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Articles
Poland vs. Russia & Germany: Did Churchill Pick the Right Enemy?
- By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH
- | March 26, 2024
- Category: Churchill in WWII Q & A
Q: Did Churchill abandon Poland?
(To the Churchill Project:) The Anglo-Polish Alliance was signed on 25 August 1939 but, was tentatively agreed to as early as 31 March 1939: The British would come to Poland’s aid in the event that they were invaded by a foreign power. No country was named. Britain lived up to her agreement with Poland when Germany invaded. However, in about a fortnight after the German invasion, the Soviet Union invaded Poland and the British did nothing. When the Polish Government asked the British Foreign Office for aid against the Soviets, Halifax responded that the Anglo-Polish alliance was restricted to Germany.
Winston Churchill became the new Prime Minister on 10 May 1940. The Soviets occupied Poland for nearly two years. Churchill had to know the intent of the Communists, and yet he did nothing. On 22 June 1941 Churchill crawled into bed with Stalin. Where was the statesmanship in that? Of course, you know all these things.
Was Churchill’s fight with Hitler a personal one? He knew that Communism was just as evil as Nazism. He had nearly two years to contemplate what to do about Russia. Churchill had several choices. The best choice would have been to let the Soviet Union and Germany slug it out. We are not talking about hindsight because Churchill had a clear choice at that time and time to study his choices. The Communists had a much longer history of oppression than the Nazis. —W.S. via email
A: Poland before the war
Thank-you for your observations, which are best considered in context of the time. Many factors need to be considered here.
Poland owed her independence to the Allied victory in 1918. Yet the 1938 Polish government was hardly a passive neutral, having joined the Germans and Russians in dismembering Czechoslovakia after the Munich Agreement.
Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck, who admittedly didn’t expect a German assault, took advantage of the Munich affair. Claiming that the Czechs were mistreating their Polish minority, Poland invaded and seized Teschen, a Czech industrial district with 240,000 people, and two other districts. In Parliament, Churchill was furious:
The British and French Ambassadors visited Colonel Beck, or sought to visit him, the Foreign Minister, in order to ask for some mitigation in the harsh measures being pursued against Czechoslovakia about Teschen. The door was shut in their faces.
The French Ambassador was not even granted an audience and the British Ambassador was given a most curt reply by a political director. The whole matter is described in the Polish Press as a political indiscretion committed by those two Powers, and we are today reading of the success of Colonel Beck’s blow.
I am not forgetting, I must say, that it is less than twenty years ago since British and French bayonets rescued Poland from the bondage of a century and a half. I think it is indeed a sorry episode in the history of that country, for whose freedom and rights so many of us have had warm and long sympathy.1
Promises kept
In March 1939, Hitler absorbed what had been left of Czechoslovakia after Munich. Realizing now that Germany would never be appeased, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain issued a British guarantee to Poland. “Here was decision at last,” Churchill wrote, “taken at the worst possible moment and on the least satisfactory ground, which must surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people.”2
When Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, Britain kept her promise to declare war on the aggressor. But the ground was indeed unsatisfactory: British chiefs of staff had earlier informed the Poles (who understood) that there was nothing practical they could do on the Western Front without the French, who did nothing. Poland was defeated in a few weeks, and by prearrangement with Hitler, Stalin helped himself to his share. The Second World War was on.
Churchill forever blamed Poland for complicity in Hitler’s designs by Beck’s rapaciousness in Czechoslovakia. He repeated his charges in his war memoirs, causing him trouble with exiled Poles, who published pamphlets attacking what they saw as a small matter compared to the depredations of Nazi Germany.3 In the face of such criticism Churchill waxed philosophic: “There are few virtues the Poles do not possess, and few mistakes that they have ever avoided.”4
“Favourable reference to the Devil”
Did Churchill make the right choices between the Third Reich and Soviet Union? “My thought has always been that Nazism had absolutely no eschatology, and would wither on the vine,” William F. Buckley Jr. once remarked. “Only the life of Hitler kept it going, and I can’t imagine he’d have lasted very long. The Communists hung in there for forty-six years.”5
That is arguably true, but we know it in what Churchill called “the afterlight.” Churchill’s attitude was based on the situation as he saw it at the time. Until 1939, the Russians had not moved beyond their own territory. Long after Poland had been conquered by the Reich, Churchill remained open to an understanding with the Soviets. Even though the Russians and Germans had signed a non-aggression pact, he thought it would ultimately clash with Russian national interests.
In the event, Hitler took care of that with his invasion of Russia in June 1941. “If Hitler invaded Hell,” Churchill famously cracked, “I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”6
With Russia invaded and America still neutral, Churchill was desperate for allies. It was logical to conclude that Germany not Russia was the greater expansionist threat. No one could see far ahead, yet no one worked harder than he for Poland’s independence after the war.
Churchill’s many efforts to secure an independent Poland are on record. Sadly, the war ended with Soviet power spread over Eastern Europe. One Russian who grasped what Churchill was trying to do was Ambassador Ivan Maisky. Our review of his diaries may be of interest.
Endnotes
1 Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC), House of Commons, 5 October 1938, in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, 8 vols. (New York: Bowker, 1974), VI: 6009-10. For Beck’s view German intentions see Melchior Wańkowicz, Poklęsce. Prószyński i Spółka (Warsaw 2009), 612.
2 WSC, The Gathering Storm (London: Cassell, 1948), 271–72.
3 Studnicki, W., An Open Letter from a Polish Political Writer to Mr. Winston Churchill. (London: privately published, 1948). Kwasniewski, Tadeus, An Open Letter of a Chicago Waiter to Winston Churchill. (Chicago, privately published, 1950), subtitled Let’s Face the Truth, Mr. Churchill. Both writers attacked Churchill’s critique of Poland’s participation in the post-Munich dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in The Gathering Storm.
4 WSC, House of Commons, 16 August 1945, in Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself (New York: Rosetta Books, 2015), 279.
5 William F. Buckley Jr. to the author, quoted in “William F. Buckley: A True Churchillian in the End,” 2020.
6 WSC, Chequers, 21 June 1941, in Langworth, Churchill by Himself, 276.
Further reading
Connor Daniels, “Why Churchill Allied with Stalin,” 2021.
Warren F. Kimball: “Ghost in the Attic: Churchill, the Soviets and the Special Relationship, 2021, in two parts. Part 1 and Part 2.
Richard M. Langworth, “The Maisky Diaries,” edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky,” 2016.
_____ _____, “Facing the Dictator: Stalin, 1946; Hitler, 1938,” 2021.
(1) “Polish government was hardly a passive neutral, having joined the Germans and Russians in dismembering Czechoslovakia after the Munich Agreement.” Czechoslovakia was dismembered as a result of the Munich Agreement between Hitler on the one side and French and British governments on the other. They bear the whole responsibility for it. Poland was not in Munich, and was not part of it. Regarding Teschen, it was given to Poland by decision of the Versailles Treaty in 1919. A year later, when Poland was attacked by Soviets, Czechoslovakia used Poland’s difficult position to take it over. Granted, taking Teschen back in 1938 was a horrible decision. But only from PR perspective. (2) “Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck, who had met with and admired Hitler, fell in with German plans.” Beck was not an admirer of Hitler. Where is evidence for this? That he met with Hitler? Of course he did, he was Foreign Minister. This view raised here was a convenient excuse for Churchill for abandoning Poland for the sake of Soviet Russia. The true is, “the West” could not win the war against Nazi Germany without Stalin and so decided to pay him by giving him control of Central Europe. This had to be justified to the public. Lies about Beck or hiding the truth about Katyn are parts of this effort.
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Response: (1) Russia was not at the Munich Conference either, and neither Russia nor Poland had any difficulties taking advantage of it. Arguing that Poland was entirely blameless in her prewar actions is as empty as arguing the same of Britain and France. “Poland was almost certainly the most disliked and her Foreign Minister the most distrusted. Poland’s pursuit of an independent line left her bereft of any close friends by the end of 1938…. The Western powers saw Poland as a greedy revisionist power, illiberal, anti-Semitic, pro-German; Beck was a ‘menace’, arrogant and treacherous.” —Richard J. Overy with Andrew Wheatcroft, “The Road to War,” London: 1999, 10.
(2) Polish journalist Melchior Wańkowicz met Beck in autumn 1939 during Beck’s internment in Romania. “I ask him whether he had ever seriously considered German attack. He keeps saying that he had met Hitler several times, that Hitler backs out of discussions, that he can easily be talked into different things, that he was influenced by von Ribbentrop.” —Melchior Wańkowicz, “Poklęsce. Prószyński i Spółka,” Warsaw 2009, 612. On the strength of these accounts, I have altered my text to say that Beck did not expect the German attack.
(3) There is no doubt that Churchill and FDR cooperated with Stalin at the expense of Poland and other countries for what they saw as allied unity. Nothing that happened at Yalta and subsequently can excuse to awful fate of Poland and other countries after the war; and nothing can erase the fact of 150 Soviet divisions in eastern Europe when the Western Alllies made those decisions. —RML