Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [28]
In a physical sense, the agreement was carried through during the next few weeks. Germany got the Sudetenland and about three and a half million Czechoslovaks, most of whom were ethnic German. Subsequently, Poland took several hundred square miles and about a quarter of a million people, and Hungary got another million and about 5,000 square miles. Czechoslovakia became a truncated, indefensible piece of territory in the midst of a German-dominated central Europe.
The initial reception to the agreement was interesting. Chamberlain had been told by his military chiefs that he had to buy time; Britain simply could not fight. He came home convinced that he had won a great diplomatic victory; he stepped off the airplane, waving his umbrella and his little slip of paper, and assured the cheering crowds that he had achieved “peace in our time.” Daladier had fewer illusions. He knew his country had suffered a crushing setback, and when he flew home to Paris, seeing masses awaiting him at the airport, he feared for his own safety. Instead of a lynch mob, he found a wildly jubilant and profoundly grateful crowd. So did Mussolini; he went home by train, and when he pulled into the first station on the Italian side of the frontier he too was met by cheering throngs. Disgusted with this lack of martial Fascist ardor, he turned to Ciano and said, “Look at that! The Italians need a good kick in the gut!”
Hitler was equally annoyed. From some deep welling need in his soul, he had wanted a war. Not knowing that his generals might have tried to overthrow him had he got it, he was disappointed. He returned to Berlin, got out the maps, and started looking at the next target.
Popular opinion on Munich soon began to veer, however. The Little Entente was now ruined, and France’s carefully constructed diplomatic web in central Europe was torn to shreds. The Franco-Russian alliance of 1935 was also a dead letter; unconsulted and unconsidered, the Russians were left to draw their own conclusions about the value of alliances with the West. Within a couple of months the triumph of appeasement at Munich had turned to gall, and the names “Munich” and “appeasement” ever since have been synonymous with weakness and disaster.
As soon as the euphoria wore off, it became obvious that war was not far away. In the last frantic months of peace, there was a general scurrying about to tidy up affairs before the storm would come. Munich was like the gust before the hurricane; people ran around to get the garage doors and windows closed and to fasten down the shutters. For the next several months the gusts came more quickly, with varying intensity, until the storm broke.
Poland and Russia renewed their nonaggression pact. Italy turned on anti-French demonstrations and moved more overtly into the German orbit. In the Western Hemisphere the American republics passed the Lima Declaration, declaring their solidarity and opposition to foreign intervention. The United States pressed for stronger wording against totalitarianism but lost the argument. Britain and France did their best to re-equip their forces.
The initiative still lay with Hitler, and he did not wait long to use it. In March of 1939, he moved in and took over the rump of Czechoslovakia. There had been a Fascist-orientated separatist movement in Slovakia, led by the premier, Msgr. Tiso. When the Prague government deposed Tiso, he appealed to Hitler. Hitler summoned the Czech President, Hacha, to Berlin. The result was that he turned “the fate of the Czech people…trustingly” over to Hitler. On March 15, Bohemia and Moravia became German protectorates, and were occupied by German troops. The next day Slovakia also came under German protection, and Czechoslovakia was gone. Germany now surrounded Poland on three sides, as she had previously done with Czechoslovakia, and the southeastern-most point of her territory was within a hundred miles of the Rumanian oil fields—and within a hundred miles of Russia.
There was panic in central Europe, among governments and