The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (221 page)

Whenever he was in London, Winston stopped in Whitehall to see Vansittart. Though stripped of power and influence, Van kept in touch with his sources abroad and accumulated inside information in Whitehall through friends and former subordinates. He was troubled, as was Winston, by the rot of defeatism among Englishmen, particularly among British diplomats. In Paris, Sir Eric Phipps told Bonnet that the Czechs, by declaring they would fight if invaded, had “put themselves in the wrong.” Basil Newton, in Prague, consistently supported Nazi demands. If the French believed it “worthwhile to try to perpetuate the
status quo
in [their] own interests,” he advised the FO, Britain should stand aside. As early as March 13, 1938, the day after the Anschluss, Newton counseled London: “If I am right in thinking that Czechoslovakia’s present political position is not permanently tenable, it will be no kindness in the long run to try to maintain her in it.”
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The most egregious of all His Majesty’s emissaries was Sir Nevile Henderson. Duplicity had won him his appointment in Berlin, and any other foreign secretary—or prime minister—would have dismissed him long before he could inflict a mortal wound on European peace. When, in the House of Commons, Duff Cooper described him as “violently anti-Czech and pro-German,” no one rose to Henderson’s defense; no other interpretation of his record was possible. He described the Czechs as “a pigheaded race”; Beneš, their president—a graduate of the universities of Prague, Paris, and Dijon—was “the most pigheaded of the lot.” As His Britannic Majesty’s official representative, he informed the Germans: “Great Britain would not think of risking even one sailor or airman for Czechoslovakia and… any reasonable solution would be agreed to, so long as it were not attempted by force.”
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Putting all other work aside to back the Czechs, Churchill was writing and speaking in their behalf at Manchester, Bristol, Sheffield, and Birmingham, trying to rouse Britain to the great peril Chamberlain and those around him could not see. In the May 1, 1938, issue of the
News of the World
he opened a new series of articles with a piece on “Future Safeguards of National Defence.” Predicting that Britain’s chances of surviving the approaching conflict depended upon the extent and efficiency of her air-raid precautions, he called for a crash program to bring nearer the day “when the accursed air-murderer, for such I must judge the bomber of civilian populations, meets a sure doom.” The “greatest safety,” he argued, “will be found in having an air force so numerous and excellent that it will beat the enemy’s air force in fair fight”; therefore continued study, expenditures, and preparations were essential. Chamberlain was infuriated; he regarded the article as an attack on His Majesty’s foreign policy, a foul blow at the fragile arch of understanding the prime minister and foreign minister were trying to build between London and Berlin.

Recriminations over what had been done and what had been left undone were futile. Unlike Baldwin, Chamberlain believed in rearmament within limits. The chief limitation arose from his greater concern for Britain’s economic prosperity. As he saw it, the practice under which the cabinet approved estimates submitted by the three services endangered the country’s fiscal security. His solution was to fix a ceiling for defense spending and then let the services distribute it among themselves.

This was a businessman’s way of defending a nation, but to others it made no sense. Duff Cooper attacked “the absurd new system of rationing the defence departments”; the “sensible plan,” he argued, “must be to ascertain your needs for defence first, and then inquire as to your means for meeting them.” Soldiers were even more vehement. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pownall of the Committee of Imperial Defence wrote in his diary that the prime minister’s theory of “limited liability in war” was “a most dangerous heresy”; the politicians “cannot or will not realize that if war with Germany comes again… we shall again be
fighting for our lives
. Our efforts
must
be the maximum, by land, sea, and air…. In God’s name let us recognize that from the outset—and by that I mean
now
.”
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Chamberlain told his cabinet that British production could not match Germany’s “unless we are prepared to undertake the tremendous measure of control over skilled labour, as in Germany.” He preferred “voluntary” cooperation by arms manufacturers, though such firms had not been noted in the past for their patriotism. The fact was that the bill for years of neglecting the nation’s defenses, most of it during the ministries of MacDonald and Baldwin, was coming due. The people were uneasy; a scapegoat was needed, and the prime minister’s eye fell on the secretary for air, Lord Swinton, who had neglected to show enthusiasm for appeasement policies. Later Churchill wrote of an Air Defence Research Committee meeting of May 12, 1938, at which “we were all busily engaged” discussing “technical problems, when a note was brought in to the Air Minister asking him to go to Downing Street.” Swinton left at once and “never returned. He had been dismissed by Mr. Chamberlain.”
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There was speculation, though not among those in a position to know, that Churchill might be appointed in his place. Instead, the prime minister announced a reshuffling of his cabinet, with Swinton replaced by Minister of Health Sir Kingsley Wood, the P.M.’s oldest and most faithful supporter, a Francophobe and the most fervent of appeasers, more eager even than Chamberlain for friendship with Nazi Germany. Kingsley Wood had never worn a uniform; his career had been devoted to health, education, and welfare. Nicolson wrote Vita: “We had an excitement yesterday, Swinton sacked. At once I telephoned or rather got Duncan [Sandys] to telephone to Winston…. How silly the whole thing is! Here we are at the greatest crisis in our history, with a genius like Winston doing nothing and Kingsley Wood as our Minister for Air.” Other changes in the cabinet seemed just as baffling, Nicolson wrote. He blamed Chief Whip David Margesson (“not… a good Cabinet-maker”) but conceded in the end that in such a hodgepodge it was impossible to assign responsibility. (He overlooked the prime minister.) “Nobody understands anything,” he concluded. “There is a real impression that the whole show is going to crack up. This view is held, not only by protagonists like Winston, but by the silent useful members of whom nobody ever hears. They think that a new Government will emerge on a far wider basis, possibly a Coalition Government.” Nicolson was two years—almost to the day—ahead of time.
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The RAF leadership, first under Sir Hugh (“Boom”) Trenchard and then under Lord Weir, still held sacred the doctrine that “the bomber will always get through.” Holding this principle sacred, Trenchard and Weir believed that Britain’s only hope of survival lay in devastating retaliation against an enemy. Every RAF plan had called for two or three times as many bombers as fighter planes. Since bombers cost more, and required larger crews, both in the air and on the ground, the waste, in retrospect, is obvious. In the spring of 1938 Dowding’s reply to this theory—radar and fast fighters to intercept hostile bombers—won acceptance. Before the shift could be reflected in the sky, however, Britain was confronted with a surplus of bombers and a scarcity of Spitfires and Hawker Hurricanes.

The imbalance, the loss of faith in their striking force of heavy bombers, wild exaggerations of Luftwaffe strength, and the deleterious implications of rationing on the service which most needed reequipment crippled RAF morale. It seemed at its lowest point in 1938, urged there by the most famous aviator of his time. Colonel Charles Lindbergh’s impact had first begun to be felt in early 1936; he had just left Germany and was reappearing in London at the invitation of U.S. ambassador Joseph Kennedy, who squired him around as he shared his views with Chamberlain, his cabinet, Fleet Street, and virtually every other Briton who possessed power and made decisions. Göring, General Ernst Udet, and the rest of the Luftwaffe hierarchy had done a job on the Lone Eagle, but there had been more to it than that. Like many other visitors to Berlin, he and his wife had been impressed by the energy and self-confidence of the Führer and his people. She wrote: “There is no question of the power, unity, and purposefulness of Germany. It is terrific.” Nothing they learned in subsequent visits to the Reich caused them to change that opinion. In April 1938 Lindbergh wrote in his diary: “England seems hopelessly behind in military strength in comparison to Germany” and “the assets in English character lie in confidence rather than ability; tenacity rather than strength; and determination rather than intelligence…. It is necessary to realize that England is a country composed of a great mass of slow, somewhat stupid and indifferent people, and a small group of geniuses.”
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At the American embassy in September he told a select group of Englishmen, presumably those he would include among the geniuses (Kennedy had not invited Churchill), that they couldn’t “realize the change aviation has made” and that “this is the beginning of the end of England as a great power.” He thought that “German air strength is greater than that of all other European countries combined” and that “she is constantly increasing her margin of leadership.” England and France, he believed, “are far too weak in the air to protect themselves…. It seems to me essential to avoid a general European war in the near future. I believe that a war now might easily result in the loss of European civilization.”
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At Cliveden, where Lindbergh was guest of honor, Thomas Jones and Lord Astor said it was “necessary for England to fight if Germany moves into Czechoslovakia.” The others, led by Nancy, shouted them down. Later Jones wrote that after reflecting upon what Lindbergh had said, “I’ve sided with those working for peace at any price in humiliation, because of the picture of our relative unpreparedness in the air and on the ground which Lindbergh painted, and because of his belief that the democracies would be crushed absolutely and finally.”
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After Roosevelt had publicly branded him “defeatist,” Lindbergh’s prestige began to shrink, and when Wilhelmstrasse documents became available to historians during the war crimes trials at Nuremberg, his prewar evaluation of Nazi air strength was discredited. It is a measure of Lindbergh’s prewar renown, however, that Roosevelt found it necessary to take such a step. In 1938 he was at his peak. A. L. Rowse recalls: “Great play in those days, I remember, was made of Lindbergh, treated as omniscient in air matters…. Dawson quoted Lindbergh to me: he was made much of by the Cliveden set.” As Sheila Grant Duff reported to Churchill from central Europe, Lindbergh buttressed the German conviction that England “would be neutral if they attacked Czechoslovakia.” On October 18, 1938, three weeks after the Munich Agreement, Hitler would decorate the American aviator with the highest award Germany could confer upon an
Ausländer
—the Service Cross of the German Eagle with Star—accompanied by a citation declaring that he “deserved well of the Reich.” The Lone Eagle had earned his Nazi medal.
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O
n Friday, May 6, when America’s 1938 recession touched bottom and Churchill found his wallet empty, Lord Rothermere told readers of his
Daily Mail
that “Czechoslovakia is not of the slightest concern to us. If France likes to burn her fingers there, that is a matter for France.” Bonnet, who was prone to nausea, read it over breakfast and became ill. On Saturday, May 7, French and British diplomats in Prague presented a formal demarche to Foreign Minister Krofta. Hitler already knew the gist of it; four days earlier Halifax had told the new German ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, Herbert von Dirksen, that the demarche would “aim at inducing Beneš to show the utmost measure of accommodation to the Sudeten Germans.” (The foreign secretary had not extended the same courtesy to Czechoslovakia’s Ambassador Masaryk.) The Czechs were asked to make a “supreme effort” to go to “the utmost limit” to meet the Henlein demands of April 24, with the hope of reaching a “comprehensive and lasting settlement” with the Sudetendeutsche. Dirksen reported to the Wilhelmstrasse that Chamberlain and his government regarded the possibility of military action “doubtful,” though the French, more optimistic, were ready to march.
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Henderson gave the Germans his personal view: “France is acting for the Czechs and Germany for the Sudeten Germans. Britain is supporting Germany.” He “urgently hoped” that the Führer would “not refuse some kind of cooperation with Britain in this matter, which might then, perhaps, lead to cooperation in other matters also.” Ribbentrop quickly replied that after this question was solved, the Reich would be “
durchtränkt
”—saturated.
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Any doubts about HMG’s position were resolved by the prime minister. Lady Astor had given Chamberlain a luncheon on May 10; his fellow guests were American and Canadian foreign correspondents. The P.M. was accustomed to the deference of British newspapermen. He also put some of his remarks on the record and some off, a dangerous format, vulnerable to misunderstandings. On May 14 the
Montreal Star
and the
New York Times
broke the story, the
Star
reporting, “Nothing seems clearer than that the British do not expect to fight for Czechoslovakia…. That being so, then the Czechs must accede to the German demands, if reasonable.” The
New York Times
man, formerly a diplomatic correspondent for
The Times
, went further: “Mr. Chamberlain today… certainly favors a more drastic measure—namely, separation of the German districts from the body of the Czechoslovak Republic and the annexation of them to Germany.”
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