Alone, 1932-1940

by William Manchester

  In bed the following morning, sipping his breakfast highball, Winston would compare them with information from the Wilhelmstrasse and the Linden; reports from the mistresses of the Duce’s intimate advisers; foreign ministries from Helsinki to Athens; and straightforward en clair et net dispatches from the French. Churchill regularly exchanged data with three successive prime ministers, Blum, Flandin, and Édouard Daladier. Typically, he wrote Daladier in early 1938, asking for a cross-check of “information I have been able to gather from various sources about the present and prospective strength of the German Army.” He put it at forty divisions “now at full war-strength,” four of them armored, with another twenty divisions ready by October 1, and still another thirty-six in trained reserves. This represented a sevenfold jump in one year, an expansion of military strength without precedent in peacetime. Moreover, another twelve Austrian divisions would be added if Hitler’s Anschluss succeeded and was followed by conscription there. Daladier consulted his War Office in the rue St. Dominique, checked the Deuxième Bureau, and replied that they were “entirely in accord with you.” Even Desmond Morton was impressed. “I am astonished,” he wrote to Winston, “by your knowledge of detail on Defence matters.”61

  All this did not pass the Treasury Bench unnoticed. Nor was it meant to. Espionage is usually covert. Information so acquired is exploited without the knowledge of the spies’ victims; if made public it becomes valueless, and agents may be blown. But Churchill’s motives were political; he meant to reverse the course of Britain’s military policy. Throughout the fall of 1937 and into 1938 he continued to receive disturbing reports from Anderson, Morton, and, through MacLean, Air Chief Marshal Sir Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt of the RAF. In the House of Commons his remarks on Britain’s lack of preparedness grew sharper. So did the criticism of his criticism, but as Morton wrote him, he was “not the first to have told the truth and become heartily unpopular for it.” Even if prophecies proved true, Morton continued, men had “the habit of crucifying the prophet or… they exterminate him with a gas cloud—of propaganda. However, they have not silenced you yet, so there is some hope for the Empire still.”62

  In the eyes of His Majesty’s Government, press lords like Beaverbrook, and most members of Parliament, Churchill’s concerns were largely irrelevant. To them, war between Britain and Nazi Germany wasn’t even a remote possibility. Differences between the British Empire and the German Reich would be resolved at negotiating tables. Since Britain was prepared to give Hitler whatever he wanted, why should a drop of blood be spilled, or England’s rising productivity be threatened by a bloated arms budget?

  Churchill was painfully aware that His Majesty’s Government regarded him as a meddler and a Cassandra. Yet his figures—which were also HMG’s figures—cried for action. In the fall of 1937 the Air Ministry, looking ahead to December 1939, had found that the RAF would have only 1,736 aircraft as against Germany’s 3,240. More urgently, Chamberlain had invited a Luftwaffe mission headed by General Erhard Milch to spend a week inspecting the RAF’s latest models on the ground and reviewing a fly-past. On October 12, Group Captain MacLean sent word of this to Chartwell. MacLean had inferred, not unreasonably, that the Nazis, suspecting the inadequacies of England’s air force, were coming “to find confirmation of their suspicions.” Once they had grasped Britain’s weakness in the air—and they could scarcely miss it; the aircraft they would be examining weren’t even fully equipped—their discovery, MacLean wrote, “must inevitably influence German policy…. We are bluffing with the sky as the limit, without holding a single card, and we have then invited our opponents to come round and see what cards we hold, trusting to sleight of hand to put across a second bluff.”63

  Alarmed, Churchill was also in a quandary. There was no way to withdraw the invitation to Germany without making things worse. But it was time the government moved quickly to heal its sickly air force. His latest data, as he wrote Sir Maurice Hankey, could not be discussed in the House of Commons because “of the present dangerous world situation.” He had decided to lay the facts before Hankey, who, as secretary to both the cabinet and the Committee of Imperial Defence, carried weight in the government. Hankey was aware of the problem; he had written Inskip that if the country realized how vulnerable Britain was to aggression HMG would be “forced to undertake late in the day panic measures.” On October 16 Winston sent him MacLean’s report, omitting the author’s name and identifying him only as “a high staff officer of the RAF.” He added, “I trust to our friendship and your honour that its origin is not probed. But look at the facts!”64

  To his dismay, Hankey chose to ignore the facts. Instead he replied with an unexpected, lengthy rebuke. He was, he said, “a good deal troubled by the fact of your receiving so many confidences of this kind,” particularly since Winston was “a critic of the Departments under whom these Officers serve” and they were ignorant “of the wider factors” in national policy. If they had grievances, they should speak to their senior officers or to the cabinet minister representing their service. “Backstairs” information, he wrote, should be discouraged “because it breeds distrust and has a disintegrating effect on the discipline of the Services.” In a stiff reply, Churchill said he had not expected a “lengthy lecture,” and “you may be sure I shall not trouble you again in such matters.”65

  By now His Majesty’s Government was aware that Churchill had become a spymaster, and the hunt for his sources within the government—the “rotten apples,” as Horace Wilson called them—was on. Not long after Churchill’s exchange with Hankey, MacLean resigned from the RAF, reportedly under pressure. But those pursuing a military alliance were after bigger game. In the Foreign Office, Vansittart, with his swagger and arrogance, was the apple likeliest to be tainted. Since moving into No. 10 with Chamberlain, Wilson had been stalking the FO’s permanent under secretary, judging him, Churchill wrote in his war memoirs, “as hostile to Germany.” In HMG’s view criticism of the Third Reich blackened a man’s name. The prime minister had dismissed Van’s warnings of German aggression as “hysterical,” and Wilson had called the under secretary “an alarmist” who “hampers all attempts of the Government to make friendly contact with the dictator states,” adding that “his influence over Anthony Eden is very great.”66

  At that time Eden, still foreign secretary, could have fought for Vansittart, and his decent instincts prodded him to do it. But as Gilbert and Gott put it, he “unwisely and rashly bowed to the wind” when Chamberlain declared that Van must be replaced by Sir Alexander Cadogan, a protégé of Horace Wilson. Vansittart had thirty-six years of diplomatic experience, but Cadogan, as a zealous believer in appeasement and the promise of an Anglo-German alliance, was likelier to sympathize with Chamberlain’s conviction that the Third Reich should become Britain’s most favored nation.67

  On January 1, 1938, Vansittart was kicked upstairs and given the empty title of chief diplomatic adviser to the government. Cadogan would run the Foreign Office. The Germans were delighted; Ernst von Wörmann, chargé d’affaires at Hitler’s London embassy, minuted that Van could no longer issue instructions to British envoys in foreign capitals, nor would classified material be channeled through him; he would see documents only “as required” by Cadogan. The fact that he was permitted to remain in his old office deceived no one. His “dismissal,” as Churchill rightly called it, stunned Whitehall. There was no precedent for it; traditionally, permanent under secretaries held office until they died or chose to retire. Winston heard the news in Paris, where, after a month’s holiday at the Château de l’Horizon, he was staying at the British embassy, conferring with Daladier, who would be premier in the next French government, and Alexis Léger, secretary general at the Quai d’Orsay. The fall of his great FO ally left Churchill distraught. The British ambassador, Sir Eric Phipps, reported to London that Winston could “hardly talk of anything else,” that he “thought Van’s displacement was a very dangerous thing, that it would be represented as a victory for pro-Germans i
n England, that it would arouse the suspicions of the French, etc etc.” Phipps, himself an appeaser, wrote Hankey that he was “honestly perturbed at the fuss over Van’s appointment.” But Churchill saw the significance of Vansittart’s fall. “No one more clearly realised or foresaw the growth of the German danger,” he later wrote, “or was more ready to subordinate other considerations to meeting it,” and now “the whole responsibility for managing the Foreign Office passed out of his hands.”68

  Emboldened, a few months later the appeasers actually tried to imprison one of Churchill’s few parliamentary followers. Duncan Sandys had his own clandestine sources; on June 17, 1938, armed with facts and figures, he sent the War Office a question—concerning London’s air defenses—which clearly revealed access to classified information. Summoned by the attorney general, he was told that unless he disclosed the name of his informant, he would be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. Sandys told his tale in Parliament and requested the appointment of a select committee to study the applicability of the act to MPs carrying out their official duties. Winston delightedly wrote Lord Hugh Cecil, one of his oldest friends—he had been best man when Churchill married Clementine thirty years earlier—“The fur is going to fly.”69

  Tempers were up, and skyrocketed the next day when Sandys informed a crowded House that as a reserve officer he had been ordered to appear, in uniform, before a court-martial. This, he submitted, was a “gross breach” of Parliamentary privileges. He was backed by Attlee and Sinclair, the Labour and Liberal leaders, and, of course, by his father-in-law, who tartly remarked that an act designed to protect the national defense should not shield ministers who had neglected national defense. When the House cleared Sandys without dissent, Oliver Harvey of the Foreign Office noted in his diary, “I hear Winston is in the highest spirits over it.” The appeasers, unchastened, reopened the inquiry on a technicality. It compounded the original blunders; Churchill took advantage of every opportunity to maul his critics. To a fellow MP he wrote that he was “quite content with my corner seat.”70

  Of course he wasn’t, but a political outcast enjoys a freedom denied those charged with responsibility, and this was particularly true in Winston’s case; even Hankey had conceded that he was “a leading Statesman… patriotic beyond criticism.” As such he had been visited by the German air mission and briefed by Ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop.71

  Central to the appeasers’ creed was the assumption that no one wanted war. They did not know, or refused to believe, that the German chancellor was an exception. Thus the victorious allies of 1918 “slept,” as Churchill put it, while Germany, not answerable to voters, trained armies, built ships, and sent swarms of bombers and fighter planes into the sky. On November 5, 1937, Hitler had summoned his generals and senior diplomats to announce an irrevocable decision. Germany must make war. He was not getting any younger, and he wanted to fight, wanted to see his armies take action while he was still vigorous and capable of exercising direct command. The Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe were ordered to prepare for battle, which could come “as early as 1938.”

  In the Reich Chancellery that day he had rambled on for four hours and fifteen minutes, raising the possibility of war between Japan and France; denouncing France and England, the two “hate-filled” (“hasserfüllte”) countries; and sounding the ritualistic demand for lebensraum. He had chosen to prolong the war in Spain, he said, because among other things, the issue might bring Italy into armed conflict with Britain and France. This would open the way for Germany to resolve the Czech and Austrian questions. He added that “annexation of Czechoslovakia and Austria” would mean improved strategic frontiers, new sources of food, the assimilation of twelve million more “Germans,” and, best of all, enough young men to form twelve new divisions. Of course, if Germany were to make use of this war between Italy and the democracies, “the attack on the Czechs” (“Überfall auf die Tschechei”) would have to be carried out with “lightning speed” (“blitzartig schnell”). Then—for the last time, as it turned out—he had agreed to answer questions from his subordinates.72

  Three men stood up to him: Generals Blomberg and Fritsch and Foreign Minister Neurath. They pointed out what everyone there knew: to predict war between Britain and Italy was absurd. Moreover, Czechoslovakia had been supported by a military alliance with France since 1925—and by the Franco-Soviet alliance since 1936. Less than two months earlier the French foreign minister had stressed that France would fulfill her obligations “whatever the form of the aggression if the aggression is certain”; unofficially, the Foreign Office had let it be known that a British declaration of war on Germany would follow.73

  Hitler ignored all this. Within three months the dissenters had all been dismissed. Neurath was replaced as foreign minister by Ribbentrop, though (like Vansittart) he was given an impressive new title to save his prestige abroad. But Blomberg and Fritsch, the leaders of Germany’s military elite, were destroyed, and Hitler, being Hitler, did it in the coarsest possible way. Blomberg was cashiered on the ground that his wife had once been a prostitute; Werner von Fritsch, the Wehrmacht’s commander, was disgraced by a preposterous assertion that he was a homosexual who practiced sodomy in a dark alley near Berlin’s Potsdam Hauptbahnhof on a demimonde figure known as Bayernsepp (Bavarian Joe). Stunned, too proud even to dignify such an accusation with an answer, the aristocratic officer told the Führer that he would respond only to a court-martial. Hitler had no evidence—there was none to be had—and he had no intention of letting the officer corps caste pass judgment on one of its own. He simply ordered Fritsch to retire, and the general, having taken the oath to obey his führer under all circumstances, vanished into obscurity. On February 4, 1938, Hitler proclaimed himself Kriegsherr (warlord), assuming personal command over Germany’s armed forces. His dictatorial powers would remain unchecked until his death.74

  It was time, the Führer decided, for Austrian independence to mount the scaffold. In the Berghof he had granted Schuschnigg’s homeland a reprieve, but it was short; he was not a patient man. Eight days after the distraught Austrian chancellor returned to Vienna, the Führer staged one of his frenzied performances before the Reichstag. He raved that “political separation from the Reich must not lead to the deprivation of rights—that is, the general rights of self-determination [Selbstbestimmung]…. To the interests of the German Reich belongs the protection of those German peoples who are not in a position to secure, by their own efforts, their political and spiritual freedom.” He ordered Jodl and Göring to mobilize their men and call up the reserves, confronting Schuschnigg with 4,126,200 superbly trained men—Versailles, had it been enforced, would have limited them to 100,000—against Austria’s 38,000 soldiers, many of German stock and therefore of doubtful loyalty.75

  But how many Austrians wanted to join the Third Reich? In the Evening Standard on March 4 Churchill estimated that two-thirds of Schuschnigg’s countrymen were prepared to defend their independence. The following day he was challenged by Unity Mitford, his wife’s cousin. Unity had strong Nazi sympathies. She had been among Hitler’s traveling companions since he became Reich chancellor five years earlier. Now she wrote “Dear Cousin Winston” that he, like most Englishmen, was “very misinformed about Austrian affairs, which are consistently misrepresented by the British press.” She had been in Vienna when her führer had torn his strip off the Austrian chancellor, and she wrote:

  The jubilation which broke out among all classes must have been one of the most tremendous demonstrations of belief the world has ever seen…. Everyone looked happy & full of hope for the future…. In Graz, Linz, and Vienna I witnessed demonstrations in which the people went mad with joy and one could not move in the streets for people shouting “Heil Hitler! Anschluss!” & waving Swastika flags. By night, the hills around Vienna were ablaze with bonfires in the shape of Swastikas.

  She predicted that “a free plebiscite would result in at least 80% for the Nazis.”76

  Churchill passed this along
to Georg Franckenstein, a veteran diplomat and Austria’s envoy in London, asking for advice and assuring him that his reply would be confidential. Franckenstein pointed out that the Austrian Nazis were purposefully noisy and highly visible because they wanted to create the impression that they formed a majority, and he agreed that “there was much jubilation among the National Socialists after Hitler’s speech.” But while the Nazis were “displaying the greatest possible activity,” the majority of people, at Schuschnigg’s expressed wish, were remaining quiet and orderly “to avoid conflict and bloodshed which might lead to German intervention.” Franckenstein had consulted several informed, objective observers about Nazi strength in Austria; “some suggested 25%, others 35%, but all were agreed that the majority in the country is in favor of an independent Austria.”77

  Chamberlain had applauded the “negotiations,” at the Berghof. To what extent the P.M. was misled by his hopes and his advisers can never be determined, but the documents prove that in crises he was capable of lying to Parliament and the country. Once back in Vienna, Schuschnigg and Guido Schmidt, his under secretary of foreign affairs, had described their ordeal in detail, including the Führer’s ultimatum. They had briefed envoys of all the powers, particularly England’s, and William L. Shirer, who was there at the time, read the British legation’s unsparing account before it was cabled to London. Even Ambassador Henderson, whose admiration for the Third Reich approached Unity Mitford’s, wrote that Austria’s chancellor had been “threatened and browbeaten, and under menaces accepted an arrangement of which he thoroughly disapproved.” Furthermore, the Viennese correspondents of the Daily Telegraph and The Times had telephoned accurate reports of Hitler’s Schrecklichkeit in the Berghof. Dawson didn’t always print dispatches from his correspondents in Europe, but those he suppressed he sent to No. 10. Thus it is impossible to argue that the prime minister did not really know what had happened at the Führer’s alpine retreat. On the contrary, he was keenly aware that Austria’s independence was gravely imperiled. Nevertheless, he told the House on March 2 that