The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (260 page)

I
n
L
ondon parents of small children were studying a notice from the town clerk of Westminster instructing them to bring “infants up to two years of age” to designated centers “between the hours of 10.p [
sic
] and 6.0 p.m., to be fitted with helmets for protection against… gas.” This time the gas threat was real. John Gunther, until recently the London correspondent of the
Chicago Daily News
, told Americans in an NBC broadcast that Friday evening, September 1: “It’s a strange face that London wears tonight. It’s a dark face. We’re having a blackout here. The streets are black, the houses are black.” In the entire length of Piccadilly he had seen fewer than a half-dozen cars; the only Londoners in sight were workmen carrying sandbags into position; indeed, already “the whole town looks sandbagged.” Although “what may be the second world war began today,” London was “quiet and confident. The British take even such a supreme moment of crisis as tonight with good humor, quietly. A few moments ago I saw something highly typical on the news ticker: ‘The Football Association announces that a message received stated that the situation at present does not warrant the cancellation of tomorrow’s matches.’ ”
¹⁷⁷

That sort of thing was taken as an illustration of British phlegm, and therefore encouraging. In fact, it was a sign that in their hearts and minds Britons were still at peace and expected to remain so. They were following their prime minister, matching their government’s mood. Under the agreement Poland and Britain had signed the previous Friday, England was pledged to act “at once” with “all the support and assistance in its power,” to make war on Germany. The status of Danzig alone was no longer an issue. Polish sovereignty had been violated. Without either an ultimatum or a declaration of war—shocking in those days—the Wehrmacht had invaded Poland on all fronts, and the Luftwaffe was bombing every Polish city, including Warsaw. No one could doubt now that the Führer’s objective was the military conquest of the entire country. Legally, under her covenant, Great Britain had no choice; she was bound to declare war on Germany immediately. But she hadn’t; the bold note to Berlin which Chamberlain had quoted to Churchill, and then in the House of Commons, was inadequate.
¹⁷⁸

Even so, there was less there than met the eye. Halifax sent Henderson, who would deliver the Foreign Office’s message to Ribbentrop, a note explaining that it was “in the nature of a warning and is not to be considered as an ultimatum.” At the same time, the Foreign Office asked Dahlerus: “Could you limit the hostilities until you had been to London?” Obviously, the invasion of Poland was not considered casus belli. Assured of some “limit,” His Majesty’s Government stood ready to negotiate. But any negotiations now would be cramped; the only alternative to declaring war was to insist that the Wehrmacht withdraw from Poland. Roger Cambon, of the French embassy, told Halifax that such a demand for a withdrawal “ought to be accompanied by a time limit.” Halifax replied that it was an interesting question, but at this point the matter was “moot.” How it could be moot confounded Cambon, but his position was weak. He couldn’t be sure his own government would back him. France’s response to the invasion of her ally had been waffly; the Quai d’Orsay had expressed its “willingness to negotiate” if the Wehrmacht pulled back but, like Whitehall, had specified no time limit.
¹⁷⁹

Churchill’s situation was now uncomfortable. He had accepted a position in a War Cabinet, and this shackled him from public criticism of HMG’s foreign policy. Shortly after midnight, in the early hours of Saturday, September 2, he wrote the prime minister from his Morpeth Mansions flat. It was a careful, crafted letter, opening with a minor issue and building toward his chief point. “Aren’t we a very old team?” he asked at the outset. “I make out that the six you mentioned to me yesterday aggregate 386 years or an average of over 64!” Labour’s refusal to join a coalition—which, though he did not mention it, was understandable; Chamberlain had not offered them a single cabinet post—meant “we shall certainly have to face a constant stream of criticism, as well as the many disappointments and surprises of which war largely consists.” It was, therefore, “all the more important to have the Liberal Opposition firmly incorporated in our ranks,” and because of Eden’s popularity there, he suggested that a place on the front bench be found for him. Then Winston rolled up his heavy guns. “The Poles,” he reminded the prime minister, “have now been under heavy attack for thirty hours, and I am much concerned to hear that there is talk in Paris of a further note. I trust you will be able to announce our Joint Declaration of War at
latest
when Parliament meets this afternoon.” He closed: “I remain at your disposal.”
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All day Saturday he awaited a summons from No. 10. Mrs. Hill recalls him “pacing up and down like a lion in a cage. He was expecting a call, but the call never came.” At a suggestion from No. 10 Lord Hankey, who would also be included in the new cabinet, called at Morpeth Mansions for a visit. Hankey wrote his wife the following day: “As far as I can make out, my main job is to keep an eye on Winston!… He was brimful of ideas, some good, others not so good, but rather heartening and big. I only wish he didn’t give one the impression that he does himself too well!”
¹⁸¹

It was a time when men in public life—and their wives—kept diaries, wrote letters, and filed memoranda to themselves against the day they wrote their memoirs. Because of this, we know far more about their observations and opinions than future writers will know of ours. But it is important to remember that Churchill’s popularity in the country was never matched in Parliament. In justifying him, events had discredited most of his colleagues. Being decent men, they tried to suppress their resentment. But they were not always successful. Hankey had been an appeaser. When Winston was down he had said hard things about him. Now Winston was up, and when Hankey told his wife about encountering him later that same day, his letter bore a faint taint of malice. In the House of Commons smoking room, Hankey wrote, “the amount of alcohol being consumed was incredible! Winston too was in a corner holding forth to a ring of admiring satellite MPs! He has let it get into the Press that he will be in the War Cabinet—to the great annoyance of many.”

Certainly, Churchill had not kept the news of his impending appointment to himself. Lord Camrose’s diary entry for that day opens, “Winston called me up at 11:30 and told me he had accepted a place in the Cabinet and was to be a Minister without portfolio.” Telling a press lord was like making an announcement over the BBC. But to keep mum would have been wholly out of character for Churchill. Thirty years earlier, when he proposed to Clementine, he had promised to keep her acceptance secret until she could tell her mother; ten minutes later he had shouted it out to everyone within earshot. After ten years in the wilderness, he could hardly be expected to keep his new appointment to himself. The indiscretion, if any, was slight. It seems fairer to infer that the motives of those who were “greatly annoyed” are suspect.
¹⁸²

The real indiscretion that evening was historic, and it was committed by Neville Chamberlain. When the cabinet met at 4:30
P.M.,
the Poles’ situation was desperate. The superior training, equipment, and strategy of the Germans had already brought Rydz-Smigly’s troops to the brink of collapse. They had lost all the frontier battles. The Luftwaffe’s Stuka dive-bombers were spreading chaos in the Polish rear, destroying communications and preventing the movement of replacements. German troops were already over the River Warta and approaching Cracow. In the north the Fourth Army, driving eastward, had linked up with another force, striking southward from East Prussia. If ever an embattled nation needed allies, it was Poland, and now. The French, fully mobilized, could have lunged into the Ruhr and the Saar upon the issuance of a single command. Hitler had rejected Anglo-French notes urging him to abort his attack; he blamed the British for encouraging the Poles in a policy of “persecution and provocation.” Some French leaders, ever distrustful of perfidious Albion, believed him. Others, grasping at straws, found merit in Mussolini’s proposal, earlier in the day, for a five-power conference. The French government, appalled at the prospect of facing the Wehrmacht alone, awaited a British initiative.

It was well that the MPs in the smoking room were fortifying themselves with drink. The session that lay ahead of them was going to be grim. In his note to Berlin, Halifax had been unwilling to set a time limit; now, in the Cabinet Room, he claimed this was the
French
position, though he supported it. The Germans, he thought, ought to be given till Sunday noon to accept or reject a conference with France and Britain. Raczyński, who had been waiting in an anteroom, was invited to address the ministers. The Polish ambassador told them that the Nazi offensives, slashing deep into his country from all sides, had been “violently resumed” at dawn, and since noon all large Polish cities had been subjected to “heavy bombing from the air.”
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Hore-Belisha, deeply moved, spoke immediately after Raczyński’s departure. As he recorded in his diary, he told his colleagues that “I was strongly opposed to further delay, which I thought might result in breaking the unity of the country. Public opinion was against yielding an inch.” He proposed that His Majesty’s Government immediately send Hitler an ultimatum which would expire at midnight. The discussion was lively, with several vehement conversations going on at once, but in the end all were won over, and Hore-Belisha recorded the final decision, binding on all ministers, including the prime minister: “
Unanimous decision was taken that ultimatum should end at midnight
.” Halifax agreed to tell the Germans that what had been a warning was now in fact an ultimatum, and that it would end at the stroke of twelve. They rose. Parliament awaited them. The prime minister would make the announcement in the House. When the clock struck, Great Britain and Germany would be at war.
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The sequel to this meeting is baffling, even incomprehensible. With the exception of one telephone call,
no one outside the Cabinet Room was ever told of the decision
. Halifax, his faith in negotiations undiminished, broke his word to his colleagues and did nothing—did, in one instance, worse than nothing: he told Ciano that Britain saw her role as that of a “mediator” and, flatly contradicting the cabinet, repeated the line that HMG’s warning “was
not
an ultimatum.” The phone call was made by Cadogan. After the cabinet had adjourned he spoke to Bonnet in Paris and informed him of its resolution. Why he bypassed Ambassador Phipps is inexplicable. So is his choice of Bonnet, the arch appeaser (“
Votre Chamberlain, il est faible
[weak],” Georges Mandel told Duncan Sandys. “
Mais notre Bonnet, il est lâche
[a coward].”) Bonnet did not repeat the conversation. He himself had not decided whether a conference of the great powers should be made conditional on the withdrawal of Nazi troops from Poland. The French cabinet, he had told Cadogan, was “going to deliberate” that point, but in any event they were “firmly decided” that any ultimatum “must be of forty-eight hours.”
¹⁸⁵

At 7:30
P.M.
a crowded House awaited the prime minister’s announcement. Parliament, like the British press and public, was ready for war. The secret conduct of foreign policy was past. The country knew of HMG’s commitment to Poland, knew how deeply the German army had penetrated the Polish defenses, knew England’s delay in declaring war was responsible for Luftwaffe supremacy in the skies over Poland, and was ready to come to her aid. Spears had never seen Parliament “so stirred, so profoundly moved…. The benches were packed. The unbearable suspense was about to be relieved. One and all were keyed up for the announcement that war had been declared.”
¹⁸⁶

To Churchill there was “no doubt that the temper of the House was for war. I even deemed it more resolute and united than in the similar scene on August 2, 1914, in which I had also taken part.” As the prime minister rose another MP felt that “most [members of the House] were ready to show their intense relief that suspense was ended by cheering wildly.”
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“But as we listened,” Spears wrote, “amazement turned to stupefaction, and stupefaction into exasperation.” Chamberlain was speaking, not of Nazi crimes, nor of suffering Poland, nor Britain’s honor, but of “further negotiations,” or rather of their possibility, since the German government had rejected HMG’s last such proposal. But, the prime minister said to the staring, straining, immobile House, that was not necessarily a reason for discouragement. The Führer of the Reich was a very busy man. It was not impossible that he was pondering the Italian government’s suggestion for a conference. Chamberlain affirmed HMG’s demand that German troops leave Poland but—despite the unanimous vote of his own cabinet, and his pledge to report it here—he mentioned no deadline for their departure. “If the German Government should agree to withdraw their forces, then His Majesty’s Government would be willing to regard the position as being the same as it was before the German forces crossed the Polish frontier.” Then, he said triumphantly, “the way would be open to discussion” between Poland and the Reich, in which case Britain would be willing “to be associated with such talks.”
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He sat down. No one cheered. Instead, Hugh Dalton heard what he called “a terrific buzz.” Margesson signaled his whips to brace themselves for physical violence, and with reason. Duff Cooper and Amery, Dalton saw, were “red-faced and almost speechless with fury.” Cooper himself had “never felt so moved.” Spears saw the House “oozing hostility.” Two MPs actually vomited. Churchill, for once understating the hostility to Chamberlain merely noted that “the Prime Minister’s temporising statement was ill-received by the House,” but Amery wrote that Parliament “was aghast. For two whole days the wretched Poles had been bombed and massacred,” and here was the prime minister of Great Britain discussing how “Hitler should be invited to tell us whether he felt like relinquishing his prey! And then there were all these sheer irrelevancies about the terms of a hypothetical agreement between Germany and Poland.” Amery wondered whether Chamberlain’s “havering” was “the prelude to another Munich.” On that occasion, Parliament had given the prime minister a standing ovation, but “this time any similar announcement would have been met by a universal howl of execration.” When Arthur Greenwood rose to reply for the Opposition, Amery, fearing a “purely partisan speech” shouted, “Speak for England!” Greenwood, not known for his eloquence, stammered and said of Chamberlain, “I must put this point to him. Every minute’s delay now means the loss of life, imperilling of our national interest—” He hesitated, and Boothby called: “Honour.” Greenwood said: “Let me finish my sentence. I was about to say imperilling the very foundations of our national honour.”
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