The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (273 page)

He announced with pride—not pardonable, because he still distrusted the convoy policy—that “a week has passed since a British ship, alone or in convoy, has been sunk or even molested by a U-boat on the high seas,” and he closed with one of those passages which men in public life later wish could be expunged from the record. “Rough times lie ahead,” he said, “but how different is the scene from that of October 1914!” Then the French front “seemed to be about to break under the terrible impact of German Imperialism…. We faced those adverse conditions then; we have nothing worse to face tonight.”
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They faced something far worse, of course, but no one can hold a mirror up to the future, and the speech was well received in England. The prime minister’s junior private secretary, Jock Colville, wrote in his diary that Churchill “certainly gives one confidence and will, I suspect, be Prime Minister before this war is over.” Colville thought he might “lead us into the most dangerous paths. But he is the only man in the country who commands anything like universal respect, and perhaps with age he has become less inclined to undertake rash adventures.” Hoare, another diarist, noted that Churchill seemed “very exhilarated” and that “the Press talked of him as Prime Minister.” It was not just the press; Sir John Wheeler-Bennett was among those establishmentarians who, listening to Winston, “first realized that Churchill was ‘the pilot of the storm’ who was needed to lead us through the crisis of the Second World War.” That thought did not occur to Neville Chamberlain, but he was impressed; to his sister he wrote that he took “the same view as Winston, to whose excellent broadcast we have just been listening. I believe Russia will always act as she thinks her own interests demand, and I cannot believe she would think her interests served by… German domination in the Balkans.”
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In Berlin, William Shirer wrote: “The local enthusiasm for peace a little dampened today by Churchill’s speech last night.” Goebbels suppressed references to Winston’s comments on Russia, but his allusion to the Admiralty’s success in shielding merchantmen from Nazi submarines had touched a nerve. Led by
Der Stürmer
,
Völkischer Beobachter
, and
Deutsches Nachtrichenbüro
, the German press had made a great thing out of the U-boat campaign; U-boat captains were the toast of the Reich, and cartoonists had pictured Winston as a battered, cornered prizefighter and as a drowning man surrounded by periscopes. His announcement that the subs had let a week pass without a victory enraged Hans Fritzsche, director of the Nazi broadcasting services. Fritzsche interrupted a program to deliver a thirteen-minute polemic denouncing Winston, quoting him and then raging: “So that is what the dirty gangster thinks! Who does that filthy liar think he is fooling?… So Mr. Churchill—that bloated swine [
aufgeblasenes Schwein
]—spouts through his dirty teeth that in the last week no English ship has been molested by German submarines? He does, indeed?… There you have the twisted and diseased mind of this infamous profiteer and specialist in stinking lying. Naturally those British ships have not been molested; they have been sunk.”
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It is possible to be more overbearing in German than in any other tongue, but only if one has mastered it as Winston had mastered English. In any duel of denigration he was bound to leave Fritzsche far behind, and he did it in November, in his second wartime address over the BBC. Germany, he said, was more fragile than it seemed. He had

Russia, he said, “returns them a flinty stare”; Italy “averts her gaze”; Japan “is puzzled and thinks herself betrayed”; Turkey, Islam, India, and China “would regard with undisguised dread a Nazi triumph, well knowing what their fate would soon be”; and the “great English-speaking Republic across the Atlantic makes no secret of its sympathies.” Thus “the whole world is against Hitler and Hitlerism. Men of every race and clime feel that this monstrous apparition stands between them and the forward move which is their due, and for which the age is ripe.” The “seething mass of criminality and corruption constituted by the Nazi Party machine” was responsible for the power of its führer, “a haunted, morbid being, who, to their eternal shame, the German people in their bewilderment have worshipped as a god.”
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Jock Colville wrote that he had “listened to Winston Churchill’s wireless speech, very boastful, over-confident and indiscreet (especially about Italy and the U.S.A.), but certainly most amusing.” If Colville was condescending, Harold Nicolson sometimes turned his thumb down on a Churchill broadcast. After listening to one of the early radio addresses, Nicolson observed in his diary that Winston “is a little too rhetorical, and I do not think that his speech will really have gone down with the masses. He is too belligerent for this pacifist age, and although once anger comes to steel our sloppiness, his voice will be welcome to them, at the moment it reminds them of heroism which they do not really feel.”
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One hesitates to gainsay Harold Nicolson; he was one of the shrewdest observers of his time, and his lapses were rare. But this may have been one of them. Nicolson, with Amery and Spears, was a member of the Eden group and continued to attend their Carlton meetings well into 1940. More important, he—like Colville—belonged to the upper class, and carried all its paraphernalia with him. His credentials as an analyst of “the masses” are therefore thin; as he himself acknowledged, he misinterpreted the feelings of his own constituents. Now that the issue with Hitler was joined and English blood was flowing, Churchill had become the most overstated member of His Majesty’s Government. Clearly that troubled Nicolson; men with his background prized understatement and recoiled from its opposite. Elsewhere on England’s social spectrum, however, that was not true. Among the middle and lower classes, pacifism had begun to fade when Hitler entered Prague, and once war was declared it was replaced by patriotism. Before the war became dreary and stale, the signs of the nation’s shift in mood had been unmistakable. The jubilant response to the naval victory off Montevideo had been one. Another had appeared when the people learned—from accounts of a Churchill speech in Parliament—that Luftwaffe pilots were machine-gunning the crews of unarmed fishing vessels and “describing on the radio what fun it was to see a little ship ‘crackling in flames like a Christmas tree.’ ” Winston was swamped with mail from clerks and miners, waitresses and small businessmen, demanding reprisals. Of course, he refused; he was a gentleman. But
they weren’t
, and they vastly outnumbered those who were.

There was talk—more out of Parliament than in it—of Churchill as prime minister. It was, and for thirty years had been, the only job which clearly suited him. That does not mean he was ineffectual elsewhere. He had always been able, and often brilliant, in other ministries, and even his Admiralty critics conceded that no other man in public life could match his performance in the private office. But given the broad reaches of his mind, his knowledge of the entire government, and his inability to hold his tongue in check, he often exasperated the cabinet by trespassing in departments which were the preserve of other men round the table. So it was in his BBC broadcasts. Although he began by confining himself to the war at sea, sooner or later he was bound to touch upon issues which could not be remotely construed as naval. If his touch had been light, the encroachment would have been ignored, but it was also characteristic of him that he was incapable of subtlety. His third major broadcast raised an issue which was clearly the special concern of the Foreign Office. He tore into Europe’s neutral nations. By now none could doubt that the German führer had plans for their future, yet like Scarlett O’Hara they seemed to be promising themselves they would think about it tomorrow, while every tomorrow darkened their prospects. In a BBC broadcast on January 20, 1940, Churchill said:

Hoare commented in his diary: “Winston’s broadcast to the neutrals. Bad effect.” One consequence of the broadcast, unknown in London, was a
Führerordnung
to restudy possible operations in Scandinavia. Hitler guessed—correctly—that the first lord of the Admiralty had his eye on Norway. The Foreign Office was more concerned about the reaction in neutral capitals. In a pained note Halifax wrote Churchill: “I am afraid I think the effect of your broadcast in the countries which you no doubt had principally in mind has been very different from what you anticipated—though if I had seen your speech myself, I should have expected some such reactions.” Among the newspapers which had bridled were
Het Handelsblad
in Holland,
Journal de Genève
, Denmark’s
Politiken
, and Norway’s
Morgenbladet
. Halifax complained that it “puts me in an impossible position if a member of the Gov. like yourself takes a line in public which differs from that taken by the PM or myself: and I think, as I have to be in daily touch with these tiresome neutrals, I ought to be able to predict how their minds will work.” Churchill answered at once: “This is undoubtedly a disagreeable bouquet. I certainly thought I was expressing yr view & Neville’s…. Do not however be quite sure that my line will prove so inconvenient as now appears. What the neutrals say is vy different from what they feel: or from what is going to happen.” In fact Hitler had designs on most of them, and before spring ended the swastika would float over all their capitals but Switzerland’s.
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Halifax had passed over the one paragraph in the broadcast with momentous implications. It was a reference to the fighting going on in Finland, part of a complex issue which no one in England, including Churchill, understood. The Russo-German marriage of convenience had scarcely been consummated in Poland before divorce proceedings were quietly begun. Stalin, anxious to guard his Baltic flank from a future Nazi attack, signed pacts with Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, permitting Moscow to garrison Red Army troops in each. He then turned to Finland. Among his objectives, all of which were defensive, was blocking the Gulf of Finland with artillery on both coasts, thus protecting the entrance to Leningrad. The Soviet Union offered Helsinki 2,134 square miles in exchange for the cession of 1,066 Finnish square miles. National sentiment—and fear of a German reprisal—barred an agreement. The Russians, desperate, offered to buy the territory. Helsinki still refused, and on November 30, 1939, the Red Army invaded Finland. To outsiders the invasion was an atrocity as black as the Nazi seizure of Poland. In retrospect, however, the difference is obvious. Russia’s need to defend Leningrad is clear. The city came perilously close to conquest by the Germans later, and would certainly have fallen to the Nazis without the strip taken from the Finns.

The necessities of war modify principle; the hand of a country whose existence is threatened is not stayed by the rules of war. Churchill, at this very time, was telling the War Cabinet that “We must violate Norwegian territorial waters”; and Pétain, worried about the stretch of French frontier undefended by the Maginot Line, had told the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre that if France was to remain faithful to the principle which had saved her in the last war (“the defensive and continuous front”), she must face the fact that the one stretch of her frontier unprotected by the Maginot Line was the classic invasion route followed by Germans for nearly two thousand years. Consequently, he concluded: “
Nous devons entrer en Belgique!
”—“We must go into Belgium!” Winston agreed that Belgium could not possibly remain neutral, that it was essential to erect “a shield along the Belgian frontier to the sea against that terrible turning movement” which had “nearly encompassed our ruin in 1914.”
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To the astonishment of the world, tiny Finland threw the Russians back. Beginning with the Japanese conquest of Manchuria eight years earlier, the aggressor powers had repeatedly overwhelmed weak, poorly led defenders. Now a small country with one-fortieth the strength of the Soviet Union was humiliating a great power, sending the invaders reeling from the Mannerheim Line, named for their leader, Field Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil von Mannerheim. The Finn victories seemed miraculous, but there were several explanations. One was Mannerheim himself. Before the Russian Revolution, when Finland belonged to the czar, he had served as a lieutenant general; he had fought the Bolsheviks to a standstill then, and now, aged seventy-two, had come out of retirement to do it again. Stalin was holding his crack divisions in reserve should Hitler strike. He had sent the Red Army’s poorest troops, ill-trained and sorely lacking in fighting spirit, against the Finns. Mannerheim led men fueled by the incentive of soldiers defending their homeland. He blinded the Russians with superior tactics, the use of superbly trained ski troops, a thorough knowledge of the lakes and forests constituting the terrain’s natural obstacles, and a strategy peculiarly suitable to arctic warfare—cutting the enemy’s line of retreat, waiting until the Russians were frozen and starved, and then counterattacking. The paralyzed invaders were not even properly clothed for the bitter Finnish winter. Churchill had spoken for tens of millions when, in his indictment of neutrals, he made an exception: “Only Finland—superb, nay, sublime—in the jaws of peril—Finland shows what free men can do. The service rendered by Finland to mankind is magnificent. They have exposed, for all the world to see, the military incapacity of the Red Army and of the Red Air Force. Many illusions about Soviet Russia have been dispelled in these few fierce weeks of fighting in the Arctic Circle.”
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