The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (196 page)

But the rest of the cabinet, including the prime minister, felt otherwise. Baldwin even opposed an appeal to the League of Nations. At some point, he said, “it would be necessary to point out to the French” that intervention in the Rhineland would not only let loose “another great war…. It would probably… result in Germany going Bolshevik.” The first lord of the Admiralty and the secretary for air acknowledged that their position was “a disadvantageous one.” One of Baldwin’s ministers observed that “public opinion” strongly opposed Allied intervention in the neutral zone. Another concurred. And this was a government whose respect for public opinion was profound. In the end they decided to do nothing. Indeed, Baldwin observed, peace was “worth taking almost any risk.”
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Quiet and efficient, British civil servants were taken for granted by most cabinet ministers, and when political issues arose they were treated brusquely or even ignored, despite the fact that most of them belonged to the same class and had gone to the same schools. Sir Robert Vansittart, forceful, knighted, and destined for a peerage, was an exception. Ralph Wigram was farther down the ladder. In Paris he had sat behind Eden and Halifax, speaking only when asked for a date, a statistic, a protocol, or technical advice. Nevertheless, Wigram had vehemently agreed with Flandin, believing a policy of drift now would be fatal, and afterward he had a private word with him. If the Locarno powers were to reconvene in London Thursday, he asked, why not move the league council’s meeting there, rather than Geneva? The hope of action was small, but whatever the Locarno decision, it would gain prestige if promptly endorsed by the League of Nations. Flandin warmly agreed, and spoke to the others. It was done. But Wigram was still troubled, and once he returned to British soil he drove straight to Chartwell.

Although he was exiled from public life in England, Churchill’s political statements continued to be closely studied in foreign chancelleries by those who sensed that eventually his hour would strike. Adolf Hitler continued to be among them. The Führer loathed Churchill and always spoke of him with undisguised malice, but he could not ignore him. In the beginning his insults were merely ugly. Winston, he said, was “a nervous old hen.” You couldn’t “talk sense” to such a man, the Führer said; he was merely
“ein romantischer Phantast”
—a romantic dreamer. However, once Churchill opened up with his heavy rhetorical artillery, Hitler’s invective also escalated. “The gift Mr. Churchill possesses is the gift to lie with a pious expression on his face and to distort the truth…. His abnormal state of mind can only be explained as symptomatic of either a paralytic disease or a drunkard’s ravings!” After his offer of nonaggression treaties, meant to blur the jagged edge of his thrust into the Rhineland, Hitler predicted that “only the Churchill clique” would “stand in the way of peace.”
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Actually, the Rhineland crisis had broken at an awkward time for Winston. When the Foreign Office phoned Chartwell and read him a translation of Hitler’s March 7 speech, he instantly saw it for what it was: “comfort for everyone on both sides of the Atlantic who wished to be humbugged.” But because he still expected a summons to No. 10 and a cabinet appointment, he suppressed his most compelling instincts and spared Baldwin’s government.
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In public, and especially in House debates, Churchill was civil, almost subdued. Parliament was amused; Winston, for once, was maneuvering for office. He had been sounding his trumpet of alarm for over three years now. His notes had been clear and true, yet they had neither altered the government’s foreign policy nor slowed the rush toward catastrophe. Since he couldn’t give up, he had redoubled his efforts to wedge his way into a seat at the cabinet table, where, he thought, he could control the clattering train. Winston believed, and virtually every parliamentary correspondent and MP not in office shared his conviction, that he would soon be appointed to the office, still vacant, of minister of defense.

Yet though he had spared the prime minister, Winston had not remained mute after Nazi troops burst into the Rhineland. He and Austen Chamberlain had formed a team, working in tandem to arouse the House by spelling out the consequences if the Nazi coup were to pass unchallenged. Austria would be the Führer’s next objective, Churchill predicted, and Austen pointed out that “if Austria perishes Czechoslovakia becomes indefensible.” Once Hitler had mastered eastern Europe, they both told the House, he would turn westward, stalking France and Britain. Some MPs, Churchill observed, thought the French were exaggerating the danger. He told them: “If
we
had been invaded four times in a hundred years, we should understand better how terrible that injury is.” In France and Belgium, he said, “the avalanche of fire and steel which fell upon them twenty years ago” was still “an overpowering memory and obsession.” He asked: “How should we feel if—to change the metaphor—we saw a tiger, the marks of whose teeth and claws had scarred every limb of our bodies, coming toward us and crouching within exactly the distance of a single spring?”
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In his diary Neville Chamberlain wrote that Winston had “made a constructive and helpful speech.” On one point, however, Churchill had been adamant, and Neville’s failure to assign it importance, or even mention it, reveals the moral gap between the two men. Both Austen and Winston emphasized Hitler’s grave damage to the sanctity of treaties. Britain, they held, must remain faithful to her every vow. There was, Churchill said, much goodwill in England toward Germany, and an abiding hope that “the three great peoples of Western Europe may join hands in lasting friendship. But”—he paused—“it ought not even to be necessary to state that Great Britain, if called upon, will honor her obligations both under the Covenant of the League and under the Treaty of Locarno.” In an article for the
Evening Standard
he amplified on this theme, appealing to Hitler “and the great disconsolate Germany he leads,” urging them to place themselves “in the very forefront of civilisation” by “a proud and voluntary submission, not to any single country or group of countries, but to the sanctity of treaties and the authority of public law, by an immediate withdrawal from the Rhineland.” It was like telling Rasputin to use his knife and fork. Still, Churchill had mentioned neither the past nor present sins of the men on the Treasury Bench.
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Wigram, reaching Chartwell late in the evening on Wednesday, March 11, found Churchill eager for news. After listening to an account of the Paris meeting, Winston decided he must talk to Flandin before anyone in the government saw him. Breaking the habit of a lifetime, he rose at dawn and drove to his London flat in Morpeth Mansions. Flandin arrived there by taxi at 8:30
A.M
. He told Winston he intended to propose simultaneous mobilization by Britain and France of all land, air, and sea forces; producing a sheaf of papers, he read aloud what Churchill afterward called “an impressive list” of support from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Yugoslavia, Rumania, and the three Baltic states. “There was no doubt,” Churchill wrote, “that superior strength still lay with the Allies of the former war. They had only to act to win.” Winston told the French minister that in his “detached private position” there was little he could do, but he guided him to others, like Duff Cooper, who had a voice in the government, and that evening he gave a dinner for him. Influential Englishmen heard Flandin out and left promising to do what they could.
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Churchill himself had left the table earlier. The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee was holding a late session, and he had asked to be heard. There he repeated his insistence that Britain keep her Geneva and Locarno pledges. Alec Douglas-Home, a future prime minister, took notes at the meeting. He recorded that Winston produced Flandin’s papers and then “drew a dramatic picture of all the countries of Europe hurrying to assist France and ourselves against Germany.” The next speaker was Hoare, who ridiculed Churchill’s argument. “As regards Winston’s references to all the nations of Europe coming to our aid,” he said, “I can only say that in my estimate these nations are totally unprepared from a military point of view.” It was Douglas-Home’s impression that after Churchill had spoken “a substantial proportion” of the committee was “prepared to see this country go to war.” But Hoare, he thought, had “definitely sobered them down.”
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It seems remarkable that no one there sought expert opinion on
Germany’s
military preparedness. If they were unaware that the Wehrmacht was only a shadow of its future self, they surely knew Hitler had introduced conscription barely a year earlier. Doubtless the smaller countries were unprepared. All Europe was, even the nations that had made a fetish of rearmament; the Italians were proving that in Ethiopia. Nevertheless, all had standing armies of trained men. The MPs can hardly have doubted that Hitler would have backed down if encircled by an alliance of France, Great Britain, and the chain of states, swiftly forged by Flandin, on the Reich’s eastern and southern fronts. It seems strange that Hoare, so recently disgraced, could discredit Churchill with so flimsy an argument.

But all the meetings held in London in that second week of March were peculiar. On Thursday, Neville Chamberlain entered in his diary: “March 12, talked to Flandin, emphasising that public opinion would not support us in sanctions of any kind.” Flandin had replied that at the very least Britain could declare an economic boycott. Neville rejected that, though he offered to give up “a colony” in the interests of peace. The appeasers thought their empire a great bargaining counter, when in fact Hitler wanted none of it. The Third Reich, Ribbentrop had explained to Eden, wanted its
Lebensraum
(living space) in Europe, preferably to the east. In a deep leather chair at his club, Halifax reread Hitler’s
Friedensrede
of March 7 and found a passage he had overlooked. In denouncing the Franco-Soviet treaty, the Führer charged that it not only violated Locarno but had also introduced “the threatening military power of a mighty empire into the center of Europe by the roundabout way of Czechoslovakia, which has signed an agreement with Russia.” Halifax rang for a Carlton servant and told him he wanted an atlas with a more detailed map of Czechoslovakia. The man returned empty-handed. The map, he explained, had already been checked out by another member, Neville Chamberlain.
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P
olicy is often determined in camera, which is why contemporaneous public opinion, formed amidst the convulsion of historic events, is shaped by incomplete, often distorted, information. In London that week of conferences in St. James’s Palace—one of the Locarno powers and the other of the Council of the League of Nations—the press was admitted only to the public meetings. It was at one of them that a friend saw Wigram, sitting at Eden’s side, “looking increasingly disillusioned and depressed.” The entire Foreign Office establishment had been shaken by the government’s failure to respond to Hitler’s challenge. The foreign secretary’s conduct completely baffled them. And a few of them decided to tell him so. On the initiative of Rex Leeper, they converged on Eden’s Whitehall office. He told them he shared their concern. But he doubted that the British people were ready for war. Most of the FO believed that Hitler’s
Friedensrede
offer of nonaggression treaties was fraudulent, and that his invasion of the Rhineland was as great a threat to England as an invasion of Belgium; greater, say, than a conquest of Austria.
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Leeper therefore proposed a nationwide campaign to awaken all Britain to the Nazi menace, persuading the country to “abandon an attitude of defeatism vis-à-vis Germany.” The need, he said, was for “bold and frank speeches, not hesitating to call a spade a spade and not shirking from unpleasant truths.” Eden agreed, but on reflection decided that the idea was impractical. It would divide the country and politicize the Foreign Office. In the end Leeper and his colleagues decided to turn to Churchill. He would lead, and they would support him behind Baldwin’s back.
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Wigram couldn’t wait. Vansittart, who had given him permission to leak data to “selected publicists,”
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was dismayed when Wigram gave this mandate the broadest possible interpretation. He called a press conference in his Lord North Street home and gave Flandin the floor. Abandoning diplomatic language the French minister spoke straight to the point. He said: “Today the whole world, and especially the small nations, turn their eyes toward England. If England will act now, she can lead Europe. You will have a policy, all the world will follow you, and you will thus prevent war. It is your last chance. If you do not stop Germany now, all is over. France cannot guarantee Czechoslovakia any more because that will become geographically impossible.” If Britain did not act, he continued, France, with her small population and obsolete industry, lay at the mercy of a rearmed Germany. Franco-German friendship was impossible; “the two countries will always be in tension.” He acknowledged that England could reach a fragile understanding with the Nazis now, but it would not last; if Hitler were not stopped “by force today, war is inevitable.”
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