Alone, 1932-1940

by William Manchester

  Part of Churchill’s particular alienation may be traced to his megalomania, a source of strength in public life but distasteful to many in private. Boothby remarked that “ ‘Thou shall have no other gods but me’ has always been the first, and the most significant, of his Commandments.” Desmond Morton wrote a journalist long afterward: “The full truth, I believe, is that Winston’s ‘friends’ must be persons who were of use to him. The idea of having a friend who was of no practical use to him, but being a friend because he liked him, had no place.” To be sure, Morton’s comment was made late in life, when he had become embittered because Churchill had not given him a more prominent role in the wartime government. But even Violet Bonham Carter, who adored Winston, conceded that “He demanded partisanship from a friend, or, at the worst, acquiescence.”16

  However, that was not why parliamentarians who had come to share his views avoided him in the House. Churchill was considered dangerous. If an MP had ministerial ambitions, association with Winston could kill his chances, and what could be the point of that? Because Churchill always seemed confident, strong, and self-assured, it never occurred to them that he might welcome a pat on the back, or a few pleasant words commending him for a great speech, despite the editorials, despite the lord chancellor’s opinion that he should be introduced to a firing squad, or the noose of hemp, for having delivered it. The prime minister might notice, or hear of it. Since his acclamatory reception at the airport and at Downing Street, Chamberlain had acquired messianic airs.

  On Thursday, the day after Churchill had spoken, the prime minister moved for an adjournment of the House until November 1. Attlee, Sinclair, and several Conservatives—Macmillan the most vehement of them—strongly protested. Churchill urged a two-day session in mid-October; it was “derogatory to Parliament,” he said, “that it should be thought unfit, as it were, to be attending to these grave matters, that it should be sent away upon a holiday in one of the most formidable periods through which we have lived.” Chamberlain replied shabbily that the Speaker decided when the House would be recalled, to which Winston instantly retorted: “But only on the advice of His Majesty’s Government.” Every MP knew that. Chamberlain called his remark “unworthy… tittle tattle,” and now it was between the two of them; Winston, desperately in need of support, got none. He wrote No. 10, protesting the prime minister’s slur, and the P.M. responded: “I am sorry if you think my remarks were offensive, but I must say that I think you are singularly sensitive for a man who so constantly attacks others. I considered your remarks highly offensive to me and to those with whom I have been working…. You cannot expect me to allow you to do all the hitting and never hit back.”17

  Churchill returned to Chartwell profoundly depressed. He canceled a lecture at the Imperial Defence College, explaining, “I am so distressed by the change in the situation that I haven’t the heart to address myself to the task to which you invited me at present.” Paul Reynaud and Georges Mandel, outraged by Munich, had resigned from the French cabinet, and Winston wrote Reynaud: “I cannot see what foreign policy is now open to the French Republic. No minor State will risk its future upon the guarantee of France. I am indulging in no pretensions upon our own account…. Can we make head against the Nazi domination, or ought we severally to make the best terms possible with it—while trying to rearm? Or is a common effort still possible?” His nephew John George Churchill later told Martin Gilbert: “The gloom after Munich was absolutely terrific. At Chartwell there were occasions just alone with him when the despondency was overwhelming.” To an old Canadian friend Winston wrote on October 11: “I am now greatly distressed, and for the time being staggered by the situation. Hitherto the peace-loving Powers have been definitely stronger than the Dictators, but next year we must expect a different balance.”18

  He thought he had touched bottom when Edward abdicated, but this was worse. That, however, was part of this. In 1936, A. J. P. Taylor writes, “Churchill had seemed the rallying point for patriotic and democratic opinion,” but Winston’s ambiguous position on the Spanish Civil War and his championing of a discredited monarch eroded his support, and “his prestige ran downhill,” particularly on the left. The conventional explanation for his continued isolation is that he had outraged Parliament by his long losing battle for the Indian Raj; but Chamberlain had deplored the parliamentary maneuvers which led to dominion status for India. Labour approved of Winston’s support of the League of Nations but recoiled from his calls for collective security. He “estranged the idealists,” as Taylor puts it, “and so remained until the outbreak of war a solitary figure, distrusted by both sides.” After Britain’s disillusionment with Munich—and the “first ecstasy,” noted Muggeridge, “soon passed” when Englishmen realized that the agreement would “involve still further concessions to Germany”—reasonable men might at the very least have acknowledged that Churchill had been right. But politics is never reasonable. Having denied, ridiculed, and scorned his accusations and impeachments, the cabinet could not indemnify him without confessing to its own incompetence.19

  As the last weeks of 1938 skulked away, anyone wagering that the member from Epping would still be in his corner seat a year hence would have been entitled to ask for odds. Two exits were available. He could quit, or his constituents could recall him. He had hung on for nine years, hoping for a responsible post, but the chances of that were as remote as ever. He was still urging the strengthening of Britain’s defenses, and that, in the eyes of the appeasers, was enough to disqualify him, despite his great abilities. Furthermore, as Chamberlain noted in his diary, recognition of Churchill was out of the question as long as friendship with Hitler and Mussolini seemed possible: “I wouldn’t risk it by what would certainly be regarded by them as a challenge.” Macmillan told Hugh Dalton that in Parliament or out, Churchill was “in danger of relapsing into a complacent Cassandra. He would say: ‘Well, I have done my best. I have made all these speeches. Nobody has paid any attention. All my prophecies have turned out to be true. I have been publicly snubbed by the Government. What more can I do?’ ”20

  In London it seemed inconceivable that Churchill could be forced to resign his seat in Parliament. But in the aftermath of Munich, during those weeks in which it seemed that Chamberlain had actually succeeded in buying peace, the rank and file of Conservative voters, proud of the party’s leader, were aroused by any criticism of him. In this political climate the Sunday Express ran a brief item under the head: “Trouble is being made for Churchill in Epping. The campaign is strong, the campaigners determined.” Winston sent Beaverbrook a note of protest; the story, he wrote, was “misleading as to the true state of affairs: & certainly most unhelpful to me.” It was unhelpful, but it was also accurate. Two of his loyal constituents, Sir Harry Goschen and Sir Colin Thornton-Kemsley, had been dismayed by his Munich speech. Goschen wrote to the chairman of the Epping Conservative Association, Sir James Hawkey, that he could not “help thinking it was rather a pity that he broke up the harmony of the House by the speech he made…. I think it would have been a great deal better if he had kept quiet and not made a speech at all.”21

  Goschen decided to stick with Churchill; but Thornton-Kemsley wanted him repudiated and replaced by someone who would “support the Conservative administration, not… discredit them.” On November 4, in a public meeting, Churchill defended his position on Munich. Then Thornton-Kemsley spoke, arguing that Winston’s attempts to contain Germany with a “ring of strongly armed powers” had floundered. There was, he said, no conflict between British and German goals, and if the four nations represented at Munich could “agree upon a policy of friendship,” no other nation would dare touch off a war. The audience seemed equally divided, but Hawkey lent his support to Winston, and his constituents passed a resolution regretting the failure of His Majesty’s Government to respond to their member’s warnings “given during the last five years” and declaring that had the prime minister and his cabinet followed Churchill’s advice, Chamberlain “w
ould have found himself in a far better position to negotiate with the heads of the dictator States.”22

  Churchill was once more secure in Epping—or so it seemed in November 1938—but as Sarah later wrote him: “What price politics since they won’t listen to you?” The one who listened least was the one who mattered most.23

  Neville Chamberlain believed that Munich was the triumph of his career. Intolerant of dissent, a believer in strong party discipline, he was vain, rude, and vindictive. These unattractive traits were balanced by terrific energy, a powerful intellect, and an even stronger gift for command. William Strang, of the Foreign Office, who was outraged by the Munich settlement, nevertheless saw him as “a man of cool, calm mind, strong will, decisive purpose, wholly devoted to the public cause and with a firm confidence in his own judgment.”24

  If he had a sense of humor, it is unrecorded. In any event, he did not think public business and national institutions subject to levity. He had detested Rugby as much as Winston had Harrow; nevertheless, he believed that public schools were part of the social order and should not be mocked. When Churchill told the House that “Britain is like a Laocoön strangled by old school ties” and compared England’s public school system to “feeding sham pearls to real swine,” Neville scowled. An incapacity for the droll and the whimsical is typical of fanatics—and the prime minister now resembled a skipper who has set his bearing and lashed himself to the wheel. After Munich he should have given England’s security overriding priority, but on Christmas Day, 1938, Oliver Harvey, a senior civil servant in the Foreign Office, noted despondently in his diary that Chamberlain was not pressing on with rearmament, that under Inskip the Committee of Imperial Defence “goes slower and slower,” and that “Inskip must certainly go. A much more vigorous and imaginative man should be there. Winston is the obvious man, but I believe the PM would rather die than have him.”25

  That much seemed clear. In November, addressing the House of Commons from the front bench, the P.M. had scorned Winston, repeating the old accusation of Churchillian instability. It was the same old wine from the same dirty bottles, but no one could remember a British prime minister turning on one of his own party’s private members. It simply wasn’t done. And it was particularly unwise to do it to Churchill, as Chamberlain learned when Winston, speaking to 1,200 of his constituents in Chingford on December 9, noted that the P.M. had told Parliament “that where I failed, for all my brilliant gifts, was in the faculty of judging. I will gladly submit my judgement about foreign affairs and national defence during the last five years in comparison to his own.”26

  It was a devastating speech. In 1934, he recalled, Chamberlain had been chancellor of the Exchequer when Winston warned Stanley Baldwin that “the Germans had a secret Air Force and were rapidly overhauling ours. I gave definite figures and forecasts. Of course, it was all denied with all the weight of official authority.” He had been derided as a “scaremonger.” In less than six months, he reminded his audience, Baldwin “had to come down to the House and admit he was wrong and he said, ‘We are all to blame.’ ” Baldwin had “got more applause for making this mistake, which may prove fatal to the British Empire and to British freedom,” than most Englishmen who rendered a great service to the nation. “Mr Chamberlain was, next to Mr Baldwin, the most powerful Member of that Government…. He knew all the facts. His judgement failed just like that of Mr Baldwin and we are suffering from the consequences of it today.” That blunder had been only the beginning. A year later Winston had asked that the RAF be doubled and redoubled, which prompted Lord Samuel, who shared Chamberlain’s faith in appeasement, to say he thought “my judgement so defective that he likened me to a Malay running amok. It would have been well for him and his persecuted race if my advice had been taken. They would not be where they are now.”

  He then turned to Chamberlain’s record as prime minister over the past two years. In his early days at No. 10 “the Prime Minister made a heart-to-heart settlement with Mr de Valera, and gave up to him those fortified ports on the South Coast of Ireland which are vital to our food supply in time of war.” The P.M. led Englishmen to believe that “the country now called Eire were reconciled to us in friendship, but I warned him with my defective judgement that if we got into any great danger Mr de Valera would demand the surrender of Ulster as the price of any friendship or aid.” And this, he said, “fell out exactly.” Recently De Valera had announced that he could give England neither friendship nor aid while any British troops remained in Northern Ireland.

  Next, in February 1938, Churchill continued, Chamberlain had said that

  tension in Europe had greatly relaxed. A few weeks later Nazi Germany seized Austria. I predicted that he would repeat this statement as soon as the shock of the rape of Austria passed away. He did so in the very same words at the end of July. By the middle of August Germany was mobilising for those bogus manoeuvres which after bringing us all to the verge of a world war, ended in the complete destruction and absorption of the Republic of Czechoslovakia. At the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in November at the Guildhall, he told us that Europe was settling down into a more peaceful state. The words were hardly out of his mouth before the Nazi atrocities upon the Jewish population resounded throughout the civilised world.

  These “proved errors of judgement in the past,” Winston ended, should be weighed carefully when pondering “some of the judgements which have been passed upon the future, the results of which have not yet been proved.”27

  The Treasury Bench excepted, Churchill did have an attentive audience in Parliament, and they were its elite, men of eminence and accomplishment in other fields, backbenchers many of them, not because they lacked ministerial talent but because their time for public affairs was limited. In the division over the Munich Agreement, MPs, following their ancient ritual, had left the chamber to vote for or against it. Thirty eminent Conservatives remained seated, however, signifying abstention. This, wrote Nicolson, “must enrage the Government, since it is not our numbers that count but our reputation.” Among the abstainers were Churchill, Eden, Duff Cooper, Leo Amery, Roger Keyes, Macmillan, Sandys, Bracken, and Boothby. This was a sign of party disarray. Rank and file MPs, Nicolson noted, realized that these dissidents “know far more about the real issue than they do.” It was clear that “the Government were rattled by this…. The House breaks up with the Tories yelling to keep their spirits up. But they well know that Chamberlain has put us in a ghastly position and that we ought to have been prepared to go to war and smash Hitler. Next time he will be far too strong for us.” On November 17 Churchill wrote in the Daily Telegraph: “Everyone must recognize that the Prime Minister is pursuing a policy of a most decided character…. By this time next year we shall know whether the Prime Minister’s view of Herr Hitler and the German Nazi Party is right or wrong. By this time next year we shall know whether the policy of appeasement has appeased, or whether it has only stimulated a more ferocious appetite.” Privately he wrote Lord Wolmer on December 12: “Neville leads us from bad to worse.”28

  Certainly he had presided over a series of disastrous defeats in 1938, altering the European balance of power and putting in jeopardy nations in eastern Europe which were friendly to France and Britain. The Anschluss and Munich had swollen the Reich’s population by 10,250,000—conscripts for the Wehrmacht, toilers in arms factories, drudges for the expanding empire. But it had already become clear that the safeguards adopted at Munich—the international commission and the guarantee of Czechoslovakia’s new borders—were worthless. The commission met in the Wilhelmstrasse, under Ribbentrop’s eye; the British and French delegates were under instructions, from Halifax and Bonnet, to yield to Hitler whenever possible. Their request for a definition of the impossible was unanswered. And Churchill’s prediction that the Czech state could not survive the butchery of its frontiers in the Führerbau had been swiftly realized. With Beneš gone, the Czech defensive forts in Nazi hands, and ethnic minorities at each other’s throats, the only dem
ocracy in eastern Europe was disintegrating. The Slovaks made the first move toward autonomy on October 6; three days later the Ukrainians followed their example; and on November 2 German and Italian arbitrators awarded Hungary nearly 4,600 square miles of Czechoslovakian soil. That left the Czech rump of Bohemia and Moravia, vaguely associated with the independent governments of Slovakia and Ruthenia.

  At Chartwell, Churchill read reports of anti-Nazi fugitives from the Sudetenland. They echoed the tales Viennese had told earlier: midnight arrests, Gestapo firing squads, respectable leaders of their communities vanishing into concentration camps. On October 7 Halifax sent Berlin a note citing press accounts of such ill-treatment; he would be grateful, he said, for information “to combat such assertions, the spreading of which might in fact hamper the advocates of Anglo-German relations in the realisation of their aspirations.” Hitler’s response gave Britain’s foreign secretary a lesson straight from Mein Kampf: anyone who agreed to negotiate with Nazis emerged a loser, his wounded pride treated with vigorous applications of salt. Speaking at Saarbrücken two days later, the Führer angrily declared: “We cannot tolerate any longer the tutelage of governesses. Inquiries of British politicians concerning the fate of Germans within the frontiers of the Reich—or of lands belonging to the Reich—are none of their concern.”29

  On the last evening of 1938 Nicolson wrote: “It has been a bad year…. A foul year. Next year will be worse.” Churchill, more optimistic, told his constituents in January that while Englishmen like himself doubted that Munich had “purchased a lasting peace,” they felt that at least a “breathing space” had been won. He said: “Let us make sure that this breathing space is not improvidently cast away.” Later, after the Men of Munich had been discredited, that became the keystone of their cover-up; they had, they said, bought time to rearm. It wouldn’t wash. The day after Churchill’s speech, Chamberlain rejected Secretary for War Hore-Belisha’s request for a larger army budget, playing the same weary tune the cabinet had heard so often before, telling them that “finances cannot be ignored, since our financial strength is one of our strongest weapons in any war which is not over in a short time.” As a former chancellor, he said, he thought Britain’s financial position looked “extremely dangerous.” Other ministers argued that Hitler would be shocked by British rearmament, interpreting it as inconsistent with the spirit of Munich, asking why, if the two countries were trusted friends, England was arming to the teeth. Hore-Belisha proposed conscription. He was denied it. Kingsley Wood wanted air parity with Germany. His request was also denied, but because he invested everything he was given in new, superior fighter planes—while the bloated Luftwaffe remained content with what it had—the number of Spitfire and Hurricane squadrons jumped from five to forty-seven in a year. Antiaircraft batteries also multiplied, but “these improvements,” as Churchill later wrote, “were petty compared with the mighty advance in German armaments.”30