The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (258 page)

At Chartwell Churchill was writing Bill Deakin: “I have tried to fit these Galleys together. The present arrangement is quite impossible. I send you my own copies, where the Galleys are arranged more or less in chronological order. I see no use mixing up sections about Pitt and George III with separate studies of the American colonies.” The Canadian section was “more or less complete”; so was the one on India. All that would be gathered together under the heading “The First British Empire,” to be followed by a chapter called either “The Great Pitt” or “The Seven Years’ War,” describing “the position of the First British Empire as it stands at the Peace of Paris 1763.” The next would be “The Quarrels of the English Speaking Peoples,” covering “the reign of George III.” George III is not remembered as an admirable sovereign, and not only because of his madness; but his years on the throne were marked by stirring events and the deeds of great men, among them the greatest military hero in the history of England. Winston had told his tale, and it lay in the galleys he was correcting before their dispatch to Deakin.
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By the autumn of 1805 Napoleon had massed his invasion barges at Boulogne. The Royal Navy’s blockade of the Continent, built around nearly forty ships of the line, had frustrated French plans to cross the Channel in force, but now, Churchill wrote, “Napoleon… believed that the British fleets were dispersed and that the moment had come for invasion.”

The decisive battle took place in the waters off Cape Trafalgar, Spain. Nelson was outnumbered and outgunned. At daybreak on October 21 he saw, “from the quarterdeck of the
Victory,
the battle line of the enemy”—an advance squadron of twelve Spanish ships and twenty-one French ships of the line under Villeneuve. He signaled his captains to form for the attack in two columns. Then:

Chamberlain and Henderson were to die of cancer, Chamberlain in the autumn of 1940, Henderson two years later. Halifax spent the war years as Britain’s ambassador in Washington, was created an earl in 1944, and died, aged seventy-eight, on December 23, 1959, thus surviving for over fourteen years the 357,116 Britons killed during the war.

T
he pressure on Warsaw worked. Two hours after receiving Halifax’s wire, Kennard replied to the FO: “Poland is ready to enter at once into direct discussions with Germany.” His instincts had told him that negotiations with the Nazis could lead only to disaster, but disaster lay at the end of every turning. Now, at last, HMG could give Hitler the reply he wanted, and that evening Ambassador Henderson met with Hitler to deliver the British note. Poland had given assurances that she was ready to “enter into discussions.” The next step should now be to initiate negotiations between Germany and Poland. Instead of responding directly to the suggestion of negotiations, Hitler extended the limits of absurdity by asking whether Britain “would be willing to accept an alliance with Germany.” An abler diplomat would have realized that Hitler was muddying the waters and raising a question of future policy while they were in the midst of a crisis requiring immediate solution. Beyond that was the fact, noted by Vansittart, that “an alliance means a military alliance if it means anything. And against whom should we be allying ourselves with such a gang as the present regime in Germany? The merest suggestion of it would ruin us in the United States.” It would also have destroyed British credibility in countries to whom England was committed: France, Poland, Rumania, Turkey, and Greece. But Henderson’s answer to the Führer, as he reported it to the FO, was that “speaking personally I did not exclude such a possibility.”
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For an ambassador to express an opinion on such an issue was inexcusable. The FO sharply told Henderson that he had gone too far and turned the offer down. Incredibly, Henderson failed to tell the Führer that Britain had rejected his proposal. During their talk Hitler had spoken of “annihilating Poland,” which ought to have alerted anyone, much less a diplomat, to the momentous fact that he would not be satisfied with Danzig. Yet Halifax ordered the reference deleted from the account of Henderson’s meeting that was sent to Warsaw.
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Hitler wanted this problem, which he had created, to be resolved by bloodshed, but the Poles must be made to appear culpable. Receiving Henderson on Tuesday, the twenty-ninth, the Führer dispensed with the tact, civility, and outward show of mutual respect required in discourse between civilized nations. Instead, he demanded the appearance in Berlin of a Polish negotiator “with full powers” the following day.
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Even Henderson was astonished. He blurted out that this was “
ein Diktat
.” Hitler and Ribbentrop, he later reported to Halifax, “strenuously and heatedly” denied it. The British ambassador left the chancellery “depressed by my own inadequacy” and “filled with the gloomiest foreboding.” Danzing, he told Whitehall, “must revert to Germany.”
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Halifax’s response was a procedural suggestion. He, too, saw the Führer’s demands as an ultimatum and suggested that instead they be called “proposals,” offered as “a basis for discussion.” Hitler agreed to this meaningless rephrasing, but it would still be necessary, he insisted, for a Pole qualified to speak for his government to appear in Berlin immediately. This was a problem. The Poles, under pressure and against their better judgment, had agreed to discussions with the Reich, but they balked at the Nazi demand that they send a negotiator, armed with full powers, on the next plane to Berlin. For them to do otherwise would have been madness; Hitler had yet to set forth formal proposals. Until he had, and until Warsaw had studied them, talks between the two sovereign powers would be meaningless—unless, of course, the Poles capitulated, which, they suspected, was what the Führer wanted.
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That the Poles continued to assert their rights was considered by Britain’s ambassador to the Reich a sign of exaggerated “prestige” and “
amour propre
.” Henderson advised Robert Coulondre, his French counterpart, “strongly to recommend” to Paris that France advise the Polish government “to propose the immediate visit of M. Beck as constituting in my opinion the sole chance now of preventing war.” He “implored” the Polish ambassador in Berlin, Lipski, to ask the immediate dispatch of a negotiator from Warsaw, as commanded by the Führer and chancellor of the Greater German Reich.
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The pressure on the Polish government was becoming massive. At noon Wednesday Henderson, in one of his unauthorized trespasses into areas where he did not belong, approached the papal nuncio in Berlin and suggested that the pope put forward some “definite impartial solution,” such as a neutral frontier patrolled by Catholic priests. The papal nuncio replied that he thought laymen would be more suitable. Unknown to either Henderson or the nuncio, the pope, after talking to Mussolini, was already in touch with Warsaw. He believed, he told the Poles, that prospects of peace would improve if they surrendered Danzig. Then, he reasoned, Hitler would be willing to negotiate over the corridor and minority problems. The pontiff thought this suggestion should receive the “most careful consideration of the Poles.”
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Polish obstinacy, Chamberlain concluded, was the greatest obstacle to peace. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy wired the State Department: “Frankly he is more worried about getting the Poles to be reasonable than the Germans.” At the cabinet meeting that Wednesday morning, only Hore-Belisha opposed pressing Beck to dispatch a negotiator to Germany. He thought it “important,” he said, “to make it clear that we are not going to yield on this point,” and he opposed any negotiations, anywhere, while the Führer was threatening Warsaw and massing his troops in Poland’s borders. The cabinet agreed that Hitler’s ultimatum was “wholly unreasonable.” But the “really important thing,” Halifax told them, was the German agreement to negotiate. The Polish government should “be prepared to do so without delay.”
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Forcing the weak to submit is clearly easier than confronting the strong, particularly if you have persuaded yourself that the weak deserve what is coming to them. At Berchtesgaden, Godesberg, and Munich, Chamberlain had discovered flaws in the Czechs which had previously escaped his attention. So it was now with the Poles. Henderson worried that the Poles might provoke the Führer’s wrath and “force” the Nazis to move against Poland. Actually, all the provocation had been on the other side, though the Nazis had gone to great lengths to make it appear otherwise. On Hitler’s orders the Sicherheitsdienst, the SS security service, had dressed a dozen German prisoners in Polish uniforms. Identical uniforms were to be worn by SS men who would “lead” them in a simulated attack on a German radio station near the Polish border, holding it long enough for a Nazi fluent in Polish to announce Poland’s invasion of the Reich. The criminals—whose code name was
Konserven
(Canned Goods)—would be given lethal injections by an SS doctor and then shot; their bloody bodies would be shown to the foreign press as evidence of Polish aggression.
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To the appeasers, efforts to avoid war were, ipso facto, virtuous, and they assumed that all sensible men would agree. But in Berlin making war was a virtue, and those who shrank from it were base. The Men of Munich never grasped this, and Henderson was staggered when the Nazis, whom he had regarded as his friends and future allies, decided that the time had come to humiliate him. On the evening of Wednesday, August 30, a German courier summoned Henderson to the Foreign Ministry. He expected the best. The Führer’s diplomats were assumed to have drawn up proposals for a solution, and these, he hoped, would be the subject of their discussions.

There were no discussions. It was after midnight when Ribbentrop ordered him into his office. “From the outset,” Henderson wrote in his memoirs, “his manner was one of intense hostility, which increased in violence…. He kept jumping up to his feet in a state of great excitement, folding his arms across his chest, and asking if I had anything more to say.” He then interrupted each attempt to reply—though Henderson was trying to tell him that HMG had “consistently warned” the Poles against “all provocative action.” The bewildered ambassador did manage to say that if the Reich’s proposals were ready, HMG “could be counted upon to do their best in Warsaw to temporise negotiations.” At this, the Nazi minister produced a long document and read it aloud “as fast as he could,” Henderson wrote, “in a tone of utmost scorn and annoyance.” There were sixteen points—the return of Danzing, a plebiscite in the corridor, sovereignty over Gdynia, a redrawing of boundaries, and on and on—but Henderson, as he wrote afterward, “did not attempt to follow too closely,” assuming the paper would be handed to him at the end.
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It wasn’t. Ribbentrop pocketed it, saying that since no Polish negotiator had come to Berlin, the proposals were “now too late.” It was now the last day of August, the last day of peace. Henderson spent it frantically trying to get Beck, Lipski, or some senior Polish official to call on Ribbentrop. It is unlikely that any of them would have been received. Hitler admitted to Schmidt, his interpreter, that his offer to negotiate was a pretext. “I needed an alibi,” he said, “especially with the German people, to show them that I had done everything to maintain peace.” That, he said, explained his “generous offer” to settle “
die Danziger und Korridor-Frage
.” In any event, the Poles, proud and defiant, were not much interested in the advice of Henderson or any well-meaning go-between. Dahlerus told Horace Wilson that it had become “obvious to us” that the Poles were “obstructing” possible negotiations.
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