The widely applauded film, Munich, starring Jeremy Irons in brilliant form as Neville Chamberlain, has provoked fresh discussion of one of the most controversial events in modern history. Richard J. Evans, former Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, repeated some of the stock criticisms of Chamberlain in an article in The New Statesman on 21 January, Alistair Lexden answered him on 28 January in the magazine’s lead letter under the heading “What Chamberlain got right”. The letter was edited for publication; the full text follows.
Richard J Evans (Critic at Large, 21 January) appears to endorse the well-worn charge that Neville Chamberlain was “weak and unintelligent”, though Jock Colville, his private secretary in 1938, described his “brilliant” mind as “ unbelievably quick, clear and incisive.” Evans goes on to deny the existence of any evidence that Chamberlain privately distrusted Hitler, but he told Joe Kennedy, the American ambassador, that the Fuhrer was “cruel, overbearing” and “completely ruthless in any of his aims and methods”.
Chamberlain is also condemned for regarding Hitler as “a conventional European statesman” when he actually felt that if he and his cabinet “were doing business with a normal man they would have some idea of what might happen, but they were doing business with a madman.”
Most seriously, Evans dodges the central question: should Chamberlain have overruled all his military advisers and declared war in September 1938 with the country deeply divided and the Dominions unwilling to commit their forces? He would have plunged Britain into a long, devastatingly costly struggle on behalf of a state to which it had no treaty obligation, which it could not save and which would probably never be resurrected in its existing form, even if victory was eventually achieved.
Chamberlain kept firmly to the course he had set a year earlier when he told Lord Weir, his principal adviser on aviation matters: “The Air Force must go on building itself up as rapidly as possible. I hope my efforts with Germany and Italy will give us the necessary time.”
Alistair Lexden
Author, Neville Chamberlain: Redressing the Balance (2018)
House of Lords
