You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast.

Hello, this is Matt from the Explorers podcast.

I want to invite you to join me on the voyages and journeys of the most famous explorers in the history of the world.

These are the thrilling and captivating stories of Vigllan, Shackleton, Lewis, and Clark,

and so many other famous, and not so famous, adventures from throughout history.

Go to Explorerspodcast.com or just look us up on your podcast app.

That's the Expl on the edge.

This week, a big thank you goes out to Randall,

who chose to support the podcast by becoming a member. You can find out more about how you can

support the podcast by becoming a member over at History of the Second World War.com slash members.

This week, we are going to do some follow-up on three of our main players in the start of the war,

Britain, France, and Germany.

For Britain, we will give a summary of their ongoing rearmament efforts.

For France, we will look at how their plans for collective security had so thoroughly

fallen apart during the interwar years.

And for Germany, we will discuss how Hitler and the German government reacted to their two great political victories, the Munich Agreement, and then the occupation of what was left of Czechoslovakia.

While these three nations were not the only nations involved in the war, it would be the decisions made by the three governments that would turn what could have been a localized war in Poland into the Second World War.

Britain in the 1930s was very different than Britain of even 30 years earlier in the years

before the First World War. The British Empire had exited the 1800s in an economically

dominant position, fueled by industrial powers to the home islands, and the massive resources from the

empire that fueled that industrial base. But due to the First World War, and more importantly,

just shifts in the industrialization of other nations, most of that advantage had evaporated

...