If you don't understand it, I suggest you go to university yourself and get a Masters in military history.
Nice 'appeal to authority' logical fallacy.
Actually, I do have a M.A. in History, although not military history.
And I wouldn't put this discussion under that category.
I see this as dealing with diplomatic or political history, not military.
[ The time to stop Germany was when it stopped paying the reparations they owed for WW1 and used them instead to build a military that was in violation of the Treaty. [
That's a valid position, but I am talking about the decisions of Neville Chamberlain - not every decision taken by the combined governments of the allied nations from 1919-1939. I am not going to blame Neville Chamberlain. Germany stopped paying reparations in 1931 when Ramsay MacDonald was Prime Minister. Before Chamberlain took on the role in mid 1937, there was also Stanley Baldwin.
Chamberlain became the poster boy for appeasement when he came back with a signed document selling out the Czech's and claimed the British could trust Hitler and there would now be peace.
What is being discussed is appeasement and Chamberlains part in it.
Chamberlain tends to get blamed for the decisions of MacDonald and Baldwin, Baldwin gets blamed for the decisions of MacDonald? Why? Because MacDonald was a socialist, and Baldwin and Chamberlain were conservatives, and socialists write most of our history books. It's the 'Blame Bush' phenomena a few decades earlier.
They all get blamed for appeasing Hitler and not dealing with reality.
There is quite a lot of legitimate blame to be assigned to Baldwin, and some to Chamberlain, as well - but for the most part, Chamberlain was dealing with the disastrous situation he inherited from MacDonald and Baldwin - especially from MacDonald. It was MacDonald who in 1924 as Foreign Secretary supported the Dawes Plan (and note that name - Dawes. It's Charles G. Dawes, the 30th Vice-President of the United States. For some reason, the American appeasers get ignored in much of the history) which softened the reparations regime of Versailles, and actually meant the US wound up indirectly paying a lot of Germany's war debt, and MacDonald again in 1929 as Prime Minister who was unable to block the Young Plan (worked out by mostly American financiers, Owen Young, J.P. Morgan Jr, and Thomas W. Lamont) which reduced them even further, and again it was Ramsay MacDonald who was British Prime Minister in 1931 when Germany stopped paying any of its reparations - because of a one year moratorium proposed by Herbert Hoover, the President of the United States.
And you left out the role that Keynes played as well with his criticism of the reparations.
But why should the Americans get blamed when this was a European problem that they could have dealt with if they had the will to do so?
Chamberlain cannot be blamed for decisions taken by governments that were in place years before he became Prime Minister. He certainly can't be blamed for them when they were made by American politicians and American businessmen.
He can get blamed for giving Hitler part of Czechovalika!
He inherited a disastrous military situation in 1937. Baldwin had started rearmament but it was in its very early stages and it was going to take time to have any effect. Chamberlain gave it as much time as he could so when Britain had to go to war, it was at least - nearly - ready.
Did any papers of Chamberlain ever say that was really his goal-stalling for time?
Or did he really believe that each concession to Hitler would be the last?
It is somewhat ironic that the Prime Minister who finally declared war is the one who winds up being saddled by so many people with the blame for the appeasement policies. And I believe it is unreasonable and I will say so.
He declared war when he was forced to and over the wrong issue, Poland.
It's not an appeal to authority. It's a serious suggestion. I don't think you've studied this in enough detail. Why do I think that?
Because of certain errors and omissions in your posts.
Particularly this statement:
It was Churchill that pressed for rearmament and constantly warned about the Nazi threat, while Chamberlain lived in his own fantasy world of the League of Nations.
In a discussion of Neville Chamberlain, anybody who mentions only Churchill as speaking out in favour of rearmament without mentioning Sir Austen Chamberlain (Neville's brother) in my view, probably isn't that aware of the actual history in Britain. Leo Amery and Roger Keyes were also important, but they weren't Neville Chamberlain's brother. Sir Austen Chamberlain was far more significant than Churchill in the rearmament movement. He's not as well known to the casual observer today because he died in 1937.
Largely because of his influence, Neville Chamberlain himself was an open supporter of rearmament from 1935, particularly with regards to the need to upgrade and improve the Royal Air Force. Chamberlain was not part of the appeasement faction of the British government, but part of its rearmament faction - a fact well known to any historian who has studied the period, but that a lot of people who have only read the popular works often miss, because of their focus on the "Churchill versus Chamberlain" oversimplification that some engage in.
Your mention of "his own fantasy world of the League of Nations" also makes no sense from the perspective of an historian when it comes to Chamberlain and these issues. The League of Nations was utterly irrelevant to this process. Germany had withdrawn from the League on October 23rd 1933, and from that point onwards, the League was an utter irrelevancy. And Chamberlain treated it as such.
As it happens, the League of Nations both tried to prevent the rearmament of Germany, and pushed for the allied powers to rearm and it was Winston Churchill who supported the League of Nations approach and, indeed, he attacked Chamberlain for not doing so in the House of Commons on 22nd February 1938.
Chamberlain became the poster boy for appeasement when he came back with a signed document selling out the Czech's and claimed the British could trust Hitler and there would now be peace.
Yes, he did. But being the 'poster boy' doesn't mean that the criticisms of him were accurate. He obtained the Munich agreement as an effort to buy time to continue British rearmament and also in the hope that there might be still be a way of avoiding war. Yes, the second was one of his aims - to try and avoid war if possible. But he realised it might not be possible.
As for the peace for our time speech - what was he supposed to say: "I've signed this document because we're not yet ready to fight Hitler, but just wait until 1940? I know his signature isn't worth the ink it's written in." It was a politician's speech for political purposes.
They all get blamed for appeasing Hitler and not dealing with reality.
Yes, even when it isn't true. Baldwin and Chamberlain dealt with reality. They presided over rearmament. They took the steps to prepare Britain for war. It would have been better if it had started earlier, but that wasn't their decision.
But why should the Americans get blamed when this was a European problem that they could have dealt with if they had the will to do so?
Why should the people who actually wrote the plans that actually allowed Germany to not pay its reparations - wrote them to such an extent that the plans are actually named after them be blamed for their consequences? Are you seriously asking that question?
And America didn't see it as a European problem - if they had, they wouldn't have got involved at all.
He can get blamed for giving Hitler part of Czechovalika!
Yes, he can be. But if he'd gone to war in 1938 with a military that wasn't ready, he could also have been blamed for British defeat and capitulation, and we could currently be writing these messages on www.unfreereich.com - or we'd probably have been shot, by now.
Did any papers of Chamberlain ever say that was really his goal-stalling for time?
Yes, actually.
So far as my personal reputation is concerned, I am not in the least disturbed about it. The letters which I am still receiving in such vast quantities so unanimously dwell on the same point, namely without Munich the war would have been lost and the Empire destroyed in 1938.