1939: Countdown to War (edition 2010)

It's not necessarily that this is a bad book, but rather that Overy has already written The Road to War, an excellent work offering a much broader investigation of the leadup to war. (Both in terms of the period covered and the nations involved.)

1939 presents a more focused view, narrowing in on a handful of events for a trio of actors. [Germany, Great Britain, and France. Poland gets a bit of discussion, but as they were largely a passive actor in terms of whether it would be a local war or a global one, their actions are primarily presented in relation to the other three.] Though more fine-grained at times than Road, I'd certainly recommend the latter before this book. In the end, I'd say that this work feels somewhat superfluous, and is for those who already know the general overview but want a detailed accounting of the actions taken in those final days. ( )

This is a short, focused book about the few months in 1939 that led to war, in particular the actions, beliefs, hopes, fears of key players all of whom wanted to avoid war, but at different levels. Hitler wanted a short, sharp war with Poland and didn’t believe that France and Britain would truly declare war in support of Poland; leaders of France and Britain wanted to avoid war and they grasped at straws of intelligence and rumours in the effort to do so, but they knew from bitter experience that Hitler could not be trusted. As Overy puts it, “All the sides eventually involved in the crisis in August and September that led to world war were locked into a collision course from the spring of 1939. Poland was determined not to concede to German demands, and was armed with an international guarantee to strengthen that determination”.

Overy argues that Chamberlain felt a “deep sense of personal betrayal” when Hitler broke his word and occupied the Czech state on 15 March. From that date forward, though he always preferred peace to war, he had few illusions about Hitler and he “turned his singleness of purpose and unyielding temperament to the task of obstructing any further violence to the European order”. Overy refutes those who charge Chamberlain with seeking further appeasement to avoid war: “Historians have been generally unwilling to concede that Chamberlain and Daladier were committed to war rather than to further appeasement. This view is at odds with the evidence”. Chamberlain may have fought to the last minute to find solutions, but “on the central issue of honouring the pledge to wage war when Poland was attacked there is no evidence that he would have abandoned it”.

Looking back, the course of events looks linear, but Overy is very good at depicting the fog of events and the uncertainties of decision-making for those involved in the crises, all recognizing that war would mean a general, possibly world-war, and the deaths of countless numbers of people: “Insufficient account is taken in all the final days of drama of the extraordinary toll imposed on those at the very centre of events that tumbled over each other in bewildering profusion…All those involved fell prey to debilitating bouts of tension, uncertainty and anxiety, and it is little surprise that frayed nerves and hurried thoughts made democratic politics more difficult to conduct in the final days of crisis”. There was also the very natural human tendency to seek collaboration of already held views and to discount those at odds when sifting through intelligence and rumours. For the Germans this meant finding straws to confirm Hitler’s belief that Britain and France would back down. For Britain and France, it meant seeking any hint in words or phrases that Hitler would back down. These “mental boxes” provoked a “growing irrationality in which the wider picture of the longer causes of the confrontation were abandoned…”. There was, in addition, a sense of events taking over and as those involved “grew more steadily subject to the mental pressures and physical debilitation of long periods of intense labour with little sleep”, it was “increasingly difficult to think in any terms outside the immediate crisis for the moment or to consider the larger consequences”.

Did Hitler want a general, world war? Overy argues no. He sides with those who argue that Hitler wanted war with Poland to “flesh out the central European empire and open the way for the eventual confrontation with Stalin’s Soviet Union”, as part of fulfilling a German “geopolitical fantasy” about carving out from Eastern Europe “a larger and more savage version of the Habsburg Empire”.

In the end, though the honour of their pledge to Poland was important for Britain and France, “the reality of war in 1939 was not to save Poland from a cruel occupation but to save Britain and France from the dangers of a disintegrating world”.

A thoughtful, insightful book on the fateful months and decisions that led to WWII, not without lessons for today, particularly on the tendency to be trapped inside mental boxes and to seek collaboration of views rather than refutations that could require reassessments.