On May 10, 1938, Ambassador Henderson’s first secretary, Ivone Kirkpatrick, lunched with Prince Bismarck. Kirkpatrick had a specific proposition, of which the French, he said, were unaware. In his report to Ribbentrop, Bismarck quoted Kirkpatrick as saying: “If the German Government would advise the British Government confidentially what solution of the Sudeten German question they were striving after, the British Government would bring such pressure to bear in Prague that the Czechoslovak Government would be compelled to accede to the German wishes.”157
If one assumes that men in public life are guided by patriotism, reason, or even political survival, the conduct of His Majesty’s foreign policy defies understanding. It makes sense, however, if one grasps the fact that HMG and the key diplomats who owed their rise to the men in Downing Street believed that England should sever her bonds with leftist France and form a new alliance with Hitler’s Germany, thereby forming a solid front against the Soviet Union. It is a historic irony that Churchill, Britain’s original anti-Bolshevik, should have fought them every inch of the way.
He could do little beyond sending Bill Deakin as his personal representative, to ask Prague whether the Czech government approved of his plan for a Grand Alliance—which it did—and to inquire about reports of disorders in the Sudetenland. In the spring of 1938 the Czechs were breaking up the Sudetendeutsche riots but treating the ringleaders with kid gloves, determined to give the Reich no excuse for intervention. On March 12—the day Hitler annexed Austria and Churchill unsuccessfully urged Halifax to protest his conquest in Geneva—the Czech foreign minister, Dr. Kamil Krofta, instructed his ambassadors “to avoid all unnecessary criticism, and to make every effort to avoid being involved.” His envoy in London was Jan Masaryk, the son of Tomáš. Jan was worried about London’s vocalizing its support of the Czech cause. On the evening of March 13, a crowd gathered in Trafalgar Square and cheered a proposal that they stage a sympathetic demonstration outside his home in Grosvenor Place. He protested that he was “a good deal disturbed,” and the demonstration was quietly canceled. It was a measure of Hitler’s power that the mere possibility of annoying him was enough to quash a peaceful show of friendship—for a country he had not yet threatened—in the capital of the world’s greatest empire.158
In newspaper accounts of the Czech disturbances, the German führer was reported to be upset by them. The British public did not suspect his complicity. For better or for worse, but mostly worse, Woodrow Wilson had sown the seed of self-determination at Versailles, and enlightened Europeans sympathized with the discontented Sudeten Germans. If German observers were to be believed—and German credibility was very high among those determined never to fight another war—the Czech government was subjecting the demonstrating Sudetendeutsche to outrageous brutality. As Harold Macmillan later pointed out: “It is a falsification of history to suggest that appeasement up to the time of Munich was not widely supported, either openly or by implication. It was only as the relentless march of events revealed the true character of the man who had seized control of Germany that opinion in Britain began to change.”159
It was going to take a lot of havoc to turn people around, and except for Churchill few were trying. The London press was disenchanted with the French. The Observer commented: “We cannot allow the British Empire to be dragged down to disaster by the separate French alliances with Moscow and Prague.” Kingsley Martin, then editor of the liberal New Statesman, later reflected on the pessimism in Whitehall and at No. 10. It began, he thought, toward the end of the 1920s, when Germany was still ruled from Weimar and almost every well-informed Englishman “regarded the French notion of keeping Germany as a second-class power as absurd, and agreed that the Versailles Treaty must be revised in Germany’s favor.” But France wouldn’t have it, and Weimar, unarmed but still suspect, was impotent. By 1938, however, Martin felt that “things had gone so far that to plan armed resistance to the dictators was now useless. If there was a war we should lose it. We should, therefore, seek the most peaceful way of letting them gradually get all they wanted.”160
One of the most outspoken of the appeasers was an Anglican bishop, the Reverend Morley Headlam, who defended Hitler’s suppression of religious freedom before a church assembly, arguing that it was “only fair to realize that a great majority” of the Nazis believed that their cause “represented a strong spiritual influence” and looked upon it as “a real representation of Christianity.” A visiting Nazi told the Anglo-German Fellowship: “Herr Hitler has given the Church a free hand… he is a very religious man himself.” There was “no persecution of religion in Germany,” said Bishop Headlam, merely “persecution of political action.” Geoffrey Dawson published the bishop’s sermons in full while consigning dispatches from his own Berlin correspondent, describing the imprisonment of German clergymen, to the wastebasket.161
The curtain rose on what would be the first Czech crisis when Konrad Henlein addressed a Sudeten German party rally in Karlsbad on April 24. He read a list of eight demands for action in Prague. They bore Hitler’s stamp; two weeks after the Anschluss, on March 28, Henlein had been rushed to Berlin for a three-hour session in which he was coached by Hitler and his foreign minister. Hitler’s closing words to the SDP leader were found among the Wilhelmstrasse debris in 1945 and submitted as an exhibit in Nuremberg. The Führer had told his Sudeten puppet that “demands should be made by the Sudeten German party which are unacceptable to the Czech government.” Accordingly, sandwiched between innocuous demands at Karlsbad were two which any Prague government would reject. One was the recognition of the Sudeten Germans as autonomous within the state, and the other provided them “complete freedom to profess adherence to the German character and ideology.” Later Henlein added another demand: a revision of Czech foreign policy, which had “hitherto placed the [Prague regime] among the enemies of the German people” and had considered it “the particular task of the Czech people to form a Slav bulwark against the so-called Drang nach Osten,” the Reich’s “thrust to the east.”162
This was provocative and, at the time, puzzling. If Hitler had the best interests of the Sudeten Germans at heart, or even if he intended to annex the Sudetenland—in short, if he intended anything except the incitement of riot leading to bloodshed—he was going about it the wrong way. Two days earlier President Beneš had told the British minister, Basil Newton, that he planned to open “serious negotiations” with Henlein and his party during May and June and, once they had reached an agreement, to pass the necessary legislation through the Czech legislature in July. Now Prague canceled this program. The Czech press was outraged. Foreign Minister Krofta called Henlein’s program “far-reaching and dangerous”; among other things, it could be used to restrict equality and freedom for other minorities—specifically Jews. The demand that the Sudeten Germans be given a separate “legal personality,” he added, was totally unacceptable. Nevertheless, the coalition government led by Premier Milan Hodža, a Slovak with broad popular support, left the door to negotiations ajar, though he told Newton that he doubted anything “serious” would be possible until after the local elections.163
Another French government had fallen in mid-April, and on April 28, four days after Henlein’s Karlsbad speech, the new premier arrived in London for two days of conferences between the allies of the last war. He was Édouard Daladier. Accompanying him was Georges Bonnet, France’s tenth foreign minister in less than six years. Daladier—not yet defeatist—was determined to honor his country’s commitment to the embattled Czechs. Like Churchill, he believed Hitler’s objective was nothing less than the “destruction of the present Czechoslovakian State.” To block him Daladier wanted a joint declaration, putting the Führer on notice that a Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia would trigger declarations of war in Paris and London. But when he arrived at No. 10 Downing Street he found that if he wanted to form a solid anti-Nazi front he had come to the wrong address. On March 20 Chamberlain had written his sister Ida: “I have therefore abandoned
any idea of giving guarantees to Czechoslovakia, or the French in connection with her obligations to that country.” He repeated this to Daladier, who left disappointed.164
Bonnet, whom Churchill called “the quintessence of appeasement,” was secretly delighted, and, in fact, he represented the mood of French politicians and the Paris press. The Army of the Third Republic was ready to fight the Boche; so were the people, with their bitter memories of 1914–1918. But their leaders and their journalists were preparing to turn them round. Professor Joseph Barthélemy, who later served in Pétain’s Vichy government as minister of justice, argued in Le Temps that the frequent violations of Locarno freed France from her treaty commitments. Paris-Soir, Le Matin, Le Figaro, Paris-Midi, Information, L’Action Française, Le Temps, Petit Parisien, the Socialist Le Populaire—every daily in the capital except the chauvinist Epoque and the Communist L’Humanité—opposed defending democratic Czechoslovakia.165
Churchill’s financial straits kept him at Chartwell most of the time, working to keep faith with Sir Henry Strakosch. Chamberlain’s tenure faced no strong challenge, and his most visible rival was the “Eden Group,” as Fleet Street called them, between twenty and thirty MPs who met regularly at various homes with Eden presiding. Churchill’s followers were the “Old Guard,” never more than four or five at this time. His absences from London were too frequent and too long to attract and hold a large number of supporters, while “Eden’s resignation,” as Harold Macmillan recalled, “had at least produced a pivot round which dissenting members of the Conservative Party could more readily form.”166
Visitors to Chartwell, correspondence, and frequent telephone conversations brought Churchill abreast of developments in the capital, however, and since public men of that generation kept meticulous accounts of public activities and personal impressions, Churchill’s growing role in British affairs can be traced and documented with confidence. His intellect and will had been recognized since his first years in Parliament nearly forty years earlier, yet his contemporaries continued to charge that he lacked sound judgment. Isaiah Berlin later commented: “When biographers and historians come to describe and analyse his views… they will find that his opinions on all these topics are set in fixed patterns, set early in life and lately only reinforced.”167
Whenever he was in London, Winston stopped in Whitehall to see Vansittart. Though stripped of power and influence, Van kept in touch with his sources abroad and accumulated inside information in Whitehall through friends and former subordinates. He was troubled, as was Winston, by the rot of defeatism among Englishmen, particularly among British diplomats. In Paris, Sir Eric Phipps told Bonnet that the Czechs, by declaring they would fight if invaded, had “put themselves in the wrong.” Basil Newton, in Prague, consistently supported Nazi demands. If the French believed it “worthwhile to try to perpetuate the status quo in [their] own interests,” he advised the FO, Britain should stand aside. As early as March 13, 1938, the day after the Anschluss, Newton counseled London: “If I am right in thinking that Czechoslovakia’s present political position is not permanently tenable, it will be no kindness in the long run to try to maintain her in it.”168
The most egregious of all His Majesty’s emissaries was Sir Nevile Henderson. Duplicity had won him his appointment in Berlin, and any other foreign secretary—or prime minister—would have dismissed him long before he could inflict a mortal wound on European peace. When, in the House of Commons, Duff Cooper described him as “violently anti-Czech and pro-German,” no one rose to Henderson’s defense; no other interpretation of his record was possible. He described the Czechs as “a pigheaded race”; Beneš, their president—a graduate of the universities of Prague, Paris, and Dijon—was “the most pigheaded of the lot.” As His Britannic Majesty’s official representative, he informed the Germans: “Great Britain would not think of risking even one sailor or airman for Czechoslovakia and… any reasonable solution would be agreed to, so long as it were not attempted by force.”169
Putting all other work aside to back the Czechs, Churchill was writing and speaking in their behalf at Manchester, Bristol, Sheffield, and Birmingham, trying to rouse Britain to the great peril Chamberlain and those around him could not see. In the May 1, 1938, issue of the News of the World he opened a new series of articles with a piece on “Future Safeguards of National Defence.” Predicting that Britain’s chances of surviving the approaching conflict depended upon the extent and efficiency of her air-raid precautions, he called for a crash program to bring nearer the day “when the accursed air-murderer, for such I must judge the bomber of civilian populations, meets a sure doom.” The “greatest safety,” he argued, “will be found in having an air force so numerous and excellent that it will beat the enemy’s air force in fair fight”; therefore continued study, expenditures, and preparations were essential. Chamberlain was infuriated; he regarded the article as an attack on His Majesty’s foreign policy, a foul blow at the fragile arch of understanding the prime minister and foreign minister were trying to build between London and Berlin.
Recriminations over what had been done and what had been left undone were futile. Unlike Baldwin, Chamberlain believed in rearmament within limits. The chief limitation arose from his greater concern for Britain’s economic prosperity. As he saw it, the practice under which the cabinet approved estimates submitted by the three services endangered the country’s fiscal security. His solution was to fix a ceiling for defense spending and then let the services distribute it among themselves.
This was a businessman’s way of defending a nation, but to others it made no sense. Duff Cooper attacked “the absurd new system of rationing the defence departments”; the “sensible plan,” he argued, “must be to ascertain your needs for defence first, and then inquire as to your means for meeting them.” Soldiers were even more vehement. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pownall of the Committee of Imperial Defence wrote in his diary that the prime minister’s theory of “limited liability in war” was “a most dangerous heresy”; the politicians “cannot or will not realize that if war with Germany comes again… we shall again be fighting for our lives. Our efforts must be the maximum, by land, sea, and air…. In God’s name let us recognize that from the outset—and by that I mean now.”170
Chamberlain told his cabinet that British production could not match Germany’s “unless we are prepared to undertake the tremendous measure of control over skilled labour, as in Germany.” He preferred “voluntary” cooperation by arms manufacturers, though such firms had not been noted in the past for their patriotism. The fact was that the bill for years of neglecting the nation’s defenses, most of it during the ministries of MacDonald and Baldwin, was coming due. The people were uneasy; a scapegoat was needed, and the prime minister’s eye fell on the secretary for air, Lord Swinton, who had neglected to show enthusiasm for appeasement policies. Later Churchill wrote of an Air Defence Research Committee meeting of May 12, 1938, at which “we were all busily engaged” discussing “technical problems, when a note was brought in to the Air Minister asking him to go to Downing Street.” Swinton left at once and “never returned. He had been dismissed by Mr. Chamberlain.”171
There was speculation, though not among those in a position to know, that Churchill might be appointed in his place. Instead, the prime minister announced a reshuffling of his cabinet, with Swinton replaced by Minister of Health Sir Kingsley Wood, the P.M.’s oldest and most faithful supporter, a Francophobe and the most fervent of appeasers, more eager even than Chamberlain for friendship with Nazi Germany. Kingsley Wood had never worn a uniform; his career had been devoted to health, education, and welfare. Nicolson wrote Vita: “We had an excitement yesterday, Swinton sacked. At once I telephoned or rather got Duncan [Sandys] to telephone to Winston…. How silly the whole thing is! Here we are at the greatest crisis in our history, with a genius like Winston doing nothing and Kingsley Wood as our Minister for Air.” Other changes in the cabinet seemed just as baffling, Nicolson wrote. He blamed C
hief Whip David Margesson (“not… a good Cabinet-maker”) but conceded in the end that in such a hodgepodge it was impossible to assign responsibility. (He overlooked the prime minister.) “Nobody understands anything,” he concluded. “There is a real impression that the whole show is going to crack up. This view is held, not only by protagonists like Winston, but by the silent useful members of whom nobody ever hears. They think that a new Government will emerge on a far wider basis, possibly a Coalition Government.” Nicolson was two years—almost to the day—ahead of time.172
The RAF leadership, first under Sir Hugh (“Boom”) Trenchard and then under Lord Weir, still held sacred the doctrine that “the bomber will always get through.” Holding this principle sacred, Trenchard and Weir believed that Britain’s only hope of survival lay in devastating retaliation against an enemy. Every RAF plan had called for two or three times as many bombers as fighter planes. Since bombers cost more, and required larger crews, both in the air and on the ground, the waste, in retrospect, is obvious. In the spring of 1938 Dowding’s reply to this theory—radar and fast fighters to intercept hostile bombers—won acceptance. Before the shift could be reflected in the sky, however, Britain was confronted with a surplus of bombers and a scarcity of Spitfires and Hawker Hurricanes.