How Hitler benefited from the Allies’ mutual distrust

In February 1939 Edouard Daladier, the French premier, told the US ambassador William Bullitt that ‘he fully expected to be betrayed by the British’, whose prime minister was ‘a desiccated stick, the King a moron and the Queen an excessively ambitious woman’. The British had become so feeble, he said, that they would betray all their friends rather than stand up to Germany and Italy. The British harboured similar views of France. Even when it came to declaring war in 1939, Chamberlain had to wait many hours for Daladier to follow his lead. Daladier then merely said: ‘We are waging war because it has been thrust on us.’

R.T. Howard’s examination of how British and French intelligence spied on the Nazi threat shows how their efforts were continually dogged by such dislike and distrust. Even during the Weimar period, Paris was almost hysterical about German rearmament and attempted to pull the British into a much tighter alliance, something which London stoutly resisted.