Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [2]
It was Germany’s neighbors who had most to fear, or thought they had, and it was they, particularly France, who soon discovered the cracks beneath all this paper. France had after all been twice invaded by Germany in recent memory, in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and again in 1914-18, and she was not disposed to put her faith in someone else’s expression of good intent. Even in the early twenties then, the French began creating their own private alliance-system against Germany.
France and Poland had signed a defensive alliance in 1921. At that time the newly resurrected Poland was busy fighting with Russia; just as in the eighteenth century, she proved no match for the Russians—though at one point the Poles did threaten Moscow—and now as then she turned to France for help. A French military mission helped the Poles keep the Russians away from Warsaw, and the two states signed an alliance in which both looked fearfully east: the Poles to Moscow, and the French to Berlin.
There were also assorted mini-systems in central and eastern Europe. In 1920, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia signed an alliance that became known as the “Little Entente.” Poland allied with Rumania in 1921, and Rumania then joined in with the Little Entente. After Locarno, France realized that her various alliances did not prevent German aggression directed toward the east and the south. She therefore reaffirmed her alliance with Poland, and she also joined the Little Entente, extending her ties to the southeast. Theoretically, she had created a diplomatic barrier against potential German aggression in any direction. Actually, she had now made it extremely likely that, if Germany developed any expansionist tendencies at all, the French would be dragged into another war—exactly what the alliances were all supposed to avoid. None of the treaties could disguise the basic fact of European life—a united Germany was potentially the strongest power on the Continent. France began to rearm.
Less than a decade after the end of the war to end all wars, and after all the talk of peace settlements, guarantees, mutual-defense systems, alliances, and treaties, the countries of Europe were faced once again with the old problem of military force. A concomitant to the bankruptcy of diplomacy was the even worse failure of the movement for disarmament.
At the signing of the military armistice in November of 1918, and more definitively in the Peace of Versailles, Germany had been effectively disarmed. She had been limited to an army of 100,000 men, which made the French happy. Her navy had been held to no more than thirty-six combat vessels, including no submarines and no modern battleships, and that made the British happy. She was not allowed to have an air force, and she was not permitted any military installations within fifty kilometers of the east bank of the Rhine River—the famous “demilitarization of the Rhine.”
All of these provisions were systematically circumvented by the German government, often unwittingly aided by the Allied Control Commissions set up to oversee them. The army, for example, had been envisaged by the peacemakers as an internal police force. But the German General Staff, officially broken up at the end of the war, actually reformed and disguised as a troop-organization office, built up an army in which every man was to be a potential officer or noncommissioned officer. The 100,000-man Reichswehr thus became the skeleton of a larger army, to be fleshed out when the occasion arose. The Allied control officers, all serving professional soldiers rather than internal-security specialists, allowed and in some cases encouraged the Germans to set up organizations capable of dealing with armored cars which would one day become tanks, and heavy infantry weapons and artillery pieces.
Denied an air force, the Germans developed a great interest in sport gliding. That was in the thirties, after Hitler came to power, and he would soon spring a full-grown air force on