<P> The journalist Shiela Grant Duff's Penguin Special, Europe and the Czechs was published and distributed to every MP on the day that Chamberlain returned from Munich . Her book was a spirited defence of the Czech nation and a detailed criticism of British policy, confronting the need for war if necessary . It was influential and widely read . Although she argued against the policy of "peace at almost any price" she did not take the personal tone that Guilty Men was to take two years later . </P> <P> Once Germany invaded Poland, igniting World War II, consensus was that appeasement was responsible . The Labour MP Hugh Dalton identified the policy with wealthy people in the City of London, Conservatives and members of the peerage who were soft on Hitler . The appointment of Churchill as Prime Minister hardened opinion against appeasement and encouraged the search for those responsible . Three British journalists, Michael Foot, Frank Owen and Peter Howard, writing under the name of "Cato" in their book Guilty Men, called for the removal from office of 15 public figures they held accountable, including Chamberlain and Baldwin . The book defined appeasement as the "deliberate surrender of small nations in the face of Hitler's blatant bullying". It was hastily written and has few claims to historical scholarship, but Guilty Men shaped subsequent thinking about appeasement and it is said that it contributed to the defeat of the Conservatives in the 1945 general election . </P> <P> The change in the meaning of "appeasement" after Munich was summarized later by the historian David Dilks: "The word in its normal meaning connotes the pacific settlement of disputes; in the meaning usually applied to the period of Neville Chamberlain ('s) premiership, it has come to indicate something sinister, the granting from fear or cowardice of unwarranted concessions in order to buy temporary peace at someone else's expense ." </P> <P> Churchill's book The Gathering Storm, published in 1948, made a similar judgment to Guilty Men, though in moderate tones . This book and Churchill's authority confirmed the orthodox view . </P>

What did the policy of appeasement in pre-wwii europe entail