The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (228 page)

The scene in Parliament later in the day was a piece of stage management from the people who had brought Britain to the brink of catastrophe. At about noon Hitler’s invitation to Chamberlain had reached the German embassy in London, where it was immediately decoded and dispatched to No. 10. Three hours passed. Chamberlain, addressing the House of Commons in its first session since the August adjournment, was describing the tangled diplomatic skein when a messenger arrived. Normally so important a dispatch would have been taken straight to the front bench. This one was delivered to Halifax, seated in the Peers’ Gallery. He passed it down to Simon, who read it and pushed it in front of the prime minister. The House watched all this with mounting interest. In a voice that could be heard throughout the hall, Chamberlain asked: “Shall I tell them now?” and, when Simon smiled and nodded, announced: “Herr Hitler has just agreed to postpone his mobilisation for twenty-four hours and to meet me in conference with Signor Mussolini and [Monsieur] Daladier at Munich.” One independent MP, a diarist, described what followed as “one of the most dramatic moments which I have ever witnessed. For a second, the House was hushed in absolute silence. And then the whole House burst into a roar of cheering, since they knew that this might mean peace.” Harold Macmillan remembered that “I stood up with the rest, sharing the general emotion.”
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Some were undeceived by the contrivance. Macmillan recalled that “Eden just could not bear it; he got up and walked out of the Chamber. Another Member sat bravely still and refused to rise. It was Harold Nicolson.” Amery also remained in his bench, arms folded. Men all round them were shouting “Get up! Get up!” and “Thank God for the Prime Minister!” Then, Macmillan recalled, “I saw one man silent and seated—with his head sunk on his shoulders, his whole demeanour depicting something between anger and despair. It was Churchill.” But Winston, ever magnanimous, rose as Chamberlain passed him, shaking his hand, wishing him “Godspeed.”
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The German army’s anti-Nazi conspirators had been about to spring. The order to arrest Hitler and occupy all government buildings, including the chancellery, had been on General Franz Halder’s desk at noon, and General Erwin von Witzleben was standing by to witness his signature, when his orderly entered with a bulletin: Chamberlain and Daladier would travel to Munich for further talks. Halder later testified: “I therefore took back the order of execution because, owing to this fact, the entire basis for the action had been taken away.” The next day, as Telford Taylor writes, “the four men of Munich danced their quadrille.”
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W
ebster defines “munich” as “an instance of unresisting compliance with and capitulation to the demands of an aggressor nation.” Actually, nothing of great consequence happened at the Munich Conference. The Czechs’ fate had been decided at Berchtesgaden and Godesberg. Britain’s participation was a gross violation of parliamentary government. Unnoticed after the prime minister had been swept out of the chamber by hysterical MPs was a singular omission. His (and Horace Wilson’s) inconclusive, ambiguous, highly questionable exchanges with the German führer had never been subjected to a House debate. The entire cabinet assembled at the airport the next morning to wish him luck, but neither the cabinet (including the foreign secretary) nor Parliament had shared in the formation of the policy that led to Munich.

At Munich the prime minister was clearly delighted to see Hitler again, eager to stand at his side. Here he made a cardinal error. Afterward he happily wrote his sister that the Astors’ son William, recently returned from a trip to Berlin, had the impression that “Hitler definitely liked me & thought he could do business with me.” This was true in the sense that an armed robber thinks he can do business with a bank teller. In fact, Hitler had taken a strong personal dislike to Chamberlain, who impressed him as an “insignificant” man. The Führer dealt with him because he believed him to be infinitely malleable. Other men in Parliament, he knew, were dangerous. On the eve of Munich he said he was “fully aware” that one day Chamberlain might be replaced by Churchill, whose “aim would be to unleash at once a new world war against Germany.”
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The Führer was right. He had never met Churchill, but he understood him, as Winston understood Hitler. Walter Lippmann observed that the supreme qualification for high office is temperament, not intellect, and on that level the two men had more in common than either would have acknowledged. The countless millions spellbound by Winston’s genius would angrily reject any comparison of the two. Nevertheless they were mirror images of one another. Since the embattled defender of Western civilization was the one who was ultimately successful, his vision has prevailed. What would have happened had victory gone to the Nazi leader doesn’t bear thinking about. In the mid-1980s a poll reported that a large majority of
Germans
believe the worst thing that could have happened to them would have been the triumph of the Third Reich.
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Satan was once angelic; he and God had much in common. Similarly, both the Führer and his English nemesis were born demagogues. Each believed in the supremacy of his race and in national destiny; each had artistic talent—Churchill had more, but Hitler, though dismissed as a shallow painter of picture postcards, was a charismatic figure moved by dark but profound passions, the man whose voice at Nuremberg inspired men to lay down their lives, shouting “
Heil, Hitler!
” as they died. The inescapable fact is that Hitler and Churchill both were ruled not by reason but by intuition.

Chamberlain, the businessman, accustomed to the friendship of other good fellows who met on the level and parted on the square, understood neither man. The P.M. respected success. He assumed that any man who had risen to rule the most powerful nation on the Continent was a man with whom he could deal. Neville seems to have been oblivious to the fact that nearly everyone who had tried to bargain with this extraordinary man had been murdered, sent to a concentration camp, or hounded into exile.

Chamberlain could not have comprehended the depth of the horrors plumbed by the Third Reich. The Führer vowed that restoring their beloved homeland to the mistreated Sudetendeutsche was his last claim, and Chamberlain believed him. The P.M. had not been deceptive in his “faraway country” broadcast. Although the “Czech problem” had been on his desk for months, to him Czechoslovakia remained precisely that: a problem, not a land inhabited by real people. He knew nothing of eastern European geography, not to mention the Serbs, Croats, Slavs, Slovaks, Czechs, Poles, and gypsies inhabiting the region; he disregarded all the warnings of the FO and swallowed everything he was told by the Reich’s
Kriegsherr
.

Churchill knew better. He had studied Adolf Hitler’s career with intensity, and remembered his remarkable history of broken promises. When the Führer broke the Versailles treaty he promised to honor Germany’s signature on Locarno; when he broke the Locarno Pact—long before the Sudetenland became a synonym for crisis—he had sworn that the Rhineland would be his last territorial claim. When he sent Wehrmacht bayonets into Austria he grandly guaranteed Czechoslovakia’s borders. His position had subtly evolved; he was interested only in Germans, he said—including, of course, Germans living beyond the borders of the Reich. But over the past two thousand years Europe had become a mix, racially, culturally, and ethnically. As Duff Cooper observed, “There are Germans in Switzerland, in Denmark, and in Alsace; I think that one of the few countries in Europe in which there are no Germans is Spain, and there are rumors that Germany has taken an interest in that country.”
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Churchill’s sources in the Reich reported that the great Ruhr munitions factories, on orders from Berlin, continued to work around the clock. In Kiel and Hamburg new U-boats slid into the water like the litters of an incredibly fertile sea monster; Luftwaffe observation planes, equipped with long-range cameras, overflew eastern Europe, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, even France. Churchill carried graphs when he entered the House of Commons now. They revealed that the gap between British and German arsenals was widening. Since fighting was inevitable, he argued, better that it come now, with France prepared to meet her treaty obligations to Czechoslovakia, thus confronting German strategists with the specter of a two-front war.

Now the crisis had reached its climax. Violet Bonham Carter recalled Churchill’s mood then. “He rightly mistrusted Chamberlain, who, he was convinced, was still searching desperately for a way out” when no honorable way existed. That same September 29, as the so-called Four-Power Meeting began in Bavaria, the Focus group lunched in the Savoy’s Pinafore Room. Violet saw that “Winston’s face was dark with forboding. I could see he feared the worst, as I did. I finally suggested that during the afternoon a few of us should draft a telegram to the Prime Minister adjuring him to make no further concessions at the expense of the Czechs and warning him that if he did so he would have to fight the House of Commons on his return.” The wire was to be signed by, among others, Churchill, Lord (Robert) Cecil, Attlee, Archie Sinclair, Eden, Liddell Hart, Lloyd George, and Lord Lloyd.
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It was drafted—after eliminating the threat—and at 7:00
P.M.
they again met at the Savoy. Winston then called for the signatures, and Sinclair, Lloyd, and Cecil came quickly forward. But some who had said they would come had not. Eden, reached by telephone, declined to permit the use of his name. Attlee was then phoned. He, too, refused; he said he would need the approval of his party. As Nicolson wrote in his diary, they “sat there gloomily realising that nothing could be done. Even Winston seemed to have lost his fighting spirit…. So far as one can see, Hitler gets everything he wants.”
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It was decided to send no telegram. One by one the group drifted away. Violet wrote: “Winston remained, sitting in his chair immobile, like a man of stone. I saw the tears in his eyes. I could feel the iron entering his soul. His last attempt to salvage what was left of honor and good faith had failed.” She spoke bitterly of those who refused to put their names to their principles. Then Churchill spoke. He said: “
What are they made of?
The day is not far off when it won’t be signatures we’ll have to give but lives—the lives of millions. Can we survive? Do we deserve to do so when there’s no courage anywhere?”
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Shortly after noon that Thursday—as Churchill, heavy with despair, lunched at the Savoy—Hitler led his guests from a buffet at the Führerbau (the working headquarters of the Nazi party) and into his private office, to determine the future of a country in a conference from which that nation’s elected leaders had been excluded. Two Czechs—Hubert Masařík and Vojtech Mastny—were in the city as “observers” attached to the British delegation, but when Chamberlain weakly suggested they attend the discussions the Führer had said “
Nein!
” The issue was then dropped, with the tacit understanding that the delegation from Prague would be informed of the Hitler-Chamberlain-Mussolini-Daladier decisions later.

Mussolini produced a memorandum, ostensibly drawn up by him but actually the work of Göring, Neurath, and Weizsäcker. The Englishmen—Horace Wilson had again accompanied Chamberlain—assumed that it was a base for negotiations, but Hitler did not negotiate. He simply repeated, over and over, what he was going to take, when he would take it, and what he might or might not do with it. Nevertheless, the men from Paris and London kept battering away, through the evening and past midnight. At 1:00
A.M.
Chamberlain capitulated. Virtually all of the claims Hitler had made in the past were accepted, including many he could never have won by force of arms. He now held the strategic center of Europe. The agreement signed in the early hours of September 30 (though it was dated September 29) specified that Czechoslovakia should begin evacuation of the Sudetenland at once. All Czechs in the Sudetenland must be gone—no one thought to ask where they might go—by October 10. Their departure would be supervised by an international commission which would also decide when plebiscites should be held, determine where the borders of the rump Czech state should be drawn, and see to it that all “existing installations” remain intact in Czechoslovakia’s lost territories. Poland, exploiting the turmoil, was placated by a slice of the pie, some three hundred square miles of Teschen Silesia. If other “problems of Polish and Hungarian minorities in Czechoslovakia” were not settled by negotiations with Prague, they would “form the subject” of another four-power meeting.
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The proceedings ended briskly, with efficient young German diplomats tidying up and disposing of loose strings. It had been a disgraceful business, but only Daladier and François-Poncet saw it for what it really was. The French premier was glum and silent; his ambassador to Germany, mortified by his country’s sellout of a faithful ally, was overheard by Ciano as he spoke in a voice broken by shame: “
Voilà comme la France traite les seuls alliés qui lui étaient restés fidèles
.” (“See how France treats the only allies who remained faithful to her.”)
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