I'm pretty sure it was Hitler that initially told them to be ready in 1942,
Nope. The closest he ever said to that effect was "the nation would have to settle the issue of Lebensraum by 1943 at the latest" in 1937. He was horribly upset when the generals told him otherwise.
"No doubt Hitler was counting on support from his advisers. Their response must have been a shock and a disappointment. In the discussion that followed the Fuhrer's monologue, Blomberg (Wehrmacht Commander in Chief) and Fritsch (Army Commander in Chief) raised serious objections to his plans. They were not moral objections... What disturbed the generals was the possibility that Germany might become embroiled in a war with France and Britain before the Wehrmacht was ready. They disagreed with many specific points of Hitler's analysis, and they cautioned him against moving too quickly."
-Megargee, "Inside Hitler's High Command," p.38
Fritsch in particular took his objections to Hitler's ambitions very seriously and was public in his opposition, and in trying to rally others in opposition - most particularly Chief of the General Staff, Ludwig Beck. Hitler got around these objections by simply getting rid of Blomberg (on charges that his wife had posed for pornographic pictures) and Fritsch (on trumped up accusations of homosexuality), after which he took the position of Commander in Chief for himself, and appointed the toady Wilhelm Keitel as his Chief of Staff. By taking the post of Chief of Staff, Hitler had also done an end run around Beck's continuing opposition to his plans. By 1938 this came to a head over Czechoslovakia, where his opposition to Hitler's plans led Beck to resign, writing in extreme prescience:
"In order to make our position clear to historians in the future and to keep the reputation of the high command clean, I wish, as Chief of the General Staff, to make it a matter of record that I have refused to approve any kind of National Socialist adventure. A final German victory is impossible."
-Megargee, p.52
Beck had hoped his resignation might be followed by mass resignations among the other Generals. Not a single one of them followed him. Hitler even managed to get Beck not to publicize his resignation for "national security reasons," which removed any effect the act might have had on the wider German population.
Under Hitler's accelerated timetable, the war was actually supposed to have started in 1938. He later commented multiple times that Chamberlain had cheated him of his ideal war. We have contradictory accounts of his reaction to the Anglo-French declaration of war but his demand to hit the French ASAP generally indicate he was not unduly put off by it.started a regional war against Poland that turned into a general war in Europe that was not supposed to happened until 1942 even under Hitler's accelerated time table.
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