Faith in appeasement, the central tenet of British foreign policy throughout the 1930s, remained strong among the most devout long after it had been exposed as entirely bankrupt. Even as it lay in tatters with the German military massing on the Polish frontier for the invasion of Poland in the late summer of 1939, the virtually disloyal British ambassador to Berlin Sir Nevile Henderson recommended the Polish government concede to Hitler’s demands, while in London R.A.B. Butler, member of parliament, despaired that the British Foreign Office was displaying an unwarranted “absolute inhibition” to pressure the Poles to negotiate. After the German invasion of Poland, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his government prevaricated one last time before finally declaring war on Germany.
Appeasement was “the attempt by Britain and France to avoid war by making ‘reasonable’ concessions to German and Italian grievances.” The long list of “reasonable concessions” when finally catalogued included the systematic dismantling of the Treaty of Versailles, disbelieving Hitler’s Mein Kampf manifesto, willfully ignoring the anti-Semitic nature of Hitler’s regime, and excusing the camps and Nazi atrocities, such as Kristallnacht. The Rhineland was conceded, massive German rearmament permitted, intervention in the Spanish Civil War accepted, Austria was allowed to be absorbed, Abyssinia invaded, an undeclared Italian submarine war waged in the Mediterranean, Albania annexed, Memel seized from Lithuania, and the Sudetenland and eventually all of Czechoslovakia occupied.
The abysmal history of British foreign policy in the years before the Second World War is described in Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War by Tim Bouverie, a political journalist. It a well-written work that engages the reader with the drama of the events, while, as the author acknowledges in the introduction, providing only limited analysis and commentary. In this his first book, Bouverie is particularly good at mining published diaries, correspondence, and archival collections to illuminate the characters and personalities involved. The sorry cast includes Stanley Baldwin who as prime minister excused his own ignoring of Britain’s military defenses as a policy of rearmament might have lost him the 1935 election and former prime minister David Lloyd George who after visiting Hitler gushed that the Fuhrer was “the greatest German of the age.” Bouverie describes the steady stream of British admirers who joined Lloyd George in travelling to “Hitler’s Wonderland” to gape at the supposed achievements of Nazi Germany.
A success as a British cabinet minister, Neville Chamberlain became prime minister in 1937 determined to reach an accommodation with the dictators. As a leading anti-appeaser Duff Cooper noted Chamberlain as mayor of the city of Birmingham had never met anybody “who in the least resembled Adolf Hitler.” Chamberlain’s defenders claim that his surrender of Czechoslovakia at Munich bought Britain an “extra year” before the start of the war. This ignores the reality that he remained reluctant to increase the pace of British rearmament. Bouverie rightly concludes that Chamberlain blundered badly in his handling of the relationship with President Franklin Roosevelt and the United States and failed to establish an anti-German deal with the Soviet Union.
Brightening Bouverie’s story are the anti-appeasers whose number included, of course, Winston Churchill as well as the glamorous but indecisive Anthony Eden, the pugnacious Leo Amery, and Harold Macmillan, who burned an effigy of Chamberlain on Guy Fawkes Night in 1938. While many of the pro-appeasement politicians had not served in the First World War, most of the prominent anti-appeasers had fought, been wounded, and decorated for valor in the trenches of the Western Front. The anti-appeasers were small in number and isolated politically, attacked as war-mongers in the pro-appeasement newspapers, harassed by their constituents, and had their telephone conversations bugged. Ronald Cartland, the brother of the novelist Barbara Cartland, was a member of parliament who on the eve of the German invasion of Poland passionately attacked appeasement in a speech in the House of Commons. He was vilified in the press and Chamberlain boasted he would have the young man’s political career destroyed. Chamberlain did not have bother himself to carry out his threat as after war was declared, Cartland joined the army and nine months later was killed at Dunkirk.
Appeasement cannot be entirely dismissed as the cowardly policy of Chamberlain and a feckless British establishment who blindly ignored the looming danger. Borne out of perceived British weakness and the instability of France, it reflected the general desire to avoid a repetition of the horrible losses of the First World War. As Bouverie details, appeasement was an extremely popular policy. In the 1930s, millions of British supported disarmament and pacifism as reflected, albeit overplayed, in the famous Oxford Student Union vote against fighting for King and Country. The public, while abhorring the Nazi regime, reacted with delirium to avoiding war by throwing Czechoslovakia to the wolves at Munich. Chamberlain with his promise of peace with honor was serenaded by crowds in Downing Street on his return. Only after the long series of humiliations at the hands of Hitler and Mussolini was British patience with the dictators at last exhausted.
While the story of appeasement has been much written about, Bouverie retells the story in outstanding fashion. Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War is a fascinating narrative history.