With Great Britain, France was bound by treaties to come to the aid of Czechoslovakia and Poland if they were attacked. Like Great Britain, too, France was dominated by pacifist sentiment, a desire to avoid war at all cost. This was understandable, since no western European nation had suffered more destruction and loss of life in World War I than France, which, for four years, had been the principal battlefield of the western front. At the outbreak of war, France had a very large army of 5 million, believed by many (including Britain’s Winston Churchill and the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin) to be the finest army in the world. Its size, however, belied a prevailing ambivalence, absence of will, and fear of a new war. War plans, drawn up in cooperation with British military commanders, were entirely defensive in nature, and the French put a great deal of faith in a strong line of defensive fortifications along the German frontier, the Maginot Line. With all of its military resources, France seemed to suffer from the same malaise afflicting the other Western democracies, an attitude that in Great Britain, which spent all but the last two or three years of the decades after World War I disarming, had motivated Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s Appeasement Policy with regard to the expansionist aggression of Germany’s Adolf Hitler.

Despite the sentiment prevailing in France, French premier Edouard Daladier at first objected to his ally’s Appeasement Policy and to the cession of the Sudetenland that followed it as a betrayal of Czechoslovakia. Yet he dared not oppose Germany alone. Instead, he appealed to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR). Although FDR was sympathetic to Daladier’s objection to appeasement, he knew that he would not be able to move the isolationist U.S. Congress to alter American neutrality. With Roosevelt’s rebuff, hope vanished, and Daladier agreed to hand over the Sudetenland to Hitler. Yet whereas Chamberlain seemed sincerely to believe that appeasement had brought “peace for our time,” Daladier understood that it made war all the more inevitable. He was, of course, correct. After the German invasion of Poland, France and Great Britain honored treaty obligations to Poland, as they had not honored those with Czechoslovakia. The two nations declared war against Germany on September 3, 1939. . .

Free term papers are not written to satisfy your specific instructions. You can use our professional writing services to buy a custom written research paper, term paper, or essay on History at affordable price. CustomTermPapers is the best solution for those who seek help in writing term papers, essays, and research papers related to History and other relevant topics.