The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (197 page)

The reporters returned to Fleet Street and wrote straightforward accounts of Flandin’s appeal, which their editors buried. Everyone in Whitehall expected Baldwin to loose a lightning bolt, destroying Wigram, but his irregularity was ignored. Thoughtful Englishmen wavered, hawks one day and doves the next. Harold Nicolson summed up the quandary in a letter to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, that Thursday, March 12. “If we send an ultimatum to Germany, she ought in all reason to back down,” he wrote. But what if she didn’t? Then, he said, “We shall have war.” He assumed that the Nazis would lose, but, he asked, what would be “the good of that? It would only mean communism in Germany and France.” At that his line of reason broke. It wouldn’t happen that way, he decided, because “the people of this country absolutely refuse to have a war. We should be faced by a general strike if we even suggested such a thing. We shall therefore have to climb down ignominiously and Hitler will have scored.” Indecision was the equivalent of a Nazi triumph, and by the end of the week a swelling majority of MPs, diplomats, and journalists decided that Hitler would emerge the winner of the Rhineland crisis—that he had, indeed, already won.
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Flandin, offended and disheartened by the British press’s lack of attention and the failure of his meeting with Chamberlain, again arrived at Morpeth Mansions. Churchill shared his anguish but could offer nothing but advice. As he later wrote: “I advised M. Flandin to demand an interview with Mr. Baldwin before he left.” Darkness had fallen when the French minister’s taxi turned off Whitehall and into Downing Street. The prime minister appeared at the threshold of No. 10 to receive his troubled guest. Baldwin was gracious. Once the amenities were over and they began to talk, however, he told his guest that his cause was lost. Explaining diffidently that he “knew little of foreign affairs”—quite true, but an astonishing admission from the leader of the world’s one superpower, vulnerable, through its empire, to major disorders all over the world—he said he did know the feelings of his people, “and they want peace.” Flandin protested. The peace would be unbroken. Not a shot would be fired. If faced by a police action the Germans would quickly evacuate the Rhineland. According to Flandin, the prime minister replied: “You may be right, but if there is
even one chance in a hundred
that war would follow from your police action, I have not the right to commit England.”
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The behavior of both men is baffling. What commitment was Flandin seeking? According to his later version, he merely asked Baldwin to give the French a free hand. But France was a sovereign power. She needed no one’s permission to act. Churchill had recognized this weakness in Flandin’s first visit to England, before the invasion. He had thought it feckless of Flandin to come to Downing Street, cap in hand, urging the prime minister to honor England’s treaty obligations and send British troops to join the French in a Rhineland counterattack. Statesmen shouldn’t beg; “Clemenceau or Poincaré,” he later noted, “would have left Mr. Baldwin no option.” If France moved to meet her Locarno commitments—even though England refused to honor hers—Baldwin’s approval would be unnecessary and irrelevant. It was the postwar verdict of the French parliamentary investigating committee that during the Rhineland crisis Premier Sarraut and his cabinet, unable to make up their own minds, were asking the British to do it for them. Churchill would have done it; Baldwin didn’t. He said repeatedly: “England is not in a state to go to war.” Back in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Flandin described his call at No. 10 to Sarraut and his cabinet, concluding, “I understood that evening that I would not obtain, despite my efforts, British acceptance of our military intervention in the Rhineland.” In other words, “
Nous sommes trahis.
” In Berlin, Shirer scrawled in his diary: “Hitler has got away with it!” And so he had. The Führer immediately ordered a nationwide plebiscite to ask the
Volkes
whether they approved of the coup, and 98.8 percent voted
ja
.
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In Parliament that same month Winston reflected: “When we think of the great power and influence which this country exercises we cannot look back with much pleasure on our foreign policy in the last five years. They have certainly been very disastrous years.” He spoke slowly, his voice heavy: “Five years ago all felt safe; five years ago we were all looking forward to peace, to a period in which mankind would rejoice in the treasures which science can spread to all classes if conditions of peace and justice prevail…. Look at the difference in our position now! We find ourselves compelled once again to face the hateful problems and ordeals which those of us who worked and toiled in the last struggle hoped were gone forever.”

He summed up the outcome of the latest crisis: “What is, after all, the first great fact with which we are confronted? It is this. An enormous triumph has been gained by the Nazi regime…. The violation of the Rhineland is serious from the point of view of the menace to which it exposes Holland, Belgium, and France. It is also serious from the fact that when it is fortified… it will be a barrier across Germany’s front door, which will leave her free to sally out eastward and southward by the back door.”
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This speech was ignored. Macmillan recalls that at that time Winston’s “speeches and demands… however effective in themselves, were injured because of the general doubt as to the soundness of his judgement,” and Lady Longford described him as “the disregarded voice of Cassandra.”
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Painter Paul Maze wrote Churchill, “Half England is hardly aware of the situation.” That was understating it. The masses of the British people, few of whom knew where or what the Rhineland was, had returned with relief to their daily routines. Sir Oswald Mosley was planning an anti-Semitic demonstration, the Cunarder S.S.
Queen Mary
was ready for launching, George Orwell’s
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
, having received mixed reviews, was selling poorly, and early vacationers in Brighton heard music hall “vocalists,” as they were now called, croon:

Nazism had become fashionable in London’s West End. Ladies wore bracelets with swastika charms; young men combed their hair to slant across their foreheads. Paul Maze continued: “
Do
write to the papers all you can. The German propaganda spread about is most harmful, especially in Mayfair society!”
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The Führer still had many admirers in Parliament and a lofty one (King Edward VIII) in Buckingham Palace. Germanophilia in the British upper classes had begun as an open, closely reasoned cause, but as the nature of Nazism became evident, with Churchill lifting rocks to show the creatures scurrying below, its character had changed. Martin Gilbert and Richard Gott observed that, “the more it was opposed and the more it was shown to be inadequate, if not erroneous, the more it transformed itself into a hidden obsession.” The faithful plotted in the dark, behind closed doors. Sympathy for the Germans, “originally a mood to be proud of,” Gilbert and Gott wrote, “became, with the brutalization of German politics, a mood of whispers and cabals.”
The Times
echoed
Der Angriff
and
Völkischer Beobachter
; much was made of the joint Saxon heritage shared by pure-blooded Britons and German Aryans (and
not
by Jews). British criticism of the Third Reich was deeply resented in Berlin, and the British embassy there was always quick to apologize for it.
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The Quai d’Orsay and the Foreign Office, bruised and shaken, had done their best to paper over the debacle with new documents, exchanges of formal letters, and sealed covenants. Flandin wearily told the British he would accept Hitler’s coup provided the reoccupation remained
symbolique
and unfortified—a provision which England could not possibly guarantee. Nevertheless, Eden and the FO went to work, persuading the other signatories to accept the Nazi fait accompli. Meanwhile, the League of Nations council went through the motions of condemning Germany for her treaty violations. On the day of the council’s finding, twelve irreclaimable days had passed since the Führer’s nervous battalions had crossed the Rhine bridges. Since no one even raised the question of imposing sanctions on the aggressor, the condemnation was a meaningless gesture, serving only to demonstrate the league’s hollow authority and shrunken prestige.

The repercussions were not over. In 1918, when Ludendorff was plunging his bloody fists into the snakelike line of Allied trenches winding from the Swiss border to the Channel, the northern anchor of the defense had been held by King Albert’s stubborn Belgians. Now Albert had lain in his grave for two years and the country was ruled by Leopold III, frivolous, shallow, and callow. After the fall of the Rhineland, Leopold decided that Britain and France were no longer reliable allies. He renounced the military alliance Albert had signed with the democracies twenty years earlier and acquired written releases from Paris and London. This meant that at the outbreak of war French troops could not enter Belgium until a Nazi invasion had been confirmed. “In one stroke,” writes Alistair Horne, the British military historian, “the whole of her [France’s] Maginot Line strategy lay in fragments.”
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By March 26, less than three weeks after a few thousand poorly equipped Wehrmacht troops had cowed the armed might of France, photographs of the rising system of concrete fortresses Hitler was building opposite the Maginot Line—the Siegfried Line—came into Churchill’s possession, and during the first week in April he received detailed reports. Shielding his sources, he shared the substance of the reports with the House. In a remarkably prescient speech he pointed out that these redoubts would permit Nazi troops to be “economised on that line,” enabling “the main force to swing round through Belgium and Holland.” If that happened, and the two Low Countries fell “under German domination,” England would be in mortal peril, a terrifying prospect, he said, which was “brought very much nearer to this island by the erection of the German fortress line.” Nor was that all. “Look east,” he continued. “There the consequences of the Rhineland fortification may be more immediate…. Poland and Czechoslovakia, with which must be associated Yugoslavia, Rumania, Austria and some other countries, are all affected very decisively the moment this great work of construction has been completed.”
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Parliament was unmoved. It was characteristic of the late 1930s that His Majesty’s Government—and the vast majority of His Majesty’s subjects—assumed that each crisis was the last, and that Hitler could be taken at his word when he assured them that he would press no further claims upon Europe. Churchill warned them now: “When you are drifting down the stream of Niagara, it may easily happen that from time to time you run into a reach of quite smooth water, or that a bend in the river or a change in the wind may make the roar of the falls seem far more distant. But”—his voice dropped a register, and only those who strained could hear—“
your hazard and your preoccupation are in no way affected thereby
.”
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On May 18 the Reich’s foreign minister, Baron Konstantin von Neurath, received William Bullitt, Franklin Roosevelt’s friend and the American ambassador to France. Neurath could scarcely have spoken more plainly. In his report to the State Department Bullitt quoted Neurath as declaring that it would be “the policy of the German Government” to take no new action beyond Germany’s borders “until the Rhineland has been digested…. Until the German fortifications have been constructed on the French and Belgian frontiers, the German Government will do everything possible to prevent rather than encourage an outbreak by the Nazis in Austria and will pursue a quiet line with regard to Czechoslovakia.” Neurath’s parting words to Bullitt were: “As soon as our fortifications are constructed and the countries of Central Europe realize that France cannot enter German territory at will, those countries will begin to feel very differently about their foreign policies and a new constellation will develop.”
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If public men of vision are tough, as Churchill was, they endure. If they are not, and most are not, they perish or live out their lives in lonely exile. The future may serve as an appellate court. It cannot, however, award retroactive damages, and so Ralph Wigram can never be redeemed. He was not a weak man. Nevertheless, Hitler’s successful smash-and-grab coup had, in Churchill’s words, dealt Wigram “a mortal blow.” The crisis had subjected him to an unbearable strain. Valentine Lawford, one of Wigram’s subordinates, notes that the “purely physical demands of those twelve days had been almost intolerable; and they had still further enfeebled the frail organs of a frail body.” After Flandin had left London, Wigram forced himself to tour the occupied Rhineland. There he was shocked to see little children, coached by German soldiers, play “grenades” with snowballs. He returned to his Lord North Street home, as Ava Wigram later wrote Churchill, “and said to me, ‘War is now
inevitable
, and it will be the most terrible war there has ever been. I don’t think I shall see it, but you will. Wait now for bombs on this little house.’ ” He felt a sense of personal guilt. He told her, “I have failed to make the people here realize what is at stake. I am not strong enough to make the people here understand. Winston has always, always understood, and he is strong and will go on to the end.” Several months later, writes Henry Pelling, Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, “depression overtook him and he committed suicide.”
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Vansittart phoned the news to Winston. Churchill wrote Clementine, “I was deeply shocked & grieved…. I thought him a grand fellow.” Meantime Clementine, skiing in Austria, had read Wigram’s obituary in
The Times,
and their letters crossed in the mail, hers reading: “He was a true friend of yours & in his eyes you cd see the spark wh showed an inner light was burning—His poor wife will be overwhelmed with grief.” Bearing a wreath, Winston attended the funeral, near Hayward’s Heath, with Vansittart, Bracken, and Maze. Afterward they brought the young widow and the Wigrams’ five-year-old mongoloid child back to Chartwell for lunch. Churchill was amazed to learn—it is astonishing that a statesman who owed so much to civil servants should not have known—that, as he wrote Clemmie, “there appears to be no pension or anything for Foreign Office widows.” In another note he added: “Poor little Ava is all adrift now. She cherished him [Ralph] &… he was her contact with gt affairs. Now she has only the idiot child.”
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