However, I'm welcome to dance nose history at 11.30pm on the 2nd of September 1939 with

a thunderstorm raging outside.

Neville Chamberlain presided over his last peacetime cabinet meeting as Prime Minister.

It was decided an ultimatum would be presented to Hitler in Berlin at 9 o'clock the following

morning to expire two hours later.

On the day before, on September 1, 1939, Germany had invaded Poland.

The old battleship Schleswig Holstein had fired what was probably the first shots of the

Second Model in Europe at a Polish military port at a military depot on the mouth of the

river Vistula.

German Luftwaffe aircraft had struck several Polish targets in the early hours of the first

and troops flooded across the border in the hours that followed.

The series of compromises reached with the Western powers over things like Rearmament, the

Rhinelands, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hitler gambled that the British and French would not

declare war, would not plunge the world into a second global conflict over his dispute

with Poland.

Hitler was wrong.

At 11am on the 3rd of September, the ultimatum to Poland expired at 1115am, Chamberlain

Address to the radio stating that the United Kingdom was at war with Germany.

We have, he said, a clear conscience.

We have done all that any country could do to establish peace, but a situation in which

no word given by Germany's ruler could be trusted, then no people or country could feel

itself safe and become intolerable.

...