I cannot blame the Belgians for 1940. Belgium is a tiny country. It could not be expected to stand up to the might of Nazi Germany.
No, that role was the duty of the major Western powers: France, Britain and the United States. France failed because of a combination of atrocious strategy and moral fear of a replay of the devastation of World War I. Britain also failed in the field in 1940, but was saved by her “walls of water” and by German strategic blunders in the air war.
But the greatest failure was that of the Americans, who pretended that the fate of free Europe had nothing to do with America, that America could remain aloof and out of the picture and not be attacked. Of course this was always ridiculous, and when the Americans were finally attacked, they proved as militarily incompetent, initially, as the French and the British: an entire US Army surrendered in short order in the Philippines, and most of the US Navy was blown up at the pier, caught utterly unprepared at Pearl Harbor. America, too, was protected by her walls of water long enough to recover and get her production on-line. France had no walls of water, and had no room to recover from the surprise: Paris is only a bit over 100 miles from the border.
What SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED, had the French, British and Americans had any courage and intestinal fortitude, was that all three should have intervened when Hitler rearmed the Rhineland in violation of the World War I Armistice. But none had the courage. The US turned its eyes aside and Britain and France caved diplomatically for the Anschluss. Only with the invasion of Poland did Britain and France finally bestir themselves to the inevitable war, but even then the Americans played the coward and remained out of the war.
If America could not bestir herself to resist the Nazis in 1936, or 1937, or 1938, or 1939, or 1940, or even 1941, how could little Belgium be expected to do anything effective against them.
The behavior of all of the Western powers: Britain with Chamberlain, France with Maginot, and the US with cowardly ostrich-hood, were all equally contemptible. Hoping that little Belgium could hold any line when the three great Western powers were cowering, wetting their pants, or pretending that the conquest of the world by evil was not their concern, was as foolish as the American, British and French strategy of the period.
What sticks in my craw is that Americans think that French performance in 1940 is to be crowed from the rooftops as an example of French weakness, while forgetting that the AMERICAN performance in 1940 was a display of even worse moral cowardice. PRETENDING that Hitler was of no concern to America - and that’s all it was, pretence - was not simply an “error” by the Americans, it was moral cowardice of the rankest sort. France lost in 1940, but she FOUGHT. America cowered in her cave and hoped the crocodile would eat her last. She finally got hers at Pearl Harbor and Bataan, but it would have been better had all three Western Powers stood up like men and FACED the threat before it became a calamity.
there seems to be a cyclic pattern of war and peace
I percieve this British "catch and release" stunt by Oddmanojob as a diplomatic tool to buy more time in order to keep the centrifuges spinning.
So sad that, once again, all we can do is sit and wait for the first punch to be thrown
But you are correct, the Allies should have stepped in when when Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland.
But that would have caused hard feelings, France was Germany's second largest trading partner.
I think you are applying 100% hindsight to judging American in 1936-40. Yes, I wish that everyone had shaken off their peacetime stupor and listened to Churchill, but there were very few voices of foresight anywhere in the world then. It was not a case of “moral cowardice” then for America — it was a combination of distance, ignorance, and peacetime complacency. Europe had basically flipped the bird to America since 1919 and made it clear no US involvement in European affairs was wanted or needed...... and Americans largely reciprocated the attitude..... since Europe was viewed as its own entity with its own problems and Europeans themselves (with few exceptions) were not expecting or seeking any help from America until it was just about too late. Why do you demand that 1930s Americans have vastly more strategic insight than everyone in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, central Europe, etc.? If European governments were not screaming for US intervention, why exactly was the USA supposed to have so much more insight and “moral courage” than the millions of people living directly in Hitler’s shadow?
If virtually all of the leadership and populations of Germany’s neighbors were as monumentally ignorant and complacent as we know them to have been, how exactly were Americans living 3000-6000 miles from the scene supposed to be far more cognizant of the threat? Sure, it would have been great had there been budding Churchills everywhere then, but the fact remains that the countries facing the greatest and most immediate threat were, with a few notable exceptions, immensely naive, gullible, fatuous, and servile toward Hitler’s Germany until it was too late (and definitely too late for tens of millions).
Blame the ostrich mentality of European political parties, journalists, and leaders throughout the 1930s first, please.
fwiw, a good part of my family is from Belgium and was living there in 1940, becoming war refugees in May 1940 because they refused to live under Hitler’s rule and were fortunate enough to be able to escape (no one was of military age - my grandfather was a WWI veteran and his children were under age 14). We don’t let the Belgian government off the hook so easily, either — the obsession with a hopeless neutrality led them to decline to make any signficant preparations to coordinate military defences with France and the UK, which guaranteed that when the allied armies rushed north to try to meet the invasion onslaught they were in grave danger of being carved to pieces (even if they hadn’t been completely surprised by the Ardennes offensive). The Belgian leadership had a lot to answer for too, although as you note they had no chance without the big powers - but they did nothing to improve the prospects of successful French and British aid because they were so wobbly before Hitler.