The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (244 page)

Churchill yearned to finish his manuscript and do things which ought to be done and no one else was doing. He knew, from his informants in Whitehall, that the prime minister and his foreign secretary had been treating their French ally shabbily, dealing directly with Hitler and Mussolini without even informing the French. To be sure, those holding political power in Paris almost seemed to encourage this. At Munich, Daladier had played second fiddle to Chamberlain. The agreement had dismayed him but he failed to protest, despite the fact that he was among the more assertive premiers of the tottering Third Republic. But if war came again, poilus, not Tommies, would bear the heavier burden on the battlefield. Winston felt that it was time fences between the allied democracies were mended. Chamberlain and Halifax, however, still dreamed of a London-Berlin-Rome axis.

C
HASING
deadlines, Churchill was pushing himself and his secretaries ruthlessly, but when an important guest arrived he gave them, their silent typewriters, and himself a rest. As Chartwell moved through spring and high summer, it became the chief watering place for parliamentarians, flag officers, generals, air marshals, members of the established government, and even cabinet ministers haunted by nightmares of triumphant Nazis marching through the streets of London.

Among those who put their careers at risk to seek Winston’s advice was a future chief of the Imperial General Staff, Tiny Ironside, now Sir Edmund Ironside, inspector-general of overseas forces. The general not only shared his host’s concerns; they had been friends since the Boer War, and he regarded him with genuine affection. In his diary he wrote that the two of them “made a night of it”; after dining alone they “sat talking till 5 am this morning.” The talk was of this and that. Churchill said he would have to “pull in my horns considerably” if he were returned to office, because he “would have to cease making money by writing.” Ironside speculated that had last year brought war instead of Munich, his host would at the very least be first lord or war minister, and possibly P.M. But Winston had made friends in the cabinet, particularly “Belisha because… it was Belisha who got conscription through.” They agreed that “Neville Chamberlain is not a war Prime Minister. He is a pacifist at heart. He has a firm belief that God has chosen him as an instrument to prevent this threatened war.” In Winston’s opinion, the general noted, it was “now too late for any appeasement. The deed was signed and Hitler is going to make war.” Ironside concurred, and the prospect troubled him, for he knew that despite Hore-Belisha’s efforts the General Staff had “no considered plans, no plans to deal with the war in general.”
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Unlike the War Office, Churchill had plans. In a paper he had written on stratagems for the Royal Navy, he proposed, among other moves, that the Admiralty put “a Squadron of battleships into the Baltic. It would paralyse the Germans and immobilise many German divisions.” The following day Ironside noted: “It ran through my head that here was a grand strategist imagining things, and the Navy itself making no plans whatever.” When the present first sea lord had commanded the Mediterranean Fleet, Ironside had asked him for “any offensive plan for dealing with Italy.” He had none then, and, the general added: “I am sure there is none now.”
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Insofar as England’s political leaders had plans, many surmised that Germany and Britain were virtually allied. One of them was Lord Kemsley, brother of Lord Camrose and a Fleet Street tycoon in his own right. Even as Winston and Ironside parted after a hearty breakfast, Kemsley was in Germany meeting a series of Nazi leaders, including Alfred Rosenberg, editor of the anti-Semitic Nazi
Völkischer Beobachter
, and Baron von Weizsäcker at the Foreign Ministry. Both asked about the strength of Chamberlain’s critics in England, particularly Mr. Winston Churchill. On Thursday, July 27, when Hitler received Kemsley at Bayreuth, he, too, asked about Churchill “and his powers of expression.” According to Kemsley’s notes, he replied that in his opinion “far more notice was taken abroad of the Opposition than in England,” and he reminded the Führer that “Mr. Churchill had been unfortunate in his campaigns on at least four occasions in the past, starting with the Abdication of King Edward VIII.”
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This is shocking, and it served England ill, encouraging the Nazi conviction that England would not fight under any circumstances—that Churchill was an eccentric without a following, who spoke only for himself. A few months earlier that had been true. But as a publisher of newspapers Kemsley must have known how public opinion had changed since Prague, and how Churchill’s stock had soared. It was now summertime 1939. By now Winston could have spoken anywhere in England, on any topic, for any fee. Ironside wrote in his diary on July 27: “I keep thinking of Winston Churchill down at Westerham, full of patriotism and ideas for saving the Empire. A man who knows that you must act to win. You cannot remain supine and allow yourself to be hit indefinitely. Winston must be chafing at the inaction. I keep thinking of him walking up and down the room.”
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O
ne of the more insidious consequences of Munich was a sharp erosion in Britain’s credibility, a suspicion on the Continent that His Majesty’s Government would respond to future Nazi demands by diplomatic talks leading to capitulation. Churchill warned the House that “the slightest sign of weakness will only aggravate the dangers which concern not only us, but the whole world.” He begged the prime minister: “Do not yield another yard.”
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Britain’s guarantee to the Poles was, he felt, one promissory note which was certain to be called. “The glare of Nazi Germany,” he predicted in the
Daily Telegraph
, would soon “be turned on Poland.” His great worry was that Chamberlain would refuse to redeem his pledge. The prime minister’s betrayal of the Czechs had established a pattern. The first transgression is always the most difficult; the second is relatively easy. If forced to choose between breaking his word and breaking the peace, the P.M., Winston suspected, would not hesitate to scuttle his vow to rescue Poland, and that, Churchill believed, would lead to an irrevocable disaster. Britain’s honor would be forfeit. Hitler’s mastery of the Continent would be absolute. Freedom would vanish from Europe.
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But what if the P.M. acted out of character? Suppose he kept his word, and took Britain and France into war? He could do it; the French had permitted the initiative to pass to London and were a silent, acquiescent partner. Then diplomatic problems would be replaced by strategic questions. At Chartwell, Churchill studied his map and recalled the lessons inherent in
The World Crisis
. During the first three years of trench warfare, the Allied armies had kept the enemy at bay only because the czar’s huge forces had tied a million Germans down on the eastern front. After the Bolsheviks had overthrown the Romanov regime in 1917 and signed a draconian peace with the kaiser’s generals, the million Germans on the eastern front, no longer needed there, were rushed to the west for a knockout blow. In 1918 they had nearly achieved total victory. Only the last-minute arrival of a huge American army had rescued the weary Allies from defeat.

Now the Americans were committed—legally, by an act of Congress—to a policy of neutrality. Churchill doubted that Poland could hold the Wehrmacht at bay. It would be 1918 all over again, except that the Western democracies would lack not only the Yanks but also the Italians. This time the Germans looked like winners, and the future would be an unsurpassed horror for any people who lost a war to Adolf Hitler.

The destruction of Czechoslovakia and the subsequent demoralization among her neighbors to the south had left Britain and France without any strong ally in the east. Poland by herself was inadequate. What the democracies needed, Churchill concluded, was an eastern European ally more powerful than Poland—a nation strong enough to hold the Wehrmacht at bay, forcing the Führer to fight a two-front war. They couldn’t choose; only one great power lay east of the Reich. He would have preferred almost any other country, but the long years of appeasement, pacifism, defeatism, and threadbare military budgets had reduced the democracies to the role of beggars, or at any rate petitioners. Moscow, however, had every reason to be responsive to Western overtures. The Soviet Union lay directly in Hitler’s path of conquest. He meant to crush her;
Mein Kampf
testified to his intent, reaffirmed in a hundred Führer speeches since.

To Winston the solution to the Anglo-French dilemma was obvious: détente with Russia should become Whitehall’s primary goal. Yet he knew that the chances of persuading the men ruling Britain to embrace Bolsheviks were exceedingly small. Therefore, when Labour adopted a policy of recriminations, reciting all the ways in which Baldwin and Chamberlain had played into Hitler’s hands, he aligned himself with the government. Opening a major address on Monday, April 3, he described the Polish guarantee as “splendid,” declaring his “full support” for the prime minister’s policies. Chamberlain eyed him warily. Such ringing Churchillian affirmations were often followed, not by sly attacks—his rhetoric was nothing if not straightforward—but by the introduction of a new proposal which the P.M. liked even less. Actually, Winston began by reintroducing an old proposal of his own; he quoted a passage he had delivered in this chamber a year earlier: “If a number of States were assembled around Great Britain and France in a solemn treaty for mutual defence against aggression; if they had their forces marshalled in what you may call a Grand Alliance; if they had their staff arrangements concerted… then I say that you might even now arrest this coming war.”
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Since then “the situation has deteriorated.” And one of Hitler’s excuses for the enslavement of millions had been his paranoid claim that Germany’s enemies were trying to “encircle” her. In fact, Churchill said, he and his supporters had been urging “the encirclement of an aggressor.” Collective security reassured nations which felt threatened, and all were entitled to it, including the Third Reich: “If Herr Hitler feels that he will be overrun by Russia, that he will be fallen upon by Poland, that he will be attacked by Belgium, Holland, or Switzerland, he has only to declare his anxiety open to the world in order to receive the most solemn international guarantees. We seek no security for ourselves that we do not desire Germany to enjoy as well.” But providing that security for all countries deserved absolute priority, he said; halfway measures were more dangerous than none: “To stop here with a guarantee to Poland would be to halt in no-man’s-land under fire of both trench lines and without the shelter of either…. We must go forward now until a conclusion is reached. Having begun to create a Grand Alliance against aggression, we cannot afford to fail.” Nor, he warned the House, could they exclude unsavory regimes, provided those who ruled them sought peace.

As the P.M. had feared, Winston was proposing a fresh policy, a British tie with the one great power Chamberlain detested. Churchill’s loathing of bolshevism was more famous, and had certainly been more memorably expressed; he had described Lenin as a “plague bacillus”; he had denounced “the Bolshevik cancer eating into the flesh of the wretched being” and had reviled “the bestial appetites and passions” of Communist Russia, a “tyranny of the vilest kind,” where “thousands of people have been executed or murdered in cold blood.” But he had also declared that when the safety of Britain and her empire stood at risk, his conscience became “a good girl”; and it happened now. He wanted the five million men of the Red Army marching against the Wehrmacht, and he told the House of Commons why.
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“Russia,” he said, “is a ponderous counterpoise in the scale of world peace. We cannot measure the weight of support which may be forthcoming from Soviet Russia.” Labour had proposed that “the attitude of His Majesty’s Government towards Russia” be summed up in the phrase “The maximum cooperation possible.” Winston thought this “a very accurate and convenient phrase.” But, he added, “to find any guidance as to where we stay with Russia, one must ask what is the interest of the Russian people.” He asked: “Why should we expect Soviet Russia to be willing to work with us? Certainly we have no special claims upon her good will, nor she upon ours.” The answer, he said, was that “Soviet Russia is profoundly affected by German Nazi ambitions.” He reeled off Nazi objectives which menaced the U.S.S.R.: the Danube Valley, the Black Sea (a “conquest of the Ukraine by Nazi Germany, upon which such covetous eyes have been avowedly set, would be a direct assault upon the life of the Russian Soviet State”), and targets in the Far East. Thus, “No one can say that there is not a solid identity of interest between the Western democracies and Soviet Russia, and we must do nothing to obstruct the natural play of that identity of interest…. The worst folly, which no one supposes we should commit, would be to chill and drive away any natural cooperation which Soviet Russia in her own deep interests feels it necessary to afford.” The wisest course was to forget the Bolshevik past and forge Britain, France, and Russia in a “Triple Alliance.”
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The Men of Munich thought the folly was Churchill’s. The prime minister, gazing into his foggy crystal ball, appraised potential Soviet military contributions in a war against Germany and wrote, in a private letter on March 26: “I have no belief whatever in her [Russia’s] ability to maintain an effective offensive, even if she wanted to.” And even if she wanted to and could, he wasn’t sure he would welcome her help. In his mind Bolsheviks, not Nazis, were still the greater threat to Western civilization. Here Chamberlain represented the opinion of Britain’s ruling classes. As Winston later observed in the House, during his April 3 speech he “heard a sort of commotion behind me. I heard the Noble Lady the Member for the Sutton Division of Plymouth (Viscountess Astor) express her dislike of any contact with Bolshevik Russia.” He asked pointedly: “Where was this dislike when she paid a visit to Soviet Russia with Mr Bernard Shaw?” Lady Astor interrupted: “I have had the great advantage of going to Russia and seeing it; you have only had the advantage of hearing about it from the outside.” The point, Winston replied, was that “the time when she went to Russia and gave all her applause and credit to Russia was the time when the influence was deeply detrimental to the interests of this country.”
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