h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Woah. Alright.let's not get unnceessarily heated, or we'll find ourselves being filmed by channel 4 and used a teaser for some documentary.
Come on then. let's put it to the vote. This house (me- I am the house- look mum) says that Neville Chamberlain was unfairly denegrated after ww2

Ays and Nays please?

Aye.

Effers, I get it. You're a unique special snowflake and I should bend over backwards to make sure I don't hold you to the same standards as everyone else.

Regardless of anything I said in another unrelated conversation a fortnight or more ago, this is a cracking thread on the way a British PM is portrayed.

You've decided to not engage with any viewpoints or counterarguments, and have instead decided that regardless of the situation at the time, Chamberlain's contemporary reputation and the fact that he re-armed the UK anyway, that the guy's an idiot.

That's not banter. That's pig-headedness. That's the equivalent of "LALALALALALAI'MNOTLISTENINGANDI'MRIGHTANDYOU'REWRONGLALALA!!"

If that's witty banter round your end, then it must be really dull in the pub.

I think we should take the Zhou En-Lai approach to the delivery of historical verdicts.

Of Mao he said he was '70% good, 30% bad' (A5141369).

And when asked what he thought were the consequences of the French Revolution he said 'It's too soon to say.'

Fence-sitter

I'm not an expert but it has been said elsewhere that the Versaille treaty after WW1 more or less made WW2 inevitable. Rather than blaming everything on the Kaiser and trying to reestablish Germany back into the European fold, similar to that done in 1814 for France (treaty of Vienna - where Napoleon was blamed but the French people forgiven), severe punitive measures were actioned that crippled the German economy, and German territory was ceded that included significant numbers of ethnic Germans. The League of Nations was set up with the help of Woodrow Wilson to police the peace but was never sanctioned by the US Congress and was toothless. When the dust had settled the treaty came to be viewed as rather unfair by many in the US and Britain, and so there wasn't much resistance when Germany later began to defy the treaty.

With regard to Chamberlain it is not clear what more he could have really done in 1938. I don't think Britain was prepared to start a fight in a far away corner of Europe over a matter that many felt was Germany attempting to correct a wrong in the defunct Versaille treaty and allowing for self determination of the Sudetenland Germans. It seemed that Germany were going to invade anyway and it's not clear whether Britain was in a good position to actually do anything about it.

It seems that the vilification of Chamberlain as an abominable appeaser was initially part of a Churchillian tactic to focus the minds of the British people during the dark days of WW2, to instill in the British an irresistible determination not to give in to Hitler and to strive to overcome and defeat him.

Soon after WW2 Churchill was voted out of office so he could only warn about the "Iron curtain" of Stalins Soviet Union, but at the time most thought he was over-reacting.

I have to agree, this isn't humourous, its more to do with subscribing to a political view by someone with little interest in facts.

I'm terrible with names, but the French guy in the railway carriage at Versailles had lost his son-in-law in the war and was determined that every German should pay for his daughter's heartbreak.
France deliberately picked him because he was known to be immovable.

Unfortunately England and America did little to restrain him. Germany came to discuss terms France came the terms already decided.

And it was a particular French animus for the Germans that did the deed: The Turks showed that the terms of the post-war treaties could be altered as happened with the Treaty of Sevres.

For the French, WW1 was mostly about revenge and regaining Alsace-Lorraine. If you've gone for revenge against someone, they've kicked the out of you a second time and you only 'win' (WW1 seems as pyrrhic a victory for the French as WW2 was for the British) with the help of bigger, more powerful friends, then it's fairly inevitable you're going to be ferocious. Clemenceau was involved with the Paris Commune so this was his second time meeting the Germans at the negotiating table. If you want to blame someone for causing WW2 whilst proclaiming peace, Clemenceau is your guy.

To answer bpm's question: aye all the way.

>How ill are we talking here?<

Died of cancer in November 1940 - in a scale of 1 to ill - that's ill I think.

Another thing I didn't know* was that he remained an important member of the war cabinet and *led* it in the absence of Churchill. Interesting - must have retained some respect then huh?




*I guess after his loss/resignation of the premiership he rather becomes history's forgotten man

Quite a few leaders made particularly controversial decisions when they were very ill. For example, Kennedy gave in to a lot of Soviet demands whilst he was coming down off 'painkillers' (amphetamines I think) in negotiations. There is view that we need to test our leader's health in order to avoid such things happening.

However, if Chamberlain did appease because of his illness, maybe it was fortunate, if it gave us a bit more time to get organised.

Effers; gone to earth.




I only found out this year that he never said that actual phrase:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZHpprf6HSM&feature=related

It was all a it complicated as well. Chamberlain allowed Hitler to annex part of Czechoslovakia to save our back-side but then Poland started badgering Czechoslovakia cede it's Teschen district.

Once again messy around that part of the continent.

The problem is we do not know what other PMs would have done in the same situation to save the UK from conflict...allowing a foreign power to nick a bit of another country in hope that it makes us safe seems a good deal...and we have the exact science of Hindsight at our disposal.

>>I'm not an expert but it has been said elsewhere that the Versaille treaty after WW1 more or less made WW2 inevitable.


Well *everything* is inevitable. How can we tell? It happened! That and only that. p=1.0.

The question is 'Was it *predictable*?' But it's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.

Why did we go into the war at all?

Couldn't we have stayed out of it?

It's impossible for our generation(s) to remember just how self-sustaining and *wealthy* the Empire made Britain. We didn't actually need Europe that much.

Could we have stayed neutral, arming to defend ourselves against invasion, but letting Europe sort itself out?

We sat out Germany's 19th C invastions of France, and the Siege of Paris. Couldn't we have sat this one out?

Ben

Were thee any agreements with other countries about helping them if any invasion took place.

I believe that is why WW1 blew up quickly due to Treatise making other countries go to the aid of others that had bee invaded?

"We sat out Germany's 19th C invastions of France, and the Siege of Paris. Couldn't we have sat this one out?"

There's a great book on WW1 that asks that same question, and the answer is even more pertinent to WW2.

Throughout British (English) history, we've stayed out of European wars as far as possible. Unless of course that war puts a foreign power in the Low Countries or Channel Ports.

Unless your army is in Calais, Belgium or Holland, you'll have a hard time invading England. Just ask the Spanish. So if an invading army gets to those all important ports, we're suddenly under threat.

In WW1, we could've stayed out, until the Germans set a beeline for the Channel ports. As soon as that happened, we had to put soldiers on the ground to secure our "outer wall".

The same goes for WW2. And it actually happened. As soon as the Germans took the channel ports, we were under threat of invasion for the first time since Napoleon.

(note: as I'm writing this, I've realised that this explains why we spent so long fighting the French, and why we keep our Navy in Portsmouth, instead of ports with better access to the longer Atlantic and North Sea coastlines)

>>It's impossible for our generation(s) to remember just how self-sustaining and *wealthy* the Empire made Britain. We didn't actually need Europe that much.

Really? Wasn't it a struggle between two industrial competitors?

Let's take an example. We've all heard of the Berlin-Baghdad railway. What important industrial resource is found near Baghdad?

And what were the first British troops to be deployed? The Expeditionary Force to Basra.

We were never going to be bystanders. It was our war.

>> We've all heard of the Berlin-Baghdad railway.

I haven't.

That's a fair old simplification of our european relations of course.

A lot of the threat from revolutionary/post-revolutionary France was in the forms of economic impact (Napoleon's Continental System), revolutionary impact (fear of a 'domino effect' toppling our own aristocratic systems) and (actual and fear of) attacks on our imperial interests in the middle east and Americas

Also in the mid-nineteenth century France was under control of Napoleon's nephew and Prussia and the Austro-Hungarian's had master dimplomats that could run rings around most others in the forms of Bismarck and Metternich. von Ribbentrop was most certainly not in their league.