The Final Innings by Christopher Sandford

Author:Christopher Sandford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

In the same week that Somerset entertained the West Indies at Taunton there was a seemingly inconsequential and, under other circumstances, almost comic episode of bureaucratic turmoil some 1,200 miles away that dramatically lessened the chances of the Polish question being settled without bloodshed. This followed the apparent announcement by Germany’s sock-puppet district administrator, Albert Forster, that Danzig customs officials could no longer carry out their normal duties. The Warsaw government responded with an irate demand that he withdraw the order within twenty-four hours, whereupon Forster furiously denied that any such directive had been issued, charging instead that it was all part of a plot to undermine German interests in the area. Four days later, on a note of near-farcical indignation, Berlin warned Warsaw that any repetition of the Danzig ultimatum ‘would lead to greater tension in the relationship between Germany and Poland’. Warsaw replied that she would consider any possible German intervention an act of aggression, and that this would require a ‘full retaliatory response’.

A second tragicomic set of circumstances soon followed, when an Anglo-French delegation, urgently invited to Moscow to discuss a possible non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, took a week to arrive by slow cargo-ship and train when they could have made it in a single day. The deputation’s senior officer had come without proper credentials, and when the talks finally got under way it seemed that the British were not all that serious: a Soviet offer to provide 137 divisions for a common defence against the Nazis was matched by a British proposal to supply one mechanised and four infantry divisions, with some repurposed First World War lorries thrown in.

Assessing all this in a letter just over a week later, Learie Constantine wrote: ‘There is such terrible news from Poland. The war is now inevitable. We go out to play the final Test tomorrow.’

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