There were many people in England against Churchill, they didnt want to go to war but in the end common sense prevail and you went.
OK, if you want to discuss the history of World War II then we will. Yes, there were appeasers in parliament and in the country as a whole. The first world war had only been over for twenty years and many people had it fresh in their memories. But the majority of British people were uncertain when Chamberlain came back from Munich after Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia. As krizon says, we had a treaty with the Poles and when Hitler invaded Poland there was massive support behind the government's delivery of an ultimatum to Hitler and, when it was ignored, the declaration of war.
About Spain, it was not a neutral postion, we had no position after the country destroyed after a civil war.
Technically neutral but during the Spanish Civil War Franco's army was often assisted by Germany. Hermann Goering's policy was to use the Spanish Civil War as an arena for trying out the airmen and planes of his new Luftwaffe . The Condor Legion was headed by Wolfram Von Richthofen, the cousin of the near mythical Red Baron of the First World War.
On April 26, 1937, German bombers, operating on behalf of Franco's government, attacked the Basque village of Guernica, which was an open town. The unprovoked attack began at 4:30 pm, the busiest hour of a market day. The streets were jammed with townspeople and peasants from the countryside. Never before in modern warfare had non-combatants been slaughtered in such numbers, and by such means.
The Condor Legion had had many successful missions to prove their accuracy. For example, they succeeded in dropping provisions squarely into the courtyard of the besieged Nationalist city of Alcazar. For the Guernica mission the Condor Legion was equipped with airplanes consisting of three German types, Junkers and Heinkel bombers and Heinkel fighters which were loaded with 3,000 pounds of bombs weighing up to 550 pounds each along with more than 3,000 two-pounder aluminum incendiary projectiles.
From 4:30 pm to 7:45 pm the squadron poured an uncontested, continuous rain of bombs and gun fire on Guernica. Normal procedure would have been to observe the fall of the bombs and record the exact location of their explosion, yet there are no reports of accuracy for this mission. Villagers who were not immediately killed fled to the fields to take refuge, only to be ravaged by plunging machine gun fighters. Approximately 1,700 of Guernica's 5,000 inhabitants were killed or wounded. The fires that engulfed the city burned for three days. Isolated farms as far away as four miles were bombed.
Ostensibly the goal of the assault was hitting a bridge near an important road junction that possibly could be used in the future by Republican forces. Given that the intent was only to hit the bridge, Von Richthofen would have used his Stuka dive bombers, capable of carrying a single bomb weighing 1,000 pounds. Equipped with the latest bomb sights, a Stuka had a high chance of taking out the bridge with one direct hit. Even a near miss would have made a powerful shock wave that, if it did not cause the bridge the bridge to collapse, would doubtless have made it unsafe for traffic.
Although the Condor Legionnaires were the best trained and most experienced airmen of the Luftwaffe, they failed to score a single hit on the bridge, the presumed target. The dubious intent of the mission is evident; it was wanton, man-made holocaust. In 1945 in an American hospital Von Richtofen's diary was recovered. In his diary he states that the "concentrated attack" on Guernica "was the greatest success".
The destruction of Guernica was immortalised in Picasso's painting of the subject.
Now we come to Franco's neutrality during the war. On June 14th 1940, Spanish troops occupied the Tangier in Morocco, hitherto a free city under international control. Franco offered Hitler a Spanish entry into the war, if he would agree to an expansion of the Spanish colonial holdings in Africa (Spain demanded all of French Morocco, parts of Algeria and an expansion of Spanish Guinea). Hitler did not accept these terms.
Then Hitler and Franco met at Hendaye on October 23rd 1940. Here plans were made for a German-Spanish campaign against Gibraltar - code-name "Operation Felix". In February 1941 the Germans suggested that the operation be started but Franco hesitated, pointing out that Spain was not yet ready. Germany soon after launched the Balkans and North Africa campaigns.
When Germany launched the invasion of Russia in June 1941, Franco identified himself with the German cause. He promoted the formation of a volunteer force, the Blue Division (Division Azul), later renamed the Blue Legion (recalled in August 1944). Spain also sent an estimated 100,000 workers to Germany to help keep up her industrial production.
Spain thus obtained a position "neutral" toward Britain and the US, while in an (undeclared) war with the USSR. Stalin decided to accept the situation and not to declare war on Spain. German-Spanish relations were friendly. Vichy France repatriated tens of thousands of Spanish republicans who had sought refuge in France, many of whom went straight to Franco's Labour Camps. A trail of refugees beginning in Vichy France crossed the Pyrenees and Northern Spain, leading to Lisbon, from there the refugees hoped to cross the Atlantic. Spanish authorities did little to interrupt this trail.
In November 1941 US forces landed in French-held North Africa, then late in 1942 the Axis lost the Battle of El Alamein, early in 1943 the Battle of Stalingrad; the invasion of Italy and the Italian armistice followed later that year. Franco's Spain, staunchly pro-German, now moved toward stressing neutrality.
Luckily, neither side was willing to press Spain too much, as Germany was more than busy holding on to it's positions in North Africa and at Stalingrad, and the Allies did not want to see a pressured Spain join the ranks of the Axis. However, the western Allies had no love for Falangist Spain, and the stronger their position became, the more they dictated conditions to Spain.
Spanish losses in World War II are estimated at 12,000 military and 10,000 civilians. After the Civil War had ended early in 1939, the Spanish economy recovered very slowly. Food shortage lasted throughout the war. While the authorities blamed outside factors such as damage caused during the civil war and an extended drought, the main reasons were mismanagement of the economy by a military bureaucracy ignorant of and disinterested in economics, by an ambitious, yet irrealistic policy aiming at autarchy (in imitation of Italy and Germany). The contribution of about 100,000 Spanish workers to fill the gaps in Germany's industrial workforce, in combination with the men enlisted in the Blue Division, may have had an impact, too. Many of the industrial workers with special skills, the technicians and engineers, had been among the supporters of the republic and were regarded with extreme suspicion, and excluded from the decision making process. Thus, the management of Spain's economy was extraordinarily inefficient. Exports suffered from an overvalued Peseta and imports were tightly regulated.
The Franco period was undemocratic with a regime similar to the Italy of Mussolini or the Argentina and Chile of the Generals. There were political prisoners, concentration camps, executions and torture (more at the beginning, fewer at the end). He escaped invasion by the allies in 1945 but was not welcomed as an ally until the height of the Cold War in 1959, when Eisenhower visited and gained American bases in exchange for money and a degree of recognition (like many American allies, his lack of democracy was overlooked).
King Juan Carlos became head of state since 1974, when Franco fell ill. On the death of Franco in 1975 the king, his designated successor, brought about a return to democracy and a parliamentary regime with a constitutional monarchy, one of the most astonishing transitions in European history.
For which we are all grateful, because Spain is a great country.
