Posted on 10/04/2010 11:26:57 AM PDT by nickcarraway
They did plenty of oppressing from 1939-1941 as well.
People malign Chamberlain because he has come to be seen as the ‘face’ of appeasement, but whilst he was talking peace with Hitler, he was gearing Britain up for the war he secretly knew was coming, and he introduced peacetime conscription (unprecedented in all of British History and over strong objections), ramped up armaments production and prepared British industry to allow it to gear up to serve the war effort before 1939.
The PM who deserves blame for the appeasement policies was Stanley Baldwin. He comprehensively failed to prepare Britain to face Nazi Germany and left it to his successor, Neville Chamberlain to follow through. Chamberlain knew how woefully unprepared Britain was (he had warned Stanley Baldwin and urged him to increase armaments spending when he was Chancellor), when Chamberlain became PM in 1937, he was forced to play for time whilst he was working furiously behind the scenes to put Britain on a war footing...
I stand corrected. I take back my “Goering was an imbecile” remark.
You are right, it was Hitler himself who ordered the shift away from the RAF.
In fact, it’s probably true that every blunder the Germans made in WWII was directly ordered by Hitler.
He was good at bullying the weak-kneed West in the 30s, but once real war started, his bluster and arrogance led him to make one bad decision after another.
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