Labour and the Outbreak of War, Summer 1939, Part I
1930s resulted in Labour havig "...no reason to trust the Government." [13]
In any event, the National Government got its way and the first peacetime military conscription in all of British history was implemented. With this, Parliament and England settled down to the last summer of the peace. At the same time, Attlee was hospitalized for prostate cancer, [14] and was unable to speak in Parliament throughout the entire Summer and early Fall of 1939, leaving Arthur Greenwood, the Deputy Leader of the Party, to speak in the contentious debates of late August and early September 1939.
As in the preceding year, all of Europe's attention was paid in the Summer of 1939 to what Hitler would do next. Throughout the Summer, as Germany stepped up the pressure on Poland, the National Government dallied in its negotiations with the Soviet Union. By mid-Summer, the Soviets, apparently bored with the British and also distrustful of them, began to look at Germany with increasing favor. [15] On August 14th, Vorioshilov, the Soviet negotiator, asked the British and French military representatives a crucial question: "Can the Red Army move across North Poland... and across Galicia in order to make contact with the enemy [Germany]?" [16] The British and French representatives were unable to answer. This was the decisive breaking-point; five days later [August 19th] came the Russo-German commercial treaty, and two days after that, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, was invited to Moscow. On August 23rd, as the British and French representatives were sent home, he and Molotov [the Soviet Foreign Minister] signed the Nazi-Soviet Anti-Aggression Pact. [17] This startling development, which caught the entire world by surprise, set into motion the Second World War.
Footnotes:
[1] Kenneth Harris, Attlee, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), p. 159.
[2] House of Commons Debates, 5th Series [hereafter H.C. Debs. by vol.], vol. 339, 3 October 1938, col. 51.
[3] A.J.P. Taylor, English History, 1914-45, (NY: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 441.
[4] 346 H.C. Debs., 13 April 1939, col. 19.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., col. 20.
[7] 336 H.C. Debs., 30 May 1938, col. 1778.
[8] John F. Naylor, Labour's International Policy: The Labour Party in the 1930s, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), p. 280.
[9] 336 H.C. Debs, 30 May 1938, col. 1790.
This, according to Naylor, was just a figure of speech. [See Naylor, p. 363, note #61.
[10] Naylor, p. 279.
[11] Ibid., p. 280, quoting Anthony Eden, The Reckoning, p. 61.
[12] Alan Bullock, The Life and
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