(3 of 8)
For both the rulers and the peoples of Britain and France, this was an agonizing time. Again and again they had gone through brink-of-war crises over Hitler's insatiable and megalomaniacal demands, over his rearming of the Rhineland in 1936, his annexation of Austria in the spring of 1938, his claims on the Czech Sudetenland in the fall of 1938, his seizure of Bohemia and Moravia in the spring of 1939. In each crisis, the threat of war had reawakened the nightmarish memories of World War I, when tens of thousands of men had been slaughtered in meaningless offensives over a few miles of trenches and barbed wire; and each time the threat of a new war had ended with another few months of nervous peace, bought at the price of another diplomatic victory for Hitler. Yet even now, with the Fuhrer's armies invading a nation that Britain and France were pledged to defend, it seemed hard to believe war was really at hand. Virginia Woolf's husband Leonard recalled that he was planting irises under an apple tree. "Suddenly I heard Virginia's voice calling to me from the sitting-room window: 'Hitler is making a speech.' I shouted back: 'I shan't come. I'm planting iris, and they will be flowering long after he is dead.' "
Though Hitler had made no pretense of declaring war on Poland -- with which he had signed a ten-year nonaggression pact in 1934 -- the British and French response to his attack was glacial in its formality. Not until 10 a.m. did the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, summon the German charge d'affaires to ask if he had any explanation for this "very serious situation." The charge admitted only that the Germans were defending themselves against a Polish attack.
At this point, even with fighting under way all along the Polish frontier, it was still conceivable that Hitler might once again achieve his goal without a major war. Italy's Benito Mussolini, who had promised to join Hitler's side in case of war, telephoned Berlin to say that he wished to remain neutral; Mussolini had been telling the British and French all that week that if they , would agree to a new four-power conference (much like the one at Munich that had carved up Czechoslovakia the previous year), he might be able to arrange some kind of compromise based on the return of Danzig to Germany. Just before noon on the day of the invasion, French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet, a devoted believer in the appeasement of Hitler, telephoned Rome to say that France would welcome such a conference. He did not even mention any need for the Germans first to withdraw from Poland.
The British insisted on that, however, and so, after several anxious telephone calls between London and Paris, the two Allies' ambassadors in Berlin finally requested an interview at 7:15 p.m. with German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. They told him that unless Germany immediately stopped its invasion, they would "without hesitation fulfill their obligations to Poland."
All the next day, Saturday, Sept. 2, while the German tanks kept pressing forward, Hitler made no response. The British Cabinet met in the afternoon and decided that Hitler was stalling and that Britain and France should deliver an ultimatum to Berlin at midnight, to expire at 6 a.m. the following day. When Halifax proposed this to Paris, however, Bonnet said the French military commanders needed another 48 hours to mobilize.