The Anglo-Polish alliance

On 25 August 1939, in London, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, and the Polish ambassador, Count Edward Raczyński, signed an Agreement of Mutual Assistance between Poland and the United Kingdom. Its eight published articles bound each party to give the other at once “all the support and assistance in its power” in the event of aggression by “a European Power”. On the same day the two governments signed a secret protocol which made clear that this expression was to be understood to mean Germany. The agreement came into force on signature, without ratification. It turned the temporary, one-sided guarantee of 31 March into a permanent alliance, and it was concluded two days after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact had been signed in Moscow. It was the last major diplomatic act before the outbreak of war, and Britain’s first ever permanent military alliance with a state in Eastern Europe.

From guarantee to treaty

The alliance had been announced as early as the beginning of April. During the visit of the Polish Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, to London, a communiqué was issued on 6 April stating that the two countries were ready to conclude an agreement of a permanent and reciprocal character, and that in the meantime Poland would give Britain the same assistance as Britain had promised Poland. Work on the text, however, dragged on all summer. Neville Chamberlain’s government was in no hurry, since it was simultaneously negotiating in Moscow for an agreement with the USSR and did not want to tie itself to Poland in a way that might complicate those talks. The question of Gdańsk (Danzig) was also awkward: London did not want a dispute over the Free City to drag it automatically into war, while in Warsaw every ambiguity on this point aroused suspicion that the British were looking for a loophole leading to a new Munich.

Through the spring and summer Germany’s verbal attacks on Poland grew ever sharper. Hitler, who in March had renewed his demands for the cession of Danzig and an extraterritorial road across Pomerania, repudiated the 1934 declaration of non-aggression in the Reichstag on 28 April, citing the Anglo-Polish understanding as his justification. On 10 July Chamberlain stated in the House of Commons that a change in the status of Danzig by unilateral action, which Poland decided to resist, would be a matter engaging Britain’s obligations. Staff talks in Warsaw and London produced few concrete results, and the negotiations over a credit for Polish rearmament ended in early August with an agreement for a sum several times smaller than Poland had asked for.

The impetus came from Moscow. When it was announced on 21 August that the Reich Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was flying to the Kremlin, the British Cabinet decided that it had to show quickly and unambiguously that its position was unchanged. On 22 August Chamberlain wrote a letter to Hitler warning him that an agreement with the USSR would not alter Britain’s obligations to Poland, and recalling that in 1914 war might have been avoided had the British government made its position clearer at the time. It would not repeat that mistake. On 24 August Parliament passed an emergency powers act in a single day. Within a few days the negotiators wrapped up matters that had been dragging on since April. On the Polish side the wording of the text was worked on by the counsellor of the London embassy, Władysław Kulski, who years later called the agreement the most important achievement of his diplomatic career.

The day of signature

In Berlin, 25 August was a day of decisions. At around 1.30 p.m. Hitler received the British ambassador, Nevile Henderson, and put to him a “final” offer: once the Polish question had been settled, he was prepared to guarantee the existence of the British Empire and conclude a wide-ranging agreement with Britain. It was a last-minute attempt to prise London away from Warsaw. Henderson was to fly home with it the following day. At around 3 p.m. Hitler gave the army its final order to attack Poland at dawn on 26 August.

Unaware of that order, but conscious that war was near, Halifax and Raczyński signed the agreement in the late afternoon at the Foreign Office. The text was drawn up in English; the parties declared that they would later agree a Polish text and that both would be equally authentic. The news was released at once by the press agencies and reached the Reich Chancellery within the hour. At almost the same moment the Italian ambassador, Bernardo Attolico, brought Hitler the reply of Benito Mussolini: Italy was not ready for war and would not enter it unless Germany immediately supplied it with huge quantities of raw materials and equipment. That afternoon the French ambassador, Robert Coulondre, assured Hitler that France would fight at Poland’s side. In the evening, at around 7.30 p.m., Hitler halted the attack.

What the agreement contained

Article 1 provided that if one of the parties became engaged in hostilities with a European Power in consequence of aggression by that Power, the other would “at once give” it “all the support and assistance in its power”. Article 2 extended this obligation to any action by a European Power which “clearly threatened, directly or indirectly” the independence of one of the parties and which that party considered it vital to resist with its armed forces. The second paragraph of the article covered a situation in which a Power threatened the independence or neutrality of another European state in a way that constituted a clear menace to the security of one of the parties. Article 3 provided for joint resistance to attempts to undermine independence “by processes of economic penetration or in any other way” – a clear allusion to German methods in Danzig and Slovakia.

The remaining articles concerned the mechanics of cooperation. The manner of rendering assistance was to be settled by the competent naval, military and air authorities of the two countries. The parties undertook to exchange information on any threat and to inform each other of their obligations to third states, which could not restrict their obligations as allies. Article 7 prohibited the conclusion of a separate armistice or peace without the other party’s agreement. The agreement was concluded for five years, to be extended automatically unless either party denounced it.

The secret protocol was the most important part. Its first point stated that “a European Power” was to be understood to mean Germany, and that in the event of action by another European Power the parties would consult together on the measures to be taken in common. The second point gave substance to Article 2: the case of an indirect threat to Poland’s independence was Danzig, and the states whose security was at issue in the second paragraph were Belgium, the Netherlands and Lithuania. Latvia and Estonia were to be added should Britain conclude an agreement covering those countries with a third state – in practice, with the USSR. As regards Romania, the British referred to their guarantee of April, and the Poles to the Polish–Romanian alliance. The third point stipulated that any undertakings towards third states must not prejudice the sovereignty or territorial inviolability of the other party. This was an answer to the Polish fear that London might come to terms with Moscow at Poland’s expense.

Through the protocol, Britain made it plain that a war over Danzig would be a war over Poland. At the same time the agreement, like the March guarantee, protected Poland’s independence, not its frontiers.

France: the 1921 alliance and the Kasprzycki–Gamelin protocol

The second pillar of Polish security was the alliance with France. In February 1921 the two countries had concluded a political agreement and a secret military convention providing for mutual assistance in the event of an unprovoked attack by Germany. In 1925, at Locarno, this was supplemented by a treaty of guarantee embedded in the League of Nations system. Over the years the alliance weakened, as France, after the German entry into the Rhineland in 1936 and after Munich, made no secret of its unwillingness to fight a war over Eastern Europe.

After the occupation of Prague, Paris joined Chamberlain’s guarantee, and in May 1939 military talks took place. On 19 May in Paris the Minister of Military Affairs, General Tadeusz Kasprzycki, and the Chief of the General Staff of National Defence, General Maurice Gamelin, signed a protocol in which France promised, in the event of German aggression, immediate air operations, an offensive with limited objectives from the third day of mobilisation, and – should the main German effort be directed against Poland – an offensive with its main forces no later than the fifteenth day of mobilisation. The protocol, however, was to come into force only together with a new political protocol, and that had stalled because the Foreign Minister, Georges Bonnet, made it conditional on an agreement over Danzig. Ambassador Juliusz Łukasiewicz pressed in vain all summer for it to be signed. When the London agreement was concluded, therefore, France’s obligations formally rested on the old alliance of 1921 and on the assurances of the Prime Minister, Édouard Daladier. Knowledge of the French plans mattered a great deal to the Polish command in August: the defence plan assumed that the Polish Army would hold out for the first weeks of the war until the French offensive got under way in the west.

Its significance in the last week of peace

The alliance of 25 August was above all meant to deter. It showed Hitler that the pact with the USSR had not broken up the coalition, as Ribbentrop had been predicting, having argued for months that Britain and France would not fight. That evening it achieved what nothing had achieved before: Hitler called off the attack, even though his troops were already on their way to their start lines. He did not, however, abandon the war; instead he decided to try once more to separate Britain from Poland. Over the following days, through Henderson and the Swedish industrialist Birger Dahlerus, an acquaintance of Hermann Göring, he offered London an agreement over Warsaw’s head, and on 29 August he demanded that a Polish plenipotentiary be sent to Berlin within twenty-four hours. The British government, although it urged Poland to show moderation and to negotiate, did not back away from the agreement.

In Warsaw the alliance was greeted with relief and the conviction that Poland would not be left alone in the event of war. Some historians point out that this conviction stiffened the Polish government’s resolve not to give way; others stress that Poland had no intention of accepting the German demands in any case, having seen where Czechoslovakia’s concessions had led. Hitler, for his part, as his remarks of those days show, still expected the Western powers to confine themselves to gestures.

What came of it

On 1 September 1939 Germany invaded Poland. For two days the British government delayed, trying together with France and with the help of Italian mediation to induce Hitler to withdraw his troops, until, under pressure from the House of Commons, it presented Germany with an ultimatum at 9 a.m. on 3 September and announced a state of war at 11 a.m. France did the same at 5 p.m. On 4 September Łukasiewicz and Bonnet finally signed the Franco-Polish political protocol. But that was where the obligations ended. France confined itself to a token Saar offensive, and on 12 September the Supreme War Council at Abbeville concluded that help for Poland was not possible. The Royal Air Force attacked a few Kriegsmarine bases and dropped leaflets over Germany. The Phoney War had begun.

It was then that the meaning of the secret protocol became clear. On 17 September the Red Army invaded Poland. Raczyński approached the Foreign Office, pointing out that the agreement spoke of aggression by “a European Power” and that the USSR was such a power. Halifax replied that, under the first point of the secret protocol, the obligation to give assistance applied only to Germany, and that in the case of another power the parties were merely to consult. Britain condemned the Soviet aggression but did not declare war on the USSR. This was not a last-minute trick but a provision to which Poland had knowingly agreed in August: from the outset the British had not wanted to close off the path to an understanding with Moscow, while the Poles had been concerned above all with certainty in the face of Germany.

The agreement remained the basis of Polish–British relations throughout the war. Under it the Polish Armed Forces were re-formed in Britain, and Polish airmen, sailors and soldiers fought alongside the British from Narvik to Monte Cassino. Article 7, which prohibited a separate peace, was honoured to the end. The British government published the secret protocol only in the spring of 1945, during the disputes over the decisions of the Yalta Conference, which handed Poland’s eastern lands to the USSR. On 5 July 1945 Britain withdrew its recognition of the Polish government-in-exile, whose ambassador in London was still Raczyński. For many Poles the alliance of 25 August became a symbol of both loyalty and disappointment: it drew Britain into war in defence of Poland, but it saved Poland neither from defeat in 1939 nor from its post-war fate.