Should 15 mil lion Europeans have been killed in order to oblige three million Sudeteners, who wished to be German, to remain in Czechoslovakia?” “I believe we have done the reasonable thing.

Indeed, he talked to Chamberlain once about attack ing Germany but he permitted himself to be dissuaded on the ground that such a step would surely result in a general war and ultimately he signed the pact along with Chamberlain, Hitler and Benito Mussolini, Italy's Fascist dictator. He was not initially eager to abandon Czechoslovakia and France's traditional balance ‐ of ‐ power policy. Daladier was not the architect of the pact (British Prime Minister Neville Cham berlain was that) so much as an accomplice in it. Daladier pushed France a giant step along the road to her doom by joining in the Munich Pact of September, 1938, whereby his country's ally, Czechoslovakia, was vir tually dismembered and Adolf Hitler's appetite for a war of genocidal conquest was sharp ened. Irresolute, weak, intellectual ly unalert, Mr. Perennially Minister of War and thrice Pre mier (he was in office when World War II began in Septem ber, 1939), he was one of those political leaders who failed, un til it was far too late, to per ceive the menace of Hitlerism to France, to Europe and to the world. In the inglorious fall of France, a process that went on for at least a decade and cul minated in her crushing defeat by Germany in the spring of 1940, Edouard Daladier played a conspicuous part.

Edouard daladier