The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (212 page)

Strolling up to a wall map, the Nazi blandly ticked off the Reich chancellor’s shopping list: all of Poland, all of the Ukraine, and the Soviet republic of Byelorussia, including the Pripet Marshes. Churchill stared at the map. The Reich’s land mass would be quintupled, from 182,000 square miles to 760,000. Great Britain had less than 89,000. After a long pause he replied that although Britons were “on bad terms with Soviet Russia” and “hated Communism as much as Hitler,” they didn’t hate it
that
much. He could only speak for himself, but he felt certain that no British government would tolerate German “domination of Central and Eastern Europe.” According to Churchill, Ribbentrop “turned abruptly away” and said, “In that case, war is inevitable. The Führer is resolved. Nothing will stop him and nothing will stop us.” Churchill urged him not to “underrate England,” and particularly not to “judge by the attitude of the present administration.” Britain, he said, “is a curious country, and few foreigners can understand her mind…. She is very clever. If you plunge us all into another great war, she will bring the whole world against you like last time.” The Nazi said heatedly, “Ah, England may be very clever, but this time she will not bring the world against Germany.” Because he thought the incident should be “put on record,” Churchill later wrote, he “reported it at the time to the Foreign Office.”
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It was not news there. The FO was, however, surprised by Hitler’s decision to approach Churchill, his most implacable enemy, apparently in the belief that he could frighten him with Teutonic
Schrecklichkeit
. It was also noted wryly that this was one of those rare occasions in which Winston arrived in Whitehall as the bearer of news. Usually it was the other way round; the situation map he kept at Chartwell was almost as detailed, and as accurate, as those in Whitehall. He had begun on a small scale, but now his business as the receiver of stolen goods—state secrets not meant for the eyes of a private MP, however prominent—was booming. At Chartwell and in his Westminster flat he pored over classified British documents and reports on the latest developments in eight continental capitals. In London his informants included three members of Chamberlain’s cabinet; in the world of science, technology, and the intelligentsia were Sir Eustace Tennyson-d’Eyncourt and Sir William Beveridge; in the War Office, the chief of the Imperial General Staff (first Sir Cyril Deverell, and then, in 1939, Sir Edmund Ironside), a brigadier, and two colonels; in the RAF, an air chief marshal, a wing commander, a group captain, and a squadron leader; and in the Admiralty, a vice admiral (Sir Reginald Henderson), a rear admiral, a captain, and a brilliant young commander, Lord Louis Mountbatten. He had the support of almost every man in the top echelon of the Foreign Office. Ribbentrop had thought his message would stun Winston, and had been taken aback by his ready reply. In fact, he had only confirmed what Churchill had already known—from Vansittart’s agent in Göring’s office—for several months.

He relied on Van for material from the Wilhelmstrasse, but his data on the RAF’s inadequacies, which created such consternation on the front bench, came directly from officers who were risking court-martial if found out. Group Captain Lachlan MacLean, who had commanded a company of Gurkha Rifles in France before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps in 1916, had drawn up a savage indictment describing the RAF’s obsolete equipment and concluded that were war to come in the next three or even five years, “We shall be powerless to retaliate, at any rate in the air.” Wing Commander Anderson acquired a copy and sent it to Churchill, who replied that he would like to meet the author. According to MacLean’s account, “Accompanying Anderson I was introduced to Winston in his flat in Westminster and he congratulated me on the paper and we discussed the air rearmament.” Subsequently Anderson would tell MacLean that Churchill needed data for a speech in the House. MacLean would prepare a memorandum “and I would let him have these papers and would perhaps go to Churchill’s flat for a discussion.” The arrangement evolved, he recalled, “into my sending to Winston’s personal secretary, Mrs Pearman, papers on the more significant events in the air rearmament.” In less than seven months the two RAF officers met Churchill, either in Morpeth Mansions or at Chartwell, seven times. Inevitably, they met Lindemann. Papers were exchanged on such arcane topics as RDF and “Times of Flight and Trajectory Tables”—dull to the layman, but essential to Britain’s survival three years later.
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Eminent guests from abroad whose names are inscribed in Chartwell’s guest book include the Rumanian foreign minister Nicolae Titulescu; former German chancellor Heinrich Brüning; Pierre Cot, the French air minister; and Britain’s ambassador to Belgrade, who approved Churchill’s plan to visit Yugoslavia and urge the formation of a European alliance to confront Nazi aggression. These visitors would stay for dinner. British civilian informants would arrive for tea at Chartwell or “elevenses” in his London flat, leaving behind them, when they departed, copies of blueprints, charts, diagrams, minutes of cabinet meetings, and confidential reports to the prime minister, all of which belonged in locked, guarded files at the War Office, the Admiralty, the Air Ministry, or Downing Street.

In bed the following morning, sipping his breakfast highball, Winston would compare them with information from the Wilhelmstrasse and the Linden; reports from the mistresses of the Duce’s intimate advisers; foreign ministries from Helsinki to Athens; and straightforward
en clair et net
dispatches from the French. Churchill regularly exchanged data with three successive prime ministers, Blum, Flandin, and Édouard Daladier. Typically, he wrote Daladier in early 1938, asking for a cross-check of “information I have been able to gather from various sources about the present and prospective strength of the German Army.” He put it at forty divisions “now at full war-strength,” four of them armored, with another twenty divisions ready by October 1, and still another thirty-six in trained reserves. This represented a sevenfold jump in one year, an expansion of military strength without precedent in peacetime. Moreover, another twelve Austrian divisions would be added if Hitler’s Anschluss succeeded and was followed by conscription there. Daladier consulted his War Office in the rue St. Dominique, checked the Deuxième Bureau, and replied that they were “entirely in accord with you.” Even Desmond Morton was impressed. “I am astonished,” he wrote to Winston, “by your knowledge of detail on Defence matters.”
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All this did not pass the Treasury Bench unnoticed. Nor was it meant to. Espionage is usually covert. Information so acquired is exploited without the knowledge of the spies’ victims; if made public it becomes valueless, and agents may be blown. But Churchill’s motives were political; he meant to reverse the course of Britain’s military policy. Throughout the fall of 1937 and into 1938 he continued to receive disturbing reports from Anderson, Morton, and, through MacLean, Air Chief Marshal Sir Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt of the RAF. In the House of Commons his remarks on Britain’s lack of preparedness grew sharper. So did the criticism of his criticism, but as Morton wrote him, he was “not the first to have told the truth and become heartily unpopular for it.” Even if prophecies proved true, Morton continued, men had “the habit of crucifying the prophet or… they exterminate him with a gas cloud—of propaganda. However, they have not silenced you yet, so there is some hope for the Empire still.”
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In the eyes of His Majesty’s Government, press lords like Beaverbrook, and most members of Parliament, Churchill’s concerns were largely irrelevant. To them, war between Britain and Nazi Germany wasn’t even a remote possibility. Differences between the British Empire and the German Reich would be resolved at negotiating tables. Since Britain was prepared to give Hitler whatever he wanted, why should a drop of blood be spilled, or England’s rising productivity be threatened by a bloated arms budget?

Churchill was painfully aware that His Majesty’s Government regarded him as a meddler and a Cassandra. Yet his figures—which were also HMG’s figures—cried for action. In the fall of 1937 the Air Ministry, looking ahead to December 1939, had found that the RAF would have only 1,736 aircraft as against Germany’s 3,240. More urgently, Chamberlain had invited a Luftwaffe mission headed by General Erhard Milch to spend a week inspecting the RAF’s latest models on the ground and reviewing a fly-past. On October 12, Group Captain MacLean sent word of this to Chartwell. MacLean had inferred, not unreasonably, that the Nazis, suspecting the inadequacies of England’s air force, were coming “to find confirmation of their suspicions.” Once they had grasped Britain’s weakness in the air—and they could scarcely miss it; the aircraft they would be examining weren’t even fully equipped—their discovery, MacLean wrote, “must inevitably influence German policy…. We are bluffing with the sky as the limit, without holding a single card, and we have then invited our opponents to come round and see what cards we hold, trusting to sleight of hand to put across a second bluff.”
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Alarmed, Churchill was also in a quandary. There was no way to withdraw the invitation to Germany without making things worse. But it was time the government moved quickly to heal its sickly air force. His latest data, as he wrote Sir Maurice Hankey, could not be discussed in the House of Commons because “of the present dangerous world situation.” He had decided to lay the facts before Hankey, who, as secretary to both the cabinet and the Committee of Imperial Defence, carried weight in the government. Hankey was aware of the problem; he had written Inskip that if the country realized how vulnerable Britain was to aggression HMG would be “forced to undertake late in the day panic measures.” On October 16 Winston sent him MacLean’s report, omitting the author’s name and identifying him only as “a high staff officer of the RAF.” He added, “I trust to our friendship and your honour that its origin is not probed. But look at the facts!”
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To his dismay, Hankey chose to ignore the facts. Instead he replied with an unexpected, lengthy rebuke. He was, he said, “a good deal troubled by the fact of your receiving so many confidences of this kind,” particularly since Winston was “a critic of the Departments under whom these Officers serve” and they were ignorant “of the wider factors” in national policy. If they had grievances, they should speak to their senior officers or to the cabinet minister representing their service. “Backstairs” information, he wrote, should be discouraged “because it breeds distrust and has a disintegrating effect on the discipline of the Services.” In a stiff reply, Churchill said he had not expected a “lengthy lecture,” and “you may be sure I shall not trouble you again in such matters.”
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By now His Majesty’s Government was aware that Churchill had become a spymaster, and the hunt for his sources within the government—the “rotten apples,” as Horace Wilson called them—was on. Not long after Churchill’s exchange with Hankey, MacLean resigned from the RAF, reportedly under pressure. But those pursuing a military alliance were after bigger game. In the Foreign Office, Vansittart, with his swagger and arrogance, was the apple likeliest to be tainted. Since moving into No. 10 with Chamberlain, Wilson had been stalking the FO’s permanent under secretary, judging him, Churchill wrote in his war memoirs, “as hostile to Germany.” In HMG’s view criticism of the Third Reich blackened a man’s name. The prime minister had dismissed Van’s warnings of German aggression as “hysterical,” and Wilson had called the under secretary “an alarmist” who “hampers all attempts of the Government to make friendly contact with the dictator states,” adding that “his influence over Anthony Eden is very great.”
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At that time Eden, still foreign secretary, could have fought for Vansittart, and his decent instincts prodded him to do it. But as Gilbert and Gott put it, he “unwisely and rashly bowed to the wind” when Chamberlain declared that Van must be replaced by Sir Alexander Cadogan, a protégé of Horace Wilson. Vansittart had thirty-six years of diplomatic experience, but Cadogan, as a zealous believer in appeasement and the promise of an Anglo-German alliance, was likelier to sympathize with Chamberlain’s conviction that the Third Reich should become Britain’s most favored nation.
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On January 1, 1938, Vansittart was kicked upstairs and given the empty title of chief diplomatic adviser to the government. Cadogan would run the Foreign Office. The Germans were delighted; Ernst von Wörmann, chargé d’affaires at Hitler’s London embassy, minuted that Van could no longer issue instructions to British envoys in foreign capitals, nor would classified material be channeled through him; he would see documents only “as required” by Cadogan. The fact that he was permitted to remain in his old office deceived no one. His “dismissal,” as Churchill rightly called it, stunned Whitehall. There was no precedent for it; traditionally, permanent under secretaries held office until they died or chose to retire. Winston heard the news in Paris, where, after a month’s holiday at the Château de l’Horizon, he was staying at the British embassy, conferring with Daladier, who would be premier in the next French government, and Alexis Léger, secretary general at the Quai d’Orsay. The fall of his great FO ally left Churchill distraught. The British ambassador, Sir Eric Phipps, reported to London that Winston could “hardly talk of anything else,” that he “thought Van’s displacement was a very dangerous thing, that it would be represented as a victory for pro-Germans in England, that it would arouse the suspicions of the French, etc etc.” Phipps, himself an appeaser, wrote Hankey that he was “honestly perturbed at the fuss over Van’s appointment.” But Churchill saw the significance of Vansittart’s fall. “No one more clearly realised or foresaw the growth of the German danger,” he later wrote, “or was more ready to subordinate other considerations to meeting it,” and now “the whole responsibility for managing the Foreign Office passed out of his hands.”
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