Eighty Years Ago This Week

It was the British who blinked first in the crisis that had developed at the western concession in Tientstin in China. The Japanese blockade of the settlement had lasted some weeks and there was no sign that it was going to be eased; British subjects passing through the Japanese cordon were routinely subjected   to full body searches in an intentional humiliation by the Japanese army. After a few days of talks in Tokyo the British agreed in principle to hand over to the Japanese authorities the four Chinese citizens who were accused of the murder of a bank manager who collaborated with the Japanese. All the British got in return was that the outright murder charges against two of the suspects were scaled down to charges of complicity in the crime. The Japanese newspapers described the word with a compound adjective, which translated roughly as “hoary and crafty.” It is not clear why. The Italian foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano visited Germany for discussions with his co...

There was a disturbing echo of the Munich crisis a year before, when Albert Forster the Nazi Gauleiter of Danzig and Zaske,   his propaganda chief, were summoned to meet the F ü hrer at Berchtesgaden, in the same way that Konrad Henlein had been called to receive his final instructions before triggering the final moves to sever the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. Hitler had already declared a “war of nerves” over Danzig, but his discussion with his subordinates in Danzig translated almost immediately into ever more provocations directed at the Polish authorities. Just as they had awaited Hitler’s speech at the Nuremberg rally in mid-September 1938 as the likely trigger for the final moves, London now looked to his speech marking the 25 th anniversary of Germany’s victory over Russia at Tannenberg on 27 th August as the moment when he would show his hand. The British population were given an unmistakable sign that the government thought war might be close, in the fo...

The Parliamentary session ended on an unusual and acrimonious note. The question of when Parliament should reassemble was, for once, a matter of serious contention. The opposition support by Winston Churchill proposed a much shorter recess than normal of only three weeks given the menacing international situation. Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister, not only wanted a recess of the customary two months but also made the vote on the question one of confidence in the government. Chamberlain at least partly believed the story that he had been fed by one of his unofficial contacts in Berlin that Hitler was in no hurry to settle the Danzig dispute. This fitted with his delusion that he had got the measure of Hitler, and that no exceptional measure were required. Lurking in the background was the fact that a number of the aggressions launched by Hitler and Mussolini had occurred when Parliament was not sitting; not that they would have been deterred. More brutally, Churchill simp...