page_title: Neville Chamberlain
section_title: "Phoney War"
hierarchical_section_title: Neville Chamberlain / Premiership (1937–1940) / War leader (1939–1940) / "Phoney War"
caption_attribution_description: English: Letter written by Winston Churchill, in his official capacity of First Lord of the Admiralty, on 1 October 1939 to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. Crown copyright 1939; expired 1989.
context_page_description: Arthur Neville Chamberlain FRS was a British politician of the Conservative Party who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from May 1937 to May 1940. He is best known for his foreign policy of appeasement, and in particular for his signing of the Munich Agreement on 30 September 1938, conceding the German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Germany. Following the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, which marked the beginning of World War II, Chamberlain announced the declaration of war on Germany two days later and led Great Britain through the first eight months of the war until his resignation as prime minister on 10 May 1940.
  After working in business and local government, and after a short spell as Director of National Service in 1916 and 1917, Chamberlain followed his father, Joseph Chamberlain, and older half-brother, Austen Chamberlain, in becoming a Member of Parliament in the 1918 general election for the new Birmingham Ladywood division at the age of 49. He declined a junior ministerial position, remaining a backbencher until 1922. He was rapidly promoted in 1923 to Minister of Health and then Chancellor of the Exchequer.
context_section_description: Chamberlain instituted a War Cabinet and invited the Labour and Liberal parties to join his government, but they declined. He restored Churchill to the Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty, with a seat in the War Cabinet. Chamberlain also gave Eden a government post (Dominions Secretary) but not a seat in the small War Cabinet. The new First Lord proved to be a difficult Cabinet colleague, deluging the Prime Minister with a sea of lengthy memos. Chamberlain castigated Churchill for sending so many memos, as the two met in War Cabinet every day. Chamberlain suspected, correctly as it proved after the war, that "these letters are for the purpose of quotation in the Book that he will write hereafter." Chamberlain was also able to deter some of Churchill's more extreme plans, such as Operation Catherine, which would have sent three heavily armoured battleships into the Baltic Sea with an aircraft carrier and other support vessels as a means of stopping shipments of iron ore to Germany. With the naval war the only significant front involving the British in the early months of the conflict, the First Lord's obvious desire to wage a ruthless, victorious war established him as a leader-in-waiting in the public consciousness and among parliamentary colleagues.
  With little land action in the west, the initial months of the war were dubbed the "Bore War," later renamed the "Phoney War" by journalists. Chamberlain, in common with most Allied officials and generals, felt the war could be won relatively quickly by keeping economic pressure on Germany through a blockade while continuing rearmament. The Prime Minister was reluctant to go too far in altering the British economy. The government submitted an emergency war budget about which Chamberlain stated, "the only thing that matters is to win the war, though we may go bankrupt in the process." Government expenditures rose by little more than the rate of inflation between September 1939 and March 1940. Despite these difficulties, Chamberlain still enjoyed approval ratings as high as 68% and almost 60% in April 1940.
caption: First page of a letter from Churchill to Chamberlain, 1 October 1939
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