It was in virtue of this that we went to war.â?? Thus, William Strang, a Foreign Office official and later Permanent Under-Secretary, described the guarantee of Polandâ??s independence that the British and French Government gave that country on March 30th, 1939.
The guarantee was without precedent in British foreign policy. Until recently, such was the lack of interest in Poland in London that their ambassador, Count Edward Racynski, reported to Warsawin early February 1939 that the whole of Eastern Europe was considered by British politicians to be outside the scope of British concerns. Colonel Josef Beck, who had been the Polish Foreign Minister since 1932, was not well thought of in London or Paris. Initially, he saw the Nazis as a relief from the entrenched anti-Polish rulers of Germany. He had played a leading part in Polandâ??s seizure of Teschen from Czechoslovakia at the time of the Munich crisis. The guarantee meant an undertaking to use force to defend a country in Eastern Europe, to which, as the Chiefs of Staff said â??we could give no direct help by land, sea or airâ??. It came about within a matter of days, following Hitlerâ??s coup of March 15th, against Czechoslovakia, a country whose security and integrity he had pledged to defend at Munich.
Despite the coup, Neville Chamberlain was initially determined, as he told the House of Commons on March 15th, to stick by his policy of appeasement. But something dramatic was happening to the national mood such as comes over the British people from time to time, a sea-change not necessarily observable abroad but that, working through Parliament and the press and touching the nerve-ends of the body-politic, exercises a profound impact on government. For two decades the British, like the French, had so recoiled from the horrors of the First World War that they refused to countenance the idea that armed conflict might arise over the settlement of disputes in Europe. The destruction of Czechoslovakia shattered them. Stirring a deep-seated national instinct for survival, it induced a widespread feeling that that was enough and that Hitler had to be stopped. The French people, likewise aroused by Hitlerâ??s latest move, were if anything more indignant; his ally, Mussolini, was making demands for Nice, Corsica and Savoy. The same sentiment reachedLondon from the countries of the Commonwealth.
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