In his diary Neville Chamberlain wrote that Winston had “made a constructive and helpful speech.” On one point, however, Churchill had been adamant, and Neville’s failure to assign it importance, or even mention it, reveals the moral gap between the two men. Both Austen and Winston emphasized Hitler’s grave damage to the sanctity of treaties. Britain, they held, must remain faithful to her every vow. There was, Churchill said, much goodwill in England toward Germany, and an abiding hope that “the three great peoples of Western Europe may join hands in lasting friendship. But”—he paused—“it ought not even to be necessary to state that Great Britain, if called upon, will honor her obligations both under the Covenant of the League and under the Treaty of Locarno.” In an article for the Evening Standard he amplified on this theme, appealing to Hitler “and the great disconsolate Germany he leads,” urging them to place themselves “in the very forefront of civilisation” by “a proud and voluntary submission, not to any single country or group of countries, but to the sanctity of treaties and the authority of public law, by an immediate withdrawal from the Rhineland.” It was like telling Rasputin to use his knife and fork. Still, Churchill had mentioned neither the past nor present sins of the men on the Treasury Bench.65
Wigram, reaching Chartwell late in the evening on Wednesday, March 11, found Churchill eager for news. After listening to an account of the Paris meeting, Winston decided he must talk to Flandin before anyone in the government saw him. Breaking the habit of a lifetime, he rose at dawn and drove to his London flat in Morpeth Mansions. Flandin arrived there by taxi at 8:30 A.M. He told Winston he intended to propose simultaneous mobilization by Britain and France of all land, air, and sea forces; producing a sheaf of papers, he read aloud what Churchill afterward called “an impressive list” of support from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Yugoslavia, Rumania, and the three Baltic states. “There was no doubt,” Churchill wrote, “that superior strength still lay with the Allies of the former war. They had only to act to win.” Winston told the French minister that in his “detached private position” there was little he could do, but he guided him to others, like Duff Cooper, who had a voice in the government, and that evening he gave a dinner for him. Influential Englishmen heard Flandin out and left promising to do what they could.66
Churchill himself had left the table earlier. The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee was holding a late session, and he had asked to be heard. There he repeated his insistence that Britain keep her Geneva and Locarno pledges. Alec Douglas-Home, a future prime minister, took notes at the meeting. He recorded that Winston produced Flandin’s papers and then “drew a dramatic picture of all the countries of Europe hurrying to assist France and ourselves against Germany.” The next speaker was Hoare, who ridiculed Churchill’s argument. “As regards Winston’s references to all the nations of Europe coming to our aid,” he said, “I can only say that in my estimate these nations are totally unprepared from a military point of view.” It was Douglas-Home’s impression that after Churchill had spoken “a substantial proportion” of the committee was “prepared to see this country go to war.” But Hoare, he thought, had “definitely sobered them down.”67
It seems remarkable that no one there sought expert opinion on Germany’s military preparedness. If they were unaware that the Wehrmacht was only a shadow of its future self, they surely knew Hitler had introduced conscription barely a year earlier. Doubtless the smaller countries were unprepared. All Europe was, even the nations that had made a fetish of rearmament; the Italians were proving that in Ethiopia. Nevertheless, all had standing armies of trained men. The MPs can hardly have doubted that Hitler would have backed down if encircled by an alliance of France, Great Britain, and the chain of states, swiftly forged by Flandin, on the Reich’s eastern and southern fronts. It seems strange that Hoare, so recently disgraced, could discredit Churchill with so flimsy an argument.
But all the meetings held in London in that second week of March were peculiar. On Thursday, Neville Chamberlain entered in his diary: “March 12, talked to Flandin, emphasising that public opinion would not support us in sanctions of any kind.” Flandin had replied that at the very least Britain could declare an economic boycott. Neville rejected that, though he offered to give up “a colony” in the interests of peace. The appeasers thought their empire a great bargaining counter, when in fact Hitler wanted none of it. The Third Reich, Ribbentrop had explained to Eden, wanted its Lebensraum (living space) in Europe, preferably to the east. In a deep leather chair at his club, Halifax reread Hitler’s Friedensrede of March 7 and found a passage he had overlooked. In denouncing the Franco-Soviet treaty, the Führer charged that it not only violated Locarno but had also introduced “the threatening military power of a mighty empire into the center of Europe by the roundabout way of Czechoslovakia, which has signed an agreement with Russia.” Halifax rang for a Carlton servant and told him he wanted an atlas with a more detailed map of Czechoslovakia. The man returned empty-handed. The map, he explained, had already been checked out by another member, Neville Chamberlain.68
Policy is often determined in camera, which is why contemporaneous public opinion, formed amidst the convulsion of historic events, is shaped by incomplete, often distorted, information. In London that week of conferences in St. James’s Palace—one of the Locarno powers and the other of the Council of the League of Nations—the press was admitted only to the public meetings. It was at one of them that a friend saw Wigram, sitting at Eden’s side, “looking increasingly disillusioned and depressed.” The entire Foreign Office establishment had been shaken by the government’s failure to respond to Hitler’s challenge. The foreign secretary’s conduct completely baffled them. And a few of them decided to tell him so. On the initiative of Rex Leeper, they converged on Eden’s Whitehall office. He told them he shared their concern. But he doubted that the British people were ready for war. Most of the FO believed that Hitler’s Friedensrede offer of nonaggression treaties was fraudulent, and that his invasion of the Rhineland was as great a threat to England as an invasion of Belgium; greater, say, than a conquest of Austria.69
Leeper therefore proposed a nationwide campaign to awaken all Britain to the Nazi menace, persuading the country to “abandon an attitude of defeatism vis-à-vis Germany.” The need, he said, was for “bold and frank speeches, not hesitating to call a spade a spade and not shirking from unpleasant truths.” Eden agreed, but on reflection decided that the idea was impractical. It would divide the country and politicize the Foreign Office. In the end Leeper and his colleagues decided to turn to Churchill. He would lead, and they would support him behind Baldwin’s back.70
Wigram couldn’t wait. Vansittart, who had given him permission to leak data to “selected publicists,”* was dismayed when Wigram gave this mandate the broadest possible interpretation. He called a press conference in his Lord North Street home and gave Flandin the floor. Abandoning diplomatic language the French minister spoke straight to the point. He said: “Today the whole world, and especially the small nations, turn their eyes toward England. If England will act now, she can lead Europe. You will have a policy, all the world will follow you, and you will thus prevent war. It is your last chance. If you do not stop Germany now, all is over. France cannot guarantee Czechoslovakia any more because that will become geographically impossible.” If Britain did not act, he continued, France, with her small population and obsolete industry, lay at the mercy of a rearmed Germany. Franco-German friendship was impossible; “the two countries will always be in tension.” He acknowledged that England could reach a fragile understanding with the Nazis now, but it would not last; if Hitler were not stopped “by force today, war is inevitable.”71
The reporters returned to Fleet Street and wrote straightforward accounts of Flandin’s appeal, which their editors buried. Everyone in Whitehall expected Baldwin to loose a lightning bolt, destroying Wigram, but his irregularity was ignored. Thoughtful Englishmen wavered, hawks one day and doves the next. Harold
Nicolson summed up the quandary in a letter to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, that Thursday, March 12. “If we send an ultimatum to Germany, she ought in all reason to back down,” he wrote. But what if she didn’t? Then, he said, “We shall have war.” He assumed that the Nazis would lose, but, he asked, what would be “the good of that? It would only mean communism in Germany and France.” At that his line of reason broke. It wouldn’t happen that way, he decided, because “the people of this country absolutely refuse to have a war. We should be faced by a general strike if we even suggested such a thing. We shall therefore have to climb down ignominiously and Hitler will have scored.” Indecision was the equivalent of a Nazi triumph, and by the end of the week a swelling majority of MPs, diplomats, and journalists decided that Hitler would emerge the winner of the Rhineland crisis—that he had, indeed, already won.72
Flandin, offended and disheartened by the British press’s lack of attention and the failure of his meeting with Chamberlain, again arrived at Morpeth Mansions. Churchill shared his anguish but could offer nothing but advice. As he later wrote: “I advised M. Flandin to demand an interview with Mr. Baldwin before he left.” Darkness had fallen when the French minister’s taxi turned off Whitehall and into Downing Street. The prime minister appeared at the threshold of No. 10 to receive his troubled guest. Baldwin was gracious. Once the amenities were over and they began to talk, however, he told his guest that his cause was lost. Explaining diffidently that he “knew little of foreign affairs”—quite true, but an astonishing admission from the leader of the world’s one superpower, vulnerable, through its empire, to major disorders all over the world—he said he did know the feelings of his people, “and they want peace.” Flandin protested. The peace would be unbroken. Not a shot would be fired. If faced by a police action the Germans would quickly evacuate the Rhineland. According to Flandin, the prime minister replied: “You may be right, but if there is even one chance in a hundred that war would follow from your police action, I have not the right to commit England.”73
The behavior of both men is baffling. What commitment was Flandin seeking? According to his later version, he merely asked Baldwin to give the French a free hand. But France was a sovereign power. She needed no one’s permission to act. Churchill had recognized this weakness in Flandin’s first visit to England, before the invasion. He had thought it feckless of Flandin to come to Downing Street, cap in hand, urging the prime minister to honor England’s treaty obligations and send British troops to join the French in a Rhineland counterattack. Statesmen shouldn’t beg; “Clemenceau or Poincaré,” he later noted, “would have left Mr. Baldwin no option.” If France moved to meet her Locarno commitments—even though England refused to honor hers—Baldwin’s approval would be unnecessary and irrelevant. It was the postwar verdict of the French parliamentary investigating committee that during the Rhineland crisis Premier Sarraut and his cabinet, unable to make up their own minds, were asking the British to do it for them. Churchill would have done it; Baldwin didn’t. He said repeatedly: “England is not in a state to go to war.” Back in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Flandin described his call at No. 10 to Sarraut and his cabinet, concluding, “I understood that evening that I would not obtain, despite my efforts, British acceptance of our military intervention in the Rhineland.” In other words, “Nous sommes trahis.” In Berlin, Shirer scrawled in his diary: “Hitler has got away with it!” And so he had. The Führer immediately ordered a nationwide plebiscite to ask the Volkes whether they approved of the coup, and 98.8 percent voted ja.74
In Parliament that same month Winston reflected: “When we think of the great power and influence which this country exercises we cannot look back with much pleasure on our foreign policy in the last five years. They have certainly been very disastrous years.” He spoke slowly, his voice heavy: “Five years ago all felt safe; five years ago we were all looking forward to peace, to a period in which mankind would rejoice in the treasures which science can spread to all classes if conditions of peace and justice prevail…. Look at the difference in our position now! We find ourselves compelled once again to face the hateful problems and ordeals which those of us who worked and toiled in the last struggle hoped were gone forever.”
He summed up the outcome of the latest crisis: “What is, after all, the first great fact with which we are confronted? It is this. An enormous triumph has been gained by the Nazi regime…. The violation of the Rhineland is serious from the point of view of the menace to which it exposes Holland, Belgium, and France. It is also serious from the fact that when it is fortified… it will be a barrier across Germany’s front door, which will leave her free to sally out eastward and southward by the back door.”75
This speech was ignored. Macmillan recalls that at that time Winston’s “speeches and demands… however effective in themselves, were injured because of the general doubt as to the soundness of his judgement,” and Lady Longford described him as “the disregarded voice of Cassandra.”76
Painter Paul Maze wrote Churchill, “Half England is hardly aware of the situation.” That was understating it. The masses of the British people, few of whom knew where or what the Rhineland was, had returned with relief to their daily routines. Sir Oswald Mosley was planning an anti-Semitic demonstration, the Cunarder S.S. Queen Mary was ready for launching, George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, having received mixed reviews, was selling poorly, and early vacationers in Brighton heard music hall “vocalists,” as they were now called, croon:
These foolish things
Remind me of you…
Nazism had become fashionable in London’s West End. Ladies wore bracelets with swastika charms; young men combed their hair to slant across their foreheads. Paul Maze continued: “Do write to the papers all you can. The German propaganda spread about is most harmful, especially in Mayfair society!”77
The Führer still had many admirers in Parliament and a lofty one (King Edward VIII) in Buckingham Palace. Germanophilia in the British upper classes had begun as an open, closely reasoned cause, but as the nature of Nazism became evident, with Churchill lifting rocks to show the creatures scurrying below, its character had changed. Martin Gilbert and Richard Gott observed that, “the more it was opposed and the more it was shown to be inadequate, if not erroneous, the more it transformed itself into a hidden obsession.” The faithful plotted in the dark, behind closed doors. Sympathy for the Germans, “originally a mood to be proud of,” Gilbert and Gott wrote, “became, with the brutalization of German politics, a mood of whispers and cabals.” The Times echoed Der Angriff and Völkischer Beobachter; much was made of the joint Saxon heritage shared by pure-blooded Britons and German Aryans (and not by Jews). British criticism of the Third Reich was deeply resented in Berlin, and the British embassy there was always quick to apologize for it.78
The Quai d’Orsay and the Foreign Office, bruised and shaken, had done their best to paper over the debacle with new documents, exchanges of formal letters, and sealed covenants. Flandin wearily told the British he would accept Hitler’s coup provided the reoccupation remained symbolique and unfortified—a provision which England could not possibly guarantee. Nevertheless, Eden and the FO went to work, persuading the other signatories to accept the Nazi fait accompli. Meanwhile, the League of Nations council went through the motions of condemning Germany for her treaty violations. On the day of the council’s finding, twelve irreclaimable days had passed since the Führer’s nervous battalions had crossed the Rhine bridges. Since no one even raised the question of imposing sanctions on the aggressor, the condemnation was a meaningless gesture, serving only to demonstrate the league’s hollow authority and shrunken prestige.
The repercussions were not over. In 1918, when Ludendorff was plunging his bloody fists into the snakelike line of Allied trenches winding from the Swiss border to the Channel, the northern anchor of the defense had been held by King Albert’s stubborn Belgians. Now Albert had lain in his grave for two years and the country was ruled by Leopold
III, frivolous, shallow, and callow. After the fall of the Rhineland, Leopold decided that Britain and France were no longer reliable allies. He renounced the military alliance Albert had signed with the democracies twenty years earlier and acquired written releases from Paris and London. This meant that at the outbreak of war French troops could not enter Belgium until a Nazi invasion had been confirmed. “In one stroke,” writes Alistair Horne, the British military historian, “the whole of her [France’s] Maginot Line strategy lay in fragments.”79
By March 26, less than three weeks after a few thousand poorly equipped Wehrmacht troops had cowed the armed might of France, photographs of the rising system of concrete fortresses Hitler was building opposite the Maginot Line—the Siegfried Line—came into Churchill’s possession, and during the first week in April he received detailed reports. Shielding his sources, he shared the substance of the reports with the House. In a remarkably prescient speech he pointed out that these redoubts would permit Nazi troops to be “economised on that line,” enabling “the main force to swing round through Belgium and Holland.” If that happened, and the two Low Countries fell “under German domination,” England would be in mortal peril, a terrifying prospect, he said, which was “brought very much nearer to this island by the erection of the German fortress line.” Nor was that all. “Look east,” he continued. “There the consequences of the Rhineland fortification may be more immediate…. Poland and Czechoslovakia, with which must be associated Yugoslavia, Rumania, Austria and some other countries, are all affected very decisively the moment this great work of construction has been completed.”80
Parliament was unmoved. It was characteristic of the late 1930s that His Majesty’s Government—and the vast majority of His Majesty’s subjects—assumed that each crisis was the last, and that Hitler could be taken at his word when he assured them that he would press no further claims upon Europe. Churchill warned them now: “When you are drifting down the stream of Niagara, it may easily happen that from time to time you run into a reach of quite smooth water, or that a bend in the river or a change in the wind may make the roar of the falls seem far more distant. But”—his voice dropped a register, and only those who strained could hear—“your hazard and your preoccupation are in no way affected thereby.”81