Not really, or at least that isn’t my line of reasoning.
My contention is that Germany massively increased their military from March 1938 to September 1939 while the Allies only moderately increased their militaries. It is during the Phoney war period that most of the British built up took place. That combined with the Czech armies being added to the German armies instead of opposing them makes a massive difference in the forces available to each side.
Wait - who or what is the Czech industry dwarf, and how is it the Polish one? I’m not sure what that could even mean.
It helps if you actually use the quote instead of just part of it. ie The Czechoslovakian ability to build tanks, planes, and guns, is much larger and more modern than the Polish industry in this time period.
He is?
Which word do you not understand? Arms, Industry, or Czech as a shorthand for Czechoslovakia?
“Czech Industry Dwarf” sounds like the star of a Communist-era children’s program.
Oh, now I see it. I made a silly grammar error and included a “'s” instead of just an “s”. Your right I made a mistake.
Was that what you were hoping to achieve?
Well, it is my right.
Agreed, it is well within anyone’s rights. However, I suggest you actually contribute to the discussion at hand if you don’t want to be known as a poster whose only possible contribution is to correct other people’s grammar.
Moderating:
Both, this is becoming too personal. Dial it back and engage in productive discussion, or step away.
I’d watch that.
Perhaps I should have started here instead. Dr. Gerhard Weinberg is not the first historian to try and rehabilitate Chamberlain’s reputation. Pretty much like clockwork, every 10-15 years someone tries to make that argument and then get rejected for many reasons. ie
Do I think Dr. Gerhard Weinberg is going the change the historical consensus when all of the others couldn’t?
No, I don’t. Particularly when one of his core arguments is that it was smart for Britain to delay the war 1.5 years so it could build up the British armed forces more to better prepare. While it is true that Britain increased it’s military in that year the problem is that Germany increased it military more both by adding the Cech military and having a larger mobilization.
But to be fair, Chamberlain’s support of Churchill during a later crisis was very helpful.
So yes, Chamberlain made a big fucking mistake with Hitler and Czechoslovakia. But many underestimated Hitler, Chamberlain wasnt alone in that.
Checked out the Wikipedia articles for those guys.
Taylor’s thesis was rejected by the consensus of historians. Weinberg is cited as having written a two-volume work largely to rebut Taylor.
Charmley, as you said, felt Britain should never have gone to war at all. His “rehabilitation” of Chamberlain rests on the assumption that he shared that view, which obviously is not Weinberg’s assumption.
Aster has written books about Chamberlain, but no mention is made of any controversy, and the other two’s don’t make any mention of their views on the origins of WW2.
Other than Taylor, these guys are all obscure academics with no major honors or awards and no bestselling popular works.
To reiterate, Weinberg’s own article contains no mention of any serious controversy or attempt to rebut his work, which was published in the 80s and 90s.
Perhaps it’s just that I’m too old, too jaded and too British, but that does seem a rather weird assessment. Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers was a very big deal in its day. A genuine example of an academic book that crossed over to become a media sensation. It also won the Wolfson Prize, the preeminent prize for history books in the UK. Historians don’t become a FBA without a serious scholarly reputation nor do they get a CBE without a certain amount of fame.
Charmley’s reputation is more complicated. His Churchill: The End of Glory didn’t convince many people. But it too was a very big deal at the time in the UK.
None of which means that they were right about Chamberlain. But neither is or was ‘obscure’.
You’re right, I left a sentence out about Kennedy. He is clearly a serious historian. However, based on his Wikipedia article, which is pretty lengthy, he isn’t a WW2 specialist, and whatever his opinions about the origins of the war were, they weren’t considered central enough to his work to be mentioned in the article. (He appears to have done significant work on the origins of the FIRST World War). So I would need further information to know what his opinions even are, let alone how they compare to Weinberg’s.
Here is some information about how much Chamberlain’s Munich agreement enriched the German army-
In a speech delivered in the Reichstag, Hitler expressed the importance of the occupation for strengthening of German military and noted that by occupying Czechoslovakia, Germany gained 2,175 field guns and cannons, 469 tanks, 500 anti-aircraft artillery pieces, 43,000 machine guns, 1,090,000 military rifles, 114,000 pistols, about a billion rounds of small-arms ammunition, and 3 million rounds of anti-aircraft ammunition. That could then arm about half of the Wehrmacht.[117] Czechoslovak weapons later played a major role in the German conquest of Poland and France, the latter having urged Czechoslovakia into surrendering the Sudetenland in 1938.
I’ve just watched a British Antiques Roadshow, probably from the early 2020s.
The story I’ve just heard is that this family fled from continental Europe (I think Belgium but I’m not 100% sure) as Hitler rose in Germany, but after the “Peace in our Time” announcement they went back. As a consequence they were sent to Auschwitz and all of that generation died, being Jewish.
Oh, absolutely. I am not in the camp that Chamberlain was a stupid or even cowardly man. He was in an bad situation and had to make a choice with incomplete information. As someone earlier in the thread already noted British intelligence let him down with bad estimates of the correlation of forces. Combine that with the horrors of war and learning some lessons from WWI that no longer applied caused the allies to make some seriously tragic mistakes at the beginning of the war.
It is interesting you bring up the Cabinet crisis. There is an alternate history story where Halifax wins that cabinet battle and sues for peace in 1940 and uses that to become Prime Minister. Of course, this means the war lasts much longer but that is a very bad thing for Germany as in the long run, it means they get heavily nuked instead of just invaded. (Not a nice story.) Part of the reason I know so much about this subject is I am a member of a Alternate History message board where this subject comes up on every 3-4 years or so.
I would think the most likely consequence of a peace between Britain and Germany in 1940 would have been that Hitler would have had time to destroy the USSR at his leisure before turning his attention to the West. It’s possible in that timeline that somebody invents atomic weapons before the war ends, but it’s possible that someone might have been Germany, not England. (I imagine most likely in that scenario the Japanese don’t feel emboldened to attack Pearl Harbor, so the US probably stays neutral).
(Returning to the OP, note that when he resigned Chamberlain strongly urged the King to appoint Churchill rather than Halifax as his successor, precisely out of fear of such an outcome)