Nicolson despaired. “A sense of danger and anxiety hangs over us like a pall. Hitler has completely collared Austria; no question of an Anschluss, just complete absorption.” Later in the same entry he noted, without dissent, a colleague’s argument that “the Government have betrayed the country and that the Tories think only of the Red danger and let the Empire slide. I am in grave doubts as to my own position. How can I continue to support a Government like this?” Looking back, Lord Boothby damned sheep and shepherds alike:
From 1935 to 1939 I watched the political leaders of Britain, in Government and in Opposition, at pretty close quarters; and I reached the conclusion, which I have not since changed, that with only two exceptions, Winston Churchill and Leopold Amery, they were all frightened men. On four occasions Hitler and his gang of bloody murderers could have been brought down, and a second world war averted, by an ultimatum…. Every time we failed to do it. And four times is a lot. The reasons for it, I am afraid, can only be ascribed to a squalid combination of cowardice and greed; and the British ministers responsible, instead of being promoted, should have been impeached.113
Nevertheless, Churchill’s vision—challenging Hitler with a broad coalition of nations threatened by Nazi aggression—reached the hearts of millions. In London the Star expressed gratitude that “one man spoke out in Parliament last night, and made a speech which fitted the hour.” Liddell Hart sent the War Office a memorandum pointing out that “we are blind if we cannot see that we are committed to the defence of Yugoslavia,” adding that the French “military situation largely turns on the existence of a Czechoslovakian distraction to Germany’s power of concentration in the West.” According to minutes of a March 16 meeting, Halifax told the cabinet that “public opinion was moving fast in the direction of placing the defences of the country more nearly on a war footing.” The prime minister, nodding slowly, replied that he was well aware of the nation’s mood, and knew it was entitled to a statement or broadcast from him, but “at the moment he himself did not feel clear how far we are to go, or in what direction.”114
Chamberlain was, in fact, tempted by Churchill’s soaring proposal. Napoleon had been overwhelmed by a coalition of allied powers led by England; why not crush Hitler by the same strategy? But forming an alliance wasn’t Chamberlain’s style. Like Baldwin he felt uncomfortable with foreigners; he didn’t really trust them, and their differences in national character seldom stirred his curiosity. On March 21, scarcely nine days after the Anschluss, Dawson quoted the P.M. as saying he had “come clear around from Winston’s idea of a Grand Alliance to a policy of diplomatic action and no fresh commitments.”115
The eight days in between had been filled with debate—Churchill and his supporters on one side, HMG on the other. Austria had gone down almost unnoticed, it seemed, and while Churchill’s idea of a Grand Alliance had been aimed at securing the future of all Europe, in those eight days the spotlight was turned upon one country, Hitler’s next target: Czechoslovakia.
By universal agreement the Reich’s warlord was either a madman or a genius. In neither case could he be expected to behave like ordinary men, and he rarely did. General Alfred Jodl, the Wehrmacht’s chief of operations, had worked with him for five years. He believed that at last he understood him. Yet when the Anschluss had been accomplished, Jodl wrote in his diary: “After the annexation, the Führer indicated that he is in no hurry to solve the Czech question.” In fact, Hitler was rapidly revising Fall Grün, Case Green, the plans for a surprise attack on Czechoslovakia first drafted by Blomberg nine months earlier.116
How Case Green could have surprised anyone now seems inexplicable. In his Reichstag speech of February 20, when he declared that “over ten million Germans live in two of the states adjoining our frontiers,” Hitler was including the three million Czechoslovakians of German descent—the Sudetendeutsche—living in the northern part of the country, in the shadow of the Sudeten (Sudetic) Mountains. Prague had trembled when he warned: “It is unbearable for a world power to know there are racial comrades at its side who are constantly being afflicted by the severest suffering for their sympathy with the whole nation…. The German Reich intends to protect those German peoples who live along its frontiers and cannot, by their own efforts, secure their political and spiritual freedom [ihre politische und geistige Freiheit].”117
London newspapers had carried brief accounts of disturbances in the Sudetenland, but British opinion was not, at this time, concerned with Czechoslovakia as a whole. Nor, until then, was Hitler. It was on his hit list, but rather far down. Now the Sudetendeutsche were forcing his hand. Their part of Czechoslovakia had never belonged to Germany. Nevertheless, the Führer’s intoxicating performance had spawned five pseudo-Nazi parties in the Sudetenland, of which the noisiest, and probably the largest, was the Sudetendeutsche Heimatfront (Sudeten German Home Front) with its political arm, the Sudetendeutsche Partei (SDP), led by one Konrad Henlein, an otherwise unprepossessing gymnastics teacher with a fanatical loyalty to Germany’s charismatic leader. One of the Heimatfront’s most effective talents was to send gangs of SDP bullies into Czech communities and deliberately create Grenzzwischenfälle (border incidents). These scuffles revealed the Heimatfront’s ardor (and violence); they also won broad sympathy for the group among the Germans. Hitler’s countrymen remembered his campaign pledge to unshackle Germans enslaved in other countries. He was under pressure to deal with Czechoslovakia—but he was not irked; this was the kind of pressure he liked.
Actually, the Czechs had been extraordinarily tolerant of the boisterous Nazis who lived under their flag and were spoiling for a fight. In recent years President Eduard Beneš had been wary and tactful, but he was unreassured by Göring’s “word of honor” (“Ehrenwort”) that the Czechs had nothing to fear from the Reich. In the Third Reich, Beneš knew, honor had acquired new meanings. The word was, for example, engraved on the daggers of SS men. He believed the Sudetenland riots were being orchestrated in Berlin as pretexts for intervention by Reich troops, and by the spring of 1938 he was absolutely right.
Churchill had long foreseen a jeopardized Czechoslovakia should a vindictive, rearmed Germany emerge in central Europe. As early as February 13, 1925, he had urged a redrawing of national borders in eastern Europe, contending that “real peace” would be elusive as long as regions with large German populations lay outside Germany’s borders, only to be told that any change in frontiers would mean “tearing up” the Versailles treaty. On March 31, 1931—two years before Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor—he told readers of the Hearst papers that Tomáš Masaryk, the country’s first president, and Beneš had “refounded an ancient nation…. They have established a strong state on the broad basis of social democracy and anti-communism.” But if Germany and Austria were reunited, “Czechoslovakia would lie in dire peril.”118
The more Hitler pondered Czechoslovakia, the more he concluded that its very existence was an affront to him. Its birth at Versailles was enough to condemn it. Moreover, it lacked ethnic integrity; Hungarians, Ruthenians, Slovaks, Germans, and Czechs had all been spliced into the ancient Kingdom of Bohemia, and, if that weren’t enough, the splicers had been Masaryk and Beneš, both intellectuals and believers in democracy. These men had then committed the ultimate sin in the Führer’s eyes: they had transformed their country into the most prosperous, progressive, and enlightened nation in eastern Europe.
Until 1938 neither Hitler nor Henlein contemplated outright annexation. Most Sudeteners—about 18 percent of the country’s fifteen million people—had intermarried with Czechs of other ethnic stock. Henlein could not speak for them; indeed, thousands of them were refugees from the Reich he admired, and thousands of others thanked God they didn’t live under the hakenkreuz. Nevertheless, the Führer had concluded that the SDP had a future and he would invest in it. Beginning in 1935 the Sudeten party received fifteen thousand marks a month from the Wilhelmstrasse.
On May 19, 1935, the SDP had shown astonishing strength
at the polls, winning 1,250,000 votes, three out of every five German votes cast, making it the second largest party in the national parliament. In the House of Commons Churchill called this demonstration of support “a very considerable fact, having regard to the energy which the German people, when inspired by the Nazi spirit, are able to exercise.” It was, he said, one of several alarms set off by the success of the German dictatorship; “not only [was] the supreme question of self-preservation” involved, “but also the human and the world cause of the preservation of free Governments and of Western civilisation against the ever-advancing forces of authority and despotism.”119
There was cause for alarm: by the summer of 1936 Nazi parties had appeared in Poland, the Baltic States, and the Free City of Danzig, where men wearing the swastika in their lapels held all key positions in the government. On July 21 Churchill wrote Lord Rothermere: “My information tallies with yours, that Czecho-Slovakia will soon be in the news.” It was; the Czechs were rapidly rearming and building a powerful line of fortifications along the German frontier. Goebbels accused them of letting the Russians build military airfields on their soil, opening a campaign of denunciation and recrimination resembling his attacks on the Austrian government on the eve of Chancellor Dollfuss’s murder. On February 5, 1937, Churchill wrote in the Evening Standard that “at any moment a quarrel may be picked with [the Czechs] by a mighty neighbor. Already they see the directions given in the regimented German press to write them down, to accuse them of being Communists, and, in particular, of preparing their airports for a Russian assault upon Germany. Vain to protest their innocence, vain to offer every facility for German or neutral inspection of their arrangements.”120
In June 1937 Winston received a long report from one of his most reliable informants, Sheila Grant Duff, a cousin of Clemmie’s and an Oxford graduate who was living in Prague. Western Czechoslovakia, she wrote, was kept in constant turmoil by gangs of Sudeten Germans who roamed the streets at night, clubbing Jews, looting their shops, and desecrating synagogues. She cited two of Henlein’s Nazis, who claimed they had been ill-treated by Czech policemen: “This could be used to launch the ‘Gegenmassnahmen’ [countermeasures] which the German press has threatened.” Sheila was worried about the future of the Czech state. She implored Winston to “do everything in your power to make our attitude firm and unfaltering. The crisis has never been so great and I am convinced that only a stand on our part can overcome it. Czechoslovakia is, for the moment, almost entirely dependent on us.” Writing in October to Lord Londonderry—who continued to believe that Anglo-Nazi friendship was possible—Winston pointed out that any arrangement with the Germans would entail giving them a “free hand so far as we are concerned in Central and Southern Europe. This means that they would devour Austria and Czecho-Slovakia as a preliminary to making a gigantic middle Europe-block. It would certainly not be in our interests to connive at such policies of aggression.”121
The Chamberlain government, however, clearly agreed with Lord Londonderry, and continued to refuse to allocate adequate funds for defense. In February 1938, the secretary for air, Lord Swinton, having been blocked in his earlier proposals, again submitted an RAF budget, this one representing “the minimum for security.” Attempts to match the Luftwaffe’s overwhelming superiority in fighter planes were abandoned; the RAF would settle for enough aircraft to meet German “bombers that could be used against this country.” Inskip said that would be too expensive. He proposed cutting back not only Britain’s first-line air strength but also the reserve. Halifax, supporting him, stressed “every possible effort to get on good terms with Germany,” which, as a code phrase of the time, meant refraining from war preparations which might arouse the Führer’s wrath. Summing up the discussion, Chamberlain told his ministers what they already knew—that he attached “great importance to… the maintenance of our economic stability.” Despite Swinton’s appeal for a swift decision, the record shows that “no final decision was reached on policy for expansion of the Air Force.” Action on the Admiralty budget was also deferred for a year.122
Meanwhile, the Czechoslovakian bomb continued to tick. One of Churchill’s sources, traveling through eastern Europe, sent Chartwell an appraisal underscoring the determination of small countries not “to provoke Germany,” while the Germans themselves “are convinced that we would be neutral if they attacked Czechoslovakia.” The Czechoslovakian mood was described as “desperate.” In Prague, Beneš reflected bitterly on a Versailles misjudgment, the drawing of his country’s frontiers. The Sudeten Mountains, which he had fortified to repel a German attack, were an integral part of the very region inhabited by Henlein’s Teutonic constituents. If they were annexed by Hitler, those strongholds would become part of the Reich, leaving the rest of Czechoslovakia defenseless.123
The tumultuous events in Vienna in March set off huge demonstrations in the Sudetenland, irresponsible talk of “going home to the Reich,” and heightened harassment, including Sudetendeutsche clubbing of Czechs living along the German border. At Eger twenty-five thousand Sudetendeutsche demonstrated as church bells pealed; at Saaz fifteen thousand paraded down streets chanting, “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!” Until now the Germans had enjoyed prosperity and peace in Czechoslovakia, but the Führer would tell the world that they were martyrs, that they were “subjected to unspeakable suffering at the hands of Prague sadists because Aryan blood coursed through their veins.” And decent Englishmen in public life, including a decent prime minister and his decent cabinet, would hesitate to challenge this absurd indictment because open disbelief would “provoke” Hitler. In reality, Hitler needed no provocation. He now meant to destroy the Czech state and incorporate it into the Reich.124
Immediately after Churchill’s proposal for a Grand Alliance, Cadogan had discussed it with Chamberlain and Halifax, and had left with the impression that they were giving it serious consideration. He disagreed, and his report to the FO reflected it. His position was not, however, acceptable to his colleagues, among them his assistant under secretary, Sir Orme Sargent, a protégé of Vansittart. In a memorandum to Cadogan, Sargent saw the Anschluss as the first step in a Nazi “policy of expansion” which would reduce “all the weak and disorganized countries of the Danubian basin… to a position, both politically and economically, of vassal states.”125
It became the task of William Strang, Ralph Wigram’s successor as head of the FO’s Central Department, to sort it all out. Strang proposed three possible courses of action, ending with a wretched alternative, “a negative one,” in his words, “not advanced on its own positive merits,” but on the assumption that England was too weak to make any other response. In that event, Britain should “try to persuade France and Czechoslovakia that the best course would be for the latter to make the best terms she can with Germany while she can perhaps still do so in more favorable conditions than would obtain later.”126
That was the option Cadogan found most appealing. He recommended that Britain make no commitment to support France in fulfilling her pledge to join the Czechs if they were attacked. In his diary that night, March 16, he wrote: “I shall be called ‘cowardly’ but after days and nights of thinking, I have come to the conclusion that it is the least bad. We must not precipitate a conflict now—we shall be smashed…. That is the policy of the line of least resistance, which the Cabinet will probably take.” He was right. After Churchill’s speech Chamberlain wrote his sister Ida that “the plan of the ‘Grand Alliance,’ as Winston calls it, had occurred to me long before he mentioned it…. I talked about it to Halifax.” They had found it “a very attractive idea,” he continued; “indeed, there is almost everything to be said for it until you come to examine its practicability. From that moment its attraction vanishes. You have only to look at the map to see that nothing that France or we could do could possibly save Czechoslovakia from being overrun by the Germans.” He had reached the conclusion that “we could not help Czechoslovakia—she would simply be a pretext for goin
g to war with Germany.” But he intended to remain flexible. Should the Sudeten Germans agree to a sensible solution, he was “not sure that in such circumstances I might not be willing to join in some joint guarantee with Germany of Czech independence.” Here, surely, was foreign policy with a clogged drain. Chamberlain refused to join France in defending the integrity of Czechoslovakia, but he might sign on with the Nazis. In Berlin, Henderson spoke as though a Nazi-British alliance were already a reality. He openly referred to “those blasted Czechs,” and, when a diplomat on his staff began a dispatch to the Foreign Office, “There is no such thing as Czechoslovakia,” made a marginal note agreeing that this was “largely true.”127
The Times urged the Czechs to negotiate with Hitler; Czech stubbornness, it declared, could lead to war. The Times also reported a speech by Alan Lennox-Boyd, one of Winston’s personal friends, who had told an audience in Biggleswade that Hitler could “absorb Czechoslovakia and Great Britain would remain secure.” Boothby sent Churchill a cutting of this story and called it “an incitement to Germany to get on with the job.”128
Even as Lennox-Boyd spoke, Churchill flung down his own gauntlet in the Evening Standard. Obviously, he wrote, Prague must make every effort to provide its Germanic minority with “every form of good treatment and equal citizenship, not incompatible with the safety of the State,” but he had every reason to believe that this was being done already. The real danger, as he saw it, was that the Germans might create incidents and use them to justify an invasion of Czechoslovakia. He therefore welcomed the French reassurance that France would keep her word and fulfill treaty obligations to support the Czechs if they were victims of an unprovoked attack. He added: “A further declaration of the intentions of the British Government in such an event must be made.”129