Alone, 1932-1940

  Insofar as England’s political leaders had plans, many surmised that Germany and Britain were virtually allied. One of them was Lord Kemsley, brother of Lord Camrose and a Fleet Street tycoon in his own right. Even as Winston and Ironside parted after a hearty breakfast, Kemsley was in Germany meeting a series of Nazi leaders, including Alfred Rosenberg, editor of the anti-Semitic Nazi Völkischer Beobachter, and Baron von Weizsäcker at the Foreign Ministry. Both asked about the strength of Chamberlain’s critics in England, particularly Mr. Winston Churchill. On Thursday, July 27, when Hitler received Kemsley at Bayreuth, he, too, asked about Churchill “and his powers of expression.” According to Kemsley’s notes, he replied that in his opinion “far more notice was taken abroad of the Opposition than in England,” and he reminded the Führer that “Mr. Churchill had been unfortunate in his campaigns on at least four occasions in the past, starting with the Abdication of King Edward VIII.”3

  This is shocking, and it served England ill, encouraging the Nazi conviction that England would not fight under any circumstances—that Churchill was an eccentric without a following, who spoke only for himself. A few months earlier that had been true. But as a publisher of newspapers Kemsley must have known how public opinion had changed since Prague, and how Churchill’s stock had soared. It was now summertime 1939. By now Winston could have spoken anywhere in England, on any topic, for any fee. Ironside wrote in his diary on July 27: “I keep thinking of Winston Churchill down at Westerham, full of patriotism and ideas for saving the Empire. A man who knows that you must act to win. You cannot remain supine and allow yourself to be hit indefinitely. Winston must be chafing at the inaction. I keep thinking of him walking up and down the room.”4

  One of the more insidious consequences of Munich was a sharp erosion in Britain’s credibility, a suspicion on the Continent that His Majesty’s Government would respond to future Nazi demands by diplomatic talks leading to capitulation. Churchill warned the House that “the slightest sign of weakness will only aggravate the dangers which concern not only us, but the whole world.” He begged the prime minister: “Do not yield another yard.”5

  Britain’s guarantee to the Poles was, he felt, one promissory note which was certain to be called. “The glare of Nazi Germany,” he predicted in the Daily Telegraph, would soon “be turned on Poland.” His great worry was that Chamberlain would refuse to redeem his pledge. The prime minister’s betrayal of the Czechs had established a pattern. The first transgression is always the most difficult; the second is relatively easy. If forced to choose between breaking his word and breaking the peace, the P.M., Winston suspected, would not hesitate to scuttle his vow to rescue Poland, and that, Churchill believed, would lead to an irrevocable disaster. Britain’s honor would be forfeit. Hitler’s mastery of the Continent would be absolute. Freedom would vanish from Europe.6

  But what if the P.M. acted out of character? Suppose he kept his word, and took Britain and France into war? He could do it; the French had permitted the initiative to pass to London and were a silent, acquiescent partner. Then diplomatic problems would be replaced by strategic questions. At Chartwell, Churchill studied his map and recalled the lessons inherent in The World Crisis. During the first three years of trench warfare, the Allied armies had kept the enemy at bay only because the czar’s huge forces had tied a million Germans down on the eastern front. After the Bolsheviks had overthrown the Romanov regime in 1917 and signed a draconian peace with the kaiser’s generals, the million Germans on the eastern front, no longer needed there, were rushed to the west for a knockout blow. In 1918 they had nearly achieved total victory. Only the last-minute arrival of a huge American army had rescued the weary Allies from defeat.

  Now the Americans were committed—legally, by an act of Congress—to a policy of neutrality. Churchill doubted that Poland could hold the Wehrmacht at bay. It would be 1918 all over again, except that the Western democracies would lack not only the Yanks but also the Italians. This time the Germans looked like winners, and the future would be an unsurpassed horror for any people who lost a war to Adolf Hitler.

  The destruction of Czechoslovakia and the subsequent demoralization among her neighbors to the south had left Britain and France without any strong ally in the east. Poland by herself was inadequate. What the democracies needed, Churchill concluded, was an eastern European ally more powerful than Poland—a nation strong enough to hold the Wehrmacht at bay, forcing the Führer to fight a two-front war. They couldn’t choose; only one great power lay east of the Reich. He would have preferred almost any other country, but the long years of appeasement, pacifism, defeatism, and threadbare military budgets had reduced the democracies to the role of beggars, or at any rate petitioners. Moscow, however, had every reason to be responsive to Western overtures. The Soviet Union lay directly in Hitler’s path of conquest. He meant to crush her; Mein Kampf testified to his intent, reaffirmed in a hundred Führer speeches since.

  To Winston the solution to the Anglo-French dilemma was obvious: détente with Russia should become Whitehall’s primary goal. Yet he knew that the chances of persuading the men ruling Britain to embrace Bolsheviks were exceedingly small. Therefore, when Labour adopted a policy of recriminations, reciting all the ways in which Baldwin and Chamberlain had played into Hitler’s hands, he aligned himself with the government. Opening a major address on Monday, April 3, he described the Polish guarantee as “splendid,” declaring his “full support” for the prime minister’s policies. Chamberlain eyed him warily. Such ringing Churchillian affirmations were often followed, not by sly attacks—his rhetoric was nothing if not straightforward—but by the introduction of a new proposal which the P.M. liked even less. Actually, Winston began by reintroducing an old proposal of his own; he quoted a passage he had delivered in this chamber a year earlier: “If a number of States were assembled around Great Britain and France in a solemn treaty for mutual defence against aggression; if they had their forces marshalled in what you may call a Grand Alliance; if they had their staff arrangements concerted… then I say that you might even now arrest this coming war.”7

  Since then “the situation has deteriorated.” And one of Hitler’s excuses for the enslavement of millions had been his paranoid claim that Germany’s enemies were trying to “encircle” her. In fact, Churchill said, he and his supporters had been urging “the encirclement of an aggressor.” Collective security reassured nations which felt threatened, and all were entitled to it, including the Third Reich: “If Herr Hitler feels that he will be overrun by Russia, that he will be fallen upon by Poland, that he will be attacked by Belgium, Holland, or Switzerland, he has only to declare his anxiety open to the world in order to receive the most solemn international guarantees. We seek no security for ourselves that we do not desire Germany to enjoy as well.” But providing that security for all countries deserved absolute priority, he said; halfway measures were more dangerous than none: “To stop here with a guarantee to Poland would be to halt in no-man’s-land under fire of both trench lines and without the shelter of either…. We must go forward now until a conclusion is reached. Having begun to create a Grand Alliance against aggression, we cannot afford to fail.” Nor, he warned the House, could they exclude unsavory regimes, provided those who ruled them sought peace.

  As the P.M. had feared, Winston was proposing a fresh policy, a British tie with the one great power Chamberlain detested. Churchill’s loathing of bolshevism was more famous, and had certainly been more memorably expressed; he had described Lenin as a “plague bacillus”; he had denounced “the Bolshevik cancer eating into the flesh of the wretched being” and had reviled “the bestial appetites and passions” of Communist Russia, a “tyranny of the vilest kind,” where “thousands of people have been executed or murdered in cold blood.” But he had also declared that when the safety of Britain and her empire stood at risk, his conscience became “a good girl”; and it happened now. He wanted the five million men of the Red Army marching against the Wehrmacht, and he t
old the House of Commons why.8

  “Russia,” he said, “is a ponderous counterpoise in the scale of world peace. We cannot measure the weight of support which may be forthcoming from Soviet Russia.” Labour had proposed that “the attitude of His Majesty’s Government towards Russia” be summed up in the phrase “The maximum cooperation possible.” Winston thought this “a very accurate and convenient phrase.” But, he added, “to find any guidance as to where we stay with Russia, one must ask what is the interest of the Russian people.” He asked: “Why should we expect Soviet Russia to be willing to work with us? Certainly we have no special claims upon her good will, nor she upon ours.” The answer, he said, was that “Soviet Russia is profoundly affected by German Nazi ambitions.” He reeled off Nazi objectives which menaced the U.S.S.R.: the Danube Valley, the Black Sea (a “conquest of the Ukraine by Nazi Germany, upon which such covetous eyes have been avowedly set, would be a direct assault upon the life of the Russian Soviet State”), and targets in the Far East. Thus, “No one can say that there is not a solid identity of interest between the Western democracies and Soviet Russia, and we must do nothing to obstruct the natural play of that identity of interest…. The worst folly, which no one supposes we should commit, would be to chill and drive away any natural cooperation which Soviet Russia in her own deep interests feels it necessary to afford.” The wisest course was to forget the Bolshevik past and forge Britain, France, and Russia in a “Triple Alliance.”9

  The Men of Munich thought the folly was Churchill’s. The prime minister, gazing into his foggy crystal ball, appraised potential Soviet military contributions in a war against Germany and wrote, in a private letter on March 26: “I have no belief whatever in her [Russia’s] ability to maintain an effective offensive, even if she wanted to.” And even if she wanted to and could, he wasn’t sure he would welcome her help. In his mind Bolsheviks, not Nazis, were still the greater threat to Western civilization. Here Chamberlain represented the opinion of Britain’s ruling classes. As Winston later observed in the House, during his April 3 speech he “heard a sort of commotion behind me. I heard the Noble Lady the Member for the Sutton Division of Plymouth (Viscountess Astor) express her dislike of any contact with Bolshevik Russia.” He asked pointedly: “Where was this dislike when she paid a visit to Soviet Russia with Mr Bernard Shaw?” Lady Astor interrupted: “I have had the great advantage of going to Russia and seeing it; you have only had the advantage of hearing about it from the outside.” The point, Winston replied, was that “the time when she went to Russia and gave all her applause and credit to Russia was the time when the influence was deeply detrimental to the interests of this country.”10

  The need for a bond with the U.S.S.R. was “very serious,” he said, “and I hope I shall be able to put it without any offense.” Nevertheless, it was offensive; the thought of shaking hands with what he himself had once called the “bloody paws” of the czar’s murderers shocked all the Conservatives from front bench to backbenchers. But he wasn’t speaking to them now, or to Nancy Astor; or even, at that evening session, to the House of Commons. His audience was in the Kremlin. Ivan Maisky was in the gallery, and his presence cannot have been coincidental. It was customary, when foreign powers were being discussed, for His Majesty’s Government to suggest that their envoys attend Parliament. For a private member to extend such an invitation was highly irregular, but that is the only way the Russian ambassador could have got one that Monday; he and Halifax were on the worst of terms. After Munich, the foreign secretary wrote, Maisky’s “attitude seemed to me… one of some suspicion.” The ambassador, for his part, had come to regard the appeasers as Hitler’s “accomplices.”11

  In this he reflected the views of his superior in Moscow, Maksim Litvinov, the Soviet commissar for foreign affairs. Litvinov and Churchill had been thinking along the same lines, and on March 18, three days after the destruction of Czechoslovakia, the commissar had made his first diplomatic move toward rapprochement, proposing an immediate conference in Bucharest of six powers—Russia, Rumania, Poland, Britain, France, and Turkey—to form a “peace front” against the expanding Reich. In the Quai d’Orsay files there is no record of any response from Bonnet, and the Soviet overture is not even mentioned in his capacious (and self-serving) memoirs. Halifax and Chamberlain read the Litvinov initiative, but the prime minister dismissed the plan as “premature” and the Foreign Office told the Russians that it was “not acceptable.” On March 19 Maisky called at the FO to ask why. Halifax told him that he was short-handed; no minister of the Crown could be spared for the Bucharest meeting. Even though Litvinov had issued a public statement explaining that no Soviet guarantees of Poland and Rumania would be forthcoming unless their governments asked for them—they didn’t ask; they were terrified by the prospect of Nazi reprisals—Chamberlain told the House of Commons on March 23 that His Majesty’s Government took a dim view of establishing “opposing blocs” in Europe, the very argument Beck would use in refusing to guarantee Rumania. After a frustrating session with Halifax, Maisky told Boothby that this rebuff to the Russian proposal had dealt “another smashing blow to the policy of collective security.”12

  Churchill’s relationship with the Soviet envoy was very different. They had been meeting regularly for seven years to discuss diplomatic moves which could contain or discourage Nazi aggression. After Churchill concluded his speech suggesting British overtures to Moscow, the House broke up, and Maisky came down to the smoking room to talk to Churchill and other MPs he knew. According to Nicolson’s diary: “The House rises at 10.50 pm and I am seized upon by Winston and taken down to the lower smoking room with Maisky and Lloyd George. Winston adopts the direct method of attack [upon Maisky]. ‘Now look here, Mr Ambassador, if we are to make a success of this new policy, we require the help of Russia.’ ” He said: “Now I don’t care for your system and I never have, but the Poles and the Rumanians like it even less. Although they might be prepared at a pinch to let you in, they would certainly want some assurances that you would eventually get out. Can you give us such assurances?” Although the question was highly pertinent, it was not one an envoy could answer, and they were interrupted anyway. Nicolson noted: “Lloyd George, I fear, is not really in favour of the new policy and he draws Maisky on…. Winston rather objects to this and attacks Lloyd George. ‘You must not do this sort of thing, my dear. You are putting spokes in the wheel of history.’ ”13

  This does not ring true. It seems inconceivable that Churchill had not consulted Maisky, with whom he was on such close terms, before his speech. As early as February 9 Maisky had been entertaining writers and independent MPs, encouraging the belief that Britain and Russia should put aside ideological differences and face the common enemy together. Boothby, J. B. Priestly, and Nicolson had attended such a luncheon at the Soviet embassy, and Nicolson noted that evening: “Maisky says that Russia was obviously much wounded by Munich and that we can expect no advance from her side. But (and here he became serious) if we made approaches, we should not find Russia as aloof or offended as we might have supposed. Bob Boothby and I have an eye-meet like a tennis-ball across a net.”14

  After Prague the Russians had, in fact, made a major advance, the six-power proposal at Bucharest. Then, and throughout the spring and summer of 1939, Churchill’s son was seeing a great deal of the Soviet ambassador—Chamberlain wrote his sister of “a regular conspiracy in which Mr Maisky has been involved as he keeps in very close touch with Randolph”—and it is reasonable to assume that when Winston rose on the evening of April 3 he had Russian assurances that his seed would not fall on barren ground. No doubt prodding from Maisky contributed to his proposal, though he alone would have been inadequate. Churchill would have sought, or been offered, encouragement from a Soviet leader of higher rank.15

  Almost certainly it came to him from Litvinov. The Soviet Union’s commissar for foreign affairs held a curious position in Kremlin intrigues. He had become a revolutionary in 1898, was arrested and imprisoned
in 1901, but escaped to England and became a Bolshevik in 1903. As a party member he was actually senior to Stalin. But he had never been admitted to the Kremlin hierarchy. He was a Jew, he had been abroad during the 1905 uprising, his wife was British, and during the great revolt in 1917 he had been in London—as Lenin’s representative, to be sure, but Communists with an eye on the future made sure they were seen on the barricades. Nevertheless, Litvinov had been foreign commissar since 1930. Stalin trusted him, and was persuaded by Litvinov’s argument that the Soviet Union would be wiser to pursue closer ties with England and France than to seek Hitler’s good graces. Hitler, Litvinov said, had none. Thus, in Harold Macmillan’s words, it became Russian policy “to seek security through the League and by alliances with the western democracies.”16

  The Soviets’ chief obstacle continued to be what Thomas Jones called Chamberlain’s “Russian complex.” Late in November 1938 Bernard Shaw had given a lunch at his flat for Maisky and Jones, and in his diary Jones set down Maisky’s summary of the blows Litvinov—and his policy—had suffered during the year. Immediately after the Anschluss, he said, Litvinov had approached Paris, proposing a joint declaration, vowing to fight for Czechoslovakian independence. In the Quai d’Orsay his demarche had been ignored. The foreign commissar had tried again on September 2. Bonnet suppressed his note, whereupon Maisky went to Whitehall. There, too, he was disappointed. “Beyond expressing an interest in the views of Russia,” Jones wrote, “Halifax made no sign.” The Soviets’ exclusion from the Munich Conference had meant an immense loss of prestige for Litvinov and Maisky in the Kremlin; the Anglo-French rejection of Litvinov’s proposal for a six-power conference was a further blow. Nevertheless, Stalin permitted him to prepare another tremendous move in 1939, which was in its final stages when Churchill on April 3, knowingly or unknowingly, fired the first gun in Parliament.17