Yesterday marked the 70th anniversary of Prime Minister Chamberlain’s return to London from Munich after the settlement about cessation of the Czech Sudetenland to Nazi Germany has been reached between Germany, France, Britain, and Italy.

It is at that day that the above photograph was taken at the Heston aerodrome, Chamberlain showing the paper containing the resolution to the press. Later that day, speaking to the crowd outside 10 Downing Street he said: “My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.” He received cheers and “hear hears” from the crowd.

The news headlines on the following day were full of praise and relief. The 2-hour alert, introduced on 26 September on most RAF stations, was recalled.

The peace for our time represents the apex of Neville Chamberlain’s policy of Appeasement. The rights or wrongs of this have been the subject of debate ever since. The historian’s assessment of Chamberlain has ranged from condemnation to the judgment that he had no alternative and acted in Britain’s best interests.

The peace, as we know, proved to be so short-lived. The settlement gave Germany the Sudetenland under Hitler’s promise to go no further. It took only six more months for Czechoslovakia to disappear completely, destroying whatever meaning the Munich Agreement ever had. And a mere another six months lead to the German invasion of Poland and the inevitable British declaration of war.

Seeing it from the perspective of the subsequent war, the Sudeten crisis marked a new epoch in the history of British rearmament and general war preparations. Despite Prime Minister’s public declarations, the government was under no illusions. All armament programmes were rapidly reviewed and remedies sought to speed them up. Among them was the problem of production delays at Supermarine. At the time of the Munich conference only five Spitfires had been delivered from the Eastleigh factory. Although No. 19 Squadron at Duxford had four of them at their disposal, the testing phase was not complete and the unit was called to readiness on their old Gloster Gauntlets.

It is difficult today to understand the sense of seriousness of the Sudeten crisis as it appeared at the time to the public mind. Trenches were dug in the city parks. Gas masks distributed among families. Children evacuated from the cities. Ration cards prepared. Newspapers published articles on how to build an air raid shelter. All these attributes of war which we are used to connect with the images of the Battle of Britain manifested themselves for the first time right then, in September 1938. In the same year the Air Ministry was expecting a million casualties during the first month of the war, 3 million refugees and the majority of the capital destroyed.

Brett Hollman, the author of the Airminded blog, is into an unique project connected with the described events. His experiment on post-blogging the Sudeten crisis day by day has been seemingly succesful, and offers a day-by-day account of the events based on contemporary press articles and commentary. I can highly recommend this reading for anyone interested by history of the World War II.