Traditional enemy

Press, 6 September 1989, Page 20

Traditional enemy

Sir,—Naylor Hillary makes one incomplete and one misleading assertion in his otherwise accurate summary of events preceding World War II (August 31). He says Germany was France’s “traditional enemy.” This is true only in a modern sense. The real villain, from the twelfth to nineteenth centuries was England, which regularly invaded France and its colonial territories in Africa, India and North America. Mr Hillary, unfairly, blames the 1930 s peace movement for hampering re-armament and encouraging Hitler. The greatest boost to Hitler’s ambitions and subsequent aggression was the supine Anglo-French attitude to Franco’s Fascist take-over of democratic Spain in 1936-39. Only Russia and the idealistic peace-lovers of the International Brigade gave any real help to Republican Spain. Later Soviet attempts to form an alliance against Hitler with Britain and France were rejected and the outcome was the cynical NaziSoviet Pact to carve up Poland and the Baltic States.—Yours, etc.,

M. T. MOORE. August 31, 1989.

[Naylor Hillary responds: “The ancient hostility of Germany and France can be traced back to the Treaty of Verdun in 843 A.D. which partitioned the empire of Charlemagne. Britain and France have also been ancient enemies; they have not been at war since 1815. Germany and France fought four major wars between 1813 and 1945.”]