Historians would later dismiss the belief in German economic weakness as a myth, but new research has shown that Chamberlain was at least half right. Until the summer of 1940, when the wealth of Western Europe fell under Hitler’s control, the German war machine was under intense economic pressure. In 1939, Britain was spending only 12 percent of its national income on defense, while Germany was already spending 23 percent and its economy was operating at 125 percent of capacity, while the British economy had yet to fully mobilize.

Chamberlain’s miscalculation was in thinking that Germany’s financial weakness would make it even more vulnerable to a British blockade than it had been in the Great War. Blockades, which are intended to deny the enemy resources, only work if they are airtight. And, as Lloyd George, Britain’s prime minister in the Great War, lost no opportunity to point out, this time, unlike last time, the British blockade had a gaping hole. The German-Soviet pact had given Hitler access to Russian oil, to copper—to enough raw materials to sustain a ten-year war. Indeed, when it came to his successor’s faults as a war leader, Lloyd George did not know where to begin or end. The previous March, Chamberlain had blithely handed Poland a security guarantee unenforceable without Russian help; then, when an opportunity arose to strike an alliance with Stalin, he had let it slip away. And because Chamberlain refused to put British industry on a full wartime footing, Britain would not have ten divisions in France until the spring of 1940, and had only 1,270 first-line aircraft and a few hundred tanks, many outdated models. Against this force, Germany could field up to 157 divisions—10 of them armored—nearly 4,000 modern warplanes, and 3,000 modern tanks. It was true that 90 to 94 of France’s 117 divisions also faced Germany, but the French army’s 3,254 tanks and 1,562 aircraft were in the hands of soldiers and airmen preparing a 1939 army with 1918 training and strategies.

No one who lived through the Great War was surprised that Lloyd George had emerged as Chamberlain’s principal critic. The personal vendetta between the two men began in August 1917, when then prime minister Lloyd George dismissed Chamberlain as director of National Service, the organization that oversaw conscription. It was Chamberlain’s first—and, until the collapse of his appeasement policy, almost only—public failure, and Lloyd George was not inclined to let him forget it. In his War Memoirs, he described Chamberlain as “not one of my most successful selections.” Eighteen years later Chamberlain got his revenge. In 1935, when Stanley Baldwin proposed appointing Lloyd George to the cabinet, Chamberlain, who was then chancellor of the Exchequer, said he would not sit at the same table with that man.

In the autumn of 1939, Lloyd George was seventy-seven, and had a large, intact ego and a controversial past. On Mussolini and Franco, on the Munich settlement—on many of the great issues of the 1930s—he had been on the right side of history; but there had been one egregious lapse. On several occasions, Lloyd George had praised Hitler, not because he admired national socialism, but because he believed the Führer, like himself, was a historic leader. In the late 1930s, not many British politicians could have called Adolf Hitler the “George Washington of Germany” and lived to tell the tale, but Lloyd George was admired for his Great War leadership, and, like Churchill, he was one of those larger-than-life, fabulously gifted figures whom the public grants a latitude they deny mere mortal politicians. As “artful as a cartload of monkeys” is how one aide described Lloyd George; “a mind like a scorpion,” said another. One of nature’s slyer jokes was to fashion Lloyd George into an almost perfect physical facsimile of the Wizard of Oz: a great white mane of hair, perfectly matched by a great white mustache and, in between, twinkling blue eyes full of mischief.

The dispute between the former and current prime ministers would dominate most of September and October 1939, and while it began as an argument over the conduct of the war, it quickly turned into a debate about a negotiated peace settlement with Germany; and as it did, the broad middle of the British public, those who had gone to war “stolidly to kill or be killed,” would make their voices heard. The day Britain declared war, Lloyd George pledged to support the Chamberlain government, though he could not bring himself to mention the prime minister by name. “I am one of the tens of millions in this country who will back any government that is in power, in fighting through this struggle,” he had told the House. However, after the quick German victory in Poland, Lloyd George began to fear Britain was overmatched. On September 27 he told the All Party Group, a collection of Liberal, Conservative, and Labour MPs, that if Britain’s chances of prevailing in a war with Germany were less than 50 percent, the government should seek a settlement. Privately, Lloyd George was blunter. “If [the government] rejects the chance of making peace,” he told a friend, “it will not be long before Britain will realize that they [sic] have committed the most calamitous mistake perpetuated by British statesmanship since the days of Lord North.” (Frederick Lord North was the British statesman who lost the American colonies.)

On October 3, the day Poland fell, Lloyd George made the case for a negotiated settlement in a House of Commons speech. Armageddon might be taking its time in coming, he said, but no one should fool themselves, Armageddon was coming. For MPs who had already met Armageddon once before—at Passchendaele, on the Somme, or on Vimy Ridge—that was a sobering thought. The “flood waters are still holding,” Lloyd George said. Let us hope “that as in the time of the deluge, the dove of peace will appear with an olive branch in its beak.” A faint ripple of assent went through the Conservative backbenches.