Posted on 10/01/2013 9:29:15 AM PDT by mojito
Seventy-five years ago, on Sept. 30, 1938, 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 the prime minister 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 in general and narrowed the options of Neville Chamberlain in particular," 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. Over time, Dutton says, "the weight of the historiography began to shift to a much more sympathetic appreciation" of Chamberlain.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
The real story is probably that Germany hadn’t built up enough at that time to really provide JPMorgan, Nat City et. al. the opportunity to really make a killing off another long bloody conflict so Neville had to give them some breathing room to refine their tactics and come up with better material...
Recall, those banking institutions would have been footnotes in history if we hadn’t spent ~250,000 young men on collecting their British and French war loans in the first world war, setting the stage for the second.
/cynicism...
Whatever Neville Chamberlain was, he was no liberal. He was the hero of the Conservative Party, the hero even after Churchill took over as PM, whose aim, futile as it turned out to be, was to direct Hitler into a war with Communism that would destroy both evils.
The heart of opposition to Chamberlain was the socialist Labour Party, men like Atlee who brought the welfare state to Britain after the war.
—First, a look at the military situation. Most historians agree that the British army was not ready for war with Germany in September 1938.—
This guy forgets that the Brits would have relied on the French Army to fight the Germans in 1938. They had the largest army on the continent at the time, if memory serves.
Neville Chamberlain was not a “left”ist. He was a Conservative MP, just like Churchill.
Chamberlain was a conservative in much the same way that Lindsey Graham is a conservative.
the left has to rehab chamberlin. mein kamf is a best seller in the arab world these days.
Yes, but do not underestimate the demoralization caused by the Great War. Nobody wanted a reprise of it - and I’m talking about the “victors!” Even in 1941, entry into WWII polled no more than 20% among Americans before Pear Harbor.The reality of the historical situation is that nobody had the vision and the moral authority to act in 1933. Churchill was humiliated by Gallipoli; would you in 1933 have been enthusiastic about having your son drafted into a war against Germany then - only 15 years after your older brother had returned in a coffin from WWI?
for another Gallipoli?
The only thing which would have prevented WWII would have been prosperity. Absent the disastrous decay of American - and British - industry due to the policies of Hoover which were doubled down on by FDR, even as FDR blamed the results of those policies on Herbert Hoover, it wouldn’t have taken so much time to ramp up production of war materiel.The little-known story of the American buildup of war materiel production is told in
It’s not politically correct for you to know that FDR - with his Under Secretary of the Navy experience of the signal failure of US industry to produce and deliver war materiel to Europe before WWI ended - ramped up war production from the fall of France (May, 1940) right through Pearl Harbor and US entry into WWII. He did it by hook or by crook, and US entry into the war - nominally on the timetable of the Japanese, and of the Germans who declared war on us after Pearl Harbor. But it is an interesting coincidence that, after FDR had been told by GM’s Wm Knudsen that it would take 18 months to ramp up American war materiel production, the Japanese happened to attack in December of 1941. A coincidence which could lend credence to the theory that the Japanese were played like a Stradivarius by FDR’s diplomacy, and got us into WWII on FDR’s timetable.
- Freedom's Forge:
- How American Business Produced Victory in World War II
Arthur HermanThe reason that, notwithstanding American ramped up military production starting in mid-1940, America had very weak forces on hand in December 1941 is simply that American production (and, in the case of obsolescent bolt-action rifles, existing inventory) had been devoted to keeping the British war effort afloat. But with the preliminary 18 months behind him, Knudsen was in a position to say in December 1941 that America could produce 50,000 warplanes in 1942. The administration was throttling back on military production well before the war was over.
Presumably, then, in the absence of the Depression American production potential would have made it far easier to dominate a contest of war materiel production in 1933. But in 1933, FDR was not Winston Churchill.
This was the depression, when money was scarce.
Europe had disarmed itself after WWI. It wasn't really an ideological thing in the 1920s. Everybody was sick of war and nobody in the democracies wanted to prepare for another European war.
After Hitler took power, British rearmament had begun under Chamberlain, but it took time to get up to speed.
Very good points.
The horror of WW1 was still with Britain. 160,000 women widowed by that war. My two grandfathers had served. One could see men still suffering shell shock. They twitched and shook and tried to hide it. Poor devils still had lung problems from the gas attacks. Amputees a plenty.
The high ranking Nazis were interrogated by the Americans after 1945. I have read some of the transcripts. Obviously they desperately wanted to tell the Americans exactly what they wanted to hear. To this day I will never know the truth. What they said was that Hitler took a bit of a fright after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. If what they said is true, then had Neville Chamberlain had delivered his ultimatum Hitler could have backed down. Chamberlain did not know this- if it was true.
Now for the figures of the British Aircraft strength. The all metal planes were indeed on the drawing boards. The Spitfire and the Hurricane, also the Boulton Paul Defiant. Six were operational. When the ultimatum was given to Herr Hitler in September 1939, the British industry had 1,200 all metal fighter planes in service.
Molders, the German air ace had 187 kills against the WW1 vintage aircraft flown by the Dutch, French and Polish air forces. Plywood and canvas against an all metal aircraft. Even then the British had canvas covered bombers to bomb the Germans. Shot down left and right. They soon got better bombers from overseas of course.
I will take one quick thrust here. During that war, a war of propaganda, we were told one of the reasons for declaring the war was to "save the Jews". We will never know if Germany was willing to negotiate a peace. Rudolph Hess could have shed light on this. He was murdered/ or suicide before his release.
Well anyway I thank Americans for the Lend-Lease and everything. Still grateful from this corner.
Werner Molders (1913-1941) had 101 kills before the German Propaganda Ministry pulled him out of action. This included flights against the Russians. He was killed as a passenger in a non-combat crash.
Good point.
True enough.
But why would anyone be foolish enough to NOT be prepared for war.
The world was no less evil or dangerous then than it is now.
I guess it all goes back to: “They who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it”, doesn’t it?
After all, the U.S. had let their military strength lapse a bit since WWI also.
Well anyway I thank Americans for the Lend-Lease and everything. Still grateful from this corner.. . . and no one of them voting for another war in 1933 - when, as Churchill knew, it would be much less costly - or even in 1938. My knowledge is from books; I was a small child during WWII.There is a similarity in the history of WWII to WWI, w/ respect to this morale issue. It is seen in a postcard I received from my uncle, a tanker under Patton. It read, “Your uncle is finished fighting. We licked the Jerries.”
At the time, of course, it seemed like a simple declaration of triumph. But in historical perspective, WWII was still going on in the Pacific, and it would certainly have seemed logical to planners in the (then-new) Pentagon that the experienced veteran soldiers no longer needed in Europe would be of signal use in the contemplated invasion of Japan. Had they undertaken to actually require those veterans to serve in the Pacific, tho, they might very well have turned mutinous. In person later, and not in that context, my uncle stated that “If they want me to fight another war, I know where I can hide that they’ll never find me.”
So I conclude that this business of fighting wars is very easily overrated. And that’s if you win them.
Gratitude is a virtue and a blessing. And it is for us to be grateful that we didn’t go through what Britain did. And in historical perspective, America at that point still had a chip on its shoulder, even then, for the attitude of superiority that it perceived in Britain. Our navy wasn’t inclined to learn from the Royal Navy, for example, and in the early going the U-boats unnecessarily had their “happy time - during which hundreds and hundreds of freighters were sunk off our coasts. For the loss, in the first nine months, of zero U-boats to American arms. The Roosevelt Administration kept those figures as a military secret, though - so fortunately the Germans didn’t know that. </sarcasm>And historically Americans, being anti-imperialist, underestimated the virtues of the British Empire. We could have done a lot worse than to have been more supportive of it. The reality being that America’s preferred option before the American Revolution was to be a part of a British Commonwealth - but when Benjamin Franklin proposed that, he was laughed out of London.
What a different turn history would have taken, had it been otherwise! No American Revolution, no War of 1812, no American Civil War. And no Louisiana Purchase, either. But pretty certainly, Britain would ultimately have fought France (as it in fact did do) and win Louisiana. And then Mexico, because the pickings were just too juicy to have passed up. Just as the US fought Mexico
for that very reasonahem, because they attacked us, yeah, that’s it.
Spoke right, acted left. Like McCain is a conservative.
McCain would’ve bombed Berlin during the remilitarization of the Rhineland, though.
—The left is now rehabilitating appeasing Hitler. 0bama would have done it. —
The *actual* left didn’t just appease Hitler, they collaborated with him, until he violated the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, then the course changed, obviously.
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