"Why did he do it?" The question reverberated last week from the leathery fastnesses of St. James's clubs to the House of Commons smoking room. With mordant relish, Britons were discussing a new biography of Neville Chamberlain, in which the Man of Munich is pictured not as a vain, gullible appeaser but as a bold, imaginative statesman who took the only gamble open to him. What gave the debate an irresistible piquancy was that Chamberlain's apologist is Iain Macleod, 48, chairman of the Conservative Party, leader of the House of Commons and an odds-on candidate to succeed Harold Macmillan as Prime Minister.
A Faraway Country. Macleod's case for the defense rests largely on the argument that the Munich pact was a wise if bitter expedient necessitated by the fact that Britain and the Commonwealth were "not ready for war." Growled the Times (which supported Munich): "The reply must be to ask why they were not." For though Chamberlain himself had realized the urgent need for rearmament four years before Munich, and later described Hitler as a "lunatic," he could close his eyes to all unpleasant evidence. He left the first meeting with Hitler at Berchtesgaden in 1938 radiating confidence that "here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word."
Far from sharing Biographer Macleod's belief that Munich was a shrewd play for time. Chamberlain actually seemed convinced that it was a great, enduring master stroke that, as he boasted, would assure "peace with honor, peace for our time." Too often, Author Macleod's biography soft-pedals Chamberlain's naiveté and glosses over his smugness and arrogance, such as his unfeeling verdict on Hitler's dismemberment of Czechoslovakia: "A quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing."
Nonetheless, argues Macleod, "it is not at Munich but at the locust years, 1934 and 1935, that the finger of criticism should be pointed." For despite Chamberlain's "most valiant" championship of rearmament in the mid-'30's, so little was done that by September 1938. Britain was almost completely defenseless against air attack, had only a token quantity of modern antiaircraft guns and one operational Spitfire squadron. "After Munich," says Iain Macleod, "the last strong hopes of peace were not allowed to hold back our accelerating preparations against war."