Peace for Our Time

Almost everyone has seen the photograph, even if they couldn't place it. A man in a dark coat stands in front of an aeroplane at an airfield outside London, holding a sheet of paper up to a cheering crowd. It is Neville Chamberlain at Heston on 30 September 1938, back from Munich.

The paper he is waving is not the Munich Agreement. It is a second, much shorter document that he and Hitler had signed that morning, and the gap between those two pieces of paper is most of the story.

The agreement

The Munich Agreement itself was signed in the early hours of 30 September by Hitler, Chamberlain, Édouard Daladier of France and Benito Mussolini. It handed Germany the Sudeten German districts of Czechoslovakia, the mountainous border regions with large German-speaking populations, and it read like a removals schedule.

The evacuation would begin on 1 October and be finished by the 10th. German troops would occupy four marked zones in stages between 1 and 7 October. And the Czechoslovak government would be "held responsible for carrying out the evacuation without damage to the said installations", which meant it was obliged to hand over its own border defences intact.

No Czechoslovak representative was present. The country being divided had been told the result.

The other piece of paper

Chamberlain had already flown to see Hitler twice that month, at Berchtesgaden and then at Godesberg, each time to find the demands had grown. At Munich, later on the morning of the signing, the two men met again and put their names to a short declaration.

"We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again," it said. Disputes would be settled by consultation.

That was the paper at Heston. Later that day, outside 10 Downing Street, Chamberlain told the crowd he had brought back "peace with honour", consciously echoing Disraeli's words on returning from the Congress of Berlin in 1878, and added: "I believe it is peace for our time." It is still routinely misquoted as peace in our time.

Hitler, according to a later account, said the declaration was "of no significance whatsoever".

The debate in the Commons

Not everyone was cheering. On 5 October, on the third day of the Commons debate on Munich, Winston Churchill, then a backbencher, rose to speak. "We have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat," he said, "and France has suffered even more than we have."

He described the sequence of the three meetings as a man being robbed in instalments. "£1 was demanded at the pistol's point. When it was given, £2 were demanded at the pistol's point." And he ended with a warning: "This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time."

On 15 March 1939 German forces took the rest of Czechoslovakia. The promise of the paper at Heston had lasted five and a half months.

The case that it bought time

For eighty years Chamberlain has been the byword for weakness, so it's worth stating the defence properly, because it isn't silly.

In the autumn of 1938 RAF Fighter Command had 25 squadrons, most of them flying obsolete biplanes. By the eve of the Battle of Britain in 1940 it had 58, most of them Spitfires and Hurricanes, as the New Statesman set out in 2018. By 1939, it argued, British aircraft production had overtaken Germany's. A Supermarine manager, Denis Webb, put it bluntly afterwards: "Chamberlain's despised scrap of paper gave us a good return." The RAF Museum's own history says Munich "certainly helped buy another year for British re-armament".

On that reading, Chamberlain knew Britain wasn't ready, could not say so publicly, and paid with Czechoslovakia for twelve months of factory time on aircraft. It is a cold argument, but it is a real one.

The case against

The trouble is that Germany used the same year, and it got a country thrown in.

The military historian Williamson Murray, writing in Commentary for the fiftieth anniversary, went through what Germany gained. The Czechoslovak army was taken out of the reckoning without firing a shot. Czech tanks, he wrote, equipped three of the ten panzer divisions that invaded France in May 1940. The Skoda works carried on "grinding out military equipment for the Wehrmacht" until May 1945. Czech financial reserves helped keep the German war economy going through 1939.

The Czech border fortifications were the other loss, and the British government had barely grasped it. Murray quotes the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, admitting to the Cabinet on 8 September 1938 that until the day before he had not known the main Czech fortifications lay inside the Sudeten German districts, the very land being handed over.

And the fear that made appeasement feel necessary, the idea of German bombers over London in 1938, was overdrawn. "As late as August 1938 half of the Luftwaffe's aircraft were out of commission," Murray wrote, and a German air staff officer judged that his command could inflict only "pinpricks" on Britain.

Which side is right

Both arguments are true about different things. The RAF was much stronger in 1940 than in 1938, and it needed to be. But the balance between Britain and France on one side and Germany on the other did not improve in that year, because Germany removed the Czechoslovak army from the scales and added its weapons, factories and defences to its own side.

The deeper failure was the second piece of paper. The Munich Agreement was a bad deal made under threat, and governments make those. The declaration at Heston was something else: a promise from a man who had broken every promise so far, accepted at face value and sold to a crowd as peace. Chamberlain was not a coward. He was a man who believed a signature would bind Hitler, and the occupation of Prague in March 1939 was the proof that it wouldn't.

The Czechoslovak government, which had not been invited to Munich, had to withdraw from its own border fortifications by 10 October, leaving them intact for the army that would use the country's own tanks against France a year and a half later.

Sources

• The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, "Munich Pact September 29, 1938" (the text of the agreement between Germany, Britain, France and Italy; the evacuation beginning on 1 October and completed by 10 October; the four zones occupied between 1 and 7 October; Czechoslovakia held responsible for leaving installations undamaged; the signatories).
• The National WWII Museum, "Appeasement and 'Peace for Our Time'" (the signing early on the morning of 30 September; no Czech representative present; "I believe it is peace for our time"; Hitler calling the declaration "of no significance whatsoever"; the seizure of the rest of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939).
• German History in Documents and Images, "'Peace for our Time' (1938)" (the reading of the Anglo-German declaration at Heston and its wording; "peace for our time" and its echo of Disraeli after the Congress of Berlin in 1878; the frequent misquotation).
• The National Archives, "Chamberlain and Hitler 1938" (the meetings at Berchtesgaden and Godesberg; Czechoslovakia's absence from the negotiations; the occupation from 1 October).
• UK Parliament, Historic Hansard, "Policy of His Majesty's Government", 5 October 1938 (Churchill's "total and unmitigated defeat", the pistol's point, and "the beginning of the reckoning").
• The New Statesman, "Did Neville Chamberlain create the conditions for the RAF to win the Battle of Britain?", 2018 (Fighter Command's 25 squadrons in autumn 1938 and 58 by the Battle of Britain; British aircraft output overtaking Germany's by 1939; Denis Webb's remark).
• RAF Museum, "Munich" (Munich helping to buy another year for British rearmament).
• Williamson Murray, "Munich at Fifty", Commentary, July 1988 (Czech tanks in three of ten panzer divisions in May 1940; the Skoda works producing for the Wehrmacht until 1945; Czech financial reserves; Halifax's admission of 8 September 1938 about the fortifications; half of the Luftwaffe's aircraft out of commission in August 1938 and the "pinpricks" assessment).