Misunderstandings between the dictators and the democracies were inevitable anyhow; never, in the long reach of European history, had two more disparate cultures coexisted. The Nazis and Fascists were convinced that they were, as an admiring Anne Morrow Lindbergh called them, “the wave of the future.” To celebrities from the West the societies created by the Duce and the Führer were impressive. They seemed efficient. There were no strikes, no demonstrations, no disrespect for authority. The Gleichschaltung—political coordination and the elimination of opponents—of Hitler’s new order meant more productive assembly lines, organized holidays for workers, and an inspired, patriotic youth. It was heartening to see blond Aryan boys in short leather pants running through the fields hand-in-hand with blond, buxom Aryan girls, though visitors were seldom told why they were so enthusiastic. Once they were out of sight, the boy’s lederhosen were shucked while his companion, as a loyal member of the Bund Deutscher Maedel, hoisted her skirts to enjoy Strength through Joy, pleasing the Führer by increasing the population of his Reich, which, he said, would always need soldiers. The young were the most ardent Nazis, but enthusiasm for the regime was found among Germans of every age and on every social level. They had always been a regimented people, and did not seem to mind the loss of personal freedom. They rallied to the slogans “Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz” (“The Common Interest before Self-interest”) and “Kanonen statt Butter” (“Guns instead of Butter”). Those who preferred liberty and butter absconded or remained silent. In the Third Reich Gleichschaltung wasn’t for everybody, just everybody who wanted to live.
Nothing in the democracies, including the United States, matched the euphoria of this lusty carnival, these vigorous folk who never jaywalked, never argued with their superiors, who listened meekly when upbraided by policemen yet turned viciously on those they considered Untermenschen, their inferiors. They seemed to spend an inordinate amount of their time marching, and singing stirring songs as they marched: “Die Wacht am Rhein,” “Bomben auf Polen,” the “Horst Wessel Lied,” and “Deutschland über Alles” (“… über alles in der Welt”).
Since the United States was among alles in der Welt, and Franklin Roosevelt was determined not to see the swastika hoisted in Washington, the president asked Congress for $552 million to strengthen American defense. He also appealed to Hitler to keep his sword sheathed. The Führer ignored him; he held all democracies in contempt, seeing them as weak, indecisive, and easily bullied. Many in England, France, and the United States agreed with him. Each democracy now had its strong, local Fascist movement, and even those who scored dictatorships wondered whether their countrymen had gone “soft.”
In the Nazis’ book burning of May 10, 1933, Goebbels, who had struck the first match, had declared: “The soul of the German people can again express itself.” Implicit here was the Nazi conviction that beneath the veneer of modern culture was the primitive vigor of a warrior race; of noble savages, supple and powerfully built; of those ancient Germans who, Tacitus had written, were conspicuous for their “fierce blue eyes, red hair, tall frames,” and whose loyalty to their chieftain was absolute. Strip away that veneer, the Nazi ideologues told one another, and Germany, redeemed, would be invincible. What they overlooked was that it was true of all civilized nations. Deutschland was not the only European nation with proud military traditions. British soldiers had been winning battles, and the Royal Navy sinking ships, three centuries before Bismarck welded the three hundred states of central Europe into the German Empire. Churchill was putting it on record every night. It was Britain’s misfortune, and the world’s, that the men at the helm of His Majesty’s Government in 1939 had lost England’s compass and, lacking the wisdom of Caesar, thought you could strike a deal by shaking hands with barbarians.
Britain was by treaty committed to the defense of Danzig, but in fact HMG’s position was very different. Immediately after signing the Anglo-Polish treaty on Friday, August 25—the first day of the last week of peace—Halifax told the Polish ambassador that while he recognized “how vital to Poland was the position in Danzig,” he did not feel that “if there were ever any opportunity of conversations being held about Danzig, the Polish Government would be right or wise to reject it.” Indeed, he thought the Poles “would make a great mistake if they sought to adopt a position in which discussions of peaceful modifications of the status of Danzig were ruled out.” Despite Daladier, members of the French government were frantically trying to abandon their ally in the east; a member of Daladier’s cabinet said publicly: “There is nothing to be done but to allow Germany to have her way.” To further enfeeble opposition to Hitler, England and France were trying to approach the Führer through Mussolini, although neither democracy was informing the other.143
The Poles, wary of yielding an inch to the Germans, believed that any concession over Danzig would lead to new Nazi demands. In Warsaw the British ambassador, Sir Howard Kennard, had returned from leave, to the relief of his exhausted chargé. Kennard was blessed with clearer vision than any senior diplomat in Whitehall except the shelved Vansittart. To the Foreign Office he explained that “if Hitler decides on war, it is for the sole purpose of destroying Polish independence.”144
But HMG was sure Hitler could be bought off for less, if only they could get him to state his price. Hitler, too, with the invasion of Poland nearly at hand, needed to know what Britain would do. On August 25, the Führer summoned Henderson to the chancellery. There Hitler told him, as the ambassador afterward reported to Whitehall, that he “accepts the British Empire and is willing to pledge himself personally for its continued existence.” Once “the problem of Danzig and the Corridor” was resolved, Hitler would convey “an offer” detailing how his few colonial demands could be “negotiated by peaceful methods.” But first, HMG must inform him of its attitude toward the Polish problem.145
Meantime the Duce was trying desperately to stop the Nazi juggernaut from rolling into Poland, not to spare the Poles or avert another general war, but because, as Germany’s ally, he was pledged to fight beside Hitler and couldn’t do it. On the morning of August 25 he found himself in an unaccustomed state of acute embarrassment. The Führer had sent him an urgent personal letter, alerting him to the Wehrmacht’s imminent plunge into Poland. The Führer had written: “In case of intolerable events in Poland, I shall act immediately.”
Mussolini’s reply reached Hitler at about 6:00 P.M. According to Schmidt, it staggered him. He had not asked for Italy’s help; under the three-month-old Pact of Steel it was taken for granted. But Hitler and Chamberlain were not the only European statesmen prepared to break their word. In his answer to Hitler’s letter, the Duce said flatly that if the Reich made war on the Poles, Italy must be counted out. “The Italian war preparations,” he said, were not complete; he was unprepared to “resist the attack which the French and English would predominantly direct against us.” It had been his understanding “at our meetings [that] the war was envisaged for 1942, and by that time I would have been ready.” After Hitler read it, he summoned Keitel and shouted: “Stop everything! At once!” Thus the invasion of Poland—Fall Weiss—was postponed to September 1.146
As Europe slept, Churchill stood hunched over his Disraeli desk, correcting galleys, revising passages with his red pen, or dictating inserts to Mrs. Hill, who sat over the keyboard of a silent typewriter, her fingers at the ready. He was telling the tale of an earlier Britain, when, in time of war or the threat of war, pusillanimous officials were flogged or hung. He went back to the birth of Britain, to the Roman occupation, the departure of Rome’s legions, and the chaos that followed in the fifth century when, as the Welsh monk Nennius recorded, invading Saxons (“Sessoynes”) from Germany plundered the island’s quilt of little kingdoms, raping, looting, and spreading disease. The desperate kings turned to a dux bellorum—no monarch, but in those times something far more prestigious: a military commander of great gifts and courage—known to history as Arthur. Arthur brought England a century of peace
by defeating the Saxons in twelve mighty battles, the greatest of which, “the crowning mercy,” as Churchill called it, was fought on Mount Badon at some time between 490 and 503. Now in 1939, at Chartwell, he invested Arthur with a crown and wrote that his “name takes us out of the mist of dimly remembered history into the daylight of romance. There looms, large, uncertain, dim but glittering, the legend of King Arthur…. Somewhere in the Island a great captain gathered the forces of Roman Britain and fought the barbarian invaders to the death. Around him, around his name and deeds shine all that romance and poetry can bestow.”147
In London three days were devoted to preparing an official reply to Hitler’s insolent offer to “accept” the British Empire once Polish problems were solved. Horace Wilson and Rab Butler completed the first draft that Friday. Chamberlain reworked it until late in the evening. At 6:30 P.M. Saturday it was presented to the full cabinet, with Henderson present, presumably to offer the views of the German führer. There was, it turned out, nothing in it which he would have found objectionable. The reply was largely devoted to the need for Polish concessions, or the lack of them. Hitler had been insisting that they must give way, and HMG agreed. Hore-Belisha thought this first draft “fulsome, obsequious and deferential.” He wrote in his diary that he had “urged that our only effective reply was to show strength and determination—that in no circumstances” should England “give the impression that we would weaken in our undertaking to Poland. Kingsley Wood supported me.” Discussion continued awhile longer, then the group adjourned for the night.148
To Frenchmen it is La Manche, to Germans der Ärmelkanal, but Britons and Americans know it as the English Channel, and with some justification; it has long served the British as a formidable moat, the equivalent, in military terms, of perhaps a hundred divisions. It is not, however, unbridgeable. The Romans, Saxons, and Normans hurdled it. Philip II, Louis XIV, and Napoleon tried and came close. Concern about invasion fueled “isolationism,” as the Victorians called it, three generations before Americans thought the concept theirs; and until Neville Chamberlain decided to chart his own foreign policy, it served as the keystone of British foreign policy in Europe. The island’s safety, it was held, rested upon two stout principles. First, no nation possessing a great army would be permitted to seize the lowlands, Belgium and Holland. It was Germany’s violation of Belgian territory which had triggered England’s declaration of war in 1914. Second, power on the Continent would be shared by two or more nations. Chamberlain was the first prime minister to encourage domination by one, believing that Anglo-German friendship would guarantee peace, and—until Ribbentrop and Molotov signed their treaty of alliance in Moscow—that the Third Reich was a bulwark against Soviet imperialism. However, England’s encouragement of balanced power in Europe had been challenged in every century, most frequently by France, but most memorably, perhaps, by Spain.
Prowling back and forth in his study—muttering while Mrs. Hill’s fingers flew over her keyboard—Churchill reworked the story of Philip II’s Great Armada. Philip II of Spain, envisaging his empire as the worldly arm of the Roman Catholic church, and himself as its sword, had plunged into all the religious wars of the time, guided by the faith that the Reformation could be undone and all Europe reunited in a single faith, regardless of the cost. Henry VIII had led England out of the church. Now his daughter Elizabeth was defending her father’s Reformation. Philip, honing his blade, became obsessed with England, and when the northern Netherlands broke loose from Catholicism in 1581, he began building his “invincible Armada,” over 132 vessels bearing 3,165 cannon and 30,000 men, intent upon the conquest of Britain. Lord Leicester could muster but 20,000 untrained men. This force could not defend the beaches, and the fate of the island therefore rested with the fleet.
If the British prevailed, rule of the seas would pass from Spain to England. There, too, however, prospects seemed dim. Only 34 of the Queen’s ships were seaworthy, all of them smaller than the enemy’s galleons. They were joined by 36 privately owned vessels. It didn’t seem enough. But the Royal Navy was led by captains like John Hawkins and Francis Drake, the finest seamen the world had known. The size of their craft was misleading; based on his experience as a buccaneer in colonial waters, Hawkins had radically altered the design of English ships, cutting down the castles which had towered over decks, mounting heavier, long-range guns, and deepening keels and concentrating on seaworthiness and speed.
Perhaps the island’s greatest weapon, however, was its sovereign. Now in her mid-fifties, she had ruled England for thirty years, as long as Philip had Spain, and was as skilled in the use of power. She knew how to wear the crown, how to use it, and, in this hour of national peril, how to arouse her people in its defense. “The nation was united in the face of Spanish preparations,” Churchill wrote. “While the Armada was still off England Queen Elizabeth reviewed the army at Tilbury and addressed them in these stirring words:
“Let tyrants fear. I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and goodwill of my subjects; and therefore I am come amongst you, as you see, resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live or die amongst you, to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and for my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust. I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which, rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.”149
The first appeaser Hitler had laid eyes on had been Halifax, when the noble lord had visited the Berghof nearly two years earlier and had mistaken the master of the Reich for a servant. The Führer, skilled at taking a man’s measure, told his guest that all SS men were shown the film Lives of a Bengal Lancer because it depicted “a handful of Englishmen holding a continent in thrall.” It was then that he had recommended that Gandhi be shot. Halifax’s lack of enthusiasm, Hitler told his interpreter, triggered his first suspicion that the heirs to the British Empire were weak and irresolute. In mid-August, with the crisis over Poland growing, he had decided to probe. To Karl Burckhardt of the League of Nations he expressed “great sympathy” for Halifax: “I thought he was a man who saw things on a big scale and desired a peaceful solution. I hope one day to see him again.” Burckhardt sent London an account of these remarks and Halifax began “considering” sending a member of His Majesty’s Government to talk to the Führer. Another Munich seemed to be shaping up.150
On August 27 the P.M. met with Birger Dahlerus, a Swedish businessman and friend of Göring who served as an unofficial go-between that week. Dahlerus, who had arrived in London from Berlin that afternoon, told Chamberlain, Wilson, Halifax, and Cadogan that Danzig and the corridor were indeed Hitler’s targets. To Dahlerus, Halifax emphasized the necessity of “direct discussions” between the Germans and the Poles. Now that HMG “knew” that Danzig was the Nazi objective, England could force Beck to yield it. This should be construed, the foreign secretary told Dahlerus, not as England’s final position, “but rather to prepare the way for the main communication”—to establish, in short, a procedure for meeting further Nazi demands. In Berlin the Swede saw Göring that evening, but not the Führer: “Hitler too tired,” he wired the Foreign Office. Halifax said he understood; the Führer had many burdens. In the morning—it was now Monday, August 28—Dahlerus was granted an audience in the chancellery. To Halifax he quoted the chancellor: “Great Britain must persuade Poland to negotiate with Germany.” It was “most important,” Hitler said, that “Sir N. Henderson” bring him a statement affirming that England had undertaken to so persuade the Poles. The desirability of this was underscored after a cabinet meeting that afternoon, when the foreign secretary received a telegram from Sir George Ogilvie Forbes, counsellor in Britain’s Berlin
embassy. Ogilvie Forbes quoted Dahlerus as saying: “Herr Hitler suspects that the Poles will try to avoid negotiations. Reply should therefore contain a clear statement to the effect that the Poles have been strongly advised immediately to establish contact with Germany and negotiate.” Halifax now took a step without precedent. He wired Kennard in Warsaw: “His Majesty’s Government earnestly hope that… Polish Government… is ready to enter at once into direct discussion with Germany. Please endeavour to see M. Beck at once and telephone reply.” Thus, without consulting or even informing the cabinet, Halifax turned a Nazi demand into British foreign policy, thereby weakening Britain’s sole ally in the east. If the Wehrmacht crushed Poland, Hitler could turn and hurl the full fury of his might against France, Britain’s only ally in the west. Should France be overwhelmed, England would stand alone, facing the first European power in a century to threaten the very existence of Britain by vaulting the Channel.151
At Chartwell Churchill was writing Bill Deakin: “I have tried to fit these Galleys together. The present arrangement is quite impossible. I send you my own copies, where the Galleys are arranged more or less in chronological order. I see no use mixing up sections about Pitt and George III with separate studies of the American colonies.” The Canadian section was “more or less complete”; so was the one on India. All that would be gathered together under the heading “The First British Empire,” to be followed by a chapter called either “The Great Pitt” or “The Seven Years’ War,” describing “the position of the First British Empire as it stands at the Peace of Paris 1763.” The next would be “The Quarrels of the English Speaking Peoples,” covering “the reign of George III.” George III is not remembered as an admirable sovereign, and not only because of his madness; but his years on the throne were marked by stirring events and the deeds of great men, among them the greatest military hero in the history of England. Winston had told his tale, and it lay in the galleys he was correcting before their dispatch to Deakin.152
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