Appeasement's folly looks more obvious in hindsight

Seventy-five years ago this week, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Pact, handing portions of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler's Germany. Chamberlain returned to Britain to popular acclaim, declaring that he had secured "peace for our time." Today he is generally portrayed as a foolish man who was wrong to try to "appease" Hitler — a cautionary tale for any leader silly enough to prefer negotiation to confrontation.

But among historians, that view changed in the late 1950s, when the British government began making Chamberlain-era records available to researchers. "The result of this was the discovery of all sorts of factors that narrowed the options of the British government," explains David Dutton, a British historian who wrote a recent biography of the prime minister. "The evidence was so overwhelming," he says, that many historians came to believe that Chamberlain "couldn't do anything other than what he did" at Munich and gained "a much more sympathetic appreciation" of Chamberlain.

Most historians agree that the British army was not ready for war with Germany in the fall of 1938. If war had broken out over the Czechoslovak crisis, Britain would only have been able to send two ill-equipped divisions to the continent. Between 1919 and March 1932, Britain had based its military planning on a "10-year rule," which assumed Britain would face no major war in the next decade. Rearmament began in 1934 — and only on a limited basis.

The British army in autumn 1938 was simply not intended for continental warfare. Nor was the rearmament of the Navy or the Royal Air Force complete. Although Hitler's Luftwaffe had repeatedly doubled in size in the late 1930s, it wasn't until April 1938 that the British government decided that its air force could purchase as many aircraft as could be produced.

In March 1938 the British military chiefs of staff produced a report concluding that Britain could not possibly stop Germany from taking Czechoslovakia. In general, British generals believed the military and the nation were not ready for war. On Sept. 20, 1938, then-Col. Hastings Ismay, secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defense, sent a note to Thomas Inskip, the minister for the coordination of defense, and Sir Horace Wilson, a civil servant. Time was on Britain's side, Ismay argued, writing that delaying the outbreak of war would give the Royal Air Force time to acquire airplanes that could counter the Luftwaffe, which he considered the only chance for defeating Hitler.

British strategists, including Ismay, believed their country could win a long war, so long as they had time to prepare for it. This was a common belief, and doubtless factored into Chamberlain's calculations.

Historians disagree whether the British military's position relative to Germany was objectively better in 1939 than it was in 1938. The British military systematically overestimated German strength and underestimated its own in the lead-up to the Czechoslovak crisis, then shifted to a more optimistic tone in the months between Munich and the outbreak of war. Whatever the situation on the ground, it's clear that the British military's confidence in its abilities was far higher in 1939 than it was during the Munich crisis, especially because of the development of radar and the deployment of new fighter planes. In 1939, the military believed it was ready. In 1938, it didn't.

Soviet Russia was seen as a potential enemy to be feared, not a potential ally. America's neutrality laws made it unlikely that even a willing president could bring the United States into the fight.

There is also plenty of evidence in the archives that the British government had near-total disdain for the stability and fighting abilities of France, its only likely major-power ally. The average duration of a Third Republic government in the 1930s was nine months. When war did break out, Chamberlain's doubts about France's staying power proved prescient.

Nor was the British public ready for war in September 1938. "It's easy to forget that this is only 20 years after the end of the last war," Dutton notes. British politicians knew that the electorate would never again willingly make sacrifices like the ones it had made in World War I. Any strategy that claimed to offer an alternative to sending large armies to Europe therefore found supporters on every level of British society. "There was a feeling that any sensible politician would explore every avenue to avoid war before accepting war was inevitable," Dutton says.

If Britain were to go to war with Hitler's Germany, most people didn't want to do so over Czechoslovakia. "People spoke of Czechoslovakia as an artificial creation," Dutton says. "The perception by the '30s was there was a problem, it was soluble by negotiation, and we ought to try. It was not the sort of thing that would unite the country as an issue to go to war over."

Nor is the modern view of Hitler reflective of how the Nazi dictator was seen in the late 1930s. Blitzkrieg and concentration camps were not yet part of the public imagination. The British had already been dealing with one fascist, Benito Mussolini, for years before Hitler took power, and top British diplomats and military thinkers saw Hitler the way they saw Mussolini — more bravado than substance.

So, when Chamberlain returned from Munich with the news that he had negotiated a peace agreement, cheering crowds filled the streets and the press rejoiced.

To Chamberlain's credit, his views changed as Hitler's intentions became clearer. When Hitler took Prague and the Czech heartland in March 1939 — his first invasion of an area that was obviously without deep German roots — Chamberlain said he feared it might represent an "attempt to dominate the world by force." He doubled the size of the Territorial Army (Britain's version of the National Guard) and, on April 20, launched peacetime conscription for the first time in Britain's history. Then, on Sept. 3, 11 months after Munich, he took his country to war.

Historians often find themselves moving against popular opinion. In the case of Chamberlain, though, the gap between public perception and the historical record serves a political purpose. The story we're told about Munich is one about the foolishness of searching for peace. In American political debates, the words "appeasement" and "Munich" are used to bludgeon those who argue against war. But every war is not World War II, and every dictator is not Hitler.

Should we really fault Chamberlain for postponing a potentially disastrous fight that his military advisers cautioned against, his allies weren't ready for, and his people didn't support?

Chamberlain's story is of a man who fought for peace as long as possible, and went to war only when it was the last available option. It's not such a bad epitaph.