Alone, 1932-1940

by William Manchester

  Chamberlain had not dressed for dinner. He had been too busy, and as he led his ministers into the Cabinet Room they began to understand, from exchanges between him, Halifax, and Cadogan, why he had failed to answer Simon’s calls. As late as 9:30 P.M., shortly after he had received the cabinet ultimatum signed by four senior members of his government, he had been on the phone with Rome, trying to turn Mussolini’s proposal for a five-power conference into a reality, with the understanding that the talks could not begin until the German troops now in Poland were back in Germany. Ciano’s final message had torpedoed the prime minister’s hope. The Italians, the Duce’s son-in-law had told him, “do not feel it possible” to ask the Reich to join such a conference; the British insistence on a Wehrmacht withdrawal would merely arouse the Führer’s celebrated wrath. If Hitler decided “on his own” to pull out the Wehrmacht, Ciano said, “well and good,” but Mussolini did not “feel able to press him to do so.”205

  This was the final blow to appeasement. Chamberlain bleakly acknowledged that his long struggle to keep the peace had failed. Halifax was not so sure, but the responsibility was not his, and he had not been in the House of Commons that afternoon. The decision was Chamberlain’s, and, having made it, his next step was to inform Paris and arrange for a joint declaration of war. Shortly before 10:00 P.M., while dissident conservatives were conferring at Morpeth Mansions, the prime minister phoned Daladier and told him that there had been “an angry scene in the House of Commons,” adding that his “colleagues in the Cabinet are also disturbed.” The premier replied that the French government had decided to present the Germans with a forty-eight-hour ultimatum which would begin at noon tomorrow, Sunday, September 3. Out of the question, said the prime minister; if he agreed “it would be impossible… to hold the situation here.” He wanted an Anglo-French ultimatum which would be issued at 8:00 A.M. tomorrow and expire at midday. Daladier, distressed, replied that he would confer with his ministers and reply through the Quai d’Orsay.206

  In the Cabinet Room, Cadogan was also talking to Paris, telling Bonnet that His Majesty’s Government would, of course, prefer simultaneous declarations of war by the two democracies, but England could not wait until noon Tuesday. If the German offensive maintained its momentum, Poland’s position would be hopeless by then. Bonnet replied that it was all very well for England to set a Sunday deadline; the British had evacuated London’s children to the country, but “we cannot get our young people out of Paris” on such short notice. This issue was new. The French could have followed the British example. They had overlooked it, and now, in the last-minute rash of calls to No. 10 and the Foreign Office, it obsessed them. According to Dorman-Smith’s recollection they were “convinced Paris would be bombed as soon as war was declared… horrified and terrified at our determination for an immediate ultimatum and saying: ‘Are you going to have all our women and children killed?’ ” HMG was unmoved. The French were indignant and surprised, and they sulked through most of Sunday. Yet their able ambassador in London, Charles Corbin, had alerted them to the fact that if HMG did not deliver an ultimatum in Berlin before Parliament met, “They risk overthrow,” and French politicians, with their history of tumbling cabinets, should have understood that.207

  In the past Chamberlain had tried to accommodate the French whenever possible, and he had usually found it possible. The renitent cabinet—representing, in Gilbert and Gott’s felicitous phrase, England’s “revolt of conscience”—had stiffened the backbones of its leaders. The decisive conversation was between the two foreign ministers. Halifax had crossed the street to take the call in his own office, but the prime minister, with an aroused Hore-Belisha at his elbow, had given him precise instructions. Chamberlain had not yet decided how he would yield to the cabinet, but he wanted the French to know that the British were prepared to act independently of Paris. Thus Halifax informed Bonnet that the British government would send Berlin an ultimatum, with a deadline, before they went to bed. They had no choice, “owing to the difficult position which has arisen in the House of Commons.” And hesitation by Chamberlain now would make it “very doubtful” he could “hold the position” of His Majesty’s Government. If France wanted to delay its ultimatum later than 8:00 A.M. that was up to the French. Great Britain would already be at war.208

  Returning to No. 10 with Ivone Kirkpatrick, Halifax encountered Hugh Dalton and greeted him almost as a colleague; though Dalton represented Labour in Parliament, he was also a graduate of Eton, King’s College at Cambridge, and the London School of Economics, and under MacDonald he had served two years as parliamentary under secretary in the FO. Halifax told him that France was vacillating and asked whether he thought Labour would “favor our declaring war alone.” Dalton said he couldn’t speak for the party, and in fact it was unnecessary; Greenwood had already gone on record with the prime minister. Kirkpatrick said he could speak for himself and then did. Public opinion, he said, was “bewildered and disturbed. Unless we go to war we are sunk.”209

  After a long meeting with Margesson—who once more advised that he could not answer for the consequences should Parliament meet tomorrow without a declaration of war—Chamberlain finally joined his ministers in the Cabinet Room. It was 11:00 P.M. They were hungry and tired, but none had left, or forgotten why they had come, or the strategy adopted in Simon’s office. To Dorman-Smith “the PM was calm, even icy-cold.” He told them of the French pleas and said they had not left him unmoved; he was, in fact, “terribly worried that Paris might indeed be attacked from the air.” No one commented. However, when he pointed out that should an ultimatum be sent, they must agree on its timing, they broke their vow of silence. Hore-Belisha thought Henderson should deliver it at 2:00 A.M., less than three hours from now, and that it should expire four hours later. “The less time involved, the better,” he argued. Many heads nodded in agreement, and Halifax left the room to cable Henderson: “I may have to send you instructions tonight…. Please be ready to act.” But Chamberlain’s implicit acceptance of war had dulled the edge of the mutineers’ resolve. They were vulnerable to manipulation. In the end they agreed on a 9:00 A.M. delivery and an 11:00 A.M. expiration. Thus, by failing to stand by Hore-Belisha, Britain gave the advancing Nazi troops another five hours, and in the new mobile warfare that counted heavily. When time ran out and this final deadline passed, the Germans would be on the Vistula.210

  It was nearly midnight. Outside, the storm was mounting, the lightning bolts coming ever closer; there was scarcely any interval now between the flash and the thunder pealing across St. James’s Park. Simon and Sir John Anderson of the Home Office were in a corner, conferring. Chamberlain seemed determined, but he had seemed no less in earnest only seven hours earlier, in this very room, when he had approved of the “immediate fulfilment of British obligations to Poland” and declared his agreement with those in favor of a midnight ultimatum. This time they wanted his sworn word; either he promised to respect the decision of the cabinet now reassembled or they would carry their fight to the people. They approached him and told him that. Chamberlain nodded and said quietly: “Right, gentlemen. This means war.”211

  He had scarcely said it, Dorman-Smith recalled, “when there was the most enormous clap of thunder and the whole Cabinet Room was lit up by a blinding flash of lightning. It was the most deafening thunder-clap I’ve ever heard in my life. It really shook the building.”212

  The same stunning thunderclap shook Churchill’s flat, and there, too, the timing was dramatic. Winston had just finished reading his letter to the prime minister aloud. Dazzled by the lightning bolt, his friends took a sharp breath, agreed that his message was splendid—and began arguing loudly over what should be added and what stricken out. This was scarcely practical, since the letter, if it was to be effective, must be sent to No. 10 immediately. Winston let them fuss. He had no intention of altering a comma. And he was quite pleased by the lightning. Its timing could scarcely have been improved upon.

  Actually he was ent
itled to another dramatic moment. At intervals, between writing paragraphs, he had been placing more phone calls, and now he reached one of the insurgent ministers at No. 10. He told his guests that someone—he mysteriously described him as “a friend”—would call back and tell him what had been decided. “Unfortunately,” Duff Cooper noted with amusement, “his secretary gave the show away by coming in and saying, ‘Mr. Hore-Belisha is on the telephone.’ Churchill was much annoyed. He came back with the information that it had been decided ‘to deliver the ultimatum next morning.’ ” This changed the situation. The quarreling ended; the men in Morpeth Mansions recovered their poise. After a moment of reflection he decided to send his letter to Chamberlain anyway. Then he rooted around, producing items he had had the foresight to order a year earlier, before the Munich crisis. It was all on a list in his pocket: “1 Torch for Mrs. Churchill; dark material for door; Adhesive tape, gum and black paper.” His departing guests had taken no precautions, “and so,” Duff Cooper wrote, “we wandered through the dark streets.”213

  Halifax had cabled Henderson to request a 9:00 A.M. appointment with Ribbentrop, and then—since the ultimatum need not be drafted until morning—went to bed. To Kirkpatrick he had “seemed relieved” that the waiting was over and his role as an appeaser was finished. That was not true of his French counterpart. As the British foreign secretary slept, the French foreign minister made one last absurd attempt to avoid fighting Hitler’s Germany. Telephoning Ciano, Bonnet asked whether “un retrait symbolique” (“a symbolic withdrawal”) of German troops was possible. Ciano knew Hitler would scorn not only the idea, but also anyone who brought it to his attention. In his diary he wrote: “Nothing can be done. I throw the paper in the wastebasket without informing the Duce.”214

  Henderson delivered the ultimatum but he was heartbroken. Awaiting a reply that never came—Hitler would deliver his answer with his U-boats, now patrolling the sea lanes around Britain—he said farewell to Dahlerus, who noted that the British ambassador could not hide “his profound grief and disappointment.” Dahlerus later wrote that “certain circles in England regarded him with scepticism and considered him susceptible to Nazi influence,” but the Swede thought that unjust; he had “never found him a dupe of German policy.” Since Dahlerus himself was a dupe, his judgment here carries little weight. But if Henderson’s dreams lay in ruins, they were not only his dreams; they were shared by his superiors in London. He had not served King and Country well. Neither had they. And none of his acts diminishing England’s prestige, and weakening her in the years before her people faced the greatest challenge in her history, would have been possible without the connivance and even the encouragement of Chamberlain, Halifax, and Cadogan.215

  The British ultimatum expired (the French declaration of war would follow at 5:00 P.M., six hours later) and at 11:15 A.M. September 3 the prime minister spoke to the nation over the BBC, telling them that England and Germany were once again at war. His address was neither memorable nor inspiring; Boothby wrote Churchill: “Your immediate task seems to have been made much easier by the PM today. His was not the speech of a man who intended to lead us through the struggle.” Winston and Clementine had heard over their Morpeth Mansions radio, and hardly had Chamberlain’s voice died away than the piercing wail of air-raid sirens, later to become so familiar to an entire generation of Englishmen, sounded all over the city. Winston, Clementine, and Inspector Thompson hurried toward the door. “You know, you’ve got to hand it to Hitler,” said Churchill—heading for the roof, not the shelter—“The war is less than a half-hour old, and already he has bombers over London.” Actually, the alarm was false, though Churchill didn’t know it as he gazed out, as he put it, “in the clear, cool September light” to watch “thirty or forty cylindrical balloons” slowly rising above the city. “It was with difficulty,” Inspector Thompson recalled, “that we prevailed upon him to enter an air-raid shelter. He only agreed to go when it was pointed out to him that it was up to him to set an example. Down we went… the Old Man with a bottle of brandy under his arm.”216

  They made their way, Churchill wrote, “to the shelter assigned to us.” It lay a hundred yards down the street, “an open basement, not even sandbagged,” as he described it, already occupied by the tenants of a half-dozen flats. “Everyone was cheerful and jocular,” he recalled, “as is the English manner when about to encounter the unknown.” But according to Fritz Günther von Tschirschky, a German refugee, Churchill himself was less than jolly. Tschirschky remained outside the shelter, feeling a German would not be welcome, until Clemmie, who knew him, insisted he come down. There he found Churchill “in a great state of indignation, stamping his foot, complaining that there was no telephone and no portable wireless, and saying the Germans would have much better organized air raid shelters.” Tschirschky volunteered that there was a portable radio in his flat, and Churchill said: “You Germans are so damned efficient—please be kind enough to fetch it.” But just then the wailing was heard again. Churchill afterward remembered that he “was not sure that this was not a reiteration of the previous warning, but a man came running along the street shouting ‘All Clear.’ ”217

  Parliament met at noon, and as Churchill crossed the lobby he was handed a note from the prime minister asking him to call on him “as soon as the debate died down.” It wasn’t much of a debate. The issue which had divided them had been resolved. The prime minister, speaking first, called the day “a sad day”; then, having turned overnight from dove to hawk, added: “I hope I may live to see the day when Hitlerism has been destroyed.” Greenwood, speaking for Labour, told the House that the “intolerable agony of suspense” had ended and saluted the gallant Poles, “now fighting for survival.” More cheers. Churchill, scheduled as the third speaker, wrote afterward that “as I sat in my place, listening to the speeches, a very strong sense of calm came over me, after the intense passions and excitements of the last few days. I felt a serenity of mind and was conscious of a kind of uplifted detachment from human and personal affairs. The glory of Old England, peace-loving and ill-prepared as she was, but instant and fearless at the call of honour, thrilled my being and seemed to lift our fate to those spheres far removed from earthly facts and physical sensation. I tried to convey some of this mood to the House when I spoke.”218

  Parliament remembered his years of warnings, his denunciation of Munich, the countless scenes in which he had been hooted and jeered and mocked when he tried to tell them of Nazi Germany’s growing military superiority and the threat to them and their island. He had anticipated this more than six years ago and never was a man more entitled to remind them that he had told them so. But his friends knew him incapable of that. “If we quarrel with the past,” he had said, “we may lose the future.” It is fair to add that he had high hopes of his imminent meeting with the prime minister. Bitterness now could sour his prospects then. So he began by declaring: “In this solemn hour it is a consolation to recall and to dwell upon our repeated efforts for peace. All have been ill-starred, but all have been faithful and sincere…. Outside, the storms of war may blow and the lands may be lashed with the fury of its gales, but in our own hearts this Sunday morning there is peace…. Our consciences are at rest.”219

  He warned them to expect “many disappointments, and many unpleasant surprises,” but added, “We may be sure that the task which we have freely accepted is not one beyond the compass and strength of the British Empire and the French Republic.” It was hardly true that Chamberlain had freely accepted it, and at hour four France was still at peace, but mention of the Empire was greeted with a murmur of approval; within the hour Australia and New Zealand had declared war on Germany while the other Dominions prepared to follow. Churchill noted that the prime minister had said it was “a sad day,” and so it was, but “there is another note which may be present,” a sense of gratitude that a new generation of Britons was “ready to prove itself not unworthy of the days of yore and not unworthy of those great men, the fath
ers of our land, who laid the foundations of our laws and shaped the greatness of our country.”

  Few cheered that. It was prophetic, but on that first day of the war the older generation’s thoughts about England’s youth were anxious thoughts. The Oxford Oath was still popular. Hitler was wicked; they knew that. He had forced this hated war on England. But fighting for the Union Jack, so powerful an incentive in 1914, had little appeal now. Vision was necessary, and in his closing remarks Churchill recognized that. Over the past few days, he observed, Parliament had passed bills entrusting “to the executive our most dearly valued traditional liberties,” but they would be safe there; no British government would use them “for class or party interests”; it would instead “cherish and guard them.” England’s dream was of a world in which all governments could be so trusted, the dignity of all people respected.