The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (189 page)

On Tuesday, March 19, he made this threat good. Backbenchers, he told the House, were beginning to lose faith in the credibility of His Majesty’s Government. He picked up the previous day’s
Daily Telegraph
and quoted: “ ‘Between 250 and 300 military aircraft have been added to Germany’s total since November.’ ” At that rate, the Nazis could have another 1,500 warplanes by 1936.

Laying before the House a string of precise figures, he went on: “At the end of the year, when we were to have had a 50 percent superiority over Germany, they will be at least three and four times as strong as we.” He demanded that RAF expansion be redoubled.

Attlee’s Labourites were outraged. The government’s position was more nebulous. Baldwin chose Under Secretary Sassoon to answer the attack. To what extent Sassoon’s reply was based on duplicity—Baldwin’s duplicity or Sassoon’s—and to what degree on ignorance by either or both, is matter for speculation. The record merely tells us that Sassoon rose, addressed himself to Winston, and said vaguely: “I do not think I can follow him into a morass of figures which must be, after all, very largely conjectural.” Sassoon denied that the Luftwaffe would become “50 percent stronger than ours either on the basis of first-line strength or on the basis of total number of aircraft. So far as we can at present estimate, we shall still, at the end of this year, possess a margin of superiority.”
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Baldwin again questioned Winston’s evidence. It was incredible to him that the Luftwaffe could mount a serious challenge to the RAF. He could, it seemed, be convinced by only one man: Adolf Hitler. And that, amazingly, is what happened. Hitler had everything to gain by remaining silent, leaving His Majesty’s Government comfortable in its false security. But in this, as in all else, he was unlike other men. Curing himself of his cold, he impulsively invited Simon and Eden to Berlin on March 25, less than a week after Parliament’s air debate, and told them that the Reich had “reached parity with Great Britain as far as their respective air forces are concerned.” Simultaneously, Goebbels released this electrifying news to the press. The Luftwaffe, the Führer told Simon, was a bulwark against bolshevism. He was alert to “the Russian danger,” he said, though he seemed to be “a solitary prophet in the desert.” He added confidently: “But later people will find out that I was right.”
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Churchill wrote Clementine: “The political sensation of course is the statement by Hitler that his air force is already as strong as ours. This completely stultifies everything that Baldwin has said and incidentally vindicates all the assertions that I have made. I suspect in fact that he is really much stronger than we are.”
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Hitler had told Simon and Eden that according to his information the RAF had 1,045 first-line aircraft; since he was claiming parity, that, presumably, was the present strength of the Luftwaffe. But German intelligence had blundered. The British were nowhere near as formidable as he believed them to be. According to Air Ministry archives the RAF had only 453 first-line warplanes. Britain was in deep trouble unless she acted swiftly, but as summer approached and the days grew warmer it was often difficult to find any movement at all in Whitehall.

Parliament awaited a response from the front bench. And waited. And waited. In the
Daily Mail
of April 4 Churchill urged the government to make preparations for converting “the whole of our industry, should it become necessary, to various forms of munition production.” Three days later Ralph Wigram arrived at Chartwell for an overnight stay. With him he brought a February 27 analysis by Creswell, comparing the relative air strengths of Britain and Germany. The Air Ministry report on RAF strength was only one of several sources; they varied greatly, but all confirmed Hitler. Actually the Führer had inflated the operational strength of his air arm, but Nazi “training, design, and production were proceeding apace and expanding rapidly,” Telford Taylor writes. “The [operational] base was rapidly broadening, and by 1936 the threat of German air power would become reality.”
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Given this momentum, and the inertia at No. 10, the threat was already real, and on May 2 Churchill spoke in the House of Commons:

He bluntly told the House: “It cannot be disputed that both in numbers and in quality Germany has already obtained a marked superiority over our Home Defence Air Force.” At Chartwell Wigram had told Churchill that the Foreign Office staff was profoundly disturbed by the facts the FO was reporting to His Majesty’s Government and HMG’s abuse of them, and a remarkable instance of this had occurred only a few days earlier, on April 30. By April 1937, MacDonald had told the Ministerial Committee on Defence Requirements, “Germany will have 1,512 aircraft, and we shall have 740.” He asked: “Is this a situation that the Government can explain and defend in the House?” Chamberlain replied firmly that they couldn’t and shouldn’t; if they were to remain loyal to Baldwin they were “bound to maintain the position” that his pledge had not been broken. Should they acknowledge the mistake, he said, they would “give Germany the impression that we are frightened.” His proposal, which his colleagues accepted, was that air power should be judged not from the number of fighters and bombers in an air force, but by an intangible “air strength.” Secretary for Air Londonderry eagerly fell in line. Luftwaffe training, he said, “is inferior to ours.” RAF flying skills were so finely honed, and British airplane designers and manufacturers were so imaginative and competent, that to say “Germany is stronger” would be incorrect. Therefore Britain had, in effect, retained parity.

The Foreign Office and Air Ministry experts protested that this was mendacity. The parliamentary under secretary for foreign affairs produced a sheaf of reports demonstrating that German pilots and planes, far from being “behind in training and equipment,” were in the lead. Even if Luftwaffe air expansion ended in 1937, aerodynamic engineers said, Britain might not catch up until 1942, which meant that in the interval German diplomacy could exploit the gap.

Baldwin considered a cover-up and rejected it. A parliamentary inquiry could destroy him and give Churchill a national forum from which he could emerge as Britain’s hero. So, to the consternation of a majority of his ministers, he announced that he had decided to make a clean breast of things. Addressing the House on May 22, nearly two months after Hitler’s revelation, he quoted his pledge and followed it with what might be called his first confession:

The fact that Stanley Baldwin had made a personal pledge to Parliament and England was ignored. Privately he blamed the Foreign Office. But FO figures which would have alerted him had gone to the Air Ministry. Vansittart recalled: “S.B. did not know the true position, either because the Air Ministry had not given my figures to him, or because it took them with salt, or because it had different ones of its own. Or perhaps they just got into a box and stayed there.”

Intelligence, Van noted, “was becoming increasingly hard to operate in Germany, because informants, if detected, died slow and horrible deaths. Money was no longer enough for the risk of vastly improved tortures. Yet the facts were there. If S.B. had none, he was the rasher to say that we had a 50 percent margin.”
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The implications of the new situation were profoundly disturbing. Working at maximum capacity, British industry could turn out 1,250 planes in two years. Safety required twice as many.

Churchill expected a dramatic surge of public opinion, or at the very least a formal parliamentary inquiry. The conviction that he and England had been cheated burned in him. In April he had written Clementine: “How discreditable for the Government to have… misled Parliament upon a matter involving the safety of the country.” Two days later he had written her again: “It is a shocking thing when a Government openly commits itself to statements on a matter affecting the public safety which are bound to be flagrantly disproved by events.”
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But he had not thought it through. If the government fell, who would succeed? In other circumstances he might have expected a coalition, but both the Labour and Liberal parties had opposed
any
arms appropriations. Unmoved by Hitler’s disclosures, they continued to plan waging the 1935 election campaign, now imminent, against “Tory armaments.” Sinclair delivered a long speech in Parliament on “the question of private profits being made out of the means of death,” and expressed astonishment at Winston’s “dangerous argument” that vast sums should be spent on the RAF “in view of the financial conditions of the country and the intolerable burdens of our national debt and taxation.” Lloyd George declared that Germany had been treated “as a pariah.” She had, he said, been “driven into revolution” by the architects of Versailles (of whom he had been one) and demanded that her grievances be “put right.”

Meanwhile, Baldwin was traveling around the country, puffing his pipe and assuring relieved audiences that England was safe. “His statements were wrong,” Churchill wrote in an unpublished memorandum, “but they were everywhere accepted… by the British public.” Winston blamed Fleet Street. His indictment was unjustified; as Lord Londonderry noted, press comment was “vehement.” British reporters entering Germany confirmed the existence of the swelling army and the sense of urgency among the generals. In detailed dispatches the
Daily Telegraph
reported that the Luftwaffe was “already equipped with practically double the number of firstline military aircraft available in the country for the purposes of home defence.” No sensible man could doubt now that Churchill had been right and Baldwin wrong. Londonderry wrote that the unmasking of the Baldwin pledge “came as a rude shock to the British public.” In an open apology to Winston for having “ignored” his warnings, the
Daily Express
prophesied: “The reaction of the British public to the Nazi rearmament will be plain and positive.”
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It wasn’t, though. To a British colonel, a survivor of the Dardanelles expedition twenty years earlier, Churchill wrote that he was “astounded at the indifference” which had been the country’s response to “the fact that the Government have been utterly wrong about the German air strength,” and in a despairing note to Clemmie he said that the Nazis were “not only substantially stronger than we are,” but were “manufacturing at such a rate that we cannot catch them up.”
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By summer it was clear that the Dear Vicar had not only weathered the rearmament crisis; he was more popular than ever. Later Churchill recalled bitterly: “There was even a strange wave of enthusiasm for a Minister who did not hesitate to say he was wrong…. Conservative Members seemed angry with me for having brought their trusted leader to a plight from which only his native manliness and honesty had extricated him; but not, alas, his country.” He wrote a friend: “When I first went into Parliament the most insulting charge which could be made against a Minister—short of actual malfeasance—was that he had endangered the safety of the country…. Yet such are the surprising qualities of Mr. Baldwin that what all had been taught to shun has now been elevated into a canon of political virtue.”
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