Neville Chamberlain will without a doubt continue to be a controversial figure in British history. His tenure as a British Prime Minister will be always overshadowed by his last seven months in that position as German forces swept across France and Belgium forcing the British and French evacuation from Dunkirk. His appeasement policy has been portrayed as a weak and ineffective Prime Minister who sold out to Hitler. This perspective has been allowed to stand as the defining feature of his career but there was more to Chamberlain than his appeasement policy and the disaster that ensued.

Steve Prout looks at Neville Chamberlain’s career.

Neville Chamberlain holding the signed Munich Agreement in 1938 after meeting Hitler. The agreement committed to peaceful methods.

Lloyd George and the First World War

Chamberlain first started out in life as a successful businessperson before serving as the Lord Mayor of Birmingham between 1914-16. Afterwards he took the post as Director-General of National Service during the First World War under David Lloyd George. It would not be a successful start in his political career because he was often at odds with Lloyd George who was particularly critical of Chamberlains’ techniques. Chamberlains and his supporters would argue that he frequently lacked the support and clarity needed from Lloyd George to be successful in that role.

Both would harbour mutual dislike of each other that would continue up to Chamberlains death. Lloyd George would state that Chamberlain was “not one of my most successful selections” and in later added, ‘When I saw that pinhead, I said to myself, he won’t be of any use.’ Chamberlain in return referred to Lloyd George as "that dirty little Welsh Attorney.” Suffice to say it was a relationship that would never repair and resurface much later at when Chamberlain was at his most vulnerable.

Not all of Chamberlain’s peers agreed with Lloyd George’s comments. John Dillon, an Irish Nationalist MP, stated in a rather flowery fashion that "if Mr. Chamberlain were an archangel, or if he were Hindenburg and Bismarck and all the great men of the world rolled into one, his task would be wholly beyond his powers".  Bonar Law in a more succinct manner called Chamberlain’s role an "absolutely impossible task" and would later rescue Chamberlain’s career. Meanwhile Chamberlain's successor Auckland Geddes received more favor and support than Chamberlain ever received.

In 1918 when Chamberlain became a Member of Parliament he refused to serve under Lloyd George and in 1920 he refused a junior appointment offered by Andrew Bonar Law in the Ministry of Health. In October 1922, the situation changed when Lloyd George’s Coalition Government collapsed and presented Chamberlain new opportunities and a succession of top-level posts would follow.

Despite Lloyd George’s disparaging comments Bonar-Law was impressed with Chamberlain’s administerial abilities and appointed him as Postmaster-General. A promotion to Minister of Health in March 1923 soon followed and his advancement would continue. In August 1923 Bonar Law was forced to resign due to his ill health and Stanley Baldwin who took over as Prime Minister appointed Chamberlain as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

His ascent to the top levels of government was as fast as it was brief. Within five months Baldwins Conservative government was defeated in the December 1923 general election and the first Labour government took power in January 1924. Chamberlain’s contribution almost went unnoticed, but renowned historian AJP Taylor said of Chamberlain “nearly all of the domestic achievements of Conservative governments between the wars stand to his credit.”  The work he did in the interwar years was considerable.

Domestic affairs – politics in the interwar period

Neville Chamberlain was highly active in all the offices he held. He possessed a drive to reform and promote efficiency. By 1929 he had presented twenty-five bills to Parliament of which twenty-one of this number had become enacted into law and practice. Despite this Opinion remains divided concerning Chamberlains effectiveness as politician and Prime Minister. His achievements were numerous.

The introduction of the Local Government Act of 1929 abolished and reformed the obsolete poor laws in Britain that were not fit for purpose. The administration of poverty relief was placed in the hands of local authorities. One aspect of this act made medical treatment of the infirmaries free to those who could not afford it. In a pre-1945 Welfare State Britain this was a forward-thinking piece of legislation.

The Housing Act in 1922 addressed another set of issues. The necessity for this piece of legislation arose due to the shortfall in housing created by the previous Liberal Government, who under Christopher Addison had promised “homes fit for heroes” for the returning soldiers but the reality was that this promise had not delivered upon. Chamberlain was tasked to address this shortfall. He was of the belief that Government high subsides were the reason building costs were remaining too high and so stunted progress. Being a former businessperson and quintessential conservative, he believed the private building sector would perform the task more efficiently and so reduced these subsides. He was not entirely wrong because by 1929 438,000 houses were built. This was in the words chosen by AJP Taylor’s “the one solid work of this (Baldwins) dull government.” But critics viewed the Housing Act as only helping the lower middle classes and not the industrial workers giving the impression that he was the “enemy of the poor”. This perception would contribute to losing the Conservatives a substantial number of votes.

The introduction of the Widows', Orphans' and Old Age Contributory Pensions Act 1925 lowered the age for entitlement to receive the old age state pension from 70 to 65 (there has been little change since until the twenty first century), and it allowed provisions for dependents of deceased workers. Although it was met with criticism for not extending far enough it was still nevertheless a progressive step forward for pre-welfare state Britain. Chamberlain’s justification to his critics was that the act was not intended to replace private thrift and that the sum was the” maximum financially feasible” within budgetary means.

The Factory Act of 1937 was another successful and progressive piece of legislation for the time. Whether the motive out of altruistic reasons or due to a growing, effective opposition from the Labour Party and the unions it still was particularly far reaching. This Act set various standards factory working condition which addressed working hours, sanitation, lighting, and ventilation. This had significantly improved working conditions set by an earlier Act in 1901. The official wording by the Home Office, signed by Samuel Hoare was that the act presented an “important milestone on the road to safety, health and welfare in Industry.” The Holiday Pay Act of 1938 would follow which allowed workers one full week’s holiday pay. By modern times this seems paltry, but in the context of the time it was a significant move forward for the working population.

Chamberlain had his supporters although much of this support came posthumously. AJP Taylor said that “Chamberlain did more to improve local government while serving as Health Minister than did anyone else in the 20th century” and from an American perspective, according to Bentley Gilbert, Chamberlain was "the most successful social reformer in the seventeen years between 1922 and 1939… after 1922 no one else is really of any significance."

Dutton considers, later in 2001, that Chamberlain's accomplishments at the Ministry of Health were "considerable achievements by any standards" and of Chamberlain himself “a man who was throughout his life on the progressive left of the Conservative Party, a committed believer in social progress and in the power of government at both the national and local level, to do good” - but the war clouds that were gathering above Europe and his domestic achievements would be forgotten.

Munich, Churchill, and the road to war

In his last few months as Prime Minister Chamberlain and his appeasement policy was attacked from his own party and opposition parties with accusations of being blinkered, narrow and supporters of appeasement were now labelled cowards whereas before they were saviours for averting war. This is not entirely fair as for Chamberlain’s government these were not normal times and the problems placed before his government left his few alternatives that sat comfortable or palatable with little or no alternative but to acquiesce to Hitler’s demands.

Chamberlain’s bellicose opponents were either suffering from a delusion that Britain could face the many growing threats abroad alone. There were no suitable allies to form effective alliances with, the USSR was as untrustworthy as Germany, and therefore any containment from the east for the time being was unlikely. There were other threats outside of Europe such as Japan which threatened Britain in the Asia. The USA, a power in the Pacific, was following an isolationist policy. Adding to this were Italian aspirations for empire building in North Africa, and there Britain needed a cautious approach.

Churchill would ignore all of this, re-write history, and instead portray Chamberlain in a poor light whilst at the same flattering his own place in history. On the one hand he said “I have received a great deal of help from Chamberlain. His kindness and courtesy to me in our new relations have touched me. I have joined hands with him and must act with perfect loyalty.”  Then on the other hand he said "Poor Neville will come badly out of history. I know, I will write that history" and he ensured that this happened in his memoirs, The Gathering Storm, in 1948 by referring to Chamberlain as “an upright, competent, well-meaning man fatally handicapped by a deluded self-confidence which compounded an already debilitating lack of both vision and diplomatic experience”.

For many years, his version of events remained unchallenged, but we wonder how much of this can be taken as a gospel of those times. We forget that whereas Chamberlain sought to work with Hitler and was later reviled for doing so, Churchill had no qualms with working with other dictators as we would see for example with Stalin in 1941 and in the 1930s his praise of Mussolini. Stalin’s relationship with the democracies would prove equally toxic. After the war Eastern Europe would be subjected to further totalitarian rule which would last longer than Hitler’s domination of Europe.

Chamberlain was not fooled by the outcome of Munich affair, and he knew by that point in time that Hitler could not be contained nor trusted. He immediately started in earnest an ambitious rearmament programme. This programme was on no small scale and challenges the accusations of complacency that history critics accuse him of. In May 1938 after four months elapsing since Munich agreement, Chamberlain told the annual Conservative Women’s Conference that “we have to make ourselves so strong that it will not be worthwhile for anyone to attempt to attack us”.

Rearmament

Chamberlain began a vast expansion in Britain’s armed services. Whilst doing so he was attacked by the Labour Party for ‘scaremongering, disgraceful in a responsible politician’ because of his support of expansion of Britain’s military capacity. By April 1939, rearmament was swallowing 21.4 per cent of Britain’s Gross National Product, a figure that reached 51.7 per cent by 1940. War was delayed but it was to no avail to “a man of no luck.” The failure of the Norwegian campaign and the subsequent invasion of the Ardennes quickly changed the political landscape for Chamberlain, eroded the support of his own party and of the majority of as in May 1940 British troops were being evacuated off Dunkirk.

The results of Chamberlain’s rearmament programme were not immediately appreciated but the advances made in Air Power and Sonar were vital for the Battle of Britain. The British Spitfire for instance was one of the most up to date fighter planes of the time. The British expeditionary force at the time of its mobilisation was one of the most modern and mechanised armies in the world. Within the disaster of the Norway there was one redeeming feature - that naval battles crippled the German Navy so much it could not be relied upon by Hitler in his plans to invade Britain. All these subtle factors brought Britain a chance, albeit a hairs breadth, of resisting an invasion if nothing more. The realists also knew there was little chance of an offensive and Britain could only consider her meagre defensive options.

Although Chamberlain was assigned the blame for the failure to hold Norway he was not the architect of the plan. This plan was in fact devised and supported by Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty who made many unpunished errors in the matter. He had the diminished confidence of his Conservative peers owing to his costly actions in The First World War and India. Some feared that Norway would be a repeat of Gallipoli. In the debate in The House of Commons in May 1940 when questioned about the campaign Churchill said “I take complete responsibility for everything that has been done by the Admiralty, and I take my full share of the burden” only to be rebuffed by Lloyd George who vented his criticism out on Chamberlain whose fate was already sealed.

Chamberlain was not alone in his naivety that Germany was economically stretched and that a simple naval blockade would deprive her of her natural resources. Churchill even displayed lack of foresight over Germany’s strategic position when the Soviet Union invaded Poland when he immediately proclaimed, “Hitler’s Gateway the East was closed.” Under the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Soviet Union was providing vast quantities of war materials to Germany. It was a spoken folly equal to “Hitler has missed the bus.”

The war materials the Soviet Union provided to Germany throughout the early years of the war were enough to render any Allied blockade ineffective. Whether Churchill knew the quantities and the extent is not known but it is likely that this would have been available via the British intelligence services. The true extent of the aid the Soviets gave was over 820,000 metric tons (900,000 short tons; 810,000 long tons) of oil, 1,500,000 metric tons (1,700,000 short tons; 1,500,000 long tons) of grain and 130,000 metric tons (140,000 short tons; 130,000 long tons) of manganese ore. This considerable amount of material excludes rubber and other industrial outputs that enabled Germany’s war machine. If Chamberlains political judgements were flawed then equally so were Churchills, but he was not in the Premier’s seat and so escaped much of the fallout.

Critics

Old adversaries and new would be particularly visceral in the debates that followed in parliament. It is interesting how some of Chamberlain’s most vocal and loudest critics were also the most hypocritical. Leo Amery famously quoted “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!". Leo Amery was a supporter in the 1930s of Italian aggression in Abyssinia and Japanese ambitions in Manchuria. Lloyd George, who held a deep dislike of Chamberlain, also could not resist but he also conveniently forgot his courting of Hitler in September 1936 and his praising of a “pro-English Hitler”. Chamberlain’s premiership ended but he continued to serve in the higher levels of government until his death.

Chamberlain’s political career continued long after Munich and it was not yet over. He still served cordially under Churchill in the war cabinet. Despite the war controversy Chamberlain, in Churchill’s absence due to Prime Ministerial duties, still deputised and chaired the war cabinet meetings until cancer finally forced him to resign in 1940.

Chamberlain spoke of Churchill, “Winston has behaved with the most unimpeachable loyalty. Our relations are excellent, and I know he finds my help of terrific value to him.” Churchill reciprocated: “I have received a great deal of help from Chamberlain. His kindness and courtesy to me in our new relations have touched me. I have joined hands with him and must act with perfect loyalty.” And upon Chamberlains death he said. “What shall I do without poor Neville?,” as Churchill admitted that he “was relying on him (Chamberlain) to look after the Home Front.” Chamberlain had remarkable administrative skills Churchill recognised and still was of value to Britain’s war effort. Churchill himself admitted that the two men could work respectfully and professionally with each other.

In a eulogy in the House of Commons Churchill spoke highly in praise “He had a precision of mind and an aptitude for business which raised him far above the ordinary levels of our generation. He had a firmness of spirit which was not often elated by success, seldom downcast by failure and never swayed by panic…He met the approach of death with a steady eye. If he grieved at all, it was that he could not be a spectator to our victory, but he died with the comfort of knowing that his country had, at least, turned the corner.”

Churchill would conveniently forget this in the post war period and be one of many to blight Chamberlain's career and reputation. Dr Adam Timmins, reviewing the book Appeasing Hitler by Tim Bouverie sees that too much emphasis was put on one event and one person and no other factors that guided that decision which at the time appeared the only sensible option only hindsight offers other alternatives. Without the benefit of hindsight, the phenomena of Hitler were something that had never been witness or confronted before, and with that it is of no surprise that the states people of the 1930s failed to accurately judge him.

Conclusion

Neville Chamberlain’s presence in British history will always be overshadowed by Munich and the road to war. This will always continue to be enforced by surviving accounts such as Michael Foot’s Guilty Men or Churchill’s post war memoirs, which places the failure to contain Hitler together with the early misfortunes unfairly on his shoulders.

When we remove all of this from the emotional equation Neville Chamberlain has been unjustly criticised and maligned by political opportunists of the time who failed to understand the limitations Britain faced. Chamberlain was proof of the adage that “history is written by victors”, a phrase invented by Churchill who did just that when writing about Chamberlain. He conveniently chose to omit his own failures and ill judgement in the early days of the war. It is that context that the Director of Military Operations, Major-General J.N. Kennedy, remarked on later during the campaign in North Africa. "He (Churchill) has a very keen eye to the records of this war”, Kennedy wrote in his diary, “and perhaps unconsciously he puts himself and his actions in the most favourable light.” Churchill’s contradictions and self-aggrandization are unhelpful and misleading.

Chamberlain was the unfortunate victim of circumstances. AJP Taylor terms him a man of no luck whom the cards always ran against. He had a shaky start against Lloyd George and his humiliation at Hitler’s hands bookended his political career. The tide of the war would turn against Hitler and deliver Churchill two titanic allies with immense resources, the USA and T=the USSR, to form a formidable alliance. It was a matter of fortunate timing that Chamberlain would be denied and that Churchill would enjoy.

Chamberlain’s other work, which brought about significant and successful social reform, went unnoticed. At the outbreak of war, he said in Parliament "Everything I have worked for, everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life, has crashed into ruins." Chamberlain’s legacy would be marred by his unwavering desire to avoid war that was further tainted and twisted by the hypocrisy of his critics. Neville Chamberlain will always be a subject of polemical debate and his reputation will continue to be blighted.

When do you think of Neville Chamberlain’s career? Let us know below.

Now read about Britain’s relationship with the European dictators during the inter-war years here.

References

Stuart Ball - Professor of Modern British History at the University of Leicester. Portrait of a Party: The Conservative Party in Britain, 1918–1945 (Oxford, 2013).

Leo McKinstry - In Defence of Neville Chamberlain – Article the Spectator Nov 2020

David Dutton – Reputations – Neville Chamberlain – May 2001 – Bloomsbury Academic

AJP Taylor English History 1914-45 and Origins of The Second World War

Graham Hughes, history graduate (BA) from St David’s University, Anglo-Nazi Alliance Debate

British politician Winston Churchill was famously against the appeasement of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s. However, a public who still remembered World War One, were not altogether sympathetic towards these arguments. Here, Bilal Junejo looks at this period.

Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain in 1935.

“Appeasement” refers to “the response of British foreign policy makers in the 1930s to the rise of the dictator powers, especially Nazi Germany … it is seen as a policy of making one-sided concessions, often at the expense of third parties and with nothing offered in return except promises of better behaviour in the future, in a vain attempt to satisfy the aspirations of the aggressor states (Dutton, 2007).”

Appeasement arose as “an attempt to adjust the balance between the victorious and vanquished powers of the peace settlement of 1919 by concessions based on the widely held feeling that the terms of that peace had been unacceptably harsh (Dutton, 2007).” It would also be helpful to remember what is meant linguistically by the word “appease” — “to pacify or placate someone by acceding to their demands”, as per the Oxford English Dictionary. The meaning implies the presence of a choice for the appeaser. One does not “accede” to a demand when one does not have a choice in resisting it — one simply acquiesces therein! Since the application of the word “appeasement” to British foreign policy in the 1930s implies that there was nothing inevitable about that policy — that it could have been different, had its makers so chosen — we must consider the reasoning which was propounded at the time (i.e. without the benefit of hindsight) in favour of that policy, if we are to be at all able to determine just how realistic, in the sense of being practicable, were the arguments which Churchill put forward against it.

The doctrine of collective security, which was laid down in Article 16 of the League of Nations’ Covenant, stipulated that the League must present a united front in the face of unprovoked aggression against any member. However, “the basic premise of collective security was that all nations would view every threat to security in the same way and be prepared to run the same risks in resisting it (Kissinger, 1994, page 52).” In an organisation which boasted 60 different members from around the world at its greatest extent in the mid-thirties, this was never likely to be the case, least of all after the Great Depression’s advent in 1929, when the economic woes of Great Britain, one of the League’s principal ‘policemen’, not only precluded the imposition of meaningful economic sanctions by her upon an aggressor, but also necessitated the reduction of expenditure upon defence to the barest minimum required for national and imperial security. The League was only as strong as the collective will of its members, and since collective security, by definition, did not envisage unilateral action by a member, the stage was set for Great Britain, already riddled with moral doubts as to the peace settlement of 1919 and weakened by the Depression, to embark upon appeasement.

Japan - 1930s

First came Japan, in 1931. Then Italy, in 1935. Churchill, however, was selective in his opposition to appeasement. Whilst he adamantly opposed any manner of compromise with Hitler’s Germany to the last, he exuded no similar sentiment when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia, “[remaining] out of the country during the autumn of 1935 so as to avoid having to pronounce for or against Italy (Taylor, 1964, page 123).” Even after Mussolini’s assault upon Albania in April 1939, Churchill was able to say that the invasion was “not necessarily a final test … [since it appeared], like so many other episodes at these times, in an ambiguous guise (The Daily Telegraph, 13 April 1939, page 14).” In believing that Italy should be appeased, so as to retain her crucial goodwill in dealing firmly with Germany, Churchill was not alone, his views finding harmonious echoes in the thinking of men such as Robert Vansittart, who was permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office from 1930-8. Churchill had two reasons for singling out Germany — her inherent economic and military strength, and the advent of Adolf Hitler.

Hitler’s rise

Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933. In October, Germany walked out of not only the otiose Disarmament Conference, but also the League of Nations, of which she had been a member since 1926! That she was able to do so with complete impunity was in itself a harbinger of what was to come — from the Anglo-German naval agreement of June 1935, to the Munich agreement of September 1938. In an early speech which, significantly, he delivered to his constituents at a fête in Theydon Bois, Essex — almost as though he were testing the mood of the people before he delivered the same remarks in the House of Commons and committed himself more palpably to the cause of anti-appeasement — Churchill warned that “at present Germany is only partly armed and most of her fury is turned upon herself. But already her smaller neighbours … feel a deep disquietude. There is grave reason to believe that Germany is arming herself … I have always opposed … all this foolish talk of placing [Germany] upon some kind of [military] equality with France … Britain’s hour of weakness is Europe’s hour of danger. I look to the League of Nations to rally the forces which make for the peace of the civilised world and not in any way to weaken them (The Times, 14 August 1933, page 12).” In other words, Germany could not be treated as an equal without resurrecting the military imbalance which had haunted Europe since 1871. There was no need for Great Britain either to ignore her own rearmament or to appease Germany by tolerating hers, least of all at the expense of France. Churchill’s principal apprehension was that a rearmed Germany would attack in the west — a fear which the British Government did not come to share until after the Nazi-Soviet Pact’s conclusion in August 1939, which explains why they reacted in the manner that they did to the subsequent invasion of Poland. But the fact remains that after remilitarising the Rhineland in March 1936, Hitler only moved eastwards. Would he have turned westwards after dismantling Poland, an Anglo-French ally, with Soviet help? In retrospect, Operation Barbarossa makes that seem somewhat unlikely.

If, as the appeasers believed, Hitler’s advent was only the culmination of German resentment at the invidious Treaty of Versailles, then the sooner that settlement was dismantled in favour of a more congenial one, the sooner would the wind be taken out of the Nazi sail, and stability return to Europe. But there was also the risk that alleviation of that resentment during the existence of the Nazi regime could actually fortify its national appeal. As a contemporary would eventually put it, “three main factors have militated against the growth of active opposition to the regime. In order of importance they are the success of German foreign policy, the absence of any apparent alternative to Hitlerism, and the success of the Government in combating unemployment (The Times, 2 January 1939, page 15).” As it was a catch-22 situation, Churchill saw no merit in strengthening a brutal regime with needless concessions, and was correct in fearing that appeasement would only send the wrong signal to Hitler.

Foresight

Churchill’s foresight, however, was not commonly appreciated. “It was partly Churchill’s extremely dangerous time on the Afghan-Pakistan border in 1896 and 1897, and in the Sudan in 1898, which had brought him up close to militant Islamic fundamentalism, that allowed him to spot the fanatical nature of Nazism that so many of his fellow politicians missed in the 1930s (Roberts, 2020, page 56).” As late as 1938, Anthony Eden, who had already resigned as Foreign Secretary over diplomatic differences with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, was arguing that “a settlement of the Sudeten German problem by conciliation is of the utmost urgency in view of the growing realisation of the far-reaching consequences of any resort to a decision by armed force in Central Europe (The Times, 12 September 1938, page 13)” — a settlement which was decried by Churchill as “a total and unmitigated defeat” on the floor of the House on 5 October 1938. The fact was that the appeasers not only believed that Nazi Germany would help counter what they considered was a bigger threat from Soviet Russia, but also remembered the horrors of the Great War — too vividly to recognise the import of caving in to Nazi bellicosity.

Conclusion

To conclude, acting upon Churchill’s counsel, the realism of which depended entirely upon the goals of its recipient, would have required rapid rearmament. Rearmament presupposed economic stability, which was already precarious at the time. But if the Government still believed, even in an era of Jarrow Marchers and an increasingly turbulent empire, that preserving a country which only (re)appeared on the map when both Germany and Russia were down and out in 1919 was vital to their own interests, then, with hindsight, it can be reasonably said that they should have issued an ultimatum when an infant regime committed its first act of overt “aggression” in March 1936 (Taylor, 1964, page 134). It might have averted another world war.

What do you think of Winston Churchill’s anti-appeasement in the 1930s? Let us know below.

Bibliography

Dutton, D. (2007) Proponents and critics of appeasement. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [Online]. Available at: https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-95646?rskey=aCl7MO&result=1 [Accessed on 22.11.22]

Kissinger, H. (1994) Diplomacy. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks.

Roberts, A. (2020) Leadership in War. Penguin Books.

Taylor, A. (1964) The Origins of the Second World War. Penguin Books.

The Times

The Daily Telegraph

The 1943 Trident Conference involved the two-key World War II allies of the USA and Britain. Prime Minister Winston Churchill traveled to Washington to meet President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Here, William Floyd Jr. looks at what happened during the conference and its impact on the later years of World War II.

Churchill and Roosevelt fishing - when taking a break from the conference. Source: FDR Presidential Library & Museum, available here.

Churchill and Roosevelt fishing - when taking a break from the conference. Source: FDR Presidential Library & Museum, available here.

On May 10, 1943, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, identifying himself as “Naval Person”, wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt from on board the ocean liner, “Queen Mary”, “Since yesterday we have been surrounded by U.S. Navy and we all greatly appreciate high value you evidently set upon our continued survival. I look forward to being at White House with you tomorrow afternoon, and also going to Hyde Park with you at weekend. The voyage has been so far most agreeable and Staff have done vast amount of work.”

The ocean liner “Queen Mary” had made her first voyage on May 27, 1936, as a passenger liner, primarily sailing on the North Atlantic until 1967. With the beginning of World War II, it was converted to a military ship transporting Allied soldiers. Her colors of red, white, and black were now gone under a pewter gray to make the ship less visible. She would become known as the “Gray Ghost.” On Tuesday morning, May 11, 1943, she would arrive in New York carrying her very special passengers, the Prime Minister and about one hundred staff. The ship also had 5,000 German prisoners, on board, captured in the North African Campaign and bound for POW camps in the American Southwest.

The Prime Minister and his staff would be meeting with the President and his aides to map out a plan to bring the war to a successful conclusion. Waiting at the dock to greet the Prime Minister was the President’s closest aide, Harry Hopkins, along with a special presidential train for the trip to Washington D.C. As the train came to a stop at Union Station, the limousines pulled onto the platform. The President was lifted from the lead vehicle and placed in a wheelchair. All of Roosevelt’s symptoms of stress and age seemed to go away at the sight of the Prime Minister approaching in his yacht squadron uniform. The two men beamed at each other before driving off to the conference. The President insisted that the Prime Minister stay at the White House.

The Trident Conference would become one of many between the United States and Great Britain including Casablanca, Quebec, Cairo, Tehran, Malta, Yalta, and Potsdam. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin attended the Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam Conferences.

 

Objectives

The first meeting of the conference took place at the White House on May 12, 1943 at 2:30 P.M. The President, Prime Minister, and their staffs would be in attendance. The President welcomed Mr. Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff stating that it was very appropriate that they should meet again just as Operation Torch (North African Campaign) was coming to a satisfactory conclusion. He also said that he thought the keynote should be to employ every resource of men and munitions against the enemy. Nothing that could be brought to bear should be allowed to stand idle.

He then asked the Prime Minister to open the discussion. Churchill would deliver some opening remarks and then proceeded to go through a number of objectives to consider. The first objective was the Mediterranean Theatre. The great prize was to get Italy out of the war by whatever means possible. The second objective should be taking the weight off of the USSR. Stalin had stated that the best way of taking the weight off of the Soviet front, in 1943, would be to knock Italy out of the war forcing the Germans to send a large number of troops, from the Soviet front to hold down the Balkans. The third objective, as mentioned by the President, was to apply the greatest possible numbers of our armed forces for the campaign. The fourth objective was to make it absolutely clear that his majesty’s government earnestly desired to undertake a full-scale invasion of the continent. The fifth and final objective should be aid to China and the hope that the USSR could be brought in for the fight against Japan.

In his closing statement the Prime Minister stated that he hoped his remarks would help to frame an agenda for the Combined Chiefs of Staff and serve as a guide for their discussions. The President expressed his gratitude to the Prime Minister for the open way in which he had presented his views.

The conference in Washington D.C. happened at a time of greater optimism for the Allies. There had been success in North Africa, a number of islands in the Pacific had been retaken, the Soviet Union had withstood the siege of Stalingrad, the battle of the Atlantic was turning in favor of the Allies, and preparations were going forward for Operation Husky (the invasion of Sicily).

 

Discussions

One of the main topics was that, if the British were interested in further operations in the Mediterranean Theatre while the Americans were insistent that these actions be limited so they would not interfere with a cross-Channel invasion in 1944. If the British would not commit themselves to the European invasion of Western Europe in 1944, then all bets were off and the United States would focus on Japan. There was much disagreement, even among those on the same side as to what the next step should be. However, Churchill and his generals were thus far right in that it was imperative to attack the Italian mainland, which was the only battlefield where Anglo-American ground forces could engage the Germans in 1943. Other topics of discussion included an increase in air attacks on Axis targets with an emphasis on the bombing of oil fields, recapturing Burma from the Japanese and reopening the supply line to China. There was also discussion of refugees leaving Europe, but no final decision was arrived at.

The President and Prime Minister had spent ample time together when they met for the 1943 conference, so they were used to each other’s moods for better or worse. They were each comfortable through the long hours of conversation. When the subject of the 1944 presidential election came up, Churchill told Roosevelt, “I simply can’t go on without you.” Churchill would write to Clementine from Washington, “Although after 12 arduous years he would gladly be quit of it. It would be painful to leave with the war unfinished and break the theme of his action. To me this would be a disaster of the first magnitude.” The United States and Britain, Churchill said in Washington, “could pull out of any mess together.” In Roosevelt’s mind, however, Churchill had become less of a force to contend with and was now a permanent part of Roosevelt’s universe, one in which he was in charge. 

During his time in Washington, Churchill would give another full -scale address to Congress. It was again a success. According to his typing secretary, Churchill spent nine and a half hours dictating it to her and it commanded the approval of the President.

After opening remarks on May 12, the first meeting would take place in Roosevelt’s oval study, a small hideaway above the Blue Room. As would be expected nautical paintings and etchings decorated the walls. The President would sit in his armless wheelchair greeting the Prime Minister and ten other men mostly from the Combined Chiefs. At this conference, the Americans were much better prepared than they had been at Casablanca where they felt they had been outfoxed by the British.

The President’s advisers worked hard to overcome what many thought was the biggest obstacle to American strategic leadership: Roosevelt himself, and his willingness to be swayed by Churchill’s oratory. The U.S. Joint Chiefs had met with Roosevelt three days before and had gotten from him a promise to press the British for a commitment to a cross-Channel invasion of Europe. They also reminded the President that a large segment of the American public considered the Japanese the real enemy. 

The President and Prime Minister would meet six times with the Combined Chiefs of Staff at the White House over the course of the conference. The Combined Chiefs, themselves, would meet almost every day in the Board of Governor’s Room at the Federal Reserve Building. On May 15 the two staffs had been able to take a rest-and-relaxation break at nearby Williamsburg, Virginia, the restored capital of 18th century Virginia. They would tour the town and feast on traditional foods of that era. Everyone from both sides seemed to enjoy themselves.

 

Final outcomes

Back in Washington, the meetings would continue until May 25. However, many major decisions would be reached on Wednesday, the nineteenth. On May 21, the Combined Chiefs presented their results to the President and the Prime Minister. In his diary Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, wrote, “We spent about one and a half hours listening to PM and President and holding forth on strategy and shivering lest either of them should suddenly put their foot right into it and reopen some of the differences which we had reconciled with some difficulty! ... Thank heaven we got through safely!” Brook spoke too soon. Three days after writing this, he again stated in his diary that Churchill, “wished to repudiate half” of the agreement, “which would have crashed the whole” agreement. Fortunately, Roosevelt’s adviser, Harry Hopkins, was able to get the Prime Minister to withdraw his revisions and only do minor rewording of some text.

The result of the Trident Conference, as that of Casablanca, for the near future pointed to the continuation of both the Mediterranean and Pacific offensives. However, barriers had been set at the Washington meetings to contain or limit the Mediterranean advance and these plans had mostly shifted to operations, which would set the stage for the planned cross-Channel invasion. There had also been progress in putting together the Pacific and European operations into tentative long-range planning in the war against both Japan and Germany. As welcome as these signs were to military planners, events would soon indicate that all the pieces in the worldwide strategic puzzle had not yet fallen into place and that the Mediterranean issue was still far from finished.

 

Ending the conference

At 4:00 P.M. on May 25, exactly two weeks after his arrival in Washington, Churchill walked down the corridor to the oval office. He would be leaving by flying boat from the Potomac River the next morning. After much debate, the code name for this departure would be “Neptune.” Roosevelt sat in his armless wheelchair, with Churchill now at his side, and gave a nod to let a large number of reporters in. “We are awfully glad to have Mr. Churchill back here,” the President told the gathering. “Considering the size of our problems, these discussions have been done in practically record time.” When asked about our plans for the future, Churchill replied, “Our plans for the future are to wage this war until unconditional surrender is procured from all those who have molested us, and this applies equally to Asia and Europe.”

     At the final Trident meeting with the Combined Chiefs and the President, Churchill proposed that Marshall accompany him to Algeria where they would meet with General Eisenhower. Churchill hoped to get from Ike irreversible promises to launch a campaign on the Italian mainland soon after “Husky.” Churchill also intended to try and get Marshall to accept some of his further plans in the eastern Mediterranean. However, Marshall remained skeptical as to the wisdom of invading mainland Italy. He would forcefully remind Churchill and the others that they had set a definite date for the cross-Channel attack in France for May 1, 1944.

     Eisenhower stated that the invasion of the Italian mainland would be an easy operation. Marshall disagreed. In fact, the invasion of Italy would be a bloody twenty-four month long struggle up the Italian boot that would cost the Allies more than three hundred thousand casualties, including 23,500 American deaths, and would turn most of the country into a wasteland.

 

What do you think of the Trident Conference? Let us know below.

Now read William’s article on three great early influences on Thomas Jefferson here.

Sources

1.     Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007).

2.     Chapter VI-The Trident Conference-New Patterns: 1943, history.army.mil.

3.     Debi and Irwin Unger, General Marshall (New York: Harper Collins, 2014).

4.     The Trident Conference: May 1943, U.S. Government Bookstore, https://bookstore.gpo.gov.

5.     Trident Conference Home, Eisenhower Presidential Papers and Minutes of Meetings, https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov.

6.     Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

7.     Max Hastings, The World at War: 1939-1945 (New York: Random House, 2011).

8.     The Trident Conference-May 1943 by Joint History Office (U.S.)

9.     Jon Meacham. Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship (New York: Random House, 2003).

10.  Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny (New York: Penguin Random House, 2018).

11.  Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (New York: Penguin Group, 2002).

12.  The Trident Conference, Defense Media Network.

Sometimes images of the week need only a line or two of explanation – such as Winston Churchill here…

World War II had been an epic war and as a symbol of victory, Winston Churchill produced his famous V for Victory. Here he is producing it complete with a classic Homburg hat!

 

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George Levrier-Jones

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