THE INEVITABLE FALL OF FRANCE AND WESTERN EUROPE

 France reaction c1940 to the looming Nazi threat

Could the Allies have prevented the fall of France and Western Europe?  I was recently asked this question.  The short answer is probably yes, but efforts to do so would had to have commenced in 1918, not 1939 or 1940. For by then it was too late.

The way the first world war ended, and the way its end was formalized in the Treaty of Versailles, was one of the primary causes of the second world war. In addition to heavy war reparations laid upon the German government, the treaty placed strict limitations upon Germany’s military forces, made the Rhineland a demilitarized zone, prohibited an Austro-German union, and severely cut back on Germany’s lebensraum, giving the Sudetenland to Czechoslovakia, and ceding the Polish Corridor to Poland.[1]

Gregor Dallas points out that, to many Germans, the terms of the Paris Peace Conference in 1918 was a Diktat, not a treaty.[2] Germans felt betrayed, stabbed in the back. They regarded their leaders who emerged at war’s end, who pushed for German capitulation, as the “November criminals.”[3] Revenge for Versailles was clearly one of Germany’s – not just Hitler – motivations for going to war again in 1939.

Hitler became chancellor in 1933. Within eight months he had secured the “unconditional obedience” of the Army and, hard upon the heels of Hindenburg’s death, the approval of 90 per cent of German voters (95% turnout) of his unconstitutional usurpation of the powers of the German presidency.[4] To stop him, and thereby to prevent the fall of France and Western Europe, required the will on the part of the Allies to confront Germany with military force. Unfortunately, though that will existed in the person of Sir Winston Churchill, Churchill was not in a position to do very much about it until 1940 when he succeeded Chamberlain as Prime Minister, and even then he lacked like-minded partners in power in France and the low countries. The United States, except for Lend-Lease, and until it was forced to enter the war after Pearl Harbor, kept the worsening European situation at arm’s length. One of Churchill’s successes was, by dint of his personal relationship with President Roosevelt, to pull the U.S. into the conflict in Europe and to make winning the war in that theater its priority, despite Japan’s direct attack on America in the Pacific. But it took a long time for America to move – much too late to prevent the Nazi takeover of France and most of Western Europe.

By the time of the U.S. entry into the war, all attempts to appease the Nazi beast had run their course. France had already fallen. The low countries were occupied. The Wehrmacht was on the threshold of crushing England. It would take three and a half years for the Allied Powers to push them back to Berlin. Allied diplomatic failure was all too obvious. To summon the requisite political will to stop Hitler, they had waited too long.


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[1] Silly Willy, Ed., “Principle Causes of the Second World War” (H2G2). http://www.h2g2.com

/approved_entry/A1000774 (accessed 8 June 2012).

[2] Gregor Dallas, 1945: The War that Never Ended (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 372.

[3] Ibid.

[4] William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 226-230.