Neville Chamberlain's War: The British Campaign Against Hitler, 1939-1940

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, the arch-appeaser of 1938, waged the only war he could manage: a war of appeasement that was phoney from the start. He did not seek the defeat of Germany, since the British establishment considered that country to be the prime bulwark against Bolshevism in Europe. He assumed that the good German people would replace Hitler with a government amenable to Britain once they saw the threats of a fully mobilized French army and a British naval blockade. Chamberlain had tried mightily to avoid a war with Germany. His hastily-conceived guarantee to Poland was meant to deter Hitler from starting one. Instead, the Phoney War resulted in Hitler's greatest triumph--the conquest of Western, democratic Europe, whose industrial and agricultural resources allowed Nazi Germany to pursue its aggression against the Soviet Union. As an island, Britain survived the defeat of 1940 and eventually emerged on the side of the victors. This thoroughly researched history tells the entire story of Chamberlain's Phoney War and carries an important lesson: any power that goes to war without weighing its chances of victory is courting disaster. Read more