Fighting Churchill, Appeasing Hitler: Neville Chamberlain, Sir Horace Wilson, & Britain's Plight of Appeasement: 1937-1939

by Adrian Phillips

Overview

A radically new view of the British policy of appeasement in the late 1930s, identifying the individuals responsible for a variety of miscalculations and moral surrender that made World War II inevitable.

Appeasement failed in all its goals. The kindest thing that can be said of it is that postponed World War II by one year. Its real effect was to convince Hitler and Mussolini that Britain was weak and afraid of confrontation, encouraging them to ever-greater acts of aggression.

Chamberlain and Wilson blindly pursued bilateral friendship between Britain and the dictators and ferociously resisted alternative policies such as working with France, the Soviet Union, or the U.S. to face down the dictators. They resisted all-out rearmament which would have put the economy on a war footing. These were all the policies advocated by Winston Churchill, the most dangerous opponent of appeasement.

Neither Chamberlain nor Wilson had any experience of day-to-day practical diplomacy. Both thought that the dictators would apply the same standards of rationality and clarity to the policies of Italy and Germany that applied in Britain. They could not grasp that Fascist demagogues operated in an entirely different way to democratic politicians. The catastrophe of the Chamberlain/Wilson appeasement policy offers a vital lesson in how blind conviction in one policy as the only alternative can be fatally damaging.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643132211
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	12/03/2019
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	1,059,042
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

Adrian Phillips is the author of The King Who Had to Go: Edward VIII, Mrs. Simpson, and the Hidden Politics of the Abdication Crisis. Adrian lectures and blogs regularly on the broader history of the period. He lives in England.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Dramatis Personae and Explanatory Notes xvii

Prologue A Man I Can Do Business With 1

Chapter 1 Personal Discourtesy Is His Chief Weapon 11

Chapter 2 Winston's Power for Mischief 27

Chapter 3 My Master Is Lonely Just Now 37

Chapter 4 Taking Personal Charge 57

Chapter 5 Woolly Rubbish 69

Chapter 6 Getting on Terms with the Germans 79

Chapter 7 A New Chapter in the History of African Colonial Development 87

Chapter 8 All That Is Well Sewn Up 97

Chapter 9 The Central Weakness 113

Chapter 10 Every Effort to Bring About Appeasement 127

Chapter 11 A Nice Fraudulent Balance Sheet 147

Chapter 12 A Wise British Subject 157

Chapter 13 The Best the English Can Do 169

Chapter 14 Their Just Demands Had Been Fairly Met 181

Chapter 15 Clearly Marked Out for the Post 191

Chapter 16 The Appalling Sums It Is Proposed to Spend 197

Chapter 17 Well Anchored 203

Chapter 18 Abandonment and Ruin 213

Chapter 19 Riding the Tiger 219

Chapter 20 The Right Line About Things 227

Chapter 21 Advice from the Devil 233

Chapter 22 The Mountebank 239

Chapter 23 Combating Hoare's Heresies 247

Chapter 24 The End of the Rainbow 253

Chapter 25 Pay Whatever Price May Be Necessary 267

Chapter 26 Catching the Mugwumps 273

Chapter 27 Talking Appeasement Again 283

Chapter 28 More Ways of Killing a Cat 291

Chapter 29 Mr Boothby Expects a Rake-Off 301

Chapter 30 Too Many People at the Job 307

Chapter 31 Entitled to Demand Concessions 319

Chapter 32 Pathetic Little Worms 329

Chapter 33 A Potato War 341

Chapter 34 A Civil Servant with a Political Sense 353

Chapter 35 Minister to Iceland 365

Chapter 36 A Guilty Man in the Realm of King Zog 377

Chapter 37 He Has Returned to Bournemouth 385

Endnotes 389

Select Bibliography 413

Acknowledgements 435

Index 437

Editorial Reviews

10/21/2019

Phillips (The King Who Had to Go) delivers a comprehensive examination of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s efforts to negotiate peace with Nazi Germany. Phillips’s account reveals the extent to which the prime minister banked his appeasement efforts on such ill-fated plans as partially restoring German claims in colonial Africa in exchange for Adolf Hitler’s agreement to rejoin the League of Nations and take a less aggressive posture toward Czechoslovakia and other Eastern European countries. Phillips deepens the common understanding of such well-known events as Chamberlain’s September 1938 Munich visit by focusing on the role played by Sir Horace Wilson, a senior civil servant with no foreign policy background who served as the prime minister’s aide and confidante in the years leading up to the German invasion of Poland and England’s war declaration. Chamberlain apologists are likely to rethink their stance in light of evidence, presented here, that the prime minister ignored his military advisers’ opinions when it suited him, and that he and Wilson influenced the British media to suppress criticism of the Nazi regime. This somber, exhaustive account will persuade WWII history buffs that, in trying to prevent the war, Chamberlain and Wilson “made it almost inevitable.” (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"This very readable and detailed description of how policy was made and implemented gives us a unique way to look at fateful decisions that helped advance events leading to World War II."

BookPage

"The King Who Had to Go provides a dramatic and persuasive account of an important episode in British constitutional history. Based on an impressive range of sources, and written with flair, it makes a compelling case for Edward VIII's inadequacy as a monarch."

Richard Toye

Adrian Phillips has pulled off a remarkable coup. By sedulous research he has been able to shed fresh light on the intricate political maneuvers surrounding one of most studied episodes in our history—the 1936 abdication crisis. The King Who Had to Go is an elegant and compelling book.

Piers Brendon

2019-09-24
A complex tale of the political rivalry that underlay a key episode in 20th-century world events.

Although the efforts of Neville Chamberlain to preserve the peace in Europe by accommodating Hitler's demands for territory have long been viewed as an act of moral cowardice, British historian Phillips (The King Who Had To Go: Edward VIII, Mrs. Simpson and the Hidden Politics of the Abdication Crisis, 2017, etc.) notes that it had a certain logic, since going to war with Germany might put the entire British Empire at risk. That empire, he writes, "had been built in the days when France was its only challenger, but now Germany, Japan, and the United States had the resources to put its standing to the severest of tests." The behind-the-scenes architect of appeasement was Chamberlain's adviser Horace Wilson; arrayed against them was Winston Churchill, who insisted on a vigorous policy of containment. Chamberlain was willing to go to unusual measures to placate Hitler, including giving in to his demands that African colonies seized by Britain after World War I be returned to Germany—at the risk, the British understood, that the colonized peoples might become ardent Nazis and new enemies. (In any event, notes the author, those peoples were never consulted about whether they wanted to be ruled by a foreign power in the first place.) Chamberlain and Wilson calculated wrongly that the economic costs of rearmament would help keep Hitler in check, and they also took the curious position that Churchill and his allies in government proved a greater danger to the peace than the fascist dictators then in power. In the end, it became clear that Britain would not be able to avoid war, and Churchill accordingly rose to serve as prime minister in Chamberlain's stead. Churchill, though vain and capable of exercising questionable judgment, was ordinarily a hard fighter who bore no grudges, but Phillips writes that he seems to have taken pleasure in stripping Wilson of his positions and making his life otherwise difficult after Chamberlain's fall.

A fresh interpretation of the question of appeasement that will interest students of 20th-century history.

Kirkus Reviews