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Appeasing Hitler Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War
Tim Bouverie
London: The Bodley Head, 2019 Hardcover. xiii+497 p. ISBN 978-1847924407. £20
Reviewed by Antoine Capet Université de Rouen
‘Appeasement’ has given rise to what seems to be a never-ending stream of monographs, many excellent, a few poor. Since Bouverie’s book appeared in April 2019, two more have already come on the market (Milton, Nicholas. Neville Chamberlain's Legacy : Hitler, Munich and the Path to War. Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2019 and Phillips, Adrian. Fighting Churchill, Appeasing Hitler : How a British Civil Servant helped cause the Second World War. London: Biteback Publishing, 2019). The reason is not far to see: it is a ‘good story’ which makes for ‘good history’ in competent hands – like those of Bouverie – since it mixes high politics, top-level diplomatic relations and military brinkmanship with the negotiations, deliberations and decisions of political leaders whose strengths and weaknesses are not always above those of ordinary humans like those who read these books. And Appeasing Hitler is especially strong in this field, covering and quoting many more fascinating protagonists besides the two mentioned in the sub-title, Chamberlain and Churchill. Indeed, on its very first page after the Preface, the book recounts a telling story full of ‘human interest’, in the journalists’ jargon – but also a story which sets the scene for the confrontation inside the British élites (the ordinary population being largely left out until its support was really needed from May 1940), between the two sides which now form the heroes and the villains of the popular narrative of the Appeasement disaster. Bouverie opens his book on a heated discussion on 1 September 1939 between Duff Cooper and the Duke of Westminster, two indisputable members of that élite, with Cooper being a former First Lord of the Admiralty and the Duke one of the richest aristocrats in the country. Cooper of course had resigned over the Munich Agreement [290], and the Duke of Westminster was a member of the ‘Link’, a pro-German (in effect pro-Nazi) informal group [342]. The next day, ‘Cooper was amused to hear that Westminster was going around saying that if Britain did end up going to war [it only declared war on the 3rd] then it was all the fault of “the Jews and Duff Cooper” ’, Bouverie writes [1]. After these two clear-cut camps emerged in the wake of Hitler’s accession to the Chancellorship in January 1933, it is interesting to note that the defectors all came from the same side, that of the Appeasers, as the decade went on. Thus Duff Cooper was one of the late converts, after Anthony Eden, and perhaps the last convert of note was Sir Alexander Cadogan who, as Deputy Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, initially supported Chamberlain’s policy [132]. The irony, of course, is that all through the 1930s the die-hard Appeasers like ‘Chips’ Channon, spoke of ‘the doctrinaire “Leftist” policy of the Foreign Office’ [168 – from Channon’s diary]. Yet these supposed ‘doctrinaire Leftists’ who had perceived the Nazi menace were gradually eliminated, starting with Sir Horace Rumbold, the Ambassador in Berlin, who had written a long, percipient note on Hitler’s implicit bellicist aims to his chiefs in Whitehall as early as April 1933, after a careful reading of Mein Kampf (which of course most British leaders did not read) [15-16]. Needless to say, Rumbold would soon have become an embarrassment, but fortunately he reached retirement age in July, to be replaced by the typical bona fide Appeaser – a Briton who disliked the Nazis, but believed that the Germans had a case (against the Versailles Diktat) and should be accommodated: Sir Eric Phipps. But in a further turn of the Appeasement ratchet, Sir Eric Phipps was transferred to Paris (where ‘infected by French defeatism, [he] moved firmly into the appeasement camp’ [210]), to be replaced in Berlin by Sir Nevile Henderson, who ‘possessed no a priori dislike of authoritarian regimes’ and made a speech in June 1937 which attacked the British anti-Nazis and praised the achievements of Nazi Germany [139]. Even higher up in the hierarchy of the Foreign Office, the top civil servant, the Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs (the Secretary being the minister, a politician), Sir Robert Vansittart, who had strongly warned his political chiefs against condoning German rearmament in October 1933 [30], was very adroitly promoted / demoted, or ‘kicked upstairs’ to Chief Diplomatic Adviser to the Government in January 1938, in practice a purely honorific title, to be replaced by the (then) more accommodating Cadogan. Now, as Bouverie usefully reminds us, ‘Chamberlain did not invent the policy of appeasement’ [131]. Indeed, like many bona fide Appeasers, he profoundly disliked the Nazis, and Bouverie’s Chapter VIII, ‘Enter Chamberlain’ very convincingly describes him as a man of controversial convictions (the Labour Party were ‘dirt’ [127], the Americans were ‘cads’ [130], he spoke of ‘the human side of the dictators’ [131]) and also of impossible contradictions: a realist who saw the European situation as ‘so serious’ in October 1937 [135], but an incorrigible optimist as to his own capacity to defuse the menace, writing to his sister in the same month that he had ‘far reaching plans…for the appeasement of Europe and Asia’ [135]. The tragedy, of course, was that he was not always wrong, as when Eden noted in his diary in November 1937, after a difficult discussion with Chamberlain, that ‘he did not think anybody was to attack us for the next two years’ [156]. And events in 1938, after his unfortunate broadcast of 27 September on the ‘quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing’ [273], seemed to vindicate his optimistic view that after all peace could be maintained at little cost to Britain – except from the standpoint of honour and prestige, but as he said in his speech ‘if we have to fight it must be on larger issues than that’ [273]. One problem was that Chamberlain could be carried away by his optimistic conviction that he was fighting for the right cause into believing that this allowed him to disregard some annoying principles, as in the summer of 1938: 'Announcing the Runciman mission [to Prague, to "mediate" with Benes – in effect to twist his arm] to the Commons on 26 July 1938, Chamberlain treated MPs to a cocktail of rose-tinted forecasts, dissimulation and outright lies' [225]. Another was that his self-confidence led him to dismiss the possible efficacy of potential plotters against Hitler in September 1938, comparing them to ‘the Jacobites at the court of France in King William’s time’ [232]. One reviewer at least has given powerful arguments why Bouverie should have been more careful before hastily writing that Chamberlain was probably right in this instance. As late as January 1939, ‘[d]espite the intelligence warnings [of a German invasion of what remained of Czechoslovakia] Chamberlain remained remarkably optimistic’ and ‘Chamberlain’s optimism was fuelled by Sir Nevile Henderson who…lost no time in contradicting the rumours of impeding German aggression…in February 1939’ [320]. Interestingly, at the same time, Halifax, now Foreign Secretary, who also received the soothing note from the Ambassador in Berlin, ‘now regarded Hitler as a “criminal lunatic” ’, and Bouverie speaks of his ‘journey from appeaser to resister’ [321]. But if he was a ‘resister’, it was only in the sense that he now resisted the Prime Minister’s wild optimism: he was not yet (was he ever?) prepared to resist Hitler. Bouverie had in fact summed up Halifax’s position in a nutshell in an earlier chapter, on the occasion of his appointment as Foreign Secretary in replacement of Anthony Eden in February 1938: ‘While Eden had been a reluctant appeaser, fundamentally hostile to dictators, Halifax was committed to Chamberlain’s policy and had no such prejudices’ [170]. Bouverie provides a superb analysis of the position of men like Halifax during and after his official visit to Berlin in November 1937: Thus the new, or rather the evangelical, appeasers began their mission. The doctrine was not original but the fervour, the conviction, the ruthless determination were. What was previously a reactive and desultory policy, tempered by scepticism, was now an active, positive policy, which would carry all before it. He also argues that Chamberlain’s optimism was shared by people like Henderson and Halifax: Above all, the evangelical appeasers were optimists who placed an extraordinary amount of faith in a combination of goodwill and reasonable discussion. As Halifax had written just before his visit (in a statement which might just as easily have come from Chamberlain), ‘I feel that if we could once convince them [the Germans] that we wanted to be friends we might find many questions less intractable than they now appear’. [151] All this optimism has of course to be set off against the pessimism of the Defence chiefs, who consistently pleaded that the British Army and Royal Air Force were no match for the Germans. Bouverie interestingly quotes from ‘an extraordinarily defeatist paper of February 1938’ by the Chiefs of Staff which ‘categorically opposed an extension of staff talks with the French and Belgians’, as this would provoke, they wrote, the ‘irreconcilable suspicion and hostility of Germany’ [156] – and he is right to do this, because the role of the military leaders in the continuation of the policy of Appeasement right to May 1940 is seldom discussed. Then there were what Bouverie calls ‘Blimpish Conservative MPs’, like Michael Beaumont, the Member for Aylesbury, who wrote to ‘Rab’ Butler – another arch-appeaser, by now Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs – after the Anschluss, on 18 March 1938, when a guarantee to Czechoslovakia was being discussed in Cabinet, that he ‘would sooner be tortured at the stake than fight for that beastly country’ [194]. He need not have worried, because the Foreign Policy Committee of the Cabinet was on the same wavelength: ‘ “F.C.P. unanimous that Czechoslovakia is not worth the bones of a single British Grenadier”, noted Cadogan [who attended the meeting] with approval’, Bouverie writes [196]. Bouverie also fully documents the important part played by The Times, notably ‘the infamous Times leader’ [242] of 7 September 1938, ‘repeating its view that the Czechs should cede the Sudetenland to the Reich, this time without a plebiscite’ – which ‘had not in fact yet been demanded by either Heinlein or Hitler’ [236]. Reflecting in his diary entry for 13 October 1939 upon the impossibility of imagining how to obtain the negotiated end to the Phoney War which he longed for, Sir John Simon (then Chancellor of the Exchequer), ‘usually considered foremost among the appeasers’ (it is well known that Churchill got rid of him immediately when he formed his government), paradoxically and presciently gave a perfect justification for Churchill’s refusal to negotiate with Hitler after 10 May 1940, despite Halifax’s – and Simon’s – contrary views: The central fact is that nobody would dream of putting the smallest trust in any promise that Hitler might make and consequently a method of arriving at a peaceful settlement is extremely difficult to find, short of the overthrow of the German Government, which is only likely to happen at the end of a bloody struggle in which Germany gets the worse of it. [388] Readers who do not dismiss the longue durée approach to history will not fail to notice the insightful remark by Bouverie which seems to point to a continuity between the Victorian supporters of ‘Splendid Isolation’, the supporters of Appeasement in the 1930s and the supporters of a ‘hard Brexit’ in the 2010s: It is notable how many of the prominent anti-appeasers – Churchill, Eden, Cooper, Nicolson, Spears, Vansittart, Austen Chamberlain – were Francophiles with a strong sense of British history as linked to the Continent. The leading appeasers, by contrast, had little attachment to France and had, traditionally, understood foreign affairs from the perspective of the Empire and the English-speaking dominions. As Oliver Stanley put it, cruelly but with more than a grain of truth, ‘to Baldwin, Europe was a bore, and to Chamberlain only a bigger Birmingham’. [219] The parallel must not be carried too far, however, since under Churchill and Eden there would never have been any exit simply because there would never have been any entry. Interestingly, Appeasing Hitler contains at least two quotes which show that – contrary to what I believed – Churchill was not in fact innovating with his ‘crocodile’ image when he made his famous remark about the Neutrals in March 1940, ‘Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last’. Lord Hugh Cecil described Chamberlain’s policy as akin to ‘scratching a crocodile’s head in the hope of making it purr’ [220], while Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary on 6 June 1938: ‘If we assuage the German alligator with fish from other ponds, she will wax so fat that she will demand fish from our own ponds’ [237]. Though Bouverie finds little to praise in Chamberlain, this does not mean that he supports Churchill unconditionally. Over the Norway Debate of May 1940 which, he writes, ‘has a strong claim to stand as the most important in British history’ [397], he believes that Chamberlain was in fact treated rather unfairly, which ‘was clear to those who had been privy to the twists and turns of the previous few weeks […inside] Whitehall’s secret confines’ since ‘[i]f there was one man responsible for the debacle [in Norway] it was Churchill, who, contrary to the image he painted in his war memoirs, changed his mind repeatedly over whether Narvik or Trondheim should provide the focus for Allied operations’ [396]. Like Appeasement itself, its demise with the Norway Debate (and of course the German offensive which finally proved its pointlessness) and the reasons, right or wrong, clear or unclear, why Churchill emerged as Prime Minister on 10 May 1940, will continue to feed the never-ending flow of publications like Appeasing Hitler – to our greatest delight in this case. The only slight reservation about the text proper is that dates are not always clear – one often has to guess from previous paragraphs, and this is never convenient and only partially successful. Otherwise we have the kind of limpid prose which can only be recommended to students in their essays. The proof-reading was of the highest order – something increasingly uncommon these days. The 13-page ‘Sources and Bibliography’ provide a state-of-the-art classified list of published and unpublished documents, articles, dissertations and books which will be found invaluable for further research. Unreservedly recommended.
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