A Day To Remember.

Seventy-five years ago today, Neville Chamberlain finally admitted that apeasement had failed, and failed miserably. Britain joined France in declaring war on Hitler's Nazi dominated Germany over the invasion of Poland. Historians will always be sharply dividied over whether or not it could have been avoided had Britain and her allies shown more determination in 1938 over the Südetenland question. The fact is that from 1920 up to 1936 we'd built almost no new warships, cut our armed forces to the bone and even scrapped our tanks. To crown it we'd not invested a great deal in developing what we had - so in 1938 we weren't in a position to make a stand.

Not that we were in much better case in 1939, but at least we'd made a start at re-arming.

War makes very strange bedfellows. Hitler's invasion of Poland was facilitated by the now infamous 'Non-aggression Pact' he'd made with Stalin, a feat that caught western negotiators completely by surprise. But it didn't last and barely a year later, he invaded his 'ally' and thrust the Communists into an alliance with Britain, a perhaps even less likely 'friendship'. I suspect that few realised, on this day as they listened to Chamberlain announcing the failure of diplomacy, that it would engulf the whole world, or that it would take five long years to destroy the evil cancer of Nazism.

Ironic that we now face an ideology as evil, as destructive and as vicious - and are just as unprepared.

Repeating History?

I wonder sometimes at the irony of history. Yesterday marked the 75th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland. It began with the bombardment of key installations in Gdansk (Danzig as it was then known) by the pre-dreadnought battleship KS Schleswig-Holstein, actually berthed in Gdansk on the grounds of 'protecting' the German 'minority' living there. Her 12 inch main armament did enormous damage, and her secondary 5.9 inch guns did even more, while in a co-ordinated thrust the army overran border posts and stormed into Pomerania and Poland's western provinces.

My local newspaper yesterday published photographic representations of the front page headlines of several newspapers published that day, and ran editorials pointing out how the propaganda of the period had mislead everyone. Thus, the irony. Reading some of the opening statements beneath those headlines (my abilities with the Sütterlin-style script make it a challenge!), one could be reading the pronouncements currently being made by Mr Putin concerning the 'obligation and need to protect Russian minorities' in former vassal states of the USSR. One could be excused for thinking they were written by the same speech writer.

History has a nasty habit of repeating itself, though not necessarily in the same places, or with the same outcomes. There is almost a feeling of 'here we go again' as western governments desperately try to ignore the rearmament that has been going on in Russia since Putin first came to power, and the naked aggression he has shown in 'reclaiming' parts of the so recently freed countries. Georgia was a trial run, the Crimea showed him just how toothless we have become. Now he's after the eastern half of Ukraine - with almost all the industrial development and the oil, gas and minerals. His air force makes an almost daily habit of entering Finnish airspace, and there are indications he's got his eyes on 're-absorbing' the Baltic States.

All of it using the same excuse used by Hitler in 1939 - to 'protect' the interests of his 'people' living as a minority in a 'hostile' country. The fact that his 'people' are being stirred up by his own agents to provoke a response, and that many of the 'leaders' of their 'popular resistance' movements are officers from the Russian Army is, of course, never mentioned.

That forces me to wonder; if the Ukraine/Crimea is to be Putins 'Südetenland', what will be our 'Poland' trigger to respond? What will be the likely outcome? Mr Putin has already openly warned that he will not back down, and that he will use his nuclear arsenal. Have we the guts to call his bluff? Or will the 'better Red than Dead' mindset hold sway and lead us into a spineless surrender?

Not a pleasant thought at this time of tension ...

The Final Dominoes Fall ...

Today, one hundred years ago, Britain and France declared war on the Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary, the French striking into Alsace, and the British moving the BEF to France. Reading the newspaper accounts of the time, the expectation was that the Fleet would steam across the North Sea, destroy the German High Seas Fleet in a 'second Trafalgar' at sea, or in their anchorage at Wilhelmshaven. The BEF was going to put the Germans in their place in Europe and the whole thing would be all over in a matter of months.

There would be no 'second Trafalgar', nor a 'Glorious First of June' at sea. In fact the Royal Navy suffered several disastrous losses in the early days of the war. The old cruisers, HMS Aboukir, Cressy and Hogue were torpedoed by U-9 in an almost comical series of blunders by the commanding officers, taking with them hundreds of Reservists. At the Battle of Coronel, Admiral Cradock's squadron was destroyed by Admiral von Spee's East Asiatic Squadron, and the raiders, SMS Königsberg, operating out of the Rufiji River in East Africa, and the SMS Emden in the East Indies, played havoic with Empire shipping. Jutland is best described as a 'draw', and the idea that the High Seas Fleet never again played a decisive part in the war is a myth. Their actions in the Baltic continued unhindered and would eventually play a large part in creating the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian collapse.

That is always the danger of propaganda replacing reality. Far from being 'all over by Christmas' and a nice tidy demonstration of the superiority of British forces, it turned into a rout within days in France and it was only the professionalism of the British 'Tommies' that checked the French retreat once the German onslaught was unleashed. That check condemned the Germans to a slow and agonising war of attrition, and everyone else to a slow bleeding away of their young men, and a serious drain on economies that the pro-war parties cannot have foreseen.

The 'Great War' swept away the 'old' European systems and borders, re-alligning territories and moving vast numbers of people - or marooning them in 'new' host countries where they were treated as 'foreigners'. It would, in the draconian 'reparations' demanded by the French among others, sow the seeds for a second global conflict and the rise of Nazism and Fascisim - and, ironically, in attempting to destroy the German economy - it brought on the Great Depression.

We can only speculate on what the world would be like today had Britain refrained from rushing into war and cooler heads prevailed elsewhere.

A Day to Remember

Today marks the 70th anniversary of the attempt in 1944, by a group of Wehrmacht officers, to kill Hitler and bring an end to his horrific regime. They failed, and suffered horrifically at the hands of the Gestapo psychopaths as a result. Their children were taken into children's homes, their names changed and then brainwashed into denying their own families. Nor were they alone. The Gestapo used the attempt as an excuse to round up and kill hundreds of 'suspects', sympathisers, political opponents and other 'agitators'.

It is fascinating to see that today is marked by memorial services across Germany praising those who made the attempt, and suffered and died for it. As I type the entire Bundestag is gathered at Bendler-Block in Berlin where Colonel Claus Philipp Maria Schenk, Graf von Stauffenberg, and his co-conspirators was killed. They are being remembered for their brave attempt to bring a swift and complete end to the suffering of their nation and people at the hands of the Nazis. Ultimately over 20,000 Germans of all walks of life would die or be condemned to Concentration Camps, among them Erwin Rommel and several other high ranking officers.

The memorial in the Bendler-Block.

One can only speculate on how things would have gone had they succeeded, or if the senior Wehrmacht commanders (who, like Rommel, were implicated and suffered for it) had acted swiftly and decisively instead of hesitating. I suspect that at the very least thousands of lives would have been spared, thousands of women would not have been raped and murdered, and we might even have seen more of Hitler's henchmen and supporters apprehended and punished for their crimes.

I suspect that, like me, most of those from outside Germany know only a tiny fraction of this attempt to depose the monster, and have even less idea how many Germans died as a result of its failure. Stauffenberg himself died by firing squad, but others died suspended from a meat hook, others were shot, gassed or hung. Col. von Stauffenberg's brother, Berthold, was strangled with a garrotte, revived and 'killed' again and again, all of it filmed for Hitler's viewing pleasure.

Perhaps we should all take time out to remember those within Germany who gave their lives and risked everything to work against the Nazis. Their story is all too often ignored.