These headlines from the Manchester Guardian (p. 9) could be summarised: Yeah, but no, but yeah … The Sudeten leadership agreed to accept the Czech autonomy proposals (as revealed yesterday) as the basis for negotiations. Which sounds very promising! But at that point, news was received of an incident at Mährisch-Ostrau, where two Sudeten deputies (i.e. MPs in the Czech parliament) were insulted by a Czech mounted policeman during an attempt to break up a demonstration regarding Sudetens who had been arrested for possession of illegal firearms. One of the deputies claimed to have been kicked and struck by a horsewhip. The Czechs claim this was an accident, as the policeman attempted to restrain his horse. Whatever the real truth, the Sudeten leaders used this incident as a reason to break off the negotiations before they had even begun, as their communique explains:
The incident at Mährisch-Ostrau demonstrates that the Government does not control the situation sufficiently to begin the discussions in detail in the present circumstances with any success or with a possibility of bringing them to a peaceful conclusion.
Perhaps I’m cynical, but this seems like an attempt by the Sudetens to have their cake and eat it too. Even The Times, in its leading article today, calls this move ‘childish’ and a ‘pretext’ (p. 13).
Speaking of leading articles in The Times, there are some first reactions in its letter columns (p. 13) to its proposal yesterday for the German annexation of the Sudetenland. The first is from Vyvyan Adams, a Conservative MP.1 Adams strongly disagrees with this idea, partly because of the likely discrimination by the Nazis against the Czech minorities in the newly annexed areas (there’s just no easy way around the minorities problem) but also for strategic reasons:
The fortresses in the Sudetenland are a vital element, perhaps the most vital, in the defence of Czechoslovakia. Our ally France cannot be indifferent to the strategic considerations; no more can we. It is Nazi Germany which, more than any other single factor, has compelled us to rearm. A strong Czechoslovakia should be regarded as part of our own Air Raid Precautions.
Now, I don’t quite get the ARP reference here. Obviously he’s not being literal, but is saying that a strong Czechoslovakia helps Britain strategically. But why ARP? Is he saying that Czechoslovakia would absorb a knock-out blow instead of Britain? Or that Czechoslovakia’s existence makes war (and hence air raids on Britain) less likely?
The other letter is from Douglas Steuart. I don’t know who he was, but he wrote from the Junior Carlton Club, which means he was almost certainly a Tory as well. He’s wholly in favour of the annexation proposal:
Not only have you pointed out the unnatural and surely intolerable injustice of the Sudeten Germans being placed in a position obliging them, in the event of war, to fight on the side of Frenchmen and Russians against their racial co-nationals [sic], but you have specified clearly and concisely the only feasible proposal the adoption of which would effectively remove such a contingency and operate to the lasting advantages of all the parties concerned.
I’m sure he won’t be the last supporter, either.
A couple of other notes.
The Manchester Guardian reports (p. 9) that German aircraft have been penetrating Czech airspace, flying over Krumau in an effort to find out troop numbers in the area.
And today, the Daily Mail begins (p. 4) its serialisation of P. G. Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters …
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://airminded.org/copyright/.
- What do you call somebody who likes the way words look? I love the alternating vs and ys in Vyvyan; I think he should have pulled an e. e. cummings and called himself vyvyan adams, that would have been more pleasing to the eye. [↩]
Brett Holman
Post authorWell, that was weird.
Apologies to anyone who came looking for this post from via the RSS feed and saw nothing! What happened was that I published the post, and it looked fine, but then a few minutes later it spontaneously reverted to unpublished status while simultaneously deleting most of the post. Which was not a problem, since I still had a copy of the post open and just cut and pasted it back in, fixed up the links etc. Saved it and again the post was mysteriously truncated. So I thought 'okaaaay' and decided to do a backup of the wordpress database before I did anything else. But that kept hanging partway through (at a different point each time). I finally got a backup done (though had to download it as it wouldn't email it as it normally does), re-did the post and published it. Looked fine. But one last glitch, for some reason comments and pings had been disabled for it! I mean -- what the hell?? Where did all that come from? (Maybe the site admins were doing something ... a few weeks ago all my mysql databases just disappeared without warning, which was a bit of a shock, but they were restored after a couple of hours.)
If anyone has any idea about what was/is going on, please let me know. Otherwise, fingers crossed, hopefully this will stay up now ...
Jonathan Dresner
(Saw the post in RSS, clicked over with no trouble)
The only way that name could be improved would be to switch the 'a' for a 'u' and do it in faux-Roman script.....
Pingback:
Airminded · Friday, 9 September 1938
Brett Holman
Post authorI think I'd cleaned everything up just before you came along, Jonathan!
vyvyvn: ok, I'm off to get a deed poll ...
Pingback:
Airminded · Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis: thoughts and conclusions