Churchill or Chamberlain--Which British Prime Minister Was Really the Greater Appeaser?

The answer to this question may surprise you.

The Myth of Munich

For the past eight decades, former Prime Minister Winston Churchill has been lauded by neoconservatives and their fellow-travelers as the penultimate opponent of appeasement. By contrast, former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, a lifelong anti-Communist, has been roundly condemned by neoconservatives as the greatest example of the follies of appeasement in modern history due to his decision to prevent the outbreak of World War Two with the Munich Agreement which was a compromise agreement signed by Britain, France, Italy and Nazi Germany in September 1938. The Munich Agreement ceded the Sudetenland, which was 90% ethnic German, to Germany, two decades after it had voted along with the rest of what was then the Republic of German Austria for an Anchluss with Germany that was supported by former President Woodrow Wilson.

Nazi German dictator, Adolf Hitler, was displeased that the Munich Agreement did not give him everything he wanted and foolishly proceeded to violate the Munich agreement by occupying the Czech Republic just six months later, causing Britain to overreact by issuing a military guarantee to Poland against a potential German aggression Hitler had never previously contemplated. This in turn caused Polish leaders to rule out any compromise with Hitler over the Polish controlled free city of Danzig, which was 95% German leading to the outbreak of war, after Hitler’s five-year attempt to employ diplomacy to secure its peaceful return and encourage Poland to ally with Germany against the Soviet Union had failed. The reunification of the German city of Danzig, which was not port of Poland but had been Polish occupied for two decades, with Germany was widely believed by many British and French leaders to have been the most just of Hitler’s demands.

Past US Presidents from Lyndon B. Johnson beginning with the Vietnam War have cited the need to avert “a second Munich” to justify their unnecessary no-win “forever” wars. For neoconservatives, it is always 1938 but I would counter that the international crises and perpetual, never-ending conflicts they keep creating with their aggressive, dangerous, and reckless foreign policy of liberal hegemony at an ever-increasing humanitarian cost, suggests a more apt historical analogy would be the fact that great power alliances transformed two regional conflicts in eastern Europe into unnecessary and otherwise avertable world wars in 1914 and 1939. Now, escalating US military support for Ukraine as part of Biden’s proxy war against Russia, which would never have occurred without Biden’s adamant refusal to satisfy Russia’s minimum demand to issue a written guarantee that Ukraine would never join NATO, threatens to transform yet another regional border dispute in Eastern Europe into a Third World War, which will almost assuredly escalate to the nuclear level.

For Hitler, it was a matter of justice for Germany. German Austria, which then included the Sudetenland, voted for Anschluss with Germany in November 1918. Woodrow Wilson supported extending the right of self-determination to the Sudeten Germans but was vetoed by a vengeful Clemenceau and David Lloyd George. The Munich Pact righted a historic wrong done to the Sudetenland forcing them to live under foreign Czech rule. It was Hitler's abrogation of the Munich Pact in March 1939 that was grossly unjust. The prevailing wisdom is that it was the Munich Pact that led to the outbreak of World War Two but as we should have all learned by now the prevailing wisdom is very much mistaken ab out a great many things about our history. It is indeed ironic that the UK and France chose to fight a war with Nazi Germany over its claims to the 95% German city of Danzig which privately many British and French leaders believed to be the most just of all of Hitler's territorial claims. Thus, it came to be said that "fifty million died for Danzig."

German Peace Offers During World War Two

U.S. military historians wrongly assume that war between Nazi Germany and the Western Powers was inevitable because Hitler supposedly wanted to conquer the world. However, Hitler did not want to fight the West at all which explains Germany's seventeen known peace offers between September 1939 and May 1941. In July 1940, Hitler was so sure that his comprehensive peace offer to Britain, which included the withdrawal of all German military forces from Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium and Holland would be accepted by the British that he issued orders (subsequently rescinded following the Soviet rejection of his offer of a Four Power Alliance in November 1940) to cancel all German military research and development projects that would not be ready by year’s end, confidently predicting that the war would soon be over and Germany could convert back to a peacetime economy.

Then in May 1941, Hitler sent his Deputy Fuhrer, Rudolf Hess to hand deliver a formal German peace proposal in which Hitler offered to withdraw all German military forces from western, northern and southern Europe, a total area amounting to 83% of the territory Germany had occupied since March 1939, in exchange for peace and British neutrality in Hitler’s planned war with the Soviet Union. Notably, Hitler’s peace offer would have served to liberate  six of the seven European countries liberated by the Western Allies in actual history with the exception of Luxembourg (as well as the German-speaking province of Alsace-Lorraine which constituted just over 2% of French territory) that was liberated by the Western Allies at the cost of the lives of over a million Allied soldiers. Tragically, Churchill refused this comprehensive German peace offer despite the fact that had he accepted it, it might have saved the lives of well over a million Allied soldiers and 10-20 million civilians including six million Jews, given that one of the express terms of Hitler’s peace offer was to forcibly deport them to Palestine, which would have been very inhumane but far more humane than Hitler’s monstrous crime of exterminating them in the Jewish Holocaust which he did not consider doing until after Churchill rejected his final peace offer. Here is a link to one of my past interviews from 2021 discussing Hitler’s May 1941 peace offer. Here is another link to an interview I did on American Warrior Radio a few years ago that explores the origins of World War Two, how a just, negotiated peace after World War One could have avoided the rise of Hitler and the outbreak of World War Two entirely. I also address the ‘what ifs’ as to how history would have been different had the British accepted one of Hitler’s peace offers, had Hitler accepted Chamberlain’s offer for a Second Four Power Conference in 1939, had the German resistance overthrew Hitler in 1944 or if Dewey had won the 1944 presidential election and the US had accepted one of Japan’s surrender offers outlined in the MacArthur Memorandum in January 1945.

What mad dictator bent on conquering the world would offer to withdraw all his troops from seven European countries plus Egypt and Libya in return for peace? The truth is that there was no need for the Western powers to fight Nazi Germany at all. Rather, Britain and France could have negotiated a peace deal between Germany and Poland (ceding at most a little over four percent of Polish territory to Germany) to avert war and then encouraged Hitler to proceed with his plans to drive eastward in furtherance of Harry Truman's preferred policy of getting the Nazis and the Soviets to bleed each other dry and militarily weaken each other, doing so without a drop of Western blood being shed.

I discussed this and other missed peace offers in the interview below which was conducted with Dr. Pascal Lattaz of Neutrality Studies on January 17th.

In June 1943, German resistance leader Admiral Wilhelm Canaris offered to overthrow Hitler and the Nazis and surrender to the West in exchange for the US and UK agreeing to keep the Soviets out of central and eastern Europe and contain them at their prewar borders, but again Churchill refused insisting on nothing less than Germany’s unconditional surrender at a time when the Soviets were offering a separate peace with Germany along the same lines. The map below provides a rough outline of what a post-World War Two European order might have looked like had FDR and Churchill accepted Canaris’ peace offer rather than Soviet control of much of Central Europe and nearly all of Eastern Europe as was the case in actual history.

Churchill’s War Crimes

One of the biggest things that differentiated Winston Churchill from Neville Chamberlain was that Chamberlain was a staunch Christian, a humanitarian and a champion of peace who with the exception of the illegal British starvation blockade refused to directly target German civilians for death and destruction as Churchill later did whereas Churchill loved war and cheered the outbreak of both World Wars which Britain fought against Germany. As Britain’s Prime Minister, Chamberlain forbade the Royal Air Force to attack urban targets in Germany due to the risk of accidental civilian casualties. Similarly, Hitler forbade the Luftwaffe from attacking civilian targets in Great Britain. However, when a German bomber accidentally dropped some bombs on London during the Battle of Britain, Churchill responded by engaging in a deliberate terror bombing attack on the German capitol of Berlin on August 25, 1940. That caused Hitler to revoke his strict offers to the Luftwaffe to refrain from bombing British civilian targets and to engage in a terror bombing campaign that came to be known as “the Blitz” against Britain from September 7, 1940 to May 10, 1941 that cost the lives of an estimated 40,000 British civilians.

Subsequently, Churchill began a concerted British terror bombing campaign against Germany with a series of 1,000 bomber raids beginning in May 1942. He was enthusiastic in his prosecution of the Allied terror bombing campaign against Germany that is estimated to have killed 600,000 German men, women, and children as well as his illegal starvation blockade that killed over a million German civilians and likely tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Jews, in the concentration camps. Virtually all of these non-combatant civilians might have been spared had Churchill accepted Hitler’s May 1941 peace offer. Other horrific war crimes which Churchill planned include his decision to support the implementation of the Morgenthau Plan against post war Germany, in which millions of Germans were deliberately starved to death following their surrender from 1945-50, as well as his plan, codenamed “Operation Vegetarian” to bomb Germany with massive quantities of Anthrax, which has a death rate of over 90 percent, if the Normandy landings had failed which would likely have killed tens of millions of German civilians and made large swaths of Germany inhabitable for at least half a century. Thankfully, the D-Day landings were a success, so Churchill’s plan to overtake Hitler in terms of his genocidal mass murders never came to fruition.

Furthermore, Churchill and Truman handed over two million anti-Communist freedom fighters and their families to the Soviet Union to face near certain execution at the hands of Stalin in the aptly named Operation Keelhaul, thus effectively extinguishing the flames of freedom in much of central and most of Eastern Europe for nearly half a century. They would have done a lot to help the Western Allies defeat the Soviets if we had not done so. Even with their loss, anti-Soviet resistance movements sprouted up in Eastern Europe and in the Baltics and Ukraine in particular in an effort to liberate themselves from Soviet genocidal control but the US and UK refused to lift a finger to aid them, making a farce of their supposed wartime commitment to the spread of freedom and democracy.

I stumbled upon yet another ugly chapter of World War history, of which up until then I had not been aware, while touring the Normandy battlefields in France in May 2019. Our French tour guide drove us through towns he informed us had been totally obliterated by the US and British bombing of France, which many believe was completely unnecessary for the Allied liberation of France from the Nazis. These bombings were authorized by Churchill who had also authorized the sinking of the French fleet in July 1940 surprise attacks ostensibly to prevent the French fleet from falling into the hands of the Germans. Shockingly, the French civilian death toll of 68,000 men, women and children from the Allied bombings of America’s oldest ally exceeded the British civilian death toll from both the Battle of Britain from 1940-41 and the subsequent German V1 and V2 terror attacks in 1944-45. Over 100,000 French civilians were wounded while destroying 432,000 French homes and damaging 890,000 over. Ironically, the German invasion of France and four-year occupation had been far less lethal to French civilians and much less destructive.

Churchill Duped by Stalin to Cede Half of Europe to Soviets

During World War Two, the U.S. and U.K. engaged in an unholy alliance with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, which Churchill had been agitating for since 1936 when Germany re-occupied the German Rhineland industrial region. I have long argued that this alliance was unnecessary to the defeat of Hitler as the Western Allies could have simply signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin and raced the Red Army for control of Europe.

After the war’s end, Stalin claimed that the Germans only killed seven million Soviet soldiers and citizens but in 1963, the Soviet Union claimed that the total was in fact twenty-six million citizens. If indeed it is true that 26 million Soviet citizens were killed during the war, what motive would possible Stalin have had for claiming the Germans killed seven million? The most likely motive is that he in fact was responsible for killing the other nineteen million civilians. Many Ukrainian survivors of the war have stated that life was better under Nazi occupation than under Soviet control given that Stalin killed up to ten million Ukrainians from 1932 until after the Red Army successfully crushed the last of the Ukrainian national resistance in the late 1940’s. Accordingly, it is very likely that Stalin killed more non-combatant civilians during the war than Hitler, the vast majority of whom were Soviet citizens.

A couple of excellent articles including “The Real Churchill” and another entitled “Rethinking Churchill” set the record straight detailing Churchill’s record as a war criminal who was duped by Stalin into thinking he was a crusader for democracy and that appeasing him with control of the eastern half of Europe was acceptable because he would grant independence to the Soviet subjected nations of central and eastern Europe. While Churchill gave his rousing “Iron Curtain” speech at Fulton, Missouri in January 1946, he was in fact one of its principal authors having signed his infamous Percentages Agreement which condemned the Balkan states to Soviet control at the Fourth Moscow Conference in October 1944, which FDR was not invited to attend. FDR was incensed that he had ceded these countries to Stalin without his consent. Ultimately, however both Churchill and FDR ended up appeasing Stalin with eighty times more territory including nearly 700,000 square miles, under the Yalta Agreement than Chamberlain appeased Hitler including Poland and Czechoslovakia for which Britain had supposedly fought the war to liberate in the first place. He also agreed to allow Stalin to annex parts or all of eight European countries at the end of the war. Together with FDR and Truman, Churchill provided 23,000 tanks and armored fighting vehicles, 15,000 combat aircraft and half a million jeeps and trucks with which to forcibly Communize most of Europe and most of Asia. Churchill even provided the Soviets with two battleships—one British and one Italian. Meanwhile, FDR provided the Soviets with the strategic industrial materials to build seventy percent of their tank and combat aircraft production including over 60,000 tanks.

By contrast, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was an ardent opponent of Soviet appeasement. As detailed in the book “Stalin’s War—A New History of World War Two”, which I consider the best book ever written on the Second World War, when Stalin offered Britain an alliance in exchange for Soviet domination of Eastern Europe in what essentially amounted to the same terms Stalin offered Hitler in the infamous Hitler-Stalin Pact which divided Europe before the war, Chamberlain refused to transfer control of 23 million East Europeans to Soviet control against their will. Conversely, Churchill strongly supported allowing Soviet domination and control of Eastern Europe as a necessary price to achieve his long sought Grand Alliance between the British Empire and the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany.

On February 23, 1945, Churchill invited the full British Cabinet to hear his account of the Yalta Conference. Labour Minister Hugh Dalton recorded in his diary that “The PM spoke very warmly of Stalin. He was sure […] that as long as Stalin lasted, Anglo-Russian friendship could be maintained.” Churchill added: “Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust with Hitler. He was wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong about Stalin.” Churchill had infamously awarded Stalin with a crusader’s sword portraying him as ‘a crusader for democracy’ knowing full well that he was a brutal mass murdering dictator who exterminated all political opposition in the Soviet Union and the territories which the Red Army conquered. Five days later, reports began coming in that Stalin had begun blackmailing the governments of the nations the Red Army had occupied. Less than eleven months later, he would give a speech decrying the creation of the very Iron Curtain dividing Europe into Western and Soviet spheres of influence which he had helped author.

On the other hand, Neville Chamberlain presciently warned before the outbreak of the Second World War that if the Western allies were to ally with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany in war, it would lead to the Soviet domination, control and occupation of much if not most of Europe. He supported the formation of an Anti-Bolshevik League of States to oppose Soviet aggression and along with former British Prime Minister Baldwin and other UK Conservative Party leaders supported channeling Hitler’s aggressive tendencies eastward towards the Soviet Union in order to enhance western security and embroil Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in perpetual conflict only to abruptly abandon that policy after Hitler violated the Munich Pact.

Having seen the up to then unprecedented humanitarian cost of the First World War which resulted in the deaths of forty million people and gave birth to Communism in Russia while the Treaty of Versailles that ended the war gave birth to Nazism in Germany, he was a lifelong champion of peace and bravely sought to avert an unnecessary Second World War which he correctly believed would cost many more lives than the first. Churchill on the other hand was extremely enthusiastic about the outbreak of both world wars with Germany having been only one of two British Cabinet members to have supported war with Imperial Germany in 1914 from the onset. Otherwise, British involvement in the war might have been averted, causing the war to end in a compromise peace which averted the Communist takeover of Russia and the Nazi takeover of Germany altogether.

Why Do Many Conservatives believe Winston Churchill was an opponent of appeasement when he was one of the greatest appeasers in modern history?

A recent article entitled, “What Churchill and Selassie taught us about Aggression and Ukraine” is a great example of the Orwellian mythical World War Two history that Americans have been indoctrinated to believe. The author claims that Churchill teaches us how to defeat Russian aggression in Ukraine when it was Churchill who ceded most of Europe to Soviet Communist enslavement including, of course, Ukraine!

Accordingly, if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky were indeed a new Eastern European Winston Churchill as some claim, he would have signed an agreement to let Russia annex as much of Ukraine as they wanted to by now! It is one of the great ironies of history, that the U.S. and the British are now risking nuclear annihilation to arm the Ukrainians to defend themselves against the very same Russian invaders they allied with and armed to the teeth to help subjugate and enslave Ukraine along with nearly two-thirds of continental Europe eight decades ago. The U.S. is also providing about the same level of direct military aid (in average monthly adjusted dollar terms) to defend Ukraine as we provided to the Soviets to help them reconquer it.

The main difference between the Soviet invasion of Ukraine in World War Two and its invasion today is that during World War Two, the Soviet Union was a genocidal, aggressor power bent on annexing Ukraine and parts or all of eight other countries and mass murdering millions more Ukrainian civilians unlike Russia today, which has deliberately averted any direct targeting of Ukrainian civilians for death and destruction. Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 for what they consider defensive reasons in a preventative attack to eliminate an existential threat to Russian security and end Ukraine’s self-admitted de facto NATO membership and restore it to its previous neutral buffer state status it had before the US backed Maidan coup in February 2014.

There was no legitimate reason for the US and UK to cede most of Europe to Soviet control at the end of the war. In my estimation, if it came to war, the combined might of the US and UK could have defeated the Soviets and liberated central and Eastern Europe in 1945 with our conventional and atomic airpower proving decisive. The Soviets, at the time, had exhausted their reserves while US Army divisions were largely unscathed and we could have transferred millions of troops to the European Theater of Operations or better yet used them to accept one of Japan's January 1945 surrender offers outlined in the forty-page MacArthur Memorandum to FDR and deployed a few million U.S. troops to Manchuria and northern Japan with which to threaten the Soviets from the East to force them to accept the same terms they offered Hitler in 1943 which was a return to their prewar (August 1939) borders.

I believe the Soviets could have been defeated and pushed back to their prewar borders within a year but it would have required the same ironclad commitment to victory over the Soviets that the US and UK leaders had demonstrated in their drive to defeat Nazi Germany and given four years of propagandizing the Western public to believe that Uncle Joe was a crusader for democracy as Churchill had claimed would have been a challenge to undue. If only Operation Unthinkable had been a real Churchill plan and not just one of his inventions to make him look like some kind of anti-Communist visionary in the historical accounts of the war he helped write following his and FDR's unprecedented betrayal of parts or all of nearly half a dozen nations to Soviet control at Yalta. General George S. Patton, Jr. had asked for permission to use the Third Army to take the war all the way to Moscow but was denied from doing so by General Eisenhower. Of course, it would have taken more than a single field army to defeat them and eject the Red Army from central and Eastern Europe. But if he had been appointed to replace Eisenhower as Supreme Allied Commander Europe he could have done it or perhaps even if he had replaced Bradley as 12th Army Group commander giving him control of four US field armies. My great uncle served as a M-4 Sherman tanker in Patton's Third Army division and once was only a few tanks behind Patton's lead tank. I still have his uniforms, medals and duffle bag.

Strangely, Churchill remains one of the most popular liberal icons of the war. This is presumably due to the fact that he allowed his Deputy Prime Minister, Clement Atlee implement national socialism in Britain and the fact that he did more than any other Western leader with the possible exceptions of Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman to help spread godless Communism across the globe to include one third of the world’s people and territory within four years after the war’s end. That said, some liberals have begun to be more critical of Churchill given his white supremacism and his remark against the Bengal famine which he caused that killed three million Indians by laughing and saying he thought India had too many people as it was.

© David T. Pyne 2023

David T. Pyne, Esq. is a former U.S. Army combat arms and Headquarters staff officer, who was in charge of armaments cooperation with the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas from 2000-2003, with an M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University. He currently serves as Deputy Director of National Operations for the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and is a contributor to Dr. Peter Pry’s book “Blackout Warfare.” He also serves as the Editor of “The Real War” newsletter at dpyne.substack.com and as a contributor to “The National Interest”. He may be reached at emptaskforce.ut@gmail.com.