Guilty Men

Guilty Men was a short book published in Great Britain in July 1940 that attacked British public figures for their appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

It is the classic denunciation of appeasement and it shaped popular and scholarly thinking for 20 years.

Contents

Guilty Men was a British polemical book written under the pseudonym "Cato" and published in July 1940. It attacked 15 public figures for their failed policies towards Germany and for their failure to equip the British armed forces adequately. It is the classic denunciation of appeasement, which it defined as the "deliberate surrender of small nations in the face of Hitler's blatant bullying."

The book's slogan, "Let the guilty men retire," was an attack on members of the National Government before Winston Churchill became prime minister in May 1940. Most were Conservatives, although some were National Liberals and one was Ramsay MacDonald, the late leader of the Labour Party. Several were current members of Churchill's government. The book shaped popular thinking about appeasement for 20 years and effectively destroyed the reputation of former prime ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain and contributed to the defeat of the Conservative Party in the 1945 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".

The 'guilty men' were:

• Neville Chamberlain
• Sir John Simon
• Sir Samuel Hoare
• Ramsay MacDonald
• Stanley Baldwin
• Lord Halifax
• Sir Kingsley Wood
• Ernest Brown (MP)
• David Margesson
• Sir Horace Wilson
• Sir Thomas Inskip
• Leslie Burgin
• Earl Stanhope
• W. S. Morrison
• Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith

Authorship

Guilty Men by 'Cato' was written by three journalists: Michael Foot (a future Leader of the Labour Party), Frank Owen (a former Liberal MP), and Peter Howard (a Conservative). The trio believed that Britain had suffered a succession of bad leaders who, with junior ministers, advisers and officials, had conducted a disastrous foreign policy toward Germany and had failed to prepare the country for war. After Victor Gollancz, creator of the Left Book Club, had been persuaded to publish the book, the three 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 published as the pseudonymous 'Cato' because the three journalists were employed by Lord Beaverbrook who was active in the Conservative Party. He also banned his journalists from writing for publications other than his own. Beaverbrook had also been a vocal supporter of the appeasement movement although he was never mentioned in the book.

There was much speculation as to who was Cato; at one time Aneurin Bevan was being named as its author. In the meantime, the real authors had some fun reviewing their own work. Michael Foot entitled an article about the book: "Who is This Cato?". Beaverbrook was as much in the dark as anyone, but joked that he "made do with the royalties from Guilty Men". The authors earned no money from the book, as their literary agent Ralph Pinker absconded with their royalties.

Publication

Guilty Men was published in early July, shortly after Churchill took over as Prime Minister, the Dunkirk evacuation had shown Britain's military weakness, and the Fall of France leaving 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, selling 200,000 copies in a few weeks.

Guilty Men remains in circulation and was reprinted for its historical interest by Penguin Books to mark its sixtieth anniversary in 2000.

Evaluation

The speed with which Guilty Men was written shows in its errors. For example, the authors muddled the place and date where Baldwin said that re-armament was unpopular with the voters. (They placed it in the Fulham East by-election, 1933, instead of the 1935 general election and dated the Fulham by-election 1935. "1935" was corrected to "1933" in later editions, but the 1998 Penguin facsimile edition reproduced the error without comment.) It also shows in its excessively detailed description of Dunkirk.

The book's arguments and conclusions have been questioned by politicians and historians. In 1945, Quintin Hogg, MP wrote The Left was never Right, which was critical of Guilty Men and argued that "unpreparedness before the war was largely the consequence of the policies of the parties of the Left." In contrast, in 1944 Geoffrey Mander had published We were not all wrong.

The idea of appeasement as error and cowardice was challenged in 1960 by historian A. J. P. Taylor's highly controversial The Origins of The Second World War, in which he argued that, in the circumstances, it might be seen as a rational policy.

See also

• The bomber will always get through, a military/political belief from the 1930s that held that in future conflicts regardless of air defences sufficient numbers of bombers would survive to destroy cities and infrastructure.

Further reading

• Dutton, D. J. "Guilty men (act. 1940)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press. accessed 15 Sept 2013
• Morgan, Kenneth O. Michael Foot: A Life (2007), ch 3