The extent of Churchill’s information about Kremlin infighting is unknown. But the Soviet envoy Maisky was almost certainly his chief confidant. It can hardly have been coincidence that he renewed his campaign for the triple alliance on May 4, the day after Litvinov was sacked. The chief stumbling block, he knew, was Poland. The Poles were adamant that Russian troops never be permitted to cross their territory, not even, say, if Germany attacked France and the Red Army lunged westward to support the French. Beck and his fellow officers in Warsaw not only persisted in regarding the Russians as lepers; they resented anyone who suggested that they be treated as anything else.
Churchill believed the moment must be seized despite the fears in Warsaw. He pointed out in the Daily Telegraph that “Ten or twelve days have passed since the Russian offer was made. The British people… have a right, in conjunction with the French Republic, to call upon Poland not to place obstacles in the way of a common cause.” Hitler’s prey needed not only “the full cooperation of Russia” but also the three Baltic states, who, with arms and munitions from the Soviet Union, could provide “perhaps twenty divisions of virile troops.” He appreciated the Polish policy of “balancing between the German and Russian neighbour,” but now that “Nazi malignity is plain, a definite association between Poland and Russia becomes indispensable.” Otherwise, war would be certain, and a German victory likely, with Poland in chains. The British and French could hold the Wehrmacht in the west, he wrote, but without the Red Army, the eastern front would collapse. He believed the Soviet Union would be responsive to overtures.
Russian interests are deeply concerned in preventing Herr Hitler’s designs on Eastern Europe. It should still be possible to range all the states and peoples from the Baltic to the Black Sea in one solid front against a new outrage or invasion. Such a front, if established in good heart, and with resolute and efficient military arrangements, combined with the strength of the Western Powers, may yet confront Hitler, Goering, Himmler, Ribbentrop, Goebbels and Company with forces the German people would be reluctant to challenge.32
Unmentioned in his column, but of greater concern, was his knowledge that his own government was as hostile to the triple alliance as Beck. Britain had yet to issue a formal reply to Litvinov’s proposal. That same day Lord Camrose, acting, in effect, as Winston’s representative, called at the Foreign Office for a lord-to-lord talk with Halifax. Camrose reviewed all the reasons for establishing the peace bloc. After leaving the FO he wrote an account summing up the foreign secretary’s counterarguments. Halifax thought such an alliance would be ill-received in Tokyo. Rumania, as well as Poland, would oppose it. England’s Roman Catholics would be offended. Spain might react by joining the Axis, Italy would be alienated, the Portuguese might object, and Hitler might be driven into undertaking “desperate measures.” Camrose had patiently replied that all these points were trivial or irrelevant—the Italians were already German allies—when balanced against the need to halt Nazi aggression in its tracks, defend Britain, and avert a general European war. Halifax listened politely but was unmoved.33
On May 8, three weeks after the Soviet Union had made its great move, London replied to it. “The response,” William Shirer notes, “was a virtual rejection. It strengthened suspicions in Moscow that Chamberlain was not willing to make a military pact with Russia to prevent Hitler from taking Poland.” His Majesty’s Government did leave the door ajar—a few inches. The proposal would be restudied. A flame of hope gleamed, but it was faint and flickering.34
Chamberlain did not reveal his opinion of the Russian proposal in the House of Commons until May 19, and then only after Churchill, Lloyd George, and Eden had, in Winston’s words, “pressed upon the Government the vital need for an immediate arrangement with Russia of the most far-reaching character and on equal terms.” For an hour Lloyd George appealed for decision, a clear policy to succor England’s friends and confound her enemies. Churchill described the prime minister’s speech on the Soviet proposal as “cool, and indeed disdainful.” Chamberlain’s view, he later wrote, showed “the same lack of proportion as… in the rebuff to the Roosevelt proposals a year before.” The P.M. insisted that “the suggestion that we despise the assistance of the Soviet Union is without foundation.” If the government could “evolve a method by which we can enlist the cooperation and assistance of the Soviet Union… we welcome it; we want it; we attach value to it.” It would be foolish, he said, to suppose that Russia, “that huge country, with its vast population and enormous resources, would be a negligible factor.” Talks between British and Soviet diplomats had, he said, already begun. Unfortunately, they had bogged down. He acknowledged that he was reluctant to join hands with Moscow, but insisted that his position was based “on expedience and not on any ideological ground.” There was, he said, “a sort of veil, a sort of wall, between the two governments which is extremely difficult to penetrate.”35
Churchill thought the veil was in the P.M.’s mind. His skepticism was justified; two months earlier, commenting on the Soviet Union, Chamberlain had written his sister: “I must confess to the most profound distrust of Russia…. I distrust her motives, which seem to me to have very little connection with our ideas of liberty, and to be concerned only with getting everyone else by the ears. Moreover, she is both hated and suspected by many of the smaller States, notably by Poland, Roumania, and Finland.” Significantly, he was untroubled by Nazi Germany’s ideas of liberty, though at that time Hitler’s concern with getting everyone by the ears had been far more conspicuous, and certainly more successful, than Stalin’s. Colin Coote wrote Churchill that the prime minister “fundamentally wants Nazi ideas to dominate Europe, because of his fantastic dislike of Soviet Russia.”36
French députés in Paris’s quartier des ministères found an alliance with Moscow more attractive—no Channel separated them from the Wehrmacht—but ministers like Bonnet also regarded the Soviet Union as an evil empire, and made no effort to conceal it. In neither capital were the men in office aware that their personal opinions were irrelevant. Men who control great states must deal with their peers abroad, whatever their opinions of them; the Allies’ studied rudeness toward the U.S.S.R. in the spring and summer of 1939, when Russia was offering them collective security, was inexcusable. Certainly it was no service to the millions they governed. It is arguable that Litvinov, had he met with civility and those supple conversations à deux in which trained diplomats excel, might have stopped the war that all Europe, with the exception of the Führer and his co-conspirators, dreaded. The fact that they did not understand Litvinov’s policy and the inner workings of the Soviet bureaucracy does not brighten their memory.
Winston, looking beyond ideologies, saw England in danger; her survival, for him, outstripped everything else. He doubted, he told the House on May 19, that Chamberlain’s speech had contributed to the task before Parliament. “Nor has it, I venture to say, reassured those who feel deep misgivings about the present situation.” He was, he said, “quite unable to understand what is the objection to making the agreement with Russia…. The alliance is solely for the purpose of resisting further acts of aggression. I cannot see what is wrong with that.” Turning toward the front bench, he told the prime minister: “When you come to examine… the interest and loyalty of the Russian Government in this matter, you must not be guided by sentiment. You must be guided by a study of the vital interests involved. The vital major interests of Russia are deeply engaged in cooperation with Great Britain and France to prevent further acts of aggression.” He asked: “If you are ready to be an ally of Russia in time of war”—as Chamberlain had said he was—“why should you shrink from becoming an ally of Russia now, when you may by that very fact prevent the breaking out of war? I cannot understand all these refinements of diplomacy and delay. If the worst comes to the worst you are in the midst of it with them, and you have to make the best of it with them. If the difficulties do not arise, well, you will have had the security in the preliminary stages.”37
Of course, Winston told the House, there were complicated side issues in any treaty, but here, surely, the issue could hardly be simpler.
I should have thought that this plan of a triple alliance is a preliminary step, and an invitation to other countries in danger on this front to come under its protection, was the most straightforward and practical manner of approaching the subject. I do not know whether I can commend it to my right hon. Friend by adopting a simile selected as a special compliment to him. It is like setting up an armoured umbrella, under which other countries will be invited to take shelter as and when they seek to do so. But we cannot exclude from our minds the fact that we are in a deadlock at the moment. What are the differences? We have already given guarantees to Poland and Rumania, and the Government tell us that they would be glad if Russia would give similar guarantees. Consequently, if Poland and Rumania are attacked we shall be in the war, and so will Russia. It is almost axiomatic that those who are allies of the same Power are allies of one another.
“Clearly,” he went on, “Russia is not going to enter into agreements unless she is treated as an equal, and not only treated as an equal, but has confidence that the methods employed by the Allies—by the peace front—are such as would be likely to lead to success.” Vague policy and wavering leadership discourage nations otherwise attracted to a coalition, and Chamberlain “must realise that none of these States in Eastern Europe can maintain themselves for, say, a year’s war unless they have behind them the massive, solid backing of a friendly Russia, joined to the combination of the Western Powers.” Then Churchill raised what, for Englishmen, was the ultimate issue: “Unless there is an Eastern front set up, what is going to happen to the West? What is going to happen to those countries on the Western front to whom, if we have not given guarantees, it is admitted we are bound—countries like Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Switzerland?… How are they to be defended if there is no Eastern front in activity?”
He ended:
It is a tremendous thing, this question of the Eastern front. I am astonished that there is not more anxiety about it. Certainly, I do not ask favours of Soviet Russia. This is no time to ask favours of countries. But here is an offer, a fair offer, and a better offer, in my opinion, than the terms which the Government seek to get for themselves; a more simple, a more direct and a more effective offer. Let it not be put aside and come to nothing. I beg His Majesty’s Government to get some of these brutal truths into their heads. Without an effective Eastern front, there can be no satisfactory defence of our interests in the West, and without Russia there can be no effective Eastern front. If His Majesty’s Government, having neglected our defences for a long time, having thrown away Czechoslovakia with all that Czechoslovakia meant in military power, having committed us without examination of the technical aspects to the defence of Poland and Rumania, now reject and cast away the indispensable aid of Russia, and so lead us in the worst of all ways into the worst of all wars, they will have ill-deserved the confidence and, I will add, the generosity with which they have been treated by their fellow-countrymen.38
Winston—and by now the weight of British public opinion—thought this reasoning unanswerable. Bowing to the storm of criticism, the prime minister on May 23 grudgingly agreed to negotiate with the Soviets on the basis of a British-French-Soviet alliance. He remained unpersuaded that such an alliance was necessary, however. And perhaps there was a certain logic in the argument that a strong ally on Germany’s eastern front—or her western front, for that matter—was unnecessary if the intention was to meet Hitler’s demands anyway. That, after all, had been the pattern; capitulation was inherent in the character of the British prime minister. The Führer’s minister of propaganda, certain beyond doubt that the P.M. would yield, openly said so. The Observer quoted Goebbels as predicting that “Herr Hitler will secure peace with triumph because Mr. Chamberlain will force the Poles to give way.”39
Give way where? Over what?
After Chamberlain’s vow of support for Polish independence, Daladier had told his cabinet that the British now regarded the Vistula, not the Rhine, as their frontier. At the mouth of the Vistula stood the Free City of Danzig, a free state created by the Treaty of Versailles; the city’s real significance arose from the fact that it lay on the Baltic Sea. Because the port could be approached through the Polish Corridor—another creation of Versailles—it gave the Poles access to the sea and world trade. Like almost every memorable Versailles gift, however, the transformation of the city’s sovereignty had been made at the expense of the Germans. Until the 1919 peace treaty, it had been part of the Second Reich. Danzig, in fact, is a German name. After 1945 the Poles renamed it Gdańsk.
In 1939 it was not Polish territory, though führertreu readers of Völkischer Beobachter and Der Angriff had been led to believe that it was. The victors of 1918 had designated it a free state, to be administered by the Poles, but because the population remained overwhelmingly German, Germans dominated its legislative assembly. Even in the late 1920s friction between administrators and legislators had been frequent, and beginning in 1933, when Hitler moved into the Reich chancellery, it had intensified each year. Elected officials, proud of their membership in the local Nazi party, wore swastikas on their sleeves. On orders from Berlin, they could stage a full-fledged riot within an hour.
The dispute over Danzig was destined to launch World War II, but it had long lain quiescent, like a silent fracture in the earth’s crust which, when it ruptures, will generate an earthquake. The Foreign Office had been largely unaware of the gravity of the problem until the spring of 1939, a shattering example of incompetence in both Whitehall and MI6, Britain’s secret intelligence service. Danzig’s tremors had been perceptible long before the Volksdeutsche made their grievances known in the Sudetenland; the Führer’s plan to exploit them had been inscribed in Mein Kampf. Yet even after the issue emerged, His Majesty’s Government believed it was manageable. It wasn’t, because Hitler wasn’t. The assumption that he was—the root of the government’s foreign policy failures in the prewar years—was to persist through August 1939. Even after hostilities had actually begun, Chamberlain would cling to it, like an old dog worrying a naked bone.
The British might have been more alert had Colonel Beck not obscured the issue during his visit to London in April 1939. Danzig, the suave colonel had assured his hosts, was nothing to worry about; he would not even “trouble” them over it. Beck had been mendacious; the issue of the free city’s future was in fact deeply troubling, and shadows had been darkening over it as early as November 5, 1937, when Konstantin von Neurath had told Józef Lipski, Poland’s ambassador to the Reich, that “the Danzig question” would “permanently disturb German-Polish relations” until solved, and that the only possible solution would be “the restoration of German Danzig to… the Reich.” The following year, in the aftermath of Munich, Ribbentrop had summoned Lipski to Berchtesgaden for a three-hour luncheon discussion about Danzig. It should, he said, be returned to Germany. In addition, Germany wanted extraterritorial rights in the Polish Corridor and a Polish denunciation of Russia. Chamberlain had committed himself to Poland initially because he thought Rumania was next on Hitler’s hit list and he wanted the Poles to join him in pledging support of Rumanian independence. Actually, Poland had been—and still was—in far greater danger than Rumania.40
After Prague Ribbentrop had drawn the Poles deeper into the vortex of power politics. On Tuesday, March 21, he had again summoned Lipski, repeating his Danzig and corridor demands and adding complaints: anti-Nazi demonstrations by Poles must be crushed, and criticism of the Führer in Polish newspapers suppressed. The lack of a “positive reaction” to the Danzig issue had made “an unfavorable impression on the Führer,” he said darkly; Hitler now “felt nothing but amazement over Poland’s strange attitude on a number of questions.” It would be wise, he suggested, for Colonel Beck to discuss these matters with the Führer, who might otherwise conclude that Poland “simply w
as not willing” to accommodate the Reich.41
Lipski had flown home, received instructions from Beck, and reappeared at the Wilhelmstrasse on Sunday with a memorandum from the colonel. Stripped of its elaborate periphrasis, it was a courteous rejection of all Hitler’s demands, coupled with a refusal to visit Berlin until “the questions [have] been prepared, in advance, according to diplomatic custom.” Ribbentrop, flushed with anger, replied that this response “could not be regarded by the Führer as satisfactory.” If matters continued this way, he warned, “a serious situation might arise.” Monday’s papers carried accounts of anti-Nazi rioting in Bydgoszcz—a city in western Poland whose population was largely German. Ribbentrop exploited the disorders by summoning Lipski, implying that Bydgoszcz’s Poles were to blame, and declaring that he could “no longer understand the Polish government.” He added: “An evasive answer has been given to the generous proposal Germany made to Poland…. Relations between the two countries are therefore deteriorating sharply.”42
The Foreign Office had first heard this ticking time bomb in the second week of April, when Goebbels spread rumors that Germany planned a Danzig coup on the Führer’s birthday, six days away. When this hearsay reached Halifax he wondered how Poland would respond to a staged “internal revolt” in the city, and asked HM’s ambassador in Warsaw to clarify the question, which to him was “by no means clear.” It seemed to him that if the Poles were “prepared to treat” with the Reich, they would “cut the ground from under the German Government by showing their disposition to negotiate.” Beck curtly disagreed. He felt the time was not “opportune” for Warsaw to approach Berlin. If the Germans wanted to alter the status quo, they should take the initiative and state their claims; the Polish government would then consider them. It would not, however, agree to negotiate. Danzig, the Poles insisted, must remain a free city, their only major port, administered by them, as specified in the Versailles treaty. To turn it over to the Nazis would be interpreted as a sign of weakness and would invite further German claims. Halifax, unconvinced, continued to hint at the desirability of negotiations. Beck’s principal private secretary told a British diplomat that these hints “tend to create an element of doubt as to the fixity of [Britain’s] purpose.” They evoked memories of Munich, he added, which was “not a good precedent.”43