When Germany invaded Poland in September of 1939, England and France both declared war on Germany. My question is, Russia also invaded Poland from the East, why didn’t Britain and France declare war on Russia?
Because they didn’t want to fight Russia too.
It was very clear that Germany and Russia were natural enemies; their 1939 Pact was a pragmatic temporizing move for both parties.
Stalin (supported by FDR) had been begging Britain and France to join in a three-way Alliance. Their reluctance to do so was just one of many missed opportunities during the run-up to the worst war ever.
- Russia had already tried to formalise alliance with Britain and France, but this failed . Russia had wanted to get formal permission to enter Poland, and that is what stopped formal alliance.
*Russia had already been at war against Japan just 16 days before, so they decided they had permission to take up a war stance.
( Battles of Khalkhin Gol - Wikipedia was 16 days before Russia entered Poland.)
- Britian and France then WANT Russia as ally - a enemy of my enemy is my friend.. They don’t like it, but they needed to form deals to survive.
From a legal standpoint, the Soviet Union made the claim that the Polish government collapsed after the German invasion on September 1. So they said there was no longer any Poland in existence by September 17, when they invaded. The Soviets didn’t declare war; they said they were simply occupying an ungoverned territory to protect the otherwise defenseless people living there.
A disingenuous claim obviously but it gave Britain and France enough of an excuse to allow them to ignore the invasion.
This was actually asked at the time, at least in Britain, by non-hypocrites and those elder tories of the industrialist wing who had wanted to mix it with the bolsheviki since 1919 anyway.
Then people decided they’d rather fight one enemy at a time and have a really good cold war once that rival was eliminated.
The problem, too, was German expansion. They’d agreed in Munich that Hitler could taked the border Sudentenlands which had a high german ethnic population, Chamberlain’s “peacce in our time!”. Hitler then proceeded to roll into the rest of Czechoslovakia and very much embarassed the English and French, who had already been criticized for appeasement.
Since appeasement did not work, they took a hard stance - if Hitler wanted war with Poland, he would also have war with France and England too. I suppose the main reason they did not fight Russia was because it was not “backing” Germany, and German agression was the main target of their united stance.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding some of the above comments, but I wasn’t aware that Stalin wanted any sort of alliance with Britain until after the USSR was invaded. Everything I’ve read seems to indicate that Stalin was pretty well pleased with the shit sandwich he handed Britain & France via the Ribbentrop-Molotov treaty.
Not really. What Britain, France, and the Soviet Union really wanted was to avoid a war. They were all hoping Germany wouldn’t start one.
Britain and France hoped that if they made a strong public commitment to Poland, Germany would back down. They weren’t happy when their bluff got called and Germany declared war on Poland and they were forced to follow through on their commitment.
The Soviet Union had a somewhat more realistic view. They saw that Germany was going to start a war regardless of what happened, so they decided to make as good a deal as they could with Germany and not get caught up in the war.
They did not declare war on Russia for the same reason Hitler did not declare war on South Dakota…you do not declare war on sub national entities.
As it is, they could do fuck all about the Soviets. The British especially did not want to open up a front against them, since that meant war with the USSR in Asia.
By May 1940 Stalin must have thought he was in a good position. Germany was slugging it out with UK and France and he gobbled up part of Poland. He was secretly planning on attacking Germany at some point, probably when they were weak after the fighting in Western Europe. Almost didn’t work out for him.
Based on the state of his army, probably around 1950 or so.
Stalin: We heard shooting! We were curious.
Stalin, who had already signed a Franco-Soviet Pact in 1935 and had also pledged aid to Czechoslovakia (which it was much better poised geographically to defend than was France), strongly urged a “Grand Alliance” in 1938. He was rebuffed throughout, and wasn’t even invited to the Munich conference where Chamberlain achieved “peace in our time”; Czechoslavakia fell. In April 1939 with Poland now the target, Stalin repeated pleas to the U.K. to little avail. He was presumably sincere: he understood that Hitler was his enemy and naturally wanted military allies. The problem was that many in the West hated communism. Moreover any pact acceptable to Stalin would have allowed him to overrun the states of Eastern Europe (which of course he would anyway). For his part, Stalin doubted the West was ready for war. Finally, less than two weeks before Poland was invaded, Stalin signed his Pact with Hitler.
[QUOTE=The History Place - Triumph of Hitler: The Nazi-Soviet Pact]
In May 1939, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov gave a speech hinting that the Western Allies should get busy and talk to Moscow soon or there might be some kind of agreement forthcoming between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.
However, Prime Minister Chamberlain, leader of the Western Allies, was in no hurry to talk to the Russians. He simply did not believe in the value of a military alliance with Soviet Russia. In a private letter he even asserted: “I have no belief whatever in her ability to maintain an effective offensive, even if she wanted to. And I distrust her motives…”
[/QUOTE]
Stalin was ruthless and aggressive, and countries like Poland feared him as much as Hitler. Nevertheless and even without benefit of hindsight, Chamberlain erred by implicitly encouraging Stalin to turn to Hitler.
Thanks for all the responses, very interesting!
The USSR held extremely high-level diplomatic negotiations with Britain/France ( aka ‘The West’ ) right up to summer 1939, but mutual suspicion stopped any agreement.
Basically all three sides would have been delighted for the other two to fight to the death, then cut in at the last. In the end Stalin chose Hitler and a Pact was born.
“It felt like being among old party comrades.” as v. Ribbentrop exclaimed.
Which was unsurprising since the Nazi party was politically merely a copy of the communist party in structure and inspiration but charged with racialist overtones and Bonapartist imperialist fantasies: on the other hand, as Hitler was only too aware that within a decade the Red Army would be strong enough to subjugate Europe, and he only had a narrow window of time, he won more by the Pact neutralising the USSR than Stalin did by standing out.
Well, prior to the war, all of Hitler’s generals were advising him to wait until 1948 to start the war, since they didn’t think they would have the army ready for victory until then.
Lucky for the rest of us, he didn’t listen to them.
England and France were at war with Germany. Poland was east of Germany and the Soviet Union was east of Poland. Why bother declaring war against the USSR? They’d have to fight their way through Germany and Poland to get there?
No. For the British, just through Afghanistan.
And they would have lost India in the bargain.
Maybe. If Hitler had died in 1947, we’d have been better off having the war postponed to 1948.
Sure, we might have just fought a war anyway against a Nazi Germany run by Himmler or Goering or somebody. But maybe we could have just kept postponing the war until it ended up never happening. It worked for the Cold War.