Appeasement

[CZ52GUY]

Byron Quick

I failed to acknowledge that for a very good reason. The pacifist's goals are peace and the avoidance of conflict. If he confronts his aggressor and defeats him...he doesn't achieve his goals. However, the reason for that example was not to illustrate the full range of options available...it was to illustrate the inevitability of conflict if you have only one agent desiring conflict versus peace requiring at least two agents acting in concert.

I think the "tangential point" I was trying to make, is that we are often too willing to apply a label to an individual, demographic, or even policy that becomes more rigid than the reality of the world we live in.

While a pacifist's goals may include peace and the avoidance of conflict, the pacifist is also a human being capable of unpredictable behavior. His/her views not withstanding, he/she has thousands of years of primitive instincts toward self-preservation to overcome to stand fast to those "loftier convictions".

Bottom line, the bully vs. the pacifist makes the bully a 1-5 favorite without question, but the outcome isn't a lock...which is something all bullys should consider.

In the circumstances of Chamberlain, while we are quick to point out the flaws that history has correctly allocated to him, I think the bully Hitler also miscalculated. "Peace in our time" did not prevent Chamberlain from taking the first steps which the rest of the free world at the time made stick over time.

If Chamberlain pursued failed policies, certainly Hitler did as well. He promised his people an empire which lasted but a VERY SHORT time. His country ended up in ruins, and he ended up dead in a bunker.

Bully vs. Pacifist or Appeaser...in this case score one against the Bully, because the Appeaser's instincts for self-preservation did kick in eventually, which started the process toward the ultimate downfall of the Bully.


Best Regards,

CZ52'

 

[agricola]

CZ52GUY,

Some good points, which are all to often ignored.

Briefly, even in 1938 the UK's armed forces were nowhere near ready (Spitfire and Hurricane at the late prototype stage, no tanks capable of matching the Pzkfw III, 5 CHL stations, few troops, obsolete RN), even compared with what he went to war with in 1939. As St.Johns noted, there was no public support for a policy of brinkmanship that risked war (Chamberlain was lauded for his stand) and the French probably would not have acted in concert with the UK (they of course didnt act in 1939 aside from to declare war and did not (with a few exceptions) fight when they got invaded). Chamberlain at least started the rearmament process and made sure that survival was probable - in that respect he did far more than Daladier (or Hitler for that matter). Noone here has stated what would have happened if Hitler had gone ahead and invaded the Czechs anyway regardless of the French and UK opposition - remember the Phoney War anyone?

Also, be wary of overstating Churchill's popularity - remember that he was held in such high esteem by the British public that they ran him from office in the 1945 General Election with a speed not seen again until John Major's humiliation in 1997.

 

[Byron Quick]

Noone here has stated what would have happened if Hitler had gone ahead and invaded the Czechs anyway regardless of the French and UK opposition - remember the Phoney War anyone?

I believe that I touched on this in a prior post. The idea that Britain was in a better position after losing the Czecks with their army and their ordnance factories to the Germans is, quite frankly, laughable.

The Czechs had the military and industrial capability to put up one hell of a fight. What they needed were allies...even if those allies could lend only moral support and the solemn promise of coming to their aid eventually. The perception that they were totally abandoned by the West is what sapped their will to fight. Their perception was completely and precisely accurate. It was congruent with reality at all points.

So what would have happened would have been a major attrition of German military resources even acknowledging that the Czechs would have been defeated. They would have had a better run than France.

Did Hitler miscalculate? He kept on until he was in a death match with the British Empire. And couldn't realize it was a death match. The fact that the British Empire had many times the manpower and industrial capacity of Germany seems to have escaped him also. He bet he could either conclude an advantageous peace with Britain or conquer it before it could bring its full capabilities to bear. Even without the USA and the USSR, I believe he would have lost that bet.

But he wasn't satisfied with fighting overmatched on one front. So he came up with his brainchild: let's invade the Soviet Union. Now this came frightenly close to succeeding and would have if he had been able to leave his generals alone and had kept the SS out of Ukraine.

Then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and he decided to declare war on the US.

So he wound up fighting three nations. Each outmatched Germany in manpower, resources, and industrial capacity.

That might count as minor missteps.

 

[Iain]

In surrendering the Sudetenland Czechoslovakia was deprived of 55% of its coalfields. Also parts of the old Czech-German border were thought by many to provide a natural military defense nearly on a par with the Maginot Line.

Germany won the land war up until 1941 or so for a good reason - Hitler had decided that 'conventional economic wisdom is not correct', he plowed masses of money in munitions, money that was not being spent in Britain or elsewhere for fear of collapsing the economy again.

Germany was geared for 'blitzkrieg' without realising it, in fact the invasion of France was the first deliberate blitzkrieg. The marches on the Rhineland (an invasion force of about 2,000 I believe), Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland had been unconscious 'blitzkriegs'. I doubt that the Czechs would have done much better than the French, when Hitler's troops marched into Prague they did so with little resistance, this was due to the threat of mass air raids on Prague if there was resistance. Events at Guernika and elsewhere showed the new threat from the air for what it was.

Hitler made some fairly major miscalculations. He admired the British for their 'nordic'ness, and even vaguely projected in his megalomanical brain that perhaps one day Britain would help in the invasion of the US. This was to miscalculate one power in its twilight but still with some fight left, and a newly emergent power in one go.

In 1933 the Joint Chiefs of Staff reported to the British Cabinet that Britain was less ready to intervene militarily on the content at that time than she had been in 1914. The decision was made not to expand the BEF, but spend money on the air force, the navy and the army a poor third. This, along with geography, gave Britain a strong defensive posture, but it was to take a while before she could adopt an offensive one and expect to succeed.

 

[HarryB]

"The efficiency of the airforce and navy in 1940 refutes the denunciation of Chamberlain as irresponsibly reckless."

Coming in late on this thread...

Wouldn't Hitler's poor decision to stop bombing military targets and initiate civilian bombing make this point moot? The change in strategy is what allowed the RAF to catch its breath and survive.

 

[agricola]

HarryB,

yep, but that sort of ignores the point that the system provided for by Chamberlain firstly defended the UK for longer than Goering intended, and second was able to bomb Berlin (whether or not it was a mistake is somewhat confusing). Hitler didnt decide to change targets, he was forced to because of his statements made previously.

 

[Destructo6]

Germany won the land war up until 1941 or so for a good reason - Hitler had decided that 'conventional economic wisdom is not correct', he plowed masses of money in munitions, money that was not being spent in Britain or elsewhere for fear of collapsing the economy again.

That's not true according to what I've read. Germany didn't mobilize her economy until after she was losing on the Eastern Front. Chapter 1 of Omer Bartov's Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich lists numbers, types, etc of available German armor and what they faced, which were often outnumber and even outclassed in capability. German use of armor made the whole difference.

 

[agricola]

destructo6,

in that last post youre entirely correct - after France Hitler actually cut back his tank production, and the Matilda II (albeit undergunned) and Char 1bis were much better tanks than the German mainstays Pzkfw III and IV (the IV being at that stage of the war armed with a low-velocity gun), but almost all German tanks had radio, and they were led by a well trained group of officers who knew what massed armour could do and how to do it.

 

[Khornet]

What a crew we have here!

My hat is off to you all. We need you teaching in the colleges and high schools.