RE: How much security does $1 trillion buy?

[Drsolly <drsollyp () drsolly com>]

On Wed, 1 Aug 2007, Alex Eckelberry wrote:

> It's worth noting that Chamberlin vastly overstated the abilities of the
> Third Reich and had MPs literally cowering in their seats, buttressing
> the argument for appeasement.  It's kind of what happened in the Bush
> administration, but as a converse -- the power of Germany was overstated
> in order to argue for appeasement, instead of war. 
>
> (The truth was that Hitler's Germany was not nearly as powerful as
> everyone thought and that the Czechoslovak army was at a complement,
> strength and morale exceeding the German army.  But the European powers
> sabotaged the ability of the Czechoslovak government to fight through
> the Sudetenland arrangements made between France, Italy, Germany and the
> UK  -- the Munich Agreement/Dictate.  Etc., etc., long historical
> discussion could follow but I'm on a short leash time-wise)  

You have to put yourself in the position of people in the late 1930s. 
Let's say, 1938.

World War I was a very recent memory, it ended only 20 years previously. 
And it was a very horrible memory; millions dead in a futile war. A great 
many people were resolved "never again".

There was also a new WMD - the bomber, together with poison gas. People
were expecting hundreds of thousands of *civilian* casualties. "The bomber
will always get through" was the thinking of the time, and the memory of
the use of poison gas in WW1 was very fresh. So, people were looking at
hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties.

The children of London were separated from their parents and evacuated to 
the countryside. That's how seriously it was taken. And everyone carried a 
gas mask at all times.

Yes, WW2 would have been shorter and better if we hadn't dumped the Czechs 
in the mud. But you have to understand the motives and feelings at that 
time. Maybe Germany wasn't strong, but they had a bomber fleet - a modern 
equivalent would be "Iran has a weak army and navy, but they have nukes".

At the time of the Munich appeasement, we didn't have the Chain Home radar 
operative, and our fighter fleet wasn't Spitfires (wasn't even Hurricanes, 
as I recall). We desperately needed time to "rearm", which mostly meant 
the RAF, I think.

Churchill had been advocating rearmament for several years, but the 
thinking was, that leads to an arms race, and that leads to war. And there 
was a massive depression raging, and thinking at the time was that in 
depression, you balance the budget. Keynesian economics hadn't been 
invented yet.

It's easy to use hindsight and say, well, they should have known ....

But they didn't.

Oh - and no-one imagined that the French would crack as easily as they 
did. 

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