YossariansRight said:
Neville Chamberlain was the Hitler toe sucker.
Poor Neville Chamberlain.
Few people in history have been so unfairly vilified.
People mock him for waving around the "piece of paper" he got from Hitler agreeing to a peaceful settlement of Germany's claims over Czechoslovakia. But they forget that Chamberlain's desire for peace with Germany was wildly popular at the time.
It was 1938. WW1 had only ended 20 years before. Most adults still painfully remembered losing their fathers, brothers, sons, friends, and neighbours in the trenches. Nearly a million British men perished in the Great War, and millions more of our allies died in what people hoped had been the "war to end all wars".
The public didn't want war. Churchill's warmongering wasn't popular.
Furthermore, Britain was in no shape to fight a major European war in 1938. The army could only have sent two divisions, while the navy and the air force were scrambling to re-arm.
Chamberlain wasn't psychic. He probably knew that Hitler was a bad sort, but couldn't predict he would turn out to be a genocidal madman. In 1938, Germany was a fascist dictatorship, but then our later allies in the Soviet Union were a communist dictatorship. The only European holocaust that had been perpetrated by 1938 was Stalin's atrocity in the Ukraine, which killed up to 7.5 million people.
And as a peacetime statesman, Chamberlain was hugely successful. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, he skillfully navigated the economic crisis of the early 30's, balancing the budget and soon restoring the country to surplus. That Britain never suffered the widescale privation people in America and Germany endured during the 30's is in large part thanks to Chamberlain.
And when war with Germany finally came, little over a year later, the breathing room Chamberlain had obtained for British rearmament proved to be crucial. We might not have survived the Battle of Britain had the RAF and the country's radar defences not been built up in the final years of Chamberlain's premiership.
He deserves better than to be painted as an appeaser. He was a decent man who did the best he could, and it's doubtful Churchill would have achieved more in his place.