Neville Chamberlain’s War

Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, the arch-appeaser of 1938, waged the only war he could manage: a war of appeasement. It was phoney from the start, and that is just what he intended. He did not seek the defeat of Germany, since the British establishment considered that country to be the prime bulwark against Bolshevism in Europe. He assumed that the fully mobilized French army, which Churchill had pronounced the finest in the world, would convince the good German people that they could not possibly win. Once they felt the pressure of a British naval blockade, they would gladly replace Hitler with a government amenable to Britain.

Chamberlain had tried mightily to avoid a war with Germany. His hastily-conceived guarantee to Poland was meant to deter Hitler from starting one. Instead, the Phoney War resulted in Hitler's greatest triumph, the conquest of Western, democratic Europe, whose industrial and agricultural resources allowed Nazi Germany to pursue its aggression against the Soviet Union. As an island, Britain survived the defeat of 1940 and eventually emerged on the side of the victors. This thoroughly researched history tells the entire story of Chamberlain's Phoney War, and carries an important lesson: any power that goes to war without weighing its chances of victory is courting disaster.