It was during the disarmament talks in Switzerland that Winston hit his mother lode of intelligence. He found that although he was a pariah in the House of Commons, certain British civil servants in key positions regarded him as heroic. Equally useful was Winston’s long career in the governments of Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith, Lloyd George, and Baldwin. He was known to hundreds of men in public life, the City, Fleet Street, and—most important—those who worked in shabby little offices opening off the long, bleak corridors of Whitehall. During his twenty years in office Winston had headed seven different ministries. He and Sir Robert Vansittart, for example, had been friends since 1902. The civil servants knew that soon England’s survival might be at stake. As Michael Creswell, deputy head of the Foreign Office’s Central Department, put it, they felt that their political leader, the foreign secretary, Sir John Simon, did not want to know “uncomfortable things.”79
And so, even as Hitler consolidated his power, the first trickle of reports and memoranda not meant for Winston’s eyes began to find their way there. It grew to a steady, broadening stream, until, as Professor Herbert G. Nicholas of Oxford puts it, Churchill, “supported by a small but devoted personal following,” was able to “build up at Chartwell a private information centre, the information of which was often superior to that of the government.”80 The civil servants who were among his sources were the highly educated, well-connected, understated and underpaid men who really governed England and the Empire. The prime minister and cabinet made policy, but they relied on the briefings of their permanent under secretaries and the tiers of veteran specialists below them. Civil servants remained in place while governments came and went. They belonged to no party. But they knew when Britain’s interests were in danger and Britons misinformed. Sir John Simon received daily reports from Vansittart, Ralph Wigram, and their staffs. If Simon distorted the truth in the House of Commons, the men in the FO swore and kicked their wastebaskets, but it had been happening for generations, and they had grown resigned to it. There was, however, a distinction between manipulation in the interests of political expediency and what amounted to treachery—compromising England’s very existence.
The line had always existed. Every sensible man had known when it had been crossed. But in the past the incidents had been rare. Now, however, the line was being traversed so often that it had become blurred beyond recognition. The quiet men in bowlers, each with his rolled umbrella and his copy of The Times, became increasingly troubled. Several decided to approach Churchill. It was a momentous move. They were risking not only their careers, but also imprisonment, for, as one informant reminded Winston, the government “always has the Official Secrets Act to fall back upon.” Under this remarkable piece of legislation, which would be unconstitutional in the United States, the disclosure of any government information, even if the purpose is to expose wrongdoing, is a crime. As Anthony Lewis pointed out in the New York Times, the act “intimidates the press and limits public discussion of policy.” If the scholar of today concludes that Churchill saved England, the meticulous, often anonymous men who faced ruin and jail yet still put their country first also deserve to be remembered.81
Their first important contact with Chartwell came in the spring of 1933, when tension in Britain’s Geneva delegation led to a split in the Foreign Office. A. C. Temperley, one of the frustrated British delegates, said aloud what had been on everyone’s mind—that to talk of disarmament while Hitler secretly armed was absurd. Then he put it in writing: “Can we afford to ignore what is going on behind the scenes in Germany?” If the Nazis were unchecked, he wrote, Hitler would settle for nothing less than annexation of all of Europe. He proposed an ultimatum: tell Berlin to stop arming, and, if the Nazis balked, add a “hint of force.” He was confident that it would work. At this point Nazi arrogance was all facade; Germany was “powerless before the French army and our fleet. Hitler, for all his bombast, must give way. Strong concerted action… should prove decisive…. There is a mad dog abroad once more and we must resolutely combine either to ensure its destruction or at least its confinement until the disease has run its course.”
In the margin of Temperley’s minute Vansittart scrawled his “entire agreement”; then he urged Eden to distribute copies to members of the cabinet and then have it read to them. It was done—“to no effect,” Van wryly noted. Reginald (“Rex”) Leeper, head of the FO’s News Department, snatched up the fallen standard. Temperley had addressed his note to Leeper, knowing that Leeper wanted Britain to challenge Nazi rearmament. Following the cabinet’s rejection of the suggested ultimatum, Leeper said he knew exactly how and when to trap the Nazis—now, at the conference in Geneva. After one of the Nazi delegates had spoken “in the best Hitlerian manner,” he suggested, the Britons and Frenchmen should rise “one after another” and expose what was happening in the Ruhr. Leeper knew this was a “sensational step,” he wrote, but if the Geneva talks continued on their present course, the conference would “drift to its certain death” and the munitions factories in the Ruhr would continue with increasing momentum.82
The prime minister and Simon had been pursuing a different approach. On June 16, 1932, MacDonald had met with Franz von Papen, then Germany’s chancellor, and the result had been a reduction of the German reparations liability to a token sum—three thousand marks. Although Churchill was highly critical of the Treaty of Versailles, he believed in abiding by the rules of diplomacy; such bilateral agreements on the side, violating this or that clause, diminished the integrity of the whole. And Hitler—who was loutish even in small triumphs—roused Winston’s wrath by announcing with a smirk that the three thousand marks “would be worth only a few marks in a few months.” Churchill angrily told the House that the massive American loans of the 1920s, meant to support German reparations payments, had actually been used by the Germans to modernize their industries—factories which could turn out arms faster than those in Britain and France. He wanted a firm reply to the German Challenge.
But the coalition was marching to the beat of a different drummer. Offending the Germans, the foreign secretary argued, would be disastrous. He and the prime minister were determined to return from Switzerland with Germany’s signature on a disarmament treaty, and if there was too high a price to pay, no one sitting around the table mentioned it. Leeper’s proposal was therefore rejected. The consequences of jettisoning it were graver than anyone there knew; it led to Winston’s deep penetration of the Foreign Office, directly across the street from No. 10. The FO became the most valuable beam in his intelligence structure: Churchillians there included Vansittart, Rex Leeper, and—in the FO’s inner sanctum, the Central Department—Ralph Wigram, the department’s head, together with his immediate subordinates, Michael Creswell and Valentine Lawford.
Everyone remembers Wigram as a man of immense charm. Lawford’s first impression of him was one of “gentleness, young looks, shyness, modesty, economy of language.” After Eton and Oxford he had risen almost effortlessly, drawing assignments at all the choice embassies. In 1933, aged forty-three, a Commander of St. Michael and St. George (CMG), he was brought back to the Foreign Office and, the following year, appointed counsellor. Beginning on the day Hitler became dictator of Germany, Wigram and Vansittart had watched developments in the Third Reich with growing concern. Now they agreed to share their information with Churchill. On October 26, 1934, Wigram sent his first significant report to Chartwell through Creswell and Morton. The Central Department had learned, he wrote, that the Nazis were “working for an army of offensive strength; in two years they expect to have 1,000 warplanes ready for combat.” The threat was not immediate. They would “have to be mad… to try any games in the immediate future.” However, he wrote, by 1938, “we shall be faced by a very, very much stronger Germany.” The Central Department had acquired a transcription of a long conversation between Hitler and Admiral Erich Raeder, dated June, and ending: “The Führer demands complete secrecy on the construction of the U-boats.” By Novembe
r 19, 1934, the counsellor’s anxiety had further increased. Hitler now led an army of 300,000 men, and its ranks were growing every day. The kaiser’s Generalstab—the army’s General Staff, outlawed at Versailles—was back in power. Since Hitler took over, Wigram pointed out, the Reichswehr had stopped publishing its annual list of officers. Otherwise, their swollen rolls would betray the Reichswehr’s rapid expansion.83
Wigram recommended that the British government begin the immediate stockpiling of strategic materials and industrial retooling for armaments manufacture. Soon the Reich’s military establishment would be strong enough to defy enforcement of Versailles by the Allies. This, he predicted, would be revealed by the Germans themselves. Before their might was great enough “to wage an aggressive war,” Hitler would be demanding this and that, showing off his army to blackmail other European powers. The Nazis, the counsellor’s report predicted, would become “increasingly arrogant and definitely aggressive. Instead of emitting protests and airing grievances Germany will make demands and assert rights.” When the Führer possessed the greatest war machine in the world, he would turn his “attention to the absorption of Austria and the penetration of central Europe.” Wigram’s recommendations came at the end of this minute. If Britain accepted Nazi military might as a fait accompli, France would be alienated. Once the Western democracies’ front was broken, no other combination of continental nations would dare resist the Führer. Therefore he proposed that Whitehall and the Quai d’Orsay “arraign” the Reich before the League of Nations, charging it with violations of Versailles. This strategy, he suggested, would “give us an opportunity for informing public opinion clearly of the nature of German rearmament.” So warned, the Belgians and the Dutch would, in Wigram’s judgment, join the anti-Nazi alliance.
Read today, this yellowing document reveals a sagacity and vision seldom matched in Britain’s archives. Yet after its submission to the foreign secretary, the prime minister, and the rest of the cabinet, it was returned with comments which could only be interpreted as hostile, or, at best, indifferent. Before a debate in the House senior civil servants would walk up to Parliament and enter the “briefing box.” There they would respond to ministerial questions. Creswell recalls: “One felt again and again that for them the important thing was to get through the debate…. What was happening in the world wasn’t in the forefront of their mind.” They hadn’t studied the FO’s assessments and appreciations; at most they had glanced through them. And that was what protected the secret of the civil servants’ Churchill connection. Reading the transcriptions of those parliamentary debates today, one can only imagine the ministers’ astonishment as Churchill rose to face them and reel off facts and figures that seemed to have come from nowhere—but were always confirmed afterward. Had Simon, say, or Hoare done his homework, they would have realized that Churchill had access to documents stamped “Most Secret.”
At first the drill was Wigram-to-Creswell-to-Morton-to-Churchill. Then Ava Wigram came to Chartwell for the weekend, bearing analyses her husband had drawn up for a government that didn’t want them. In time Ralph joined his wife, staying overnight. If a matter was urgent, however, an exchange in London was quicker and safer. Wigram’s home was at 4 North Street (now Great Peter Street), three blocks from Parliament and a brief stroll from Churchill’s pied-à-terre in Morpeth Mansions.
Although Churchill never wrote of their meetings—their existence was unknown until Creswell revealed them nine years after Winston’s death—one can surmise how they must have appealed to his romantic imagination: the furtive telephone conversation; hurrying down the foggy streets; the risk of discovery; the eager anticipation, afterward, of opening the plain unmarked buff envelope containing plans and details his foes in Parliament didn’t know he had; visualizing their dismay if they knew—picturing, with ever greater gusto, the horror of Hitler if he knew.
Wigram’s information was hard, precise, and tersely told. Churchill would read the latest FO accounts of the Luftwaffe’s growing strength; reports (as early as May 1935) of Nazi propaganda campaigns among the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia; columns of figures on artillery, tanks, and other Nazi armaments; and advance copies of Hitler’s speeches. Winston had to disguise his sources, and sometimes lose a debate when he had the clinching facts in his hands, but in time he became as well informed as the prime minister and in some ways more so, because certain documents, inconsistent with the catechism of appeasement, were suppressed or altered before they reached the P.M.’s desk. Winston, however, had seen the originals, and seen them first. Long afterward, Sir John Colville, who became one of his principal aides, looked through Winston’s papers of the 1930s and was astounded by what he found. Colville wrote: “Why the Government allowed… its servants to supply ammunition to its principal critic and gadfly, I have never understood.” Neither the prime minister nor the foreign secretary would have approved, Colville reasoned, and after World War II, he recalled, he “asked Churchill this question direct and was given an uncharacteristically evasive answer. In fact all Winston said was: ‘Have another drop of brandy.’ ”84
Although ill served by ministers who refused to recognize the truth, the British public, enjoying a free press, was aware of some of the more flagrant abuses in the Third Reich. On May 10, 1933, Nazis had celebrated their contempt for learning by building an enormous bonfire of books, incinerating all works on psychology and philosophy and all written by Jews, socialists, and liberals. On July 1 Nazi fliers began dropping leaflets and urging all Austrians to support the country’s tiny Nazi party in plans to overthrow the government of Engelbert Dollfuss, which, though Fascist, had come to office through free elections. If that didn’t work, Hitler confided to subordinates, he would have Dollfuss killed.
On July 14 the Reich chancellor dissolved the coalition of parties which had brought him to power. Any political speech or pamphlet not endorsed by the Nazis was verboten. Of Germany’s three greatest newspapers, the 230-year-old Vossische Zeitung, comparable to The Times of London and the New York Times, was forced to close; the Berliner Tageblatt’s Jewish owner was driven out of business, and the Frankfurter Zeitung’s editorial hierarchy, largely Jewish, was replaced by Nazis. Völkischer Beobachter and Der Angriff, the two official Nazi organs, glorified Nazi street terrorists and ran flattering front-page pictures of those responsible for the desecration of synagogues. Germans who protested Nazi outrages were sent to Dachau or other, newer stockades. Teachers were told in the official publication of their profession, Der Deutsche Erzieher, that Mein Kampf was their “unfehlbarer Leitstern” (“infallible star”). Those who actually read the book could have had no doubts that the chancellor’s infallible star would eventually lead their children to far-flung battlefields.
Central Europe lay under an “evil and dangerous” cloud, Churchill told an audience of his constituents in Theydon Bois after reading Group Captain Herring’s report in 1933. “No one,” he said, “can watch the events which are taking place in Germany without increasing anxiety about what their outcome will be. At present Germany is only partly armed and most of her fury is turned upon herself. But already her smaller neighbors, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, and Denmark, feel a deep disquietude. There is grave reason to believe that Germany is arming herself, or seeking to arm herself, contrary to the solemn treaties exacted from her in her hour of defeat.” He told the House: “At a moment like this, to ask France to halve her army while Germany doubles hers, to ask France to halve her air force while the German air force”—here he must have been sorely tempted to quote Herring—“remains whatever it is, is a proposal likely to be considered by the French Government, at present at any rate, as somewhat unreasonable.”85
In Geneva, however, there was little support for the Quai d’Orsay’s lonely stand. This may puzzle those who remember the great alliance of 1914–1918. But England and France had been enemies for nearly a thousand years before then, leaping back and forth across the Channel to fly at each other’s throats. I
n Geneva the French believed they were conducting themselves sans peur et sans reproche. Actually they weren’t. To their new allies in eastern Europe the delegates from Paris asked not “What can we do for you?” but “What can you do for us?” The instinctive French response to battlefield disasters, in 1870 and 1914—it would be heard again in 1940—was the wail: “Nous sommes trahis!” (“We are betrayed!”). As other nations in Geneva drew away from them, the French foreign minister declared: “Henceforth France will guarantee her security by her own means.” Alistair Horne comments: “For sheer arrogant folly [this declaration] is hard to beat.”86
Had the Geneva disarmament talks continued, British Foreign Office documents reveal, France herself would have been betrayed by her greatest ally; but the conference never reached that point. On March 27 Japan, offended by the League of Nations’ censure of her Manchurian aggression, had announced that she would quit the league. It was a precedent and Hitler liked it. He had been provoked by the conferees’ decision that his storm troopers—there were now 500,000 of them—counted as fighting men, and he declared that league overflights, checking upon the Reich’s compliance with any agreement, were “beschimpfend” (“insulting”). In the light of French provocations, said the Wilhelmstrasse, the German Reich refused to apologize for its glorious past. Nor need it give reasons for its present position. The Reich was a sovereign state, though it was not being treated like one, which was intolerable and “unverschämt” (“shameless”).87
President Roosevelt had tried to free the conferees from their gridlock by suggesting a ban on all offensive weapons. Privately, Hitler was furious. Nevertheless, he saw great political possibilities in the message from the White House, and on May 17, 1933, he exploited them in a deeply moving, breathtakingly meretricious speech before the Reichstag. FDR, he said, had earned the “warmen Dank” of the Reich. He accepted the president’s proposals and stood ready to scrap the Reich’s offensive weapons the moment other powers did the same. Germany was indeed prepared to disband her entire military establishment, together with uniforms, weapons, and ammunition, under the same circumstances, and would sign any nonaggression treaty, “because she does not think of attacking but only of acquiring security.” The National Socialists cherished no ambition to “germanisieren” (“Germanize”) other nations: “Frenchmen, Poles, and others are our neighbors, and we know of no event, compatible with history, which can conceivably change this reality.”88