Table Of ContentTHE IMMEDIATE ORIGINS OP THE
EUROPEAN WAR OF 1939
A Thesis
Presented to
the Faculty of the Department of Political Science
University of Southern California
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
John M. Swarthout
January, 1942
UMI Number: DP30234
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This dissertation, written by
.............
under the guidance of h.%&. Faculty Committee
on Studies, and approved by all its members, has /
been presented to and accepted by the Council d F'
on Graduate Study and Research, in partial ful
fillment of requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF P H ILO S O P H Y
Dean *
Secretary
Date..
Committee on Studies
Chairman
TABLE OP CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE CHARACTER OP WAR AS AN.INSTRUMENT OP
POLICY IN THE MODERN WORLD............. 11
II. FOREIGN POLICY (EUROPEAN STATES) IN PRAC
TICE: EUROPE BETWEEN WARS. . . . . . . 33
III. BACKGROUND OP MUNICH; GERMAN-CZECH
RELATIONS BEFORE 1938. . . . . . . . 58
IV. PRELUDE TO MUNICH: THE NAZI nWHITE WAR11
TECHNIQUE’ IN A C T I O N .................. 70
V. MUNICH: BLOODLESS VICTORY................ 120
VI. PRAGUE: THE CAST OP THE DIE . . . . . 137
VII. BACKGROUND OP THE POLISH CRISIS: GERMAN-
POLISH RELATIONS BEFORE MUNICH. . . . 176
VIII. PRELUDE TO WAR: THE POLISH CRISIS OF THE
SPRING OF 1939 . . . . . . . . . 244
IX. PREPARING FOR WAR: ALLIES, INCIDENTS,
MOBILIZATIONS......................... 262
X. THE WAR BEGINS: ULTIMATUMS AND REJEC
TIONS . . . . 288
XI. NEUTRAL PEACE EFFORTS AND THE SPREAD OF
HOSTILITIES . 312
CONCLUSION.............,.................... 325
BIBLIOGRAPHY................................... 330
PREFACE
In the arsenal of the true historian, perspec
tive is the most essential weapon* Scholars of a
future day will, no doubt, synthesize the events which
today are current on the international stage in a far
clearer and more objective fashion than that which is
now possible; for the student of today, far too many
documents lie hidden in the obscurities of foreign
office archives, and the inescapable personal bias which
only the years can erase acts as an insurmountable
obstacle to the true evaluation of all that conflicting
mass of fact and fancy which tomorrow will so clearly
appear in its true perspective* The works of contem
porary historians, judged objectively, make this too
apparent•
But this very difficulty is in itself a challenge,
and in the welter of war’s newest weapon, propaganda,
our only defense is in the clearest analysis of the actu
alities so artfully concealed#
Truth is an unpopular goddess !
INTRODUCTION
Whan, at 11:15 on the morning of September 3, 1939,
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain informed the people of
England by radio that 11 All my long struggle to win peace
has failed*1 and that '’consequently this country is now at
war with Gemany,11^ he climaxed a period of active diplomatic
strategy extending over several years and ushered In an
indeterminate period in which military strategy was to supple
ment diplomatic tactics in the dealings among the world*s
major powers. Shortly after Chamberlain’s address, Edouard
Deladier, Premier of France, told the men and women'of his
country: nWe fight to defend our soil, our homes and our
liberties,*1 and France aligned herself with the belligerents.
Two days and some hours before, the might of the German army
had been unleashed upon Poland, and at nine o’clock upon the
morning of the third, Neville Henderson, the British Ambas
sador at Berlin, acting upon telegraphic instructions from
■^The full text of the broadcast is given in the publi
cation of the British Library on the Outbreak of the War,
No. 5.
2
French Yellow Book, No. 18370, p. 403. A somewhat
different translation is to be found in the British Outbreak
of the War, No. 9, p. 21.
his government, had delivered a two-hour ultimatum to Herr
von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, demanding
1
immediate evacuation of German forces from Polish soil*
In actuality, the formal declarations of war were
almost anti-climactic, since the German-Polish conflict had
been in full swing since, at 4:45 on the morning of September
1, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein Mbegan an inten-
2
sive shelling" of the Polish fortification of Westerplatte•
British-French guarantees to Poland were almost without
reservation in the case of such a German move, and few doubted
that they would be carried into effect.
For the second time in two generations the people of
Europe — and later of most of the rest of the world *— had
been plunged into "war.11 For the second time in less than
twenty-five years the world’s major nations adopted military
techniques to supplement the regular economic and political
techniques of diplomacy in the settlement of the conflicts
between the objectives of their foreign policies. The out
break of "World War II" was a disaster of major proportions
to the great mass of the people of the world; no event had
occurred for two decades which was destined to exert such a
profound influence upon their individual lives. Historically,
British Blue Book, Ho. li8, p. 175.
^Polish Official Documents, Ho. 118, p. 126.
4
therefore, the beginning of the war takes rank among the
great, important occasions of modern times, and the period
preceding it becomes truly an ”historic” one from the
standpoint of its significance.
It is the primary purpose of this study to review, in
so far as possible, the events which marked this period,
within which might be said, in an exceedingly limited sense,
to lie the 11 origins” of this war. Since it is the thesis of
this writer that what we call ”war” in the present-day world
is but a substitution of a different type of technique — a
different set of rules, so to speak — in the constant struggle
between nations to achieve certain national objectives, it has
become necessary in many places to backtrack into history in
the attempt to trace, if not the origins, the past development
of certain phases of these constant conflicts. The first
chapter contains in brief the writer’s analysis of ”war” as
antonymous with ^peaceful diplomacy” rather than with ”peace,”
as the outgrowth of a continuing conflict between the inter
national objectives of different nations, and an analysis of
the factors influencing the' formation of these objectives.
This is followed by a short but essential review of the for
eign policies of Europe’s major powers and a summary of the
history of the twenty-odd years ^between wars.” The largest
part of the dissertation is devoted to a more detailed review
of the diplomatic happenings during the period of a year and
5
a half Just before the German invasion of Poland, commencing
with the "acceleration of the diplomatic tempo" just preceding
the settlement of the "Czechoslovak affair" at Munich*
Available materials dealing with the period between
Versailles and Munich are almost too profuse* Historians,
Journalists, economists, and politicians have covered the
events of the "twenty years of armistice" with a veritable
welter of histories, diaries, discussions, arguments, and
treatises* There is much, however, not yet disclosed even
concerning this period, and for the few years just before the
war itself a veil of diplomatic secrecy shrouds what is
possibly the most important of materials* In the interna
tional scene, the almost universal acceptance of the doctrine
that the end justifies any means is painfully apparent to
political scientists and historians* In no place is this
more obvious than in the release or suppression of pertinent
documents which may by any stretch of the imagination be felt
to prejudice the national cause, and in the interpretation of
those which are currently available this must always be borne
in mind*
Amid the quantities of materials which have appeared
since hostilities commenced, four documentary collections
stand out, and if they are not basic, they are at least sanc
tified by the approval of the issuing nations* Each purports
to be a comprehensive compilation of pertinent key documents,
6
but, on the basis of previous experience, this claim, as will
presently appear, is open to question#
The publication of selected pre-war documents in
1
‘‘colored-book* form is not a new development. During the
World War the German White Book, the Russian Orange Book,
the Austrian Red Book, the Belgian Gray Book, the British Blue
Book, and the French Yellow Book were widely distributed#
Each of these publications attempted to prove the wholehearted
efforts of the government sponsoring the volume to preserve
the dwindling peace. Each was filled with embarrassing gaps
gleefully seized upon and exploited by opposition progagandists•
Authorities now recognize that no one of the collections was
wholly false and that no one of them, certainly, was wholly
true. The truth lay somewhere in between the claims so
extravagantly pushed by the opposing parties.
Since the war the “truth* has been almost abundantly
realized. Revolutions in Germany, Austria, and Russia and the
consequent desires to discredit previous regimes in those
countries led to a wholesale ransacking of diplomatic archives
and to an extremely wholesome exposure of the documents therein
to public view. The Kautsky Documents of 1919 comprises 1123
1Indeed, even in the late nineteenth century, Bismarck
was to complain that “British diplomats. • • live in constant
fear of the Blue Book.* Documents on the Events Preceding
the Outbreak of War, p. LIII.
