Originally Posted by
Barry Shnikov
Ah, Alexander Pope, thou should'st be here at this time...
Hitler most definitely was seen as a threat. The French spent millions building the Maginot Line; at the time of the invasion of the Low Countries Frances' tanks outnumbered Germany's and it had more troops facing east than Germany had facing west.
Britain had been increasing military spending exponentially for several years in the late 1930s - warships had been built and ordered, the RAF had new procurement initiatives in place, and the British Expeditionary Force was ready to cross into France at the first sign of an invasion. These things don't happen overnight, you know: think of how long the preparations for Raiders of Iraq 2 took.
It's also incomplete to say that Churchill had foresight and was accused of warmongering. Chamberlain's cabinet were well aware that a war with Germany was probably inevitable; their policy was to delay that for as long as practical, because they knew that Germany's economy was on the brink of imploding. Hitler bought time with the Anschluss and by annexing the Sudetenland, thereby gaining access to large supplies of raw materials (particularly steel) and an increased labour force.
Yes, in public, Chamberlain and his cabinet spoke of doing deals with Hitler and 'small countries a long way away', while Churchill was smoldering with zeal for blood and guts. In the meantime, Britain and France were desperately horse trading with other countries, particularly the USA (which had its own grudges against Germany) to prevent Germany having access to the global markets on credit terms. It sounds dull, I know, and isn't at all in keeping with the image of the war we get from Hollywood and Ealing, but the object of the exercise was to make it financially impossible for Germany to get to its feet, militarily speaking.
But the policy nearly bore fruit. The invasion of the Low Countries and France was a last-gasp effort. Mannstein's blitzkrieg plan left no possibility of successfully coping with counter-thrusts, it was an all-or-nothing strategy. If the French and the British had been blessed with better generals, or they had had better intelligence or not been fooled by the northern feint, then Army Group Kleist could well have been crushed. Germany had ammunition for only a few months fighting; apart from the armoured divisions, the German army was still transported by horse and cart (from the rail heads).
That might all seem rather detailed; but the front-page-of-the-tabloid version of history is normally not the right one. Hitler was taken very seriously by the rest of Europe.
It is generally accepted, and this is where I think you may be coming from, that he was hugely underestimated within Germany, first by his political opponents in Bavaria in the late 1920s, and then by those in national politics during the early 1930s. Hindenberg, notoriously, could never bring himself to believe he would be outmanoeuvred by a mere corporal.
Bookmarks