Recently I’ve made some comparisons to Munich and Neville Chamberlain’s surrender of the Sudetenland to Hitler. But I didn’t go into any real depth while referencing him.
But then I realized that his name has become synonymous for “surrender” and even (for some) “shortsided stupidity.” Actually, I don’t think that’s the whole story, and I want to attempt to correct the perception that it was.
It’s so easy – in retrospect – to simplify a situation and think the answer would be clear. But history is lived forward, not backward. First, a summary of the perception, and Chamberlain’s tragic words afterwards:
After this monumental failure of policy Chamberlain’s name became an abusive synonym for vacillation, weakness, immoral great-power diplomacy and, above all, the craven appeasement of bullies – whatever the price in national honour. Despite his many achievements in domestic policy, therefore, ultimately Chamberlain’s reputation remains indelibly stained by Munich and the failure of his very personal brand of diplomacy.
As he confessed in the Commons at the outbreak of war, “Everything I have worked for, everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life, has crashed into ruins.”
Posterity has judged him accordingly…
As he noted stoically in January 1938, “In the absence of any powerful ally, and until our armaments are completed, we must adjust our foreign policy to our circumstances, and even bear with patience and good humour actions which we should like to treat in a very different fashion.”
His pragmatic response to this conundrum was a “double policy” of rearmament at a pace the economy could sustain, while simultaneously seeking better relations with the dictators in the belief that only by redressing Germany’s legitimate grievances would it be possible to remove the military threat – or failing that, to expose Hitler as an insatiable megalomaniac bent on world domination. As Chamberlain told Lord Halifax, his foreign secretary, the underlying strategy was to hope for the best while preparing for the worst.
I do see Chamberlain as naive and too trusting regarding Hitler and the strength of diplomacy to stop a person like that. Yet, in Chamberlain’s defense, his own options weren’t strong, and Hitler had not yet utterly revealed himself for what he was – although more perceptive minds such as Churchill were able to see it. But here is the situation Chamberlain had faced at the time of the conference:
By the mid-1930s Britain was defending a vast and vulnerable empire encompassing a quarter of the world’s territory and population, with the dismally depleted military resources of a third-rate power.
Worse still, since 1934 the Cabinet had grimly recognised that it was “beyond the resources of this country to make proper provision in peace for defence of the British Empire against three major powers in three different theatres of war”. Furthermore, the threat posed separately by Japan, Germany and Italy was compounded by the conviction that war with any one of them would inevitably provoke opportunistic “mad dog” acts by the others.
As the leader of a militarily weak and overstretched empire, such fears were crucial in shaping Chamberlain’s strategy, but this meant steering a course within the relatively narrow parameters defined by a complex inter-related web of geo-strategic, military, economic, financial, industrial, intelligence and electoral constraints.
Churchill actually praised Chamberlain later in a speech Churchill gave on the latter’s death in 1940. Here’s part of it:
It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong.
Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values.
History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days…
It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed?
‘What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused?
‘They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart-the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour.
Whatever else history may or may not say about these terrible, tremendous years, we can be sure that Neville Chamberlain acted with perfect sincerity according to his lights and strove to the utmost of his capacity and authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the awful, devastating struggle in which we are now engaged.
‘This alone will stand him in good stead as far as what is called the verdict of history is concerned…’
When, contrary to all his hopes, beliefs and exertions, the war came upon him, and when, as he himself said, all that he had worked for was shattered, there was no man more resolved to pursue the unsought quarrel to the death.
The same qualities which made him one of the last to enter the war, made him one of the last who would quit it until the full victory of a righteous cause was won.
I had the singular experience of passing in a day from being one of his most prominent opponents and critics to being one of his principal lieutenants, and on another day of passing from serving under him to become the head of a Government of which, with perfect loyalty, he was content to be a member.
We all voice opinions here and often make analogies to historical events. But – as Churchill correctly said – none of us can see the future. And none of us bear the burdens of actually having to make such decisions and seeing them affect history, sometimes for the worse.
