* This article—which was completed with the help of a travelling grant of the Notre Dame Committee on International Relations—is based primarily on Volumes I and II of the Third Series of Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939 (hereafter cited as British Documents), edited by Woodward, E. L. and Butler, Rohan (New York City: British Information Services, 1949).Google Scholar These volumes, presenting a formidable range of documents on British policy from the period immediately preceding the Austrian Anschluss through the Munich crisis, do not even in their abundance provide a fully satisfactory basis for the story of 1938. There is no question of omissions, for we have the word of the editors that they have been free to publish the Foreign Office material. But the paucity of references to Russia and other states is very surprising. The full story awaits the availability of the papers of Chamberlain and Halifax. Feiling's, KeithLife of Neville Chamberlain (London, 1946),Google Scholar more apology than critical study, remains valuable, because it provides material from the Prime Minister's private papers. Other relevant material may be found in the documents on German Foreign Policy published by the United States Government and in the proceedings of the Nuremberg trials. A useful, but highly partisan selection of material, reminiscent of wartime yellow and black books, has been published by the Soviet Government in the two volumes, Documents Relating to the Ere of the Second World War (New York: International Publishers, 1948).Google ScholarMaugham, Viscount, a member of Mr. Chamberlain's government, wrote in defence of Munich, The Truth About the Munich Crisis (London, 1944).Google Scholar It provides little information and largely repeats the arguments about British military weakness, French divisions and weakness, and the general support of appeasement, though Mr. Churchill denies that Munich won any important military advantage in The Gathering Storm. SirHenderson, Neville defended Munich in Failure of a Mission (New York: 1940)Google Scholar and in his autobiography, Water Under the Bridges (London, 1945),Google Scholar written after the author had learned from his doctors that he would be dead in six months. Characteristically harsh comments are found in the collected reviews of Taylor, A. J. P., From Napoleon to Stalin (London, 1950).Google ScholarTaylor, sees Munich as the failure of liberal nationalism and as a warning against ignoring Russia. The best books in English are Wheeler-Bennett's Munich; Prologue to Tragedy (New York, 1948)Google Scholar and Namier's, Diplomatic Prelude, 1938–1939 (London, 1948)Google Scholar and Europe in Decay (London, 1950).Google Scholar The flood of memoirs, especially the French and German, threaten to drown the casual reader and the historian in the sea of self-justification. SirWebster, Charles has written: “The greatest deviation from British policy that has occurred in the last 150 years was that which is summed up in the word ‘;Munich’.” United Kingdom Policy (London, 1950), p. 11.Google Scholar

1 Cf. the interesting and sweeping article by Utley, T. E., “Coalition Government” in The Cambridge Journal, III (07, 1950), 579–592.Google Scholar

2 One striking example may illustrate this. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps, once a maverick among the Young Turks of the Left, now offers only austere comfort to visionaries—the security of a full employment, lacking certainly in abundance, coupled with the grim announcement that British welfare projects have touched the limits of the country's present economic capacity.

3 Attlee in 1937 argued that the Conservatives were not even interested in the principle of defending imperial interests, which they used to profess, for they had, he charged, handed over the strategic position in the Eastern Mediterranean to Italy. Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, vol. 320, 02. 18, 1937, column 1500.Google ScholarThe curious reversal of roles was expressed by Sir Ernest Benn in a letter to the Daily Telegraph, June 6, 1938: “the greed of the Krupps has been replaced by the spleen of the pacifists, currently our merchants of death.”Google Scholar

4 Somervell, D. C. does not touch quite the tight note in explaining Churchill's roles “We now know, of course, that Hitler's ambition was insatiable. Churchill knew it in advance because, being built on Napoleonic lines himself, he could understand the new Napoleon.” British Politics Since 1900 (London, 1950), p. 224.Google Scholar

5 A letter published in Spectator, Sept. 30, 1938, p. 517, signed ”War Generation” expresses its criticism in significant terms: “A generation has grown up for whom history seems to begin with the Treaty of Versailles, an act of unprovoked aggression by France and Britain on a defenceless Germany.” The writer, then, revealingly enough, echoes the Liberal and Labour charge that Chamberlain was playing at power politics and, while admitting that “the rights of small nations,” seemed to be not quite sincere on the lips of Englishmen, “it was less unpleasing than the present Great Power snobbery, which makes Herr Hitler and Mr. Chamberlain appear like the managers of two big firms squeezing a small man out of business.”Google Scholar

6 This story of mutual frustration has been well told in Wolfers, Arnold,Britain and France Between Two Wars (New York, 1940).Google Scholar

7 Ibid., pp. 344–349.

8 SirPetrie, Charles, The Life and Letters of the Right Hon. Sir Austen Chamberlain (London, 1940), II, 269.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., II, 259.

10 Ibid., II, 265. The final signing of Locarno at the Foreign Office had its interesting historical auspices. The night before the ceremony Austen Chamberlain inspected the room where the ceremony was to take place and noticed a blank space on the wall. Upon enquiry he learned that it was usually occupied by a picture of James II, which was then being cleaned. Thinking that such a monarch was an unhappy omen, he had Lord Londonderry fill the blank space with a portrait of Lord Castlereagh so that the spirit of the Congress of Vienna hovered about the signing of Locarno. Ibid., II, 293. But Austen Chamberlain's speeches abounded in references to confidence and defaulting on obligations.

11 Feiling, K., The Life of Neville Chamberlain (London, 1946), p. 314.Google Scholar

12 SirHenderson, Neville admitted that Providence is inscrutable, but thought that as a boy at Eton he had been saved from drowning “to help postpone at Munich the war which would otherwise have broken out in 1938 instead of 1939.” Water Under the Bridges, p. 14.Google Scholar

13 “The Christian Attitude to War,” a lecture delivered at a Service of Prayer for Peace on 07 11, 1937 (London, 1938), pp. 3–4.Google Scholar

14 This account of the Halifax-Hitler interviews is based on the version in Documents Relating to the Eve of the Second World War (New York, 1948), I, pp. 14–45.Google Scholar

15 After Schuschnigg had been forced to paralyze his government by agreement to Hitler's Berchtesgaden demands on February 12, The Observer, Feb. 20, 1938,Google Scholar sighed with relief at this “drama without crisis” and at the removal of an obstacle to Anglo-German settlement. Thus, the preliminaries of Anschluss were a step to peace. Scrutator, in the Sunday Times, Feb. 20, 1938,Google Scholar argued that “the danger to peace is not in a cold calculation of its interest by any Power. The danger to peace is in an outburst of sentiment which overrides calculation.” After the seizure of Austria, Garvin, J. L., with unintended aptness, urged the British people to keep their heads as steady as a rock. Observer, March 13, 1938.Google Scholar Neville Henderson made a great play about believing Nazi promises, though he also emphasized the necessity of giving them no shadow of an excuse for breaking them. See British Documents, Third Series, I, no. 93, p. 66.Google Scholar Halifax was sceptical of them, but saw no alternative to accepting them, for to treat them as worthless would encourage the Nazis to withdraw them. Ibid., Third Series, I, no. 107, p. 87.

16 In view of the Marxist interpretation of appeasement as a plot of the business classes against Russia, it may be well to point out that the Financial News was mordant in its hostility to the appeasement policy. It accurately forecast a number of future developments. The Times, it argued, will be indignant for a few days. Then Hitler will make a batch of peaceful declarations. By then the sentimental Germanophiles will have recovered and, beginning to see the first rays of hope, will argue that Britain must start to restore confidence by believing in Hitler's good intentions. Financial News, March 14, 1938.Google Scholar

17 Daily Herald, March 14, 1938. Elvin apparently was ready for war, but, like most of the Labour Party, was unconcerned about preparing for it. He was an astonishing maestro of a sufficiently wide range of radical invective to assure all sections of the Labour movement that his heart was in the proper places. In a particularly dazzling and incomprehensible performance at the Trades Union Congress in September 1938, among many memorable things, he described Fascism as “capitalist, economic nudism.”Google Scholar

18 Sunday Times, March 13, 1938. This is a particularly good example of both the Utopian hope and the guilt feeling.Google Scholar

19 The Times, March 14, 1938.Google Scholar

20 Wheeler-Bennett, J. W., Munich: Prologue to Tragedy (New York, 1948), pp. 35–36.Google Scholar

21 British Documents, Third Series, I, no. 135, p. 141, and passim.Google Scholar

22 The documents for Mr. Eden's policy have not been published, but the difference between his and Chamberlain's policy is revealed in a despatch of the British Minister to Prague, Basil Newton, to Viscount Halifax, April 12, 1938. In noting that “the position has somewhat altered,” he recalled that his instructions from Eden required him to offer no advice on Czech-German relations and to urge the Czech Government to work for a solution of the Sudeten question, “but for its own sake, and not because it might facilitate an agreement with Germany.” Ibid., Third Series, I, no. 140, p. 151.

23 The Soviet purges, which extended into the highest ranks of the Red Army, suggested the gravest doubts about the sincerity of Soviet declarations and the value of them, if sincere. Ibid., Third Series, I, no. 148, pp. 161–166. No propaganda efforts were made to prepare for Russian participation in war. This is true of the Munich crisis as well, although there are stories of Russian material supplied to the Czechs. Wheeler-Bennett, , op. cit., p. 127,Google Scholar says that Russia gave an unqualified assurance of support to Czechoslovakia. The means of making this support effective is another matter. Beloff, M., The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia (London, 1949), II, 166, remains uncertain and considers it “arguable” that the Soviet Government being convinced of Franco-British unwillingness to fight “could go to the limit in pledging their country's readiness to resist aggression.”Google Scholar

24 British Documents, Third Series, I, no. 164, pp. 204, 213, 218 (Daladier),220–222.Google Scholar The same scene was repeated a number of times. The most moving of all was the conversation of Sept. 25, 1938, when Daladier, wearily desperate, spoke grimly of France doing her duty, and asked whether the British Government wanted the French to do nothing. The reply of Chamberlain was, again, to remark on the unbellicose tone of the French press and in view of French impotence to remind the French Premier of his responsibility for the lives of his people. Ibid., Third Series, II, no. 1093, especially pp. 526–534.

25 Feiling, Keith, op. cit., p. 347.Google ScholarChurchill, never expressed bitterness about the French, for he recognized the doubtful role British action had played towards France. In 1934 he had said: “I honour the French for their resolute determination to preserve the freedom and security of their country from invasion of any kind⃜ The awful danger, nothing less, of our present foreign policy, is that we go on perpetually asking the French to weaken themselves⃜ But there is nothing to be said for weakening the Power on the Continent with whom you would be in alliance, and then involving yourself more in Continental tangles in order to make it up to them … you have the worse of both worlds.” Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, vol. 287, 03 14, 1934, column 397.Google Scholar

26 Mr. Chamberlain's famous remark in his broadcast of Sept. 27, 1938, is but a reformulation of the single sentence devoted to Czechoslovakia in a humorous book, Foreigners, published several years earlier. The authors proposed as a contribution to international understanding to tell the world what Englishmen know about foreigners. Of the victim of Munich it wrote: “Czechoslovakians live in Czechoslovakia.”

27 British Documents, Third Series, II, no. 587, pp. 54–56.Google Scholar

28 British Documents, Third Series, II, no. 917, p. 367.Google Scholar