More countries declare neutrality

When in September 1939 the war in Poland turned into a European war, most of the world’s states wanted nothing to do with it. As early as 1 September neutrality was declared by the Scandinavian countries, Estonia, Latvia and Portugal, while Italy, although bound to Germany by an alliance, announced its “non-belligerence”. Over the following days, especially after 3 September, when Britain and France entered the war, further governments made similar declarations: on 2 September Switzerland carried out a general mobilisation, while in Ireland the prime minister announced neutrality and parliament declared a state of emergency; on 3 September the Netherlands and Belgium declared neutrality; on 4 September Spain, Lithuania, Iran, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico did so, as did, in its own fashion, Japan; and on 5 September Yugoslavia.

Neutrality was no empty gesture. Under international law, as set out in the Hague Conventions of 1907, a neutral state undertook not to assist either side, not to allow troops to pass through its territory and to intern any soldiers who entered it. In return the belligerents were to respect its borders. The experience of the First World War, however, had shown that the latter depended solely on the will of the stronger. Of the states that declared neutrality in September 1939, only a few managed to preserve it until the end of the war.

Switzerland

Switzerland, neutral on principle since 1815, prepared for war earlier than any of the others. On 30 August 1939 the Federal Assembly elected as commander-in-chief, with the wartime rank of general, which the Swiss army does not use in peacetime, the corps commander Henri Guisan, who received 204 votes. On 31 August the Federal Council sent a declaration of neutrality to several dozen states. After Germany’s attack on Poland the government ordered a general mobilisation, whose first day was 2 September. Within a few days some 430,000 soldiers and more than 200,000 people in the auxiliary services were under arms, which in a country of four million inhabitants meant that roughly one in five working people had joined the forces. Most were soon sent home, but the army remained on alert throughout the war.

Switzerland was one of the few countries to remain neutral until 1945. After the fall of France, surrounded by the Axis powers, it based its defence on the Alpine “redoubt” (Réduit), which Guisan announced to his officers on the Rütli meadow in July 1940. At the same time it traded with Germany, accepted German gold and permitted the transit of goods across its passes, which after the war became the subject of sharp criticism.

Ireland

In 1939 Ireland was formally a dominion of the British Crown, but since the passing of the Statute of Westminster it had decided on matters of war and peace for itself. Unlike Australia, New Zealand or Canada, which followed Britain, the prime minister (Taoiseach), Éamon de Valera, resolved to keep the country out of the war. Neutrality was to be proof of complete independence from London and at the same time a response to the partition of the island: de Valera had no intention of fighting alongside the state that held Northern Ireland. He was helped by the agreement of April 1938, under which the British had handed over to Ireland the so-called Treaty Ports, their naval bases on the Irish coast.

On 2 September Dáil Éireann, the lower house of parliament, met in emergency session. De Valera told the deputies that neutrality was the best policy for the country. The constitution of 1937 permitted emergency powers only “in time of war”, so within a single day its first amendment was passed, under which an armed conflict in which the state was not a participant also counted as a time of war. Immediately afterwards both houses declared a state of emergency (the Emergency), and in the early hours of 3 September the Emergency Powers Act was passed. It gave the government almost unlimited authority: internment without trial, censorship of the press, radio and correspondence, and control of the economy. Popular chronologies date the declaration of neutrality to 3 September, when Britain entered the war; in fact de Valera had announced it in the Dáil the day before.

Ireland remained neutral until the end of the war, though in practice it was well disposed towards the Allies: it passed them weather forecasts, sent downed British airmen back across the border, and tens of thousands of Irishmen served in the British Army. It refused, however, to make its ports available, something Winston Churchill reproached it for publicly as late as May 1945.

The Netherlands and Belgium

The Netherlands and Belgium, two small states lying on the shortest route between Germany on the one hand and France and Britain on the other, declared neutrality on 3 September. The Netherlands had come through the First World War untouched and was convinced that it could do so again. It ordered general mobilisation as early as 28 August, and its government, headed since August by Dirk Jan de Geer, adhered to strict impartiality. Belgium had abandoned its alliance with France in October 1936, when King Leopold III proclaimed a “policy of independence”, and in October 1937 it received a German guarantee of the inviolability of its borders. Its government under Prime Minister Hubert Pierlot mobilised the army, which by the spring of 1940 numbered some 600,000–650,000 men. On 28 August, in the last days of peace, Leopold III and Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands offered their good offices to the belligerents. None of them took up the offer.

Both states, faithful to the principle of impartiality, refused to hold staff talks with France and Britain, fearing that this would give Germany a pretext. In January 1940, when a German aircraft carrying plans for an attack in the west came down in Belgium (the Mechelen incident), Brussels still did not let the Allies in. On 10 May 1940 the Wehrmacht attacked both countries without a declaration of war. The Netherlands capitulated after five days, Belgium after eighteen.

Spain and Lithuania

On 4 September General Francisco Franco announced by decree that Spain would maintain “the strictest neutrality”. A country ruined by three years of civil war, which had ended only five months earlier, was in no condition to fight any war, and it depended on supplies of grain and fuel from countries controlled by the British. At the same time Franco owed his victory to Germany and Italy; in the spring he had joined the Anti-Comintern Pact and withdrawn from the League of Nations, and his sympathies were in no doubt. Neutrality was therefore a decision born of necessity. When France was collapsing in June 1940, Spain changed its status to “non-belligerence”, occupied the international zone of Tangier and offered Hitler to enter the war in exchange for France’s African colonies. The meeting of the two dictators at Hendaye in October 1940 produced no agreement, because Hitler was unwilling to pay that price. Spain sent the volunteer Blue Division to the Eastern Front, but it did not enter the war, and from 1943 it returned to “strict neutrality”.

Lithuania, too, declared neutrality on 4 September. The government in Kaunas, with President Antanas Smetona and Foreign Minister Juozas Urbšys, found itself in a particularly difficult position. Half a year earlier Germany had taken Klaipėda (Memel) from it, and Lithuania still regarded Polish Wilno (Vilnius) as its capital. In the first weeks of September Berlin repeatedly urged Kaunas to march into the Wilno region. The Lithuanians refused, judging that a war against Poland at Germany’s side would discredit them in the eyes of the West and leave them at the mercy of the Reich. Lithuania ordered a partial mobilisation only on 17 September, when the Red Army attacked Poland, and interned well over ten thousand Polish soldiers who crossed its border. It received Wilno from the hands of the USSR in October 1939, in exchange for Soviet bases on its territory. In June 1940 the Red Army occupied the whole country, which was incorporated into the USSR as the Lithuanian SSR.

Iran and Latin America

On 4 September Iran declared neutrality. Its authoritarian ruler, Reza Shah Pahlavi, was modernising the country with the help of German engineers and merchants, and Germany was one of its main trading partners. Iran’s neutrality lasted less than two years. When Germany invaded the USSR in June 1941, Iran became a key supply route for the Allies to the Soviet Union, and the presence of large numbers of Germans in the country provided a pretext. On 25 August 1941 British and Soviet troops entered Iran, and Reza Shah was forced to abdicate in favour of his son.

On the same day the three largest states of Latin America declared their neutrality. In Argentina the decree was issued by President Roberto Ortiz; his country, a major exporter of grain and meat to Britain, had kept out of European wars since the nineteenth century. In Mexico neutrality was declared by President Lázaro Cárdenas, who at the same time condemned the aggression and soon recognised the Polish government-in-exile. Brazil was ruled as a dictator by Getúlio Vargas, who traded with both the United States and Germany and counted on profiting from neutrality. The states of the two Americas quickly began to coordinate a common position on the war, and at the end of September their foreign ministers met at a conference in Panama. Latin America’s neutrality ended after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Mexico declared war on the Axis powers in May 1942, after two of its tankers had been sunk by German submarines; Brazil did so in August 1942, and its expeditionary force fought in Italy. Argentina held out longest and declared war on Germany and Japan only in March 1945.

Yugoslavia

On 5 September Yugoslavia declared neutrality. It was ruled on behalf of the young King Peter II by the regent, Prince Paul Karađorđević, and the government of Dragiša Cvetković had only just, on 26 August, concluded an agreement with the Croats, creating the autonomous Banovina of Croatia. Yugoslavia bordered on Germany (since the Anschluss), on Italy, which in April had occupied Albania, and on revisionist Hungary and Bulgaria. War would have meant its break-up, so it clung to neutrality for as long as it could. Under German pressure it joined the Tripartite Pact on 25 March 1941; two days later air force officers overthrew the regent and the government, and on 6 April Germany, Italy and Hungary attacked the country in the Balkan campaign. Yugoslavia capitulated after eleven days.

Significance

September 1939 showed that, in Europe and around the world, almost nobody wanted to fight either for Poland or against it. The neutral states were counting on the war being a repeat of 1914–1918, when the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain and the Scandinavian countries had come through it unscathed. It turned out that in this war neutrality protected only those whose location or usefulness made an attack not worth the cost. Of the states that declared it in early September, the Netherlands, Belgium, Lithuania, Iran and Yugoslavia were attacked or occupied within two years, and the states of Latin America entered the war of their own accord. Only Switzerland, Ireland and Spain in this group remained neutral until the end of the war. Argentina held out almost to the end, but in March 1945 it declared war in order to become a founding member of the United Nations.