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Sunday, March 27, 2022

Color television

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
A color television test at the Mount Kaukau transmitting station, New Zealand, in 1970. A test pattern with color bars is sometimes used when no program material is available.

Color television is a television transmission technology that includes information on the color of the picture, so the video image can be displayed in color on the television set. It is considered an improvement on the earliest television technology, monochrome or black-and-white television, in which the image is displayed in shades of gray (grayscale). Television broadcasting stations and networks in most parts of the world upgraded from black-and-white to color transmission between the 1960s and the 1980s. The invention of color television standards is an important part of the history of television, and it is described in the technology of television article.

Transmission of color images using mechanical scanners had been conceived as early as the 1880s. A practical demonstration of mechanically scanned color television was given by John Logie Baird in 1928, but the limitations of a mechanical system were apparent even then. Development of electronic scanning and display made an all-electronic system possible. Early monochrome transmission standards were developed prior to World War II, but civilian electronics developments were frozen during much of the war. In August 1944, Baird gave the world's first demonstration of a practical fully electronic color television display. In the United States, commercially competing color standards were developed, finally resulting in the NTSC standard for color that retained compatibility with the prior monochrome system. Although the NTSC color standard was proclaimed in 1953 and limited programming became available, it was not until the early 1970s that color television in North America outsold black-and-white or monochrome units. Color broadcasting in Europe was not standardized on the PAL and SECAM formats until the 1960s.

Broadcasters began to switch from analog color television technology to digital television c. 2006; the exact year varies by country. This changeover is now complete in many countries, but analog television is still the standard elsewhere.

Development

The human eye's detection system in the retina consists primarily of two types of light detectors: rod cells that capture light, dark, and shapes/figures, and the cone cells that detect color. A typical retina contains 120 million rods and 4.5 million to 6 million cones, which are divided into three types, each one with a characteristic profile of excitability by different wavelengths of the spectrum of visible light. This means that the eye has far more resolution in brightness, or "luminance", than in color. However, post-processing of the optic nerve and other portions of the human visual system combine the information from the rods and cones to re-create what appears to be a high-resolution color image.

The eye has limited bandwidth to the rest of the visual system, estimated at just under 8 Mbit/s.[1] This manifests itself in a number of ways, but the most important in terms of producing moving images is the way that a series of still images displayed in quick succession will appear to be continuous smooth motion. This illusion starts to work at about 16 frame/s, and common motion pictures use 24 frame/s. Television, using power from the electrical grid, historically tuned its rate in order to avoid interference with the alternating current being supplied – in North America, some Central and South American countries, Taiwan, Korea, part of Japan, the Philippines, and a few other countries, this was 60 video fields per second to match the 60 Hz power, while in most other countries it was 50 fields per second to match the 50 Hz power. The NTSC color system changed from the black-and-white 60-fields-per-second standard to 59.94 fields per second to make the color circuitry simpler; the 1950s TV sets had matured enough that the power frequency/field rate mismatch was no longer important. Modern TV sets can display multiple field rates (50, 59.94, or 60, in either interlaced or progressive scan) while accepting power at various frequencies (often the operating range is specified as 48–62 Hz).

In its most basic form, a color broadcast can be created by broadcasting three monochrome images, one each in the three colors of red, green, and blue (RGB). When displayed together or in rapid succession, these images will blend together to produce a full-color image as seen by the viewer. To do so without making the images flicker, the refresh time of all three images put together would have to be above the critical limit, and generally the same as a single black and white image. This would require three times the number of images to be sent in the same time, and thus greatly increase the amount of radio bandwidth required to send the complete signal and thus similarly increase the required radio spectrum. Early plans for color television in the United States included a move from very high frequency (VHF) to ultra high frequency (UHF) to open up additional spectrum.

One of the great technical challenges of introducing color broadcast television was the desire to conserve bandwidth. In the United States, after considerable research, the National Television Systems Committee approved an all-electronic system developed by RCA that encoded the color information separately from the brightness information and greatly reduced the resolution of the color information in order to conserve bandwidth. The brightness image remained compatible with existing black-and-white television sets at slightly reduced resolution, while color-capable televisions could decode the extra information in the signal and produce a limited-resolution color display. The higher resolution black-and-white and lower resolution color images combine in the eye to produce a seemingly high-resolution color image. The NTSC standard represented a major technical achievement.

Early television

Experiments with facsimile image transmission systems that used radio broadcasts to transmit images date to the 19th century. It was not until the 20th century that advances in electronics and light detectors made what we know as television practical. A key problem was the need to convert a 2D image into a "1D" radio signal; some form of image scanning was needed to make this work. Early systems generally used a device known as a "Nipkow disk", which was a spinning disk with a series of holes punched in it that caused a spot to scan across and down the image. A single photodetector behind the disk captured the image brightness at any given spot, which was converted into a radio signal and broadcast. A similar disk was used at the receiver side, with a light source behind the disk instead of a detector.

A number of such mechanical television systems were being used experimentally in the 1920s. The best-known was John Logie Baird's, which was actually used for regular public broadcasting in Britain for several years. Indeed, Baird's system was demonstrated to members of the Royal Institution in London in 1926 in what is generally recognized as the first demonstration of a true, working television system. In spite of these early successes, all mechanical television systems shared a number of serious problems. Being mechanically driven, perfect synchronization of the sending and receiving discs was not easy to ensure, and irregularities could result in major image distortion. Another problem was that the image was scanned within a small, roughly rectangular area of the disk's surface, so that larger, higher-resolution displays required increasingly unwieldy disks and smaller holes that produced increasingly dim images. Rotating drums bearing small mirrors set at progressively greater angles proved more practical than Nipkow discs for high-resolution mechanical scanning, allowing images of 240 lines and more to be produced, but such delicate, high-precision optical components were not commercially practical for home receivers.

It was clear to a number of developers that a completely electronic scanning system would be superior, and that the scanning could be achieved in a vacuum tube via electrostatic or magnetic means. Converting this concept into a usable system took years of development and several independent advances. The two key advances were Philo Farnsworth's electronic scanning system, and Vladimir Zworykin's Iconoscope camera. The Iconoscope, based on Kálmán Tihanyi's early patents, superseded the Farnsworth-system. With these systems, the BBC began regularly scheduled black-and-white television broadcasts in 1936, but these were shut down again with the start of World War II in 1939. In this time thousands of television sets had been sold. The receivers developed for this program, notably those from Pye Ltd., played a key role in the development of radar.

By 22 March 1935, 180-line black-and-white television programs were being broadcast from the Paul Nipkow TV station in Berlin. In 1936, under the guidance of the Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, direct transmissions from fifteen mobile units at the Olympic Games in Berlin were transmitted to selected small television houses (Fernsehstuben) in Berlin and Hamburg.

In 1941, the first NTSC meetings produced a single standard for US broadcasts. US television broadcasts began in earnest in the immediate post-war era, and by 1950 there were 6 million televisions in the United States.

All-mechanical color

The basic idea of using three monochrome images to produce a color image had been experimented with almost as soon as black-and-white televisions had first been built.

Among the earliest published proposals for television was one by Maurice Le Blanc in 1880 for a color system, including the first mentions in television literature of line and frame scanning, although he gave no practical details. Polish inventor Jan Szczepanik patented a color television system in 1897, using a selenium photoelectric cell at the transmitter and an electromagnet controlling an oscillating mirror and a moving prism at the receiver. But his system contained no means of analyzing the spectrum of colors at the transmitting end, and could not have worked as he described it. An Armenian inventor, Hovannes Adamian, also experimented with color television as early as 1907. The first color television project is claimed by him, and was patented in Germany on March 31, 1908, patent number 197183, then in Britain, on April 1, 1908, patent number 7219, in France (patent number 390326) and in Russia in 1910 (patent number 17912).

Shortly after his practical demonstration of black and white television, on July 3, 1928, Baird demonstrated the world's first color transmission. This used scanning discs at the transmitting and receiving ends with three spirals of apertures, each spiral with filters of a different primary color; and three light sources, controlled by the signal, at the receiving end, with a commutator to alternate their illumination. The demonstration was of a young girl wearing different colored hats. The girl, Noele Gordon, later became a TV actress in the soap opera Crossroads. Baird also made the world's first color over-the-air broadcast on February 4, 1938, sending a mechanically scanned 120-line image from Baird's Crystal Palace studios to a projection screen at London's Dominion Theatre.

Mechanically scanned color television was also demonstrated by Bell Laboratories in June 1929 using three complete systems of photoelectric cells, amplifiers, glow-tubes, and color filters, with a series of mirrors to superimpose the red, green, and blue images into one full-color image.

Hybrid systems

As was the case with black-and-white television, an electronic means of scanning would be superior to the mechanical systems like Baird's. The obvious solution on the broadcast end would be to use three conventional Iconoscopes with colored filters in front of them to produce an RGB signal. Using three separate tubes each looking at the same scene would produce slight differences in parallax between the frames, so in practice a single lens was used with a mirror or prism system to separate the colors for the separate tubes. Each tube captured a complete frame and the signal was converted into radio in a fashion essentially identical to the existing black-and-white systems.

The problem with this approach was there was no simple way to recombine them on the receiver end. If each image was sent at the same time on different frequencies, the images would have to be "stacked" somehow on the display, in real time. The simplest way to do this would be to reverse the system used in the camera: arrange three separate black-and-white displays behind colored filters and then optically combine their images using mirrors or prisms onto a suitable screen, like frosted glass. RCA built just such a system in order to present the first electronically scanned color television demonstration on February 5, 1940, privately shown to members of the US Federal Communications Commission at the RCA plant in Camden, New Jersey. This system, however, suffered from the twin problems of costing at least three times as much as a conventional black-and-white set, as well as having very dim pictures, the result of the fairly low illumination given off by tubes of the era. Projection systems of this sort would become common decades later, however, with improvements in technology.

Another solution would be to use a single screen, but break it up into a pattern of closely spaced colored phosphors instead of an even coating of white. Three receivers would be used, each sending its output to a separate electron gun, aimed at its colored phosphor. However, this solution was not practical. The electron guns used in monochrome televisions had limited resolution, and if one wanted to retain the resolution of existing monochrome displays, the guns would have to focus on individual dots three times smaller. This was beyond the state of the art of the technology at the time.

Instead, a number of hybrid solutions were developed that combined a conventional monochrome display with a colored disk or mirror. In these systems the three colored images were sent one after each other, in either complete frames in the "field-sequential color system", or for each line in the "line-sequential" system. In both cases a colored filter was rotated in front of the display in sync with the broadcast. Since three separate images were being sent in sequence, if they used existing monochrome radio signaling standards they would have an effective refresh rate of only 20 fields, or 10 frames, a second, well into the region where flicker would become visible. In order to avoid this, these systems increased the frame rate considerably, making the signal incompatible with existing monochrome standards.

The first practical example of this sort of system was again pioneered by John Logie Baird. In 1940 he publicly demonstrated a color television combining a traditional black-and-white display with a rotating colored disk. This device was very "deep", but was later improved with a mirror folding the light path into an entirely practical device resembling a large conventional console. However, Baird was not happy with the design, and as early as 1944 had commented to a British government committee that a fully electronic device would be better.

In 1939, Hungarian engineer Peter Carl Goldmark introduced an electro-mechanical system while at CBS, which contained an Iconoscope sensor. The CBS field-sequential color system was partly mechanical, with a disc made of red, blue, and green filters spinning inside the television camera at 1,200 rpm, and a similar disc spinning in synchronization in front of the cathode ray tube inside the receiver set. The system was first demonstrated to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on August 29, 1940, and shown to the press on September 4.

CBS began experimental color field tests using film as early as August 28, 1940, and live cameras by November 12. NBC (owned by RCA) made its first field test of color television on February 20, 1941. CBS began daily color field tests on June 1, 1941. These color systems were not compatible with existing black-and-white television sets, and as no color television sets were available to the public at this time, viewing of the color field tests was restricted to RCA and CBS engineers and the invited press. The War Production Board halted the manufacture of television and radio equipment for civilian use from April 22, 1942, to August 20, 1945, limiting any opportunity to introduce color television to the general public.

Fully electronic

This live image of actress Paddy Naismith was used to demonstrate Telechrome, John Logie Baird's first all-electronic color television system, which used two projection CRTs. The two-color image would be similar to the basic Telechrome system.

As early as 1940, Baird had started work on a fully electronic system he called the "Telechrome". Early Telechrome devices used two electron guns aimed at either side of a phosphor plate. The phosphor was patterned so the electrons from the guns only fell on one side of the patterning or the other. Using cyan and magenta phosphors, a reasonable limited-color image could be obtained. Baird's demonstration on August 16, 1944, was the first example of a practical color television system. Work on the Telechrome continued and plans were made to introduce a three-gun version for full color. However, Baird's untimely death in 1946 ended the development of the Telechrome system.

Similar concepts were common through the 1940s and 1950s, differing primarily in the way they re-combined the colors generated by the three guns. The Geer tube was similar to Baird's concept, but used small pyramids with the phosphors deposited on their outside faces, instead of Baird's 3D patterning on a flat surface. The Penetron used three layers of phosphor on top of each other and increased the power of the beam to reach the upper layers when drawing those colors. The Chromatron used a set of focusing wires to select the colored phosphors arranged in vertical stripes on the tube.

FCC color

In the immediate post-war era, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was inundated with requests to set up new television stations. Worrying about congestion of the limited number of channels available, the FCC put a moratorium on all new licenses in 1948 while considering the problem. A solution was immediately forthcoming; rapid development of radio receiver electronics during the war had opened a wide band of higher frequencies to practical use, and the FCC set aside a large section of these new UHF bands for television broadcast. At the time, black-and-white television broadcasting was still in its infancy in the U.S., and the FCC started to look at ways of using this newly available bandwidth for color broadcasts. Since no existing television would be able to tune in these stations, they were free to pick an incompatible system and allow the older VHF channels to die off over time.

The FCC called for technical demonstrations of color systems in 1948, and the Joint Technical Advisory Committee (JTAC) was formed to study them. CBS displayed improved versions of its original design, now using a single 6 MHz channel (like the existing black-and-white signals) at 144 fields per second and 405 lines of resolution. Color Television Inc. (CTI) demonstrated its line-sequential system, while Philco demonstrated a dot-sequential system based on its beam-index tube-based "Apple" tube technology. Of the entrants, the CBS system was by far the best-developed, and won head-to-head testing every time.

While the meetings were taking place it was widely known within the industry that RCA was working on a dot-sequential system that was compatible with existing black-and-white broadcasts, but RCA declined to demonstrate it during the first series of meetings. Just before the JTAC presented its findings, on August 25, 1949, RCA broke its silence and introduced its system as well. The JTAC still recommended the CBS system, and after the resolution of an ensuing RCA lawsuit, color broadcasts using the CBS system started on June 25, 1951. By this point the market had changed dramatically; when color was first being considered in 1948 there were fewer than a million television sets in the U.S., but by 1951 there were well over 10 million. The idea that the VHF band could be allowed to "die" was no longer practical.

During its campaign for FCC approval, CBS gave the first demonstrations of color television to the general public, showing an hour of color programs daily Mondays through Saturdays, beginning January 12, 1950, and running for the remainder of the month, over WOIC in Washington, D.C., where the programs could be viewed on eight 16-inch color receivers in a public building. Due to high public demand, the broadcasts were resumed February 13–21, with several evening programs added. CBS initiated a limited schedule of color broadcasts from its New York station WCBS-TV Mondays to Saturdays beginning November 14, 1950, making ten color receivers available for the viewing public. All were broadcast using the single color camera that CBS owned. The New York broadcasts were extended by coaxial cable to Philadelphia's WCAU-TV beginning December 13, and to Chicago on January 10, making them the first network color broadcasts.

After a series of hearings beginning in September 1949, the FCC found the RCA and CTI systems fraught with technical problems, inaccurate color reproduction, and expensive equipment, and so formally approved the CBS system as the U.S. color broadcasting standard on October 11, 1950. An unsuccessful lawsuit by RCA delayed the first commercial network broadcast in color until June 25, 1951, when a musical variety special titled simply Premiere was shown over a network of five East Coast CBS affiliates. Viewing was again restricted: the program could not be seen on black-and-white sets, and Variety estimated that only thirty prototype color receivers were available in the New York area. Regular color broadcasts began that same week with the daytime series The World Is Yours and Modern Homemakers.

While the CBS color broadcasting schedule gradually expanded to twelve hours per week (but never into prime time), and the color network expanded to eleven affiliates as far west as Chicago, its commercial success was doomed by the lack of color receivers necessary to watch the programs, the refusal of television manufacturers to create adapter mechanisms for their existing black-and-white sets, and the unwillingness of advertisers to sponsor broadcasts seen by almost no one. CBS had bought a television manufacturer in April, and in September 1951, production began on the only CBS-Columbia color television model, with the first color sets reaching retail stores on September 28. However, it was too little, too late. Only 200 sets had been shipped, and only 100 sold, when CBS discontinued its color television system on October 20, 1951, ostensibly by request of the National Production Authority for the duration of the Korean War, and bought back all the CBS color sets it could to prevent lawsuits by disappointed customers. RCA chairman David Sarnoff later charged that the NPA's order had come "out of a situation artificially created by one company to solve its own perplexing problems" because CBS had been unsuccessful in its color venture.

Compatible color

While the FCC was holding its JTAC meetings, development was taking place on a number of systems allowing true simultaneous color broadcasts, "dot-sequential color systems". Unlike the hybrid systems, dot-sequential televisions used a signal very similar to existing black-and-white broadcasts, with the intensity of every dot on the screen being sent in succession.

In 1938 Georges Valensi demonstrated an encoding scheme that would allow color broadcasts to be encoded so they could be picked up on existing black-and-white sets as well. In his system the output of the three camera tubes were re-combined to produce a single "luminance" value that was very similar to a monochrome signal and could be broadcast on the existing VHF frequencies. The color information was encoded in a separate "chrominance" signal, consisting of two separate signals, the original blue signal minus the luminance (B'–Y'), and red-luma (R'–Y'). These signals could then be broadcast separately on a different frequency; a monochrome set would tune in only the luminance signal on the VHF band, while color televisions would tune in both the luminance and chrominance on two different frequencies, and apply the reverse transforms to retrieve the original RGB signal. The downside to this approach is that it required a major boost in bandwidth use, something the FCC was interested in avoiding.

RCA used Valensi's concept as the basis of all of its developments, believing it to be the only proper solution to the broadcast problem. However, RCA's early sets using mirrors and other projection systems all suffered from image and color quality problems, and were easily bested by CBS's hybrid system. But solutions to these problems were in the pipeline, and RCA in particular was investing massive sums (later estimated at $100 million) to develop a usable dot-sequential tube. RCA was beaten to the punch by the Geer tube, which used three B&W tubes aimed at different faces of colored pyramids to produce a color image. All-electronic systems included the Chromatron, Penetron and beam-index tube that were being developed by various companies. While investigating all of these, RCA's teams quickly started focusing on the shadow mask system.

In July 1938 the shadow mask color television was patented by Werner Flechsig (1900–1981) in Germany, and was demonstrated at the International radio exhibition Berlin in 1939. Most CRT color televisions used today are based on this technology. His solution to the problem of focusing the electron guns on the tiny colored dots was one of brute-force; a metal sheet with holes punched in it allowed the beams to reach the screen only when they were properly aligned over the dots. Three separate guns were aimed at the holes from slightly different angles, and when their beams passed through the holes the angles caused them to separate again and hit the individual spots a short distance away on the back of the screen. The downside to this approach was that the mask cut off the vast majority of the beam energy, allowing it to hit the screen only 15% of the time, requiring a massive increase in beam power to produce acceptable image brightness.

The first publicly announced network demonstration of a program using a "compatible color" system was an episode of NBC's Kukla, Fran and Ollie on October 10, 1949,[47] viewable in color only at the FCC. It did not receive FCC approval.

In spite of these problems in both the broadcast and display systems, RCA pressed ahead with development and was ready for a second assault on the standards by 1950.

Second NTSC

The possibility of a compatible color broadcast system was so compelling that the NTSC decided to re-form, and held a second series of meetings starting in January 1950. Having only recently selected the CBS system, the FCC heavily opposed the NTSC's efforts. One of the FCC Commissioners, R. F. Jones, went so far as to assert that the engineers testifying in favor of a compatible system were "in a conspiracy against the public interest".

Unlike the FCC approach where a standard was simply selected from the existing candidates, the NTSC would produce a board that was considerably more pro-active in development.

Starting before CBS color even got on the air, the U.S. television industry, represented by the National Television System Committee, worked in 1950–1953 to develop a color system that was compatible with existing black-and-white sets and would pass FCC quality standards, with RCA developing the hardware elements. RCA first made publicly announced field tests of the dot sequential color system over its New York station WNBT in July 1951. When CBS testified before Congress in March 1953 that it had no further plans for its own color system, the National Production Authority dropped its ban on the manufacture of color television receivers, and the path was open for the NTSC to submit its petition for FCC approval in July 1953, which was granted on December 17. The first publicly announced network demonstration of a program using the NTSC "compatible color" system was an episode of NBC's Kukla, Fran and Ollie on August 30, 1953, although it was viewable in color only at the network's headquarters. The first network broadcast to go out over the air in NTSC color was a performance of the opera Carmen on October 31, 1953.

Adoption

North America

Canada

Color broadcasts from the United States were available to Canadian population centers near the border since the mid-1950s. At the time that NTSC color broadcasting was officially introduced into Canada in 1966, less than one percent of Canadian households had a color television set. Color television in Canada was launched on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's (CBC) English language TV service on September 1, 1966. Private television broadcaster CTV also started color broadcasts in early September 1966. The CBC's French-language TV service, Radio-Canada, was broadcasting color programming for 15 hours a week in 1968. Full-time color transmissions started in 1974 on the CBC, with other private sector broadcasters in the country doing so by the end of the 1970s.

The following provinces and areas of Canada introduced color television by the years as stated

  • Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba, British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec (1966; Major networks only – private sector around 1968 to 1972)
  • Newfoundland and Labrador (1967)
  • Nova Scotia, New Brunswick (1968)
  • Prince Edward Island (1969)
  • Yukon (1971)
  • Northwest Territories (including Nunavut) (1972; Major networks in large centers, many remote areas in the far north did not get color until at least 1977 and 1978)

Cuba

Cuba in 1958 became the second country in the world to introduce color television broadcasting, with Havana's Channel 12 using standards established by the NTSC Committee of United States Federal Communications Commission in 1940, and American technology patented by the American electronics company RCA, or Radio Corporation of America. But the color transmissions ended when broadcasting stations were seized in the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and did not return until 1975, using equipment acquired from Japan's NEC Corporation, and SECAM equipment from the Soviet Union, adapted for the American NTSC standard.

Mexico

Guillermo González Camarena independently invented and developed a field-sequential tricolor disk system in Mexico in the late 1930s, for which he requested a patent in México on August 19, 1940, and in the United States in 1941. González Camarena produced his color television system in his Gon-Cam laboratory for the Mexican market and exported it to the Columbia College of Chicago, which regarded it as the best system in the world. Goldmark had actually applied for a patent for the same field-sequential tricolor system in the US on September 7, 1940, while González Camarena had made his Mexican filing 19 days before, on August 19.

On August 31, 1946, González Camarena sent his first color transmission from his lab in the offices of the Mexican League of Radio Experiments at Lucerna St. No. 1, in Mexico City. The video signal was transmitted at a frequency of 115 MHz and the audio in the 40-metre band. He obtained authorization to make the first publicly announced color broadcast in Mexico, on February 8, 1963, of the program Paraíso Infantil on Mexico City's XHGC-TV, using the NTSC system that had by now been adopted as the standard for color programming.

González Camarena also invented the "simplified Mexican color TV system" as a much simpler and cheaper alternative to the NTSC system. Due to its simplicity, NASA used a modified version of the system in its Voyager mission of 1979, to take pictures and video of Jupiter.

United States

RCA CT-100 at the SPARK Museum of Electrical Invention playing Superman. The RCA CT-100 was the first mass-produced color TV set.

Although all-electronic color was introduced in the US in 1953, high prices and the scarcity of color programming greatly slowed its acceptance in the marketplace. The first national color broadcast (the 1954 Tournament of Roses Parade) occurred on January 1, 1954, but over the next dozen years most network broadcasts, and nearly all local programming, continued to be in black-and-white. In 1956, NBC's The Perry Como Show became the first live network television series to present a majority of episodes in color. CBS's The Big Record, starring pop vocalist Patti Page, was the first television show broadcast in color for the entire 1957–1958 season; its production costs were greater than most movies were at the time not only because of all the stars featured on the hour-long extravaganza but the extremely high-intensity lighting and electronics required for the new RCA TK-41 cameras, which were the first practical color television cameras. It was not until the mid-1960s that color sets started selling in large numbers, due in part to the color transition of 1965 in which it was announced that over half of all network prime-time programming would be broadcast in color that autumn. The first all-color prime-time season came just one year later.

NBC made the first coast-to-coast color broadcast when it telecast the Tournament of Roses Parade on January 1, 1954, with public demonstrations given across the United States on prototype color receivers by manufacturers RCA, General Electric, Philco, Raytheon, Hallicrafters, Hoffman, Pacific Mercury, and others. Two days earlier, Admiral had demonstrated to its distributors the prototype of Admiral's first color television set planned for consumer sale using the NTSC standards, priced at $1,175 (equivalent to $11,323 in 2020). It is not known when the later commercial version of this receiver was first sold. Production was extremely limited, and no advertisements for it were published in New York newspapers, nor those in Washington.

A color model from Admiral C1617A became available in the Chicago area on January 4, 1954 and appeared in various stores throughout the country, including those in Maryland on January 6, 1954, San Francisco, January 14, 1954, Indianapolis on January 17, 1954, Pittsburgh on January 25, 1954, and Oakland on January 26, 1954, among other cities thereafter. A color model from Westinghouse H840CK15 ($1,295, or equivalent to $12,480 in 2020) became available in the New York area on February 28, 1954; Only 30 sets were sold in its first month. a less expensive color model from RCA (CT-100) reached dealers in April 1954. Television's first prime time network color series was The Marriage, a situation comedy broadcast live by NBC in the summer of 1954. NBC's anthology series Ford Theatre became the first network color-filmed series that October; however, due to the high cost of the first fifteen color episodes, Ford ordered that two black-and-white episodes be filmed for every color episode. The first series to be filmed entirely in color was NBC's Norby, a sitcom that lasted 13 weeks, from January to April 1955, and was replaced by repeats of Ford Theatre's color episodes.

Early color telecasts could be preserved only on the black-and-white kinescope process introduced in 1947. It was not until September 1956 that NBC began using color film to time-delay and preserve some of its live color telecasts. Ampex introduced a color videotape recorder in 1958, which NBC used to tape An Evening with Fred Astaire, the oldest surviving network color videotape. This system was also used to unveil a demonstration of color television for the press. On May 22, 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower visited the WRC-TV NBC studios in Washington, D.C., and gave a speech touting the new technology's merits. His speech was recorded in color, and a copy of this videotape was given to the Library of Congress for posterity.

The syndicated The Cisco Kid had been filmed in color since 1949 in anticipation of color broadcasting. Several other syndicated shows had episodes filmed in color during the 1950s, including The Lone Ranger, My Friend Flicka, and Adventures of Superman. The first was carried by some stations equipped for color telecasts well before NBC began its regular weekly color dramas in 1959, beginning with the Western series Bonanza.

NBC was at the forefront of color programming because its parent company RCA manufactured the most successful line of color sets in the 1950s and, at the end of August 1956, announced that in comparison with 1955–56 (when only three of its regularly scheduled programs were broadcast in color) the 1956–57 season would feature 17 series in color. By 1959 RCA was the only remaining major manufacturer of color sets. CBS and ABC, which were not affiliated with set manufacturers and were not eager to promote their competitor's product, dragged their feet into color. CBS broadcast color specials and sometimes aired its big weekly variety shows in color, but it offered no regularly scheduled color programming until the fall of 1965. At least one CBS show, The Lucy Show, was filmed in color beginning in 1963, but continued to be telecast in black and white through the end of the 1964–65 season. ABC delayed its first color programs until 1962, but these were initially only broadcasts of the cartoon shows The Flintstones, The Jetsons and Beany and Cecil. The DuMont network, although it did have a television-manufacturing parent company, was in financial decline by 1954 and was dissolved two years later.

The relatively small amount of network color programming, combined with the high cost of color television sets, meant that as late as 1964 only 3.1 percent of television households in the US had a color set. However, by the mid-1960s, the subject of color programming turned into a ratings war. A 1965 American Research Bureau (ARB) study that proposed an emerging trend in color television set sales convinced NBC that a full shift to color would gain a ratings advantage over its two competitors. As a result, NBC provided the catalyst for rapid color expansion by announcing that its prime time schedule for fall 1965 would be almost entirely in color. ABC and CBS followed suit and over half of their combined prime-time programming also moved to color that season, but they were still reluctant to telecast all their programming in color due to production costs. All three broadcast networks were airing full color prime time schedules by the 1966–67 broadcast season, and ABC aired its last new black-and-white daytime programming in December 1967. Public broadcasting networks like NET, however, did not use color for a majority of their programming until 1968. The number of color television sets sold in the US did not exceed black-and-white sales until 1972, which was also the first year that more than fifty percent of television households in the US had a color set. This was also the year that "in color" notices before color television programs ended, due to the rise in color television set sales, and color programming having become the norm.

In a display of foresight, Disney had filmed many of its earlier shows in color so they were able to be repeated on NBC, and since most of Disney's feature-length films were also made in color, they could now also be telecast in that format. To emphasize the new feature, the series was re-dubbed Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, which premiered in September 1961, and retained that moniker until 1969.

By the mid-1970s, the only stations broadcasting in black-and-white were a few high-numbered UHF stations in small markets, and a handful of low-power repeater stations in even smaller markets such as vacation spots. By 1979, even the last of these had converted to color and by the early 1980s, B&W sets had been pushed into niche markets, notably low-power uses, small portable sets, or use as video monitor screens in lower-cost consumer equipment. These black-and-white displays were still compatible with color signals and remained usable through the 1990s and first decade of the 21st Century for uses that did not require a full color display. The digital television transition in the United States in 2009 rendered the remaining black-and-white television sets obsolete; all digital television receivers are capable of displaying full color.

Color broadcasting in Hawaii started on May 5, 1957. One of the last television stations in North America to convert to color, WQEX (now WINP-TV) in Pittsburgh, started broadcasting in color on October 16, 1986, after its black-and-white transmitter, which dated from the 1950s, broke down in February 1985 and the parts required to fix it were no longer available. The owner of WQEX, PBS member station WQED, used some of its pledge money to buy a color transmitter.

Early color sets were either floor-standing console models or tabletop versions nearly as bulky and heavy, so in practice, they remained firmly anchored in one place. The introduction of GE's relatively compact and lightweight Porta-Color set in the spring of 1966 made watching color television a more flexible and convenient proposition. In 1972, sales of color sets finally surpassed sales of black-and-white sets. Also in 1972, the last holdout among daytime network programs converted to color, resulting in the first completely all-color network season.

Europe

The first two color television broadcasts in Europe were made by the UK's BBC2 beginning on 1 July 1967 and West Germany's Das Erste and ZDF in August, both using the PAL system. They were followed by the Netherlands in September (PAL), and by France in October (SECAM). On 1 October 1968, the first scheduled television program in color was broadcast in Switzerland. Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Austria, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary all started regular color broadcasts around 1969–1970. Ireland's national TV station RTÉ began using color in 1968 for recorded programs; the first outside broadcast made in color for RTÉ Television was when Ireland hosted the Eurovision Song Contest in Dublin in 1971. The PAL system spread through most of Western Europe.

More European countries introduced color television using the PAL system in the 1970s and early 1980s; examples include Belgium (1971), Bulgaria (1971, but not fully implemented until 1972), SFR Yugoslavia (1971), Spain (1972, but not fully implemented until 1977), Iceland (1973, but not fully implemented until 1976), Portugal (1975, but not fully implemented until 1980), Albania (1981), Turkey (1981) and Romania (1983, but not fully implemented until 1985–1991). In Italy there were debates to adopt a national color television system, the ISA, developed by Indesit, but that idea was scrapped. As a result, and after a test during the 1972 Summer Olympics, Italy was one of the last European countries to officially adopt the PAL system in the 1976–1977 season.

France, Luxembourg, and most of the Eastern Bloc along with their overseas territories opted for SECAM. SECAM was a popular choice in countries with much hilly terrain, and countries with a very large installed base of older monochrome equipment, which could cope much better with the greater ruggedness of the SECAM signal. However, for many countries the decision was more down to politics than technical merit.

A drawback of SECAM for production is that, unlike PAL or NTSC, certain post-production operations of encoded SECAM signals are not really possible without a significant drop in quality. As an example, a simple fade to black is trivial in NTSC and PAL: one merely reduces the signal level until it is zero. However, in SECAM the color difference signals, which are frequency modulated, need first to be decoded to e.g. RGB, then the fade-to-black is applied, and finally the resulting signal is re-encoded into SECAM. Because of this, much SECAM video editing was actually done using PAL equipment, then the resultant signal was converted to SECAM. Another drawback of SECAM is that comb filtering, allowing better color separation, is of limited use in SECAM receivers. This was not, however, much of a drawback in the early days of SECAM as such filters were not readily available in high-end TV sets before the 1990s.

The first regular color broadcasts in SECAM were started on October 1, 1967, on France's Second Channel (ORTF 2e chaîne). In France and the UK color broadcasts were made on 625-line UHF frequencies, the VHF band being used for black and white, 405 lines in UK or 819 lines in France, until the beginning of the 1980s. Countries elsewhere that were already broadcasting 625-line monochrome on VHF and UHF, simply transmitted color programs on the same channels.

Some British television programs, particularly those made by or for ITC Entertainment, were shot on color film before the introduction of color television to the UK, for the purpose of sales to US networks. The first British show to be made in color was the drama series The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956–57), which was initially made in black and white but later shot in color for sale to the NBC network in the United States. Other British color television programs made before the introduction of color television in the UK include Stingray (1964–1965), which was the first British TV show to be filmed entirely in color, Thunderbirds (1965–1966), The Baron (1966–1967), The Saint (from 1966 to 1969), The Avengers (from 1967 to 1969), Man in a Suitcase (1967–1968), The Prisoner (1967–1968) and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967–1968). However, most UK series predominantly made using videotape, such as Doctor Who (1963–89; 2005–present) did not begin color production until later, with the first color Doctor Who episodes not airing until 1970. (The first four, comprising the story Spearhead from Space, were shot on film owing to a technician's strike, with videotape being used thereafter.)

The last country in Europe (and in Asia and the world) to introduce color television was Georgia in 1984.

Asia and the Pacific

In Japan, NHK and NTV introduced color television, using a variation of the NTSC system (called NTSC-J) on September 10, 1960, making it the first country in Asia to introduce color television. The Philippines (1966) and Taiwan (1969) also adopted the NTSC system.

Other countries in the region instead used the PAL system, starting with Australia (1967, originally scheduled for 1972, but not fully implemented until 1975–1978), and then Thailand (1967–1969; this country converted from 525-line NTSC to 625-line PAL), Hong Kong (1967), the People's Republic of China (1971), New Zealand (1973), North Korea (1974), Singapore (1974), Pakistan (1976, but not fully implemented until 1982), Kazakhstan (1977), Vietnam (1977), Malaysia (1978, but not fully implemented until 1980), Indonesia (1979), India (1979, but not fully implemented until 1982–1986), Burma (1980), and Bangladesh (1980). South Korea did not introduce color television (using NTSC) until 1980–1981, although it was already manufacturing color television sets for export. The last country in Asia (and in Europe and the world) to introduce color television was Georgia in 1984.

Middle East

Nearly all of the countries in the Middle East use PAL. The first country in the Middle East to introduce color television was Iraq in 1967. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar followed in the mid-1970s, but Israel, Lebanon, and Cyprus continued to broadcast in black and white until the early 1980s. Israeli television even erased the color signals using a device called the mehikon.

Africa

The first color television service in Africa was introduced on the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar, in 1973, using PAL.[99] In 1973 also, MBC of Mauritius broadcast the OCAMM Conference, in color, using SECAM. At the time, South Africa did not have a television service at all, owing to opposition from the apartheid regime, but in 1976, one was finally launched. Nigeria adopted PAL for color transmissions in 1974 in the Benue Plateau state in the north central region of the country, but countries such as Ghana and Zimbabwe continued with black and white until 1984. The Sierra Leone Broadcasting Service (SLBS) started television broadcasting in 1963 as a cooperation between the SLBS and commercial interests; coverage was extended to all districts in 1978 when the service was also upgraded to color.

South America

Unlike most other countries in the Americas, which had adopted NTSC, Brazil began broadcasting in color using PAL-M, on February 19, 1972. Ecuador was the first South American country to broadcast in color using NTSC, on November 5, 1974. In 1978, Argentina started broadcasting in color using PAL-N in connection with the country's hosting of the FIFA World Cup. Some countries in South America, including Bolivia, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay, didn't broadcast full-time color television until the early 1980s.

Cor Dillen, director and later CEO of the South American branch of Philips, was responsible for bringing color television to South America.

Color standards

There are three main analog broadcast television systems in use around the world, PAL (Phase Alternating Line), NTSC (National Television System Committee), and SECAM (Séquentiel Couleur à Mémoire—Sequential Color with Memory).

The system used in The Americas and part of the Far East is NTSC. Most of Asia, Western Europe, Australia, Africa, and Eastern South America use PAL (though Brazil uses a hybrid PAL-M system). Eastern Europe and France uses SECAM. Generally, a device (such as a television) can only read or display video encoded to a standard that the device is designed to support; otherwise, the source must be converted (such as when European programs are broadcast in North America or vice versa).

[1] For SECAM the color sub-carrier alternates between 4.25000 MHz for the lines containing the Db color signal and 4.40625 MHz for the Dr signal (both are frequency modulated unlike both PAL and NTSC, which are phase modulated). The frequency of the sub-carrier is the only means that the decoder has of determining which color difference signal is actually being transmitted.

Digital television broadcasting standards, such as ATSC, DVB-T, DVB-T2, and ISDB, have superseded these analog transmission standards in many countries.

Saturday, March 26, 2022

Appeasement

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Adolf Hitler greets UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain at the beginning of the Bad Godesberg meeting on 24 September 1938, where Hitler demanded annexation of Czech border areas without delay (see Godesberg Memorandum)

Appeasement in an international context is a diplomatic policy of making political, material, or territorial concessions to an aggressive power in order to avoid conflict. The term is most often applied to the foreign policy of the UK governments of Prime Ministers Ramsay MacDonald (in office: 1929–1935), Stanley Baldwin (in office: 1935–1937) and (most notably) Neville Chamberlain (in office: 1937–1940) towards Nazi Germany (from 1933) and Fascist Italy (established in 1922) between 1935 and 1939. Under British pressure, appeasement of Nazism and Fascism also played a role in French foreign policy of the period, but was always much less popular than in the United Kingdom.

At the beginning of the 1930s, appeasing concessions were widely seen as desirable—due to the anti-war reaction to the trauma of World War I (1914–1918), second thoughts about the perceived vindictive treatment by some of Germany in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, and a perception that fascism was a useful form of anti-communism. However, by the time of the Munich Pact—concluded on 30 September 1938 between Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy—the policy was opposed by the Labour Party, by a few Conservative dissenters such as future Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War Duff Cooper, and future Prime Minister Anthony Eden. Appeasement was strongly supported by the British upper class, including royalty, big business (based in the City of London), the House of Lords, and media such as the BBC and The Times.

As alarm grew about the rise of fascism in Europe, Chamberlain resorted to attempts at news censorship to control public opinion. He confidently announced after Munich that he had secured "peace for our time".

Academics, politicians, and diplomats have intensely debated the 1930s appeasement policies for more than eighty years. The historians' assessments have ranged from condemnation ("Lesson of Munich") for allowing Hitler's Germany to grow too strong, to the judgment that Germany was so strong that it might well win a war and that postponement of a showdown was in their country's best interests.

Failure of collective security

"Appeasement policy, the policy of appeasing Hitler and Mussolini, operating jointly at that time, during 1937 and 1938 by continuous concessions granted in the hope of reaching a point of saturation when the dictators would be willing to accede to international collaboration. ... It came to an end when Hitler seized Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939, in defiance of his promises given at Munich, and Prime Minister Chamberlain, who had championed appeasement before, decided on a policy of resistance to further German aggression."

– Walter Theimer (ed.), The Penguin Political Dictionary, 1939

Chamberlain's policy of appeasement emerged from the failure of the League of Nations and the failure of collective security. The League of Nations was set up in the aftermath of World War I in the hope that international cooperation and collective resistance to aggression might prevent another war. Members of the League were entitled to the assistance of other members if they came under attack. The policy of collective security ran in parallel with measures to achieve international disarmament and where possible was to be based on economic sanctions against an aggressor. It appeared to be ineffectual when confronted by the aggression of dictators, notably Germany's Remilitarization of the Rhineland, and Italian leader Benito Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia.

Invasion of Manchuria

In September 1931, the Empire of Japan, a member of the League of Nations, invaded Manchuria in northeast China, claiming that its population was not only Chinese but was a multi-ethnic region. The Republic of China appealed to the League of Nations and the United States for assistance. The Council of the League asked the parties to withdraw to their original positions to permit a peaceful settlement. The United States reminded them of their duty under the Kellogg–Briand Pact to settle matters peacefully. Japan was undeterred and went on to occupy the whole of Manchuria. The League set up a commission of inquiry that condemned Japan, the League duly adopting the report in February 1933. In response, Japan resigned from the League and continued its advance into China; neither the League nor the United States took any action. However, the U.S. issued the Stimson Doctrine and refused to recognize Japan's conquest, which played a role in shifting U.S. policy to favour China over Japan in the late-1930s. Some historians, such as David Thomson, assert that the League's "inactivity and ineffectualness in the Far East lent every encouragement to European aggressors who planned similar acts of defiance".

Anglo-German Naval Agreement

In this 1935 pact, the UK permitted Germany to begin rebuilding its navy, including its U-boats, in spite of Hitler already having violated the Treaty of Versailles.

Abyssinia crisis

Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, circa 1942

Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini had imperial ambitions in Abyssinia. Italy was already in possession of neighbouring Eritrea and Somalia. In December 1934, there was a clash between Italian and Abyssinian troops at Walwal, near the border between British and Italian Somaliland, in which Italian troops took possession of the disputed territory and in which 150 Abyssinians and 50 Italians were killed. When Italy demanded apologies and compensation from Abyssinia, Abyssinia appealed to the League, Emperor Haile Selassie famously appealing in person to the assembly in Geneva. The League persuaded both sides to seek a settlement under the Italo-Ethiopian Treaty of 1928 but Italy continued troop movements and Abyssinia appealed to the League again. In October 1935 Mussolini launched an attack on Abyssinia. The League declared Italy to be the aggressor and imposed sanctions, but coal and oil were not included; blocking these, it was thought, would provoke war. Albania, Austria, and Hungary refused to apply sanctions; Germany and the United States were not in the League. Nevertheless, the Italian economy suffered. The League considered closing off the Suez Canal also, which would have stopped arms to Abyssinia, but, thinking it would be too harsh a measure, they did not do so.

Earlier, in April 1935, Italy had joined Britain and France in protest against Germany's rearmament. France was anxious to placate Mussolini so as to keep him away from an alliance with Germany. Britain was less hostile to Germany and set the pace in imposing sanctions and moved a naval fleet into the Mediterranean but in November 1935, the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare and the French Prime Minister, Pierre Laval, had secret discussions in which they agreed to concede two-thirds of Abyssinia to Italy. However, the press leaked the content of the discussions and a public outcry forced Hoare and Laval to resign. In May 1936, undeterred by sanctions, Italy captured Addis Ababa, the Abyssinian capital, and proclaimed Victor Emmanuel III the Emperor of Ethiopia. In July the League abandoned sanctions. This episode, in which sanctions were incomplete and appeared to be easily given up, seriously discredited the League.

Remilitarisation of the Rhineland

UK Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin

Under the Versailles Settlement, the Rhineland was demilitarised. Germany accepted this arrangement under the Locarno Treaties of 1925. Hitler claimed that it threatened Germany and on 7 March 1936, he sent German forces into the Rhineland. He gambled on Britain not getting involved but was unsure how France would react. The action was opposed by many of his advisers. His officers had orders to withdraw if they met French resistance. France consulted Britain and lodged protests with the League, but took no action. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin said that Britain lacked the forces to back its guarantees to France and that in any case, public opinion would not allow it. In Britain, it was thought that the Germans were merely walking into "their own backyard". Hugh Dalton, a Labour Party MP who usually advocated stiff resistance to Germany, said that neither the British people nor Labour would support military or economic sanctions. In the Council of the League, only the Soviet Union proposed sanctions against Germany. Hitler was invited to negotiate. He proposed a non-aggression pact with the Western powers. When asked for details he did not reply. Hitler's occupation of the Rhineland had persuaded him that the international community would not resist him and put Germany in a powerful strategic position.

Spanish Civil War

Many historians argue that the British policy of non-intervention was a product of the Establishment's anti-Communist stance. Scott Ramsay (2019) instead argues that Britain demonstrated "benevolent neutrality". It was simply hedging its bets, avoiding favouring one side or the other. The goal was that in a European war Britain would enjoy the 'benevolent neutrality' of whichever side won in Spain.

Conduct of appeasement, 1937–1939

Seyss-Inquart and Hitler in Vienna, March 1938

In 1937 Stanley Baldwin resigned as Prime Minister and Neville Chamberlain took over. Chamberlain pursued a policy of appeasement and rearmament. Chamberlain's reputation for appeasement rests in large measure on his negotiations with Hitler over Czechoslovakia in 1938.

Anschluss

When the German Empire and Austro-Hungarian Empire were broken up in 1918, Austria was left as a rump state with the temporary adopted name Deutschösterreich ("German-Austria"), with the vast majority of the Austrian Germans wanting to join Germany. However, the victors' agreements of World War I (Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of Saint-Germain) strictly forbade union between Austria and Germany, as well as the name "German-Austria", which reverted to "Austria" after the emergence of the First Republic of Austria in September 1919. The constitutions of both the Weimar Republic and the First Austrian Republic included the aim of unification, which was supported by democratic parties. However, the rise of Hitler dampened the enthusiasm of the Austrian government for such a plan. Hitler, an Austrian by birth, had been a pan-German from a very young age and had promoted a Pan-German vision of a Greater German Reich from the beginning of his career in politics. He said in Mein Kampf (1924) that he would attempt a union of his birth country Austria with Germany, by any means possible and by force if necessary. By early 1938, Hitler had consolidated his power in Germany and was ready to implement this long-held plan.

The Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg wished to pursue ties with Italy, but turned to Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania (the Little Entente). To this Hitler took violent exception. In January 1938 the Austrian Nazi Party attempted a putsch, following which some were imprisoned. Hitler summoned Schuschnigg to Berchtesgaden in February and demanded, with the threat of military action, that he release imprisoned Austrian Nazis and allow them to participate in the government. Schuschnigg complied and appointed Arthur Seyss-Inquart, a pro-Nazi lawyer, as interior minister. To forestall Hitler and to preserve Austria's independence, Schuschnigg scheduled a plebiscite on the issue for 13 March. Hitler demanded that the plebiscite be cancelled. The German Propaganda Ministry issued press reports that riots had broken out in Austria and that large parts of the Austrian population were calling for German troops to restore order. On 11 March, Hitler sent an ultimatum to Schuschnigg, demanding that he hand over all power to the Austrian Nazis or face an invasion. The British Ambassador in Berlin, Nevile Henderson, registered a protest with the German government against the use of coercion against Austria. Schuschnigg, realising that neither France nor the United Kingdom would actively support him, resigned in favour of Seyss-Inquart, who then appealed to German troops to restore order. On 12 March the German Wehrmacht crossed the Austrian border. They met no resistance and were greeted by cheering Austrians. This invasion was the first major test of the Wehrmacht's machinery. Austria became the German province of Ostmark, with Seyss-Inquart as governor. A plebiscite was held on 10 April and officially recorded a support of 99.73% of the voters.

Although the victorious Allies of World War I had prohibited the union of Austria and Germany, their reaction to the Anschluss was mild. Even the strongest voices against annexation, particularly those of Fascist Italy, France and Britain (the "Stresa Front") were not backed by force. In the House of Commons Chamberlain said that "The hard fact is that nothing could have arrested what has actually happened [in Austria] unless this country and other countries had been prepared to use force." The American reaction was similar. The international reaction to the events of 12 March 1938 led Hitler to conclude that he could use even more aggressive tactics in his plan to expand the Third Reich. The Anschluss paved the way for Munich in September 1938 because it indicated the likely non-response of Britain and France to future German aggression.

From left to right: Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini, and Ciano pictured before signing the Munich Agreement, which gave the Czechoslovak border areas to Germany.

Munich Agreement

"How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing."

Neville Chamberlain, 27 September 1938, 8 p.m. radio broadcast, on Czechoslovak refusal to accept Nazi demands to cede border areas to Germany.

Under the Versailles Settlement, Czechoslovakia was created with the territory of the Czech part more or less corresponding to the Czech Crown lands as they had existed within the Austria-Hungary and before. It included Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia and had border areas with a majority German population known as the Sudetenland and areas with significant numbers of other ethnic minorities (notably Hungarians, Poles, and Ruthenes). In April 1938, the Sudeten German Party, led by Konrad Henlein, agitated for autonomy and then threatened, in Henlein's words, "direct action to bring the Sudeten Germans within the frontiers of the Reich". An international crisis ensued.

France and Britain advised Czech acceptance of Sudeten autonomy. The Czech government refused and ordered a partial mobilisation in expectation of German aggression. Lord Runciman was sent by Chamberlain to mediate in Prague and persuaded the Czech government to grant autonomy. Germany escalated the dispute, the German press carrying stories of alleged Czech atrocities against Sudeten Germans and Hitler ordering 750,000 troops to the German-Czech border. In August, Henlein broke off negotiations with the Czech authorities. At a Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg on 12 September, Hitler made a speech attacking Czechoslovakia and there was an increase of violence by Sudeten Nazis against Czech and Jewish targets.

Chamberlain, faced with the prospect of a German invasion, flew to Berchtesgaden on 15 September to negotiate directly with Hitler. Hitler now demanded that Chamberlain accept not merely Sudeten self-government within Czechoslovakia, but the absorption of the Sudeten lands into Germany. Chamberlain became convinced that refusal would lead to war. The geography of Europe was such that Britain and France could forcibly prevent the German occupation of the Sudetenland only by the invasion of Germany. Chamberlain, therefore, returned to Britain and agreed to Hitler's demands. Britain and France told the Czech president Edvard Beneš that he must hand to Germany all territory with a German majority. Hitler increased his aggression against Czechoslovakia and ordered the establishment of a Sudeten German paramilitary organisation, which proceeded to carry out terrorist attacks on Czech targets.

German annexation of the Sudetenland

On 22 September, Chamberlain flew to Bad Godesberg for his second meeting with Hitler. He said he was willing to accept the cession of the Sudetenland to Germany. He was startled by Hitler's response: Hitler said that cession of the Sudetenland was not enough and that Czechoslovakia (which he had described as a "fraudulent state") must be broken up completely. Later in the day, Hitler resiled, saying that he was willing to accept the cession of the Sudetenland by 1 October. On 24 September, Germany issued the Godesberg Memorandum, demanding cession by 28 September, or war. The Czechs rejected these demands, France ordered mobilisation and Britain mobilised its Navy.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, landing at Heston Aerodrome on 30 September 1938 after his meeting with Hitler at Munich. In his hand he holds the peace agreement between Britain and Germany.

On 26 September Hitler made a speech at the Sportpalast in Berlin in which he claimed that the Sudetenland was "the last territorial demand I have to make in Europe," and gave Czechoslovakia a deadline of 28 September at 2:00pm to cede the territory to Germany or face war.

In this atmosphere of growing conflict, Mussolini persuaded Hitler to put the dispute to a four-power conference and on 29 September 1938, Hitler, Chamberlain, Édouard Daladier (the French Prime Minister) and Mussolini met in Munich. Czechoslovakia was not to be a party to these talks, nor was the Soviet Union. The four powers agreed that Germany would complete its occupation of the Sudetenland but that an international commission would consider other disputed areas. Czechoslovakia was told that if it did not submit, it would stand alone. At Chamberlain's request, Hitler readily signed a peace treaty between the United Kingdom and Germany. Chamberlain returned to Britain promising "peace for our time". Before Munich, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent a telegram to Chamberlain saying "Goodman", and afterward told the American ambassador in Rome William Phillips, "I am not a bit upset over the final result."

First Vienna Award, German annexation of Bohemia and Moravia

As a result of the annexation of the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia lost 800,000 citizens, much of its industry and its mountain defences in the west. It left the rest of Czechoslovakia weak and powerless to resist subsequent occupation. In the following months Czechoslovakia was broken up and ceased to exist as Germany annexed the Sudetenland, Hungary part of Slovakia including Carpathian Ruthenia, and Poland Zaolzie. On 15 March 1939, the German Wehrmacht moved into the remainder of Czechoslovakia and, from Prague Castle, Hitler proclaimed Bohemia and Moravia the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, completing the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. An independent Slovakia was created under a pro-Nazi puppet government.

In March 1939, Chamberlain foresaw a possible disarmament conference between himself, Edouard Daladier, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin; his home secretary, Samuel Hoare, said, "These five men, working together in Europe and blessed in their efforts by the President of the United States of America, might make themselves eternal benefactors of the human race."

In effect, the British and French had, through the Munich negotiations, pressured their ally Czechoslovakia to cede part of its territory to a hostile neighbour in order to preserve peace. Winston Churchill likened the negotiations at Berchtesgarten, Bad Godesberg and Munich to a man demanding £1, then, when it is offered, demanding £2, then when it is refused settling for £1.17s.6d. British leaders committed to the Munich Pact in spite of their awareness of Hitler's vulnerability at the time. In August 1938, General Ludwig Beck relayed a message to Lord Halifax explaining that most of the German General Staff were preparing a coup against the Fuhrer, but would only attack with "proof that England will fight if Czechoslovakia is attacked". When Chamberlain received the news, he dismissed it out of hand. In September, the British received assurance that the General Staff's offer to launch the coup still stood, with key private sector, police and army support, even though Beck had resigned his post. Chamberlain ultimately ceded to all of Hitler's demands at Munich because he believed Britain and Nazi Germany were "the two pillars of European peace and buttresses against communism".

Czechoslovakia had a modern, well-prepared military and Hitler, on entering Prague, conceded that a war would have cost Germany much blood but the decision by France and Great Britain not to defend Czechoslovakia in the event of war (and the exclusion from the equation of the Soviet Union, whom Chamberlain distrusted) meant that the outcome would have been uncertain. This event forms the main part of what became known as Munich betrayal (Czech: Mnichovská zrada) in Czechoslovakia and the rest of Eastern Europe, as the Czech view was that Britain and France pressured them to cede territory in order to prevent a major war that would involve the West. The Western view is that they were pressured in order to save Czechoslovakia from total annihilation.

German annexation of Lithuania's Klaipėda Region

Rumors had reached the Lithuanian government to the effect that Germany had specific plans to take over Klaipėda. On 12 March Foreign Minister Urbšys represented Lithuania at the coronation of Pope Pius XII in Rome. On his return to Lithuania he stopped in Berlin with the hope of clarifying the growing rumors. On 20 March, just five days after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, Ribbentrop agreed to meet with Urbšys, but not with Kazys Škirpa, who was asked to wait in another room. The conversation lasted for about 40 minutes. Ribbentrop demanded the return of Klaipėda to Germany and threatened military action. Urbšys relayed the verbal ultimatum to the Lithuanian government. Because the ultimatum was never set down in writing and did not include a formal deadline, some historians have downplayed its importance, describing it as a "set of demands" rather than as an ultimatum. However, it was made clear that force would be used should Lithuania resist, and it was warned not to seek help from other nations. While a clear deadline was not given, Lithuania was told to make a speedy decision and that any clashes or German casualties would inevitably provoke a response from the German military.

Lithuania secretly informed the signatories of the Klaipėda Convention about these demands, since technically Lithuania could not transfer Klaipėda without the approval of the signatories. Italy and Japan supported Germany in the matter, while the United Kingdom and France expressed sympathy for Lithuania but chose not to offer any material assistance. They followed a well-publicized policy of appeasing Hitler. The UK treated the issue in the same way as it had treated the Sudeten Crisis and made no plans to assist Lithuania or the other Baltic States if they were attacked by Germany. The Soviet Union, while supporting Lithuania in principle, did not wish to disrupt its relations with Germany at that point, since it was contemplating a pact with the Nazis. Without any material international support Lithuania had no choice but to accept the ultimatum. Lithuanian diplomacy characterized the concession as a "necessary evil" that would enable Lithuania to preserve its independence and maintained the hope that it was merely a temporary retreat.

Outbreak of World War II and the Phoney War

By August 1939 Hitler was convinced that the democratic nations would never put up any effective opposition to him. He expressed his contempt for them in a speech he delivered to his Commanders in Chief: "Our enemies have leaders who are below the average. No personalities. No masters, no men of action… Our enemies are small fry. I saw them in Munich."

On 1 September 1939, German forces invaded Poland; Britain and France joined the war against Germany, but initially averted serious military involvement during the period known as the Phoney War. Following the German invasion of Norway, opinion turned against Chamberlain's conduct of the war; he resigned, and on 10 May 1940 Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. In July, following the Fall of France, when Britain stood almost alone against Germany, Hitler offered peace. Some politicians inside and outside the government were willing to consider the offer but Churchill would not. Chamberlain died on 9 November the same year. Churchill delivered a tribute to him in which he said, "Whatever else history may or may not say about these terrible, tremendous years, we can be sure that Neville Chamberlain acted with perfect sincerity according to his lights and strove to the utmost of his capacity and authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the awful, devastating struggle in which we are now engaged."

Attitudes towards appeasement

As the policy of appeasement failed to prevent war, those who advocated it were quickly criticised. Appeasement came to be seen as something to be avoided by those with responsibility for the diplomacy of Britain or any other democratic country. By contrast, the few who stood out against appeasement were seen as "voices in the wilderness whose wise counsels were largely ignored, with almost catastrophic consequences for the nation in 1939–40". More recently, however, historians have questioned the accuracy of this simple distinction between appeasers and anti-appeasers. "Few appeasers were really prepared to seek peace at any price; few, if any, anti-appeasers were prepared for Britain to make a stand against aggression whatever the circumstances and wherever the location in which it occurred."

Avoiding the mistakes of the Great War

Chamberlain's policy in many respects continued the policies of MacDonald and Baldwin, and was popular until the failure of the Munich Agreement to stop Hitler in Czechoslovakia. "Appeasement" had been a respectable term between 1919 and 1937 to signify the pursuit of peace. Many believed after the First World War that wars were started by mistake, in which case the League of Nations could prevent them, or that they were caused by large-scale armaments, in which case disarmament was the remedy, or that they were caused by national grievances, in which case the grievances should be redressed peacefully. Many thought that the Versailles Settlement had been unjust, that the German minorities were entitled to self-determination and that Germany was entitled to equality in armaments.

Government views

Appeasement was accepted by most of those responsible for British foreign policy in the 1930s, by leading journalists and academics and by members of the royal family, such as King Edward VIII and his successor, George VI. Anti-communism was sometimes acknowledged as a deciding factor, as mass labour unrest resurfaced in Britain, and news of Stalin's bloody purges disturbed the West. A common upper-class slogan was "better Hitlerism than Communism". (In France, right-wingers were sometimes heard to chant "Better Hitler than Blum," referring to their Socialist Prime Minister Léon Blum at the time.) Anticommunism was a motiv of a close ally of Chamberlain, Lord Halifax. After visiting Göring and meeting Hitler in Germany in 1936 and 1937 he said: "Nationalism and Racialism is a powerful force but I can't feel that it's either unnatural or immoral! I cannot myself doubt that these fellows are genuine haters of Communism, etc.! And I daresay if we were in their position we might feel the same!"

Most Conservative MPs were also in favour, though Churchill said their supporters were divided and in 1936 he led a delegation of leading Conservative politicians to express to Baldwin their alarm about the speed of German rearmament and the fact that Britain was falling behind. Baldwin rejected their sense of urgency, declaring he would not get Britain to war with anybody "for the League of Nations or anybody else", and that if there were to be any fighting in Europe, "I should like to see the Bolshies and Nazis doing it." Amongst Conservatives, Churchill was unusual in believing that Germany menaced freedom and democracy, that British rearmament should proceed more rapidly and that Germany should be resisted over Czechoslovakia. His criticism of Hitler began from the start of the decade, yet Churchill was slow to attack fascism overall due to his own vitriolic opposition to Communists, "international Jews", and socialism generally. Churchill's sustained warnings about fascism only commenced in 1938 after Hitler's ally, Francisco Franco, decimated the left in Spain.

The week before Munich, Churchill warned "The partition of Czechoslovakia under pressure from the UK and France amounts to the complete surrender of the Western Democracies to the Nazi threat of force. Such a collapse will bring peace or security neither to the UK nor to France." He and a few other Conservatives who refused to vote for the Munich settlement were attacked by their local constituency parties. However Churchill's subsequent leadership of Britain during the war and his role in creating the post-war consensus against appeasement has tended to obscure the fact that "his contemporary criticism of totalitarian regimes other than Hitler's Germany was at best muted". Not until May 1938 did he begin "consistently to withhold his support from the National Government's conduct of foreign policy in the division lobbies of the House of Commons", and he seems "to have been convinced by the Sudeten German leader, Henlein, in the spring of 1938, that a satisfactory settlement could be reached if Britain managed to persuade the Czech government to make concessions to the German minority".

Military views

In Britain the Royal Navy generally favoured appeasement. In the Italian Abyssinia Crisis of 1937 it was confident it could easily defeat the Royal Italian Navy in open warfare. However, it favoured appeasement because it did not want to commit a large fraction of its naval power to the Mediterranean, thereby weakening its positions against Germany and Japan. In 1938, the Royal Navy approved appeasement regarding Munich because it calculated that at that moment, Britain lacked the political and military resources to intervene and still maintain an imperial defence capability.

Public opinion in Britain throughout the 1930s was frightened by the prospect of German terror bombing of British cities, as they had started to do in the First World War. The media emphasised the dangers, and the general consensus was that defence was impossible and, as Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had said in 1932 "The bomber will always get through." However, the Royal Air Force had two major weapons systems in the works—better interceptors (Hurricanes and Spitfires) and especially radar. These promised to counter the German bombing offensive. However they were not yet ready, so that appeasement was necessary to cause a delay. Specifically regarding the fighters, the RAF warned the government in October 1938 that the German bombers would probably get through: "the situation... will be definitely unsatisfactory throughout the next twelve months."

In France, the Air Force intelligence section closely examined the strength of the Luftwaffe. It decided the German pursuit planes and bombers were the best in the world, and that the Nazis were producing 1000 warplanes a month. They perceived decisive German air superiority, so the Air Force was pessimistic about its ability to defend Czechoslovakia in 1938. Guy La Chambre, the civilian air minister, optimistically informed the government that the air force was capable of stopping the Luftwaffe. However, General Joseph Vuillemin, air force chief of staff, warned that his arm was far inferior. He consistently opposed war with Germany.

Opposition parties

The Labour Party opposed the Fascist dictators on principle, but until the late 1930s it also opposed rearmament and it had a significant pacifist wing. In 1935 its pacifist leader George Lansbury resigned following a party resolution in favour of sanctions against Italy, which he opposed. He was replaced by Clement Attlee, who at first opposed rearmament, advocating the abolition of national armaments and a world peace-keeping force under the direction of the League of Nations. However, with the rising threat from Nazi Germany, and the ineffectiveness of the League of Nations, this policy eventually lost credibility, and in 1937 Ernest Bevin and Hugh Dalton persuaded the party to support rearmament and oppose appeasement.

A few on the left said that Chamberlain looked forward to a war between Germany and the Soviet Union. The Labour Party leader Clement Attlee claimed in one political speech in 1937 that the National Government had connived at German rearmament "because of its hatred of Russia". British Communists, following the party line defined by Joseph Stalin, argued that appeasement had been a pro-Fascist policy and that the British ruling class would have preferred fascism to socialism. The Communist MP Willie Gallacher said that "many prominent representatives of the Conservative Party, speaking for powerful landed and financial interests in the country, would welcome Hitler and the German Army if they believed that such was the only alternative to the establishment of Socialism in this country."

Public opinion

British public opinion had been strongly opposed to war and rearmament at the beginning of the 1930s, although this began to shift by mid-decade. At a debate at the Oxford Union Society in 1933, a group of undergraduates passed a motion saying that they would not fight for King and country, which persuaded some in Germany that Britain would never go to war. Baldwin told the House of Commons that in 1933 he had been unable to pursue a policy of rearmament because of the strong pacifist sentiment in the country. In 1935, eleven million responded to the League of Nations "Peace Ballot" by pledging support for the reduction of armaments by international agreement. On the other hand, the same survey also found that 58.7% of British voters favoured "collective military sanctions" against aggressors, and public reaction to the Hoare-Laval Pact with Mussolini was extremely unfavorable. Even the left-wing of the pacifist movement quickly began to turn with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and many peace-balloters began signing up for the international brigades to fight Hitler's ally Francisco Franco. By the height of the Spanish conflict in 1937, the majority of young pacifists had modified their views to accept that war could be a legitimate response to aggression and fascism.

Czechoslovakia did not concern most people until the middle of September 1938, when they began to object to a small democratic state being bullied. Nevertheless, the initial response of the British public to the Munich agreement was generally favourable. As Chamberlain left for Munich in 1938, the whole House of Commons cheered him noisily. On 30 September, on his return to Britain, Chamberlain delivered his famous "peace for our time" speech to delighted crowds. He was invited by the Royal family onto the balcony at Buckingham Palace before he had reported to Parliament. The agreement was supported by most of the press, only Reynold's News and the Daily Worker dissenting. In parliament the Labour Party opposed the agreement. Some Conservatives abstained in the vote. However, the only MP to advocate war was the Conservative Duff Cooper, who had resigned from the government in protest against the agreement.

Role of the media

Positive opinion of appeasement was shaped partly by media manipulation. The German correspondent for the Times of London, Norman Ebbutt, charged that his persistent reports about Nazi militarism were suppressed by his editor Geoffrey Dawson. Historians such as Richard Cockett, William Shirer, and Frank McDonough have confirmed the claim, and also noted the links between The Observer and the pro-appeasement Cliveden Set. The results of an October 1938 Gallup poll which showed 86% of the public believed Hitler was lying about his future territorial ambitions was censored from the News Chronicle at the last minute by the publisher, who was loyal to Chamberlain. For the few journalists who were asking challenging questions about appeasement – primarily members of the foreign press – Chamberlain often froze them out or intimidated them. When asked at press conferences about Hitler's abuse of Jews and other minority groups, he went so far as to denounce these reports as "Jewish-Communist propaganda".

Chamberlain's direct manipulation of the BBC was sustained and egregious. For example, Lord Halifax told radio producers not to offend Hitler and Mussolini, and they complied by censoring anti-fascist commentary made by Labour and Popular Front MPs. The BBC also suppressed the fact that 15,000 people protested the prime minister in Trafalgar Square as he returned from Munich in 1938 (10,000 more than welcomed him at 10 Downing Street). The BBC radio producers continued to censor news of Jewish persecution even after the war broke out, as Chamberlain still held out hopes of a quick armistice and did not want to inflame the atmosphere. As Richard Cockett noted:

[Chamberlain] had successfully demonstrated how a government in a democracy could influence and control the press to a remarkable degree. The danger in this for Chamberlain was that he preferred to forget that he exercised such influence, and so increasingly mistook his pliant press for real public opinion...the truth of the matter was that by controlling the press he was merely ensuring that the press was unable to reflect public opinion.

The journalist Shiela Grant Duff's Penguin Special, Europe and the Czechs was published and distributed to every MP on the day that Chamberlain returned from Munich. Her book was a spirited defence of the Czech nation and a detailed criticism of British policy, confronting the need for war if necessary. It was influential and widely read. Although she argued against the policy of "peace at almost any price" she did not take the personal tone that Guilty Men was to take two years later.

At the start of World War II

Once Germany invaded Poland, igniting World War II, consensus was that appeasement was responsible. The Labour MP Hugh Dalton identified the policy with wealthy people in the City of London, Conservatives and members of the peerage who were soft on Hitler. The appointment of Churchill as Prime Minister after the Norway Debate hardened opinion against appeasement and encouraged the search for those responsible. Three British journalists, Michael Foot, Frank Owen and Peter Howard, writing under the name of "Cato" in their book Guilty Men, called for the removal from office of 15 public figures they held accountable, including Chamberlain. The book defined appeasement as the "deliberate surrender of small nations in the face of Hitler's blatant bullying". It was hastily written and has few claims to historical scholarship, but Guilty Men shaped subsequent thinking about appeasement and it is said that it contributed to the defeat of the Conservatives in the 1945 general election.

The change in the meaning of "appeasement" after Munich was summarised later by the historian David Dilks: "The word in its normal meaning connotes the pacific settlement of disputes; in the meaning usually applied to the period of Neville Chamberlain['s] premiership, it has come to indicate something sinister, the granting from fear or cowardice of unwarranted concessions in order to buy temporary peace at someone else's expense."

After the Second World War: historians

Churchill's book The Gathering Storm, published in 1948, made a similar judgment to Guilty Men, though in moderate tones. This book and Churchill's authority confirmed the orthodox view.

Historians have subsequently explained Chamberlain's policies in various ways. It could be said that he believed sincerely that the objectives of Hitler and Mussolini were limited and that the settlement of their grievances would protect the world from war; for safety, military and air power should be strengthened. Many have judged this belief to be fallacious, since the dictators' demands were not limited and appeasement gave them time to gain greater strength.

One of the first dissents to the prevailing criticism of appeasement was made by John F. Kennedy in his 1940 Harvard College thesis Why England Slept, in which he argued that appeasement had been necessary because the United Kingdom and France were unprepared for a world war.

In 1961 the view of appeasement as avoidable error and cowardice was similarly set on its head by A.J.P. Taylor in his book The Origins of the Second World War. Taylor argued that Hitler did not have a blueprint for war and was behaving much as any other German leader might have done. Appeasement was an active policy, and not a passive one; allowing Hitler to consolidate was a policy implemented by "men confronted with real problems, doing their best in the circumstances of their time". Taylor said that appeasement ought to be seen as a rational response to an unpredictable leader, appropriate to the time both diplomatically and politically.

His view has been shared by other historians, for example Paul Kennedy, who says of the choices facing politicians at the time, "Each course brought its share of disadvantages: there was only a choice of evils. The crisis in the British global position by this time was such that it was, in the last resort, insoluble, in the sense that there was no good or proper solution." Martin Gilbert has expressed a similar view: "At bottom, the old appeasement was a mood of hope, Victorian in its optimism, Burkean in its belief that societies evolved from bad to good and that progress could only be for the better. The new appeasement was a mood of fear, Hobbesian in its insistence upon swallowing the bad in order to preserve some remnant of the good, pessimistic in its belief that Nazism was there to stay and, however horrible it might be, should be accepted as a way of life with which Britain ought to deal."

The arguments in Taylor's Origins of the Second World War (sometimes described as "revisionist") were rejected by many historians at the time, and reviews of his book in Britain and the United States were generally critical. Nevertheless, he was praised for some of his insights. By showing that appeasement was a popular policy and that there was continuity in British foreign policy after 1933, he shattered the common view of the appeasers as a small, degenerate clique that had mysteriously hijacked the British government sometime in the 1930s and who had carried out their policies in the face of massive public resistance; and by portraying the leaders of the 1930s as real people attempting to deal with real problems, he made the first strides towards explaining the actions of the appeasers rather than merely condemning them.

In the early 1990s a new theory of appeasement, sometimes called "counter-revisionist", emerged as historians argued that appeasement was probably the only choice for the British government in the 1930s, but that it was poorly implemented, carried out too late and not enforced strongly enough to constrain Hitler. Appeasement was considered a viable policy, considering the strains that the British Empire faced in recuperating from World War I, and Chamberlain was said to have adopted a policy suitable to Britain's cultural and political needs. Frank McDonough is a leading proponent of this view of appeasement and describes his book Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement and the British Road to War as a "post revisionist" study. Appeasement was a crisis management strategy seeking a peaceful settlement of Hitler's grievances. "Chamberlain's worst error", says McDonough, "was to believe that he could march Hitler on the yellow brick road to peace when in reality Hitler was marching very firmly on the road to war." He has criticised revisionist historians for concentrating on Chamberlain's motivations rather than how appeasement worked in practice – as a "usable policy" to deal with Hitler. James P. Levy argues against the outright condemnation of appeasement. "Knowing what Hitler did later," he writes, "the critics of Appeasement condemn the men who tried to keep the peace in the 1930s, men who could not know what would come later. ... The political leaders responsible for Appeasement made many errors. They were not blameless. But what they attempted was logical, rational, and humane."

The view of Chamberlain colluding with Hitler to attack Russia has persisted, however, particularly on the far-left. In 1999, Christopher Hitchens wrote that Chamberlain "had made a cold calculation that Hitler should be re-armed...partly to encourage his 'tough-minded' solution to the Bolshevik problem in the East". While consciously encouraging war with Stalin is not widely accepted to be a motive of the Downing Street appeasers, there is historical consensus that anti-communism was central to appeasement's appeal for the conservative elite. As Antony Beevor writes, "The policy of appeasement was not Neville Chamberlin's invention. Its roots lay in a fear of bolshevism. The general strike of 1926 and the depression made the possibility of revolution a very real concern to conservative politicians. As a result, they had mixed feelings towards the German and Italian regimes which had crushed the communists and socialists in their own countries."

After the Second World War: politicians

Statesmen in the post-war years have often referred to their opposition to appeasement as a justification for firm, sometimes armed, action in international relations.

U.S. President Harry S. Truman thus explained his decision to enter the Korean War in 1950, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden his confrontation of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the Suez Crisis of 1956, U.S. President John F. Kennedy his "quarantine" of Cuba in 1962, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson his resistance to communism in Indochina in the 1960s, U.S. President Ronald Reagan his air strike on Libya in 1986, and U.S. President Donald Trump his drone strike to assassinate Qassim Soleimani in 2020.

After the Viet Minh won the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote in a letter to British Prime Minister Churchill, "We failed to halt Hirohito, Mussolini and Hitler by not acting in unity and in time. That marked the beginning of many years of stark tragedy and desperate peril. May it not be that our nations have learned something from that lesson?" Similarly, President Lyndon B. Johnson said in defense of the Vietnam War, "Everything I knew about history told me that if I got out of Vietnam and let Ho Chi Minh run through the streets of Saigon, then I'd be doing exactly what Chamberlain did in World War II. I'd be giving a big fat reward to aggression."

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay and various hawks within the Kennedy administration who favored an air strike on Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba compared Kennedy's hesitance to do so to appeasement. This was partially a jab at Kennedy's father Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., who had favored appeasement while U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom and later a negotiated surrender to Nazi Germany during the May 1940 War Cabinet Crisis and the Battle of Britain.

During the Cold War, the "lessons" of appeasement were cited by prominent conservative allies of Reagan, who urged Reagan to be assertive in "rolling back" Soviet-backed regimes throughout the world. The Heritage Foundation's Michael Johns, for instance, wrote in 1987 that "seven years after Ronald Reagan's arrival in Washington, the United States government and its allies are still dominated by the culture of appeasement that drove Neville Chamberlain to Munich in 1938." Some conservatives even compared Reagan to Chamberlain after his withdrawal of the Multinational Force in Lebanon following the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing.

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher invoked the example of Churchill during the Falklands War of 1982: "When the American Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, urged her to reach a compromise with the Argentines she rapped sharply on the table and told him, pointedly, 'that this was the table at which Neville Chamberlain sat in 1938 and spoke of the Czechs as a faraway people about whom we know so little'." Thatcher, along with U.S. National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, made similar arguments after the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the planning for the Persian Gulf War. The spectre of appeasement was raised in discussions of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.

U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair also cited Churchill's warnings about German rearmament to justify their action in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War.

In 2013, Obama administration officials such as Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel claimed that a failure of the United States to intervene in the Syrian Civil War after the 2013 Ghouta chemical attack would be an act of appeasement towards Bashar al-Assad.

In May 2008, President Bush cautioned against "the false comfort of appeasement" when dealing with Iran and its President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Opponents of President Barack Obama later criticized the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action as an act of appeasement with Iran. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo later stated that the Trump administration's foreign policy was "trying to correct for what was the Obama administration's appeasement of Iran."

Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali demands a confrontational policy at the European level to meet the threat of radical Islam, and compares policies of non-confrontation to Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler.

Tibetan separatists consider the policy of the West towards China with regard to Tibet as appeasement.

Some experts noted that NATO countries have been following the policy of appeasement towards Vladimir Putin's Russia by rejecting the support of the Ukrainian democracy through any military operations during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Degenerative disc disease

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