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Originally Posted by Wendigo
Chamberlain comes off badly as although he was a decent enough man he failed to see through Hitler's lies. That "peace in our time" comment has sadly become his albatross.
PS Scounds is right, Baldwin was a dead loss, so much so I'd almost forgotten him.
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The Right Honourable Stanley Baldwin KG, PC, FRS.
Churchill (I read his really excellent
The Second World War before my 10th birthday) was much more lenient towards Chamberlain than towards Stanley Baldwin. As far as I can tell, the difference lay in his assessment of their characters. Chamberlain was a non-entity, a really mediocre and grossly over-promoted man, out of his depth as PM; but he was driven in part by a real sense of public duty. Although his term of office was a complete failure, he was not a bad man; he was fatally weak. a moral coward (though by no means a physical one) and just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Churchill himself would have been a bloody awful peacetime prime-minister (and was, in the early 1950s) and had the guts to be quite open about his own failings as a politician and a man. After Chamberlain died in 1940, Churchill pointed out in the House of Commons with brutal frankness that MPs and the mass of the general public who were being so ungenerous to a dead man had backed and supported Chamberlain's dis-credited appeasement almost all the way to September 1939, and weren't
entitled to condemn him now for a guilt they shared in. Churchill, who had opposed appeasement,
was entitled to condemn his memory; but one of Churchill's best qualities was generosity of spirit. Once a opponent was down and beaten, Churchill nearly always cut him/her some slack. He was terms of personal friendship with many of his most vocal opponents, especially on the Labour side; even Lady Astor couldn't quite hate him because she too had a sense of humour and found their verbal duels amusing.
But for Churchill, Mr Baldwin was the exception. Churchill was Baldwin's Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924-29. Later, they grew more and more estranged over India (where Baldwin was right and the Imperialist Churchill was quite wrong) and over re-armament, where Churchill was tragically right and Baldwin was criminally wrong. Baldwin's position, quite simply, was that Hitler's territorial ambitions were against Russia rather than Britain or France; that a showdown between Germany and Soviet Russia would be a damn good thing; that promoting a re-armament policy was alarmist, would disturb the calm of a peace-loving people and might turn them against him at the ballot box. Getting re-elected; that was the priority.
Churchill felt very strongly that Baldwin had dug the hole which he found the country to be in when assuming office in May 1940. Baldwin's motives had been small minded, mean and self-serving. Chamberlain had at least been trying to play unenviable cards as well as he knew how, for his country's good, but Baldwin had knowingly done the wrong thing by his country for the good of Stanley Baldwin and the Conservative Party. This was the one unforgiveable sin in Churchill's book; to subordinate your duty to Britain in favour of your party winning the next election and you keeping the toys; and Churchill was quite correct in that this is exactly what Stanley Baldwin did.
When Baldwin died, Churchill, for the only time, could not find a shred of generosity for a dead man. Instead, he was brilliantly brutal.
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Embalm; cremate; bury him at sea. Take no chances.
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In his own
The Second World War he took the most effective revenge by offering a detailed and factually researched analysis which proved what Baldwin did and why he did it, making quite sure that history would condemn Stanley Baldwin. He was careful to stick rigidly to the proven truth; but the mere facts were damning.