History /
Lwów, Wilno ... kresy - Poland have lost enormoust part of our heritage... [389]
Actually it was seen at that time as the best defensible country in the East...they had the usable mountain region (compared to the polish/german flatland), and their army was in higher numbers motorized with uptodate machinery than the german army.
That made the easy sellout by the West the more hurting.
But their problem zone really was that the same mountain region Czechoslovakia needed for defense was populated by a hostile german minority who was annexed against their will.
So, how that would had panned out if pushes had come to shove would had to be seen...
...
Foreign minister Benes became the prime architect of the Czechoslovak-Romanian-Yugoslav alliance (the "Little Entente", 1921-38) directed against Hungarian attempts to reclaim lost areas with Hungarian majorities. Benes worked closely with France.
By a risky move in 1918, the nation annexed "Sudetenland", a fringe region that comprised 3 million Germans, who opposed the annexation and were treated as second class citizens by the new government in Prague. The original idea was that the Sudetenland had hilly areas that made feasible a military defense. Far more dangerous was the German element, which after 1933 became allied with the Nazis in Germany.
The increasing feeling of inferiority among the Slovaks, who were hostile to the more numerous Czechs, weakened the country in the late 1930s. Many Slovaks supported an extreme nationalist movement and welcomed the puppet Slovak state set up under Hitler's control in 1939....
That might have been also the point why the West had given up on Czechoslovakia in the first place, to many people not being willing to fight for that artifical Treaty-of-Versailles-construct, who knows.