The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (232 page)

He thought he had touched bottom when Edward abdicated, but this was worse.
That
, however, was part of
this
. In 1936, A. J. P. Taylor writes, “Churchill had seemed the rallying point for patriotic and democratic opinion,” but Winston’s ambiguous position on the Spanish Civil War and his championing of a discredited monarch eroded his support, and “his prestige ran downhill,” particularly on the left. The conventional explanation for his continued isolation is that he had outraged Parliament by his long losing battle for the Indian Raj; but Chamberlain had deplored the parliamentary maneuvers which led to dominion status for India. Labour approved of Winston’s support of the League of Nations but recoiled from his calls for collective security. He “estranged the idealists,” as Taylor puts it, “and so remained until the outbreak of war a solitary figure, distrusted by both sides.” After Britain’s disillusionment with Munich—and the “first ecstasy,” noted Muggeridge, “soon passed” when Englishmen realized that the agreement would “involve still further concessions to Germany”—reasonable men might at the very least have acknowledged that Churchill had been right. But politics is never reasonable. Having denied, ridiculed, and scorned his accusations and impeachments, the cabinet could not indemnify him without confessing to its own incompetence.
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As the last weeks of 1938 skulked away, anyone wagering that the member from Epping would still be in his corner seat a year hence would have been entitled to ask for odds. Two exits were available. He could quit, or his constituents could recall him. He had hung on for nine years, hoping for a responsible post, but the chances of that were as remote as ever. He was still urging the strengthening of Britain’s defenses, and that, in the eyes of the appeasers, was enough to disqualify him, despite his great abilities. Furthermore, as Chamberlain noted in his diary, recognition of Churchill was out of the question as long as friendship with Hitler and Mussolini seemed possible: “I wouldn’t risk it by what would certainly be regarded by them as a challenge.” Macmillan told Hugh Dalton that in Parliament or out, Churchill was “in danger of relapsing into a complacent Cassandra. He would say: ‘Well, I have done my best. I have made all these speeches. Nobody has paid any attention. All my prophecies have turned out to be true. I have been publicly snubbed by the Government. What more can I do?’ ”
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In London it seemed inconceivable that Churchill could be forced to resign his seat in Parliament. But in the aftermath of Munich, during those weeks in which it seemed that Chamberlain had actually succeeded in buying peace, the rank and file of Conservative voters, proud of the party’s leader, were aroused by any criticism of him. In this political climate the
Sunday Express
ran a brief item under the head: “Trouble is being made for Churchill in Epping. The campaign is strong, the campaigners determined.” Winston sent Beaverbrook a note of protest; the story, he wrote, was “misleading as to the true state of affairs: & certainly most unhelpful to me.” It was unhelpful, but it was also accurate. Two of his loyal constituents, Sir Harry Goschen and Sir Colin Thornton-Kemsley, had been dismayed by his Munich speech. Goschen wrote to the chairman of the Epping Conservative Association, Sir James Hawkey, that he could not “help thinking it was rather a pity that he broke up the harmony of the House by the speech he made…. I think it would have been a great deal better if he had kept quiet and not made a speech at all.”
²¹

Goschen decided to stick with Churchill; but Thornton-Kemsley wanted him repudiated and replaced by someone who would “support the Conservative administration, not… discredit them.” On November 4, in a public meeting, Churchill defended his position on Munich. Then Thornton-Kemsley spoke, arguing that Winston’s attempts to contain Germany with a “ring of strongly armed powers” had floundered. There was, he said, no conflict between British and German goals, and if the four nations represented at Munich could “agree upon a policy of friendship,” no other nation would dare touch off a war. The audience seemed equally divided, but Hawkey lent his support to Winston, and his constituents passed a resolution regretting the failure of His Majesty’s Government to respond to their member’s warnings “given during the last five years” and declaring that had the prime minister and his cabinet followed Churchill’s advice, Chamberlain “would have found himself in a far better position to negotiate with the heads of the dictator States.”
²²

Churchill was once more secure in Epping—or so it seemed in November 1938—but as Sarah later wrote him: “What price politics since they won’t listen to you?” The one who listened least was the one who mattered most.
²³

Neville Chamberlain believed that Munich was the triumph of his career. Intolerant of dissent, a believer in strong party discipline, he was vain, rude, and vindictive. These unattractive traits were balanced by terrific energy, a powerful intellect, and an even stronger gift for command. William Strang, of the Foreign Office, who was outraged by the Munich settlement, nevertheless saw him as “a man of cool, calm mind, strong will, decisive purpose, wholly devoted to the public cause and with a firm confidence in his own judgment.”
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If he had a sense of humor, it is unrecorded. In any event, he did not think public business and national institutions subject to levity. He had detested Rugby as much as Winston had Harrow; nevertheless, he believed that public schools were part of the social order and should not be mocked. When Churchill told the House that “Britain is like a Laocoön strangled by old school ties” and compared England’s public school system to “feeding sham pearls to real swine,” Neville scowled. An incapacity for the droll and the whimsical is typical of fanatics—and the prime minister now resembled a skipper who has set his bearing and lashed himself to the wheel. After Munich he should have given England’s security overriding priority, but on Christmas Day, 1938, Oliver Harvey, a senior civil servant in the Foreign Office, noted despondently in his diary that Chamberlain was not pressing on with rearmament, that under Inskip the Committee of Imperial Defence “goes slower and slower,” and that “Inskip must certainly go. A much more vigorous and imaginative man should be there. Winston is the obvious man, but I believe the PM would rather die than have him.”
²⁵

That much seemed clear. In November, addressing the House of Commons from the front bench, the P.M. had scorned Winston, repeating the old accusation of Churchillian instability. It was the same old wine from the same dirty bottles, but no one could remember a British prime minister turning on one of his own party’s private members. It simply wasn’t done. And it was particularly unwise to do it to Churchill, as Chamberlain learned when Winston, speaking to 1,200 of his constituents in Chingford on December 9, noted that the P.M. had told Parliament “that where I failed, for all my brilliant gifts, was in the faculty of judging. I will gladly submit my judgement about foreign affairs and national defence during the last five years in comparison to his own.”
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It was a devastating speech. In 1934, he recalled, Chamberlain had been chancellor of the Exchequer when Winston warned Stanley Baldwin that “the Germans had a secret Air Force and were rapidly overhauling ours. I gave definite figures and forecasts. Of course, it was all denied with all the weight of official authority.” He had been derided as a “scaremonger.” In less than six months, he reminded his audience, Baldwin “had to come down to the House and admit he was wrong and he said, ‘We are all to blame.’ ” Baldwin had “got more applause for making this mistake, which may prove fatal to the British Empire and to British freedom,” than most Englishmen who rendered a great service to the nation. “Mr Chamberlain was, next to Mr Baldwin, the most powerful Member of that Government…. He knew all the facts. His judgement failed just like that of Mr Baldwin and we are suffering from the consequences of it today.” That blunder had been only the beginning. A year later Winston had asked that the RAF be doubled and redoubled, which prompted Lord Samuel, who shared Chamberlain’s faith in appeasement, to say he thought “my judgement so defective that he likened me to a Malay running amok. It would have been well for him and his persecuted race if my advice had been taken. They would not be where they are now.”

He then turned to Chamberlain’s record as prime minister over the past two years. In his early days at No. 10 “the Prime Minister made a heart-to-heart settlement with Mr de Valera, and gave up to him those fortified ports on the South Coast of Ireland which are vital to our food supply in time of war.” The P.M. led Englishmen to believe that “the country now called Eire were reconciled to us in friendship, but I warned him with my defective judgement that if we got into any great danger Mr de Valera would demand the surrender of Ulster as the price of any friendship or aid.” And this, he said, “fell out exactly.” Recently De Valera had announced that he could give England neither friendship nor aid while any British troops remained in Northern Ireland.

Next, in February 1938, Churchill continued, Chamberlain had said that

These “proved errors of judgement in the past,” Winston ended, should be weighed carefully when pondering “some of the judgements which have been passed upon the future, the results of which have not yet been proved.”
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The Treasury Bench excepted, Churchill
did
have an attentive audience in Parliament, and they were its elite, men of eminence and accomplishment in other fields, backbenchers many of them, not because they lacked ministerial talent but because their time for public affairs was limited. In the division over the Munich Agreement, MPs, following their ancient ritual, had left the chamber to vote for or against it. Thirty eminent Conservatives remained seated, however, signifying abstention. This, wrote Nicolson, “must enrage the Government, since it is not our numbers that count but our reputation.” Among the abstainers were Churchill, Eden, Duff Cooper, Leo Amery, Roger Keyes, Macmillan, Sandys, Bracken, and Boothby. This was a sign of party disarray. Rank and file MPs, Nicolson noted, realized that these dissidents “know far more about the real issue than they do.” It was clear that “the Government were rattled by this…. The House breaks up with the Tories yelling to keep their spirits up. But they well know that Chamberlain has put us in a ghastly position and that we ought to have been prepared to go to war and smash Hitler. Next time he will be far too strong for us.” On November 17 Churchill wrote in the
Daily Telegraph
: “Everyone must recognize that the Prime Minister is pursuing a policy of a most decided character…. By this time next year we shall know whether the Prime Minister’s view of Herr Hitler and the German Nazi Party is right or wrong. By this time next year we shall know whether the policy of appeasement has appeased, or whether it has only stimulated a more ferocious appetite.” Privately he wrote Lord Wolmer on December 12: “Neville leads us from bad to worse.”
²⁸

Certainly he had presided over a series of disastrous defeats in 1938, altering the European balance of power and putting in jeopardy nations in eastern Europe which were friendly to France and Britain. The Anschluss and Munich had swollen the Reich’s population by 10,250,000—conscripts for the Wehrmacht, toilers in arms factories, drudges for the expanding empire. But it had already become clear that the safeguards adopted at Munich—the international commission and the guarantee of Czechoslovakia’s new borders—were worthless. The commission met in the Wilhelmstrasse, under Ribbentrop’s eye; the British and French delegates were under instructions, from Halifax and Bonnet, to yield to Hitler whenever possible. Their request for a definition of the impossible was unanswered. And Churchill’s prediction that the Czech state could not survive the butchery of its frontiers in the Führerbau had been swiftly realized. With Beneš gone, the Czech defensive forts in Nazi hands, and ethnic minorities at each other’s throats, the only democracy in eastern Europe was disintegrating. The Slovaks made the first move toward autonomy on October 6; three days later the Ukrainians followed their example; and on November 2 German and Italian arbitrators awarded Hungary nearly 4,600 square miles of Czechoslovakian soil. That left the Czech rump of Bohemia and Moravia, vaguely associated with the independent governments of Slovakia and Ruthenia.

At Chartwell, Churchill read reports of anti-Nazi fugitives from the Sudetenland. They echoed the tales Viennese had told earlier: midnight arrests, Gestapo firing squads, respectable leaders of their communities vanishing into concentration camps. On October 7 Halifax sent Berlin a note citing press accounts of such ill-treatment; he would be grateful, he said, for information “to combat such assertions, the spreading of which might in fact hamper the advocates of Anglo-German relations in the realisation of their aspirations.” Hitler’s response gave Britain’s foreign secretary a lesson straight from
Mein Kampf
: anyone who agreed to negotiate with Nazis emerged a loser, his wounded pride treated with vigorous applications of salt. Speaking at Saarbrücken two days later, the Führer angrily declared: “We cannot tolerate any longer the tutelage of governesses. Inquiries of British politicians concerning the fate of Germans within the frontiers of the Reich—or of lands belonging to the Reich—are none of their concern.”
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