How Appeasement and the National Government left us better prepared to fight the Second World War

I haven’t yet read Tim Bouverie’s new book Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War, only Andrew Rawnsley’s review in the Observer. The book may well be more nuanced than Rawnsley suggests, but it sounds much like the old accepted wisdom, the mixture as before: Appeasement bad and the National Government failed Britain.

The National Government came into being in response to the 1931 financial and economic crisis – which led to a sharp contraction of World Trade. It was formed at the instigation of George V. The Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, whose Labour minority Government depended on Liberal support in the Commons, wanted to resign. The King persuaded him, not perhaps with much difficulty, that it was his patriotic duty to remain in office and form a National Coalition. It is always said that MacDonald betrayed or deserted Labour. It is equally true that the greater part of the Labour Party deserted their leader. If they hadn’t done so, the National Government, which included Liberals as well as Conservative and the Labour remnant that followed MacDonald, would have been more “national” than it was.

Still MacDonald and the Tory leader Stanley Baldwin worked amicably together. The economy gradually recovered, especially in the South and Midlands of England. Parts of the country that depended on coal-mining and heavy industry took longer to recover, principally because much of their production was export-oriented.

Baldwin was happy to work with MacDonald. His cousin Kipling thought he was a Socialist really. He wasn’t, but he had said in the Twenties that his chief aim in politics was to prevent the Class War from becoming a reality in Britain. In this he was successful. When eventually his successor, Neville Chamberlain, reluctantly accepted that Hitler could be neither appeased nor controlled, and declared that we were at war with Germany, he led a remarkably united country.

Few welcomed the war; all but a tiny minority belonging to fringe Parties (Fascist, Communist, Scottish, Welsh and Irish Nationalist) accepted it. The near unanimity and acceptance of what was rightly expected to be a terrible war were evidence of Baldwin’s success. If Britain stood together in 1940, it was because there was social peace. The contrast with France where bitter divisions ran deep is marked.

Now to Hitler and Appeasement.

First, throughout the Twenties and well into the Thirties public opinion was on the whole favourable to Germany and suspicious of France. The Treaty of Versailles was thought to have been too harsh in its treatment of Germany. The criticisms of the Treaty offered by Keynes in his book “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” were widely accepted.

Second, many were impressed by Hitler in his early years. I have a post-card sent by my father to his new mother-in-law in the spring of 1936, when he was spending a week or so of his honeymoon in Germany before returning to Malaya where he was the manager of a rubber estate. (Rubber too had been hard-hit by the global slump; he had had to take a big cut in his salary.)

“If things were as bad here before as we were told they were,” he wrote, “Herr Hitler seems to be doing a wonderful job”. Many, ignorant of the concentration camps and – shamefully – indifferent to the persecution of the Jews, would have agreed with him. Lots of people, better informed than my young father, visited Germany and were impressed.

Bouverie, apparently, makes the case that Hitler could have been stopped when he marched into the demilitarised Rhineland and took it over in 1936. Perhaps he could. It’s an imponderable. The French were eager to intervene. Pierre Flandin, the Foreign Secretary, tried to persuade Baldwin the Prime Minister since MacDonald stepped aside the previous year. Baldwin said “no”: the British People were against intervention. He was surely right. I guess it would have been as divisive as Tony Blair’s Iraq war, or indeed even more so…

Up to the Munich Agreement in September 1938, Hitler’s foreign policy was presented, and could be understood, as an attempt to correct the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles. The inhabitants of the Rhineland were German: why, almost twenty years after the War, should Germany not re-occupy it?

Czechoslovakia was a Treaty creation. There was a large Germany majority in the Sudetenland, a province bordering Germany. They were Germans who wanted to be German citizens, not Czechs. Were we to go to war, many asked, to compel Germans to remain citizens of Czechoslovakia?

Chamberlain returned from Munich with his “piece of paper” and the assurance from Hitler that he had made his last territorial demand. Only a small minority of Tory MPs were against the Munich Agreement. Only one Cabinet Minister – Duff Cooper, the First Lord of the Admiralty – resigned. Chamberlain was a hero – one who, moreover, had been cheered loudly in Germany also; these were grateful cheers, evidence that the German People, like the British, didn’t want a war.

In contrast, Churchill, the most vociferous of the anti-Appeasers, was widely distrusted. He was known to love war – though any public speech he made might be interrupted by shouts of “Gallipoli” or “the Dardanelles”. His reputation, particularly after his opposition to any move towards Indian self-government, was low. Indeed, even in the Commons, most of the anti-appeasers attached themselves to Anthony Eden, not Churchill.

Of course things changed. When Hitler gobbled up what was left of Czechoslovakia in the Spring of 1939 and then turned on Poland, there was a general, though still reluctant, acceptance that war with Nazi Germany had become unavoidable. There had been no such feeling in the previous autumn when Chamberlain returned from Munich.

Appeasement did not prevent war. Arguments as to whether it gave us necessary time to rearm continue, with some arguing that Germany made better use of the months after Munich than we did. Nevertheless Appeasement was right, and Chamberlain’s struggle for Peace, following on Baldwin’s determination – shared by MacDonald – to prevent the Class War from becoming a reality in Britain, meant that we were prepared – morally and psychologically prepared – to accept the necessity of war in September 1939.

Of course Churchill was needed in 1940. He gave the voice to Defiance. But he was also fortunate – though he never admitted this – that the policies pursued by MacDonald, Baldwin and Chamberlain – all of which and whom he opposed – enabled him to speak to a united and resolute People. If he had had his way earlier – even only a year earlier – the public mood and opinion would have been different. It was our great good fortune in 1940 that so few voices were raised against the War.