After knocking together The Scareship Age, I started working on turning my Sudeten crisis posts into an e-book version. I knew there’d be a fair amount of work, but I underestimated the value of ‘fair’. Finding and cleaning up formatting errors is a very slow and tedious business, as is creating an index (though it […]
I’ve put the series of posts I did a couple of years ago on the Sudeten crisis into one big PDF file called, rather grandiosely, Post-blogging the Sudeten Crisis: The British Press, August-October 1938 (147 pages, 5.6 Mb). It’s freely available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. It’s very bloggy in
So the Sudeten crisis experiment has ended. How useful has it been? I think it’s been a very different view of the crisis. It’s small-scale, not big-picture; confused, not lucid; bottom-up, not top-down (well, sorta: it could be more bottom-up). Most accounts that I’ve read are from the diplomatic-political-military point of view: Chamberlain’s decision to
As The Times reports today (p. 12), the Berlin Commission of Ambassadors which is implementing the Munich agreement has finished demarcating the major zones to be transferred to Germany, and has adjourned until Monday. But there’s still much to do. For example, there’s still the question of what to about Sudeten Germans outside the transfer
After four days of debate, the House of Commons has voted on the government’s policy during the Sudeten crisis in general, and on the Munich agreement in particular (The Times, p. 14). The vote was won by 366 to 144, a majority of 222. The Times calls this ‘a conclusive vindication of the Prime Minister’,
The main headlines in today’s Daily Mail report (p. 11) on a battle raging in Palestine between ‘Arab terrorists’ and British aircraft and troops. Reinforcements are en route, and the High Commissioner has flown back to London for consultations. Hang on: this isn’t about Czechoslovakia at all! For the first time since (at least) 29
The Sudeten crisis, or rather its aftermath, still dominates the headlines. But the headlines themselves are getting smaller — these ones from the Daily Mail (p. 11) are only a couple of columns wide, where even a couple of days ago they were nearly the whole page across. The news today is serious enough: Inskip,
A few days ago, Chamberlain said Munich was ‘peace for our time’. Now he, in his speech in Parliament yesterday, he is saying that there can be no let-up in the pace of rearmament (Manchester Guardian, p. 11). In particular there is to be a ‘big increase’ in the RAF, especially for ‘the defence of
So, after all those weeks of mounting tension over the fate of the Sudetens, it’s finally being resolved: German troops have begun occupying the Sudetenland (Daily Mail, p. 13). Polish troops have also moved into Teschen, and the Czech government has agreed to let a mixed commission decide the fate of the territory claimed by
‘IT IS PEACE FOR OUR TIME’ (Daily Mail, p. 11). Chamberlain has returned from Munich, completing his third round-trip to Germany by air in as many weeks. He has been greeted by ecstatic crowds at Heston aerodrome, at 10 Downing Street (as seen above) and at Buckingham Palace, where he appeared on the balcony —
