The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (237 page)

Ian Colvin’s warning was another, and in this instance the consequences were far graver. Colvin, Berlin correspondent for the London
News Chronicle
, was among the most astute newspapermen in Europe. His sources lay deep in the Nazi hierarchy; he was, indeed, part of Churchill’s intelligence net. More than once he had sent to Chartwell directives from the Führer that were distributed to only three or four Nazi leaders. Repeatedly the correspondent’s prophecies had proved true, and when he flew to London and conferred with Halifax and Cadogan late in the afternoon of Tuesday, March 28, he had their undivided attention.
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In January, he told them, “a victualling contractor to the German army” had received instructions to provide “the same amount of rations he had supplied in September 1938, and to have them ready by March 28, 1939.” They were to be delivered “in an area of Pomerania which forms a rough wedge pointing to the railway junction of Bromberg [Bydgoszcz] in the Polish corridor.” That was sinister enough, but Colvin’s flight to London had also been inspired by the previous day’s issues of
Völkischer Beobachter
,
Der Angriff
, and the
Berliner Tageblatt
. All had carried inflammatory accounts of “incidents” on the German-Polish frontier, assaults on Reich customs posts and even German civilians by Polish
Schweine
, some of whom had confessed they had been acting on orders from Warsaw. No one in the Foreign Office needed to be reminded that the Nazis had manufactured similar border clashes before each of their earlier invasions. Colvin was taken across Downing Street; Chamberlain heard his tale and agreed with the FO’s recommendation—an immediate public declaration binding Britain to the defense of Poland.
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In the morning the cabinet cabled an approved text to the Poles and the French, who promptly endorsed it. Parliament was less docile. Critical MPs elicited acknowledgment that British intelligence had found nothing to confirm Colvin’s suspicions. This was no reflection on him; the standards for a good newspaper story are quite different from those required of a prime minister committing his country’s military forces. As it happened, Colvin had misinterpreted his data. The facts were right, but they were part of a German contingency plan whose date had since been set back. The spurious “incidents” were meant to build a case against Poland, and Hitler was indeed planning to move against the Poles; but his Wehrmacht directive specified action in September, not March. He wasn’t ready now; after touring Memel, his latest conquest, he had stopped briefly in Berlin and entrained for Munich, leaving the OKW various instructions, including: “The Führer does not wish… to solve the Danzig problem forcefully. He does not wish thus to drive Poland into England’s arms…. However, it should now be worked on. A solution in the near future would have to be based on especially favorable political conditions. In that case Poland shall be knocked out so completely that it will not be a political factor for the next decades.”
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His staff knew he meant to hoist the hakenkreuz over all Poland before the first snow fell. Chamberlain was therefore aiming at the right target—though both his weapon and his ammunition were pitifully small—when he told the House on March 31:

Thus Chamberlain reversed the British policy, adopted in 1918, of avoiding continental commitments. He had not—yet—signed a formal military alliance, but he had taken a long step in that direction. All evidence to the contrary, he believed he could discourage Hitler from forcing himself upon the Poles. He was also convinced that Poland was a powerful military nation. In both instances he was wrong.

France, already committed to Poland’s defense, was greatly relieved. But Englishmen who possessed strategic vision were, with few exceptions, appalled. Boothby told Churchill: “This is the maddest single action this country has ever taken.” Not only was the policy crazy, he said; so was the man with whom they were dealing. He had talked with Hitler for over an hour, and when the Führer told him that the Reich meant to use Poland as a staging area for a Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, he said he saw in Hitler’s eyes “the unmistakable glint” of dementia. The Führer had assured Boothby that he did not “wish to attack Britain and the British Empire but of course if England became a Polish or Russian ally, he would have no choice.” Now, to Boothby’s horror, Chamberlain had given “a sudden, unconditional guarantee to Poland, without any guarantee of Russian support.” Basil Liddell Hart agreed that the Polish guarantee was “foolish, futile, and provocative… an ill-considered gesture” which “placed Britain’s destiny in the hands of Poland’s rulers, men of very dubious and unstable judgment.” To dramatize his protest, he resigned as military correspondent of
The Times.
In the House, Lloyd George asked, and was not answered, whether the General Staff had agreed to defend this country which they could not reach under any conceivable circumstances. Duff Cooper noted in his diary: “Never before in our history have we left in the hands of one of the smaller powers the decision whether or not Britain goes to war.”
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Churchill’s reaction to the Polish guarantee was ambivalent. In his post-war memoirs he wrote of Poland’s “hyena appetite” in joining in the “pillage and destruction of the Czechoslovak State.” In 1938, with the Czechs as allies, fighting would have made sense, he said; now, after six years of “placatory appeasement,” they were asking their young men “to stake their lives upon the territorial integrity of Poland.” He wrote: “Here was decision at last, taken at the worst possible moment and on the least satisfactory ground, which must surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people.” That is not what he said at the time, however. He told the House of Commons: “The preservation and integrity of Poland must be regarded as a cause commanding the regard of all the world,” and added that Chamberlain’s declaration meant there was “almost complete agreement” between the prime minister and critics of his foreign policy: “We can no longer be pushed from pillar to post.” This approached a blanket endorsement. The most generous explanation for the chasm between these two Churchillian positions is that in 1939 he was inspired by the discovery that Chamberlain would fight for
something.
It is also fair to add that within a week Winston was raising doubts about the Polish guarantee.
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Poland, Chamberlain had told the cabinet, was “very likely the key to the [European] situation.” But Poland wasn’t. It was true that the Poles were brave beyond belief, and that the million men in uniform, splendidly uniformed, were formidably organized in thirty infantry divisions and twelve large cavalry brigades—gallant horsemen all. Unfortunately, they would be useless against Nazi panzers. The Germans planned to invade Poland with ninety-eight divisions. They were the best fighting men in Europe, and their leaders understood the mobile, armored warfare of the future. Halifax, according to Liddell Hart, “believed that Poland was of more military value than Russia, and preferred to secure her as an ally.” Actually, Liddell Hart continues, Poland’s generals “still pinned their trust to the value of a large mass of horse cavalry, and cherished a pathetic belief in the possibility of carrying out cavalry charges. In that respect…. their ideas were eighty years out of date, since the futility of cavalry charges had been shown as far back as the American Civil War.”
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Nevertheless, Józef Beck carried himself as though he were—and doubtless he believed himself to be—the representative of a first-rate military power. Swaggering, chain-smoking, and leering at young women, he arrived in London on April 3 to negotiate the details of Britain’s new pledge to Poland. Though HMG expected that it would lead to a Polish guarantee of Rumania’s frontiers, the FO had not secured an assurance from Warsaw on this point. Now, alone with Beck in Whitehall—Chamberlain, after welcoming his guest, had stepped across Downing Street to No. 10—Halifax brought it up.

To his dismay Beck declined to commit himself. Any such maneuver by Poland, he said, would increase tension in eastern Europe; it would, moreover, “automatically” link Hungary and Germany in a military alliance. Halifax heatedly replied that the link was already there, de facto if not de jure, and with the menacing cloud of approaching conflict already darkening the Continent, “the lack of ‘concerted plans’ would be calamitous.” Beck suavely countered by paraphrasing a recent Chamberlain warning in the House against the establishing of “opposing blocs” of nations; “rigid political systems,” he said, were equally dangerous. At this point the prime minister rejoined them, and the more he listened to Beck the more alarmed he became. Poland alone was pointless, the P.M. said; Rumania was the “vital spot.” The colonel lit a cigarette and repeated his objection to “too rigid a system.” The prime minister tried to scare him. If Nazi troops occupied Rumania, he said, “Poland would have a longer frontier with Germany.” Beck smoothly replied that “the additional frontier would be quite short,” adding that it would be in the mountains, which could be held “with quite a small force.”
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Chamberlain—apparently grasping, for the first time, the implications of Britain’s commitment to Warsaw—expressed anxiety that a German invasion of Poland might involve Great Britain. Beck said nothing; there was nothing to say. Chamberlain naively asked where Hitler would strike next. The Pole sardonically replied that if Nazi statements were to be believed, “the gravest question is the colonial question.” Chamberlain asked about Russia, pointing out that the Reich and the U.S.S.R. shared no common border; to fight Nazis the Red Army would have to cross Polish or Rumanian soil. Beck replied that “any association between Poland and Russia” would mean war between Poland and the Reich; whatever Britain and the Soviet Union decided to do, Poland would “keep clear.” The issue of Rumania was raised for the third time, and Beck declared that Rumania should be left to her own devices “until the Danubian problem has cleared itself up.” He then reeled off a series of outright fabrications. Germany had “never contested” Polish rights in Danzig; indeed, Ribbentrop had “recently reaffirmed them.” He doubted that the Führer would “risk a conflict” over “local matters,” or that “any serious danger” of Nazi aggression existed. The prime minister suggested that Poland had been weakened by Germany’s seizure of Czechoslovakia’s Skoda Works. Beck replied that Poland was “not at all” dependent on Skoda’s factories. In munitions she was “largely self-supporting”; indeed, the Poles exported weapons and “even supplied guns to Great Britain.”
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That was too much for Chamberlain. As a man of commerce, he kept a sharper eye on England’s trade balance than any prime minister in memory. He knew what Britain imported, where it came from, the quantities and the prices, particularly goods bought by His Majesty’s Government. Polish arms weren’t on the list. The illustrious Colonel Beck was a liar. Chamberlain and Halifax were beginning to understand why this man was a legend. They had been had. HMG’s negotiations with him, and the culminating guarantee, had been a blind. Europe’s security had not been strengthened. Instead Britain’s vulnerability had grown.
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In politics the squeaky wheel gets little grease. This is particularly true when a public figure challenging the leader carries a controversial reputation in train. The mass distrusts controversy. Reluctant to reconsider its convictions, superstitions, and prejudices, it rarely withdraws support from those who are guiding its destinies. Thus inertia becomes an incumbent’s accomplice. So does human reluctance to admit error. Those who backed the top man insist, against all evidence, that they made the right choice.

Chamberlain was still basking in the glow of the reception that had greeted his return from Munich. Having saved the peace then, he believed he could do it again. And in their hearts Englishmen still yearned for abiding peace. Chamberlain thought he had time. He could avoid a general election until 1942. By then, his loyal admirers believed, the old man could pull one more rabbit out of his hat, and the old man thought so, too. Something had gone wrong. If he could identify it and find it, he could set the world right again. But he was puzzled. What was it? Where had it gone?

The source of his greatest anxiety could be found in the Reich Chancellery, but now Hitler’s fellow dictator in Rome had decided that he had better start grabbing while the grabbing was good. Brooding on his balcony above the huge sign “
Il Duce ha sempre ragione!
” (“The Duce is always right!”) Mussolini had decided the Führer had been upstaging him. The surest way to reach the world’s front pages was to break the peace. Therefore, the Duce would dazzle the international press by avenging a personal insult: the Albanians, under King Zog, had objected to the bullying tactics of the local Fascist party. The tattered banners that Italian legions had dragged through Ethiopia were unfurled and mended; Italian warships bombed Zog’s coast, causing him and his queen to flee to Greece first, and then to Turkey. On April 7, Good Friday, the first wave of legionnaires waded ashore, some of them drowning in a treacherous undercurrent, and the natives fled inland. Enough of them were assembled to vote for union with Italy. King Victor Emmanuel reluctantly accepted the crown. It was an infamous victory.

Churchill dryly observed: “The British habit of the week-end, the great regard which the British pay to holidays which coincide with festivals of the Church, is studied abroad.” He then pointed out that this was not all opéra bouffe. Despite its Ruritanian appearance, the mountainous little country was a strategic springboard for an invasion of Greece. Mussolini’s operation had been anticipated for weeks—every Italian embassy was like a sieve—but Churchill was the only English statesman who had worked out what he regarded as England’s most appropriate response. The evening before the Duce launched his Albanian adventure, Winston had dined at Cherkeley, Beaverbrook’s country home near Leatherhead. While the others were playing backgammon, he had approached a fellow guest—Arthur Christiansen, editor of the
Daily Express
and until now a stranger to him—to talk. He was feeling histrionic, and, as Christiansen put it in his memoirs, he seemed to be “rolling the words around his palate and licking them before they [were] uttered.” He asked: “Where is the—ah—the British Fleet tonight? It is lolling in the Bay of Naples. No doubt the—ah—the Commander of the British ships at Naples is—ah—being entertained ashore, entertained no doubt on the orders of—ah—Mussolini himself at the Naples Yacht Club.” Winston’s demeanor changed; he glowered, chewed his cigar, then growled: “And where
should
the British Fleet be tonight? On the other side of that longheel of a country called Italy, in the Adriatic Sea, not the Mediterranean Sea, to make the rape of Albania impossible.”
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