The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (290 page)

He was ever the impassioned Manichaean, seeing life and history in primary colors, like Vittore Carpaccio’s paintings of St. George; a believer in absolute virtue and absolute malevolence, in blinding light and impenetrable darkness, in righteousness and wickedness—or rather in the forces of good
against
the forces of evil, for the two would always be in conflict and be therefore forever embattled. He had been accused of inconsistency and capricious judgment. Actually, it was MacDonald and Baldwin and Chamberlain who tailored their views to fit the moment. Churchill’s binnacle remained true. “Death and sorrow will be the companions of our journey,” he told the House of Commons; “hardship our garment, constancy and valour our only shield.”
²⁸⁵

And, he might have added, grief as their reward. He was sure Britons could take it. Despite his high birth he had an almost mystical faith in the power of the ordinary Englishman to survive, to endure, and, in the end, to prevail. “Tell the truth to the British people,” he had begged the shifty prime ministers of the 1930s; “they are a tough people, a robust people…. If you have told them exactly what is going on you have ensured yourself against complaints and reproaches which are not very pleasant when they come home on the morrow of some disillusion.”
²⁸⁶

But in those shabby years His Majesty’s Governments believed that there were some things the country ought not to know, and that their policy of duplicity—which at times amounted to conspiracy—would be vindicated in the end. Chamberlain would be the scapegoat of appeasement, and before the year was out sackcloth would be his shroud, but he was only one of many. Baldwin, for example, bore a greater responsibility for weakening Britain’s defenses while Hitler built his military juggernaut. The appeasers had been powerful; they had controlled
The Times
and the BBC; they had been largely drawn from the upper classes, and their betrayal of England’s greatness would be neither forgotten nor forgiven by those who, gulled by the mystique of England’s class system, had believed as Englishmen had believed for generations that public school boys governed best. The appeasers destroyed oligarchic rule which, though levelers may protest, had long governed well. If ever men betrayed their class, these were they.

Because their possessions were great, the appeasers had much to lose should the Red flag fly over Westminster. That was why they had felt threatened by the hunger riots of 1932. It was also the driving force behind their exorbitant fear and distrust of the new Russia. They had seen a strong Germany as a buffer against bolshevism, had thought their security would be strengthened if they sidled up to the fierce, virile Third Reich. Nazi coarseness, anti-Semitism, the Reich’s darker underside, were rationalized; time, they assured one another, would blur the jagged edges of Nazi Germany. So, with their eyes open, they sought accommodation with a criminal regime, turned a blind eye to its iniquities, ignored its frequent resort to murder and torture, submitted to extortion, humiliation, and abuse until, having sold out all who had sought to stand shoulder to shoulder with Britain and keep the bridge against the new barbarism, they led England herself into the cold damp shadow of the gallows, friendless save for the demoralized republic across the Channel. Their end came when the House of Commons, in a revolt of conscience, wrenched power from them and summoned to the colors the one man who had foretold all that had passed, who had tried, year after year, alone and mocked, to prevent the war by urging the only policy which would have done the job. And now, in the desperate spring of 1940, with the reins of power at last firm in his grasp, he resolved to lead Britain and her fading empire in one last great struggle worthy of all they had been and meant, to arm the nation, not only with weapons but also with the mace of honor, creating in every English breast a soul beneath the ribs of death.

By far the largest single source for
les justifications
, as the French call scholarly citations, is the Churchill College Archives Centre at Cambridge University, the repository of 300 collections of private papers, including those of Baroness Spencer-Churchill (Clementine), Bracken, Violet Pearman, Bevin, Grigg, Keyes, E. L. Spears (partial), Hankey (partial), Phipps, Lord Lloyd, Lord Thurso (Sinclair), Christie, Page Croft, Margesson, Attlee, and Halifax (on microfilm—the originals are in the India Office Library, the Public Records Office, and the estate of his heir). Papers of Viscount Templewood (Hoare, partial), Baldwin, and Crewe may be found in the Cambridge University Library; those of Beaverbrook, Lloyd George, and Samuels—until their recent transfer to the Jerusalem Archive—were available in the House of Lords Library; those of Austen and Neville Chamberlain in the Birmingham University Library; those of Lothian and Margo Asquith in the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; Derby’s in the Liverpool Public Record Office; Henry James Scrymgeours-Wedderburn’s in the Dundee Archives; Hankey’s (partial) in the Public Record Office; Marsh’s in the New York Public Library; Dalton’s diary and papers, as well as those of Cherwell (partial) in the British Library of Political and Economic Science; and Baruch’s in the Princeton University Library.

Over a hundred collections of papers remain in private hands, including some of Spears’s, Camrose’s, some of Cherwell’s, some of Halifax’s, Amery’s, Lord Lloyd’s, Lord Southborough’s, Butler’s, Lothian’s, Boothby’s, Geoffrey Dawson’s, J. L. Garvin’s, Sheila Grant Duff’s, Ironside’s, Thomas Jones’s, Harold Laski’s, Paul Maze’s, Harold Nicolson’s, those of Viscount Norwich (Duff Cooper), Major General Pakenham-Walsh, Selborne, Vansittart, Weir, Chaim Weizmann, William Heinemann Ltd., Cripps, Rumbold, Salisbury, Swinton, Thornton-Kemsley, Ramsay MacDonald, Cecil, and the Blenheim Palace Archive.

British Documents

British Cabinet Documents, Premier (Prime Minister), and Foreign Office Documents are catalogued at the Public Record Office in Kew, Richmond, Surrey, under “Records of Interest to Social Scientists.” Guidance is necessary; the records of the Committee of Imperial Defence, for example, are filed under twenty-one different categories.

Published material may be found in
Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939
, particularly the second and third series, edited by E. L. Woodward, MA, FBA, and Rohan Butler, assisted by Anne Orne, MA, and issued by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office in 1952. Other unpublished official material concerning Churchill is in the archives of the Air Ministry, the Committee of Imperial Defence, the Treasury, Documents on International Affairs, and
Documents Concerning German-Polish Relations and the Outbreak of Hostilities between Great Britain and Germany
, London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1939 (The British Blue Book). Verbatim accounts of all proceedings in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords are published in
Parliamentary Debates
(Hansard), England’s equivalent of America’s
Congressional Record
.

French Documents

Le Livre Jaune Français. Documents diplomatiques, 1938–1939
(Paris: Ministre des Affaires Étrangères (The French Yellow Book).

Documents Diplomatiques Français, Première Série
and
Deuxième Série: Les Événements survenus en France de 1933 à 1945
, a postwar investigation of French policy in the 1930s conducted by the
Assemblée Nationale
and published (a two-volume report supported by nine volumes of testimony) in 1947.

German Documents

Dokumente der deutschen Politik, 1933–1940; Akten zur Deutschen Auswürtigen Politik 1918–1945
(German Foreign Policy Documents), published jointly by the Foreign Office and the U.S. State Department; issued in Baden between 1950 and 1956. These documents are divided into
Serie C
(four volumes, covering January 30, 1933, to October 31, 1933) and
Serie D
, thirteen volumes which are arranged, not chronologically but by subject, but generally running from September 1937 to December 1941. There is an eleven-month gap here, but there are gaps in the Allied documents, too.

Nuremberg Documents (ND)

Nuremberg seems far in the future to those who have turned the last page of this book, but it was there that all the secret papers of the interwar years—some dating from 1919—first appeared, and in documents which could not be explained away. They may be found in
Trial of the Major War Criminals
: forty-two volumes covering the proceedings and exhibits—mostly in German—before the International Military Tribunal;
Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression
: ten volumes of additional interrogation transcripts and affidavits, in English;
Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Tribunals
: fifteen volumes of selected material from the twelve Nuremberg trials following the adjournment of the IMT.

Other Published Documentary Material

I documenti diploma italiani
; Ottavo series, 1935–1939, Rome, Liberia della Stato, 1952–1953;
Official Document Concerning Polish German and Polish Soviet Relations 1933–1939
, London, 1939 (The Polish White Book);
Documents and Material Relating to the Eve of the Second World War
, 1937–1939, two volumes, Moscow, Foreign Language Publishing House, 1948;
Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy
, three volumes, London, Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1931–1953.

Citations from British manuscript collections are puzzling, or rather are a series of puzzles, because each archive makes its own rules. In some instances the archive is not large enough to require extensive cataloguing. With eminent men it is not so simple. However, there are certain constants. The figure or code to the left of the slash—e.g., “123” in “123/456”—identifies the section or shelf where a document may be found. The figure to the right usually identifies the specific box number, or, if the entry is large, such as a scrapbook, the file number which houses the document. See Janet Foster and Julia Sheppard,
British Archives: A Guide to Archive Resources in the United Kingdom
(London, 1982).

The first of the three major documents centers for this work is the Churchill College Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge; Correll Barnett, the learned Keeper of the Archives, was ably assisted, during my early visits, by Archivist Marion Stewart, who has since been succeeded by Leslie James. The Centre contains 300 accessions of diplomatic, political, military, scientific, and naval papers, most of them twentieth-century. Everything has been done to make document retrieval simple; even so, the researcher must dig. To take one example, the Spears papers in the Centre comprise four sections. The first number following the code abbreviation gives the section number. Section 1 (300 files) is correspondence, A to Z. The second code number identifies the file number. The papers in Spears’s code 2 (thirty-five files) pertain to personal and family matters. Section 3 (sixty-five boxes) has no material about Churchill and is restricted to scholars. Section 4 (seven files) contains miscellaneous papers.

The second mother lode of documents is the Public Record Office in Kew, Surrey, safe in the hands of Alfred Knightbridge, head of the search department. Here a letter code (CAB for cabinet papers, PrP for Prime Minister’s papers, etc.) opens each citation. The second part, in numbers, breaks down the mass of materials by dates: the date of a cabinet meeting, or of events between meetings. The slash comes next, then the “piece number” identifying a given document.

The third trove of documentary material is the British Library’s reference division in Great Russell Street (D. A. Clark and G. E. A. Raspin in charge). Much of the most valuable material here is kept in the Woolwich Repository; delivery is normally a day after application. British newspapers since 1801 are filed in the library’s Newspaper Library, at Colindale Library, London.