Alone, 1932-1940

by William Manchester

  By the autumn of 1805 Napoleon had massed his invasion barges at Boulogne. The Royal Navy’s blockade of the Continent, built around nearly forty ships of the line, had frustrated French plans to cross the Channel in force, but now, Churchill wrote, “Napoleon… believed that the British fleets were dispersed and that the moment had come for invasion.”

  The decisive battle took place in the waters off Cape Trafalgar, Spain. Nelson was outnumbered and outgunned. At daybreak on October 21 he saw, “from the quarterdeck of the Victory, the battle line of the enemy”—an advance squadron of twelve Spanish ships and twenty-one French ships of the line under Villeneuve. He signaled his captains to form for the attack in two columns. Then:

  Nelson went down to his cabin to compose a prayer. “May the Great God whom I worship grant to my country and for the benefit of Europe a great and glorious Victory…. For myself, I commit my life to Him who made me, and may His blessing light upon my endeavours for serving my country faithfully.”

  The fleets were drawing nearer and nearer. Another signal was run up upon the Victory, “England expects every man will do his duty….”

  A deathly silence fell upon the fleet as the ships drew nearer. Each captain marked down his adversary, and within a few minutes the two English columns thundered into action…. The Victory smashed through between Villeneuve’s flagships, the Bucentaure, and the Redoutable. The three ships remained locked together, raking each other with broadsides. Nelson was pacing as if on parade on his quarterdeck when at 1:15 p.m. he was shot from the mast-head of the Redoutable in the shoulder. His backbone was broken, and he was carried below amid the thunder of the Victory’s guns…. In the log of the Victory occurs this passage, “Partial firing continued until 4.30, when a victory having been reported to the Right Hon. Lord Viscount Nelson, K.B. and Commander-in-Chief, he then died of his wound.”153

  Chamberlain and Henderson were to die of cancer, Chamberlain in the autumn of 1940, Henderson two years later. Halifax spent the war years as Britain’s ambassador in Washington, was created an earl in 1944, and died, aged seventy-eight, on December 23, 1959, thus surviving for over fourteen years the 357,116 Britons killed during the war.

  The pressure on Warsaw worked. Two hours after receiving Halifax’s wire, Kennard replied to the FO: “Poland is ready to enter at once into direct discussions with Germany.” His instincts had told him that negotiations with the Nazis could lead only to disaster, but disaster lay at the end of every turning. Now, at last, HMG could give Hitler the reply he wanted, and that evening Ambassador Henderson met with Hitler to deliver the British note. Poland had given assurances that she was ready to “enter into discussions.” The next step should now be to initiate negotiations between Germany and Poland. Instead of responding directly to the suggestion of negotiations, Hitler extended the limits of absurdity by asking whether Britain “would be willing to accept an alliance with Germany.” An abler diplomat would have realized that Hitler was muddying the waters and raising a question of future policy while they were in the midst of a crisis requiring immediate solution. Beyond that was the fact, noted by Vansittart, that “an alliance means a military alliance if it means anything. And against whom should we be allying ourselves with such a gang as the present regime in Germany? The merest suggestion of it would ruin us in the United States.” It would also have destroyed British credibility in countries to whom England was committed: France, Poland, Rumania, Turkey, and Greece. But Henderson’s answer to the Führer, as he reported it to the FO, was that “speaking personally I did not exclude such a possibility.”154

  For an ambassador to express an opinion on such an issue was inexcusable. The FO sharply told Henderson that he had gone too far and turned the offer down. Incredibly, Henderson failed to tell the Führer that Britain had rejected his proposal. During their talk Hitler had spoken of “annihilating Poland,” which ought to have alerted anyone, much less a diplomat, to the momentous fact that he would not be satisfied with Danzig. Yet Halifax ordered the reference deleted from the account of Henderson’s meeting that was sent to Warsaw.155

  Hitler wanted this problem, which he had created, to be resolved by bloodshed, but the Poles must be made to appear culpable. Receiving Henderson on Tuesday, the twenty-ninth, the Führer dispensed with the tact, civility, and outward show of mutual respect required in discourse between civilized nations. Instead, he demanded the appearance in Berlin of a Polish negotiator “with full powers” the following day.156

  Even Henderson was astonished. He blurted out that this was “ein Diktat.” Hitler and Ribbentrop, he later reported to Halifax, “strenuously and heatedly” denied it. The British ambassador left the chancellery “depressed by my own inadequacy” and “filled with the gloomiest foreboding.” Danzing, he told Whitehall, “must revert to Germany.”157

  Halifax’s response was a procedural suggestion. He, too, saw the Führer’s demands as an ultimatum and suggested that instead they be called “proposals,” offered as “a basis for discussion.” Hitler agreed to this meaningless rephrasing, but it would still be necessary, he insisted, for a Pole qualified to speak for his government to appear in Berlin immediately. This was a problem. The Poles, under pressure and against their better judgment, had agreed to discussions with the Reich, but they balked at the Nazi demand that they send a negotiator, armed with full powers, on the next plane to Berlin. For them to do otherwise would have been madness; Hitler had yet to set forth formal proposals. Until he had, and until Warsaw had studied them, talks between the two sovereign powers would be meaningless—unless, of course, the Poles capitulated, which, they suspected, was what the Führer wanted.158

  That the Poles continued to assert their rights was considered by Britain’s ambassador to the Reich a sign of exaggerated “prestige” and “amour propre.” Henderson advised Robert Coulondre, his French counterpart, “strongly to recommend” to Paris that France advise the Polish government “to propose the immediate visit of M. Beck as constituting in my opinion the sole chance now of preventing war.” He “implored” the Polish ambassador in Berlin, Lipski, to ask the immediate dispatch of a negotiator from Warsaw, as commanded by the Führer and chancellor of the Greater German Reich.159

  The pressure on the Polish government was becoming massive. At noon Wednesday Henderson, in one of his unauthorized trespasses into areas where he did not belong, approached the papal nuncio in Berlin and suggested that the pope put forward some “definite impartial solution,” such as a neutral frontier patrolled by Catholic priests. The papal nuncio replied that he thought laymen would be more suitable. Unknown to either Henderson or the nuncio, the pope, after talking to Mussolini, was already in touch with Warsaw. He believed, he told the Poles, that prospects of peace would improve if they surrendered Danzig. Then, he reasoned, Hitler would be willing to negotiate over the corridor and minority problems. The pontiff thought this suggestion should receive the “most careful consideration of the Poles.”160

  Polish obstinacy, Chamberlain concluded, was the greatest obstacle to peace. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy wired the State Department: “Frankly he is more worried about getting the Poles to be reasonable than the Germans.” At the cabinet meeting that Wednesday morning, only Hore-Belisha opposed pressing Beck to dispatch a negotiator to Germany. He thought it “important,” he said, “to make it clear that we are not going to yield on this point,” and he opposed any negotiations, anywhere, while the Führer was threatening Warsaw and massing his troops in Poland’s borders. The cabinet agreed that Hitler’s ultimatum was “wholly unreasonable.” But the “really important thing,” Halifax told them, was the German agreement to negotiate. The Polish government should “be prepared to do so without delay.”161

  Forcing the weak to submit is clearly easier than confronting the strong, particularly if you have persuaded yourself that the weak deserve what is coming to them. At Berchtesgaden, Godesberg, and Munich, Chamberlain had discovered flaws in the Czechs which had previously escaped his atten
tion. So it was now with the Poles. Henderson worried that the Poles might provoke the Führer’s wrath and “force” the Nazis to move against Poland. Actually, all the provocation had been on the other side, though the Nazis had gone to great lengths to make it appear otherwise. On Hitler’s orders the Sicherheitsdienst, the SS security service, had dressed a dozen German prisoners in Polish uniforms. Identical uniforms were to be worn by SS men who would “lead” them in a simulated attack on a German radio station near the Polish border, holding it long enough for a Nazi fluent in Polish to announce Poland’s invasion of the Reich. The criminals—whose code name was Konserven (Canned Goods)—would be given lethal injections by an SS doctor and then shot; their bloody bodies would be shown to the foreign press as evidence of Polish aggression.162

  To the appeasers, efforts to avoid war were, ipso facto, virtuous, and they assumed that all sensible men would agree. But in Berlin making war was a virtue, and those who shrank from it were base. The Men of Munich never grasped this, and Henderson was staggered when the Nazis, whom he had regarded as his friends and future allies, decided that the time had come to humiliate him. On the evening of Wednesday, August 30, a German courier summoned Henderson to the Foreign Ministry. He expected the best. The Führer’s diplomats were assumed to have drawn up proposals for a solution, and these, he hoped, would be the subject of their discussions.

  There were no discussions. It was after midnight when Ribbentrop ordered him into his office. “From the outset,” Henderson wrote in his memoirs, “his manner was one of intense hostility, which increased in violence…. He kept jumping up to his feet in a state of great excitement, folding his arms across his chest, and asking if I had anything more to say.” He then interrupted each attempt to reply—though Henderson was trying to tell him that HMG had “consistently warned” the Poles against “all provocative action.” The bewildered ambassador did manage to say that if the Reich’s proposals were ready, HMG “could be counted upon to do their best in Warsaw to temporise negotiations.” At this, the Nazi minister produced a long document and read it aloud “as fast as he could,” Henderson wrote, “in a tone of utmost scorn and annoyance.” There were sixteen points—the return of Danzing, a plebiscite in the corridor, sovereignty over Gdynia, a redrawing of boundaries, and on and on—but Henderson, as he wrote afterward, “did not attempt to follow too closely,” assuming the paper would be handed to him at the end.163

  It wasn’t. Ribbentrop pocketed it, saying that since no Polish negotiator had come to Berlin, the proposals were “now too late.” It was now the last day of August, the last day of peace. Henderson spent it frantically trying to get Beck, Lipski, or some senior Polish official to call on Ribbentrop. It is unlikely that any of them would have been received. Hitler admitted to Schmidt, his interpreter, that his offer to negotiate was a pretext. “I needed an alibi,” he said, “especially with the German people, to show them that I had done everything to maintain peace.” That, he said, explained his “generous offer” to settle “die Danziger und Korridor-Frage.” In any event, the Poles, proud and defiant, were not much interested in the advice of Henderson or any well-meaning go-between. Dahlerus told Horace Wilson that it had become “obvious to us” that the Poles were “obstructing” possible negotiations.164

  Indeed they were. They didn’t trust England anymore, though Wilson, Henderson, Halifax, and Chamberlain couldn’t imagine why. Churchill could have told them, and later did. Ribbentrop’s lies about Polish brutality had been believed; Beck’s reports of Nazi atrocities rejected. Halifax and Chamberlain had confided in Dirksen, yet were evasive, not only with the Polish ambassador, Raczyński, but also with the French. They were violating, both in letter and spirit, solemn treaties they themselves had drafted and signed a few days earlier. The prospect of fighting was unthinkable to them, unimaginable and inconceivable, and it had unmanned them. In their desperate attempts to avoid it they had resorted to trickery and deception. And they were still in business. As Hoare had told the cabinet on Monday, should German troops invade Poland they could “always fulfil the letter of a declaration without going all out.” In short, declare war but not wage it. The dux bellorum Arthur, Elizabeth I, Hawkins, Drake, and Nelson wouldn’t have known what he was talking about, and Churchill would be slow to grasp it.165

  As Henderson desperately tried to overcome what Chamberlain called “Polish stubbornness” and paced his embassy office struggling to remember the sixteen points the foreign minister had read to him at top speed, Churchill was at Chartwell dictating letters to Chamberlain, Kingsley Wood, his publisher, and G. M. Young (“It is a relief in times like these to escape into other centuries”). The note to Chamberlain urged him to take stern measures because there seemed to be no way “Hitler can escape from the pen in which he has put himself,” but afterward Winston decided not to mail it. The caution was sound; the P.M. had become increasingly unresponsive to his suggestions, and if, as Churchill believed, his prospects of a cabinet seat were at last brightening, sending unsought advice to a suspicious prime minister was clearly impolitic.166

  He could be frank with Secretary for Air Kingsley Wood, and he was. Flying home from Consuelo Balsan’s château he had found that the buildings and concrete aprons at Croydon Airport had not been camouflaged, that airport authorities were “obstructing” the digging of trenches for pilots and crews during enemy air raids, and that construction of underground shelters was “proceeding far too slowly.” Remarking upon these details was characteristic of him. So, at that time, was the lethargy of Croydon authorities and construction workers. British newspapers had reported the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and the public had been alarmed by it. But the ominous diplomatic exchanges between governments, and the growing momentum of the rush toward war, were known to very few. Only Chamberlain, Horace Wilson, and Halifax were in possession of all the facts, and the complete story of Hitler’s actions, including the murders of the Canned Goods, would not emerge until the postwar Nuremberg trials, where Ribbentrop was candid, obsequious, and hanged. Civilians in England had not even been told that their government was committed to the defense of Danzig, that Danzig was in grave peril, and that war was therefore imminent.167

  Churchill was probably better informed than anyone outside the inner circle, but the windup of his book preempted his attention. While Ribbentrop was affronting Henderson and telling him it was “too late,” Winston was reworking his manuscript and writing Sir Newman Flower at Cassels, thanking him “for procuring this extra time for the Preface to the Life of Sir Austen Chamberlain” and adding:

  I am, as you know, concentrating every moment of my spare life and strength upon completing our contract. These distractions are very very trying. However, 530,000 words [1,621 pages of manuscript] are now in print, and there is only cutting and proof reading, together with a few special points, now to be done.

  You will understand, more than anyone else, how difficult it is for me to spend a night upon another form of work. However, I still hope I may be able to serve you.168

  At 8:30 Friday morning Churchill was awakened by a telephone call from Raczyński, who told him that at 4:00 A.M. fifty-six German divisions, nine of them panzers, had crossed the Polish frontier in darkness from Silesia, Cracow, and the Carpathian flank. After he had bathed and breakfasted Winston received another call from Raczyński. Two Luftwaffe air fleets—sixteen hundred aircraft—had begun bombing Polish cities; civilian casualties were heavy. It was ten o’clock, and it occurred to Winston that the War Office might have fresh details. The War Office didn’t even know Poland had been invaded. As Ironside noted in his diary, he reached “the Horse Guards as 10 A.M. was striking and was immediately rung up by Winston from Westerham who said ‘They’ve started. Warsaw and Kracow are being bombed now.’ ” Ironside phoned Lord Gort, chief of the Imperial General Staff, “who didn’t believe it.” Ironside urged him to tell Hore-Belisha; Gort called back to report that “Belisha was seen rushing off to Downing Street.” Ironside “rang Wins
ton and he said he had the news definitely from the Polish Ambassador 1½ hours ago…. How could the War Office possibly be ignorant of this?”169

  The answer was that Raczyński, a graduate of the London School of Economics and a twenty-year veteran of diplomacy, was familiar with the intricacies of English politics. He knew Winston could be trusted but was unsure of the others, and events swiftly confirmed him. Despite their treaty obligations, the unprovoked German invasion of Poland produced, not declarations of war by Britain and France, but an awful silence. On Hore-Belisha’s return from No. 10 the War Office dispatched telegrams ordering full mobilization at 2:00 P.M., and France followed suit. But instead of planning to break through the Siegfried Line—a golden opportunity, for Hitler, confident that the democracies’ fear would restrain them, had left only ten divisions to defend it—both Paris and London expressed their readiness to negotiate if the Führer’s troops withdrew from Poland. For Berlin, this Allied betrayal of the Poles more than compensated for Mussolini’s declaration of Italian neutrality less than an hour later.170

  Churchill, outraged, was writing a blistering attack on the Chamberlain government. His voice counted now. Herbert Morrison, the leading Labourite, had once called him “a fire-eater and a militarist.” But after Prague, Morrison saw him as England’s last hope. The Daily Telegraph, Manchester Guardian, and Daily Mirror had become the most vehement forums demanding Winston’s recall to the government. As long as the struggle between Churchill and his critics had remained confined to the House of Commons he was hopelessly outnumbered, but Fleet Street had laid his case before the people of England, who now saw him as their champion. That may have explained, at least in part, Chamberlain’s call to Chartwell that noon. Parliament had been summoned for 6:00 P.M. Churchill would be driving up to London, and the prime minister said he would be grateful if, before entering the House of Commons, Winston would stop at No.10 for a few minutes.