re: #147 Targetpractice

Not really. Chamberlain’s largely been vindicated by history for his decision not to take the nation to war in 1938, a decision that most of the nation supported at the time if one looks at polls and opinion pieces. His reputation as a coward and a failure is largely due to Churchill and his cohorts who spent the immediate post-war period writing their own version of history where putting down the Nazi threat would have been a cakewalk in 1938 but Chamberlain wimped out and allowed things to turn into a full-blown war that had killed tens of millions and cost the nation untold billions.

Also overlooking that one reason the UK was so badly unprepared for another war was a budget decision in roughly 1920 that another war was about a decade away and thus the government could cut military spending sharply. And then they extended said decision repeatedly to create what Churchill (or someone) called “the lost decade”. This pretty much strangled military development programs in the UK in the crib in the 1920s and early 30s when there was a lot of new technology developed and begun that would be important during the war.

And the Chancellor of the Exchequer in England from 1925 to 1929 was no other than Winston Churchill himself.