The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (180 page)

Rumbold was quietly replaced by Sir Eric Phipps, the British minister in Vienna. But Phipps also found the Nazis outrageous. He told the American ambassador that Hitler was “a fanatic who would be satisfied with nothing less than the dominance of Europe”; that although the Nazis would not invade neighboring countries until 1935, “war is the purpose here”; and that he had actually been approached by the Wilhelmstrasse with a suggestion that Germany and England divide Europe between them, to which he replied that such an agreement would “mean the end of international morality.” The Nazis, never troubled by the principle of diplomatic immunity, opened the British pouches and read these reports before they reached London. Hitler told Lord Londonderry that he hated “the looks of Sir Eric” and felt relations between the two countries would be vastly improved if Britain were represented “by a ‘more modern’ diplomat who showed, at least, some understanding of the changes taking place in Germany.”
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“What are we to do?” a disconcerted Baldwin asked Thomas Jones. His predecessors would have known precisely what to do. The German führer would have been told that Great Britain did not welcome foreign advice in determining ambassadorial appointments. But Jones reflected the new statesmanship when he wrote in his diary, “If it is our policy to get alongside Germany, the sooner Phipps is transferred elsewhere the better.” He should be replaced, Jones thought, by someone “unhampered by professional diplomatic tradition” who could “enter with sympathetic interest into Hitler’s aspirations.” A candidate had already nominated himself. He was Sir Nevile Henderson, Britain’s representative in Argentina. Henderson had let the Foreign Office know that he had regarded Phipps’s assignment to Germany a “most unsuitable appointment” and that wags said “there is no British Embassy in Berlin at all, only a branch of the Quai d’Orsay.” So Phipps was retired “at his own request” and Henderson took over. His colleagues quickly nicknamed him “our Nazi ambassador to Berlin.” Hermann Göring and he became fast friends. Labour MP Josiah Wedgwood noted how he resembled those MPs who had “flocked to Germany at Hitler’s invitation, in like manner,” forgetting their “duty and their country’s standards.”
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But British diplomats and visiting Englishmen were not the government’s sole sources of what was happening in Berlin. In the early years of the new regime, Paul Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry concentrated on preaching its glories to the German people. Cultivation of the foreign press was of lesser concern. As it happened, this was the high summer of foreign correspondents. The best of them—who covered Europe—were intelligent, well-read men, fluent in several languages, who had developed contacts and sources across the full spectrum of society, in the Reich and beyond. Long before Hitler came to power they knew of Nazi brutality and had sent accounts of it home.
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Even after Goebbels decided that something must be done about the foreign press in Berlin, little was. His problem was compounded by geography. Germany’s capital, like England’s, represented a concentration of great power in a small neighborhood. But in London a combination of ceremonial pomp, the discouraging mazes of Whitehall, and a tradition of studied rudeness toward outsiders created a web of safeguards which could be penetrated only by an insider of Churchill’s stature. The heart of the Reich was more vulnerable. In the Zitadelle the great ministries stood shoulder to shoulder along the Wilhelmstrasse, with Hitler’s huge new chancellery at the southern end. People wandered in and out on the flimsiest of excuses. The northern end of the Wilhelmstrasse ended at the Linden. There, the Pariser-Platz and the Brandenburg Gate marked the eastern edge of the Tiergarten, Berlin’s largest and loveliest park, which spread westward behind the black, burned-out hulk of the Reichstag building. The Reichstag now met in the Kroll Opera House, four hundred yards inside the park. In the midst of all this, on the Pariser-Platz, the best possible strategic location, stood the Hotel Adlon, where the most gifted correspondents lived and worked. Because they continued to be dedicated and resourceful, the outside world was told what was happening even when diplomats in the Berlin embassies were silenced.
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Certainly England’s envoys were under pressure to be mute. Civil servants who criticized Hitler were warned that it was “unpatriotic,” as Lothian put it, “to refuse to believe in the sincerity of Germany.” The British vice-consul in Hanover, a retired army officer turned businessman, sent Whitehall a partial account of German preparations for war. The Nazis, concerned that the full extent of their secret rearmament might be disclosed, demanded his recall, and Sir John Simon obliged without asking the Wilhelmstrasse for an explanation or the vice-consul for his version. In London’s Foreign Office, however, Hitler was beset by critics beyond his reach. His most formidable foe in the diplomatic establishment was Permanent Under Secretary Vansittart—arrogant, sometimes wrong, but dead right about Nazi Germany—who ran the ministry regardless of which party was in office. Ralph Wigram, beneath Vansittart, shared his hostile view of the Nazis, and so, farther down the ladder, did young Duncan Sandys. Sandys had been Rumbold’s third secretary in Berlin. After the ambassador was dismissed, he returned to the FO in London determined that the foreign secretary should know his views. When a dispatch from Britain’s Berlin embassy reached his desk—a fresh appraisal of Hitler’s intentions—Sandys attached a comment proposing that FO diplomacy anticipate the future. Specifically, he wrote, the demilitarized Rhineland buffer state, between Germany and France, would soon become an issue. The Nazis were preparing to march in. Talks between Britain and France now would assure joint action when they did. If no action was contemplated, the Wilhelmstrasse should be told so now; the democracies could demand, and get, a quid pro quo. If they meant to fight, Hitler ought to know that, too; he might back away from the risk. It was a shrewd, prophetic note, but the foreign secretary rejected it with the scribble: “We cannot consider hypothetical issues.” Sandys promptly resigned, entered politics, was elected to Parliament, and joined the small band of Churchillians.

Van remained in the FO, arguing that the Nazis’ savagery in their own country could not be divorced from the growing possibility of aggression beyond their borders; one had only to read
Mein Kampf
to know that. The journalist Vernon Bartlett protested that it was “unfair” to judge Hitler by his book; its expansionist passages had been written ten years earlier, when the author was depressed and imprisoned. Van dismissed that as a non sequitur and went on to say that “from the very outset of the regime” in Berlin he had felt “no doubt whatever about the ultimate intentions of the Nazis.” It was, in his opinion, “an open secret that anything said by Hitler is merely for foreign consumption and designed to gain time…. Nothing but a change of the German heart can avert another catastrophe,” and that was “unlikely to come from within, for the true German nature has never changed.”
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Any accomplished continental diplomat would have seen the significance in a Vansittart minute reporting that the Nazis were determined to make their Reich “first in Europe.” England could not tolerate domination of the Continent by
any
nation. Churchill defined the principle for the Conservative Members Committee on Foreign Affairs: “For four hundred years the foreign policy of England has been to oppose the strongest, most aggressive, most dominating power on the Continent, and particularly to prevent the Low Countries”—Belgium, Luxembourg, and Holland—“falling into the hands of such a power.” This had been England’s guiding light in its struggles against Philip II of Spain, Louis XIV of France, Napoleon, and the kaiser. Each time, he reminded them, Britain had “joined with the less strong powers, made a combination among them, and thus defeated and frustrated the continental military power, whoever he was, whatever nation he led. Thus we preserved the liberties of Europe… and emerged after four terrible struggles with an ever-growing fame and widening Empire, and with the Low Countries safely protected in their independence.”
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The House stirred uneasily when Churchill, who, whatever his flaws, had been more hostile to the Bolshevik regime than any other Englishman in public life, told them—on the very day the Enabling Act became law in the Reich—that Nazi Germany was a greater threat than the Soviet Union. “We watch with surprise and distress,” he said, “the tumultuous insurgence and ferocity and war spirit, the pitiless ill-treatment of minorities, the denial of normal protections of civilized society to large numbers of individuals solely on the grounds of race.”
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In any prewar Parliament, so eloquent an appeal to the most cherished of British virtues—decency—would have touched off a demonstration. Now the chamber was silent. The difficulty was that any political coalition becomes indistinguishable from a single-party state. There is no responsible opposition. With Labour’s MacDonald as the King’s first magistrate, guided by the Tory Baldwin as his éminence grise, the coalition government disciplined everyone but the party mavericks, most of whom accepted Lloyd George’s assessment of Hitler anyway.

T
he appeasers distrusted France, blamed her for the punitive Versailles clauses, felt Germany had been wronged, and were determined to make restitution. Lord Lothian declared that it was Britain’s moral obligation to support the Germans in their struggle to “escape from encirclement” (the encircling powers, presumably, being France, Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg) “to a position of balance.” He neglected to add that any shift in the status quo would mean the liquidation of legitimate governments. At Versailles the 1914–1918 holocaust had been blamed on the Germans. Now the fashionable scapegoat was Germany’s ancient enemy. “Lady Astor,”
The Week
reported, “is obsessed with a vivid personal dislike of the French.” As late as November 7, 1936, a member of the cabinet told his ministerial colleagues that Francophobia was increasing in England because the French were an obstacle to Britain “getting on terms with the dictator powers.”
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The British yearning to accommodate their former enemies took peculiar forms. Upper-class Englishmen had been bred to handle foreign affairs with grace and subtlety. But many of the new breed of German diplomats were boorish. Therefore, envoys from Whitehall, eager to court them, tried to teach the Wilhelmstrasse manners. On August 22, 1932, for example, Sir Maurice Hankey, secretary of the cabinet and of the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID), sent a long memorandum to Prime Minister MacDonald, expressing apprehension over the likelihood that the Germans’ claim to
Wehrfreiheit
—the right to rearm—would be “conducted with their usual clumsy and tactless way,” which “might have a disastrous effect.” He proposed making a demarche, after consulting the French, urging the Germans to postpone their demands. This failing, Britain should attempt to persuade the Wilhelmstrasse “to make their proposals in as harmless a form as possible.”
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The foreign secretary, Sir John Simon, had his own euphemism for the rebuilding of the Reich’s armed might. It was “parity.” His resolve—and the cabinet’s—was to sanction an expanding German army while disarming the French, until, after an infinite number of carefully monitored phases, both nations possessed the same number of soldiers, tanks, artillery pieces, warplanes, and warships.

The Times
thought it “essential” that the Germans be permitted “to build the forbidden weapons at once.” Restoring Germany’s martial might would restore her pride and strengthen her feelings of security; then Germany and England, “in company,” would launch a program of genuine, large-scale disarmament. The prime minister was first impressed, then inspired. Thus was the seed of the extraordinary MacDonald Plan implanted. Its first tenet was that England, as the conscience of Europe, would divest herself of her most formidable weapons. The press, the universities, labor unions, and every sounding board of public opinion would enthusiastically endorse the plan. When the League of Nations Union conducted a nationwide poll, the Peace Ballot, it found that 10.4 million Britons favored international disarmament, while 870,000—about 8 percent—opposed it.
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As Churchill later wrote, “The virtues of disarmament were extolled in the House of Commons by all parties. On June 29, 1931, Ramsay MacDonald, looking forward to the first World Disarmament Conference, had proudly announced in the House that the dismantling of England’s armed forces had been “swift, patient, and persistent,” and that although it had gone “pretty near the limit,” he intended to make “still further reductions” once he had persuaded other European governments to follow suit. His first target would be Paris. Germany, stripped of her defenses, constituted no threat to the peace, but the huge French army could attack across the Rhine at any time.
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Churchill instantly replied that the French army, far from being dangerous, was the strongest guarantee of peace on the Continent. Moreover, the chancelleries of eastern Europe, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, “look to France for guidance and leadership.” If the French followed MacDonald’s advice and sent half their poilus home, he continued, those states between Germany and Russia would be lost, leaderless, and ripe for the plucking. Britain must be armed—“England’s hour of weakness is Europe’s hour of danger.” He urged the prime minister to abandon his mission: “The sudden disappearance or undue weakness of that factor of unquestionable French military superiority may open the floodgates of measureless consequence.”
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Even as he had risen to speak, other members had begun drifting out of the chamber. Winston, they told one another, had always been against disarmament. Every MP knew it; they discounted it; he would make no converts here. But he had his readers, and as the diplomats convened in Geneva, he toiled in his Chartwell study urging close scrutiny of all proposals by the conferees in Switzerland. In the
Daily Mail
he wrote that “millions of well-meaning English people” were praying for a successful conference. That, he said, was their vulnerability: “There is such a horror of war in the great nations who passed through Armageddon that any declaration or public speech against armaments, although it consisted only of platitudes and unrealities, has always been applauded; and any speech or assertion which set forth the blunt truths has been incontinently relegated to the category of ‘warmongering.’ ”
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Despite MacDonald’s optimism, the first round of talks at Geneva ended in July 1932 after five months of frustration. Nothing had been accomplished. Sixty nations, the United States and the U.S.S.R. among them, had sent delegations, but every session ended in a deadlock between the Germans, who insisted on permission to rearm before any other item on the agenda could be even considered, and the French, who argued that the disarmament of all European states be supervised, and then monitored, by an international police force. MacDonald, undiscouraged, laid plans for resuming the conference.

To Churchill the negotiations were highly suspect. He believed, quite simply, that military weakness invited attack, a view more controversial then than it has since become. As early as September 9, 1928, he had written a friend: “We always seem to be getting into trouble over these stupid disarmament manoeuvres, and I personally deprecate all these premature attempts to force agreements on disarmament.” Was it likely, he asked in the
Daily Mail
of May 26, 1932, that France, with twenty million fewer people than Germany, and half the number of youths coming to military age every year, would deprive herself “of the mechanical aids and appliances on which she relies to prevent a fourth invasion in little more than a hundred years?” The goals of disarmament were admirable, but they would never be “attained by mush, slush, and gush.” The hard and bitter truth was that lasting demilitarization of Europe could only be “advanced steadily by the harrassing expense of fleets and armies, and by the growth of confidence in a long peace.”
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Convalescing from paratyphoid, Churchill was confined to Chartwell during the opening of Parliament’s disarmament debate of November 10, 1932, and missed Sir John Simon’s affirmation that it was the objective of British policy to find a “fair meeting of Germany’s claim to the principle of equality.” Baldwin, supporting disarmament as the only way to peace, spoke of what he called “the terror of the air.” Enemy bombers, he said, could hammer London into the earth like a hot white saucer. No defense against them was possible: “I confess that the more I have studied this question, the more depressed I have been at the perfectly futile attempts that have been made to deal with this problem.” He thought that “the man on the street” should “realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed.” Whatever happened, he said, “the bomber will always get through.”
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Baldwin had raised, or perhaps stumbled upon, one of the thorniest military issues of the time. The weight of professional military opinion was on his side. In England, Italy, the United States, France, and Germany, most air strategists subscribed to what was called the Douhet Theory. Shortly before his death in 1930, an Italian airman, General Giulio Douhet, had published
The War of 19
—, in which he argued that armies and navies should be relegated to defensive roles while bomber fleets won the war. Any nation investing heavily in air defense was risking defeat, he wrote, for “No one can command his own sky if he cannot command his adversary’s sky.” His most important convert was Nazi air force chief Hermann Göring, the 1918 ace, with his treasured memories of the Red Baron and the wind in the wires. Unfortunately for Göring, one aging RAF officer thought Douhet’s thesis fatally flawed. He was Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, who would later command the RAF in the Battle of Britain. Dowding and eminent British scientists, colleagues of the Prof, convinced Churchill that every offensive weapon could be countered by imaginative, intrepid defenders. They cited fast fighters and trained antiaircraft crews; later they would brief Winston on RDF, an acronym so secret that until the war only a handful of men would know of it. It represented “radio direction finding”—or, as the Americans were to christen it, radar.
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