APPEASEMENT RECONSIDERED:

INVESTIGATING THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE 1930s

Jeffrey Record

August 2005

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iii

FOREWORD

 The appeasement of Nazi Germany by the western democracies 

during the 1930s and the subsequent outbreak of World War II have 

been a major referent experience for U.S. foreign policymakers since 

1945. From Harry Truman’s response to the outbreak of the Korean 

War to George W. Bush’s decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein, 

American presidents have repeatedly affirmed the “lesson” of Munich 

and invoked it to justify actual or threatened uses of force. However, 

the conclusion that the democracies could easily have stopped Hitler 

before he plunged the world into war and holocaust, but lacked the 

will to do so, does not survive serious scrutiny. Appeasement proved 

to be a horribly misguided policy against Hitler, but this conclusion is 

clear only in hindsight—i.e., through the lens of subsequent events.

 Dr. Jeffrey Record takes a fresh look at appeasement within the 

context of the political and military environments in which British 

and French leaders operated during the 1930s. He examines the 

nature of appeasement, the factors underlying Anglo-French policies 

toward Hitler from 1933 to 1939, and the reasons for the failure of 

those policies. He finds that Anglo-French security choices were 

neither simple nor obvious, that hindsight has distorted judgments 

on those choices, that Hitler remains without equal as a state threat, 

and that invocations of the Munich analogy should always be closely 

examined.

 The Strategic Studies Institute is pleased to offer this monograph 

as a contribution to the national security debate over the use of force 

to advance the objectives of U.S. foreign policy.

DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.

Director

Strategic Studies Institute 
iv

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR

JEFFREY RECORD is a professor in the Department of Strategy 

and International Security at the U.S. Air Force’s Air War College 

in Montgomery, Alabama. He has served as a pacification advisor 

in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War, Rockefeller Younger 

Scholar on the Brookings Institution’s Defense Analysis Staff, 

and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, the 

Hudson Institute, and the BDM International Corporation. He 

also has extensive Capitol Hill experience, serving as Legislative 

Assistant for National Security Affairs to Senators Sam Nunn and 

Lloyd Bentsen, and later as a Professional Staff Member of the Senate 

Armed Services Committee. Dr. Record is the author of six books 

and a dozen monographs, including: Dark Victory: America’s Second 

War Against Iraq; Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, 

and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo; Hollow Victory, A 

Contrary View of the Gulf War; The Wrong War, Why We Lost in Vietnam; 

and Bounding the Global War on Terrorism. He received his doctorate 

at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
v

SUMMARY

 No historical event has exerted more influence on post-World War 

II U.S. use-of-force decisions than the Anglo-French appeasement of 

Nazi Germany that led to the outbreak of the Second World War. 

Presidents have repeatedly cited the great lesson of the 1930s—namely, 

that force should be used early and decisively against rising security 

threats—to justify decisions for war and military intervention; some 

presidents have compared enemy leaders to Hitler. The underlying 

assumption of the so-called Munich analogy is that the democracies 

could and should have stopped Hitler (thereby avoiding World War 

II and the Holocaust) by moving against him militarily before 1939. 

This assumption, however, is easy to make only in hindsight and 

ignores the political, military, economic, and psychological contexts of 

Anglo-French security choices during the 1930s. Among the myriad 

factors constraining those choices were memories of the horrors 

of World War I, failure to grasp the nature of the Nazi regime and 

Hitler’s strategic ambitions, France’s military inflexibility, Britain’s 

strategic overstretch, France’s strategic dependence on Britain, guilt 

over the Versailles Treaty of 1919, dread of strategic bombing and 

misjudgment of the Nazi air threat, American isolationism, and 

distrust of the Soviet Union and fear of Communism.

 Appeasement failed because Hitler was unappeasable. He sought 

not to adjust the European balance of power in Germany’s favor, 

but rather to overthrow it. He wanted a German-ruled Europe that 

would have eliminated France and Britain as European powers. But 

Hitler was also undeterrable; he embraced war because he knew he 

could not get what he wanted without it. There was thus little that 

the democracies could do to deter Hitler from war, though Hitler 

expected war later than 1939. There was going to be war as long as 

Hitler remained in power.

 A reassessment of the history of appeasement in the 1930s 

yields the following conclusions: first, Hitler remains unequaled 

as a state threat. No post-1945 threat to the United States bears 

genuine comparison to the Nazi dictatorship. Second, Anglo-French 

security choices in the 1930s were neither simple nor obvious; they 
vi

were shaped and constrained by factors ignored or misunderstood 

by those who retrospectively have boiled them down to a simple 

choice between good and evil. Third, hindsight is not 20/20 vision; 

it distorts. We view past events through the prism of what followed. 

Had Hitler dropped dead before 1939, there would have been no 

World War II or Holocaust, and therefore no transformation of the 

very term “appeasement” into a pejorative. Finally, invocations of 

the Munich analogy to justify the use of force are almost invariably 

misleading because security threats to the United States genuinely 

Hitlerian in scope and nature have not been replicated since 1945.
1

APPEASEMENT RECONSIDERED:

INVESTIGATING THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE 1930s

There was never a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action 

than the one which has just desolated great areas of the globe. It could 

have been prevented without the firing of a single shot, but no one would 

listen.

 —Winston Churchill, 19461

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 only path to world peace.

 —Winston Churchill, 19502

INTRODUCTION

 No historical event has exerted more influence on post-World 

War II U.S. presidential use-of-force decisions than the AngloFrench appeasement of Nazi Germany that led to the outbreak of 

that war. The great lesson drawn from appeasement—namely, that 

capitulating to the demands of territorially aggressive dictatorships 

simply makes inevitable a later and larger war on less favorable 

terms—has informed virtually every major U.S. use of force since 

the surrender of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945.3

 From 

the Harry S Truman administration’s 1950 decision to fight in Korea 

to the George W. Bush administration’s 2003 decision to invade Iraq, 

presidents repeatedly have relied on the Munich analogy to inform 

themselves on what to do in a perceived security crisis; they have 

also employed that analogy as a tool for mobilizing public opinion 

for military action. Indeed, presidents who most often invoked the 

Munich analogy to describe a security threat believed the analogy to 

be valid and understood its power as an opinion swayer.

 As the United States approached its second war with Iraq, neoconservatives and other war proponents cited the consequences of the 

democracies’ appeasement of the burgeoning Nazi menace during 
2

the 1930s and asserted that war was necessary to remove Saddam 

Hussein before he acquired nuclear weapons, with which he would 

threaten and even attack the United States. Munich’s great lesson, 

they argued, was to move early and decisively against rising security 

threats. World War II could have been avoided had the democracies 

been prepared to stop Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in 

1936 or to fight for Czechoslovakia in 1938; instead, they did nothing 

when three German army battalions crossed into the Rhineland’s left 

bank, and they handed over vital chunks of Czech territory. With 

each act of appeasement, Hitler’s appetite grew. Thus military action 

against a prenuclear Saddam Hussein in 2003 would be much easier 

and less risky than war with a nuclear Saddam later on. War with 

Saddam was inevitable, as it was with Hitler, so it was better to have 

it earlier on more favorable terms rather than later on less favorable 

ones. 

 Neo-conservative Richard Perle, the influential chairman of the 

Defense Policy Board, argued in an August 2002 interview with the 

London Daily Telegraph:

[An] action to remove Saddam could precipitate the very thing we are 

most anxious to prevent: his use of chemical and biological weapons. 

But the danger that springs from his capabilities will only grow as he 

expands his arsenal. A preemptive strike against Hitler at the time of 

Munich would have meant an immediate war, as opposed to the one that 

came later. Later was much worse.4

 In that same month, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in a 

television interview in which arose the issue of evidence of Saddam 

Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, opined, “Think of all the 

countries that said, ‘Well, we don’t have enough evidence.’ Mein 

Kampf had been written. Hitler had indicated what he intended to 

do. Maybe he won’t attack us. . . . Well, there are millions of dead 

because of those miscalculations.” Later, he added, “Maybe Winston 

Churchill was right. Maybe that lone voice expressing concerns 

about what was happening was right.” As early as January 2002, 

President George W. Bush was talking the talk of preventive war as 

a means of dealing with a rising enemy bent on domination. “Time 

is not on our side,” he said in his State of the Union Address. “I 
3

will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by 

as peril draws closer and closer. The United States will not permit 

the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s 

most dangerous weapons.”5

 For neo-conservatives who have provided the intellectual 

foundation of U.S. foreign policy since September 11, 2001 (9/11) 

(enshrined in President Bush’s September 2002 The National Security 

Strategy of the United States of America), the failure of the democracies 

to stop Hitler in the 1930s remains the primary instruction on 

both international politics and America’s role in the world. In his 

trenchant assessment of the propositions that comprise the essence 

of neo-conservative thinking on foreign policy, Andrew J. Bacevich 

correctly identifies “the first and most fundamental proposition” to 

be “a theory of history” based on “two large truths” originating from 

the decade of the 1930s—namely, that “evil is real,” and that “for 

evil to prevail requires only one thing: for those confronted by it 

to flinch from duty.”6

 From this proposition flows the imperative 

of possessing irresistible military power and a willingness to use 

it; the identification of the United States as the only power capable 

of standing up to evil; and the necessary dedication of the United 

States to the mission of removing evil from the world. As President 

Bush declared just 3 days after the 9/11 attacks, “our responsibility 

to history is already clear: To answer these attacks and rid the world 

of evil.”7

 Presidential invocation of the Munich analogy as an argument 

for use of force began with the outbreak of the Korean War. For 

Truman, the analogy dictated U.S. intervention: “Communism 

was acting in Korea just as Hitler and the Japanese had acted 10, 15, 

20 years earlier.”8

 A year after the Korean War ended, Dwight D. 

Eisenhower, citing the “domino effects” of a Communist victory in 

Indochina on the rest of Southeast Asia, invoked Munich in an appeal 

for Anglo-American military action: “We failed to halt Hirohito, 

Mussolini, and Hitler by not acting in unity and in time. . . . May it 

not be that [we] have learned something from that lesson?”9

 John F. 

Kennedy cited the Munich analogy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, 

warning that the “1930s taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, 

if allowed to go unchecked, ultimately leads to war.”10
4

 The analogy indisputably propelled the United States into 

Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson told his Secretary of Defense, Robert 

McNamara, that if the United States pulled out of Vietnam, “The 

dominoes would fall and a part of the world would go communist.”11

Johnson later told historian Doris Kearns, “Everything I knew about 

history told me that 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.”12

Richard Nixon also believed Munich applied to Vietnam. In his 

memoirs, he approvingly quoted Churchill’s condemnation of the 

1938 Munich Agreement and then went on to conclude that “what 

had been true of the betrayal of Czechoslovakia to Hitler in 1938 

was no less true of the betrayal of South Vietnam to the communists 

advocated by many in 1965.”13

 Ronald Reagan saw in the Soviet Union a replay of the challenges 

the democracies faced in the 1930s and invoked the Munich analogy 

to justify a major U.S. military buildup as well as U.S. intervention in 

Grenada and Nicaragua. “One of the great tragedies of this century,” 

he remarked in a 1983 speech, “was that it was only after the balance 

of power was allowed to erode and a ruthless adversary, Adolph 

Hitler, deliberately weighed the risks and decided to strike that the 

importance of a strong defense was realized.”14 Shortly after Saddam 

Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, President George H. W. Bush, the last 

occupant of the White House to perform military service in World 

War II, declared: “If history teaches anything, it is that we must resist 

aggression or it will destroy our freedoms. Appeasement does not 

work. As was the case in the 1930s, we see in Saddam Hussein an 

aggressive dictator threatening his neighbors.”15

 The influence of the Munich analogy has persisted beyond the 

generation of decisionmakers who served in World War II. President 

William J. Clinton, the first president born after World War II, did 

not hesitate to invoke the Munich analogy against Serbian dictator 

Slobodan Milosevic. “What if someone had listened to Winston 

Churchill and stood up to Adolph Hitler earlier?” he asked shortly 

before going to war over Kosovo. “How many people’s lives might 

have been saved? And how many American lives might have 

been saved?”16 George W. Bush, like his father before him, painted 
5

Saddam Hussein as an Arab Hitler bent on acquiring unstoppable 

power (nuclear weapons) and pursuing an agenda of aggression 

(domination of the Persian Gulf). On the eve of launching Operation 

IRAQI FREEDOM, he observed that in “the 20th century, some chose 

to appease murderous dictators, whose threats were allowed to grow 

into genocide and global war.”17

 Though presidents can and have, knowingly and unwittingly, 

misused the Munich analogy to describe security threats and the 

consequences of failing to act against them,18 there is no gainsaying 

the power of that analogy to mobilize public opinion. This is so 

because of the catastrophic failure of the security policies Britain and 

France pursued vis-à-vis Germany in the 1930s. In retrospect, AngloFrench appeasement, driven by perceived military weakness and fear 

of war, did nothing but whet Hitler’s insatiable territorial appetite 

(and his contempt for British and French political leadership), while 

simultaneously undermining the democracies’ security. The result 

was the most destructive war in history and an enduring pejorative 

image of appeasement whose casting includes Nazi ideology as a selfevident blueprint of Germany’s territorial aims; Neville Chamberlain 

as a coward and fool bent on peace at any price; Britain and France 

as betrayers of brave little Czechoslovakia; and Hitler as the great 

winner at the Munich Conference of September 1938.

 This is the image of appeasement that presidents have employed 

to justify selection of military action over inaction in response to 

perceived security threats. The great strategic lesson of the 1930s, 

however, was drawn against a rising security threat that arguably 

has had no analog since the destruction of Nazi Germany and 

Imperial Japan. Security threats truly Hitlerian in scope are rare. 

What aggressor state since 1945 has possessed the combination of 

such territorial ambitions, military power, and willingness to gamble 

strategically as did Nazi Germany in Europe in 1939? Certainly 

not North Vietnam or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, both targets of U.S. 

presidential invocation of the Munich analogy. To be sure, the 

Soviet Union had great military power and imperial ambitions. But 

Stalin and his successors (Khrushchev in 1961-1962 excepted) were 

far more patient and cautious men than Hitler, and Soviet use of 

force was, in any event, checked by America’s nuclear deterrent 
6

and NATO’s containment on the ground in Europe to a degree that 

Hitler never was in peacetime. China may turn out to be America’s 

next great strategic rival, but the extent of her imperial ambitions 

in East Asia (beyond Taiwan) remains unclear. China, moreover, 

greatly depends on access to the American market for her economic 

progress and increasingly depends on oil from a Persian Gulf where 

U.S. military hegemony remains unchallenged.

 This is not to argue that threats need be Nazi Germanic in 

magnitude to justify military action. Saddam Hussein’s aggression 

against Kuwait in 1990 was unacceptable because it violated a cardinal 

international norm and because it challenged U.S. domination in a 

region of vital interest to the West. Similarly, Serbian aggression in 

the former Yugoslavia had to be stopped because it was genocidal 

and threatened NATO’s integrity. The Taliban also had to be driven 

from power because they provided a sanctuary for the attackers of 

9/11. And the United States could not stand by idly if China chose 

to attack Taiwan.

 The problem with the invocation of Munich is its suggestion 

that aggressor states are inherently insatiable and that failure to act 

against them automatically endangers U.S. security. In fact, most 

aggressor states have limited territorial objectives, and in some cases 

satisfaction of those objectives may be of little consequence to U.S. 

security. North Vietnam’s objectives were confined to the former 

French Indochina, a place of little intrinsic strategic value to the United 

States. Yet the administration of Lyndon Johnson painted Ho Chi 

Minh as the spear point of a concerted Sino-Soviet imperialism and 

claimed that a Communist victory in South Vietnam would topple 

dominoes all over Southeast Asia. Saddam Hussein was certainly 

Hitlerian in his brutality, recklessness, and appetite for aggression, 

but the military threat he posed was never a match for the power 

the United States could—and did in 1990-91—mobilize against him; 

by 2003 the Iraqi threat had been broken by 12 years of war and 

sanctions, though Saddam continued to run a monstrous tyranny 

and to defy UN demands that he account for suspected prohibited 

weapons stocks. There was no counterpart in the Europe of the 1930s 

to the superpowerdom of the United States in the Gulf over the past 

2 decades. Stephen Rock observes that “Not every state that makes 
7

demands has unlimited ambitions.”19 Unfortunately, notes Robert 

Jervis, “Our memories of Hitler have tended to obscure the fact that 

most states are unwilling to pay an exorbitant price for a chance at 

expansion.”20 To contend that Saddam Hussein was not Hitler is not 

necessarily to argue against the U.S. decision to invade Iraq; there 

was always a powerful moral and legal case for Saddam Hussein’s 

overthrow, and the future course of events in Iraq and the Middle 

East may well determine the final judgment on the wisdom of that 

decision.

 If it is important to understand the rarity of genuinely Hitlerian 

threats, it is no less important to recognize that France and Britain 

faced security challenges and dilemmas in the 1930s that were 

too daunting and complex to be distilled into the simple choice 

between the “good” of stopping Hitler militarily and the “evil” of 

appeasing him politically. Though allies in the Great War, France 

and Britain still did not fully trust one another (much of Britain’s 

social elite was Germanophile, and much of its political elite was 

Gallophobic21). Until the late 1930s, moreover, London and Paris 

differed profoundly on how to deal with Hitler, a function in part 

of differing vulnerabilities to German land power, and in part 

of differing views on the wisdom of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. 

Though Britain was more geographically secure, she faced not only 

a perceived direct German air threat but also increasingly threatened 

imperial interests in the Mediterranean and East Asia. The defense 

of the British Isles competed with the defense of the Empire. With 

respect to Nazi Germany, Britain also had to wrestle with the question 

of whether it could limit its liability in a future European war to the 

provision of naval and air power (banking on sufficient continental 

allies to supply the ground forces). 

 For its part, France, plagued by governmental instability (between 

1932 and 1940 there were no fewer than 16 coalition governments in 

Paris22) and acute internal political divisions that culminated in the 

defeatism and collaboration of 1940, sought to “contain” Germany 

through a system of alliances that would confront Berlin with the 

prospect of a two-front war. From 1936 on, however, France never 

displayed the will and military capacity necessary to convince 

potential Eastern allies (or even Belgium, for that matter) that, in the 

event of war, it was prepared to defend them by attacking Germany. 
8

Additionally, France believed it could not act alone without Britain, 

but Britain would not act at all until Hitler had isolated London and 

Paris from the rest of Europe. Given these circumstances, together 

with a gross overestimation of the German strategic air threat, it is 

hardly surprising that senior British and French military leaders 

throughout the period 1933-39 unanimously counseled against 

risking war with Germany. Going to war against contrary professional military advice is a very risky business for any democratic 

politician unless he has the electorate behind him, which British 

Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain did not in 1938 but did in 

1939.

 Harry Hearder, in his forward to the second edition of P. M. H. 

Bell’s The Origins of the Second World War in Europe, perhaps the most 

objective assessment of the causes of World War II published to date, 

rightly concludes that “a blanket condemnation” of appeasement 

“is too imprecise to be tenable, and, indeed, explains nothing.” He 

further deplores the continuing influence of the appeasement myth:

The trouble is that vague, sweeping generalizations tend to be accepted 

by an ill-informed public, and build themselves up into powerful myths. 

Such generalizations may be accepted by the media and the public for 

several decades after they have been discarded by most professional 

historians. Most journalists seem to think that the policy of appeasement 

was, in each of the relevant crises, cowardly and mistaken. They do not 

distinguish between the factors that were operative in 1936 from those 

operative in 1938 or again in 1939.23

Indeed, appeasement was never about peace at any price; had it been, 

neither Britain nor France would have gone to war in September 1939 

over a Poland neither was in a position to defend. Appeasement was 

about war avoidance consistent with preservation of vital national 

interests.

* * * * *

 This monograph: (1) examines the nature of appeasement; (2) 

explores the reasons why Britain and France chose to appease Nazi 

Germany; (3) assesses the causes of appeasement’s failure; and (4) 

offers a judgment on the utility of the Munich analogy as an informant 

on the use of force.
9

 Before turning to the nature of appeasement, however, it is 

critical to recognize that though Anglo-French appeasement of Nazi 

Germany was a horrendous mistake, decisionmakers in London and 

Paris during the 1930s did not know they were making “pre-World 

War II” decisions. On the contrary, they were struggling mightily to 

avoid war. We must attempt to see the security choices they faced 

and the decisions they made as they saw them then, not as we see 

them today. With historical events, as with professional football 

games, it is far easier to be a Monday morning quarterback than an 

actual Sunday afternoon quarterback in the middle of a tough game. 

Nor does hindsight offer 20-20 vision; hindsight refracts past events 

through the lens of what followed. Thus we view Munich today 

through the prism of World War II and the Holocaust, a perspective 

not available in 1938. How differently would Munich now be seen 

had it not been followed by war? David Potter shrewdly observes 

that hindsight is “the historian’s chief asset and his main liability.”24

THE NATURE OF APPEASEMENT

Webster’s New World Dictionary and Thesaurus defines the verb 

“appease” as “to pacify, quiet, or satisfy, especially by giving into 

the demands of,” and lists the following synonyms for the noun 

“appeasement”: “amends, settlement, reparation, conciliation, 

compromise.”25 These terms are consistent with what most 

historians and international relations theorists understand to be 

the phenomenon of appeasement: states seeking to adjust or settle 

their differences by measures short of war. Stephen Rock defines 

appeasement as simply “the policy of reducing tensions with one’s 

adversary by removing the causes of conflict and disagreement,”26

a definition echoed by Gordon Craig and Alexander George: “the 

reduction of tension between [two states] by the methodical removal 

of the principal causes of conflict and disagreement between them.”27

To be sure, Anglo-French behavior toward Nazi Germany gave 

appeasement such a bad name that the term is no longer usable except 

as a political pejorative. Before Munich, however, observes historian 

Paul Kennedy, “the policy of settling international . . . quarrels by 

admitting and satisfying grievances through rational negotiation 

and compromise, thereby avoiding the resort to an armed conflict 
10

which would be expensive, bloody, and possibly very dangerous” 

was generally viewed as “constructive, positive, and honorable.”28

Even after World War II, Winston Churchill, the great anti-appeaser 

of Hitler, declared that appeasement could be (if driven from a 

position of strength as opposed to weakness) “magnanimous and 

noble,” and perhaps “the surest and only path to world peace.”

But the success or failure of appeasement depends on more than 

whether the appeasing state is dealing from a position of strength 

or weakness. Much depends on the nature and objectives of the 

state toward which appeasement is directed. A state bent on war or 

possessing territorial or ideological objectives that cannot be satisfied 

short of war is most unlikely to be appeasable (though it may be 

deterrable); conversely, a state seeking to avoid war and having 

limited objectives whose satisfaction does not threaten core security 

interests of the appeasing state is likely to be appeasable.

 An oft-cited case of successful appeasement was Britain’s 

appeasement of the United States from 1896 to 1903.29 By the 1890s, 

the number and power of Britain’s potential enemies were growing. 

Britain had no great power allies and faced rising imperial challenges 

from Germany and Russia, on top of continuing traditional tensions 

with France and the United States. Tensions with an industrially 

expanding Germany became especially acute when Berlin in 1898 

decided to challenge British naval supremacy in European waters. 

Accordingly, Britain decided to reduce the potential demands on its 

military power by resolving its outstanding disputes with the United 

States—specifically by meeting American demands that Britain 

explicitly accept the Monroe Doctrine; submit British Guiana’s border 

dispute with Venezuela to international arbitration; agree to U.S. 

construction, operation, and fortification of an inter-oceanic canal 

through Central America; and settle an Alaskan-Canadian border 

dispute in Washington’s favor. None of these concessions involved 

vital British security interests, which in fact were advanced by 

transforming the world’s greatest industrial power from a potential 

enemy into a friend (and later) indispensable ally. Accepting 

American dominance within the Western Hemisphere not only laid 

the foundation of U.S. entry on Britain’s side in World War I; it also 

permitted a British naval evacuation of the Western Hemisphere for 

operations in the European waters.
11

 But London’s success with the Americans in the 1890s was not to 

be repeated with the Germans in the 1930s.

WHY APPEASEMENT?

 Anglo-French appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s arose 

from multiple, mutually reinforcing sources.

Memories of the Great War.

 In 1914, the outbreak of war in Europe was greeted with great 

enthusiasm among the publics of the belligerents. The almost 

universal expectation was that the war would be short and decisive. 

War was still held to be a necessary and glorious enterprise—a 

relief from the “boredom” of peace and the “soulessness” of 

industrialization.30 In 1939, the outbreak of World War II in Europe 

was nowhere greeted by the cheering crowds of 1914. Even in 

Germany there was no exaltation outside Nazi Party circles, only a 

sullen resignation. Across Europe the expectation was of a long and 

bloody war, perhaps even a repeat of the Great War. (In fact, World 

War II lasted 2 years longer and claimed perhaps 40 million more 

lives than World War I.)

 It is virtually impossible to underestimate the influence of the 

slaughter of 1914-18 on official and public opinion in Europe during 

the 1920s and 1930s. “Every country was affected in some way by the 

First World War, and its legacy hung like a shadow over international 

relations during the inter-war period,” observes Frank McDonough. 

“Over 60 million Europeans fought in the war, 7 million died, and 21 

million were disabled or seriously wounded. Over 4 million women 

lost husbands, and 8 million children lost fathers.”31 The war had 

an especially profound impact on opinion in the primary appeasing 

power of the 1930s, Britain, where vivid memories of the lost 

comrades and loved ones and the special horrors of trench warfare 

bred an electorate of which significant segments were either pacifist 

or unwilling to contemplate the use of force outside the authority of 

the collective security framework of the League of Nations. In the 

case of Neville Chamberlain, who became prime minister in 1937 
12

and whose name has become synonymous with appeasement, there 

was a simple inability to imagine that any European statesman, even 

Hitler, could or would wish to risk a repetition of the Great War. In 

the 1920s and 1930s, observes P. M. H. Bell, 

it appeared to most statesmen in Britain and France that war was highly 

unlikely to pay. They had come to regard the last war, of 1914-18, as a 

calamity, involving human, material, and financial losses which should 

not again be incurred short of the utmost necessity. They were satisfied 

powers anxious to preserve the status quo; but they also wanted peace 

and quiet. They would eventually fight in self-defense and to prevent 

the status quo from being completely overthrown; but their optimism 

about the outcome of war was at a low ebb, and their belief in war as an 

instrument of policy was weak.32

Failure to Grasp the Nature of the Nazi Regime 

and Hitler’s Strategic Ambitions. 

 Among the sources of appeasement, misjudgment of Hitler’s 

intentions was perhaps paramount. British leaders, most notably 

Chamberlain, were especially guilty on this count. Yet even after the 

war, the eminent British historian A. J. P. Taylor sought to prove that 

Hitler was a “normal” European leader practicing the opportunism 

of realpolitik on behalf of liberating Germany from the shackles of 

Versailles and restoring Germany to a political status commensurate 

with its population and industrial power. “Hitler was no more wicked 

and unscrupulous than many other contemporary statesmen.” 

Hitler’s professed ideology consisted of nothing but “day-dreams,” 

and Hitler ended up in Russia because “his judgment was corrupted 

by easy victories,” not because he really believed it was Germany’s 

racial destiny to carve out massive lebensraum (living space) in the 

Slavic East.33

 Taylor’s thesis was never convincing and has been thoroughly 

discredited by subsequent analysis.34 The thesis could never account 

for Nazi behavior in Russia or the Holocaust; more generally, 

it willfully ignored the power of ideas in international politics. 

Much of Hitler’s foreign policy was rooted in the foreign policies 

of Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic, but Hitler’s racial 
13

and territorial objectives in Europe, to say nothing of his profound 

craving for war, lay beyond the boundaries of pre-Nazi German 

foreign policy.35 Hitler’s ideology defined the scope of his territorial 

ambitions in Europe, especially in the East. To be sure, he was a 

supreme opportunist and sought to revise the Versailles Treaty in so 

far as it held Germany down militarily and “imprisoned” much of 

the German nation outside the German state. But revisionism was 

but an enabling precondition for action on a much larger agenda 

of racial conquest and enslavement. “Race, far from being a mere 

propagandistic slogan, was the very rock on which the Nazi Church 

was built,” observes Norman Rich in his masterful assessment of 

Hitler’s war aims.36 

 Hitler was hardly the first political leader to marry tactical 

opportunism and strategic vision, but strategic vision he manifestly 

possessed. Historian Gerhard Weinberg correctly believes that Hitler 

had “a clearly formulated set of ideas on major issues of foreign policy” 

and “was able to impress his ideas on events rather than allow events 

and realities to reshape his ideas.”37 Hitler was a racial Darwinist, 

and his ideas centered on Aryan (Nordic) racial superiority and 

the imperative of carving out additional agriculturally productive 

lebensraum for the Aryan community between the Vistula and the 

Urals. Racial survival depended on racial expansion and racial 

expansion depended on spacial expansion. But spacial expansion 

also meant inevitable war, since those inferior races occupying the 

vital living space could not be expected to voluntarily submit to the 

new racial order. And since war was inevitable, it necessarily became 

a preferred policy option rather than a measure of last resort.38

Thus Hitler was not just another conservative German nationalist. 

Though many conservative nationalists supported Hitler, “Nazism 

went further,” notes P. M. H. Bell.

The restoration of the old German Empire, even at its furthest extent, 

was not enough; and conservative nationalists found that their country 

was launched on a war of racial conquest with unlimited objectives that 

was almost certain to end with disaster. At different times from 1937 

onwards, and with varying degrees of commitment, numbers of German 

conservatives parted company with the Nazi regime; though they failed 

to check its growing momentum.39
14

 But this is all clear in hindsight. At the time, most observers 

dismissed Hitler’s ideological rantings on race and lebensraum as grist 

for domestic political consumption. The highly respected economist, 

Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, a traditional conservative who was sacked 

by Hitler as Reichsbank president in 1939 for opposing Germany’s 

unbridled rearmament and who was arrested and jailed in the wake 

of the July 20, 1944, attempt on Hitler’s life, told an interviewer after 

the war that, during the 1920s and early 1930s, “No one took [Hitler’s] 

anti-Semitism seriously. We thought it was a political propaganda 

issue and would be forgotten once he got into power.”40 Taken at face 

value, Hitler’s vision of an Aryan empire stretching to the Urals was 

nothing short of fantastic; it would require the conquest of Eastern 

Europe, destruction of the Soviet Union, and “ethnic cleansing on 

a grotesque scale,” objectives beyond Germany’s strengths and 

unacceptable to the European balance of power.41 

 Ravings aside, was not treaty revision Hitler’s real objective? 

Until March 1939, when Hitler invaded the non-Germanic rump 

of Czechoslovakia, it was quite plausible to believe that Hitler’s 

military ambitions were limited to rearmament and his territorial 

ambitions to Germanic Europe. Most British leaders were convinced 

that it had been a strategic mistake to have imposed the harsh 

Versailles Treaty on Germany, and that the treaty was in any event 

unenforceable; with few exceptions they “insisted on placing German 

aspirations within the traditional European continental balance of 

power, and within the system of national self-determination for all 

people established by [Woodrow] Wilson in 1918.”42 On this basis, 

Hitler was appeasable. Was it not ridiculous to think that Germany 

could be kept in a permanent state of disarmament (including the 

Rhineland’s demilitarization) while the rest of Europe was armed? 

Did not Germany have a right to equality in this regard? Until 1939, 

Hitler’s territorial demands (union with Austria and acquisition of 

Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland) suggested no appetite for further 

expansionism and its attendant risk of general war.

 Indeed, Czechoslovakia itself was an affront to the principle of selfdetermination. Cobbled together in the name of self-determination 

from ashes of the Hapsburg Empire, it was less a national state 

than a collection of territorially based nationalities—3,250,000 

Germans (concentrated in the western and northern Czech border 
15

areas with Germany), 6,500,000 Czechs (in Bohemia and Moravia), 

about 3,000,000 Slovaks (mostly in the eastern half of the country), 

plus 700,000 Hungarians, 500,000 Ukrainians, and 60,000 Poles.43

The Czechs, who dominated the country’s political and military 

leadership, were a minority in their own country. Czechoslovakia 

proved to be as unsustainable as the former Yugoslavia: after the 

Cold War, both jerry-rigged Hapsburg successor states disintegrated, 

Czechoslovakia peacefully into the successor states of the Czech 

Republic and Slovakia (the Russians had expelled the Sudeten 

Germans in 1945), and Yugoslavia in an orgy of ethnic slaughter. No 

British government in September 1938 would have been prepared to 

go to war with Germany on the wrong side of the principle of selfdetermination and especially on behalf of a state to which Britain 

had no defense obligation.

 Neville Chamberlain believed that Hitler could be sated by 

territorial concessions, that the dictator, like Bismark before him, 

understood the limits of German power, and that he could not 

possibly want to plunge his country and the rest of Europe into 

another general war. Chamberlain did not understand, as historian 

Paul Kennedy notes, “that Hitler was fundamentally unappeasable 

and determined upon a future territorial order which small-scale 

adjustments could never satisfy.”44 More profoundly he failed 

to understand, as did Winston Churchill, that the very nature of 

the Nazi regime barred any possibility of any long-term working 

strategic relationship with British democracy.45 

 That said, Chamberlain was a forceful leader who dominated his 

cabinet; indeed, his “dramatic offer to fly to Berchtesgaden [to meet 

Hitler] effectively removed from Hitler’s hands the orchestration 

and control of the [Czech] crisis.”46 (The 69-year-old prime minister 

had never flown before.) He was not prepared to accept a Germandominated Europe; indeed, it had long been a cardinal principle 

of British statecraft to align against continental powers bent on 

continental domination. When Hitler betrayed his promise of 

no further territorial demands at Munich by invading the rest of 

Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Chamberlain and French Premier 

Edouard Daladier promptly extended defense guarantees to Poland, 

Hitler’s obvious next target. The British guarantee was extraordinary 
16

because Britain was in no position to provide even indirect military 

assistance to Poland. The guarantee was an attempt at deterrence 

via the threat of general war. 

 Unfortunately, by the summer of 1939, the credibility of such 

a threat had been vitiated by the record of Anglo-French inaction 

over the Rhineland’s remilitarization, inaction over the Austrian 

Anschluss, and the sell-out of Czechoslovakia (which enjoyed a 

mutual defense treaty with France). Hitler did not believe the British 

and French would go to war over Poland. In response to expressed 

concerns that they might, Hitler told his assembled generals on 

the eve of the invasion of Poland, “Our enemies are worms. I saw 

them at Munich.”47 Additionally, Hitler simply could not accept the 

possibility that the British “wanted to fight for a country they could 

not save.”48

 Stephen Rock, in his path-breaking assessment, Appeasement in 

International Politics, concludes that appeasement is an appropriate 

policy only under two basic conditions:

First, the adversary must not be unalterably committed to the behavior 

the appeasing state seeks to modify. The use of force, for example, if 

contemplated by the opponent, must be viewed as instrumental to the 

acquisition of a particular objective, not as an essential end in and of 

itself. Second, the adversary must be susceptible to inducements that is 

[sic] within the political and material capacity of the appeaser to make. 

If the adversary is motivated by opportunity/greed, this implies that 

there are limits to its demands; if motivated by insecurity, it implies that 

leaders are not impervious to the reassuring effects of an appeasement 

policy. The latter condition is most likely to be met when the adversary’s 

insecurity is primarily a function of the appeaser’s recent actions, rather 

than political leaders’ ideology, worldview, or paranoid mentality.49

Against Hitler in the 1930s, neither of these conditions was satisfied—

or satisfiable.

France’s Military Inflexibility. 

 The French suffered fewer illusions about Hitler’s intentions 

in Europe,50 but they had, even before 1933, voluntarily stripped 

themselves of a critical hallmark of great power status: a willingness 

and capacity to attack other great powers. Indeed, next to mis-
17

judging Hitler’s intentions in Europe, the second greatest source of 

appeasement was France’s strategic self-paralysis. Determined to 

avoid the horrendous blood losses of 1914-18, alarmed by France’s 

growing industrial and demographic inferiority to Germany, 

shackled by a 1-year term of service for conscripts, and convinced 

of the tactical and strategic superiority of the defense over the 

offense, the French General Staff embraced a rigid defensive military 

doctrine and a reserve mobilization-dependent army that precluded 

offensive military action into German territory.51 The French would 

await a German attack behind the Maginot Line, a formidable line of 

fortifications that conserved French manpower, while mobilizing the 

full strength of their army. The peacetime French army was, in fact, 

little more than a skeleton on which the wartime force mobilized; it 

lacked a standing mobile strike force.

 There was nothing inherently wrong with this force posture 

(except the inexplicable failure of the French to extend the Maginot 

Line along the Franco-Belgian border after the Belgians dissolved 

their mutual defense alliance with France). The problem was that a 

purely defensive military posture did not support France’s diplomatic 

strategy; on the contrary, it completely undercut that strategy. 

 In seeking to deter a German attack by confronting Berlin with 

the prospect of a two-front war, France sought allies in the East—

Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Yugoslavia—that 

could tie down German forces that otherwise could be thrown at 

France. Yet for such Eastern allies, France’s value as an ally depended 

on France’s willingness and ability to attack Germany in the West, 

thereby tying down forces that would otherwise be available for 

Eastern employment. Observes Henry Kissinger: “None of the new 

states of Eastern Europe stood a chance of defending themselves 

against a revisionist Germany, either through their own efforts or 

in combination with each other. Their only hope was that France 

could deter German aggression by threatening to march into the 

Rhineland.”52 Yet as General Maurice Gamelin, the Chief of the French 

General Staff, confessed after Germany’s military reoccupation of 

the Rhineland in 1936, “The idea of sending a French expeditionary 

corps into the Rhineland, even in a more or less symbolic form, is 

unrealistic. . . . our military system does not give us this possibility. 
18

Our active army is only the nucleus of the mobilized national 

army. . . . None of our units are capable of being placed instantly on 

a complete war footing.”53

 In the Inter-War period France had created, in the words of 

Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, the great French historian of French 

diplomacy during the 1930s, “two contradictory security systems. . . . 

a [political]system of Eastern alliances and an alliance with Belgium 

. . . [and] a defensive [military] posture preparing a vast mobilization 

behind a fortified frontier.”54 Both deterrence and coercive diplomacy 

rest on credibly threatened force, and France lacked the political 

will and military capacity to make credible threats of force. French 

diplomacy called for a military hammer, but the French military 

provided only an anvil.

 In this regard, Hitler’s military reoccupation of the Rhineland in 

March 1936 was a much greater strategic disaster for the democracies 

than the sellout of Czechoslovakia in September 1938, but not because 

the Rhineland remilitarization blocked a French attack into Germany; 

France, as we have seen, had no intention of attacking Germany even 

through an undefended Rhineland. The disaster lay in the irreparable 

blow to French prestige. French failure to fire a single shot at token 

German military forces entering territory so vital to France’s security 

advertised France to the rest of the Continent as a feckless security 

partner. French inaction reinforced Belgium’s decision to drop its 

alliance with France in favor of neutrality,55 exposing France to the 

very German attack that was delivered through Belgium 4 years 

later; it encouraged Mussolini, who in thwarting a Berlin-sponsored 

Nazi coup in Austria 2 years earlier had handed Hitler a major 

foreign policy defeat,56 to move closer to the German dictator; it left 

Austria exposed to virtually certain German annexation, thereby 

compromising Czechoslovakia’s defense; and it undermined the 

Eastern allies’ confidence in France. The Rhineland debacle even 

prompted Pope Pius XI to tell the French ambassador that, “Had 

you ordered the immediate advance of 200,000 men into the zone the 

Germans had occupied, you would have done everyone a very great 

favor.”57 

 But it was not just what France lost in the Rhineland; it was also 

what Hitler gained. Hitler later admitted that the first “48 hours after 
19

the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-racking of my 

life” because if French forces had entered the Rhineland in response, 

“we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, 

for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly 

inadequate for even a moderate resistance.”58 As it was, concluded 

William L. Shirer:

Hitler’s successful gamble in the Rhineland brought him a victory more 

staggering and more fatal in its immense consequences than could be 

comprehended at the time. At home it fortified his popularity and his 

power, raising them to heights which no German ruler of the past had 

ever enjoyed. . . . It taught [his generals] that in foreign affairs and even in 

military affairs his judgment was superior to theirs. They had feared that 

the French would fight; he knew better. And finally, and above all, the 

Rhineland occupation, small as it was as a military operation, opened the 

way, as only Hitler (and Churchill, alone, in England) seemed to realize, 

to vast new opportunities in a Europe which was not only shaken but 

whose strategic situation was irrevocably changed by the parading of 

three German battalions across the Rhine bridges.59

 The foundation of French appeasement was military incapacity 

to act against Germany. This incapacity was inexcusable, given that 

France was, unlike Britain, directly menaced overland by Germany, 

suffered fewer illusions about Nazi ambitions in Europe, required 

allies in Eastern Europe, possessed the largest army in Europe (upon 

mobilization), and was far less strategically stressed than Britain by 

threatened imperial defense obligations.

 That said, it is important to recognize that both French and 

international military opinion had considerable confidence that 

France could put up a stiff defense against a German invasion—that 

French defenses were sufficiently strong to force Germany into a 

protracted war which the German economy would be ill prepared to 

sustain. There was a general belief in Britain and France that another 

world war would be a long attritional contest in which Germany 

would be worn down to the point of exhaustion by superior Allied 

resources (which, in fact, proved to be the case, though not for 

France). Indeed, a war of attrition, it was believed, was the only 

strategy available to inflict a decisive military defeat on Germany. 

The stunning blitzkrieg of May-June 1940 was foreseen by no one, 
20

including the Germans, who in the event were surprised by the 

speed and totality of the Allied collapse. Nor was it foreseen that 

Hitler would conquer sufficient resources in Europe to deny Britain 

and France any chance of victory through attrition. Even Churchill 

understood, after the fall of France in June 1940, that the British 

empire had no hope of defeating Hitler absent Soviet and American 

entry into the war (which Hitler promptly supplied in June and 

December 1941, respectively). Indeed, given Britain’s strategic 

position after the fall of Dunkirk, cold-blooded realism would have 

dictated a settlement of the war with Germany (London’s recognition 

of Germany’s domination of the Continent in exchange for Berlin’s 

guarantee of the British Empire). Interest in such a settlement was 

present within Churchill’s cabinet in the wake of Dunkirk, and 

postwar historians who have sought to rehabilitate Chamberlain’s 

reputation have argued that Churchill’s decision to fight on was an 

egregious mistake because it doomed Britain to loss of empire and 

postwar strategic dependence on the United States.60

 The twin convictions that the German economy could not 

sustain a war of attrition and that Britain and France in alliance had 

a good chance of imposing such a war on Germany in the event of 

hostilities account in large measure for the lack of enthusiasm of 

traditional German nationalists, including senior army leaders, for 

any threatened or actual military action that risked general war. 

The convictions also underpin the Anglo-French decision to go to 

war with Germany in September 1939; states are not in the habit of 

voluntarily entering wars they believe they will lose, and there was 

little reason for Britain and France to believe that Germany could 

defeat them outright. Neither London nor Paris wanted a war with 

Germany, but they were finally persuaded they had to fight one.

Britain’s Strategic Overstretch. 

 If French military credibility was compromised by bad strategy, 

Britain’s was undercut by a multiplicity of military obligations 

that far exceeded her capacity to act upon them. World War I had 

greatly weakened Britain’s financial power though she inherited 

even greater imperial obligations as a result of the war’s destruction 
21

of the German and Turkish empires; during the 1930s, Britain still 

controlled a quarter of the world but with only 9-10 percent of its 

manufacturing strength and war production potential.61 Yet as the 

1930s progressed, Britain faced a rising German threat in Europe, 

a mounting Japanese threat in the Far East, and an expanding 

Italian threat in the Mediterranean—Britain’s vital imperial line of 

communication to India and the Far East via Gibraltar, Malta, and 

the Suez Canal. Small wonder that in 1935 the Committee of Imperial 

Defense (CID) concluded:

We consider it to be a cardinal requirement of our national and imperial 

security that our foreign policy should be so conducted as to avoid . . . 

a situation in which we might be confronted simultaneously with the 

hostility, open or veiled, of Japan in the Far East, Germany in the West, and 

any power on the main line of communication between the two. . . . [W]e 

cannot foresee the time when our defense forces will be strong enough 

to safeguard our territory, trade and vital interests against Germany, 

Italy and Japan simultaneously. We cannot, therefore, exaggerate the 

importance, from the point of view of Imperial defense, of any political 

or international action that can be taken to reduce the numbers of our 

potential enemies or to gain the support of potential allies.62

 The call to reduce the numbers of Britain’s potential enemies 

was a call to appease Germany or Italy or Japan in order to free up 

military resources to deal with those who remained unappeased; it 

was a call that was hardly unreasonable especially as the German 

and Japanese threats greatly worsened during the 3 years separating 

the CID assessment and the Czech crisis of September 1938. 

 Chamberlain had no global military running room by the time of 

Munich. He certainly had no means of defending Czechoslovakia 

or any other Eastern European state not readily accessible by sea. In 

March 1938 the British Chiefs of Staff had submitted an assessment 

on the implications of a German attack on Czechoslovakia that 

concluded:

[N]o military pressure we can exact by sea, or land or in the air can prevent 

Germany either from invading and overrunning Bohemia or inflicting a 

decisive defeat on the Czechoslovakian army. If politically it is deemed 

necessary to restore Czechoslovakia’s lost integrity, this aim will entail 

war with Germany, and her defeat may mean a prolonged struggle. In 
22

short, we can do nothing to prevent the dog getting the bone, and we 

have no means of making him give it up, except by killing him by a slow 

process of attrition and starvation.63

 Britain was not in a position to project military power east of 

the Rhine; the Royal Navy was preoccupied with the Italian and 

Japanese threats; and the Royal Air Force was in the middle of 

rearming. Moreover, as Richard Overy points out, Chamberlain had 

been prime minister for only a year, and he was “understandably not 

prepared to crown that period by deliberately courting a war that all 

his military advisers warned him would destroy the Empire.”64

 Britain was not even in a position to contribute to the ground 

defense of France and the Low Countries. The British army had 

no defined strategic role in the 1930s outside of home and imperial 

defense, and it was not until after Munich that the Chamberlain 

government reintroduced conscription and concluded that a 

continental commitment for the British army was unavoidable. 

Until 1939, British political leaders and such influential strategic 

thinkers as B. H. Liddell Hart believed, or at least wanted to believe, 

that Britain could limit its liability in a future European war by 

restricting its role to the provision of naval and air power.65 (During 

the Napoleonic era, noted Liddell Hart, Britain’s main contribution 

to France’s defeat had been sea power and the extension of financial 

credits to continental coalitions that provided the ground forces.) 

Determined to avoid a repetition of the trench warfare horrors of 

1914-18, increasingly fearful of the German air threat (see discussion 

below), and persuaded that France and its Eastern allies, which from 

1935 on included Czechoslovakia and nominally the Soviet Union,66

would not require a major British ground force contribution in a war 

with Germany, British governments in the 1930s focused increasing 

defense expenditure on the Royal Air Force at the expense of the 

army.67 Following Czechoslovakia’s dismemberment, however, 

the Chamberlain cabinet moved quickly toward the view that a 

continental commitment could no longer be avoided; even so, it was 

not until February 1939 that Chamberlain finally authorized such 

a commitment in the form of two divisions within 21 days of the 

beginning of hostilities, with another two to follow within 65 days—

drops in the bucket compared to a fully mobilized French army and 
23

a rapidly expanding German army.68 (When war came in September, 

the French put 84 divisions in the field; and the Germans, 103.69)

 There was, too, the problem of the Empire’s self-governing 

dominions. Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand had 

brought substantial resources to the British side in World War I, but 

their participation in another great European war could no longer 

be taken for granted. None of the dominions had any threatened 

interest in such a war unless Britain itself was attacked. They certainly 

had no interest in supporting a British fight over Czechoslovakia; 

they shared Chamberlain’s view of Hitler’s intentions in Europe 

and were greatly relieved that Chamberlain had avoided war at 

Munich. It was Japan, not Germany, that threatened Australia and 

New Zealand; and all the dominions had a shared interest in British 

defense spending that sustained the primacy of naval power, even 

at the expense of Britain’s homeland air defenses. Predictably, 

Chamberlain did not hesitate to cite the dominions’ European waraversity to the French as a restraint on British freedom of military 

action.70 But with good reason. “It would have been as preposterous 

as it was politically impossible for the dominions to have declared 

in 1938 that they would throw their armed forces into a European 

war,” observes Michael Graham Fry.71

France’s Strategic Dependence on Britain. 

 If Britain’s acute strategic overstretch counseled appeasement, it 

also propelled France along the path of appeasement because the 

French believed they could not act against Hitler militarily without 

the British in tow. France could not hope to defeat Germany by 

itself. Dependence was a function of Germany’s growing industrial 

and demographic superiority over France72 and the capacity of the 

Nazi regime to mobilize German nationalism to a degree which the 

politically chaotic and decaying Third Republic never could rally 

French nationalism. It did not help that much of British political 

opinion was sympathetic to Germany’s revisions of the Versailles 

Treaty’s rearmament and territorial prohibitions. Yet, as Arthur H. 

Furnia points out, Versailles revisionism “permitted a rebellious 

Germany to augment her growing strength . . . [and] each increase 
24

in German strength made France that much more dependent upon 

Britain and the whims of British foreign policy.”73

 A strategy of “waiting for Britain” effectively gave the British 

veto power over French policy toward Germany and failed to 

recognize London’s lack of appreciation of the French need for 

security alliances in Eastern Europe, a region to which Britain was 

not prepared to extend security guarantees until after Munich. 

But the French understood that “the basic military equation in 

western Europe remained a France of 40 million confronted by 75 

million Germans and 40 million Italians,” an equation that dictated 

“cooperation in appeasement until the policy succeeded or until the 

British themselves woke up to its futility.”74

 This does not excuse France for participating in the diplomatic 

dismemberment of a state it was committed by treaty to defend. If 

France sacrificed its status as a great power by adopting a purely 

defensive military posture, it sacrificed its honor at Munich. Writing 

of the Munich Conference after the war, Winston Churchill observed 

that “For almost 20 years [Czech] President [Edward] Benes had 

been a faithful ally and almost vassal of France, always supporting 

French policies and French interests in the League of Nations and 

elsewhere. If ever there was a case of solemn obligation, it was here 

and now. . . . It was a portent of doom when a French government 

failed to keep the word of France.”75

 But for both Britain and France, more than French honor was at 

stake. Czechoslovakia may not have been sustainable as a national 

state over the long run, but in 1938 it was the only democracy 

in Central Europe and formed a significant strategic barrier to 

German expansion into Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Indeed, 

a major failure of British diplomacy during the run-up to Munich 

was its almost willful disregard of Czechoslovakia’s formidable 

military capabilities.76 During the Czech crisis of September 1938, 

the German Army fielded 37 divisions (5 of them facing France) 

to Czechoslovakia’s 35 divisions (plus 5 fortress divisions).77

Moreover, the Czechs enjoyed three strategic advantages: they were 

on the defensive, operated along interior lines of communication, 

and possessed formidable defensive terrain and fortifications along 

the German-Czech border. Czechoslovakia also had the largest 
25

armaments production complex in Central Europe (the Nazi takeover 

of Czechoslovakia in 1939 boosted Germany’s arms production by 15 

percent, and the arms and equipment of the disbanded Czech army 

were sufficient to fit out 20 new German divisions78). 

 Though most historians believe that Germany could have beaten 

Czechoslovakia in 1938, there is little doubt that Czechoslovakia 

would have proved a much harder nut to crack in 1938 than was 

Poland a year later. In his assessment of the European military 

balance during the last 2 years before the war, Williamson Murray 

concludes that a German campaign against Czechoslovakia in 

September 1938 “would have involved significantly higher casualties 

than the campaign against Poland in 1939” because “of the nature of 

the terrain, the equipment of the Czech army, Czech fortifications, 

and the general state of unpreparedness of the German armored 

force.”79

 This was certainly the view of Germany’s military leadership, 

which did not believe Germany was ready for war, had little 

confidence in a quick win over Czechoslovakia, and was fearful 

of leaving the weakly fortified Rhineland open to possible French 

attack.80 There was even discussion of a coup against Hitler on the 

part of General Ludwig Beck, Chief of the Army General Staff; his 

successor, General Franz Halder; and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, 

head of the Abwehr (the German military and counter-intelligence 

organization), should Hitler proceed to act on his announced 

decision to invade Czechoslovakia.81 Indeed, in late August 1938 

the German General Staff and Foreign Office secretly dispatched 

representatives to London to warn such known anti-Hitler hardliners 

as Robert Vansittart and Winston Churchill of Hitler’s plan to invade 

Czechoslovakia in September.82 “The prime objective,” concludes 

German historian Klaus-Jurgen Muller,

was to bring about a situation in which Hitler would be forced or frightened 

into dropping war from his agenda. For this to happen evidence must be 

produced that the Western powers would oppose with armed force any 

further German expansion; that if war came, Germany’s allies would not 

rally to the side of the Reich; that the German economy was not prepared 

for war; and finally that the desired aim could be achieved without resort 

to armed force.83
26

One German representative declared that German Army leaders 

were all opposed to war “but they will not have the power to stop it 

unless they get encouragement and help from the outside.”84

 Ironically, Chamberlain provided that help. In September 1938 

Hitler was bent on invading and conquering all of Czechoslovakia. 

At the height of the crisis, he declared to Sudeten leader Konrad 

Henlein: “Long live war—even if it lasts from 2 to 8 years!”85 Hitler 

wanted war because he was innately bloody-minded, because he 

sought the entire Czech state (the Sudetenland issue was a pretext), 

because the Czechs had embarrassed him in May by mobilizing their 

forces against a falsely reported imminent German attack,86 because in 

the wake of that embarrassment he had announced to his assembled 

generals his unalterable intention to smash Czechoslovakia, and—

probably—because “Hitler was keen to demonstrate to his more 

timid generals that he was going to be an active supreme commander. 

The Czech crisis was an opportunity to challenge and test the officer 

elite, as well as the surviving conservatives in the government.”87

Hitler was well aware of the decided lack of enthusiasm among 

the military leadership, Foreign Office, and the German population 

at large. (Chamberlain was wildly cheered by German crowds in 

Munich as the real savior of peace in Europe.88) Mussolini was also 

opposed to war, as was Herman Goering.89

 The key factor in Hitler’s back-down from his threat to invade 

Czechoslovakia was the possibility that the British and French 

would fight if Germany attacked Czechoslovakia,90 and the key 

event here may have been Hitler’s meeting with Sir Horace Wilson, 

Chamberlain’s personal emissary, on September 27.91 Chamberlain’s 

cabinet was divided over what amounted to a German ultimatum 

threatening the use of force unless Czechoslovakia accepted an 

immediate German takeover of the Sudetenland; opinion was 

hardening against Hitler, and it was decided to send Wilson to 

Berlin with a written plea for further negotiation, and failing that, 

a “special message” to be delivered orally. In “the clearest and 

strongest threat made by the British government during the month 

of the Munich crisis,”92 that message stated: “If Germany attacked 

Czechoslovakia, France, as Daladier had informed us and as he had 

stated publicly, would fulfill her treaty obligations. If that meant that 
27

the forces of France became actively engaged in hostilities against 

Germany, the British Government would feel obliged to support 

France.”93 Hitler rejected the written plea, and the “special message” 

was then delivered. Hitler clearly understood it to be a threat of 

war if he invaded Czechoslovakia, and “he clearly did not want war 

with the western powers.”94 According to one of Hitler’s adjutants, 

Fritz Wiedemann, Hitler told Goering: “You see, Goering, at the last 

moment I thought the British fleet would shoot.”95

 The British historian Richard Overy has observed:

It is easy to see why Chamberlain saw Munich as victory, and Hitler saw 

it as a defeat. From a position of military weakness and inferiority, with 

no firm allies, and an array of diplomatic imponderables, Chamberlain 

had almost single-handedly averted war between Germany and 

Czechoslovakia and compelled Hitler, for the last time, to work within 

the Western framework [of negotiation of territorial disputes.]96

 Hitler had sought to use the “persecution” of the Germany 

community in Czechoslovakia issue as a pretext for the conquest of all 

of Czechoslovakia; he had not foreseen Chamberlain’s willingness to 

accept the Sudetenland’s peaceful transfer to Germany. Chamberlain 

had wrecked his plans. “The most disappointed man of Munich was 

Adolph Hitler,” contends J. W. Wheeler-Bennett, author of an early 

work on the Munich Conference. Chamberlain and Daladier “had 

made so wholesale a surrender of Czechoslovakia that even Adolph 

Hitler could not find an excuse to go to war.”97 On his return to Berlin 

from Munich, Hitler told Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht, 

“That fellow [Chamberlain] has spoiled my entry into Prague.”98

 Hitler regarded Munich as a defeat and came to regret allowing 

himself to be talked and coerced out of war, and during the Polish 

crisis of August 1939 was determined not to retreat from war as he 

had at Munich.99 “All his actions during the Polish crisis can be 

seen as a response to the defeat he felt he had suffered personally in 

agreeing to pull back at the end of September 1938,” concludes Hitler 

biographer Ian Kershaw.100 In 1945 Hitler told Martin Bormann:

September 1938, that was the most favorable moment, when an attack 

carried the lowest risk for us. . . . Great Britain and France, surprised by 

the speed of our attack, would have done nothing, all the more since we 

had world opinion on our side . . . we could have settled the remaining 
28

territorial questions in Eastern Europe and the Balkans without fearing 

intervention from the Anglo-French powers. . . . We ourselves would have 

won the necessary time for our own moral and material rearmament and 

a second world war, even if it was altogether unavoidable, would have 

been postponed for years.101

After the war, Paul O. Schmidt, who was Hitler’s interpreter and 

was constantly at Hitler’s side during the Nazi leader’s discussions 

with Chamberlain, recounted Hitler’s disgust at Chamberlain’s 

popularity among ordinary Germans:

Chamberlain was warmly welcomed at Munich. He was the hero of the 

German people on that occasion. It was definitely Chamberlain who 

was the idol of the German people in Munich—not Hitler. The German 

masses gave flowers to Chamberlain. One could see on their faces 

that they thanked Chamberlain for saving the peace of Europe despite 

Hitler. 

Hitler didn’t like this show at all. He feared it would give the impression 

that the German people were pacifists, which, or course, would be 

unpardonable in the eyes of the Nazis. Therefore, the Nazis didn’t like 

this Munich show at all.102

William L. Shirer was in Berlin during the crisis and noted Berliners’ 

decided lack of enthusiasm for war. To stir up war fever among the 

populace, Hitler ordered a motorized division to parade through the 

capital, which turned into a fiasco. As Shirer recorded in his diary:

I went out to the corner of the Linden where the column [of troops] 

was turning down the Wilhemstrasse, expecting to see a tremendous 

demonstration. I pictured the scenes I had read of in 1914 when the 

cheering throngs on this same street tossed flowers at the marching 

soldiers, and the girls ran up and kissed them. . . . But today they ducked 

into subways, refused to look on, and the handful that did stood at the 

curb in utter silence. . . . It has been the most striking demonstration 

against war I’ve ever seen.103

 As for Chamberlain and Daladier, historian Gerhard L. Weinberg 

rightly stresses “the enormous significance of the circumstances in 

which military action is considered and the perceptions of such 

action at the time by both by those who have to make the decision 
29

and by the segments of the public that will have to bear the burdens 

of any war.” In this context, he concludes, “it is surprising that in 

the crisis over Czechoslovakia there was any serious consideration 

of going to war at all in Britain or France.”104

 A most intriguing if unanswerable question about Munich 

is: what if Czechoslovakia had decided to fight anyway? AngloFrench abandonment did not dictate Prague’s renunciation of the 

inherent right of self-defense. The Czech military strongly favored 

resistance, and Churchill believed that a Czech decision to fight 

would have shamed France into war.105 And who knows what might 

have happened then? At a minimum, Czech resistance would have 

bloodied Germany militarily and postponed Hitler’s turn on Poland 

probably into the spring of 1940. Maybe his own generals would 

have moved against him. Moreover, as the Soviet Union was also a 

nominal treaty ally of Czechoslovakia though the two states shared 

no common border, a fighting Czechoslovakia, especially if joined 

by France, almost certainly would have delayed, if not altogether 

eliminated, the emergence of any incentive on Stalin’s part to cut the 

kind of strategic deal he made with Hitler in August 1939. President 

Benes’ decision not to order the defense of his own country for fear 

that a vengeful Hitler would slaughter the Czech nation may have 

been a more fateful one than the Anglo-French capitulation to Hitler 

on the Sudetenland issue.106

Guilt Over Versailles. 

 Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland was Hitler’s last territorial 

acquisition that could be justified on the principle of selfdetermination. Between his assumption of power in January 1933 

and the conclusion of the Munich Conference in September 1938, 

Hitler worked to rectify what he, all Germans, and many in Britain 

regarded as injustices imposed on the German state and nation by 

the vengeful victors of World War I. “Until 1938,” observes British 

historian R. A. C. Parker, “British policy towards Germany was 

dictated by the belief among the majority of the British public that 

Germany had real grievances which should be rectified, grievances 

which derived, in large part, from the alleged follies of French foreign 

policy.”107 
30

 The Treaty of Versailles was indisputably vindictive. The treaty 

assigned Germany blame for World War I; imposed crushing 

reparations on Germany; stripped Germany of its colonies and all 

but token military power; demilitarized the Rhineland; prohibited 

German union with Austria; and arbitrarily redrew Germany’s 

southern and eastern borders, peeling off significant territory and 

population. As such, “it was widely regarded among historians, 

economists, politicians, and policymakers as an unjust peace” and 

“these guilt feelings effectively obstructed action to enforce its terms 

when . . . the Third Reich started casting off the treaty restrictions.”108

This harsh and unwise diktat was imposed at gunpoint and was 

unenforceable absent the constant threat of war by those who 

imposed it. However, British opinion began turning against the 

treaty (and against continued French belligerence toward Germany) 

within months after its conclusion in 1919.

 The British opposed risking war to enforce a treaty they believed 

to have been a mistake in the first place, and they believed it inevitable 

that Hitler would rearm and cast off other Versailles restrictions on 

Germany. Indeed, in anticipation of inevitable German rearmament, 

Britain cut a naval deal with Germany in 1935 that violated the Treaty 

of Versailles and gave Hitler a green light to start building a navy, 

including submarines. The Anglo-German Naval Treaty, which 

Hitler repudiated just 4 years later, permitted Germany to construct 

tonnage up to 35 percent of that the Royal Navy. Since Germany 

was starting from scratch, the agreement invited the Third Reich to 

build a navy as a fast as it could. The agreement shocked the French, 

who had not been consulted in advance, and encouraged Mussolini 

to believe that the British were too scared of Hitler to oppose the 

aggression he was about to launch in Abyssinia.109 Not until March 

1939, when Hitler broke the Munich Agreement, did British and 

French policy toward Germany converge on a willingness to go to 

war to stop further Nazi expansion.

Dread of Strategic Bombing and Misjudgment 

of the Nazi Air Threat. 

 Both governments and publics in Britain and France were gripped 

by a generic dread of mass air attacks on cities, and governments 
31

misread the size and nature of the German Luftwaffe, taking at face 

value Hitler’s announcement in 1935 that Germany already had air 

parity with Britain.110 They saw in war with Germany immediate 

and massive air attacks on London and Paris. The dread of air attack 

stemmed from a belief that strategic bombardment was irresistible 

and that its potential effects could include rapid disintegration of 

the political and social order. In 1932 British Prime Minister Stanley 

Baldwin had famously declared: “There is no power on earth that 

can protect [its people] from being bombed. . . . The bombers will 

always get through. The only defense is in offense, which means 

that you have to kill more women and children than the enemy if 

you want to save yourselves.”111 Baldwin’s view was certainly the 

starting point for British and American air power advocates from 

the early 1920s onward. They believed that air power, not armies 

and navies, would determine the outcome of future wars, and that 

the best defense against air attack was a good offense in the form of 

massive bomber forces. They rejected investment in defenses which 

(in the days before radar and “pursuit” aircraft that could fly as fast 

as bombers) they rightly regarded as futile, and they were firmly 

opposed to diverting air power to assist ground and naval forces.

 Until the summer of 1938, the Royal Air Force (RAF) remained 

committed to deterrence of air attack via the threat of retaliatory 

strategic bombardment. The persistence of this commitment was 

extraordinary, given the RAF’s lack of bombers with sufficient range 

and payload to inflict more than token damage on Germany. Indeed, 

the strength of the RAF’s ideological commitment to strategic bombing 

stood in stark contrast to its inability to provide convincing answers 

to such basic questions as what targets to bomb, how to reach them, 

chances of hitting them, how hard to hit them, how to determine 

damage inflicted, and what effect on German morale and industry? 

“The RAF was, in the late 1930s,” observes air power historian 

Tami Davis Biddle, “an organization facing the fact that it could not 

carry out its own declaratory policy.”112 Ironically, the Chamberlain 

government, on the recommendation of Sir Thomas Inskip, Minister 

for the Coordination of Defense, had already decided to shift the 

RAF’s funding priority from bombers to fighters. Inskip believed 

that German bombers could be more easily destroyed by British 
32

fighters in British air space than by British bombers over German 

airfields and aircraft production sites; fighters also were much 

cheaper to build than bombers, and the appearance of radar would 

tell Fighter Command where the attacking German bombers were.113

Over the strong objections of the RAF, the Chamberlain government 

thus opted for defense over deterrence, thereby paving the way for 

the 1940 Battle of Britain, perhaps the most critical defensive battle 

of World War II.

 The misreading of the Nazi air threat stemmed from failure to 

appreciate, especially in Britain, that German air power was being 

developed primarily for purposes other than strategic bombardment, 

and from deliberate strategic deception by Berlin and such influential 

American dupes as Charles A. Lindberg, a pro-Nazi defeatist who 

trumpeted German air power’s irresistibility to British, French, 

and American audiences. Because the RAF “lacked adequate 

information on the purpose of the Luftwaffe . . . British air planners 

assumed that its role would not be very much different from the role 

they envisaged for the RAF.”114 The assumption was that Germany 

would attempt a knock-out strike against London, and as early as 

1934 Winston Churchill, a persistent purveyor of inflated estimates 

of German air strength,115 argued that Germany was approaching air 

parity with Britain and would have three times the RAF’s strength 

by 1937.116 On the eve of Munich, Lindberg’s widely reported view 

was that “Germany now has the means of destroying London, Paris, 

and Praha [Prague] if she wishes to do so. England and France 

together do not have enough modern planes for effective defense.”117

(On the eve of the Munich Conference British intelligence estimated 

that Germany had a total of 1,963 combat-ready fighters, bombers, 

and dive bombers, when Germany actually fielded a total of only 

1,194.118) P. M. H. Bell believes that “Munich was a victory for the 

terror which the Germans inspired by displaying the Luftwaffe with 

panache, and letting their opponents’ nerves do the rest.”119

 Germany, in fact, had nothing of the sort of air capacity 

Lindberg claimed. A fleet of long-range four-engine bombers lay 

beyond Germany’s technical and industrial reach in the 1930s, and 

strategic bombardment was, in any event, alien to the kind of war 

the Germans planned to fight. “Luftwaffe planners, keenly aware 
33

of Germany’s continental position, recognized that pursuit of an air 

strategy divorced from ground operations represented a luxury the 

Reich could not contemplate.”120 Accordingly, the Germans built an 

air force of short-range light bombers, dive bombers, and fighters 

designed to support army operations; it was a force whose limitations 

as an instrument of strategic bombardment were evident in the Battle 

of Britain, notwithstanding the relatively short distances separating 

Luftwaffe air bases in France and key targets in southern England. 

Nevertheless, “the misapprehension of a Germany prepared to strike 

a ‘knock-out’ blow continued right up to the war’s outbreak.”121

 The French were thoroughly pessimistic over the Nazi air threat. 

Though French intelligence correctly concluded that the Luftwaffe’s 

primary role was to support German army operations,122 the 

leadership of the French air force had no confidence in its own service 

in a contest with the Luftwaffe. The French air force offered Daladier 

no offensive options and no convincing defensive options against a 

sustained Luftwaffe assault.123 Though nominally an independent 

service since 1930, the French air force was organizationally and 

doctrinally tied to the methodical defensive strategy of the French 

army; it had no capacity to wage a coherent air war against either 

the Luftwaffe or German industry. Additionally, French aircraft 

factories lacked mass production techniques and suffered chronic 

labor unrest; worse still, French air planners made premature 

procurement decisions that rendered much of the French air force 

obsolete in 1940.124 Finally, France, like Britain, fell for Berlin’s 

strategic deception on the strength of German air power. A month 

before the Munich conference, General Joseph Vuillemin, chief of the 

French air staff, was invited to pay the Luftwaffe an official visit. In 

Germany he was wined and dined, taken to air bases and aircraft 

production factories, and treated to “a pageant of German military 

power calculated to kill any French intention to use its admittedly 

weak air force, even though it was the only way that Czechoslovakia 

could be given any immediate aid.”125 The visit convinced the 

already pessimistic Vuillemin that the Luftwaffe could destroy the 

French air force in no more than 2 weeks.126

 Robert Jervis argues convincingly that Britain until 1939 was 

effectively “self-deterred” from taking military action against Nazi 

Germany by an exaggerated fear that “Germany would wipe out 
34

London at the start of a world war.” Though this fear represented a 

“fundamental misreading of Germany air policy and air strength,” it 

nonetheless guided British decisionmaking.127 Moreover, as Dominic 

Johnson points out, an exaggerated German air threat supported the 

agendas of both appeasers and anti-appeasers. “For the former it 

demonstrated that war would be very costly and should therefore be 

avoided; for the latter a larger Luftwaffe demonstrated that Germany 

had become more aggressive and therefore that the RAF must be 

built up to oppose it.”128

Public Opinion. 

 Not until 1939, after Hitler violently breached the Munich 

Agreement with his invasion of the remainder of Czechoslovakia, 

did British and French public opinion harden against Hitler to the 

point where it was prepared to risk war to prevent further German 

expansion. Just 6 months earlier, both Chamberlain and Daladier 

had returned from Munich to cheering crowds of their respective 

countrymen who were joyously relieved that war had been avoided 

over Czechoslovakia.

 The shift in British opinion was key because of France’s strategic 

dependence on Britain and because significant segments of the 

post-World War I British and French electorates were pacifist 

and/or committed to complete disarmament. In Britain, 4 years of 

unprecedented bloodletting in Flanders followed by a vindictive 

“peace” treaty convinced many that the war had been a terrible 

mistake and the Versailles Treaty not much better. Thus the famous 

1933 Oxford Union vote in favor of the motion: “That this House will 

in no circumstances fight for its King and County.” (The vote was 275 

ayes to 153 nays.)129 War phobia was particularly pronounced with 

respect to Germany because, as the liberal editor of the New Statesman 

and Nation observed in 1929, “Almost everyone, Conservatives, 

Liberals, and Labour alike, regarded the French notion of keeping 

Germany permanently as a second-class power as absurd, and agreed 

that the Versailles Treaty must be revised in Germany’s favor.”130

The combination of war trauma induced by the experience of 1914-

18 and sympathy toward a Versailles-wronged Germany effectively 
35

precluded any British government from carrying the country into 

war with Germany until Hitler clearly revealed his aggressive 

intentions beyond Germanic Europe. It is improbable that even the 

eloquent, Nazi-despising Churchill, had he been prime minister in 

1938, could have mobilized public opinion for war with Hitler over 

the fate of Germans in a mistakenly created country that Britain was 

in no position to save.

 The situation was not one in which British and French leaders 

were imprisoned by public opinion; statesmen seek to lead rather than 

simply follow public opinion—and both Chamberlain and Daladier 

were experienced men in the business of government. Rather, the 

situation was one in which Daladier could not hope to mobilize French 

opinion for military action against Germany absent unambiguous 

British support for such action, and in which Chamberlain was still 

of the view that Hitler’s aims in Europe were sufficiently limited to 

be accommodated via concession and negotiation. One could hardly 

expect Chamberlain to attempt to mobilize British public opinion for 

a war he believed was both unnecessary and avoidable—indeed, a 

war that he almost single-handedly thwarted at Munich via the very 

threat of war itself. 

American Isolationism. 

 U.S. intervention in World War I on the side of Britain and 

France sealed Germany’s military fate, and had the United States 

remained politically engaged in Europe after the war, the course of 

events on the Continent might have been different. France wanted 

a defensive military alliance with Britain and the United States as a 

deterrent to future German aggression, and had such an alliance been 

established and had it remained credible (via perhaps the forward 

deployment of British and American combat forces in France), it is 

difficult to imagine Hitler courting war with the great coalition that 

had defeated Imperial Germany. Hitler, who sought to dominate the 

entire continent, might have been compelled to settle for a German 

empire confined to Eastern Europe and Russia. 

 Norman Rich, in his assessment of the reasoning behind Hitler’s 

fatal declaration of war on the United States following the Japanese 

attack on Pearl Harbor, contends that Hitler, though he expressed 
36

contempt for American military capabilities “to instill courage in 

people justifiably fearful about America’s strength,” pursued prePearl Harbor policies toward the United States that were “determined 

by a very realistic respect for American power and by a constant fear 

that America might intervene in the war before Germany’s position 

on the European continent had been consolidated.”131 Until the 

Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hitler was careful not to provoke 

war with an increasingly belligerent Franklin D. Roosevelt because 

he was greatly impressed with America’s sheer size and capacity 

for mass production.132 (His views on America’s racial composition 

were another matter.)

 America, of course, absented itself from Europe’s political 

affairs during the Inter-War period. It took World War II and the 

postwar emergence of the Soviet threat to convince most Americans 

that the key to avoiding entanglement in yet another European 

war was to establish peacetime military alliances with threatened 

states. Roosevelt, who from the beginning had reservations about 

the wisdom of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, grasped the 

nature and severity of the Nazi threat long before he was politically 

able to do much about it. By the end of 1937, he was persuaded 

that the Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany, Japan, and Italy 

constituted a secret offensive-defensive alliance aimed at world 

conquest, and though he subsequently flirted with appeasement 

because Chamberlain seemed committed to it, the Munich Agreement 

and the bloody November 1938 Nazi anti-Jewish pogrom known as 

Kristallnacht convinced Roosevelt that Hitler’s aims were unlimited 

and that Nazi Germany could be stopped only by credibly threatened 

force.133 

 Roosevelt’s freedom of action, however, was severely limited not 

just by a decidedly isolationist Congress but also by Anglo-French 

appeasement of Hitler. The Neutrality Act of 1937 prohibited 

the United States from supplying arms or extending any loans or 

credits to any belligerent in a future European war. Because the 

act made no distinction between aggressor states and their victims, 

it blocked Roosevelt from assisting Europe’s democracies if they 

were attacked by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. In so doing, it 

eliminated the possibility of credible American threats to participate 
37

in the strategic containment of Hitler and Mussolini. It is testimony 

to the isolationists’ grip on the Congress (as well as Capitol Hill’s 

determination to reverse what it saw as a growing Executive Branch 

accretion of power at the expense of the Legislative Branch134) that the 

Senate rejected Roosevelt’s personal pleas to loosen the provisions of 

the Neutrality Act until after war broke out in Europe in September 

1939 and did not repeal the key provisions of the act until the eve 

of Pearl Harbor. (Congress did not authorize conscription until 

September 1940—after the fall of France and the Low Countries, 

and amazingly, the House of Representatives voted to renew 

authorization for conscription by only one vote in August 1941—2 

months after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and only 4 months 

before Pearl Harbor.)

 Even had the Neutrality Act been completely repealed in 1937 

(the year Chamberlain became prime minister), the United States 

could hardly act against Hitler when no one else in Europe would. If 

public opinion in Britain and France blocked political decisionmakers 

from risking war to stop Hitler until it was too late, a tradition of 

isolationism from Europe’s wars and the seeming remoteness 

of the German menace to America and its Western Hemispheric 

security interests virtually precluded war against Germany absent a 

German attack or declaration of war. C. A. MacDonald summarizes 

Roosevelt’s dilemma:

It was difficult to persuade [American] public opinion that an axis danger 

existed while Chamberlain continued to talk about an Anglo-German 

agreement. Yet Roosevelt could not persuade Britain to take a stiffer 

line with Germany without widespread support for an anti-axis policy 

which would convince London that American support would be quickly 

forthcoming in the event of war. The President was caught between the 

desire to play a larger role in world affairs and the necessity of preserving 

his political position at home. He never solved the problem of balancing 

these two factors. While public opinion increasingly supported an 

active anti-axis policy after September 1939, it never reached the point of 

endorsing American military intervention.135

 Roosevelt, beginning with his famous October 1937 “Quarantine 

Speech” in Chicago (which was roundly denounced by isolationists), 

began a campaign to educate the American people on the gathering 
38

threat posed by the fascist dictators in Europe and Imperial Japan; and 

beginning in 1938, he started a campaign to rearm the United States, 

focusing primarily on expanded naval and air power (Roosevelt 

was an air power enthusiast and believer in a potential German air 

threat to the Western Hemisphere). Munich convinced Roosevelt 

that Hitler could never be trusted, that his aims were unlimited, and 

that Germany would eventually threaten the United States.136 From 

the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939 to the Japanese 

attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Roosevelt transformed the 

United States from a rigidly neutral bystander into a provider of war 

assistance (Lend Lease) to Britain (and after September 1941) to the 

Soviet Union and a de facto naval co-belligerent with Britain against 

the German submarine menace in the North Atlantic.137

Distrust of the Soviet Union and Fear of Communism. 

 The alternative to appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s was formation 

of the kind of grand alliance that defeated Imperial Germany in 1918 

and crushed Nazi Germany in 1945. This alternative, however, was 

never more than theoretical until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union 

in June 1941 and declared war on the United States the following 

December. For the United States, domestic politics precluded war 

or military alliance with threatened states in Europe as voluntary 

policy choices. But this was not the case for the Soviet Union, which 

Hitler both reviled and targeted for German racial expansion. Stalin 

clearly understood Nazi Germany for the deadly foe it was, and in 

1934 the Soviet Union entered an alliance with France as a means 

of checking German expansionism. (The alliance remained nominal 

because the hostility of the French Right to the alliance effectively 

blocked initiation of Franco-Soviet military staff talks.) Russia and 

France had been allies against Imperial Germany, and the Soviet 

Union in the 1930s constituted the only great power east of Germany. 

It fielded the largest standing army in Europe and possessed war 

production potential second only to that of the United States. The 

same logic that underlay the Anglo-French-Russian alliance of 

World War I against Imperial Germany applied to stopping Hitler 

from plunging Europe into another world war, and this logic should 
39

have been glaringly apparent after Hitler removed any doubt over 

his trustworthiness and territorial intentions by invading what 

remained of Czechoslovakia after Munich.

 Yet in August 1939, Stalin entered a nonaggression pact with 

Hitler that essentially freed German forces, once they (in conjunction 

with Soviet forces) had erased Poland, to attack in the West with no 

fear of having to wage war on a second front in the East. Stalin’s 

conversion from a potential ally of the West into a collaborator 

with Nazi Germany was the product of several factors, but primary 

among them was Anglo-French appeasement of Hitler and manifest 

fear of Communism and mistrust of the Soviet Union. Many Britons 

and Frenchmen believed Communism posed a greater threat to the 

West than Nazism, and there were in any event reasonable doubts 

about the Soviet Union’s value as an ally against Hitler, especially 

after Stalin decimated the Red Army’s officer corps in 1937-38. 

“It was natural for European states, especially the great imperial 

powers, Britain and France, to regard Soviet communism as their 

sworn enemy—for so it was,” observes P. M. H. Bell. “From this 

fact of life some took the short step to the belief that the enemies 

of communism were your friends, and that fascist Italy and Nazi 

Germany were useful bulwarks against Soviet influence. Once this 

notion took root, it was hard to accept that the Nazi regime was itself 

a threat, nearer and more dangerous than the Soviet Union.”138

 Hitler was also in a position to offer Stalin extensive territorial 

concessions east of the Vistula River that Britain and France could 

not. The nonaggression pact contained a secret protocol that 

granted Stalin the eastern half of Poland, conceded to the Soviet 

Union a free hand in Finland, Estonia, and Latvia, and recognized 

Moscow’s interest in the Romanian province of Bessarabia. Under 

the circumstances, and given the Anglo-French record of appeasing 

Hitler, Stalin’s choice of a deal with Hitler rather than an alliance with 

Britain and France was a no-brainer. Andrew Crozier has summed 

up the array of considerations as they appeared to Moscow:

Did the Western powers really intend to resist Hitler? And, if they did, 

were they capable of doing so effectively? If the answer to either of these 

questions was even vaguely negative, the Soviet Union, through too 

close an association with the democracies, could have found herself at 

war with Germany without credible allies in the west. This would have 
40

been particularly embarrassing militarily for in 1939 a state of undeclared 

war existed between the USSR and Japan in the Far East which might 

ultimately have resulted in a debilitating war on two fronts. On the 

other hand, the German offer was very attractive. It certainly meant 

the postponement of war from the Soviet point of view; it implied the 

possibility of being able to emerge as the tertius gaudens from a conflict 

between the capitalist powers; and [it] allowed the extension of the 

USSR’s defensive lines into Eastern Europe and the Baltic littoral. Stalin 

opted for the certainties of an accommodation with Hitler, rather than 

the uncertainties of a tie with Britain and France.139

* * * * *

 Anglo-French appeasement of Nazi Germany during the 1930s 

was the product of multiple political, military, and psychological 

factors that combined to deny any realistic possibility that the 

Western democracies could or would act effectively against Hitler 

in time to thwart outbreak of a second world war in Europe. This is 

not to embrace historical determinism; rather it is simply to argue 

that the alignment of political, military, and psychological factors 

in the 1930s were never such as to offer both London and Paris 

simultaneously a clear appreciation of the nature and scope of the 

German threat, as well as the opportunity to employ military force 

confidently and effectively against that threat. In hindsight, it is easy 

to condemn appeasement because it led to World War II, but until 

1939, the record of appeasement was one of sparing Europe from 

war. Chamberlain and Daladier could not know they were making 

pre-World War II decisions, on the contrary, they were struggling 

to avoid war. But not at any cost. When in 1939 Hitler violated the 

Munich Agreement and, in so doing, dispelled any lingering doubts 

in London and Paris about his real intentions in Europe, Chamberlain 

and Daladier committed to a policy of war by extending defense 

guarantees to Poland and other threatened states.

WHY DID APPEASEMENT FAIL?

 Anglo-French appeasement of Hitler failed for the simple reason 

that Hitler was unappeasable. He wanted more, much more, than 

Britain or France could or would give him. Chamberlain sought to 
41

propitiate Germany within the framework of Europe’s traditional 

balance of power system; Hitler sought to overthrow that system. 

He fooled Chamberlain (and many others in Europe, including 

conservative German nationalists) into believing that Nazi Germany’s 

foreign policy ambitions, like those of the Weimar Republic, were 

limited to rectification of the ‘injustices” of the Versailles Treaty, 

and until 1939 he was careful to limit Germany’s explicit territorial 

demands to Germanic Europe, demands he justified in the name 

of national self-determination. In this regard, British policy toward 

Germany was consistent from 1919 on: it sought to bring “Germany 

back into the community of nations . . . negotiating the relaxation 

of those [Versailles] treaty restrictions that were perceived as 

untenable.” London “never supported the French policy of enforcing 

the Treaty of Versailles or the French system of alliance with Eastern 

Europe.”140 Needless to say, the success of Hitler’s diplomacy in the 

1930s profited immensely from basic Anglo-French differences over 

how to deal with Germany.

 To be sure, Hitler was not shy about discussing the scope of his 

ambitions in Europe. Mein Kampf, written in prison 10 years before 

Hitler came to power, might be dismissed as the rantings of a failed 

revolutionary, but once in power, the Nazis’ innate savagery and 

Chancellor Hitler’s numerous public declarations of Germany’s 

racial destiny in the Slavic East—the imperative of Aryan seizure 

of lebensraum in the vast domain of the inferior races that lay 

between Germany and the Urals—could not be so easily ignored. 

As Norman Rich notes, what Hitler had in mind as a model was 

not the Hapsburgian one of “indiscriminate annexation of peoples 

of different races and religions,” but rather “that of the Nordics of 

North America who swept aside lesser races to ensure their own 

ethnic survival.”141 But was this not a literally fantastic vision? How 

would Hitler go about it? Would Eastern Europe and Russia submit? 

Would the rest of Europe accept a continental German empire that 

would destroy the European balance of power? Was any head of a 

major European state really prepared to plunge the continent into 

another bloodbath on behalf of a crackpot racial theory? It all seemed 

incredible.

 The very fact that Chamberlain could not bring himself to believe 

that Hitler wanted another world war testified to his understanding 
42

that any German bid for continental domination meant war, and 

in 1939 Chamberlain was even prepared to—and did—go to war 

with Germany for the sake of a country Britain was in no position 

to defend. Hitler, and ultimately Chamberlain, understood that his 

imperial ambitions in Europe could not be satisfied without war. 

 But Hitler was not just unappeasable; he was also undeterrable. 

Shows of strength and resolve—Mussolini’s reaction to Hitler’s 

attempted Nazi coup in Vienna in 1934, Britain’s “special message” 

of September 1938 that it was prepared to join France in going to war 

over Czechoslovakia—forced Hitler to back off, but only because 

Germany was still rearming and Hitler was not yet prepared to risk 

military defeat or a general war. True, Hitler planned for general 

war no later than 1943-45 (when he thought Germany’s military and 

ideological strength would peak relative to Germany’s enemies)142

and was surprised when the French and British prematurely visited 

it upon him in 1939 by honoring their defense guarantees to Poland. 

But this miscalculation in no way affected pursuit of his long-term 

racial objectives in the East. J. L. Richardson properly sums it up. 

Given Hitler’s ideologically driven expansionism,

it follows that neither appeasement nor deterrence could have succeeded in 

averting war. The fundamental reason for the failure of appeasement was 

that Hitler’s goals lay far beyond the limits of reasonable accommodation 

that the appeasers were prepared to contemplate. If appeasement 

encouraged him to increase his demands, it was only in a short-term, 

tactical sense. Likewise, if a policy of deterrence or firmness had been 

adopted earlier, it would have changed Hitler’s tactical calculations, but 

there is no reason to suppose that he would have modified his goals.143

 War was thus inevitable as long as Hitler remained in power. 

Clearly, the appeasers had illusions about Hitler; but no less clearly, 

as Ernest R. May observes, “‘Anti-appeasers’ had their own illusions 

which were almost equally distant from reality. They believed that 

Hitler could be deterred by the threat of war. Few suspected that 

Hitler wanted war.”144 The threat of war cannot be expected to scare 

off a regime that welcomes war. Churchill’s postwar declaration 

that World War II could have been avoided without a shot being 

fired was wishful thinking; it would have taken either an assassin’s 

bullet or an Anglo-French preventive war to have stopped Hitler.
43

 Hitler’s undeterrability renders moot much discussion about 

what might have been. Would, for example, a credible Franco-British 

alliance with the Soviet Union have deterred Hitler from seeking to 

subdue the Slavic untermensch in the East? Hitler was ideologically 

predestined to invade the Soviet Union, for which he had both racial 

and military contempt, and he proceeded to do so in June 1941 

notwithstanding an unfinished and expanding war with Britain in 

the West and the growing difficulties of his Italian ally in the Balkans 

and the Mediterranean. There was, of course, virtually no prospect 

of a credible Anglo-French-Soviet alliance. Most British and much 

French political opinion was extremely hostile to Bolshevism and the 

Soviet pariah state; an alliance with Moscow would be a pact with 

the Devil. Indeed, a significant segment of French opinion preferred 

a fascist political order in France itself and viewed Nazi Germany 

as an indispensable barrier to the westward spread of Bolshevism. 

Russia’s military value as an ally was also questionable, especially 

after Stalin’s decimation of the Red Army’s senior leadership. Nor 

did the Soviet Union share a border with Germany, which meant 

that Moscow could not project military power against Germany 

except through Poland and Czechoslovakia.

 To repeat, because Hitler was both unappeasable and undeterrable, 

war could have been avoided only via Hitler’s forcible removal of 

from power, an option apparently not considered by London or 

Paris and only briefly considered by German military leaders in 

1938. Beyond Hitler’s departure from power, only a preventive war 

that crippled German military power, collapsed the Nazi regime, or 

both, could have averted World War II. Given the horrors of that 

war, initiation of a preventive war seems retrospectively imperative, 

and when neo-conservatives such as Richard Perle speak of how 

Hitler could have been stopped before 1939, they mean forcible 

regime change of precisely the kind the United States launched 

against Iraq in 2003. For Britain and France in the 1930s, however, a 

decisive preventive war against Germany was morally unacceptable, 

politically impossible, and militarily infeasible. Rewriting history is 

always easier than writing it.

 These judgments strongly suggest that Germany without Hitler 

would have been deterrable, and indeed it is hard to see how Europe 
44

gets to World War II without Hitler. Any German government of 

the 1930s would have pursued rectification of the Versailles Treaty 

injustices, but even a government of traditional conservative 

nationalists of the kind that Hitler discarded on his road to war 

(precisely because they opposed his reckless policies) would have 

respected the limits of German power and the unacceptability to 

Britain and France of a German-dominated Europe. They would 

have been happy to recover lost German territory in Poland, even to 

see Poland disappear—but not at the cost of general war for which 

Germany was not prepared (the German economy was not placed 

on a total war footing until 1942). Almost certainly there would have 

been no slaughter of the Jews.

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Hitler Remains without Equal as a State Threat. 

No post-1945 foreign dictatorship bears genuine comparison to 

the Nazi dictatorship. The scope of Hitler’s nihilism, ambitions, and 

military power posed a mortal threat to Western civilization. No other 

authoritarian or totalitarian regime has managed to employ such a 

powerful military instrument in such an aggressive manner to fulfill 

such a horrendous agenda. Stalin had great military power but was 

cautious and patient; he was a realist and neither lusted for war nor 

discounted the strength and will of the Soviet Union’s enemies. Mao 

Zedong was reckless but militarily weak. Ho Chi Minh’s ambitions 

and fighting power were local. And Saddam Hussein was never in a 

position to reverse U.S. military domination of the Persian Gulf. Who 

but Hitler was so powerful and unappeasable and undeterrable?

Anglo-French Security Choices in the 1930s 

Were Neither Simple Nor Obvious. 

They were at every turn severely constrained by domestic politics, 

economic difficulties, perceptions of military inadequacy, and Hitler’s 

effective strategic deception regarding Nazi Germany’s intentions 

and capabilities. Appeasement of attempted German revision of the 
45

Versailles Treaty made both moral and strategic sense because the 

treaty was unjust, strategically short-sighted, and unenforceable. 

Nor was it politically possible for the democracies to forcibly oppose 

the reunification of the German nation within a single state; the 

victors of 1918 had violated Woodrow Wilson’s sacred principle of 

self-determination by prohibiting union of Germany and Austria 

and by creating the polyglot state of Czechoslovakia with unhappy 

German minorities in that state’s border areas with Germany.

 Appeasement became untenable the moment Hitler demanded, 

under the threat of force, the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia—

which was not only a democratic state prepared to grant the Sudeten 

Germans considerable autonomy but also a significant military 

counterweight to German territorial ambitions in Eastern Europe. 

Yet neither Britain nor France was in a military position to defend 

Czechoslovakia, although Chamberlain’s threat of a general war 

deterred Hitler from seizing all of Czechoslovakia in 1938.

Beware of Hindsight; It Is Not 20/20 Vision. 

Many hindsighters believe they now know what Britain and 

France (and for that matter the United States) should have done in the 

1930s—regime change in Berlin via Hitler’s assassination or, failing 

that, an invasion of the Third Reich—because we all know that World 

War II and the Holocaust were the consequences of appeasement. 

These facts were hardly self-evident at the time. Today’s should

runs afoul of yesterday’s could not and would not. British and French 

statesmen did not know they were on the road to general war; on 

the contrary, they were seeking to avoid it. In any case, neither 

assassination of the head of a major state nor the launching of 

preventive war against that state fell within the repertory of practical 

and politically acceptable policy options available to London and 

Paris. Past events are viewed through the lens of subsequent events. 

To be sure, Neville Chamberlain profoundly misjudged Hitler, but 

if Hitler had dropped dead the day after the Munich Conference 

of September 1938, Munich would in all likelihood be an historical 

footnote and “appeasement” a non-pejorative term.
46

Invocations of the Munich Analogy to Justify Use 

of Force Should Be Closely Examined. 

Such invocations have more often than not been misleading 

because security threats to the United States genuinely Hitlerian 

in scope and nature have not been replicated since 1945. Though 

the Munich analogy’s power as a tool of opinion mobilization is 

undeniable, no enemy since Hitler has, in fact, possessed Nazi 

Germany’s combination of military might and willingness—indeed, 

eagerness—to employ it for unlimited conquest. This does not mean 

the United States should withhold resort to force against lesser 

threats. Nor does it mean that Hitlerian threats are a phenomenon 

of the past; an al-Qaeda armed with deliverable nuclear weapons 

or usable biological weapons would pose a direct and much more 

lethal threat to the United States than Nazi Germany ever did.

 The problem with seeing Hitler in Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi 

Minh, and Saddam Hussein is that it reinforces the presidential 

tendency since 1945 to overstate threats for the purpose of rallying 

public and congressional opinion, and overstated threats in turn 

encourage resort to force in circumstances where deterrence, 

containment, even negotiation (from strength) might better serve 

long-term U.S. security interests. Threats that are, in fact, limited 

tend to be portrayed in Manichaean terms, thus skewing the policy 

choice toward military action, a policy choice hardly constrained by 

possession of global conventional military primacy and an inadequate 

understanding of the limits of that primacy.

 If the 1930s reveal the danger of underestimating a security threat, 

the post-World War II decades contain examples of the danger of 

overestimating a security threat.

ENDNOTES

 1. Quoted in J. Snell, ed., The Outbreak of the Second World War: Design or 

Blunder? London: D. C. Heath, 1962, p. vii.

 2. Quoted in Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, 

New York: Anchor Books, 1995, pp. 317-318.

 3. See the author’s Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and 

Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 

2002.
47

 4. Reprinted in “Rhetoric Starts Here,” Washington Post, November 11, 2002.

 5. George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, January 29, 2002, excerpted in 

George W. Bush, et. al., We Will Prevail: President George W. Bush on War, Terrorism, 

and Freedom, New York: Continuum, 2003, p. 108.

 6. Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced 

by War, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 73.

 7. We Will Prevail, op. cit., p. 6.

 8. Harry S Truman, Memoirs, Vol. 2: Years of Trial and Hope, 1946-1952, Garden 

City, NY: Doubleday, 1955-1956, p. 335.

 9. Eisenhower letter to Winston Churchill, 1954, excerpted in Robert J. 

MacMahon, ed., Major Problems in the History of the Vietnam War, 2nd ed.; Lexington, 

MA: D. C. Heath, 1995, p. 373.

 10. Quoted in Theodore C. Sorenson, Kennedy, New York: Harper and Row, 

1965, p. 703.

 11. Quoted in Michael Beschloss, ed., Taking Charge: The Johnson White House 

Tapes, 1963-1964, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997, p. 248.

 12. Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, New York: Harper 

and Row, 1976, p. 252.

 13. Richard Nixon, The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, New York: Grosset and 

Dunlap, 1978, pp. 269-270.

 14. Radio address to the nation on defense spending, February 19, 1983, in 

Ronald Reagan, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 

1983, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1984, I, p. 258.

 15. Address to the nation announcing the deployment of United States armed 

forces to Saudi Arabia, August 8, 1990, George H. W. Bush, Public Papers of the 

Presidents of the United States: George Bush 1990, Washington, DC: U.S. Government 

Printing Office, 1991, II, p. 108.

 16. Quoted in “Lessons from the War in Kosovo,” Heritage Foundation 

Backgrounder, No. 1311, p. 5.

 17. “President Says Saddam Hussein Must Leave Iraq Within 48 Hours,” 

remarks by the President in address to the nation, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/

releases/2003/03/20030317-7.html.

 18. See Record, Making War, Thinking History, op. cit.

 19. Stephen R. Rock, Appeasement in International Politics, Lexington, KY: 

University Press of Kentucky, 2000, p. 5.

 20. Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics, Princeton, 

NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976, p. 90.

 21. Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, France and the Nazi Threat: The Collapse of French 

Diplomacy, 1932-1939, New York: Enigma Books, 2004, pp. 155-156.
48

 22. Frank McDonough, The Origins of the First and Second World Wars, New 

York: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 96.

 23. Harry Hearder, “Editor’s Forward,” in P. M. H. Bell, The Origins of the 

Second World War in Europe, 2nd edition, London: Longman Group, 1997, p. viii.

 24. David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861, New York: Harper and 

Row, 1976, p. 145. Emphasis added.

 25. Webster’s New World Dictionary and Thesaurus, 2nd edition, New York: 

Hungry Minds, Inc., pp. 27-28.

 26. Rock, op. cit., p. 12.

 27. Gordon A. Craig and Alexander L. George, Force and Statecraft: Diplomatic 

Problems of Our Time, 2nd edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 

250.

 28. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and 

Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, New York: Random House, 1987, pp. 16, 39.

 29. See Rock, op. cit., pp. 25-47.

 30. Edmund Stillman and William Pfaff, The Politics of Hysteria: The Sources of 

Twentieth-Century Conflict, New York: Harper and Row, 1964, pp. 115-121.

 31. McDonough, op. cit., p. 43.

 32. Bell, op. cit., p. 11.

 33. A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, London: Hamish 

Hamilton, 1961, pp. 68-72. Also see pp. 105-109.

 34. See Gordon Martel, ed., The Origins of the Second World War Reconsidered: 

A. J. P Taylor and the Historians, 2nd edition, London: Routledge, 1999.

 35. See McDonough, op. cit., pp. 92-93; and Bell, op. cit., pp. 50-52.

 36. Norman Rich, Hitler’s War Aims: Ideology, the Nazi State, and the Course of 

Expansion, New York: W. W. Norton, 1973, p. 4.

 37. Gerhard L. Weinberg, Germany, Hitler, and World War II: Essays in Modern 

German and World History, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 30.

 38. For a concise discussion of how Hitler saw the world, see ibid., pp. 30-53.

 39. Bell, op. cit., p. 94.

 40. Leon Goldensohn, edited and introduced by Robert Gellately, The 

Nuremberg Interviews: An American Psychiatrist’s Conversations with Defendants and 

Witnesses, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004, pp. 223-224.

 41. Richard Overy, “Misjudging Hitler: A. J. P. Taylor and the Third Reich,” in 

Martel, op. cit., p. 95.

 42. Ronald M. Smelser, “Nazi Dynamics, German Foreign Policy and 

Appeasement,” in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Lothar Kettenecker, eds., The Fascist 

Challenge and the Policy of Appeasement, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1983, p. 

42.
49

 43. Bell, op. cit., pp. 28-29; The Oxford Companion to World War II, New York: 

Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 279; and William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of 

the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960, p. 

358.

 44. Kennedy, op. cit., p. 338.

 45. On October 3, 1938, Winston Churchill condemned the Munich Agreement 

before the House of Commons. He said that Nazi Germany “cannot ever be the 

trusted friend of British democracy” because the Nazi regime was one “which 

spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, 

which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and 

perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless 

brutality the threat of murderous force.” Quoted in Graham Stewart, Burying 

Caesar: The Churchill-Chamberlain Rivalry, New York: Overlook Press, 1999, p. 346.

 46. Donald Cameron Watt, “British Intelligence and the Coming of the Second 

World War in Europe,” in Ernest R. May, ed., Knowing One’s Enemies: Intelligence 

Assessment Before the Two World Wars, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984, 

p. 247.

 47. Quoted in Robert Allan Doughty, The Seeds of Disaster: The Development of 

French Army Doctrine 1919-1939, Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984, pp. 36, 38.

 48. Richard Overy with Andrew Wheatcroft, The Road to War, Revised edition, 

London: Penguin Books, 1999, p. 71.

 49. Rock, op. cit., p. 174.

 50. See Robert J. Young, “French Military Intelligence and Nazi Germany. 

1938-1939,” in Ernest R. May, ed., Knowing One’s Enemies, op. cit., pp. 271-309.

 51. See Doughty, op. cit., pp. 1-40.

 52. Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994, p. 303.

 53. Quoted in Doughty, op. cit., pp. 36, 37.

 54. Duroselle, op. cit., pp. 189, 190.

 55. See Telford Taylor. Munich, The Price of Peace, Garden City, NY: Doubleday 

and Company, 1979, pp. 472-476.

 56. See Richard Lamb, Mussolini as Diplomat: Il Duce’s Italy on the World Stage, 

New York: Fromm International, 1999, pp. 100-107. Though British diplomacy in 

the mid-1930s seemingly went out of its way to alienate Mussolini as a strategic 

partner against Hitler, an alliance between Rome and Berlin was probably 

inevitable, given the ideological affinities between Nazism and Italian fascism, 

especially their shared contempt for bourgeois democracy and Italian imperial 

ambitions in the Mediterranean and Africa, which could be realized only at the 

expense of British and French interests.

 57. Quoted in Duroselle, op. cit., p. 136.

 58. Quoted in Shirer, op. cit., p. 293.
50

 59. Ibid., pp. 294-295.

 60. See discussion in Andrew J. Crozier, The Causes of the Second World War, 

Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1997, pp. 233-245.

 61. Kennedy, op. cit., p. 320.

 62. Committee of Imperial Defense, Annual Review by the Chiefs of Staff SubCommittee, quoted in John Dunabin, “The British Military Establishment and the 

Policy of Appeasement,” in Mommsen and Kettenacker, op. cit., p. 176.

 63. Quoted in Telford Taylor, op. cit., p. 631.

 64. Overy and Wheatcroft, op. cit., p. 104.

 65. For an extensive discussion of the concept of limited liability as formulated 

by Liddell Hart and the relationship of that concept to Britain’s strategy situation 

in the 1930s, see Azar Gat, A History of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to 

the Cold War, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 696-783.

 66. The Franco-Soviet pact of mutual assistance directed against Germany 

was a militarily toothless political alliance because the French refused to hold 

the military staff talks with their Soviet counterparts necessary to coordinate war 

plans and because the Soviet Union did not share a border with Germany or enjoy 

right of military passage with Eastern European states that did. Kissinger, op. cit., 

pp. 296-297.

 67. See Williamson Murray, The Change in the European Balance of Power, 1938-

1939: The Path to Ruin, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984, pp. 84-92.

 68. Ibid., pp. 276-278.

 69. Bell, op. cit., p. 194.

 70. See Martin Gilbert and Richard Gott, The Appeasers, London: Phoenix 

Press, 1963, p. 115; and Richard Meyers, “British Imperial Interests and the Policy 

of Appeasement,” in Mommsen and Kettenacker, op. cit., p. 339.

 71. Michael Graham Fry, “Agents and Structures: The Dominions and the 

Czechoslovak Crisis, September 1938,” Diplomacy and Statecraft, July/November 

1999, p. 295.

 72. See Robert Frankenstein, “The Decline of France and the Policy of 

Appeasement,” in Mommsen and Kettenacker, op. cit., pp. 236-245.

 73. Arthur H. Furnia, The Diplomacy of Appeasement: Anglo-French Relations 

and the Prelude to World War II, 1931-1938, Washington, DC: University Press of 

Washington, DC, 1960, p. 388.

 74. Martin Thomas, “France and the Czechoslovak Crisis,” Diplomacy and 

Statecraft, July/November 1999, p. 149.

 75. Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm, Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1938, p. 

302.

 76. Gerald Guenwook Lee, “‘I See Dead People’: Air-Raid Phobia and Britain’s 

Behavior in the Munich Crisis,” Security Studies, Winter 2003/4, p. 266.
51

 77. Murray, op. cit., p. 231; and David Vital, “Czechoslovakia and the Powers: 

September 1938,” Journal of Contemporary History, October 1966, pp. 44-45.

 78. Donald Cameron Watt, How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second 

World War, 1938-1939, New York: Pantheon Books, 1989, p. 195.

 79. Murray, op. cit., p. 261. Also see Telford Taylor, op. cit., p. 819.

 80. Vital, op. cit., p. 7. Also see Walter Gorlitz, ed., The Memoirs of Field Marshal 

Wilhelm Keitel, David Irving, trans., New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000, pp. 62-

73.

 81. See Klaus-Jurgen Muller, “The German Military Opposition before the 

Second World War,” in Mommsen and Kettenacker, op. cit., pp. 67-70; and Shirer, 

op. cit., pp. 366-384, 404-414.

 82. See ibid., 67-68; Stewart, op. cit., p. 297; and R. A. C. Parker, Chamberlain and 

Appeasement: British Policy and the Coming of the Second World War, New York: St. 

Martin’s Press, 1993, pp. 153-154.

 83. Muller, op. cit., p. 70.

 84. Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, quoted in Telford Taylor, op. cit., p. 663.

 85. Quoted in Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis, New York: W. W. 

Norton, 2000, p. 88.

 86. Telford Taylor, op. cit., pp. 390-395.

 87. Richard Overy, “Germany and the Munich Crisis: A Mutilated Victory?” 

Diplomacy and Statecraft, July/November 1999, p. 203.

 88. Kershaw, op. cit., p. 122.

 89. Ibid., p. 122; and Overy, “Germany and the Munich Crisis,”op. cit., p. 209.

 90. In June Hitler had told Keitel that he would attack Czechoslovakia “only if 

I am firmly convinced, as in the case of the demilitarized zone and the entry into 

Austria, that France will not march, and that therefore Britain will not intervene.” 

Quoted in Churchill, op. cit., p. 290.

 91. See Telford Taylor, op. cit., pp. 878-884; and Parker, op. cit., p. 173-176.

 92. Parker, op. cit., p. 175.

 93. Quoted in Telford Taylor, op. cit., p. 874.

 94. Ibid., p. 878.

 95 Richard Overy, Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945, New York: 

Penguin, 2001, p. 316.

 96. Overy, The Road to War, op. cit., p. 103.

 97. J. W. Wheeler-Bennett, Munich: Prologue to Tragedy, New York: Duell, Sloan 

& Pearce, 1948, p. 331.

 98. Quoted in ibid., p. p 331.
52

 99. Watt, op. cit., p. 30; Kershaw, op. cit., pp. 163-164.

 100. Kershaw, op. cit., p. 230.

 101. Quoted in Overy, The Road to War, op. cit., pp. 57-58.

 102. Goldensohn, op. cit., p. 443.

 103. Excerpted in Shirer, op. cit., p. 399.

 104. Gerhard L. Weinberg, “Reflections on Munich after 60 Years,” Diplomacy 

and Statecraft, July/November 1999, p. 8.

 105. “I have always believed that Benes was wrong to yield. He should have 

defended his fortress line. Once the fighting had begun, in my opinion at the time, 

France would have moved to his aid in a surge of national passion, and Britain 

would have rallied to France almost immediately.” Churchill, op. cit., p. 302.

 106. For an account of the decision, see Vital, op. cit., pp. 60-65.

 107. Parker, op. cit., p. 11.

 108. Telford Taylor, op. cit., p. 76.

 109. Lamb, op. cit., p. 114.

 110. See Lee, op. cit., and Uri Bialer, The Shadow of the Bomber: The Fear of Air 

Attack and British Politics 1932-1939, London: Royal Historical Society, 1980.

 111. Quoted in Wesley K. Wark, The Ultimate Enemy: British Intelligence and 

Nazi Germany, 1933-1939, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985, p. 28.

 112. Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of 

British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945, Princeton: Princeton 

University Press, 2002, p. 112.

 113. Ibid., p. 121; and Taylor, op. cit., p. 648.

 114. Biddle, op. cit., p. 111.

 115. Taylor, op. cit., p. 218.

 116. Ibid., p. 112. In fact, when war broke out in September 1939, Germany’s 

strength in front-line aircraft was 3,609, compared to Britain’s 1,911 and France’s 

1,792. German and British aircraft annual production rates were, however, 

approaching parity at 8,000. The Oxford Companion to World War II, New York: 

Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 14.

 117. Quoted in Telford Taylor, op. cit., p. 849.

 118. Bell, op. cit., p. 202.

 119. Ibid., p. 216.

 120. Williamson Murray, “Strategic Bombing: The British, American, and 

German Experiences,” in Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, Military 

Innovation in the Interwar Period, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 

131.
53

 121. Murray, The Change in the European Balance, op. cit., p. 51.

 122. Young, op. cit., pp. 288-289.

 123. Thomas, op. cit., pp. 140-143.

 124. See Anthony Christopher Cain, The Forgotten Air Force: French Doctrine in 

the 1930s, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002.

 125. Telford Taylor, op, cit., p. 719.

 126. Duroselle, op. cit., pp. 278-279.

 127. Robert Jervis, “Deterrence and Perception,” International Security, Winter 

1982/1983, pp. 14, 15.

 128. Dominic D. P. Johnson, Overconfidence and War: The Havoc and Glory of 

Positive Illusions, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, p. 92.

 129. Telford Taylor, op. cit., pp. 197, 198.

 130. Quoted in ibid., p. 200.

 131. Rich, op. cit., p. 238.

 132. Before and during the war, Hitler spoke admiringly of America’s 

continental unity (a model for Europe under German control) and machine-based 

society. See Gerhard L. Weinberg, ed., Hitler’s Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel 

to Mein Kampf, Krista Smith, trans., New York: Enigma Books, 2003, pp. 107-110, 

and 117-118; and Hitler’s Secret Conversations, New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 

1953, pp. 228, 337.

 133. C. A. MacDonald, The United States, Britain and Appeasement, 1936-1939, 

New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981, pp. 50-51, 73, 82-83, 105, 179.

 134. In January 1938, the House of Representatives almost passed the Ludlow 

Amendment, which would have required a national plebiscite to authorize a 

declaration of war.

 135. MacDonald, op. cit., p. 182.

 136 See Barbara Rearden Franham, Roosevelt and the Munich Crisis: A Study of 

Political Decision-Making, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997, pp. 137-

172.

 137. See David Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor: Roosevelt’s America and 

the Origins of the Second World War, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001.

 138. Bell, op. cit., p. 131.

 139. Crozier, op. cit., p. 155.

 140. J. L. Richardson, “New Perspectives on Appeasement: Some Implications 

for International Relations,” World Politics, April 1988, p. 306.

 141. Rich, op. cit., p. xlii.
54

 142. See “The Hossbach Memorandum: A Strategy Conference?” in Keith 

Eubank, ed., World War II: Roots and Causes, Lexington, MA: DC Heath, 1975, pp. 

95-106.

 143. Richardson, op. cit., pp. 67-68.

 144. Ernest R. May, Knowing One’s Enemies: Intelligence Assessment before the 

Two World Wars, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984, p. 520.