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Why England Slept (1940) is the published version of a thesis written by John F. Kennedy in his senior year at Harvard College. Its title alludes to Winston Churchill's 1938 book Arms and the Covenant, published in the United States as While England Slept, which also examined the buildup of German power. [1]
It asks why England did not prevent German aggression, and why they pursued a policy of appeasement (they did not have the power to back up any threats). On a larger level it is about the relative merits and weaknesses of democracy compared to totalitarian government.
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- 55,000 British civilian casualties were sustained through German bombing before the end of 1940. This included 23,000 deaths.
- London was bombed for 57 consecutive nights from 7 September 1940.
- At this time, as many as 180,000 people per night sheltered within the London underground system.
- The rubble from bombed cities was used to lay runways for the RAF across the south and east of England. On the 73rd anniversary of the firebombing of Dresden, Dan Snow accompanies British veteran Victor Gregg, a POW in Dresden during the raid, as he returns to the city for a historic meeting with Irene Uhlendorf, who was just 4 years old on the night of the bombing.
The copyright law extends its protection to unpublished works from the moment of creation in a tangible form. Page Last Updated: October 28, 2023 10:46:23 AM EDT. This folder contains a copy of President Kennedy’s honors thesis titled, “Appeasement at Munich,” later published as, "Why England Slept."
British policy becomes a “permissive” cause of World War II by allowing Hitler to rearm Germany, consolidate western German frontiers, and expand towards the east. First, the British failed to prevent Hitler from occupying the Rhineland in March, 1936, and then merely protested the German annexation of Austria two years later.
On September 3rd, 1939 Britain was a very different country from that of today. As she prepared to declare war on Germany, Britain was still struggling with the vestiges of an Empire upon which the “sun never set” and the world economic crisis triggered by the Wall Street Crash ten years beforehand.
So why did Britain not act earlier? Britain’s approach to Germany in the ‘30s is known as appeasement. Some people, like Winston Churchill, thought it was a cowardly policy, but was it?
