The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (229 page)

As they were about to break up Horace Wilson gave a little start and asked: “What to do about the Czechs?”
²⁶⁵

While others discussed who was to inform the Czechs and how to assure their cooperation, the P.M. and Hitler discussed the Reich’s economic difficulties. Then the Führer consented to glance at a joint declaration regarding future Anglo-German relations which the prime minister had brought with him. This, for Chamberlain, was the high point in the conference. According to him, “As the interpreter translated the words into German, Hitler frequently ejaculated ‘
Ja, Ja
,’ and at the end he said, ‘Yes, I will certainly sign it; when shall we do it?’ I said ‘Now,’ and we went at once to the writing table, and put our signatures to the two copies which I had brought with me.” Neither Schmidt nor Alec Douglas-Home, Chamberlain’s parliamentary private secretary, who were looking on, shared the prime minister’s conviction that the Führer was as elated as Chamberlain thought him to be. Schmidt wrote afterward that Hitler agreed to sign “with a certain reluctance,” because the wording was too vague to be described as a commitment, and “to please Chamberlain.” Douglas-Home thought he signed “perfunctorily.” Compared with his signature on other documents, this one was careless, even sloppy.
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At 2:30
A.M.
the P.M. joined a delegation to tell the Czechs—who were being held in the Regina Hotel, prisoners, in effect, of the Gestapo—the fate of their country. Hubert Masařík, who was given the text to read aloud, later said that the French seemed “embarrassed.” Certainly the agreement was an occasion for Allied embarrassment. To the Czechs the terms were shocking. Yet Chamberlain, according to Masařík, “yawned without ceasing and with no show of embarrassment.” Both he and Daladier said Czech approval was not, strictly speaking, necessary. It was indeed irrelevant; the agreement was final. According to Horace Wilson’s later notes, Mastny was given “a pretty broad hint that… the best course for his Government was to accept what was clearly a considerable improvement upon the German Godesberg memorandum.” It wasn’t. Hitler had yielded nothing. Every outrageous demand he had made at Godesberg had been meekly met.
²⁶⁷

As the Czechs were facing those who had betrayed them, Churchill had returned to the Savoy, joining fellow members of the Other Club for a very late dinner, to be followed by a meeting. Sleep was out of the question. According to Colin Coote, a member of the Other Club and also a member of the
Times
staff, they were awaiting the first editions of London’s newspapers, which were expected to be carrying the Munich settlement. In the meantime, Coote remembered, discussion of the Godesberg terms and whether the P.M. would succeed in modifying these demands sparked “a violent argument. One began to understand why, in the House of Commons, a red line on the carpet, just beyond rapier reach of the opposite bench, marks the limit beyond which the speaker must not stray.” One defender of Chamberlain was insulted so grossly that he left the table and, upon reaching home, sent a letter of resignation from the club.
²⁶⁸

“Winston,” Coote remembered, “was snarling and clawing at the two unhappy ministers [First Lord Duff Cooper and Walter Elliot, secretary for Scotland]…. One could always tell when he was deeply moved, because a minor defect in his palate gave an echoing timbre to his voice. On this occasion it was not an echo, but a supersonic boom.” He asked them: “How could honourable men with wide experience and fine records in the Great War condone a policy so cowardly? It was sordid, squalid, sub-human, and,” he said, “suicidal…. The sequel to the sacrifice of honour” would be “the sacrifice of lives, our people’s lives.” In his memoirs Cooper charges, quite rightly, that Churchill was fouling him. He agreed with Winston, but since he was still a cabinet minister, he felt it was “honorable to defend them for the last time.”
²⁶⁹

At last one man produced his watch and remarked that the early papers must be on the streets. The member pocketed his watch, left, and returned with a stop press. Duff Cooper snatched it from him and read the terms out loud, according to Coote’s account “with obvious anger and disgust.” Then he rose and departed without a word. Behind him he left silence. In Coote’s words: “Nobody attempted to defend them. Humiliation took almost material shape.” Churchill left with Richard Law, a young Tory MP. They passed the open door of a restaurant, from which issued the sounds of loud laughter. It was “packed,” Law remembered long afterward, “and everyone was very gay. I was acutely conscious of the brooding figure beside me.” As they turned away Winston muttered: “Those poor people. They little know what they will have to face.” In the darkness they may have passed E. M. Forster, an English writer who resembled Churchill in only two traits: both possessed genius and remarkable intuition. Forster heard of the agreement in Munich and wrote that he “trailed about reading the notices, some of which had already fallen into the gutter.” It was “good news,” he wrote, “and it ought to have brought great joy; it did bring joy to the House of Commons. But unimportant and unpractical people often foresee the future more clearly than do those who are engaged in shaping it, and I knew at once that the news was only good in patches. Peace flapped from the posters, and not upon the wings of angels.”
²⁷⁰

Later in the morning, still September 30, Winston, Clemmie, and Lord Cecil seriously discussed gathering a group of friends who shared their wrath, marching to No. 10, and heaving a brick through a window. By then the two Czech delegates in the Regina had agreed not to fight. The need for their approval was urgent. By 5:00
P.M.
that day an international commission would convene in Berlin to fix the details for evacuation of the first zone of the Sudetenland, which was to commence October 1, and the transfer of policing power from local officials to the German Wehrmacht.

The Czechs were angry, of course—they would have been certifiable otherwise—and the Frenchmen were the focus of their wrath. Chamberlain, to them, was contemptible. Masařík’s narrative concluded: “The atmosphere was becoming oppressive for everyone present. It had been explained to us in a sufficiently brutal manner, and that by a Frenchman, that this was a sentence without right of appeal and without possibility of modification. Mr. Chamberlain did not conceal his fatigue. After the text had been read, we were given a second slightly corrected map. We said ‘Good-bye’ and left. The Czechoslovak Republic as fixed by the frontiers of 1918 had ceased to exist.”
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Masařík had not, however, formally accepted Czechoslovakia’s subjugation. Nor could he; that decision had to be made in Prague. But he knew all hope had fled. The Führer didn’t even have to send an ultimatum to Prague—Englishmen did it for him. Frank Ashton-Gwatkin, the member of the British delegation who had been given this dubious honor, arrived from Munich September 30, breakfasted with Lieutenant Colonel H. C. T. Stronge, the British military attaché, and showed him the Munich Agreement. Stronge said Czechoslovakia could never accept such terms; it would mean a sacrifice of their defenses, leaving them helpless. Ashton-Gwatkin said they
had
to accept. Stronge, to use his own word, was “staggered.”
²⁷²

Later in the day, after heated arguments with his advisers, military and civilian, Beneš capitulated. He also resigned five days later, but decided, at the urging of his ministers, to speak to the entire nation in a 7:00
P.M.
broadcast, telling them what lay in the hearts of those they had elected to govern them. “They wished,” Churchill later wrote, “to register their protest against a decision in which they had no part.” On the air Beneš said that he remained “what I have always been, a convinced democrat.” That was why he was stepping down; he thought it “best not to disturb the new European constellation which is arising.” (He would be succeeded by an anti-Semitic banker who, in the words of one newspaper, “enjoys the confidence of Germany.”) Beneš said: “Do not expect from me a single word of recrimination. But this I will say,”—here he came as close to bitterness as a gentle man could—“that the sacrifices demanded from us were immeasurably great, and immeasurably unjust. This the nation will never forget, even though they have borne these sacrifices quietly.” He departed to set up a government-in-exile in London. The SS moved in swiftly. No one knows how many Czechs were murdered in the week that followed, though it has been estimated that more than half of them were Jews. Exact figures were unavailable; with the Führer’s men reigning over the Sudetenland, the news blackout was absolute.
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The German generals, who had been sweating blood, could scarcely believe their good luck. They were unanimously agreed that had the British and French stood up to Hitler, and had Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, the Reich would have been swiftly defeated. All this came out at Nuremberg. Keitel, chief of the OKW, testified: “From a purely military point of view we lacked the means for an attack which involved the piercing of the [Czech] frontier fortifications.” Fritz Erich von Manstein, Germany’s most brilliant field commander (and not a defendant at Nuremberg), said that “had Czechoslovakia defended herself, we would have been held up by her fortifications, for we did not have the means to break through.” And Alfred Jodl, the key general at OKW, taking the witness stand in his own defense, told the International Military Tribunal: “It was out of the question with five fighting divisions and seven reserve divisions in the western fortification [Siegfried Line]… to hold out against 100 French divisions. That was militarily impossible.” Churchill later wrote that he had “always believed that Beneš was wrong to yield. He should have defended his fortress line. Once fighting had begun, in my opinion at that time, France would have moved to his aid in a surge of national passion, and Britain would have rallied to France almost immediately.” The chance had been tragically missed.
²⁷⁴

Nevertheless, Hitler, returning from Munich on his private train, was not rejoicing. To his SS honor guard he ranted that Chamberlain had “
meinen Einzug in Prag verdorben
” (“spoiled my entry into Prague”). In his grand strategy the seizures of Austria and Czechoslovakia were to be the opening moves in a tremendous campaign for lebensraum in the east, to be followed in the west by the conquest of the Low Countries and France. Only ten days earlier he had told the Hungarian prime minister that the wisest course was “
die Tschechoslowakei zu zerschlagen
” (“to destroy Czechoslovakia”). The sole danger was that the Czechs might buckle at the first threat. Now the British had done the buckling for them; Chamberlain had deprived the
Kriegsherr
of his first battlefield victory.
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On his flight home Daladier was also out of sorts, desolate and despairing. He later told Amery that as they landed in Paris and taxied toward the terminal he turned up his coat collar, to protect his face from the rotten eggs he expected when he came within range of the crowd. To his astonishment there were no eggs, no offensive shouts of “
Merde!
” and “
Nous sommes trahis!
” He paused halfway down the steps, dumbfounded. They were actually cheering him—shouting “
Vive Daladier!
” “
Vive la Paix!
” “
Vive la France!
”—greeting him as though he had won a great victory. Daladier was a man completely without vanity. He turned to Léger and whispered, “
Les cons!
” (“Fools!”). There were a few grumblers; one man muttered, “
Vive la France malgré tout.
” Yet for the most part the gaiety was unqualified. It was also mindless. Because the Reich no longer need face the formidable Czech army in the east, Munich had been a catastrophe for France. Hitler’s empire had increased its strength, and could quickly field twice as many soldiers. Nevertheless, the Chamber of Deputies ratified the Munich Agreement 535 to 75. Bonnet told an interviewer: “Yes, we have a treaty with the Czechs, and France remains faithful to her sacred word. Czechoslovakia wasn’t invaded, was she?”
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Nestling in Chamberlain’s pocket was the document he prized; today it lies in an obscure file at the Imperial War Museum, possibly the last place he would have had in mind. At the time that it was famous, Harold Nicolson denounced it in Parliament as “that bit of paper” which had betrayed the Reich’s neighbors and threatened the security of England. In reality the document was meaningless. That was why Hitler had signed it. The first paragraph declared that Anglo-German relations were “of the first importance for the two countries and for Europe”; the second that the Munich Agreement and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935 were “symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again”; and the third that both the prime minister of Great Britain and the Führer of the Third Reich intended to use the “method of consultation” in questions “that may concern our two countries,” because of their mutual determination “to continue our efforts to remove possible sources of difference, and thus to contribute to assure the peace of Europe.” That is all. It lacked even the ringing affirmation of nonaggression treaties; instead it expressed the
desire
of their peoples not to war on one another. But for a few days in the quirky autumn of 1938—the same season that Orson Welles’s radio drama of Martians landing in New Jersey sent thousands of Americans heading for the hills—people believed that Chamberlain had done rather a good thing. Britons, haunted by the dread that war might be declared at any hour, felt that they had been granted a reprieve. They cast about for ways to express their gratitude. Some became hysterical.
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