60 years ago tomorrow, the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. I was reading Callimachus' essay re: dropping the atomic bomb, American power, and the lives in the balance, when I came across Swiss Major (General Staff) Dr. Ulrich F. Zwygart's 1992-93 Eisenhower Award winning essay: How Much Obedience Does an Officer Need? Winding the reel back a few years...
"[General] Halder, although he did not have the same perseverance as Beck, was ready to announce a coup if Hitler gave the order to attack Czechoslovakia. The conspirators, among them Generals von Witzleben, Oster, and Hoepner, were uncertain of Halder and therefore ready to act without his agreement. The deployment of units of the army and the police of Berlin was planned in detail. Hitler was to be arrested or shot down on sight. On 28 September 1938, a general mobilization was expected, whereupon the conspirators planned to strike. But in the afternoon, news came of an international conference in Munich the following day. The preconditions for a coup failed to materialize. Sir Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador in Berlin, wrote to Lord Halifax, secretary of state: "By keeping the peace, we have saved Hitler and his regime.7"
Precisely so - the delays and dithering may have looked good for a time, but they were not without consequences. Ponder, for a moment, what might have been.
I do not believe the British knew about the conspiracy, and that's actually part of my point in shining a light on this little-known facet of Munich. It's a good reminder that lack of perfect knowledge can favour boldness as well as caution - and that getting the calculus wrong by allowing an aggressive evil to persist and grow brings ghastly consequences of its own.
UPDATE: Excellent comment by Callimachus. I had not known that. And his last sentence re: intelligence is perfect.
At the risk of making this into a synergy-orgy, I've been writing about 1938 over at my home place, and about the interplay of intelligence and boldness in international relations.
France in the 1930s was slouching toward fecklessness. Its angry neighbor to the east built from strength to strength, while France frittered its time and built useless tunnels in Alsace. That story's well-known. More surprising, though, is the brilliant effectiveness of the French secret service -- the Deuxième Bureau -- during this period. They had the Nazi government wired up like a Christmas tree. The result was "a record of accuracy rarely equaled in the history of modern intelligence," according to Benjamin F. Martin ["France in 1938," p.74]The French even had access to German cryptology. "Yet, far from spurring the French to act, the intelligence reports of a powerful and increasingly dangerous German military were used instead to justify passivity." No wonder, as Martin writes, the Deuxième Bureau and its agents came "to despise the national leaders who exploited their work." Having the most perfect intelligence-gathering in the world means nothing without the statesman's vision to project it into the future and the political will to act on it.
"and that getting the calculus wrong by allowing an aggressive evil to persist and grow brings ghastly consequences of its own."
This should be the caption for that photo of a grinning Rumsfeld shaking Saddam's hand.
It should, as a fine reminder of where Jimmy Carter's idiocy led the USA. Just as Chamberlain's idiocy led the allies to smile and shake the hand of the man who was Saddam Hussein's greatest hero (Stalin).
As a minor saving grace, Rumsfeld, unlike say Jacques Chirac, was offering that handshake to provide food aid and satellite imagery, rather than nuclear reactor for a weapons program (the French) or artillery and rocket chemical weapons delivery systems (Russia).
U.S. policy at the time was perhaps best summed up by Henry Kinssinger, who looked at the Iran-Iraq war and hoped that both of them (the Soviet client-state and the Islamist terrorist-state) would lose.
Both did.
There you go bringing up pesky facts again, Joe.