The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (248 page)

Churchill thought the veil was in the P.M.’s mind. His skepticism was justified; two months earlier, commenting on the Soviet Union, Chamberlain had written his sister: “I must confess to the most profound distrust of Russia…. I distrust her motives, which seem to me to have very little connection with our ideas of liberty, and to be concerned only with getting everyone else by the ears. Moreover, she is both hated and suspected by many of the smaller States, notably by Poland, Roumania, and Finland.” Significantly, he was untroubled by Nazi Germany’s ideas of liberty, though at that time Hitler’s concern with getting everyone by the ears had been far more conspicuous, and certainly more successful, than Stalin’s. Colin Coote wrote Churchill that the prime minister “fundamentally wants Nazi ideas to dominate Europe, because of his fantastic dislike of Soviet Russia.”
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French
députés
in Paris’s
quartier des ministères
found an alliance with Moscow more attractive—no Channel separated them from the Wehrmacht—but ministers like Bonnet also regarded the Soviet Union as an evil empire, and made no effort to conceal it. In neither capital were the men in office aware that their personal opinions were irrelevant. Men who control great states must deal with their peers abroad, whatever their opinions of them; the Allies’ studied rudeness toward the U.S.S.R. in the spring and summer of 1939, when Russia was offering them collective security, was inexcusable. Certainly it was no service to the millions they governed. It is arguable that Litvinov, had he met with civility and those supple conversations
à deux
in which trained diplomats excel, might have stopped the war that all Europe, with the exception of the Führer and his co-conspirators, dreaded. The fact that they did not understand Litvinov’s policy and the inner workings of the Soviet bureaucracy does not brighten their memory.

Winston, looking beyond ideologies, saw England in danger; her survival, for him, outstripped everything else. He doubted, he told the House on May 19, that Chamberlain’s speech had contributed to the task before Parliament. “Nor has it, I venture to say, reassured those who feel deep misgivings about the present situation.” He was, he said, “quite unable to understand what is the objection to making the agreement with Russia…. The alliance is solely for the purpose of resisting further acts of aggression. I cannot see what is wrong with that.” Turning toward the front bench, he told the prime minister: “When you come to examine… the interest and loyalty of the Russian Government in this matter, you must not be guided by sentiment. You must be guided by a study of the vital interests involved. The vital major interests of Russia are deeply engaged in cooperation with Great Britain and France to prevent further acts of aggression.” He asked: “If you are ready to be an ally of Russia in time of war”—as Chamberlain had said he was—“why should you shrink from becoming an ally of Russia now, when you may by that very fact prevent the breaking out of war? I cannot understand all these refinements of diplomacy and delay. If the worst comes to the worst you are in the midst of it with them, and you have to make the best of it with them. If the difficulties do not arise, well, you will have had the security in the preliminary stages.”
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Of course, Winston told the House, there were complicated side issues in any treaty, but here, surely, the issue could hardly be simpler.

“Clearly,” he went on, “Russia is not going to enter into agreements unless she is treated as an equal, and not only treated as an equal, but has confidence that the methods employed by the Allies—by the peace front—are such as would be likely to lead to success.” Vague policy and wavering leadership discourage nations otherwise attracted to a coalition, and Chamberlain “must realise that none of these States in Eastern Europe can maintain themselves for, say, a year’s war unless they have behind them the massive, solid backing of a friendly Russia, joined to the combination of the Western Powers.” Then Churchill raised what, for Englishmen, was the ultimate issue: “Unless there is an Eastern front set up, what is going to happen to the West? What is going to happen to those countries on the Western front to whom, if we have not given guarantees, it is admitted we are bound—countries like Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Switzerland?… How are they to be defended if there is no Eastern front in activity?”

He ended:

Winston—and by now the weight of British public opinion—thought this reasoning unanswerable. Bowing to the storm of criticism, the prime minister on May 23 grudgingly agreed to negotiate with the Soviets on the basis of a British-French-Soviet alliance. He remained unpersuaded that such an alliance was necessary, however. And perhaps there was a certain logic in the argument that a strong ally on Germany’s eastern front—or her western front, for that matter—was unnecessary if the intention was to meet Hitler’s demands anyway. That, after all, had been the pattern; capitulation was inherent in the character of the British prime minister. The Führer’s minister of propaganda, certain beyond doubt that the P.M. would yield, openly said so. The
Observer
quoted Goebbels as predicting that “Herr Hitler will secure peace with triumph because Mr. Chamberlain will force the Poles to give way.”
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Give way where? Over what?

A
fter Chamberlain’s vow of support for Polish independence, Daladier had told his cabinet that the British now regarded the Vistula, not the Rhine, as their frontier. At the mouth of the Vistula stood the Free City of Danzig, a free state created by the Treaty of Versailles; the city’s real significance arose from the fact that it lay on the Baltic Sea. Because the port could be approached through the Polish Corridor—another creation of Versailles—it gave the Poles access to the sea and world trade. Like almost every memorable Versailles gift, however, the transformation of the city’s sovereignty had been made at the expense of the Germans. Until the 1919 peace treaty, it had been part of the Second Reich. Danzig, in fact, is a German name. After 1945 the Poles renamed it Gdańsk.

In 1939 it was not Polish territory, though
führertreu
readers of
Völkischer Beobachter
and
Der Angriff
had been led to believe that it was. The victors of 1918 had designated it a free state, to be administered by the Poles, but because the population remained overwhelmingly German, Germans dominated its legislative assembly. Even in the late 1920s friction between administrators and legislators had been frequent, and beginning in 1933, when Hitler moved into the Reich chancellery, it had intensified each year. Elected officials, proud of their membership in the local Nazi party, wore swastikas on their sleeves. On orders from Berlin, they could stage a full-fledged riot within an hour.

The dispute over Danzig was destined to launch World War II, but it had long lain quiescent, like a silent fracture in the earth’s crust which, when it ruptures, will generate an earthquake. The Foreign Office had been largely unaware of the gravity of the problem until the spring of 1939, a shattering example of incompetence in both Whitehall and MI6, Britain’s secret intelligence service. Danzig’s tremors had been perceptible long before the
Volksdeutsche
made their grievances known in the Sudetenland; the Führer’s plan to exploit them had been inscribed in
Mein Kampf
. Yet even after the issue emerged, His Majesty’s Government believed it was manageable. It wasn’t, because Hitler wasn’t. The assumption that he was—the root of the government’s foreign policy failures in the prewar years—was to persist through August 1939. Even after hostilities had actually begun, Chamberlain would cling to it, like an old dog worrying a naked bone.

The British might have been more alert had Colonel Beck not obscured the issue during his visit to London in April 1939. Danzig, the suave colonel had assured his hosts, was nothing to worry about; he would not even “trouble” them over it. Beck had been mendacious; the issue of the free city’s future was in fact deeply troubling, and shadows had been darkening over it as early as November 5, 1937, when Konstantin von Neurath had told Józef Lipski, Poland’s ambassador to the Reich, that “the Danzig question” would “permanently disturb German-Polish relations” until solved, and that the only possible solution would be “the restoration of German Danzig to… the Reich.” The following year, in the aftermath of Munich, Ribbentrop had summoned Lipski to Berchtesgaden for a three-hour luncheon discussion about Danzig. It should, he said, be returned to Germany. In addition, Germany wanted extraterritorial rights in the Polish Corridor and a Polish denunciation of Russia. Chamberlain had committed himself to Poland initially because he thought Rumania was next on Hitler’s hit list and he wanted the Poles to join him in pledging support of Rumanian independence. Actually, Poland had been—and still was—in far greater danger than Rumania.
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After Prague Ribbentrop had drawn the Poles deeper into the vortex of power politics. On Tuesday, March 21, he had again summoned Lipski, repeating his Danzig and corridor demands and adding complaints: anti-Nazi demonstrations by Poles must be crushed, and criticism of the Führer in Polish newspapers suppressed. The lack of a “positive reaction” to the Danzig issue had made “an unfavorable impression on the Führer,” he said darkly; Hitler now “felt nothing but amazement over Poland’s strange attitude on a number of questions.” It would be wise, he suggested, for Colonel Beck to discuss these matters with the Führer, who might otherwise conclude that Poland “simply was not willing” to accommodate the Reich.
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Lipski had flown home, received instructions from Beck, and reappeared at the Wilhelmstrasse on Sunday with a memorandum from the colonel. Stripped of its elaborate periphrasis, it was a courteous rejection of all Hitler’s demands, coupled with a refusal to visit Berlin until “the questions [have] been prepared, in advance, according to diplomatic custom.” Ribbentrop, flushed with anger, replied that this response “could not be regarded by the Führer as satisfactory.” If matters continued this way, he warned, “a serious situation might arise.” Monday’s papers carried accounts of anti-Nazi rioting in Bydgoszcz—a city in western Poland whose population was largely German. Ribbentrop exploited the disorders by summoning Lipski, implying that Bydgoszcz’s Poles were to blame, and declaring that he could “no longer understand the Polish government.” He added: “An evasive answer has been given to the generous proposal Germany made to Poland…. Relations between the two countries are therefore deteriorating sharply.”
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The Foreign Office had first heard this ticking time bomb in the second week of April, when Goebbels spread rumors that Germany planned a Danzig coup on the Führer’s birthday, six days away. When this hearsay reached Halifax he wondered how Poland would respond to a staged “internal revolt” in the city, and asked HM’s ambassador in Warsaw to clarify the question, which to him was “by no means clear.” It seemed to him that if the Poles were “prepared to treat” with the Reich, they would “cut the ground from under the German Government by showing their disposition to negotiate.” Beck curtly disagreed. He felt the time was not “opportune” for Warsaw to approach Berlin. If the Germans wanted to alter the status quo, they should take the initiative and state their claims; the Polish government would then consider them. It would not, however, agree to negotiate. Danzig, the Poles insisted, must remain a free city, their only major port, administered by them, as specified in the Versailles treaty. To turn it over to the Nazis would be interpreted as a sign of weakness and would invite further German claims. Halifax, unconvinced, continued to hint at the desirability of negotiations. Beck’s principal private secretary told a British diplomat that these hints “tend to create an element of doubt as to the fixity of [Britain’s] purpose.” They evoked memories of Munich, he added, which was “not a good precedent.”
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