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British establishment did not waver in its conviction that Nazi conduct had passed the bounds of tolerance. Hitler’s occupation of Prague in March was the event that brought all shades of opinion to a common conclusion. Even those like Beaverbrook, who continued to argue publicly for avoiding war, privately accepted that war was coming. ‘One or the other,’ he wrote to a friend in March, ‘the British Empire or the German Reich must be destroyed.’ 7 The only questions were when and how. The Daily Express was still asserting in August that ‘there will be no war this year’, 8 and, when the Wehrmacht finally marched, the likes of Beaverbrook were still trying to stay aloof. ‘Poland’, he objected, ‘is no friend of ours.’ 9 But by then, they were voices crying in the wilderness. The British Government, the British Parliament, and British public opinionas a whole had decided that enough was enough. Even Chamberlain, the arch-appeaser, was determined to respect his commitments. Early on 3 September, he made the fateful broadcast. ‘This morning, the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final Note stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consquently this country is at war with Germany.’ 10
    Britain’s dilemma with its eastern allies was well illustrated by the case of Czechoslovakia, which, after Austria, was the second of Germany’s neighbours to feel the heat of Hitler’s attentions. In the 1930s, Britain simply had no means of intervening in Central Europe. The RAF had very few warplanes with the practical capability to fly across Germany and to return without refuelling. The Royal Navy could not steam along ‘the coast of Bohemia’. The tiny British army could not contemplate marching across Germany. And to take any sort of action on the Continent without French support was unthinkable. Hence, during the Munich Crisis of September 1938, the British Government took the perfectly rational option of appeasing Nazi Germany rather than of confronting it. They did not play their hand very cleverly, and missed the chance of reaching a workable compromise. But they had already made the mistake of issuing an unenforceable guarantee to Austria and of seeing the guarantee humiliatingly sidelined by the Anschluss . So they were all too eager to save face and to reach a settlement. Czechoslovakia capitulated without a fight, signing an agreement that proved to be its death warrant. In less than six months, Hitler was in Prague, waving from the same window in Hradany Castle from which Presidents Masaryk and Beneš had been wont to wave. Slovakia broke away. Bohemia and Moravia were turned into a protectorate of the Reich. President Beneš and his Czecho-Slovak Committee took up residence in Paris, and then, after the fall of France, moved to London, where they stayed until the end of the war.
    Throughout the war years, the Czechs planned for the day when their people would rise against the Nazi oppressor and welcome their exiled rulers back home. They were to have many setbacks, and a long wait. Yet in the end their patience was rewarded. A rising broke out in Slovakia in late August 1944, and in the first week of May 1945 a popular rising in Prague immediately preceded Liberation. An understanding was reached between the Western Allies and the Soviets to avoid friction. It was swiftlyfollowed by the homecoming of President Beneš and the restoration of the exiled Government with the blessing of all the Allied powers.
    At the other end of the Continent, the victory of Gen. Franco’s fascists in Spain had incalculable consequences for British attitudes. For three years, from 1936 to 1939, the Western powers had anxiously watched as the Spanish Republic gradually submitted to the fascist