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As any historian knows, there are many dubious assertions in mainstream historical and foreign policy discourse. Few, however, are as dubious yet accepted as the conceit that appeasement caused or helped cause World War II.

This moldy little chestnut has gone from an assertion to common wisdom to dogma with little challenge. It was one of those claims that everybody across the political spectrum could endorse. Embarrassed by getting whipped by the Germans in 1940? Blame appeasement. Want to stand up to the “red menace” during the Cold War? Say that your enemies who seek peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union are practitioners of the “failed policy of appeasement.” Care to trash the interwar British Conservative Party? Wheel out appeasement as exhibit “A.” Center, right and left could all agree that appeasement had been a bad thing, although it was always somebody else’s fault that it existed, and no coherent alternative was ever mentioned.

Appeasement’s popularity and rational aspects forgotten, the whole mess of the 1930s could be pinned on the winged collar of a dead man—Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who died in 1940— and safely anathematized. However, the contention that appeasement led to, or caused, World War II is built on military and moral sand. It is a pious fiction that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

The strategic case for appeasement was and is rock solid. World War I and the Great Depression had taken a drastic toll on British and French military strength. Their finances were strained to the point where Britain was forced off the gold standard in 1931. Add to this the erosion of Britain’s Victorian industrial infrastructure, and the loss of revenue from shipping and insurance as world trade tanked after 1929, and you’ve got a fair picture of the deep strategic weaknesses with which British military and political leaders wrestled in the 1930s. American neutrality laws, which closed American capital markets to warring states, left the British certain that the next war would have to be financed wholly by the British taxpayer. This was not the broadest base on which to construct a global military machine. After 1931 Britain enjoyed no margin for error in the timing and pace of any future rearmament program. Its stored assets of gold and foreign currency could not be squandered, leaving nothing to support the state once war came. War could not be initiated as a choice or an indulgence—it had to be invoked only in a vital matter of national life or death.

British strategy was hobbled by the need to counter three potential enemies— Germany, Italy and Japan—in three widely separated theaters of operation: Western Europe and the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Far East. Any one, or combination of the three, could strike in conjunction or in sequence. The British chiefs of staff were adamant in insisting that they could never fight all three successfully at the same time. Therefore they wanted a robust rearmament program and a serious effort to limit the number of their potential enemies. By 1937, they had a rearmament program underway. In the meantime, the military in Britain backed Chamberlain and appeasement to the hilt as the only sound approach to weathering the storm until British diplomacy could be backed by muscle.

If war came, the British expected to fight it on the seas and in the air. They fervently wished that France would do most of the fighting (and by implication the dying) on land. This did not appeal much to the French, who wanted a strong continental commitment of British troops, but they had no choice. They needed Britain badly if they were to have any hope against Germany in a replay of World War I. In any case, Allied strategy implicitly rested on a defensive stance on land while Britain instituted a naval blockade and strategic bombing to weaken Germany. The World War I formula would be repeated, but this time without the suicidal early offensives such as Loos and the Somme. The steady, patient mobilization of British and French imperial and financial strength would be used to exploit German weaknesses in money and natural resources until Adolf Hitler’s Germany, like the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II, collapsed from within.

For France, the reality of German numerical and industrial superiority would not go away. Because France was incapable of securing either British or American guarantees of support if attacked again by Germany, the French logically opted for a defensive strategy. To protect the eastern frontier and free up troops for a likely German thrust through Belgium, France built the Maginot Line. Like Britain, France expected the next world war to be a multiyear slugging match, so doctrine and training were adjusted accordingly. Unlike in 1914-18, French generals decided to let the Germans hammer their heads against strong Allied defenses. French armies would be wedded to the defensive, and would attack carefully and methodically only when great materiel advantage had been massed at a narrow point of attack. There would be no more heroic bayonet charges like the ones that wrecked the French army in 1914-1917.

Unfortunately for Britain and France, the logic of Allied strategy precluded any preemptive strikes against Germany, even if the popular will existed for such an action, which it never did. At no time from 1936 to 1939 did Britain or France possess offensive strike forces capable of dealing a decisive blow against Nazi Germany. The muscle simply was not there. Then too, the horror of 1914-18, with more than 700,000 British and 1.4 million French dead, made instigating a new war virtually impossible for the democracies. Nobody in his or her right mind wanted a repeat of World War I, and nobody could imagine that a future war would be in any way less bloody and destructive than the last one. The Allies expected that if war came (and they hoped it would not), Germany would start it, and the Allies would have to plan some way of winning it. Both Britain and France prepared for a long-war scenario that promised them the best chance of winning. Britain did this by privileging the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force (RAF). Those were its best tools and promised good results at a reduced cost in blood compared with raising a big army for a renewed slugging match on a revivified Western Front. It also allowed Britain to retain the small, volunteer professional army best suited to policing its empire. The result of those choices was a very small army widely dispersed. When Hitler moved into the Rhineland in 1936, the British army had on hand a field force in the United Kingdom of only two constituted infantry divisions. Even in 1936 Germany could handle such a force.

France depended on a large conscript army of short-term citizen soldiers who were best suited to manning the defenses of the frontiers. If war came, France intended to let the Germans charge headlong into machine guns, artillery and the Maginot forts, preserving its strength and training troops for the final push against a weakened and exhausted Germany. The paper armies the anti-appeasement advocates imagine “stopping” Hitler in 1936 or 1938 are fantasies, completely divorced from Allied military doctrine, planning and force structure, not to mention political reality and public morale. They are a historical construct intended to buttress a policy of aggressive, preemptive war that was not possible at that time.

Moral claims against appeasement are predicated on two claims—that appeasement led to war by failing to stop Hitler, and that it somehow abetted the Holocaust. Let’s look at each claim in turn. As we have seen, neither Britain nor France was materially or psychologically prepared to fight in 1936-38 because of the trauma of World War I, its economic fallout and the damage done by the Great Depression. Despite major efforts, neither power was ready in 1939, although they were closer and were finally savvy about Germany’s longer-term intentions. The claim that Hitler could have been stopped rests on the shaky foundation of believing that earlier rearmament would have deterred him, and that going to war in 1936 or 1938 would have been somehow more morally upright than waiting until 1939. Both points can be debated, especially the latter, which hinges on moral claims that are in the end subjective and/or culturally determined. A Quaker, an Anglican and a Jew could have totally legitimate yet completely different stances on when or if war was justified. Nevertheless, the moral case against appeasement is weak. In the first instance, there is no evidence that Hitler could have been deterred from his course toward war no matter how much the Allies spent on rearmament. By 1939 the British and French were together outbuilding the Germans in every weapons system (tanks, artillery, machine guns, warships, fighters) save bombers, yet Hitler kept pushing on the Danzig question. His self-aggrandizing foreign policy was at its heart irrational, so it makes little sense to say that he could have been deterred if the British and French had thrown more money at the problem.

That the Allies should have gone to war earlier flies in the face of all the evidence of their real-world strategy, doctrine and force structure. It ignores public opinion and the real human concern of Chamberlain that the next war would be a bloodbath (it turned out to be just that) and that the onus for starting such a terrible war should not rest on Britain but on the aggressors. Unleashing a war that would kill millions needed one big provocation. And the experience of 1939-40 indicates that an earlier rush to war would not have gone any better for the Allies, who were even less well prepared for it before then. Unless one feels that that the gesture of going to war was more important than the reality of beating Hitler, it doesn’t make much sense to say that the British and French should have tried to stop Hitler earlier than they did. Since nothing approaching the bloodletting of the Einsatzgruppen or the death camps had yet emerged, no incident before the invasion of Poland morally compelled the Allies to take action against Nazi Germany.

This brings us to the issue of how, if at all, appeasement abetted the Holocaust. It is a sticky one and must be carefully considered. As we look closer we will see that such claims rest on weak assumptions: that Chamberlain, Edouard Daladier and other Allied leaders knew the Nazi “Final Solution” was coming and still did nothing; that the Allies could have beaten Hitler and nipped his genocidal ambitions in the bud. The first claim is, frankly, a ridiculous slur against Chamberlain and fails logically because it reads history backward and assumes a prescience Chamberlain didn’t have. Because the Holocaust happened doesn’t mean that people living before it knew it would happen. We know it did happen, but to blame those who did not and could not have predicted it is irrational. Such claims are always ex post facto assertions and never based on documents from the time. They condemn a man for not knowing about actions that would only manifest themselves after his death. Worse, they cloud an issue that should be crystal clear: who was responsible for the Holocaust. One thing is for sure: It wasn’t Neville Chamberlain.

I will go further. Those who associate appeasement with the Holocaust must answer this question: Would the Jews of Europe have been safer or in greater danger if war had come earlier? The answer is, they would have been safer only if the British and the French could have quickly and decisively beaten Nazi Germany. But they couldn’t. In fact, it was under cover of war that the genocide took place, not before it. The vast majority of its victims lived in countries only accessible to the Nazi killing machine through war and conquest. So marching off to war in 1938 would have done nothing to help avert the Holocaust. The Holocaust was caused by Nazi ideology, the German state apparatus, early German victories that exposed the victims to the machinery of mass murder, and widespread, active collaboration and collusion throughout Europe, not by appeasement.

The diplomatic dance that we now call appeasement failed, but it was a damned sight better than the alternatives available at the time—capitulation or war. The British and French chose a rational path of diplomatic engagement and compromise, and Hitler threw it back in their faces. World War II happened because Hitler was wedded to an irrational course of unlimited expansion. He imagined that somehow his relatively small and resource-poor nation could one day rule the world, or at least the Eurasian landmass. In that mad dream he could neither be dissuaded by compromise nor deterred by rearmament. As Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm once pointed out, the causes of World War I are complex; the cause of World War II was Adolf Hitler. We do history, Chamberlain and appeasement a disservice when we try to apportion any part of the blame for World War II to anyone but Hitler. Diplomacy doesn’t cause wars—men who substitute violence for diplomacy do.

 

Originally published in the September 2006 issue of Military History. To subscribe, click here