This author takes the perspective of Great Britain's war planners. This is not an unreasonable starting point for an understanding of the military readiness of

This author takes the perspective of Great Britain's war planners. This is not an unreasonable starting point for an understanding of the military readiness of the nations that would eventually go on to fight in the war, but a full understanding mustn't stop there. War planners always assume war will break out because that is their job, and given that Britain and France did ultimately decide to declare war on Germany, the war can appear like an inevitability after the fact. In truth, no one at the time saw it as inevitable and indeed it wasn't. The case P. E. Caquet should be making (and isn't) would be that Germany's ambitions extended beyond the pre-Versailles central European boundaries of Germany and Austria. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Prussian_War#/media/File:Europe_1871_map_en.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Prussian_War#/media/Fil... Those boarders were surely larger, but had existed just 19 years prior and did not threaten the existence of France or Britain in all the years between German Unification and the Versailles treaty. Nothing in Germany's public proclamations nor the documents uncovered after the war suggest this hidden larger ambition, despite it being central to Churchill's case for granting the war guarantee to Poland (and his ultimate declaration of war against Germany) The underlying reality is that England has always been the weakest of the European powers due to its small population. It built its empire with trade, espionage and its navy not large armies. England made itself more relatively powerful by playing the larger continental players against each other and against non-Europeans, always taking the side of the weaker countries against the strongest. England aided the Prussians to defeat Napoleon, and the Ottoman Turks against Russia in Crimea. The public arguments made at the time to morally justify England's geopolitical stratagems should not be uncritically assumed to be true and do not constitute a sound starting point for a correct historical understanding of World War II.