silentsentinel said:
And I know that Appeasement was intended to avert WW2. However, it was SO much stupider than isolationism (and you have to remember that most Americans had bad memories of WW1). And Hitler himself admitted in the middle of World War 2 that if the French or British had counterattacked when he was invading one of the first counties he invaded (forgot which one) he would "returned with our tails between our legs".
Nevins said:
Er....... he never said that appeasment was intended to start WW2, he said that it did. If Chamberlain and whatever Frenchman was the PM on that particular day (The french didnt even have a govt. the day that Hitler came into power) had had the balls to tell Hitler to back the fuck down, millions of lives could have been saved. And as far as the American aid is concerned, the British might have been able to hold out for a year or two, but after the fall of the Soviet Union (which would have happened without massive aid from lend lease) they would have been very fucked.
That having been said, I don't mean to come off as saying that Britain's wartime sacrifices were not as great as others, only that without the timely intervention of the US, Hitler would never have been stopped.
There's a distinct lack of research to this kind of stuff. The goal of appeasement wasn't just to try and get Germany to stop invading countries. A major reason that appeasement was such a desirable idea was that Britain was in
no way prepared to go back into a full-scale war. We simply did not have the resources, or the manpower. Hell, we won the Battle of Britain by sending the majority of the RAF into battle, and hoping that it'd look like we had a bigger airforce than we actually did. In 1938, taking on Germany would've been
extremely dangerous.
Secondly, hindsight is wonderful, but at the time, all we knew of Hitler was that Germany had gained a charismatic new leader. He was described as someone that could be "relied upon to keep his word". On top of the Munich Agreement, Germany had signed a non-aggression treaty with Poland in 1933; to break both of these would make Hitler's government, not to mention Germany itself, highly untrustworthy. Even then, granting Germany the Sudetenland was seen as somewhat reasonable; the restrictions and reparations inflicted on Germany post-WWI are infamously harsh. Returning land to Germany was a
good idea.
Finally, it was 1938. Do you even know what that means? It had not even been
ten years since the end of the First World War, which had brought unprecedented bloodshed to the world.
Nobody wanted to just leap back into another war, even if we could, and you can't blame anyone for trying to take whatever steps necessary to ensure a peaceful and diplomatic solution. Yeah, it didn't work. A lot of people died. Maybe it would've turned out better, had they done things differently. But at the time? With the intelligence available? With the manpower available? It was the best decision they could've made.
