(6 of 7)
Bloodless Conquest? Most observers agree, however, that the Fuhrer will accept no "solution" of the Sudeten problem, will instead keep this pet caldron bubbling as long as necessary to force Statesman Benes into an agreement. The kind of agreement Hitler would like to make with Czechoslovakia would force Czechoslovakia into the economic structure of the Reich and place her foreign trade under German limitations.
To put Czechoslovakia under this economic yoke, Germany does not have to go to war with Czechoslovakia—she already holds the young nation economically at her mercy. Although Czechoslovakia is nearly 60% agricultural (see map, p. 17), producing wheat, rye, barley, oats, hop-vines in Bohemia, potatoes, and sugar beets in middle Moravia, and 32% of her land is forest-covered, she depends principally on her industries for her favorable balance of trade, which in 1937 reached an impressive $35,000,000. From her first city of Prague come machinery, refined sugar; dull, blackened Brno (see map, p. 77) exports textiles and the top-rank light arms produced in the Czechoslovakian Arms Manufacturing Co. plant. Bustling Moravská Ostrava, in Silesia, is the Czech Pittsburgh; Bratislava the site of the Nobel dynamite works. Pilsen workers brew the world-famed Pilsen beer, produce heavy machinery, locomotives, rail equipment in the main Skoda foundry. The vital Skoda munition units have been reported secretly moved into the interior. At Zlin is located the mammoth shoe factory of the Bat'a (pronounced Bahtya) family.
Nothing but a trickle of these products could leave landlocked Czechoslovakia if Hitler decided to crack down, for most of the country's trade is carried by German rails or rivers to the German ports of Hamburg, Bremen, Stettin and Italian Trieste. This would leave Czechoslovakia outlets only through Poland's Gdynia on the Baltic, or Rumania's Constantsa on the Black Sea. Since both these nations lean to Hitler already, the harassed Czechs would meet little cooperation. More important, closing of German ports would virtually cut off Czech imports of Swedish alloys, which she needs to add to her own rather low-grade ores necessary for armaments. The Czechs are already apprehensive over the prospects: last week in Berlin a Czech mission was striving to reach an agreement on the amount of goods which can be carried over the former Austrian railroads to Trieste; for weeks the Czech chambers of commerce have been quietly urging merchants to shunt their shipments through Gdynia, in an early effort to get on the right side of Poland; in what is still apparently unofficial action, private commission men in Hamburg have been hiking their fees on Czechoslovakian transactions for the past few months.
Thus it may well be that the destiny of Europe will be decided bloodlessly. If the powers on whom President Benes now optimistically depends do not move to guarantee his political status quo, the time may come when the little President will be sucked willy-nilly into the German sphere of influence. If so, Germany will have bullied or bluffed her way to European supremacy and the whole issue of Czechoslovakian independence will have been swallowed by issues far graver and deeper.