Abstract
The failure of the United States to play a more active role during the 1930s in the containment of international aggression remains an important issue for historians interested in whether World War II could have been prevented; and is intimately connected with the debate concerning Britain’s ill-fated policy of appeasement — whether misguided capitulation to German, Italian and Japanese expansion, or pragmatic response to insuperable burdens contingent upon British decline. Could more have been done by the British government to establish a closer association with America, and thereby deter war? Did London miss the chance to follow leads from Washington, confounding Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempts to wean Congress away from isolationism? Or was Britain’s desperate, febrile policy towards potential enemies — consequence of ineluctable constraints — further weakened by America’s persistently ambiguous posture: one that, if aligned with, risked antagonising hostile powers without providing the practical support necessary to justify such risk? Did British policy, thus, merely help entrench isolationism, or was the latter itself one of the determinants of appeasement?
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Notes
David N. Dilks, ‘Appeasement Revisited’, The University of Leeds Review (1972); David N. Dilks, ‘“We must hope for the best and prepare for the worst”: The Prime Minister, the Cabinet and Hitler’s Germany, 1937–1939’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 73 (1987), pp. 309–352;
John Charmley, Chamberlain and the Lost Peace (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989);
Peter Bell, Chamberlain, Germany and Japan, 1933–34 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996);
David Dutton, Neville Chamberlain (London: Edward Arnold, 2001);
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Bell, Chamberlain, Germany and Japan; for a more critical appraisal see Keith Neilson, ‘The Defence Requirements Sub-Committee, British Strategic Foreign Policy, Neville Chamberlain and the Path to Appeasement’, English Historical Review, cxviii, 477 (2003), pp. 652–84; for an extremely negative appraisal see
John Ruggiero Neville Chamberlain and British Rearmament: Pride, Prejudice and Politics (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999).
Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. 1, The Gathering Storm (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), pp. 197–9;
see also Earl of Avon, Facing the Dictators (London: Cassell, 1962) ch. XII; and
David Reynolds, In Command of History (New York: Basic Books, 2007) for a critical appraisal of Churchill’s memoirs and influence upon historical perspectives.
Keith Feiling, The Life of Neville Chamberlain (London: Macmillan, 1946).
‘Cato’, Guilty Men (London: Victor Gollancz, 1940); Sidney Aster, ‘“Guilty Men”: The Case of Neville Chamberlain’, in Robert Boyce and Esmonde Robertson (eds), Paths to War: New Essays on the Origins of the Second World War (London Macmillan, 1989);
R.A.C. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement: British Policy and the Coming of the Second World War (London: Macmillan, 1993);
B.J.C. McKercher, Transition of Power: Britain’s Loss of Global Preeminence to the United States, 1930–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Ruggiero, Neville Chamberlain and British Rearmament; Neilson, The Defence Requirements Sub-Committee;
Greg Kennedy, ‘Neville Chamberlain and Strategic Relations with the US during his Chancellorship’, Diplomacy & Statecraft, 13, 1 (2002), pp. 95–120;
Greg Kennedy, ‘“Rat in Power”: Neville Chamberlain and the Creation of British Foreign Policy, 1931–39’, in T.G. Otte (ed.), The Makers of British Foreign Policy from Pitt to Thatcher (Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan, 2002), pp. 173–95;
Greg Kennedy, Anglo-American Strategic Relations and the Far East, 1933–1939 (London: Frank Cass, 2002).
Warren F. Kimball Forged in War: Churchill, Roosevelt and the Second World War (New York: William Morrow, 1997) pp. 25–6.
Robert Self, ‘Perception and Posture in Anglo-American Relations: The War Debt Controversy in the “Official Mind”, 1919–1940’, International History Review, 29, 2 (2007), pp. 282–313;
Keith Neilson, ‘Perception and Posture in Anglo-American Relations: The Legacy of the Simon-Stimson Affair, 1932–41’, International History Review, 29, 2 (2007), pp. 313–37.
Memorandum, August 1936, Chatfield Papers, in L. Pratt East of Malta, West of Suez: Britain’s Mediterranean Crisis, 1936–39 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 3.
A. Trotter Britain and East Asia 1933–1937 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975); A. Trotter, ‘Tentative Steps for an Anglo-Japanese Rapprochement in 1934’, Modern Asian Studies, 8, 1 (1974), pp. 59–83; Neilson, ‘Perception and Posture’.
L. Pratt, ‘The Anglo-American Naval Conversations on the Far East of January 1938’, in International Affairs, XLVII (1971), pp. 745–63;
I. Hamill, The Strategic Illusion: The Singapore Strategy and the Defence of Australia and New Zealand, 1919–42 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1981) pp. 303–4; Earl of Avon Facing the Dictators, pp. 544–6;
M.H. Murfett, Fool-Proof Relations: The Search for Anglo-American Naval Cooperation During the Chamberlain Years, 1937–40 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1984).
P. Bell, ‘The Foreign Office and the 1939 Royal Visit to America: Courting the United States in an Era of Isolationism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 37, 4 (2002), pp. 599–616.
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© 2014 Peter Bell
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Bell, P. (2014). ‘Leaving Us in the Lurch’. In: Murfett, M.H. (eds) Shaping British Foreign and Defence Policy in the Twentieth Century. Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137431493_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137431493_5
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