Appeasement through concessions and negotiation to avoid or delay war

Appeasement through concessions and negotiation to avoid or delay war is presented as both a policy of immediate restraint and a gamble over what time might achieve. Neville Chamberlain seeks to avert war by negotiating over the Sudetenland and later publicizing a declaration with Adolf Hitler; critics warn that concessions cannot guarantee Hitler will stop. The book makes the policy’s stakes visible in the distance between a crisis temporarily defused and a future still poised for conflict.

Origins in the Sudeten crisis

The immediate test is Hitler’s deadline for Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain tells the British Cabinet that an orderly transfer of the Sudeten territory to Germany, subject to a plebiscite, had been expected and accepted by the Czech Government. Hitler, however, has announced that he will not wait even a week and will invade on Saturday. After Sir Horace Wilson’s warning that Britain would support France if France fulfilled its treaty obligations to Czechoslovakia, Hitler replies that a resulting war would not deter him. Diplomacy is therefore conducted under the pressure of a declared invasion timetable, not in the expectation that negotiations can proceed at leisure.

That pressure produces a debate over whether Britain should signal readiness to fight. When military chiefs discuss partial mobilisation, Chamberlain recognizes that it would mean mobilising before Germany. He is told that the measure could demonstrate that Britain is not bluffing and might make Hitler reconsider. Chamberlain counters that a show of resolve might instead push Hitler into war: from his encounters with Hitler, he believes that losing face is intolerable to him. The argument exposes a central uncertainty in appeasement as the book depicts it. A threat might deter an aggressor, but it might also hasten the very conflict it is meant to prevent; restraint, meanwhile, can be read as either prudence or weakness.

The British Government’s choices are also constrained by the prospect of fighting without dependable allies. After Colonel Mason-MacFarlane leaves a Cabinet meeting, Chamberlain asks how the public could be persuaded to sustain a winter war if the Czechs collapsed. The Sudeten Germans, he observes, had been transferred to a Czech-dominated state despite their wish to leave it. Lord Halifax, Foreign Secretary, reports that the Dominions will not support a war over so narrow an issue, while America will not join and Ireland will remain neutral. The Soviet Union has a treaty with Czechoslovakia, but Chamberlain points to the absence of a common border: intervention would require passage through Poland or Romania, which he believes would bring both into the war on Germany’s side. Lord Gort warns that a wider conflict could force Britain to fight Germany in Europe, Italy in the Mediterranean, and Japan in the Far East, placing the Empire itself in grave jeopardy.

Against that background, Sir Horace Wilson proposes a telegram urging the Czechs to accept Hitler’s terms before his deadline: withdraw from the Sudetenland and allow Germany to occupy it. He regards this as the surest way to avoid becoming entangled in a potentially vast war, and argues that refusal would at least leave the United Kingdom without a moral obligation to intervene. Lord Halifax objects that asking Czechoslovakia to surrender territory under threat of force would amount to capitulation. He accepts that rejecting the telegram may make war certain, but argues that Britain cannot advise the Czechs to do what it believes wrong, or promise that Hitler’s forces will stop at the Sudetenland’s borders. Appeasement thus emerges not as a consensus but as a decision contested within government over the moral cost of acquiescence and the danger of refusing it.

Concession, coercion, and the limits of the agreement

The territorial settlement sharpens that conflict. The proposed transfer is defended on the ground that it includes areas where the majority of the population is German; the Czech representatives reply that the transfer also takes their border fortifications and leaves the country indefensible. Sir Horace Wilson calls the terms the best available and argues that ninety per cent of Czechoslovakia will remain intact and uninvaded. Hubert Masarík rejects that characterization, calling the settlement a capitulation rather than a negotiation. In this exchange, the language of national self-determination and the material consequences of territorial surrender pull in opposite directions: the remaining territory may be large, but its security is not thereby assured.

The strongest warning against the policy comes from Paul von Hartmann, who brings Chamberlain a document he describes as conclusive proof that Hitler’s claims to have no further territorial demands in Europe are false. Hartmann says Hitler plans a war of conquest to gain living space, that the incorporation of Austria and Czechoslovakia is only the first step, and that war will begin within five years at the latest. He adds that commanders of the German Army and the Foreign Minister who had reservations have been replaced. In Hartmann’s account, if Britain and France stand firm, the Army will move against Hitler to prevent a disastrous war; signing the agreement, by contrast, will make Hitler’s position in Germany unassailable.

Chamberlain acknowledges Hartmann’s courage but refuses his recommendation. For him, the decisive political fact is that the peoples of Britain and France cannot be expected to take up arms to deny ethnic Germans the right of self-determination. Hitler has made threats before, Chamberlain argues, while his own immediate objective is to avert war and build a lasting peace incrementally. He advises Hartmann to return the document to its government, but Hartmann refuses to take it back and asks Chamberlain to have his experts study it. Their disagreement is not simply over whether Hitler is dangerous: Hartmann presents a forecast of further conquest, while Chamberlain gives priority to what he believes the public can be persuaded to fight for now.

Buying time and making the case publicly

After the agreement, William Strang urges Chamberlain to treat any undertaking from Hitler with the utmost caution. He distinguishes the Sudeten settlement from the separate joint declaration and says the latter document makes him especially uneasy. Chamberlain understands the Foreign Office view that appeasement should be treated as a regrettable necessity: an opportunity to buy time, accompanied by a massive rearmament programme. He says that Britain is rearming on a substantial scale and will devote more than half of all government expenditure to arms the following year. In his reasoning, accommodation does not mean pacifism. Rather, Britain cannot play a high-stakes game against a gangster without cards; until it is better prepared, avoiding war may be the only workable choice.

Chamberlain also sees a public purpose in the declaration. If Hitler keeps his word, he believes, war can be avoided. If Hitler breaks it, the world will see him clearly, the country will unite, and the Dominions may rally to Britain; Chamberlain even allows that the breach might bring the Americans in on Britain’s side. He therefore intends to give the declaration the maximum publicity on landing in London. This makes the policy depend not only on Hitler’s future conduct but on what that conduct will reveal to other governments and publics. The declaration is at once a hoped-for assurance and a test whose failure, Chamberlain believes, could strengthen the coalition for resistance.

Relief without resolution

The return to Britain produces a public scene of celebration, but the book does not treat that response as proof that appeasement has secured peace. Hugh Legat later explains to Pamela Legat that the response is relief, which he understands, especially when he thinks of the children. Yet he sees the crisis as having laid a tripwire for the future, one Hitler will cross sooner or later. The contrast between celebration and Legat’s prediction gives the policy its unresolved ending: the immediate danger has receded, but the conditions that produced it remain. Appeasement may have postponed war and created time for rearmament, as Chamberlain hopes; in Legat’s view, it has not removed the danger, only deferred the moment when it will have to be faced.