‘To Gamble All on a Single Throw’: Neville Chamberlain and the Strategy of the Phoney War

Abstract

As Carl von Clausewitz wrote in his celebrated book On War, ‘no other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance’.1 The long history of inferior armies winning battles against superior foes supports his observation. Although Clausewitz insight about the play of chance in victory is a truism in modern strategic studies, defeat still retains some of its former stigma as an expression of divine judgement. Defeat is never just a gamble lost, but a damning verdict on the war preparations and commanders of the fallen side. This tendency to interpret what precedes a military misfortune in a harsh light is particularly evident in the historiography of British policy from September 1939 to May 1940. Scholars are especially critical of the leadership of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.2 British strategy during the Phoney War was once dismissed as nothing more than a token effort to wage war whilst sustaining a forlorn hope that peace could be restored with the Nazi regime through further ‘appeasement’. More recent studies regard this period as the last stage in Britain’s belated but inevitable adjustment to the demands of waging total war and as a hapless prelude to the triumphant leadership of Winston Churchill.3KeywordsPrime MinisterGerman EconomyNazi RegimeGerman PeopleGerman ArmyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.