The Red Army and the Munich Crisis

Abstract

Although enthusiastically received by majority British and French opinion at the time, the Munich Agreement of 1938 soon came to be viewed as a shameful act of capitulation. At the time, Conservative dissidents headed by Churchill, as well as many Opposition figures, particularly criticized the failure of the Chamberlain and Daladier governments to make common cause with, or even sound out, the Soviet Union, which had treaties of alliance with both France and Czechoslovakia. Defence of this inaction, as far as the British are concerned, has hinged on Chamberlain's deep-rooted distrust of communism and on military advice, specifically the opinion of the Chiefs of Staff, that the Red Army had been so harmed by Stalin's purge of the military leadership as to be incapable of effective action. This opinion they continued to hold until some time after the German invasion of 1941, apparently taking the poor Soviet performance in the Winter War against Finland in 1939-40 as more definitive than the much better record against the Japanese army before Munich in the summer of 1938 and after it in Mongolia in 1939. Up to now, assessment of whether Soviet military action could have made any difference to the outcome of the crisis has depended entirely upon subjective judgments about the effect of the purges. However, even granting that they were gravely detrimental to the Red Army's effectiveness, the crisis, if it had led to war, would have required Germany to face not the Red Army alone but the armies of France, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, that is a war on three fronts, which it would probably have had to fight without allies. Conduct of such a war, difficult enough in itself, would have been further complicated by Anglo-French naval blockade. Even with poorly-led Soviet forces, the odds against Germany would have been