Spears could not remember Georges’s reply, but neither Georges nor Weygand acted upon, or even made note of, Churchill’s advice. Yet in its heavily guarded headquarters outside Berlin, the German high command was studying that same spot in the Ardennes. Using tanks, the generals believed, they could outflank the Maginot Line, take Paris, and force the French to their knees—accomplishing in six weeks what their fathers had vainly sought in four years of bloody, frustrating siege warfare.
On Friday, August 18, when Ambassador Schulenburg was climbing walls in Moscow, trapped between his führer’s demand for a windup of treaty negotiations with Russia and Stalin’s dawdling, Spears and Churchill parted, Spears returning to London and Winston traveling fifty miles north of Paris to Dreux and the château of Consuelo Balsan, born a Vanderbilt and for twenty-six years a duchess of Marlborough. Her 1921 divorce from Charles (“Sunny”) Marlborough had been amicable, and the door to her home was always open to Winston and his family. Churchill was aware that galleys and even page proofs were accumulating on his Chartwell desk, but despite his outward display of vigor, he was weary. Believing as always that “a change is as good as a rest,” he had decided to paint. Clementine and Mary, now approaching her seventeenth birthday, awaited him there. Because they were “conscious that the sands of peace were fast running out,” Mary recalls, their “appreciation of those halcyon summer days was heightened: there was swimming and tennis (so greatly enjoyed by Clementine) and fraises des bois; Winston painted a lovely picture of the exquisite old rose-brick house; we visited Chartres cathedral and were drenched in the cool blueness of the windows.” As with a song that runs through one’s mind, she kept remembering a line from Walter de la Mare: “Look thy last on all things lovely.”127
Among Consuelo’s other guests was Paul Maze, the professional painter and an old friend of Winston’s. In his diary Maze noted: “We talked about his visit to the Maginot Line with Georges—very impressed by what he saw.” At dinner he was cross, “but with reason,” Maze thought, “as the assemblée didn’t see any danger ahead. As [Sir Evan] Charteris was walking up the stairs to go to his bed he shouted to me, ‘Don’t listen to him. He is a warmonger.’ ” On two successive days he and Winston painted together. Maze wrote that as he worked alongside him, Churchill “suddenly turned to me and said: ‘This is the last picture we shall paint in peace for a very long time.’ What amazed me was his concentration over his painting. No one but he could have understood more what the possibility of war meant and how ill-prepared we were.” As they worked, Winston would remark from time to time on the relative strength of the opposing armies. “They are strong, I tell you, they are strong.” Then, Maze wrote, “his jaw would clench his large cigar, and I felt the determination of his will. ‘Ah,’ he would say, ‘with it all, we shall have him.’ ”128
After three days at Consuelo’s château Winston suddenly left. Later, in his memoirs, he wrote that he “decided to go home, where at least I could find out what was going on,” promising “my wife I would send her word in good time.” It was August 22; the Germans and the Russians had announced that final negotiations for their nonaggression pact would begin tomorrow. Now it was official: the triple alliance was dead. The Allies could expect no support from the U.S.S.R. The situation was even worse than they thought. Not only would the pact provide that if either country should “become the object of belligerent action by a third party,” the other country would “in no manner lend its support to this third power”; in a secret protocol the signatories agreed to respect each other’s “spheres of influence in Eastern Europe”—the basis, a month later, for the division of conquered Poland between the Soviet Union and the Reich. Even so, the impact of the impending treaty on Englishmen may be roughly compared to that of Pearl Harbor upon Americans. Nicolson, learning of it over the 6:00 P.M. BBC news, described Britain’s shock: “This smashes our peace front and makes our guarantees to Poland, Rumania and Greece very questionable. How Ribbentrop must chuckle. I feel rather stunned…. I fear that it means we are humbled to the dust.” Malcolm Muggeridge wrote: “Groping down darkened streets, dimly it was felt that a way of life was failing, its comfortable familiarity passing away never to reappear.”129
Churchill paused in Paris to lunch with Georges, who produced figures on the strength of the opposing armies, including their fighting spirit. “The result impressed me so much,” Winston later wrote, “that for the first time I said: ‘But you are the masters.’ ” The general replied: “The Germans have a very strong army,” adding cryptically: “We shall never be allowed to strike first.” French politics, in short, ruled out a French preemptive strike into the Ruhr after war had been declared—Poland’s only hope and also, as it turned out, France’s. Apparently Winston missed these implications; he left Paris in a cheerful mood. Leaving Dreux, he had seemed depressed, and Maze had given him a note to be read after he was on his way: “Don’t worry Winston. You know that you will be Prime Minister and lead us to victory.”130
“That night,” Churchill wrote in his memorandum of events, “I slept at Chartwell.” He did not sleep unguarded. In The Gathering Storm he later wrote: “There were known to be twenty thousand organised German Nazis in England at this time, and it would only have been in accord with their procedure in other friendly countries that the outbreak of war should be preceded by a sharp prelude of sabotage and murder.” In February he had spent six pounds, fifteen shillings, on his two guns, having them stripped, cleaned and oiled, fitted with new trigger blades and cross pins, and the two pairs of barrels rejointed. He had hired Inspector W. H. Thompson, the retired Scotland Yard detective who had served as his bodyguard in the 1920s, to resume his old duties. Thompson recalled that in the car on his way home from Croydon Airport, “Mr. Churchill grew graver and graver as he sat wrapped in thought, and then said slowly and thoughtfully: ‘Before the harvest is gathered in—we shall be at war.’ ”131
Winston had not asked for official protection, as he wrote afterward, but “I had enough information to convince me that Hitler recognised me as a foe.” At Chartwell he and Thompson planned vigils. “While one slept,” Churchill wrote, “the other watched. Thus nobody would have had a walkover.” He knew “a major burden” would fall upon him if war came—“and who could doubt its coming?” His wife and daughter had no doubts. They followed him to England a few days later, passing through Paris. “On that golden summer evening,” Mary recalls, “the Gare du Nord teemed with soldiers: the French army was mobilizing.”132
In the morning Churchill felt refreshed, and was off to London. Nicolson noted that he “has just returned from Paris and is in high fettle. The French are not at all perturbed by the Russo-German Pact and are prepared to support Poland nonetheless.” Winston had “just rung up Paul Reynaud who asserts that all is going well: by which he means war, I suppose.” He did, but only because there was no honorable alternative. A year ago the pied piper at No. 10 had thought there was. This new crisis was the bitter price they must pay for that error. Their exigency had worsened. There were no Czech divisions to march with them now, and the Russians—who had been ready to fight for Czechoslovakia—had shifted sides. Churchill believed that if the Allies had taken a firm stand at Munich, it “would have prevented war,” and “if worse had come to worst, we should have been far better off than we may be at some future date.”133
This was that future date. He devoted the night of his return to writing an article for the Daily Mirror—“At the Eleventh Hour”—which appeared on August 24. In the light of the “intrigue” between the Nazis and the Communists, he wrote, it was becoming “increasingly difficult to see how war can be averted.” Events, he stated, were “moving forward from every quarter and along all roads to catastrophe. The German military preparations have already reached a point where action on the greatest scale is possible at any moment.” That afternoon, August 24, Chamberlain recalled Parliament—to reach the House of Commons MPs had to pass through a line of pickets carrying s
igns bearing the single name CHURCHILL in a blue circle. The House approved an emergency war powers bill; the Royal Navy was ordered to its war stations, reservists were called up, twenty-five merchantmen were requisitioned for conversion to armed merchant cruisers, leaves were canceled, the Dominions alerted, and twenty-four thousand reservists ordered to man ack-ack batteries, radar stations, and balloon stations.
Britain was springing to arms, but not eagerly. In 1914, London, including Parliament, had thrilled with war fever. Now—and this was also true of Paris and Berlin—the mood was somber and resigned. Victor Cazalet wrote in his diary that the House had been “very full” and that Chamberlain had made “a good but not very impressive speech.” Afterward, he added, “I sat in Smoking Room with LG and Winston. Both v anti-Chamberlain. Think he has led us into this mess. We ought never to have given guarantees to Poland unless they had consented to allow Russian army across their frontiers.” Nicolson joined the group in the smoking room; he had heard rumors that the P.M. had offered to resign if war came and that the King would refuse to accept. That evening Churchill dined at the Savoy with Duff Cooper, Eden, Sandys, and Sinclair. In his diary Duff Cooper noted: “We were all very gloomy.”134
On August 25, His Majesty’s Government, recognizing the gravity of Poland’s peril in light of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, signed a formal treaty of alliance with the Poles, turning a unilateral guarantee into a bilateral pact. Britain’s obligation to Poland was now far more binding. The next Tuesday, after talking to Churchill on the telephone, Eddie Marsh noted in his diary that Winston had said “Hitler was evidently rattled, but he didn’t see how he could climb down, which would cost him his life.” That same day the FO also sent Berlin a note urging Germany not to attempt a Danzig coup. Churchill read it before it was sent—he always managed to be in the Foreign Office at critical moments, alerted by his informants there—and doubted that the message was strong enough. Duff Cooper, another diarist, noted that Vansittart had assured them that “HMG’s note to Hitler was everything that could be desired. Winston rang up the Polish ambassador while we were there, who said that he was now completely satisfied with the support he was receiving from our Government.”135
On Saturday, Ironside, driving down to Chartwell for lunch, had found Winston “full of Georges, whom he had seen over in France. I found that he had become very French in his outlook…. The burden of his song was that we must have a great Army in France, that we couldn’t depend upon the French to do our effort for us.” He wanted twenty British divisions across the Channel by Christmas. Before Ironside left Chartwell, Winston observed that His Majesty’s Government, in trying to sway European events, was taking a far more imperious pose than its military establishment warranted—that, as Ironside paraphrased him, “We were trying to get as much control in the conduct of affairs as if we had an Army of one and a half millions.”136
Churchill thought HMG still did not fully appreciate that the great danger on the Continent required urgent measures. The prime minister and members of the cabinet, apparently believing this was just one more crisis which could be solved by deferring to the Führer, continued to be relatively passive as the week unfolded. With a few outstanding exceptions—Shirer, Colvin, Sheean, John Gunther, and the best of the London press corps—press dispatches from the Continent did not reflect a need for speed. One of Winston’s most reliable sources was Geoffrey Parsons of the New York Herald Tribune. On Sunday Parsons wired Chartwell: “Send you this by telegraph since hours are numbered. Impossible to exaggerate confidence of Hitler and German people that British will capitulate…. Nobody has expected anything but swift easy victory over Poles, having been fed idea British would never fight over Danzig or Poland…. General cynicism toward British attitude amazes me after visit to London. But it exists in opinion of American observers in Britain.”137
Chamberlain seems to have sensed as much, and, within the bounds of his desire to avoid offending the Führer, had been taking steps to counter this impression. On August 22 he had written a personal letter to Hitler, informing him that Britain was now on a war footing. This alert, he said, was the result of German troop movements and the assumption “in some quarters in Berlin” that since the announcement of Germany’s agreement with Russia “intervention by Great Britain on behalf of Poland is no longer a contingency that need be reckoned with. No greater mistake could be made.” Whatever the nature of Hitler’s pact with Stalin, the P.M. wrote, “it cannot alter Great Britain’s obligation to Poland, which His Majesty’s Government have stated in public repeatedly and plainly, and which they are determined to fulfill.”138
Ambassador Henderson flew to Berchtesgaden, arriving at Hitler’s mountain retreat about noon on Wednesday, the twenty-third, to deliver the P.M.’s letter. Hitler was on edge—thirty Wehrmacht divisions were moving toward the Polish frontier—and his response, according to Henderson’s cable to Halifax, was “excitable,” couched in language “violent and exaggerated both as regards England and Poland.” The situation of Germans in Poland had become intolerable, he shouted; Polendeutsche were even being subjected to “kastrieren” (“castration”). If Britain did not force the Poles to stop these outrages, the Reich would be forced to begin “Gegenmassnahmen” (“countermeasures”). Later that day, he again received Henderson. This time his temper was under control, which made what he had to say all the more appalling. He was “fifty years old,” he said, and “preferred war now” to when he “would be fifty-five or sixty.” It was “surely quite clear to everyone that the World War would not have been lost” had he “been Chancellor at the time.” In his formal, uncompromising reply to Chamberlain, he declared that the Reich had displayed “unparalleled magnanimity” in its attempts to settle the Danzig and Polish Corridor problems. Then, in what Churchill later called “a piece of lying effrontery,” the Kriegsherr charged that England’s “unconditional assurance” to Poland “could only be interpreted in that country as an encouragement henceforward to unloose, under cover of such a charter, a wave of appalling terrorism against the one and a half million German inhabitants living in Poland.”139
In Danzig and Poland, local Nazis were following the modus operandi which had played so well in Austria and Czechoslovakia. Local Nazi storm troopers in uniform sacked stores owned by Jews, painted huge yellow swastikas on synagogues, and assaulted critics of their führer in the streets. In Polish communities where Germans were a majority, policemen cheered them on. Meantime German newspapers were telling their readers the exact opposite—that the victims were Polendeutsche, stalked by Polish terrorists. In Karlsruhe the daily paper carried the headline “WARSAW THREATENS BOMBARDMENT OF DANZIG—UNBELIEVABLE AGITATION OF THE POLISH ARCHMADNESS! [POLNISCHEN GRöSSENWAHN].” “POLEN, GIB ACHT!” (“POLAND, LOOK OUT!”) warned the Berliner Arbeiterzeitung; “ANSWER TO POLAND, THE RUNNER-AMOK [AMOKLÄUFER] AGAINST PEACE AND RIGHT IN EUROPE!” On Saturday, August 26, the Zwölf-Uhr Blatt reported: “THIS PLAYING WITH FIRE GOING TOO FAR—THREE GERMAN PASSENGER PLANES SHOT AT BY POLES—IN CORRIDOR MANY GERMAN FARMHOUSES IN FLAMES!” The banner headline in the Berliner Arbeiterzeitung that day read, “COMPLETE CHAOS IN POLAND—GERMAN FAMILIES FLEE—POLISH SOLDIERS PUSH TO EDGE OF GERMAN BORDER!” Goebbels saved his masterpiece for the Sunday Völkischer Beobachter:
ALL OF POLAND IN A WAR FEVER! 1.5 MILLION MEN MOBILIZED!
UNINTERRUPTED TROOP TRANSPORT TOWARD FRONTIER!
CHAOS IN UPPER SILESIA!140
William L. Shirer notes dryly: “There was no mention, of course, of any German mobilization.” Germany had been fully mobilized for two weeks, but the Poles, anxious to avoid provoking the Reich, and on British advice, had actually delayed their mobilization. Only thirty Polish divisions were in position to defend their frontiers. The Germans had massed fifty-six divisions, including nine armored, on Poland’s borders. Two great pincer movements were prepared to overwhelm the defenders, troops whose leaders had no plan and cherished an absolute faith in the power of cavalry charges to defeat m
odern tanks.141
The Anglo-Polish Treaty of Mutual Assistance, as announced in London and Warsaw that last Friday in August, was a model of clarity. Article One clearly stated that should either country fall victim to aggression, the other would declare war on the offenders. To strengthen this, Article Two provided that this action would be triggered in the event of “any action by a European Power which clearly threatened, directly or indirectly, the independence of one of the contracting parties.”
That was the way to handle Hitler. Yet despite Chamberlain’s firm words in Parliament, the indecisiveness and yearning for German friendship were still there. When Hitler studied the text of the pact, he found no mention of Danzig. Since the free city was not Polish soil, he assumed that England was not committed to its defense. Actually England was, but Halifax had been unwilling to commit himself openly, and so—in an act of prodigious diplomatic incompetence—the guarantee to defend Danzig’s status quo had been entered in a secret clause of the treaty. It would have been better to omit it entirely. As Duff Cooper had written in July: “Lack of decision is the worst fault from which a policy can suffer. So soon as a decision has been taken no time should be lost in announcing it…. It is of the first importance that we should know our own minds; it is of almost equal importance that the world should make no mistake about our intentions.” Halifax, by clouding HMG’s intentions, should have forfeited his office on this issue alone.142
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