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" "Give us another 3 or 4 months of production, not more hampered than it is at present, and we shall have something over, with which we can make ourselves disagreeable in many ways, and many places. We could perhaps take a stronger line with Japan then, even though we still got no help from the U.S.A. ... People ask me how we are going to win this war. I suppose it is a very natural question, but I don't think the time has come to answer it. We must just go on fighting as hard as we can, in the belief that some time—perhaps sooner than we think—the other side will crack.
Arthur Neville Chamberlain (18 March 1869 – 9 November 1940) was a British politician. After a period as Lord Mayor of Birmingham, he entered national politics and was Chairman of the Conservative Party from 1929 to 1931. During the National Government of Ramsay MacDonald, Chamberlain served as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He later succeeded Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1937. Chamberlain negotiated the Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler (Hitler never intended to honour it) and declared war in September 1939 owing to a mutual defence pact with Poland, which Hitler's Germany had invaded. He was forced to resign after the Norway Debate eight months into World War II and was replaced by Winston Churchill, who had been a leading critic of Chamberlain's foreign policy of appeasement. Since his death, Chamberlain has been viewed highly unfavorably among the general public, journalists, and politicians due to his foreign policy and handling of the war, although historians remain divided on whether this reputation is warranted.
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The result was that when war did break out German preparations were far ahead of our own, and it was natural then to expect that the enemy would take advantage of his initial superiority to make an endeavour to overwhelm us and France before we had time to make good our deficiencies. Is it not a very extraordinary thing that no such attempt was made? Whatever may be the reason—whether it was that Hitler thought he might get away with what he had got without fighting for it, or whether it was that after all the preparations were not sufficiently complete—however, one thing is certain: he missed the bus.
I am myself a man of peace to the depths of my soul. Armed conflict between nations is a nightmare to me; but if I were convinced that any nation had made up its mind to dominate the world by fear of its force, I should feel that it must be resisted. Under such a domination, life for people who believe in liberty would not be worth living: but war is a fearful thing, and we must be very clear, before we embark on it, that it is really the great issues that are at stake.