Appeasement: not such a dirty word

(c) Smabs Subster

Appeasement is one of the dirtiest of historical words. With it come thoughts of the Second World War and those in the government who let Hitler get away with murder. It is the unfortunate legacy that Neville Chamberlain is stuck with, his fate determined by the memory of six bloody years in Europe. But is it a fair judgement?

One of the most fascinating points in my education was during my first year of university study when a seminar turned into a mock cabinet meeting of Chamberlain’s 1938 government, prior to his visit to Munich as the German army threatened the Sudetenland.

What interested me was our conclusion. Appeasement was the right course of action: the only rational option for a government who did not  have many. Of course though, this argument must be considered within the confines of the political dramas of 1938. Certainly, more could have been done to prevent the situation from arising in the first place. Perhaps enforcing the Versailles Treaty may have managed it – a novel idea, I know.

The reality in 1938, as the Germans occupied Bohemia and Moravia and then the entire Sudetenland in the north of Czechoslovakia, was one where the odds were stacked against the Allied forces. A look at the combined military strength of the two factions shows that the German-Italian alliance was both stronger and larger than that of Britain and France, who needed Russia to stand any chance of defeating the Central powers in combat.

At that same time the question marks were hanging over Czechoslovakia and not Poland, so it would have required a miscalculation of dramatic proportions on Hitler’s part to lose the war: he would have had to have attacked and invaded Poland. In 1938, Russia was only able to provide assistance aerially due to being separated from the German border by Poland. Would the Poles have allowed the Russians to travel across their country to support the Allies? It would have been an improbability, given the fact that the Red Army had occupied Poland 19 years earlier.

So the conclusion we came to was the same one reached by the 1938 government. Without Russia, the war would almost certainly be lost. Fighting the Germans in 1939 over Poland, thus drawing Stalin’s empire into the war was the crucial factor that saved Europe from preventing the emergence of Nazi hegemony. It is in this retrospective light that Chamberlain’s actions, intentional or otherwise, were ultimately vindicated.

It is a story all too widely ignored by the popular press and media of today, and one that historians need to teach our young. Appeasement saved Poland, it saved the Jews, it saved Europe and those living beyond. Yet it seems Chamberlain was a politician doomed to his fate as the serial appeaser, with the wisdom of his actions in 1938 to be shamefully forgotten.