The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (216 page)

As Leo Amery had pointed out earlier in the day, England lacked a foreign policy. The country should acquire one, Churchill said, and swiftly. “Why,” he asked the House, “should we assume that time is on our side?” Each day dawned on a Reich stronger than the day before. Parliament was “in no position to say tonight, ‘The past is the past.’ We cannot say ‘The past is past’ without surrendering the future.” Churchill’s proposed geopolitical concept, he declared, would assure peace for Britain and indeed for all European nations alarmed by Hitler’s huge, teeming Wehrmacht.
¹⁰⁸

Winston told the House that England’s neglected defenses were too shaky for her to stand alone against the pullulating Reich and the lands it dominated: “Over an area inhabited perhaps by 200,000,000 people Naziism and all it involves is moving on to absolute control.” Even a rearmament crash program would be inadequate. Britain, he said, needed allies. The House was alert. They knew where Winston’s line of thought was leading, and a few catcalls were heard from Tory backbenchers. He said quickly: “I know that some of my hon. Friends on this side of the House will laugh when I offer them this advice. I say, ‘Laugh, but listen.’ ”
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Those who listened heard an imaginative, closely reasoned plan to confront Nazi aggression with an interlocking alliance of nations, each country inadequate in itself, but together mighty enough to give pause to Hitler’s generals, if not to Hitler himself. Churchill directed their attention to the three states of the Little Entente: Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Yugoslavia. Each was a power of the second rank, “but they are very vigorous states, and united they are a Great Power.” The first had the Skoda munitions plants, the second oil, the third minerals and raw materials—and all had large armies. The Anschluss had driven “a wedge” into the Little Entente, but if that had roused them, perhaps the price was not exorbitant. Each faced a simple choice: “to submit, like Austria, or else to take effective measures while time remains to ward off the danger and, if it cannot be warded off, to cope with it.” Coping, he said, could include widening the Little Entente by offering membership to other Danube countries lying in Hitler’s path: Hungary and Bulgaria. That would thwart the Reich’s drive for lebensraum in the east. Meantime Britain, with France, should vow to declare war on Germany if Hitler attacked any country in eastern Europe. Should Churchill’s alliance become a reality, Germany’s Generalstab would face the specter they had sworn to avoid since 1918: a two-front war. Winston turned on the jeering backbenchers; his voice rose: “Our affairs have come to such a pass that there is no escape without running risks. On every ground of prudence as well as of duty I urge His Majesty’s Government to proclaim a renewed, revivified, unflinching adherence to the Covenant of the League of Nations. What is there ridiculous about collective security? The only thing that is ridiculous about it is that we haven’t got it.”

But Churchill knew that restoring the balance of power, however practical, reasonable, and even essential, would not in itself satisfy a British public still haunted by the memory of a million British corpses in the trenches. Winston believed in statecraft on a higher level, and he believed the British public could be swayed at this level. He insisted that there must be a “moral basis” for British rearmament and foreign policy, that only on those terms could the British people be united. Parliament could on this basis “procure their wholehearted action, and”—Churchill, typically, included America in his plan—“stir the English-speaking people throughout the world.”

Meantime, he argued for the virtual encirclement of the Third Reich. Treaties binding Europe’s Western democracies and the Danube states in a united front would turn back German aggression, and England would regain the security she had lost in 1914. He closed:

Such a speech, and such a proposal, coming from a senior statesman known throughout Europe, could not be ignored or set aside for future “study” and “discussion.” In Moscow, Maksim Litvinov, the Soviet foreign commissar, praised the Grand Alliance strategy, condemned the Anschluss as an act of aggression and a threat to the chain of small countries between the Soviet Union and the Reich, and—though Churchill had not mentioned Russia as a grand ally—declared that his government was ready “to participate in collective actions… checking the further development of aggression and eliminating the increased danger of a new world massacre.” The U.S.S.R., he said, was “prepared immediately to take up in the League of Nations or outside of it the discussion with other Powers of the practical measures which the circumstances demand.”
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Ambassador Maisky delivered Litvinov’s statement to the Foreign Office, which, by diplomatic custom, was bound to respond within a week. France was also heartened; Joseph Paul-Boncour, the minister now presiding over the Quai d’Orsay, submitted a similar demarche through Corbin, his ambassador in London. Halifax received these overtures with elegant courtesy, expressing a gratitude for Russian and French interest which he did not feel. The noble lord despised Bolsheviks and was a lifelong Francophobe. “The French are never ready to face up to realities,” he remarked after Corbin had departed; “they delight in vain words and protestations.” Cadogan agreed. Although Paul-Boncour had been in politics since 1899—serving variously as minister of war, minister of labor, and premier except between 1914 and 1918, when he had commanded an infantry battalion and won the Croix de Guerre—Cadogan thought him “not a Foreign Minister who at so serious a moment could be a worthy partner in a discussion of the European crisis.”
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Nicolson despaired. “A sense of danger and anxiety hangs over us like a pall. Hitler has completely collared Austria; no question of an
Anschluss
, just complete absorption.” Later in the same entry he noted, without dissent, a colleague’s argument that “the Government have betrayed the country and that the Tories think only of the Red danger and let the Empire slide. I am in grave doubts as to my own position. How can I continue to support a Government like this?” Looking back, Lord Boothby damned sheep and shepherds alike:

Nevertheless, Churchill’s vision—challenging Hitler with a broad coalition of nations threatened by Nazi aggression—reached the hearts of millions. In London the
Star
expressed gratitude that “one man spoke out in Parliament last night, and made a speech which fitted the hour.” Liddell Hart sent the War Office a memorandum pointing out that “we are blind if we cannot see that we are committed to the defence of Yugoslavia,” adding that the French “military situation largely turns on the existence of a Czechoslovakian distraction to Germany’s power of concentration in the West.” According to minutes of a March 16 meeting, Halifax told the cabinet that “public opinion was moving fast in the direction of placing the defences of the country more nearly on a war footing.” The prime minister, nodding slowly, replied that he was well aware of the nation’s mood, and knew it was entitled to a statement or broadcast from him, but “at the moment he himself did not feel clear how far we are to go, or in what direction.”
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Chamberlain was, in fact, tempted by Churchill’s soaring proposal. Napoleon had been overwhelmed by a coalition of allied powers led by England; why not crush Hitler by the same strategy? But forming an alliance wasn’t Chamberlain’s style. Like Baldwin he felt uncomfortable with foreigners; he didn’t really trust them, and their differences in national character seldom stirred his curiosity. On March 21, scarcely nine days after the Anschluss, Dawson quoted the P.M. as saying he had “come clear around from Winston’s idea of a Grand Alliance to a policy of diplomatic action and no fresh commitments.”
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The eight days in between had been filled with debate—Churchill and his supporters on one side, HMG on the other. Austria had gone down almost unnoticed, it seemed, and while Churchill’s idea of a Grand Alliance had been aimed at securing the future of all Europe, in those eight days the spotlight was turned upon one country, Hitler’s next target: Czechoslovakia.

B
y universal agreement the Reich’s warlord was either a madman or a genius. In neither case could he be expected to behave like ordinary men, and he rarely did. General Alfred Jodl, the Wehrmacht’s chief of operations, had worked with him for five years. He believed that at last he understood him. Yet when the Anschluss had been accomplished, Jodl wrote in his diary: “After the annexation, the Führer indicated that he is in no hurry to solve the Czech question.” In fact, Hitler was rapidly revising
Fall Grün
, Case Green, the plans for a surprise attack on Czechoslovakia first drafted by Blomberg nine months earlier.
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How Case Green could have surprised anyone now seems inexplicable. In his Reichstag speech of February 20, when he declared that “over ten million Germans live in two of the states adjoining our frontiers,” Hitler was including the three million Czechoslovakians of German descent—the
Sudetendeutsche
—living in the northern part of the country, in the shadow of the Sudeten (Sudetic) Mountains. Prague had trembled when he warned: “It is unbearable for a world power to know there are racial comrades at its side who are constantly being afflicted by the severest suffering for their sympathy with the whole nation…. The German Reich intends to protect those German peoples who live along its frontiers and cannot, by their own efforts, secure their political and spiritual freedom [
ihre politische und geistige Freiheit
].”
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London newspapers had carried brief accounts of disturbances in the Sudetenland, but British opinion was not, at this time, concerned with Czechoslovakia as a whole. Nor, until then, was Hitler. It was on his hit list, but rather far down. Now the Sudetendeutsche were forcing his hand. Their part of Czechoslovakia had never belonged to Germany. Nevertheless, the Führer’s intoxicating performance had spawned five pseudo-Nazi parties in the Sudetenland, of which the noisiest, and probably the largest, was the Sudetendeutsche Heimatfront (Sudeten German Home Front) with its political arm, the Sudetendeutsche Partei (SDP), led by one Konrad Henlein, an otherwise unprepossessing gymnastics teacher with a fanatical loyalty to Germany’s charismatic leader. One of the Heimatfront’s most effective talents was to send gangs of SDP bullies into Czech communities and deliberately create
Grenzzwischenfälle
(border incidents). These scuffles revealed the Heimatfront’s ardor (and violence); they also won broad sympathy for the group among the Germans. Hitler’s countrymen remembered his campaign pledge to unshackle Germans enslaved in other countries. He was under pressure to deal with Czechoslovakia—but he was not irked; this was the kind of pressure he liked.

Actually, the Czechs had been extraordinarily tolerant of the boisterous Nazis who lived under their flag and were spoiling for a fight. In recent years President Eduard Beneš had been wary and tactful, but he was unreassured by Göring’s “word of honor” (“
Ehrenwort
”) that the Czechs had nothing to fear from the Reich. In the Third Reich, Beneš knew, honor had acquired new meanings. The word was, for example, engraved on the daggers of SS men. He believed the Sudetenland riots were being orchestrated in Berlin as pretexts for intervention by Reich troops, and by the spring of 1938 he was absolutely right.