Nazi Germany crossed the frontier of Poland and the world went to war in September 1939. How many warnings had previously been issued to the rulers of Britain? Hitler himself had written it in ‘Mein Kampf’; the million speeches delivered by the Nazi leaders on the hustings of Germany; the denunciation of Versailles; the institution of Conscription in Germany; the Rhineland; Spain; Austria; Czechoslovakia; Munich; Prague – these and countless more. How many further proofs were needed?

The Polish army was utterly obliterated. All the facts of Germany’s prodigious capacity for war were known. Mr. Churchill had reiterated them to the House of Commons over the previous years. No room was left for doubt. The Nazis had been spending prodigiously. In the year before the war they spent £1,650,000,000 on armaments alone. Our rulers turned themselves to the task in a more leisurely manner. The British Government did not exert itself to any great extent in the arming of our country, even after we had clashed into war with the most tremendous military power of all times.

An extract from Guilty Men by Cato, published in 1940.

‘Winston Churchill – The Valiant Years’ holds promise of developing into a stimulating and engaging series. ‘The Gathering Storm’, first of 28 projected filmed episodes, was shown last night. After tracing Sir Winston’s family roots in America and Britain, the program moved rapidly through war’s prologue period, from 1931 to 1939, when Churchill, a statesman in discard, a lone voice whose vibrant words were ignored, was forecasting the holocaust which Adolph Hitler would unleash.

A review of a US TV documentary from 1960 called Winston Churchill – the Valiant Years. The first episode was based on Churchill’s book The Gathering Storm.

The central flaw in Churchill’s version of events is that it amounts to no more than an exercise in self-promotion. The sheer unlikeliness that everyone was out of step but our Winston is obscured by his iconic status as the man who won the war and as ‘the prophet of truth’ before it. His whole reading of events leading up to World War Two was badly flawed, and looks good only with the advantage of hindsight. … It is also worth noting that Chamberlain could hardly have been that bad a choice as prime minister, or Churchill would hardly have seconded his nomination – a fact he somehow omitted from his memoirs.

British historian John Charmley, writing in 2011.

Appeasement in 1938 was a natural policy for a small island state gradually losing its place in world affairs, shouldering military and economic burdens which were increasingly too great for it, and which as a democracy had to listen to the desire of its people for peace.

An extract from The Realities Behind Diplomacy by British historian Paul Kennedy, writing in 1981.

Chamberlain succumbed to the temptation to believe that actions which were specifically his own were triumphing. Hitler helped. He appealed to Chamberlain’s vanity and encouraged Chamberlain to think he had a special influence over him. Sir Neville Henderson, the British Ambassador in Berlin, encouraged Chamberlain even though he lost the confidence of his own colleagues in the Foreign Office. Chamberlain’s appeasement was not a feeble policy of surrender. He never pursued ‘peace at any price’. But he made big mistakes, especially after Munich. He could have built a strong alliance with France. He could have tried to ally with the USSR but he refused to try in any serious way. Chamberlain refused to listen to alternative views and his powerful personality probably stifled serious chances of preventing the Second World War.

An extract from Chamberlain and Appeasement: British Policy and the Coming of the Second World War by British historian Robert Parker, 1993.

So how did my pre-emptive strategy stand up to a computer stress test? Not as well as I had hoped, I have to confess. The Calm & the Storm made it clear that lining up an anti-German coalition in 1938 might have been harder than I’d assumed. To my horror, the French turned down the alliance I proposed to them. It also turned out that, when I did go to war with Germany, my own position was pretty weak. The nadir [low point] was a successful German invasion of England, a scenario which my book [had ruled out] as militarily too risky!

British historian Niall Ferguson writing in an article for the New York Magazine, 16 October 2006.

To the dismay of his British colleagues and his French allies Chamberlain alone, motivated by his anti-Bolshevik prejudice, deliberately sabotaged the chance of an Anglo-Soviet alliance in 1939. Such an alliance would have been a workable solution for discouraging, or if necessary defeating, Hitler.

British historian Louise Shaw, writing in 1987.

The personality of Chamberlain is central to the discussion of Appeasement. He had a rather inflated sense of his own judgement and abilities and was unwilling to listen to anyone but himself. It could be said that he saw himself acting in the name of God or history. This earned him the disapproval of his people and historians.

Historian Donald Cameron Watt, writing in 1991.

‘The Gathering Storm’ has been one of the most influential books of our time. It is no exaggeration to claim that it has strongly influenced the behaviour of Western politicians from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush.

Its central theme – the futility of appeasement and the need to stand up to dictators – is one that has been taken for granted as a self-evident truth in Western society, both during the period of the Cold War and subsequently.

British historian John Charmley, speaking in 2011.

The problem of negotiation with Russia was difficult enough under the Czars; now there has been erected the additional barrier of a fanatical Communist ideology. The pledges and agreements of the Russian Communists, like those of the Nazis, could not be trusted. Treaties have proved useful to the Kremlin as instruments for binding the hands of other countries, and freeing the Soviets to pursue their own world-conquering objectives. The American public, at least by 1947, concluded that a head-on clash between the American democratic system and the Soviet socialist system was inevitable, unless the Moscow directorate was prepared to deviate sharply and sincerely from the aim of world revolution.

US historian Thomas Bailey, writing in 1950. This was one of the earliest accounts of the Cold War, titled America Faces Russia.

Soviet writers agreed on the importance of the Truman Doctrine in contributing to the conflict between East and West, but they regarded their country’s response as defensive. In their opinion, American imperialism was the cause of the Cold War. This view reflected an official line which was consistently maintained throughout the Cold War. For example, only a day after the Truman Doctrine was enunciated, Soviet news agencies criticised it as part of a calculated strategy to expand the capitalist system throughout Europe. The Marshall Plan was similarly condemned as an American plot to encircle the Soviet Union with hostile capitalist states. In addition, the United States was accused of endangering Soviet security by creating NATO and proceeding to remilitarise West Germany.

British historian Joseph Smith, summarising the Soviet view, 2001.

My undergraduate education at the University of New Hampshire, 1959–1963, featured, first, the work of George F. Kennan and, second, the “nationalist” school of Samuel Flagg Bemis, known for his grand narrative of American exceptionalism and benevolent imperialism. My superb professors showed me that an intellectual’s responsibility was not only to build knowledge but also to be a sceptic of doctrine, a critic of fashionable thinking. From my graduate-school years of 1963–1967, I emerged a “revisionist.” There is no mystery why. Influencing me were the horrific Vietnam War, the assaults and embargo against Cuba, and the invasion of the Dominican Republic—events that spawned anti-war teach-ins, protest songs such as Phil Ochs’s “Cops of the World,” the Fulbright Senate hearings, and essays by public intellectuals such as Henry Steele Commager on the abuse of American power. I took special notice of Senator Wayne Morse’s vote against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and his bold statement that “our hands are dripping with blood in Southeast Asia.” The concurrent civil rights movement, antipoverty campaign, women’s rights advocacy, and environmental movement also encouraged new ways of thinking, challenging prevailing assumptions and worldviews—especially at the University of California, Berkeley, in the days of the Free Speech Movement.

US historian Thomas G. Paterson, describing how his views on the Cold War changed through this period, writing in 2007.

I have proceeded on the assumption that foreign policy is the product of external and internal influences, as perceived by officials responsible for its formulation. In seeking to understand their behavior, I have tried to view problems of the time as these men saw them, not solely as they appear in retrospect. I have not hesitated to express judgments critical of American policy-makers, but in doing so have tried to keep in mind the constraints, both external and internal, which limited their options. If there is a single theme which runs through this book, it is the narrow range of alternatives open to American leaders during this period as they sought to deal with problems of war and peace.

In contrast to much recent work on the subject, this book will not treat the “Open Door” as the basis of United States foreign policy. Revisionist historians have performed a needed service by stressing the influence of economic considerations on American diplomacy, but their focus has been too narrow: many other forces – domestic politics, bureaucratic inertia, quirks of personality, perceptions, accurate or inaccurate, of Soviet intentions – also affected the actions of Washington officials.

US historian John Lewis Gaddis, writing in 1972.

It was Stalin who eventually sealed the fate of Eastern Europe. However, the way that U.S. aid was originally conceived under the Marshall Plan … propelled the Soviet Union into a more antagonistic and hostile stance, including the establishment of its own economic and political bloc. We do not assume Soviet … innocence. … Nevertheless, we would still insist … that Soviet foreign policy was not just driven by ideology, but a series of responses and reactions that were just as likely to be shaped by the way others acted toward the Soviet Union as by Stalin’s own outlook.

British historians Michael Cox and Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, writing in 2005.

At the end of the 1940s a few Americans began to recognize and face the need to rethink the way the USA conducted its international affairs. But Truman and the other key decision makers in the US either discounted the need for such action or were carried along by the momentum of the long commitment to the expansion of US power and to reforming the world in the image of the United States. The US elite remained limited by the outlook that had crystallized during the 1890s: organize the world according to the principles of the Open Door policy and reap the benefits.

William Appleman Williams, writing in 1959. The ‘Open Door’ policy meant using US military, political and economic power to pressure other countries to adopt democracy and capitalism in the same way as the USA.

At present, there is no greater source of international concern than American-Soviet relations. Under these conditions the reader, deeply conscious of the frightening implications of the American-Soviet cold war, anxiously grasps the new books with the word “Russia” in their titles. But with this book the reader gets only more frustrated when he does not find anything new or of value. The study by Thomas A. Bailey, Professor of History at Stanford University is written in a lively and simple style. Yet there is something profoundly disturbing about it. The title of the book is misleading. The author expresses only the American perspective, and does not really address the relations between the countries or the reasons for the problems they face.

An extract from a review of Thomas Bailey’s book America Faces Russia, written in 1951 by John Valery Tereshtenko and published in the American Journal of Politics. Tereshtenko was a researcher and academic based in the USA, but his family was originally Russian and he wrote books and articles about relations between Russia and America.

As long as Stalin was running the Soviet Union a cold war was unavoidable. Stalin waged cold wars incessantly: within the international system, within his alliances, within his country, within his party, within his personal entourage, [and] even within his family.

Most important, Stalin was a revolutionary. He never gave up on the idea of an eventual world revolution, but he expected this to result … from an expansion of influence emanating from the Soviet Union itself.

John Lewis Gaddis writing in his book We Now Know: Rethinking the Cold War, 1999.