XPost: aalt.war.world-war-two, sci.military.naval

Andrew Tanner
History enthusias tOct 11

What’s an unpopular opinion about Nazi Germany you hold that others don’t? That the Prime Minister of the UK in 1938, Neville Chamberlain, was
probably right to sign the Munich Agreement with Germany.


This act, which led directly to the conquest of Czechoslovakia, is
generally derided as an extremely short-sighted act of appeasement.
Churchill in particular singled Chamberlain out for scathing criticism
over this decision in his auto-biography.

Nazi Germany was not ready for war, Czechoslovakia had quite a strong
position, and it is entirely possible that drawing the line here might
have prevented WWII.

However, this wasn’t nearly so obvious at the time.

Chamberlain was not a military man. He had no experience or expertise on
the subject. When Hitler began making demands of Czechoslovakia and
threatening war, Chamberlain consulted with the leadership of Britain’s military arms and their intelligence apparatus.

The advice Chamberlain received was that the UK and France - the two
major powers in Western Europe - were in no way ready to confront
Germany. Should war break out in 1938, Germany would have a decisive
advantage.

(As an aside, this advice was classified until the late 1960s. It was,
however, known to Churchill.)

We now know that this advice was completely inaccurate but it was,
nonetheless, the advice to the Prime Minister of the UK by the experts
of the day. I think that, given what he knew at the time, Chamberlain
made the only choice he could - sacrificing Czechoslovakia for time to
continue re-arming.

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Chris Thomas
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Chris Thomas
· Thu
The problem with that theory is, if you read Shirer, chamberlain didn’t
just go along with Munich, hee gave away things that weren’t his. And,
even if you think it’s your only way out, you don’t take the god damn document out onto the balcony and proclaim peace in our time.
Chamberlain had no idea what he was doing.

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Andrew Tanner
· Fri
Shirer is an excellent source, but he was writing at a time when the
advice received by Chamberlain was still classified.

That is one of the interesting issues with the history of this period.
The earlier scholarship benefits from direct access to eye-witnesses
(and often being written by eye-witnesses, as in the case of Shirer) but
later scholarship has access to secrets that were not known at the time.

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Chris Thomas
· Fri
No, but it has all been released by the time Manchester write the second
volume off of his biography of Churchill. It doesn’t matter what advice
he wasn’t given. He didn’t care about any international agreements, he wanted peace no matter who he sacrificed. Even Halifax didn’t agree.
Again, you don’t stand on the balcony and proclaim peace in our time if you’re just holding in order to rearm. He did - after repeated
condemnation in parliament - finally come to his senses in early ‘39,
and come to a mutual defense agreement with Poland (another country that benefited from his betrayal of Checkoslovakia), but he had alienated the
Soviet Union by then enough that they signed a non aggression pact with
Hitler.

The attempted resurrection of Chamberlain, suggesting he has a clue of
how to deal with Germany, doesn’t hold water. He thought he was smarter
than everyone else, including his own foreign minister.


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Andrew Tanner
· Fri
Chamberlain made the decision that his military advisors urged him to
make. They said any other decision would be disastrous.

It was the wrong decision, but I can't see how Chamberlain can be
reasonably expected to have known that.

That's all I'm arguing here.

I won't tell you Chamberlain didn't act like a fool when he waved the
Munich Agreement around like that and proclaimed “peace in our time”. It
is a classic example for a reason.

I will disagree with you about rearmament though. It was already well
under way in the UK before Hitler started talking about Czechoslovakia.

In fact, British rearmament began in 1933 - though it was initially
about arming for a war with Japan. Germany became the main cause of
British rearmament by 1936 at the latest.


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Chris Thomas
· Fri
Chamberlain proactively aided Germany in the dismemberment of
Chekoslovakia; he put up no resistance in any form, otherwise he would
have tried to string the negotiations along more than three days, and
would have tried to limit what the nazis took, which he did neither.
Neither the British nor the French were in measurably better shape nine
months later, when they finally took a stand for the far less honorable
Poland. By that time, Chamberlain, having faced withering criticism in
the Commons, must have uttered Alec Guinness’ last words in Bridge on
the River Kwai, “What have I done?”

Chamberlain felt that the Rhineland, the Sudatenland, and the rest of
Bohemia, were not a British concern.

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Andrew Tanner
· Fri
In terms of realpolitik, Chamberlain decided that betraying
Czechoslovakia was better than dying beside them. It was a brutal call,
but that’s how realpolitik works.

I suspect he also held out hope that Hitler really would stop with the Sudetenland, but that’s honestly beside my point.

As for the state of military readiness… I am no expert on that of
France, but Britain’s military readiness in late 1939 was streets ahead
of what it had been in 1938.

If nothing else, the RAF in 1938 had been relying on biplanes that were
too slow to intercept Nazi bombers and had not yet completed the fighter intercept system that it would use to win the Battle of Britain (it was completed in August of 1939).

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Martin Walsh
· 5h
Perhaps not, but it was a popular move at the time with the British
public. I think folk who had been through the first war less than 20
years earlier were simply relieved there would be no follow-up. Perhaps
they should have taken notice of a cartoon published in 1919, showing
the leaders of the victorious nations leaving the peace conference.
Nearby is a baby with 1940 written on him. Lloyd George is saying
“Strange! I seem to hear a baby crying…” Prophetic.

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Jan Indrák
· Wed
I am from Czech republic (former Czechoslovakia) and I oppose this
opinion. I think he should not sold us to this swastika mofo. But then
again, we were young country, founded 1918, and no one really cared
about us. Chamby thought he saved peace for Europe. He was oh so wrong…

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Andrew Tanner
· Thu
I can understand why you would feel that way. If it had been my homeland
I would probably take the same position.

Note that I am only defending the move as “right” in terms of brutally practical power politics. I would never try to defend it on ethical grounds.

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