Churchill didn’t think Neville Chamberlain was the problem. He thought that the unreadiness foisted on Britain by Stanley Baldwin was the problem.
Chamberlain certainly made mistakes, but the Munich agreement was in fact a peace treaty that made peace, at the cost of Czech defenses. Hitler went beyond the agreement and took over the rest of Czechoslovakia (except for bits handed to Poland and Hungary), but that wasn’t Chamberlain’s fault.
It should be noted that German war production was vastly over estimated, as Germany intended, with conventional intelligence reporting that, for example, tank production was as high as 1400 tanks a month, which led to an understandable caution. Only after the war started were some German tanks captured, and from analysis of their serial numbers a better estimate was derived: No more than 275 a month. That is a big difference.
There is a nice article in Wikipedia on “The German Tank Problem”.
I don’t need to read anything from wiki. I have Churchill’s works AND I have Life magazines (bound) from the period 1933 until 1953.
Winston was certainly no fan of Chamberlain. He did not suffer fools lightly. Nor did he solely blame Baldwin.
Churchill’s observations on Baldwin are spot-on. After all, it was Stanley Baldwin who famously observed “the bomber will always get through,” but did less than any other pre-war British Prime Minister to prepare his nation’s defenses. As another poster observed, development of the Spitfire and Hurricane (along with radar) came on Chamberlain’s watch and (in a sense) the Brits were playing catch-up.
At the operational level, Baldwin’s feckless defense policies are one reason Bomber Command was totally unprepared for World War II and suffered staggering losses in its early, daylight raids. Of course, we weren’t much better in the run-up to the war; as I recall, the B-17 bomber program survived in Congress by a single vote, and our budget for tank development in 1941 was just under $90,000.
chamberlain was put in a situation where he knew dern well that england could not stop germany from taking czech-via. the only thing chamberlain could do was buy time for england’s rearmament program to reap results before going to war with germany.
maybe he got a bad rap, but i don’t think it was becaause of personal gullibility - he knew that britian could not force germany out without a war there was no chance of winning.
Chamberlain certainly made mistakes, but the Munich agreement was in fact a peace treaty that made peace, at the cost of Czech defenses. Hitler went beyond the agreement and took over the rest of Czechoslovakia (except for bits handed to Poland and Hungary), but that wasn’t Chamberlain’s fault.
Let me begin by saying that I agree with a number of other posters that these "news" stories about Neville Chamberlain and Munich are transparent attempts to defend the Obama Administration's recent mishandling of the Syria crisis.
That said, I too am going to offer something of a contrarian view for FR about the Munich Agreement itself. The agreement was a bad choice for Britain, but it was a bad choice among other bad options.
By 1938, both Britain and France had neglected defense preparations for about a decade, a de facto bilateral policy that left someone like Chamberlain in a very poor position to act in 1938. This policy and its effects were was simply facts at the time of Munich, and this policy was the fundamental mistake. Not only were both Britain and France underprepared for war against a continental power, but the doubt each country therefore had about the other's willingness to maintain a wartime alliance between the two was quite reasonable.
Remember that Britain was not faced with destruction in 1938. Nor was the German absorption of Czechoslavakia itself a strategic threat to Britain. Britain reckoned, accurately, that should war be necessary it could be prosecuted later than the spring of 1938 from a position that was no worse than at that time.
It should be noted, too, that the strategic worries Britain had in 1938 about a major war all came to pass, as things actually happened, and the British ability to avoid these outcomes by declaring war in 1938 is doubtful. The Japanese would eventually have tried to take advantage of British weakness in the far East had Britain begun a major European war in 1938, just as actually happened, and there is no reason to think that these counterfactual Japanese adventures would have been any less disastrous for Britain than the actual ones. Germany would not have abandoned its broader war plans, and it would not have accepted any settlement denying it strategic dominance in Europe without being defeated in war. Britain only suspected as much about German intentions in 1938, true. Britain did realize, though, that the ability of Britain and France to inflict defeat on Germany in 1938 was not notably greater than they could expect it to be in the near future, such as in 1939, when war actually began.
The real significance of Munich was to make vivid the one fact that Britain and France were struggling to avoid facing. Should it be necessary to go to war to curb German aggression the two countries were neither willing nor able to do so.
This deficiency persisted right up to the start of the war in 1939. By the time Britain began preparing for war in earnest, it was too late to make good a decade of neglect. Hence the disasters that ensued.
In this respect, Britain was hardly unique. France, the United States, and the Soviet Union all systematically underestimated the German and Japanese threats, all of them neglected their defense preparations despite ample warnings of strategic danger, and all of them suffered numerous catastrophes as a result. The Munich Agreement was just the last dramatic demonstration of the danger the (eventual) Allied powers had allowed themselves to drift into before war actually began. By itself, it did little to alter the strategic situation for any of the belligerent powers.
The popular discussion of Munich tends to emphasize a narrative of personal weakness on Chamberlain's part. That is unfortunate, as the more important lesson derives from Britain's strategic weakness that left Chamberlain without good options.