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Friday 10 February 2012

In Praise of Neville Chamberlain

Friday, 18th September 2009

18th March 1940: British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940) walking across the Horse Guard's Parade, Buckingham Palace on his seventy-first birthday. Photo: Davies/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images.

Neville Chamberlain, it is fair to say, does not receive a good press these days. The War Party - on both sides of the Atlantic - sees Munich popping up every six months or so and, for reasons that escape one, presumes that it is always better to fight a war as soon as possible. All of subsequent human history is seen through the lens of Munich. This is a baffling virus but one that is, I fear, ineradicable.

To take a pair of recent examples: Obama's decision to relocate missile batteries from Poland and the Czech Republic to the mediterranean is, accoring to our old chum Con Coughlin, rank appeasement, (Brother Korski offers a more sensible appraisal here, incidentally) while Sister Philips bitterly complains that the prospect of a mid-level meeting between Iran and the United States, demonstrates that Chamberlain was a far-sighted hero compared to Barack Obama.

Perhaps she's right. But if so, it says nothing about Obama's weakness and everything about Chamberlain's appreciation of the national interest. That is, Chamberlain was a hero whose determination to avoid a cataclysmic war until it was no longer avoidable ought to be saluted, not vilified.

Whatever mistakes may have been made in 1936, by the time of the Munich conference Chamberlain found himself in an invidious position and, the judgement of history notwithstanding, he played his cards as best they could be played. Hitler may have been in a weak position at Munich, but so was Chamberlain knowing that there was neither public support nor much military readiness for a new war, least of all one to be fought on the continent. (As you can see, mind you, I choose to defend Chamberlain on a narrow front.)

To listen to the Munichites talk one might be excused for thinking that actions never have causes, only consequences. Furthermore, one might surmise that the choices available to Prime Ministers and Presidents are clearly between good and evil, black and white. But history does not work like that, no matter how tempting it is to pretend history runs along neat, straight lines. Chamberlain’s policy of delaying war until it was utterly inevitable may look foolish now but it was a policy guided by prudence and an awareness of what was possible. It was also popular.

Anyone reading Field Marshall Alanbrooke’s war diaries cannot help but be struck by the good fortune with which British forces escaped France in 1940. Equally, Alanbrooke (who would later become Chief of the Imperial General Staff) writes with the melancholy knowledge of a man returning to the bloody fields of his youth. On the 14th December 1939, for instance, he writes that seeing the fields he’d first visited in 1914 prompted “a mass of memories which were given a bitter twinge through the fact that I was back again starting again what I thought at the time I was finishing for good and all. It gives me a lonely feeling also going back over these old grounds, so many of them that were with me then are now gone, and so many that are with me now were not born then.”

It's pretty easy for bar-room generals to complain that Britain wasn't willing to embrace another war just 20 years after the last one had cost a million lives. But if you can't imagine why there might have been a proper, even decent, reluctance then, frankly, I suggest you lack the empathy and imagination that any half-decent historian or commentator needs if they're to be successful.

And when push came to shove, it’s sometimes forgotten that Chamberlain actually declared war on Germany, rather than vice versa. Consider these familiar-sounding words too:

“We are a solid and united nation which would rather go down to ruin than admit the domination of the Nazis...If the enemy does try to invade this country we will fight him in the air and on the sea; we will fight him on the beaches with every weapon we have. He may manage here and there to make a breakthrough: if he does we will fight him on every road, in every village, and in every house, until he or we are utterly destroyed."

That wasn't Winston Churchill, but Neville Chamberlain, speaking before his death in 1940. Chamberlain’s detractors, whose admiration for his successor knows no bounds, might pause to remember Churchill’s eulogy for Chamberlain “The same qualities which made him one of the last to enter the war, made him one of the last who would quit it before the full victory of a righteous cause was won.”

Today’s breed of hawks might also recall Churchill’s post-war judgement on Munich.

"No case of this kind can be judged apart from its circumstances. ... Those who are prone by temperament and character to seek sharp and clear-cut solutions of difficult and obscure problems, who are ready to fight whenever some challenge comes from a foreign power, have not always been right. On the other hand, those whose inclination is to bow their heads, to seek patiently and faithfully for peaceful compromise, are not always wrong. On the contrary, in the majority of instances, they may be right, not only morally but from a practical standpoint. ... How many wars have been precipitated by fire brands!”

Well, yes, how many? True, Churchill insists that sometimes delaying a looming war by a year or more merely makes matters worse, but in the case of Munich it's not obvious that this was necessarily the case. Apart from anything else, what if we had gone to war and lost before the Americans had been brought into the conflict?

I must say that there's something cavalier about the willingness of so many to risk so many lives so frequently, regardless of the wisdom or lessons that might be learnt from past expeditionary wars. Munich may sometimes offer useful lessons, but so do other more recent wars. Including an Iraqi adventure which I supported more enthusiastically than it is now entirely comfortable to recall. But if offered the choice between general rules requiring that one either rush to war as soon as possible or delay it until all other choices had been eliminated I'll choose the latter.

Filed under: Chamberlain (5 more articles) , Churchill (12 more articles) , Russia (94 more articles) , War (144 more articles) , World War 2 (65 more articles)

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Dave Weeden

September 18th, 2009 11:42am Report this comment

Good to see they've not thrown you out. I must confess that I was getting a wee bit worried when you didn't post anything when that chump Liddle got a gig.

Look, history should be simple. Chamberlain bad; Churchill good. Sister Phillips as you call her doesn't go for all this swotting and nuance. Anyone would think the facts had some bearing on judgements!

King Prawn

September 18th, 2009 11:46am Report this comment

The UK was always lucky in 1938 that Munich occurred. If war had started in 1938 then the Nazis would have won very easily.

The most important reasons being that the Spitfire and Hurricanes did not come into service until 1939. The RAF would have been destroyed.

Iraq is a different matter. If the West had delayed any longer then Saddam would have just got stronger. The UN sanctions were breaking down and, with the help of the French and Russians, Iraq would have been brought back into the international fold. The no-fly zones would go as a result.

Do you think that Saddam would then act like an enlightened leader. Of course not. He would have re-armed and turned his sights on the Northern Kurdish enclave. Then he would have turned his sights on Kuwait and so on and until he targeted Israel.

And would the West have the political will to stop Saddam. Brown and Obama certainly would have not have the stomach for the fight.

See the big lesson from the 1930s is this - if France and UK and challenged Hitler when he went into the Rhineland then he would have quickly retreated (Hitler admitted this).

Therefore you deal with potential enemies when they are weak. You do not wait until they become stronger!!!

Stephen

September 18th, 2009 1:02pm Report this comment

Thank you Alex, for this thoughtful and nuanced piece.

It is good to be reminded that Churchill understood the complexities of political decision making. Assuming this quote is typical of his opinion it would appear that he recognised that life is not simple and that the decision to solve matters through compromise or through war is at best difficult. He knew this because of his considerable knowledge of history as well as his experience of the affairs of state.

It seems to me that one can rarely know at the time when the right moment to go to war is. Life is only occasionally divided into black and white, good and bad, righteous and evil but spotting when it has an uncharacteristic simplicity is almost impossible. Of course, for a variety of political, religious and other complex psychological reasons, some would have us believe that issues are clear cut and certainty merely a matter of affirming the correct moral absolutism. We read as much elsewhere in the Coffee House blogs. But like you Alex, before I resort to that most destructive of diplomatic options - war - I want to be sure that every other diplomatic route to living together has been exhausted.

Ray

September 18th, 2009 2:43pm Report this comment

Had Chamberlain faced down Hitler in 1938 the strategic situation was more promising (all those well-armed Czechs behind their tough mountain defences), but - as you rightly say - public opionon was not ready.

However, by the time public opinion was ready a year later (after Hitler's duplicity was clear for all to see), even though Britain was better-armed the overall strategic situation had worsened considerably (no more well-armed Czechs, whose key armaments industry now lay in German hands).

Of course, had Britain and France faced down Hitler in 1938 we would have forever afterwards been damned as warmongering imperialists who toppled a well-meaning German nationalist!

An Authority on The Subject

September 18th, 2009 3:45pm Report this comment

Great picture - looks like Neville is about to clobber the photographer with his brolly. Do you know there isn't even a memorial to the old boy? Not that he would have wanted one himself, but it would be one in the eye for the noisy neo-con types (and their paid up stooges, e.g. CC) so worth a couple of quid donation by most right thinking sorts I should have thought.

dearieme

September 18th, 2009 4:20pm Report this comment

Churchill might have been thinking ruefuly of his own role in precipitating us into the First German War, and its horrible cost.
As for the SecondGerman War, it was surely a wild gamble that we could win it. It required the fluke of Dunkirk, the idiocy of Hitler's attack on the USSR before he'd polished us off, and the madness of his declaration of war on the USA.

Matthew

September 18th, 2009 5:02pm Report this comment

I think it was Field Marshall Alan Brooke, not Alanbrooke, as he wasn't given his peerage until after the war.

ndm

September 18th, 2009 5:18pm Report this comment

Great stuff.

I've long thought that the people who so readily point to Munich as our guide for international diplomacy would have been more than happy being in the crowd at Nuremberg. It was Hitler, after all, whose downfall was caused by intemperate attacks on his neighbours.

NJM

September 18th, 2009 6:24pm Report this comment

- I've long thought that the people who so readily point to Munich as our guide for international diplomacy would have been more than happy being in the crowd at Nuremberg.

What a pathetic & disgraceful comment.

Hugh

September 18th, 2009 7:15pm Report this comment

Munich has been so badly misused that there should be an equivalent of Godwin's Law for those who invoke it to justify interventionism.

James Currin

September 18th, 2009 9:25pm Report this comment

Just yesterday I sent this to my extended family:

Whatever one might say about the merits of Obama's stunning reversal of policy, one only can stand in awe of his exquisite sense of timing in announcing it on the 70th anniversary of the invasion of Eastern Poland by the USSR, in "fulfillment" of its part of the Molotov/Ribbentrop pact of August 1939. The Poles and the Czechs are now on their own.
The President spoke with his usual mastery of deceit [I don't think this is on the House Ethics Committee's list of proscribed utterances] in saying that the new policy would better protect the Czechs and the Poles from Iran's!! nuclear ambitions. If he mentioned that it had anything to do with Russia's often vehemently expressed opposition to the Bush policy, I must have missed it. It is as clear as anything can be in the complex field of international relations that Putin is steadily and inexorably reconstituting the Soviet Empire and its suzerainty over Eastern Europe, and that his method is intimidation Already, in todays NYT, we find analysts of the "realist" school proclaiming that Obama [or to use his full honorific "Barack Obama..."AKA: A CAR BOMB] has pulled the rug out from under Putin—one recalls Neville Chamberlain's fatuous exultation after Munich; "Hitler has missed the Bus"— and has simultaneously brought pressure on the Mullahs to end their nuclear program. Defenders of Chamberlain have asserted, not without some justice, that he had a weak hand to play in September of 1938. This is certainly true. His predecessor, Stanley Baldwin, aptly described by Orwell as "a hole in the air", had not drawn the proper conclusions from German rearmament, and had left Britain woefully unprepared to deter Hitler's ambitions. So Chamberlain may be said to have taken the best deal he could get, given the "correlation of forces" at the time. As we know,—but not perhaps Obama, given his notable ignorance of modern history— the deal lasted less than six months.*

Gil

September 18th, 2009 9:40pm Report this comment

An Authority on The Subject@3:45: 'Great picture - looks like Neville is about to clobber the photographer with his brolly. Do you know there isn't even a memorial to the old boy? Not that he would have wanted one himself, but it would be one in the eye for the noisy neo-con types (and their paid up stooges, e.g. CC) so worth a couple of quid donation by most right thinking sorts I should have thought.'

And pray who are these 'neocons'? Are you actually Taki in disguise?

ndm

September 18th, 2009 11:36pm Report this comment

James Currin writes:

-- Just yesterday I sent this to my extended family:

I think they just wanted a postcard from the beach at Agadir.

daniel maris

September 18th, 2009 11:53pm Report this comment

Seems to me that we are confusing two ways of looking at the past. Yes, we can understand WHY Munich happened (to understand all is to forgive all), but that doesn't mean it was RIGHT. Whether it was right or wrong depends on a detailed tactical and ethical analysis.

Personally I would say it was always wrong to acquiesce in the dismemberment of an independent, essentially peaceful nation. That's the ethical position.

Moreover, tactically it was not good. We delivered a huge military potential to Hitler by allowing him to take over Czechoslovakia at zero cost.

Lastly I would say that, yes, we should have the example of Munich - and even more the Rhineland in 1936 - before us at all times.

(By the way shouldn't colleagues spell each other's names correctly.)

An Authority ...

September 19th, 2009 12:45pm Report this comment

Gil,

The defining characteristic of your typical neocon is that of a runt who brags and makes threats against formidable opponents from a safe distance and/or from behind someone bigger or stronger than himself (or herself, in rare instances). Generally this behaviour leads to many deaths, but never any harm to the neocon. It is worth noting that these people existed in Hitler's day (a man who responded very predictably to threats, but unpredictably in most other respects). Suffice to say that those threats came principally from NYC but the consequences were visited upon countless innocent millions in his own backyard.

A final thought, perhaps the only reason that Hitler held back his forces at Dunkirk was out of a desire to avoid all-out war with the British Empire. Maybe that singular moment was the true gain from Chamberlain's policy of appeasement?

ashley

September 20th, 2009 4:28am Report this comment

i thought "the good fortune with which British forces escaped France in 1940" was hitler's largesse. letting the BEF out the back door would make his future subjects less restive.

daniel maris

September 20th, 2009 6:34pm Report this comment

I think it's worth pointing out:

1. There was no prospect of Hitler's army invading in 1938, 1939, 1940 or thereafter. The British Navy would have made mincemeat of any invasion fleet, with or without air cover. Only a sustained U boat offensive could have choked Britain and brought it to surrender. But Hitler had preferred to build his air force and mechanised land forces rather than the U boat fleet.

2. Do not forget we never committed all our air forces - not even in the Battle of Britain - there were large reserves in the north.

3. If the war had started in 1938, Germany faced the possibility of war in the West against Britain and France and war in the East against Poland and Czechoslovakia.

4. Had the anti-appeasement policy been pursued effectively the Rhineland remilitarisation woudl never have happened and Hitler would likely have been deposed.
Had that policy been brought in after 1936, then Hitler would never have gained Austria and it is perhaps doubtful that Italy would have entered into an alliance with the Nazi government.

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