The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (225 page)

Jan Masaryk had to pay two visits to Whitehall that morning before the Foreign Office agreed to announce that the
Times
proposal “in no way represents the view of His Majesty’s Government.” By then every capital in Europe was convinced that it did. In Blackpool the Labour party’s National Executive issued a formal statement declaring that “the British Government must leave no doubt that they will unite with the French and Soviet Governments to resist any attack on Czechoslovakia.” Halifax agreed—he was vacillating, not for the last time, on the Czech issue, and like many appeasers he was occasionally discomfited by flecks of doubt about the wisdom of endlessly yielding to Hitler’s demands.
²¹²

By now the Czech border was swarming with German assault troops, and London knew that this time they weren’t there for maneuvers. Theodor Kordt, the chargé d’affaires at the German embassy in the absence of Dirksen, had arrived in Downing Street the night of September 6 and entered No. 10 through the garden gate and the Horse Guards Parade. There he told Horace Wilson, and then Halifax, who came hurrying over from the FO, that he had come, “putting conscience before loyalty,” as “a spokesman for political and military circles in Berlin who desire by every means to prevent war.” He and his associates wanted a blunt warning that England would fight for the Czechs. “Hitler,” he said, had “taken his decision to ‘march in’ on the nineteenth or twentieth.”
²¹³

Kordt was confirmed by an equally sensational development. Dr. Karl Burckhardt of the League of Nations had given the British ambassador in Berne a message from Weizsäcker, second only to Ribbentrop in the Wilhelmstrasse, confirming Kordt in every particular and underscoring the need to warn the Führer that the invasion of Czechoslovakia meant war. Halifax, with Chamberlain’s reluctant approval, drafted a sharply worded note for delivery to the German government: if the Czech frontier were breached France would declare war on Germany, touching off “a sequence of events” resulting in “a general conflict from which Great Britain could not stand aside.” But Ambassador Henderson—who had no authority whatever to pass judgment on the foreign secretary’s instructions—refused to deliver the note, on the ground that it would only inflame the Führer. Besides, he said, he had already made the British position “as clear as daylight to people who count.” With this assurance, and because of the difficulty of communicating with Henderson, who was living aboard a train for five days while he attended the Nuremberg rally, Halifax, “on understanding that you have in fact already conveyed to Herr von Ribbentrop… [the] substance of what you were instructed to say,” agreed that Henderson need make no further representation.
²¹⁴

Precisely what His Majesty’s ambassador to the Reich may have said to Ribbentrop is unrecorded; but the SS officer who served as Henderson’s escort at Nuremberg later said that during his stay he “remarked with a sigh that Great Britain was now having to pay for her guilty part in the Treaty of Versailles” and “expressed his aversion to the Czechs in very strong terms.”
²¹⁵

On the third day after the
Times
editorial, Göring spoke to the vast, hysterical mass at Nuremberg, calling the Czechs a “miserable pygmy race… oppressing a cultured people” and fronting for “Moscow and the eternal mask of the Jew Devil.” The Führer’s turn at the rostrum came, as always, on the last night of the rally, Monday, September 12. Bathed in spotlights, pausing after each scream of invective as the huge, packed stadium roared, “
Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!
” he shouted his distorted version of the May crisis, raging at the recollection of Germany’s humiliation then, which he blamed on Beneš and his “Jew plotters.” Sweating till his cowlick was plastered across his forehead, he called Czechoslovakia a “monstrous formation” and demanded that the Sudetendeutsche be granted the “right of self-determination” and “justice” (“
Gerechtigkeit
”), adding in a flash of arrogation: “Germans of Austria know best how bitter a thing it is to be separated from the Fatherland. They will be the first to recognize the significance of what I have been saying today.” They would indeed. And so would Winston Churchill. According to the cabinet minutes, Halifax reported that he and the prime minister had seen Churchill on the previous day (Sunday), and said that “Mr. Churchill’s proposition was that we should tell Germany that if she set foot in Czechoslovakia we should at once be at war with her. Mr. Churchill agreed that this line of action was an advance on the line of action which he had proposed two or three weeks earlier, but he thought that by taking it we should incur no added risk.”
²¹⁶

Yet while Winston saw an Anschluss replay thundering toward them, the edgy cabinets in Paris and London, listening to Hitler’s Nuremberg speech over radios, heard only wind. They awaited what the FO called “triggers,” vows and demands which could only be resolved by German bayonets slashing toward Prague. Since the Führer was unspecific, however, the prime minister, the premier, and their ministers felt relieved. Misunderstanding him and his genius, they erred. This was his milieu, and he knew, as they did not, that his wild gestures and mindless raving were enough to set off bloody rioting in the Sudetenland. Prague declared martial law and rushed in convoys of troops. “
SCHRECKENHERRSCHAFT!
” (“
REIGN OF TERROR
”) shrieked
Der Angriff
, and Henlein fled into Germany. Then, abruptly, the storm ended. Thursday morning everything in the Sudetenland was normal.
²¹⁷

At No. 10 Downing Street and the Paris home of the French premier, things were not. Premier Daladier wired Chamberlain, proposing that France, Britain, and Germany convene for a discussion
à trois
. But the P.M. had anticipated him. With the Sudetenland rioting approaching its peak, Chamberlain decided the time for Plan Z had arrived. Bypassing Henderson, he cabled Hitler during the night of September 13 that in the light of “the increasingly critical situation I propose to come over at once to see you with a view to trying to find a peaceful solution.” He intended to fly, could “start tomorrow,” asked for the “earliest time” they might meet and “a very early reply.” Chamberlain was eager. And anxious. It was the sort of mood that sales clerks recognize in the customer who has decided to buy even before entering the store, and to pay any price.
²¹⁸

Churchill’s
Daily Telegraph
column of September 15 predicted bloodshed; the Czechs, he wrote, possessed “an absolute determination to fight for life and freedom.” If not “daunted by all the worry and pressure to which they have been subjected,” they would inflict 300,000 or 400,000 casualties, but the world would hold them blameless. It was German aggression which would be condemned; “from the moment that the first shot is fired and the German troops attempt to cross the Czechoslovakian frontier, the whole scene will be transformed, and a roar of fury will arise from the free peoples of the world, which will proclaim nothing less than a crusade against the aggressor.”

He could still sound his bugle, but the rest of the orchestra was following a different score. In the Foreign Office, Oliver Harvey wrote: “British press receives news of PM’s visit with marked approval. City is much relieved. Reaction in Germany also one of relief. In America it looks as if it were regarded as surrender. Winston says it is the stupidest thing that has ever been done.” Churchill knew what the prime minister was planning. He had learned that nearly a year earlier Chamberlain had written what he really wanted to tell the Nazis: “Give us satisfactory assurance that you won’t use force to deal with the Austrians and Czechoslovakians and we will give you similar assurance that we won’t use force to prevent the changes you want, if you can get them by peaceful means.” Declining Lord Moyne’s invitation to join him on a Caribbean cruise, Winston wrote: “Alas, a cloud of uncertainty overhangs all plans at the present time…. We seem to be very near the bleak choice between War and Shame. My feeling is that we shall choose Shame, and then have War thrown in a little later on even more adverse terms than at present.”
²¹⁹

The prime minister, of course, saw matters differently. In his eyes the choice lay between peace and devastation, and he saw nothing shameful in buying peace by coercing a pretentious little state on the far side of Germany. Late in life R. A. Butler, who had watched him prepare for his historic trip, described his mood as “exalted.” Some Britons were worried by the loss of a strong ally—Czechoslovakia, whose army was described by the British military attaché in Prague as “probably the best in the smaller states of Europe,” could field thirty to forty divisions after manning her fortress line. Others were troubled by the moral implications, and by the sloughing off of British pride. Winston’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Mary, wrote him: “I have been following the Czechoslovakian problem with keen interest. I think we are making things more difficult by declaring such a feeble policy.”
²²⁰

Chamberlain, who distrusted public opinion, the press, and to some extent, the House of Commons and even the cabinet, had taken steps to free himself of unwanted advice while he practiced his personal diplomacy. Parliament was not sitting and would not convene in the immediate future. (They were “being treated more and more as a kind of Reichstag,” Harold Macmillan complained.) The cabinet’s Foreign Policy Committee had last met three months before; the next meeting was a month away.
²²¹

Those familiar with later conferences between world leaders, particularly Churchill’s, may be surprised by the fact that apart from two typists and two bodyguards—who would travel in a separate plane—the prime minister took with him only three companions: the ubiquitous Sir Horace Wilson and two young FO diplomats. Like their leader, none in the party spoke a word of German. Henderson, who would join them in Munich, was fluent in German, but of course he also spoke in tongues. Chamberlain and Hitler would talk
à deux
, aided only by an interpreter. The prime minister had no strategy, no proposals, no conversational lines to fall back upon if confronted by an unexpected proposal requiring thought. As he said afterward, he regarded himself as a one-man mission of inquiry to determine “in personal conversation whether there was any hope of saving the peace.” Horace Wilson had made some notes on reciprocal suggestions, but the P.M., it seems, was prepared only to accept the Führer’s terms. This was his virgin flight, and he had been told to anticipate a bumpy three-hour trip to Munich. Understandably he was nervous, and he had therefore asked Geoffrey Dawson to ride with him to Heston airstrip. At such a time it was comforting to be accompanied by a friend who would console you with reasonable answers to unreasonable doubts, someone who understood you, someone you could trust.
²²²

Hitler was guilty of treason, incest, incitement to riot, and the murder of millions. In small matters, however, he was a prig: a vegetarian who scorned nicotine, and was offended by foul language. “
Um Himmel willen!
” (“For heaven’s sake!”) was about as strong as he got, and he fairly sputtered it when told that the prime minister of Great Britain, the leader of the greatest empire in history, was coming to him, like the English pilgrims in the early days of the Third Reich. Landing at Munich about noon on September 15, Chamberlain enjoyed reviewing an honor guard whose members, Wilson noted without comprehension, wore skulls and crossbones on their caps. Though none of the English visitors knew it, these were members of the
Totenkopf
(Death’s Head) SS, recruited from Dachau guards. It was not an auspicious greeting.

Chamberlain wrote Ida that he “felt quite fresh” during the ride from the airport to the train station, and was “delighted with the enthusiastic welcome of the crowds… all the way to the station.” A three-hour train ride brought him to Berchtesgaden; then he and his entourage were driven up to the Berghof. There, Chamberlain later wrote, “Halfway down [the] steps stood the Führer, bareheaded and dressed in a khaki-coloured coat of broadcloth with a red armlet and a swastika on it, and the military cross on his breast.” Except for this costume, the prime minister thought, “he looks entirely undistinguished. You would never notice him in a crowd, and would take him for the house painter”—Chamberlain had swallowed this whopper—“he once was.”
²²³

The prime minister had been traveling since dawn, and it was nearly 5:30
P.M.
when, after tea, he and the Führer, accompanied by Schmidt, Hitler’s interpreter, climbed the stairs to the Berghof’s study, where Schuschnigg had been browbeaten seven months before. Hitler dominated the conversation, running on and on about how he had vowed to solve the Czech issue “one way or another.” The Sudetenland’s three million Germans must “return” (“
zurückkehren
”) to the Reich. He was “prepared to risk a world war rather than allow this to drag on.” Chamberlain had tried again and again to comment; now he succeeded in interrupting Hitler—something one did not
do
—and said that if the Führer had decided to resolve the issue by force, “why did you let me come? I have wasted my time.” Hitler calmed down and suggested they examine “the question of whether a peaceful settlement is not possible after all.” Would Britain agree to a “
Loslösung
” (“liberation”) of the Sudetenland, one based on the right of “
Selbstimmungsrechts der Volker
” (“self-determination”)? That was the trap. Chamberlain went for it. He was pleased, he said, that they “had now got down to the crux of the matter.” Of course, he would have to sound out his cabinet and confer with the French, he said, adding, according to Schmidt’s shorthand notes, that “he could personally state that he recognized the principle of the detachment of the Sudeten area…. He wished to return to England to report to the Government and secure their approval of his personal attitude.” That, so to speak, was the ball game. The prospect had been hooked.
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