Debate: could Czechoslovakia have stopped Germany in 1938?

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**Future War Cultist**

You know when the most opportune time to stop Gitler would have been? 1936, when he sent the German army into the demilitarised Rhineland. At that time he still only had about 100,000 men. That would have been no match for either the British or the French. gak, the sources I read said that a big chunk of the force he sent in there were actually cops. Of course, hindsight is a wonderful thing...

**Whirlwind**

jmurph wrote:

However, had Beneš not bowed to the west and instead embraced the Soviet offer of support, things might have gone down very differently. Maybe. The Soviets may also have carved Czechoslovakia with Germany up like Poland or worked some other deal.

The Soviets and Czech were allies and USSR stated they would support the defence of the Czech. What Germany managed to achieve in the late 30's and early 40's was divide and conquer. He managed to attack little parts of Europe until he was strong enough to launch a final campaign. It wasn't until the allies started co-ordinating their actions that things turned around generally.

A lot of this question really depends on how the allies co-operated. If after Hitler's demands on the Sudeten area all of USSR/Britain/France had all come out categorically to say that military action would be taken in any invasion then I think things may have gone differently. That would have left Germany facing three fronts - Czech border defences and the USSR support. France/Britain armed forces on the western border and a French/British navy blockading access to the sea. It is unlikely that Germany would have won in such circumstances. It may have just ground to a bloody stalemate, and this is what I think Britain and France were trying to avoid a repeat of, but by surrendering the Sudeten area they effectively surrendered a defensible staging area that would have taken large resources to take (even if they went round that would still leave a hostile area behind your forces).

On the other hand Germany may have backed off and then invested heavily in technology for the next 10 years and then started again...

**Do_I_Not_Like_That**

sebster wrote:
It's hard to see how a fight between Germany and Czechoslovakia would have resulted in anything but German victory. German airpower and superior training and doctrine, combined with greater numbers would have got the job done. The Czechs had better tanks, but so did the French and the Soviets during Barbarossa - but they don't help much when you have poor tank doctrine and the enemy has air superiority.

But it is an interesting question whether the Czechs might last just long enough. The Czechs had a different political situation than Poland. Poland was politically and economically pressured to defend the disputed regions as they thought if they ceded these to the Germans in the fighting they would be unlikely to get them back during any negotiated ceasefire. This meant the Poles pushed troops to the fringes of the border with Germany and opened up the encirclement that collapsed the Polish defense. Now admittedly the Czechs also had similar territorial concerns, but defense of the Sudetenland didn't have the same vulnerabilities, you couldn't bypass that territory and threaten Prague. So possibly the Czechs might have lasted longer, held a viable defensive line longer.

That chance to last longer in a protracted campaign would then play in to the next consideration - the weakness of Hitler's position in 1938. Hitler's military aggression was not popular in Germany, not even among the officer class, who treated his promises of easy victories with skepticism. But the resistance melted as Hitler's promise of easy victories came - annexation of Czech territory, then swift victory over Poland then France caused that skepticism to melt away, and Hitler's political position went from weak to insurmountable. If a campaign in Czechoslovakia had become at all protracted, and also brought a combined British, French and Russian end of trade, then Hitler's political position in Germany might have collapsed.

But of course, that's a lot of guesswork to reach an unknown. Guesses to produce a hypothetical. I'm not sure what that's worth.

Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
France borders with Germany, had the largest army in Western Europe, and was considered the foremost power in Europe. Yeah, we know with hindsight it all went downhill, but they could easily have invaded Germany in 1938 to support the Czechs.

In 1938 French force projection was woeful. Their organisation, doctrine and equipment level was committed to a defensive, static war. Even in 1939 when they went to war to support Poland, they sent expeditionary units across the border and came scurrying back at the first sign of resistance.

As always, I disagree with you

To be fair you're not the only one, but you're falling into the classic trap of buying German invincibility in the early war phase.

For sure, the German army of 1941 would have went through the Czechs like a steamroller going downhill, but the German army of 1941 was battle hardened, confident, and ran like a Swiss watch.

The German army of 1938 had a core of veterans from a war 20 years previously, was largely untested in his current form, and like I said, suffered from inter-divisional cooperation. It was not the army of 1941.

And the evidence for this is the wodeful performance of some German units when Poland was invaded. Troops killed by friendly fire, troops lacking fighting spirit, and mass break-downs of key vehicles and tanks, which were all problems that worried German high command. Yes, in the long run, it was a great learning curve for invading France, but the army of 1938 is not the army of 1941 or even 1940.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

George Spiggott wrote:
No for the following reasons.

1. The large 'German' demographic makes the army much less reliable than it appears on paper. There are more Germans than Slovaks in Czechoslovakia. There are also Slovak tensions.
2. All the defences face towards Germany, the Germans can easily advance through newly annexed Austria and avoid most of the static defences.
3. Unlike the Czech army the Czech air force is weak and reliant on the French air force to intervene. The French air force will be too little too late anyway.
4. They have too few local (central and eastern European) allies. Relations with the Poles are still poor which will (be one of many reasons that will) prevent Soviet aid.

I'm 50/50 on air power, because the Germans themselves showed that after 1943, you can still fight on, even against Allied air superiority, so maybe the Czechs could have got by?

As for the German demographic, for sure, there would have been a hard core minority acting like a 5th column against the Czech war effort, but some German speaking Czechs fled to Britain and fought on for the rest of the war, so you could argue, that not every German in Czechoslovakia was suspect.

**jouso**

Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:

I'm 50/50 on air power, because the Germans themselves showed that after 1943, you can still fight on, even against Allied air superiority, so maybe the Czechs could have got by?

Again, Czechosloviakia is a thin sliver of land whose most strategic bits are surrounded on three sides by Germany. There just ain't much ground to retreat to. You either break the offensive early on or the Germans are having lunch in Plzen and dinner in Prague.

**George Spiggott**

Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:

I'm 50/50 on air power, because the Germans themselves showed that after 1943, you can still fight on, even against Allied air superiority, so maybe the Czechs could have got by?

As for the German demographic, for sure, there would have been a hard core minority acting like a 5th column against the Czech war effort, but some German speaking Czechs fled to Britain and fought on for the rest of the war, so you could argue, that not every German in Czechoslovakia was suspect.

They may have got by but the lack of suitable modern aircraft is one of the reasons I think they wouldn't have. They had no capability to suppress German reserves while the Germans have plenty of capability to suppress theirs. The Czech's may find themselves fighting on two or three different fronts and to add to that there's also the Hungarian situation. If the Hungarian land grab occurs (six months early) at the same time (or even the Polish one) the situation would have been even more dire.

The 'German' population doesn't have to be hardcore 5th columnists they're mistrusted by the leadership. Even that limits their capability. They don't need to be saboteurs the lack of will to fight is enough.

I'm not convinced by the arguments for superior tanks either. The Lt vz 35 (aka Panzer 35t) has a better gun than the Panzer II (the Panzer III isn't in service yet iirc) but it is unreliable and there are no crews with actual combat training.

**Frazzled**

Indeed better tanks would not have stopped the Germans. Both the French and Soviets had superior machines. The French had the Char heavy tank (for the time), and the Soviets had nearly 1,500 T34 and KV 1 tanks when Barbarossa started:
At the start of hostilities, the Red Army had 967 T-34 tanks and 508 KV tanks[79] concentrated in five[80] of their twenty-nine mechanized corps. In one of the first known encounters, a T-34 crushed a 37 mm PaK 36, destroyed two Panzer IIs, and left a 14 kilometres (8.7 mi)-long swathe of destruction in its wake before a howitzer destroyed it at close range.[81][page needed] The Germans' standard anti-tank gun, the 37 mm PaK 36, proved ineffective against the T-34; the Germans were forced to deploy 105 mm field guns and 88 mm anti-aircraft guns in a direct fire role to stop them.[82]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-34#Operation_Barbarossa_.281941.29

**sebster**

Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
As always, I disagree with you

There's people here I agree with on lots of things. I hardly ever have conversations with them because of it

To be fair you're not the only one, but you're falling into the classic trap of buying German invincibility in the early war phase.

I'm really not, and I don't know how you got any impression that my expectation came from any idea of an invincible German army. I said dominant German airpower, plus superior training and doctrine would be enough to get the job done. Getting the job done doesn't mean dominance, it means being good enough. Because ultimately airpower in support of an offensive doctrine had a very good record against armies built around static lines and fixed fortifications throughout the war, and the earlier in the war you go the better that record was.

Even ignoring that advantage in method and just looking at an overall national view - the big fish eat the little fish. Big nations that set about conquering little nations get the job done. Even the Winter War, famous for the incredible ineptitude of the Soviets attackers... still resulted in a Soviet victory and the cessation of territory to Russia by Finland. Being bigger simply matters too much.

I still say it is possible that the Czechs might have blocked the German offensive long enough, repulsed enough offensives that Hitler's promises of easy victories would disintegrate and his political base collapse. But that is very different to believing in a military victory.

And the evidence for this is the wodeful performance of some German units when Poland was invaded. Troops killed by friendly fire, troops lacking fighting spirit, and mass break-downs of key vehicles and tanks, which were all problems that worried German high command. Yes, in the long run, it was a great learning curve for invading France, but the army of 1938 is not the army of 1941 or even 1940.

The bigger take away from that should have been that such mistakes just didn't matter at all in the long run. Poland was swept months quicker than the most ambitious projections had expected, even with some German failings.

I'm 50/50 on air power, because the Germans themselves showed that after 1943, you can still fight on, even against Allied air superiority, so maybe the Czechs could have got by?

Germany in 1943 had accepted they were in total war, and were happy to burn through millions of men to delay an advance. There's nothing to indicate the Czechs would have been any different to the Poles or the French and accepted surrender over continuing a nation destroying futile war.

**konst80hummel**

It should be of interest to the discussion that in the Balkans campaign in 1941 the German army was effectively checked in the static defences along the Greek -Bulgarian border. The region there is mountainous with narrow passes that were heavily fortified. The Germans had overwhelming air and armor support and made zero gains for about a week.
By that time of course they had stormed through Yugoslavia and into the unfortified Yugoslavian -Greek border but in the Chechslovak invasion that wouldn't be an option as invading Hungary is a whole new can of worms...
I can search for english speaking source for that if it is required.

**AlmightyWalrus**

Considering Horthy later joined the Axis they might not have had to invade. Hungary might just've joined in.

**konst80hummel**

But at the time he was bidding his time. Nobody likes a loser and I don't think Hitler would have much support if he returns from his first venture with a bloodied nose.