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Articles
Peden: A Fresh Look at Churchill, Chamberlain and the 1930s
- By CHRISTOPHER M. BELL
- | June 19, 2023
- Category: Books
George Peden, Churchill, Chamberlain and Appeasement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023, 418 pages, $39.98, Kindle $37.98.
Britain’s path to the Second World War is often reduced to a story of the weak, naïve Neville Chamberlain making one disastrous concession after another to Adolf Hitler while ignoring the repeated warnings of a wise and prophetic Winston Churchill. This simplified narrative was encouraged by Churchill himself. In his influential memoir, The Gathering Storm, Churchill scorned the policies of Britain’s prewar governments while detailing his own warnings. The Second World War, he famously suggested, was “‘The Unnecessary War.’ There never was a war more easy to stop.”1
George Peden, Emeritus Professor at Stirling University, is not the first historian to look critically at Churchill’s record as an anti-appeaser. Several have questioned whether his prescriptions could, in fact, have averted the Second World War.2 Peden’s study nevertheless offers a fresh and valuable perspective on the subject. This is a detailed examination of British policy in the 1930s from the dual perspective of Chamberlain and Churchill. Their individual stories are woven into a single clear and illuminating narrative.
Churchill and Chamberlain reconsidered
Predictably, Chamberlain features more prominently, since he was at the center of British decision-making throughout this period. He joined the National Government in 1931 as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He served in that post until succeeding Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister in May 1937.
Churchill, on the other hand, was a Conservative backbencher deliberately excluded from high office by his own party leaders. He was a persistent and forceful critic of the government. But he had little influence on official policy until he joined Chamberlain’s war cabinet in September 1939.
Peden’s study is also noteworthy for giving as much attention to rearmament as to diplomacy. These two subjects are frequently treated in isolation. But as Peden repeatedly shows, contemporaries regarded them as complementary, and we should too.
Chamberlain’s policy towards Nazi Germany was never simply peace at any price, as his harshest critics sometimes suggest. He understood the importance of rebuilding Britain’s defence capabilities, not only to ensure readiness should war break out, but also to act as a deterrent to German aggression.
Parallels and divergencies
On the question of grand strategy, Peden demonstrates that Churchill and Chamberlain shared many of the same views. They agreed that Germany was a far greater menace than distant Japan. Both believed British rearmament should prioritize the expansion of the Royal Air Force. Both were willing to rely on France to meet the German threat on land, making the expansion of the British Army a low priority until early 1939. And neither showed much interest in naval expansion or preparations for war in the Far East.
The main difference between the two politicians was not where to allocate defence funds, but how fast to spend them. Churchill was eager to accelerate rearmament even if it meant higher taxation, increased borrowing, or government interference in civil industry. Chamberlain, on the other hand, was more cautious. He recognized the need to rearm but was concerned about the impact of heavy defence expenditure on an economy struggling to recover from the Depression. Like many decisionmakers, Chamberlain believed that Britain’s economic strength was the foundation of its military power. His position, in short, was that Britain should rearm at a rate that was prudent and sustainable, even if that meant falling behind Germany in the short term.
Peden shows that Churchill’s views on foreign policy also aligned at times with Chamberlain’s, sometimes in unexpected ways. Churchill remained hopeful, for example, that fascist Italy could be detached from Germany. He favored lifting sanctions against Mussolini at the end of the Ethiopian war. He supported the government’s policy of neutrality in the Spanish Civil War. During the Czech crisis in 1938, he was willing to accept a settlement that brought the Sudetenland into Hitler’s Germany.
The Peden critique
The differences between the two statesmen were nevertheless substantial. Peden is critical of Chamberlain’s personal diplomacy, which was repeatedly undermined by his inexperience in foreign affairs, overconfidence, and susceptibility to flattery. Chamberlain’s commitment to Appeasement stemmed in large part from his doubts about the League of Nations and Collective Security. He also resisted relying on military alliances to deter Germany. He shared the widespread view that the European alliance system had been a major factor leading to war in 1914, and he was determined not again to divide Europe into hostile camps. Far better, in his view, to work bilaterally with Germany to resolve grievances and build a general and lasting settlement.
Churchill, in contrast, saw the value of alliances. As the German threat grew, he advocated the construction of a “grand alliance”: Britain, France, and the Soviet Union, backed by an array of lesser European powers. He was confident that this coalition, sanctified by the League of Nations and enjoying the moral support of the United States, would present a deterrent that even Hitler would take seriously.
Chamberlain’s brand of Appeasement ultimately failed because he did not understand Hitler. At the Munich Conference, Chamberlain badly misjudged the dictator. He believed Hitler could be trusted, and had only modest and reasonable territorial ambitions. Allowing Germany to incorporate ethnic Germans into an expanded Reich seemed sensible if it led to a lasting European settlement. Once it became clear that Hitler could not be trusted, and was pursuing a vast expansionist agenda, Chamberlain’s views on alliances, rearmament and deterrence began to align more closely with Churchill’s.
Pondering counterfactuals
Peden concludes the volume with a series of grounded and thought-provoking counterfactuals. He considers what might have happened if Churchill rather than Chamberlain had been Chancellor and Prime Minister in the 1930s. His conclusions are admirably balanced. Britain would undoubtedly have rearmed faster under Churchill, but its spending priorities would have remained substantially the same. Ethiopia would still have been sacrificed to Italy. The USSR might have been drawn into alliance with Britain and France, although Stalin would not necessarily have been as cooperative as Churchill hoped.
Could the war have been prevented? Peden believes Hitler would not have been deterred by a stronger Royal Air Force or a Churchillian “Grand Alliance.” And since Churchill would not have abandoned Czechoslovakia, Peden suggests that a general European war would have broken out around 1938. Would this have been better for Britain? Peden thinks it probably would have been, at least in military terms. But he also suggests that that war might have been long and bloody. And he wonders whether the British public and the Dominions were ready in 1938 to fight over Czechoslovakia.
This, of course, is the nature of counterfactual analysis. Every question leads to more questions; and every answer is necessarily speculative. No historian can hope to prove definitively that the Second World War was or was not easily preventable, and Peden is wise not to try. He provides readers with insights rather than answers, making this volume an indispensable contribution to the literature on Appeasement.
The author
Dr. Bell is Professor of History at Dalhousie University. His publications include Churchill and the Dardanelles, Churchill and Sea Power and (with co-editor Marcus Faulkner) Decision in the Atlantic: The Allies and the Longest Campaign of the Second World War.
Endnotes
1 Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm (London: Cassell, 1948), viii.
2 See:
Martin Gilbert & Richard Gott, The Appeasers (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1963; London: Phoenix House, 2000)
Donald C. Watt, “Churchill and Appeasement,” in Robert Blake & Wm. Roger Louis, eds., Churchill: A Major New Assessment (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), 199-214
Graham Stewart, Burying Caesar: Churchill, Chamberlain and the Battle for Tory Party (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999); Burying Caesar: The Churchill-Chamberlain Rivalry (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2001)
R.A.C. Parker, Churchill and Appeasement (London: Macmillan, 2000)
David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2004)
Richard M. Langworth, Churchill and the Avoidable War: Could World War II have been Prevented? (Moultonborough, N.H.: Dragonwyck Publishing, 2015)
Adrian Phillips, Fighting Churchill, Appeasing Hitler: Neville Chamberlain, Sir Horace Wilson, and Britain’s Plight of Appeasement 1937-1939 (New York: Pegasus, 2019)