Posted: Jun 02, 2016 11:09 am
jamest wrote:
I'm not questioning the [with hindsight] judgement that Britain & France probably should have acted quicker against Germany (even though beating Germany in 1936 would NOT have been a "rout"),
Staggering, breathtaking ignorance and stupidity.
Even a cursory glance at the history books would show what nonsense jamest has written.
From the Wikipedia page on the Rhineland re-militarization with a few highlilghts:
The Rhineland coup is often seen as the moment when Hitler could have been stopped with very little effort. The American journalist William L. Shirer wrote if the French had marched into the Rhineland,
that almost certainly would have been the end of Hitler, after which history might have taken quite a different and brighter turn than it did, for the dictator could never have survived such a fiasco...France's failure to repel the Wehrmacht battalions and Britain's failure to back her in what would have been nothing more than a police action was a disaster for the West from which sprang all the later ones of even greater magnitude. In March 1936 the two Western democracies, were given their last chance to halt, without the risk of a serious war, the rise of a militarized, aggressive, totalitarian Germany and, in, fact-as we have seen Hitler admitting-bring the Nazi dictator and his regime tumbling down. They let the chance slip.
Hitler:
The forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-racking in my life. If the French had then marched into the Rhineland we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.
Additionally:
A German officer assigned to the Bendlerstrasse during the crisis told H. R. Knickerbocker during the Spanish Civil War: "I can tell you that for five days and five nights not one of us closed an eye. We knew that if the French marched, we were done. We had no fortifications, and no army to match the French. If the French had even mobilized, we should have been compelled to retire." The general staff, the officer said, considered Hitler's action suicidal.[120] General Heinz Guderian, a German general interviewed by French officers after the Second World War, claimed: "If you French had intervened in the Rhineland in 1936 we should have been sunk and Hitler would have fallen."
jamest should really think a little bit more before posting such rubbish.