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Oliver Popplewell on Munich, with Some Omissions
Oliver Popplewell, Munich: Why?, New York and London: Austin Macauley Publishers, 2022, 250 pages, paperback $15.95, Kindle $4.50.
Fruits of Munich
Two significant Churchill-adjacent films appeared in 2017: Darkest Hour and Dunkirk. Both addressed 1940, the year Churchill said “nothing surpasses.” Both attempted to illustrate the strategic choices of statesmen and generals, and their immense influence on our time. Each represented the fruits of events 18 months earlier, now illuminated in Munich: Why? by Oliver Popplewell.
Darkest Hour presented the political turmoil of May 1940, following the collapse of the Chamberlain government. At that that moment, as German panzers were driving through Holland, Belgium, and Northern France, Chamberlain gave way to Churchill, an uncertain leader with a reputation for risk-taking, unwilling to seek accommodation with Hitler. Despite historical inaccuracies, Darkest Hour shows how Churchill’s spirit and oratory persuaded his countrymen that Hitler was a moral as well as strategic danger.
Dunkirk, despite its high-priced stars, captured little of that terrible moment when the British Expeditionary Force faced possible annihilation. It offers virtually no depictions of the bloody world of combat. Instead, we watch a number of lackluster individuals, including two who have fled their units in the chaos of the evacuation. The deserters then sneak aboard a rescue ship in place of two individuals too stupid not to have deserted—at least from the film’s point of view. Their moral turpitude never enters the picture.
Those films should remind us of what led to 1940: the Munich Conference in September 1938, where Hitler, Churchill, Daladier and Mussolini had determined the fate of Czechoslovakia. Munich, too, has had a film lately, but a more serious study is warranted—and Oliver Popplewell provides it.
Prelude to catastrophe
This old, curmudgeonly reviewer has a number of criticisms of the Popplewell book. Nevertheless, it offers a deep understanding of those who, after the Great War, failed to grasp the real implications of Hitler. His Nazi movement represented a danger not only to Britain’s national interests, but to its values as well.
In July 1937, conversing with Russian Ambassador Ivan Maisky, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain remarked: “If we could only sit down with the Germans and run through all their complaints and claims with a pencil, this would relieve all tension.” Like leaders of other great powers in the 1930s, Chamberlain failed to recognize the truth. Ensconced in the belief that no European power would seriously consider the use of military force, the British Prime Minister desperately tried to prevent the French from supporting their Eastern European allies. He was sure this would only draw the Western Powers into a continental war.
Disastrously the British had long minimized defense spending. Caught on his own political petard that Britain was not ready for war at Munich, Chamberlain began rapid rearmament in March 1939, when it was far too late.
Pusillanimity was the order of the day, but the French followed the most dishonest policy of any major power. In the 1920s they had created alliances with Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania, believing they would come to France’s aid should the Germans move west. Such a strategy made sense in the 1920s, but in the 1930s it made no sense at all. France had no intention of supporting the Eastern Europeans. It possessed neither the military doctrine nor the strength. So the French pretended to prepare for war, while trusting that the British and their policy of appeasement would make every effort to shield France from war and its treaty obligations to Czechoslovakia. Thus, Munich represented a great success for France’s strategy.
Peace in their time
Chamberlain would garner most credit for the surrender of Czechoslovakia. French President Daladier, returning from Munich, worried that the great crowd gathered at Le Bourget airfield was there to lynch him. They were not. They were there to cheer, because Britain had followed the favored French strategy of abandoning Czechoslovakia without seeming to do so. France would pay in May 1940 for her dishonesty and sacrifice of the Czechs, when the catastrophe of Nazi occupation would break the country.
Moreover, Munich eliminated the Czech Army and armaments industry from the Allied order of battle. In February 1939, Chamberlain found himself confronted with France’s warning that it could no longer defend the Low Countries without substantial British ground forces.
Stalin and Communist Russia were not an enigma in September 1938. Stalin had begun his great purge of the officer corps in May 1937. That shows he had no intention of involving Russia in a major European war. By spring 1940 Stalin had consigned half of the Red Army officer corps to the firing squad or the Gulag, where 90 percent of the generals would accompany them. As in 1939, Stalin was counting on avoiding a major conflict.
Popplewell notes that in 1938, there was no means to reach Czechoslovakia from Russia. Soviet support for the Czechs was aimed more at allowing Moscow to settle matters with the Poles if the Western powers and Germany tore each other apart. Then Russia would move into Central Europe to pick up the pieces.
The Czech tragedy
Popplewell explains Czechoslovakia’s great problem: the intermixing of nationalities during the old Hapsburg Empire. The Battle of the White Mountain, in 1624, had ensured domination of the region by German speakers for three centuries. The collapse of the ramshackle Empire in 1918 caused the Versailles Peace Conference to reorganize an area where Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles, Germans, Jews, and Romani were intermixed.
The difficulty for Czechoslovakia was that Sudeten Germans were settled heavily in the mountainous areas surrounding Bohemia and Moravia. At Versailles, that populace had asked to join the new German Republic. The French immediately said no. They had no intention of enhancing the economic and political growth of the German state they had just defeated. Moreover, loss of its mountainous borderland would have placed Czechoslovakia in an indefensible position. Thus the Sudetens found themselves lorded over by the Czechs they had dominated for 300 years. Versailles had put the shoe on the other foot.
In the 1920s the Czechs and Sudeten Germans got along reasonably well, but the 1930s were a different matter. The global depression hit the Germans particularly heavily. The rise of the Nazi regime across the border added a new element of political instability to Czechoslovakia. Konrad Henlein, the Nazi stooge in Czechoslovakia, attempted with some success to persuade the British that he was an independent leader more interested in local autonomy than Anschluss with Germany.
Czechoslovakia’s president, Eduoard Beneš, attempted a desperate course of diplomacy. But he refused fight when Anglo-French appeasers shoved the Munich agreement down his throat. Instead he fled to Paris and then London, leaving his countrymen to suffer the fate of Lidice and over six years of German occupation. The following year, under more desperate circumstances, the Poles opted to fight.
The Popplewell account
The great strength of Oliver Popplewell’s book lies in his ability to unravel the strategic, diplomatic and political aspects of the Munich crisis. He is also able to convey the uncertainties and ambiguities of that dark time.
There are two weaknesses in the book. First, Poppplewell should have spent more time discussing how Munich changed the military balance. For example, three of the ten panzer divisions which invaded Western Europe in May1940 were equipped with Czech tanks. The Waffen SS divisions were equipped with Czech weapons for the Polish Campaign. And Germany profited by selling off substantial amounts of Czech weapons.
A more serious weakness is that Popplewell provides only a minimal discussion of Germany’s severe economic difficulties in September 1938. Hitler’s bluster masked extraordinary weaknesses confronting Germany that autumn. The omission of Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction is glaring.
But as I commented at the beginning of this review, what matters is the heart of the book. Here Oliver Popplewell has recognized the pernicious evil that lay in appeasing Nazi Germany. What makes this a particularly valuable book is that we are living in another time of appeasement, when the Macrons, Scholzs, Le Pens and others can hardly wait to abandon the noisy Ukrainians and Taiwanese who are so annoying the peace of the world. Munich: Why? is a wonderful antidote to their silliness.
The author
Dr. Murray is professor emeritus at Ohio State University, adjunct professor at Marine Corps University, and author or editor of many books on military history, strategy and theory. His works include Moment of Battle: Twenty Clashes That Changed the World, with James Lacey (2013), The Iran-Iraq War (2014), and A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War (2017).
Those films should remind us of what led to 1940: the Munich Conference in September 1938, where Hitler, Chamberlain, Daladier and Mussolini determined the fate of Czechoslovakia. Munich, too, has had a film lately, but a more serious study is warranted—and Oliver Popplewell provides it.