Whatever the worries in Paris and London over their own military unpreparedness, in fall 1938 the Wehrmacht was woefully unready for a major military clash against the combined forces of Czechoslovakia (36 already mobilized divisions), France, and possibly the Soviet Union. True, in Czechoslovakia, half the Sudeten German conscripts had deserted to Germany, and many ethnic Poles had failed to report to the colors, but more than 1 million troops, including reservists, were called to the colors.77 Nazi Germany possessed around 70 divisions, but that included a great many rated second class, while some would have to remain home to protect Germany against an attack from the west. If Germany were forced to employ nearly the full weight of its army (and air force) in a war in Czechoslovakia, France might be left with as much as a seven-to-one advantage in Germany’s west, at a time when Germany’s Siegfried Line (or Westwall) was perhaps 5 percent complete (recently poured concrete had not yet set).78 Chief of staff Ludwig Beck had been trying to rally the military brass to oppose Hitler’s plans, curb the SS, and “reestablish orderly conditions in the Reich,” because he feared that the French general could take advantage of adventurism in Czechoslovakia and strike a decisive blow from the other side.79 To be sure, by August 1938, Beck had resigned, but his replacement, Lieutenant General Franz Halder, was perhaps even more anxious over the Wehrmacht’s inadequacies and the German public’s antiwar mood, and on September 28 he pleaded with military commander in chief General Walther von Brauchitsch to restart the coup against Hitler, to prevent war.80 Brauchitsch, however, worried that such an act would divide the army, and in any case he and others were undercut by the announcement of the diplomatic gathering in Munich.
Stalin had a copy of the French intelligence assessment, via a Soviet spy, which indicated both German weaknesses and lack of French resolve stemming from worries about its own weakness.81 The despot seemed off the hook. Nonetheless, he had had the Red Army augment its military preparedness: on September 28, Voroshilov reported that 246 high-speed bombers and 302 fighter planes were ready to take off within two days; some 330,000 Soviet reservists in the interior were called up. On September 29, chief of staff Shaposhnikov issued an order not to discharge Red Army soldiers and commanders who had completed service.82 In the event, none of the mobilized troops or planes would see action. The cynical Germans had long anticipated that the absence of a common frontier with Czechoslovakia would serve as a convenient pretext for Stalin to demur on living up to his commitments and coming to Prague’s rescue.83 Beneš had had his own doubts on that score.84 Still, we shall never know whether Stalin would have fulfilled his obligations, because France failed to fulfill its own treaty obligations, the precondition for Soviet action.
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NOTHING IN THE TREATIES of mutual assistance with France and Czechoslovakia