Hitler's Rise To Power: Why The Third Reich Terrified Europe | Impossible Peace

Hi everyone, welcome to this Timeline documentary. Just before you watch, I want to tell you about my new history channel. It's called History Hits. It's like the Netflix for history. It's got hundreds and hundreds of documentaries on there and interviews with some of the world's best historians. We're adding new stuff all the time. For example, today I'm filming in this one of the few remaining Lancaster bombers for a show about the Dam Busters raid in 1943. If you want to know more about History Hits, follow the information just below this video or search online for History Hits and make sure you use the code Timeline to get a special introductory offer. Now enjoy this show. Part out of the 20th century, they are a rent in the fact of history. The first war set the stage for the second in many ways through ill-considered borders, economic burdens, national resentment, a prescription for reckless dictators and an impossible peace. Whether action against Hitler in March 1936 when he sent troops into the Rhineland would have ended or merely postponed his ambition can never be known. The consequences of the failure to act are well known. The remilitarization of the Rhineland gives the National Socialist state and Hitler a set of resources that make them a much more formidable foe. You know, the Rhine and the territory alongside it is really key. With his usual and peculiar concern for legitimacy, Hitler put his action in the Rhineland to a plebiscite. 99% approved. In explaining to the parliament why the British did nothing, Antony Eden, the foreign secretary said, it is the appeasement of Europe as a whole that we have constantly before us. And there he had let loose a word that would be mocked, misunderstood and vilified for generations to come. The militarization of the Rhineland seemed to the British to be a case of German troops marching onto German soil. Lord Lothian comfortingly remarked that the Germans were only going into their own back garden. But he was not looking at the map and so failed to realize what a blow this was for France, whose eastern frontier was suddenly exposed. The incident which really crystallized, I think, people's view was the reoccupation of the Rhineland. And it was perfectly clear that the British were not going to respond, and nor were the French, to this flagrant breach of Versailles and of the Treaty of Buccano. France was hamstrung in what actions she could take to meet the new threat. Between May 35 and June 36, as much as 13 million francs was exported from France. Speculators thus denied the French government the legitimacy of true political independence. Monsieur Serra's government resigns, and the first 100% socialist premier takes office in When Leon Blum announced his Popular Front government on June the 5th, a deputy from the Ardèche could only marvel. Who would have believed, Xavier Valla asked, that this old Gallo-Roman country would be governed by a Jew. The newspaper Action Forces habitually referred to Leon Blum as the circumcised Narbonne. He represented a constituency in Narbonne. On June the 27th, President Roosevelt accepted the nomination of his party for re-election. To some generations, much is given, he said. Of other generations, much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny. His words carried a far greater truth than even he imagined. The 1936 election did more than return Roosevelt. As one of his aides remarked, it all but crowned him. If you just went by the newspapers of the 30s, you would have thought Roosevelt is going to lose, because they were staunchly Republican. Roosevelt understands that. He says, I can't change what the newspapers are going to say, but I can command the radio. Roosevelt's opposition through 1936 came from the conservatively weighted Supreme Court, which, in judgment after judgment, struck down every major New Deal initiative, whether help for agriculture, the prohibition of child labor, or restructuring the bituminous coal industry. The Democratic administration and the Congress made a gallant, sincere effort to raise wages, to reduce hours, to abolish child labor, and to eliminate unfair trade practices. You know who assumed the power to veto and did veto that program. The angry president's reputation was sullied. His agenda crippled. When one justice, Owen Roberts, possibly sensing the meaning behind Roosevelt's language, tilted the majority in favor of progress, the necessity of adopting FDR's contentious court reform strategy passed. This New Deal endures, and it puts in place a different infrastructure for the central government. It makes it much more of a player in welfare, industrial relations. It extends its influence over other areas. This becomes transformative in the relationship of government to citizenry. There were no such checks and balances on Stalin's assault on his people. It has been said that the purges launched in 1936 were the Stalinist version of civil war. Because patronage played such an important part of getting anything done in the Soviet system, the reason why this process becomes so murderous is because once you start pulling out one leader, you then have to pull out what the contemporaries would have called their tail, the patrons, their clients, the people they've put in various positions. In 1936, Bukharin, the darling of the party, according to Lenin, but now about to face one of Stalin's executioners, said that Stalin was unhappy at not being able to convince everyone, himself included, that he is greater than everyone. I think Stalin enjoyed the trappings of power. I mean, he always said, you know, I'm very modest, I don't want a fuss made of me. But he let it happen. You know, he let the airplanes fly with banners over Red Square in Moscow at the time of his birthday. You know, he let his picture be everywhere. And he kept on saying rather modestly, well, it's only because the people need to identify with someone, I don't really like it. Well, I think people get to enjoy power. When under the heavy impact of the Great Depression that had started in 1929, the tide began to turn away from democracy. It did so forcefully in Japan. Anticipating all-out war following the army's provocation of the Manchurian incident, the army and navy resisted towing the line drawn by party politicians and strongly opposed further development of party politics. They undertook an unabashed propaganda campaign aimed at turning the people against party-led government. In the 1930s, you get this concept of the greater East Asian co-prosperity sphere, whereby Japan sees itself as controlling areas, which can then provide it with the raw materials and some of the energy that it needs, and in return, they will export finished goods. In China, in December, Yumin Tang leader Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped by two of his own generals. The Xi'an incident. Following negotiations, he was released, having agreed that he would stop fighting the communists and join them in resisting the Japanese. Within months, the Japanese would launch a full-scale invasion. There was more pluralism. There was more opportunity for people to debate new ideas, both about how the war should be fought, but also about the kind of society that would be constructed after the war was over. In those terms, the Japanese invasion was one of the most profound political shocks to China of the entire modern era. In 1936, John Maynard Keynes published The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, which buried the sacred cow of the balanced budget. In 1936, according to George Orwell, history stopped. H.G. Wells wrote Things to Come in 1936. The heroine in Graham Greene's A Gun for Sale declared, And Orwell, in Keep the Aspidestra Flying, wrote, The threat of German nationalism, which Britain and France appeased, is portrayed often as the only disruptive issue which those countries faced. Had it been, perhaps Adolf Hitler would have been dealt with differently. But it was not. Italy, Spain, Japan, India, Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and the Soviet Union, a constellation of issues confronted these two democracies. One, which they sought to tackle through a conference in Brussels, was Japan's invasion of China. What you've got by 1937 is you've got some willingness on the part of both of the Chinese communists and the Kuomintang nationalists to work together to try and save China. Now, that's a threat to Japan. And we, China, is much less of a threat to Japan than a potentially strong China. Japan's defence budget had risen from 465 million yen in 1931 to over 1 billion in 1935, and 3 billion by 1937. Troops and more troops are marching in the east, and still the world is wondering, must the mastery of China be decided by open war? World War II broke out on the 7th of July, 1937. This is not a date that European historians generally attribute to this event, but I think there is a very strong case that actually the Second World War began in Asia, and particularly with shooting between locally garrisoned Chinese and Japanese troops at a bridge called Luotiao, known in the West as the Marco Polo Bridge. There is skirmishing here and there, and a tenseness of civilians, wait and soldiers watch. Does each dawn bring the storm nearer, or will it die away beyond the horizon? The statement that now we, Chinese people, as a nation, we need to unite together, despite the class, despite where we're from, and now we need to fight against the enemy from the outside. I think that was definitely a turning moment. Chinese defenders give themselves up, so the defending position is taken, and the soldiers of Japan march on. On November the 15th, 1937, the Mind Power Conference adjourned. Its declaration rejected Japan's euphemistic characterization of its invasion of China, noting the reality and believing that the declaration described the essential realities of the situation, which was that Japan had launched an unprovoked, undeclared, full-scale invasion of China. The Brussels signatories admitted to finding it difficult to understand Japan's persistent refusal to discuss a way forward, and with that, they all went home. The onset of full-scale war with China, some say to some extent it's a cock-up, you know, they don't bring it under control. By the late 1930s, what you've got is a China that is increasingly trying to unify itself. The potential for conflict was always there. If you have troops on the ground, on both sides, the potential for conflict is there. It seems incredible, viewed through our end of the telescope, that the British Foreign Office in March 1937 was suggesting that a general settlement with Hitler was still a possibility, perhaps in exchange for the restoration of former German colonies, Cameroon and Togoland. But British optimism arose from a keen awareness of deficiencies. The annual output per blast furnace in the British steel industry had increased from 30,000 tons in 1913 to 83,000 tons in 1937. It was not enough. By then, the figure for Germany was 125,000 tons, for the USA, 210,000. In May, Neville Chamberlain entered Downing Street as Prime Minister. He was 68, and he faced a threatening world, peopled by such characters as he had never known. Parodied as an umbrella-twirling fool, he was able to pursue his policy of appeasement, not because he was a weak prime minister, but because he was a strong one who controlled his cabinet with autocratic firmness. You know, he was not the naive, wide-eyed idiot that some people portray him as. He didn't trust Hitler. He was trying to get the best deal. Some in the Parliament are thought to have had a better grip on the pulse of the times, but that too is doubtful. The Tories are concerned about the state of Britain's defences and show their sympathy with the views of Mr Winston Churchill, one of the chief advocates of increasing the armed forces of the crown. It would be dangerous folly for the British people to underrate the amazing qualities of courage, comprehension, self-control and perseverance, which he exemplifies, Churchill wrote on October the 10th. He was not, of course, describing Chamberlain or Hitler. He was talking about Mussolini. Churchill's been portrayed as a sort of wine-bibbing liberal democrat. In fact, he was a whiskey-sloshing Tory thug, and that's just what we needed where Hitler was concerned. He was prepared to stand up to it, and he was unintimidated by the menace. It was a very challenging time for would-be judges of character. Lord Halifax had met Hitler, and his impression of the man, he wrote, was that he was very sincere. Stalin's Russia, on the other hand, Lord Halifax considered to be the Antichrist. A man with a less church-bound Manichaean view might have reached out and done some good in pre-war diplomacy. He might, as British foreign secretary, have tested foreign minister Litvinov's suggestion of a British-French-Soviet accord in defense of Czechoslovakia. He might have, but he did not, and in March, the air raid sirens were tested for the first time in London, and the city's gas mask depot was opened. People saw what was happening in Manchuria, in Abyssinia, in Spain, so they knew what aerial bombardment meant. They knew that this would be a war not of combatants, but a war on the non-combatants. This would be a war against civilians. Carry your gas mask, because you never know where you'll need it. Certainly an excellent way of getting to know your respirator, but maybe it's not so good a way of getting to know your partner. It was a time for governments to prepare their people. In 1937, the Japanese Ministry of Education issued a text titled Cardinal Principles of the National Polity. This was an official statement for use in schools. It defined the Japanese state as aggressively nationalist, imperialist, authoritarian, non-individualistic. The 30s was a decade of reaction in Japan. Reaction to individualism, socialism, jazz. Reaction that reinforced the pillars of emperor, nation, tradition. The future, the loudest voices argued, was polluting the national essence, kokutai. What was needed was the establishment of a new order, jinshitsujo. Of course, the last thing the voices wanted was for the new order to have anything new about it. In July, the Japanese parliament approved a 2.5 billion yen rise in military spending and mobilization laws that gave the now totalitarian state control over the economy. When Japan launched the full-scale invasion of China, America remained docile. The Dominions remained markedly shy of contributing to the defense of the region. And the British service chiefs told the Prime Minister they could fight Germany in Europe and or Mussolini in the Mediterranean and or Japan in the Far East. What they could not do was fight all three. What was Neville Chamberlain to do? What he did has become known as appeasement. What Japan did was vent its fury against the Chinese, who had not succumbed in a few weeks as they expected. Their aim was deadly and unrestricted bombing of civilians became a Japanese trademark. When we think about the experience that we associate with the war in the West, even something as iconic as the Blitz in London, we should remember that those experiences were not just shared in China, but often the Chinese were there first. The atrocities inflamed the world. A Gallup poll after the Nanking atrocity found that 59% of Americans supported China and 1% Japan. Irving Hoffman, filing from New York for The Hollywood Reporter in 1937, described the reaction to first reports of the Japanese capture of Nanking. The shots, he said, inspire hisses from all parts of the house. And when a Japanese aviator is shot to earth, the house rocks with applause. When people look today at newsreel footage or photographs of the war in China in its first two or three years, 1937 to 39, I think what might strike them is not so much its strangeness, but its familiarity. The city of Chongqing, the temporary capital of China, being bombed at some seasons almost on a daily basis with incendiary devices dropped by Japanese planes. The digging of trenches in the streets of Shanghai during the desperate battle for that city in the summer and autumn of 1937. The training and drilling of troops, often at very short notice and desperation. The sending of refugees from the vulnerable cities to the interior, to the countryside. China's problem was that she lacked organization, and most of all, she lacked modern weapons. In Europe, an undeclared race was on to match the offensive capability of potential enemies. And the emphasis was on air power. In 1937, Germany built 5,606 aircraft. The USSR, 6,033. Great Britain, 2,218. Italy, 1,794. And France built 370. France had poured a huge sum, and all of her hopes, into the defensive barrier called the Maginot Line. The Maginot Line, believed by the French to be impregnable. They fondly think that this mighty barrier of underground fortifications makes them safe against German attack. Many notables, like Premier Deladier, visit the fortifications. France, deluded, is Maginot-minded. If war came in any other form, or trampled into any other part of France, there would be disaster. And there was. But there was always something about France that did not quite seem to have a grip on the real reality. It was still the center of life and letters, the fashion capital. In 1937, Cristobal Balenciaga, the man Chanel said, was the only couturier. The rest of us are just dressmakers. And Dior, acknowledged as the master, opened his salon and, as Piers Brendan put it, the franc was allowed to float. And it sank. Molotov said of the great terror, we were driven in 1937 by the consideration that in the time of war, we would not have a fifth column. And the terror switched to maximum pitch. Along with thousands of so-called kulaks, the landed but still impoverished class of peasantry, 42,000 ethnic Germans, 56,000 Poles, even 6,000 citizens of outer Mongolia had been shot. An insignificant number compared to the victims of the forced famine in Ukraine, or the much worse that was to come. Stalin had also purged the Red Army, killing 13 out of 15 army commanders, 50 out of 57 corps commanders, 154 out of 186 divisional commanders, and 36,000 other officers. Of the 80 member Supreme Military Soviet, five survived the 1937 purge. Stalin probably was a monster, right? You wouldn't be wanting to invite him to a dinner party. But Stalin's historical reputation in Russia today does rest on the fact that Russia today considers that there were positive and popular achievements of Stalin. But if everyone is supposed to have betrayed one man, asked author Eugenia Ginzburg, who spent nearly 20 years in the Gulag, isn't it easier to think he has betrayed them? On November the 22nd, the Chicago Tribune published a story filed from Berlin. It said, a famous Viennese specialist has disclosed what he claims is a record for going through the spookiest experience in modern doctor's practice. He was called to Moscow to treat dictator Joseph Stalin, but he declares that when he got there, he was confronted by six silent and almost identical men, all wearing the same kind of moustache as that worn by Stalin. The specialist treated all six of them for 10 days, three times in succession. He returned from his third trip last month and still does not know which of his patients was Stalin. This was the absolute ruler of the USSR. In Spain in March, at the Battle of Guadalajara, Republican forces sent Italian formations into headlong retreat. When the Italians were smashed, everything unflattering that had ever been said about Italian soldiers was said again. Foreign correspondent H.R. Knickerbocker claimed that they fled lock, stock, and barrel organ. Mussolini could hardly boast, though it would have been true, that amongst the victors of Guadalajara was the Italian anti-fascist Garibaldi Brigade. The strength of Germany's Condor Legion never exceeded 5,000, but its firepower was greater than that of the combined air forces of World War I. At 4.30 p.m. on April the 26th of 1937, its bombers arrived over Gernika, the holy city of the Basques. It is difficult to nominate the moment when Nazism first revealed what it would devour if ever it entered the arteries of Europe. But perhaps it was this action of which Hermann Göring said Germany could not do otherwise as we had nowhere else to try out our machines. In 1937, Pablo Picasso poured his heart and outrage into one of art's most impassioned paintings. Picasso does seem to have done something that has endured and has still keeps a message that we recognize and respond to today. Its impact at the time was modest. It was exhibited in Paris in 1937 in the Spanish Pavilion and people had difficulty understanding it. The crowds were more attracted by Dufy's homage to electricity. On Memorial Day 1937, the last Monday in May, an unarmed and well-behaved march of American strikers and their families moved towards the Republic Steel Plant in Chicago. The New Deal didn't conquer unemployment. Unemployment remained at a very high level throughout the 1930s in the United States. Even in 1937, the best year of the 1930s, it was probably around about 10 percent of the workforce. The strikers' path was blocked by 500 police whose captain yelled, you dirty sons of bitches, this is as far as you go. Nine were killed, more than a hundred wounded, many shot in the back, as Exhibit 1463 at the Senate Committee hearing proved. On September the 12th in Chicago, FDR delivered a speech calling on countries to quarantine the nations that were causing what the president described as international anarchy and instability. But who did that leave out? I have seen a war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gas lungs. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war. In India, 1937 was the year when limited reform began to bring some Indians into government. The first elections were held in 1937 in India on this new constitutional basis, and it brought Congress governments into power in the majority of the provinces. Elsewhere, the general trend seemed to be retrogressive. Terror was rampaging through Spain. To the east, new records of monstrosity were being set in the Soviet Union. And in China, a foreign nation was pressing a full-scale invasion. The history books say that the World War started in 1939. Some even say 1941. It's a matter of perspective. On March the 16th, the Italians launched an effectively unopposed air raid on Barcelona that killed a thousand and wounded twice that number. This will stand up our stocks in Germany, said Count Ciano. They loved total and ruthless war. In Barcelona, by then serving as the Republican capital, the death rate for children and the elderly had doubled in 1938. Here are official pictures of Italian units in Spain and members of a contingent being decorated by the insurgent general. Very hush-hush has been the attitude over the presence of these foreign volunteers. Their numbers have never been published. On July the 18th, the second anniversary of the failed coup, the rebel government in Burgos proclaimed the elevation to the dignity of Captain General of the Army, among other titles, of the Most Excellent Signor Don Francisco Franco Bahamonde. There are aspects of Franco that go beyond anything Ruritanian, that are pure comedy. You know, he's a man who believed in alchemy, thought he could resolve Spain's international economic problems by turning lead into gold. He believed that a powder could be produced that, when mixed with the water of a particular river, would turn into gasoline. Some of the things he says are seriously comical. The significance of Franco's appointment would not have been lost on the Spanish establishment, which would have recognized Captain General of the Army as a rank reserved for the Spanish monarch. There's also a seriously terrifying side of a man who has no compunction about merging large numbers of his compatriots. If we compare what is comparable, a higher percentage of the Spanish population was killed by Franco than the German population was killed by Hitler. So, I'm not a fan. On August the 1st, the Republican Army of the Ebro was ordered to go onto the defensive. And when, at 4.30am on November the 16th, the last survivors of the 35th Division recrossed the river, the Army of the Ebro had, in any meaningful sense, ceased to exist. And so, if it had not already vanished, had any prospect of a military victory over the nationalists. Anywhere. Ever. By September, only 7,102 foreigners were left in the much-celebrated and romanticized International Brigades. They were to leave behind 9,934 dead and 7,686 missing. As the Republican forces prepared to face the final and decisive rebel assault on Barcelona, they could count only 40 tanks, less than 100 field guns, barely 50 serviceable aircraft, and only 40,000 rifles. The 340,000 troops opposing them could depend on the support of 300 tanks, 1,400 guns, and 500 aircraft. December the 23rd was bright and cold. The nationalist offensive against Barcelona was launched. Under a February 26th byline, AAP reported, Swear with us that Austria shall live forever, was the slogan of a torchlight procession, in which 35,000 adherents of the Fatherland Front took part in one of the greatest demonstrations in Salzburg's history. The correspondent goes on to report that Nazis who refused to uncover when the Austrian anthem was sung had their hats knocked off. Chancellor Schuschnigg announced a referendum that would ask whether voters supported a free and German, independent and social, Christian and united Austria. They would not be allowed to answer. Schuschnigg met Hitler and caved in to all of his demands, but that did not deflect the Führer from sending his troops across the border. As Chancellor Schuschnigg of Austria accepts Hitler's terms and reforms his cabinet with Austrian Nazis, forgotten is the sensation of Germany's army changes, Chancellor Schuschnigg's surrender has set the front pages a new puzzle. Reflecting on his meeting, Schuschnigg said he felt as though he had met a madman who thinks he is God. The German invasion and forced annexation of Austria, the Anschluss, took place in early March. Germany got land and people and Austria's gold reserves, which were four times those of the Reich. Following the Anschluss and in the aftermath of terror unleashed against the Jewish population, so many Viennese Jews committed suicide that the city's gas company temporarily suspended supply to Jewish households. Two months after the Anschluss, a football match was scheduled for Berlin. The German national team now included several of the more powerful Austrian team, which had defeated England in 1936. They were now Germans. The visiting team was England. The English team gave the Nazi salute during the German national anthem. Some claimed it was to make up for British athletes not having given the salute at the Berlin Olympics. Neville Henderson, Britain's ambassador to Berlin, said that the Nazis were looking for victories to boost their regime. It is, he said, their way of claiming a super race. When Goulden sees an opportunity and makes it 6-3. Because of Spain, Ethiopia and other pigeon-chested posturing, Italy, between 1935 to 1938, spent almost as much of its GDP on military matters as Germany and about double the proportion expended by Britain and France. Between 1934 and 1940, military and colonial outlays accounted for 51% of expenditure. It is hard not to be reminded of Bismarck's Bon Mo. Poor Italy, such a huge appetite, such poor teeth. In early May, Hitler with an entourage of 5,000 made his second visit to Italy. A very different figure from the fresh-minted junior partner of his first tour. Hitler makes his triumphant progress towards Rome. At the specially built Ostia station, the German dictator is met by the King of Italy. Only after royal greetings is the Mussolini handshake forthcoming. Mussolini stands on the flagship to welcome them as Minister of Marine and it's on with the review. Mussolini told Ciano that he was sure the Fuhrer, to defeat his natural pallor, was wearing rouge. With Ostia safely pocketed, attention turned to Czechoslovakia, or at least its western region, the Sudetenland, where lived three million ethnic Germans. These are the people whose aspirations are the present cause of the world's jitters. Sudeten Germans whose desire to become part of Hitler's Reich is so keen that they leave their homeland to form a free legion in Bavaria. Hitler, of course, was very clever at sounding very moderate. You know, we just want to protect our fellow Germans. There are all those Germans in Austria. Why shouldn't they join with us? What about national self-determination? They want to join with us. All those poor Germans in the Sudetenland, in the western part of Czechoslovakia, and all they want to do is join with their fellow Germans. And if we get that, we're going to settle down. We don't want much more. All we want is just to be respected. He sounded very reasonable at times, particularly when he was talking to foreign statesmen. Off went the man with the umbrella and the wing collar, bringing to the international crisis, according to the narrator of British Movietone News, his courageous genius. So what do we see about Chamberlain? We see that he is a man who is very concerned with being popular, with being liked, with being loved, with being admired. This isn't about romance as such. It's about being the kind of paternalistic figure. My policy has always been to try to ensure peace and a Führer's ready acceptance. My suggestion encourages me to hope that my visit to him will not be without result. The Czech ambassador to Britain, Jan Masaryk, expressed himself fearful of Chamberlain's senile ambition. The accomplished fact of Nazis occupying Sudetenland has been another event rendering negotiations difficult. The so-called Sudeten Free Corps move into Ash, a frontier town, without show of opposition. Pity the poor Sudetens who do not profess Nazism. Communists or socialists, perhaps, they are rounded up and taken away in lorries. Czechoslovakia had been assembled from Bohemia, Moravia, parts of Silesia, Slovakia, and Ruthenia, the sub-Carpathian Ukraine. It was enfolded on three sides by Germany. The handbook of the Royal Automobile Club was already describing both Austria and the Sudetenland as provinces of greater Germany. As Chamberlain flew to Berchtesgaden, a bumpy storm tossed flight of seven hours. The Prime Minister was 69. As soon as Hitler sees that old man, said Mussolini, he will know that he has won the battle. There was also, I think, an extraordinary willingness to believe that somebody like Chamberlain could really, you know, deal with Hitler. Of course, it partly stemmed from Chamberlain's amazingly arrogant self-confidence, you know, that he understood Hitler and that Hitler liked him and that he could get on with it. In fact, you know, Hitler despised him. I've come back again rather quicker than I expected. In a few days, I'm going to have another talk with Herr Hitler. Only this time, he has told me that it is his intention to spare an old man another long journey. Perhaps Chamberlain's greatest mistake was to think that he stood atop the world's most powerful empire and that was weight enough to press against the dictators. It was not. And a greater effort, an effort, to bring the American and or Soviets and or the Japanese into the process may have had an effect. When Chamberlain agreed to go to Munich, President Roosevelt sent him a cable which contained two words, good man. Various forms of foreign office doggerel reportedly parodied the effort in similar terms. If at first you don't appease, when one ditty, fly, fly, fly again. When I come back, I hope I may be able to say, as Hotspur says in Henry IV, out of this metal danger, we pluck this flower safely.