The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (254 page)

Approaching the end he said: “It is not, believe me, my American friends, from any ignoble shrinking from pain and death that the British and French peoples pray for peace.” He was wallowing again; everyone shrinks from pain, and there is nothing ignoble about it. Yet, as always, he came on strong at the end:

Even when off his form, Churchill was a powerful broadcaster, and getting better all the time. By now informed Americans were beginning to realize it. As early as October 1938, he had told U.S. listeners why Munich had been a disaster and the perils it had spawned. Thomas Jones wrote a friend in the United States: “Churchill’s speech to America, brilliant as it was in phrasing, is criticised here as not likely to be helpful on your side. I should have thought that for the present we ought to leave America alone.”
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British opinion had reversed itself since Munich. Chamberlain, however, had not, and the country’s new mood was not reflected in his policy. The public—even the House of Commons—knew very little of the decisions and commitments being made in the name of their king and affecting their future, or indeed, whether they would have one. Fleet Street had kept them informed of negotiations looking toward an alliance with the Soviets, because Litvinov had announced his plan to foreign correspondents. No Englishman—including, for a time, the country’s leaders—knew of the talks between Berlin and Moscow, but England’s Polish policy should have been known everywhere in Britain. At the very least it ought to have been debated in Parliament. In practice, it was conducted in secret by a handful of men, led by Chamberlain, Halifax, and Horace Wilson. They withheld news of the moves and countermoves in London, Warsaw, and Berlin because they knew their countrymen would disapprove. They were still the Men of Munich. Their higher loyalty was to appeasement. That policy continued to entail duplicity, lies, a stronger Reich, and a further weakening of the Führer’s enemies in the coming conflict. His Majesty’s Government had sold out the Czechs; now, if they thought it would keep them out of war, they would sell out the Poles, too.

Hitler and Stalin could gag their newspapermen; in the democracies that was impossible. Foreign correspondents from the United States and every European capital were aware of the developing tension between London and Warsaw, and although they only picked up fragments of the story, they gave the Poles a forum for their grievances, which were found to be completely justified when the forty volumes of
Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919-39
were published after the war. The issue was whether England would or would not fight for Poland. One of the first journalists to put it bluntly was Garvin, who noted in the
Observer
that summer that Chamberlain’s reputation was reflected in the greeting now exchanged by passing acquaintances on the streets of Warsaw. They simply said: “Remember Munich.”
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O
n Monday, August 14, the day Ribbentrop cabled Schulenburg that he wanted to fly to Moscow “in the name of the Führer” with the object of “restoring German-Russian friendship,” Churchill left England for a three-day tour of the Maginot Line. His mission was an exercise in personal diplomacy, obsolescent then, illegal today, and rarely productive. At the time of Winston’s departure, Chamberlain and his cabinet were unaware that he had left the country; only the Imperial General Staff, whose blessing he had, knew where he was going, and why. His name and his reputation were familiar to every Frenchman in authority.
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Political relationships between the two Western allies had soured; the Warsaw junta had driven a wedge between them. To Churchill’s consternation, the rift between London and Paris was matched by chilliness on the military level. The Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre, France’s high command, was altering its military plans, but Tiny Ironside had been provided with no details. He hoped they were better than Britain’s.

Winston’s prestige across the Channel made him an ideal choice to do what Britain’s Imperial General Staff could not: talk to the French high command, question them, reassure them. In 1936, as their guest, he had toured Verdun, Metz, and the famous line named after André Maginot, a politician who believed good fences made neighbors who are not good friends keep their distance. Winston’s letters then had been notable for their lack of opinion. To Clementine he had written: “There was nothing to see as all the troops were hidden in holes or under bushes. But to anyone with military knowledge it was most instructive.” Now he was going to take a closer look. To Ironside he wrote that he was “off tomorrow” for the Rhine sector. “Generals Georges and Gamelin are very kindly going to come with me part of the time, and I expect we shall be able to have some talks on the matters we discussed.”
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Accompanied by General Spears, he landed at Le Bourget and was greeted personally by Gamelin’s deputy, General Joseph Georges, who had cleared his crowded calender to serve as Churchill’s guide. Winston was flattered; as he wrote Clementine that evening from the Ritz, “Georges will command the army in a war.” After they had left the airport, he wrote, the general drove him and Spears “to the restaurant in the Bois where in divine sunshine we lunched & talked ‘shop’ for a long time.” As they ate wood strawberries soaked in white wine, the French commander said the French thought “nothing will happen till the snow falls in the Alps & gives to Mussolini protection for the winter.” Churchill agreed. “This looks like early or mid-September, wh wd still leave Hitler two months to deal with Poland, before the mud season in that country. All this of course is speculation, but also reasonable. It seems to fit the German programme so far as it has been published.”
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As the tour progressed—they traveled, Winston proudly wrote Clementine, “in a special Michelin train of extreme speed, dining en route” and spent “2 vy long days on the line”—their host’s feeling grew that hostilities were inevitable. According to Spears’s notes, Georges said he was “convinced that war was almost upon us, and that the Germans, unless given all they wanted, were prepared to launch it.” Spears wrote, “It emerged that there was no more doubt in General Georges’ mind than in ours that it was the Germans rather than we who had benefited by the time gained at Munich, always supposing that they had really intended fighting then, which he doubted. He thought Hitler had been bluffing.” A year ago, he told them, the Nazis had no elaborate defenses facing France; now they had built their
Westwall
, the Siegfried Line, “a formidable obstacle built according to modern ideas, in great depth, whereas the Maginot Line was linear.” A year earlier, French artillery had been “incomparably superior”; the Germans, whose Munich spoils included Czechoslovakia’s vast Skoda munitions works, were now masters of the big guns. Moreover, Georges said, the Nazis had built a long lead in the air, “and all we could do was to build and build, and place the largest possible orders in the United States.”
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Churchill’s second tour of the Maginot Line confirmed his new views of modern tactics and strategy. After he had lunched with General Gamelin, chief of the French General Staff and commander in chief–designate (Georges would be the field commander), Gamelin left instructions that Winston and Spears were to be shown parts of the intricate defense system never revealed before to any foreign visitor—strong points along the Rhine, ingenious new antitank obstacles, underground railroads opposite the
Westwall
, and, should Hitler decide to attack through Switzerland, heavy artillery sited on Swiss road junctions. And so it was that on Tuesday, August 15—as Anglo-French diplomats tried in vain to get Poland to agree to let Soviet troops cross Polish territory—Churchill and Spears, led by Georges, began a grueling exploration of the line’s eighty-seven “fortified” miles, completed four years earlier.

Shielded by ten feet of cement, each casemate housed grenade throwers, machine guns firing out of underground slits with a fifty-degree arc, and rapid-firing antitank guns. Every casemate was manned by twenty-five men who moved through tunnels and down elevators to sleeping quarters deep below the earth. Skillfully camouflaged, the casemates were invisible to intruders in the forest, save only for the two observation cupolas above each. Five miles behind these outer strong points, spaced every three to five miles, were steel-and-concrete forts housing as many as twelve hundred poilus, who were transported from their subterranean barracks to gun turrets by electric trains. Ventilation was provided by compressors which could screen out poison gas. A major fort consisted of from fifteen to eighteen concrete blocks, each bristling with guns—ranging from 37 millimeters to 135 millimeters—bolted to disappearing turrets. Each block was split into two sections linked by underground galleries, some over a mile long. If half the fort were captured, the other half could fight on, bringing down heavy fire on the enemy. At Verdun in 1916 two forts, Douamont and Vaux, had been lost to Germans who infiltrated their superstructures and fought their way downward. To prevent this, the designers of the Maginot Line had provided for “interval troops,” special forces complete with their own field artillery, which could be shifted to any fort under heavy attack. “These,” Alistair Horne explains, were meant “to compensate for what, by definition, the Line lacked: mobility.”
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On Wednesday, August 16, accompanied by a
Times
correspondent, Winston and his party drove right up to the front line, within shouting distance of Nazi troops on the right bank of the Rhine.
The Times
reported that Winston was “amazed” to see an enormous sign opposite Neufbrisach reading: “
Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer
,” and, on the left bank, a French billboard replying: “
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité
.” Churchill was amazed—but not by this very ordinary sport of idle soldiers. He was startled by the naked intent of the German deployment, invisible to the reporter’s untrained eye but recognized immediately by him and his companion. “The trip,” Spears wrote, “tore to shreds any illusion that it was not Germany’s intention to wage war and to wage it soon. There was no mistaking the grim, relentless and barely concealed preparations she was making.”
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That evening they joined French officers for a long discussion of the new threat posed by parachute troops, of tank traps, of assaults screened by artificial fog—Winston thought this very important—and of the need for heavier tanks, upon which all were agreed. As Spears listened, his mind drifted back to Vimy Ridge in 1915. Winston had earnestly explained his theory of “land cruisers” then to a French general and his staff. Spears had lingered after Churchill departed, and he remembered “how heartily they had laughed” at “this absurd idea.” They had told Spears: “Your politicians are even funnier than ours.”
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Thursday, when Ribbentrop’s Luftwaffe pilot was instructed to prepare a flight plan for imminent departure to Moscow’s Khodnynka Airport, Churchill and Spears were back in Paris, registering at the Ritz. Long afterward Spears said that what had impressed him most during their tour was “Winston’s incredible vitality.” Nearly sixty-five, he would have been entitled to bypass some of the line’s lesser features, but he had insisted on stumbling over every pillbox in sight, scrutinizing antitank obstacles in front of the main line of resistance (repeatedly ensnaring himself on barbed wire), climbing in and out of antitank ditches, and striding in and out of the reinforced barracks, known as
maisons fortes
, for troops who must remain on the surface. He had been on the go for three days, hurrying through tunnels and sleeping bays, arguing over whether certain stretches could support the weight of tanks, and being manhandled down the slopes of the Rhine’s banks so he could stand, arms akimbo, staring at the German soldiers on the far shore.

And he was not finished. In his room he prepared a report, to be dispatched by courier to the War Office. He thought it might be useful, he began, “to set down some of the points in my mind as a result of my long talks here.” The coming war, he believed, ought to be better managed than the last, and to that end he recommended “a liaison between British and French supply organizations.” In his opinion German regulation of industry “is the greatest advantage they possess.” The Allies “should match it.”
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He thought the possibility of any “heavy German effort” in the west during the “opening phase” of the war extremely unlikely. The Wehrmacht’s strategy would be to crush Poland first. Preventing this was essential; if the Poles were overwhelmed the Germans could turn and hurl their full might against the Allies. Eventually France could put six million men in the field, but her present strength was only a fraction of Germany’s. To “take the weight off Poland” the French should be prepared “to engage actively all along the line and… force the Germans to man their lines heavily.” Since the German border on that front “extends so many miles, it ought to be possible to hold a very large number of German divisions in the West.” The thought that England and France might remain idle, leaving the Poles to their fate in the hope of a negotiated peace with Hitler, never crossed his mind.
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However, his misgivings about the French static strategy were grave. The Paris dailies called the line “France’s shield.” But, Winston noted, the great advantage of a shield is that it may be moved to defend any part of the soldier’s body. The Maginot Line was immovable. It was incapable of protecting the French from Germany’s classic invasion route over the Belgian plains—“the pit of the French stomach,” as Clausewitz had called it. Churchill recalled an old Whitehall joke: “The War Office is always preparing for the last war.” Now, he thought, it was “certainly true of the French.” In his report to Tiny Ironside he wrote that while “the French Front cannot be surprised… the flanks of this front… rest upon two small neutral states.” He was satisfied that the French had “done everything in their power to prepare against an invasion through Switzerland,” but “the attitude of Belgium,” on the other hand, “is thought to be profoundly unsatisfactory. At present there are no military relations of any kind between the French and the Belgians.”
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