Alone, 1932-1940

by William Manchester

  Wilson liked this even less than Winston’s. He declared that “any intelligent journalist… could draw but one deduction, namely that we were threatening Germany.” Patiently, Halifax sent over a new draft. Chamberlain himself commented on this one, and he could find nothing good to say about it. One paragraph was sure to “draw protests from the Dominions,” another was “clearly a threat”; all in all it was “out of place till after Nuremberg.” The whole point of it had been to put His Majesty’s Government on record before the Führer’s annual diatribe at the Nazis’ September rally. Ambassadors Henderson and Newton were also critical, and Halifax wrote Henderson that he had “more or less given up the idea of making a public speech.”203

  Others, even champions of the new Germany, shared his concern. Henderson reported that Ribbentrop believed England would not “move under any circumstances,” and Under Secretary Weizsäcker had pointedly remarked that “war in 1914 might possibly have been avoided if Great Britain had spoken in time.” In a general FO discussion on September 4, support grew for what one participant called “a private warning” to the Führer, a plain statement “that we should have to come in to protect France.” Cadogan thought this had merit because “Hitler has probably been persuaded that our March and May statements are bluff, and that’s dangerous.” Yet nothing was done. They drifted.204

  British policy had evolved subtly since late March, when the prime minister had barred commitments to, or even concern over, political events in Europe. Chamberlain was now concentrating on two objectives which were mutually exclusive: establishing a special relationship with the Reich and, at the same time, preserving England’s longtime friendship with France. Together they were impossible, but some tie with the Continent was necessary. Otherwise England was merely an island country off the Continent’s coast, at the mercy of any dominant continental power. So now, when Lord Maugham, Somerset Maugham’s brother, said that “no vital British interest is involved” in the Sudetenland, Duff Cooper fiercely reminded him that “the main interest of this country has always been to prevent any one power from obtaining undue predominance in Europe,” that in Nazi Germany they faced “the most formidable power that has ever dominated Europe,” and that resistance to power “is quite obviously a British interest.” No one in the cabinet disagreed. Yet as the crisis escalated, no statement of policy was made, publicly or through private diplomatic channels.205

  The one British voice which had been heard through the summer was Geoffrey Dawson’s. On June 3, in his lead editorial he had pondered the advisability of permitting “the Germans of Czechoslovakia—by plebiscite or otherwise—to decide their own future, even if it should mean secession to the Reich.” Indeed, he wondered whether it might be sensible to allow other minorities inside the country to take the same course. It would be, he acknowledged, “a drastic remedy for the present unrest, but something drastic may be needed.”

  Drastic was not the word; it would be catastrophic. The nation Beneš and Masaryk had founded was a polyglot state, a reflection, in microcosm, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from which it had derived. Within its borders were communities of Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, Magyars, Ruthenians, Poles, and Bohemians. That hardly meant that it was doomed. Dawson was writing völliger Unsinn. But many Europeans had once more concluded that The Times was the voice of Downing Street, and as September 1938 opened, no spokesman of His Majesty’s Government denied this. Since no one in Whitehall was making foreign policy, a newspaper editor had done it.

  The prime minister was assigning greater priority to an exercise in personal diplomacy.

  There is something almost touching about Neville Chamberlain’s faith in his cherished Plan Z, a simple scheme, redolent of those Chatterbox volumes in which the Chamberlain boys, like so many young Victorians of their class, had lost themselves on long Saturday afternoons when there were no playmates and Nanny was busy elsewhere. Pen-and-ink drawings identified the handsome, mesomorphic heroes, the helpless but winning heroines, and the scowling ruffians doomed, in issue after issue, to be foiled in the last paragraph. And how had they been outwitted? By Plan Z! Or Plan X, or Q, or whatever—a simple ruse, harmless to others but fatal for the wicked. The first we know of its reappearance in the mind of Neville, grown up and grown old, is a memorandum by Sir Horace Wilson, written after the adjournment of a cabinet meeting on August 30, 1938. He and the prime minister had discussed the matter two or three days earlier, and now he wrote: “There is in existence a plan, to be called ‘Plan Z,’ which is known only to the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Foreign Secretary, Sir Nevile Henderson and myself.”206

  The procedure’s success, he continued, depended upon “its being a complete surprise, and it is vital nothing should be said about it.” A second Wilson memorandum, filed the following day, gives the whole thing away: “On being told that Plan Z is emerging, Henderson will ascertain where Hitler is, but will not say why he wants to know.” If time permitted, HM’s ambassador in Berlin would receive another message indicating time of arrival; he would pass this along to Ribbentrop. Again, time permitting, “we would like to do this before we make public announcement here that Plan Z has been put into operation. Place of arrival must be Berlin connecting with Henderson and Ribbentrop. (Schmidt is reliable.)”207

  Wilson’s emphasis on time is subject to but one interpretation; the plan anticipated a supreme crisis, with a German invasion of Czechoslovakia imminent—perhaps but a few hours away. The need to know Hitler’s whereabouts, and the reference to Paul Otto Schmidt, the Führer’s personal interpreter, contemplated a surprise call on him—uninvited, with no prior arrangements. Presumably the P.M. planned to land in Germany and tell wide-eyed Germans, “Take me to your leader,” though that would have been difficult because he, like Hitler, spoke only his native language.

  On September 3 Chamberlain wrote his sister Ida: “I keep racking my brains to try and devise some means of averting catastrophe, if it should seem to be upon us. I thought of one so unconventional and daring that it rather took Halifax’s breath away. But since Henderson thought it might save the situation at the 11th hour, I haven’t abandoned it, though I hope all the time that it won’t be necessary to try it.” If, as Horace Wilson had written, success of the operation depended upon “complete secrecy,” its chances were slim, since Henderson was notorious for sharing confidences with his Nazi friends Göring and Ribbentrop. The circle of those informed widened; Hoare and Simon were also told of it. No one remembered that it was illegal for a prime minister to leave the country without the King’s permission, but the matter of cabinet approval arose. It was, they decided, unnecessary. Chamberlain’s power to commit his country was beginning to rival Hitler’s.208

  The year which had begun with Vansittart’s dismissal and Eden’s resignation had now reached the first lovely week of September, and if the Wilhelmstrasse of 1914 had been confused by England’s intentions, the Nazi generation was utterly baffled. The Quai d’Orsay had made it as clear as diplomats can that the French would fight if the Czech frontier were ruptured, and Britain was France’s ally. Yet, after a long cabinet meeting in Downing Street, Henderson told Ribbentrop that “the Sudeten Germans and the Czechs are a matter of complete indifference to Great Britain. Great Britain is only concerned with the attitude of France.”209

  It was time to read The Times again. It is in keeping with the bizarre patterns of the Big Czech Crisis, now looming, that the author of the paper’s September 7 leader has never been identified. Dawson would spend the rest of his life explaining that he had returned late from his country weekend, insisting that he didn’t reach the office until late Tuesday afternoon, September 6. He read an incomplete draft of an editorial on Czechoslovakia, cut a paragraph, ordered it rewritten, and, apparently exhausted by this effort, left for dinner. Returning at 11:45 P.M. he had misgivings. A Francophile colleague, solicited for advice, urged further surgery. It would have been more useful, for those who wanted to avoid another grea
t war, if they had burned every copy of the paper and then burned the building. One paragraph, in the words of Martin Gilbert, “gave its support to what was, in effect, the extreme Henlein position, unacceptable not only to Beneš, but also to that large number of Sudeten Germans for whom union with Germany would mean the loss of all liberty, swift imprisonment, forced labour, and death.” It ran:

  If the Sudetens now ask for more than the Czech Government are ready to give… it can only be inferred that the Germans are going beyond the mere removal of disabilities for those who do not find themselves at ease within the Czechoslovak Republic. In that case it might be worth while for the Czechoslovak Government to consider whether they should exclude altogether the project, which has found favour in some quarters, of making Czechoslovakia a more homogeneous state by the cession of that fringe of alien populations who are contiguous to the nation to which they are united by race.210

  Considering the unique relationship between The Times and the government, it would be difficult to find a more irresponsible passage in the history of journalism. The unknown author—his identity shielded by Dawson, who either wrote it himself or knew who did—betrayed a staggering ignorance of geography, history, and both the ethnic diversity and range of political persuasions of the people living in the shadow of the Sudeten Mountains. As Churchill wrote the following day, in a letter which Dawson refused to publish, The Times’s proposal “would have the effect of handing over to the German Nazis the whole of the mountain defence line which marks the ancient boundaries of Bohemia, and was specially preserved to the Czechoslovak State as a vital safeguard of its national existence.” German propaganda had created the impression that everyone living in the Sudetenland was German, and that Henlein was their spokesman. Neither was true; four other political parties strongly opposed his Sudetendeutsche Nazis, and at least a quarter-million voters were German fugitives from the Third Reich. Like their Austrian comrades in terror, they knew that the names of their leaders were on Gestapo lists. For them, the Times editorial was at the very least the first draft of a death warrant.211

  Jan Masaryk had to pay two visits to Whitehall that morning before the Foreign Office agreed to announce that the Times proposal “in no way represents the view of His Majesty’s Government.” By then every capital in Europe was convinced that it did. In Blackpool the Labour party’s National Executive issued a formal statement declaring that “the British Government must leave no doubt that they will unite with the French and Soviet Governments to resist any attack on Czechoslovakia.” Halifax agreed—he was vacillating, not for the last time, on the Czech issue, and like many appeasers he was occasionally discomfited by flecks of doubt about the wisdom of endlessly yielding to Hitler’s demands.212

  By now the Czech border was swarming with German assault troops, and London knew that this time they weren’t there for maneuvers. Theodor Kordt, the chargé d’affaires at the German embassy in the absence of Dirksen, had arrived in Downing Street the night of September 6 and entered No. 10 through the garden gate and the Horse Guards Parade. There he told Horace Wilson, and then Halifax, who came hurrying over from the FO, that he had come, “putting conscience before loyalty,” as “a spokesman for political and military circles in Berlin who desire by every means to prevent war.” He and his associates wanted a blunt warning that England would fight for the Czechs. “Hitler,” he said, had “taken his decision to ‘march in’ on the nineteenth or twentieth.”213

  Kordt was confirmed by an equally sensational development. Dr. Karl Burckhardt of the League of Nations had given the British ambassador in Berne a message from Weizsäcker, second only to Ribbentrop in the Wilhelmstrasse, confirming Kordt in every particular and underscoring the need to warn the Führer that the invasion of Czechoslovakia meant war. Halifax, with Chamberlain’s reluctant approval, drafted a sharply worded note for delivery to the German government: if the Czech frontier were breached France would declare war on Germany, touching off “a sequence of events” resulting in “a general conflict from which Great Britain could not stand aside.” But Ambassador Henderson—who had no authority whatever to pass judgment on the foreign secretary’s instructions—refused to deliver the note, on the ground that it would only inflame the Führer. Besides, he said, he had already made the British position “as clear as daylight to people who count.” With this assurance, and because of the difficulty of communicating with Henderson, who was living aboard a train for five days while he attended the Nuremberg rally, Halifax, “on understanding that you have in fact already conveyed to Herr von Ribbentrop… [the] substance of what you were instructed to say,” agreed that Henderson need make no further representation.214

  Precisely what His Majesty’s ambassador to the Reich may have said to Ribbentrop is unrecorded; but the SS officer who served as Henderson’s escort at Nuremberg later said that during his stay he “remarked with a sigh that Great Britain was now having to pay for her guilty part in the Treaty of Versailles” and “expressed his aversion to the Czechs in very strong terms.”215

  On the third day after the Times editorial, Göring spoke to the vast, hysterical mass at Nuremberg, calling the Czechs a “miserable pygmy race… oppressing a cultured people” and fronting for “Moscow and the eternal mask of the Jew Devil.” The Führer’s turn at the rostrum came, as always, on the last night of the rally, Monday, September 12. Bathed in spotlights, pausing after each scream of invective as the huge, packed stadium roared, “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!” he shouted his distorted version of the May crisis, raging at the recollection of Germany’s humiliation then, which he blamed on Beneš and his “Jew plotters.” Sweating till his cowlick was plastered across his forehead, he called Czechoslovakia a “monstrous formation” and demanded that the Sudetendeutsche be granted the “right of self-determination” and “justice” (“Gerechtigkeit”), adding in a flash of arrogation: “Germans of Austria know best how bitter a thing it is to be separated from the Fatherland. They will be the first to recognize the significance of what I have been saying today.” They would indeed. And so would Winston Churchill. According to the cabinet minutes, Halifax reported that he and the prime minister had seen Churchill on the previous day (Sunday), and said that “Mr. Churchill’s proposition was that we should tell Germany that if she set foot in Czechoslovakia we should at once be at war with her. Mr. Churchill agreed that this line of action was an advance on the line of action which he had proposed two or three weeks earlier, but he thought that by taking it we should incur no added risk.”216

  Yet while Winston saw an Anschluss replay thundering toward them, the edgy cabinets in Paris and London, listening to Hitler’s Nuremberg speech over radios, heard only wind. They awaited what the FO called “triggers,” vows and demands which could only be resolved by German bayonets slashing toward Prague. Since the Führer was unspecific, however, the prime minister, the premier, and their ministers felt relieved. Misunderstanding him and his genius, they erred. This was his milieu, and he knew, as they did not, that his wild gestures and mindless raving were enough to set off bloody rioting in the Sudetenland. Prague declared martial law and rushed in convoys of troops. “SCHRECKENHERRSCHAFT!” (“REIGN OF TERROR”) shrieked Der Angriff, and Henlein fled into Germany. Then, abruptly, the storm ended. Thursday morning everything in the Sudetenland was normal.217

  At No. 10 Downing Street and the Paris home of the French premier, things were not. Premier Daladier wired Chamberlain, proposing that France, Britain, and Germany convene for a discussion à trois. But the P.M. had anticipated him. With the Sudetenland rioting approaching its peak, Chamberlain decided the time for Plan Z had arrived. Bypassing Henderson, he cabled Hitler during the night of September 13 that in the light of “the increasingly critical situation I propose to come over at once to see you with a view to trying to find a peaceful solution.” He intended to fly, could “start tomorrow,” asked for the “earliest time” they might meet and “a very early reply.” Chamberlain was eager. And anxious. It was the
sort of mood that sales clerks recognize in the customer who has decided to buy even before entering the store, and to pay any price.218

  Churchill’s Daily Telegraph column of September 15 predicted bloodshed; the Czechs, he wrote, possessed “an absolute determination to fight for life and freedom.” If not “daunted by all the worry and pressure to which they have been subjected,” they would inflict 300,000 or 400,000 casualties, but the world would hold them blameless. It was German aggression which would be condemned; “from the moment that the first shot is fired and the German troops attempt to cross the Czechoslovakian frontier, the whole scene will be transformed, and a roar of fury will arise from the free peoples of the world, which will proclaim nothing less than a crusade against the aggressor.”

  He could still sound his bugle, but the rest of the orchestra was following a different score. In the Foreign Office, Oliver Harvey wrote: “British press receives news of PM’s visit with marked approval. City is much relieved. Reaction in Germany also one of relief. In America it looks as if it were regarded as surrender. Winston says it is the stupidest thing that has ever been done.” Churchill knew what the prime minister was planning. He had learned that nearly a year earlier Chamberlain had written what he really wanted to tell the Nazis: “Give us satisfactory assurance that you won’t use force to deal with the Austrians and Czechoslovakians and we will give you similar assurance that we won’t use force to prevent the changes you want, if you can get them by peaceful means.” Declining Lord Moyne’s invitation to join him on a Caribbean cruise, Winston wrote: “Alas, a cloud of uncertainty overhangs all plans at the present time…. We seem to be very near the bleak choice between War and Shame. My feeling is that we shall choose Shame, and then have War thrown in a little later on even more adverse terms than at present.”219