In the House he spoke to empty seats, dozing MPs, and disapproving frowns. Once the cry “Winston’s up!” had brought members scurrying from the lobby and the smoking room. Now—like Edmund Burke six generations earlier, warning Parliament that unless the government changed its policy, Britain would lose her American colonies—he was largely ignored. There is a time to be eloquent, and there is a time when eloquence is wasted. Many of his greatest addresses, writes an Oxford historian, were delivered before “inattentive or skeptical audiences.” To Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, who was in Germany, the 1930s were a period in which he, “like so many others, tried desperately to convince those in authority of the growing menace of National Socialism.” They “failed miserably.” It was “in those days,” Wheeler-Bennett recalls, that “Winston was a tower of strength and comfort to us, the one British statesman who understood the warning which we sought to give, and who perceived, in all its starkness, the danger of a fresh outbreak of the Furor Teutonicus.”16
England, to paraphrase Melville, seemed cloaked in a damp, drizzly, foggy November of the soul. So did France. In his Paris home at 110, boulevard Raspail, Major Charles de Gaulle was writing Vers l’armée de métier, advancing his concept of a small professional army, mobile and highly mechanized, which, he believed, should replace the reigning static theories of war symbolized by the Maginot Line. In the London murk Churchill, with his moral compass, knew exactly where he was, but few Englishmen even glimpsed him. Sir Robert Vansittart, “Van,” the permanent under secretary of the Foreign Office, wrote: “Left or Right, everybody was for the quiet life.” To those who saw what lay ahead, the quietude was excruciating. Franklin Roosevelt, sworn in as president five weeks after Hitler became Reich chancellor, was lifting American hearts with his fireside chats, and an MP suggested to Churchill that MacDonald or Baldwin try the same thing. “If they did,” said Winston, “the fire would go out.”17
Lady Astor—née Nancy Langhorne of Danville, Virginia—was rarely reflective of the British public’s mood, but threading the maze of parliamentary intrigue with consummate skill, she always knew who was welcome at No. 10 Downing Street and who was not, even when those who were not included her. Joseph Stalin, receiving a British delegation headed by Nancy and George Bernard Shaw, had bluntly asked her about Winston’s political prospects. Her eyes had widened. “Churchill?” she had said. She gave a scornful little laugh and replied, “Oh, he’s finished.” Afterward, in Red Square, Shaw told the waiting press that he found the Soviet Union admirable, and would, indeed, advise young men from all over the world to pack up and settle in it. Nancy smiled and nodded, which, Virginia Cowles points out, was “reprehensible, because up until then she had been a tremendous anti-Bolshevik, denouncing the slaughter of the Russians in speech after speech.” Winston’s rhetorical weapons were of larger bore. He fired his broadside in the Sunday Pictorial, pointing out that the lady in question “denounces the vice of gambling in unmeasured terms, and is closely associated with an almost unrivaled racing stable. She accepts Communist hospitality and flattery, and remains the Conservative member for Plymouth.” The Russians, he said, “have always been fond of circuses and traveling shows,” and “here was the world’s most famous intellectual Clown and Pantaloon in one, and the charming Columbine of the capitalist pantomime.”18
In Parliament Churchill was supported by five MPs at most. The power of the party whips in those days was immense. Their effectiveness, Churchill wrote, combined with the “lethargy and blindness” of the three parties, made this “one of those awful periods which recur in our history, when the noble British nation seems to fall from its high estate, loses all sense of purpose, and appears to cower from the menace of foreign peril, frothing pious platitudes while foemen forge their arms.” A. J. P. Taylor observes that Winston had “periods of great distinction when he seemed right at the front, and he had a gift for sliding down the ladder again. His life was one of snakes and ladders. Until the very end of the 1930s, there were more snakes than ladders. Before then, his reputation, in a sense, was at its lowest ebb.” He had served twenty years in one cabinet or another, but because of his stand against independence for India, the “majority of the party,” recalled Harold Macmillan, then a Conservative MP, not only “regarded his attitude as reactionary and unrealistic,” but also questioned “the soundness of his judgment.” The consequence, Macmillan believed, was that “all his warnings about the German threat and the rise of Nazism, as he himself has described, were in vain.” Baldwin told his whips to keep a sharp eye on the outcast and to foster the view, Lord Winterton recalled, that Churchill was “an erratic genius; that he was utterly unreliable”; he had caused “unnecessary trouble to the Prime Minister and to all his colleagues in every Cabinet in which he has served by his volubility in disregarding every opinion except his own.” In sum, according to Boothby, “The breach between Winston and the Conservative leaders was complete.”19
In these years Churchill, in Lady Longford’s words, was often “far away from the ‘clatter and whirlpool,’ beached, like one of the boats he painted.” The British left, led by Clement Attlee and pledged to pacifism and disarmament, deeply distrusted him. Thus he outraged MPs on both sides of the Commons. But in Parliament, at least, traditional civility was observed. Outside Westminster was another matter. Afterward he said there had been “much mocking in the Press” about his fall from grace. The political cartoonists in Punch, the Daily Herald, the Express, and above all David Low in Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard were brutal. Public appearances became an ordeal for him. Chosen rector of Edinburgh University, he was unable to deliver his rectorial address; students hostile to his calls for a strengthened national defense repeatedly shouted him down until he gave up and left the platform. A particularly ugly book published in 1931 was The Tragedy of Winston Churchill. Disregarding all evidence, including the findings of the Dardanelles Commission, the author wrote: “Overriding the considered opinions of every seaman who knew his job, he [Churchill] rushed blindly into that wretched fiasco of the Dardanelles. He had great gifts but ‘nothing to offer’ any member of any party.” The author asked, “What has been Mr Churchill’s career in reality but the tragedy of the brilliant failure, of whom it has been repeatedly said that he secretly despises those who pass him on the road to office and power?”20
Churchillian apocrypha has it that he was unwounded by all this, that throughout he was supremely confident that his hour would strike. On the contrary, his daughter Mary remembers, he was “far from resigned to his exclusion from the exercise of power”; the slanders, libels, and the distortions of his long career “hurt him deeply.” In the House an MP launched a personal attack on him, saying: “All his political life has been notorious for changing opinions, just like the weathercock, which vacillates and gyrates with the changing winds. It is about time this House took notice of this menace.” When Winston cited figures on the growing (and illegal) Nazi Luftwaffe and all but begged the government to strengthen the Royal Air Force, Sir Herbert Samuel, an eminent Liberal, compared him to “a Malay running amok.”21
His old acquaintances and former colleagues were convinced that he was misjudging the Nazis as he had India. Beaverbrook wrote that Churchill had “been everything to every party. He has held every view on every question…. He is utterly unreliable in his mental attitude.” After Hitler became chancellor, the Beaver predicted that “Winston Churchill will retire from Parliament. It is really the best thing for him to do.” Hindenburg died, Hitler’s power grew, and Max convinced himself that Winston’s speeches were stanzas in a swan song. “Now that he seems to have reconciled himself to the part of a farewell tour of politics, he speaks better than for years past.” Beaverbrook’s biographer writes: “It became clear even to Churchill that Beaverbrook was no longer on his side, nor even sympathetic to him.”22
Nevertheless, the two men occasionally saw one another. Beaverbrook’s devotion to his newspapers approached that of a religieux; Churchill alwa
ys produced good copy, so the Beaver paid him to write a column every other week for the Evening Standard. Malcolm Muggeridge was a young reporter for the Standard; at the next desk was Winston’s son. Randolph, now in his early twenties, was already difficult, constantly quarreling with his father and nearly everyone else who crossed his path. Churchill would nod briefly at his son as he passed through the Standard’s office with his fortnightly piece. Muggeridge recalls that Winston “just looked awful. You’d say to yourself, ‘There’s a guy who’s not well, or down on his luck, or dead broke.’ If you knew he was a politician you’d think, ‘He’s washed out, he’s had his chance and now he’s through.’ ” Randolph rarely mentioned his father in the office, but one afternoon, as he watched him depart, he said to Muggeridge, “He’s in a terrible state.” Then, in an amused tone: “He misses his toys.” Muggeridge asked, “What toys?” Randolph said: “His dispatch boxes.”23
Even before Hitler became chancellor, British intelligence had confirmed Churchill’s unofficial estimates, based on his private sources of information, that the Nazis had over 400,000 storm troopers in uniform. During the Chancellor Crisis, Churchill had told the House: “I do not know where Germany’s parliamentary system stands today, but certainly military men are in control of the essentials.” Each concession which had been made to them, he said, each softening of the Versailles agreement, “has been followed immediately by a fresh demand.” To him the peril was clear. If the Germans were permitted to reassemble their military juggernaut, every nation bordering the Reich would be in mortal danger. These, he said, were facts. The British people were being told lies. The prime minister and his cabinet had developed a “habit of saying smooth things and uttering pious platitudes and sentiments to gain applause.” He could not recall “any time when the gap between the kind of words which statesmen used and what was actually happening in many countries was so great as it is now.”24
MacDonald and Baldwin should have been aware of the threat. The British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Horace Rumbold, was an exceptional diplomat. In early March 1933, less than four days after Hindenburg had signed the emergency decree, Rumbold sent the Foreign Office a lengthy assessment of the new regime. The Nazis, he reported, had brought out “the worst traits in German character, i.e. a mean spirit of revenge, a tendency to brutality, and a noisy and irresponsible jingoism.” In the heart of the capital, whippings and clubbings could be seen in every block and every park, even the Tiergarten. Rumbold regretted the failure of foreign opinion “to have fully grasped the fact that the National-Socialist programme is intensely anti-Jewish.” It was no passing phase: “The imposition of further disabilities… must therefore be anticipated, for it is certainly Hitler’s intention to degrade, and if possible expel the Jewish community from Germany.”25
The ambassador knew this dispatch would be unwelcome to both the prime minister and the Foreign Office, but he continued to send them stark appraisals, including an account of the March 23 Enabling Act and its immediate consequences. The Nazis, he wrote, had ordered local burgomasters to “carry on anti-Jewish propaganda among the people.” Jews were being “systematically removed from their posts” throughout the civil service because of “the accident of race.” Youths were being enrolled in infantry training programs, boys under sixteen were subject to military training, pilots were being recruited for a Luftwaffe—all in open defiance of Versailles. The departure of “so many writers, artists, musicians, and political leaders has created for the moment a kind of vacuum [because] they numbered among their following the intellectual life of the capital and nearly all that was original and stimulating in the world of arts and letters.” Most ominous of all, Jews, together with “Social Democrats, Communists, and non-political critics of Nazi policy” were being seized and sent to “large concentration camps” which were “being established in various parts of the country, one near Munich”—it was Dachau—“being sufficiently large to hold 5,000 prisoners.”26
The ambassador was genuinely alarmed. He told Foreign Secretary Simon that he viewed the future with “great uneasiness and apprehension…. Unpleasant incidents are bound to occur during a revolution, but the deliberate ruthlessness and brutality which have been practiced [here] seem both excessive and unnecessary. I have the impression that the persons directing the policy of the Hitler Government are not normal. Many of us, indeed, have a feeling that we are living in a country where fanatic hooligans and eccentrics have got the upper hand.”27
Rumbold was quietly replaced by Sir Eric Phipps, the British minister in Vienna. But Phipps also found the Nazis outrageous. He told the American ambassador that Hitler was “a fanatic who would be satisfied with nothing less than the dominance of Europe”; that although the Nazis would not invade neighboring countries until 1935, “war is the purpose here”; and that he had actually been approached by the Wilhelmstrasse with a suggestion that Germany and England divide Europe between them, to which he replied that such an agreement would “mean the end of international morality.” The Nazis, never troubled by the principle of diplomatic immunity, opened the British pouches and read these reports before they reached London. Hitler told Lord Londonderry that he hated “the looks of Sir Eric” and felt relations between the two countries would be vastly improved if Britain were represented “by a ‘more modern’ diplomat who showed, at least, some understanding of the changes taking place in Germany.”28
“What are we to do?” a disconcerted Baldwin asked Thomas Jones. His predecessors would have known precisely what to do. The German führer would have been told that Great Britain did not welcome foreign advice in determining ambassadorial appointments. But Jones reflected the new statesmanship when he wrote in his diary, “If it is our policy to get alongside Germany, the sooner Phipps is transferred elsewhere the better.” He should be replaced, Jones thought, by someone “unhampered by professional diplomatic tradition” who could “enter with sympathetic interest into Hitler’s aspirations.” A candidate had already nominated himself. He was Sir Nevile Henderson, Britain’s representative in Argentina. Henderson had let the Foreign Office know that he had regarded Phipps’s assignment to Germany a “most unsuitable appointment” and that wags said “there is no British Embassy in Berlin at all, only a branch of the Quai d’Orsay.” So Phipps was retired “at his own request” and Henderson took over. His colleagues quickly nicknamed him “our Nazi ambassador to Berlin.” Hermann Göring and he became fast friends. Labour MP Josiah Wedgwood noted how he resembled those MPs who had “flocked to Germany at Hitler’s invitation, in like manner,” forgetting their “duty and their country’s standards.”29
But British diplomats and visiting Englishmen were not the government’s sole sources of what was happening in Berlin. In the early years of the new regime, Paul Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry concentrated on preaching its glories to the German people. Cultivation of the foreign press was of lesser concern. As it happened, this was the high summer of foreign correspondents. The best of them—who covered Europe—were intelligent, well-read men, fluent in several languages, who had developed contacts and sources across the full spectrum of society, in the Reich and beyond. Long before Hitler came to power they knew of Nazi brutality and had sent accounts of it home.30
Even after Goebbels decided that something must be done about the foreign press in Berlin, little was. His problem was compounded by geography. Germany’s capital, like England’s, represented a concentration of great power in a small neighborhood. But in London a combination of ceremonial pomp, the discouraging mazes of Whitehall, and a tradition of studied rudeness toward outsiders created a web of safeguards which could be penetrated only by an insider of Churchill’s stature. The heart of the Reich was more vulnerable. In the Zitadelle the great ministries stood shoulder to shoulder along the Wilhelmstrasse, with Hitler’s huge new chancellery at the southern end. People wandered in and out on the flimsiest of excuses. The northern end of the Wilhelmstrasse ended at the Linden. There, the Pariser-P
latz and the Brandenburg Gate marked the eastern edge of the Tiergarten, Berlin’s largest and loveliest park, which spread westward behind the black, burned-out hulk of the Reichstag building. The Reichstag now met in the Kroll Opera House, four hundred yards inside the park. In the midst of all this, on the Pariser-Platz, the best possible strategic location, stood the Hotel Adlon, where the most gifted correspondents lived and worked. Because they continued to be dedicated and resourceful, the outside world was told what was happening even when diplomats in the Berlin embassies were silenced.31
Certainly England’s envoys were under pressure to be mute. Civil servants who criticized Hitler were warned that it was “unpatriotic,” as Lothian put it, “to refuse to believe in the sincerity of Germany.” The British vice-consul in Hanover, a retired army officer turned businessman, sent Whitehall a partial account of German preparations for war. The Nazis, concerned that the full extent of their secret rearmament might be disclosed, demanded his recall, and Sir John Simon obliged without asking the Wilhelmstrasse for an explanation or the vice-consul for his version. In London’s Foreign Office, however, Hitler was beset by critics beyond his reach. His most formidable foe in the diplomatic establishment was Permanent Under Secretary Vansittart—arrogant, sometimes wrong, but dead right about Nazi Germany—who ran the ministry regardless of which party was in office. Ralph Wigram, beneath Vansittart, shared his hostile view of the Nazis, and so, farther down the ladder, did young Duncan Sandys. Sandys had been Rumbold’s third secretary in Berlin. After the ambassador was dismissed, he returned to the FO in London determined that the foreign secretary should know his views. When a dispatch from Britain’s Berlin embassy reached his desk—a fresh appraisal of Hitler’s intentions—Sandys attached a comment proposing that FO diplomacy anticipate the future. Specifically, he wrote, the demilitarized Rhineland buffer state, between Germany and France, would soon become an issue. The Nazis were preparing to march in. Talks between Britain and France now would assure joint action when they did. If no action was contemplated, the Wilhelmstrasse should be told so now; the democracies could demand, and get, a quid pro quo. If they meant to fight, Hitler ought to know that, too; he might back away from the risk. It was a shrewd, prophetic note, but the foreign secretary rejected it with the scribble: “We cannot consider hypothetical issues.” Sandys promptly resigned, entered politics, was elected to Parliament, and joined the small band of Churchillians.