But Chamberlain and his military advisors used the months following Munich well. Chamberlain did ruthlessly abandon the only democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, presenting to the Czechoslovak president Edvard Benes, as fait accompli, a deal to dismember his country and hand Sudetenland, a German-speaking mountainous province bordering the Third Reich, to the Nazis. Munich: Edge of War presents viewers with a pragmatic PM who remembered that the primary obligation of a British Prime Minister is not to those living in Prague it is to the inhabitants of places like Poplar, Pontefract and Perth. He simply wanted it to occur at the most advantageous moment for the country he led. Chamberlain favored diplomacy, but is this so wrong? Even that pugnacious old bulldog, Churchill, thought “ meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.” The crucial point is that Chamberlain did not shy from conflict. In his book Britain At Bay (2020), the historian Alan Allport argues that the British prime minster was pursuing a two-pronged diplomatic strategy in which appeasement and rearmament were complementary processes. In 1936, while Chancellor of the Exchequer, he began a vast, costly modernization of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force (RAF) and continued this policy when he became Prime Minister a year later. Far from quailing at the massing jackbooted Nazi hordes, Chamberlain was the architect of British rearmament. Archival records of cabinet discussions in the late 1930s show a clear-eyed understanding of Nazi duplicity. Munich: Edge of War makes the case for redress. He was dead from bowel cancer before 1940 was over. Winston Churchill would make similar arguments in his memoirs of the war. Political tracts like Guilty Men and We Were Not All Wrong, published in the first years of the war, lamented Chamberlain’s credulity towards the dictators and his failure to ready Britain for war.
In the United States, cable news pundits lament political concessions to one’s opponent as an act of shameful appeasement, while ghoulish talking heads urging war against enemies real or imagined-whether Afghanistan, Iraq or, today, Russia-accuse those preferring forethought of enjoying a Munich moment. Munich is often a synonym for diplomatic betrayal in histories of interwar Britain or British foreign policy. It is no spoiler to say that the Chamberlain we see in the film is not a dupe, but a canny political operator who held no illusions about the gangsters he was dealing with.Ĭhamberlain does not enjoy a healthy legacy. Munich: The Edge of War, based on a novel by British author Robert Harris, uses the September 1938 conference between Britain, France, Italy and Germany to decide the fate of Czechoslovakia as the backdrop to a plot in which two diplomats, one German and one British, former Oxford University friends, scheme to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Nevertheless, the new Netflix film, Munich: The Edge of War, suggests that historical perceptions of Chamberlain require revision. To the extent that historians do hot-takes, considering Sir Neville Chamberlain an unsung British hero of World War II is a particularly spicy number.