August 20, 2006
On Chamberlain and Munich Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:05 AM EST Fred Schwarz posts that John Steele Gordon has been defending Chamberlain’s decision not to fight for Czechoslovakia. I followed the links Fred posted, and they seem to contain only excerpts of what John Steel Gordon wrote, but one thing John Steele Gordon does write is, I think, absolutely wrong. In the post Fred links to, John Steele Gordon argues that “the biggest problem was air power . . . no invasion was possible as long as the Navy controlled the sea. . . . But by the 1930’s control of the sea was not possible without control of the air above it, and here Britain was far, far weaker than Germany. Had Hitler gained control of the air over the Channel for even a couple of days, he could have put an army on British shores and then Britain, with its weak army, would have been doomed. . . . So the growth of the Royal Air Force in these months, growing from 5 to 47 squadrons as Manchester states, was crucial. Britain could not have survived otherwise . . .” This is perfect nonsense, although nonsense with an interesting history of its own, of which more later. The figure of a total of 5 RAF squadrons in October of 1938 is absurd. According to the official history of British war production, in September of 1938 there were 30 operational fighter squadrons. Without hunting up the exact figures for October 1938, the figures for January of 1939 should do: 135 RAF squadrons. The number of fighter squadrons actually went down, to 27, because obsolete aircraft were being retired (the first Spitfires were delivered to fighter squadrons in 1938). As background, one of the greatest intelligence failures of the 1930s was the Allies’ often gross overestimate of the Luftwaffe’s strength. At the time of the Munich crisis most RAF and Luftwaffe aircraft were obsolete, and both sides were in the throes of rearmament. If both sides had fought with what was on hand, my memory is that Britain and France combined outnumbered German combat aircraft by something like 4:3, and that ratio excludes the not-insignificant Polish and Czech air forces. The catastrophic overestimate was fostered by sustained German propaganda and disinformation. There is no excuse for being taken in by that exercise more than 60 years on. The best book—by a very long chalk the best book—on the merits of fighting Hitler in 1938 rather than 1939 is by Williamson Murray, an excellent and celebrated military historian. That book is The Change in the European Balance of Power, 1938-1939, published by Princeton University Press in 1984. Anyone wanting to develop an informed opinion of this question should read Murray, or failing that a professional review of his book. The equally able and equally celebrated military historian Brian Bond did one in the English Historical Review, and there are others. By the way, neither of these men are the “liberals” Mr. Gordon so enjoys pillorying, nor are they the tenured Marxists he also mentions. At any rate, in 1938 the Luftwaffe was simply not ready for war. I have never read a professional study of the Luftwaffe that argued otherwise. Had it been ready for war, the relative strength of the Czech Army (and probably the Polish Army, which Polish historians think would have fought if Britain and France had, despite Poland’s animosity toward Czechoslovakia, and her territorial disputes), plus the relative strength of the French Army would have made it extremely unlikely that Germany could have quickly secured the bases that would have allowed her fighters to even reach the Channel, let alone contest it for any length of time. One reason, among many: If the war had broken out in October, the tanks Germany possessed would not have been able to do the only thing that made them truly formidable, which was impose a tempo of operations unmatchable by their adversaries. In 1938 German armor was not only relatively sparse, it was not designed to fight lightening campaigns during a European winter (neither was 1939 German armor). Suppose that the Wehrmacht did the impossible and somehow conquered both Czechoslovakia and France by June of 1939, the date by which (against all odds) it actually did that. Could the Luftwaffe have covered an invasion of Britain? Even a year later, in the summer of 1939, the Luftwaffe’s aircraft would have had no deployed air-launched torpedo, and most of its bombs would still have been 50-kilogram fragmentation or general-purpose bombs, which could not have pierced the deck armor of a Royal Navy light cruiser. In 1938, contrary to Mr. Gordon’s assertion, control of the Channel was more than possible without control of the air. That would also be true in 1939 and 1940. And if Germany had gotten control of the Channel, she could not have moved many troops across it. She did not have the sealift. If she had moved troops across it, she could not have supplied them. Professionals who have modeled the logistics of a 1940 Sea Lion—I mean professional militaries—have agreed about this since joint British-German war games in the 1960s. A very interesting recent book on the likely fate of a cross-Channel invasion in 1940—crushing defeat—gives the Germans every break by assuming that the RAF lost control of the Channel and that the Royal Navy declined to contest it. The book was published in 2004 (it is Martin Marix Evans’s Invasion! Operation Sea Lion, 1940), and anyone wanting to get a sense of some of the logistical obstacles facing a 1940 Sea Lion should read it. So where did this implausible defense of Chamberlain at Munich come from? It began in the early 1970s with Tory apologists like Maurice Cowling, who detested both the rise of the Labour Party after the war and the Social Democratic welfare states of postwar Western Europe, who mourned the loss of empire, and who did not admire Churchill for having waged and won the war that created our world. In the postwar world, there have been some on both left and right—their numbers seem to be increasing—who do not admire the Allied leaders of the Second World War, or accept what were long taken to be that war’s most urgent lessons. Cowling and his followers attempted to redeem Churchill’s disgraced opponent Chamberlain. Simultaneously, Munich became an analogy in both the Cold War world and the post-Cold War world, and as an analogy was detested on the left, where Churchill was not much admired for a host of reasons. The mutual hostility to Churchill made for an unwitting and unholy alliance, but that alliance has not yet managed to redeem Chamberlain at Munich.
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