September 25, 2024

Churchill, Appeasement, and the Lessons of History

Finest Hour 201, First Quarter 2023

Page 37

By Tim Bouverie

Tim Bouverie is author of Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War (Bodley Head, 2019).

The following text was presented by Tim Bouverie to the 2022 International Churchill Conference in Kansas City, Missouri.

Practically alone among that bunch of thugs, racists, nihilists, and parvenus who made up the senior coterie of the Third Reich, Joseph Goebbels was, as the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper appreciated, an intellectual or, at least within that crude milieu, the closest approximation of one. As such, he read widely and, through his diaries, revealed a fascination with the longest standing and (until December 1941) most formidable opponent of Nazism, Winston Churchill. Much of this, as one might expect, was simply to fuel the distorted reality and vulgar propaganda that the little doctor had made his specialty. In May 1941, for example, he records his glee over a new book about the British Prime Minister, which claimed that he “drinks too much,” wears “pink, silk underwear” and dictates messages from the bath or in his underpants, “a startling image which the Führer finds hugely amusing.”¹ (All of these claims, with the exception of the colour of the underwear, were, in fact, true.) A few days later, however, Goebbels records that he has been studying Step by Step, the edited collection of Churchill’s fortnightly articles from the latter half of his so-called “Wilderness Years,” 1936–1939. His reaction is striking: “This man,” Goebbels wrote, “is a strange mixture of heroism and cunning. If he had come to power in 1933, we would not be where we are today.”²

It is the implications of this statement that I propose to examine in this lecture. To explore, in the first part, Churchill’s appreciation of the danger posed by Nazi Germany and the actions he urged in order to redress this. And, in the second part, to survey the legacy of appeasement and of the Churchillian counterfactual— spelt out by Goebbels—to see how the so-called lessons of the period have been interpreted, used, and, frequently, abused. Finally, I will set out the few precepts that, to my mind, may be extracted from this seminal decade and the role of Churchill within it.

2025 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 42nd International Churchill Conference. Washington, DC | October 9-11, 2025

2025 International Churchill Conference

Second Finest Hour

Many of you are, I am sure, familiar with Robert Rhodes James’s book, Churchill: A Study in Failure. An assessment of the litany of controversies, errors of judgement, and setbacks that constituted Churchill’s career between 1900 and 1939, it is one of the most original and nuanced studies of the great man. I, however, take issue with it in one important respect: that being that I do not believe, as the title implies, that had Churchill died in 1939, and thus never become Prime Minister, his career would be judged a failure or reduced to a mere historical footnote. On the contrary, I believe that if the Second World War in general, and the summer of 1940 in particular, constituted Churchill’s “finest hour,” then his campaign to warn the British people about the Hitlerian danger, during the 1930s, was his “second finest hour.”

Churchill, as Rhodes James reminds us, got many things wrong. From the Gold Standard to Gallipoli, to British intervention in the Russian Civil War, women’s suffrage, the Abdication, and, of course, India, he has been accused of faulty and, indeed, reactionary judgement. On the supreme issue of his age, however, the rise and challenge of Nazi Germany, he was shown to be right—and right from the very beginning.

Churchill’s first public warning about the Nazis came in a speech to the House of Commons, on 23 November 1932, two months before Hitler came to power. The demand that Germany should be granted “equality of armaments” with the other great European powers was already current. For ten years, the Versailles settlement had been attacked, within Germany and without, as a “Carthaginian peace.” Germany, so the argument went, deserved to be rehabilitated; she deserved those arms that were the necessary accoutrements of great power status. From the beginning, Churchill saw the dangers as well as the innate dishonesty of these arguments. “Do not delude yourselves,” he urged his fellow MPs:

Do not let His Majesty’s Government believe…that all that Germany is asking for is equal status….All these bands of the sturdy Teutonic youths, marching through the streets and roads of Germany, with the light of desire in their eyes to suffer for their Fatherland, are not looking for status. They are looking for weapons, and, when they have the weapons, believe me they will then ask for the return of lost territories and lost colonies and when that demand is made it cannot fail to shake and possibly shatter to their foundations every one of the countries [France, Belgium, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia], I have mentioned and some other countries I have not mentioned.³

A few months later, once Hitler, now Chancellor, had succeeded in eviscerating German democracy and already begun his persecution of the German Jews, Churchill drew attention to the “insurgence of ferocity and war spirit” and “pitiless ill-treatment of minorities” on the other side of the Rhine. “When,” he continued, “we see that occurring in one of the most gifted, learned, scientific and formidable nations in the world, one cannot help feeling glad that the fierce passions that are raging in Germany have not found, as yet, any other outlet but upon themselves.”

Churchill, it should be stressed, was not alone in deploring the Nazi regime. From its inception, many, particularly on the left of British politics, watched with horror as events unfolded in Germany. He was, however, one of the few who understood how German domestic violence could be transferred to the international sphere and who advocated wholesale rearmament, particularly in the air, to protect Britain and indeed Europe from this menace. How do we account for such perspicacity? What was it that made Winston Churchill the leading Cassandra of that disastrous decade?

Prophet of Truth

To begin with, Churchill had always believed that Germany, should she be allowed to grow strong enough, was likely to embark on a war of revenge. In an article entitled “Shall We All Commit Suicide?” published in 1925, he spoke of the “intense hatred of France” that united the recently vanquished nation and noted, with fear, the “enormous contingents of German youth growing to military manhood year by year…inspired by the fiercest sentiments.” “The soul of Germany smoulders with ideas of a war of liberation or revenge,” he claimed, and the only thing that kept it in check was its corporeal impotence.⁵

Then, there was Churchill’s philo-Semitism—that rarest of qualities in early twentieth century British society—that caused him to react with revulsion against Nazi Jew baiting even before von Hindenburg invited Hitler to become Chancellor.

There was the fact that, thanks to the rupture with his colleagues over Indian self government, Churchill was, between 1932 and September 1939, outside the Cabinet, able to survey the European scene more clearly and speak his mind more freely.

And then there was his sense of history, focussed, during these years, on his illustrious ancestor, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, who, through a combination of martial valour and military alliance, succeeded in forestalling the hegemony of the Sun King. Although by tradition, Britain preferred to abstain from European quarrels and focus, instead, upon her global empire, there was, Churchill argued, a well established precept of British foreign policy, namely to prevent any one power from dominating the continent. It was for this reason that Marlborough and his armies had resisted the domination of Louis XIV. It was because of this that the British strove to thwart the ambitions of the French revolutionary governments and later Napoleon. It was for this that they took up arms, in 1914, against the Kaiser Reich. And it was for this that Britain eventually declared war on the Third Reich.

There were, thus, manifold reasons why Churchill was able to perceive the Nazi threat and why, in turn, he became the foremost opponent of the policy that became known as appeasement: arguing, consistently, in favour of rearmament; harrying the Government over the gap between the Luftwaffe and the RAF; deploring the naivety of his countrymen (such as his cousin, Lord Londonderry), who sympathised with Hitler’s so called “reasonable” grievances; denouncing the “rape of Austria”; and damning the Munich agreement that sold out the Czechoslovaks.

Of course, Churchill remained fallible and was not always consistent. He opposed sanctions against Japan, following her conquest of Manchuria in 1931 and was similarly reluctant to punish Mussolini following his invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. Yet, Churchill also showed considerable pragmatism during the decade. Despite initial reservations as well as his opposition to specific sanctions, he became a staunch supporter of the League of Nations and its policy of “collective security,” believing this—the destruction of Abyssinia notwithstanding—the best means of containing German militarism.

Later, in an even more revolutionary act, Churchill— the most notorious opponent of Communism, the man who wanted to use British soldiers to strangle the Bolshevik revolution at birth—became the leading advocate of an alliance with the Soviet Union. It was not that he changed his views. He continued to fear and despise Marxism, but (again, in contrast to many of his colleagues) he recognised Nazism as the more immediate threat, later remarking that “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil.”⁶

As almost all historians agree, the task facing the democracies was more complicated than Churchill made out in his war memoirs. In the preface to The Gathering Storm, he relates a conversation with Franklin Roosevelt, in which the President raised the question of what they should call the war they were now waging. Without a moment’s reflection, Churchill replied: “‘The Unnecessary War,’ for never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle.”^7–8 This was not the case. Once Hitler came to power, avoiding a second conflagration was always going to be extremely difficult and would have relied on the threat or use of force, either of which might have led to war—although, conceivably, one fought under more favourable circumstances and, thus, briefer and less terrible.

If, however, the issue was complex, the lessons soon appeared simple. In January 1943, the Deputy Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Orme Sargent, informed the Under Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, Paul Emrys-Evans, that he had been spending his few moments of leisure designing the plaque he felt should be affixed to the ruins of Britain’s blitzed monuments. The inscription read:

These deplorable, avoidable and disgraceful ruins are dedicated to the British people as a perpetual warning against national unreadiness, as also with memory of Lord Baldwin (Prime Minister 1923 24; 1924–29; 1932–37)⁹ and Neville Chamberlain (Prime Minister 1937 1940), who did not tell the nation the truth because it was unpleasant and…enforced, during a period of growing uncertainty and danger, the policy of disarming Great Britain and appeasing Germany, in defiance of logic, experience and common sense, with shameful results which we here see and which all will do well to ponder.¹⁰

Lesson Applied

This, then, was the lesson of the period, a lesson that was given maximum publicity, following the publication of The Gathering Storm in 1948, as well as polemics, such as Cato’s Guilty Men, published in the summer of 1940. “Appeasement,” so the 1930s “demonstrated,” only encouraged dictators. Rather than negotiating with international lawbreakers, the answer was to crush them as swiftly as possible. Rarely has a historical “lesson” been taken so literally.

Explaining his decision to send US troops to fight in Korea in 1950, President Truman later wrote that “communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese had acted” and that “if this was allowed to go unchallenged it would mean a third world war, just as similar incidents had brought on a second world war.”¹¹

Three years later, Prime Minister Anthony Eden, haunted by his failure to stand up to Hitler when he was Foreign Secretary at the time of the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, tried to depose another moustachioed dictator by colluding with France and Israel in the invasion of Egypt.

In April 1961, President John F. Kennedy—who had written his undergraduate thesis on the British policy of appeasement— attempted to topple the Cuban Communist government of Fidel Castro by landing a force of counterrevolutionaries in the Bay of Pigs. One year later, as the same President stared down Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he told more than a hundred million Americans in a television address that the “1930s taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged ultimately leads to war.”¹²

Everything he knew about history, President Lyndon B. Johnson informed the historian Doris Kearns, propelled him to escalate US involvement in Vietnam. “If I got out of Vietnam and let Ho Chi Minh run through the streets of Saigon, then I’d be doing exactly what Chamberlain did…I’d be giving a fat reward to aggression.”¹³

The same argument was used by Margaret Thatcher who, as a British task force sailed towards the Falklands in April 1982, reminded US Secretary of State Al Haig—trying to broker a peace deal—that “Neville Chamberlain sat at this same table discussing an arrangement which sounds very much like the one you are asking me to accept.”¹⁴

Both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush invoked the spectre of Munich to justify US incursions in Central America and the Gulf, while on 17 March 2003, two days before the onset of “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” George W. Bush enjoined his fellow citizens to recall those statesmen who had appeased “murderous dictators” and thus allowed their threats “to grow into genocide and war.”¹⁵

There were, of course, myriad factors behind this catalogue of military ventures, at least half of which turned into bloody disasters, responsible for producing, in direct contradiction to the intentions of their architects, a less safe world, in which Western power and prestige declined and violence, including terrorism, proliferated. Yet the appeasement analogy, if only a fig leaf, has much to answer for and is, thus, worth repeatedly debunking.

Wrong Lessons

Hegel famously claimed that “people and governments have never learned anything from history.”¹⁶ Well, up to a point. Although it is true that human beings are capable of woeful and, sometimes, calamitous ignorance about their past, disasters also occur when they latch on to the wrong lessons, or view the present through a historical prism that necessarily distorts. An example of the former may be seen in the decades following the First World War. Traumatised by the horrors of Passchendaele and the Somme, the “causes” of that catastrophe were investigated to ensure against repetition. An arms race was found at the scene of the crime and so the zeitgeist moved decisively in favour of disarmament—a position to which the British Labour Party continued to cling until the outbreak of the Second World War.

Also found amid the mud of Flanders’ fields were the various alliances that had snapped into force following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Once again, the lesson seemed clear: avoid alliances and eschew staff talks. The United States, accordingly, retreated into isolationism, while the British refused to act in concert with France until the spring of 1939, the same time when they, belatedly, began to negotiate with Stalin. The consequences speak for themselves.

In the conclusion to my study of appeasement, I wrote that “the failure to perceive the true character of the Nazi regime and Adolf Hitler stands as the single greatest failure of British policy makers during this period, since it was from this that all subsequent failures—the failure to rearm sufficiently, the failure to build alliances (not least with the Soviet Union), the failure to project British power and the failure to educate public opinion—stemmed.”¹⁷

And it is this same failure of perception, the failure to understand the world as it is, rather than as it may appear when distorted by ideological fixation, or trite historical comparison, that was, to a large extent, responsible for many of the debacles enumerated above. Gamal Nasser, despite the moustache, was not Adolf Hitler. Nor was Saddam Hussein—a murderous tyrant, no question, but, by 2003 scarcely a threat to the region, let alone the wider world. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was not Pearl Harbor, whilst the wisdom that kept the Cold War cold was the realisation that the Soviet leaders—the only men, other than the American president, capable of acting on a Hitlerian scale—did not share the Führer’s suicidal rashness.¹⁸

Right Lessons

Of course, it can go the other way. Who among us does not now feel that the world should have paid closer attention when President Putin murdered former FSB operative Alexander Litvinenko in 2006; when, in the following year, he withdrew Russia from the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty; when, in 2008, he invaded Georgia; when, in January 2009, he cut Russian gas to Ukraine and south-eastern Europe; when he deployed chemical weapons on the streets of Salisbury; and, most importantly, when, in 2014, he annexed Crimea and started a war in the Donbas?

While all this was going on, London became a piggy-bank for Russian oligarchs; Germany scrapped her nuclear energy programme and became even more dependent on Russia for her energy supply; President Obama and David Cameron failed to act when Bashar al-Assad crossed the red line they had drawn over his use of chemical weapons and then stood by while Russia wreaked carnage in Syria; European nations turned inward upon themselves; and the Republican candidate praised Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election and then, once in office, repeatedly undermined his European allies as well as NATO.

“For five years,” Churchill told the House of Commons, after the German invasion of Austria, in March 1938, “I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which leads to a dark gulf. It is a fine broad stairway at the beginning but after a bit the carpet ends. A little further on there are only flagstones and a little further still these crack beneath your feet.”¹⁹ As was shown with tragic consequences in the 1930s, and has been reinforced in more recent decades, democracies, alas, are often capable of harming themselves far more than anything that can be inflicted by hostile nations.

What, then, are the lessons that can, with safety, be extracted from the 1930s and the policy of appeasement? They are, necessarily, broad but no less important for being so. First, as I have argued, to try to understand the world as it is, not as it was or as we wish it to be. Second, to maintain alliances and the structures of international discourse and co-operation. Allies may be exasperating but, as Churchill observed, “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies and that is fighting without them.”²⁰ International bodies are even more frustrating but, again, as Churchill saw with the deeply flawed League of Nations, they offer forums for negotiation and, occasionally, concerted action. And lastly, the grim necessity of maintaining those levers of force, that “arsenal of democracy,” that may act as a deterrent, may be deployed in humanitarian causes and, in the last resort, ensure our liberty and safety. As Edward Gibbon wrote at the start of his magisterial history of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “The terror of the Roman arms added weight and dignity to the moderation of the emperors. They preserved peace by a constant preparation for war; and while justice regulated their conduct, they announced to the nations on their confines that they were as little disposed to endure as to offer an injury.”²¹

Finally, I would conclude by emphasising that appeasement and, more importantly, negotiation and compromise are not, a priori, a bad thing. Was President Kennedy “appeasing” Khrushchev when he promised, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, to remove American nuclear missiles from Turkey? Arguably. But this, combined with his decision to impose a quarantine around Cuba, helped save the world from nuclear holocaust. Equally, diplomacy and negotiation—the tools that offer us the surest means of living safely together in this world—are not the same as appeasement.

Everything, as I have tried to argue in this lecture, depends on the context. As the hero of this conference told the House of Commons on 14 December 1950: “Appeasement in itself may be good or bad according to the circumstances. Appeasement from weakness and fear is alike futile and fatal. Appeasement from strength is magnanimous and noble and might be the surest and perhaps the only path to world peace.”²²

Endnotes

1. Fred Taylor, ed., and trans, The Goebbels Diaries, vol. I, 1939 1941 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982), 3 May 1941, p. 346.

2. Ibid., 8 May 1941, p. 354.

3. Hansard, 23 November 1932.

4. Hansard, 23 March 1933.

5. Winston S. Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1932), p. 249.

6. John Colville, The Fringes of Power (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2004), p. 350.

7. Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm (London: Cassell, 1948), p. Viii.

8. “Of all wars, this was the most unnecessary,” Churchill told his youngest daughter, Mary, in November 1940. “In 1933 or 1934 a dispatch would have stopped German rearmament. In 1935 an ultimatum—in 1936 general mobilisation of France and England.” In Emma Soames, ed., Mary Churchill’s War: The Wartime Diaries of Churchill’s Youngest Daughter (London: Two Roads, 2021), pp. 56–57.

9. Ramsay MacDonald was, in fact, Prime Minister of the National Government between 1932 and 1935. Yet with the Conservatives providing the Government’s majority, Baldwin, as Lord President of the Council, was Prime Minister in fact if not in name.

10. Emrys-Evans Papers, MSS 58262, Orme Sargent to Paul Emrys Evans, 21 January 1943, British Library, London.

11. Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, vol. II, Years of Trial and Hope, 1946–1952 (New York: Doubleday, 1955), p. 335.

12. https://www.jfklibrary.org/ learn/about-jfk/historic-speeches/ address-during-the-cuban missile-crisis

13. Jeffrey Record, “Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s,” US Army War College Press, August 2005, p. 4.

14. Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher, vol. I, Not for Turning (London: Allen Lane, 2013), p. 688.

15. https://georgewbush whitehouse.archives.gov/news/ releases/2003/03/20030317-7.html

16. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, translated by John Sibree (London: Bell, 1914), p. 6.

17. Tim Bouverie, Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War (London: Bodley Head, 2019), p. 418.

18. As for those interventions that are considered successful— Kennedy’s response to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Falklands War, the First Gulf War, and Kosovo—it is worth noting that all had limited and attainable objectives—something that could not be said of the second Iraq war, or indeed, Afghanistan.

19. Hansard, 24 March 1938.

20. Alexander Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds., War Diaries, 1939–1945, Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2001), 1 April 1945, p. 680.

21. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. I (London: Cadell and Davies, 1807), pp. 13–14.

22. Hansard, 14 December 1950.