Alone, 1932-1940

  Churchill’s isolation in Parliament seems remarkable now. England was not ready for him. Whenever Hitler loomed large in headlines, Britons plunged their heads deeper into the sand. And their leaders joined them. Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, a British expatriate living in Germany, had first judged Hitler as “a man of sense… who does not want war,” then, when his vision cleared, tried to persuade his countrymen at home that the Nazi regime was evil. He failed, he came to believe, because in Britain the “forces of apathy, of wilful myopia and of general delusion in high places were too strong for us.”105

  Neville Chamberlain told Nancy Astor that when he moved from No. 11 Downing Street to No. 10 he intended to be his “own Foreign Minister.” His half brother Austen chided him: “Neville, you must remember you don’t know anything about foreign affairs.” Neville thought he knew a great deal, however, and his fellow ministers, especially Baldwin, found him impressive. He convinced them that Hitler would never attack France, the Low Countries, and Britain. The Führer, he said, wanted to move against Russia, not the West.

  Actually, Hitler intended to turn south first. On the first page of Mein Kampf he had declared that a rejoining of Austria and Germany was a “goal to be pursued with every means [mit allen Mitteln], all our lives,” and had melded both countries into a single proper noun: Deutschösterreich. His motive, as Churchill saw it, was to open “to Germany both the door of Czechoslovakia and the more spacious portals of southeastern Europe.” His chief obstacle was Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, no tribune of the people but a leader who had risen through free elections. In the summer of 1934 Austrian Nazis, acting on Hitler’s orders, plotted to murder Dollfuss and arrest everyone in his cabinet. At noon on July 25, ten of them, dressed in Austrian army uniforms, passed the chancellery sentries unchallenged. Bursting into the chancellor’s office they shot him and left him on a sofa bleeding to death, ignoring his pleas for a priest. But their cabinet roundup was flawed; among the ministers they failed to capture was Kurt von Schuschnigg, a man of action. On Schuschnigg’s orders Austrian troops overpowered the plotters. He hanged them while Mussolini, jealous of German designs on Austria, rushed fifty thousand troops to the Brenner Pass. This was the kind of language Hitler understood. He lay low, leaving Austria, in Churchill’s phrase, “on the hob.”

  Even The Times commented that the assassination of Dollfuss “makes the name of Nazi stink in the nostrils of the world.” But the appeasers were also shocked by the executions in Vienna and the Duce’s threat of armed intervention. Somehow Schuschnigg’s violence, and Mussolini’s threat of it, blurred the brutal assassination of a national leader on orders from—and not even Germany’s most ardent British supporters doubted the instigator’s identity—another head of state. It was part of the tragedy of the 1930s that the democracies always gave Hitler a second chance, and he never failed to profit from it. Next time his plan to seize Austria would be foolproof and his armed might overwhelming.

  It was Ludendorff’s concept of totaler Krieg, total war, which gave the Reich’s feverish boom its identity: deutsche Wehrwirtschaft, or German war economy. While the House of Commons haggled over petty appropriations for the services and debated whether men in the Royal Navy should be paid a living wage, all German shops were retooling to prepare for war so thoroughly that victory would be inevitable. Within a year of Schacht’s appointment his staff had completed plans to convert 240,000 plants for total war. Lord Eustace Percy later wrote in awe of how Germany succeeded, “in little more than five years, not only in mobilizing a nation and abolishing its unemployment, but in equipping a great army and bringing the dreams of a new strategy within the bounds of reality.” At the time, he added, English observers, official and unofficial, had “considered this feat wholly incredible.”106

  In 1945 Georg Thomas, the German general who served as Schacht’s military liaison officer, published an account of Nazi rearmament in the 1930s. He wrote: “History will know only a few examples of cases where a country has directed, even in peacetime, all its economic forces deliberately and systematically toward the requirements of war, as Germany was compelled [sic] to do in the period between the two world wars.” The army hierarchy was grateful, and particularly aware of its debt to the Reich’s economic czar. In the mid-1930s, on Schacht’s sixtieth birthday, Militärwochenblatt, the official army periodical, paid tribute to him as “the man whose skill and great ability” had made it possible for “an army of 100,000 men” to swell to “its present strength.”107

  But what was its present strength? The Foreign Office was monitoring the German press and radio, studying reports from its intelligence sources in the Reich, and struggling to establish figures, or at least approximations, of Hitler’s growing might. The Nazis were gambling with time. Versailles notwithstanding, on assuming the chancellorship in 1933 Hitler had told Germany’s generals that he wanted heavy army recruitment to start immediately. The generals were aghast at his military goals. Walter Görlitz’s history of the German General Staff clearly documents their doubts. It would be 1942 or 1943, they believed, before they could present him with a reliable military instrument. But Hitler knew them better than they knew themselves. He said he wanted the Reichswehr tripled by October 1, 1934. And the generals nearly made it.108

  Winston’s intelligence apparatus was now almost complete, and the information he assembled was somber. Others shared his alarm; Vansittart remembers that “Wigram, made desperate by our danger, asked leave to leak some of my figures…. After all they were my figures, given to me personally for the good of the world and if necessary for its enlightenment. Indeed the donor had only risked his life on condition that I use them, and the moment had come.” Some of the data arriving at Chartwell were almost unbelievable. Meeting in executive session, the cabinet in early 1934 had decided to sell 118 Rolls-Royce Merlin engines to the German government. Chamberlain had declared that approval of the sale was a matter of principle; trade, like religion, should recognize no frontiers. The engines, he said, had been designed for civilian use, and he refused to yield ground when an Air Ministry minute pointed out that they could also “be used in small fighter planes.” When word of this transaction first reached Churchill, he dismissed it as preposterous; but then the actual bill of lading arrived in a plain envelope. Immediately he proposed a total ban on aircraft deliveries abroad. The Royal Air Force needed every plane it could get, he said, and none should be sold to any other country—certainly not to Nazi Germany. Chamberlain, speaking for the cabinet, rejected his proposal because the trade policy of His Majesty’s Government required that “deficiencies in the Defence Forces should be made up with the least possible interference with the export trade.”109

  It is significant that HMG thought it necessary to make a formal reply to Winston, who, on the face of it, was merely another backbencher. But in England’s ruling classes, little is as it seems. Historic policy decisions, including some which Walter Bagehot incorporated in The English Constitution, have been made by men who never held public office or were even elected to Parliament. It is what one is that counts; Churchill carried with him his lineage, his former eminence, and a presence so commanding that he dominated a room the moment he entered it. He might be mocked in the House of Commons, his calls to arms dismissed as “warmongering” or “scaremongering.” But he was heard; he was seen. No one, however haughty, dismissed him with one of those rude, infuriating stares which Englishmen of position hand down from generation to generation, as though by gene.

  Winston himself, when aroused, could be intimidating, a tremendous advantage in a leader. Unfortunately his hubris made it impossible for him to play the sneak. Because he was the least devious of men, his informants often lost sleep wondering whether he might unwittingly betray their confidences. Vansittart, a fellow patrician (and at times an infuriating snob), was the most visible of them; to those whose spiritual homes were Lothian’s Blickling Hall and the Astors’ Cliveden—citadels of appeasement—his hostility to Hitler had
made him the most dangerous man in Whitehall, although he was, at this time, beyond the reach of his critics. Lesser men worried about the possibility that Churchill might compromise them. Mrs. P., anxious about the informant she had recruited in Westerham, sent Winston a note: “Cmdr Anderson told me very seriously that he had never been frightened in life before, but he is of this, ie that the fact of the vast number of German pilots”—the Nazis had trained over 8,000—“may come out. IT MUST NOT BE DIVULGED OPENLY as it would implicate not only him, but Wing Commander Goddard, whom he must not harm. The number must be camouflaged.” And Major G. P. Myers, in reporting that General Aircraft Ltd. had built only twenty-three Hawker Furies (fighters), reminded Winston: “I am an employee of General Aircraft Ltd. and as such would lose my position were the source of this information disclosed by mischance.”110

  To those threatened by it, Churchill’s carelessness in shielding such informants constituted a major defect. Certainly it was a flaw. So was his lack of consideration for those who served him, and (this became more conspicuous after he moved into No. 10) the callousness with which he discarded men for whom he had no further use. Ingratitude is not attractive. But the man who stood against Nazi Germany when his peers ridiculed him—and who later refused to quit when those around him believed England’s cause lost, thereby saving Western civilization—is surely entitled to a few warts.

  Not so Stanley Baldwin. In the mid-1930s he possessed more prestige and political power than any prime minister since the death of Queen Victoria. Yet in history he is a cipher. Clearly he relished his popularity and knew how quickly it would vanish if he warned the country to prepare for another four years in the trenches and barbed wire of France and Flanders. Everyone would turn on him, including his sovereign. In 1935, when Sir Samuel Hoare succeeded Simon as foreign secretary, Baldwin gave him one instruction—“Keep us out of war, we are not ready for it.” And when Hoare kissed hands within the hour, George V urged him to resolve diplomatic crises with compromises. “I have already been through one war,” he moaned. “How can I go through another? If I am to go on, you must keep us out of one.”111

  Churchill, hammering away at the need for collective security, remained far from the mainstream. Writing in the Daily Mail on July 13, 1934, he reaffirmed his support of the League of Nations, urging agreements, under the sanction and authority of the league, between anxious nations with standing armies: “If you want to stop war, you gather such an aggregation of force on the side of peace that the aggressor, whoever he may be, will not dare challenge…. It is no use disguising the fact that there must be and there ought to be deep anxiety in this country about Germany. This is not the only Germany which we shall live to see, but we have to consider that at present two or three men, in what may well be a desperate situation, have their grip on the whole of that mighty country.”

  In 1934 the BBC decided to broadcast a series of talks by prominent Englishmen on “Causes of War.” The first two speakers declared that wars were fostered by armaments manufacturers (“merchants of death”), by “nationalism” (a pejorative alias for patriotism), and by networks of treaties, specifically the encirclement of Germany, which was called “a gratuitous affront to German pride.” On Friday, November 16, when Churchill’s turn came, his message was very different. Diplomatic attempts to isolate the Third Reich were “the encirclement of an aggressor,” and the only alarming thing about it was that the circle seemed too fragile to contain the rising tide of Teutonic fury. If containment failed, a series of crises would “lead to war. Great Wars usually come only when both sides think they have good hopes of victory.” He knew, he said, that some of his listeners would think none of this threatened them. But they must remember that only a few hours away “there dwells a nation of nearly seventy millions of the most educated, industrious, scientific, disciplined people of the world, who are taught from childhood to think of war and conquest as a glorious exercise, and death in battle as the noblest fate for man. There is a nation which has abandoned all its liberties in order to augment its collective might. There is a nation which with all its strength and virtues is in the grip of intolerance and racial pride unrestrained by law.” He went on:

  At present we lie within a few minutes’ striking distance

  of the French, Dutch, and Belgian coasts,

  and within a few hours of the great aerodromes of Central Europe.

  We are even within cannon-shot of the Continent.

  So close as that!

  Is it prudent, is it possible, however much we might desire it,

  to turn our backs upon Europe and ignore what may happen there?…

  I hope, I pray, and on the whole, grasping the larger hope,

  I believe, that no war will fall upon us,

  But… if you look intently at what is moving towards Great Britain,

  you will see that the only choice open

  is the grim old choice our forefathers had to face, namely,

  Whether we shall submit to the will of the stronger nation

  or whether we shall be prepared

  to defend our rights, our liberties, and indeed our lives.112

  By now a few elder statesmen were drifting toward his standard, and on November 28 Leopold Amery and Sir Robert Horne joined his small group of supporters when he moved to “humbly represent to Your Majesty that, in the present circumstances of the world, the strength of our national defences, and especially of our air defences, is no longer adequate to secure the peace, safety, and freedom of Your Majesty’s faithful subjects.” Speaking to the motion, Winston reasoned that only a strong British military presence would guarantee peace. He reasoned—and was jeered for reasoning—that “to urge preparation of defence is not to assert the imminence of war. On the contrary, if war was imminent preparations for defence would be too late.” Now was the time for Britain to strengthen her ramparts. Parliament could not wish away the fact that German munitions factories were working around the clock—that rearmament dominated all other issues in the Third Reich, while Hitler Youth were taught “the most extreme patriotic, nationalistic and militaristic conceptions.” The greatest peril to England was the Reich’s building of a mighty air arm: “However calmly surveyed, the danger of attack from the air must appear most formidable.” It was also unique. “Never in our history have we been in a position where we could be blackmailed, or forced to surrender our possessions, or take some action which the wisdom of the country would not allow it to do…. And yet, as I am going to show, this is the kind of danger which is coming upon us in a very short time unless we act upon a great scale and act immediately.”

  The time had arrived, he said, “when the mystery surrounding the German rearmament must be cleared up.” The brutal fact was that “Germany already, at this moment, has a military air force—that is to say, military squadrons, with the necessary ground services, and the necessary reserves of trained personnel and material—which only awaits an order to assemble in full open combination; and that this illegal air force is rapidly approaching equality with our own.” In less than three years the Luftwaffe would be “nearly double” the size of the RAF. And his estimate did not include some four hundred Nazi mail planes which could be converted into long-distance bombers “in a few hours” by removing passenger accommodations and fitting in bomb racks, racks which “are already made and kept in close proximity to the machines.”

  All Britain was vulnerable to Nazi bombers; modern aircraft traveling 200, 230, and even 240 miles an hour possessed an “enormous range…. The flying peril is not a peril from which one can fly. It is necessary to face it where we stand. We cannot possibly retreat. We cannot move London. We cannot move the vast population which is dependent upon the estuary of the Thames.”113

  Characteristically, Churchill had singled out one issue—air power—and would set all else aside when the RAF/Luftwaffe question arose. The year ahead would be crowded with crises, and he would play an active role in all of them, but he would always retu
rn to the question of England’s strength in the air, for there England’s very life was at risk. It was the linchpin of his military policy, linked to his call for collective security as diplomatic policy. If European states threatened by Nazi aggression agreed to confront Hitler with a solid phalanx of nations, as Napoleon had been confronted at Leipzig, the RAF’s Fighter Command need never fly into battle.