‘The Legion that Sailed but Never Went’: The British Legion and the Munich Crisis of 1938

Abstract

The involvement of the British ex-service movement in the diplomatic prelude of the Second World War is now very much a forgotten episode. Despite the publicity which surrounded these efforts at the time, the British Legion’s controversial policy of contact with German veterans in Nazi Germany has left little trace in historical research. However, the involvement of a voluntary group in diplomatic affairs and decisions during the inter-war period is rare indeed, and British Legion contacts with Nazi veterans and Nazi leaders might even be considered unique. In many respects, this late attempt by the British Legion to promote peace and avert war forms a sad coda to the bright hopes generated by the spirit of veterans’ internationalism as generated in the 1920s. In that decade, many veterans’ groups, including the Legion, had espoused the ‘Brotherhood of the Trenches’. This was a bond which, it was believed, joined all the men who had shared the experience of hardship, suffering and loss in the trenches of the battle fronts. This credo connected with the comradeship said to be at the root of the Legion itself, and the wider, international concept was used to invoke unity amongst veterans across the barriers of nationality, politics and language, primarily through the auspices of FIDAC.