Alone, 1932-1940

by William Manchester

  And as his debts mounted and his gloom deepened, England’s indebtedness to Stanley Baldwin rose. He had kept that undesirable woman out of Buckingham Palace, and now, in his final deed for his homeland, he joined Chamberlain in telling Tory MPs that if they felt they must deplore totalitarianism and aggression, they must not name names. It was important, he said, to avoid “the danger of referring directly to Germany at a time when we are trying to get on terms with that country.”185

  Fleet Street cheered. So did Britain. These were men of peace.

  “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

  “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

  “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

  THREE

  UNDERTOW

  CHURCHILL’S popularity touched bottom in the months following the royal marriage crisis. After the holidays Randolph brought the American writer Virginia Cowles to a Chartwell lunch. Late in life she recalled: “The year 1937 was one of the most painful in Churchill’s life. His influence had fallen to zero, partly because of the Abdication Crisis, partly because Hitler and Mussolini remained quiet and people began to feel that perhaps there would not be a war after all.” Exploring the grounds, she found him “down by the pond, in a torn coat and battered hat, prodding the water with a stick, looking for a pet goldfish which seemed to have disappeared.” The goldfish was retrieved; his prestige in London was not.1

  On May 27, 1937, six days after the coronation of George VI in Westminster Abbey, Stanley Baldwin resigned, departing, wrote Churchill, “in a glow of public gratitude and esteem.” Harold Nicolson noted in his diary, “No man ever left in such a blaze of affection.” At the abbey the applause for Baldwin had rivaled that for the King. Dawson’s editorial declared that the Dear Vicar had “revealed himself as the authentic spokesman of the nation”—a startling accolade; until then Dawson had reserved that role for The Times—and, he continued, the crowds had “cheered him just because they had come to look upon him as the embodiment of their own best interests.” At No. 10 that evening, as the maids packed, the departing P.M. became Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, Knight of the Garter, while his lordship’s ladyship was invested as a Dame of the British Empire. “All hearts seem open at the moment,” S.B. wrote Halifax. “It is wonderful. I feel tired, happy, and at peace.” Churchill, of course, did not join the chorus. Instead he said: “Well, the light is at last out of that old turnip.”2

  History has coupled Baldwin’s name with Neville Chamberlain’s, though they were very different men, leaving No. 10 with different legacies. S.B. approved of appeasement, but passively; unsure of himself in foreign affairs, he waited for other governments—particularly Germany’s—to take the initiative. Chamberlain, never troubled by self-doubt, gave the policy drive. As Churchill later wrote, S.B.’s “vague but nonetheless deep-seated intuition” had been succeeded by the “narrow, sharp-edged efficiency” of an “alert, businesslike, opinionated, and self-confident” man. Macmillan thought the new P.M. “only too sure that he was right on every question. Baldwin’s attitude to problems was largely one of temperament and feeling; Chamberlain approached them with a clear, logical mind. The only trouble was that when he was wrong he was terribly wrong.”3

  Part of Baldwin’s charm had been his air of boundless tolerance; he had refused openly to take offense even when offense was deliberate. Chamberlain, on the other hand, “was resentful of criticism even from his supporters,” Leo Amery wrote in his memoirs. “It seemed to him akin to insubordination, and no team could get on without discipline.” Eden and Duff Cooper, outspoken men with independent minds, were all but ignored in cabinet meetings. At first Eden had been delighted by Chamberlain’s ascent of what Disraeli called “the greasy pole.” He had told Halifax that it would be a great relief “to have a Prime Minister who would take some interest in the foreign side.” Eden was less pleased when he learned that Neville meant to be his own foreign minister, and that when the P.M. did seek advice on foreign affairs, he sought it from two other ministers who had presided over the Foreign Office: Simon and Hoare. Simon, Hoare, Halifax, and Chamberlain himself formed what Fleet Street called “the Big Four.” The lesser three refrained from contradicting Chamberlain or challenging his judgment. “Both by instinct and training,” wrote Hoare, “I was bound to find myself in accord with Chamberlain’s ideas.” In other words, if you wanted to get along, you went along.4

  As they veered away from traditional British foreign policies and turned down the garden path, the appeasers seemed wholly unaware of Hitler’s great design, blueprinted in Mein Kampf and now emerging as an alarming reality. They preferred to concentrate on political intrigue. Halifax, lord president in Chamberlain’s cabinet, had his eye on Eden’s office at the FO, and Chamberlain was seriously considering the switch, despite the fact that in the first year of the new government Halifax demonstrated how imperfect his grasp of diplomacy was. On November 17, 1937, he became the first member of a British cabinet to call on the Führer at Berchtesgaden, accepting an invitation which had pointedly excluded the French. When the car arrived he remained seated. Viscounts do not open doors for themselves. He saw a man’s black trousers just outside. Assuming they were those of a footman, he muttered impatiently about the delay until the shocked chauffeur whispered hoarsely, “Der Führer! Der Führer!” Wrenching the door open, Halifax made matters worse by explaining why he had not done what he ought to have done. Adolf Hitler was the last man to enjoy being mistaken for a servant, and he glared as only he could. The noble lord laughed heartily. It was not a propitious overture. When Halifax reported back to No. 10 the P.M. agreed that the misunderstanding was a great joke, however, and that, for Halifax, was what counted. He told Chamberlain of Hitler’s solution for the turmoil in India: “Shoot Gandhi.” That, too, amused the P.M. It occurred to neither of them that the Führer had been serious.5

  Chamberlain was appalled when the House of Commons voted to debate Halifax’s trip. Determined to forge bonds of friendship and trust with the Third Reich, he was dismayed by the possibility that the Führer, who understood neither a free press nor parliamentary debates, might be offended by critics over whom the P.M. had no control. He sent Eden word that he hoped nothing would be said to “upset the dictators.” It was a vain hope; on December 21, 1937, Winston delivered a powerful speech. Twice, he noted, the Nazi foreign minister had been invited to London; twice the invitation had been rejected. Halifax’s mission, Churchill said, was an unseemly response to obduracy and bound to offend the French. He attached “the greatest significance to the relations we have with France.” The security of the two democracies was “founded upon the power of the French Army and the power of the British Fleet.” Noting that since Hitler had become Reich chancellor and Führer “the Germans in Czechoslovakia” had loudly denounced “the form of government under which they have to live,” he expressed the hope that no more Europeans would come under Nazi rule; they would suffer for it—“particularly the Jews.” It was unspeakable, he said, the timbre of his voice rising, that Hitler should plot to exterminate a race from the society “in which they have been born,” or that, from their earliest years, “little children should be segregated, and that they should be exposed to scorn and odium. It is very painful.”6

  Chamberlain had been following a different line of thought. Over the holidays he read Stephen Roberts’s The House That Hitler Built, a powerful indictment of National Socialism by an eminent Australian scholar, but he wrote his sister Ida: “If I accepted the author’s conclusions I should despair, but I don’t and won’t. Fortunately I have recently had a ‘scintillation’ on the subject of German negotiations. It has been accepted promptly and even enthusiastically by all to whom I have broached it and we have sent for [Nevile] Henderson [the British ambassador in Berlin] to come and talk it
over with us.”7

  Churchill watched the evil stirring in central Europe and felt strengthened in his conviction that it was time, and past time, that Britain looked to her defenses. An unimpeachable source had sent him a tentative draft of the Führer’s Fall Grün, or Case Green, a plan to invade Czechoslovakia with three Wehrmacht corps in two or three months. Another informant had written Chartwell of the frantic attempts in eastern Europe’s capitals “not to provoke Germany” and how the Nazi hierarchy was “convinced that we would be neutral if they attacked Czechoslovakia.” Still another had provided him with figures on the RAF’s loss of new aircraft due to inexperienced pilots and incompetent, untrained mechanics.8

  But Chamberlain, certain there would be no war, saw no future for the armed forces. Churchill was standing against the tide, and on March 16, 1937, he had lost his most prestigious ally in the campaign to waken England when Sir Austen Chamberlain died. “Nothing can soften the loneliness or fill the void,” he wrote Lady Chamberlain. “In this last year I have seen more of him and worked more closely with him that at any time in a political and personal association of vy nearly forty years.”9

  As the character of Neville’s foreign policy emerged—alliances with Italian fascism and German Nazism, leaving France out and thus, by washing England’s hands of old quarrels, assuring peace for Britain—ministers would hear less and less of it from the prime minister himself. The new householder at No. 10 rarely received anyone. Visitors appearing at the door were greeted by Sir Horace Wilson, a deferential man of hooded eyes and soft voice who had entered the civil service at the time of the Boer War. As chief industrial adviser to the government he had proved indispensable to Chamberlain during Neville’s six years as chancellor of the Exchequer. On taking over the reins from Baldwin, the new P.M. appointed Sir Horace head of the civil service and head of the Treasury. Although never elected to office and unknown to the British public, Chamberlain’s adviser held more power than most members of the cabinet, and he served his master as Rasputin had served the last czar. By the end of 1937 he would build for himself, writes W. J. Brown, “a more powerful position in Britain than almost anybody since Cardinal Wolsey…. His influence was almost wholly bad…. In all the critical years, when swift, bold, strong action alone could have served our need, Wilson’s temporising, formula-evolving mind reinforced and emphasized the weakness of the Prime Minister.” The Big Four made headlines, but it was Wilson, working through Chamberlain—whose faith in him was boundless—who became the high priest of appeasement.10

  In a spirit of reconciliation Churchill had volunteered to appear at the Conservative convention to second the nomination of Chamberlain as leader of the party, but it was a wasted gesture. He was never a bearer of grudges; nevertheless, Sir John Colville recalled, he always retained “some bitterness toward ‘the caucus’ which, first under Baldwin and then under Chamberlain,” had kept him “out of office throughout the nineteen-thirties.” His nominating speech, delivered at Caxton Hall on May 31, 1937, was not quite what the Tories had come to hear. After paying ritualistic tribute to Neville’s accomplishments as chancellor in stimulating foreign trade and restoring England’s foreign credit (“a memorable achievement”), he put the Conservatives on notice: he intended to continue on his lonely, unpopular path. The role of leader, he said, had never been interpreted as “dictatorial or despotic”; the House “still survives as the arena of free debate.” He felt confident, he said—though he felt no such thing—that Chamberlain, “as a distinguished Parliamentarian and House of Commons man,” would “not resent honest differences of opinion,” and that party opinion would “not be denied its subordinate but still rightful place in his mind.” In his diary one Tory MP described it as “an able, fiery speech not untouched by bitterness.”11

  Even Nicolson chose not to march under Churchill’s banner. To his wife, Vita, he wrote: “Don’t be worried, my darling. I’m not going to become one of the Winston brigade. My leaders are Anthony [Eden] and Malcolm [MacDonald].” Eden’s following outmatched Churchill’s, still limited to Boothby, Bracken, and Duncan Sandys, Winston’s son-in-law since his 1935 marriage to Diana.12

  There can be little doubt that Chamberlain was the choice not only of Conservative MPs but of the general public, and that Churchill was seen as a scaremonger. Sir John Reith saw to it that he was seldom heard over the BBC, and in that Reith had the full backing of the prime minister; twice in one week Horace Wilson summoned Reith to No. 10 to warn him that Chamberlain disapproved of broadcasting excerpts from parliamentary speeches critical of the government. Excerpts in which the P.M. chided his critics were another matter. Like all evangelists he observed two standards, arrogating all power to himself when his own cabinet disagreed with him, and, whenever possible, gagging eloquent critics.13 But he could never have got away with it had his countrymen disagreed. The voices of 1930s appeasement fall strangely on the ear today; at the time a consensus of Englishmen not only thought them sensible, but those who argued otherwise were scorned, vilified, and even accused of treason. That same year British crowds packed cinemas to see Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon, based on the novel by James Hilton. Early in the film the protagonist, Robert Conway—memorably played by Ronald Colman—bitterly reproaches himself for his flawed character. As a pacifist he had believed that Great Britain should dismantle her army, scuttle the Royal Navy, destroy all RAF bombers and fighter planes, and beat her swords into plowshares. Should hostile troops arrive on English soil, he had argued, they should be greeted politely and asked what they wanted, and be immediately given it. But when he was appointed foreign secretary with extraordinary powers, his nerve had failed him. When the movie was shown to Tommies and GIs in the early 1940s it required heavy editing. The uniformed audiences knew what Hitler would have done had he stumbled upon Shangri-La, whose inhabitants were clearly non-Aryan.

  Early in 1938, as he had intimated to his sister, Neville struck out boldly. The prime minister’s inspiration was christened “colonial appeasement.” In Mein Kampf, and in his demagogic speeches to Nazi mass rallies, the Führer had bitterly denounced the “theft” of Germany’s pre-1914 colonies at Versailles. Chamberlain believed that if the colonies were returned, Hitler would stop plotting to seize neighboring countries on the Continent. He presented his idea to the cabinet as a plan to court Nazi friendship by opening “an entirely new chapter in the history of African colonial development,” under which the Reich would be “brought into the arrangement by becoming one of the African Colonial Powers… by being given certain territories to administer.” Henderson and Halifax enthusiastically backed it. Eden’s support was muted. The P.M. looked at him sharply. It was an omen.14

  Horace Wilson assembled a task force of civil servants to draft documents for the transfer of colonial possessions. Halifax told Ribbentrop, Hitler’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, that England was “urgently trying to make concessions”; Eden, still loyal to Chamberlain, assured the Nazi ambassador that His Majesty’s Government’s “earnest desire” was a quid pro quo—colonies for the Reich and, for England, “a greater feeling of security,” which would require some kind of arms agreement.15

  At this point, the French, alarmed at reports from London, challenged the concept of colonial appeasement and Colonial Secretary Ormsby-Gore put a spoke in its wheel. Eden had pointed out that Britain’s moral superiority would be less plausible if, like Hitler and Mussolini, she shredded agreements and flouted compacts—which, Chamberlain’s colonial secretary now reminded him, would be entailed in such a deal. The territories which had once belonged to Germany flew the Union Jack now, but that didn’t mean that they belonged to Britain; the League of Nations had mandated them to the English with the understanding that Englishmen would better the lot of the native populations. That pledge would clearly be shattered if they were turned over to the Third Reich, which had withdrawn from the league and taken the official view that blacks, like Jews, belonged to an inferior race and should be so tre
ated.

  But the appeasers, like all fundamentalists, held facts in contempt. One of England’s most respected intellectuals, R. W. Seton-Watson, wrote heatedly that “the convenient thesis of Germany’s unfitness to administer colonies is as untrue as it is insulting, and should be recanted.” After Hitler’s Rhineland coup and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, it was argued, the Versailles treaty and the League of Nations had become feeble precedents. Dawson, back in his role as self-appointed spokesman for forty million Britons, wrote that “British public opinion is probably far ahead of the Government” in its conviction that a stable relationship with Germany should be the sole objective “of our foreign policy.” Englishmen, he declared, had “little sympathy with the view” that the Third Reich should be bound by “limits imposed twenty years ago.”16

  Now a rift appeared among the appeasers. Hitler refused the quid pro quo on armaments. Eden argued that that should be the end of it. So did Churchill’s cousin Lord Londonderry, who thought all Germany’s former colonies should be returned but believed it essential that Britain get something in exchange. He was, he told a friend, “very anxious lest our conciliatory trend” be interpreted in Berlin as weakness, and he feared that when the Germans became strong enough they would seek to redress their grievances “by force of arms…. It appears to me that by the shilly-shallying policy of the Government we are slowly but surely drifting toward this position.”17

  Actually that was already Chamberlain’s position. By February 1938, two years after the House of Commons had first debated the issue of German colonial claims—and despite the vehement protests of Eden—he cabled Nevile Henderson in Berlin that he would accept less quid than quo. To “justify” the exchange to the British public, he wanted the Nazis to offer something “towards safeguarding the peace of Europe.” He withdrew his request for a broad limitation of armaments and said an agreement on aerial bombing would be enough. When Ribbentrop rejected that, too, Chamberlain caved in. They could settle the colonial issue now. It wouldn’t even be used as a bargaining chip in future negotiations.18