appeasement and pacifism

Taj Huda U5A

“Examine The Main Factors Which Led The British Governments To Follow To Policy Of Appeasement In The Period 1931-1938”

In the 30s the British policy was that they needed to avoid war and looked to an alternative, appeasement which seemed the only realistic option at the time especially since the British economy and diplomatic position was bad at this time and they were not prepared.

Neville Chamberlain had plenty of reasons at this moment of time to risk appeasement, however there were equally as many reasons that Hitler should of been stopped. Across GB morale was low, due to the fact that after the “war to end all wars” was over people saw that being a pacifist made sense and fighting for king and country did not seem so noble, for example in 1933 the oxford union declared they would not fight for king and country. GB was not in a good condition to fight another war, as they had a vast empire to defend, and there were more and more pacifist in the world. Chamberlain also saw that with Germany in the way of Russia it was possible that Germany acted as a buffer zone for GB if “the red menace” was to start a war. I believe that Chamberlain’s decision for appeasement was based on putting GB as the first priority and if it that meant another country suffering but GB not, that is what counts.

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GB’s Army and RAF were not in shape for fighting, as the Army had been neglected and was in poor condition. Most of the money was spent on the Navy and the RAF’s funding was extremely poor which made no sense because following the scare of the Guernica bombings in Spain people could see that using fighter planes to attack and defend your country was extremely effective. Chamberlain was poised with an extremely hard decision to make, even though he was uncertain if Hitler was trustworthy, but nevertheless he could have stopped the war. Chamberlain also had to consider that he had a world wide empire to defend and maintain. The empire would be lost if he were to summon all his troops in GB, so he had no decision but to keep the military spread out across the globe. As well as Germany, Chamberlain also had other military oppositions to think about. He had Japan in the Far East invading Manchuria and of course threatening GB’s empire in the Far East e.g. Hong Kong, Japan were looking extremely dangerous. There was also the Italians, Mussolini was looking to take North Africa, where Britain had a lot of there empire. Mussolini invaded Abyssinia (Ethiopia) by crushing the African tribes; this was very close to some of the GB colonies and Chamberlain chose to leave it and not stop Italy to avoid war, by appeasement.

At the time the USA were isolationist, this meant that GB did not have USA’s support and the French were extremely weak and useless in helping GB stopping Hitler. I have listed a lot of reasons as to why Chamberlain chose appeasement, and I personally conclude that he was not right to take the option of appeasement. Looking back in hindsight we can say that Chamberlain made the wrong decision and that he simply let Hitler bully him and gave away countries heartlessly, although I believe he had GB’s interests at heart. He had to decide whether to risk the well being of GB or to help other countries, a lot of people say that he took the selfish option, which is a respected, but I also believe that he is the Prime Minister of GB only, and should not have to run or care about other countries.

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