941, about the time that Joseph P. Kennedy resigned as Ambassador. Don't know where you get two terms ending in 1939.
ReplyDeleteThanks for pointing out my slip, anon.
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