Was Neville Chamberlain really a weak and terrible leader?

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Re: Was Neville Chamberlain really a weak and terrible leade

#121

Post by durb » 27 Oct 2014, 16:40

History written by Chamberlain fans:

Chamberlain saved the western civilisation in Munich buying time for RAF which defeated Hitler, who frustrated went to Russia and met his fate there. Churchill was grumpy with more realistic Chamberlain - but Chamberlain really was the one that saved Europe.

French were of little help - inefficient they were just occupied by Germans until British and Americans came to save them. The most important France contributed was the rrresistance which helped British and American pilots to escape from occupied France.

Soviets did their fare share but were bad guys with which only temporary uneasy alliance existed. The bad guys of east took over everything which bad bosses had agreed in Molotov-Ribbentrop business + as bonus PL, CZ, HUN, RO, BUL, DDR - all this was an inconvenience coming from absolutely necessary Munchen deal for some decades, but now everything is in order after and we have free civilised Europe. Lets just be grateful to Chamberlain for buying time for RAF which stopped Hitler.

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Re: Was Neville Chamberlain really a weak and terrible leade

#122

Post by Michael Kenny » 27 Oct 2014, 17:11

durb wrote:History written by Chamberlain fans:

Chamberlain saved the western civilisation in Munich buying time for RAF which defeated Hitler, who frustrated went to Russia and met his fate there. Churchill was grumpy with more realistic Chamberlain - but Chamberlain really was the one that saved Europe.

French were of little help - inefficient they were just occupied by Germans until British and Americans came to save them. The most important France contributed was the rrresistance which helped British and American pilots to escape from occupied France.

Soviets did their fare share but were bad guys with which only temporary uneasy alliance existed. The bad guys of east took over everything which bad bosses had agreed in Molotov-Ribbentrop business + as bonus PL, CZ, HUN, RO, BUL, DDR - all this was an inconvenience coming from absolutely necessary Munchen deal for some decades, but now everything is in order after and we have free civilised Europe. Lets just be grateful to Chamberlain for buying time for RAF which stopped Hitler.

Not a version I have seen before in the UK. Reads more like a version compiled by someone nursing a grudge-perhaps it might have more circulation in one of the vanquished Axis nations?


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Re: Was Neville Chamberlain really a weak and terrible leade

#123

Post by phylo_roadking » 27 Oct 2014, 17:20

Chamberlain saved the western civilisation in Munich buying time for RAF which defeated Hitler, who frustrated went to Russia and met his fate there. Churchill was grumpy with more realistic Chamberlain - but Chamberlain really was the one that saved Europe.

.... Lets just be grateful to Chamberlain for buying time for RAF which stopped Hitler.
Not a version I have seen before in the UK. Reads more like a version compiled by someone nursing a grudge-perhaps it might have more circulation in one of the vanquished Axis nations?
Hi Michael - it's a version I've seen, just maybe not as pithily :D In a way it's correct - in that that is what happened...but it's clear from what I noted earlier about Chamberlain's christmas card of 1938 that he really thought he had achieved peace in our time.

Maybe he was smart enough to realise the Air Ministry was dragging him along in a particular direction...peace for a time...by the nose - maybe not; but he was an arch appeaser for whatever reason. And he'll never escape that bad press now... You'd think if he had really had an ulterior motive that someone somewhere would have managed to produce something confirming a hidden motive by now 8O And I'm sure many Chamberlain partisans have spent years trying...! :lol:

It just so happened that we survived the summer of 1940 because what he did in 1938...but it will take a lot to convince me it was more than a very fortuitous side effect. After all - if he had beeing just buying time for the RAF...why didn't he allow Bomber Command off the leash in September 1939? :wink:
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Re: Was Neville Chamberlain really a weak and terrible leade

#124

Post by ChrisDR68 » 27 Oct 2014, 22:02

durb wrote:Soviets did their fare share but were bad guys with which only temporary uneasy alliance existed. The bad guys of east took over everything which bad bosses had agreed in Molotov-Ribbentrop business + as bonus PL, CZ, HUN, RO, BUL, DDR - all this was an inconvenience coming from absolutely necessary Munchen deal for some decades, but now everything is in order after and we have free civilised Europe. Lets just be grateful to Chamberlain for buying time for RAF which stopped Hitler.
The choice Churchill had in June 1941 when Barbarossa began was between Nazi Germany or communist Russia. Given what a danger Hitler's Germany was for the future of Europe Churchill immediately chose Russia even though he personally hated communism. In other words he chose the lesser of two evils (correctly in my view).

At the end of the war he was desperate for Poland to remain free from Soviet occupation and to become a democracy but was reluctantly forced to accept the facts on the ground.

None of this had much to do with Chamberlain or the Munich Agreement. His only real concern during the 1938/39 period was to deter Hitler as best he could from starting another general European war.

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Re: Was Neville Chamberlain really a weak and terrible leade

#125

Post by Attrition » 28 Oct 2014, 03:22

~~~~~why didn't he allow Bomber Command off the leash in September 1939?~~~~~

Because it was a paper tiger; a lot of the resoures earmarked for Bomber Command were directed into Fighter Command once radar made the interceptor fighter concept workable. I don't know if the balance of forces in 1938 favoured the Anglo-French or the balance in 1939 but clearly time was not on the side of the Germans.

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Re: Was Neville Chamberlain really a weak and terrible leade

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Post by phylo_roadking » 28 Oct 2014, 13:50

Attrition wrote:~~~~~why didn't he allow Bomber Command off the leash in September 1939?~~~~~

Because it was a paper tiger; a lot of the resoures earmarked for Bomber Command were directed into Fighter Command once radar made the interceptor fighter concept workable. I don't know if the balance of forces in 1938 favoured the Anglo-French or the balance in 1939 but clearly time was not on the side of the Germans.
Actually, according to John James, it wasn't the advent of radar...it was part of the Munich debates in Cabinet. The Air Minstry, of course never happy with the appropriations for the Air Plan, had to tell the Cabinet that as of the summer of 1938 they couldn't DEFEND the UK home Base; so the decision was taken to rejig the Air Plan to complete Fighter Command first...as opposed to the swapping about of funding at times as the original Air plan envisaged, as various development paths reached points where time was needed, not finance...and it could be shifted to other developments for a time. Radar was a fortuitous development - but the original Air Plan had been based on a developed capacity to monitor and control UK air space INSIDE what would later become the radar fence - in turn based on the air exercises of 1934 and 1935. Radar just gave us the ability to do that better, with better early warning.

Yes it left Bomber Command stunted; stuck with older aircraft in many squadrons, and other vital capabilities were put on the back burner. It only opened its nightflying school in the summer of 1939, for example.But I was thinking more of all those long months when the AASF sat in France with hundreds of light and medium light bombers, flying recce sorties only and not a bomb dropped...and the famous instructions to Bomber Command's Heavy Force (or as heavy as it was then) to avoid damage to German private property, not to bomb shipping along quaysides, just out in port roads', etc....while lives were lost on long range "raids" - dropping leaflets night after night.
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Re: Was Neville Chamberlain really a weak and terrible leade

#127

Post by Attrition » 28 Oct 2014, 17:16

Didn't he write that it was radar which made piecemeal defence feasible, which is why a decision like "the decision was taken to rejig the Air Plan to complete Fighter Command first" could be taken?

I thought it was the comparative state of the British and German bomber forces that you had overlooked in your post. Hundreds of light and medium bombers against 1-2,000 Boche medium bombers and Stukas....

Have you ever wondered if the government and the RAF conclusion that self-defending bomber formations in daylight were suicidal was arrived at with suspicious haste? Plenty of other examples of the bleeding obvious were not accepted so swiftly.
Last edited by Attrition on 28 Oct 2014, 18:39, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Was Neville Chamberlain really a weak and terrible leade

#128

Post by Gooner1 » 28 Oct 2014, 18:23

phylo_roadking wrote:[ The Air Minstry, of course never happy with the appropriations for the Air Plan, had to tell the Cabinet that as of the summer of 1938 they couldn't DEFEND the UK home Base;
Yes, because the Air Ministry decided to piss away the very large sums of taxpayers money they were receiving building crappy bombers instead of the decent fighters we had.

Left to those chumps and the RAF would have lost the Battle of Britain.

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Re: Was Neville Chamberlain really a weak and terrible leade

#129

Post by Steve » 28 Oct 2014, 19:09

If Bomber Command had carried out daylight raids over Germany at the start of he war it would have quickly been wiped out. Night bombing was useless as at this time British bombers had trouble hitting small towns never mind anything else.

The French would have done the fighting on the western front in 1938 as the British could only contribute two or three divisions not enough to make any meaningful difference. Based on what the French accomplished when war came it must be unlikely they would have done anything. From the French point of view why should they sacrifice their young men in 1938 while the British did nothing much more than enforce a naval blockade?

A land war in 1938 would quite likely have been fought in the east not the west. People who advocate going to war in 1938 over Czechoslovakia never seem to consider what would have happened if Stalin had honoured his commitment and supported the Czechs. If the Red army had tried to force a passage across Poland it would have joined the war on Germany’s side. Rumania and Hungary may well have entered the war on opposing sides.

Hitler had made a very good deal at Munich and was left with only one more problem to solve which was the corridor and Danzig. That he would now act in a completely irrational manner ripping up the agreement and then be prepared to start a European war over Danzig was a long odds bet.

Churchill thinking that Stalin would honour the commitments he made during the war is more delusional than Chamberlain believing Hitler. There is much less excuse for Churchill not understanding that he was dealing with a mentally deranged mass murderer. For example a report from the British Ambassador saying that the Katyn massacre was probably carried out by the Soviets was hushed up. Can we imagine how Chamberlain would now be vilified if he had received a report saying that Hitler had probably ordered the killing of thousands of Jews and then gone to meet him and have tea together.

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Re: Was Neville Chamberlain really a weak and terrible leade

#130

Post by phylo_roadking » 28 Oct 2014, 19:27

Have you ever wondered if the government and the RAF conclusion that self-defending bomber formations in daylight were suicidal was arrived at with suspicious haste? Plenty of other examples of the bleeding obvious were not accepted so swiftly.
Well, it wouldn't have been THAT obvious; the Luftwaffe were flying unescorted bomber raids in Poland, and in France later....and even tried it during the BoB with some suprising successes - such as the two times RAF pilots ignored standing orders NOT to enter a Dornier box formation...and they learned the reason why :( And the RAF did it too; thinking particularly of the Blenheim raids down into western Germany after the Fall of France after the Armistice and through the summer of 1940, like the raid on the Dortmund-Ems Canal....way beyond fighter escort range.

In other words - we kept on doing it because we had to, it was the only way to reach Germany then...in daylight, for "precision" raids.

What I think you're meaning however is the stopping of the Heavy Force's unescorted daylight raids after the embarassment of the Wellingtons in the German Bight?
Didn't he write that it was radar which made piecemeal defence feasible, which is why a decision like "the decision was taken to rejig the Air Plan to complete Fighter Command first" could be taken?
It made an air defence ideally without standing patrols feasible...which in turn made piecemeal attacks feasible, so to speak. It greatly reduced pilot fatigue/exhaustion, wear and tear on aircraft etc...although the later lesson of the kanalkampf was that standing patrols were necessary down near the coast, as fighters going up from coastal fields like Lympne, Hawkinge etc. couldn't get off the ground AND get altitude quickly enough.

But otherwise...no, I'll have to check but IIRC he put the redirection of funds to Fighter Command directly down to the Air Ministry's stance during the discussions over the Munich Crisis about not being ready yet to carry out any of its functions - particularly defence.

Gooner...
Yes, because the Air Ministry decided to piss away the very large sums of taxpayers money they were receiving building crappy bombers instead of the decent fighters we had.
What decent fighters were those by the middle of 1938? Only one squadron was re-equiped with Hurricanes by December 1937...and only 16 by the start of the war twenty months later. The first production Spitfires only reached the first squadron, No.19 at Duxford, in August 1938... 8O The backbone of Fighter Command was still aircraft like the Hawker Fury at the time of the Munich Crisis...

It's the same as all those WIs about the Germans cramming aircraft development into too-short a time in the 1939s. We did the same; we leapfrogged from biplane fighters, with the Hawker Fury as one of the pinnacles of that design stream...to aircraft like the Hurricane and the Spitfire. They needed years of development...and in the case of the Spitfire a major false start in the shape of the Type 224 that lost over 18 months of development time...

The Air Plan was crafted to accomodate all that development time...and everything ELSE the RAF needed; new bases, new technical colleges and the parallel rebuilding of the technical side of the RAF needed to support all those new aircraft. The annual appropriations that would be spent on the HUGE contract buys of fighters towards the end of the decade were used before that for other things...then moved to aircraft buy-ins as the aircraft companies reached the stage of first production types. We should have reached September 1939 with a replacement on hands for the Blenheim and the Fairey Battle - the Blenheim was getting long in the tooth, and the Battle was only meant to be an interim type...and something on the cards to replace the Hampden and the Whitley. But because more money was diverted to Fighter Command, those projects all fell by the wayside.

Steve...
If Bomber Command had carried out daylight raids over Germany at the start of he war it would have quickly been wiped out. Night bombing was useless as at this time British bombers had trouble hitting small towns never mind anything else.
Bomber Command DID carry out daylight raids on Germany in the autumn of 1939. It suffered badly...which is WHY they went over to nightbombing.

But it didn't help that they suffered badly attempting missions that were in no way worth the cost because of the resttrictions put on them...as opposed to sensible attacks on real value targets like those specified in the later "Oil Campaign" in the spring of 1940. In my answer above to Attrition I was referring to the atrocious raids of the 14th and 18th of December 1939, when Wellingtons were sent unescorted in daylight across the North Sea to attack shipping in Schilling Roads. Without side-mounted guns (rapidly fitted afterwards!) they had no real defensive fire in a close formation, just nose and rear turrets...and they were butchered in the German Bight by JG 1. My point is that if they had been tasked insted against the ports and harbours that sea traffic was coming from/going to, they might at least have done some damage worth the cost :(
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Re: Was Neville Chamberlain really a weak and terrible leade

#131

Post by Attrition » 28 Oct 2014, 19:58

~~~~~it was the only way to reach Germany then...in daylight, for "precision" raids.~~~~~

This is sort of what I meant; the day heavy bomber operations seem to be an example of a lack of persistence.

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Re: Was Neville Chamberlain really a weak and terrible leade

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Post by phylo_roadking » 28 Oct 2014, 20:01

A lack of persistence...or a willingness to preserve the Heavy Force for something...even if right then that "something" was inaccurate night raids and leafleting :P It was a Force that had been expensive to build in peacetime - and losses on the scale of Schilling Roads would very quickly have rendered it useless.
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Re: Was Neville Chamberlain really a weak and terrible leade

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Post by Attrition » 28 Oct 2014, 20:15

That's sort of what I mean.With hindsight they were a disaster waiting to happen but as you point out with the light day bombers the effort was persisted in. Did the government and RAF give up on heavy bomber operations because they were dubious about them all along; don't forget the opportunity cost they took on by deciding on a night force.

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Re: Was Neville Chamberlain really a weak and terrible leade

#134

Post by phylo_roadking » 28 Oct 2014, 20:29

Did the government and RAF give up on heavy bomber operations because they were dubious about them all along; don't forget the opportunity cost they took on by deciding on a night force.
Oh god no! In the Douhet-ist interwar era, when Trenchard as an MP had been preaching a bomber force "deterrent" to aggression in the Commons for years? :D No, they saw the bomber force as having a greater value than Fighter Command if anything, for advocates of an air warfare strategy and strategic bombing it would, after all, be the force that would win any war...! :P Everyone thought that a bomber force would be more efficacious than it proved in the medium and long term - which was why the "failure" of the heavy force in daylight was a cruel shock....it did indeed deprive the strategists of half of the working "day"! :lol:

It's worth taking a ook at the couple of pages in Hooton that deal with this along with James; this (the second half of the 1930s)was an era where the lessons of WWI regarding a bomber's defensive armament hadn't YET been unlearned...given that they were first reinforced by events in Spain - that even single-mount, rifle calibre defensive armament on bombers was more than enough protection. In the few seconds' or fractions of a second that a fighter's bullet path might intersect the path of a bomber, AND hit something valuable enough to its functioning to bring it down...a single stream of MG fire was enough to put off a fighter pilot from getting close enough for accuracy...and even then, if he DID press home his attack - HE only had two or at most four MG's-worth of rifle-calibre fire!

Hence the general change to cannon and/or multibank MGs for the attack profile; if you're only going to be on target for a second or two - those few seconds have to throw MORE lead or destructive power at a bomber :P
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Re: Was Neville Chamberlain really a weak and terrible leade

#135

Post by Attrition » 29 Oct 2014, 00:01

That's the point, why did they give up so quickly when they didn't with other equally untenable practices? It seems a bit precipitate by comparison.

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