MICHAEL Rossi and Hugh Kerr repeat the received version of Second World War history with regard to Germany’s conquest of both Czechoslovakia and Poland (Letters, October 19). If the response to my contention in my letter of October 16 that reaction to Nazi Germany overrunning Poland was inadequate, is, as Mr Kerr contends, that Neville Chamberlain immediately announced that a state of war then existed between Britain and Germany, then I consider this a feeble response. The so-called Phoney War ensued and so did the sharp dismissal of Neville Chamberlain as British Prime Minister. Yes, Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart, Molotov, signed a deal that effectively dismembered Poland and exposed that country to German and Soviet invasion. This mirrored the “Peace for our time” speech of Chamberlain following his signing of the Munich Agreement with Hitler the previous year, 1938, in that it effectively ceded Czechoslovakia to Germany and there was no Soviet involvement in that.
Indeed, it was likely that this passive consequent absorption of Czechoslovakia rang loud alarm bells in Stalin’s Moscow and led directly to the German-Soviet pact of August 1939. As with the perceived (and actual) eastward expansion of Nato today, Russia was nervous of the eastward shift of the Third Reich.
At the time of the occurrence of the Warsaw Uprising in late July 1944, the writing was writ large on the wall for the Third Reich and post-war politics was assuming larger lettering too on the agendas of Allied leaders both west and east. That the uprising fell victim to this agenda is but one simplification among many possible such, and none of them diminishes the agonies of the event.
Then, as now and always, the ramifications of politics are as complex as are the assorted interests of the players.
I suggest to Mr Rossi, who writes about an absence of bases for military action by, effectively, Britain and France, in defence of Poland and Czechoslovakia, that had the USSR been prevailed upon timeously, there could have been such strategic bases established, but again the politics of the time, the distrust and so on, went against such probabilities. Maybe the Spanish Civil War had encapsulated the political complexities of the time and was a template for the huge conflict that followed. That Franco was not ousted upon the victory over fascism that the end of the Second World War signified is yet another subject matter inviting historical re-assessment.
Ian Johnstone,
84 Forman Drive, Peterhead.
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