in Britain a ‘peace at any price’ party whose influ-
ence might become powerful. He thought it prob-
able nevertheless that the German home front
would crack first, forcing Hitler into the wrong
policy of attack.
Whether all aspects of ‘appeasement’ com-
pletely ended after the outbreak of war in
September 1939 poses questions that can, as yet,
be answered only tentatively. From existing evi-
dence we can reasonably conclude that Chamber-
lain would never have consented to peace on
Hitler’s terms; also that Chamberlain thought
Britain and France would not be able to impose
a Carthaginian peace on Germany. He appears to
have thought that some reshuffle of power setting
Hitler aside might offer a solution. ‘Until he dis-
appears and his system collapses there can be no
peace’, he wrote a week after the outbreak of the
war. Chamberlain’s assumptions were mistaken.
Events turned out very differently, when what was
to him the unthinkable occurred and the French
armies collapsed. Only then did the pre-war illu-
sions on which policies had been based for so
long finally collapse.
While at sea Britain had the better of the war,
serious fighting on land began not on the fron-
tiers of France but in Norway. Winston Churchill
had rejoined the Cabinet as first lord of the
admiralty at the beginning of the war and was
anxious that some visible blow be struck at
Germany’s war effort. The attack by the Soviet
Union on Finland on 30 November 1939 seemed
to provide a good opportunity. Swedish iron ore
was vital to the German war machine. During
the winter months it was shipped through the
Norwegian port of Narvik. For weeks, under
Chamberlain’s chairmanship, the Cabinet dis-
cussed the possibility of an operation that would
disrupt its flow. The favourite idea was to help the
Finns against the Russians by sending volunteers
who would, on the way so to speak, control the
railway line from northern Sweden to the coast.
This scheme made use of the public indignation
in the West about Russia’s attack to damage both
Germany and the Soviet Union, which was seen
as Germany’s partner in the European war of
aggression. The Finns successfully resisted the ill-
prepared Soviet troops for weeks, inflicting heavy
casualties on them in what became known as the
Winter War.
The French, too, were keen to fight, but not
in France. They agreed in February 1940 to a
joint Anglo-French expedition of ‘volunteers’ to
aid the Finns and occupy the strategic northern
railway. British scruples about infringing neutral
rights, and Norway’s terrified adherence to neu-
trality – the Norwegians did not wish to give
Germany an excuse for invasion – led to delays,
until finally the British decided to mine the waters
off Narvik through which the ore ships sailed
(though only until spring had opened the other
route by way of the Baltic, blocked by ice in the
winter). Before an expedition could be sent to the
Finns, however, they were defeated, making peace
on 12 March 1940. French politicians were so
outraged at the inability of the government to
help that Daladier’s ministry fell; the more mili-
tant Paul Reynaud became prime minister.
Chamberlain’s own fall was delayed by another
month and historically was far more important.
The public was tiring of the phoney war and
the easy successes of the dictators, Hitler and
Stalin. Poland and now Finland had fallen. Fortu-
nately the British Cabinet (unlike the French)
never contemplated any steps that might lead to
outright war with the Soviet Union as well, even
though, or perhaps because, the Soviet Union
represented a far greater threat to Britain’s impe-
rial interests than to France. Chamberlain was sin-
gularly unlucky in some of his public utterances.
After Munich he had rashly repeated the phrase
about ‘peace in our time’. Early in April 1940 he
coined one phrase too many when he told the
nation that Hitler ‘has missed the bus’. After
relatively small forces had secretly begun the
operation at sea on 3 April 1940, the main force
following during the night of 7 and 8 April, the
Germans in a daring move occupied all Norway’s
major ports, including the capital, Oslo, on 9
April. The Norwegians resisted and inflicted casu-
alties, especially on the German warships making
for Oslo’s harbour. But Germany’s attack was
almost entirely successful, even though it was
not a complete surprise to Britain and France.
The British navy missed the German warships.
Executing the policy decided on by the Cabinet,
1
GERMANY’S WARS OF CONQUEST IN EUROPE, 1939–41 243
