The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

granted a strip of land between the German province of East Prussia and the
rest of Germany that gave them access to the Baltic Sea. Hitler wanted this
largely German-peopled strip of land returned and had assumed that Poland
could be threatened and bullied into ceding the Danzig ‘corridor’ back to
Germany. This done, he believed Poland would then become a virtual
German satellite and ally when he eventually launched an attack on the
Soviet Union.
The Poles, however, had no intention of being bullied and flatly rejected
German proposals to cede the corridor despite threats of military action. It
was at this point that Britain, and then France, made their pledge to honour
Poland’s territorial rights. Few countries involve themselves in the affairs of
others purely for the wider good. Foreign intervention is always rooted in
self-interest, albeit this self-interest might be shared with a number of other
states. Thus Britain, under the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, and
Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, had in March 1939 given a public
guarantee of Poland’s territorial rights, not because they were feeling
altruistic towards Poland but because they thought this would be the best
way to deter Hitler from ideas of further expansion. They assumed that
Hitler, with his despicable totalitarian Nazi ideology, would, if encouraged,
slowly try to conquer all of Europe and then even the world, in which case
Nazi Germany was clearly a threat to Britain too. Thus he had to be
stopped. That might well have happened in the long term, but in 1939
Hitler’s aims were still ultimately directed towards the Jewish-Bolshevik
menace in the east.
Since Hitler ignored this threat and invaded Poland anyway, the policy
was clearly a failure. What might have been more effective would have
been an alliance with the Soviet Union, which both Britain and France
actively pursued at the same time as von Ribbentrop. Ironically, however,
Britain and France’s Polish guarantee had already ensured that a deal with
Russia was out of the question, because Stalin wanted his hands on Poland
just as much as Hitler did.
The wooing of their sworn enemy was an extraordinary success that had
followed on from a series of failures. For some time before, von
Ribbentrop, Hitler’s Foreign Minister, had tried to bind both Italy and Japan
into a military alliance. An Axis coalition that ran through the heart of
Europe, the Mediterranean and the Far East would have been a nightmare
for Britain and may well have deterred her from declaring war. However,