Suppose Churchill had not succeeded in pressuring Chamberlain to interfere with Hitler’s negotiations with the Polish colonels by issuing a British guarantee to Poland in the event of German aggression. Would World War II have resulted or would it have been a different war?

The British guarantee emboldened the colonels and frustrated Hitler’s attempt to restore a Germany dismantled by the Versailles Treaty. The result was Hitler’s secret pact with Stalin to divide up Poland, technically known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

Having given the guarantee, Britain was honor-bound to declare war on Germany (fortunately not also on the Soviet Union), which pulled in France because of the British-French alliance against Germany.

Without Britain’s guarantee, the German (September 1, 1939) and Soviet (September 17, 1939) invasions of Poland would have been prevented by the Polish colonels’ acquiescence to Hitler’s demands and would not have resulted in Britain and France starting World War II by declaring war on Germany, resulting in the fall of France, the British driven off the continent, and Roosevelt’s determination to involve the US in a foreign war unrelated in any significant way to Americans’ interests.

Historians write that Hitler’s ambitions were in the East, not the West. Without the British and French declaration of war, the war might have been contained, with the two totalitarian powers fighting it out.

Alternatively, Hitler and Stalin might have continued their cooperation and together seized the oil rich Middle East. The British, French, and Americans would have been a poor match for the German and Soviet militaries. General Patton, the best American commander, thought he could take on the Red Army that had crushed the Wehrmacht, but his hubris did not worry Red Army commanders, who defeated the bulk of the German Army, which was deployed on the Eastern Front, while the Americans, aided by German motorized units running out of fuel, struggled to contain a small part of German forces in the Battle of the Bulge. Today we would be buying our oil from a German/Soviet consortium.

pitfield wrote:War with Germany was not at all inevitable, and was in fact EXACTLY what Hitler didn't want; he was a committed anglophile and, as you noted, was intently focussed on Germany's need for eastward expansion.