World War II
A Quarrel in a Far-Away Country: Britain on the Brink at Munich, 1938
In ten days of September 1938, Neville Chamberlain flew three times to Germany to keep Europe out of war. He came home to cheering crowds and a phrase that would haunt him. This is the decision as the men in the room actually faced it.
The Hour Brings Grave News
By the second week of September 1938, the wireless in a million British sitting rooms carried the same careful voice: this is London, and the hour brings grave news from the Continent. The crisis over Czechoslovakia had reached its head. Germany demanded the Sudetenland, the German-speaking border districts that happened also to contain the country's mountain fortifications, and the German army was massing on the frontier. Europe held its breath.
The pressure had been engineered with patience. Konrad Henlein's Sudeten German Party raised demand after demand on Prague through 1938, working to instructions from Berlin whose whole purpose was to keep the crisis unresolved. London's Runciman mission pressed the Czechs toward ever-greater concessions, but each Czech offer was met by a fresh demand built to be refused. Behind Henlein stood Berlin; behind Prague stood its border forts and an army of some thirty-five divisions.
Into this stepped a sixty-nine-year-old British Prime Minister who had spent his career in city government and the Treasury, and who had concluded that the surest way to stop a war was to find out what the other man wanted and give it to him before the shooting began. The question that would define the century was deceptively practical: was this distant quarrel Britain's to fight, and was Britain in any condition to fight it?
Three Flights and a Signature
On 15 September 1938, Chamberlain did something no British Prime Minister had done. He climbed into an aeroplane, the first flight of his life, and flew to Berchtesgaden to meet Adolf Hitler in person. It was a dramatic, unprecedented intervention, and Hitler used it to demand outright the cession of the Sudeten areas. Chamberlain flew home and set about winning French and Czech acquiescence to the principle of transfer, the thing he had crossed Europe to negotiate already half-conceded.
Then came the trap. At Bad Godesberg on 22 to 24 September, expecting to settle the orderly handover agreed in principle, Chamberlain was instead handed a harsher ultimatum: immediate military occupation of the Sudetenland by 1 October, with no orderly transfer at all. He balked. For several days war seemed genuinely imminent. At home the country prepared in earnest: slit trenches were dug in London's parks, some thirty-eight million gas masks were distributed, and on 27 September the Royal Navy was mobilised. France, treaty-bound to defend Czechoslovakia but terrified of war, looked to London for a lead; the French premier, Édouard Daladier, went along with Anglo-French pressure on Prague with deep private misgivings.
With war apparently only hours away, a fourth option opened. A four-power conference was arranged at Munich for 29 September, brokered partly through Mussolini after a final British appeal. There, on 29 and 30 September, Britain, France, Germany and Italy agreed the cession of the Sudetenland on terms close to the Godesberg demands, with staged occupation under an international commission. Czechoslovakia, whose fate was the entire subject, was not invited. It was presented with the result and pressed to accept or face Germany alone, surrendering its mountain fortifications and, with them, any defensible frontier. Chamberlain flew home a third time. At the aerodrome he waved the joint declaration he had signed before jubilant crowds; that evening, from a window in Downing Street, he spoke the words that would outlive him: peace for our time.
No Clean Answer
The reason Munich remains an argument rather than a verdict is that every gauge on the table pulled against the others. The first was deterrence and the peace: a settlement reached from strength might stop an aggressor, but a capitulation that fed a democracy to him would only embolden him, while a reckless stand might trip a war Britain was not ready to fight. The second was readiness. The Chiefs of Staff judged the country dangerously unready in 1938. Fighter Command was still re-equipping with Hurricanes and Spitfires, the Chain Home radar network was incomplete, and the army was thin. Their argument that appeasement bought a vital year of preparation was genuine, not cowardice dressed as prudence.
The third pressure was the public and the press. A nation that remembered the trenches of 1914 to 1918 dreaded another European war, and most newspapers yearned for any settlement that would avert one; the government quietly encouraged that hopeful mood. The fourth was the alliance and the Dominions. France was wavering, the Soviet Union, bound to Czechoslovakia by a pact conditional on France acting first, hinted it might help but could move no troops without crossing a hostile Poland and Romania, and the Dominions made it unmistakably clear that Canada, Australia and South Africa would not readily go to war over a quarrel in central Europe.
No option satisfied more than two of these at once. Standing firm raised the deterrent but spent readiness, frightened the public, and risked the very war the Empire would not back. Conceding eased the public and bought time but cratered the deterrent and abandoned an ally. Chamberlain himself captured the temptation of disengagement in a broadcast, calling it a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing. His critics answered that the principle at stake, the right of a small nation to exist, made it very much Britain's concern. Both were honest readings of a desperate moment.
What Restraint Bought, and What It Cost
It is tempting now to read Munich as pure surrender, but the case for restraint was real, and it is worth stating at its strongest. Britain genuinely was unready, and the months bought before war came were used: after Munich, fighter production and radar in particular were accelerated, and the air defences that held in the summer of 1940 were in part the dividend of the year not spent fighting in 1938. A war begun that autumn, with the RAF half re-equipped and France hesitant and the Dominions unwilling, was a frightening prospect to sober soldiers, not just to frightened politicians.
Yet restraint had a logic that ran the other way too, and it is the heart of the indictment. Some German generals doubted the Wehrmacht was ready for a general war in 1938, and Czechoslovakia's thirty-five divisions and frontier forts were a formidable obstacle that the settlement simply gave away. A firm Anglo-French stand, perhaps with the Soviets, might have forced Hitler to climb down, calling a bluff that was never seriously tested. Each concession, the critics charged, only taught the aggressor that threats worked.
The reckoning came fast. In March 1939, Germany occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia, seizing Bohemia and Moravia and dismembering the state entirely, territory with no German population and beyond anything Munich had ever claimed to cover. It destroyed the last illusion that the aims were limited. Britain's guarantee to the rump Czech state had been discussed but never made firm; only now, too late, came the firm guarantees to Poland and others. Peace for our time had lasted not quite a year. The deepest lesson of Munich is not that conceding is always wrong, but that a concession made from weakness and called a triumph is the most dangerous kind, because it teaches the wrong men exactly what they wanted to learn.
Take the Chair
Balance of Nations puts you in the Prime Minister's seat for The Price of Peace and walks the whole arc, from Henlein's first demands through the Berchtesgaden flight, the Godesberg ultimatum, the September war scare and the conference itself to the March 1939 reckoning. Across roughly ten turns you weigh real decisions, whether to fly out and negotiate or refuse the summit, whether to stiffen France or lead it gently toward a settlement, whether to open staff talks with Moscow, whether to reject the ultimatum or swallow it, against four gauges that genuinely pull apart: Deterrence and the Peace, Readiness and Rearmament, The Public and the Press, and The Alliance and the Dominions. There is no all-positive move, and that is the point.
Munich is remembered as a failure of nerve, but it was really a failure of strength dressed as a triumph, and the hardest thing to judge in any crisis is the difference.
Take the chair — play Balance of Nations →
A free browser strategy game. Lead a nation through this crisis and others, balancing four pressures across about ten turns. No download; play as a guest. Browse all 16 scenarios.