[BLANK_AUDIO] Hi.

Welcome back. Last time we talked about the ambitions of

the new empires. This time we'll talk about how those
ambitions unfolded during three terrible years: from 1937 to the
summer of 1940. As soon as Hitler's ambitions and others
become apparent, the democracies had some fundamental
decisions to make as to where, if anywhere, they were going to
draw the line to confront Hitler with the
danger of war. They stand by as Hitler annexes Austria in
March of 1938. But then as Hitler begins to look at
Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1938, war clouds gather. The British and French
have to decide:
Will we go to war over the issue in
Czechoslovakia? What was the issue in Czechoslovakia? It had to do with Hitler's
claims the
Sudetenland. Because, of course, Hitler's not revealing
all of his large imperial ambitions. What he's saying is, he just wants to
reunite the Germanic peoples. And there's some German speaking people living in
this part of, one of these new states created in 1918 and 1919,
Czechoslovakia. Let's take a look at this from the German
point of view. Here's a German map of Czechoslovakia
that shows their Sudetenland. You see, these little
images of the German-speaking lands of Czechoslovakia
with their picturesque little castles and the German-speaking
people in their folk costumes. The Germans say, we just want to annex the
Sudetenland. This part of Czechoslovakia. Now, it turns out that this part of
Czechoslovakia has, of course, all of
Czechoslovakia's defenses. It also has Czechoslovakia�s key munitions
industries that make its armaments. So, if Hitler's ambitions are granted, and
the Germanic-speaking peoples are reunited, Czechoslovakia becomes
defenseless. The military balance in Europe begins to shift because Czechoslovakia
is a powerful
medium-sized country. It's got a real army. It could have given the Germans a
serious
fight, in conjunction with help, perhaps, from the
British and the French. So there's a really serious danger that there's going to be
a general European
war that comes to a head in a series of
meetings in September 1938. Three summit conferences are held, the
diplomatic lead held by the British Prime Minister,
Neville Chamberlain. Very early on Chamberlain makes it clear
that they're prepared to have some kind of
plebiscite or vote or some process that may allow the
Sudetenland to be turned over to Germany. Hitler, in a way, refuses to take yes for
an answer, alarming Chamberlain and
the British Cabinet. He says, no I can't wait for this slow
process, I need this right now, or else we're just going
to have a war. For a lot of Chamberlain's Cabinet this is
the moment at which that really dawns on them that Hitler
really does want a war. There's a lot more going on here than just
the claims to reunite the Germans. Chamberlain makes one last effort. Hitler
falters at carrying forward his
ultimatum to go directly to war. He allows himself to be talked out of
going to war at the third of these summit conferences, this one held
at Munich at the end of September 1938. Here are the summit participants: Hitler in
the foreground, next to him is the French prime minister, �douard
Daladier, who clearly looks unhappy to be there.
There's Neville Chamberlain. Over here is the Italian Duce, Benito
Mussolini. Their aides are in the background. That gentleman on the far right is
the
Italian foreign minister, Count Ciano. The result of the meeting is: The
Sudetenland
will be turned over to Germany in fairly short
order. Chamberlain comes back to London and tells the relieved world
there will be no general European war, he has secured
peace in our time. Everyone praises what Chamberlain has
done. The American president, Franklin
Roosevelt, writes him a congratulatory message. Fairly soon it becomes clear that
the Sudetenland really was just the first
step. In March of 1939, Hitler takes the rest of Czechoslovakia, too, which is now
defenseless. And this map shows you the way in which
the Germans proceed to cut up Czechoslovakia and
parcel it out to their friends. These areas in dark purple simply
become part of Germany. This area becomes an imperial
protectorate, German protectorate. A puppet republic here. Land given here to the
Hungarians who'd
become Germany's allies. After seeing what happened to
Czechoslovakia, though, the British and French governments
rally. The British Cabinet is determined that the
line has to be drawn, the French government
strongly with them. They decide to draw the line at Poland. They issue a guarantee
to the Pols that
if Germany attacks them Britain and France will come
to their defense. Let's think about this choice for a
moment, though. Why Poland? At this point, Germany and its new occupied territories
will surround
Poland from three sides: north, west, and south. It will be very hard to defend
Poland
against a German attack. The British and French, however, are
deciding to make a stand, telling Germany you will have a European
war if you go there. Why that stand then? Why not just let the Germans have Poland
and have the Nazis face to face up against
Stalin. It's clear the British and French don't just view this as a cynical
calculation; there is this sense
of we really have to decide whether we're
going to stand up to the preservation of independent
states in Europe. Whether we're going to stand up at some
point to the development of a gigantic German
continental empire. There's almost a sense of pride, embarrassment, prestige, their
status as
empires. Plus, especially in the case of the French, a long-standing emotional
dedication to the
cause of Polish independence. All these factors come together as the
British and French decide that's the place to draw the
line. They then begin looking to their former
mortal enemy, Stalin's Soviet Union, and asking do you want to make common
cause against the Nazis. Stalin, of course, is no more trustful of them than they
are of him. He looks around, Stalin thinks about his
options, Stalin makes a choice that stuns the
world. At the end of August 1939, the Soviets
and the Nazi Germans, the sworn deadly enemies of right and left,
combine and sign an agreement, named for their foreign ministers, the
Molotov Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, in which they decide they're
going to not only stand back and let the Germans take Poland, they're going to join
with them and cut up the country between them. Hitler had hoped that his agreement
with
the Soviet Union might persuade the British and French to stay out of the war,
at least for a while. But when he goes into Poland, they come in
too. But it doesn't do much
to protect what happened in Poland. To just kind of illustrate this
graphically, I've got this wonderful interactive map
prepared by the British government's National
Archives. You can see that German annexation of Austria in
1938. The Sudetenland: September �38. The rest of Czechoslovakia: spring of '39.
And then comes the invasion of Poland,
followed shortly thereafter by the Soviet Union making its
move. So as a general European war begins, the
sides start looking at their war plans. They're taking into account some lessons
from the last war. For instance, they're not going to charge headlong into machine
guns and artillery
fire. On the British and French side, they're
going to stand pat behind strong powerful defensive fortifications
built in eastern France, which they call the Maginot Line. They have powerful
forces poised at the
border between France and Belgium in case the Germans try to come in that way, the
way they had in 1914. And then they're going to rely on their advantages in naval
power, especially, to
try to strangle Germany with a blockade, like
they had in the First World War. The Germans, meanwhile, are looking at their
lessons from the last war. They're adopting offensive plans. They don't want to
charge headlong into
that Maginot Line. They're thinking also about replaying a
little bit of what they had done in 1914. We'll invade through Belgium and come
around. But that's kind of exactly what the
British and French are expecting. The German High Command looks at that. They're
pretty pessimistic about what's
going to happen, but they're getting ready. In fact, the German generals had
thought,
really from 1938 on, that if there was a war between Germany and Britain and
France, probably they're
going to lose. Or they're going to get a long stalemate
at best. They were deeply pessimistic about how all
this was going to work out. But, they followed the F�hrer�s orders.
They prepared these plans. The British and French are relatively
Confident that they can do well, relying on their blockade, relying on building up
a large air force that can bomb Germany,
eventually. This period of quiet that ensues as the
Allies are waiting for a German attack and making their plans, the Germans are
looking at their offensive plans, just can't quite go
forward - the generals reluctant, weather problems,
no invasion of France in the fall of 1939. It seems to the outside world like a
phony
war. What's really happened though is the
initial plans of both sides have already failed.
Why? Well on the Allied side, the blockade
plans were hopeless, because Hitler's Germany is
getting all the raw materials it needs from its friend the
Soviet Union, which has access to raw materials from
throughout Eurasia. The blockade's hopeless. So hopeless, in fact, that the British
and
French start asking themselves whether they need to go to war
with the Soviet Union and think about taking sides when the
Soviets pick this moment to have a war with Finland, up to
their north. What about the German side? Well, they're finally getting ready to
launch that attack through Belgium that the Allies are
expecting. And then a courier carrying these plans is
actually downed in his plane over Belgium. The plans are captured by the Allies,
which reveals that the Germans are getting
ready to do about what they expect them to do. But the German High Command thinks,
desperately, well, we better come up with some sort of different plan, since we
just turned over our existing plans to the
Allies. What then follows is one of the strangest, startling military victories in
modern history. I use the term strange victory here,
borrowing the phrase that a colleague of mine, Ernest
May, used for his great book about the French
campaign of 1940. He called it strange victory, reversing
the terms a French scholar, Marc Bloch, had used to call it a
strange defeat. No, it wasn't so much France's defeat
that's strange. In a way, it's that the Germans were able
to win at all. They develop an incredibly high-risk plan, desperate to find
something that might
work. Now, I haven't spent a whole lot of time
in the course zeroing on military campaign
plans, but this one is so important in the course of world
history that it's worth taking a little bit of a look at what
happened here. The original plan of the German High
Command, portrayed up here, was an invasion up through Holland and Belgium
that might eventually then sweep down against the French and British forces
that are waiting to move in to confront them up
here. What might then ensue would be another
version of World War I all over again, but with the British and French forces
relatively even stronger in comparison to the German
ones. And of course after their plans were
captured, the German generals are even more certain that this
plan is doomed, at best, to get a stale mate, and probably
long-term defeat. But one of their generals, von Manstein,
proposes a daring idea. So Manstein's plan, this gamble, was you'd
start just the way the Allies are expecting, moving
in up here. They respond, wheeling their armies up
into Belgium. Then you use this army group, here, to punch
in behind them, sweeping behind them, cutting off their forces,
driving them against the English Channel. Sounds like a great idea. Why is this
hard? Well first of all, you have to mass this
huge army group here, and the Allies can't really quite notice
or fully figure out what you're doing. Second, this army group has to punch
through the most difficult terrain in the entire
front: heavily wooded valleys, where armored
vehicles in their thousands all most have to line up single file, crossing
significant river obstacles. If the French move their forces rapidly
enough down here, this can be bottled up easily and the
whole offensive fails. In fact, when the German generals analyzed
the prospects for success of a plan like this, which got successfully
refined in the coming months, they estimated the chances that it would
work as something like one in ten. It was kind of like the military
equivalent of what, in American football, we might call a Hail
Mary pass. But, amazingly, it worked. The French and British forces actually
fought well and bravely. The quality of their equipment was very
good, comparable to, sometimes superior to the
German equipment. The problem was the French were out of position. Their
intelligence had not worked well
enough in anticipating and seeing the German
move. And they had not been agile enough to
respond once they detected the move. As sometimes those Hail Mary passes do,
this play worked, but the consequences were
simply enormous. So let's go back to our handy interactive map prepared by the
British government's
National Archives so we can see this process unfold. It'll start with a German
attack on
Denmark and Norway in early April of 1940, an attack in which they will end up
controlling the Baltic Sea, access to their raw materials from neutral
Sweden. Then the Germans, knowing about the
defensive line in eastern France, make their feint in the
Netherlands and Belgium. Their attacks there followed by the attack
that'll punch through down here, in order to drive the Allied armies to the
English Channel. From here, hundreds of thousands, mostly
British troops but also French troops, had to be evacuated, at the end of May, back
to Great Britain. The evacuation of Dunkirk. After this, the rest of France is
helpless. The Germans take Paris a couple of weeks
later and subdue the rest of the country. France surrenders. The Germans and the
French agree to set up a government, at Vichy, that will
rule France in partnership with Germany, as the
Germans set up a military occupation over the rest of the
country. The sudden collapse of France, the defeat
of the British and French in little more than a few weeks,
stunned the world. Everyone had in their mind the memory of
World War I: years and years of struggle and battle and
trench warfare. Suddenly, there was a lightning war, a
blitzkrieg, and the balance of power in the world was
overthrown. The first choice that had to be made was by Britain: Should they fight
on, should
they make terms? The issue comes to a head in five days in London at the end of May
1940, as the catastrophic news
pours in. The key players in the British government
on the issue: Neville Chamberlain had already
resigned as prime minister. He had been replaced by the conservative
maverick Winston Churchill, someone who'd been
warning about the German menace for years but had been a bit of an outcast, even
within his own
party. With Churchill now as prime minister, he
looks to his foreign minister, the conservative
Lord Halifax, for advice. Halifax thinks it's probably best to,
perhaps, look at ways to make terms, find some way to protect
the Empire. Churchill is determined, however, to fight
Hitler to the death. In this, interestingly, he's joined by the
other key partners in this British government of
national unity. That's the British Labour party: social democrats and socialists
led by
this man, Clement Attlee. The Labour Party is determined that the war
should be fought to a finish. They align with Churchill. The British Cabinet
decides that Britain will fight
on. But Britain's choices are only the opening act for the choices
everyone else in the world will make. It looks like the dictatorships are now
holding the whip hand over the rest of the world. Indeed, fairly shortly after
these
victories, at the dawn of this new era, Germany, Italy, and Japan
formally conclude a new alliance.
A pact of steel. Here's a picture of the Japanese Embassy
in Berlin, festooned with the banners of the
new alliance. And back in Japan, Japanese schoolchildren could see how
children from all lands are rejoicing at the conclusion of
this new coalition. From the point of view of the democracies,
or from the British point of view, this is what the world
looked like in late 1940: The areas in black are the areas
effectively controlled by, dominated by Germany, Italy,
and Japan. The areas in red controlled by the Soviet
Union, Germany's friend - not a formal ally but so far its partner. Facing them is
the British Empire in
blue, along with its allies among the Dominions, like Australia, South
Africa, Canada, New Zealand. At this point, in late 1940, the
dictatorships of the world, the totalitarians, will control the
action. If you had been asked to rank the five
most powerful countries in the world in the fall of 1940: probably Germany and the
Soviet Union would be number one and
number two. Maybe the British Empire, gravely weakened
by its defeat in France but having the Empire and Dominions behind
them, might be ranked as number three. The Japanese might be number four. The
Americans over there, they're neutral;
they have a strong navy but negligible army. This is a point at which the
totalitarian
countries, if they can continue working together, will more or less decide how the
world is going to get carved up. The democracies have lost their ability to take
the strategic initiative or drive the
action. Those are both the opportunities and the dilemmas that the
world faces in the summer of 1940. The choices that they will then make, on
all sides, in 1940 and �41, that will transform the whole shape of this war, is
what we'll come to next week. See you then. [BLANK_AUDIO].