The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (240 page)

The new post went, however, not to the superbly qualified man who would have served England best, but to Leslie Burgin, the minister of transportation, an obscure man whose only other appointment had been parliamentary secretary to the Board of Trade. Nicolson set down two reactions in the House of Commons: “a gasp of horror” and “a deep groan of pain.” The
British Weekly
noted: “There was much disappointment on both sides of the House that the changes in the Cabinet did not include such out-standing figures as Mr. Winston Churchill and Mr. Anthony Eden.” Samuel Hoare later attributed Churchill’s exclusion to his repeated calls to arms, which had stigmatized him as a warmonger, and the prime minister, according to his biographer, was “anxious that Hitler not think of [Winston] as a spokesman for His Majesty’s Government.”
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Chamberlain’s decision to bypass Winston and appoint Burgin had been made with an eye on the Wilhelmstrasse, and in his diary the prime minister justified it: “If there is any possibility of easing the tension and getting back normal relations with the dictators, I wouldn’t risk it by what would certainly be regarded by them as a challenge.” But he paid a price in Parliament. There, Nicolson noted, the general “impression was deplorable.” Independent MPs, he wrote, had “hoped that the P.M. would take this opportunity of broadening the basis of his Cabinet. There is a very widespread belief that he is running a dual policy—one the overt policy of arming, and the other the
secret de l’Empereur
, namely appeasement plus Horace Wilson. Chamberlain’s obstinate refusal to include any but the yes-men in his Cabinet caused real dismay.”
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On March 18 Neville Chamberlain celebrated his seventieth birthday. He was exhausted, and the seeds of personal tragedy were beginning to take root. After two grueling years at No. 10, signs of stress were evident. Rab Butler had been in the country on Good Friday. Learning that the Italians had invaded Albania he hurried to Downing Street, and long afterward he recalled being led upstairs to a small room overlooking a garden, which the P.M. used as a study. The window was open; bird food was strewn on a shelf outside. Chamberlain appeared annoyed by Butler’s arrival and expressed amazement at his distress. He said: “I feel sure Mussolini has decided not to go against us.” Butler recalled: “When I started to talk about the threat to the Balkans, he dismissed me with the words: ‘Don’t be silly. Go home and go to bed,’ and continued to feed the birds.”
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Writing his sister of the Duce’s Albanian adventure, Chamberlain complained, not of Italian aggression, but of duplicity: “What I had hoped when I went away on Thursday was that Musso would so present his coup as to make it look like an agreed arrangement & thus raise as little as possible questions of European significance.” In a strange admission—coming so late, after so many broken promises in Rome and Berlin—he wrote: “Such faith as I ever had in the assurances of dictators is rapidly being whittled away.”
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Before Parliament’s Albania debate, on April 13, the P.M. sent for Winston “in the hope of keeping the House as united as possible.” In the debate Churchill did endorse Chamberlain’s guarantee to Rumania and Greece and said he anticipated “even more effective arrangements with Turkey.” If a “great design” of binding alliances were achieved, he said, “even now, at the eleventh hour,” the world could be spared “the worst of its agonies.” At the same time, however, he wondered how His Majesty’s Government could make such wide-ranging commitments when Britain’s defenses were so weak—how they could speak so loudly when carrying so small a stick. At the very least, he argued, Parliament should be asked to approve the conscription of British youth. He could not understand why the government had remained silent on this pressing issue. He asked: “How can we bear to continue to lead our comfortable, easy lives here at home, unwilling even to pronounce the word ‘compulsion,’ unwilling even to take the necessary measure by which the armies that we have promised can alone be recruited and equipped?”
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He then raised an issue which MPs had discussed among themselves in the smoking room or lobby, but never in the chamber itself. It was the unique position of Sir Horace Wilson, known to insiders for his influence on Chamberlain, his sympathies for the Third Reich, and his unscrupulous intervention between the prime minister and other government advisers, including senior members of the cabinet. Without naming names, Churchill wondered how anyone on the Treasury Bench could indulge in “sunshine talk,” predicting “the dawn of a Golden Age” only five days before Hitler raped what was left of Czechoslovakia. Yet it was now obvious that “something of a very exceptional character, the consequences of which could not be measured, was imminent.” Why, then, was the government unprepared? “After twenty-five years’ experience in peace and war, I believe the British Intelligence Service to be the finest of its kind in the world. Yet we have seen, both in the case of the subjugation of Bohemia and on the occasion of the invasion of Albania, that Ministers of the Crown had apparently no inkling, or at any rate no conviction, of what was coming. I cannot believe that this is the fault of the British Secret Service.”

Churchill knew “very well,” he continued, “the patriotism and sincere desire to act in a manner of perfect rectitude which animates Ministers of the Crown, but I wonder whether there is not some hand which intervenes and filters down or withholds intelligence from Ministers.” More than once “the facts were not allowed to reach high Ministers of the Crown until they had been so modified that they did not present an alarming proposition.”
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Chamberlain was vexed. April was turning into the cruelest month of his prime ministry. He had expected an altogether different sequel to Munich: growing friendship with Germany and Italy, trade agreements reviving British industries still sunk in the Depression, and, once Hitler and the Duce realized that the British could be trusted, worldwide disarmament. Instead, he had seen his diplomatic strategy collapse with the Nazi conquest of Czechoslovakia, the Italian invasion of Albania, threats to the Balkans, intrusions into Europe’s affairs by Russia, and, most alarming of all, Nazi pressure on Poland, England’s one hostage in eastern Europe—pressure suspiciously like Hitler’s modus operandi in the opening moves of the Anschluss and the Czech crisis.

Moreover, Roosevelt had interceded. The American president’s concern over Europe’s murky future had been crystallized by the Italian landings in Albania. The week after the invasion the president had sent a personal message to Mussolini and Hitler, asking them to pledge not to undertake further aggression for ten “or even twenty-five years, if we are to look that far ahead.” Both dictators ridiculed it. The Duce called it “a result of infantile paralysis.” Göring suggested that Roosevelt was “
im Anfangsstadium einer Geisteskrankheit
” (“in the early stages of a mental disease”), and on April 28 Hitler cruelly mocked the president before the Reichstag—and then renounced both the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935 and the German-Polish agreement of 1934, charging that Poland and Britain were conspiring to encircle the Reich.
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Chamberlain’s response to Roosevelt’s initiative was to denounce “Yankee meddling.” He was sympathetic toward Berlin, indifferent or hostile to Washington; he believed Hitler, not Roosevelt. As Sidney Herbert had written Churchill: “One of the things which the Prime Minister appears consistently to ignore is American public opinion.” He also tried to disregard British opinion, but his choices were narrowing. Events were in the saddle, riding Neville Chamberlain and driving him toward the one measure he had vowed he would never take: conscription.
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Churchill had been accused of living in the past. Actually that was what HMG was doing; in dodging the draft the appeasers were ignoring Britain’s altered status as a world power. For generations the Continent had listened to British prime ministers with respect and had given their advice great weight because behind them ranged the great British Empire, ready to spring to arms—as in 1914—when the sovereign, on instructions and without consulting his dominions, committed his vast realm to global war. Victoria had spoken of those dwelling in imperial possessions as “my people.” But her great-grandson’s relationship with their great-grandchildren had been altered by parliamentary statute. Although the Dominions would probably declare war if England did, they couldn’t be counted on.

This massive fact, together with the neglect of the island’s armed forces by MacDonald, Baldwin, and Chamberlain, meant that Britain could no longer expect the Continent to catch cold when the prime minister sneezed. Chamberlain had treated the Czechs as pawns. In reality their military presence—forty trained, well-equipped divisions—had dwarfed Britain’s. As of this moment, Europe’s great standing armies were the French and Italians, each with about one hundred divisions; the Germans, with over two hundred; and the Red Army—which Chamberlain slurred—with three hundred. Britain’s potential might was great, and had the front bench responded to Churchill’s appeals over the past six years the country might have had a strong force-in-being. He had been ignored. If asked to field an expeditionary force now, the chief of the Imperial General Staff could have sent two regular divisions right away, another two later, and four divisions of territorials.

Even Chamberlain had to recognize the discrepancy. In late March he took a half step toward conscription, increasing the territorials by 210,000 (unequipped) and therefore, theoretically, doubling the army reserve. No one was deceived. Now, on April 24, after introducing the new Ministry of Supply, he renounced his past pledges and proposed a draft. The pressures of an aroused country, the press, his own party, and even the King had played roles in turning him around; but the main force goading him was the persistence of Hore-Belisha, who “took his political life in his hands,” Winston later wrote. “Several of his interviews with his chief were of a formidable character. I saw something of him in this ordeal, and he was never sure that each day in office would not be his last.”
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Churchill, the
Daily Telegraph
reported, “was in his most striking and effective form” during the conscription debate. “To hear him, Members hurried in, filling the Chamber and side galleries.” He not only approved of the draft; he said it should have been introduced immediately after Munich. Pacifists had denounced the measure as “peacetime conscription.” His eyes sweeping the benches, he asked, “Is this peace?” and answered his own rhetorical question: “We have had three disastrous campaigns and the battles, the actions of the war have gone not only against us but against the principles of law and freedom, against the interests of the peaceful and progressive democracies. Those battles already make a long catalogue—the Rhineland, Abyssinia, Austria, Munich, Prague and Albania [Hon Members ‘And Spain’]…. We are all, then, agreed that circumstances are analogous to war actually prevailing.”
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But now he saw “a common cause in this House,” and, indeed, throughout Western Europe: “The impulse, the main impulse, to resist the Nazi principles comes from the mass of the people.” Doubtless many members voting for the bill would feel a wrench inside. He, too, had reservations, but his were different. He thought the measure inadequate. It provided for the induction of 200,000 twenty-year-old youths, but they would be issued neither equipment nor supplies until the Ministry of Supply persuaded British manufacturers to turn them out. It was the story of the reserves all over again; young Englishmen were to surrender their liberty and later, perhaps, their lives, but the production schedules of English factories still had priority. In effect this bill was a gesture, Churchill said, and “a gesture is not sufficient; we want an army and we may want it soon.” He said he believed that “everyone is baffled by the now rapid changes of policy upon fundamental issues” in the government, switches which suggested that decisions were being made, “not after mature planning, but in a hurry, not from design, conviction, or forethought,” but in response to initiatives in Berlin and Rome. This was consistent with the theme he had been sounding for years, but Chamberlain now suspected malice in all Churchill’s criticism of him. He had heard, he wrote his sister, that Winston “thought I was going to offer him the Ministry of Supply & he was therefore smarting under a sense of disappointment, only kept in check by his unwillingness to do anything which might prevent his yet receiving an offer to join the Govt.”
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The relationship between the Duce and the Führer was warmer. Within a month of the conscription debate, Mussolini yielded to Hitler’s cajoling and agreed to join Germany in a military alliance. On May 22, 1939, the two dictators signed their Pact of Steel, agreeing to use force in acquiring “living space” for their peoples. If one of the two went to war, the other would “immediately come to its assistance as an ally and support it with all its military forces on land, at sea, and in the air.” In the event of war neither nation would conclude a separate armistice or peace. General Ironside told Churchill that England and France were “in for a bad time.”
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