Should Britain and France have guaranteed Poland — a promise they could not keep — or was the guarantee the necessary end of appeasement?

THE SHORT ANSWER

• Prague converted the doubters. Every previous gamble had worn a costume of justice — plebiscites, minorities, treaty grievances. March 1939 came undressed. British opinion, press and backbench moved before the government did; even the arch-appeasers conceded the premise was dead. But conversion produced deterrence-on-credit: guarantees to Poland, Romania and Greece issued precisely because Britain now believed Hitler unlimited, yet backed by no deliverable force. The question of 1939 was whether promises without armies deter — Hitler answered it in September.
• The pact was the cheapest insurance either dictator ever bought. For Hitler, the pact removed the two-front nightmare and (he calculated) would collapse British resolve — “our enemies are little worms, I saw them at Munich.” For Stalin, it bought territory the Tsars had lost, a buffer against the attack he expected eventually, and — the darkest reading — time while the capitalists exhausted each other. Each man believed he had made the other his tool. The historiographical fight is over Stalin’s alternative: Anglo-French talks in Moscow that August were real but slow, low-ranked, and wrecked on Poland’s refusal to admit the Red Army — a refusal 1940 would explain (see Katyń, Ch. 11). Collective security’s last chance died of everyone’s entirely rational distrust.
• Danzig was pretext; the objective was erasure. The formal quarrel — the Free City of Danzig and an extraterritorial road across the Corridor — was designed to be unacceptable, then withdrawn from negotiation entirely: Hitler wanted the war Munich had denied him. His directive of April 1939 ordered the army ready “to destroy Polish military strength and create in the East a situation which satisfies the requirements of national defense” — not to adjust a border. The secret protocol’s line, and the occupation policies that began within days (the AB-Aktion murder of Polish elites, expulsions, the first ghettos), confirm the aim was the state’s existence, not its frontier.
• Poland would not be a client. Warsaw’s agency deserves the map’s respect: offered satellite status in Hitler’s anti-Soviet schemes repeatedly in 1934–39, Poland refused — the only state in the region that declined both dictators in the same year, knowing the price. Beck’s foreign policy has been criticized (the seizure of Teschen from Czechoslovakia in 1938 spent moral capital Poland would need), but the fundamental choice of 1939 was to fight a hopeless war rather than hold a leash. Twenty percent of its population would not survive the consequence.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Eastern Europe is partitioned by annex. The protocol’s spheres became facts within a year: eastern Poland absorbed after a staged plebiscite, the Baltic states garrisoned then annexed (June 1940), Bessarabia seized from Romania — watch the map’s next snapshots execute the schedule. Two of the era’s empires expanded in lockstep before they fought each other.

The war Britain and France declared, they did not fight. September’s Saar “offensive” advanced eight kilometres and withdrew; the promised bombing was leaflets. The Phoney War had reasons — French doctrine, British unreadiness — but its effect was to confirm Hitler’s contempt and to leave the initiative entirely his for the spring.

Japan is stunned out of the German orbit — briefly. Tokyo, fighting Soviet troops at Khalkhin Gol that very month (Ch. 10) under an Anti-Comintern Pact aimed at Moscow, learned of its ally’s Soviet pact from the newspapers. The cabinet fell; Japanese planners never fully trusted Berlin again — one reason they would refuse to join Barbarossa in 1941 and strike south instead.