raharris1973
Well-known member
I was reading a bit about Churchill's and other Axis and Allied leaders' visions for the postwar world, during and before WWII, and I got this quote by historian Gerhard Weinberg about Churchill: "With considerable understanding of the military needs of the British Empire as it moved to oppose Germany, he both voted for conscription at a time in the summer of 1939 when all the Labour and Liberal Party members in Parliament voted against it,"
So I am reading this as a statement that, as of summer 1939, after the British political consensus that appeasement was a dud, and the adoption of a political consensus that Hitler had to be stopped, and Chamberlain's springtime guarantee to Poland, and his Conservative governments' endorsement of peacetime conscription for the first time in Britain's history, quite a transformation from the median Conservative Party position, and Chamberlain's, a year earlier before Munich, the Labour and Liberal MPs, who I think had been more critical of appeasement and instances like Munich all along, still voted to a man *against* conscription, and thus against preparing to back up their preferred policies of guarantees and collective security with force?
Did Weinberg get this accurately, or did he make an error?
So I am reading this as a statement that, as of summer 1939, after the British political consensus that appeasement was a dud, and the adoption of a political consensus that Hitler had to be stopped, and Chamberlain's springtime guarantee to Poland, and his Conservative governments' endorsement of peacetime conscription for the first time in Britain's history, quite a transformation from the median Conservative Party position, and Chamberlain's, a year earlier before Munich, the Labour and Liberal MPs, who I think had been more critical of appeasement and instances like Munich all along, still voted to a man *against* conscription, and thus against preparing to back up their preferred policies of guarantees and collective security with force?
Did Weinberg get this accurately, or did he make an error?