The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (271 page)

It was still His Majesty’s Government’s policy to avoid offending Germany; although Great Britain and the Third Reich were at war, Reith’s BBC was uncomfortable with criticism of the enemy regime. Reith, now minister of information, denied air time to eminent Englishmen on the ground that they were too critical of Germany. As a cabinet minister Hore-Belisha could not be denied BBC time, and in October he delivered a superb speech on British war aims. They were not fighting to reconstitute Czechoslovakia or Poland, he said: “We are concerned with the frontiers of the human spirit…. Only the defeat of Nazi Germany can lighten the darkness which now shrouds our cities, and lighten the horizon for all Europe and the world.” Hore-Belisha’s days were numbered. Next to Churchill he was the ablest member of the War Cabinet, advocating vigorous prosecution of the war; nevertheless, in January 1940 the prime minister asked for his resignation. Chamberlain wanted to offer him the Ministry of Information, but Halifax objected to the appointment; it would have a “bad effect among the neutrals,” he said, “because HB [is] a Jew.” Being a Jew was worse in Germany, of course, but under His Majesty’s Government at the time it was no character reference.
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On Wednesday, September 6, His Majesty’s Government assured the House of Commons that the Luftwaffe was bombing “only Polish military objectives.” Yet three days earlier the Warsaw government had informed HMG that twenty-seven towns had been bombed by Nazi planes and over a thousand civilians killed. Edward Spears decided to raise in the House “the question of the lack of support we are giving the Poles,” but changed his mind when Kingsley Wood told him the reply would involve “questions of strategy” and to discuss them in public would be “most dangerous.” On Saturday, Beck cabled Raczyński, instructing him to raise the issue in Whitehall. On Monday, the Polish ambassador told Cadogan: “This is very unfair to us. The least that we can ask is, what are you prepared to do?” Cadogan promised him an answer by the end of the day. But Raczyński never heard from Cadogan, then or later.
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Chamberlain saw the growing anger in the House. He believed he fathomed it. “The Amerys, Duff Coopers, and their lot,” he wrote, “are consciously swayed by a sense of frustration because they can only look on.” He added: “The personal dislike of Simon and Hoare has reached a pitch which I find difficult to understand.” There was a great deal he did not understand; he was neither the first nor the last leader to lose his touch, his feeling for the temper of his people. Once war has been declared, the slate is wiped clean. A leader’s peacetime policies are forgotten, even those which led the country into a war it did not want, unless, of course, he is so unwise as to bring them up. Even after the fall of Poland, after Fleet Street had printed evidence of Nazi crimes in Poland—the random murders, then mass executions; the tortures and the seizure of Poles to work in German munitions factories—the prime minister seriously considered a negotiated peace with a Reich purged of the more extreme Nazis. He had a “hunch,” he wrote, that the war would end in the spring of 1940. “It won’t be by defeat in the field,” he wrote, “but by German realization that they
can’t
win and that it isn’t worth their while to go on getting thinner and poorer when they might have instant relief.” If negotiations were successful the Germans might “not have to give up anything they really care about.” One pictures Neville Chamberlain in hell, sitting at one end of a table with Satan at the other, each checking off items on his agenda, and a slow, awful expression of comprehension crossing the late P.M.’s face as he realizes that he has just traded his soul for a promise of future negotiations.
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One issue which eluded him completely was that the plight of the Poles could not be relieved by Allied defensive warfare in the west. An offensive, or a series of offensives, should be launched, and launched
now
, while the Wehrmacht was committed in Poland. Blood had to be spilled in a drive against the Siegfried Line or in bombing the Reich. An infantry attack on the western front depended upon France. Although the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was growing in strength every week, the overwhelming majority of the troops there were French, and their decisions would determine the Allied strategy there. The RAF could bomb, but here again France, because of her proximity to the Reich, could cast the decisive vote.

France did. The vote was a veto. The French had ruled out bombing, Chamberlain explained to the War Cabinet, because the Nazis might retaliate by an air attack on one of the Seine bridges. Churchill was aroused, but “I could not move them,” he wrote. “When I pressed very hard, they used a method of refusal which I never met before or since. [On one occasion in Paris] M. Daladier told me with an air of exceptional formality that ‘The President of the Republic himself had intervened, and that no aggressive action must be taken which might only draw reprisals upon France.’ ” In his memoirs, Winston commented:

The prime minister, it developed, had decided to avenge the Poles killed in Luftwaffe raids on Warsaw, Cracow, and Katowice by punishing the Reich with “truth raids.” In truth raids, leaflets were to be substituted for bombs. This strategy assumed that once Germans read the leaflets describing Hitler’s atrocities, they would rise up and overthrow their Nazi leadership. After the first mission over Germany, Kingsley Wood revealed that this ingenious approach had been his inspiration, and that the Nazis in Berlin were deeply troubled by them. They were not without peril for the RAF; German antiaircraft gunners could not distinguish between Blenheims dropping explosives and those distributing the pamphlets threatening the stability of the regime in Berlin; hence British planes were lost. Hoare paid tribute to the truth-raiders. They wrote, he said, “a chapter of heroic bravery, of forlorn hopes, of brilliant improvisation.”
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Ironside’s optimistic briefing of the War Cabinet had been inspired more by the Poles’ valor than their military prospects. Yet their élan
was
astonishing. That same Friday the Fourth Panzer Division, attacking Warsaw’s southeastern suburbs, was thrown back and Polish divisions around Kutno rallied, counterattacked across the Bzura, and drove the German Eighth Army back for three straight days. It would be a long time before any troops, under any flag, would do anything like that again. They were inspired not solely by determination to preserve their honor—though their gallantry still gleams across nearly a half century—but because they believed they were going to win. They knew they couldn’t do it by themselves. That, they thought, was unnecessary. England and France were bound to them in ironclad military alliances. Both powers had declared war on Nazi Germany. The British, they assumed, had unleashed an all-out bombing of the Ruhr, and the French army, the world’s strongest, must have penetrated deep into western Germany. If they pinned down the Wehrmacht here, the Poles reasoned, their allies would soon force Hitler to sue for peace.

RAF bombers had been rendered impotent by French fear of Luftwaffe reprisals. Where was the French army? Here the Poles’ nemesis was the same officer who three and a half years earlier had, in effect, awarded Hitler the Rhineland by default. Gustave-Maurice Gamelin, a short, timid, rabbity man in his late sixties, was a former aide to Marshal Joseph-Césaire Joffre who had toiled his way upward through the maze of military politics to become
généralissime
of the enormous French army, constable of France, and leader of the combined Anglo-French high command. His rise had been extraordinary, not because he was eccentric—in mufti he was just another nondescript
fonctionnaire
—but because under pressure he became everything a commander ought not to be: indecisive, given to issuing impulsive orders which he almost always countermanded, and timid to and beyond a fault. Illustrative of his unpredictability was his proposal, at the outbreak of war, to invade Germany by lunging across neutral Belgium and Holland, and then, when a shocked cabinet rejected the plan, declaring that any French offensive would be doomed, that the poilus in the Maginot and their comrades above it should sit out the war. There would be more of this sort of thing later. And more. And more.

His performance during the Rhineland crisis should have revealed his incompetence to his civilian superiors. They had asked him for action then, and he had given them excuses. After that he ought to have been relieved of all responsibility for the defense of French soil. But like the rest of the senior officers in their army he had his
patron
, who in his case was Premier Daladier. So he had remained at his high post, and now the price must be paid, not by him, not by Daladier, but by the Poles. The issue of Polish survival was a matter of days, if not hours. France possessed the only force strong enough to save Poland by attacking Germany now. Furthermore, the Franco-Polish Military Convention of May 19, 1939, was more precise than Britain’s agreement with the Poles. Drafted by Gamelin and two Polish generals, the convention provided that “the French army shall launch a major offensive in the west [
lancerait une grande offensive a l’ouest
] if the Germans attack Poland.” The Poles had asked how many poilus would be available for this drive. “Between thirty-five and thirty-eight divisions,” Gamelin had replied. The Poles had also wanted to know what form the attack would take. It was spelled out in the convention: the French army would “progressively launch offensive operations… the third day after General Mobilization Day.” Yet that deadline had passed without action in Paris.
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On August 23, when the German invasion of Poland was imminent, the irresolute French commander in chief—without telling the Poles—had reappraised the military prospects of nations who offended the Führer. As a result, his faith in his army had been shaken, and his confidence in France’s political leaders, and himself (this was justifiable), had shrunk. He hoped that by the spring of 1940, with British concurrence and the support of “
matériel américain
,” France would be capable of fighting, if necessary, “
une bataille défensive
.” Then—this from a man who had promised the Poles offensive operations on the third day after mobilization—“My opinion has always been that we could not take the offensive before roughly 1941–1942.” The French, in short, had unilaterally renounced the Franco-Polish Military Convention. Despite the fact that his signature was on the document, Gamelin concluded in his memoirs, “Our military protocol had no meaning and [did] not bind us.” In his heart, therefore, he was “
satisfait
.” Among other things, he had overlooked an earlier military treaty—still an absolute commitment by the French government—which Marshal Ferdinand Foch had negotiated with the Poles on February 19, 1921, pledging “
effectif et rapide
” support should Poland be confronted by German aggression.
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Generals are seldom afflicted by nagging consciences, but then, they seldom betray an embattled ally. Perhaps a pang of guilt moved this commander in chief to point out that French mobilization in itself would bring some relief to Poland “by tying down a certain number of large German units on our frontier.” Daladier asked him how long the Poles, abandoned by their allies, could hold out. The
généralissime
replied that he believed they would put up “
une résistance honorable
” which would prevent “
la masse des forces
” of the Reich from turning against France until the English were “
effectivement à nos côtés
”—standing beside them, shoulder to shoulder.
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Between them the Poles and the French had 130 divisions against Germany’s 98—really 62, because 36, as Liddell Hart put it, were “virtually untrained and unorganized.” Rydz-Smigly’s army had but to hold up the Wehrmacht divisions on the eastern front; the French, meantime, could overwhelm the green, second-rate German divisions across the Rhine. The challenge should have daunted no one. Gamelin’s forces in the west outnumbered the Germans by at least two to one—four to one, if one is to believe the Nuremberg testimony of OKW General Alfred Jodl, who told the International Military Tribunal that he had expected the Third Reich to collapse in 1939. He attributed its survival “to the fact that during the Polish campaign the approximately 110 French and British divisions in the West were held completely inactive against the 23 German divisions.”
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Most of the Zossen generals were appalled at Hitler’s gamble. To blitz Poland he had stripped the Siegfried Line defenses of armor, artillery, warplanes, and reliable troops, leaving a skeleton force to face Germany’s ancient foe in the west. It seemed inconceivable that the French would let so golden an opportunity pass, knowing that a quick Nazi conquest of Poland would free the German Generalstab of its greatest nightmare—a two-front war—and permit the Führer to concentrate the full might of the Wehrmacht in a massive attack, knifing through the Low Countries, into France. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, head of the OKW, recalled that “We soldiers always expected an attack by France during the Polish campaign, and were very surprised that nothing happened…. A French attack would have encountered only a German military screen, not a real defense.”
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