The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (201 page)

He reviled Hitler, but spoke enigmatically of Mussolini and the Caudillo. In Cannes he told Vincent Sheean that to him Ethiopia, the Rhineland, and Spain were not unrelated incidents, that they “involve the whole structure of Europe, with possibilities of realignment carrying the promise of deadly danger to England.” It struck Sheean that Churchill’s “patriotism was rapidly engulfing all other sentiments,” that his “awareness of the danger to England drove out whatever had originally prepared him for benevolence toward the Fascist principle, and he was willing, in the end, to work with the extreme left if necessary to defeat the paramount enemy. This evolution I saw.” At their last parting, with Franco on the verge of triumph, Sheean observed that Churchill, “saddened and made solemn by the whole thing, perceived the importance of the victory for Hitler and Mussolini, and regarded the fall of the Republic as a blow to England.”
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Harold Macmillan remembered “Churchill talking to me with great energy on this [aspect] of the Spanish question. He decided to declare himself neutral, for his eye was on the real enemy.” Italy, as he saw it, was not England’s real enemy. In his memoirs he would write that Britain was “justified in going so far with the League of Nations against Italy as we could carry France,” but he knew the French could not be carried far. At the time he said: “We are not strong enough to be the lawgiver and the spokesman of the world.” There was poignance here, for in his youth—before 1914 destroyed Britain’s paramountcy—they had been both.
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As Franco’s Nationalists gained the upper hand, he urged the House not to repeat the Ethiopian fiasco: “It is no use once again leading other nations up the garden path and then running away when the dog growls.” As Sheean had seen, once the tide of battle favored the Nationalists, Churchill turned away from them. In the
Daily Telegraph
he wrote on December 30, 1938, that “the British Empire would run far less risk from the victory of the Spanish Government than from that of General Franco,” and a few months later he told subscribers to the
Telegraph
that “the British Conservative Right Wing, who have given him [Franco] such passionate support, must now be the prey of many misgivings.” Since the German threat had absolute priority, he told the House, Britain should refuse to take sides in Spain, though “I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Naziism, I would choose Communism.” He added: “I hope I will not be called upon to survive in a world under a Government of either of these dispensations. I feel unbounded sorrow and sympathy for their victims.”
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However qualified, this was a remarkable turnabout for the man who, in the turmoil after the Armistice, had led the attempt to stifle bolshevism in its cradle. But he had executed remarkable pivots before: in the first decade of the century, when, as a young MP, he had fought to provide the poor with unemployment insurance, pensions for the aged, and insurance for the sick; again, by joining the IRA’s Michael Collins in the early 1920s to create the Irish Free State; and yet again, after the general strike of 1926, by leading the struggle for the underpaid, ill-housed, ill-fed British coal miners. If a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, Winston was disqualified.

At the urging of Vansittart and Leeper, Churchill in 1936 embarked on a strenuous campaign to awaken Britain through public lectures and newspaper articles, beginning on April 3 in the
Evening Standard
. His cry of alarm, published in the most prominent newspapers of fourteen countries, warned that without concerted action by the nations now lying under the shadow of the swastika, “such civilisation as we have been able to achieve” would be reduced by renewed warfare to “pulp and squalor.” The peoples of Europe, “chattering, busy, sporting, toiling, amused from day to day by headlines and from night to night by cinemas,” were nevertheless “slipping, sinking, rolling backward to the age when ‘the earth was void and darkness moved upon the face of the waters.’ ” Surely, he argued, “it is worth a supreme effort—the laying aside of every impediment, the clear-eyed facing of fundamental facts, the noble acceptance of risks inseparable from heroic endeavour—to control the hideous drift of events and arrest calamity on the threshold. Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!!!
NOW
is the appointed time.”

Time increased Hitler’s momentum. His triumph in the Rhineland had heightened the Third Reich’s prestige throughout Europe and dealt England and France a deep wound, all the more painful because it was self-inflicted. The damage to Britain had been particularly grievous; in 1914 the French had gone to war because, facing invasion, they had no choice, but the British, who could have remained on the sidelines—where the Germans had begged them to stay—had fought to defend Belgian neutrality. Other small countries had assumed that they too could rely on the righteous might of history’s greatest empire. Now that England had shown the white feather, recruits swelled the ranks of Nazi parties in Austria, Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, western Poland, and the Free City of Danzig. New parties raised the hakenkreuz in Bulgaria, Rumania, and Hungary; and in May a Fascist plot was exposed in Estonia. On July 11 Churchill gloomily wrote Sir Hugh Tudor, with whom he had stood shoulder to shoulder when Ludendorff launched his great triad of offensives on March 21, 1918: “Everything is getting steadily worse on the Continent. A good deal of work is of course going on here, but all about two years behind.”
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By now Churchill had gathered a formidable mass of data about war preparedness from Morton, Anderson, and the FO. He could not reveal it in open session without further endangering the national security, however, and Baldwin refused his request for secret session. The prime minister did agree to receive a delegation representing both houses of Parliament, and they met on July 28 and 29. There Churchill presented an extraordinary array of facts detailing German air strength, identifying his sources as French to protect his informants. He went on to discuss, among other matters, “night-flying under war conditions”; the need to recruit more university graduates as pilots and to train more navigators; the gap between planning aircraft production and actual delivery; the want of spare parts; the vulnerability of England’s “feeding ports” of London, Bristol, Liverpool, and Southampton; the need for an “alternative centre of Government” if London were bombed flat; proposals to build underground storage tanks to protect the country’s fuel oil from attack; radar; industrial mobilization; and the shortages of machine guns, bombs, searchlights, trench mortars, and grenades. He stopped short of recommending that the nation’s industry be put on a war footing, but he did suggest that “we ought not to hesitate to impinge on a certain percentage—25 percent, 30 percent… and force them and ourselves to that sacrifice.” He said: “The months slip by rapidly. If we delay too long in repairing our defences, we may be forbidden by superior power to complete the process…. I say there is a state of emergency. We are in danger as we have never been in danger before.”
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After Churchill had finished, Tom Jones wrote in his diary, “all subsequent speeches were an anti-climax.” He was wrong. The most memorable remarks were Stanley Baldwin’s. The prime minister observed that he could not “deal in detail with the many points that have been raised.” He and Neville had discussed the implications of an all-out effort to prepare the country for the worst, he said, and had concluded that the adverse “effect on trade” would be too high a price to pay. Any disturbance of peacetime production “might throw back the ordinary trade of the country for many years,” inflicting grave damage on the nation’s economic health “at a time when we might want all our credit.”
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Winston could not imagine how British credit could be useful if Hitler’s headquarters were in Buckingham Palace, the Reichstag met in the House of Commons, and all Englishmen in public life were herded into concentration camps. Baldwin assured him it would never come to that. As the City said, the prime minister was a practical man, a “sound” man. Churchill’s figures, he said, were “exaggerated”—unaware that most of them had appeared in the weekly reports he initialed and passed on, apparently unread—and, raising doubts about “the peril itself,” he recited the worn litany that Hitler’s Reich was a shield against the Bolshevik bogey. Germany had no designs on Western Europe, he told them, because “West would be a difficult programme for her.” The Führer wanted “to move East, and if he should move East, I should not break my heart.” In all events, he was not going to get England into a war “for the League of Nations or for anybody else.” If war broke out, he said, “I should like to see the Bolshies and the Nazis doing it.” To Churchill this begged the question. Germany, not Russia, threatened the peace. His fear was that the Tory rank and file, championing Franco’s brand of Red-baiting, would join Hitler’s camp followers. After the meeting broke up he wrote Corbin at the French embassy that one of his “greatest difficulties” was “the German talk that the anti-Communist countries should stand together.” Should Léon Blum—the new French leader, a socialist—support the Spanish Loyalists, he said, “the dominant forces here would be pleased with Germany and Italy, and estranged from France…. I do not like to hear people talking of England, Germany and Italy forming up against European Communism. It is too easy to be good.”
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T
he unforgivable sin of a commander, said Napoleon, is to “form a picture”—to assume that the enemy will act a certain way in a given situation, when in fact his response may be altogether different. The first Allied response to the Nazi regime had been prompted by the universal loathing among decent men of modern war’s senseless slaughter. But revulsion is a frail foundation for a foreign policy. As Hitler’s belligerence became clearer, Baldwin, Chamberlain, their fellow appeasers in England, and
les apaisers
in France assured one another that he would fight the Russians and leave them alone. But wishing didn’t make it so, and they should have known that; Baldwin himself had described Hitler as a “lunatic” with whom “you can never be sure of anything,” adding that “none of us know what goes on in that strange man’s mind.” Therefore, in the autumn of 1936, he called for his fiddlers three—Samuel Hoare (now first lord of the Admiralty), Lord Halifax (lord privy seal), and Neville Chamberlain (Exchequer)—and moved toward what they thought was firmer ground.
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It was quicksand. Their new mantra was
diplomacy
—negotiation as a sensible alternative to war. Britain’s honor, they told the public, would be preserved; the negotiating table, not the battlefield, was where differences between England and Germany would be resolved. They were convinced that Hitler had his price. Some of them believed this even after all their assumptions, and much of London, lay in ruins. Devoted to peace, they could not understand that the ruler of Nazi Germany disdained negotiations, enjoyed bloodshed—including the shedding of German blood—and therefore preferred military conquest. Churchill understood because of the aggressive drives lying deep in his own complex personality. He worked tirelessly to avoid hostilities, but if the Führer was determined to fight, the prospect of unsheathing the sword of England struck no terror in Winston’s heart. All other remedies having been exhausted, he would wield it with relish.

Unfortunately it was a blunt, rusting weapon in 1936, and its hilt lay beyond his reach anyhow. Those who held it despised it. And on November 7, after King Edward VIII had opened the new session of Parliament, they all but discarded it. Although the exhausted prime minister was confined to Chequers on doctor’s orders—only a handful knew that the King’s yearning for an impossible marriage was responsible for his exhaustion—his cabinet, meeting in Downing Street and knowing he would approve, set the course which would lead to Munich less than two years later.

Inskip was first to speak. The devout Anglican had no prayer for the League of Nations. Collective security, he said, was dead; after Ethiopia and the Rhineland, confidence in it had simply “disappeared.” He proposed it be succeeded by broadening “the appeasement of Germany’s economic conditions.” This was the new diplomacy, which had its critics even within the government. Foreign Secretary Eden and Secretary for War Duff Cooper disagreed. The government, they argued, should give absolute priority to preparing a credible response to Nazi aggression within a year. Hoare protested that this would trigger an “immense upheaval,” weakening England in the long run, and William Ormsby-Gore, the colonial secretary, remarked that Britain’s close ties with France were “widely resented in the country.”

Everyone awaited Chamberlain’s decision. He would move into No. 10 in a few months; his voice would be decisive. After a long pause he adopted a firm, if reasonable, tone. He saw no alternative to a widening of the search for appeasement. The issue of “national safety” was hard to oppose, he said, but as chancellor of the Exchequer he was “concerned that the cost of defence programs was mounting at a giddy rate.” The latest White Paper had led to the appropriation of £400 million. Should the flow of funds continue at the present rate, rumors of an unbalanced budget would spread. If that happened—and his tone left no doubt that he viewed the possibility as calamitous—they might discover that Britain’s credit abroad was “not so good as it was a few years ago.”
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