Chamberlain and Appeasement: British Policy and the Coming of the Second World War [Paperback]

Robert Alexander Clarke Parker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1993 | ISBN-10: 031209969X | ISBN-13: 978-0312099695

This book provides a fresh and original approach to a controversial episode in British history, Chamberlain's policy of 'appeasement' towards Hitler's Germany. Written directly from primary archival sources, Alastair Parker's account offers the student new perspectives on the man who dominated the making of British policy before and after his 'triumph' at Munich in September 1938 - Neville Chamberlain. This study considers his personality, his aims and his methods and the opposition to him from men both within and outside his party.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 388 pages
• Publisher: Bedford/St Martins (November 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 031209969X
• ISBN-13: 978-0312099695
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,187,201 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Labeling a close-minded, stubborn man, August 26, 2010

By 

D. Martz (Vienna, VA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Chamberlain and Appeasement: British Policy and the Coming of the Second World War (Paperback)

This judicious scholarly monograph weaves numerous short quotations from source documents into a reasonably readable and balanced assessment of C. It concludes that his "policy was arrogant, not weak or timid" (p.218). Parker notes that since the opening of WWII archival records in the 1960s historians have become "steadily more benign" in revising the myth fostered by Churchill and others that C. was a stupid and/or cowardly man. He was not, claims the author "a parochial, narrow minded nonentity" but a "hard working, clear headed and efficient statesman" (p.326).

One theme of the work is that appeasement, based on British guilt feelings about the severity of the Treaty of Versailes, was a widely popular policy through much of the 1930s. Even when this view waned in the post-Munich period and down to the onset of war, no political faction of consequence offered any alternative German policy that could hope to command a parliamentary majority. Give Parker credit; he avoids the seductive trap of 20-20 hindsight. But it remains an open question whether readers will accept his assessment that "In the the circumstances that [C.] found, scholars suggest, he managed public affairs as well as anyone could have done" (p.343).

This is not to suggest that Parker gives C. a free pass. He taxes the Prime Minister with failing "to grasp the suicidal irrationality of Nazism" (p.332). Wisdom of hindsight or not, any suggestion that there was not plenty of evidence in Mein Kampf and Hitler's behavior up to 1939 that this was not an individual easily reasoned with would be difficult to swallow. I came away from this book wishing that Parker had tried harder to analyze C's thinking processes, particularly his almost pathological self-certainty and refusal to learn from criticism by friends or adversaries. C.'s misjudgments of the character of the dictators, the value of a Soviet alliance, and the need for more rapid rearmament nearly led to extinction of the U.K. as a sovereign entity. Whether one chooses to label these catastrophic errors as stupidity or willful self-delusion seems in the end like semantic hair-splitting.