What I Am Reading: "Appeasement" by Tim Bouverie
I was initially very excited to add another book to my "I Hate Édouard Daladier" subgenre, but this book is in fact mainly about British foreign policy: what cabinet members, diplomats, bureaucrats, and MPs were thinking, doing, and saying while dealing with Hitler (and, to a lesser extent, Mussolini) prior to WW2.
"Appeasement" was the policy of satisfying dictators' demands in order to preserve peace, and was mainly carried out by the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments. Naturally for the period, this policy was girded by the experience of the First World War: not only the desire to avoid repeating the suffering and loss of life; but also the view, in Britain, that the Treaty of Versailles had been unwise, and that Germany had legitimate territorial grievances. Even people who disliked the Nazis thought that the Allies had, in fact, "created" them, and that appeasing them was one way to stabilize the situation.
I'll get to the headline first, according to Bouverie, a journalist, appeasement was a complete failure. This might seem obvious with the advent of WW2, but there is a school of thought that appeasement, including the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia, bought time for the British to re-arm and thus eventually triumph in the war. Bouverie disputes this, both when the Munich conference is recounted, about 2/3rds of the way through, and in his summation at the end. Though it is true that the British were given an extra year to re-arm, the Germans were also given an extra year to widen the armament gap. If the British and French had fought for Czechoslovakia in 1938 instead of waiting to fight for Poland in 1939, they would have had the military advantages of
A German air force that would not have been at optimal fighting strength,
An advantage on Germany's western front as the bulk of the German army would have been bogged down fighting the well-prepared, well-motivated Czech military to the south,
A Russian commitment to prop up Czechoslovakia, which would have at bare minimum been superior to the Nazi-Soviet pact in place a year later.
It was not to be, and the Munich conference famously continued the pattern of appeasement that had begun years earlier, when Stanley Baldwin was Prime Minister. This is the point where I quickly dispose of the good elements of Chamberlain, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer during Baldwin's government: he was at least steady on re-armament, including orienting re-armament towards a build up of airplanes (which had the virtue of being the most cost-effective option). The Baldwin government took office in 1935, as the continuation of the National Government that had formed a coalition during the Great Depression, when Ramsey MacDonald split the Labour party and aligned his rump of supporters with the Conservatives on the basis of monetary policy. That subject, however, is beyond the scope of the book, the book review, and my understanding. In any event, the quiet and lethargic Baldwin government saw enough crisis in Europe to agree with anti-Nazi hawks such as Churchill on the need to re-arm, but did not share their view on the seriousness of the crisis or the urgency of the timetable. They even thought that rearmament would be bad for the country's economy! It was at this time that the Italians invaded Ethiopia/Abyssinia and the Germans remilitarized the Rhineland on the French border. British and French failure to do anything other than protest either of these served as the death knell of the League of Nations as a functioning institution. British efforts to come to an agreement with Mussolini on the subject caused the resignation of Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, remembered well by some in the aftermath of the era but actually an indecisive politician despite being opposed to appeasement. Appeasement of Mussolini in an effort to drive a wedge between him and Hitler is pursued for a while, but ends up as a nonstarter.
Meanwhile, my background knowledge and between-the-lines reading tells me that it was with the attack on Ethiopia and the fascist involvement in the Spanish Civil War the next year that saw the left turn away from an opposition to re-armament. There are several asides throughout the book where Attlee and the Labour Party are criticized for wanting to take a tough line on the fascists but voting against raising the firepower to do so. Nevertheless, it is repeated that appeasement is both a Conservative and a conservative policy; the anti-appeasement Foreign Office civil service is described as "leftist" by its critics, and late in the book a Conservative MP laments that he looks bad because he has been telling his constituents that "voting for a socialist will mean war." Attlee at some point figured out that they would need to fight.
Meanwhile, despite Churchill's best efforts at warning, the Conservative party was united until the policy became untenable, with a strong whip in favor of Chamberlain. In analyzing this division beyond the left/right spectrum, Bouverie notes a few different theories others had floated. In terms of class, the left thought the country's leadership to all be plutocrats; but within the right, the aristocracy, itself divided, saw the appeasers as small-minded bourgeois. Was it service in the first war? No, this was mixed in each side, though more anti-appeasers had fought. Age? See above. The main predictor is the underlying political philosophy: the anti-appeasers saw an active role for Britain in the European community, while the appeasers thought more in terms of the British Empire.
Hardly anyone spared a thought of fighting for Austria, despite Chamberlain's fondness for the assassinated Austrofascist leader Engelbert Dollfuss. Czechoslovakia, however, was a different story. Hitler claimed that his intention was to reintegrate the German minorities of the Sudetenland into the Reich, which would have deprived the Czechs of the country's natural resources and defenses. British policy was, essentially, to pressure the Czechs to give in to German demands. At this point, the appeasers took Hitler at his word that he was simply seeking a reunification of the German peoples; some even thought that this was a reasonable goal. As tensions escalated, Chamberlain accepted an invitation to negotiate directly with Hitler, and flew across the channel to meet him. The first sit-down was basically just a meet-and-greet, but after a flurry of diplomacy between the Czechs and the British/French, at a second sit-down Chamberlain presented a deal that acceded to Hitler's territorial demands.
Hitler dramatically rejected this deal, in a trademark over-the-top rant. This is when the British cabinet finally showed a little backbone, and British public sentiment, never with a majority in favor of appeasement, oriented towards a fight. In the face of this, Hitler, who had wanted to fight all along, blinked. He invited the British and French to join him and the Italians at Munich for a conference. In a flurry of public support, Chamberlain went with strong domestic support.
For all the fame of the Munich conference, it was essentially a face-saving gesture. The disorganized British and French delegations "brought Hitler around" to accept the original deal. The whole situation is presented by Bouverie as a fait accompli. After this, the famous stuff happened: Chamberlain waved his document above his head at the airport, then leaned out the window of Number 10 Downing St. and said that it was "peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time." I will now always think of the scene related in my previous book, by Hochschild, where Edvard Beneš, the President of Czechoslovakia, allegedly said when announcing the deal, "our state will not be the smallest. There are smaller states than we shall be." Hungary and Poland also took pieces of the country. The British, rapturous for a while, quickly moved on to a feeling of shame, as recorded by public opinion polls and interviews.
Early in the next year, Hitler dealt appeasement a mortal below by overrunning the remainder of Czechoslovakia on the pretense of supporting Slovak separatists (related well in HHhH by Laurent Binet). After this occurred, there were a series of small panics regarding potentially vulnerable countries. This was when the British made their commitment to defend Poland. This was a hasty decision, and was not intended to be a long-term plan; but rather a stopgap to help box Hitler in at the time. Its hastiness led to a lack of due diligence on Poland, and their readiness and willingness to fight.
After Mussolini invaded Albania in Spring of 1939, it set off another round of panic, and Britain finalized agreements to defend Greece and Turkey in the event of their attack, and reluctantly joined France's pledge to Romania. This was the point where relations between the British and the Nazis were officially dead, despite the continuing efforts of amateur diplomats (mostly aristocrats who think they alone can fix things and make deals). Meanwhile, another (perhaps underappreciated) black mark on Chamberlain's record comes with his lack of serious interest in making an agreement with the Soviets, sending an underpowered delegation and not pushing when talks went poorly. Things might have gone better the first time the Soviets tried, but the amenable Maxim Litvinov, a believer in collective security, was replaced after Munich by Molotov, a less accommodating figure. The Soviets ended up making a pact to divide Poland with the Nazis. Meanwhile, Churchill was finally gaining political cache (squandered in his wilderness years through support of some quixotic causes), and manages to get the Ministry of Supply position created as he had long campaigned for, an economic planning position.
Chamberlain's cascading failures continued during the "phoney [sic] war" period after the Nazis invaded Poland and the British and French declared war. Not wanting to institute bombing campaigns, either against German civilians or against troops moving into Poland or Norway, Chamberlain thought that a blockade and economic pressures would bring Germany down. After the failure of the British expedition to Norway to prevent the Germans from seizing natural resources, Chamberlain's government was dramatically brought down when he sustained a lot of Tory defectors on a confidence vote, and then Labour refused to join a coalition government if Chamberlain ran it. The last stand of the appeasers was admittedly subsequently finished off by Chamberlain, after he backed Churchill's determination to decline negotiations with Hitler as France fell.
This is just a chronology of events, and it does not do the book justice, because it contains a wealth of information on the thoughts, writings, and actions of British policymakers. I felt that things escalated rapidly while I was writing this, but it was actually an excruciating drag to watch the situation proceed through Ethiopia, Spain, the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and finally Poland. There are many characters beyond merely Chamberlain, Churchill, and Lord Halifax, Chamberlain's Minister of Foreign affairs who went from an appeaser to an anti-appeaser to a defeatist. There is Horace Wilson, Chamberlain's fixer who arranged many of the backroom deals and negotiations and was a strong voice for appeasement, and the defeatist Nevile Henderson, Ambassador to Germany, who did his best to block anything that would antagonize the Germans. Also making cameos were Lord Lothian, appeaser, later ambassador to the United States, and future spies in the US Fritz Wiedemann and Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, also previously seen in Hitler's American Friends. I wish that the book had paid a bit more attention to the Anglo-French alliance and activities in Paris, especially after I had read so much about the pressure on Léon Blum not to help the Spanish Republic; but ultimately, the focus was on Britain, and that was enough. The horrors of WW1, faith in Hitler's claims of German reunification and no more, and an underestimation of their military position vis a vis the Germans all led to World War 2 opening on terms that certainly could have been much more favorable to the Allies.