Once More unto the Breach: Britain's Guarantee to Poland, March 1939

Abstract

In the continuing debate on the origins and ends of appeasement,' three generations of tough-minded historians have sifted through the ruins of Britain's pre-war foreign policy planning. After the war, western historians tended to condemn the Munich Agreement and its makers, and described the 31 March 1939 guarantee to Poland as the point when British leaders belatedly stood up to Hitler, though often with a caveat criticizing the exclusion of the Soviet Union. A.J.P. Taylor and certain of his students challenged this dominant interpretation; they argued that the guarantee was the continuation of appeasement, as it allowed for further territorial revision in Europe. In Taylor's view, however, appeasement was entirely justified, as it represented a principled attempt to avoid war. After the 1968-9 opening of the relevant British documents under the thirty-year rule, the third generation of postwar historians submitted the policy of appeasement to a fundamental reassessment. They emphasized the strategic and economic constraints which severely limited the options of the Cabinet in its responses to nazi Germany, and many exonerated the then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, of previous charges of craven behaviour at Munich. Strangely, historians have subjected the British guarantee to Poland of 31 March 1939 to a very different process of revision. Several historians have questioned the early orthodoxy, and offered a set of widely divergent explanations of both the expectations and intentions of British statesmen. Simon Newman dominates the field. He argues a continuity thesis: Britain's traditional foreign policy never allowed for the domination of the European continent by any one power, and Chamberlain's Cabinet maintained that policy even during 1938, as it resisted nazi expansion at all points short of war. In Newman's view, the only change in