Lifeofthemind, thank you for the clarification.

But too bad Chamberlain didn’t have his moment of clarity sooner, no?

I’m just now rereading Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The part about Czechoslavakia is especially pertinent and interesting.

As to educated gentlemen, you are no doubt correct, but in my estimation Chamberlain was an educated fool and was taken for one by Hitler.

Largely ignored (or completely unknown) in all the current emphasis about meeting and talking with our enemies is the fact that sometimes doing so goes counter to intentions. Some of us know Churchill’s reaction (He called it, “The complete surrender of the Western Democracies”) but most people don’t know that prior to Munich a good many German generals were planning a coup against Hitler, so convinced were they that aggression against the Czechs would lead to Germany’s ruin. They were in the long run right, of course, but in the immediate aftermath of “Peace in our time” they realized a coup attempt would not be propitious. And so Schirer is left wondering if Chamberlain may not have single-handedly guaranteed the onslaught of the Second World War.