The Huskar Social Union wrote:Thermodolia wrote:No Versailles was to fucking weak and not enforced. If the British had put aside their distrust of the French and gone with the French version there wouldn’t haven’t been any WW2.
Hell if they had threatened to invade Germany after they rearmed the Rhineland WW2 would have been a total German embarrassment
If i remember Hitler actually had orders for the german military to retreat from the rhineland if it was challenged by the French, he only sent a handful of battalions too i believe, nothing that could have taken on the french army in an immediate fight. But france had its own issues at that time.
Not doing so actually kind of fucked over the allies come 1940, as the Belgians switched to a policy of neutrality after the Germans reoccupied the Rhineland and saw that the French did nothing and thus didnt want to rely on them as much as they did before. As the original French plan was to meet the Germans in northern Belgium along the Meuse river with the Belgian army, however they were not able to take up positions in Belgian soil because of Belgiums new foreign policy, so when Belgium was invaded they were not quick enough to take up those positions and had to fight further west in open ground which hampered their plans.
Missed chances to stop Nazi Germany's aggression in its tracks:
1936, when a militarily unprepared German army gambled the Rhineland back under its control.
1938, when German officers secretly urged Western representatives at Munich to take a hard stance against Hitler to create a pretext for couping him out of power.
1939, when the vast majority of the German military was engaged in Poland, with Germany's western flank and its core industries virtually undefendened with Germany having less than 20 divisions against the combined 120+ divisions of the Allies standing at the border.
1940, when the French failed to realize that the bulk of the German tank forces was slogging its way through the Ardennes forests, where they could have easily been trapped and destroyed, before it was too late.
So yeah all in all, that's quite an example of hindsight being 20/20.