The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (224 page)

He drove to Whitehall and handed his letter to Halifax, who went across Downing Street to No. 10. There, like every other communication to the prime minister, including those bearing the royal seal, it came under the shifty eyes of Sir Horace Wilson. At his peak Rasputin was known to all Moscow. Wilson was more like one of the burrowing insectivores. A nation in peril, with hundreds of thousands of lives in jeopardy, does not refuse to answer the doorbell when a well-muscled neighbor, feeling his own future darkened by the same shadow, comes to make common cause. But that, in effect, was Horace Wilson’s advice to his patron. When Churchill’s proposal reached Chamberlain, attached to it was an admonition in his seneschal’s neat handwriting condemning it in every particular. Wilson described it as “a mixture of diplomacy and threat” which would enrage Hitler by including Russia in the coalition confronting him. He predicted that if Winston’s proposal were adopted, England would be carried closer to a situation in which “we might find ourselves… tackling Germany single-handed”—which was, of course, the one thing it would
not
have done.
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Winston, meantime, was receiving confirmation that his plan would have had a warmer reception elsewhere. On September 2 the Russian ambassador sent Chartwell word that he would like to drive down and discuss “a matter of urgency.” Maisky’s mission was to inform him of conversations which had taken place in Moscow the previous day between the French chargé d’affaires and Foreign Commissar Litvinov, the essence of which was that the Soviet Union wanted to stand shoulder to shoulder with the British and French against Hitler. Churchill later recalled: “Before he had got very far, I realized that he was making a declaration to me, a private person, because the Soviet Government preferred this channel to a direct offer to the Foreign Office which might have encountered a rebuff.” He felt this implication strengthened, he wrote after the Russian had left, “by the fact that no request for secrecy was made.” Considering the matter of signal importance, Winston composed a detailed account of the conversation for Halifax, taking special care not to use language which might “prejudice its consideration by Halifax and Chamberlain.” This report, too, was received unenthusiastically by HMG; Halifax replied, Winston later wrote, “in a guarded manner, that he did not feel that action of the kind proposed… would be helpful, but that he would keep it in mind.”
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Nonetheless, when Churchill’s August 31 proposal was returned to the Foreign Office with Wilson’s comment endorsed by Chamberlain, Halifax had been uneasy. If Hitler was Britain’s enemy, then so was time; the government should make some clear statement of policy before the Reich chancellor delivered another of his incendiary speeches to the Reichstag, touching off rioting among Henlein’s Sudeten Nazis. To restore order Prague would be obliged to use force; Hitler would rant about Czech police brutality, and the cycle would be repeated again, until a single swing of an impatient policeman’s club could bring the Wehrmacht surging across the border. Therefore, the foreign secretary decided he himself should speak, establishing Britain’s disapproval of Sudeten German incidents. He sent his text across the street, and back it came, with its own Wilson critique embellished by the prime minister’s approval.

Wilson liked this even less than Winston’s. He declared that “any intelligent journalist… could draw but one deduction, namely that we were threatening Germany.” Patiently, Halifax sent over a new draft. Chamberlain himself commented on this one, and he could find nothing good to say about it. One paragraph was sure to “draw protests from the Dominions,” another was “clearly a threat”; all in all it was “out of place till after Nuremberg.” The whole point of it had been to put His Majesty’s Government on record
before
the Führer’s annual diatribe at the Nazis’ September rally. Ambassadors Henderson and Newton were also critical, and Halifax wrote Henderson that he had “more or less given up the idea of making a public speech.”
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Others, even champions of the new Germany, shared his concern. Henderson reported that Ribbentrop believed England would not “move under any circumstances,” and Under Secretary Weizsäcker had pointedly remarked that “war in 1914 might possibly have been avoided if Great Britain had spoken in time.” In a general FO discussion on September 4, support grew for what one participant called “a
private
warning” to the Führer, a plain statement “that we should have to come in to protect France.” Cadogan thought this had merit because “Hitler has probably been persuaded that our March and May statements are bluff, and that’s dangerous.” Yet nothing was done. They drifted.
²⁰⁴

British policy had evolved subtly since late March, when the prime minister had barred commitments to, or even concern over, political events in Europe. Chamberlain was now concentrating on two objectives which were mutually exclusive: establishing a special relationship with the Reich and, at the same time, preserving England’s longtime friendship with France. Together they were impossible, but
some
tie with the Continent was necessary. Otherwise England was merely an island country off the Continent’s coast, at the mercy of any dominant continental power. So now, when Lord Maugham, Somerset Maugham’s brother, said that “no vital British interest is involved” in the Sudetenland, Duff Cooper fiercely reminded him that “the main interest of this country has always been to prevent any one power from obtaining undue predominance in Europe,” that in Nazi Germany they faced “the most formidable power that has ever dominated Europe,” and that resistance to power “is quite obviously a British interest.” No one in the cabinet disagreed. Yet as the crisis escalated, no statement of policy was made, publicly or through private diplomatic channels.
²⁰⁵

The one British voice which had been heard through the summer was Geoffrey Dawson’s. On June 3, in his lead editorial he had pondered the advisability of permitting “the Germans of Czechoslovakia—by plebiscite or otherwise—to decide their own future, even if it should mean secession to the Reich.” Indeed, he wondered whether it might be sensible to allow other minorities inside the country to take the same course. It would be, he acknowledged, “a drastic remedy for the present unrest, but something drastic may be needed.”

Drastic was not the word; it would be catastrophic. The nation Beneš and Masaryk had founded was a polyglot state, a reflection, in microcosm, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from which it had derived. Within its borders were communities of Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, Magyars, Ruthenians, Poles, and Bohemians. That hardly meant that it was doomed. Dawson was writing
völliger Unsinn
. But many Europeans had once more concluded that
The Times
was the voice of Downing Street, and as September 1938 opened, no spokesman of His Majesty’s Government denied this. Since no one in Whitehall was making foreign policy, a newspaper editor had done it.

The prime minister was assigning greater priority to an exercise in personal diplomacy.

T
here is something almost touching about Neville Chamberlain’s faith in his cherished Plan Z, a simple scheme, redolent of those
Chatterbox
volumes in which the Chamberlain boys, like so many young Victorians of their class, had lost themselves on long Saturday afternoons when there were no playmates and Nanny was busy elsewhere. Pen-and-ink drawings identified the handsome, mesomorphic heroes, the helpless but winning heroines, and the scowling ruffians doomed, in issue after issue, to be foiled in the last paragraph. And how had they been outwitted? By Plan Z! Or Plan X, or Q, or whatever—a simple ruse, harmless to others but fatal for the wicked. The first we know of its reappearance in the mind of Neville, grown up and grown old, is a memorandum by Sir Horace Wilson, written after the adjournment of a cabinet meeting on August 30, 1938. He and the prime minister had discussed the matter two or three days earlier, and now he wrote: “There is in existence a plan, to be called ‘Plan Z,’ which is known only to the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Foreign Secretary, Sir Nevile Henderson and myself.”
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The procedure’s success, he continued, depended upon “its being a complete surprise, and it is vital nothing should be said about it.” A second Wilson memorandum, filed the following day, gives the whole thing away: “On being told that Plan Z is emerging, Henderson will ascertain where Hitler is, but will not say why he wants to know.” If time permitted, HM’s ambassador in Berlin would receive another message indicating time of arrival; he would pass this along to Ribbentrop. Again, time permitting, “we would like to do this before we make public announcement here that Plan Z has been put into operation. Place of arrival must be Berlin connecting with Henderson and Ribbentrop. (Schmidt is reliable.)”
²⁰⁷

Wilson’s emphasis on time is subject to but one interpretation; the plan anticipated a supreme crisis, with a German invasion of Czechoslovakia imminent—perhaps but a few hours away. The need to know Hitler’s whereabouts, and the reference to Paul Otto Schmidt, the Führer’s personal interpreter, contemplated a surprise call on him—uninvited, with no prior arrangements. Presumably the P.M. planned to land in Germany and tell wide-eyed Germans, “Take me to your leader,” though that would have been difficult because he, like Hitler, spoke only his native language.

On September 3 Chamberlain wrote his sister Ida: “I keep racking my brains to try and devise some means of averting catastrophe, if it should seem to be upon us. I thought of one so unconventional and daring that it rather took Halifax’s breath away. But since Henderson thought it might save the situation at the 11th hour, I haven’t abandoned it, though I hope all the time that it won’t be necessary to try it.” If, as Horace Wilson had written, success of the operation depended upon “complete secrecy,” its chances were slim, since Henderson was notorious for sharing confidences with his Nazi friends Göring and Ribbentrop. The circle of those informed widened; Hoare and Simon were also told of it. No one remembered that it was illegal for a prime minister to leave the country without the King’s permission, but the matter of cabinet approval arose. It was, they decided, unnecessary. Chamberlain’s power to commit his country was beginning to rival Hitler’s.
²⁰⁸

The year which had begun with Vansittart’s dismissal and Eden’s resignation had now reached the first lovely week of September, and if the Wilhelmstrasse of 1914 had been confused by England’s intentions, the Nazi generation was utterly baffled. The Quai d’Orsay had made it as clear as diplomats can that the French would fight if the Czech frontier were ruptured, and Britain was France’s ally. Yet, after a long cabinet meeting in Downing Street, Henderson told Ribbentrop that “the Sudeten Germans and the Czechs are a matter of complete indifference to Great Britain. Great Britain is only concerned with the attitude of France.”
²⁰⁹

It was time to read
The Times
again. It is in keeping with the bizarre patterns of the Big Czech Crisis, now looming, that the author of the paper’s September 7 leader has never been identified. Dawson would spend the rest of his life explaining that he had returned late from his country weekend, insisting that he didn’t reach the office until late Tuesday afternoon, September 6. He read an incomplete draft of an editorial on Czechoslovakia, cut a paragraph, ordered it rewritten, and, apparently exhausted by this effort, left for dinner. Returning at 11:45
P.M.
he had misgivings. A Francophile colleague, solicited for advice, urged further surgery. It would have been more useful, for those who wanted to avoid another great war, if they had burned every copy of the paper and then burned the building. One paragraph, in the words of Martin Gilbert, “gave its support to what was, in effect, the extreme Henlein position, unacceptable not only to Beneš, but also to that large number of Sudeten Germans for whom union with Germany would mean the loss of all liberty, swift imprisonment, forced labour, and death.” It ran:

Considering the unique relationship between
The Times
and the government, it would be difficult to find a more irresponsible passage in the history of journalism. The unknown author—his identity shielded by Dawson, who either wrote it himself or knew who did—betrayed a staggering ignorance of geography, history, and both the ethnic diversity and range of political persuasions of the people living in the shadow of the Sudeten Mountains. As Churchill wrote the following day, in a letter which Dawson refused to publish,
The Times
’s proposal “would have the effect of handing over to the German Nazis the whole of the mountain defence line which marks the ancient boundaries of Bohemia, and was specially preserved to the Czechoslovak State as a vital safeguard of its national existence.” German propaganda had created the impression that everyone living in the Sudetenland was German, and that Henlein was their spokesman. Neither was true; four other political parties strongly opposed his Sudetendeutsche Nazis, and at least a quarter-million voters were German fugitives from the Third Reich. Like their Austrian comrades in terror, they knew that the names of their leaders were on Gestapo lists. For them, the
Times
editorial was at the very least the first draft of a death warrant.
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