Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share DZ Season 025 Part 01 Chamberlain at Munich. Gullible? Cowardly? Human? Genius? First and Final Part.
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
DZ Season 025 Part 01 Chamberlain at Munich. Gullible? Cowardly? Human? Genius? First and Final Part.
I’ve done a programme before based on a book by Ben MacIntyre called “The Spy and the Traitor” – a true story about the most important spy who defected to the West from the Soviet Union. He leaked information to the West that probably averted an all-out nuclear war.
Ben has also written a number of other true life books about spies and spying, in World War II and in the Cold War. So I was interested to see that he’d written an article for The Times newspaper about the Munich Agreement that the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, with French Prime Minister Daladier negotiated with mediation by the Italian Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini in September 1938. The newspaper article was prompted by a movie on Netflix about Neville Chamberlain and this incident. The movie’s called “Munich: The Edge of War”.
Ben McIntyre concludes that Chamberlain wasn’t taken in by Hitler – well not entirely. He says that England wasn’t prepared for war at that time. Following Munich, MacIntyre tells us that Chamberlain took steps to speed up the rearmament of England. He brought in conscription, doubled the size of the Territorial Army, ordered more bombers and created the Ministry of Supply, to co-ordinate the provision of equipment for all three branches of the armed forces. Ben summed his point of view up by paying this tribute to what Chamberlain had achieved by averting war in September 1938:
“The Britain that faced Germany in September 1939 was far better prepared for war than it had been a year earlier”. All of this seems to have some merit but there were other things that made all of those points seem to me to be of small consequence compared to what Chamberlain had given away at Munich. I'm going to test that against the evidence.
Tag words: Neville Chamberlain; Adolf Hitler; Herman Goring; Sudetenland; Czechoslovakia; Tatra mountain range; Luftwaffe; high octane ethyl petrol; American Standard Oil; tetra-ethyl lead; Chief of the German Army General Staff Ludwig Beck; General Franz Halder; General Erwin von Witzleben; Things to Come; HG Wells; Guernica; Sir Basil Liddell Hart; Munich Treaty;
View all episodes
By Paul FordyceI’ve done a programme before based on a book by Ben MacIntyre called “The Spy and the Traitor” – a true story about the most important spy who defected to the West from the Soviet Union. He leaked information to the West that probably averted an all-out nuclear war.
Ben has also written a number of other true life books about spies and spying, in World War II and in the Cold War. So I was interested to see that he’d written an article for The Times newspaper about the Munich Agreement that the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, with French Prime Minister Daladier negotiated with mediation by the Italian Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini in September 1938. The newspaper article was prompted by a movie on Netflix about Neville Chamberlain and this incident. The movie’s called “Munich: The Edge of War”.
Ben McIntyre concludes that Chamberlain wasn’t taken in by Hitler – well not entirely. He says that England wasn’t prepared for war at that time. Following Munich, MacIntyre tells us that Chamberlain took steps to speed up the rearmament of England. He brought in conscription, doubled the size of the Territorial Army, ordered more bombers and created the Ministry of Supply, to co-ordinate the provision of equipment for all three branches of the armed forces. Ben summed his point of view up by paying this tribute to what Chamberlain had achieved by averting war in September 1938:
“The Britain that faced Germany in September 1939 was far better prepared for war than it had been a year earlier”. All of this seems to have some merit but there were other things that made all of those points seem to me to be of small consequence compared to what Chamberlain had given away at Munich. I'm going to test that against the evidence.
Tag words: Neville Chamberlain; Adolf Hitler; Herman Goring; Sudetenland; Czechoslovakia; Tatra mountain range; Luftwaffe; high octane ethyl petrol; American Standard Oil; tetra-ethyl lead; Chief of the German Army General Staff Ludwig Beck; General Franz Halder; General Erwin von Witzleben; Things to Come; HG Wells; Guernica; Sir Basil Liddell Hart; Munich Treaty;