Posted on 02/16/2022 9:27:30 AM PST by Rummyfan
The city name “Munich” is already profoundly associated with cinematic moral confusion. It was the title Steven Spielberg gave his relativistic reflection on the way the Mossad avenged the murder of Israeli athletes in 1972. Now Netflix has given us Munich: The Edge of War, a prestige film that has gained a high-end audience and that has been hailed by many critics. At its heart is a quest to undo the legacy of one of history’s greatest heroes and to lionize one of its weakest statesmen.
The movie seeks nothing less than to celebrate Neville Chamberlain, a man whose name is eternally affiliated with appeasement. It focuses on the meeting between the British prime minister and Hitler when the latter asserted Germany’s right to the Czech territory Germans called the Sudentenland. Chamberlain conceded and returned home brandishing a signed promise by Hitler not to wage war on Britain.
This anti-Churchill thesis has been embraced by Jeremy Irons, the Oscar-winning British actor who plays Chamberlain. He told Variety: “Churchill was able to write the history of that period afterwards. It’s all very easy to look back at history and see what you want to see. But at the time, I believe Chamberlain followed the right path. He tried to prevent war. He tried to appease Hitler and got an agreement with Hitler that he would go no further. That was a canny thing to do because once Hitler did go further, he was able to say to the country, this man is not to be trusted and we’re going to have to fight him. I think Chamberlain should be praised for his pragmatic behavior. We shouldn’t view the Munich Agreement simply as the appeasement of a weak man who was fooled by Hitler. It’s the wrong way to look at it.”
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Chamberlain clearly did believe that he had made peace with Hitler, as did the English elite who cheered him in Parliament when he returned. And we must therefore understand why Churchill saw what so many others missed. The most interesting character in Munich is an aide to Hitler who as a student was enthusiastic about the “new Germany” and then becomes revolted by it. The role is based on Adam von Trott, who later attempted to assassinate Hitler. In the movie, it is the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews that wakes this young man to the danger posed by Hitler. This ironically highlights what is elided in the film. As Andrew Roberts has noted, the Anglo elite refused to fully face up to the horrors of Hitlerism because many of them cared so little for the fate of the Jews of Germany.
Another great WWII era movie was the Canadian “49th Parallel” with Leslie Howard, Lawrence Olivier, Raymond Massey and many others. Usually easy to find free in good quality. Nazis in Canada trying to make their way to the “neutral” U.S. Pure propaganda, but well done, and VERY Canadian.
I agree. No matter what the Luftwaffe did, a German invasion fleet of river barges escorted by the German Navy was amateur hour. The Royal Navy Home Fleet would have -utterly- slaughtered them.
And look at the lessons in blood expertise the USN, USMC and US Army had to learn before they got force entry amphibious assault right. The German effort was truly childish. So I fully agree they never had any real intent to land. It was a non-starter without a British treason as in Norway.
Battle of Britain always forgets the British Fleet. That was a monumental and deadly threat at that time.
The Brits had 15 Battleships & battlecruisers, of which only two were post-World War 1. Five ‘King George V’ class battleships were building.
7 Aircraft carriers. One was new and five of the planned six fleet carriers were under construction. There were no escort carriers.
66 Cruisers, mainly post-World War 1 with some older ships converted for AA duties. Including cruiser-minelayers, 23 new ones had been laid down.
184 Destroyers of all types. Over half were modern
Germany had 4 battleships and 9 cruisers.
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-1940
by William Manchester
This book is a textbook about leadership, information/intelligence, and how clear values guide a leader through difficult times when almost everyone disagrees with you. It is about the “dull” period in WC’s life—neither WW1 or WW2, but it is the book to which I most often refer. Well worth the time to read.
I will second that opinion. Of the three books (all good) the second one, Alone, is the best written.
trivia...The agent who took Hess into custody was the future father of Olivia Newton-John. He could speak german and worked on the Ultra project at Bletchley Park. Olivia was born 3 years after the war.
I agree. Chamberlain did what the politics of the time required him to do. He did so willingly and THOUGHT he was avoiding war, but our hindsight is far better than what most of the world expected in 38.
Churchill was a mixed bag. He got a lot right but also a lot wrong. Any general who had dealings with him found him infuriating. He also fired a great general (General Auchinleck) and replaced him with a damn poor one (Montgomery). That was politics triumphing over military reality.
One of the lessons of Sicily and Anzio and Salerno was the need to air superiority for a successful landing. By D-Day, 14,000 Allied planes flew 20,000 sorties, versus 60 planes flying 200 sorties for the Germans. Rail lines had been smashed and moving reinforcements into Normandy was extremely difficult. AND IT WAS STILL A TOUGH, DANGEROUS FIGHT!
If Hitler had tried a landing against the UK in 1940, he would have been destroyed. The British fleet was far more powerful than many remember and the UK had not be ‘primed’ for invasion. Anzio was a good example of an amphibious landing going wrong - 4 months to break out. And Normandy took months too, in spite of the superiority we had going into it. It wasn’t an easy thing to do. D-Day built on all we learned in the Pacific and in repeated landings from Sicily on. Hitler could never have pulled it off.
Since Hitler didn’t spend much money on the German Navy. you have to wonder if there were any real plans to invade Britain. Hitler admired the British Empire and had no interest in regaining the colonies lost at Versailles. The flight of Rudolph Hess to Scotland was done to establish contact with rightist elements in Britain to help oust Churchill and get the UK to withdraw from the war.
Agree with your take on Chamberlain... he had to play for time. But the recent popular trashing of Charles Lindberg as an eeeevil Nazi supporter is revisionist BS. The biggest hit against him is an America First speech he made in 1941 stating that America’s Jews wanted the country in the war against Hitler. By 1941, what Jew anywhere in the world wouldn’t have wanted that?
What kind of idiot do you have to be to believe Iron’s argument. I knew this would happen eventually though. In many ways Churchill is the leading conservative of the first half of the 20th century. Lefties want his reputation to be sullied
Yes, and some historians miss the fact Churchill did target women and children in Dresden.
Germany’s failure to develop a powerful surface navy and rely on submarine warfare pretty much doomed them. It worked great at least until early 1943 and then afterwards...not so great.
I watched it a week or two ago. Not a bad flick. Entertaining.
I don’t expect historical movies to be accurate. I get my education on historical matters by reading, not Netflix.
Brilliant book. Just excellent.
I have the third volume but haven’t yet undertaken to reading it.
Lindbergh was no Nazi lover as Leftists like to slander him with, and they did that and do today simply because he went against Roosevelt on many things, not the least of which was the Air Mail fiasco in 1933-34. Roosevelt and his administration remembered that, and did all they could to destroy him and exclude him from service in any fashion in WWII, including blackballing him from participating in the aviation industry.
He did get duped by the Nazis, and he wasn’t the only one. They were making a concerted effort to have exactly that effect with many people, but because of who Lindbergh was, they paid special attention to him. He did get quite chummy with Ernest Udet, who would use his pistol for drunken target practice in his apartment, one day blowing a hole in the wall while Lindbergh was there, and the people in the next apartment could be seen peering in terror at them through the hole in the wall.
But Udet let him fly the Me-109, and took him on tours to all the major Luftwaffe bases. Lindbergh was blown away by the quantity and quality of new and modern combat aircraft. He felt that anyone going against the Luftwaffe was going to lose.
What he didn’t know was that it was a dog and pony show. As soon as they would leave the airbase, they would fly all the planes to the next airfield he was set to visit. So Lindbergh, taken in by the ruse, had an exaggerated view of Luftwaffe capabilities, and thus had the desired effect from the Nazi view.
Winston Churchill was the man of the hour in the 20th Century.
I am a fan, warts and all. As a matter of fact, I appreciate his warts, in the same way I appreciated Halsey’s warts, and Patton’s warts. Those warts were part of what made those men who they were.
And made them fascinating and interesting, besides.
Even if Chamberlin's cave in at Munich is calculated as a strategic necessity, it was attended by so much ignominious delusion and self-congratulatory puffery that his reputation was permanently stained. There is some reason to think Chamberlin realized this at the time, but it also seems possible that he believed the foolish "peace in our time" posturing, with the evidence to the contrary later contrived by his circle of friends, allies, and hangers on chastened by how badly things turned out.
There is also a hard to assess counterpoint that had Chamberlin and Britain held firm and gone to war instead of making a deal at Munich, the German generals planned to depose Hitler and make peace. Moreover, with Germany's rearmament and blitzkrieg tactics, training, and equipment not yet sufficiently matured at the time of Munich, Czechoslovakia's army and border fortifications would have posed a formidable military obstacle.
A larger consideration also deserves mention. Chamberlin's cave in at Munich and the folly associated with it was part of how democratic Britain became unified and reconciled to a second terrible war with Germany a generation after the First World War. Britain had gone as far as possible to make peace with Hitler and the Nazis, farther perhaps than was reasonable. The influential peace lobby on Britain had no cause for complaint when war came.
As it was, in extremity, Britain turned to the combative Churchill as her indispensable wartime leader despite him otherwise being widely disliked and seen by many as discredited and erratic. And, to Chamberlin's credit, he accepted Churchill's return to government as First Lord of the Admiralty and the soon to be prime minister.
Thanks, I’ll check that out…it’s actually on the Channel.
We shouldn’t view the Munich Agreement simply as the appeasement of a weak man who was fooled by Hitler. It’s the wrong way to look at it.
So we shouldn’t look at if for exactly what it was? Next Jimmy Carter was greater than George Washington starring Gary Busey as Carter.
The problem was not so much the Munich Agreement, itself, but the fact when the Nazis marched into Prague, in violation of said agreement, they pretty much did nothing. That also convinced Hitler they would pretty much do nothing when Hitler attacked Poland.
Catch the movie The One Who Got Away. It is about a German POW who escaped in Canada Before the US entered the war and made his way to the US and back to Germany.
It is a TRUE story.
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