Why Appeasement?

This is a brief talk on the reasons for appeasement…

It fits nicely with the section in the Year 9 area of the blog: The Road to War: part 2 (just click the link).

In it, I’m arguing that appeasement made sense, at least in 1938. I comes in these sections (I have also added some of the very specific things I mention; you may need to find out what some of them were). You can get a Word copy of this crib Why Appeasement?, a PDF WWhy Appeasement?, just click on the link.

INTRODUCTION: WHO’S GOING TO ARGUE WITH THE GREATEST ENGLISHMAN?

The answer is, I am…

 

PART ONE: THE FIRST WORLD WAR REMEMBERED

Memories of the last war haunted Britain, and British politics

• All Quiet on the Western Front; Journey’s End; Goodbye to all That; Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
• The Oxford Union: ‘This house will under no circumstances fight for its king and country’
• The East Fulham by-election
• Peace Pledge Union
• Stanley Baldwin: Appalling Frankness speech
• The Great Depression and the not so great recovery

PART TWO: WHO DO YOU THINK YOUR KIDDING MR HITLER?

Why was Hitler’s Germany so hard to read?

• Mein Kampf
• Hermann Goering
• The treaty of Versailles
• The Hossbach memorandum
• Czechoslovakia; Edvard Benes
• The Germanophiles: Unity Mitford, Lady Londonderry, Edward VIII
• The be nice to the Germans. and see where it gets us: Lloyd George, Lord Halifax, Chamberlain
• The diplomatic web: the Anglo-German Naval Agreement
• Collective Security? The story of the Stresa Front
• Just how strong were German forces?

PART THREE: THE EMPIRE ON WHICH THE SUN WAS VERY MUCH IN DANGER OF SETTING UPON

How Britain’s empire affected its options

• The white dominions and the Statute of Westminster
• The very thin red line
• India

PART FOUR: NAKED INTO THE CONFERENCE CHAMBER

Britain was woefully ill prepared for war in 1938

• Ten Year Rule
• DRC (Defence Requirements Committee)
• Guernica; ;’the bomber will always get through’
• Rearmament in 1938: RADAR, Spitfires and Hurricanes

PART FIVE: THE FACTS OF LIFE IN 1938

Britain had one ally, and they weren’t much use

• The League of Nations: Manchuria, Abyssinia
• Italy: Mussolini, the Rome-Berlin Axis
• France: the Maginot Mentality
• Mitteleuropa, Little Europa
• The remilitarisation of the Rhineland
• Anschluss
• Stalin’s USSR: the Great Terror, the Red Army, Poland
• Why the Franco-Soviet Pact wasn’t worth the paper it was written on

PART SIX: THE MAN OF THE HOUR

How Neville Chamberlain saved the world. Or, how he thought he had…

• The Chamberlains
• Britain’s German Question
• Sudeten Crisis (Konrad Henlein)
• Plan Z
• Berchtesgaden, Godesberg, Munich
• Was Munich a defeat for Hitler?

SOME CONCLUSIONS: THERE WAS NO ALTERNATIVE IN 1938, BUT THAT WAS IN PART THEIR OWN FAULT

• Rab Butler
• Cabinet Papers
• Appeasement analogy

Here is old cinema newsreel footage of Chamberlain returning from Munich