Shore up it’s diplomatic position by surrendering a strategic ally to an inevitable enemy? Ok.
No German general believed then or now '38 was a better year for them.
Many wanted to believe war would not come so Neville was in large company, but he had a responsibility and more information than his fellow countrymen.
Not claiming the shoring up was necessarily successful. Clearly the French were not eager to fight and could use some encouragement.
The big prize would have been an alliance with the USSR. If they could have pulled that off, it would have drastically shifted the balance of power and perhaps even deterred Hitler from starting the war entirely. It didn’t happen, but that doesn’t mean it was a bad idea to try.
“Peace in our time if the Russians get their act together” has an entirely different ring to it. Hope isn’t a plan, and if the argument is now that Chamberlain was attempting some sort of international degree of decorum to trip up and embarrass their perfidious Gothic neighbors in the name of order. Balderdash. Simply balderdash, I dare say.
Condensed quotes from A World At Arms, pp 28-29:
Hitler already thought of himself under great time pressure (due to) both material and personal considerations. The material consideration is simple. Once Germany had by her rapid rearmament gained a headstart over her neighbors, the sooner she struck, the greater the chances for success. The longer war was postponed, the more likely it would be that (other country’s) rearmament programs would catch up and surpass that of the Third Reich. Lacking…the economic resources for the repeated replacement of one set of weapons by more modern ones, Germany could either strike while she still had an advantage, or see the balance of strength shift in favor of her potential adversaries (with) their greater economic bases (producing) more recently developed and more numerous weapons. Germany would therefore have to strike (soon), a point which Hitler had repeatedly explained to his associates, and which indeed represents an essentially accurate assessment of the situation if Germany were to have even the slightest hope of succeeding in (Hitler’s) preposterously ambitious schemes of conquest.
(Emphasis mine, to point out that this is not just Weinberg’s opinion, but Hitler’s)
The personal element was Hitler’s (grandiose delusions that he, and only he, was capable of leading Germany to victory). He also thought of his age as a factor of importance; it is impossible to ignore his repeated extraordinary assertions in 1938 that he preferred to go to war at the age of 49, and in 1939 that he would rather lead his nation at the age of 50 than go to war when 55 or 60 years old.
I don’t think Chamberlain himself was that naive, but certainly that event caused much of the British public to adopt a more realistic view of Hitler’s intentions than they previously had, which contributed to their high morale when the war did start. If significant portions of the population had believed their leaders were unnecessarily dragging them into war, it would have been a very different story.
With the benefit of hindsight, we may fail to understand just how convincing Nazi propaganda was in the Thirties. Their stated goal of unifying all German-speaking people into one nation exactly reflected the logic of Versailles, that dividing Europe into ethno-national States would ensure peace. This seemed entirely reasonable to most people at the time. It was a lot easier to believe that Hitler just wanted to unify Germany that it was to believe that he was intent on causing the most destructive war in human history. Indeed, I would say it was even rational; the vast majority of world leaders are not intent on deliberately causing a world war, and it’s reasonable to demand a lot of evidence before concluding that you are dealing with one of the exceptions.
Remember two things- Stalin invaded Poland also, but the USSR was our “ally”. Stalin was likely calculating two things- either Czechoslovakia would ask for help, or the Soviets could sweep in from the east and take half of Czechoslovakia just like they did in Poland.
More or a history, but yeah, Churchill forgave Chamberlain- it was the political thing to do. Easy to be nice to a dead person.
Or maybe not even Czechoslovakia- but there a German victory was likely.
Good points.
Oddly Churchill castigated Chamberlain loudly and publicly that same year.
Let us look at it this way- let us say Chamberlain didnt appease Hitler. The outcomes were-
Are any of these worse for the World?
By giving Hitler another year to show his true colors, Chamberlain assured that the major Dominions of Canada, Australia and South Africa would join in the war as soon as it was declared, which none of them had been willing to do in 1938. Consider also public opinion in the United States, which was largely isolationist as it was. How much more difficult would it have been for FDR to persuade Congress to pass Lend-Lease if it had been plausible to view Hitler as just a German nationalist who had war thrust upon him while he was just trying to help the oppressed Sudetenlanders?
Determining whether going to war in 1938 would have been a better idea is a lot more complicated than just counting tanks and airplanes.
I think you’d have to be really confident that #6 rather than #5 would be the outcome in order to say that starting the war in 1938 would have been better.
Pretty much this. Hitler most certainly did not think France was going to be a cakewalk. German plans in 1938 and 1939 were quite conservative and did not envision conquering France in one go. The Manstein plan didn’t even exist until 1940. Fall Gelb (Case Yellow), the German plan for war with France envisioned a repeat of WWI primarily concerned with occupying Belgium and the northern French coast. It was only the compromising of the plan in the Mechelen incident that led to the vastly more ambitious plan by Manstein to defeat the Allied armies in detail to be adopted.
The whole idea of Hitler somehow being denied a war by Munich is rather silly. He could and did start wars when he felt like doing so. It’s not like he had difficulty walking into the rump of Czechoslovakia 6 months after Munich, or invading Poland less than a year after Munich and blaming the war on Poland attacking a radio station. If he really wanted a war with France and Britain in 1938, he would have started one with or without Munich.
Why do you assume GB would declare war vs Germany when/if it invaded Czechoslovakia? There were quite a few little wars in the 1920s 1930s that Britian didnt get involved with.
You didnt see my cites then.
Books written about it, even.
Why does France and the UK get involved?
The UK has fighter planes in 1938. And the Luftwaffe wasnt ready either. Not to mention, in order for this to happen, Germany has to take France out- unlikely without any modern tanks- and the idea of Blitzkrieg didnt get organized until the invasion of Poland- whose wide open plains made the idea work- compared to the Mountains of Czechoslovakia. So what you have is Germany taking Czechoslovakia, then Poland, then France in less than a year- without any modern tanks, and with a non-mechanized army. Poland only fell so fast as the Soviets invaded for the East- but I guess it was Okay for the Russians to invade Poland, but not okay for Germany to do it?
Sure, he obviously could have just unilaterally declared war on Britain and France for no particular reason, but it would have been extremely unpopular in Germany and around the world. It might well have triggered a military coup against him. Even dictators have to pay some attention to public opinion.
Regarding German tank composition in 1938 vs 1939, there was little substantive change in the overwhelming reliance on the light Pz.kpfw I and Pz.kpfw II in 1938, in 1939 and even in 1940. German panzer inventories and numbers deployed to panzer division are on page 3 of this pdf.
May 1, 1940, total Heer inventory
Pz.kpfw I - 1,077
Pz.kpfw II - 1,092
Pz.kpfw 35(t) - 143
Pz,kpfw 38(t) - 238
Pz.kpfw III - 381
Pz.kpfw IV - 290
Again, not at all my field of expertise, but I really have a hard time believing that one more year to rearm made a SUPER dramatic difference in the military balance of power. Some people here seem to believe that the Allies would have quickly and easily defeated Germany if they’d just had the sense to attack in 1938, and I don’t see any reason to think that’s true.
Yes, I know what the Oster conspiracy was. It was of one of dozens of conspiracies within the military and Nazi hierarchy which sought to overthrow Hitler, all of which wound up either being found out and killed or just chickening out. Maybe this would have been the one to succeed, but the historical record doesn’t suggest a great deal of cause for optimism.
And yet he walked into the Rhineland in 1936, Anschluss’d Austria in 1938, walked into what remained of Czechoslovakia in October 1938, and invaded Poland in 1939 despite the extreme risks involved in most of them. He gambled the retention of his grip on power in sending troops into the Rhineland, he would likely not have survived the humiliation of being forced to retreat. And all France had to do to stop him at that point was to announce mobilization, Germany was in absolutely no position to put up any opposition to France brushing their pathetically small numbers out of the Rhineland or marching to Berlin if they wanted to.
A fair point. Leaders can only lead people as far as they’re willing to follow. And I agree that public opinion in Britain and France was strongly against fighting another war in 1938.
Yeah, the guy took crazy stupid risks, and unfortunately it took a long time for them to come back and bite him. I don’t think anyone will disagree that France should have responded to the remilitarization of the Rhineland and that might have nipped the whole thing in the bud.
But notice: the Rhineland, Austria and Sudetenland were all German-speaking areas, and the idea that people who speak the same language should live in the same country was the basic organizing principle of the Treaty of Versailles. So a lot of people found those actions perfectly reasonable, and they didn’t greatly damage public opinion of Hitler in the democracies. Just randomly declaring war on another great power would have been a whole other thing. Today we tend to realize that ethno-nationalism is dumb and definitely not a valid reason to start wars, but times were different then.
When he occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia, it did have diplomatic consequences: Chamberlain announced that his government would no longer negotiate with Hitler, as he could not be trusted to keep his promises. And then obviously the invasion of Poland brought real consequences.
And after all, he only delayed the war by a year (another factor not yet mentioned influencing Hitler’s 1938 decision is that Mussolini unexpectedly reneged on a promise to enter the war when it started). I’m quite sure that if his choice had been to start the war in 1938 or never start it at all, he definitely would have chosen the former.
Something that people often neglect is the slow pace of the opening months of the war.
Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Britain and France declared war on September 3. The Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 17 (but claimed it didn’t count as an invasion). The last Polish forces surrendered on October 6.
And then the war just kind of stopped. Germany did not launch any offensives against Britain or France and France and Britain didn’t launch any offensives against Germany. There were some minor air and naval attacks but no significant ground attacks.
Germany didn’t invade any new countries until April 1940 when it invaded Denmark and Norway.
Then on May 10, 1940, Germany launched its big offensive against France along with Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. This was over eight months after the war had begun.
As for those two tanks- “they had light armor… and were really only suitable as training tanks or for aggressive reconnaissance”. But see that still leaves in 1940 (Battle of France) around a thousand decent battle tanks, whereas in 1938 they had none, and only 300 or so of the Pz.kpfw II.
I showed you links to a well reviewed book- which took it seriously and several articles.
Good points. Those two years gave Germany more and better tanks, more and better airplanes, and two battleships. Not to mention decent u-boats, the first type VIIB commissioned in May 1938. So, no Battle of the Atlantic either in 1938.
You’re arguing in a circle. The only democracies whose public opinion Hitler could conceivably care about in the slightest (not that he did) were France and the UK. The same countries he’d be going to war with. And you’re arguing that Chamberlain outmaneuvered him by preventing him from starting a war in 1938, while conceding that he could have just declared war on a great power if he had wanted to. And it’s not like there wasn’t a big chunk of France that was German speaking that he could claim the French had attacked a radio station from in the form of Alsace-Lorraine.
It’s not like Europe was composed of democracies in the 1930s, or that they would have opposed Hitler ‘to defend democracy’. Outside of France and the UK, you had Czechoslovakia (which was being disposed of by Munich), Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway - none of which did anything to oppose Hitler until he invaded them. And I suppose there’s Sweden and Switzerland, which assiduously avoided the war all together, and Finland, which side with Germany. Poland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Spain, Bulgaria, Greece - they were all to a greater or lesser degree dictatorships.
Cite? Mussolini made no promise to enter the war when it started. And Hitler most certainly didn’t rely upon them joining his war when he invaded Poland.
His actions show otherwise. His actions show that he didn’t particularly care when the war started. He didn’t care if Czechoslovakia brought war in 1938 or if Poland brought war in 1939. His only concern was that the war eventually come. He was going to just keep expanding until France and the UK finally decided to bring the full-scale war about by actually sticking to a red line.
And the war had to come eventually, or the German economy was going to implode eventually from the pyramid scheme that German rearmament was built upon in the form of the Mefo bills