The Forced War

The Forced War – When Peaceful Revision Failed by history professor David L. Hoggan is the result of years of archival research, diplomatic transcripts, and firsthand testimony. Based on the author's Harvard University doctoral dissertation, this masterful study of the origins of the Second World War is diplomatic history of the first order. It was first published in German as Der erzwungene Krieg, the first English language edition was published by the Institute for Historical Review (USA) in 1989.

Content

The Forced War earned praise from the eminent American historian and sociologist Harry E. Barnes, who called it "the first thorough study of the responsibility for the causes of the Second World War in any language ... likely to remain the definitive revisionist work on this subject for many years." David Hoggan explains why Hitler decided to attack Poland in 1939 and examines the shortsighted policies that made war all but inevitable. He examines the familiar claims about British "appeasement," the "shameful" Munich Agreement, and the "rape" of Czechoslovakia. He dismantles the often-repeated charge of sole German responsibility for the 1939 war, which for many years has been a centerpiece of the prevailing narrative of twentieth century history.

Britain's actual foreign policy moves following its fateful 31 March 1939 "blank check" guarantee to Poland, Hoggan writes, "were directed unrelentingly toward war." During the months leading to the outbreak of hostilities, he adds, "Britain was encouraging Poland to adopt a hostile policy toward Germany despite the generous terms which Hitler had offered for a lasting German-Polish settlement." "The unreasonable attitude adopted by the Polish government in 1939 is no mystery when one considers the grandiose British assurances to Poland after August 1938," Hoggan concludes. "The Polish leaders made a German-Polish war inevitable by creating a permanent crisis and refusing to negotiate for its solution.

Book review

This is a review of David L. Hoggan’s “The Forced War.” It is not a tale of inevitability, but of refusal. Refusal to negotiate, refusal to listen, and a Western policy that ensured war. Hoggan shows that 1939 was not fate. It was a decision. David L. Hoggan’s “The Forced War” is not a work of academic speculation. It is the result of years of archival research, diplomatic transcripts, and firsthand testimony. What follows is a condensed account of his findings, drawn from documentary evidence and grounded in facts long buried beneath postwar mythology. Also, to be clear, because this always needs to be stated, this is a book review and a presentation of the information gleaned from Hoggan, not my own original research. The Second World War did not erupt like a storm from nowhere. It was not the consequence of madness or fate. It was summoned, summoned by treaties broken in silence, by games of bluff and betrayal, by men who mistook prestige for power and dogma for diplomacy. In Hoggan’s account, the war of 1939 was not inevitable. It was manufactured. This is not a tale of blind escalation or an uncontrollable clash of ideologies. It is the record of deliberate choices. The German Reich, under Hitler’s leadership, had already recovered territories lost to Versailles without a shot fired. Austria had returned to the Reich willingly. The Sudeten Germans, abandoned by the Czechs and denied self-rule for two decades, rejoined their own people after the Munich Conference. No army had been needed. No conquest had occurred. These were not acts of aggression, but acts of national reintegration. Poland was different. Poland, shaped by the legacy of Józef Piłsudski, clung to illusions of grandeur and a deep distrust of compromise. Instead of seeking accommodation with Germany, it looked to Britain for security and to the past for purpose. Hitler did not demand subjugation. He asked only for the peaceful return of Danzig, a city over 90 percent German, and a corridor of transit between Germany and East Prussia. The response from Warsaw was silence. The response from London was a guarantee it could not enforce. This guarantee, issued on March 31, 1939, was not a moral stand. It was a strategic miscalculation drawn from the oldest of British habits. For centuries, Britain had sought to prevent the rise of any dominant power on the Continent. But the world of 1939 was no longer ruled by European balances. It was shaped by forces beyond London’s reach: Soviet industrial might, American wealth, Japanese expansion, and a reborn German nation. Yet Britain played its hand as if nothing had changed, dragging France along and gambling with the lives of millions for the sake of old illusions. Hitler, despite everything, did not rush into war. He revised his demands. He delayed operations. He made new proposals. He pleaded for negotiation. But the line had already been drawn, not across maps, but across minds. And once drawn, it would not be crossed. The war to come was not declared by Berlin, but by silence, by pride, and by a refusal to listen.

What followed in late August was not the drumbeat of inevitability, but a final, frenzied effort by Germany alone to avert the war its enemies had already decided upon. On August 25, after Britain signed its so-called guarantee of Polish independence, Hitler suspended the planned invasion. Troops already in position were held back. Operational orders were rescinded. It was not hesitation out of weakness, but a last attempt to summon reason. That same evening, Hitler met with British ambassador Sir Nevile Henderson and offered direct talks. He expressed a willingness to compromise. Danzig would return to Germany, but Poland would receive reciprocal guarantees. No territory would be taken by force. The British government responded with platitudes. They spoke of peace while preparing for war. In private, they discouraged Poland from even showing up to negotiate. The next day, Hitler authorized a formal framework: the Marienwerder Proposals. Crafted by the German Foreign Office and approved by Hitler himself, they were neither demands nor ultimatums. They included a plebiscite in the Corridor. If the local population voted to remain with Poland, Germany would accept it. If the population chose union with the Reich, Poland would receive a guaranteed corridor to the sea through Gdynia. Danzig would return to Germany, and both sides would sign non-aggression pacts. These were proposals rooted in self-determination, not conquest. But Warsaw did not reply. No Polish delegate was sent. No counter-proposal was made. The British, acting through the Swedish intermediary Birger Dahlerus, withheld key documents, distorted timelines, and sent contradictory signals. On August 28, Lord Halifax told Dahlerus that Britain supported Poland’s position but was open to negotiation. The next day, he informed Warsaw that they should stand firm and avoid dialogue. The Polish government, emboldened by British duplicity, declared partial mobilization. Still, Hitler waited. On August 30, he extended the deadline again and clarified that Poland need not even come to Berlin. Any neutral site would do. He asked only for a Polish emissary willing to talk. Instead, Halifax called the request “wholly unreasonable.” That evening, Warsaw announced full general mobilization. German civilians in Poland were arrested and beaten. Refugees fled west. The Red Cross received the first reports of atrocities. On August 31 at 10:00 AM, the German government delivered a copy of the proposals to the Polish embassy. They were quietly forwarded to Warsaw. By noon, the response came: a direct order not to receive any further German overtures. It was not a rejection. It was the end of diplomacy itself. At 12:40 PM, Hitler issued the final command. The Wehrmacht would advance at dawn. Not into a peaceful country, but into a nation that had prepared for war, refused every offer of settlement, and held its position only by the promise of British intervention. The war had not begun with gunfire. It had begun with silence. Silence from London. Silence from Paris. Silence from Warsaw.

The invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, was not a blitzkrieg launched in haste. It was the result of weeks, indeed months, of deliberate delay, diplomatic maneuvering, and unanswered appeals. Hitler had done everything short of surrender to avoid the broader war he knew might follow. Even after issuing the final order, he continued to hope that reason might yet prevail. That morning, as German troops advanced across the Polish frontier, the Reichstag convened. Hitler’s address made clear that Germany’s quarrel was with the Polish government, not the Polish people. He recounted the persecution of ethnic Germans, the repeated rebuffs to his offers, the refusal to send an emissary, and the mockery of every effort at negotiation. His tone was firm, but not triumphant. He still expressed hope that Britain and France would not interfere. That hope was misplaced. In London, Neville Chamberlain addressed Parliament. He declared that Hitler alone bore responsibility for the war. He claimed, falsely, that Germany had demanded Poland surrender without condition, and that the Reich had made no effort to negotiate. Not a word was spoken of the Marienwerder Proposals. Not a word about Britain’s role in preventing talks. The British public, trusting their statesmen, believed they had been forced into a just war. France hesitated. Foreign Minister Bonnet urged caution. Prime Minister Daladier wavered. A plan for an international conference was floated by Mussolini and supported by Rome, Berlin, and even Paris. Hitler endorsed it at once. The proposal included a ceasefire, restoration of diplomatic ties, and the withdrawal of troops from combat zones. Germany was ready. Italy was ready. France was tempted. Only one man stood in the way: Lord Halifax. Halifax demanded unconditional German withdrawal, not only from Poland but also from Danzig and the Corridor—territories overwhelmingly German. He insisted that no talks could be held unless Germany restored the League of Nations’ authority over Danzig, a demand that even the French found excessive. It was a diplomatic poison pill, intended to kill the conference before it began. Despite this, the Italian delegation pressed on. On September 2, Mussolini's foreign minister, Count Ciano, attempted to coordinate a peace conference. Berlin was enthusiastic. Daladier, under pressure from Bonnet and the French Parliament, indicated cautious support. But Halifax issued an ultimatum to Rome: unless Germany withdrew immediately, Britain would proceed with its own ultimatum, regardless of French hesitation. At 9:30 PM, Ciano informed Berlin that Italy had abandoned its mediation. France was cornered. Under unending pressure from London, Daladier acquiesced. Bonnet, exhausted and defeated, relayed France’s decision to align with Britain. The next morning, both powers declared war on Germany. The last door to peace had been closed. Not by Germany, which had delayed its advance at every opportunity. Not by France, which had sought a diplomatic out. But by Britain—by Halifax—who rejected every path that did not lead to war. There had been no countdown. No turning point. Only a steady burial of alternatives, until nothing remained but catastrophe.

The war that now began was not the war the British public had been promised. It was not a swift defense of Poland, nor a moral stand against tyranny. It was a war of ritual, launched to preserve an order that no longer existed. Within weeks, Poland collapsed. The British and French, despite their declarations, did not send armies east. They had no means to do so. The “guarantee” had been a lie. Poland had been goaded into a position it could not sustain. Encouraged by British promises and confident in its own martial mythos, the Polish government chose defiance over negotiation. Yet the outcome was not heroic resistance, but annihilation. By mid-September, the Wehrmacht had broken the Polish front. On the 17th, the Soviet Union invaded from the east, seizing half the country in accordance with its secret agreement with Germany. The Polish state ceased to exist. London and Paris, having lit the fuse, now watched as Poland burned. There was no intervention, no second front, no serious military engagement on Germany’s western border. What followed was the so-called “Phoney War,” a period of strategic inactivity in which France and Britain made no real move to assist the ally they had claimed to protect. The contrast could not be starker. Germany had made repeated efforts to settle the Danzig question through diplomacy. It had offered territorial compromise, plebiscites, and non-aggression guarantees. Britain had issued ultimatums. It had refused mediation. It had lied about the nature of German demands and suppressed the very proposals that could have ended the crisis peacefully. What Hoggan makes clear—and what history confirms—is that the war was not fought for Poland. It was fought to crush Germany’s resurgence. British policy was not dictated by concern for Danzig or the Corridor, but by fear that a strong, united Germany would challenge British supremacy on the continent. The same strategy that had once been used against Spain, against Napoleon, against the Kaiser, was now deployed against Hitler. Not to protect the peace, but to preserve an illusion of geopolitical control. In the end, it did not work. Britain emerged from the war victorious, but ruined. Her empire shattered. Her economy in tatters. Her sovereignty mortgaged to American power. The Soviet Union, the true threat to Europe, expanded westward, occupying half the continent. And Germany, the only nation that had both the will and the strength to resist Bolshevism, lay in ruins. The Second World War was not a crusade. It was not the defense of civilization. It was a civil war in the West, engineered by men who could not abandon the past and would not accept a future not made in their image. And the price of their arrogance was the death of Europe.

Critics often claim that Hitler’s appeals to peace in 1939 were a ruse, that his record before the invasion of Poland proves duplicity rather than restraint. They cite the reoccupation of the Rhineland, the Anschluss, and the Munich Agreement as evidence of treaty-breaking aggression. Hoggan addresses each of these directly, and the historical record, stripped of postwar mythology, tells a different story. The reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 was a response to repeated French violations of the Locarno Pact, including treaties aimed at encircling Germany with Eastern alliances. Hitler sent lightly armed troops into territory that was German by right. It was not an act of conquest, but a symbolic correction. No fighting occurred. France did nothing. The League of Nations did nothing. Even at the time, British commentators acknowledged that Versailles had imposed an unsustainable arrangement, and that Germany’s actions, however bold, were inevitable. The Anschluss of 1938 was not a forced annexation, but a national unification supported overwhelmingly by the Austrian people. There was no military resistance because there was no will to resist. German troops were greeted with flowers, not gunfire. Austria had been denied its right to join Germany in 1919. Hitler restored that right. British newspapers at the time acknowledged the popular support for union, even if their governments disapproved. The Munich Agreement was not a unilateral act, but the result of a four-power conference involving Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. The Sudetenland, far from being ethnically Czech, was home to over three million Germans who had been denied autonomy by Prague for two decades. Hitler’s intervention came only after their appeals for self-determination were ignored. Poland and Hungary also annexed territory from Czechoslovakia in the same period, with no comparable outcry. Only Germany’s actions were later condemned as criminal. None of these events demonstrate a desire for world war. On the contrary, each was resolved through diplomacy. In Austria and the Sudetenland, Hitler succeeded not through tanks, but through statecraft and the will of the people. The map drawn at Versailles had created conditions that could not endure. Hitler sought to change them peacefully—until that door was slammed shut. Poland was different. No plebiscite was allowed. No negotiation was accepted. No emissary was sent. There was no treaty for Hitler to violate. No agreement had been made. What failed was not his credibility, but the willingness of Poland and Britain to speak in good faith. The war that followed was not the result of broken promises, but of diplomacy refused. In the final chapter of “The Forced War,” Hoggan turns to a subject rarely addressed openly. He argues that Jewish influence in the press, financial institutions, and political circles, particularly in Britain and the United States, played a central role in shaping the climate that made war with Germany seem not only necessary but inevitable. Hoggan does not generalize or blame all Jews. Rather, he traces how specific Jewish organizations and individuals helped to frame Hitler’s Germany as a uniquely evil regime. This portrayal, magnified through mass media and political lobbying, created a moral narrative in which diplomacy became appeasement and peace became betrayal. He points to Churchill’s financial backing from wealthy Jewish donors and the consistent drumbeat of anti-German agitation in Anglo-American newspapers from 1933 onward. The result was more than propaganda. It was policy. The idea that Germany could not be reasoned with, that it must be crushed, narrowed the room for negotiation until none remained. Hitler was not seen as a national leader, but as a global menace. The war that followed was no longer about borders or treaties. It was a crusade against a caricature. A war not declared by Germany, but made inevitable by the stories told about it. Hoggan’s conclusion is not just a revision of facts, but a call to face them, openly and honestly. The path to war was not paved by one man’s ambition, but by the blindness, pride, and ideology of many. What was needed in 1939 was not rearmament, but realism. Not guarantees, but honesty. And above all, not war, but the will to prevent it. – Chad Crowley, writer and translator, x.com, 12 April 2025

See also

• Causes of World War II
• Declarations of War during World War II
• Bombing of Germany during World War II

External links

• Read The Forced War online, also as PDF
• Der Erzwungene Krieg, 9th Edition, 1976