ANOTHER “COUNTER-FACTUAL” SPECULATION? YES, BECAUSE there’s no better way to examine whether the choices that were made were the only or the best ones. What would have happened if Britain and France had not extended the unconditional guarantee to Poland in March 1939 that subsequently triggered their declaration of war on Germany in September? After all, it was both rash and dishonest to promise to protect Poland when they had no conceivable means of getting military help to the Poles, and no intention of mounting an offensive against Germany’s western frontier to draw the Wehrmacht away from Poland. A little more thought, and perhaps a little more honesty, might have persuaded the British and French governments that they should not make a promise they couldn’t keep.
Without that Anglo-French guarantee, there probably wouldn’t have been a war in September 1939 at all. Knowing that no help was coming, the Poles would probably have given the Germans what they wanted—the city of Danzig, and a sovereign road and rail route across the “Polish Corridor” to connect East Prussia to the rest of Germany—and then they would have concluded an anti-Soviet alliance with Germany. That was Hitler’s original plan for Poland, whose 35 million people would be useful in his planned anti-Soviet crusade. True, they were “racially inferior” Slavs according to Nazi ideology, but Hitler was prepared to be flexible on such matters, and official Poland, at least, shared his own anti-Semitism.
There would not have been a cynical and temporary Nazi-Soviet pact in this history either, for that was a direct response by both countries to the Anglo-French guarantee to Poland. There would certainly have been a war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union eventually, for Hitler saw Communism as a “Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy” and truly believed that the Soviet Union had to be destroyed. The war might have come a bit earlier than June 1941, when he invaded the Soviet Union in the real history, or it might even have come a bit later, but it would probably have unfolded in much the same way.
It’s very unlikely that Britain and France would have gone to war at that stage in the game to save the Communists, so the Russians would have been on their own. Hitler would have enjoyed a few more advantages in this counter-factual version of his attack on the Soviet Union, as Poland would have been his ally and the start line for the invasion would have been several hundred kilometres closer to Moscow. He would also have been spared the distraction of an unresolved war with Britain at his back—but he might have found the need to keep up his guard against a hostile Britain and an unconquered France even more burdensome.
Could Hitler have won his war in our alternative history? Probably not, for in the real history the outcome of the German-Soviet war, the greatest land battle in the history of the world, was not heavily influenced by events on other fronts of the Second World War. The Allied bombing offensive, for all its casualties, did not significantly reduce German industrial production before late 1944; nor did the Atlantic Wall tie up more German troops than, in the alternative history, would need to have been kept in the West to protect Germany from an Anglo-French declaration of war. Germany lost the war on the Eastern Front because it was outnumbered two-to-one, outproduced by Soviet industry and decisively beaten on the battlefield, and those same factors would have led to a Soviet victory over Germany even if Britain and France had stayed out of the war.
Britain and France would have gone to war with Germany in the end, of course, because they would not have wanted victorious Soviet troops to occupy all of Germany up to the French border. Indeed, they would probably have attacked Germany around the time when the advancing Soviet army entered Poland: that is to say, at around the same time as the Allied landings in Normandy reopened the main ground war in the West with Germany in the real history. And the United States would almost certainly have been part of that anti-Nazi alliance.
Even by the rather flexible rules of writing counter-factual history, we are obliged to leave events beyond the specific area where we are making an alteration (no Anglo-French guarantee to Poland) unchanged. And in truth we may safely assume that Japan would have launched its campaign of conquest in South-East Asia and the Pacific around the time (late 1941 in the real history) when it looked as if Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was going to succeed. That would have made Britain, France and the United States allies in the war against Japan, and they would no doubt have remained allies when the time came to enter the war against Germany. Their motive would have been to prevent an overwhelming Soviet dominance in the centre of Europe—but in practice, they would have been countering it by introducing an overwhelming American military presence into the west of the continent, because the United States was the only potential counterbalance available.
This alternative Second World War would still have ended, therefore, with American, British and French troops sharing a divided Germany with Soviet troops—and in all likelihood falling into serious disaccord quite quickly. No matter how you fiddled with the details of the history, you would still get a Communized Eastern Europe and a divided Germany out of this alternative scenario.
Some details would have been different, of course. The Jews of France and the Low Countries would have survived. So perhaps might the Italian Jews, for Mussolini might not have taken Italy all the way into a war with the Soviet Union, which offered him no territory or other advantages. Instead, he might have limited himself to sending “volunteers” to the Eastern Front as Spain’s fascist dictator, Francisco Franco, did—and perhaps stayed in power after Germany’s defeat as Franco did. But the details do not really matter, because the object of this exercise was simply to see how inevitable the outcome of the war was. And at the end of the exercise, it looks pretty inevitable.
This does not prove that Britain and France should have stayed out almost until the end of the war. We can moralize or strategize about that until the cows come home. But it does suggest that the war was really just another great-power struggle, driven by the same calculations as all the others. Even though it certainly didn’t feel that way to Sergeant Al Clavette, who fought in the Breskens Pocket with the Canadian Scottish Regiment.
I think that the boys themselves felt that we were making a contribution to rid a menace to the world, and I think they’re right as proved out. Because if Germany had, for example, got the atomic bomb, I don’t think [Hitler] would have hesitated two seconds to use it.
Al Clavette, Canadian Scottish Regiment
The trouble is that our side would have used it too. In fact, it did.