Fighting Churchill, Appeasing Hitler

How a British Civil Servant Helped Cause the Second World War

Adrian Phillips

• Publisher: Biteback Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781785904752
• eBook ISBN:
  9781785905407
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Fighting Churchill, Appeasing Hitler Adrian Phillips presents a radical new view of the British policy of appeasement in the late 1930s. No one doubts that appeasement failed, but Phillips shows that it caused active harm – even sabotaging Britain's preparations for war. He goes far further than previous historians in identifying the individuals responsible for a catalogue of miscalculations, deviousness and moral surrender that made the Second World War inevitable, and highlights the alternative policies that might have prevented it.Phillips outlines how Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his chief advisor, Sir Horace Wilson, formed a fatally inept two-man foreign-policy machine that was immune to any objective examination, criticism or assessment – ruthlessly manipulating the media to support appeasement while batting aside policies advocated by Winston Churchill, the most vocal opponent of appeasement.Churchill understood that Hitler was the implacable enemy of peace – and Britain – but Chamberlain and Wilson were terrified that any display of firmness would provoke him. For the first time, Phillips brings to light how Wilson and Churchill had been enemies since an incident early in their careers, and how, eventually, opposing Churchill became an end in itself.Featuring new revelations about the personalities involved and the shameful manipulations and betrayals that went into appeasement, including an attempt to buy Hitler off with a ruthless colonialist deal in Africa, Fighting Churchill, Appeasing Hitler shines a compelling and original light on one of the darkest hours in British diplomatic history.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Dramatis Personae and Explanatory Notes
• Prologue: A Man I Can Do Business With
• Chapter One: Personal Discourtesy Is His Chief Weapon
• Chapter Two: Winston’s Power for Mischief
• Chapter Three: My Master Is Lonely Just Now
• Chapter Four: Taking Personal Charge
• Chapter Five: Woolly Rubbish
• Chapter Six: Getting on Terms with the Germans
• Chapter Seven: A New Chapter in the History of African Colonial Development
• Chapter Eight: All That Is Well Sewn Up
• Chapter Nine: The Central Weakness
• Chapter Ten: Every Effort to Bring About Appeasement
• Chapter Eleven: A Nice Fraudulent Balance Sheet
• Chapter Twelve: A Wise British Subject
• Chapter Thirteen: The Best the English Can Do
• Chapter Fourteen: Their Just Demands Had Been Fairly Met
• Chapter Fifteen: Clearly Marked Out for the Post
• Chapter Sixteen: The Appalling Sums It Is Proposed to Spend
• Chapter Seventeen: Well Anchored
• Chapter Eighteen: Abandonment and Ruin
• Chapter Nineteen: Riding the Tiger
• Chapter Twenty: The Right Line About Things
• Chapter Twenty-One: Advice from the Devil
• Chapter Twenty-Two: The Mountebank
• Chapter Twenty-Three: Combating Hoare’s Heresies
• Chapter Twenty-Four: The End of the Rainbow
• Chapter Twenty-Five: Pay Whatever Price May Be Necessary
• Chapter Twenty-Six: Catching the Mugwumps
• Chapter Twenty-Seven: Talking Appeasement Again
• Chapter Twenty-Eight: More Ways of Killing a Cat
• Chapter Twenty-Nine: Mr Boothby Expects a Rake-Off
• Chapter Thirty: Too Many People at the Job
• Chapter Thirty-One: Entitled to Demand Concessions
• Chapter Thirty-Two: Pathetic Little Worms
• Chapter Thirty-Three: A Potato War
• Chapter Thirty-Four: A Civil Servant with a Political Sense
• Chapter Thirty-Five: Minister to Iceland
• Chapter Thirty-Six: A Guilty Man in the Realm of King Zog
• Chapter Thirty-Seven: He Has Returned to Bournemouth
• Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• Plates
• Copyright