Seventy-five years ago today, Ford introduced the 9N tractor, which used the modern Ferguson three-point system of hydraulics. The result was a revolution in agriculture; within twenty years, ALL tractors used the Ferguson system. In one way, though, the Ford was very archaic; it used the top end of the Model A Ford engine, and the fact that so many millions of these tractors were made helps account for the fact that there are more than half a million flat-head four Ford motors still running today, a hundred and six years after that engine was introduced in the Model T in 1908. Also seventy-five years ago today, on June 19, 1939, the German Foreign Ministry, on direct orders from the Fuehrer, broke off negotiations with the Russians. The Wilhelmstrasse gave the reason that the Russians were insisting on using, as a basis for negotiations, their economic positions outlined early in 1939, whereas the Germans wanted to move away from them. In fact, the Russians had already agreed to move more toward German positions, but in the surreal world of the Nazis, this inconvenient fact didnt matter much. Historians spend, perhaps, too much time trying to understand Hitlers reasoning. He was, after all, mad. This maneuver could have been a negotiating tactic, an example of Hitlers sudden reversals of position due to delusion, or some mixture of both. Certainly, the Germans had no reason to feel threatened by the pace of Anglo/Russian talks, as very little (if any) progress was being made there. Lord Halifax had been invited to Russia earlier in the month, in an attempt to speed things up, but he declined; his official excuse was, Really, it is impossible for me to get away right now. He sent as his deputy William Strang, a man with great capabilities but who lacked sufficient political standing to participate in high-level negotiations. Halifaxs move thus locked the Anglo/Russian talks into mid-level negotiations at best, not a way to speed things up. (It also gave Halifax a scapegoat if the negotiations failed.) It was perhaps for this reason Churchill had made his veiled criticisms of HMGs Russian policy at the Century Club luncheon honoring Halifax on the 19th. In fact, the Anglo/Russian talks were probably doomed from the start because of Stalins ambitions in Eastern Europe. The actual sticking point took the form of guarantees to be offered to Latvia, Poland, Rumania, etc., which the Russians were only too happy to give, as long as they in turn got carte blanche to send troops into those countries whenever they wanted (even, and this was especially ominous language, in the event of non-military aggressions). This was an impossible concession for Chamberlain and the countries concerned to grant, even if they had wanted to (which they plainly did not); any Government, whether democratic or authoritarian, which agreed to such a thing would have quickly found itself out of power, before any such treaty could be ratified. The Russians had had enough, and on this same June 29th, Pravda published an article titled, British and French Do Not Want a Treaty on the Basis of Equality With the Soviet Union, in which one Andrei Zhadnov very publically criticized the British approach to the negotiations. The German Ambassador in Moscow, Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg (of whom much more later), noted wryly in a telegram to Berlin that Zhadnov had considerably greater political standing in his own country than Strang had in his, and that the Russians seemed to be positioning themselves to place the blame squarely on the British for the impending failure of the negotiations.
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 15:54:22 +0000
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