The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (259 page)

Indeed they were. They didn’t trust England anymore, though Wilson, Henderson, Halifax, and Chamberlain couldn’t imagine why. Churchill could have told them, and later did. Ribbentrop’s lies about Polish brutality had been believed; Beck’s reports of Nazi atrocities rejected. Halifax and Chamberlain had confided in Dirksen, yet were evasive, not only with the Polish ambassador, Raczyński, but also with the French. They were violating, both in letter and spirit, solemn treaties they themselves had drafted and signed a few days earlier. The prospect of fighting was unthinkable to them, unimaginable and inconceivable, and it had unmanned them. In their desperate attempts to avoid it they had resorted to trickery and deception. And they were still in business. As Hoare had told the cabinet on Monday, should German troops invade Poland they could “always fulfil the letter of a declaration without going all out.” In short, declare war but not wage it. The
dux bellorum
Arthur, Elizabeth I, Hawkins, Drake, and Nelson wouldn’t have known what he was talking about, and Churchill would be slow to grasp it.
¹⁶⁵

As Henderson desperately tried to overcome what Chamberlain called “Polish stubbornness” and paced his embassy office struggling to remember the sixteen points the foreign minister had read to him at top speed, Churchill was at Chartwell dictating letters to Chamberlain, Kingsley Wood, his publisher, and G. M. Young (“It is a relief in times like these to escape into other centuries”). The note to Chamberlain urged him to take stern measures because there seemed to be no way “Hitler can escape from the pen in which he has put himself,” but afterward Winston decided not to mail it. The caution was sound; the P.M. had become increasingly unresponsive to his suggestions, and if, as Churchill believed, his prospects of a cabinet seat were at last brightening, sending unsought advice to a suspicious prime minister was clearly impolitic.
¹⁶⁶

He could be frank with Secretary for Air Kingsley Wood, and he was. Flying home from Consuelo Balsan’s château he had found that the buildings and concrete aprons at Croydon Airport had not been camouflaged, that airport authorities were “obstructing” the digging of trenches for pilots and crews during enemy air raids, and that construction of underground shelters was “proceeding far too slowly.” Remarking upon these details was characteristic of him. So, at that time, was the lethargy of Croydon authorities and construction workers. British newspapers had reported the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and the public had been alarmed by it. But the ominous diplomatic exchanges between governments, and the growing momentum of the rush toward war, were known to very few. Only Chamberlain, Horace Wilson, and Halifax were in possession of all the facts, and the complete story of Hitler’s actions, including the murders of the Canned Goods, would not emerge until the postwar Nuremberg trials, where Ribbentrop was candid, obsequious, and hanged. Civilians in England had not even been told that their government was committed to the defense of Danzig, that Danzig was in grave peril, and that war was therefore imminent.
¹⁶⁷

Churchill was probably better informed than anyone outside the inner circle, but the windup of his book preempted his attention. While Ribbentrop was affronting Henderson and telling him it was “too late,” Winston was reworking his manuscript and writing Sir Newman Flower at Cassels, thanking him “for procuring this extra time for the Preface to the Life of Sir Austen Chamberlain” and adding:

At 8:30 Friday morning Churchill was awakened by a telephone call from Raczyński, who told him that at 4:00
A.M.
fifty-six German divisions, nine of them panzers, had crossed the Polish frontier in darkness from Silesia, Cracow, and the Carpathian flank. After he had bathed and breakfasted Winston received another call from Raczyński. Two Luftwaffe air fleets—sixteen hundred aircraft—had begun bombing Polish cities; civilian casualties were heavy. It was ten o’clock, and it occurred to Winston that the War Office might have fresh details. The War Office didn’t even know Poland had been invaded. As Ironside noted in his diary, he reached “the Horse Guards as 10
A.M.
was striking and was immediately rung up by Winston from Westerham who said ‘They’ve started. Warsaw and Kracow are being bombed now.’ ” Ironside phoned Lord Gort, chief of the Imperial General Staff, “who didn’t believe it.” Ironside urged him to tell Hore-Belisha; Gort called back to report that “Belisha was seen rushing off to Downing Street.” Ironside “rang Winston and he said he had the news definitely from the Polish Ambassador 1½ hours ago…. How could the War Office possibly be ignorant of this?”
¹⁶⁹

The answer was that Raczyński, a graduate of the London School of Economics and a twenty-year veteran of diplomacy, was familiar with the intricacies of English politics. He knew Winston could be trusted but was unsure of the others, and events swiftly confirmed him. Despite their treaty obligations, the unprovoked German invasion of Poland produced, not declarations of war by Britain and France, but an awful silence. On Hore-Belisha’s return from No. 10 the War Office dispatched telegrams ordering full mobilization at 2:00
P.M.,
and France followed suit. But instead of planning to break through the Siegfried Line—a golden opportunity, for Hitler, confident that the democracies’ fear would restrain them, had left only ten divisions to defend it—both Paris and London expressed their readiness to negotiate if the Führer’s troops withdrew from Poland. For Berlin, this Allied betrayal of the Poles more than compensated for Mussolini’s declaration of Italian neutrality less than an hour later.
¹⁷⁰

Churchill, outraged, was writing a blistering attack on the Chamberlain government. His voice counted now. Herbert Morrison, the leading Labourite, had once called him “a fire-eater and a militarist.” But after Prague, Morrison saw him as England’s last hope. The
Daily Telegraph
,
Manchester Guardian
, and
Daily Mirror
had become the most vehement forums demanding Winston’s recall to the government. As long as the struggle between Churchill and his critics had remained confined to the House of Commons he was hopelessly outnumbered, but Fleet Street had laid his case before the people of England, who now saw him as their champion. That may have explained, at least in part, Chamberlain’s call to Chartwell that noon. Parliament had been summoned for 6:00
P.M.
Churchill would be driving up to London, and the prime minister said he would be grateful if, before entering the House of Commons, Winston would stop at No.10 for a few minutes.

In the Cabinet Room, Chamberlain told Churchill that he saw “no hope of averting war.” He proposed to form “a small War Cabinet of Ministers without departments” to conduct it. This would exclude the war, Admiralty and RAF ministers, which he thought wise. He had hoped to form a national coalition, but Labour had declined to join it. Churchill later recalled that the prime minister “invited me to become a member of the War Cabinet. I agreed to his proposal without comment, and on this basis we had a long talk on men and measures.” The P.M. repeated that he had abandoned his long quest for peace. “The die,” he said, “is cast.” The Foreign Office had informed Berlin that unless the Germans suspended “all aggressive action against Poland” and were prepared “to withdraw their forces” already there, His Majesty’s Government would fulfill its obligations to the Poles “without hesitation.”
¹⁷¹

This was considerably less than candid. Chamberlain had not abandoned hope of preserving the peace, did not believe the die was cast, and was prepared to hesitate indefinitely before fulfilling HMG’s obligations to the Poles. To Parliament early that evening the prime minister announced that the government was preparing a White Paper which would “make it perfectly clear that our object has been to bring about discussions about the Polish-German dispute between the two countries themselves on terms of equality, the settlement to be one which safeguarded the independence of Poland,” an agreement buttressed “by international guarantees.” The P.M. had his eye on history now; he was trying to launder it. His attempt was doomed. By drafting an apologia instead of fighting, he himself was flouting such guarantees. British and German foreign policy documents would provide a day-by-day account of his stewardship, and Churchill, not Chamberlain, was to be the first writer of that history. Furthermore, the last thing the Poles needed in this hour of desperation was a White Paper exonerating the Chamberlain government. Lacking tanks and divisions which could be moved on trucks, very short of antiaircraft and antitank guns, they had rashly decided to make their stand on Poland’s frontiers, meeting the enemy columns with massed cavalry charges. The strongest enemy force, the army group under Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, attacking from Moravia and Slovakia as well as Silesia, had overwhelmed the gallant but ill-starred defenders and was now roving through open country. Defiant but tragic Poles were being mashed beneath panzer treads of Generals Heinz Guderian and Paul von Kleist as the Wehrmacht drove across the corridor. The Poles’ Field Marshal Edward Rydz-Smigly had no reserves because the corridor forced him to fight a two-front war, sending the reserves to check another German army group striking southward from East Prussia.
¹⁷²

At 10:00
A.M.,
as Churchill had been breaking the news to an incredulous Ironside, Raczyński had met his official obligation by calling on Halifax and delivering a formal notice of the Nazi invasion. It was, he said, “a plain case as provided for by the treaty.” The foreign secretary replied that he had no doubt of the facts—he was reluctant to discuss the treaty—and at 10:50, after Raczyński had departed, Halifax summoned the German chargé d’affaires, Theodor Kordt, and asked if he had any news which might interest HMG. Kordt replied that he knew nothing of a German attack and had received no instructions from the Wilhelmstrasse. The foreign secretary murmured that reports reaching his desk “create a very serious situation.” He said no more. Kordt reported their brief meeting to Berlin by phone at 11:45
A.M.
¹⁷³

In this new situation, one of the few civilians who seemed to be himself—if indeed he was a civilian—was Adolf Hitler. After describing the bogus Polish attack on the German radio station to the Reichstag, he received Göring, accompanied by the ubiquitous Dahlerus. The Führer had been at ease with the Reichstag, but now, Dahlerus thought, his manner was “exceedingly nervous and very agitated.” He had always suspected that England wanted war, he said—believing his own lies—and now he knew it. He would crush Poland; he would crush England; he would destroy anyone who tried to stop him. The Führer “grew more and more excited and began to wave his arms,” Dahlerus noted; he shouted, and the shout rose to a scream; the “movements of his body began to follow those of his arms,” and “he brandished his fist and bent down so that it nearly touched the floor as he shrieked: ‘
Und wenn es erforderlich ist, will ich zehn Jahre kämpfen!’
[‘And if necessary I will fight for ten years!’].”
¹⁷⁴

Henderson was another exception to the rule. Everyone else in his embassy was anxious, but he followed the course that had contributed so much in leading Europe to the cataclysm now upon them. At 10:45
A.M.,
while the War Office in London was sending mobilization telegrams and Kordt was on his way to the FO, His Majesty’s envoy in Berlin had phoned Halifax: “I understand that the Poles blew up the Dirschau bridge during the night.” It was their bridge; they had the right to blow it, and, with German troops in their coal-scuttle steel helmets swarming on the far bank, would have been fools not to, but Henderson appears to have thought it aggressive. “On receipt of this news,” he said, “Hitler gave orders for the Poles to be driven back from the border line and to Göring for destruction of the Polish Air Force along the frontier.”
¹⁷⁵

The ambassador ended his report: “Hitler may ask to see me… as a last effort to save the peace.” The fact that peace could no longer be salvaged—that World War II had begun, that borders guaranteed by his own government had been violated on a clumsy, vaudevillian excuse, that Poles of both sexes and all ages had been dying for nearly seven hours—was ignored. Josiah Wedgwood, an MP who despised appeasement and had visited Germany, recalled now in bitter contempt how Henderson had “smiled [and] fraternized with evil.” Like Chamberlain, Halifax, and Horace Wilson, Henderson was among that group of Englishmen who had, in Wedgwood’s words, mistaken Hitler “for a new crowned head at whose fancy cruelties they might giggle and from whom they might not differ with propriety.”
¹⁷⁶

Hitler did not ask to see the British ambassador. After Britain’s declaration of war Henderson would return to London and volunteer to serve His Majesty in another diplomatic post for which his experience made him suitable. The Foreign Office would reply that there was none.