Abstract
As Carl von Clausewitz wrote in his celebrated book On War, ‘no other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance’.1 The long history of inferior armies winning battles against superior foes supports his observation. Although Clausewitz insight about the play of chance in victory is a truism in modern strategic studies, defeat still retains some of its former stigma as an expression of divine judgement. Defeat is never just a gamble lost, but a damning verdict on the war preparations and commanders of the fallen side. This tendency to interpret what precedes a military misfortune in a harsh light is particularly evident in the historiography of British policy from September 1939 to May 1940. Scholars are especially critical of the leadership of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.2 British strategy during the Phoney War was once dismissed as nothing more than a token effort to wage war whilst sustaining a forlorn hope that peace could be restored with the Nazi regime through further ‘appeasement’. More recent studies regard this period as the last stage in Britain’s belated but inevitable adjustment to the demands of waging total war and as a hapless prelude to the triumphant leadership of Winston Churchill.3
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Notes
Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch, Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War (New York, 1990), p. 2.
The polemic Guilty Men (London, 1940) written by Michael Foot, Frank Owen, and Peter Howard under the pseudonym ‘Cato’, which crystallised for a whole generation the indictment of the Chamberlain and appeasement, was written in July 1940, just after the defeat of France and the British retreat from Dunkirk. See Patrick Finney, Remembering the Road to World War Two: International History, National Identity, Collective Memory (London, 2010), pp. 191–99.
For example Graham Stewart’s Burying Caesar: Churchill, Chamberlain and the Battle for the Tory Party (London, 1999), pp. 385–420,
and Talbot Imlay’s Facing the Second World War: Strategy, Politics and Economics in Britain and France, 1938–40 (Oxford, 2003), take this line.
For a more sympathetic interpretation, see Robert Self, Neville Chamberlain (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 383–410.
Joseph Maiolo, Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931–1941 (New York, 2010).
For an insight into contemporary thinking about future war, see in Norman Angell et al. (eds), What would be the Character of a New War? (London, 1933).
Robert Self, The Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters: Volume 4 The Downing Street Years, 1934–40 (Aldershot, 2005), p. 445;
Chamberlain was not alone in framing the war as not against the German people but against their rulers: see Peter W. Ludlow, ‘The Unwinding of Appeasement’, in Lothar Kettenacker (ed.), Das ‘Andere Deutschland’ in Zweiten Weltkrieg (Stuttgart, 1977), pp. 15–19,
and John Colville, The Fringes of Power: 10 Downing Street Diaries 1939–1955 (London, 1985), p. 26, pp. 46–7, p. 55.
Peter Howlett, ‘The Wartime Economy, 1939–1945’, in Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson (eds), The Economic History of Britain since 1700: 1939–1992 (Cambridge, 2004). Not surprisingly, Treasury officials considered themselves best placed to run the war economy. See T175/117, ‘Economic Coordination’ 7 Dec. 1939; Colville, Fringes of Power, p. 78.
Talbot Imlay, ‘Paul Reynaud and France’s Response to Nazi Germany, 1938–1940’, French Historical Studies 26/3 (2003), pp. 497–538; David Dilks, ‘The Twilight War and the Fall of France: Chamberlain and Churchill in 1940’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1978), pp. 61–86.
David Dutton, The Politics of Diplomacy: Britain and France in the Balkans in the First World War (London, 1998). For the Chiefs of Staff view, see CAB 80/1, COS (39)15, ‘Balkan Neutrality’, 9 Sept. 1939.
Frank Marzaria, ‘Projects for an Italian-led Balkan Bloc of Neutrals, September–December 1939’, Historical Journal 13/4 (1970), 767–88; and CAB 80/5, COS(239)135, ‘Strategical Situation in South East Europe’, 28 Nov. 1939.
Roderick Macleod and Denis Kelly, (eds), Ironside Diaries, 1937–1940 (London, 1963), pp. 235–9.
Patrick Salmon, ‘British Plans for Economic Warfare against Germany, 1937–1939: The Problem of Swedish Iron Ore’, Journal of Contemporary History 16 (1981), pp. 53–71.
For the detailed discussions, see CAB 65/11–12, War Cabinet Minutes, 2 Jan.–30 April 1940. For a detailed analysis of British military advice see Bernard Kelly, ‘Drifting Towards War: The British Chiefs of Staff, the USSR and the Winter War, November 1939–March 1940’, Contemporary British History 23/3 (2009), pp. 267–291.
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Beatrice Heuser, The Evolution of Strategy: Thinking War from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge, 2010).
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Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London, 2007), pp. 285–325. Maiolo, Cry Havoc, pp. 289–95.
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Klaus-Jürgen Müller, Das Heer und Hitler: Armee und nationalsozialistisches Regime 1933–1940 (Stuttgart, 1969), pp. 471–573.
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Maiolo, Cry Havoc, pp. 355–9. Jürgen Förster, ‘The German Military’s Image of Russia’, in Ljubica Erickson and Mark Erickson, (eds), Russia: War, Peace and Diplomacy (London, 2005), pp. 122–3.
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The English translation of the 1995 German book is by Karl-Heinz Frieser, The Blitzkrieg Legend: The Campaign in the West 1940 (Annapolis MD, 2005), p. 2.
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Peter Jackson, France and the Nazi Menace: Intelligence and Policy-making, 1933–1939 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 117–8, pp. 184–91, pp. 324–6. J.P. Harris, ‘British Military Intelligence and the Rise of German Mechanized Forces, 1929–40’, Intelligence and National Security (1991).
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Martin Alexander, ‘After Dunkirk: The French Army’s Performance Against “Case Red”, 25 May to 25 June 1940’, War in History, 14/2 (2007), pp. 219–64.
Frieser, The Blitzkrieg Legend, pp. 59–74. Earnest R. May, Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France (London, 2000), pp. 240–68.
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Maiolo, J. (2013). ‘To Gamble All on a Single Throw’: Neville Chamberlain and the Strategy of the Phoney War. In: Baxter, C., Dockrill, M.L., Hamilton, K. (eds) Britain in Global Politics Volume 1. Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137367822_10
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