August 24, 2006
Counterfactual Munichs Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:45 AM EST John Steele Gordon wonders what the situation was regarding British radar installations in the fall of 1938, noting that they came in very handy in 1940. I am up on Cape Cod and away from my books, so what follows is off the top of my head, for which I apologize. With that caveat: I do not think that Chain Home, the radar installations that indeed came in handy in the summer of 1939, had been completed in October of 1938. Nor do I think this would have mattered too much in a war that began at that time. Among other things, Chain Home allowed the Royal Air Force to forgo scattered forward air patrols, which might have been chewed up by the (initially) numerically superior Luftwaffe fighters. Instead, radar allowed the RAF to see the big raids coming, and commit its forces accordingly. But a war that began in late 1938 would not have seen Germany in possession of those forward bases for some time (if ever). Over that time, Chain Home would presumably have been completed.
Until forward bases were conquered, though, German fighters could not have escorted bombers to southern England. They simply lacked the range. In this alternate war, by the way, German bombers could not have been based in Norway, which Germany would yet not have occupied, and this would have significantly simplified the RAF’s problems when defending Britain. But those problems would in any case have been much simpler, because unescorted daylight raids would have been suicide, as the RAF would shortly discover in the history that actually happened, and night raids might have had trouble hitting within five miles of their targets, as the historical RAF would also discover (although electronic navigation aids would be developed by both sides). German bombers were in any case not very good at strategic bombing. The early-war Luftwaffe was brilliantly effective when used for its intended purpose, which was to function as flying artillery for mechanized forces, but lacked the equipment and the doctrine for strategic bombardment.
In any case, I found a number of John Steele Gordon’s later remarks on Munich and counterfactual history quite interesting. He writes, “Had Chamberlain and Daladier made it plain (by mobilizing the Royal Navy, calling up reservists, burning embassy papers, etc., etc.) that they absolutely would go to war over Czechoslovakia, Hitler might have pulled back.” I agree. It is admittedly hard to have any confidence about the likeliest consequences, had Hitler done so; all that seems clear is that he would have been in a somewhat weaker position inside Germany and, in the near future, a much weaker military position in Europe. In our history, he used the Czech reserves of gold and foreign currency to get out of immediate economic difficulties and continue rearmament, and used the Czech weapons he seized in March of 1939 to help conquer first Poland, then the Netherlands, Belgium, and France; in this alternate history, neither the money nor the weapons (a fair number of tanks, and infantry weapons which equipped all or part of 20 divisions) would have been available.
On the other hand, Mr. Gordon says, “I think France was doomed regardless of when war broke out. The nation’s spirit was broken. Neither Poland nor Czechoslovakia would ever have invaded Germany had war come about, so Hitler could have safely moved many divisions and slammed into France with more than enough force to break that broken nation.” There I disagree. I agree that the Czechs were unlikely to invade Germany, but the war that might have broken out in October of 1938 was scheduled to begin with a German assault on Czechoslovakia. Germans who surveyed the Czech defenses in the Sudetenland, after they had been abandoned, thought an attack would have been ruinously expensive.
I don’t know what Polish war plans would have been, had they gone to war in 1938; I don’t know if anyone knows. In 1939 or later, Poland might have stood on the defensive and waited for a French attack into the Rhineland, which did not come in our 1939, other than in the most halfhearted fashion. When Germany did attack Poland in our September of 1939, with the Czech state and its formidably well-equipped army gone, the Poles inflicted 50,000 casualties. Had the Poles been fully mobilized in 1939—they went to war with only two thirds of their forces mobilized—they would have inflicted more. In 1938, against much weaker German adversaries, they would almost certainly have inflicted many more. Had war broken out later, much would depend on whether the Poles had modernized their once-formidable air force with aid from their Western allies, whether that air force had been caught on the ground, whether the Poles had modernized in other respects, what German forces would have been available to attack Poland while others screened not only France but the Czechs, etc. It is unlikely that an alliance of France, Britain, Poland, and Czechoslovakia would have operated efficiently or aggressively; the French were determined to have other people do the fighting, the Poles and Czechs mistrusted each other, and the British were also very reluctant to see any repeat of the Western Front of World War I. This suggests that Germany might have picked off first Poland, then Czechoslovakia, at significant cost, but after that the most probable Allied plan—stand on the defensive while building up military strength through mobilizing the vast resources of the British and French empires, while starving resource-poor Germany through blockade, then going over to the offensive— might well have worked. After all, something like it worked in 1918.
What about the idea that France was already broken? It was for a long time the fashion to argue that the French Third Republic was conquered because it was politically rotten. This argument was initially deployed by both the French left and the French right, for different political purposes, and picked up in the English-speaking world, where it was very widely popularized by William Shirer. There is a pretty good case that the reverse was true: The Third Republic became rotten because it was conquered, i.e., we should not reason backwards from Vichy to see a defeatist, illiberal France, thus mistaking consequences for causes. By the time war broke out, Daladier had restored French morale and to a large degree unity. After war broke out, there was something of an economic miracle, and French output was very impressive. The stories about Communist sabotage of war production seem to have been Vichy propaganda. The Air Force was finally modernizing (by May of 1940, the French had built although not yet deployed large numbers of better aircraft than the German aircraft they would have faced), and in May of 1940 the French air force inflicted significant losses on the Luftwaffe. A fascinating argument by Ernest May (Strange Victory) argues that swift and crushing defeat that concluded the historical campaign was a case of the vastly improbable happening, then being taken to have been inevitable. At least one very great historian still thinks the 1930s French were indeed politically enfeebled (Eugene Weber, in The Hollow Years), while other very good historians have over the last couple of decades made the opposite case.
The controversy is interesting for a lot of reasons. Here is one of them: People seem to cling pretty tenaciously to the idea that the Third Republic was doomed, and they generally assume that its doom was over-determined, that it had profound underlying political causes. At some level, people seem to want the French to deserve what happened to them. My belief is that France fell for almost purely military reasons: Her generals and some of her troops were out-thought and out-fought, and they were terribly unlucky. My hunch is that most of us do not like to think about how much luck matters in history, and we do not like to think about how much proficiency at war may be a relatively independent variable in determining great and tragic outcomes. Because of bad generalship and worse luck, a staggering number of people died. An earlier age might have had less trouble than we seem to have in understanding why.
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