Peace For Our Time : But What Time?

Despairing at the total absence of any signs of peace in the Middle East, my mind turned to earlier peace efforts and that most famous return flight from Munich: the one undertaken by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain on the 30th September 1938. Amongst other things, I wondered how long the journey took him. Why such a ridiculous question should have come into my mind at a time when the difference between life and death in Gaza seems wafer thin, I have no idea. But I was determined to discover the answer.

There is a lot of information available about that journey. Chamberlain was returning with a meeting with Hitler, Mussolini, and Prime Minister Édouard Daladier of France: a meeting at which the future fate of Czechoslovakia had been decided (without the active participation of the Czech Government). On his return to Heston Aerodrome*, Chamberlain waved his famous piece of paper and spoke of peace. Later that day, in Downing Street, he issued his famous promise of "peace for our time". We know what kind of plane he flew in (a Lockheed 14 with the registration number G-AFGN), we even know Chamberlain's ticket number (BA/WS 18249: the actual ticket was re-discovered a few years ago). But how long did the flight take?

I eventually found the answer within an archive recording from the BBC. The clip is from the original report made as the plane landed at Heston and features the sonorous tones of the famous reporter, Richard Dimbleby. Near the beginning of the broadcast, Dimbleby comments on the poor weather in England but says that the Prime Minister had good weather for most of the return flight which took "something like three and a half hours - a little less than that actually". You can find the full nine minute broadcast from September 1938 on the BBC Archive website - it makes interesting, but poignant, listening.

Around the same time that Chamberlain was making his three and a half hour flight, the German poet Bertolt Brecht, living in exile in Denmark wrote a poem entitled "From A German War Primer" One verse from the poem says:

When the leaders speak of peace

The common folk know

That war is coming.

When the leaders curse war

The mobilization order is already written out.

War grows from their peace

Chamberlain ended his famous "Peace For Our Time" speech with the following request to his audience: "And now I recommend you to go home and sleep quietly in your beds".  A verse of the Brecht poem seems to almost echo the thought:

It is night

The married couples

Lie in their beds. The young women

Will bear orphans

Much maligned ever since, I think the importance of Chamberlain's apparent 'appeasement' of Hitler is underestimated. It did buy time for British forces to be better prepared for a war than they otherwise would have been. But that's a debate for another day.

* Despite a widely held belief, Chamberlain did not land at Croydon Airport. It was Heston, to the west of London, not far from Heathrow, and now buried under the Heston Service Area on the M4.