The Munich Agreement was anything but Peace for Our Time. Neville Chamberlain’s famous quote gained considerable ignominy in its naive acceptance of Adolf Hitler’s promise to maintain peace. World War II may still have broken out if Britain had pushed back over Hitler’s grab for Czechoslovakia, but a push back would have possibly given the Allied nations more time to prepare for war. As it was, Poland was bound to occur as Hitler’s appetite for power after Munich was now unbridled, especially in light of his willingness to work with a sworn Nazi Party enemy, Stalin and the Soviets, to partition Poland.

Helen Paull Kirkpatrick (1909-1997) was an American correspondent whose insights were unerringly accurate about both sides in this scary time in human history. Living and working in Britain as a free-lance reporter for multiple high profile newspapers in the late 1930s, Kirkpatrick with a couple of other anti-appeasement correspondents started the weekly political paper, Whitehall News, which was read by Anthony Eden and Winston Churchill, the latter with whom she developed a friendship. She vividly reflects the reasons for her views in This Terrible Peace. She followed this book up with a more thorough address of the conditions and people that enabled Hitler and the start of World War II in Under the British Umbrella: What the English Are and How They Go to War.