Truth is the First Casualty of War

Brad De Long delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU
Sat Jun 24 13:39:30 PDT 2000



>So Chamberlain declared his phoney "war" (drole de guerre) on
>Germany and spent the next year or so doing nothing against Hitler
>and everything feasible to get Hitler to expedite his attack on
>Russia.

That's not how I read it at all. The British mobilization curve during the first year of the war is extraordinarily impressive--not what a country fighting a "phony war" does. And a Britain that is fighting a "phony war" would be a Britain that makes peace in the winter of 1940, or just after the fall of France.

As to doing "everything feasible to get Hitler to expedite his attack on Russia", why yes, of course. The British government needed allies, and whatever they could do to suck America into the war on their side and whatever they could do to get Russia to change sides, they did...

Brad DeLong



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