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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Everything You Need to Know
- Sprache: Englisch
The Second World War is without parallel in human history. The sheer carnage is staggering, with some estimating over 80 million people died as a result of the conflict. Catherwood brings an objective, informative voice to the vast detail on the subject of the war's key battles, allowing you appreciate how it shaped the world we live in today. Discover everything you need to know about: . The prelude to war . The Battle of Britain . The USA's entry into the war . The Battle of Stalingrad . The Battles in Asia; Iwo Jima, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and much more.
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Seitenzahl: 311
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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THE BATTLES OF WORLD WAR II:
Everything You Need to Know
CHRISTOPHER CATHERWOOD
To Geoffrey Drinkwater Fleet Air Arm and Veteran of the Arctic Convoys
To Alan Clough Queen’s Bays Veteran of North Africa and Italy
and to my wife Paulette Niece of Lacy Foster Paulette Jr Veteran of the Battle of the Bulge.
Tables of Contents
Introduction
The War of the Millennium
No conflict ever fought has been like World War II. The sheer carnage is staggering. Experts now reckon that over eighty million people died as a result of the war; this is without parallel in human history. Since an unusually large percentage of that number were civilians, ordinary folk living far from what they thought were the battlefields, the Second World War was more horrific than any conflict for centuries, since the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. In Europe no such death toll of innocent lives had occurred since the Thirty Years War over 300 years earlier. World War II, especially the fighting on the Eastern Front between the Germans and the USSR, is often called the ‘War of the Century’ but one can argue that ‘War of the Millennium’ might be a better title.
The Scale of War: The Uniqueness of Death and Destruction
This book is about some of the key individual battles fought during this unique conflict. By definition, therefore, we will be looking mainly at military deaths. We will also consider the bombing raids, which entailed mainly civilian casualties, such as the Blitz in London, and the attacks on German and Japanese cities.
Even the battles themselves have deaths on a scale unimaginable before the war began – for example, over twelve million Red Army troops were killed in the fight against Germany in 1941–1945, a toll that dwarfs even the carnage of the First World War. But along with those deaths, it is now reckoned that some fifteen million civilians also died in those four years, a figure therefore higher than the slaughter in the battles that will be described in our book. All six million of the Jewish deaths in the Holocaust were also civilian and the same horrors would apply to most of the twenty million Chinese killed by the Japanese. War is normally about battles, but this struggle was different.
Before we go on to look at the battles, we need to consider the origins and causes of the Second World War. We also need to examine the question: when and where did the Second World War begin?
In my previous book The Battles of World War I, we asked at the start ‘why were they enemies’, ‘what led to the war’ and ‘was war inevitable’? In some ways it is easier to answer these questions when studying World War II. No one doubts that Germany was unquestionably the aggressor this time. The Nazis, Italy and Japan were all guilty. So we know whom the main enemies were, and that the aggression of Germany and Japan led to war.
Italy fought against the Allies 1940–1943, joining the Third Reich in 1940 out of opportunism when it looked as if Hitler would win, and leaving it in 1943, when Benito Mussolini was overthrown. We will look at Italy in this book but what that country did was not as vital as Germany and Japan.
But while the aggressors are known and undisputed, much discussion has taken place over the ‘what led to war’ question, to which we now turn.
When Where and Why Did War Begin?
The Second World War is often thought of as the ‘good war’. But that is because we think of it entirely in relation to the Western war: of the British plucky resistance to Adolf Hitler in 1940, of the Americans, Canadians and British on D-Day and afterwards in 1944, and for American readers, the gigantic scale battles between the USA and Japan in the Pacific.
But the story is in fact more complex than that.
British and Commonwealth countries mark the beginning of armed conflict as September 3rd 1939, with the German invasion of Poland. The Russians joined the war on June 22nd 1941 when Germany invaded their country. The bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7th 1941 marked the beginning of hostilities for the USA. As President Franklin Roosevelt told the American people when declaring war on Japan the following day, the 7th was ‘a date which will live in infamy’.
However, a new school of thought dates the war as beginning on July 7th 1937, with World War II opening, not in Europe or Hawaii, but in Beijing. To this way of thinking, the Sino-Japanese war of 1937–1945 morphed into the wider conflict in 1941 and can thus be seen as the real start of the global conflict as a whole. One of our battles, therefore, will be the Japanese capture and massacre of Nanjing in 1937.
In this case the war was under way two years before Hitler started to invade various countries in 1939, and we need to rethink how we consider the war. We shall look in detail at the ‘Marco Polo Bridge Incident’ later on, when fighting broke out in 1937 between Chinese and Japanese troops near Beijing. Certainly we need to have it in mind as we look at the more familiar story of Hitler and the struggle for Europe.
And we should not forget that Britain, the Netherlands and France had large colonies in East Asia back then, not to mention the biggest of all, the British Raj in South Asia, all of which were threatened by Japan even if war against the British and Dutch colonies did not actually start until 1941. Thousands of Americans lived in China as missionaries, and the USA had a long history of active involvement in that region, not least because they ruled the Philippines. So while this chapter will be more Eurocentric, the desire of Japan to expand at the expense of China and of the European ruled parts of Asia is a very major factor in the war.
And let us not forget that in the First World War, Japan and Italy were allies of Britain, France and of their associated power, the USA.
Let us return now to Europe and to 1933.
The Origins of World War II in Europe: A New Perspective
No Hitler, no Second World War … This seems obvious, yet we forget that perhaps World War II was not as inevitable as we often consider it.
In the 1920s Germany actually recovered from the economic crisis that afflicted it in the immediate aftermath of 1918. We usually recall the riots and near-Communist revolution in Berlin, and Hitler’s attempt to seize power in Munich. However, we forget that Germany recovered from its inner turmoil and settled down to being a fairly prosperous country ready to put its defeat behind it.
In 1925 the victorious countries of the Great War – the USA, United Kingdom and France – signed the Locarno Treaty in Switzerland with Germany. In essence Germany recognised its Western borders and in effect promised to behave. The Americans now gave Germany massive financial credits, which in turn created a virtuous circle, since this enabled Germany to pay (much reduced) reparation payments to France and Britain. This money in turn enabled the United Kingdom and France to repay their war debts to the USA. In 1925 the British Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain (Neville’s half-brother) was given the Nobel Prize for the Locarno Treaty, and the German Chancellor, Gustav Stresemann, received it in 1926 for similar contributions to peace between Germany and France.
The ‘Locarno Honeymoon’, the name given to the euphoria in Western Europe that peace would now be permanent, meant that everyone felt happy and safe. And Winston Churchill, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, kept going an earlier British policy, the Ten Year Rule. This measure drastically lowered British defence expenditure because politicians were certain there would be no war for at least ten years ahead. If Britain’s army was small in 1933 when Hitler came to power it was because Churchill, as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1924–1929), along with most other people around the world, thought that a major new war would never come.
We tend to blame the framers of the Treaty of Versailles for the origins of war in 1939. But there is a good case (now growing in popularity) that instead blames the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the slump in many national economies from 1929 onwards, of which Germany was but one.
Look at the Nazi Party’s votes before and after the Depression:
May 1928: 810,000 votes (2.6 per cent of the total)
September 1930: 6,409,600 votes (18.3 per cent of the total)
July 1932: 13,745,000 votes (37.3 per cent of the total)
All this is deeply significant. Before the slump, the Nazis were considered fringe lunatics. As the economic situation got worse, their vote went up – but it was still under twenty per cent in 1930. Only by 1932, when German politics were in chaos, did the Nazis gain significantly, and even then only just won over thirty-seven per cent of the vote.
What happened when the Crash of Wall Street began in October 1929 is that the USA recalled all its loans and ceased to subsidise the German economy. As the whole world then imploded financially, so too did Germany. And in that country, when things became hard, the German people began looking for scapegoats all around them for the disaster. Hitler, blaming the Jews and the German defeat in 1918, had as his audience a German people now ready to listen. By 1933 the Conservative Right, which had long since ceased to practise legitimate democratic politics, thought that if they made Hitler Chancellor of Germany that they could control him as their puppet. So Chancellor he became.
He was, as we know, no puppet. With President Hindenburg’s death in 1934 Hitler became President of Germany as well, and thus the Führer with whom we are familiar.
But none of this was inevitable – it could all have been different.
So we can perhaps now say that the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, combined with the effects of the Depression on Germany and the foolishness of non-Nazi reactionaries put Hitler in power and then created the trajectory that lead to World War II.
And it is now that we can come to the traditional version: once Hitler was ruler of Germany, war became inevitable: Churchill was right.
(Churchill was out of office in 1933, not because he was anti-Hitler but because he zealously opposed independence for India. But for now that is another story …)
The Origins of World War II in Europe: The Traditional Perspective
The sheer scale of the horror and carnage of World War I had alienated most decent West Europeans from ever having such a terrible war again. In retrospect we can see that appeasement with dictators such as Adolf Hitler or the Italian ruler Benito Mussolini, was a foolish move. We can see in hindsight that it would have been far better in 1936 or in 1938 to have stopped Hitler and maybe prevented World War II from ever happening.
(Our main emphasis in this chapter is on Germany, Britain’s main enemy. But the United Kingdom also appeased Italy, over the latter’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, and did not prevent either Germany or Italy from intervening in the civil war in Spain 1936–1939, in which Britain and France stayed officially neutral. And with Italy appeasement nearly worked! It was not until near the German conquest of France in 1940 that Italy actually joined Germany in fighting Britain, and the fascist dictator of Spain stayed neutral in relation to Britain and France throughout the war.)
But the key thing to remember is that people at the time did not know what we know now. Globally far more people were slaughtered in the Second World War than in the First, although in fact British deaths were to be fewer in the later war than they had been in the Somme or Western Front.
At the time though, people remembered the humungous losses of the trenches and felt, as we can understand, that they never wanted such a conflict ever again. What they did not realise of course is that Hitler wanted to have one, and that being nice to him, as British politicians tried to be after 1933, only made him far worse.
The other thing we overlook is that Britain and its Empire was financially broke in the 1930s. And up to 1967, in fact, the United Kingdom had global defence responsibilities that meant that in the crucial 1933–1939 period the British military chiefs were terrified of the consequences to Britain of a war simultaneously against Germany, Italy and Japan. By 1941 that is exactly what they got, but they spent those crucial pre-1939 years doing all possible to avoid precisely that contingency.
The other thing we forget is US isolationism. After 1941 the USA was more than fully engaged in the war and in 1945 – completely unlike 1918 – the US troops stayed in Europe rather than going home. But in the 1930s the American public wanted nothing to do with Europe and its Old World struggles. However sympathetic the President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was to the cause of freedom, he was elected head of a nation that was firmly isolationist in its views. Churchill felt certain that the USA would one day come to the rescue. But it took the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 for this to happen. In 1938, the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, was far more representative of opinion in the United Kingdom when he said that the Americans were ‘nothing but words’.
In retrospect the appeasement policy of the 1930s was a terrible tragedy, especially in the light of what happened afterwards. In 1938 came a real last chance to stop Hitler. Recent discoveries have shown that it was even more tragic than we knew at the time.
Was War Inevitable?
The history of war is interesting. As we saw in The Battles of World War I historians are always changing their minds. This is true with accepted opinion about the origins of World War II, except that most people agree that Hitler was evil. The first version of the history of the war was Churchill’s – the far-seeing and prophetic voice in the wilderness. He argued against appeasement and was proved right, in large measure not merely by events but by the books he wrote himself after the war.
Then came the revisionists, arguing that Churchill threw away the British Empire (which had been bankrupted by the Second World War). They said that this allowed the Americans to become the number one world power, and that appeasement was thus right after all.
Then finally come the neo-revisionists, who try to balance out the conflicting interpretations.
Obviously Hitler was a massive threat to world peace and to everything that decency and humanity holds dear. Churchill insisted on victory whatever the cost. Morally he was right. The idea of Hitler ruling an empire from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific (if he had conquered Britain in 1940 and the USSR in 1941) is too horrible to contemplate. We know now, for example, that he would have starved 40 million Russians to death as well as murdering all of Europe’s Jews. Britain may indeed have lost the Empire, and let the USA instead of the United Kingdom rule the waves, but together we saved democracy and freedom and destroyed one of the most evil tyrannies that the world has ever seen.
Munich the Needless Tragedy
All the arguments come together in 1938. Should we have defended Czechoslovakia, the one shining democracy in Central Europe, surrounded by a sea of despotic or quasi-dictatorial monarchies, and gone to war in October 1938? Or was it right to betray the Czechs, as Britain did in league with France and Italy, by signing the Munich Agreement with Hitler in 1938? This settlement gave him large chunks of Czech territory without a single German soldier needing to fight.
A brief recap: when the First World War ended the victorious allies created a series of multi-ethnic states such as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, many of which no longer exist today. These contained within them many large ethnic minorities from the defeated powers. Many ethnic Germans lived in what is now the Czech Republic and many Hungarians in present-day Slovakia. In February 1938 Hitler broke the Treaty of Versailles and reunited Germany with his Austrian homeland. Contrary to The Sound of Music story, most Austrians were overjoyed, since they were ethnically German. The poor Czechs now found themselves surrounded on three sides by a much bigger German Reich. And in all the Czech borderlands lived ethnic Germans – the Sudeten. But all of the main defences and munitions factories of Czechoslovakia were also in this region. War seemed imminent, as Hitler demanded that all the Sudeten part of Czechoslovakia be given to the Third Reich.
In terms of economics and defence capabilities, the British Chiefs of Staff were right that Britain could not possibly fight Germany, Italy and Japan at the same time. In 1941 it was only the entry of the USA (longed for by Churchill) that saved the day. So in terms of what we knew in 1938 the appeasers have a strong case, however immoral in hindsight. And as Churchill’s wartime Chief of Staff Lord Ismay put it, what happened in 1938 was wrong, but at that time the overwhelming majority of Britons and Commonwealth countries, such as Canada and Australia, were resolutely against going to war. Never forget that when Chamberlain returned from Munich, having betrayed the Czechs by handing all their key defences and munitions and borders to Hitler, that massive cheering crowds in London praised him for avoiding a war.
What is tragic is that we now know that the USSR would have been willing to go to the aid of Czechoslovakia. Right up until late 1938 Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, was open to a deal with the Western democracies to stop Hitler. But the British and French politicians so hated the Soviet Union that not only were the poor Czechs excluded from the conference to partition their country at Munich but so too was the USSR. Again Churchill, a former anti-Bolshevik, now favoured a British–USSR alliance.
Stalin was furious. He sacked his Jewish Foreign Minister, Litvinov, who wanted to unite with the West against Hitler. He replaced him in 1939 with Molotov, a Stalin loyalist who was quite happy to deal with the Nazis direct in order to protect the USSR. So the true and massive tragedy of Munich was not simply the betrayal of the Czechs to Hitler, but the alienation of the USSR. As we shall see, Hitler and Stalin were to come together in August 1939, to the ruin of Western Europe. The Germans, unlike in World War I, would now only have to fight in the West, since they now had a treaty guarding them in the East, with the USSR. The whole nature of the war would change, to Hitler’s advantage.
So in the short term the appeasers have a case. But long term they were horribly wrong, and that surely must be the verdict of history.
Therefore when Germany invaded Poland in late August 1939, the Nazis were able to partition that poor state with the Soviets, as we will see below. Britain now entered the war, but with the USSR neutral they were in a far worse position than would otherwise have been the case. Churchill was right.
But the war that started in September 1939 was in Europe only. The war was far bigger than that, so let us explore what we so often forget: it was to be a global conflict.
The War That Never Happened and Its Consequences
And we forget too that Japan’s original invasion plans included war against the USSR. If that had happened Stalin would have possibly faced a two-front war: against the Germans on the USSR’s Western and European frontiers; and Japan on their Eastern and Asian frontiers. This might well have been a war that the Soviets could not have won.
But the pact with Hitler saved the Soviet Union in their Western border regions (Eastern Europe from a British/French perspective). And as we shall see, a key battle on the Mongolian/Chinese border between the Soviet Red Army and Japanese forces determined an internal debate going on in China: should they go north against the USSR or south against the European and American colonies such as Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines? Japanese defeat determined the outcome: they would go south and risk inevitable war with the USA.
This changed the whole nature of the war. Stalin could relax with Japan until he chose to attack them after D-Day in Europe in 1945. Troops stationed in Siberia could be transferred to counter any German threat, as was to happen in 1941. A small battle near Mongolia changed the nature of the war and shows how interconnected the war with Japan was with that against Germany, thousands of miles away. The Japanese decision not to attack the USSR as well as the USA made a critical difference, as we shall see.
The Global Reach of World War II
When we watch films about the war most of them, inevitably, concentrate on the battles against Germany in Western Europe or perhaps those fought slightly earlier against the Germans and Italians in North Africa. The exception would be American films set in the Pacific, in the war against the Japanese. But plenty of British, Australian and New Zealand forces also fought in the Pacific, and often in much harsher jungle terrain. Likewise, and this is a far bigger distortion, around eighty-five per cent of the Germans fought on the Eastern Front against the USSR. That means that only fifteen per cent of the German army was involved in fighting British and American troops in the Mediterranean and then in north-west Europe.
Television series such as Band of Brothers or films like Saving Private Ryan do convey a wonderfully accurate view of what it must have been like to be an Allied soldier in 1944–1945. Films such as The Guns of Navaronne or Charlotte Gray ably demonstrate the bravery of those involved in clandestine war behind enemy lines and the moral dilemmas involved in such conflict.
But none of them show the major battles and battlefields of World War II. Only now, through television-documentary makers, do we know about the titanic struggles on the Eastern Front. Laurence Rees’s programmes World War II: Behind Closed Doors and War of the Century provide excellent examples. Books by Norman Davies and Timothy Snyder have brought the kind of discussion, hitherto restricted to university history courses, to wider audiences. We all know about the Holocaust. But how many of us have heard of the Hunger Plan, the Nazi programme to starve forty million Soviet citizens to death? This is almost four times as many Russians and Ukrainians, for instance, as the ten million or so Jews in the whole of Europe whom the SS planned to kill if it had been given the chance.
World War II therefore is much wider and also far more ruthless and pernicious than most of us have realised. It was a war without the usual rules – the Germans regarded Slavs and Jews as subhuman. The Japanese regarded the Chinese in the same way, and with similar consequences. It was, in that sense, not just a conflict but an existential struggle, what historians now term ‘total war’, with civilians as well as soldiers involved in all aspects of the fighting.
Moral Ambiguities and the Myth of the ‘Good War’
As we saw the West tends to think of the Second World War as being a ‘good war’. From a Western perspective, this is wholly understandable. Many people are still, 100 years later, debating whether or not World War I was a justifiable conflict. But the struggle against Hitler, and the vile Nazi ideology that he embodied, was a fight whose morality few would question.
As shown earlier, just before the outbreak of war in Europe, the USSR and the Third Reich were members of a neutrality pact that, for all intents and purposes, meant that Hitler and Stalin were allies August 1939–June 1941. The questionable morality of these two ruthless dictators, who soon were to fight on separate sides, led to unbelievable devastation. For it was, of course, Hitler who decided to break the neutrality pact and bring the Soviet Union into the war in 1941 by invading them in operation Barbarossa. That traitorous decision made the USSR Britain’s uneasy ally against Germany. It also made the USSR and the USA partners after Hitler declared war on the USA in December of that year. The Soviet Union remained our co-belligerent until war ended in 1945.
Now that the USSR as such has not existed for over twenty years, there are many who do not remember or know what this Communist regime was like. It is reckoned that during his time in power (1922–1953) Stalin slaughtered twenty million of his own people in ideologically motivated mass murder. He had ordered the deaths of over three million innocent civilians even before war broke out in Europe in 1939.
As we have just seen, it was overwhelmingly Soviet Red Army soldiers who fought against the Germans in 1941–1945: Britain and the USA did not land in north-west Europe, on D-Day, until three years after the German invasion of the USSR had begun. But morally speaking, there was no real difference between Hitler and Stalin when it came to mass murder, ideological genocide and totalitarian horror. It was Red Army troops who liberated much of Central Europe, such as Poland, Hungary or the now former state of Czechoslovakia, from Nazi conquest. The problem for tens of millions of Poles, Hungarians, Czechs and others is that the Red Army simply exchanged one kind of tyranny for another. Not until 1989, forty-four years after VE-Day in 1945, did the Soviets finally leave and allow those countries the freedom and liberty that countries liberated by the British and Americans, such as France or the Netherlands, had enjoyed since the end of the war.
For a Pole, foreign rule started with the Nazi invasion in 1939 and lasted a full fifty years until the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. That is an experience of war very different from ours in the West. There is a moral ambiguity in the Second World War that gives it a profound double-edged feeling if we look at it in the context of the whole of Europe. It is more comfortable to forget this aspect of the war and to focus on the tales of the wonderfully courageous British, Commonwealth and American troops who fought from D-Day to VE-Day and to victory over the Germans.
Finally, one can suspect that while most British people are familiar with El Alamein, the United Kingdom/Commonwealth victory over German troops in late 1942, American readers will be less likely to know of this battle. By contrast, people in the USA might know of the great naval battles in the Pacific against the Japanese, such as Midway or Iwo Jima. British or Commonwealth readers may not be acquainted with them, even though in terms of the war against Japan they played as important a role as some of the battles after D-Day with which people on both sides of the Atlantic are very aware.
So as we go on to look at the battles of World War II, let us not forget the context in which we should see them. It was a truly global conflict and one that has shaped the world in which we live today ever since.
Part One
1937–1939
Prelude to War and Beginning Short
The Nanjing Massacre (or Rape of Nanking)
December 1937
As we saw earlier, one proposed starting date for World War II is July 7th 1937, when Chinese and Japanese troops began eight years of continuous warfare that lasted down to VJ-Day and the Japanese surrender in 1945.
The Japanese always referred to their war against China as an ‘incident’, but when their full-scale invasion of that country began it was a war, whatever its technical status. Shanghai fell swiftly to the invaders and then in December they attacked the former Chinese capital of Nanjing (then named Nanking). There the Chinese Nationalist Army surrendered virtually without a fight.
So the Japanese decided to massacre as many innocent men, women and children in the city as possible. The later International Military Tribunal that investigated the slaughter estimated the death toll at 200,000 murdered, and the Chinese figure for the atrocity is 300,000 killed. Interestingly the Japanese figure is about 40,000, and the Japanese have never really owned up to the wide-scale carnage carried out by their troops. Tens of thousands of women were raped before being killed, and the Japanese army seems to have run amok. Even the German Embassy in its report was horrified at the sheer enormity of the crimes against humanity that the Japanese committed.
Because we start World War II in 1939 we forget that this atrocity took place. But since the Japanese have never acted to China as modern-day Germany has, for example, to Israel, it remains a source of acute tension between China and Japan right down to today.
Nanjing was only the start of a large-scale and eight-year-long campaign of atrocities committed by the Japanese on the Chinese people, with over twenty million of the latter slaughtered during that period. The attitude of the Japanese to the Chinese inhabitants was every bit as racist as the Germans’ was to the Jews or Slavs, something we in the West often forget, but which the Chinese do not.
The Conquest of Prague
March 16th 1939
Strictly speaking the occupation of Prague was a conquest, not a battle, as the Czechs decided not to fight the German invaders who took over their country in March 1939. For the Czechs it would be the start of a fifty-year nightmare since, apart from a brief spell of nominal freedom in 1945–1948, they were in effect to be under foreign domination, first under the Nazis and then under the Soviets. Finally, genuine liberty came with the Velvet Revolution against Communist oppression in late 1989.
How had it come to this? Czechoslovakia, as the country was named 1919–1939, was the beacon of democracy, freedom, and of Western civilisation and values in a region where dictatorship, anti-Semitic hatred and corruption was the norm. Bohemia and Moravia – what we now call the Czech Republic – had always been one of the most advanced, prosperous and tolerant parts of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire up until that county’s demise in 1918. The new state, created out of that part of the old Austrian Empire, also included the mainly Slovak part of the old Kingdom of Hungary and a less developed part of Europe called Ruthenia, which since 1945 has been part of the Ukraine.
But it was an artificial creation, rather like the nation of Yugoslavia, which so dramatically and bloodthirstily imploded during World War II and again in the 1990s. For as well as the dominant Czechs, there were the Slovaks and Ruthenes, both also Slavic peoples. However, ethnic Germans were living in all of the mountain areas that surrounded the Czech parts of the country, in the regions bordering both Germany and Austria. Until 1918 they were content, since their overlord, the Austrian Emperor, was a German, like them. Come 1918 they found themselves an ethnic minority within a predominantly Slavic Czech/Slovak state, and they resented not being able to join their fellow Germans in either Austria or Germany.
Then in February 1938 Hitler conquered Austria, to the enormous enthusiasm and joy of most of the ethnically German-Austrian inhabitants. The Czech half of Czechoslovakia thus found itself surrounded by the Third Reich on three sides, a strategically very dangerous position.
Czechoslovakia was not only a liberal democracy that believed in freedom and the rule of law. It had, in the Skoda Works, the most advanced arms manufacturing capability that then existed in the world. The army was thus among the best-equipped anywhere in Europe. Not only that, but the Sudeten Mountain regions that bordered the new Third Reich provided some of the best natural defences available. It should have been impregnable, and this is just what the German military leaders in the Wehrmacht feared to be the case.
In addition, Czechoslovakia’s territory had been guaranteed both by France and by the USSR. It is important to remember that back in 1939 there was no Soviet-Czech border, since Polish territory was then substantially in the way.
In 1938 Hitler wanted war, and the idea of reuniting the ethnic Germans living in Czechoslovakia gave him, he felt, the excuse for which he was looking.
