Has history been unfair to Neville Chamberlain?

[MannyGoldstein]

"My good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. And now I recommend you to go home and sleep quietly in your beds."
- Neville Chamberlain

[WI_DEM]

1. Interestingly, he served as Prime Minister for the first 8-months of WWII

and only left that position in September of 1940 because he was a dying man (he died of bowel cancer in November).

[RZM]

12. Actually he resigned on May 10, 1940

At the commencement of the German invasion of France and the Low Countries. That was about 8 months from the beginning of the war though.

[thucythucy]

32. Chamberlain left office

because he was driven out. Much of his own party refused to back him during a vote of no confidence in May 1940.

The proximate cause of his political defeat was the catastrophic campaign in Norway, during which the Germans outwitted and defeated both the French and British militaries. Only weeks before this happened Chamberlain had boasted in the press that "Hitler has missed the bus"--meaning that it was now too late for the Germans to make any successful attack against the western powers. Only days later the Germans seized Denmark and invaded Norway, taking the west completely by surprise. The British/French expeditionary force sent to help the Norwegians was routed, after which the Germans -- again taking the west by surprise -- attacked Holland, Belgium, and France.

It was the wieght of these disasters, following Chamberlain's obvious failure as a diplomat, that pushed him out of office. "Hitler missed the bus" became every bit as damning a phrase in English politics as "peace in our time."

[thucythucy]

34. Sorry for the redundant post

but I was told by my computer that the first one failed--and now here it is! Ah well...

[thucythucy]

33. Chamberlain left office because

of the vote of no confidence in Parliament in May 1940, following the British/French route in Norway. Days before the German attack Chamberlain had boasted that "Hitler has missed the bus"--meaning it was now too late for a successful German attack against the west. The disaster in Norway, followed by the German attack on Holland, Belgium, and France, proved that Chamberlain was as poor a war time leader as he was a diplomat. "Hitler missed the bus" became as infamous a phrase in English politics as "peace in our time." Think "Mission Accomplished"--only a hundred times worse.

[lunatica]

2. He wasn't the first person fooled by Hitler

Hitler fooled millions, even while murdering millions.

[chrisa]

3. It's hard to say without knowing the feeling of the time before it all started.

It's easy to say what he should have done now, but then, I'm sure decisions were much more difficult.

[WinkyDink]

14. Let history books be your guide.

[JHB]

17. The buchery of WW1 was still fresh in everyone's minds...

At the time, it was as recent as the Gulf War (Operation Desert Proving Ground Storm) is to us.

[dmallind]

4. Other - hindsight is 20/20

NOBODY - no matter how much they think so - can say what they would have done in his position with his info in his time. If you pretend you can, tell me who the next Hitler is and put big money on when the genocides will start.

History hasn't really been unkind because he made a terrible decision (England could not have done all that much to stop Germany at the time, but it could have started the buildup to do so then), but people who assume he did so out of personal weakness or intent to "appease" are being unkind, and irrational, because they are assuming facts not known at the time should have been correctly guessed.

[RZM]

15. I think people now forget how salient the memory of WWI was back then

In the 1930s, WWI was still a fresh memory. Everybody remembered that slaughter on such a large scale had been triggered by a relatively minor conflict between Serbia and Austria-Hungary. There were plenty of folks who were not all that keen on taking the chance of a repeat performance over a place like the Sudetenland.

[DevonRex]

19. And the men who fought then were still young enough

to fight again, if they made it through with all their arms and legs and sight intact. And it would mean leaving their
families in the middle of the depression. Barely enough food or money for rent.

[joeybee12]

5. Other...he was weak and ineffective...nt

[CanonRay]

6. Neville Chamberlain reincarnated as Harry Reid?

Just wondering...

[lapislzi]

7. I don't doubt that Chamberlain acted out of conviction.

I'm sure he thought he was doing the best thing for Britain and Europe. He was just...wrong. Or self-deluded.

It's not a bad trait to try to think well of your enemies. To hope for the best. It just doesn't work when your enemy is a bully without a conscience. As we are now witness.

[MilesColtrane]

22. You're talking about Gaddafi, right?

[Cobalt-60]

8. encourage is better than embolden

It's a word cheney used once too often.

[JoePhilly]

9. Other ... Our top story tonight ... Chamberlain, FDR, and Reagan are STILL DEAD.

And the popular legacy of each is wrong.

[SidDithers]

10. + 1 brazillion....nt

Sid

[DevonRex]

11. Nah. They're zombies. And Elvis is a vampire.

:hi:

[WinkyDink]

13. Is that you, Prescott?

[DevonRex]

16. Other. Facts:

Every country except Russia thought that it would be unwise to go to war during a Depression despite the fact that Germany had pulled itself out of depression by preparing for war. Every country but Russia was blind to the evils of fascism.

So whatever he is guilty of then so is everyone else. But he IS a convenient scapegoat for the others, isn't he?

And don't get me started on Churchill and his hatred of Russia causing the iron curtain and the cold war.

[Igel]

18. The USSR had its own problems, no need to assume another's guilt.

Stalin had no love for the West, what with socialism in one country and all, and even before the Iron Curtain had started to treat any Soviet in a western concentration camp as an enemy of the people. The rhetoric had already heated up, feelings were raw over the claim that the West's aim of letting the USSR take the brunt of Hitler's aggression and for the West to claim any of the glory or credit for defeating Hitler (much less talking about Lend Lease) was an affront to Mother Russia, the Soviets, and Stalin Almighty Himself.

Just as you can watch American WWII war movies for years and never see a Russian/Soviet, so you can watch Russian war movies for years and never see a can labelled in English or munitions ascribed to Lend/Lease. (Although there are stories from back then that refer oddly to canned beef and chopped canned pork as well as other supplies that weren't really very Russian/Soviet. But you have to find old, out of print editions to run into them. They were purged of such impurities later.)

[DevonRex]

21. However...

Before Stalin signed the nonaggression pact with Hitler he had tried desperately to form an alliance with
GB and the US. He knew hitler was going to war and he knew which side he should be on. But Churchill was adamantly against any pact with Mat' Rossia.
And this did lead to hitler invading Russia and taking the heat off the allies. So there is reason for Russia to feel as it did.

But you are right. The propaganda went both ways.

[Kaleva]

30. Hard for Churchill to form an alliance with USSR as that nation invaded Poland w/Germany

[thucythucy]

31. Churchill was NOT

"adamantly against any pact with Russia." That's absolutely wrong. Churchill in 1938 and 1939 went onto the floor of Parliament and insisted that the ONLY way to stop Hitler was to enter into an immediate military pact with the Soviet Union, however distasteful such an alliance might be. It was Chamberlain and other conservatives in both Britain and France who opposed a pact with Russia. It was Chamberlain's refusal to negotiate seriously with Russia that pushed Stalin into a pact with Hitler, in an attempt to buy time before the inevitable German attack. Add to this the fact that the right wing junta of Poland refused even to consider a pact with Russia, thinking they might somehow stand up against Germany long enough for the French and British to come to their rescue.

All sides miscalculated. Stalin thought that the fight on the western front would be another protracted stalemate, as per 1914-1918, giving him time to rearm and repair the damage he'd done with the purges. Chamberlain believed the Soviet Union was a third rate power that could offer no support to the west (or that's what he wanted to believe). Hitler thought that once France was finished, Britain would reach an accomodation and thus he could turn on Russia, which would be a push over. And the Polish colonels had no idea what would be unleashed on them and their people.

Rarely have the leaders of peoples been so wrong about everything. We've been suffering the consequences, ever since.

[Kaleva]

35. Hitler miscalculated by thinking GB & France would not defend Poland

Stalin did little to prepare for war with Germany, ignored intelligence that Germany was preparing to attack and went into a drunken funk for several days after Germany did invade.

[thucythucy]

38. All true

None of the so-called major "leaders" of the time comes off very well. Stalin was probably the worst thing ever to happen to the peoples of the Soviet Union, after Hitler. The conservative leaders of Britain and France were either naive, dull, or (in France) actively preferred the rule of German Nazis to French socialists ("Better Hitler than Blum").

I think Stalin went into the 1939 pact looking to buy time, but somehow between '39 and '41 deluded himself into thinking the German attack would come "later." But it's not true that he did nothing to prepare. There were attempts to improve the quality of training for Russian officers (after all the best ones had been shot or imprisoned in the purges of the '30s), to increase tank production, to upgrade the Soviet air force, etc. The occupation of the Baltic republics, the attack on Finland, all were intended to give the Soviet military a better strategic position vis a vis the Germans. Even the terms of the military pact with the Germans had important defense componants, for instance, the Russians traded oil and industrial diamonds for the blueprints to the Bismark, and the plans for German aircraft.

And yet, as you say, Stalin and his underlings were completely deluded by Hitler, and the attack when it came was a total surprise. It's like one cynical, murderous gangster being outfoxed by an even more cynical, murderous gangster. Truly an awful, awful era in human history.

[RZM]

25. I was thinking about this the other day

You're right that everybody tends to see their own contribution as the most important. In truth it was all important, though it's hard to argue that the Soviets don't deserve the lion's share of the credit. Even Churchill acknowledged that the Red Army 'tore the guts out of the Wehrmacht.'

A couple weeks ago on Bill Maher's show, Dan Savage claimed that Alan Turing 'almost single-handedly' won WWII because of his role in the British codebreaking project. I guess in his world, tens of millions of dead Soviets didn't count for much. I was glad Bill called him out on it, though in his retort Bill still failed to mention the Soviets.

On edit: Stalin did refer to lend-lease publicly, but only once, in the immediate wake of the D-Day invasion.

[DevonRex]

27. I heard that. I almost thre something at my teepee. :). Nt

[RZM]

24. That's not entirely true

The French were actually quite worried about the German threat. They had pressed for a harsh peace at the end of WWI because they felt they were the most exposed to a resurgent Germany. The problem was that they weren't willing to go it alone against Hitler in the 1930s, even when he was weak. Hitler himself described the first 24 hours after he re-militarized the Rhineland as the most trying of his career up to that point because he though the French might react with an invasion.

The Soviet line until 1934 was that all capitalists were bad. Because of its large empire and the fact that London was a center of world finance, Britain was actually frequently depicted as public enemy number one. And then of course there was Rapallo, an agreement under which the Soviet Union and Weimar Germany engaged in military cooperation against the terms of the post-WWI treaties. It was actually Hitler, and not Stalin, who put an end to that.

Collective Security did indeed fail, but it was the fault of both sides. True, the West didn't trust the Soviets, but part of the reason for that was that they were still advocating the overthrow of capitalism. Up to the outbreak of the war, the Soviets still had a larger spy network in Britain than they did in Germany.

And then there's the Nazi-Soviet pact. On the eve of war, the West was offering getting in on the war from the beginning, with no guarantee of expanding Soviet territory. Hitler was offering a way to stay out of the war for the time being and receiving Eastern Poland and the Baltics to boot (with the exception of Galicia, most of that territory had belonged to Russia before WWI). Stalin knew that the USSR would eventually be dragged into the war, but he hoped to stay out as long as possible, let the capitalists beat up on one another, and then intervene at a more opportune time. The pact with Hitler was clearly the better deal for him, but it wasn't exactly the policy of a leader who was all about standing up to the evils of fascism.

[DevonRex]

26. But Stalin actually did try to ally with the US and GB prior

To his pact with hitler. But GB was still angry about the Russia-France pact prior to WW1 which they felt was respossible for dragging GB into it. And GB did hate socialism in a rabid fashion and hated what Russia had done to their Royals during their revolution. Notably, they didn't care so much about the literally starving and freezing Russian people under that regime.

All to say that there are many, many sides and many, many consequences in international relations.

[DevonRex]

29. And thank you so very much for an intelligent discussion

of history as it relates to war in the 20th. That was my poly sci concentration, with emphasis on conflict in the nuclear age and US-Soviet relations.

[RZM]

39. Hey thanks!

:hi:

[Igel]

20. No.

He honestly believed he'd won the best deal for the West. That it was appropriate, because his cause was such that it was permissible to sacrifice others to it, others over which he had no licit authority.

It's rather like the US suing for peace with Germany and offering them Britain in exchange. One should at least ask permission before any deal which involves swapping inhabited land for peace.

[TheKentuckian]

23. Nope

[Kaleva]

28. There was no stomach for another costly war with Germany at the time.

It's easy to slam Chamberlain but he had no majority support for a showdown with Nazi Germany.

[BlueCheese]

36. Alas, it wasn't a real choice.

As Churchill said at the time, "You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war."

[thucythucy]

37. Neither was there any stomach

in Germany for a world war over a swath of land in Czechoslovakia. There was even a plan on the part of members of the German General staff to arrest Hitler and seize power in a military coup if he ordered an attack on the Czechs, and the Brits and French declared war on Germany. In fact, members of the German military even met with British intelligence to tell them of the planned coup--Chamberlain refused to believe it.

Ironically, it was Hitler's diplomatic triumph--the fact that he bluffed the British and French into surrendering Czech territory without firing a shot (as he'd already remilitarized the Rhineland, and annexed Austria, all without military conflict)--that cemented his popularity with the German public. He rode that wave of popularity right through September 1939--when a majority of Germans STILL opposed a world war. After all, the slogan "Why die for Danzig?" cut both ways. The victory in France gave Hitler a bump that lasted into 1942, by which time the whole of Europe was engulfed.