Neville Chamberlain – the man who saved Britain from defeat at the hands of Germany

One man made sure that Britain was ready and prepared for war in 1939, although today his actions in pursuit of this aim have been generally forgotten

Mention Neville Chamberlain to anybody today and you are sure to be told that he was the arch-appeaser, a weak prime minister who spent the three years of his premiership allowing Adolf Hitler to do as he pleased in Europe and avoiding confrontation and conflict at any cost. So firmly embedded in public consciousness is this erroneous and misleading version of history, that it is perhaps hopeless to set the record straight at this late date, but I shall give it a try anyway. Before doing so, let’s try a little quiz.

Who was the only prime minister in British history to introduce peacetime conscription into the armed forces? Which prime minister ensured victory for this country in the Battle of Britain, by speeding up the construction of radar stations on the south coast of England and authorising the mass production of Spitfires? Which prime minister gained Britain two vital years to prepare for the inevitable war with Germany, by skilfully playing for time and misleading the Germans into supposing that Britain would adopt an attitude of neutrality towards any conflicts in Europe? The answer to all these questions is of course Neville Chamberlain, the man who laid the foundations for our victory over the Nazis. Let us see what he actually did, as opposed to what people think he did.

By the 1930s some of the ideas appearing in the novels of H. G. Wells had proved astonishingly prescient. Perhaps it was this which prompted the British government to take seriously the idea of a death ray, one capable of destroying enemy aircraft from a great distance, as well as soldiers as they advanced across a battlefield. In 1898, Wells had written the following description of just such a weapon;

Whatever is combustible flashes into flame at its touch, lead runs like water, it softens iron, cracks and melts glass, and when it falls upon water, incontinently that flashes into steam.

Imagine something like this being directed against aeroplanes heading towards Britain, intending to bomb cities. A ray of this kind would enable the defenders to stop them above the channel, before they even reached the coast of Britain.

Although various famous inventors, Nikolai Tesla for example, tinkered with the idea of a death ray, the technology of the time was not sufficiently advanced to make such a thing practical. This left the field open for various confidence tricksters, who set out to try and solicit money from both private investors and governments, promising that a breakthrough was imminent and that only a little more capital would enable the development of this, the ultimate weapon. One such person was a British man called Harry Grindell Matthews.

In the years before the First World War Grindell Matthews founded the Grindell Matthews Wireless Telephone Company, which promoted mobile phones. It was a visionary project which raised a good deal of money for the man running it, but which collapsed in 1914. After the end of the war in 1918, Grindell Matthews emerged as the inventor of a ray gun which would apparently make war impossible. The idea was that ultra-violet light would ionise the molecules making up the atmosphere, so allowing them to conduct electricity. Then a huge charge of electricity would be fired along the ionised air; killing men and causing the engines of aeroplanes, tanks, ships and cars to explode. The only slight difficulty was that a little more money was needed to perfect this wonderful device.

Both the British and French governments showed interest in Grindell Matthews’ invention, but in demonstrations it proved impossible for the ‘death ray’ to do more than stall a motorcycle engine a few yards away. This was seemingly the limit of its power. The British Air Ministry though was still intrigued by the idea and offered the sum of £1000 to anybody who could, under controlled conditions, kill a sheep 100 yards away with any kind of ray weapon.

The £1000 reward spurred on research into radio waves as a useful means of waging war, but led ultimately in quite a different direction. It was discovered that rather than blowing up aeroplanes, they could actually be bounced off them and the echoes detected from many miles away. In this way, radar was developed, which was to prove of such crucial importance during the Battle of Britain. Towers, 300 feet high, were built along the English coast and these were able to detect aeroplanes heading across the North Sea or English Channel towards Britain. It was this network of radar stations, known as Chain Home, which gave the RAF an edge during the Battle of Britain in 1940. Neville Chamberlain was responsible for forcing the pace of the construction of Chain Home, because although he was not keen on a second great war, he followed the old Roman dictum of Si vis pacem, para bellum – if you want peace, then prepare for war. It was thanks to his efforts after becoming prime minister in 1937 that Britain was, at the outbreak of war, the only country in the world to be protected in this way by an electronic system which made it possible to monitor approaching enemy aircraft.

It was Chamberlain too who accelerated the production of fighters such as the Hurricane and Spitfire, insisting that Britain should start the mass production of such aeroplanes two years before the crucial Battle of Britain in 1940. The wisdom of this move may be seen when the German bombing raids began against this country in August 1940. On the first major day of combat, August 13^th, which the Germans had designated as Adlerangriff or Eagle Day, 1500 German aeroplanes attacked RAF bases in southern England. Because of the advance warning from the Chain Home system, the British were able to intercept the enemy aircraft. The Germans lost 45 planes to the British 13. It was clear that this was to be a war of attrition, with each side trying to grind down the other. It was now that Chamberlains strategy of forcing the mass production of fighters was to show results. We can see by looking at the production figures for aircraft in Britain and comparing them with the German statistics that we are able to understand just why we won the Battle of Britain. In August 1940, the British produced 476 military aircraft to Germany’s 176. The following month, the figure was 467 new British planes to 218 in Germany and then in October, Britain turned out 469 fighters to Germany’s 144 planes in total. Certainly, the pilots of the RAF played their part, but it was the mass production of aircraft, masterminded by Neville Chamberlain, which ensured that they actually had aeroplanes to fly.

Having decided to making rearming Britain a top priority, Chamberlain realised that it would take at least a couple of years before such a policy would allow the country to establish the radar system and be able reliably to turn out hundreds of fighter planes each month. For this reason, he saw that it would be necessary to delay any confrontation with Germany for as long as was humanly possible. So it was that he engaged in various rounds of pointless and timewasting negotiations with Hitler, spinning such discussions out and giving the impression of Britain as a country which did not have the stomach to fight. His actions though, rather than his vague words, give the lie to this idea of Chamberlain’s character. Everybody remembers the Munich agreement at the end of September 1938, often regarded as the archetypal act of appeasement, but very few people are aware that just seven months later, Neville Chamberlain’s government passed the 1939 Military Training Act, which introduced peacetime conscription for the first time ever in Britain. It meant that by outbreak of war in September of that same year, there was no delay in mobilisation.

When Winston Churchill became prime minister in 1940, he inherited control of a nation which for the previous three years had been on a war footing, thanks to Neville Chamberlain. Had the steps which I have outlines above not been taken, then it is highly unlikely that the RAF would have won the Battle of Britain and the course of our history would have been very different. We owe Chamberlain a great debt.