Analysis of British Guarantee to Poland

Okay, I, a lot of this I owe to somebody called

Simon Newman, whom I've

never met, and who wrote an extraordinary, uh, piece of work as his, as his

PhD thesis, uh, called The British Guarantee to Poland

of 1939. And his analysis of what took place

and of the, the, what was going through the minds of the British

government at the time that we m- made this guarantee to Poland

is devastating.

And if you can get hold of it, which is very difficult, I recommend it to you.

But the, what runs through it and what shocked me

in the way that, you know, sitting late at night over a book,

sometimes something

really does deliver a shock to the mind, was the discovery that

not merely, because this is easily discovered, uh, not merely had,

had we

made a guarantee to Poland, which we had no intention whatsoever of f-

fulfilling.

Uh, we could not have helped Poland in 1939

if we'd wanted to.

We didn't plan to do so. Our military leaders knew

that we couldn't.

Our political leaders knew that we couldn't.

Yet we still made this guarantee.

Not merely did that guarantee give Poland control over the exact time

and place of the beginning of the Second World War, which it did.

That's also known. But that we made the guarantee because we

were afraid that Poland would come to a

friendly understanding with Nazi Germany, and we were worried that we would

therefore not have a pretext for a war which we sought

because we wished to reassert our position as a major power.

And this is clear from minutes of, uh, of, of, of cabinet

meetings and of discussions between major figures in British foreign policy at

the time. I would fundamentally attribute it to Lord

Halifax, though it's quite

clear that Neville Chamberlain was involved