Alone, 1932-1940

  Van remained in the FO, arguing that the Nazis’ savagery in their own country could not be divorced from the growing possibility of aggression beyond their borders; one had only to read Mein Kampf to know that. The journalist Vernon Bartlett protested that it was “unfair” to judge Hitler by his book; its expansionist passages had been written ten years earlier, when the author was depressed and imprisoned. Van dismissed that as a non sequitur and went on to say that “from the very outset of the regime” in Berlin he had felt “no doubt whatever about the ultimate intentions of the Nazis.” It was, in his opinion, “an open secret that anything said by Hitler is merely for foreign consumption and designed to gain time…. Nothing but a change of the German heart can avert another catastrophe,” and that was “unlikely to come from within, for the true German nature has never changed.”32

  Any accomplished continental diplomat would have seen the significance in a Vansittart minute reporting that the Nazis were determined to make their Reich “first in Europe.” England could not tolerate domination of the Continent by any nation. Churchill defined the principle for the Conservative Members Committee on Foreign Affairs: “For four hundred years the foreign policy of England has been to oppose the strongest, most aggressive, most dominating power on the Continent, and particularly to prevent the Low Countries”—Belgium, Luxembourg, and Holland—“falling into the hands of such a power.” This had been England’s guiding light in its struggles against Philip II of Spain, Louis XIV of France, Napoleon, and the kaiser. Each time, he reminded them, Britain had “joined with the less strong powers, made a combination among them, and thus defeated and frustrated the continental military power, whoever he was, whatever nation he led. Thus we preserved the liberties of Europe… and emerged after four terrible struggles with an ever-growing fame and widening Empire, and with the Low Countries safely protected in their independence.”33

  The House stirred uneasily when Churchill, who, whatever his flaws, had been more hostile to the Bolshevik regime than any other Englishman in public life, told them—on the very day the Enabling Act became law in the Reich—that Nazi Germany was a greater threat than the Soviet Union. “We watch with surprise and distress,” he said, “the tumultuous insurgence and ferocity and war spirit, the pitiless ill-treatment of minorities, the denial of normal protections of civilized society to large numbers of individuals solely on the grounds of race.”34 In any prewar Parliament, so eloquent an appeal to the most cherished of British virtues—decency—would have touched off a demonstration. Now the chamber was silent. The difficulty was that any political coalition becomes indistinguishable from a single-party state. There is no responsible opposition. With Labour’s MacDonald as the King’s first magistrate, guided by the Tory Baldwin as his éminence grise, the coalition government disciplined everyone but the party mavericks, most of whom accepted Lloyd George’s assessment of Hitler anyway.

  The appeasers distrusted France, blamed her for the punitive Versailles clauses, felt Germany had been wronged, and were determined to make restitution. Lord Lothian declared that it was Britain’s moral obligation to support the Germans in their struggle to “escape from encirclement” (the encircling powers, presumably, being France, Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg) “to a position of balance.” He neglected to add that any shift in the status quo would mean the liquidation of legitimate governments. At Versailles the 1914–1918 holocaust had been blamed on the Germans. Now the fashionable scapegoat was Germany’s ancient enemy. “Lady Astor,” The Week reported, “is obsessed with a vivid personal dislike of the French.” As late as November 7, 1936, a member of the cabinet told his ministerial colleagues that Francophobia was increasing in England because the French were an obstacle to Britain “getting on terms with the dictator powers.”35

  The British yearning to accommodate their former enemies took peculiar forms. Upper-class Englishmen had been bred to handle foreign affairs with grace and subtlety. But many of the new breed of German diplomats were boorish. Therefore, envoys from Whitehall, eager to court them, tried to teach the Wilhelmstrasse manners. On August 22, 1932, for example, Sir Maurice Hankey, secretary of the cabinet and of the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID), sent a long memorandum to Prime Minister MacDonald, expressing apprehension over the likelihood that the Germans’ claim to Wehrfreiheit—the right to rearm—would be “conducted with their usual clumsy and tactless way,” which “might have a disastrous effect.” He proposed making a demarche, after consulting the French, urging the Germans to postpone their demands. This failing, Britain should attempt to persuade the Wilhelmstrasse “to make their proposals in as harmless a form as possible.”36

  The foreign secretary, Sir John Simon, had his own euphemism for the rebuilding of the Reich’s armed might. It was “parity.” His resolve—and the cabinet’s—was to sanction an expanding German army while disarming the French, until, after an infinite number of carefully monitored phases, both nations possessed the same number of soldiers, tanks, artillery pieces, warplanes, and warships.

  The Times thought it “essential” that the Germans be permitted “to build the forbidden weapons at once.” Restoring Germany’s martial might would restore her pride and strengthen her feelings of security; then Germany and England, “in company,” would launch a program of genuine, large-scale disarmament. The prime minister was first impressed, then inspired. Thus was the seed of the extraordinary MacDonald Plan implanted. Its first tenet was that England, as the conscience of Europe, would divest herself of her most formidable weapons. The press, the universities, labor unions, and every sounding board of public opinion would enthusiastically endorse the plan. When the League of Nations Union conducted a nationwide poll, the Peace Ballot, it found that 10.4 million Britons favored international disarmament, while 870,000—about 8 percent—opposed it.37

  As Churchill later wrote, “The virtues of disarmament were extolled in the House of Commons by all parties. On June 29, 1931, Ramsay MacDonald, looking forward to the first World Disarmament Conference, had proudly announced in the House that the dismantling of England’s armed forces had been “swift, patient, and persistent,” and that although it had gone “pretty near the limit,” he intended to make “still further reductions” once he had persuaded other European governments to follow suit. His first target would be Paris. Germany, stripped of her defenses, constituted no threat to the peace, but the huge French army could attack across the Rhine at any time.38

  Churchill instantly replied that the French army, far from being dangerous, was the strongest guarantee of peace on the Continent. Moreover, the chancelleries of eastern Europe, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, “look to France for guidance and leadership.” If the French followed MacDonald’s advice and sent half their poilus home, he continued, those states between Germany and Russia would be lost, leaderless, and ripe for the plucking. Britain must be armed—“England’s hour of weakness is Europe’s hour of danger.” He urged the prime minister to abandon his mission: “The sudden disappearance or undue weakness of that factor of unquestionable French military superiority may open the floodgates of measureless consequence.”39

  Even as he had risen to speak, other members had begun drifting out of the chamber. Winston, they told one another, had always been against disarmament. Every MP knew it; they discounted it; he would make no converts here. But he had his readers, and as the diplomats convened in Geneva, he toiled in his Chartwell study urging close scrutiny of all proposals by the conferees in Switzerland. In the Daily Mail he wrote that “millions of well-meaning English people” were praying for a successful conference. That, he said, was their vulnerability: “There is such a horror of war in the great nations who passed through Armageddon that any declaration or public speech against armaments, although it consisted only of platitudes and unrealities, has always been applauded; and any speech or assertion which set forth the blunt truths has been incontinently relegated to the category of ‘warmonge
ring.’ ”40

  Despite MacDonald’s optimism, the first round of talks at Geneva ended in July 1932 after five months of frustration. Nothing had been accomplished. Sixty nations, the United States and the U.S.S.R. among them, had sent delegations, but every session ended in a deadlock between the Germans, who insisted on permission to rearm before any other item on the agenda could be even considered, and the French, who argued that the disarmament of all European states be supervised, and then monitored, by an international police force. MacDonald, undiscouraged, laid plans for resuming the conference.

  To Churchill the negotiations were highly suspect. He believed, quite simply, that military weakness invited attack, a view more controversial then than it has since become. As early as September 9, 1928, he had written a friend: “We always seem to be getting into trouble over these stupid disarmament manoeuvres, and I personally deprecate all these premature attempts to force agreements on disarmament.” Was it likely, he asked in the Daily Mail of May 26, 1932, that France, with twenty million fewer people than Germany, and half the number of youths coming to military age every year, would deprive herself “of the mechanical aids and appliances on which she relies to prevent a fourth invasion in little more than a hundred years?” The goals of disarmament were admirable, but they would never be “attained by mush, slush, and gush.” The hard and bitter truth was that lasting demilitarization of Europe could only be “advanced steadily by the harrassing expense of fleets and armies, and by the growth of confidence in a long peace.”41

  Convalescing from paratyphoid, Churchill was confined to Chartwell during the opening of Parliament’s disarmament debate of November 10, 1932, and missed Sir John Simon’s affirmation that it was the objective of British policy to find a “fair meeting of Germany’s claim to the principle of equality.” Baldwin, supporting disarmament as the only way to peace, spoke of what he called “the terror of the air.” Enemy bombers, he said, could hammer London into the earth like a hot white saucer. No defense against them was possible: “I confess that the more I have studied this question, the more depressed I have been at the perfectly futile attempts that have been made to deal with this problem.” He thought that “the man on the street” should “realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed.” Whatever happened, he said, “the bomber will always get through.”42

  Baldwin had raised, or perhaps stumbled upon, one of the thorniest military issues of the time. The weight of professional military opinion was on his side. In England, Italy, the United States, France, and Germany, most air strategists subscribed to what was called the Douhet Theory. Shortly before his death in 1930, an Italian airman, General Giulio Douhet, had published The War of 19—, in which he argued that armies and navies should be relegated to defensive roles while bomber fleets won the war. Any nation investing heavily in air defense was risking defeat, he wrote, for “No one can command his own sky if he cannot command his adversary’s sky.” His most important convert was Nazi air force chief Hermann Göring, the 1918 ace, with his treasured memories of the Red Baron and the wind in the wires. Unfortunately for Göring, one aging RAF officer thought Douhet’s thesis fatally flawed. He was Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, who would later command the RAF in the Battle of Britain. Dowding and eminent British scientists, colleagues of the Prof, convinced Churchill that every offensive weapon could be countered by imaginative, intrepid defenders. They cited fast fighters and trained antiaircraft crews; later they would brief Winston on RDF, an acronym so secret that until the war only a handful of men would know of it. It represented “radio direction finding”—or, as the Americans were to christen it, radar.43

  In the Daily Mail of November 17, Churchill called on the government to look to Britain’s defenses: “If Geneva fails, let the National Government propose to Parliament measures necessary to place our Air Force in such a condition of power and efficiency that it will not be worth anyone’s while to come here and kill our women and children in the hope that they may blackmail us into surrender.” Six days later he addressed the House on the issue. He had studied Baldwin’s speech and thought it needlessly pessimistic. It had “created anxiety,” he said, “and it created also perplexity.” S.B. had left an unjustified impression of “fatalism, and even perhaps of helplessness.” The time had come not to dismantle the RAF, but to expand it. “Why should we fear the air?” he asked. “We have as good technical knowledge as any country.” He pressed the government to “consider profoundly and urgently the whole position of our air defense.”

  Of the French, he said, “They only wish to keep what they have got, and no initiative in making trouble would come from them.” He was “not an alarmist” (this drew jeers) and did not “believe in the imminence of war” (more jeers). But, he continued, “the removal of just grievances of the vanquished ought to precede the disarmament of the victors.”44

  Diplomatic conversations and disarmament pacts seemed tiresome to Britons in those years. The Depression persisted, and they sought diversion in the yo-yo craze, three trunk murders, and the exceptional seductive prowess of the middle-aged rector of Stiffkey, who prowled London teashops, persuading an astonishing number of young waitresses to slip into toilets with him, assume awkward positions, and copulate. Defrocked, the vicar found employment as a tamer of lions and was eaten by one. The popular songs of the era were played in slow, almost lugubrious measures: “How Deep Is the Ocean,” “Say It Isn’t So,” and “With My Eyes Wide Open, I’m Dreaming,” which, Churchill later suggested, ought to have been Ramsay MacDonald’s theme as the prime minister crossed the Channel in February 1933 and entrained for Geneva, where the plan bearing his name would highlight the agenda of the resuming disarmament talks.45

  Churchill was not impressed. In Parliament he produced a copy of the Swiss newspaper La Liberale Suisse and quoted from the leading article. Prime Minister MacDonald’s call for “German equality in armaments,” he said, was depicted in the Swiss paper as raising suspicions “all over the Continent” that England wanted to “help Germany at the expense of her neighbours.” The Swiss, he continued, saw it as “part of a deliberate plot by which the British Prime Minister is pursuing those pro-German sympathies which he has had for so many years. It is devised in order to bring about the defeat or paralysis of France at the hands of Germany and Italy, and so to expose the small nations to the ambition of the Teuton mass.” Churchill tossed the paper aside. “Of course it is not true,” he told the House, but “you see how small countries work out these proposals.”46

  MacDonald had called the Continent a house “inhabited by ghosts.” It wasn’t, said Churchill; “Europe is a house inhabited by fierce, strong, living entities. Poland, recreated at Versailles, is not a ghost: Poland is a reincarnation.” But he was anxious about Teutonic influences. Poland’s national character, like Germany’s, was marred by a livid streak of anti-Semitism; the “odious conditions now ruling in Germany” might spread across the border “and another persecution and pogrom of Jews [begin] in this new area.” Czechoslovakia—“the land of Good King Wenceslas”—had also emerged from Versailles “with its own dignity established.” To be sure, there were Germans living within its borders, but they had always lived there, as inhabitants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Neither they nor their ancestors had ever been citizens of the Reich.

  Indeed, he continued, at the Versailles peace conference, “No division was made of the great masses of the German people…. No attempt was made to divide Germany…. No State was carved out of Germany. She underwent no serious territorial loss, except the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, which she herself had seized only fifty years before. The great mass of Germans remained united after all that Europe had passed through, and they are more vehemently united today than ever before.”47

  The response in Germany was outrage. The Birmingham Post’s Berlin correspondent cabled: “Today’s newspapers are full with ‘sharp warnings’ for England, introduced by headlines about… Mr Wins
ton Churchill’s ‘impudence.’ ” Winston had no intention of lowering his voice. Eleven days later he told the Royal Society of St. George that the greater peril lay not in Berlin, but in British “defeatist doctrines” arising from “the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals.” He said: “Nothing can save England if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then indeed our story is told.”48