Every time I think that the news is awful, that things cannot be worse, I try to imagine what it was like in the spring of 1940. The Germans took basically all of western Europe in a series of lightning strikes, eventually defeating the most powerful military on the continent, the French. The British managed to evacuate hundreds of thousands of their troops from Dunkirk, but just barely. A German invasion of England seemed imminent.

At this dark time, three journalists — including future Labour Party leader Michael Foot — wrote this short book. The ‘guilty men’ of the title are not just the appeasers, above all Chamberlain, but all the other Tory fools who saw no particular need to get Britain ready for the coming war. Their blind overconfidence — believing in the futility of war, in Mr. Hitler’s trustworthiness, in the invincibility of the British empire — led them to do almost nothing to re-arm in time. It was only with Winston Churchill’s arrival at Number 10 that Britain’s real war against Germany began.

At the time, the book was hated by most reviewers. But it was a hugely popular best-seller and I can see why. The case against Chamberlain and his cronies, usually based on their own words, is essentially unanswerable. Yet even today there are people — including some noted historians — who buy into the myth that Britain used the year after the Munich pact, as well as the next eight months of ‘phoney war’, to rearm. They did nothing of the sort. When the British forces were being kicked off the continent it was entirely due to the fact that the Germans too had time to rearm, which they did rather effectively, and their Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe were far better equipped and battle-ready than the British forces trapped on that French beach.

Looking back decades later, Michael Foot wrote about the revisionists who were already encouraging a more generous evaluation of Chamberlain. He would have none of it. The old umbrella-carrying fool, with a worthless piece of paper in his hands, proclaiming ‘peace in our time’ when there was no peace — he nearly brought an end to Britain as an independent country. Churchill arrived in the nick of time to prevent a disaster.

There are bits of this hastily-scribbled book that don’t read as well today as they may have in 1940. The comments about Poland, for example, are very unfair to the Poles and inaccurate too. But on the whole, this books and the arguments it makes about appeasement and the need to stand up to bullying dictators is as relevant today as when it was first written. ( )

Owen, Frank (Contributor); Foot, Michael (Contributor); Howard, Peter (Contributor)