By Julian Lewis

Salisbury Review – April 1986

Part One: Appeasing the Voters

On 26 May 1932, whilst 'millions of well-meaning English people' were hoping for the success of the World Disarmament Conference at Geneva, Winston Churchill published an article in the Daily Mail regretting that there was currently

'such a horror of war in the great nations who passed through Armageddon that any declaration or public speech against armaments, although it consisted only of platitudes and unrealities, has always been applauded; and any speech or assertion which set forth the blunt truths has been incontinently relegated to the category of "warmongering".'

In the run-off poll against President Hindenburg on 10 April, Hitler had obtained nearly 40 percent of the votes cast; yet, less than a fortnight later, the British Prime Minister – Ramsay MacDonald – had arrived in Geneva to urge the European democracies to disarm.

Justified accusations were to be made in later years that some Conservatives with a preference for Fascism against Communism were partly responsible for the pursuit of appeasement. But it is important to note the pacifist/idealist element in its early motivation, after the trauma of World War One. Thus, it was a Liberal Foreign Secretary in the National Government – Sir John Simon – who told the House of Commons that only by reducing the level of arms could the dangers of a future war be averted. His claim that nothing could be worse than a disarmed Germany facing a well-armed France, led Churchill to respond:

'I would say to those who would like to see Germany and France on an equal footing in armaments: 'Do you wish for war?' [1]

It was nonsense to expect the French to disarm in the face of a much more populous and potentially more powerful Germany, wrote Churchill returning to this theme in his 26 May article. It was equally futile not to expect Poland, Finland and the Baltic States to try similarly to protect themselves from 'a ferocious deluge from Russia' (which all, indeed, had to undergo in 1939).

Churchill had been criticising reliance on disarmament for security for many months before the Nazis came to power; nor was he under the slightest delusion about their nature. As early as 18 October 1930, he had warned a senior staff member at the German Embassy that, whereas Hitler disavowed any aggressive intentions, he (Churchill) was

'convinced that [Hitler] or his followers would seize the first available opportunity to resort to armed force'. [2]

The following April, the formation of an Austro-German Customs Union raised the prospect of an eventual Anschluss, or political union, between those two countries. If this occurred (as it did in 1938), warned Churchill, the 40 million-strong French would be confronted by a 'solid German block' of 70 millions, which would also flank Czechoslovakia on three sides.

Hitler's aims were clear: renunciation of the Treaty of Versailles, which had imposed major strategic restrictions upon Germany after the end of World War I; a 'cleansing’ of Jews from German public life; and a programme of rearmament. Such harsh realities failed to fit in with the prevailing anti-militarist climate of élite circles in British public life, in the aftermath of the 1914–18 slaughter. That climate, together with stringent economic conditions, had led to the adoption throughout the 1920s of the so-called 'Ten Year Rule' by which the heads of the Armed Services, the Chiefs of Staff, had been required to base their military planning on the assumption that they need not anticipate a major war for ten years from any given date. Towards the end of the decade (1928–30), there also appeared a spate of novels and memoirs on the 'futility of war" theme – most notably by Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden and, from the German side (All Quiet on the Western Front), Erich Maria Remarque.

As will be seen, it is far from certain that disenchantment with the wisdom of a strong foreign policy was widespread at the grass-roots of British society. However, it is a basic weakness of democracies, when faced with dictatorships, that their leaders feel constrained by what they think public opinion will or will not tolerate. Thus, by the beginning of the 1930s, few members of the 'intelligentsia' subscribed to the view that Germany had been mainly responsible for the Great War. Wars were fashionably thought to occur from 'mistakes', or the acquisition of 'great armaments', or the operations of 'capitalism', of the harbouring of 'grievances' which could and should be removed. The concept of aggressive megalomania had no place in this impersonal analysis. As A. J. P. Taylor has commented:

'These explanations were usually mixed together. Whichever were adopted, it led to much the same conclusion. Since there was nothing to choose between the governments of each country and since war was always a purposeless evil, the duty of those who wanted peace was to see that their own government behaved peacefully and, in particular, to ensure this by depriving their government of arms.' [3]

The Ten Year Rule was eventually discarded in 1932, largely as a sop to the military, but in February that year the World Disarmament Conference opened in Geneva:

'From this moment, Labour and Liberals alike pressed for disarmament as the main element in British foreign policy and developed their opposition to the government mainly on this issue. [Sir Herbert] Samuel and his Liberals went into formal opposition because of the government's hesitations. Labour denounced the government as apologists for "the merchants of death" [i.e. the arms manufacturers].' [4]

From 1931 to 1935, Labour was led by the much-loved pacifist idealist, George Lansbury, who had been chosen in the aftermath of the Labour Party's 1931 election disaster. This had left it with only 52 parliamentary seats, in opposition to an overwhelming National Government coalition majority. In retrospect, it seems probable that it was largely a reaction against this freak result coupled with the country's continuing economic difficulties which caused several striking defeats for the government at by-elections, the most remarkable being that at East Fulham in October 1933. Yet, this is not how politicians interpreted matters at the time. In the run-up to the East Fulham poll, Lansbury had declared that, if he were a dictator,

'I would close every recruiting station, disband the Army, dismantle the Navy, and dismiss the Air Force. I would abolish the whole dreadful equipment of war and say to the world "Do your worst!" I believe it would do its best.'

The successful Labour candidate, John Wilmot, likewise demanded that Britain should

'give a lead to the whole world by initiating immediately a policy of general disarmament',

and his overturning of a government majority of 14,500 was interpreted by Conservative leaders as an endorsement of that view. Three years later, Stanley Baldwin – MacDonald's successor as Prime Minister – replied to an attack by Churchill in the following terms:

'I put before the whole House [of Commons] my own views with an appalling frankness. You will remember at that time [1932–3] the Disarmament Conference was sitting in Geneva You will remember that at that time there was probably a stronger pacifist feeling running through this country than at any time since the war … I asked myself what chance was there – when that feeling that was given expression to in Fulham was common throughout the country – what chance was there within the next year or two of that feeling being so changed that the country would give a mandate for rearmament? Supposing I had gone to the country and said that Germany was rearming, and that we must rearm, does anybody think that this pacific democracy would have rallied to that cry at that moment? I cannot think of anything that would have made the loss of the election from my point of view more certain.' [5]

In his memoirs, Churchill was charitably to acknowledge that his old adversary, Baldwin, had not been motivated 'by any ignoble wish to remain in office', but rather

'by the fear that if the Socialists came into power even less would be done than his Government intended'. [6]

It is certainly true that in its manifesto for the 1935 General Election (which took place on 14 November) the Labour Party still declared – nearly three years after Hitler had become Germany's Chancellor – that a Conservative victory would endanger peace as it would entail 'a vast and expensive rearmament programme'; but had it really been necessary for Baldwin to respond with an address to the Quaker-founded Peace Society on 31 October 1935, declaring:

'I give you my word there will be no great armaments',

though stressing the need for some improvement in defence?

The very large Conservative victory (432 seats, to Labour's 154 and the Liberals' 21) suggests on the contrary that a more courageous stand for rearmament would not have made 'the loss of the election from [his] point of view more certain'. The result of the 'Peace Ballot', conducted by the League of Nations Union and revealed on 28 June 1935, had actually shown some 6,750,000 participants in favour of using force as a last resort to stop aggression and only some 2,000,000 against – the customary three-to-one majority of resisters versus disarmers generally to be found in 20th century Britain. Unfortunately, this finding was overshadowed by the other, 'peace'-oriented questions in the ballot, tendentiously worded to invite overwhelmingly one-sided results. Other events, such as the notorious Oxford Union vote not in any circumstances to fight for 'King and Country' (February 1933) also played a part in convincing the National Government that a firm rearmament policy would be electorally unacceptable. Nevertheless, it is the fundamental duty of any government to recommend those defence policies it judges to be necessary for the security of the country. Often it will receive much stronger public support than it might have expected. As the contemporary Defence Correspondent (now the Editor) of the Daily Telegraph, William Deedes, later commented:

'There sprang up, just before East Fulham, a small wind, from a quarter not fully accounted for, which ministers allowed to blow them off the prudent course ... Baldwin and [Neville] Chamberlain [his successor in 1937] misread the public telegrams ...' 7

With the election safely behind them, however, their policy of appeasing the electorate was to be overshadowed by the even more reprehensible one of appeasing the Nazis.

Part Two: Appeasing the Nazis

Many factors contributed to the British policy of seeking to keep the peace by constantly conceding to German 'grievances'. One was fear of Bolshevism (Communism): Stalin's purges in the 1930s coincided with a period of unbridled admiration for Soviet Russia by large sections of the Left of British politics. It was not only the more blinkered sections of the Right, however, which viewed Hitler as a preferable alternative to Stalin. Even when Britain and Germany were actually at war, the philosopher Bertrand Russell could write that he had

'no doubt that the Soviet Government is even worse than Hitler's, and it will be a misfortune if it survives'. [8]

There was no secret about the Soviet Union's ideological aims. Abortive though Communist coups had been in Germany and Hungary in the aftermath of World War I, Lenin's Comintern (the Third – or Communist – International) was openly functioning in its attempts to direct a revolutionary world movement. Stalin's split with Trotsky, apart from being a personal contest, had been concerned much more with the priority than with the principle of pursuing the goal of 'world revolution'.

Another factor was the reaction against the horrors of the previous war and against the prospect of another. The prospect of aerial bombardment especially was viewed (wrongly as it turned out) with similar dread which now applies to nuclear war. Theorists such as the Italian General Douhet had their adherents in the RAF and outside it, who thought that wars might be settled by air power alone. A 'knock-out blow’ would be inflicted by a rain of poison gas and high explosive bombs. Typically, an article in the New Statesman (30 January 1932) stressed the horrors of gas attack – a 'synthetic earthquake', which 'could only be equalled by one of nature's worst convulsions'. The only safeguard, of course, would lie in 'international measures of disarmament'. Or consider Bertrand Russell again:

'London for several days will be one vast raving bedlam, the hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for help, the city will be a pandemonium. What of the Government at Westminster? It will be swept away by an avalanche of terror. Then will the enemy dictate its terms ...' [9]

In an article entitled 'A National Air Force – No Defence', published in 1935, Philip Noel-Baker – doyen of the Labour Party's disarmament campaigners for over 50 years until the 1980s – predicted:

'In the next war our only hope of saving London will be to destroy Paris or Berlin before the enemy's attacks begin. And if this is true, can we resist the conclusion that the next war if it comes will obliterate the civilisation in which we live?' [10]

As early as November 1932, Stanley Baldwin (who often spoke for MacDonald on defence matters) had declared supinely that

'the bomber will always get through'.

His solution was to tell the Cabinet Disarmament Committee in March 1933:

'We must have a convention prohibiting bombing.' [11]

During this period, as in most stages of British history perhaps since Ethelred the Unready sought to buy off the Danes, there were two competing schools of thought. One held that the danger of war could best be averted by banning the weapons of war and attempting to placate potential opponents. The other maintained that aggressive ambitions had to be deterred or resisted, because they could not be defused. Looking back on the efforts of the League of Nations Disarmament Commission, which he had chaired between the wars, Salvador de Madariaga reflected in 1973 that:

'The trouble with disarmament was (and still is) that the problem of war is tackled upside down and at the wrong end... Nations don't distrust each other because they are armed; they are armed because they distrust each other. And therefore to want disarmament before a minimum of common agreement on fundamentals is as absurd as to want people to go undressed in winter.' [12]

Churchill, belonging to the second – anti-disarmament – school of thought, completely rejected Baldwin's view. As he said in Parliament on 23 November 1933:

'There was a sense of, what shall I say, fatalism and even perhaps helplessness about it, and I take this opportunity of saying that as far as this island is concerned, the responsibility of Ministers to guarantee the safety of the country from day to day and from hour to hour is direct and inalienable ...' [13]

To fear of Communism and fear of the costs of war must be added a third factor: the sense of guilt derived from the harsh terms imposed upon the defeated Germans at Versailles in 1919. Just as current Soviet repression of Russian dissidents is blamed on Western 'confrontationist' behaviour by modern apologists on the Left, so could Lord Lothian, a Liberal member of the National Government in 1931–2 and an apologist for the Nazis until 1938, describe Hitler's brutalities in April 1937 as

'largely the reflex of the external persecution to which Germans have been subjected since the war’. [14]

In the words of Gilbert and Gott:

'A sense of guilt drove the appeasers into a one-sided relationship with Germany, in which Germany was always to be given the benefit of the doubt. Hitler's outbursts were not treated as the ravings of a wicked man: they were the understandable complaints of a man who had been wronged.' [15]

Hitler knew perfectly well how to play on these fears of war and feelings of guilt Looking back on the success of his tactics, in a secret speech to representatives of the German press in Munich on 10 November 1938, he pointed out that:

'The prevailing circumstances have obliged me to speak, for a decade or more, of almost nothing but peace. Only, in fact, by continuously declaring the German desire for peace and Germany's peaceful intentions was I able, step by step, to secure freedom, for the German people and to provide Germany, with the armaments which have, time and time again, always been the essential precondition for any further move.' [16]

From the outset, the appeasers had no valid excuse for doubting the nature of the Nazi régime, but they were determined not to let the facts stand in the way of their theories. Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. On 6 February he issued a 'Law for the Protection of the German People', enabling him to silence the German press. Within a few days, the Oxford Union had resolved by 275 to 153 votes that it would not 'in any circumstances ... fight for King and Country’. In a speech on 17 February, Churchill contrasted this with German youth

'burning to suffer and die for their fatherland ... One can almost feel the curl of contempt upon the lips of the manhood of all these peoples when they read this message sent out by Oxford University in the name of young England.' [17]

The first five months of Hitler's Chancellorship were the last – before retirement – of Britain's Ambassador in Berlin since 1928, Sir Horace Rumbold. His penetrating analysis of the new régime spelt out what others in years to come were to choose to ignore. In March 1933 he reported that the Nazis were intimidating the population. On 14 March he described the new government as having brought to the surface

'the worst traits in German character, i.e. a mean spirit of revenge, a tendency to brutality, and a noisy and irresponsible jingoism'.

On 28 March he stated that Jews were being 'systematically removed from their posts' in the public services, adding on 5 April that

'large concentration camps were being established in various parts of the country, one near Munich being sufficiently large to hold 5,000 prisoners'. (This was Dachau.)

Rumbold's 26 April despatch – written before his first meeting with Hitler – was circulated to the Cabinet. It stressed that parliamentary rule in Germany had been replaced by brute force; it quoted Mein Kampf to show how easy it was to forecast that the evils of the régime would continue indefinitely; it warned that

‘Germany's neighbours have reason to be vigilant',

and that attempts to divide Hitler from his fellow-Nazis would be bound to fail. On 11 May Rumbold restated this last point. Having now met Hitler personally, he concluded that

'Herr Hitler is himself responsible for the anti-Jewish policy... it would be a mistake to believe that it is the policy of his wilder men whom he has difficulty in controlling’.

The Ambassador knew all too well the tendency of democrats to seek to find aspects of 'liberalism' in their totalitarian opponents, as recognition of their inherent hostility to democracy was too awful to contemplate:

'The deliberate ruthlessness and brutality which have been practised during the last five months seem both excessive and unnecessary’,

he reported in his final despatch on 30 June.

'I have the impression that the persons directing the policy of the Hitler Government are not normal. Many of us, indeed, have a feeling that we are living in a country where fantastic hooligans and eccentrics have got the upper hand.' [18]

By May 1933, Germany's clandestine rearmament was well-known within the Foreign Office. When a British delegate at Geneva argued that a threat of force by France and Britain would compel Hitler to desist, the strongly anti-German head of the Foreign Office – Sir Robert Vansittart – had his recommendations read in the Cabinet, but 'to no effect'. Vansittart deplored the politicians' tendency to try to divorce German domestic brutality from possible aggression abroad. On 28 August, he wrote that:

'From the very outset of the régime I have felt, with all deference to those who with more sweet reasonableness were disposed for at least a little while to wait and see, that there was no doubt whatever about the ultimate intentions of the Nazis ... It is an open secret that anything peaceful said by Hitler is merely for foreign consumption and designed to gain time.' [19]

Churchill was even more forthright on the question of sweet reasonableness versus direct action:

'If a mad dog makes a dash for my trousers',

he warned the German Press Attaché in London, Fritz Hesse,

'I shoot him down before he can bite.'

These attitudes were poles apart from those holding sway in Westminster, but they illustrate two vital facts: first, that sufficient evidence for a sound appreciation of the Nazi menace was available early on for those who wished to see it; and, secondly, that the failure of the government to initiate or support any firm action was mainly due to the character of the individuals in power rather than to any particular cleverness on Hitler's part in deceiving them. He could not have succeeded as he did, had they not been determined to swallow his efforts at deceit. Thus, the veteran disarmer, MacDonald, could look at the same evidence as Vansittart and read the same despatches, yet propose instead a plan for détente (another term not unfamiliar to the post-war world). He told the German Ambassador, Leopold von Hoesch, that

'From the very start he had not believed the reports of excesses'

by the régime. Hitler should visit England, he suggested, a plan privately dismissed as 'absurd' in Berlin.

In March 1933, Churchill had criticised the announcement that Britain was only fifth in the league-table of air power. His concern was not shared by Lord Londonderry, then the Secretary of State for Air, who pointed out in a speech in Newcastle in late June how the Germans had

'passed through a tribulation which we have never known. We should receive in no niggardly spirit the offers made to the world by Herr Hitler.'

It would be wrong, he felt, to

'refuse to believe in the sincerity of Germany'. [20]

Right from the outset, therefore, the stage was set for the ensuing tragedy. From 1934 until 1937 the positions of the two schools of thought hardened; but in every threatening cloud that gathered over Germany, Hitler's apologists inside and outside government sought the silver lining. In March 1936, Hitler sent a token military force to reoccupy the Rhineland, demilitarised under the terms of the Versailles Treaty. Baldwin, who had taken over from MacDonald as Prime Minister in June 1935, confessed that Britain lacked the strength to make good its guarantees under the 1925 Treaty of Locarno against aggression between Germany, France and Belgium. Too many people could see neither reason against, nor portent in, Hitler reoccupying 'his own back-yard'. Besides, had he not simultaneously offered to discuss a proposal for '25 years' peace in Europe'? To the influential 'Cliveden set' of appeasers who regularly met at the home of Nancy Astor MP, this offer was much more important:

'Welcome Hitler's declaration whole-heartedly',

they cabled the Prime Minister.

Rumbold's successor at the Berlin Embassy, Sir Eric Phipps, soon lost his early illusions about accommodating Hitler, and his First Secretary, Ivone Kirkpatrick, made a practice of showing covert German rearmament at first hand to English visitors. But the appeasers did not want to know. Critics were regarded as people standing in the way of détente:

'The appeasers wanted to hear that Hitler was reasonable. If their Ambassador would not tell them, they must look elsewhere for confirmation. The Embassy could be ignored.' [21]

And so it was until 1937, the year which saw Neville Chamberlain succeed Baldwin in May, having just told Nancy Astor that he intended to be his own Foreign Secretary. He did indeed bypass his Secretary of State, Anthony Eden, until the latter's resignation in 1938. Chamberlain relied instead upon a closed circle – an 'inner Cabinet' consisting of Viscount Halifax, Sir Samuel Hoare, Sir John Simon and himself – and upon a 'grey eminence' in the shape of Sir Horace Wilson, a senior Treasury civil servant seconded to Downing Street.

In April 1937, the disastrous Sir Nevile Henderson took over as Ambassador in Berlin. He soon began saying officially what opinionated visitors to the Nazis (such as Thomas Jones, Deputy Cabinet Secretary, 1916–30) had been saying unofficially to the satisfaction of their hosts for some considerable time. According to a speech by Henderson at a dinner in his honour on 1st June:

'far too many people have an erroneous conception of what the National-Socialist régime really stands for. Otherwise they would lay less stress on Nazi dictatorship and much more emphasis on the great social experiment which is being tried out in this country.' [22]

Perhaps more typical than such blatant fellow-travelling, was the shocked reaction of the Editor of The Times – arch-appeaser Geoffrey Dawson – when his perceptive Berlin correspondent, Norman Ebutt, was expelled by the Nazis. This was despite Dawson's refusal to print many of Ebutt's more embarrassing observations. Instead of Dawson's eyes being opened to the futility of what he had been doing, the expulsion merely caused him to contact his man in Geneva, and to explain:

'I do my utmost, night after night, to keep out of the papers anything which might hurt their [the Germans'] susceptibilities ... I shall be more grateful than I can say for any explanation ... I have always been convinced that the peace of the world depends upon our getting into reasonable relations with Germany.'

In reality, this one-sided approach meant acquiescing in virtually everything the Nazis did, and trying to count one's blessings. As Halifax told Hitler when they met in November 1937, he could see that

'the Chancellor ... had been able, by preventing the entry of Communism into his own country, to bar its passage further west'.

Meanwhile, despite divisions over the use or non-use of force to fight Fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), the Labour Party continued on its irresponsible course. Clement Attlee had succeeded Lansbury as leader, after an attack on the latter's extreme pacifism by the union leader Ernest Bevin in 1935. As Taylor notes, however,

'Attlee criticised every demand for arms made by the National Government until after the outbreak of war in 1939.' [23]

Yet, with the 1935 election safely behind them, as has been seen, the National Government had no excuse for being further afraid of, or constrained by, Labour disarmament agitation. The fact is that the dominant Conservative grouping had no stomach for a confrontation with Hitler. They were determined to press concessions upon him, rather than to risk a fight. By constantly conceding in this way they merely postponed the fight and ensured that it would have to be fought on terms more disadvantageous to themselves in the future.

It was noted above how Churchill had predicted that, apart from breaching the Versailles provisions, an Austro-German Anschluss would leave Czechoslovakia exposed and isolated, and under pressure in connection with its sizeable German-speaking minority in the Sudetenland. German entry into Vienna came on 13 March 1938. Czechoslovakia was next on Hitler's list, and the Munich Agreement (without Czech participation) to amputate the Sudetenland left the remainder of the country militarily defenceless. It is true that a military case can be made for the use to which Britain put the year's respite conferred by Munich; but the primary motivation of Chamberlain, Halifax, Henderson and the rest, was not that. Against all the odds, they were genuinely banking on Hitler finally having been placated by his seizure of the Sudetenland. Why else was such value placed on the now notorious 'piece of paper’ Chamberlain flourished on his return, pledging Germany and Britain 'never to go to war with one another again'? (30 September 1938)

Only the First Lord of the Admiralty, Alfred Duff Cooper, resigned in disgust at the dismemberment of a democracy to buy off a dictator. Public opinion at home and in the Dominions – lacking any lead from the government – seemed to favour the Agreement, but certainly stiffened after the Nazi seizure of Prague in March 1939. The Sudetenland – Hitler's ‘last territorial demand in Europe' – had satisfied his appetite for less than six months. Still Chamberlain wished to persist with appeasement, but public reaction to Hitler's betrayal of his Munich pledge required some symbolic firmness. This took the form of a guarantee of the security of Poland – a country even more difficult to assist militarily than Czechoslovakia had been.

A Bill for limited conscription passed through Parliament, against the vehement opposition of Labour and the Liberals:

'It is very dangerous to give generals all they want',

warned Attlee sententiously as war loomed. [24] Between April and August 1939, some effort was made (though with great misgivings) to reach an agreement with the Russians. Not only was this a matter of ideological antipathy, there were also great doubts about Russian military capabilities after the Great Purges. (Only the ferocity of Nazi behaviour in occupied Soviet territory was to ensure the resistance of many who initially welcomed the threat to Stalinism posed by the invasion in June 1941.) Labour and the Left supported the idea of a deal with the Soviet Union. The government dithered in the hope that Hitler might still draw back; but he had other plans. On 23 August, the Foreign Ministers of Germany and the Soviet Union, von Ribbentrop and Molotov, signed the Nazi-Soviet pact in Moscow. With it went their secret agreement to carve-up Poland, which was duly attacked in the rear by the Soviet army whilst vainly trying to resist Hitler in the West. (Nazi attack, 1 September; Soviet attack, 17 September)

By this time, Britain was at war (from 3 September) for the sake of a commitment which she could not get out of – although Chamberlain did his best to do so, even after the attack on Poland. Churchill, who had predicted so much, so accurately, was at last brought back into government (as First Lord of the Admiralty) after his decade in the political wilderness. But it was not to be until after further crises and setbacks that he was to take charge of the military struggle which he had tried in vain to prevent during the long years of appeasement.

Notes

1. W.S. Churchill: House of Commons speech, 13 May 1932
2. Quoted in M. Gilbert: Winston S. Churchill, Vol. V, 1922–39, (London, 1976), p. 407
3. A.J.P. Taylor: English History, 1914–1945, (Oxford, 1965), p. 362
4. Ibid.
5. S. Baldwin: House of Commons speech, 12 November 1936
6. W.S. Churchill: The Gathering Storm, 2nd Edition (London, 1949), p. 195
7. W.F. Deedes: 'The Real Appeasers Who Came from the Ranks of Politicians', Daily Telegraph, 25 February 1983
8. Quoted in M. Gilbert and R. Gott: The Appeasers, (London, 1967), p. 8
9. B. Russell: Which Way to Peace? (London, 1936), quoted in U. Bialer: The Shadow of the Bomber – The Fear of Air Attack and British Politics, (London, 1980), p. 47
10. P. Noel-Baker: 'A National Air Force – No Defence' (1935), quoted in Bialer, op. cit., p. 47
11. Quoted in Bialer, op. cit., p. 21
12. Quoted in The Times, 2 April 1983
13. W.S. Churchill: House of Commons speech, 23 November 1933
14. Quoted in Gilbert and Gott, op. cit., p. 39
15. Ibid., p. 9
16. Quoted in Z.A.B. Zeman: Nazi Propaganda, 2nd Edition (Oxford, 1973), p. 213
17. Quoted in M. Gilbert: Winston S. Churchill, Vol. V, 1922–1939, (London, 1976), p. 456
18. Gilbert and Gott, op. cit., pp. 9-17
19. Ibid., p. 19
20. The Times, 26 June 1933
21. Gilbert and Gott, op. cit., p. 38
22. Ibid., p. 63
23. Taylor, op. cit., p. 382
24. Quoted in Taylor, op. cit., p. 445