Channels, Spring 2019

Page 24 Lanning • The Long Defeat Baldwin’s credit, his refusal to let King Edward VIII marry the twice-divorced Mrs. Simpson – which resulted in the King giving up his throne – averted a constitutional crisis and perhaps worse problems, given that the couple were Nazi sympathizers and admirers of Hitler.32 Having resigned on a high note in the spring of 1937 not long after the coronation of George VI, Baldwin gave up the premiership to his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain. Though year after year the House of Commons and its leaders had ignored Churchill’s pleadings for rearmament, the great attention he received at a meeting with the Conservative Committee on military defense had offered him some hope that they were waking up.33 The deaths within three months of two of Churchill’s friends and key allies in the call for rearmament, MP Austen Chamberlain and informant Ralph Wigram, seemed to have depressed his spirits. However, despite their deaths, and despite the loss of two powerful voices to this imperative cause of strengthening Britain’s defenses, Churchill remained hopeful. He provided encouragement to Wigram’s widow, noting the light Ralph was through their long battle for Britain’s future: He was one of those – how few – who guard the life of Britain. Now he is gone – and on the eve of this fateful year. Indeed it is a blow to England and to all that England means . . . And you? What must be your loss? But you still will have a right to dwell on all that you did for him. You shielded that bright steady flame that burned in the broken lamp. But for you it would long ago have been extinguished, and its light would not have guided us thus far upon our journey.34 Much to Churchill’s frustration, Neville Chamberlain would prove as inept as Baldwin in overseeing Britain’s defense. And much to Churchill’s anger, Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler at the Munich Conference meant the loss of the fortified Sudetenland to the Nazis and thus the loss of support from what was formerly a stout and capable Czechoslovakian military. Nonetheless, Britain’s response to the Munich Agreement signaled a growing light in the minds of the British people. Though a crowd of 5,000 gathered in front of 10 Downing Street to embrace Neville Chamberlain as he gave his infamous “Peace for Our Time” speech, less than a mile away in Trafalgar Square there were 16,000 people demonstrating against the agreement.35 The Government had not only left Czechoslovakia in the dark – at the mercy and disposal of Hitler – they had left their own people in the dark through careful censorship and manipulation of the media. Listeners of the BBC heard next to nothing about what actually took place in the meetings with Hitler, and the extent of their knowledge was mostly based off of two recorded statements made by Chamberlain, one before leaving for Germany and the other on his return.36 What could not be hidden, however, was Hitler’s lust for domination that had already stretched its hand across Austria, the Rhineland, and now the Sudetenland. The distrust of Hitler was solidifying once it became apparent Germany was taking over the rest of Czechoslovakia; Hitler’s promise that he did 32 Christopher Klein, “The Scandalous Romance That May Have Saved the British Monarchy,” History.com, 2016, accessed March 25, 2018, https://www.history.com/news/the-scandalous-romance-that- may-have-saved-the-british-monarchy . 33 Gilbert, Churchill: A Life, 570. 34 Ibid., 571. 35 Frank McDonough, Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement, and the British Road to War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 126. According to a British public opinion poll taken in March 1938, around six months before the Munich Agreement, fifty-eight percent of those surveyed said they did not support Chamberlain’s foreign policy (see 127). 36 Ibid., 125 and 127.