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Old 01-10-16, 08:36 AM   #26
Oberon
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Alright, I'll bite, but I doubt this thread will go anywhere but down, it's not the first time we've been down a road like this.

Quote:
And the English were the ennemies of this alliance, as they constantly show during the actions they led against the French fleet, and other facts. England was not the ally of France, but its rival.
England...or should I say Britain, and France were indeed rivals, until around 1904, when efforts were made by both sides to reduce the tensions between their respective empires as both were faced with the prospect of a rapidly industrialising Germany. The Franco-Prussian war had already ended in a very heavy defeat for France, and Britain had struggled during the Boer war and there was a fear in both nations that Germany was going to outpace both of them in regards to technology, weaponry and power projection and force.
If Britain and France were as much rivals as you seem to suggest they were then when Russia and Japan went to war in 1904 then Britain and France would have found themselves at war with each other due to France being allied to Russia and Britain allied to Japan.

To look at your other point, the actions of the Royal Navy against the French fleet, that is not a high point in Anglo-French relations, I will agree, however it was one isolated incident and I think due to poor diplomatic actions rather than malice. Contrast Mers-el-Kébir with the action at Alexandria where Admiral Cunningham successfully negotiated the disarmament of the French warships commanded by Admiral Godfroy. If there was an intended malice on the part of the British then these ships would have been taken by force or destroyed.
Besides, why would Britain want to give Germany such a propaganda coup? If you consider it in diplomatic terms it makes no sense to encourage the French people to look to Germany as a friend by purposefully targetting the French navy in malice.
To quote the Admiral in charge of the operation at Mers-el-Kébir, he considered it "...the biggest political blunder of modern times and will rouse the whole world against us...we all feel thoroughly ashamed..."

Now, as to who to assign the blame for 'World War II', that is a harder course of action because the victors of World War I certainly have their part to play in creating the conditions which would encourage the rise of the National Socialist German Workers Party, and the rather stupid partition of Danzig certainly didn't help matters, but this is something borne by hindsight and any attempt to rid Germany of her part in World War II is honestly an insult to those who died in the war.
Hitler could well have used diplomacy to fix his problems, he could have spent some of the goodwill he had created in Europe during his time in power to bring about a better solution to the Danzig problem, but his actions in Czechoslovakia turned European powers against him, despite their best attempts to seek some sort of avoidance to conflict.

Ultimately Hitler could have chosen not to persue Danzig, there was no immediate need to invade Poland, no-one was being massacred in Danzig, no one was threatening Germany with war unless she took the Danzig corridor, he could well have backed down and let Danzig slide. Heck, if he had then perhaps the Soviet Union would have invaded Poland later in the 1940s and we would have found Germany, France and the UK allied against the Soviet Union. It's something that some alternate history writers like to consider from time to time. Certainly France and the UK found themselves torn between the two evils of Fascist Germany and Italy and the Communist Soviet Union.
But no, Germany sought and signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and Germany invaded Poland, and that resort to force of arms over diplomacy puts the immediate blame for the war that followed upon Germany. One can argue the threads that lead to that declaration of war can trace back to the First World War and its conclusion, but the final decision to plunge Europe into another major conflict was Germanys.
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