That's strange assessment. What could Poland possibly have done to help Czechoslovakia, in a situation where Czechoslovakia's protectors and guarantors had thrown that country to the Nazi wolves already?
No I mean what could they have possibly done to save CZECHOSLOVAKIA
The Czechs should have, and could have, fought. Had they done so, Polish aid would have been invaluable.
Ally with them. There were two events regarding CSSR. First, the annexation of the Sudetenland by Germany, second, the liquidation of the remnant. Polish annexation of Teschen happened during the first, not the second.
Let's check wikipedia:
Apart from that, wikipedia claims that the 1921 population of the CSSR was 13,607,385. For Poland, I found a 1931 population of 21,993,444, so the one million CSSR army seems a bit much, taking the Polish ratio of population to army strength would leave an army of 600,000. Still enough to cancel out German numerical superiority.
With or without the French and British?
Are you saying the Poles and Czechs together could have defied the Wehrmacht? Acheton you need to read less Wikipedia if that's where you get that idea from. There are better sources to inform oneself about the balance of power and the military strength of the pre WW2 nations of Europe.
Yeah this is a very good assessment of what Poland had to deal with.
He was of course being facetious: He was prime minister and certainly had any number of dossiers and research articles available to him about anything any everything related to Czechoslovakia and its people. But that he pandered in a such irresponsible way to the isolationist feelings among his less informed citizens shows how crassly the British elites had closed their eyes to the political realities that shaped their world and that determined the security of the British themselves.
Germany in 1938 also didn't have the army it had in 1939 though, not by a long shot. In the end of 1938, the total army strength was about equal to the army that invaded Poland (at which time other, limited, forces were deployed elsewhere). https://www.telegraph.co.uk/history...ys-strength-now-51-divisions-Nov-30-1938.html
Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not blaming Chamberlain for making the decision on 1938 to abandon Czechoslovakia to the Nazis. In blaming all the British governments since 1918 for being so shortsighted that they thought eastern Europe could be ignored without threatening Britain's own security.
The low margin of actual German superiority got me puzzled. But if I remember right, Poland committed the bulk of her forces directly to the front, due to (justified) fears that any territory Germany took, it might easily keep in a peace brokered by the western allies. However, that disposition played right into the hands of the Wehrmacht, allowing it to break through and encircle the bulk of the Polish army right from the get go. Which, btw, wasn't some unforeseeable totally new "Blitzkrieg", but rather the application of doctrines like "Schwerpunkt" and "Vernichtungsgedanke" which had been the German army's bread and butter before there was a German army, these concepts going back to the post-Napoleonic Prussian army and where thus over a hundred years old.
Better led for sure, as said above, at least at high levels. Better trained, on one hand, I read some (iffy) claims that the German training doctrine was superior, though OTOH, the Wehrmacht had expanded rapidly in the previous years only. As for armed, probably better than the Polish army, though it is interesting to note how many of the German tanks used were Czech models (the Pz 35(t) and the Pz 38(t)), particularly in relation to then rather rare German Panzer III and IV's, the rather light-weight Panzer I and II's being the mainstay of the German army then.
Life isn't a fairy tale. Once the French and British had given up on Czechoslovakia there was no glorious but risky alternative left to the two options of vassalization and military destruction. The Czechs were wise to choose the way they did, at least if you consider it wisdom to avoid physical harm and industrial scale massacre of your own people. Poland chose other option and suffered like no other country for it. Prague too could have become a wrecked ruin like Warsaw, the Czechs could also have been treated like the Poles, their elites exterminated by the Germans, perhaps their whole people displaced wholesale into a General Gouvernement in Eastern Moravia or Slovakia. There was no way out for them.
I spelled out why there was an alternative 3 posts ago, I guess you missed it?
No I think you said the same thing that Acheron said: That Poland and Czechoslovakia had, on paper, an army strength comparable to Germany, and that they could have together defied Germany militarily.
Your analysis of the numbers makes no account of the potential way in which those numbers could have been employed. What would have been a strategy for a Czechoslovakian military deployment against Hitler's Wehrmacht, in September 1938? How could Poland have aided them? Both countries had large armies and the Czechs had a bunch of tanks, but so did the French a year later. Neither had anything even approaching a military strategy to deal with
Well you certainly have made a different argument here.No I think you said the same thing that Acheron said: That Poland and Czechoslovakia had, on paper, an army strength comparable to Germany, and that they could have together defied Germany militarily.
To which I answered that this was not so
1) CSR being surrounded on three sides by Germany, and lacking fortifications along the former Austrian border
2) Neither country having open sea lanes or riverine lanes by which military and civilian supplies could have been imported in case of war (Poland had the Baltic but the Germans would have closed that shut, CSR had the Elbe and Danube rivers but Germany would close the one and get Hungary to close the other easily)
3) The possibility of a devastating attack by a third party while their own defense was fully engaged against the Wehrmacht - Poland had the USSR to the east who was, if anything, seen as an even worse enemy than Germany; CSR had a long border with Hungary in the south, and Hungary had a ton of grievances with the CSR including revenge fantasies about Trianon. Hungary would quite certainly have attacked them some time after the start of the war.
4) Both countries, especially CSR, having prepared their militaries almost exclusively in defense, not in deep attack, against modern armies. The Poles had some experience from the Polish-Soviet war and likely a more aggressive mindset but totally lacked preparations for mobile industrialized warfare. CSR had spent the 1920s and 1930s constructing bunkers along the German border, creating a huge fortress line that was pretty much their whole defensive strategy. And rightly so, from their point of view, since geography dictated that the Czechs had to stop German breakthroughs or else the war would be lost due to the lack of depth available for a more mobile defense.
There were good reasons why the Czechs folded in 1938. The main reason being that to go to war, alone, was hopeless. An offer of alliance from Poland, instead of land demands, would not have changed anything about that. At best, the British and French would have stood by and watched the two get slaughtered by Germany for a few weeks before offering/demanding a "meditation" that would likely have involved Poland and Czechoslovakia handing over large parts of their territory to Germany. The Czechs would have been done for after such a "mediation", just like they were after the historical Munich agreement, only worse now because the Nazis will have it in for them later. The Poles would at best have been severely weakened, Danzig would certainly be lost, the Polish army depleted, if not worse. Poland would at best limp away from such a war in a comparable state to Finland after the Winter War. At worst, the Germans would have crushed Czechoslovakia first by attacking from all sides together seht the Hungarians, then moved against Poland, unhindered by French and British hand-wringing. If the Poles are lucky then Stalin comes to their aid, and then bolshevizes eastern Poland while fighting Hitler. If the Poles are unlucky then Stalin comes to Hitler's aid, and then bolshevizes eastern Poland. It's not pretty, whichever way the dice fall.
Had there been a chance that the French and British could have summoned a forceful response to a German attack on Czechoslovakia, such as an ultimatum demanding that Germany submit their grievance to arbitration, backed by threat of war, then Poland coming to Czechoslovakia's aid would have made a lot of sense. In that situation, any escalation of the conflict, and any delay of Germany's conquest of Czechoslovakia, would increase the chance that the two western powers would enter the war and possibly defeat Germany on a prolonged struggle.
But as has been said already in this thread, the British were not about to commit to any military confrontation with Germany, and France would likewise not go at it alone. There might be attempts at bluffing from France and Britain, but unless the Germans lose their nerve, Poland and Czechoslovakia would both be defeated and partitioned.
And poles/ Czechoslovaks don't have to like... Take Berlin. They just have to blunt the German attack and then wait for the French to come in.
