The fictionalized story depicts Chamberlain being tipped off of Hitler’s true plans for Europe before the signing of the agreement. Chamberlain decides to go forward with it anyways because it will at least give the UK and her allies time to mobilize for the inevitable war.
The film, therefore, depicts the Munich Conference as a victory for the UK rather than an act of dangerous naïvety as it’s often described. The end credits even go as far to imply that the allies may have lost the war if not for this crucial year of mobilization between the Munich Conference and the outbreak of WWII.
Did military mobilization actually begin in Britain after the Munich Conference? Was a second war with Germany really considered inevitable in the UK during the mid-late 1930’s? To what extent is this a fair and/or accurate perspective of the Munich Conference and the situation between the UK and Germany as a whole?
Thanks!
Let's look at what Chamberlain himself wrote privately to the Archbishop of Canterbury a few days later:
"I am sure that some day the Czechs will see that what we did was to save them for a happier future, and I sincerely believe that we have at last opened the way to that general appeasement which alone can save the world from chaos."
Missing in this is anything about ulterior motives or a grand strategy; Chamberlain genuinely believed that appeasement was the best and only way to deal with Hitler's demands. Give into them, and avoid war.
At the end of October, he made an even more direct statement about rearmament in a Cabinet meeting where he lashed out at those ministers who had argued for a more robust expansion of it and even hoped Munich might eventually result in arms reductions:
"A good deal of false emphasis had been placed…on rearmament, as though one result of the Munich Agreement had been that it will be necessary for us to add to our rearmament programmes. Acceleration of existing programmes was one thing but increases in the scope of our programme which would lead to a new arms race was a different proposition. [He] hoped that it might be possible to take active steps and to follow up the Munich Agreement by other measures, aimed at securing better relations,” just as he also hoped that “some day we should be able to secure a measure of limitation of armaments, but it was too soon to say when this would prove possible."
So, no, Chamberlain was no 5 dimensional strategic chess player buying time; he was someone who honestly believed that if he properly appeased Hitler there would be "peace in our time." Interestingly enough, while Robert Harris - who besides writing pretty good thrillers generally is a cut above in his research (there are a remarkable 53 references at the end of his Munich book that the film is fairly faithful to as an adaptation) and stays relatively close to actual history as the spine of his stories - has been far more sympathetic to Chamberlain over the years than most, even he doesn't go so far as to have his fictional PM of the book assert that he was trading away land for time; that's a movie addition.
Now the interesting part is that this indeed has been an argument raised by various historians over the years who've defended the Munich agreement; Great Britain badly needed to modernize its air fleet, and 1939 saw not just Spitfires and Hurricanes ramp up manufacturing but also a vast investment building Chain Home (radar) stations that proved incredibly valuable in 1940. But the gaping hole in that argument is that 1938 Germany wasn't exactly ready to go into a two front war either; Erich von Manstein stated shortly after the war that "neither our western border nor our Polish frontier could really have been effectively defended by us, and there is no doubt whatsoever that had Czechoslovakia defended herself, we would have been held up by her fortifications, for we did not have the means to break through." This has been generally confirmed by a variety of military analysis; a very short summary is that the West feared 1938 Germany a lot more than it should have - partially thanks, believe it or not, to Charles Lindbergh, whose estimates of Luftwaffe strength were wildly off but also widely believed by a good part of the political leadership.
The underlying problem was that Germany took better advantage of that year of peace than did the Western allies, and in the process they closed the gap significantly. That was the immediate failure of Munich.
A terrific recent book that goes through this is Tim Bouverie's Appeasement: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War, who looks to be one of the better young writers of popular history for years to come.
The taking over of Czechoslovakia led to the Soviet non aggression pact which led to the invasion of Poland. These events therefore allowed Germany to mobilize the majority of its divisions to the Western front. To say the Munch Conference was a victory for the western Allies is utter nonsense.