Guilty Men is a Britishpolemical book written under the pseudonym "Cato" that was published in July 1940, after the failure of British forces to prevent the defeat and occupation ofNorway andFrance byNazi Germany. It attacked fifteen public figures for their failed policies towards Germany and for their failure to re-equip the British armed forces. In denouncingappeasement, it defined the policy as the "deliberate surrender of small nations in the face of Hitler's blatant bullying".[1] A classic denunciation of the former government's policy, it shaped popular and scholarly thinking for the next two decades.
The book's slogan, "Let the guilty men retire", was an attack on members of theNational Government beforeWinston Churchill becamePrime Minister in May 1940. Most wereConservatives, although some wereNational Liberals and one wasRamsay MacDonald, the former leader of theLabour Party. Several were current members of Churchill's government. The book shaped popular thinking about appeasement for twenty years; it effectively destroyed the reputation of former Prime MinistersStanley Baldwin andNeville Chamberlain, and contributed to the defeat of theConservative Party at the1945 general election. According to historian David Dutton, "its impact upon Chamberlain's reputation, both among the general public and within the academic world, was profound indeed".[2][3][4]
According to the book, the "guilty men" were:
Though mostly devoted to what the authors see as the blindness and inertia of the Conservative majority that in 1939 led a drastically under-prepared Britain into war, followed by the disastrous losses of Norway and of France in 1940, the authors look briefly at the British Army's contribution to these failures. While praising the discipline and courage of the soldiers in the field, they point to grave errors of strategy. In their opinion, some lessons that should have been obvious from the1914–1918 war over the same terrain in France were ignored: you need a secure perimeter to fall back on in need; you need a mobile reserve to call on; in defence, you must guard against infiltration by motorised infantry and you need copious anti-aircraft and anti-tank artillery; to attack, you need superiority in aircraft and tanks.[5]
Guilty Men was written by three journalists:Michael Foot (a future leader of the Labour Party),Frank Owen (a formerLiberal MP), andPeter Howard (a Conservative). They believed that Britain had suffered a succession of bad leaders who, with junior ministers, advisers and officials, had conducted a disastrous foreign policy towards Germany and had failed to prepare the country for war. AfterVictor Gollancz, creator of theLeft Book Club, had been persuaded to publish the book, the authors divided the 24 chapters among themselves and wrote it in four days, finishing on 5 June 1940. Gollancz asked for some of the rhetoric to be toned down, fearing the reaction it might provoke, but he rushed it into print in four weeks.
It was under a pseudonym because the writers were employed byLord Beaverbrook, who barred his journalists from writing for publications other than his own. Beaverbrook, who was active in the Conservative Party, was also a vocal supporter of appeasement, though he was not mentioned in the book.[6]
There was much speculation as to who Cato was. At one timeAneurin Bevan was named as its author.Randolph Churchill (Winston's son, also a Beaverbrook journalist) was also wrongly attributed as its author.[7] In the meantime, the real authors had some fun reviewing their own work. Michael Foot wrote an article, "Who Is This Cato?" Beaverbrook was as much in the dark as anyone but joked that he "made do with the royalties fromGuilty Men".[citation needed] The authors earned no money from the book as their literary agent Ralph Pinker, son of the much more successfulJames B. Pinker, absconded with the royalties.[8]
Guilty Men was published in early July 1940, shortly after Winston Churchill became Prime Minister, theDunkirk evacuation had shown Britain's military unpreparedness, and theFall of France left the country with few allies. Several major book wholesalers,W H Smith and Wyman's, and the largest book distributor,Simpkin Marshall, refused to handle the book. It was sold on news-stands and street barrows and went through twelve editions in July 1940,[9] selling 200,000 copies in a few weeks.[8]
Guilty Men remains in circulation and was reprinted for its historical interest byPenguin Books to mark its sixtieth anniversary in 2000.
The book's arguments and conclusions have been questioned by politicians and historians. In 1945,Quintin Hogg, MP, wroteThe Left Was Never Right, which was critical ofGuilty Men and argued that "unpreparedness before the war was largely the consequence of the policies of the parties of the Left".[10] In 1944,Geoffrey Mander publishedWe Were Not All Wrong.[11]
The fact that all bar one of the 15 "guilty men" named were either Conservatives or Liberals caused controversy – no mention was made, for example, of theLabour Party (UK) cabinet member and mid-1930s leaderGeorge Lansbury, a pacifist who advocatedUnilateral disarmament in the face of fascist rearmament.
The idea of appeasement as error and cowardice was challenged by historianA. J. P. Taylor in his bookThe Origins of the Second World War (1960), in which he argued that, in the circumstances, it might be seen as a rational policy.
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