Evening Post FRIDAY, MAY 30, 1941. WHO INSTIGATED THE WAR?

Evening Post, Volume CXXXI, Issue 126, 30 May 1941, Page 6

Evening Post FRIDAY, MAY 30, 1941. WHO INSTIGATED THE WAR?

Admiral Darlan's self-contradic-tions answer him. He states that Britain instigated the war, and in the same breath he cites evidence of Britain's peaceful policy—Britain's upholding of Germany against the militarily predominant France in the decade following the Versailles peace, also Britain's scarcity of offensive armament in the third decade of the century. This poorlyarmed Britain, who had been holding back France, "instigated the war"! Darlan does not say that in 1939-40 Britain failed to keep her military commitments to France in so far as these commitments were definitely laid down, but in a general way he says that. Britain did not give all the help France expected; which means that both nations were ill-prepared for a land-war, but as geography dictated that the land-war was France's responsibility first and foremost, it was France herself who let herself down. The unpreparedness of both nations surely discounts the idea that either of them could have been an instigator of war; moreover, the Darlan -iliarges, and the world-wide criticisms of Mr. Chamberlain's appeasement policy, are ridiculously inconsistent. Nor is it true that politicians made the war. M. Andre Maurois has quoted the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, M. Bonnet, as stating that on the eve of the war, towards the end of August, 1939, he called to his office "two of the generals responsible for the French army and air force," and said that, he was prepared to postpone war by advising Poland to cede Danzig and the Corridor, and was prepared to take on his own shoulders all the abuse of being "the betrayer of Poland," if the generals would tell him candidly that "France has no serious chance of being victor." Bonnet added: The generals answered me, each one separately, that they saw no military reason for postponing the outbreak of war, and that a delay would be as useful to Germany as to ourselves! Here was a French Foreign Minister so little influenced by "Britain's instigation to war" that he was prepared to "back down" and to sacrifice Poland and himself, but his generals said No. War followed, and Maurois has described how the first eight months were wasted on the French front and behind the lines by both the Allied armies, without any "effective preparation for the German offensive." Lastly, that offensive when it came against the French, at Sedan, was instantly successful, and France's immense though numerically inferior army never recovered. Every circumstance negatives the idea that France in 1939 was "a plaything in Britain's hands," or a victim of anything else than that tendency to play which Marshal Petain deplores. For the Frenchmen who continue to fight there is every sympathy, but for Darlan and his tactics there can be nothing but I contempt.