FIGHTING CHURCHILL, APPEASING HITLER:

Sir Horace Wilson was chief adviser to the PM Neville Chamberlain at the time of the Munich crisis, and the policy of appeasing Hitler is always associated with the names of the two men. Wilson was a civil servant with no official cabinet role, reflecting Chamberlain's preference for seeking the advice of those outside official government decision-making. The chief enemy of appeasement was Winston Churchill, an unpopular figure in the Conservative party. Chamberlain's policy of averting war at all costs is often ascribed to the fact that he was buying time to allow Britain to rearm sufficiently to present a credible military challenge to the might of Germany, but the author's examination of the papers of the period reveals that Chamberlain and Wilson were together seeking to avert war entirely. When Wilson was sent to deliver a personal letter and encountered a shrieking rant from Hitler, he refused to be intimidated and Hitler told Wilson, "England could wish for no better friend than the Führer". At the time of Hitler's Nuremberg rally, as Wilson and Chamberlain agreed to try to avert the coming war by sacrificing the claim of Czechoslovakia to its provinces in the Sudetenland, Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, began to realise that appeasement was futile. The abandonment of the Czechs under the Munich agreement created a conflict in the Conservative party which was finally resolved by the invasion of Poland and subsequent war. Wilson lost his job with Chamberlain's demotion and was subsequently unemployable. 448pp, photos.