The Anglo-German Naval Agreement was signed on June 18, 1935—Hitler sent Ribbentrop to London as his personal emissary—eleven days after Baldwin succeeded MacDonald at No. 10, thereby becoming prime minister de jure as well as de facto. Less than three months had passed since the Führer made public the fact that Germany had renounced Versailles and was rearming. Europe, the United States, and Japan took note of Britain’s cynical disregard of her Versailles obligations, and Mussolini, deciding he could now safely flout the League of Nations Covenant, ordered his generals to plan an invasion of Ethiopia, to take place after the rainy season ended.148
The most baffling aspect of this diplomatic debacle was Britain’s treatment of her great ally across the Channel. In a spectacular understatement, Eden had pointed out to his ministerial colleagues that the French, when they learned of the agreement, might have “reservations.” Certainly they were entitled to them. Hoare told the cabinet that it was “essential” to humor the Germans in certain small requests, among them a pledge that the French be told none of the treaty’s provisions. France also had a first-class navy, and the new agreement would put her ships within range of German naval gunners. Yet His Majesty’s Foreign Office could not even tell the Quai d’Orsay how many ships Hitler could build, their size, and their categories—battleships, heavy cruisers, light cruisers, destroyers, U-boats. Actually, the pact permitted the Nazis to construct five battleships whose armament and tonnage outclassed any vessels in the Royal Navy—this had been accomplished by a mistranslation of one clause—together with twenty-one cruisers, sixty-four destroyers, and, in practice, an unlimited number of submarines.149
French loyalty to the triumphant entente of 1914–1918 was vital to England’s safety. If war were declared, it would be France’s job to contain the German army; at most the British could send but five divisions to the Continent at the outset and six later. But beginning with Hitler’s defiant rejection of Versailles and continuing through the imminent crises in the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, France was to be the passive member of the 1918 entente, deferring to the British, accepting decisions made in Whitehall. The patriciate ruling England enjoyed their dominant role, accepting Gallic docility without question. They had never understood why anyone should question their judgment and thought the French were merely being sensible.
Churchill shared the illusion of France’s defensive strength. Speaking in the House three days after Hitler’s defiant acknowledgment of German rearmament, Winston said: “The frontiers of Germany are very much nearer to London than the sea-coasts of this island are to Berlin, and whereas practically the whole of the German bombing air force can reach London with an effective load, very few, if any, of our aeroplanes can reach Berlin with any appreciable load of bombs.”150 He considered this warning dire. He did not anticipate England’s plight if Nazi bombers were based on French airfields—directly across the Channel. Carrying blockbuster bombs, they could then devastate London and Britain’s great industrial cities, including their armaments factories, in the Midlands. Even Churchill’s imagination could not encompass such a calamity. The possibility that the Germans could actually conquer France and overrun Paris, using over a million superb infantrymen behind a great panzer force, was never raised. He still believed that the French army was “the finest in the world.”
Having predicted Hitler’s outrages throughout 1935, Winston was treated with new respect in Parliament, but, he later wrote, although the House “now listened to me with close attention, I felt a sense of despair.” The year had seen a series of triumphs for the Führer and humiliating defeats for the democracies. Baldwin, Churchill now knew, was hopeless. He recalled, from an 1883 issue of Punch, lines he had memorized as a young schoolboy in Brighton:
Who is in charge of the clattering train?
The axles creak and the couplings strain;
And the pace is hot, and the points are near,
And Sleep has deadened the driver’s ear;
And the signals flash through the night in vain,
For Death is in charge of the clattering train.151
Baldwin was asleep at the throttle, so Winston decided that he must become the engineer, or at any rate the conductor or stoker—in short, a member of the government’s crew and therefore a participant in the formulation of policy. On August 2, 1935, Parliament passed the Government of India Act, charting the course which would lead to Indian independence and, at the same time, ending Winston’s six-year struggle to keep India in the Empire. He had quit the Tory leadership because of its decision to end the Raj, but now India was no longer an issue. He was free to concentrate on the Nazi menace, and, as he saw it, to rejoin his old cabinet colleagues. On August 25 he addressed an open letter to his Epping constituents, a eulogy to the glories of British India, which ended: “We have done our best and we have done our duty; we cannot do more.”
As a propitiary gesture he invited G. D. Birla, one of Mahatma Gandhi’s chief lieutenants, to lunch.* Afterward, Birla wrote Gandhi that the luncheon had been “one of my most pleasant experiences” in England. His host, he reported, had said, “Mr. Gandhi has gone very high in my esteem since he stood up for the untouchables,” and had then gone on to express the hope that a Congress party regime would bring “improvement in the lot of the masses, morally as well as materially. I do not care whether you are more or less loyal to Great Britain. I do not mind about education, but give the masses more butter.” Winston had told Birla: “I am genuinely sympathetic towards India. You need not expect anything but silence or help from us.” Later Attlee introduced Churchill to Jawaharlal Nehru. According to him, the two old Harrovians “got on splendidly. Winston said how he had admired Nehru’s courage in standing up to rioters and Nehru said he had enjoyed reading Winston’s books. They chatted most amicably and something like real confidence was established, and to the best of my knowledge never diminished.”152
In the weeks before November’s general election, no Tory campaigned more tirelessly for Conservative candidates than Churchill. He offered his services to the party’s central office, and they scheduled him to deliver major addresses in Wanstead, Hull, Biggleswade, Epping, Woodford, and South Chingford. He would decide his own strategy, of course, but Baldwin had chosen the ground on which the party as a whole would fight. The issues would be the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, trade and shipping, and public works. Actually, as Macmillan later recalled, Baldwin’s own campaigning was “somewhat disingenuous. His speeches were admirably devised to suit all shades of opinion.” He declared, “No great armaments!” That pleased the pacifists. Advocates of lower taxes wanted to stress the government’s refusal to join Hitler in an arms race; Baldwin preferred an agreement with Hitler, which, he said, provided solid evidence that hard-headed, no-nonsense Britons could deal with dictators.153
Hitler, Baldwin’s audiences were reassured, was not the menace he had been made out: “There may be Governments deliberately planning the future, leading reluctant or unsuspecting people into the shambles…. I confess that in my own political experience I have not encountered Governments possessed of all these malevolent qualities. Most Governments seem not much better or worse than the people they govern.” To those like Leo Amery, who privately predicted that appeasement might encourage dictators, Chamberlain, speaking for the prime minister, heatedly replied that this was a “mischievous distortion.” The choice, he said, was “whether we shall make one last effort at Geneva for peace and security” or submit in a “cowardly surrender” to warmongerism, which would hold them up to “the shame of our children and our children’s children.” It was Chamberlain’s strength that he never doubted that events would vindicate him; it was his fate that they would condemn him. Baldwin was the same, and the tragedy for both was that they lived long enough to know it.154
Churchill remained faithful to the cadence of his own drummer. Tory whips had approached him, advising him his prospects in the party would brighten if he refrained from fresh att
acks on the Nazis until after the election. Winston replied that although that was the prime minister’s line, it wasn’t his. While Baldwin was dismissing the Nazi threat, Winston, in speeches and in articles for the Daily Mail and Strand, told his audiences the Ruhr’s “great wheels revolve… disgorging weapons” for “the already largely war-mobilized arsenals and factories of Germany.” As the campaign reached the home stretch he delivered a major address in Parliament, reminding members that Hitler was still spending £800 million a year—$3.9 billion at the then current rate of exchange—on arms. He said: “We cannot afford to see Naziism in its present phase of cruelty and intolerance, with all its hatreds and all its gleaming weapons, paramount in Europe,” and he noted that he was being joined by fresh converts in the House. Only yesterday Lloyd George, finally aware of the Nazi peril, had performed an act of contrition in the House. Winston said that neither Lloyd George “nor His Majesty’s Government will, I imagine, disagree today with the statement that Germany is already well on her way to becoming, and must become incomparably, the most heavily armed nation in the world and the nation most completely ready for war.”155
There could be no doubt, he declared, that Nazi plans of European conquest existed. “Germany is an armed camp,” he told Parliament. “The whole population is being trained from childhood up to war.” And: “The German air force is developing at great speed and in spite of ruthless sacrifice of life.” In “The Truth about Hitler,” published in the November 1935 Strand, he wrote of how the Führer, after secretly rearming, had “sprung forward armed to the teeth, with his munitions factories roaring night and day, his aeroplane squadrons forming in ceaseless succession, his submarine crews exercising in the Baltic, and his armed hosts trampling from one end of the broad Reich to the other.” Condemning Hitler’s “ferocious doctrines,” and predicting that they would be carried out with “brutal vigour,” he wrote that German soil was “pock-marked” with concentration camps, where masses of Germans, from “world-famous scientists” to “wretched little Jewish children,” were persecuted. Nothing could save a Jew from imprisonment and torture. “No past services, no proved patriotism, even wounds sustained in war,” could prevent atrocities against people “whose only crime was that their parents had brought them into the world.” Churchill referred skeptics to Mein Kampf, where Jews were described as “a foul and odious race.” But the inmates of these camps were not all Jewish. Under Hitler “the slightest criticism” of the Führer and his criminal regime was “an offence against the State.”156
The British ambassador in Berlin reported that Churchill’s attacks on Hitler were widely covered in German newspapers, some of which “point out that the speech has special importance in view of Mr. Churchill’s almost certain inclusion in the next Cabinet.” There was no such certainty, of course, but throughout the thirties Winston seemed more formidable abroad than in England—a consequence, perhaps, of his perception and his eloquence. On October 30 Ralph Wigram minuted: “Mr. Churchill is making himself very unpopular in Germany,” and the ambassador reported that the tone of Winston’s piece “is much resented here.” Desmond Morton, however, cabled Chartwell that “Germany did not like it—but resentfully admires it in private. It is right that Germany should realize that we are not all lulled into weak-livered complacency.”157
Hitler read a translation of the Strand piece. According to Wigram’s sources, he all but flung himself on the carpet and drummed his heels on the floor. Libels against the Reich’s head of state, the Wilhelmstrasse officially warned the British embassy in Berlin, were “intolerable.” Wigram sent the protest to Churchill, including the infuriated Führer’s question to Britain’s ambassador: “What is to be the fate of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement if the writer of this article is to be the Minister of the British Navy?” When this reached Wigram he wrote in the margin: “I don’t know what exactly this means: but if Churchill knew that Hitler had said this”—as though Winston wouldn’t know, and within hours—“he might well say that it was only another proof of the necessity of strong armaments—otherwise we shall have Germans telling us who shall & shall not be in office in this country.”158
An unexpected consequence of this was a clumsy Nazi attempt to discredit Churchill in his own constituency. Broadcasts by the London correspondent for Völkischer Beobachter identified him as “an unscrupulous political intriguer,” who, unless HMG repudiated him, might become a threat to world peace. His aunt Leonie Leslie wrote him: “Oh Winston! What a grand speech and how I am enjoying the abuse from Germany which I hear on the wireless.” The British naval attaché in Berlin wrote him from Warsaw: “I had to wait until I left Germany to write & say how wonderful I thought your speech—as the Germans are so annoyed with you for telling the truth that no letters addressed to you would ever have got out of the country.” He reminded Winston of a conversation between them in the spring of 1933 and commented: “I have never forgotten what you said then about the Nazis. Two & a half years in Berlin has shown everything you said then is true today. The Germans have only learnt one thing from the War—& that is never to go to war again until they are absolutely ready, & certain of victory. No chances next time! The Germans fear, & I hope, you WILL be 1st Lord—or Minister of Defence! Please don’t give me away.”159
The Nazi reaction to Churchill’s speeches and writings during the 1935 election campaign mirrored the future. Indeed, over the years one of the most persuasive witnesses to Churchill’s effectiveness abroad was Adolf Hitler. In speeches to his people he said: “If there is any man in the world who is authorized to speak for Germany, then I am that man and no one else…. The German regime is entirely a matter for the German people and I will never allow any such foreign schoolmasters or governesses to interfere with it.” When Winston spoke of the fate of Austria and Czechoslovakia, two democracies which lay helpless in Hitler’s path, Hitler cried: “I can only ask—Good Lord [du meine Güte]! After all, what is a democracy? Who defines it? Has the Almighty perhaps handed the key to democracy to such people as Churchill? I am only the advocate of Germany. I am not like Churchill, and God knows what oppositionalists, who style themselves advocates of the world. If Churchill says: ‘How is it that a Head of State can cross swords with a British parliamentarian?’ I must say: ‘Churchill, feel yourself honored.’ ” And: “Churchill said the German regime should be destroyed by forces within Germany…. I can assure this gentleman, who appears to live on the moon, that forces opposed to the regime do not exist in Germany. There is only one force—the National Socialist movement and its leadership and armed forces. I cannot stop this man from rising to high office, but I can assure you that I will prevent him from destroying Germany.” And: “If Churchill came to power in Great Britain instead of Mr. Chamberlain we know it would be his aim to unleash immediately a world war against Germany. He makes no secret of it.” And: “I assume it is his desire to steal our weapons and to bring about again our fate of 1918. I can tell Churchill that it happened only once and that it will not happen again!”160
On Thursday, November 14, Britain voted. By evening it was clear that the Conservatives, winning 432 seats, had retained their overwhelming majority in the House of Commons. Labour had won 154 seats, a gain; the Liberals 21, a loss. Churchill was among the few Conservatives actually to increase his plurality; he polled over 10,000 votes more than his two opponents combined. That evening he dropped by Albert Hall to watch the results posted. Once the outcome was certain, he took a cab to Stornoway House, where Lord Beaverbrook was throwing a victory party. Beaverbrook’s first words to Churchill were: “Well, you’re finished now. Baldwin has so good a majority that he will be able to do without you.” Twelve years later, in an unpublished note, Winston wrote: “I was taken aback and offended by this.” A “man like Mr. Baldwin,” he had believed, “would not be influenced… about my joining the Government by the size of his majority.”161
When he had resigned from Baldwin’s shadow cabinet nearly five years earlier, Church
ill had told Vansittart: “I have cheerfully and gladly put out of my mind all idea of public office.” Van knew that was untrue. “Without office he was miserable,” he wrote, “although I could never understand why. The big boy without a bauble had at his command every other gift in the world, and much attention if small assent. He should have been radiantly happy as the greatest of his time, probably of all time.” Van had pointed out to him that should he become one of the cabinet’s twenty-two ministers, the only consequence would be an increase in his frustration. Churchill believed the government thought well of him. Vansittart knew he was wrong: “Right and Left he was in bad odor for his gloomings. The Left called him ‘the darling of the die-hards,’ who proved too faint-hearted to back him.” And the right regarded him a renegade. “The pity was great” for both Winston and himself, Van recalls, “for a lone voice can accomplish nothing, and in the last analysis a British public servant can do little to serve the State. We both pegged away, he with orations, I with comments and memoranda.”162
In June, when Baldwin moved into No. 10, he had appointed Hoare as Simon’s successor at the FO and replaced Londonderry with the abler Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, an admirer of Churchill. The new air minister’s greatest achievements were to be his promotion of new fighter planes: the Hawker Hurricane, first tested five months after he took office, and the Spitfire, whose prototype flew four months later. In the House Winston had continued what he later described as his “severe though friendly” criticism of the government. He supported the government’s position, in Geneva and elsewhere, with increasing frequency. “It is a terrific decree in life,” George Meredith wrote, “that they must act who would prevail.” A backbencher could not act. Vansittart notwithstanding, a minister could. In previous cabinets Churchill had found that he could often sway decisions. As his desire for a seat on the Treasury Bench grew, so did the frequency with which he praised Baldwin in public. In October he had written him: “If yr power is great, so also are yr burdens—and yr opportunities. I think you ought to go to the country at the earliest possible moment, & I hope you will do so…. I will abide with you in this election, & do what little I can to help in the most serviceable way.” It is impossible to miss the hunger in these last words.163