Rehabilitate Neville Chamberlain

[Deleted member 94680]

They would be in a very bad way but depending on who took power they might be able to persuade the British and Americans to prop them up by raising the dire prospect of Communist revolution.

True. But it would limit any possible aggressive action, no?

 

[Garrison]

True. But it would limit any possible aggressive action, no?

Oh absolutely, I assume any support would be contingent on converting the bulk of German industry back to civilian production. No 20-30% of GDP being spent on the military.

 

[raharris1973]

Would a post-hitler Germany not just economically collapse if it didn’t have the financial boosts of those early conquests?

There's a limit to national economic collapses. Individuals starve, ministries fall, businesses fail, programs get cancelled, but at the end of the day there's usually still a state and an army around. Russia and North Korea come to mind. Don't get me wrong, they can be weakened a lot and lose weight, even muscle weight, but only so much.

 

[Bob in Pittsburgh]

Hmm, if there's an absolute Czech defeat in the east and perfect German defense in the west, I suppose the Germans would try to annex Sudetenland and impose the protectorate regime over the Czech lands. If there's a static front in the Czech lands, it depends where it falls. If it falls right at the border, the Germans get nothing or almost nothing in the short run. If the front stabilizes further into Czecoslovakia, maybe you get German territorial gains and a new straight line border with mutual ethnic cleansing and population exchanges on both sides, something like this river-line border or a German Bohmen and Czech Moravsk

Certainly either is a plausible end point. Where I beg to differ is the assumption of a Franco/British attack on Germany's Western border. They had equal opportunity to attack in 1939 and they did not. While commentators love to say Germany was less prepared in 1938 than in 1939. It would have been the same leaders, Gamelin for the French and Gort for the British. Why do so many assume these two would have been more aggressive with less well prepared forces?

The numbers of Jews in the territory are small enough they can hope to "solve" by emigration, which is what they were doing. They may decide to go more extreme, but it would be a Holocaust of under a million whilst contained within these borders

This was before Kristallnacht so the horrors were not yet easily seen. None the less I think Hitler and his boys were already committed to the Holocaust.

 

[Cryhavoc101]

Certainly either is a plausible end point. Where I beg to differ is the assumption of a Franco/British attack on Germany's Western border. They had equal opportunity to attack in 1939 and they did not. While commentators love to say Germany was less prepared in 1938 than in 1939. It would have been the same leaders, Gamelin for the French and Gort for the British. Why do so many assume these two would have been more aggressive with less well prepared forces?


This was before Kristallnacht so the horrors were not yet easily seen. None the less I think Hitler and his boys were already committed to the Holocaust.

The German Army in 1938 was certainly less prepared for war than in late 39 - it had 36 Infantry Divisions (plus several other units such as a small number of armour Brigades, cavalry, mountain etc) and 600,000 trained men - it would expand 4 fold over the next 18 months in terms of trained men and was 51 Divisions and 2 Brigades at the start of 1939 and significantly stronger in Sept 1939.

The French army at the same time had 900,000 trained regulars and up to 5 million reservists that it could call up and in 1938 had significantly more tanks

And to this we have to add Poland's army and the Czechoslovakian army and Germany would also have to take into account at that time the Belgium army, the Netherlands army and even at that time the Italians.

Oh and of course the British.

And in 1938 there was no Molotov-Ribbontrop pact agreement with the Soviets!

Germany was massively out numbered in 1938 had it gone to war

 

[Mikestone8]

Germany was massively out numbered in 1938 had it gone to war

All very intersting but how relevant is any of it?

GB and France did not avoid war in 1938 because they feared defeat. If anything, many in those countries prophesied defeat because they did not wish to go to war.

In Sep 1939, their position, both militarily and diplomatically, was in many ways *worse* than a year before, yet this did not prevent war being declared. The difference was that in 1938 there was still a hope - a slim one, but still real - that it needn't come to that. It was possible to believe that Hitler would be satisfied with te rritories to which he had a reasonable claim on self-determination grounds. And as long as that hope existed, it would be pursued. The memory of WW1 was too recent and raw to permit of anything else.

By Sep '39, events of the intervening year - esp the occupation of Prague - had dashed that hope. It was clear that Hitler would go on conquering unti he was stopped by force. So the same governments which had rejected war the previous year were now resigned to it. Nobody had gone around giving them testosterone injections. It was merely that circumstances had changed since then.

 

[Hugh Third of Five]

Appeasement didn't start at the 1938 Munich Conference, although that's the most infamous part of it, nor did Neville Chamberlain's role in it start when he became prime minister. There's this myth that just won't die about him cannily delaying the war so Britain would have time to re-arm, but it's just that, a myth. As an MP he had strongly opposed re-armament for years. After the Munich Conference, he reluctantly agreed to re-arm under pressure from his military advisors. Even then, it was a fairly half-hearted approach. What's more although Britain may not have been prepared for war in 1938, the Wehrmacht was even less prepared; delaying the war gave them time to build up their armaments. Also most of Czechoslovakia's fortifications and military bases were in the Sudetenland, which made it rather difficult to stop Hitler when he violated the Munich agreement by annexing the rest of Czechoslovakia.

 

[Bob in Pittsburgh]

There's this myth that just won't die about him cannily delaying the war so Britain would have time to re-arm, but it's just that, a myth. As an MP he had strongly opposed re-armament for years. After the Munich Conference, he reluctantly agreed to re-arm under pressure from his military advisors. Even then, it was a fairly half-hearted approach. What's more although Britain may not have been prepared for war in 1938, the Wehrmacht was even less prepared; delaying the war gave them time to build up their armaments.

There indeed is a myth about Chamberlain; that Britain quickly would have won the war if it had begun in 1938. I will ignore for the sake of argument the need to convince France to join in the war. I will ignore the need to rally public opinion about the need to go to war to protect the Sudetenland Germans against joining the country they seemed to want to join, I will ignore the lack of interest in the Poles to joining the way. I will even ignore the fact that the Red Army had no common border with Germany. So even if you get over all of that you still have a reluctance in the G boys Gort and Gamelin to plan and execute any sort of offensive action. You have a Czechoslovak army with a sizable fifth column of ethnic Germans that will require considerable force to pacify and control. You have a very real threat of Communist insurrection if somehow the Red Army gets into Czechoslovakia or Poland. Chamberlain had a weak hand. In retrospect would it have been better if he went to war? Certainly from the perspective of his historical standing the answer is yes. From the perspective of the decision he had to make in September, 1938 to me the answer is not so clear.

 

[ArtosStark]

There indeed is a myth about Chamberlain; that Britain quickly would have won the war if it had begun in 1938. I will ignore for the sake of argument the need to convince France to join in the war. I will ignore the need to rally public opinion about the need to go to war to protect the Sudetenland Germans against joining the country they seemed to want to join, I will ignore the lack of interest in the Poles to joining the way. I will even ignore the fact that the Red Army had no common border with Germany. So even if you get over all of that you still have a reluctance in the G boys Gort and Gamelin to plan and execute any sort of offensive action. You have a Czechoslovak army with a sizable fifth column of ethnic Germans that will require considerable force to pacify and control. You have a very real threat of Communist insurrection if somehow the Red Army gets into Czechoslovakia or Poland. Chamberlain had a weak hand. In retrospect would it have been better if he went to war? Certainly from the perspective of his historical standing the answer is yes. From the perspective of the decision he had to make in September, 1938 to me the answer is not so clear.

I think you are conflating “winning the war that starts in 1938” with “winning the war in 1938”. The French plan was, AIUI, to use their fortifications to effectively force static warfare on their terms while calling up their reserves for an offensive. No, this probably won’t happen in a year. It could, if an initial small scale incursion like we saw in 1939 has unexpected success and more forces are committed to it. But more likely there is a bit of a phoney war at the start.

In the meantime Germany has to deal with Czechoslovakia. As mentioned by others, with the Sudetenland intact that is more difficult. Anschluss with Austria allows the Germans to outflank the Czechoslovak defences somewhat, but it will still likely be a tough nut to crack.

The Soviets are pretty eager at this point to keep Hitler off their doorstep. Poland did not like the idea of Soviet troops being transported across their territory, but with enough pressure from Britain and France may get them to relent. It is possible, though not guaranteed, the Poland could be made to join the war later on on the allied side.

Unless Germany can crush Czechoslovakia quickly, then by the time they turn to deal with Britain and France, they have already been worn down materially while the WAllies have only gotten stronger.

My guess would be that the war is over by 1940.

 

[Reggieperrin]

Well the planes they’re using make a lot of difference...

Did they though? The Luftwaffe I mean?

Were they? What experience did they have? Or was it “the bomber will always get through” kind of thinking?

Sorry but this is exactly the flawed intelligence I was talking about before. These estimates were based on wild overestimates of Luftwaffe strength and the destructive power of bombers in general, added to which I suspect they are assuming the use of poison gas from the outset. In essence their vision of aerial warfare is cribbed from the film 'Things to Come'. It was a tragic error that goes some way to mitigate Chamberlain's responsibility for events but it does not absolve him.



Military advice is often constrained by what politicians want to hear, not to mention there is a significant difference between 'playing the long game' and selling out allies. Chamberlain used this advise as an excuse to pursue a policy of avoiding war at any price.


The question is not one of reduction, its of a failure to accelerate in the preparation for anything other than purely defensive operations. In the six months between Munich and Prague there was little effort to ready the army and even after Prague the efforts to improve the army were half-hearted to say the least.



Again Chamberlain was the man in charge, yes he took advise from the military, how he chose to interpret that advice, and indeed abuse it, is the real issue.

And here we have this odd attitude again, that when confronted by the consensus advice of the military establishment regarding national defence being “if it comes to war the nation will be torn to shreds with a horrific death toll” the expected reaction of an elected politician should not be to ask “oh dear, what then is necessary to ensure the security of the nation?” but instead to whip out his copy of the Ladybird Big Book of Aircraft and start arguing with them about power-to-weight ratios and air miles per kg of fuel.
Why on earth would any sane politician without access to a time machine believe himself to know more about the practicability of aerial bombing operations than the head of his Air Force, or for that matter that he needs to build an expeditionary army sufficient to carry the load on behalf of the biggest army in Europe?
There is this weird dichotomy that Hitler was an imbecile for not listening to the professionals running his military, but the French and British leaders were imbeciles for not overruling their military professionals the way Hitler did, which I just don’t understand. It’s almost as if people believe national leaders should flip a coin for every decision and whenever it comes down tails do the opposite of whatever their experts tell them.

The general idea that the man in charge gets blame as well as any credit is perfectly fair, but I think there must be some limits unless one somehow expects every leader be a world-leading expert in every field. Not even the most revisionist types give Churchill a roasting for every single cockup the British made under his leadership, yet it seems Chamberlain is regularly expected to carry the can for every failure of British military thinking.
Which is extra odd since during most of the Chamberlain years it was theory and guesswork, while during the Churchill years everyone had at least some practical experience.

This is part of the problem. There simply seems to be nothing recorded at the time which supports the playing for time theory. There should surely be minutes of cabinet meetings where foreign policy and/or defence matters were discussed, letters, diary entries, even anecdotes recounting his attitude to the Munich Agreement. It's hard to escape the conclusion that when Chamberlain pronounced, 'peace in our time' he actually believed it.

But isnt this just the same old problem about proving the negative? There seems to be equally little evidence to show he genuinely believed peace was about to break out. Surely if he had been properly suckered by Hitler there would be plenty of self-serving memoirs offering real evidence on the lines that “Chamberlain believed Hitler but my memorandum (reproduced below) shows I WASN’T FOOLED!!”. And yet 80 years later, there seems to be very little other than assertions. It’s just an article of faith for both sides in the discussion that they must be right, which as I said generates lots of heat but very little light.

As far as I know rearmamant continued uninterrupted on an accelerating trajectory right up to the outbreak of war, and if there was ever any genuine belief in Peace in our Time then it seems to have evaporated before there was time to write a single memo or minute about it or even about its reversal. So I just make the simplifying assumption that it was all flimflam for public consumption.

 

[Look More Closely Later]

Churchill notes of Chamberlain:

...He had formed decided judgements about all the political figures of the day, both at home and abroad, and felt himself capable of dealing with them. His all-pervading hope was to go down to history as the great Peace-maker, and for this he was prepared to strive continually in the teeth of facts, and face great risks for himself and his country. Unhappily he ran into tides the force of which he could not measure, and met hurricanes from which he did not flinch, but with which he could not cope...

(The Second World War, volume I, 'The Loaded Pause'.)

And again of Neville Chamberlain and of the Munich agreement (Churchill specifically dates this piece of writing as being from November 17th, 1938 - my own guess is it might be from a parliamentary speech or newspaper article; note that the Munich Agreement was concluded at the end of the preceding month):

...No one impugns his motives. No one doubts his conviction or his courage... Mr. Chamberlain is convinced that all this will lead to general agreement, to the appeasement of the discontented Power, and to a lasting peace…

(The Second World War, volume I, 'Munich Winter')