Fighting is sometimes needed on road to peace

The image of his smiling, victorious face, aglow with the sense of vindication that seemed to be one step away from “I told you so,” has become the paradigm of the image of impending disaster. And the signed agreement he waved victoriously as he stepped from the plane, fresh from his seemingly successful whirlwind negotiations, has become synonymous with the adage of any agreement literally “not worth the paper it is written on.”

The year was 1938, the man was British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and the agreement was the peace deal he had signed with no less than Adolph Hitler, relinquishing allied promises of protection to the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia. This flawed decision, which essentially set the stage for World War Two, was briefly celebrated as heralding the wisdom to “make peace not war,”thus avoiding the arrogant thinking which had led to World War One a scant 25 years earlier. But it soon became clear that this weak-willed abrogation of an established alliance and treaty would pave the way for Hitler’s invasion of Poland, and the eventual loss of tens of millions of lives. 

Chamberlain’s famous meeting with Hitler in 1938, was one of those “what if” moments, which might have changed the course of history. Beginning with Germany’s Anschluss invasion of Austria, and culminating with Germany’s march into Czechoslovakia, the Allies had ample opportunity to declare war on Germany and stop Nazism in its tracks before its military machine became unstoppable. But Chamberlain, along with the rest of the Western world, missed opportunity after opportunity, until it was too late. Why was it so difficult to see what Hitler really wanted?  Why did so many world leaders lack the will to say “enough”?