Darkest Hour

by Anthony McCarten

It was a dignified and rousing speech, and it garnered praise even from his critics. The broadcast was a little over five minutes in length, after which Winston returned to work for another six hours. He later wrote about this monumental day in The Gathering Storm:

  During these last crowded days of the political crisis my pulse had not quickened at any moment. I took it all as it came. But I cannot conceal from the reader of this truthful account that as I went to bed at about 3 a.m. I was conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial. Ten years in the political wilderness had freed me from ordinary party antagonisms. My warnings over the last six years had been so numerous, so detailed, and were now so terribly vindicated, that no one could gainsay me. I could not be reproached either for making the war or with want of preparation for it. I thought I knew a good deal about it all, and I was sure I should not fail. Therefore, although impatient for the morning, I slept soundly and had no need for cheering dreams. Facts are better than dreams.

  Across town, in his plush suite at the Dorchester hotel, Edward Wood, aka Lord Halifax, was considering his own future. In recent days he had passed up having immense power – his ambitions to be Prime Minister would have to wait – but he had not given up on the principle that had defined his life: that every problem had a rational solution, and that the last thing that should ever be spent is blood. How worried he must have been to think that the man he had allowed to come to power in his place represented, in almost every way, the antithesis of his idea of leadership.

  4. The Holy Fox

  When Halifax turned down the premiership on 10 May 1940, Sir Henry (‘Chips’) Channon, a sharp-eyed American friend who had nested among the English upper classes, noted in his diary, ‘I don’t understand why, since a more ambitious man never lived, nor one with, in a way, a higher sense of duty and “noblesse oblige”.’

  So who was this man whom everybody wanted as leader but who, at the crucial moment, turned his back on such a great responsibility?

  At six feet five inches tall, with pallid skin and deep-set eyes, Halifax cut an imposing, somewhat cadaverous figure. Added to this, a congenital defect left him with no left hand and a withered left arm, which he concealed with a prosthetic clenched fist clothed in a black leather glove. Despite his disability, Halifax was a renowned horseman and fanatical fox-hunter. In essence, he was a quintessential English aristocrat. Born Edward Frederick Lindley Wood on 16 April 1881, he was the fourth son of Charles Wood, 2nd Viscount Halifax. His childhood was spent in Yorkshire but was marred by the tragic early deaths of his three elder brothers before he was ten, leaving him the heir-apparent to the Halifax peerage.

  The Woods were deeply pious High Anglicans. Halifax followed the traditional path of Eton College and Oxford University and, upon graduating, made the decision to go into politics in 1909. Having inherited several large London properties and two grand estates in Yorkshire, he was a natural fit for the Conservatives. That same year, he married Lady Dorothy Onslow, a woman described as ‘a paragon amongst women’ who was well known for her charm, friendliness, sympathy and kindness. The couple began their family, and in 1910 Halifax won the seat of Ripon in North Yorkshire.

  When the First World War broke out, Halifax joined the Queen’s Own Yorkshire Dragoons and took an active service commission in Flanders. The living hell of Flanders, the bloody loss of many friends, the pall of so much death, would haunt Halifax the whole of his life and inform his politics.

  After the war ended he was one of 202 Conservative MPs who signed a telegram to the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, who was attending the Paris Peace Conference, strongly urging him not to waver on the strict terms of reparation from Germany.

  In April 1921 Halifax had his first political run-in with Winston Churchill, then the Secretary of State for the Colonies. At that time a member of the Liberal Party in the Government coalition, Churchill was unhappy about the suggestion of Halifax for Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies and so, for two weeks, resisted even meeting him. The usually tightly buttoned Halifax was furious with this treatment, and burst into Churchill’s office to tell him, ‘I have no desire to be your Under-Secretary, nor to have any other office. I am prepared to resign and leave this office tomorrow, but, so long as I remain here, I expect to be treated like a gentleman.’ He was described by many as ‘aloof, serious, devout, cunning – all of which coalesced in Churchill’s characterization of him as the “Holy Fox”’. Despite this initial rocky start, the pair were able to settle their differences, for now, and Halifax assumed his first ministerial post, albeit a lowly one.

  It was not until 1926 that he gained the first real post to garner him respect and status among his colleagues. He was appointed Viceroy of India, following in the footsteps of his grandfather, the 1st Viscount Halifax, who was Secretary of State for India from 1859 to 1866, and interestingly also in the footsteps of Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill’s father. He assumed this office in 1926 and was created Baron Irwin at the same time. This new title elevated him to the House of Lords and he resigned his seat as an MP.

  India defined Halifax. During his five years there he supported the idea of self-governance for the country, which was ruled entirely by Britain, advocating that it have full ‘Dominion Status’ as enjoyed by Australia and New Zealand. While making himself popular with the pacifist Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi, Halifax’s view put him at sharp odds with almost all the big names in his party, among them Winston Churchill, to whom it became clear that Halifax was ready to put India before loyalty to the Conservative Party. But Halifax’s plan, intended to further the Indian cause, backfired spectacularly when talks with leading Indian politicians over the proposals broke down and violent clashes erupted once more.

  As civil disobedience raged on, Conservatives felt that Halifax’s approach to India was far too weak, and the party leader, Stanley Baldwin, was warned by Churchill not to allow his friendship with Halifax ‘to affect your judgement’ on the situation. Undeterred, Halifax, in his last act as Viceroy, pushed through and signed the Gandhi–Irwin Pact on 31 March 1931. The pact brought an end to the period of civil unrest, allowed for the release of many imprisoned protestors and paved the way for the first Round Table Conference to consider Indian constitutional reform in London later that year, but it left him deeply unpopular with the imperialist factions in Britain, in particular with Churchill, who lambasted his colleague’s ‘catalogue of errors and disasters’ as Viceroy of India. This difference of opinion caused an angry Churchill to break with the Conservative Party and begin his years in the political wilderness.

  Upon returning to England in 1931, Halifax resumed his old life in the countryside. His interests centred mainly on fox-hunting, the church and politics. He made his maiden speech in the House of Lords in December that year. He was said to have ‘carried himself as a senior member of the Government, even if strictly speaking he wasn’t one’.

  When his father died in January 1934, Lord Irwin became Viscount Halifax. This personal ascendancy was, a year later, followed by a professional one: he became Secretary of State for War under his old friend Stanley Baldwin, who had recently resumed his role of Prime Minister after Ramsay MacDonald resigned because of ill-health. After only five months, Halifax was promoted again, to Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords following the Conservatives’ November 1935 General Election win.

  By now Herr Hitler had been Chancellor for two years. What of Halifax’s attitude to the German leader?

  Throughout this time Anthony Eden, the new British Foreign Secretary, had been warning of the potential implications of German rearmament. Halifax, who in 1918 had been supportive of harsh penalties on Germany, now – after India – expressed a certain sympathy for Germany over the penalties imposed by the Treaties of Versailles and Locarno. At the same time as Bri
tain was gripped by the Abdication Crisis of 1936, in which King Edward VIII renounced his place on the throne, Hitler’s tanks rolled into the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland in flagrant violation of the treaties of Locarno and Versailles.

  Despite Eden’s early fears regarding Hitler, he initially shared Halifax’s opinion that the Rhineland occupation could be resolved through talks and negotiation, but when the pair attended a meeting with other Locarno Treaty governments in Paris on 10 March 1936, they were surprised, in Eden’s words, to find ‘that our policy of condemning the German action and then developing a constructive policy to re-establish the European settlement had no chance of acceptance’. It is here that we see Halifax first begin to cement in his mind the doctrine of a ‘European Settlement’: an idea that would stay with him through all the failures of appeasement and beyond the outbreak of war, and would erupt again in spectacular fashion in the War Cabinet meetings of May 1940.

  The British Government ignored the warning signs of German rearmament and continued with its policy of negotiations, accepting the occupation of the Rhineland as a fait accompli that was not worth going to war over. When Hitler understood that he was not about to meet with resistance for violating Locarno sanctions, his plans for retaking former German territories lost after the First World War began to progress in earnest.

  In Britain, the Soviet Union was seen as the greater threat by far. More importantly, a strong pro-German sentiment ran through large swathes of the English aristocracy, including the recently abdicated and newly created Duke of Windsor, who would meet Hitler less than a year after his abdication. Concern about Germany taking back territories populated by German-speaking peoples was not high on the British agenda, and many believed Hitler’s intentions were honourable when he offered a non-aggression pact to France in an attempt to soothe that country’s fears. At a Cabinet meeting in January 1937, Halifax is quoted as saying he would like to ‘improve our contacts with Germany’ and that ‘he thought the Germans had some justification for their resentment against the sympathy expressed for France in this country and the criticism of Germany’.

  When Stanley Baldwin retired in May 1937, his successor, Neville Chamberlain, who had been waiting in the wings for a long time, began actively to pursue an open policy of appeasement in an attempt to avoid a second world war. Halifax, in particular, had developed a good relationship with Chamberlain, so was quickly promoted to Lord President of the Council, and soon emerged as a favourite.

  When the sensational invitation for Halifax to attend a fox-hunting expedition in Germany in November 1937, run by the founder of the Gestapo, Hermann Göring, was expanded to include a meeting with Hitler, it placed him in a difficult position, betwixt the opposing policies of the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary. Chamberlain’s belief that the meeting was just an informal courtesy to be tagged on to the end of Halifax’s trip set the suspicions of the Foreign Office racing over fears that someone from the pro-appeasement camp was being surreptitiously authorized by the Prime Minister to conduct a meeting in which myriad foreign policies could be discussed. Despite the objections raised by Eden, Halifax was permitted to attend but was warned to ‘confine himself to warning comments on Austria and Czechoslovakia’, the next two countries upon which Hitler clearly had designs. However, in a memo Halifax sent to the Foreign Secretary upon his return, Eden was horrified to read that he had discussed ‘possible alterations to the European order which might be destined to come about with the passage of time. Amongst these questions were Danzig, Austria and Czechoslovakia.’

  The meeting with Hitler had started with farce. After initially mistaking the Führer for a footman and nearly handing him his jacket, Halifax was quickly won over, ‘both personally and politically’. Writing to his mentor, Stanley Baldwin, after returning to England, Halifax stated that ‘Nationalism and Racialism is a powerful force but I can’t feel that it’s either unnatural or immoral! . . . I cannot myself doubt that these fellows are genuine haters of Communism, etc.! And I daresay that if we were in their position we might feel the same!’

  Staggering words about the man who, when elected in 1933, rushed to implement national boycotts of Jewish businesses, removed citizenship from naturalized German Jews and outlawed interracial marriages. But the letter to Baldwin was tame compared to the sycophantic personal performance Halifax put on for Hitler. One line of vague disapproval was uttered when he said ‘there was much in the Nazi system that offended British opinion (treatment of the Church; to perhaps a lesser extent, the treatment of the Jews; treatment of Trade Unions)’, but the rest of the three-hour meeting was filled with nothing but compliments to Hitler for, in Halifax’s own words, ‘performing great services in Germany’ and explaining that ‘if the public opinion in England took up an attitude of criticism . . . it might no doubt be in part because the people of England were not fully informed’ of the wonderful changes he had made.

  While it was clearly Halifax’s intention to avoid all subjects which might lead to conflict, his instigation of conversations regarding diplomacy that his Foreign Secretary had told him strictly not to go near, plus his effusive compliments to Hitler himself, show a man not just desperately out of his depth politically but worryingly detached from the reality of the situation. He wrote in his diary that Hitler ‘struck me as very sincere, and as believing everything he said’. Even more charming to Halifax was Göring: ‘His personality, with that reserve, was frankly attractive, like a great schoolboy . . . a composite personality – film star, great landowner interested in estate, Prime Minister, party manager, head gamekeeper at Chatsworth.’ Göring’s status as a ‘great landowner’ played right into Halifax’s pastoral heart, completely clouding any judgement that might have been trying to wrestle free from all the Teutonic honey that had been poured in his ears that day.

  When he returned to London, it was too late. He had been successfully fooled by an artfully crafted German PR stunt. He reported to the Cabinet that war was ‘inconceivable’ and that ‘The Germans had no policy of immediate adventure. They were too busy building up their country.’ In the final part of his report, Halifax turned to the concept that would resurface in the most combative War Cabinet meetings between 25 and 28 May 1940: trades of colonial lands as part of a General European Settlement. But long before those meetings, it was an idea that formed the foundation for the policy of appeasement that Halifax and Chamberlain would now actively pursue.

  In January 1938, Chamberlain officially announced his policy of colonial appeasement, and the Government began assessing what territories Europe could cobble together and give to Germany. The policy was openly derided by politicians and newspapers alike, and this public criticism even elicited complaints directly from Hitler himself. Staggeringly, Halifax stepped in to soothe Hitler and prevented the broadcast of several BBC radio programmes featuring leading anti-appeasers discussing their opposition to the colonial issue.

  When Eden resigned in February 1938, over appeasement policies that favoured Hitler’s designs in Austria and Mussolini’s in the Mediterranean, Chamberlain offered the job to Halifax.

  Just over two weeks later, on 11 March 1938, Hitler annexed Austria with the rapid operation he called Anschluss. Having known that this was coming, Halifax did very little to intervene until it was too late and the troops had marched into Vienna. The German Ambassador to Britain, Joachim von Ribbentrop, later went so far as to blame Halifax entirely for the Anschluss. In the memoirs he wrote from his cell while on trial at Nuremberg after the war, he referred to a comment made by Halifax in 1937 that he said effectively gave Hitler the green light to invade: ‘the British people would never consent to go to war because two German countries wanted to merge’.

  Following the Anschluss, all attention turned to the German-speaking Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. How would Halifax respond to Hitler’s intentions there?

  Halifax at this time was described as being ‘a man of uncertain judgement and vacillating opinions’, who
, along with Chamberlain and a cabal of titled appeasers – Sir John Simon, Sir Samuel Hoare, Sir Kingsley Wood, Sir Thomas Inskip, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, Earl Stanhope – was described in Martin Gilbert’s book The Roots of Appeasement as believing ‘in the possibility of saving Anglo-German relations from the storm caused by rearmament, Anschluss, and anti-Semitism, into which international relations had been swept’. They concluded that it was impossible to guarantee any kind of British military response should Germany use force to annex a territory populated by a majority of ethnic Germans.

  The summer of 1938 saw rumours swirling of German troops massing on the Czech border. When Hitler dismissed British and French proposals for a solution, a conference was called in Munich in September. By then Halifax – though not having lost faith in Hitler’s potential rationality – wanted to hedge his bets and moved firmly behind a policy of rapid rearmament in Britain. But it was all too little too late.

  In his biography The Holy Fox, Andrew Roberts writes:

  [Halifax] made the disastrous error of trying to translate his Indian experiences of dealing with [the Indian] Congress into policy for dealing with the problems of Europe. He failed to appreciate the fact that Hitler believed in neither negotiation nor non-violence. Every single view [he] held in India . . . that ninety per cent of the problem was psychological . . . that face-to-face negotiations worked; that short-term humiliations were to be endured in the expectation of a general settlement; and that historical inevitability was ranged against him – worked well in the context of India. When Halifax went on to apply precisely these same criteria to his dealings with Nazi Germany, every one of these assumptions was to prove catastrophic.

  When Chamberlain returned from Munich on 30 September, waving his little white piece of paper and declaring, ‘Peace for our time!’, Halifax joined the many in celebrating this seeming victory, but these celebrations failed to acknowledge that Hitler would be gifted if not Czechoslovakia (not just yet), then the Sudetenland as part of the deal.