re: #117 John Hughes

This is a totally incorrect analysis of both Birx and Chamberlain.

Birx is not naive, nor incompetent. She is lying for party political reasons.

Chamberlain was neither naive, nor incompetent. The British government and military consensus was that the coming war had to be delayed until Britain had finished rearmament. He was maybe optimistic about how long he could delay the war, but he knew it was coming.

There was no more a “consensus” against war than there was one for it. If one wanted to make a case for war with Germany in 1939, they would have found military leaders just as ready to argue Britain’s armed forces were large enough and strong enough to blunt Hitler’s ambitions, just as the peace crowd could find generals and admirals who felt the military was woefully antiquated and threadbare. Even within Parliament the parties were split, with half of each pushing for war and the other half pushing for negotiated settlement. Before the Blitz, Chamberlain and Lord Halifax had a stronger argument for agreeing to a “live and let live” non-aggression treaty with Hitler than Churchill had for going to war.

Chamberlain was not naive for believing he’d negotiated “peace in our time,” as Churchill and his allies would later accuse the man. He was naive for believing that the Reich’s ambitions would stop with a few colonial concessions and an agreement not to interfere in Germany’s continental expansion.