“I’ve got it!” he shouted to Lord Halifax. “I’ve got it!”3 “Here is a paper which bears his name.”4
Drafted by Chamberlain and Sir Horace Wilson, three sentences long, the Munich Accord read: “We, the German Fuehrer and Chancellor and the British Prime Minister…regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.”5
At the request of George VI “to come straight to Buckingham Palace so that I can express to you personally my most heartfelt congratulations on the success of your visit to Munich,” Chamberlain was driven to the palace to receive the gratitude of his sovereign.6 Though the trip was only nine miles, so dense were the crowds it took an hour and a half.7
“Even the descriptions of the papers give no idea of the scenes in the streets as I drove from Heston to the Palace,” wrote Chamberlain. “They were lined from one end to the other with people of every class, shouting themselves hoarse, leaping on the running board, banging on the windows, and thrusting their hands into the car to be shaken.”8
At Buckingham Palace, Chamberlain and his wife were invited by the King to “join him on the balcony…as a token of the ‘lasting gratitude of his fellow countrymen throughout the Empire.’”9 “It was…the first time a ruling monarch had allowed a commoner to be acknowledged from the balcony of Buckingham Palace.”10 Thus did George VI and his queen render a royal blessing to appeasement. Beside his sovereign, the prime minister “stood there smiling, the most popular man in the world, more universally acclaimed than any statesman has ever been.”11 From the palace, Chamberlain was driven to 10 Downing Street, where another throng awaited, singing over and over, “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” From the window at Number 10, Chamberlain, in the shortest, most famous speech he would ever deliver, declared, “My good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.”12
“Peace with honour” was the phrase Disraeli had used when he returned from Berlin after redrawing the map of Europe with Bismarck. “Peace in our time,” from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, was the title of a 1928 collection of speeches by Neville Chamberlain’s half brother Austen, the architect of the Locarno pact and winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace. “In repeating the phrase,” writes a British historian, “Neville believed that he had completed his late brother’s unfinished business: the pacification of Europe.”13
When French Premier Edouard Daladier flew home from Munich, he was stunned to see a huge throng gathered at Le Bourget. He circled the field twice, fearful the crowd was there to stone him for having capitulated to Hitler and betrayed France’s Czech allies by forcing them to surrender the Sudetenland. Daladier was astonished to find the crowd rejoicing and waving him home as a hero of peace.
Across the Atlantic, FDR, who had bid Chamberlain Godspeed on his Munich mission with the cryptic telegram “Good Man!,” wanted to share the glory.14 Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles went on national radio, where he referred to “steps taken by the President to halt Europe’s headlong plunge into the Valley of the Shadow of Death.”15 Credit for Munich, Welles told the nation, must go to Franklin Roosevelt: “Europe escaped war by a few hours, the scales being tipped toward peace by the President’s appeal.”16
In a letter to Canada’s Mackenzie King, Roosevelt wrote, “I can assure you that we in the United States rejoice with you, and the world at large, that the outbreak of war was averted.”17 A week later, FDR wrote to Ambassador William Phillips in Rome, “I want you to know that I am not a bit upset over the final result [Munich Agreement].”18
The New York Times echoed FDR: “Let no man say that too high a price has been paid for peace in Europe until he has searched his soul and found himself willing to risk in war the lives of those who are nearest and dearest to him.”19 Declared the New York Daily News: “[Hitler] has made a significant gesture towards peace…. Now is the time for haters of Hitler to hold their harsh words.”20
The British press outdid the Americans. The morning after the prime minister’s return, the London Times’s story began: “No conqueror in history ever came home from a battlefield with nobler laurels.”21 Margot Asquith, widow of the prime minister who had led Britain into the Great War, called Chamberlain the greatest Englishman who had ever lived.22 Old ladies “suggested that Chamberlain’s umbrella be broken up and pieces sold as sacred relics.”23 From exile in Holland, the Kaiser wrote Queen Mary of his happiness that a catastrophe had been averted and that Chamberlain had been inspired by heaven and guided by God Himself.24 The clerics rejoiced.
The Church of England responded very largely as if the men of Munich had been guided by Almighty God. “You have been enabled to do a great thing in a great way at a time of almost unexampled crisis. I thank God for it,” wrote [the Archbishop of Canterbury] Cosmo Lang to Chamberlain. There were services of thanksgiving in all the churches and cathedrals of England on the next Sunday. In Lincoln Cathedral, the dean held the congregation spellbound “by ascribing the turn of events to God’s wonderful providence.”25
On October 2, Chamberlain wrote the Archbishop of Canterbury, “I sincerely believe that we have at last opened the way to that general appeasement which alone can save the world from chaos.”26
To Western peoples, familiar with shuttle diplomacy, Chamberlain’s journey to Germany may seem routine. But as Graham Stewart writes,
No British Prime Minister had ever intervened in this manner before. Indeed, Chamberlain had never been in an aeroplane before, let alone one making a trip to the heart of Europe. Chamberlain was to be the first British Prime Minister to set foot in Germany for sixty years.27
Not all joined the celebration. The Daily Telegraph was caustic and cutting: “It was Mr. Disraeli who said that England’s two greatest assets in the world were her fleet and her good name. Today we must console ourselves that we still have our fleet.”28
Duff Cooper resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty.
“This is hell,” Harold Nicolson said to Churchill, who muttered in reply, “It is the end of the British Empire.”29 Listening in Parliament as Chamberlain was feted as the Prince of Peace, Churchill was heard to say in a sarcastic aside, “I never knew Neville was born in Bethlehem.”30
On October 5, Churchill rose in the House. “We have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat,” he began.31
“Nonsense!” cried Lady Astor.32
Churchill continued with an address of great foreboding:
All is over. Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness…. We have passed anawful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged and…the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.”
This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless, by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we rise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden times.33
Yet Churchill could not contain his awe and envy at Hitler’s audacity and nerve. On October 4, one day before his mighty address to the Commons, he wrote of Britain’s need to replicate “the spirit of that Austrian corporal” who had bested the British statesmen at Munich:
It is a crime to despair. We must learn to draw from misfortune the means of future strength. There must not be lacking in our leadership something of the spirit of that Austrian corporal who, when all had fallen into ruins about him, and when Germany seemed to have sunk for ever into chaos, did not hesitate to march forth against the vast array of victorious nations, and has already turned the tables so decisively upon them.34
Chamberlain, however, must have sensed he had not really brought home “peace for our time.” In the triumphal ride to Buckingham Pal
ace, he had confided to Halifax, “All this will be over in three months.”35
THE VICTOR
ACROSS THE NORTH SEA, Adolf Hitler was sullen and silent. As an Austrian, he despised the Czechs’ mongrel state that had come out of the Paris peace conference and then allied itself with archenemy France and the detested Bolshevik regime. He hated Beneš and had wanted to crush his regime in a lightning war and ride in triumph through Prague. Munich had robbed him of his moment. He had the Sudetenland, but to the world it was only because Chamberlain permitted him to take it. Chamberlain was the hero of Munich who had been cheered by throngs of Germans on his trips to Berchtesgaden, Godesberg, and Munich, for the Germans, too, wanted peace and believed he had come to preserve it.
“That senile old rascal,” Hitler raged at his ministers. “If ever that silly old man comes interfering here again with his umbrella, I’ll kick him downstairs and jump on his stomach in front of photographers.”36
Munich has been called the greatest diplomatic disaster in history. It was also a strategic disaster. By surrendering the Sudetenland, which held Czechoslovakia’s mountain fortifications, Prague’s Maginot Line was lost. Hitler would confide to Dr. Carl Burckhardt, the League of Nations High Commissioner for Danzig, how astonished he had been by the strength of the Czech defenses:
When after Munich, we were in a position to examine Czechoslovak military strength from within, what we saw of it greatly disturbed us; we had run a serious danger. The plan prepared by the Czech Generals was formidable. I now understand why my generals urged restraint.37
Six months after Munich, the remnant of Czecho-Slovakia—the name had been hyphenated after Munich on the demand of the Slovaks—was occupied by Hitler, and the thirty-five Czech divisions prepared in September of 1938 to fight to hold the Sudetenland vanished. Paul Johnson describes the Nazi windfall:
As Churchill who perceived the military significance of the capitulation better than anyone pointed out in the Munich debate (5 October 1938), the annexation of Austria had given Hitler an extra twelve divisions. Now, the dismantling of Czech military power released a further thirty German divisions for action elsewhere.
In fact the shift was worse than this. The Czechs’ forty divisions were among the best-equipped in Europe: when Hitler finally marched in he got the means to furnish equivalent units of his own, plus the huge Czech armaments industry. The “turnaround” of roughly eighty divisions was equivalent to the entire French army.38
There is evidence that the ex–chief of the German General Staff Ludwig Beck, his successor Franz Halder, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and other officers were so alarmed at the prospect of war with Czechoslovakia and France, and possibly Russia and Britain, they had planned to arrest Hitler, Himmler, Göring, and Goebbels, but held off after learning Chamberlain was coming to Germany. American historian Ernest May writes:
In 1938, General Beck had ended up advocating that the army seize power. Halder had backed him. Preparations were being made for army units from the Berlin military district to seize the Chancellery when news arrived of Chamberlain’s surprise flight to Berchtesgaden. The plans for a coup were put on hold and then, after Munich, practically ceased.39
U.S. historian Charles Callan Tansill supports this version, contending a putsch had been prepared for September 28, when word came that Chamberlain and Daladier would fly to Munich on the twenty-ninth. Writes Tansill, “‘[T]he old man with the umbrella’ had scared off an immediate shower in favor of the wild tempest of World War II.”40
Munich gave Hitler another year to build up his Panzers and erect his West Wall. “Finally and most important of all,” writes Shirer, “the Western democracies lost Russia as an ally.”41 A Soviet diplomat who had considered an alliance with Britain and France remarked after Munich, “We nearly put our foot on a rotten plank. Now we are going elsewhere.”42
About the character of Hitler and the folly of Munich, Churchill was right. And Chamberlain and Halifax have gone down in history as two of the Guilty Men in the 1940 book indicting the Tory governments of the 1930s. “Appeasement had been designed by Chamberlain as the impartial redress of justified grievances,” writes Taylor. “It became a capitulation, a surrender to fear. This was Chamberlain’s own doing.”43
Few today defend Chamberlain. And appeasement has become a synonym for cowardly surrender to evil that leads to desperate war. As Churchill said to the prime minister, home from Munich: You were given a choice between dishonor and war. You chose dishonor, you will have war.
But why did the British in the autumn of 1938, from palace to pulpit, from Parliament to press, celebrate Chamberlain as a miracle worker of peace? Why was Munich a diplomatic triumph unequaled by a British prime minister since Lloyd George came home from Versailles? What persuaded Britain to break up Czechoslovakia to appease Adolf Hitler?
WHY MUNICH?
WHY DID CHAMBERLAIN GO to Munich? What could he have hoped to accomplish by brokering the transfer to Hitler of a Sudetenland that held the mountain fortifications of Czechoslovakia, loss of which would put Prague at the mercy of Berlin?
To answer these questions we must go back to 1919. At Paris, 3.25 million German inhabitants of Bohemia and Moravia had been transferred to the new Czechoslovakia of Tomás? Masaryk and Eduard Beneš in a flagrant disregard of Wilson’s self-proclaimed ideal of self-determination. Asked why he had consigned three million Germans to Czech rule, Wilson blurted, “Why, Masaryk never told me that!”44
H. N. Brailsford, England’s leading socialist thinker on foreign policy, had written in 1920 of the Paris peace: “The worst offence was the subjection of over three million Germans to Czech rule.”45 Austrian historian Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn describes the polyglot state the men of Paris had created:
The Czechs numbered 47 percent of the population of Czechoslovakia. It was only by “annexing” the Slovaks, much against their expressed will, into a hyphenated nation which had never existed historically that they suddenly became a “majority.” In fact, there were more Germans (24.5 percent) in Czechoslovakia than Slovaks. But by clever gerrymandering devices the Czechs maintained a parliamentary majority and exercised an oppressive rule which drove the German minority (inexactly called “Sudeten Germans”) into a rebellious and disloyal nationalism that would evolve into national socialism.46
Masaryk and Beneš, who had demanded the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the principle of self-determination for Czechs, ran a state that was a living contradiction of the principle. For Czechs now ruled Germans, Hungarians, Slovaks, Poles, and Ruthenians, who constituted half the population and had never been consulted about being ceded to Prague. Czechoslovakia was a multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural, Catholic-Protestant conglomerate that had never before existed.
Less than a year after the Paris treaties that created Czechoslovakia, leaders of the German and Hungarian minorities in the new state had begun angrily to petition the League of Nations:
More than five million Germans, Magyars, and people of other nationalities have not a single representative in this National Assembly, and all claims advanced by them have been waived aside by the Czechs. All the fundamental laws concerning the Constitution, and the language to be used in the administration, as regards social reform, the expropriation of land, etc., have been determined by this arbitrarily formed National Assembly without a single German-Bohemian or Magyar having been allowed a voice.47
From 1920 to 1938, repeated petitions were sent to the League by the repressed minorities of Czechoslovakia.48 By 1938, the Sudetendeutsch were agitating to be rid of Czech rule and become part of the new Reich. In a fair plebiscite, 80 percent might have voted to secede. On the eve of the 1938 crisis, Lloyd George blamed the impending disaster on the duplicity of Beneš, who had not kept his word given at Paris: “Had the Czech leaders in time, and without waiting for the menacing pressure of Germany, redeemed their promise to grant local autonomy to the various races in their Republic on the lines of the Swiss Confedera
tion, the present trouble would have been averted.”49
European statesmen by 1938 had concluded that severing the ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland from Vienna had been a blunder that must be corrected. Neither Chamberlain nor his Cabinet was willing to go to war to deny Sudeten Germans the right to self-determination or keep them under an alien Czech rule. But there were complications. The first was France.
As we have seen, at Paris in 1919, Marshal Foch had wanted to annex the Rhineland and Clemenceau wanted to make it a buffer state. Wilson and Lloyd George had refused, but made a counter-offer: a U.S.-British-French alliance. Should Germany attack France again, America and Britain would fight at her side. But the Senate had refused to take up Wilson’s security treaty and the British had then exercised their right to back out. France was left with no security treaty and no buffer state.
Paris had sought to compensate for the loss of a security treaty with America and Britain, and loss of her former Russian ally to Bolshevism, by negotiating defense pacts with the Little Entente of Rumania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. By 1938, France was thus obligated to come to the defense of Czechoslovakia. But if a war between France and Germany broke out over Czechoslovakia, Britain must surely be drawn in.
Thus, as the Sudeten crisis unfolded, Chamberlain believed Britain must become involved diplomatically to address the valid German grievances and prevent a Franco-German war. The prime minister viewed the prospect of another Great War with horror. The war of 1914–1918 had cost the lives of 700,000 British soldiers, among them his beloved cousin Norman.
Why did Britain not let Paris play the hand? Why not stay out of the crisis and let the French force their Czech allies to give up the Sudetenland? Eden’s biographer, David Carlton, explains. Chamberlain and his Cabinet
Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War Page 21