Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War

by Tim Bouverie

the Daily Telegraph came out with a thumping, two-column editorial demanding Churchill’s inclusion in the Government.

Führer, however, would be to recall Churchill. “Churchill is the only Englishman Hitler is afraid of,”

“Have the gods sent us mad before destruction falls?”

hour earlier, members of the SS, dressed as Polish nationals, had taken over the Gleiwitz radio station on the Polish frontier, where they had dumped corpses—two taken from a concentration camp, the third murdered by lethal injection—and faked an anti-German broadcast. Other staged acts occurred at the customs house at Hochlinden (more concentration camp victims, shot in the woods nearby) and at a deserted forester’s hut at Pitschen. At 4:45 a.m. on Friday, September 1, the guns opened. The war had begun.

The ensuing forty-eight hours was a time of high tension and acute frustration. When Churchill saw Chamberlain early on Friday afternoon, the Prime Minister told him that the die was cast: he could see no hope of avoiding conflict with Germany and invited his rival to become a member of the small War Cabinet he intended to form. It was a moment of personal vindication for the younger man, who had warned of the Nazi danger for so long and been ignored, but the call to arms did not follow this meeting as he expected.

On the same day that this letter was written, it was announced that Chamberlain had exhumed the former Home Secretary Sir John Gilmour to run the newly created Ministry of Shipping. It almost makes one “wonder whether he is trying to win the war,” commented Violet Bonham Carter, Herbert

You know how greatly I desired to halt this tragic sequence by peaceful means. Munich was, I believe, the last chance of a peaceful solution and the final test of German sincerity, but Hitler deliberately rejected that chance and demonstrated his insincerity. When, with abundant warning of the results that must follow, Germany invaded Poland, the last opportunity had come of halting the sequence even by war, and I have no shadow of doubt that when we entered the war in September we did so not merely in defence of Poland but of France and the British Empire.

The blame for the defeat fell on Chamberlain. That this was far from fair was clear to those who had been privy to the twists and turns of the previous few weeks. If there was one man responsible for the debacle it was Churchill, who, contrary to the image he painted in his war memoirs, changed his mind repeatedly over whether Narvik or Trondheim should provide the focus for Allied operations.

Government did not wish to lose the war, then they would do well to remember Nelson’s dictum that “the boldest measures are the safest.”

At 6 p.m. he offered his resignation to the King and recommended Churchill as his successor.*6

At 7 p.m., the order for Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of the BEF from France, was given.

At 4:30 p.m., the War Cabinet, plus Sir Archibald Sinclair—the new Secretary of State for Air and, importantly, an ally of Churchill—met, for the second time. The meeting only lasted an hour and a half but was arguably the most important ninety minutes of the war; certainly the closest that Hitler came to winning

By the end of June 4—nine days after the commencement of Operation Dynamo—338,226 men

had been evacuated, including more than 125,000 French soldiers.

When the Director of the National Gallery, Kenneth Clark, suggested that the museum’s paintings should be sent to Canada for safekeeping, he received a similar response: “No. Bury them in caves and cellars. None must go. We are going to beat them.”

We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

was the ultimate signal of Churchill’s victory over Halifax and the appeasers: the most dramatic expression of that defiance which would deny Hitler victory in 1940.

The failure to perceive the true character of the Nazi regime and Adolf Hitler stands as the single greatest failure of British policy makers during this period, since it was from this that all subsequent failures—the failure to rearm sufficiently, the failure to build alliances (not least with the Soviet Union), the failure to project British power, and the failure to educate public opinion—stemmed.

But for two reasons nobody could have succeeded at Berlin. These reasons are a) the nature of the character of the beast with which any British representative would have to deal and b) the fatuous belief of Chamberlain and, presumably of his Government, that in 1937 it was possible to achieve anything by a policy of appeasement of Germany. Hitler is an evil man and his regime and philosophy are evil. You cannot compromise with evil.

Aside from Rumbold—whose close reading of Mein Kampf allowed him to warn the British Government as early as April 1933 of the aggressive and expansionist ideology guiding the new Chancellor—Sir Robert

Vansittart, Brigadier A. C. Temperley, Sir Austen Chamberlain, Ralph Wigram, and, of course, Churchill stand as examples of men who understood “the nature of the beast” from the very beginning and argued for remedial action.

In this, Chamberlain, obviously, failed. Given the character and ideology of the man with whom he was dealing, it is inconceivable that he could have done otherwise. What was far from inevitable, however, was that he should also have neglected to build a system of alliances capable of deterring Hitler or, if it came to war, defeating him as swiftly as possible.

Unlike his successor,

he treated the United States with frigid disdain, while his failure to secure a deal with the Soviet Union stands out as among the greate...

But his policy critically misunderstood the nature of the man with whom he was treating and neglected those contingencies which might have contained him or defeated him more quickly. It was, in every sense, a tragedy.