Chamberlain's Legacy | A Brief History of Things

Strictly speaking, Churchill and Roosevelt did not appease Stalin at all. In a sense they got the best terms anyone could have got in the circumstances.

Chamberlain died in November 1940, after a fight with bowel cancer. Hitler's betrayal and the accusations over the Munich appeasement broke his heart; whether they also hastened the illness, no one can say. But Chamberlain could never have guessed that the summit he had pushed through under enormous pressure, staking his political capital and his health on it, would haunt generations of leaders after him — and turn any meeting with the leader of a totalitarian power into an unmistakably high-risk venture.

That nightmare rests in part on a misreading of what the Chamberlain-Hitler summit actually produced. The standard account of the Munich Agreement still holds: Britain and France did give ground step by step, and did believe, not without naivety, that the Munich compromise would be the last one, peace's final chance. But a more generous reading shows that the appeasement did buy Britain a breathing space, and the time it won put the country in a far better position when Göring's bombers came.

In September 1938, at the height of the Sudeten crisis in Czechoslovakia, Britain had 29 squadrons fit for combat. Only five of them flew the new Hurricane fighter, and not one could fight above 15,000 feet. The coastal radar chain was only partly built, radio communication was primitive, and of the barrage balloons, anti-aircraft guns and searchlights needed to defend the key districts of London, barely a third were in place. The smaller gaps were beyond counting: too few air-raid wardens, too little firefighting equipment, a severe shortage of doctors, nurses, ambulances and hospital beds, and no plan yet for evacuating civilians by rail.

Besides being unready to fight, Chamberlain and his cabinet leaned toward peace for another plain reason: the memory of the slaughter of the First World War, and their determination to avoid a second one if there was any way to do it. The crowds that poured into the streets to greet Chamberlain when he came home with the Munich Agreement show how badly mainstream British opinion wanted to keep out of war. And one point has long been overlooked: faced with Hitler's roaring and threats, Chamberlain's government did not simply sue for peace at any price. It drew a line at which it would answer with force. It was Britain's softness with a hard edge, the German army command's opposition to war in 1938, and the flat lack of enthusiasm among Berliners for a general mobilization, that made Hitler give up at the last moment on taking the Sudetenland by force and accept instead an agreement that produced much the same result but carried at least some binding force.

Looking back, it was the Munich Agreement that led Hitler into a fatal misjudgment. In August 1939, on the eve of the invasion of Poland, he told his generals: "Our enemies are little worms. I saw them at Munich." This time he would go beyond his own "cowardice" at Munich, and he believed the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact that Ribbentrop had cooked up would stop Britain and France from going to war over Poland.

That was a huge misjudgment — so huge that Hitler came to think the British had tricked him at Munich on purpose. In the last weeks of his life, it is said, he was still convinced that war should have begun in September 1938, because that was the last chance to keep it a local one, and that he had been fooled by "Chamberlain, that crafty representative of the capitalists, and his deceptive umbrella." As Hitler saw it, Chamberlain had come to the summit already knowing in his heart that he would fight a brutal war against Germany, and everything he said out loud "was carefully prepared to deceive my suspicions — his only purpose in coming was to gain time."

That, too, was a misjudgment. It was unrealistic to expect a British government that had spent a long stretch giving ground before Germany's advances to turn hard overnight. Chamberlain's real problem was that he honestly believed concessions would buy peace, which left him pleased with himself over the Munich Agreement — and nailed him forever to history's pillar of shame.

What goes around comes around. A few years later Churchill, who had denounced Chamberlain in cabinet for selling out his country's sovereignty and honor, was himself mocked as an appeaser for his conduct at Yalta, except that this time the object of appeasement was Stalin rather than Hitler.

Strictly speaking, Churchill and Roosevelt did not appease Stalin at all. In a sense they got the best terms anyone could have got in the circumstances.

For one thing, the Eastern Front really was the main theater of the Second World War. Right up to the Yalta conference Hitler was still throwing his best panzer divisions against the Soviet lines, while in the west more or less letting the Allied armies, once across the Rhine, drive deep into Germany. As Stalin saw it, the Soviet side had borne so much suffering and paid so much in blood and tears that it had every right to decide the fate of Poland and the other countries of Eastern Europe — and in return he tacitly accepted Britain's primacy in Greece. Later evidence also shows that Stalin had not been plotting from the start to fight a Cold War with Britain and the United States, nor were his promises and postures at Yalta all mere play-acting. He did want to keep the wartime alliance with the Americans and the British going as long as he could; he only felt it had to run on his terms.

For another, Churchill and Roosevelt needed things from Stalin — Soviet entry into the war against Japan as soon as possible, the early release of British and American prisoners of war — and they got a good deal of what they wanted, including his broad acceptance of the United Nations and, holding his nose, his agreement to let France join the postwar settlement in Germany as one of the victors.

If Yalta gives off a whiff of Munich-style appeasement, it is only because Stalin was not "considerate" enough. He manipulated the postwar political arrangements in Poland and elsewhere so openly that he spared Churchill and Roosevelt no embarrassment, while the two of them had assumed, rather wishfully, that Stalin would show some regard for their wartime comradeship, keep one eye on world opinion, and stop short of going that far. Both leaders had already boasted to their own press about what Yalta had achieved, which made it all the more awkward, and competitive party politics at home in both countries made it worse still.

As the Cold War set in and the standoff between the American and Soviet camps sharpened, the stigma of Yalta as a second Munich froze summits between the leaders of great powers for close to a whole era, until Kennedy and Khrushchev restarted informal talks between heads of state in Vienna. Even then they could not shake off Chamberlain's legacy and the nightmare of Munich.

Having won the presidency by the thinnest of margins, Kennedy was drawn to the idea of a summit with Khrushchev. He believed a summit would help keep the Cold War contest between the United States and the Soviet Union from turning hot, and that meeting across a table beat facing each other down at the edge of a crisis — which is what he meant by "Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate." At the same time, he thought the thing that mattered most was a lasting deterrent, so that negotiations would stand a chance of succeeding, or at least would not repeat Chamberlain's mistake. Back in 1940, as a senior at Harvard, Kennedy had written a thesis on the policy of appeasement at Munich, later published as Why England Slept.

The briefings his staff prepared pushed him further in that direction. They assumed that if Kennedy took a hard line, he would show he could not be pushed around and would also make Khrushchev easier to handle. Khrushchev, for his part, was confident that if he came on tough with the green young Kennedy, the other man would come round to his views. Both sides had large blind spots. The world was nothing like the world of Hitler and Chamberlain, but the psychological traps of summit diplomacy had barely changed.

Neither man would give an inch, so the talks were, predictably, stiff and combative, and both were bound to go home with nothing. On the flight back aboard Air Force One the mood was silent and heavy — "like flying home with a baseball team that had just lost the World Series." At the first stop, London, Kennedy poured out his troubles to the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, admitting that Khrushchev's "almost brutal frankness and confidence" had startled him. Macmillan could see that Kennedy had been "shaken," and in a letter to the Queen he wrote that it reminded him of "the way Chamberlain tried to talk to Hitler."

History proved that both Macmillan and Khrushchev had misread Kennedy. The comparison to Munich stung him, and he set out to prove he was not a leader who could be frightened. Before long Khrushchev, and the world, would see Kennedy's nerve in the Cuban missile crisis. Unfortunately, it was precisely because he needed to show after Vienna that he was nobody's pushover that Kennedy came to treat Vietnam more and more as a chance to demonstrate American strength — making it ever harder for himself, and for the presidents who followed him, to get out of Vietnam.

If Khrushchev's misreading at Vienna led him to the most dangerous gamble of his career over the missiles in Cuba, and so laid the ground for his defeat in Soviet domestic politics, Vienna also marked the beginning of America's descent into the quagmire of Vietnam.

Recommended reading: Summits: Six Meetings That Shaped the Twentieth Century

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