“Hitler counted on the moral cowardice of his foreign adversaries to seek any solution other than war, to hand him a victory by default – and he was proved right.”
By Robert Forczyk
IN SEPTEMBER 1938, Europe was on the brink of a major armed conflict. At issue was a territorial dispute involving heretofore obscure borderlands in Czechoslovakia.
The Czechoslovak First Republic (ČSR) had been created in the closing weeks of the First World War from the wreckage of Austria-Hungary in October 1918. Its birth was the result of a serendipitous mixture of American idealism and local nationalist exuberance. Yet it had never been accepted as fully legitimate by its neighbors – particularly the Germans.
Once he had consolidated his political power in Germany and begun rearmament, Reichskanzler Adolph Hitler was determined to crush and dismember the Czechoslovak Republic. He directed his military advisors to develop an operational plan, known as Fall Grün (Case Green), to invade Czechoslovakia. Although Czechoslovakia possessed a healthy economy and a strong, modern military, in 1938 it found itself diplomatically isolated and possessing few options other than a desperate military struggle for existence or abject surrender to Hitler’s political demands.
Once armed confrontation appeared imminent, the Czechoslovak government called for full mobilization. Britain, France and the Soviet Union – ostensibly supporting Czechoslovakia’s interests – made vague assertions about possible military action in an effort to deter German aggression. Yet Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and France’s Edouard Daladier sought an expedient diplomatic solution to the Czech crisis and only grudgingly began to prepare for the possibility of war. In Moscow, Josef Stalin carefully watched the developing crisis and considered employing a mix of diplomatic and military measures to try and shape the outcome in the Soviet Union’s favour.
While preparing his own invasion plans, Hitler openly dared the Anglo-French to intervene and stated that the Wehrmacht was prepared for a lengthy war. The German military had misgivings. In fact, Hitler’s own chief of the German Großer Generalstab, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, was opposed to Fall Grün, since he believed the Wehrmacht was unready for war. He believed an invasion of Czechoslovakia at that time could lead to a catastrophe. Consequently, Beck began working with other senior German officers to resist Hitler’s push toward confrontation. As a result, the Czech crisis accelerated the growth of the anti-Nazi resistance movement within the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH).
Thus, the outcome in Europe in late September 1938 hung in the balance: war or peace? And if war, could the Wehrmacht achieve a rapid victory before the Anglo-French or Soviets made their own countermoves? Was the Wehrmacht really ready for a campaign lasting more than a few weeks or was Beck correct, in that a military failure could lead to the collapse of Hitler’s regime? Was Czechoslovakia capable of mounting enough military resistance to frustrate Hitler’s geo-political objectives? Could the Anglo-French or Soviets actually do anything substantial to prevent the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia?
These questions are crucial to understanding the lead-up to the Second World War, but they have not been well addressed in existing English-language historiography, nor even in popular histories – most of which focus primarily on the diplomatic actions leading to the Munich Agreement.
Indeed, Munich is a painful memory for the West, since the Anglo-French leaders ultimately abandoned Czechoslovakia to its fate and the settlement proved to be one of Hitler’s greatest diplomatic triumphs – so the entire sorry affair has been swept under the rug, as much as possible. The Munich Agreement, forever associated with appeasement, makes the Anglo-French political leadership look unethical and foolish, which they were.
However, the Czechs were ultimately responsible for their nation’s fate and their leaders performed miserably during the September crisis. Other neutral nations – Belgium, Norway, Finland and Holland – were threatened by major powers in the Second World War and ultimately chose to fight, even though all were eventually defeated. Czechoslovakia’s decision to surrender without a fight was abnormal.
The Czech political class — urbane, intellectual and bourgeois to a fault — seriously miscalculated the international environment in Europe during the Interwar Period. Based upon the heady experience of independence in 1918 and the creation of the League of Nations, idealistic Czechs like Tomáš Masaryk and Edvard Beneš seemed to think that Europe had turned a page in history and the wind would always be at their back. The members of the ruling elite had a liberal, but rather rigid intellectual outlook which made it difficult for them to empathize or even understand other viewpoints, particularly the ethnic German, Slovak and Polish minorities within the new republic. Furthermore, the leadership was thoroughly secularized and pacifist in outlook, which made them look down with disdain upon the Catholic Slovaks and professional soldiers. Beneš, when serving as foreign minister, loved the League of Nations and preferred spending far more time in Geneva than trying to build bridges to Czechoslovakia’s actual neighbors.
Czech regional diplomacy often proved half-hearted and the most egregious mistake was the failure to mend relations with Poland in order to build a useful security relationship.
Indeed, Poland was probably the only country in the region that might be capable of providing any meaningful assistance, but despite French encouragement there was no chance for this relationship to blossom. Masaryk and Beneš loathed Hitler and his Nazi regime from the start but erroneously assumed that the League of Nations would simply contain him. Yet when international support evaporated in the mid-1930s and their republic had to fend for itself, the Czech political leadership proved completely ineffective and clueless.
When the danger did become obvious in 1934-35, the Czech government decided to invest heavily in concrete and began a construction effort to build a line of fortifications along their borders. Prague also placed large orders for tanks while its existing cavalry brigades were converted into motorized ‘fast brigades.’ Despite this, the army was tied to a strategy of positional defense. Although thousands of small infantry bunkers had been completed prior to the Munich Crisis, only a handful of the larger artillery-equipped fortified casemates were nearly ready. Thousands of inexpensive anti-tank and antipersonnel mines, which could have been emplaced in a matter of weeks, would have been far more useful in delaying a rapid German invasion than a thin line of squad-size bunkers.
Aside from the millions wasted on border fortifications that failed to deter or defend, Czechoslovakia squandered its military advantages. Unlike most neutral countries, it had an efficient arms industry which could manufacture all of the weapons required by its army. Škoda-made artillery and tanks were some of the best in Europe in 1938, with improved models just about to begin serial production. When the Czechoslovak army mobilized in September 1938, it was able to field just over one million troops, which exceeded the size of the likely German invasion force.
Similarly, German planning for Fall Grün was sub-par, with the OKH opting for a simplistic simultaneous ‘pincer attack’ from Austria and Silesia; even if Czechoslovakia could be sliced in two at the waist, its armaments factories in Bohemia would still be intact and churning out more tanks and artillery. The OKH leadership was pessimistic about Fall Grün, insisting that the Wehrmacht lacked the numbers of trained troops and artillery ammunition to succeed.
Incensed by the lackluster OKH planning effort, Hitler took more control over the effort and rejected the pincer strategy. Instead, he wanted the Wehrmacht to push in from the west, making a frontal advance upon Prague and the military industries around the capital. Nevertheless, Fall Grün was essentially a bluff, intended to intimidate the Czech political leadership into surrendering territory without a fight. Hitler counted on the moral cowardice of his foreign adversaries to seek any solution other than war, to hand him a victory by default – and he was proved right. He ignored the professional opinion of the OKH, even though they were essentially correct that the Wehrmacht lacked the means to fight a protracted campaign. Instead, Hitler examined the crisis in terms of morale and politics, which the OKH leadership ignored.
In October 1938, the Czech leadership and their military suffered a moral collapse and could not even offer feeble resistance. Then they repeated this collapse, even more ignominiously in March 1939. And again, it’s worth noting, in February 1948.
Aside from committing national suicide, the Czech leadership’s gravest error of 1938-39 was allowing their modern military-industrial base to fall intact into German hands. The Czech government made no effort to sabotage critical infrastructure, nor did the army leaders make any effort to sabotage or destroy their military equipment. Consequently, the Wehrmacht inherited a large stockpile of useful equipment that could be used to accelerate German rearmament plans.
Furthermore, in the Škoda works, the Germans acquired the ability to mass produce new tanks and artillery. Equipped with hundreds of new Czech-built tanks, the Wehrmacht was able to field two complete new Panzer Divisions (including Rommel’s 7th Panzer-Division) in the invasion of France in 1940. Consequently, Czechoslovakia’s rich military-industrial base would play a significant role in enabling the Third Reich to launch its campaigns of aggression in 1939 to 1941.
Yet what if Czechoslovakia had decided to fight in 1938? As with the other neutral countries attacked by the Wehrmacht in 1940, Czechoslovakia most likely would have succumbed after two to three weeks of fighting. While individual Czech soldiers may have fought well, their chain of command was likely to fall into the same kind of indecisive, slow-thinking funk that hindered most Allied ground operations in 1939-40. As it was, by not resisting in 1938-39, the Czechoslovakian government did not spare their population from the brutality of enemy occupation, which eventually caused the death of over 300,000 civilians. Beneš never learned that the opposite of war is not necessarily peace but may in fact be slavery.
In contemporary terms, NATO members have debated for years about the proper level of military spending and manpower mobilization required to adequately deter armed aggression. Oftentimes, the three per cent of GDP spending on defence is held up as a gold standard for members, as if this is some kind of magic number. Yet the performance of neutral nations in the 1930s shows otherwise. Czechoslovakia was spending 3.6 per cent of its GDP on defence and purchased plenty of modern military equipment. But the best weapons are useless if the will to fight is not present. Altogether, Czechoslovakia spent CZK 2.56 billion (about $87 million) on its border fortifications, which were essentially lost in a day.
Although the neutral countries of the 1930s could mobilize significant numbers of troops, they really were not prepared for actual warfare in terms of training, doctrine or planning. Nor did any of the neutral countries learn how to counter the hybrid warfare tactics developed by the Third Reich, which included propaganda, subversion, terrorism and intimidation to instigate a crisis. Instead, the neutral countries of the 1930s remained passive in the face of mounting aggression, hoping it would pass them by. If the neutral nations of Europe in the 1930s had taken responsible steps to improve their military and diplomatic positions, they could have rendered the environment far less conducive to armed intimidation and aggression.
For the Wehrmacht, Fall Grün was an unexpected bonus in terms of experience. Heretofore, the post-war Reichswehr and its successor the Wehrmacht, had been almost exclusively focused on training; with Fall Grün, the German military began shifting into an operational mindset.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, the Reichswehr thought only in terms of using brigades and a handful of divisions to defend Germany’s borders. Five years later, the OKH was now learning how to assemble and deploy multiple armies, in conjunction with Luftwaffe support, to conduct large-scale offensive campaigns. No guns fired in anger during Fall Grün, but it was a vital step in the Third Reich’s preparations to employ force to reverse the structures imposed by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.
Robert Forczyk is the author of Case Green: The Birth of the Wehrmacht from Osprey Books. A PhD in International Relations and National Security from the University of Maryland Forczyk has a strong background in European and Asian military history. He retired as a lieutenant-colonel from the U.S. Army Reserves having served 18 years as an armour officer in the U.S. 2nd and 4th infantry divisions and as an intelligence officer in the 29th Infantry Division (Light). Dr Forczyk is currently a consultant based in Pennsylvania.
