Fighting Churchill, Appeasing Hitler: Neville Chamberlain, Sir Horace Wilson, & Britain’s Plight of Appeasement: 1937–1939

Phillips (The King Who Had to Go) delivers a comprehensive examination of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s efforts to negotiate peace with Nazi Germany. Phillips’s account reveals the extent to which the prime minister banked his appeasement efforts on such ill-fated plans as partially restoring German claims in colonial Africa in exchange for Adolf Hitler’s agreement to rejoin the League of Nations and take a less aggressive posture toward Czechoslovakia and other Eastern European countries. Phillips deepens the common understanding of such well-known events as Chamberlain’s September 1938 Munich visit by focusing on the role played by Sir Horace Wilson, a senior civil servant with no foreign policy background who served as the prime minister’s aide and confidante in the years leading up to the German invasion of Poland and England’s war declaration. Chamberlain apologists are likely to rethink their stance in light of evidence, presented here, that the prime minister ignored his military advisers’ opinions when it suited him, and that he and Wilson influenced the British media to suppress criticism of the Nazi regime. This somber, exhaustive account will persuade WWII history buffs that, in trying to prevent the war, Chamberlain and Wilson “made it almost inevitable.” (Dec.)