; its shades of meaning will be explored later in this essay. But "its greatest strength was drawn from the deep-seated horror of war which had gripped [Britain] since 1918 and which could point to the subsequent failure of armed Western intervention in Russia, Turkey and the Ruhr."
Thus, in the end, suggests Thorne, the crucial component at Munich, and in all the events that surrounded it, was that the West entered the crisis already unnerved, and thus predisposed to believe Adolf Hitler. This belief persisted up until the point, a year after Munich, when the sequence of events had at least removed every shred of possible room of doubt about his intentions. "The timing and circumstances [of the advent of war] had been to a certain degree fortuitous. The responsibility was not."
So prominent is the notion of "appeasement" in the image and presumed lessons of Munich that it is worthy of fuller consideration. In fact, "appeasement and 'Munich' were two quite different phenomena," writes Martin Gilbert in the opening line of his article, "Munich and the New Appe
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