The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (186 page)

The self-anointed Führer declared that he was now head of state and commander in chief of the country’s military establishment. Every German officer was required to swear an oath of loyalty to him. The officer corps knew how momentous this step was. The kaiser had never dreamed of asking personal allegiance. The oath bound them not to the government or even the country, but to the commands of a single individual whose stability, even then, was widely questioned. Nevertheless, to their eternal shame, each of them pledged “by God” that he would “render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to risk my life at any time for this oath.” Hitler was now absolute ruler of Europe’s most powerful state, a phenomenon unknown to the Continent since Napoleon.

Meanwhile, anti-Semitism, which had troubled Churchill from the outset, was becoming increasingly vicious. His informants reported that all over Germany
Bierkeller
, motion picture theatres, shops, and restaurants were displaying prominent signs reading “
Juden unerwünscht
” (“Jews not welcome”). Day-to-day existence was becoming increasingly difficult for non-Aryans. “
Für Juden kein Zutritt
” (“Jews not admitted”) placards hung outside grocery and butchers’ shops; they could not enter dairies to buy milk for their infants, or pharmacies to fill prescriptions, or hotels to find lodging. At every turn they were taunted: “
In dieser Stadt ist Juden der Zutritt streng verboten
” (“Jews absolutely forbidden in this city”); “
Juden betreten diesen Ort auf eigene Gefahr
” (“Jews enter this place at their own risk”); and, at a dangerous highway curve on the west bank of the Rhine opposite Mannheim: “
Vorsicht! Scharfe Kurve! Juden 100 km!
” (“Caution! Sharp Curve! Jews 60 mph!”).
⁹⁷

Visitors attending the Berlin Olympics in 1936 would ask how Germany had ended the breadlines and found jobs for the jobless. Their hosts suavely assured them that the Führer had solved the Depression in Germany by expanding public works programs and stimulating private enterprise. It sounded plausible, and the tourists left believing it. Yet any persistent searcher for the real source of the Reich’s booming economy could have found it by visiting the Ruhr valley—the Ruhrgebiet—and the industrial areas of the Rhineland, where the great factories of Krupp, Thyssen, Flick, and I. G. Farben, looming like
kolossale
cathedrals through the smoke belching from their smokestacks, were working shifts around the clock. It was, for those who saw it, a vision of stark Teutonic power. In the peak years of Victorian energy, when England had been called “the workshop of the world,” Londoners had a word for the sound of their toiling city. It was the Hum. Now the Ruhr was Germany’s
Bienenstock
—its beehive. But the yield of a beehive is benign; the Ruhr’s sweating workers were intent on building a more powerful military juggernaut than the army General Erich Ludendorff had guided in 1918.

No one who held high office in the 1920s, Churchill included, can be completely absolved of responsibility for the shocking deterioration of England’s defenses between the wars. After the Armistice Lloyd George’s government, at Winston’s urging, had adopted a “ten-year rule”—an assumption, in drawing up service budgets, that “no great war is to be anticipated within the next ten years.” Year after year the principle was reaffirmed. Ministers saw no reason to drop it. Germany was disarmed; Russia still in turmoil; France pacifistic; America isolationist. Nevertheless, as early as 1929 Basil Liddell Hart had written in the
Daily Telegraph
that “every important foreign power has made startling, indeed ominous, increases of expenditure on its army” and declared that the British government “would be false to its duty to this nation if it reduced our slender military strength more drastically.” The Admiralty recommended building a submarine base at Hong Kong. “For what?” asked Winston. “A war with Japan! But why should there be a war with Japan? I do not believe there is the slightest chance of it in our lifetime.”
⁹⁸

Churchill had an unusual, if unorthodox, grasp of military strategy, but was weak on tactics. In hindsight his observations of weapons seem odd. “The submarine,” he wrote, “is not now regarded as the menace it used to be.” Similarly, he told readers of the
News of the World
that he doubted “very much” whether the tank “will ever again see the palmy days of 1918…. Nowadays the anti-tank rifle and the anti-tank gun have made such great strides that the poor tank cannot carry thick enough skin to stand up to them.” Anticipating “How Wars of the Future Will Be Waged,” he envisioned “great prepared lines of fortifications which it will be very difficult indeed for the other army to break through…. The idea that enormous masses of mechanical vehicles and tanks will be able to overrun these fortifications will probably turn out to be a disappointment.” He foresaw deadlock; any ground gained “will very often be only as moles.” Doubtless there would be new developments, but nothing dramatic: “One thing is certain about the next war; namely, that the armies will use their spades more often than they use their bayonets.”
⁹⁹

He also underestimated air power. In 1936 the first reports of civil war in Spain led him to conclude that events there demonstrated “the limitations rather than the strength of the air weapon” and proved that “so far as the fighting troops are concerned, aircraft are an additional complication rather than a decisive weapon.” This, he felt, together with “the undoubted obsolescence of the submarine… should give a feeling of confidence and security so far as the seas and oceans are concerned, to the western democracies.” On one point he had no doubt whatever. No warplane, he declared, could sink a warship. Over a decade had passed since Brigadier General William (“Billy”) Mitchell, the American airman, had proved it could be done—proved it by actually doing it, sending six obsolete battleships to the floor of the Atlantic. But as late as January 14, 1939, Churchill told subscribers to
Collier’s
that “even a single well-armed vessel will hold its own against aircraft.”
¹⁰⁰

A friend of his later recalled a dinner party in the mid-1930s: “Winston was laughing at the idea that any bombers could put ships out of commission. He thought it ridiculous, so terribly funny. He said to get a ship you would have to be sure to put the bomb down the funnel. He had been told it had to go down the funnel or these armor-plated ships wouldn’t blow up…. You know, he was making this great joke about the whole thing. I just remember how he amazed me at the time. Of course, the bomb didn’t have to go down the funnel at all.”

Winston’s most striking tactical gaffe was a memorandum he sent to Neville Chamberlain, then prime minister, only six months before the Munich Agreement, and it sharply criticized the two fighter planes which would prove to be England’s salvation in 1940. On March 12, 1938, Churchill wrote: “We have concentrated upon the forward-firing fixed gun Fighter (Hurricane and Spitfire). The latest developments increasingly suggest that hostile aircraft can only be engaged with certainty on parallel or nearly parallel courses, hence that the turret type of equipment will be paramount.” This revealed a total failure to grasp the evolution of aerial rearmament. Churchill was thinking in terms of the Tiger Moth and other old wood-and-fabric two-gun biplanes. To send such slow, fragile aircraft against the Nazis’ Messerschmitt fighters would have meant the sacrifice of the RAF, followed by catastrophe; the Luftwaffe’s bombers, arriving in fleets, would have leveled their targets, unchallenged by a single British fighter pilot.
¹⁰¹

But if he misunderstood armored warfare, so did every officer on Britain’s Imperial General Staff; and if he underrated air power and believed it would be ineffective against capital ships, the Admiralty agreed with him. The essence of England’s armaments dilemma was not inaccurate views on weaponry. The real problem was that the most powerful and influential men in Britain were determined not to offend Hitler. And in this matter Churchill’s vision was clear. He warned that whenever absolute rulers assemble great armies, they eventually make war: “Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.” Appeasing Germany was folly, he said; Hitler would spare no one; and there was no refuge in neutrality, no sense in urging the Nazis to turn their wrath against others or pursue a policy based on the hope that the Führer would be satisfied with half a loaf—even the whole loaf would leave him unglutted; he would never stop until he was stopped by force. British rearmament was therefore essential.

After the Japanese seized Shanghai in 1932 the cabinet had quietly dropped the ten-year rule, adding, however, that expenditures on arms would be determined by existing economic conditions. Existing economic conditions being what they were, arms budgets were depressed, and England, as Churchill put it, remained a “rich and easy prey.” Winston said: “No country is so vulnerable and no country would better repay pillage than our own”; with London “the greatest target in the world,” Britain was “a kind of tremendous, fat, valuable cow tied up to attract the beast of prey.”
¹⁰²

Yet except for Austen Chamberlain, who as foreign secretary had been the architect of Locarno, no eminent parliamentarian backed Winston’s calls for rearmament and for binding military alliances with European states under the shadow of the swastika. Even England’s Chiefs of Staff were wary of commitment to other states; without such pacts, they argued, Britain could choose when and where to apply pressure. Alliances—even a League of Nations alliance—would mean that each member nation would be obliged, at the very least, to apply sanctions to an aggressor, who in response could declare war on England. Anthony Eden agreed with the chiefs. Answering Churchill in the House of Commons on one occasion, he had said that “where I differ, with respect, from my Right hon Friend the Member for Epping, is that he seems to conceive that in order to have an effective world consultative system nations have to be heavily armed. I do not agree…. General disarmament must continue to be the ultimate aim.”
¹⁰³

Labour regarded Churchill’s demands for rearmament with a suspicion which can only be called paranoid. Clement Attlee, the party’s deputy leader, denounced all arms appropriations and denied that Hitler’s attentions were aggressive. He told Parliament: “We are back in a prewar atmosphere… in a system of alliances and rivalries and an armaments race,” adding: “We deny the proposition that an increased British air force will make for the peace of the world.” In the military estimates of HMG—His Majesty’s Government, the prime minister and his cabinet—which were so inadequate in Churchill’s view, Attlee discerned familiar, sinister themes. They were “nationalist and imperialist delusions… far more wild than any idealist dreams of the future we hold.” He declared: “We on our side are for total disarmament because we are realists.” When Winston recited a list of over twenty-four German factories producing airframe components and “considerably more” than eight plants turning out parts for warplane engines to be assembled by Heinkel, Junker, and Dornier, “on whose behalf the majority of other factories are working,” Attlee replied that anyone could draw up lists. One Labourite suggested that Baldwin was building a force which could be sent “abroad to fight in foreign countries.” Vansittart, who knew the MP had indicted the government of the wrong country, read that a Labour party conference had recommended a policy “subordinating our defense to the permission of Geneva, abolishing allegiance and loyalty to England, and pledging British citizens to a world-commonwealth which would ‘override any national duty in time of war.’ ” They had decided to take this position, they explained to the press, because “we have abandoned the whole idea of the national order.” In his memoirs Van acidly noted: “Hitler hadn’t.”
¹⁰⁴

Churchill’s isolation in Parliament seems remarkable now. England was not ready for him. Whenever Hitler loomed large in headlines, Britons plunged their heads deeper into the sand. And their leaders joined them. Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, a British expatriate living in Germany, had first judged Hitler as “a man of sense… who does not want war,” then, when his vision cleared, tried to persuade his countrymen at home that the Nazi regime was evil. He failed, he came to believe, because in Britain the “forces of apathy, of wilful myopia and of general delusion in high places were too strong for us.”
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Neville Chamberlain told Nancy Astor that when he moved from No. 11 Downing Street to No. 10 he intended to be his “own Foreign Minister.” His half brother Austen chided him: “Neville, you must remember you don’t know anything about foreign affairs.” Neville thought he knew a great deal, however, and his fellow ministers, especially Baldwin, found him impressive. He convinced them that Hitler would never attack France, the Low Countries, and Britain. The Führer, he said, wanted to move against Russia, not the West.

Actually, Hitler intended to turn south first. On the first page of
Mein Kampf
he had declared that a rejoining of Austria and Germany was a “goal to be pursued with every means [
mit allen Mitteln
], all our lives,” and had melded both countries into a single proper noun:
Deutschösterreich
. His motive, as Churchill saw it, was to open “to Germany both the door of Czechoslovakia and the more spacious portals of southeastern Europe.” His chief obstacle was Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, no tribune of the people but a leader who had risen through free elections. In the summer of 1934 Austrian Nazis, acting on Hitler’s orders, plotted to murder Dollfuss and arrest everyone in his cabinet. At noon on July 25, ten of them, dressed in Austrian army uniforms, passed the chancellery sentries unchallenged. Bursting into the chancellor’s office they shot him and left him on a sofa bleeding to death, ignoring his pleas for a priest. But their cabinet roundup was flawed; among the ministers they failed to capture was Kurt von Schuschnigg, a man of action. On Schuschnigg’s orders Austrian troops overpowered the plotters. He hanged them while Mussolini, jealous of German designs on Austria, rushed fifty thousand troops to the Brenner Pass. This was the kind of language Hitler understood. He lay low, leaving Austria, in Churchill’s phrase, “on the hob.”