The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (202 page)

In the discussion the chancellor’s most enthusiastic supporter was the minister of health, Kingsley Wood. Wood’s forte, and no one could do it better, was tidying files, updating appointment books, and—he was a wizard at this—keeping interoffice memos moving. After four years as Chamberlain’s parliamentary private secretary, he had risen in the postal, telegraph, and telephone services. Baldwin, impressed by the alacrity with which his mail arrived, made inquiries about Kingsley Wood and was told that he was “a sound man.” Soon Chamberlain would appoint him secretary of state for air, assigning him responsibility for the RAF with the enthusiastic approval of
The Times
, which hoped he would “increase the number of aeroplanes with the same bright suavity with which he has increased the number of telephone subscribers.” Duff Cooper wrote of him: “He clings to the idea of friendship with Germany and hates the thought of getting too closely tied up with the French.”
¹²⁰

The cabinet approved Chamberlain’s position, and thus his emerging policy was established. To preserve Britain’s financial resources, they would reach some sort of agreement with Hitler. The vote was not, however, unanimous. Eden, Duff Cooper, and Minister of Transport Leslie Hore-Belisha, veterans of the trenches, disagreed with the chancellor, thereby numbering their days in office, for Chamberlain had little patience with men who, after he had given them clear instructions, argued about them. Already it was said of those rallying to his standard that each was “like a naught in arithmetic that makes a place but has no value of its own.”

Kept abreast of developments at No. 10 by his FO informants, Churchill had seen Chamberlain’s move coming. His intelligence net had provided new evidence that Parliament’s appropriations, which Chamberlain thought improvident, would prove pitifully inadequate should Hitler let slip the dogs of war. Next to air power, a matter of life or death for Britain, Winston took a personal interest in the tank corps. The tank had been his conception, originally meant to mash German barbed wire for British soldiers swarming over their parapets and across no-man’s-land; he had forced it on a reluctant War Office and seen its triumphant performance in the Great War’s last battles. Although he had yet to grasp the role it would play in the next conflict, he knew Allied tanks had to be strong enough to match Germany’s. On the evening of October 27, Brigadier P. C. S. Hobart, commander of England’s only tank brigade, arrived at Morpeth Mansions in mufti and laid before him the full extent of Britain’s mobile armor. Its medium tanks, the world’s best in 1918, were now hopelessly obsolete, surpassed in quality and quantity by those of Germany, Russia, Italy, and even isolationist America.

In the air Britain continued to lag; Wing Commander Anderson, taking his greatest risk yet, sent Churchill a diagram dated October 6 and stamped “for official use only,” pinpointing the exact location and strength of all RAF operational, training, and administrative units, together with its chain of command. The most dismaying report to reach Morpeth Mansions came from Squadron Leader H. V. Rowley, who had returned from the Reich only a few days earlier. He wrote: “The development of air power in Germany has left me in a somewhat dazed condition, but with one fact firmly in my mind, and that fact is that they are
now
stronger in the air than England and France
combined
.”
¹²¹

Armed with all this, Churchill struck. The cabinet had endorsed Chamberlain’s proposal, thereby giving formal approval to Baldwin’s meandering appeasement by adopting it as His Majesty’s foreign policy. Winston laid his facts before Austen Chamberlain and other members of the delegation Baldwin had so recently received and reassured. All joined in a phalanx which petitioned the prime minister to schedule a two-day debate on the country’s defenses. Since most of them were elder statesmen of his own party, he had no choice. At long last Churchill would have it out with him with the House of Commons as spectators, and, in a sense, as jurymen.

In 1897, as a twenty-three-year-old cavalry officer stationed in India, Winston had written a striking essay, “The Scaffolding of Rhetoric.” Unpublished but found among his papers after his death, it dealt with diction, rhythm, accumulation of argument, analogy, and—approvingly—“a tendency to wild extravagance of language.” Extravagance did not, however, mean verbosity; he preferred short words because “their meaning is more ingrained in the national character and they appeal with greater force to simple understanding than words recently introduced from the Latin and the Greek.” The key to a speaker’s impact on his audience, he believed, was sincerity: “Before he can inspire them with any emotion he must be swayed by it himself…. Before he can move their tears his own must flow. To convince them he must himself believe.” If he has grasped all these, young Winston had written, his is the most precious of gifts: “He who enjoys it wields a power more durable than that of a great king. He is an independent force in the world. Abandoned by his party, betrayed by his friends, stripped of his offices, whoever can command this power is still formidable.”

Now, nearly forty years later, abandoned by his party, betrayed by friends, and stripped of office, Churchill himself had grasped and mastered rhetorical skills, and in the RAF debate of 1936 his range, force, and depth held the House rapt and brought Stanley Baldwin to his knees. On November 11, the first day of the debate, Winston’s hapless victim was Inskip. Under Winston’s pitiless questioning, the defense minister admitted that England could put up only 960 warplanes to match the Luftwaffe’s front-line strength of 1,500. Churchill then asked him when the government proposed to reach a decision on the proposal to establish a ministry of supply. Inskip was stammering, contradicting himself, evading the issue with vague promises to “review” the matter “in a few weeks,” when Hoare intervened.

In a lengthy exchange Hoare repeatedly used the word “fluid.” It was among the notes in Churchill’s hands when he rose the following afternoon. His sense of history, of irony, and of retribution prompted him to adopt a tactic which struck a profound chord among those who had followed his long struggle, including, in the Strangers’ Gallery, Lady Violet Bonham Carter, with her lifelong emotional commitment to him. Exactly two years earlier Churchill had moved an amendment declaring that Britain’s security from attack, especially in the air, was “no longer adequate.” It was then that Stanley Baldwin had made his formal pledge—a personal commitment—to maintain British military superiority in the air. Now Winston moved the identical amendment with the same cosponsors: Amery, Guest, Winterton, Horne, and, in place of Bob Boothby, who was abroad, Colonel John Gretton.

The prime minister’s vow was at forfeit, and there was no way to redeem it. Only twenty-four hours earlier Inskip had acknowledged to the House that the RAF was outnumbered by Göring’s fleets of Heinkels, Messerschmitts, Junkers, and Focke-Wulfs. This was Winston’s day to speak for all who knew that sooner or later England must confront Hitler, and to observe it he had worked through the night, dictating and revising passages to polish one of his most brilliant philippics. The amendment of November 1934, he reminded the House, had been “the culmination of a long series of efforts to warn the Government of looming dangers.” Producing a discolored old newspaper, he quoted a
Times
account of one of his own 1933 speeches. He had said: “During the last four or five years the world has grown gravely darker…. We have steadily disarmed, partly with a sincere desire to give a lead to other countries, and partly through the severe financial pressure of the time. But a change must now be made. We must not continue longer on a course in which we alone are growing weaker while every other nation is growing stronger.”
¹²³

Unheeded, he had therefore moved his amendment the following year, and exacted Baldwin’s promise. In so doing, he now reminded the House, he had been “much censured by leading Conservative newspapers, and I remember that Mr Lloyd George congratulated the Prime Minister, who was then Lord President, on having so satisfactorily demolished my extravagant fears.”

That was the background: his concern in 1933 and, in 1934, his warning, which had been dismissed as “alarmist.” What would have been said then, he now wondered aloud, had he predicted what had actually happened since? Imagine that he had prophesied that Nazi Germany would spend billions of marks on weapons, creating a stupendous arsenal by organizing her industries for war “as the industries of no country have ever been,” building “a gigantic air force,” introducing conscription, occupying the Rhineland and fortifying it “with great skill,” launching a large submarine fleet “with our approval, signified by treaty,” and forming a standing army of thirty-nine divisions “of highly equipped troops,” with another eighty divisions “rapidly being prepared”—all momentous events which threatened the peace of Europe and defied covenants signed by the German government. Assume that he had foretold the disarray of the smaller powers in eastern and central Europe, the Belgian declaration of neutrality—“which, if the worst interpretation proves to be true, so greatly affects the security of this country”—and the transformation of Italy from an Anglo-French ally to an Axis partner—“Italy, whose industry is so much smaller, whose wealth and credit are a small fraction of this country’s,” yet who boasts an army of “eight million bayonets.”

He continued relentlessly: “Suppose all that had been forecast. Why, no one would have believed in the truth of such a nightmare tale. Yet just two years have gone by and we see it all in broad daylight. Where shall we be this time in two years? I hesitate to predict.”

But some things seemed certain. During 1937 the Wehrmacht would outnumber the French and increase in efficiency. The gap between the Luftwaffe and the Allied air forces—particularly the long-range bombers—would continue to grow. The French and British rearmament programs “will not by themselves be sufficient.” Therefore, the Western democracies should “gather round them all the elements of effective collective security… assembled on the basis of the Covenant of the League of Nations.” It was his great hope that “we may succeed again in achieving a position of superior force” and “not repeat the folly which we committed when we were all-powerful and supreme,” but instead “invite Germany to make common cause with us in assuaging the griefs of Europe and opening a new door to peace and disarmament.”

The House was waiting, quiet but alert. They knew he had not risen to propose joining hands with Hitler. He always opened with feints, often with studied praise of those he meant to execute. No one, he said, could withhold sympathy from Inskip, who “from time to time lets fall phrases or facts which show that he realizes, more than anyone on that bench it seems to me, the danger in which we stand.” One such phrase “came from his lips the other night.” In justifying his weak ministerial performance, he had called the period before he had taken office “years that the locust hath eaten.” Churchill intended to weave locusts in and out of his speech, but here he merely observed that “from the year 1932, certainly from the beginning of 1933, when Herr Hitler came to power, it was general knowledge in this country that serious rearmament had begun in Germany.” Then, with a genial smile, he turned toward the prime minister and expressed his pleasure at seeing him back in the chamber, “restored to vigour… recuperated by his rest and also, as we hear, rejuvenated.” Knowing Baldwin, Churchill said, he felt sure that he would not wish any “shrinking” from “real issues of criticism” over “his conduct of public affairs.” At any rate, Winston intended to “proceed in that sense.”

Now, like Ulysses, he bent his bow. His expression hardened; joviality faded; there was bite in his voice as, without taking his eyes off Baldwin, he declared that in matters of national security “there rests upon him inevitably the main responsibility for everything that had been done, or not done.” From his waistcoat he produced a piece of paper and let the arrow fly, slowly reciting Baldwin’s promise of March 8, 1934:

The House was still, but Churchill’s voice rose, as though he meant to be heard above a din: “Well, sir, I accepted that solemn promise.” He recalled that some of his friends, men less trusting than he, had demanded particulars, and Baldwin had then “showed less than his usual urbanity in chiding those Members for even venturing to doubt the intention of the Government to make good in every respect the pledge which he had so solemnly given in the afternoon.” Now, cuttingly, Winston said: “
I do not think that responsibility was ever more directly assumed in a more personal manner
.”

Baldwin was set up. Everyone expected an immediate attack on him. Baldwin himself did, and of course Winston knew that, so he left him hanging there and briefly dealt with what at first seemed to be the less incendiary issue of ministerial supervision of the armed forces. “The proper organization,” he said, “is four Departments—the Navy, the Army, the Air, and the Ministry of Supply, with the Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence over the four.” He observed that “practically everyone in the House is agreed upon this,” and—the tone was sharpening again—if Inskip “had known as much about the subject when he was appointed” as he must have learned by now, he would have insisted upon the reorganization. Now, committed, he stubbornly refused to alter his stand; he argued that a supply ministry would do more harm than good, disturb or delay military programs, upset the country, destroy trade, demoralize finance, and turn the country into “one vast munitions camp.” But then, surprisingly, Inskip had told the House, “ ‘The decision is not final.’ It would be reviewed again in a few weeks.” Churchill turned on him and asked: “What will you know in a few weeks about this matter that you do not know now, that you ought not to have known a year ago, and have not been told any time in the last six months? What is going to happen in the next few weeks which will invalidate all these magnificent arguments by which you have been overwhelmed, and suddenly make it worth your while to paralyze the export trade, to destroy the finances, and to turn the country into a great munitions camp?”