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Robert Harris’ Munich, from 2018, was a very suspenseful read for me. You see, Mr. Harris writes speculative fiction. So I had no idea whether this book was to be the real story of the the Munich Agreement or an alternative version where negotiations failed and war began a year early. In case you haven’t read the book, I won’t tell you which it is.

My reticence will only be of service for a short time. Munich is currently being turned into a feature film, at which point the answer to my question will probably be well known. One does wonder if the typical movie audience will, in fact, know what was the result of the Munich conference between Chamberlain, Hitler, Daladier, and Mussolini. Maybe the knowledge of whether it is historical or not will not give away the ending. I’m assuming you know how it all turned out.

I continue to appreciate Harris’ skills. Perhaps my favorite aspect of this novel is how he portrays the mindset of Chamberlain in a way that we, his readers, understand and appreciate it. This is no mean feat. Neville Chamberlain’s “appeasement” of Hitler is, to this day, held up as one of the greatest diplomatic mistakes of the previous century. His assurance of “peace in our time” is universally ridiculed and history regards him as a weak and ineffectual leader from whom Winston Churchill was required to save England and the world.

Yet, in September of 1938, it was Chamberlain who was the world’s hero. His choice – whether to stand up to or cater to Hitler – is missing an important facet when viewed in hindsight. Standing up to Hitler meant war – unequivocally. War with Czechoslovakia was a certainty. “Standing up” further meant war between England, France, Germany, and Italy. Long has it been said that war comes to us when the current generation no longer appreciate its horrors. In 1938, though, the world knew the horror of war and understood that a new “world war” could be far worse than the previous one. In that calculus, even buying the world a little time should be worth something. The certainty of a war starting in a matter of weeks cannot be preferable to the mere possibility of war starting in a matter of years.

Of course, we know how badly it turned out and September 1938 seems to have been the turning point. I’ve thought before about the fact that a war between Germany and Czechoslovakia would not have been as lopsided as we all assume it would have been. Czechoslovakia had a modern army, technologically comparable to Germany’s. The Czechs had a frontier defense, fortifications that would have served as a force multiplier. The numerical deficit which remained relative to Germany would have been offset by the threat of France and (kinda, sorta) England on Germany’s western borders. Czechoslovakia may well have been able to manage a German invasion. We’re so used to the decisiveness of the German attack on Poland, we assume that the Wehrmacht was unstoppable.

More importantly, the German army knew the risk of war in 1938.

A key element emphasized in the book is that the German “deep state” may well have been ready to turn out Mr. Hitler were he to launch them into a losing war. In that event, England’s “standing up” to Hitler would have not only supported the Czechs, but would have allowed the Germans themselves to do the same. Or to put it another way – it wasn’t so much that Hitler was bluffing. He believed he could go to war and believed he would win. Instead, 1938 may have been that perfect time to challenge him on his wild gambles. This was a time his gambles were known to pay off. By September 1939, he may have been “right” too many times in a row to make it worth a challenge.

I read Munich as an Amazon ebook. On Amazon*, when readers highlight certain passages in a book, those highlights are visible to those who subsequently read the same book. Munich had a handful of such flagged passages. Now, I’ve remarked before on Harris’ ability to create some profound historical commentary that seems particularly relevant to our world, today. An initial impression, when I picked up the book, was that of a present-day political agenda from Harris.

That bias was gleaned from several passages seeming trying to draw a parallel between the unrealized (in the 30s) threat that Hitler represented and the fear (in 2016-2017, when the novel was written and published) of the same from Donald Trump. By the time I got to the end of the book and read his afterward, I’m no longer so sure. Would I have given such attention to those passages had they not been underlined? Probably not. In retrospect, I may have been picking up a political bias from my fellow readers, not from the author. Of course, given Harris’ politics and the dim view that the English have of our former president, I suppose I shouldn’t rule anything out.

For a book that I would rate pretty highly, the Amazon readers’ reviews are decidedly polarized. I’ll warn you not to read them if you’re still not sure which way the book is going to go (i.e. historical or alternative fiction). Every review I scanned assumes that the reader will know the answer going in. I’ll make the point one more time. Part of my enjoyment was that I found the story suspenseful. The reason it was so suspenseful for me is that I remained in doubt about the ending until nearly the very end.

I was really thinking that a good afterward to this novel might be the playing of a scenario which imagined the hypothetical invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938. If TOAW didn’t have one, surely I could find a mod for Decisive Campaigns. Or something. However, such a game doesn’t seem to exist. I suppose part of it is the amount of work to research armies that never fought. I’m left to wonder how well all the various iterations of Hearts of Iron can do with an early WWII start.

Maybe worth a try one of these days.

Photo by Abdel Rahman Abu Baker on Pexels.com

*And here I assume it is part of the whole Kindle ecosystem, although I don’t know that for sure. I also assume that its something I have configured and could very easily switch it off. I probably should. I’d be rather miffed if I picked up a new physical book from the bookstore and it already had passages underlined by strangers.