Other historians follow Churchill in regarding appeasement as both hapless and hopeless. Chamberlain and his colleagues, the argument runs, turned out to be the victims of Hitler’s hypocrisy and mendacity, and vainly clung on to the hope of peace because they could not face the prospect of another war. The government should have embarked on a more extensive rearmament programme, while Chamberlain ought to have constructed a grand anti-fascist alliance with France and Russia. With powerful allies and weapons behind him, the prime minister might have called Hitler’s bluff. In the end, it is hard not to see the period 1937 to 1939 as a series of wasted opportunities and, in Churchill’s memorable phrase, as a ‘line of milestones to the disaster’.
Between 1937 and 1938, Britain tried to persuade Mussolini to withdraw his troops from Spain and to recognize the Mediterranean status quo, in return for an acknowledgement of his Abyssinian conquest; the Duce was not tempted. Neither would he help Chamberlain with his attempts to persuade Hitler to resolve the ‘Austrian question’ through negotiation. In March 1938, without warning the other European powers, Hitler sent troops into Austria to incorporate the country into a Greater Germany. There was no opposition from the Austrian army or government.
Chamberlain was not averse to Germany absorbing Austria, despite the fact that the country was a democratic republic and a member of the League. But he was ‘deeply shocked’ by Hitler’s unilateral show of force and sent an official protest to Berlin. When German diplomats told him that Austria was none of Britain’s business, Chamberlain became angry. But what was he going to do about it? This was the question Churchill asked in the Commons, warning that Europe was ‘confronted with a programme of aggression, nicely calculated and timed, unfolding stage by stage’.
It is doubtful that Hitler ever engaged in precision planning, yet Churchill’s argument was soon justified by events. After Austria, Hitler turned his attention to Czechoslovakia, where a majority of Germans lived in the northwest area known as the Sudetenland. He declared that he would ‘defend’ the ‘liberties’ of these Germans and ensure their right to join a Greater Germany. His intention was to incorporate the Sudetenland, perhaps as a prelude to the annexation of other parts of Czechoslovakia.
Following Hitler’s absorption of Austria, Chamberlain had been asked in the Commons to pledge support for Czechoslovakia’s independence. Created by the Versailles Treaty, the country had been exceptional among the new Eastern European states in maintaining its democratic institutions since 1919. Rich in industrial and military resources and occupying an important geopolitical position, its borders had already been guaranteed by France and Russia. Yet Chamberlain declined to follow – ensuring the Czech frontiers would be militarily impossible and diplomatically risky, carrying with it the possibility of provoking another European war. Army chiefs, meanwhile, had warned the prime minister that British intervention would be like ‘a man attacking a tiger before his gun is loaded’. Chamberlain believed that neither the public, nor the armies of the empire, would ‘follow us … into war to prevent a minority from obtaining autonomy; it must be on larger issues than that’.
The Russians, eager to halt any possible German territorial advance in the east, proposed a conference whose aim would be to stop continental aggression. The Labour party and Churchill saw this as an opportunity to establish an alliance that would deter Hitler and encourage opposition to him within Germany. Yet Chamberlain declined to participate – he loathed Communism and thought the Soviets wanted to embroil Britain in a war with Germany. He informed the ‘idealistic cranks’ and ‘warmongers’ in the Commons who criticized his decision that conferences were, any case, ineffective. It was far better to take the direct, personal route.
Over the spring and summer of 1938, Chamberlain talked things over with Hitler and Mussolini on various occasions. These private discussions took place in a public climate of fear and panic, created by the threat of German invasion of the Sudetenland. During these talks, Chamberlain came to believe that Hitler was prepared to use force to facilitate the ‘self-determination’ of the Sudetenland Germans. Nevertheless, his confidence in Hitler’s trustworthiness, and in his own ability to orchestrate a peaceful solution, remained undimmed. For his part, Hitler came away from the discussions confident that Britain would not oppose him with force should he annex the Sudetenland.
But Chamberlain was determined to do far more – or rather far less – than simply back down. The prime minister now privately persuaded France to renege on its commitments to upholding Czech borders. This was not difficult, since the French had no appetite for another war and nor could they guarantee Czech borders in the absence of British assistance. Chamberlain urged France to accept the absorption into Germany of all Czech areas containing a majority of German people, in return for the promise that Britain would guarantee the new Czech borders. Reluctantly France agreed. The prime minister then pressured the democratic Czech government to accept these terms, making it clear that the alternative would be a German invasion during which France and England would stand aside. With both the French and the Czechs in tepid agreement, Chamberlain returned triumphantly to Hitler on 22 September 1938, to announce that he had come up with a settlement that satisfied everyone.
Yet instead of thanking Chamberlain, the German chancellor now insisted on the immediate occupation of German-speaking areas by German troops. Chamberlain demurred on the usual grounds that ‘the use of force’ should be avoided. The French and the Czechs agreed, and a diplomatic stand-off ensued. France now declared she would stand by Czechoslovakia’s frontiers and Britain reluctantly pledged to assist France. In the Commons, Churchill urged the government to hold its nerve, since the partition of Czechoslovakia would represent ‘a complete surrender by the Western democracies to the threat of force’. The choice, he told a friend, is between ‘War and Shame. My feeling is that we shall choose Shame, and then have War a little later.’
In the last week of September, however, it seemed likely that war would come first. London schools and hospitals were evacuated, sandbags were piled around public buildings and millions of gas masks were distributed. In anticipation of air raids, numerous trenches were hastily dug in city parks across the country and the navy was mobilized. The mood among the people was fearfuclass="underline" ‘We were expecting 30,000 casualties a night in London,’ the historian Arnold Toynbee wrote, ‘and we believed ourselves … to be within three hours of the zero hour. It was just like facing the end of the world.’
On 27 September, a weary Chamberlain addressed the nation on the radio: ‘How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is,’ he said, in his stiff, thin voice, ‘that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.’ It was an extraordinary description of Germany and Czechoslovakia from a man who spoke of the intimate ties within the far-flung empire. Yet it is precisely because Britain was a vast global power that its governing class saw European ‘quarrels’ in these distant terms.
Despite his weary tone of resignation, Chamberlain still hoped to find an escape route. When Hitler asked Chamberlain to intervene with the Czechs, the prime minister grew optimistic once more, assuring the German chancellor he would secure his ‘essential’ demands ‘without war, and without delay’. With the help of Mussolini, a four-power conference was hastily organized at Munich. There, on 30 September, an agreement was struck that gave Hitler almost everything the British and French had denied him a few days previously. It dismembered Czechoslovakia, ceding to Germany the industrially rich Sudetenland, which effectively destroyed the country’s infrastructure and military capability. Britain and France guaranteed Czechoslovakia’s new borders with the threat of force, but since Germany and Italy did likewise, the agreement was worthless. How would the Fascists oppose their own acts of aggression? Representatives of the Czech government were forced to wait outside the room in which the deal was struck; Chamberlain yawned as he informed them of its details afterwards.