Britain in the 20th Century: "Appeasement" - Professor Vernon Bogdanor

ladies and gentlemen are those of you who've been coming to these lectures regularly will that I've fallen somewhat behind schedule having reached just 1931 with seemingly one further lecture to go to cover the rest of the 20th century well the authorities at Gresham have been very kind and said that I can continue these lectures next year so what I will do for this and the next lecture I will hope to reach 1945 and then cover the post-war period in more detail in detail indeed in the next year now those who came to the last lecture will perhaps remember that I finished with the formation of the national government which was a conservative liberal coalition led though by a Labour Prime Minister whom the rest of the Labour Party regard as a renegade Ramsay MacDonald but primarily a conservative liberal coalition and it was formed to deal with the economic crisis a serious economic crisis but in fact its main problems were those on foreign policy in particular the challenge in the 1930s from three totalitarian dictatorships Nazi Germany fascist Italy and Imperial Japan and these governments have been very harshly judged by historians the three governments Ramsay MacDonald from 1931 to 1935 and Stanley Baldwin a conservative from 1935 to 1937 and then Neville Chamberlain another conservative from 1937 to 1940 and I think we all have the image in our minds of Neville Chamberlain coming back from the Munich Agreement with the piece of paper in his hand signed by himself and Hitler which he said guaranteed peace and these governments have been bitterly attacked for not preparing Britain for war and for leading Britain so it said in 1940 into perhaps the most dangerous moment they're history and that had great effect on post-war politics because in 1945 the Conservatives had been the dominant element in the national government were repudiated and labor government and Ashley the first majority Labour government was returned and one of the leading conserves as of the time would in fact opposed the policies of the national government Harold Macmillan needed to become Prime Minister said in 1945 people weren't voting against Churchill they were voting against the ghost of Neville Chamberlain and so history has jobs these governments rather harshly though the more we know about the period I think in my regenerate the more sympathetic we become to the dilemmas faced by those prime ministers and particularly as the papers cabinet papers of the Pierre were revealed we have a different view and the trouble with so many of the judgments on the period is that they are all based on hindsight and whenever you see on television a discussion of the Munich Agreement for example you always have interviews with opponents of Munich who never seem to find anyone who supported it but we know from opinion polls which were begun in Britain in 1937 that the majority of people did support for the Munich Agreement and there's another element of hindsight here because despite the criticisms made of these governments Britain and France were the only countries to go to war against Nazi Germany without themselves being attacked the only governments to go as it were freely to war but of course in 1940 quite unexpectedly France collapsed and only thought of that people thought of the French army is the strongest in Europe and most computer simulations of the German attack in 1940 show that it should fail it was thought not to be not be likely to succeed and had the German attack failed judgments of the governments of the 1930s would I think be more favorable and upon that fader the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax said the one firm rock on which everybody has been willing to build for the last two years has collapsed everybody relied on the French army and then it's fair to say that looking at the policy of appeasement as it was called that the worst of Hitler's atrocities and in particular the Holocaust did not occur until the war and it was difficult perhaps before it happened to imagine that atrocities on this scale would be carried out in what was thought of as a civilized era so it was possible to believe that Hitler although in some sense an extremist would become more moderate if German grievances were resolved peaceably and difficult to believe that even the Nazis wanted a war for its own sake Neville Chamberlain said in April 1939 in cold blood I cannot see Hitler starting a world war for Danzig and then a further factor batting patter our judgement of the governments of the 30s is the accident in the sense that Winston Churchill after his defeat in 1945 spent his time in opposition not in fact leading the opposition but writing his war memoirs and the first volume of those memoirs contained a biting criticism of the governments of the period and it's been very difficult for historians to escape from what Churchill said and people assumed that what Churchill said was objective history and of course he was giving his own point of view in fact he once said in answer to a parliamentary question we can safely leave that to the judgment of history especially as I shall be writing the history and a Churchill Churchill called the war the unnecessary war and that has hit home I think I think our view of it would be very different if Churchill had been returned to government and other people had written their memoirs first or other people had done so it's worth noting the three prime ministers of the 1930s were the last prime ministers not to written their memoirs every Primus since hairs now MacDonald and Chamberlain died shortly after leaving office and Baldwin although he lived on for 10 years after resigning in knighted that had never wrote an autobiography so they didn't write their own defense now Churchill said never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action and that critique as I say did become very important and the as it were critics of the 1930s became the post-war political establishment after the Munich Agreement of 1938 there was a vote in the House of Commons and around 30 conservatives abstain from supporting the government not very many really but those 30 included three future prime ministers Churchill himself Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan and it's fair to say that if the policy of appeasement had succeeded and none of them would have become leaders of the Conservative Party Churchill it's worth remembering in 1938 was already 63 years old and 63 was then older than it is now he was thought his political career was really finished that he was a figure of the past a brilliant failure in a sense Antony Eden was a young man he was only 40 but he'd compromised his position so it was held by resigning from Neville Chamberlain's government early in 1938 from the position of Foreign Secretary in the youngest foreign sect in modern times a point at the age of 38 he'd resigned on the question of the appeasement of Italy and it was clear that if Chamberlain survived there wouldn't be much future for Antony Eden Harold Macmillan was unimportant an eccentric backbencher at the time who made their little impact on affairs at the time in moody he's already 44 and had no office whatsoever and was not going to be given any office by the national government bitter opponent of it and as a story in the war that Churchill was talking to Harold Macmillan and rather Macmillan sought a rather interminable monologue about the evils of Hitler and millon said it shouldn't be too hard on Hitler you know and show to what he said I hope you're not going to say anything favorable about that man which is how he caught Hitler but Miller said no but it took Hitler to make you Prime Minister and me and undersecretary no one else could have done it and Churchill growl well perhaps at Wright and Macmillan got his first appointment under Churchill in 1940 as an undersecretary junior upon and gradually worked his way up but it's clean would not have been appointed under the national government now similarly all the statistical information we have show that if they had been a general election in 1940 when it was next do the Conservatives would have won it by pretty convincing majority and it's possible at Li the Labour leader would not have remained Labour leader for much longer but instead of that happening labour was brought into the government and the effect of bringing labour into the government was also to bring the trade unions in to gut the government because the leading trade unionist whom we discussed at the time the general strike Ernest Bevin was made Minister for labour and national service was a crucial role in the war and so labour and the trade unions became if you like a part of the state a part of the establishment and that was a very different matter from 1931 because the implication of the national government of 1931 that Labour couldn't be trusted that Labour will somehow not national it will somehow outside the state not if you like Cathy otic but 1940 brought labour into respectability and helped the Labour Party win the election of nineteen 45 because labor could say it had a double advance you could say not only had it oppose the policies of the national gums in the 1930s but you couldn't say labor was an irresponsible opposition because after all labour had been in government from 1940 onwards part of the government during the 1945 election campaign Churchill made a very ill-judged speech in which he said that a socialist government in Britain could not work successfully without introducing some form of Gestapo and that strapped people are looking at at Lee and Bevin and Morris and the rest as a bit absurd and at Lee had a wonderful reputation of that in his reply on the radio he said I understand why Churchill said that because he wanted to draw a clear distinction between Winston Churchill the great war leader and mr. Churchill the leader of the Conservative Party he didn't want people to vote for him just because of his success in the war but he wanted to draw attention to the fact that he was also a leader of a Conservative Party which was a bit wild in its outlook and that proved very effective but anyway the point I'm making is that the opposition to appeasement brought together a new political establishment which as it were had every interest in damning the leaders of the 1930s but I think one has to go back to a look at what actually happened rather than what in hindsight people said happened and I think the first point to make is one I made before when talking about the end of the First World War but three million British families were affected by it the three million families had lost a husband a father a son or a brother 750,000 people were killed soldier young men killed a Lost Generation and there were war memorials constructed in every town and village and I think the First World War had a much deeper emotional impact upon Britain than the second and this affected particularly the awareness of what one might call the opinion-forming political elite Harold Macmillan used to say that his career at Oxford he been undergraduate when war broke out had been interrupted for the war he couldn't bear to go back to Oxford because in his college he was just one of two scholars and exhibitions left alive and he said the rest of them is he used to say had been sent down by the Kaiser and uh none left and therefore it was very natural to say that this was the war to end war they should never again be another war and more than that that no sensible person in any country could ever want a war again and therefore anything would be better than that and I'd give an example of that from my own experience in in the year 2002 I wrote an article for The Times on the 50th anniversary of the death of George 4/6 and in that article I said that George and six had committed what people might think of a constitutional error because when Neville Chamberlain had come back from Munich heeds he'd welcomed him onto the balcony of buckingham palace and i said that was an error because after all Munich was a party's and policy opposed by the Labour Party in Parliament and I said but nevertheless it was an understandable error because the country was hysterical being freed from the Menace of war the people feared bombing over London and so on and I had an interesting letter from a lady in Northern Ireland and said you misunderstand the atmosphere wasn't the bombing we were frightened of it was a thought of another war she said I had lost three uncles on the psalm just over 20 years before we were all determine it shouldn't happen again which was why we supported Neville Chamberlain and I think that was right now gradually as the 1920s went on people went even further and said not only should there never be another war but perhaps even the first war itself had been a mistake a bit pointless what he did actually achieved and round about 1929 1930 we had the famous polemics that perhaps you're familiar with the play recently in London by RC sheriff called journey's end around this period the memoirs of siegfried sassoon poets and so on actually both of those men were actually in favor the war they thought had been a good thing but that message was lost obviously in the literary creations and people said it was also a mistake to believe as they thought amid the after war the ward come about as a result of German aggression they said it resulted from a competitive arms race each country's rearming from alliances and so on and that there were a warlike atmosphere being produced in Europe and therefore make sure that didn't happen again rather unfortunate this view came just as Hitler was coming to power in Germany perhaps it shows that all you learn from history is how to make new mistakes and not the old ones now in order to avoid another war the Allies after war primarily Americans decided that they should set up a League of Nations and the League of Nations was intended to be an international policeman and just as if you had a lawbreaker domestically the police would intervene to deal with a lawbreaker and impose sanctions of various sorts so any aggressor would be met by civilized nations getting together law-abiding nations and imposing sanctions first Pratt economic but in the last resort military sanctions to ensure that the aggressor didn't get away with it and this was the idea of it came from Britain in fact but it was championed by the American President Woodrow Wilson who hoped that us would be accepted by all countries but unfortunately Wilson himself was repudiated by the American Senate which refused to join and America withdrew from any involvement in European affairs in the 1920s and in America the view was held perhaps even more strongly than in Britain that she'd been mistaken to get involved in European squabbles and they were irrelevant to America and perhaps even that Woodrow Wilson had got America into war against the wishes of the American people and in the 1930s the American Congress passed neutrality legislation which meant the president could not get involved in any foreign war that any war was involved let Americans attack the president was required to go neutral and America had as it were the constitution of an isolationist state all this was crucial because it meant the League of Nations lacked much clout and when people talked about collective security what they really meant was probably Britain and France the other large power the Soviet Union refused until the nineteen thirties had joined the League of Nations which it said was a group of imperialist thieves and had no relevance to a socialist state they wouldn't join and Britain it meant Britain and France in practice and perhaps just not enough clout to hold the peace now when the Nazis came to power Hitler said that the Versailles Treaty had not been applied properly because of their side treaty said there should be general disarmament and they said that only the Germans were forcibly disarmed and that the victor power did not disarm and Hitler repeated it so often that many people came to believe it but in fact it wasn't true that Britain and America American northern Britain disarmed very considerably in the 1920s and early 1930s and in America when President Roosevelt came to power General MacArthur said him that America disarmed very dangerously into a dangerously low level but Roosevelt said they weren't going to do anything about that and Britain in the 1920s adopted the rule so-called ten-year rule that they're sure they should plan on the assumption there wouldn't be a war for the next ten years that will only abandon in 1932 because the view was at large armaments led to war now the six of the national government led by Churchill said that the national government itself failed to disarm and that you can't I think be sustained and in any of you have seen the King's Speech it's a bit of a caricature and very very unfair I think to Stanley Baldwin the Prime Minister of that government now um as the 1930s preceded Britain paradoxically came to feel that Germany had been harshly treated in the peace treaties and that if Germany was treated fairly then her extremism would die down now the national government did not in fact fail to rearm and in 1933 shortly after Hitler came to power a committee was set up by Ramsay MacDonald who ironically had been opposed to the First World War in a pacifist to consider what should be done and they produced a report in 1934 and that report was chewed over the dominant figure in the government although he was he was not in charge of defense of time a Chancellor of Exchequer was Neville Chamberlain Neville Chamberlain set the pattern for rearmament right through the 30s and in 1934 he made two crucial decisions he first said that defense expenditure could not be unlimited in the interest of the economy that if Defence expendable unlimited it would unbalance the economy to a dangerous extent and I think he also felt as most conservatives did at the time that their aim was to try and secure recovery from the slump and one of the national government's policies was to have very low interest rates 2% and this encouraged in particular a housing boom a housing boom and an expansion of consumer goods we tend to see the 1930s in the light of mass unemployment that Jarrow marches and so on but in the south of England and the Midlands living standards improved fair rapidly well the new light industries were going up there was very low unemployment lower than 5% and more people were beginning to buy their houses and also by the consumer goods that they wanted and the national government quite understandably has said are we really to divert resources from this into armaments especially they were being attacked from the left not for failing to rearm but for rearming too much and thereby repeating the mistakes of governments before 1914 and leading to war so Chamberlain said that defense spending should be limited in the instant economics but it also said the emphasis should be not on the army but on the RAF on the Royal Air Force and in particular in defending Britain against enemy attack on fighters for defense and on radar and we had a very small army therefore in May 1940 just before the German attack Britain had 10 divisions on the Western Front France had 104 Belgium had 22 and the Netherlands 8 so we did not have a strong army the Americans also had cut though they weren't fighting and also cut down their army and in 1939 when we tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a pact with the Soviet Union Stalin said how many divisions has Britain got to put in the field against Nazi Germany and we replied 2 and Stalin said the Soviet Union has 500 divisions so that makes 500 to now the reason why we didn't have a strong army was absolutely clear but the only way to get it was through conscription and we never had conscription in peacetime and conscription and a large army meant for most British people Chamberlain included the horrors of the farm and Passchendaele all over again and he was not going to go through that all over again let's make sure we can defend the country now there's no evidence that Churchill disagreed strongly with that policy and it was known when the cabinet papers were published that Churchill was brought into the government committees discussing rearmed of the very policy he attacked he'd been helping to formulate now his attack was but we weren't doing enough in the air and the Germans were ahead of us in their air force figures tend to show that he was probably wrong in that argument it may be the national government didn't mind being attacked so much by Churchill because it made them appear moderates they could say Churchill's a war monger not us but in any case the argument over the air force was I think a sideshow the real question was are you prepared to have a large army and Churchill did not himself favor a large army he said if you've got a strong Air Force you do not need conscription in peacetime so the real debate I think was ignored the only people calling for a large army were the military leader the army and they were dismissed as blimps old-fashioned people who want to lead the British into another bloodbath now the consequence of this was obvious that the brunt of the fighting would be done by the French and the British said the French can supply the army and will supply the Air Force now if we were French leader who might perhaps not be too happy at that the French would lose all their men while the British were fighting from the air and in fact British see under Chamberlain was really the policy of an isolationist state a state would have gun defend itself against attack but couldn't do very much to stop Hitler in Europe or rather you may say it was the policy of someone who was an imperialist and one has to remember Neville Chamberlain was the son of the great imperialist Joseph Chamberlain and at that time Britain was a very different sort of country from what it was now because a quarter of the Empire sorry a quarter of the world was part of the British Empire Britain while these superpower in the way that perhaps the United States is now quarter of the world was painted red and the old ones among you may remember history lessons we saw small island in the middle with the rest of the world a lot of it anyway painted red so Britain was a very large Empire if you like a satiated power the head of the Admiralty Lorde Chatfield said we have got most of the world already or the best parts of it and we only want to keep what we have got and prevent others taking it away from us now if you're if you take that view may say what happens in Europe perhaps doesn't matter too much and Neville Chamberlain during the Munich crisis faith famously referred to checks of Arc it was one country then the Czechs and snow back linked together he famously referred to check Slovakia as a faraway country of which we know nothing and that annoyed many people but perhaps expressed what many British people thought but as debate here that still goes on whether Britain is in fact a European country or not and that's not just a debate of the 1930s it's a debate today now if you're an imperialist then you might say well look we've got this worldwide Empire does it really matter who rules a certain part of Czechoslovakia or Poland and before 1914 and 1939 British leaders try to keep out of European involvement but they were dragged in on both occasions by what you may call quarrels in faraway countries the First World War began in via whether killing in Sarajevo which most people certainly have thought of faraway country and the second because of a dispute in Poland and as debate about Europe of course has dominated British domestic politics since the war broke up the Labour Party in 1981 almost broke up the Conservatives in the 1990s and could conceivably break up the current coalition gun but it was certainly a matter of dispute then and I think this was a main source of dispute between Chamberlain and Churchill that Churchill was a different sort of imperialist from Chamberlain and he was I think fundamentally a European and he said we could not allow a one country to dominate Europe though I think the conclusion from what he said was conscription which he didn't himself draw now we are so accustomed of the heroic status of Winston Churchill that we have to cast our mind back to the 1930s as to how people saw him them and you sometimes see the arguments that Churchill was kept out of office by political pygmies who were disinclined to notice his warnings I think of the kind of profit in the wilderness and that is untrue Churchill was not a member of the national government because he'd resigned from the conservative Shadow Cabinet earlier in 1931 in January 1931 and he'd resigned because he didn't agree with the conservative policy that India should be steered to self-government the Viceroy of India who was as Lord Halifax to be the conservative for infect in late 1930s if you're a declaration in 1929 saying the natural evolution of India should be towards self-government like the older dominions Australia Canada and so on and this for the time was revolutionary because until 1914 I think even fairly progressive people attend interview self-government was only the white people and that the non-white people perhaps Imperial paternal rule was the best they could hope for wasn't quite revolutionary in a way time coming from a conservative and Baldwin the leader of the Conservative Party except des is absolutely right and he refused to oppose the Labour government on it he said we had all these parties and troubles on Ireland we mustn't do the same with India we must steer indy responsibly to self-government the origins of Indian independence lie there but Churchill said this is quite wrong it would disrupt the Empire and he opposed this and not only do resides in shadow cabinet he had a powerful campaign which came with an inch of success to defeat the leadership on the india bill which the national government brought forward he went round the constituencies as you could imagine those days and conservative constituencies he had a lot of support and came within an inch of success and he said some pretty wild things he said in the 1930s that the British Empire faced two crucial challenges from Gandhi and from Hitler and you can see perhaps why people didn't take him to see he wasn't it's fair to say the only one and compared Gandhi to Hitler because Lord Halifax shortly before becoming foreign secretary villain Hitler in 1937 and when he got back he said to one of his associates he said well one of the thousand said to him I'm delighted you were going to go to Berlin because some time ago Lloyd George told me after his visit to Hitler that the man was really an oriental mystic the sort of Gandhi and I thought there was no one better able to deal with a Gandhi than you and Halifax said did Lloyd George really say that well this is perfectly true that's exactly what he is and there you may say Cirrus Cirrus misjudgment there it's fair to say a Gandhi's own and his own utterances also don't bear much repetition because in June 1940 after the fall of France he said Germans of future generations will honor hair Hitler as a genius as a brave man a matchless organizer and much more now Churchill used this analogy really hits Varun Gandhi but the national government said we can conciliate Gandhi and if we can conciliate Gandhi why can't we conciliate Hitler as well and the leaders of appeasement were those who'd succeeded in appeasing Gandhi the foreign sector said Lord Halifax the Viceroy of India so Samuel hor played a leading part in appeasement he'd been the indus secretary who steered the bill from Parlin against the opposition of Churchill and Churchill therefore was discredited and appeasement seemed a policy for liberal minded people now Churchill during the nineteen thirties for anyone who looked at his previous record seemed marked by bad judgment immediately after the Russian Revolution he'd thought to lead a foreign intervention against the Soviet Union to remove the Bolshevik regime now whatever you may think of that now in the 1930s this was thought as illegitimate that really what sort of country the Russians had their own business and it wasn't for us to try and determine how Russia was ruled then as Chancellor of the Exchequer he'd led the return to the gold standard up to higher rate in 1925 which people beginning to say was responsible for our economic troubles and then finally and here the King's Speech is a travesty far from being a friend of George the sixth Churchill not only supported Edward the eighth during the abdication but tried to act unconstitutionally by saying that if the government resigned because they couldn't accept the marriage he Churchill would become Prime Minister and since he didn't have a majority in parliament there would be an election on the question of the Kings marriage well anything more disastrous did imagine and it put the cabinet as you can understand very much against him so it seemed that Churchill really had a record of being wrong on almost everything and that was the view that people had of him in the 1930s quite contrary to the do afterward that he was a right-wing renegade and very very poor judgment hurry action area figure from the past if you like and Lord Halifax said the day is past in my humble opinion when Winston's possessive instinct can be applied to empires and alike that consecutive imperialism is finished and when he called for British rearmament people said he was a scare monger and the leader of the liberal sir Herbert Samuels and he was calling blind and causes panic the language of a Malay running amok rather than a responsible British statesman so people didn't take much notice at that time of Churchill now the national government then faced a difficult problem and it didn't have the advantage of the hindsight that we have now and they decided to follow a conciliatory policies towards the dictators now the first breach of serious breach of treaty obligations of the territorial kind on the part of Hitler took place in March 1936 when he reoccupied and we militarized the Rhineland part of Germany that is the left bank of the Rhine which had been demilitarized by the Treaty of Versailles now this was a breach not only the Versailles Treaty which Hitler said had been exacted from Germany by force but also the Treaty of Loch Carnot of 1925 which Germany had freely signed the Fetzer government and a pre Nazi government not Hitler himself and Churchill in his war memoirs said this was the ideal opportunity to stop Hitler and that we he said we we now know that if British and French troops had moved into Rhine and Hitler would have had to withdraw now if you look at what happened at the time Churchill made no comment about the Rhineland at the time and I haven't found one British politician who said that this should be met with force beacon the reason being that we now know the British French had realized that the rhineland provisions were untenable they could not forever prevent Germany from occupying her own territory or putting troops in her own territory and they said it being untenable we have to give up that position what can we get in returns they're giving it up now the Germans are well aware of this British and French thinking and so they weren't taking a risk as much of a risk has previously been thought in reoccupying the Rhineland they knew the British and French would not fight for something they were in any case going to give up now and apart from that in 1923 the French had followed a similar policy because when the Germans defaulted on their reparations payments they had occupied the Ruhr with French troops that had done no good and after a while they'd simply had to withdraw and the same would happen in 1936 the British and French troops had gone in and the Nazis had withdrawn and we have found ourselves permanently trying to hold down hostile population and would have had to withdraw from possibly Hitler's prestige would have increased so I don't think this was a great missed opportunity and nor did people at the time and even Harold Macmillan he was a bitter opponent of the government he said in 1938 in his constituency that Hitler had a good deal of reason behind him in the reoccupation of the Rhineland so I think that was not a lost opportunity now in February 1938 Neville Chamberlain's foreign secretary Anthony Eden resigned from the government in protest not against the appeasement of Germany but against the appeasement of Italy and Trainmen was rather eager to reduce the number of Britain's potential enemies and he therefore thought to make an agreement with Mussolini of Italy and even said they shouldn't be done until Mussolini kept his earlier agreements and his earlier agreement was to stop sending so-called volunteers to Spain to help the Franco side in the Spanish Civil War mostly new promise to stop that but he hadn't in fact done so and Eden said there's no point in signing a further treaty with Mussolini until he accepts the previous one he should keep to his word now the resignation of Eden was made the subject of a purple passage in Winston Churchill's war memoirs and Churchill said there were many times in the war when he felt depressed and upset but he said he never felt a sense of gloom that he felt when Anthony Eden resigned he said one night he couldn't sleep because he said this was a symbol of young Britain he hadn't always agreed with Eden but he stood for something very firm and important an idealistic with him out of the government the policy of appeasement clearly would have no obstacles enabler one time he really felt very depressed about the future well that may be so but he didn't immediately after the resignation of Eden at the time sign emotion expressing full confidence in the government's foreign policy so you had to compare what he said later with what happened at the time now later in that year became the real symbol of a policy of appeasement namely the Munich Agreement and this I think too has been misinterpreted and the general way it's seen perhaps a caricature is of Neville Chamberlain rather weak and naive being blocked by Hitler and I think that isn't true firstly Neville Chamberlain was by no means weak he was one of the strong Prime Minister with powerful knew his own mind extremely well secondly the policy followed Muni was not the policy of a single individual I think it's very important there was a book I reviewed two years ago a very good book by David Reynolds of Cambridge called summits about summit conferences and he took the first summit conference as being the Munich conference between the four leading powers then Britain France Germany and Italy interesting none of them leading powers probably now Britain France Germany in Italy and I think that's a mistake because the policy Chamberlain followed was a policy laid down by the Cabinet and not just at the time in the Munich Agreement but beforehand because the government had to face the problem that after the so-called Angelus with Austria in in March 1938 that is the link between Germany and Austria was very clear that Czechoslovakia might be under threat and the cabinet met to consider their policy and they said that they would not go to war to keep the german-speaking territories of Czechs of Archaea within checks of arkad all decided that that was a policy and Munich in a sense was the implementation of that policy and therefore in a sense the conference didn't decide anything the important decision was made by the Cabinet for good or ill in March and Munich merely ratified a decision that had already been made and dealt with the pressures dealt with the procedures rather by which German territorial claims would be carried out now Neville Chamberlain didn't like this policy in march 1938 he wrote the following for his sister i should say that them he was a very assiduous family man fortunately with historian and every week he wrote letters to his wife if his wife was in burnings he represented a burning constituency and also to his two sisters laying out in great detail the basis and policy and he said this in march 1938 he said it made his blood boil to see germany getting away with it time after time and increasing her domination over free peoples but such sentimental considerations were dangerous and we must remember the forces with which we were playing well we sufficiently powerful to make victory certain frankly he did not think we were he thought that a time would come when a gamble on the issue of peace or war might be contemplated with less anxiety than at present at this moment he was certain public opinion in Great Britain would not allow her majesty's government in majesty's government take such a risk and it was no use for this government or indeed for any other government to go beyond its public opinion with the possible effect of bringing destruction to brave people now he was confronted with the view of the chiefs of staff which supported him Britain was in no condition to go to war they held that unanimously and in my opinion it's a brave prime minister who goes to war in those conditions when the Chiefs of Staff say you're not in a position to do so and he made the point that public opinion would not allow the government that takes such a risk for this reason that whatever you thought of Hitler and his government he had on his side at that time the argument from self-determination after all it was argued the Germans in Czechoslovakia did not want to remain in Czechoslovakia they wanted to go back to Germany are you going to go to war to stop them doing that and more particularly the purpose of going to war would not be simply to deal with that problem but to remove Hitler and that possibly would involve a long war would the British people have the stomach for it would they think it was really a cause they ought to fight for at that time and I think the answer must be very dubious now he wrote his sister about the alternative policy which Winston Churchill was putting forward and that was for a grand alliance between Britain France Czechs of Archaea and possibly the Soviet Union and Churchill wrote was so Chamberlain wrote to his sister you have only to look at the map to see that nothing that prompts all we could do could possibly save Czech Slovakia from being overrun by the Germans if they want to do it therefore we could not help Czechoslovakia she would simply be a pretext for going to war with Germany that we could not think of unless we had a reasonable prospect of being to bend her to her knees in a reasonable time and of that I see no sign I have therefore abandoned any idea of giving guarantees to check Slovakia Tour de France in connection with her obligations that country but he spoke in terms of what he decided but that was the cabinet's view now um Chet lavaca attracted much sympathy in Britain it was the only democracy at that time east of the Rhine every other country was a dictatorship half of its population of 10 million 3 million were german-speaking mainly concentrated in the northwest and southwest parts of the country near the borders but it was also divided by other ethnic conflicts but when the Slovaks the Czechs and Slovaks which broke the country up in the 1990s and there were also strong Hungarian and Polish minorities which had claims upon the country now in 1935 the German Nationalist Party in the territories fairly close to a Nazi Party won more votes than any other in the german-speaking areas and became the second largest in the Czech Parliament as a whole and they were threatening the unity of the country now Czechs of Archaea had a treaty with France by which France was obliged to go to her aid if she was attacked and also a treaty with the Soviet Union by which the Soviet Union was obliged to go to her aid if attacked she did not have a treaty with Britain but British governments feared they might be dragged in because once the French were at war they would have to be a war because after all that's what had happened in 1914 we didn't have a treaty with France but we were dragged in when France was dragged in when Belgium was attacked and that analogy was in many people's minds now as time went on attention during the summer autumn months ratcheted up and in September at the Nuremberg rally Hitler made a wild speech but without making any specific proposals and the Czech leader Henline the Konrad Henlein broke off negotiations and went to Germany and said that he was no longer prepared to discuss anything with the Czech government and the german-speaking territories must be allowed to secede now meanwhile Chamberlain in seeking to mediate had sent a mission to Czechoslovakia under Lord ransom and a former minister to see if he could find solution and Lord Runciman said that the dispute was no longer an internal one but one between two countries Czechs of our current Germany and although the Germans were responsible for break up negotiations he said he had much sympathy with them and he said that although Czech rule was not oppressive and certainly not terroristic it had he said been marred by tactlessness lack of understanding petty intolerance and discrimination to a point where the resentment of the German population was inevitably moving in the direction of revolt and he said that therefore the frontier district should be transferred to Germany and Chamberlain R then thought this is going to lead to war because the Czechs won't transfer the territory and Hitler will attack and I want to stop that happening now he then wrote to his sister in September that he conceived with a plan to try and avoid that happening by personally visiting Hitler and he said I thought he realized if things eventually go wrong and the aggression takes place there will be many including Winston who will say that the British government must bear the responsibility and if only they had had the courage to tell hit sir now but if he used force we should at once declare war that would have stopped him by that time it will be impossible to prove the contrary but I am satisfied we should be wrong to allow the most vital decision that any country could take the decision was to peaceful war to pass out of our own hands into those of the ruler of another country and a lunatic at that now the first the first public proposal that the german-speaking territories should be ceded came not from any conservative but from the left-wing newspaper the New Statesman which said at the end of August before Hitler's speech at Nuremberg the strategical value of the Bohemian frontier should not be made the occasion of the world war which Amon decided on his daring plan to visit Hitler bearson's garden in Bavaria and rather naively perhaps he did Hitler without an interpreters who relied on Hitler's interpreters account of what was discussed but he hopes to begin the discussion on general discussion on anglo-german problems little brush that aside and said the only problem worth discussing was that ensued Aten land which was his last terra trolled around in europe but hey the big government accepted the principle of self-determination which the nazis not invented he would discuss ways and means he's had apart from that there was no other place where frontiers made any territorial difficulty he did not want any checks in germany but merely racial unity in other words he was saying that he would negotiate only if his basic principle was immediately accepted and he didn't get what he wanted he would use force Chamberlain replied Pat's foolishly my personal opinion was that on principle I didn't care two hoots well-understood dayton's within the Reich or out of it according their own wishes Hitler said that all errors with more than 50% of Germans should be ceded and Chamberlain said he'd consult with his cabinet and then return when the cabinet had decided only did the Czechs had decided when he got back he told the cabinet you can't go to war to prevent the principle of self-determination it thought but he then said rather more he said and so many people do at summits he said I had established a certain confidence which was my aim and on my side in spite of the hardness and ruthlessness I thought I saw in his face I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word anyway the principle of self-determination was decided and once that was decided you may say there's no point in going to war because the other issues like the area to be ceded in the timetable should not be made the occasion for war so you may say the Munich Agreement was as it were preordained well are some difficult discussions jaymund got agreement of the cabinet as which was fairly easy in the Czechs which wasn't easy but he then went back for a second meeting with Hitler this time Hitler said to you the long way to flat Etherea let's meet near Barnett goddess Berg shorter journey goddess Berg on the Rhine but when Chamberlain arrived Hitler said well how have you gone he said well I think I've managed to get the agreement and Hitler said well I'm afraid that's no longer enough it's too late and it seemed was probably the Hitler hadn't expected Chamberlain's beer to kill us the Czechs to agree to the session of territory and his aim had been to split Britain in France from Czechoslovakia but Hitler now demanded immediate occupation of the areas without any delay clevis it's in there's other areas and settlements of polish and Hungarian claims also on Czechoslovakia and he presented a Jamin with another memorandum which Jane meant it was an ultimatum and he said that again after he's settled with no further territorial claims to make in Europe Chamberlain came back the cabinet and said this is terrible it's very difficult but still we have agreed the principle of self-determination and Hitler's object he said was racial unity and not the domination of Europe and he said that Hitler trusted him and work with him and would not deliberately deceive a man whom he respected at this point the cabinet Ravel led by Lord Halifax foreign secretary and said there was a distinction between an orderly transfer of territory and a disorderly transfer and that they couldn't accept the goddess Berg memorandum at that point it looked as if Britain was heading for war and Chamberlain made a famous broadcast the broadcast so quoted from earlier about a quarrel in a faraway country of which we know nothing seemingly a minor quarrel being blown up like Serbia before 1914 so we were getting in war exactly when people heard him speak they thought they remember reminds of 1914 but he also said in a radio broadcaster armed conflict between nations is a nightmare to me but if I were convinced that any nation had made up its mind to dominate the world by fear of its force I should feed it must be resisted but he thought about this and said it's mad to go to war over what amounted to procedures and he sent another letter to Hitler and said why don't we discuss all this together at a conference and Hitler agreed and Chamberlain then set off for Munich and at the airport Heston Airport the princess of Heathrow Trainmen was very fond of Shakespeare in Croatian you lot about Chamberlain and to the waiting news men he said quote I think some Henry the fourth he said out of this nettle danger we pluck this flower safety the pellet laureate John Masefield wrote a poem at work on his visit he said as prime to Achilles for his son so you into the ninth divinely led to ask that young men's bodies not yet dead be given from the battle not yet begun and so Chamberlain is on the flight to Munich and there will be four representatives there in France Germany and Italy the Czechs weren't to be represented and nor the Soviet Union and since ting that none ten years later none of those four powers counted as world powers it was the last two major European confidence in the only conference Hitler ever attended in his career and Mussolini said when some of the concert he would go he said there will be no war but it's the end of British prestige and it's a mousseline he said in the country where animals are adored to the point of making cemeteries and hospitals and houses for them and legacies are bequeathed to parrots you can be sure that decadence has set in and that was a grievously mistaken view a view held by Hitler as well the British were going to Munich out of weakness it wasn't for that primarily it was because they believed that however awful Hitler's regime was there will some justice to the claim for self-determination and they shouldn't resist it and Mussolini made a bad error I think in believing that Britain was decadent now we now know what they didn't people didn't know at the time that Hitler was not interested in SU datin land but he was interested just as in 1939 in using that dispute in order to go to war with Czech Slovakia and defeat her because he regarded Czechs of Archaea as a nante which it was an anti-nazi power and the Sudetenland to be the excuse just as Danzig and the Polish corridor in 1939 the excuse to war so Munich Agreement actually stopped a war which Hitler wanted and although the general British view is that Chamberlain was utterly deceived by Hitler Hitler's view wasn't he'd been deceived by a cunning Englishman who would go to war then when the time was right near the end of the war when it was Cleves going to be defeated Hitler mr. Martin Bormann September 1938 that was the most favorable moment where an attack carried the lowest risk for us Great Britain and France surprised by the speed of our attack would have done nothing all of also since we had world opinion on our side we could have settled the remaining territorial questions in Eastern Europe and the Balkans without fearing intervention from the anglo-french powers so as you can see there's much misunderstanding about the Munich Agreement but my time's up so we'll leave Chamberlain in the plane going to Munich and next time we will talk about the Munich Agreement and then Britain coming to war and the rise of Churchill thank you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 37,508

Rating: 4.7333331 out of 5

Keywords: Neville Chamberlain, National Government, Political History, British Politics, History, Politics, Government, British History, English Politics, Westminster, Vernon Bogdanor, Gresham College, Gresham, Gresham Professor, lecture, talk, politics talk, politics lecture, history lecture, history talk, education, free education

Id: ZDal5_73OY0

Length: 59min 12sec (3552 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 26 2011