Comments on: Name that crisis!

By: Airminded · Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis: thoughts and conclusions

Airminded · Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis: thoughts and conclusions — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:42:38 +0000

[...] I wonder how these posts will be used in future. They were designed to be read sequentially, day-by-day, and some of you have done so; but in future I expect people will more commonly surf in randomly from search engines, maybe read a few entries and surf out again. The context built up by following the development of the crisis will be lost. Also, as far as search engines go, my pedantic insistence on “Sudeten crisis” over “Munich crisis” may be a hindrance; on Google I come in at 4th place for the former term but only 49th for the latter, and even then that was for my earlier post on terminology. [...]

By: Airminded · Thursday, 29 September 1938

Airminded · Thursday, 29 September 1938 — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 11:53:27 +0000

[...] Sudeten crisis, and a new word has entered the headlines: ‘Munich’ (The Times, p. 12). See what I mean? ‘Munich’ and ‘crisis’ shouldn’t go [...]

By: Paul Shafer

Paul Shafer — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:14:36 +0000

Ambassador Coulondre of France wrote in 1938 after Daladier and Chamberlain abandonned the Czechs, “Munich tolled the bell for a certain France, la grande France of former times and even 1914…..The tolling of bells do not kill a sick man! They announce his death. The accord of Munich did not
provoke the fall of France. It registered it!”

Two years later Coulondre was proven correct.

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 06:24:15 +0000

Thanks, Paul.

By: Paul Shafer

Paul Shafer — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 03:06:42 +0000

You are correct. This is clearly pointed out in Shirer’s 1969 Book “The Collapse of the Third Republic.” However, it was really a crisis of Great Britain and France. France was too scared to act on her own and kept blaming GB. If France had acted, beyond just putting her army on alert, GB would have had no choice but to send her 130+ bombers over Germany to scare Hitler. (Of course, the US was kept abreast of the whole affair and did not help at all…the US could have sent additional bombers to GB and France in 1938). It did not help that before the “crisis” Goering wined and dined the Head of the French Air Force and even took him to see the jet engine test bench. Vuillemins told Gamelin and Daladier that “the French air force would be wiped out in two weeks” based upon the hype that he was permitted to see by Goering.

By: Brett Holman

Brett Holman — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 05:57:30 +0000

Nemo:

Thanks!

Gavin:

I agree that it’s good idea, in general, to stick with previous nomenclature if it’s well-established, even if it’s misleading. (The Big Bang is an example that comes to mind … it’s evocative but misleadingly so, and was coined by an opponent of the theory to disparage it!) But I think Sudeten crisis has about enough currency to not confuse people? Google suggests “Munich crisis” is used about 10 times more often than “Sudeten crisis”, which I thought is a surprisingly low ratio.

David:

I like ‘September crisis’ too (the fact that I like all the alternatives probably says something about how much Munich crisis annoys me!) It harks back to the July crisis of 1914. Was there an August crisis of 1939? Good point about ‘crisis’ itself. Madge and Harrisson discussed at some length the word itself and the way in which it attached to the, well, crisis in their Britain by Mass-Observation (1939).

By: David Edgerton

David Edgerton — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 21:25:45 +0000

Nice point Brett. If we are speaking about British responses it is worth making the point that the term ‘crisis’, much overused here now, was very clearly associated with the events of Sept/Oct 1938. So ‘crisis’ is right. As to the first term, I have been noting recently that (as Brett says) there was no ‘Munich crisis’, but lots of people referred to the ‘September crisis’, but I don’t have any sense how long this lasted.

By: Gavin

Gavin — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 07:18:09 +0000

Knowing what to call things is always difficult. I often tend to go with the one that most people know even if it’s misleading. For example, I argued (following Mark Kishlansky) that the New Model Army might not have been quite as new as many people think, but I still carried on calling it the New Model Army. I wrote a whole post somewhere about what to call the English/British Revolution(s)/Civil War(s). I usually tend to stick with English Civil War because that’s what my own work is about - south-eastern England during the First Civil War (which wasn’t the first civil war to ever happen in England).

Numbering things gets even more confusing. It seems like Gulf War numbers have got right out of sync. Back in the 80s Gulf War meant the Iran-Iraq war but then in 1991 that came to be the First Gulf War and Desert Storm the Second (or at least that’s how I thought of it). Since the present one kicked off people have been talking about Desert Storm as the First Gulf War and this one as the Second.

And I’m really confused about what to call the people who lived in North America before Columbus or the Vikings arrived.

By: Nemo

Nemo — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:57:59 +0000

There are some great audio clips from 1938 radio braodcasts about the Sudeten Crisis (going far beyond just Chamberlain’s “Peace in our time” soundbite) at the following page:

http://www.otr.com/munich.shtml

By: Heather

Heather — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 19:07:25 +0000

Brett, you may find Thorne’s book covers more or less what Brendon’s does, but it does concentrate on the European events. It obviously shares sources, but Brendon’s book has a much wider scope, as you say. It really filled in may details of the global situation during the 1930s, and how it was almost inevitable that the countries that moved toward extremist political views during that period would end up in a war.