What if Neville Chamberlain never became Prime Minister?

[Mike K.]

Say Stanley Baldwin remained Prime Minister. How would he have handled Hitler?

[peter_suciu]

What if Mosley became Prime Minister?

[Andy H]

From what I know of Baldwin (Which is not a lot0 was that he was a man of stronger character but the appeasement of Hitler sufficed for Britain to give it some time to set the war wheels moving and I'm not sure if Balwin would have acted any different given the larger picture.

Andy

[Cantankerous]

If Winston Churchill had been the UK's prime minister in 1938, he would have responded to Kristallnacht by imposing an embargo on the import of German goods into the UK and breaking off diplomatic relations with the Nazi government, and he would have sent officials to the USSR to urge Stalin's top diplomats not to sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler because the Nazi leader's annexation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 was weaponized by Churchill himself to criticize Neville Chamberlain for not paying attention to passages of Hitler's Mein Kampf calling for the enslavement and annihilation of Slavic peoples and lebensraum for the Aryan race in Eastern Europe.

Churchill also would have stepped up the British naval presence in the Mediterranean Sea in the event that Mussolini decided to send troops to conquer French colonies in North Africa as well as Egypt.

[wm]

Why should Britain have initiated hostilities against Germany? Because 90+ German subjects were killed in riots?
Did the British people really care about riots in foreign countries?

Should Britain have initiated hostilities against the Soviet Union when the Soviets, at the same time, killed hundreds of thousands and deported millions of their own citizens?
When the Japanese killed hundreds of thousands a year earlier?
When ~20,000 were killed in Addis Ababa two years earlier?
When ~25,000 were massacred in Western El Salvador a few years earlier?
Kristallnacht was the tinest of them all massacres in the thirties, and still, everybody wants to start a world war because of it.

[ljadw]

If Winston Churchill had been the UK's prime minister in 1938, he would have responded to Kristallnacht by imposing an embargo on the import of German goods into the UK and breaking off diplomatic relations with the Nazi government, and he would have sent officials to the USSR to urge Stalin's top diplomats not to sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler because the Nazi leader's annexation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 was weaponized by Churchill himself to criticize Neville Chamberlain for not paying attention to passages of Hitler's Mein Kampf calling for the enslavement and annihilation of Slavic peoples and lebensraum for the Aryan race in Eastern Europe.

Churchill also would have stepped up the British naval presence in the Mediterranean Sea in the event that Mussolini decided to send troops to conquer French colonies in North Africa as well as Egypt.

Do you have any proofs for these claims ?
Stalin's non-aggression pact with Hitler ( which was the only sensible thing Stalin could do ) had nothing to do with the German invasion of Czechia .
Is there any proof that Churchill read Mein Kampf ?
And, where did Hitler write in Mein Kampf that the Slavic peoples should be enslaved and be annihilated ?
And, as there was no possibility at all that Churchill could become leader of the Conservatives before the war(he was hated by the Tories) , or that Baldwin would remain PM and have an other foreign policy than Chamberlain ,this if is a wast of time .

[Sheldrake]

From what I know of Baldwin (Which is not a lot0 was that he was a man of stronger character but the appeasement of Hitler sufficed for Britain to give it some time to set the war wheels moving and I'm not sure if Balwin would have acted any different given the larger picture.

Andy

This is the most likely scenario. Chaimberlain was not alone in considering negotiation/ appeasment or as it is now called "Containment". These were the elected leaders of a democracy. British Public opinion was not in favour of war in 1935 or 1936. Rearmament started under Baldwin.

Baldwin supported the Munich Agreement and said to Chamberlain on 26 September 1938: "If you can secure peace, you may be cursed by a lot of hotheads but my word you will be blessed in Europe and by future generations".[101] Baldwin made a rare speech in the House of Lords on 4 October and said that he could not have gone to Munich but praised Chamberlain's courage. He also said the responsibility of a prime minister was not to commit a country to war until he was sure that it was ready to fight. If there was a 95% chance of war in the future, he would still choose peace. He also said he would put industry on a war footing the next day, as the opposition to such a move had disappeared.[102]

This is wikipedia but quotes source deom Middlemas and Barnes (1969). Baldwin: a biography. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

[wm]

Sidelined politicians, trying to return to power, are invariably radical in their opinions. But such people usually de-radicalize when in power and Churchill should have been any different.

Churchill cried wolf when there was no wolf at the gates, and Britain was protected by (seemingly invincible) France.
He must have known that his fearmongering based on the idea that Hitler would bomb London to smithereens was impossible - London was too far away for that.

Churchill himself to criticize Neville Chamberlain for not paying attention to passages of Hitler's Mein Kampf calling for the enslavement and annihilation of Slavic peoples and lebensraum for the Aryan race in Eastern Europe.

Although there were no such passages. In Mein Kampf, the Slavs generally weren't even criticized. The harshest sentence is probably this:

The greatest friend of the Slavs [the Archduke Franz Ferdinand] had fallen a victim to the bullets of Slav patriots.

[Tom from Cornwall]

Churchill cried wolf when there was no wolf at the gates, and Britain was protected by (seemingly invincible) France.
He must have known that his fearmongering based on the idea that Hitler would bomb London to smithereens was impossible - London was way too far for that.

Hmmm,

"He must have known" - is that because of what you now think you know? See Homer's The Iliad, and who can be wise after the event. :roll:

He was actually just repeating what many in the British establishment thought at the time - I'd recommend reading any book about British politics in the 1930's or you could start with the first chapter in Richard Overy's 'The Bombing War'. That should give you a better idea of the context within which Churchill was speaking.

Regards

Tom

[wm]

Then he argued from ignorance.
London was 500 kilometers away, it couldn't be bombed without triggering war with France and Belgium (where all the bombers would be badly needed anyway), and the British could have interdicted the raids from Belgium.

Yes, Churchill wasn't alone:

Frank Morison in War on Great Cities, published in 1938, just months before the outbreak of the next war, talked of a million dead in London from a gas attack, and millions more following swift British retaliation on Paris, Rome or Berlin.
One 5,000-lb bomb would be enough, he suggested, to destroy completely the whole administrative and government centre around Whitehall.

Wintringham, a former soldier ..., painted an equally lurid picture in 1935 of the end of Europe’s major cities: 5–6 million killed in London, Paris and Berlin by a combination of gas, high explosive, exposure, disease and hunger.

Most of these pessimistic representations of air warfare were indeed fanciful portraits, divorced from technical and scientific reality.

The German Air Force Service Manual in 1936 excluded the use of aircraft in terror raids on cities in favour of bombing attacks on the depots, communications and troop concentrations deep in the enemy rear.
The Bombing War: Europe, 1939-1945 by Richard Overy

[Cantankerous]

If Winston Churchill had been the UK's prime minister in 1938, he would have responded to Kristallnacht by imposing an embargo on the import of German goods into the UK and breaking off diplomatic relations with the Nazi government, and he would have sent officials to the USSR to urge Stalin's top diplomats not to sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler because the Nazi leader's annexation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 was weaponized by Churchill himself to criticize Neville Chamberlain for not paying attention to passages of Hitler's Mein Kampf calling for the enslavement and annihilation of Slavic peoples and lebensraum for the Aryan race in Eastern Europe.

Churchill also would have stepped up the British naval presence in the Mediterranean Sea in the event that Mussolini decided to send troops to conquer French colonies in North Africa as well as Egypt.

Do you have any proofs for these claims ?
Stalin's non-aggression pact with Hitler ( which was the only sensible thing Stalin could do ) had nothing to do with the German invasion of Czechia .
Is there any proof that Churchill read Mein Kampf ?
And, where did Hitler write in Mein Kampf that the Slavic peoples should be enslaved and be annihilated ?
And, as there was no possibility at all that Churchill could become leader of the Conservatives before the war(he was hated by the Tories) , or that Baldwin would remain PM and have an other foreign policy than Chamberlain ,this if is a wast of time .

See this link for an overview of when Winston Churchill got the chance to read Mein Kampf:
https://richardlangworth.com/mein-kampf-2

The chapter of Mein Kampf calling for lebensraum for the Aryan race as a prelude to subjugation of Slavic peoples is titled "Eastern Orientation or Eastern Policy".

[wm]

No such chapter in Mein Kampf. But "Germany’s Policy in Eastern Europe" could be found.
And Slavs are mentioned there only once:

For the Russian State was not organized by the constructive political talent of the Slav element in Russia.

Russia was for the taking not because it was populated by the Slavs but because it was made weak by the (Jewish) Bolsheviks. He repeats it ad nauseam.

[Tom from Cornwall]

Then he argued from ignorance.

It's a common enough habit.

Regards

Tom

[jabhatta]

If Winston Churchill had been the UK's prime minister in 1938, he would have responded to Kristallnacht by imposing an embargo on the import of German goods into the UK and breaking off diplomatic relations with the Nazi government, and he would have sent officials to the USSR to urge Stalin's top diplomats not to sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler because the Nazi leader's annexation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 was weaponized by Churchill himself to criticize Neville Chamberlain for not paying attention to passages of Hitler's Mein Kampf calling for the enslavement and annihilation of Slavic peoples and lebensraum for the Aryan race in Eastern Europe.

Churchill also would have stepped up the British naval presence in the Mediterranean Sea in the event that Mussolini decided to send troops to conquer French colonies in North Africa as well as Egypt.

Do you have any proofs for these claims ?
Stalin's non-aggression pact with Hitler ( which was the only sensible thing Stalin could do ) had nothing to do with the German invasion of Czechia .
Is there any proof that Churchill read Mein Kampf ?
And, where did Hitler write in Mein Kampf that the Slavic peoples should be enslaved and be annihilated ?
And, as there was no possibility at all that Churchill could become leader of the Conservatives before the war(he was hated by the Tories) , or that Baldwin would remain PM and have an other foreign policy than Chamberlain ,this if is a wast of time .

Hi ljadw - if the Tories hated Churchill so much - why did the Torries make him Prime Minister in May 1940 ?

[ljadw]

In May 1940 Chamberlain resigned as PM, but not as leader of the Tories,and, de facto, he remained PM .One word of Chamberlain and Churchill was out .
Churchill became PM only because there was no other candidate and because Chamberlain wanted to form a coalition cabinet,but Labour and the Liberals refused to serve under Chamberlain .