while not strictly a ww11 topic, i have to ask, was chamberlain right to try and appease hitler in the 30's
while not strictly a ww11 topic, i have to ask, was chamberlain right to try and appease hitler in the 30's yes - Britain's military was ill prepared for a war (and appeasement actually bought valuable time for the military to start re-arming after the fiasco of the 1920s military strategy of the British governments). Chamberlain knew a war was coming but had to forestall it - he has been much maligned (especially by the Churchill camp)
Well, I was in the Churchill camp but I certainly didn't then -- or now in retrospect -- malign Neville Chamberlain. During the dark days of late May and early June 1940 there was a colossal struggle between Churchill and Lord Halifax (the Foreign Secretary and the leading appeaser) in the tense War Cabinet meetings. To his great credit, Chamberlain supported the position of Churchill and was instrumental in him prevailing. All this despite the fact that Chamberlain was very ill and in great pain (he was dying of cancer).
I had always been of Churchill's camp and a detractor of Chamberlain's, until reading the posts above, that is. Now I must re-think a favorite and comfortably held opinion. OH, the headaches! JT
not forgetting that while churchill was winning the war, clement atlee was actually running the country, something that many fail to recognise
There were many British appeasers who thought that Hitler was a "fine chap" and had pulled Germany around from the aftermath of a defeated nation.These were of a right wing political orientation and predominately the influencial classes who thought that Hitler would save Europe from commumism and were drawn into Hitler's seduction.When war started, a number of these were,quite rightly held in detention under the 18b Regulations. There were some who wished that Churchill would be removed from office in order that Germany and Britain may come to some understanding regarding the spheres of influence on foreign policy.Hitler anticipated the understanding to be a free hand in Europe.The deep detail of Hess's flight to Britain as late as 1941 in the guise of seeking peace has never really revealed. After Hitler's NSAP Party had been clearly formed for war,had produced a ready made Luftwaffe "out of an hat" in 1935,had introduced conscription and rearmanent in 1935, why was a World War 1 Prime Minister seduced by Hitler.Lloyd George, after a private visit to Hitler at the Obersalzberg Berghofon September 3 1936, spoke of Hitler as being "a great man who was admired as a national hero who had saved his people from utter dispair and humiliation" I do not think that Chamberlain's talks with Hitler were deliberate appeasement.Chamberlain was merely hoping that Hitler's territorial demands would be eventually satisfied.Of the leading British political figures,Churchill was the only one to challenge that view. When the Munich Agreement was broken,Chamberlain realised that Hitler's declaration, after marching into the Sudenland in October 1938,"this is my last territorial demand in Europe" was false.The annexation of the whole of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 confirmed that Hitler could not be trusted. Hitler had been assured by Rippentrop that Britain would never go to war.As the German Ambassador to Britain and later Hitler's Foreign Secretary Ribbentrop boasted of his close contacts within British influencial circles.What impact this had on Hitler's thinking is not clear.However,Goering must have thought Ribbentrop had Hitler's ear, when he revealed to the Nuremberg psychiatrist,Gilbert that he told Hitler that Ribbentrop had been guilty of "tactlessness in England" and related that Hitler thought Ribbentrop "had connections with English aristocrats". Whatever appeasement there was, it could not last long.The German /Russia Pact of August 1939 with a non aggression clause of 25 years sealed Poland's fate.
FYI: “…on 6 March 1936 [Germany] marched into the Rhineland [and] devoid of British support, the French did nothing either, and thus began the period known as appeasement. In fact, of course, there was little that Britain could have done. Certainly she and France together could have sent the three German battalions packing, and, just, the rest of the Wehrmacht too, still only in the first throes of expansion. Many today consider that they should have done so. Had Britain and France taken decisive military action, the theory goes, Hitler would have received a blow to his prestige from which he could not have recovered; he would have been voted out or the army would have removed him. The course of aggression leading inexorably to war could have been halted before it began and the Second World War would not have happened. Quite apart from the fact that the Polish Corridor, or tension between Germany and Russia, or instability in the Balkans would have led to war eventually, whoever was in power in Germany, this argument fails to distinguish between what should have been done and what could have been done. Politics is the art of the possible, and neither the British public, nor the French public, nor the important neutrals (notably the USA) would have approved military action to restore the demilitarised status of the Rhineland……” (Corrigan pg 130) “……Conventional received opinion tells us that it was Chamberlain and the appeasers, the guilty men of Munich, added and abetted by craven generals and tight-fisted bean counters at the Treasury who were to blame, and that picture is reinforced by those who won the struggle for political control of the nation in 1940, when disaster after disaster, …prompted a change in government. It was in the interests of Winston Churchill – brought in from the cold as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1939 -and his adherents to propagate that view and to ridicule the little man and his umbrella. In fact Chamberlain was not ridiculous in appearance, and nor was he a coward, nor a lackey of the dictators, nor an unrealistic believer in universal brotherhood incapable of seeing the threat that Fascism posed. Chamberlain…was one of the first members of the cabinet to oppose the ten-year rule and, in 1934, one of the first to advocate rearmament. As [PM] his defence posture – a strong air force, a one-power navy and no expeditionary force – may have been unrealistic, but at least it was a policy, even if it changed from when he had been Chancellor. Churchill, in contrast, argued for battleships in the 1920s when the evidence favoured aircraft carriers; opposed any development of the Singapore naval base in 1925; recommended the automatic extension of the ten-year rule in 1928, and fought to reduce the naval estimates in 1928 and the army estimates in 1929. It was only when he was out of office, and increasingly unlikely to regain it, that Churchill underwent a conversion that makes the Black Death seem like a minor outbreak of the sniffles, and began to bang the drum of opposing the dictators and building up Britain’s military strength. Of course, Churchill was right, but he must also take the blame for contributing to that weakness in the first place. Because of the ten-year rule, and the tortuously slow pace of rearmament after its abolition, the last time that Britain might have been able to stamp on Germany militarily was in 1936, but it is pretty big ‘might’. Had all been quiet in the Mediterranean, and had the situation in the Far East been favourable, and had France agreed to use her large army, then something might have been achieved; but all was not quiet in the Mediterranean, Japan was a real worry, and nobody in power in France or Britain were prepared to go to war. After 1936 appeasement was the only possible course for the Chiefs of Staff and the government to take until Britain’s armed forces were capable of acting decisively. Even the Treasury, always the scapegoat for a lack of defence spending, was not being entirely unreasonable when it argued that Britain could not afford the military capability the Chiefs of Staff recommended. …From 1914-18 Britain had the deepest Allied purse…she was able to make loans to France, Italy and Russia, and was never seriously in danger of economic ruin…Britain in 1939 was still a world power with a great empire…her industrial capacity had reduced in line with a decline in global economic activity.” (Corrigan pg 152-153) From: “Blood, Sweat and Arrogance and the Myths of Churchill’s War” by Gordon Corrigan ( Weidenfield & Nicolson 2006 isbn: 029784623x)
I wrote it in the other topic. In my opinion, the politics of appeasement was the reason why WW2 started... Munich Agreement was a prelude to the war. Can you imagine how much did Hitler earned by taking Czechoslovakia? How much weapons, tanks, vehicles, great aircraft, sources, labourforce, strategical terriroty... If we dismiss that France (UK didn't have one) broke the explicit ally agreement with Czechosl., still it was a moral trait on [my] nation... We suffer from it until these days. Yes, Great Britian was not prepared for war yet, but Czechs were. It was - as always - cronny political games. We had a promise of the Soviets, that they'd help us. All together, Czechoslovakian and Russian forces were much stronger then the Germans could raise against... But it is just "what if" and historians don't like that...
even thought it made Hitler more confident and gave him more land, we badly need to re-equip or army as it was not ready for a war at that time.
Chamberlain saved England's bacon. This was the standard of English Bomber in the mid to late 1930s And this one of the main fighters.
Kiwimac Good point - except that the Fury belongs to the Yugoslav Air Force! The Bombers, in case anyone is wondering, are Handley Page Harrows.
Vailron You weren't to know this, but I started a very similar thread a few months ago (on "the other site", now merged with this one). People's responses were pretty well what they have said here. Most of the points that I made at the start of that thread have been made here, but for the record, this is what I wrote: Appeasement: Would we have known better in 1938? How much of our knowledge and beliefs about WW2 are derived from hindsight? I’ve been thinking about the issue of Appeasement. Did it seem such a bad idea at the time? Would I or any of us necessarily have been an outright Churchillian in the 1930’s? What did we actually know about the reality of Nazism in 1937-38? I’m not turning into a pacifist! There is no doubt, knowing what we know now, that WW2 was a just war against a terrible evil, and this country and the world would have been a very dark place if we had not fought and won. But firstly, we must not overlook that fact the in the 1930’s, the memories and pain of WW1 (The Great War as people called it) were still very raw, and most people in Britain and Europe were very apprehensive of another war. Can we blame them for wanting to avoid this if at all possible? We did not go to war in 1939 to protect the Jews. Jews had been persecuted for centuries in Europe and there wasn’t that much sympathy for them in Britain. The Holocaust did not start until 1941. Of course, Jews were being persecuted in Nazi Germany. There had been Kristallnacht. Concentration camps, (but not the mechanism for extermination), had opened, and the mentally handicapped and the communists were being sent there even before the Jews. But then as now, there were many countries that persecuted their minorities and dissidents. Something as awful as the Holocaust as it eventually happened was way outside of the imagination or experience of the British or even German public in the late 30’s. We could not have predicted it. The only similar episode of mass extermination since the seventeenth-century religious wars was the Turkish genocide of the Armenians in 1915, and this was not general knowledge in Britain at the time (even today, Blair’s government will not refer to it as a genocide for fear of upsetting the Turks). I haven’t read Mein Kampf. Perhaps if any of you have, you can tell us whether Hitler explicitly spells out his plans for the Holocaust, or whether his anti-Semitic rhetoric is much vaguer, the ranting of a rabble-rouser? The reason why we eventually went to war, and why the anti-Appeasers believed we should have gone sooner, was because it became clear that Hitler was committed to building a German Empire that extended beyond the German speaking peoples, and would be a threat to this country. As far as I know, Mein Kampf spells this out more explicitly than it does the Holocaust - the concept of Lebensraum etc. Probably we should have stamped on Germany as soon as its troops marched into the Rhineland in 1936. With decisive action on the part of Britain and France, the Germans may well have withdrawn with little loss of life, and Hitler may well have lost sufficient authority for his position to be compromised. But we didn’t, and then it was too late to take action without starting a repeat of WW1. When the Nazis marched into Austria, the Sudentenland, and Czechoslovakia, we could only hope that they would stop at these territories, which (many politicians told themselves) could be thought of as Germanic. Of course we were deluded, but given our military unpreparedness, and the memories of WW1, the temptation to give Hitler one more chance must have been very strong, which was presumably Neville Chamberlain’s thinking at Munich. Certainly Appeasement was a common, and even respectable, political position in the 1930’s. Many senior members of the British Establishment supported it, e.g. the Duke of Hamilton with whom Rudolf Hess later tried to make contact. Being an appeaser was not necessarily the same as being a fascist sympathiser. There were probably many motivations for Appeasement. Some people were primarily trying to avoid a repeat of the Great War and its horrors. Some certainly had a degree of admiration for the Nazis; perhaps seeing them as a having lofty ideals of discipline and service that contrasted with the decadence and corruption of the Weimar Republic. And many saw the Nazis as providing a buffer against the real threat to Western interests, the Soviet Union and Communism (at least until the Non-Aggression Pact). Of course all these people had to ignore the atrocities that the Nazis did commit in the 30’s. But throughout most of the twentieth century, there were far more members of the British Establishment who believed that the Soviet Union and Red China were enlightened, progressive countries, and they had to turn a blind eye to far more atrocities that were far better reported. Were we physically capable of starting WW2 any sooner, perhaps instead of agreeing to the Munich settlement in 1938? The respective military strengths of the UK and Germany is a debate in itself. But to take the situation with fighter aircraft in 1938 for instance: RAF Fighter Command would have relied primarily on the Hurricane. At least half of its strength still comprised biplanes, not all as modern as the Gladiator. The Spitfire was only just entering service with 19 Squadron. The Luftwaffe would have relied primarily on the Jumo-engined Messerschmitt 109B, which was inferior to the Hurricane but better than the biplanes: but some 109Ds were in service and the E was being introduced: these were more nearly equivalent to the Spitfire. Bomber strength was just as critical. The RAF would have relied primarily on the early versions of the Whitley, the Blenheim Mark 1, and the fixed-undercarriage Harrow, with only handfuls of Wellingtons and Hampdens, and again many squadrons still had biplanes such as the Virginia and Hind. The German Kampfgeschwaders had entirely monoplanes, such as the Ju 86 and the early versions of He111 and Do17. I’m not an expert on the in-service numbers of these types; perhaps someone knows better? And what was the situation with the U-boat fleet in 1938? Another point is that there was a common belief that another Great War would lead to Armageddon, to the end of Western Civilization, much as people believed about World War 3 in the Cold War. 1930s science fiction, and films such as “The Shape of Things to Come” fed into this belief. There is no doubt that in 1940, Winston Churchill was the right man in the right place at the right time, and all his warnings of the 30’s proved right. But we must remember that it was Neville Chamberlain who took us into WW2: when Hitler invaded Poland, he was prepared to accept that we could give him no more chances. Rather than remembering Chamberlain as a failure, famous only for being wrong, perhaps we should thing of him as an honourable man who did his best to avoid a War which there was no guarantee of winning, and bought his Country vital time. Adrian Roberts, August 2006
Interesting reading, Ade. However, as I wrote above... Maybe Rheinland. But occupation of the Sudetenland? It was an indecent betrayal on Czechoslovakia. We managed to gather more then 1,500,000 soldiers in only 5 days on the borders, all of the willing to fight until they die... On the contrary to England, we had a very good airforce (obviously, because the B-534's were used by Germans and other Axis even in 1944!) We had also another good technique, like tanks Škoda (used afterwards in Operation Barbarossa...), weapons (Bren/Brno), etc, etc, etc... Czechoslovakia was prepared for war and was traited. That is the worst moral insult a nation could ever recieve...
Czechoslovakia was prepared for war and was traited. That is the worst moral insult a nation could ever recieve... Yes, I agree that Czechoslovakia was betrayed by Britain and France, and I am very sorry about that. But as I said in my post, we just were not ready to fight a war at the time. We would have lost, which would not have helped Czechoslovakia. A year later, we were a little more prepared, so went to war over Poland. Even then, we were very lucky that Hitler made the mistake of allowing us almost another year before invading France, so that we could prepare further. We are very grateful for all the Czechoslovakian soldiers and airman who came and fought in the RAF during the war, men like Frantisek Fatjl who died a few weeks ago. I agree the Czechoslovakians made good machinery. At different times, I have had a Jawa motorbike and a Skoda car. Adrian
You don't have to excuse for something you didn't cause when you were not born. But appreciated anyway. That is very significant, that many of the Brits have apologized me for the betrayl during Munich. (!) By the way, from a law point of view, the Munich Clerk was nulit (invalid), because another country is not legimited to touch another sovereign country's territory. By the way, Czechoslovakia had explicit defence settlements, with France (so called "Big Union") and Yugoslavia and Romania ("Small Union"). That would mean, if any of the countries would have been attacked, all the other were obliged to help and defend against the agressor. Something like NATO but in a smaller scale. And not that only it was not respected by France, but...
Well that is the French for you, they were determined not to fight (and then when they had to they didn't at least not effectively). They believed that appeasement was the right course of action when we know with hindsight that was only delaying the inevitable which of course came in 1939...
There were generals in France who were screaming for the Maginot Line to be extended to the sea in prepartion for an attack from Germany, but those higher up refused and refused to listen until it was too late. The Maginot Line began it's extention and armament only months before Germany invaded, and it never did reach the sea. But don't forget that France to this day carries the physcial scars of WW1, and many of the people could vividly remember it 20 years before. It was a battle scarred country that wanted to avoid a replay. Can you blame them? but i do blame them for not opening their eyes sooner. As to Britain: We would have been whitewashed if we had gone into a war sooner than 1939. As it was we nearly were obliterated and it was only the mistake of switching from the airfields to the Blitz that saved us and gave us another chance to regroup and breathe. As to Czechoslovakia, i am sorry we did not come to their aid. But we couldn't. Chamberlain did right by us, but that is with hindsight. The soldiers of Flanders knew we would have to fight the sons of the men we had just defeated, but no-one wanted it to really happen, as we knew the second time around Germany would be out for our blood. Everything was done to aovid a devestating war, but it could not be. We have to thank the politicans for at least trying.
Everything was done to aovid a devestating war, but it could not be. We have to thank the politicans for at least trying. No, I disagree! It was COMPLETELY OBVIOUS that Hitler wants to conquer the whole Europe - he shouted about Lebensborn as sonn as 1930... If only the politicians (Oh, how much I can't stand them!) would open their eyes and act properly. Appeasemnt = helping the enemy.
One can only imagine what would have happened if France was courageous enough to stand by its alliance with the Czechs. Interesting fact: France was so politically unstable that everytime the Germans made a move to annex countries etc. France did not have a Government in power. There were more elections in France in the 30's than any other nation!
