Was the Policy of Appeasement a terrible mistake or did it make sense in 1938?

The Policy of Appeasement is, simply put, Neville Chamberlin (Britain) and Charles de Gaulle (France) trying to keep Hitler (Germany) happy and avoid another war.  In my opinion, I believe that yes, the policy of appeasement was a mistake. I say this on the grounds of many reasons, the first and most obvious being, well, that it clearly didn’t work.

Chamberlin and de Gaulle were right in principle. The world had just seen the devastating effects of the First World War, and nobody wanted a repeat of that. People-in order to succeed in war-had to want war, and nobody did. I also agree with the notion that the Treaty of Versailles treated Germany way too harshly-more so than they deserved. They deserved a fair deal.  Also, if they were going to fight, Britain needed the time to build up her army.

That being said, by giving Britain time to build up her army, Germany is given the same opportunity.  Although the German army was limited during the Treaty of Versailles, this was another rule that Hitler just failed to follow.

Speaking of rules that Germany failed to follow, had Hitler not lied about his intentions before? Hitler had said that the Rhineland was his last land claim on Europe. Did they not realise at this stage he wasn’t going to stop? They let him take the Rhineland. They let him annex Austria. They let him take the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. Then they let him take the rest of Czechoslovakia. Czech was sacrificed for nothing. Did they not realise that this was only whetting his appetite for more? Hitler lost all fear.

Fear. That leads me to my next point. The USSR. Stalin wasn’t stupid. Britain wasn’t taking a stand. France wasn’t taking a stand. To them, that showed increasing German power. They began thinking that perhaps it would be an idea to create a pact with Germany. That type of thinking lead to the Nazi-Soviet pact.

Based on that, I believe that the Policy of Appeasement stopped making sense after a while, and if De Gaulle and Chamberlain stopped it then, they might just have averted WWII