ABSTRACT
By extinguishing the last vestiges of Czech independence and absorbing eight million non-Germans into the Reich on 15 March 1939, Hitler brazenly discarded the pretence that the Sudetenland was his ‘last territorial claim’ and ‘appeared under his true colours as an unprincipled menace to European peace and liberty’.1 After this devastating blow, Chamberlain was scarcely exaggerating when he declared it had been a ‘black week’. ‘No balder, bolder departure from the written bond had ever been committed in history’, Channon recorded in his diary. ‘The manner of it surpassed comprehension and his callous desertion of the Prime Minister is stupefying.’2 Despite words of sympathy from the King and the assurances of friends that there was ‘nothing on your side that you need regret’, nothing could obscure the fact that it appeared ‘his whole policy of appeasement is in ruins’.3 Moreover, coming only a few days after his public declaration that European tensions were decreasing, the Prague invasion raised the most fundamental questions about Chamberlain’s judgement and credibility.4 Yet if Hitler’s treachery gravely damaged Chamberlain’s prestige, the Prime Minister was solely responsible for turning this crisis into a potential disaster. Despite intelligence warnings for over a week before, Chamberlain was evidently stunned by Hitler’s coup. He told the Cabinet on the day of the invasion that ‘Czechoslovakia had spontaneously fallen apart’ and at one point even declared that ‘the German military occupation was symbolic, more than perhaps appeared on the surface’. His only comfort was the thought that ‘our guarantee was not a guarantee against the exercise of moral pressure’; a logic which conveniently evaded the need to act on the transitional Franco-British undertaking regarding Czech frontiers given at Munich. After this, the Cabinet
agreed that action should be confined to the cancellation of the Hudson-Stanley visit to Berlin and the recall of the Ambassador to report. Unfortunately, at this rather disorientated stage of proceedings, Chamberlain reluctantly gave way to pressure for an immediate statement. That afternoon he thus informed the Commons that he ‘bitterly regretted’ German action, but that despite ‘checks and disappointments from time to time, the object that we have in mind is of too great significance to the happiness of mankind for us lightly to give it up or to set it on one side’.5 Although Chamberlain looked miserable, his tone and emphasis disastrously suggested that he was unmoved either by the Czech tragedy or the Nazi betrayal. It was Chamberlain’s personal decision to add this final point to the agreed text and according to Cadogan it was ‘Fatal!’ Supporters thought it a ‘restrained but well received statement’, but to critics already convinced that only force would halt Nazi aggression it represented an outrage. ‘Your hero Chamberlain took a pluperfect pearler yesterday’, Brendan Bracken sneered to Beaverbrook next day. ‘Instead of telling Parliament that Hitler had broken the promises he made at Munich, he entered into a protracted legalistic argument worthy of Uriah Heep or Simon, or both.’6 As a result, exultant critics rejoiced ‘that Chamberlain will either have to go or completely reverse his policy’. Some even fantasised briefly about a government under Halifax with Eden leading in the Commons, while the mass of the parliamentary party privately voiced its alarm at the backbench Foreign Affairs Committee.7 By then, however, Chamberlain had recognised his fundamental tactical error. As one Foreign Office sceptic put it, throughout Whitehall it was possible to detect ‘a strange sound as if of the Turning of Worms’. British policy had apparently ‘reached the crossroads’.8 By his own later admission, Chamberlain’s initial statement was made in response to Opposition demands ‘before we knew all that had happened and when we had had no time to consider our attitudes’. As a result, he felt ‘obliged to be cool and so was accused of being unmoved by events’. As soon as he had time to consider the implications of Hitler’s actions and to recover from the shock, however, he ‘saw that it was impossible to deal with Hitler, after he had thrown all his own assurances to the winds’. Having repeated this conviction to Halifax and Butler next day, Chamberlain’s planned speech to the Birmingham Unionist Association’s annual dinner on 17 March provided him with ‘a great opportunity to speak to the world’ and he seized it with both hands.9 Now fully conscious of widespread discontent, the original text on economic recovery and social services was discarded. The Prime Minister who addressed the world from Birmingham was a very different man from the one who had urged further appeasement and conciliation only two days before. As Butler recalled, it was ‘more like an oration by the younger Pitt’.10 After explaining away the misapprehensions created by his earlier ‘somewhat cool and objective statement’, Chamberlain devoted half the speech to defending Munich as a means of enabling Hitler to prove his desire for peace and cooperation. He then unequivocally condemned German aggression as a wanton betrayal of the Munich agreement and speculated about his future
policy: ‘Is this the last attack upon a small State, or is it to be followed by others? Is this, in fact, a step in the direction of an attempt to dominate the world by force?’ Although Chamberlain made no effort to answer this question, his peroration hinted at a new policy. While he was not prepared to enter into ‘new unspecified commitments operating under conditions which cannot now be foreseen’, he warned that ‘no greater mistake could be made than to suppose that, because it believes war to be a senseless and cruel thing, the nation has so lost its fibre that it will not take part to the utmost of its power in resisting such a challenge if it were ever made’.11 When put in these robust terms, the Birmingham speech achieved all of its objectives. Despite the diplomatic language, Chamberlain had drawn the first proverbial line in the sand as a warning to Hitler. In so doing, he reassured his supporters and even temporarily silenced his critics. As most agreed, the speech helped to ‘put him right after his restraint in the House of Commons’.12 At the War Office, Hore-Belisha privately despaired that ‘Neville has no intention of doing anything’ because he ‘still believes he can control Hitler and Mussolini’ and other colleagues complained that Chamberlain was ‘still not quite tough enough on the question of getting ready for war’. But notwithstanding such complaints, Malcolm MacDonald encapsulated the general Cabinet view when declaring that ‘whereas the Prime Minister was once a strong advocate of peace, he has now definitely swung around to the war point of view’.13 Listening to Chamberlain’s speech at a constituency meeting in Southend, ‘Chips’ Channon certainly thought it ‘was strong meat’, while Margesson assured Chamberlain that ‘all is well with the Party they are solid behind you; the few croakers cut no ice at all’. Even supporters of Lloyd George conceded that while there was ‘a general acceptance that Chamberlain is incompetent, gullible and totally unfitted for the role he is called upon to play’, it was also true that ‘nobody can suggest an alternative that would command general confidence’.14 For the time being, Chamberlain had regained control. Whether he could retain it, however, depended upon the ability to match his words with actions.
