real quick:
Nazis invade Poland 1939.
Two days later France and England and others declare war on Germany for that very reason and the greater war begins.....England after all had a fresh protection treaty with Poland.
Meanwhile Soviets sensing an opportunity and a necessity enter Poland and subsequently split it with Germany for the time being....a very short time being.
The Pre-US Allies are busy with Germany in the west. Britain was hardly in a position to invade Poland from the Polish Corridor on the Baltic to attack the German occupiers. The logistics would have been Godawful, the overall strategy unwise and the north coast corridor of Poland was ethnic German bordered by Germany on one side and Prussia on the other....how would you have had England invade Poland to throw out the Nazis? It was impossible.
The war progresses through it's various twists and turns and the US enters and Polish government in exile set up in England and Polish troops fight in Normandy invasion and elsewhere admirably.....and in the air.
As the war draws to a close the Soviets are entrenched in Poland, and Poland ostensibly gets some big chunks of former Germany albeit under now the Communist yoke.
The only thing different folks coulda done is to have attacked Stalin after the war with nukes and freed Poland and others in the east bloc.....woulda suited me. Coulda spared us the Cold War but I was born 12 years after WWII ended. they were a number of nations freed from the Axis occupation where it was impossible to attack the Axis on that particular soil for the Allies....and Poland was one of them but when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, he doomed his dreams right there, he brought the West into his war.
Here’s the history:
The USSR and Germany sign a pact; on Sep 1 the Nazis invade from the West. The Brits declare war but do nothing.
On Sep 17 the Soviets invade from the East, as previously agreed to and not from ‘sensing opportunity’. The Brits do nothing.
So Britain’s guarantee meant -as Patrick Buchanan pointed out - nothing. I wouldn’t have had the Brits invade Germany. That is, I would not have given the Polish gvt any guarantees, either. After all, they knew in advance that the “logistics would have been Godawful, the overall strategy unwise and the north coast corridor of Poland was ethnic German bordered by Germany on one side and Prussia on the other” So why the guarantee? What was the point? How did it change the Polish government’s behavior, except for the worse in that they assumed they had an ally.
So the declaration of war was a sham.