Liam Ostermann's Reviews > Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War

This is an excellent history of appeasement from a UK point of view but it is also a rather conventional and old fashioned history of the period. There was a lot of hype about this being a new evaluation and one that would attack established shibboleths but that had a marketing spin to it. It is useful to be reminded of how much the horrific legacy of WWI had on the events of the 1920s and 30s and how the general unease about the Versailles treaties lead large numbers of people to have more sympathy for German desire to revise the treaty rather than concerns of those like the French who worried about such revisions. But it is also useful to remember, and this not a point Mr. Bouverie gives much time at all to, how many of the people pronouncing authoritatively on the future of Germany and Europe and the UK's relationship to them were speaking with a degree of ignorance that should have made them blush and hold their tongues (of course politicians and others talking rot about foreign affairs are still with us).

I find Bouverie's account of Churchill utterly predictable he may point out flaws but more in the light of amazed at Churchill's genius then with a critical eye at what a damaging blowhard he was. A huge amount of the warnings he gave about Germany were wrong (rather like the alarms about the non existent missile gap Kennedy used as scare tactics in his political career). His successful frustration every move to provide some satisfaction to Indian nationalist before WWII has a huge responsibility for the horrors of the partition that came with independence.

Ultimately both Churchill and the appeasers were working not on a basis of antipathy or admiration of Hitler but about the preservation of British power. Churchill would have been as aggressively negative about Germany's resurrection as a military power if it had remained the Weimar republic. Churchill didn't defy the Nazis, he struggled to preserve Britain's pretty shaky imperial preeminence. That was what he cared about and in a different way that is what appeasers wanted as well. Churchill had as much interest or concern for Czechoslovakia as he had in Poland. He would have sacrificed the Czechs as he sacrificed the Poles but, to paraphrase Frederick II of Prussia on Marie Theresa and the partitions of Poland in the 18th century, 'he cried, when he betrayed; the more he cried, the more he betrayed.' What mattered was the preservation of Britain's honour and power. It wasn't so much what Munich did to Czechoslovakia that mattered but what it revealed about Britain.

The fact that after the defeat of the Nazis they were revealed as an absolutely repugnant regime gave a retrospective glow of moral purpose to the anti-appeasers that was without foundation. It is time for appeasement, like all the other actions of British governments in the 20th century right up until it's idiotic involvements in Afghanistan and Iraq, were seen as increasingly pointless attempts to preserve an ever more chimerical idea of British importance.