Review of Appeasement by Tim Bouverie
My personal copy of Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War
Category: Non-fiction, history, international diplomacy
Page Count: 419 (Paperback Edition)
Year of Publication: 2019
Rating: 5/5
10-Word Summary: The diplomatic history of Neville Chamberlain’s failed policy of appeasement.
About Appeasement
Tim Bouverie wrote the authoritative book when it comes to Neville Chamberlain’s failed policy of appeasement in the 1930s. After getting through this masterpiece of a book, I had to stop and ask myself: “How did the British refrain from placing Chamberlain’s head on a spike?”
Appeasement begins with Adolf Hitler’s ascension as Chancellor of Germany in 1933. The British press didn’t know what to make of Hitler; The Times claimed he “was held to be the least dangerous solution of a problem bristling with dangers,” while The Economist, the Spectator, and the New Statesmen foolishly stated: “We shall not expect to see the Jews’ extermination, or the power of big finance overthrown.” (Pages 8-9) The French press was equally clueless, and reading all this gave me the realization that newspapers, in general, are terrible sources for geopolitical information, as journalists usually guess as to what a world leader is really up to, and their guesses do not constitute knowledge any more than the average person on the street who guesses correctly which side a six-sided die will fall on.
As for the policy of appeasement itself, Bouverie gives a wonderful explanation as to why it was the foreign policy of choice for Britain throughout the 1930s: The Allies believed that they were to blame for the rise of the Nazi Party; as a matter of fact, Nazism was “the natural, if violent, reaction to legitimate grievances stemming from Versailles.” (Page 48) At this point, the Treaty of Versailles had come to be viewed a treaty that was too harsh, hence the idea was that “the Treaty should be altered and Germany allowed to regain that place and status to which her size and history entitled her.” (Page 48) The only problem with this policy is that it assumed Hitler could be appeased, and few people saw Hitler for who he really was.
Mein Kampf
Anyone who reads Mein Kampf will be baffled at how open Hitler was in stating his foreign policy ambitions: He announces his desire to unite Germany with Austria, he announces his desire to expand Germany’s territory at the expense of Russia, who he refers to as a “culturally inferior” nation, and he announces that the French were the mortal enemy of the Germans. Hitler said the following about France:
Never suffer the rise of two continental powers in Europe. Regard any attempt to organize a second military power on German frontiers, even if only in the form of creating a state capable of military strength, as an attack on Germany, and in it see not only the right, but also the duty, to employ all means up to armed force to prevent the rise of such a state, or, if one has already risen, to smash it again. (Mein Kampf, Page 664; First Mariner Books Edition)
All of this begs the question: With Hitler’s foreign policy of territorial conquest out in the open, why did the British choose the policy of appeasement? If anything, one would think that the British leaders would favor to formulate some sort of Bismarck-style alliance system with France, the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia in an attempt to keep Hitler from conquest.
But Bouverie makes it clear that the British chose appeasement for the same reason we in the 2020s would chose appeasement if Adolf Hitler were around today: No one read Hitler’s book. And those that did read his book were of split opinion: Since Hitler was proclaiming that he was “a man of peace” early in his chancellorship, those that believed him dismissed his early writings as the “the moribund rantings of a young firebrand.” (Page 18) Even Neville Chamberlain, who had read excerpts of Mein Kampf, chose to ignore Hitler’s early writings, stating: “If I accepted the author’s conclusions I should despair.” (Page 418) This brings me to my final point and the main character of Bouverie’s book: Neville Chamberlain.
Neville Chamberlain
To be fair, I don’t want to put all the blame on Chamberlain, as Bouverie makes it clear that appeasement had already been the policy of choice for both the government and, more importantly, for the British people. Stanley Baldwin, who preceded Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister, admitted that even if he were to go back in time and try to convince the British populace that Germany was a threat and that Britain should focus on rearmament in the midst of an economy attempting to get out of the Great Depression, the effect would have been disastrous and have meant the loss of a General Election. (Pages 25-26) Indeed, it was Winston Churchill’s pursuit of rearmament that made him so unpopular in the 1930s until his eventual ascension to Prime Minister in 1940.
By the time Neville Chamberlain became Prime Minister in 1935, his main goal was to balance the budget and cut expenses to get Britain out of the Great Depression; but he just so happened to take the job at the same time Hitler’s rearmament program was in full swing. Eerily, it was Chamberlain’s half-brother Austen Chamberlain who had reminded Neville after a dinner in 1936: “Neville, you must remember you don’t know anything about foreign affairs.” (Page 129) That statement turned out to be prophetic, as the rest of the book details how poorly Chamberlain handled the international situation. To make things worse, Chamberlain was hard-headed, always convinced that he was right. For example, his desire to appease Benito Mussolini’s aggression in Ethiopia would eventually lead to the resignation of his Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, all of which Bouverie brilliantly details in chapter ten. Chamberlain even went so far as to have secret channels of communication with Mussolini so as to not have to go through his secretary—an obvious sign that Chamberlain felt he could handle the international situation himself without the need to seek advice from any members of his cabinet. And when you couple Chamberlain’s stubbornness with the fact that he surrounded himself with “yes men” who were convinced that appeasing Hitler’s desires for German greatness was the right policy to pursue, what you get is a recipe for disaster.
Should You Read Appeasement?
The answer is a definite yes. Tim Bouverie’s first book is both a classic and a must-have for those who are interested in history—in particular the diplomatic history leading up to the Second World War—and the best source for explaining why Britain’s policy of appeasement failed to stop Adolf Hitler in his pursuit of empire. Bouverie does a wonderful job weaving the policy of appeasement in the 1930s into one dramatic narrative, and, if you can, read the book along with the audiobook narrated by John Sessions. Sessions did an amazing job narrating and deserves an equal amount of praise for his performance.
