Britain and France, however, seemed to be losing their audience. The diplomatic conversations in Moscow were not revolting, but they had certainly become tiresome. The negotiations were wallowing. After a brief spurt of activity at the bargaining table, Halifax, on Chamberlain’s instructions, permitted the talks to lapse again. This was dangerous, raising questions in other capitals over England’s resolution and strength. On July 7 Mussolini, the poseur of machismo, summoned His Majesty’s ambassador in Rome, Sir Percy Loraine, and said loftily, “Tell Chamberlain that if England is ready to fight in defense of Poland, Italy will take up arms with her ally, Germany.”60
Actually, this was the hollowest of threats. Despite the Pact of Steel, the Italian end of the Axis was tin. Mussolini’s men weren’t ready. However, Whitehall was unaware of that (so was Hitler), and in any event Chamberlain’s extravagant efforts to keep Italy in the Anglo-French entente had already failed.
The defection of Belgium was more serious. Three years had passed since the Belgians’ announcement that they would no longer participate in staff talks with officers from the War Office and the French Ministère de Guerre. Instead they would, in any future conflict in Europe, remain strictly neutral. But Belgium now, as in 1914, did not enjoy the freedom to make that choice. If Hitler’s powerful new Wehrmacht chose to knife through the Low Countries into France, it would drive a bloody blade into the same scar over the same wound the kaiser had opened a quarter-century earlier, and a nation which has been invaded cannot remain neutral. All the callow sovereign in Brussels had accomplished was to ease the task of Hitler’s Generalstab. King Leopold III had reached his decision, Churchill commented, “in a spirit of detachment from the facts.” He lived to see his people subjugated by the Wehrmacht, the young men forced to work as slave labor in Ruhr munitions factories, the old subject to execution as hostages whenever Belgian freedom fighters struck. They would still be bowed beneath the Third Reich’s yoke when he died in 1944.61
Despite Hitler’s shredding of the Munich Agreement, despite daily reports of Nazi outrages in Austria and shattered Czechoslovakia, and despite brutal incidents on the borders between Germany and Poland (the beatings of civilian Poles by Nazi thugs), Neville Chamberlain remained serene in his stateroom on the Titanic. And his troika—Halifax, Simon, and Hoare—was equally tranquil. Churchill, untranquil but helpless as Europe blundered toward the brink of war, toiled away at Chartwell or sat brooding by his fish pond, his hands in his lap, like weapons put to rest. The Chamberlain government ignored him, but he remained a public figure; J. L. Garvin wrote and published in the Observer an editorial stating that were Churchill taken into the cabinet the decision “would be accepted” throughout Europe as “conclusive proof of national efficiency and resolution.” Pravda, arguing that the Baltic states must not fall into Nazi hands, noted on July 22 that “The security of such states” was of prime importance for Britain and France, “as even such a politician as Mr. Churchill has recognized.”62
Churchill’s rare disclaimers of ambition, his affecting to enjoy the squire’s life in Kent, were merely the palaver expected of any political figure excluded from power. His lust for office remained undiminished. He yearned to be in the cockpit of action, not only for the excitement—though that would always be there, and was part of his charm; his expressions, gestures, and swings in mood evoked images of the mischievous small boy at Harrow. He relished the prospect of glory, and, if he made it to the top, of more decorations and honors, of audiences with his sovereign, and motorcycle escorts as he raced about serving the monarch and his people. But he was driven by deeper motives. He was, and proudly proclaimed himself to be, an egoist. He wanted, he needed power. He knew his worth, and suffered when he saw mediocrities, men without imagination, vision, or honor, betraying his England. Egoism and grandeur are so close that they may merge in one man, and he was such a man. Like Lord Chatham, prosecuting the Seven Years’ War in the eighteenth century, Churchill could say: “I believe I can save this country and no one else can.”63
Clearly Neville Chamberlain couldn’t. His indifference to the Russian proposal proved that. The talks in Moscow remained stalled, and on July 13, nearly three months after the Soviet offer to Britain and France, Winston wrote in the Daily Mirror that there could be no excuse for the “unaccountable delay” in signing “a solid, binding, all-in alliance” between Moscow, Paris, and London. Such procrastination, he declared, “aggravates the danger of a wrong decision by Herr Hitler. It is lamentable indeed that this broad mainsail of peace and strength, which might carry the ship of human fortunes past the reef, should still be flapping half-hoisted in the wind.”
The prime minister was unmoved. He wrote Ida: “I am so sceptical of the value of Russian help that I should not feel that our position was greatly worsened if we had to do without them.” This was a stunning misjudgment. Hitler had told his interpreter that if Britain and France accepted the Soviet offer and formed the triple alliance which had been Litvinov’s dream, he would be outmanned, outgunned, and outwitted; he would be forced to cancel his war plans and bide his time. Churchill later wrote that the three-power coalition “would have struck deep alarm into the heart of Germany.” With “superior power on the side of the Allies,” countries the Führer had marked as future victims would have regained the diplomatic initiative and “Hitler could afford neither to embark upon the war on two fronts… nor to sustain a check. It was a pity not to have placed him in this awkward position, which might well have cost him his life.” Winston concluded: “Having got ourselves into this awful plight of 1939, it was vital to grasp the larger hope.”64
Throughout July the three-power talks flickered, sputtered, and guttered, like the last candle in a darkening house. Pravda reported that “in the circles of the Soviet Foreign Ministry, results of the first talks are regarded as not entirely favorable.” Actually Maisky had told the ministry that he believed the men from London “want the talks to fail,” that Chamberlain was a creature of the “Cliveden set” whose only reason for entering negotiations had been to mollify his critics in Parliament. The distrust was mutual. Cadogan was developing a profound hatred for the Soviet delegation. Their chairman was particularly easy to hate. Churchill, who later encountered him at several official functions, described Molotov in vintage Chartwell prose: He was “a man of outstanding ability and cold-blooded ruthlessness. He had survived the fearful hazards and ordeals to which all the Bolshevik leaders had been subjected in the years of triumphant revolution… His cannonball head, black mustache, and comprehending eyes, his slab face, his verbal adroitness and imperturbable demeanour, were appropriate manifestations of his qualities and skill. He was above all men fitted to be the agent and instrument of the policy of an incalculable machine… I have never seen a human being who more perfectly represented the modern conception of a robot.”65
But during the Moscow talks Molotov also had reason to fume. Cadogan wrote: “We give them all they want, with both hands, and they merely slap them.” That was absurd; how could they be giving the Russian negotiators “all they want” when, despite repeated Soviet entreaties, they refused to exert pressure on Poland—whose best interests would be served, since the Poles would be trapped in any war between Russia and Germany—to become party to the agreement? The Anglo-French delegates rejected the simple, comprehensive Soviet proposal, suggesting instead unilateral guarantees by individual nations. The Englishmen parried and thrusted, immunized to boredom by their profession and doubtful that Britain had anything to gain or lose here. Like Chamberlain and Halifax, most of them doubted that the Red Army would be any match for the Wehrmacht. And, like them, they believed nothing else was at stake.66
Here their error was not only spectacular, it was historic. Harold Macmillan, one of the handful who suspected what was coming, was puzzled by their blindness. In part they were victims of a distorted self-image, an illusion common among superpowers; like Americans a generation later, they assumed that all other countries h
eld them in high regard. Actually, the men in the Kremlin bore malice toward the Western Allies, and with reason. Both England and France had intervened in the Russian Civil War after the Armistice of 1918 and had sent troops to fight the Bolsheviks; both had imposed diplomatic sanctions on Russia’s new regime; and they had deprived the Soviet Union of Russian territories in postwar treaties. Postwar Germany had, on the other hand, shared in none of these actions. Even after the Nazi rise to power, Macmillan noted, “German-Russian relations had been good and even cordial.” To be sure, “Hitler’s violent and offensive anti-Communist propaganda no doubt angered Stalin, but he was not a man to be deterred by words from any action that he deemed advantageous.”67
Yet what diplomatic action, in the growing European crisis, would be to Russia’s advantage? War was coming, the Reich would be the aggressor, and Hitler did not wish Stalin well. If Russia allied herself with the democracies, the Führer would be forced to fight on two fronts. On the other hand, such a treaty would mean war between Germany and the Soviet Union. Britain and France could not guarantee Stalin peace—but Hitler could. A Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact would mean peace for a Russia which chose to remain neutral, and would bring about, without the loss of a single Red soldier, the recovery of the lost lands surrendered to Rumania, Poland, and the Baltic states twenty years ago at the insistence of the Western powers. If he chose that course and the Allies were defeated, eventually he would have to face Germany alone. But Hitler might be dead by then, or overthrown; or Germany might be defeated. The temptation to withdraw from the imminent maelstrom, to buy time to arm, was enormous.
Meantime, the talks with the Allies were permitted to continue, in the hope that they would give him reason to turn away from what would, in the long run, be the greater peril. Long afterward, Churchill wrote: “It is not even now possible to fix the moment when Stalin definitely abandoned all intention of working with the Western democracies” and turned his attention to “coming to terms with Hitler.” Maisky told Boothby he thought the die had been cast on March 19, when Halifax sandbagged Moscow’s Bucharest conference, but the evidence strongly suggests that a firm Anglo-French commitment could have saved the triple alliance as late as mid-August. Nevertheless Stalin was keeping his German option open.68
How long had it been open? After the war Russian expatriates published Notes for a Journal, identifying the author as Maksim Litvinov. Establishing its authenticity is impossible, but according to this source, the Soviet dictator had pondered a détente with Germany as soon as he read the Munich Agreement. He is quoted as having told Litvinov toward the end of 1938: “We are prepared to come to an agreement with the Germans… and also to render Poland harmless.” According to a journal entry dated January 1939, Stalin had instructed Alexei Merekalov, the Russian ambassador in Berlin, to open talks with Weizsäcker, telling him “in effect” that “We couldn’t come to an agreement until now, but now we can.”69
Almost certainly this, or a variant of it, is close to the truth. If Munich had been a battle, it would have been among the most decisive in history. Walter Lippmann wrote: “In sacrificing Czechoslovakia to Hitler, Britain and France were really sacrificing their alliance with Russia. They sought security by abandoning the Russian connection at Munich, in a last vain hope that Germany and Russia would fight and exhaust one another.” Stalin was aware of that. On March 10, five days before Prague, he had savaged the democracies for sacrificing Austria and Czechoslovakia and accused them of trying to “embroil” the Reich in a war with the U.S.S.R., “pushing the Germans further eastward, promising them an easy prey and saying: ‘Just start a war with the Bolsheviks, everything else will take care of itself!’ ”70
Whitehall saw no shadows cast by coming events, but Gallic suspicions had begun well before Prague, when Coulondre had warned the Quai that a Nazi-Soviet rapprochement was in train; its objective, he said, would be to divide Poland between them. On May 9 he cabled the Quai: “For the last 24 hours Berlin is full of rumors that Germany has made, or is going to make, proposals to Russia leading to a partition of Poland.” On May 22 he reported that Ribbentrop had said that Poland “sooner or later must disappear, partitioned again between Germany and Russia. In his mind this partition is closely linked with a rapprochement between Berlin and Moscow.” Later Coulondre told Paris that the Führer “will risk war if he does not have to fight Russia. On the other hand, if he knows he has to fight her too he will draw back rather than expose his country, his party, and himself to ruin.”71
Daladier, having studied the cable traffic from Coulondre, afterward wrote: “Since the month of May [1939] the U.S.S.R. had conducted two negotiations, one with France, the other with Germany. She appeared to prefer to partition rather than to defend Poland.” Chamberlain seems to have been the last politician in Europe to discover that the Russians were keeping two sets of books. In late May, when the P.M. finally agreed to negotiate with the Russians largely on the basis of the terms embodied in Litvinov’s original proposal, Dirksen, the Führer’s envoy to the Court of St. James, advised the Wilhelmstrasse that Chamberlain had taken this step “with the greatest reluctance,” prompted by reports to the Foreign Office of “German feelers in Moscow.” Chamberlain and Halifax, according to Dirksen, were “afraid that Germany might succeed in keeping Soviet Russia neutral or even inducing her to adopt benevolent neutrality.”72
By then the two dictators were in fact on the way to the altar. Churchill observed afterward: “It is a question whether Hitler or Stalin loathed it most.” But marriages of convenience are not expected to be joyous. The one mot which won universal acceptance in the democracies and the United States was “They deserve each other.” Certainly the Führer, until now regarded as the new Machiavelli, had met his match in duplicity. It was characteristic of Stalin’s amorality that on the day after Litvinov had invited England and France to join Russia in an anti-Nazi alliance, Merekalov called on Ernst von Weizsäcker at the Wilhelmstrasse, ostensibly to discuss commercial issues arising from Czechoslovakia’s incorporation into what was now known as Grossdeutschland, beginning with a request for sales to Russia from the Skoda Works, now a Nazi arsenal.73
In fact the ambassador’s objectives transcended trade. His appearance in the office of Ribbentrop’s under secretary marked the beginning of a dramatic shift in relations between the two dictatorships. On that day Weizsäcker responded to the Skoda issue first. He told his visitor that reports of Soviet negotiations with Britain and France, looking toward a military alliance, did not create “a favorable atmosphere for the delivery of war materials to Soviet Russia.” But he knew that trade, even trade in arms, could not be the real reason for this visit. The ambassador had presented his credentials nearly a year ago, and this was the first time he had entered the Foreign Ministry. Weizsäcker, unlike Ribbentrop, was a trained diplomat; he had a pretty good guess at what was coming. To encourage Merekalov to get to the point, he remarked that the Russian press was not “fully participating in the anti-German tone of the American and some of the English papers.”74
At that, his visitor spoke up: “Ideological differences of opinion had hardly influenced the Russian-Italian relationship,” he said, “and they need not prove a stumbling block for Germany either…. There exists for Russia no reason why she should not live with Germany on a normal footing. And from normal, relations might become better and better.” This ground-breaking ceremony was followed, first, by two meetings between Dr. Julius Schnurre of the Wilhelmstrasse and Georgi Astakhov, the Russian chargé d’affaires, and second, on May 20, by a long talk in Moscow between Molotov and Ambassador Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg. Schulenburg found the foreign commissar “sehr freundlich” (“very friendly”) and ready to discuss both economic and political agreements between the two powers. Thus the seeds were planted. They might never blossom. Russian diplomats were still courting Britain and France. But if those talks fell through, Stalin had established an alternative.75
On July 24 prospec
ts for an accord between the Reich’s three most powerful adversaries seemed to brighten. Molotov, summoning the British and French negotiators, was conciliatory; clearly he had received fresh instructions from the Kremlin. Since the political matters still to be thrashed out were technical, he said, he recommended that they draw up the related military convention spelling out the obligations of each nation, under the mutual assistance pact, in meeting Nazi aggression. The Foreign Office and the Quai were consulted; the French agreed enthusiastically, the British less so. Dirksen reported to the Wilhelmstrasse—now genuinely alarmed by the prospective alliance—that His Majesty’s Government regarded the military talks “skeptically.”76
Events swiftly confirmed the German ambassador. In diplomacy great importance is attached to the prestige of the men a nation sends to represent it. For these talks the Russians chose officers holding the highest ranks in the U.S.S.R.: Marshal Voroshilov, Russia’s commissar for defense; the chief of the Red Army’s General Staff; and the commanders in chief of the air force and the navy. To lead the French delegation Daladier picked General of the Army André Doumenc, formerly Maxime Weygand’s deputy chief of staff, regarded throughout France as one of the most brilliant officers to serve under the tricolor. Chamberlain, however, repeated the Strang snub, deliberately offending the Kremlin. A month earlier, when Anglo-Polish military talks were held in Warsaw, Britain had been represented by Tiny Ironside. This time Tiny was kept home. Instead, an obscure and undistinguished British party was led by Admiral Sir Reginald A. R. Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, of whom Dirksen wrote that he was “practically on the retired list and was never on the Naval Staff.”77