The King's War
Page 7
With the ordeal of his first wartime Christmas message out of the way, the King had been able to relax with his family at Sandringham for a few more days. He and the Queen now had to decide what to do with the princesses; they were reluctant to send them hundreds of miles back to Scotland and decided they would go instead to Windsor and stay at Royal Lodge, a house in Windsor Great Park, three miles south of the Castle, that he had been granted by his father as a country retreat in 1931. ‘Birkhall is too far off, & at their age, their education is too important to be neglected,’ he wrote in his diary.24
No sooner were the holidays over than the King became embroiled in the growing crisis surrounding Leslie Hore-Belisha, the colourful Secretary of State for War, whose relations with the military, and Lord Gort in particular, had become increasingly fraught. The two men’s mutual animosity plunged new depths over the so-called Pillbox Affair that erupted when Hore-Belisha complained after a visit to the British Expeditionary Force in November 1939 that Gort was not doing enough to build defences to protect his troops. The King learnt first hand about the ill feeling of the top brass towards his minister when he went to France the following month. He also appears to have helped to fuel the animosity – inspired, in part, by his continued resentment of the support that Hore-Belisha had given his elder brother during and after the abdication crisis, even going to Paris to meet the Duke in September 1937. The King duly passed on his concerns to Chamberlain, who then went to France a few days later. Ultimately, thanks to the King’s intervention, the generals managed to get their way: on 5 January, Hore-Belisha was forced to resign and left the cabinet, refusing an offer from Chamberlain to stay on in the less prestigious job of President of the Board of Trade. His sacking provoked a media storm, described variously by the newspapers as a result either of society intrigue, ‘hostility of the brass hats’ or opposition to the ousted minister’s attempts to ‘democratise’ the army.
In a letter to the King three days later Chamberlain said he had told Hore-Belisha, who was Jewish, there ‘existed a strong prejudice against him for which I could not hold him altogether blameless’, adding: ‘In these circumstances I felt the change had better come when things were quiet than be forced later when perhaps some crisis might have arisen.’25 Ambitious and often tactless, Hore-Belisha had made a lot of enemies, but there was also more than a whiff of anti-Semitism about the affair; Henry Pownall, the chief of staff to the British Expeditionary Force, wrote of the relationship between Gort and Hore-Belisha: ‘The ultimate fact is that they could never get on – you couldn’t expect two such utterly different people to do so – a great gentleman and an obscure, shallow-brained, charlatan, political Jewboy.’ Hore-Belisha himself claimed later that senior army officers resented his appointment because he was ‘a Jew and an ordinary person not of their caste’.26
Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, the diarist, believed the King had played a crucial role in turning Chamberlain against his minister – and thought Hore-Belisha knew it. ‘London is agog with Belisha tales ... as it has now leaked out that the King himself insisted on Leslie’s resignation,’ he wrote in his diary on 8 January. ‘Ever since the Abdication, the Court Minions have been intriguing his downfall ... all this will do the Monarchy harm, as they should not intrigue or dabble in politics.’27 For that reason, the King was understandably expecting an awkward encounter when Hore- Belisha came to Buckingham Palace the next day to surrender his seals of office. In the event, the ousted minister behaved graciously, prompting the relieved King to write in his diary: ‘I saw Hore- Belisha on my arrival at B.P. Luckily he was pleasant, and there was no need for me to open up the question of his resignation.’ In his resignation speech the following week, however, Hore-Belisha made ‘two clever digs’, which, according to Channon, ‘could be taken by the uninitiated to be slurs on the PM, but which now seem certainly to have been sad, sly allusions to the Sovereign’.28
The affair cast further gloom over the public mood. By March 1940, Britain had been at war for six months. Contrary to all expectations, the country, on the home front at least, was enjoying a period of relative calm. The air raids that had been expected by everyone – the government included – had not taken place. While there was military action at sea and in the air, the conflict in Western Europe had hitherto been one of words and propaganda from Germany, which was waging a war of nerves against the neutral countries to pressure them into providing it with food, oil and other raw materials. A general feeling of frustration found expression in growing popular discontent with the government. Though still loyal to Chamberlain, the King shared some of this frustration: ‘I am very worried over the general situation, as everything we do or try to do appears to be wrong,’ he wrote in his diary.29
The King, meanwhile, continued his efforts to rally morale at home, taking to the royal train to travel around the country. During his visit to a munitions factory ‘somewhere in the Midlands’, one of the female workers who was sorting out live bullets from duds turned to him and said: ‘If I had my way, each of these would have Hitler’s name on it.’ Standing next to her, the King tried his hand at sorting, only to give up and declare with a laugh: ‘I’m no good at it.’30 On another occasion, dressed in his admiral’s uniform, he spent several hours inspecting the naval forces; while there he acted, for a while, as ticket collector for troops from the British Expeditionary Force who were boarding trains for a spell of leave – much to the amazement of one sergeant who, on recognizing him, ‘gave a gasp of surprise, straightened to attention and saluted’.31
One crucial issue in these months was the attitude of Washington, a subject in which the King had a personal stake. The birth of what in the decades since has become known as the ‘special relationship’ can be traced back to the few days he and Queen spent in the United States in June 1939 during their tour of North America, in what was the first visit by a reigning British monarch to the former rebellious colony. For the King, the highpoint had been their twenty-four hours at Hyde Park, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s country house on the bank of the Hudson River in Dutchess County, New York, where he and the President discussed the worsening international situation over beer and hotdogs. The King left, convinced that Britain could count on Washington’s support in the event of war, telling an American reporter in an unguarded moment later in the trip: ‘It’s in the bag.’32
Events showed how wrong the King had been. Despite strong sympathy for the British and French cause, a poll in September 1939 showed at least ninety-five per cent of Americans strongly opposed to becoming ‘involved in Europe’s wars’. Roosevelt, though keen to do what he could for Britain, had his hands tied by his attempt to win re-election in November 1940, given that he was already under fire for pursuing policies that critics claimed had brought America too close to military intervention.
The King was nevertheless keen to build on the rapport he had established with the President. In the first instance this meant working on Joseph Kennedy, the US ambassador to London, who had been a strong supporter of appeasement. During a lengthy meeting with the King a few days after the outbreak of war, Kennedy expressed his incredulity that Britain should be involved in a conflict that could potentially ruin her for the sake of the Poles. The King was alarmed at what he had heard and was concerned the ambassador’s views were colouring the reports he sent back to Washington. In a frank letter to Kennedy the following day, the King described America, France and the British Empire as the ‘three really free peoples in the World’ and noted that two of the three were now fighting against ‘all that we three countries hate & detest’ in the form of Hitler and his Nazi regime. He concluded: ‘We stand on the threshold of we know not what. Misery & suffering of War we know. But what of the future? The British Empire’s mind is made up. I leave it at that.’33
Yet Kennedy continued to send his gloomy reports back to Washington. In January 1940 he informed Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, that Sumner Welles, the Under-Secretary of State, would shortly be coming on
a visit to Italy, Germany, France and Britain to ‘place the President in a position to judge whether there was or was not the possibility of finding the way of settlement’. By settlement’ he meant a negotiated peace with Germany. The King’s meeting with Welles left him depressed. ‘The fact is the US is not coming to help us, & nothing yet will make them,’ he wrote, though he added: ‘But they are pro-British in the main.’34
There was grim news, too, from northern Europe where Finland was heading towards defeat in its Winter War against the Soviet Union. The origins of the conflict lay in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Although ostensibly a non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, the treaty had a secret protocol that divided the countries of Eastern Europe into spheres of interest. Finland, along with parts of Poland and the Baltic States fell into the Soviet sphere. Stalin had begun with Poland, sending his forces into the east of the country on 17 September – sixteen days after Hitler had invaded from the west. The Soviet leader then forced Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to accept treaties that allowed the Russians to establish military bases and station troops on their soil. The following month, he made a number of territorial demands on Finland, including the shifting of its border with the Soviet Union on the Karelian Isthmus westwards, in return for other territory elsewhere. The Finns refused, however, and on 30 November, after a fake border incident staged by the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, Soviet forces invaded with twenty-one divisions, totalling 450,000 men, and bombed Helsinki. It was an unequal contest: the Soviets had more than three times as many soldiers as the Finns, thirty times as many aircraft, and a hundred times as many tanks, but the Red Army’s officer class had been crippled by Stalin’s purge of 1936-38 and the Finns fought hard. Battle raged in freezing temperatures that hit a record low of minus 43° C at one spot in Karelia on 16 January. Often travelling on cross-country skis and dressed in snow camouflage, the Finnish soldiers used guerrilla tactics to great effect against their conventionally equipped Soviet foes.
The David versus Goliath struggle caught the imagination of many in Britain – among them Myrtle. ‘Russia is unleashing something. One wonders what this convulsion of civilisation is opening up,’ she wrote on the day of the Soviet attack. On 4 December, she added: ‘How valiant the Finns are to stand up to Russia, do hope this small nation withstands annihilation.’ And then four days later: ‘Sure the Finns rejoiced over yesterday. They’re doing a lot of damage to the Bolshies. Do hope they can hold out.’ On 13 January came news of a great Finnish victory that saw the destruction of the Russian 44th division. ‘I always thought I was soft-hearted,’ wrote Myrtle, ‘but I openly rejoiced at this news.’
Thanks to their overwhelming numbers, however, the Russians began to prevail, prompting growing demands in Britain and France to intervene militarily to help the Finns. But the Swedes and Norwegians were unwilling to give either Germans or the Soviets a pretext to attack them and refused to grant the Allies transit rights, leaving the Finns with little alternative but to sue for peace. On 12 March a formal peace treaty was signed, obliging Helsinki to cede even more territory than it had stood to lose under the terms of the original Soviet proposal.
Adding to the King’s problems was his increasingly prickly relationship with the former Edward VIII, now Duke of Windsor. Bertie, as the King was called by his family, had grown up in awe of his elder brother, known as David. Given the amount of time they spent together – and the distant attitude of their parents – it was natural that the two boys should become close. Yet it was an unequal relationship: as the oldest child, David looked after Bertie and their younger siblings, Mary, Henry, George and John, but also told them what to do. ‘I could always manage Bertie,’ he wrote in his autobiography. His attitude increasingly jarred – as Henry Hansell, their tutor, noticed to his concern. ‘It is extraordinary how the presence of one acts as a sort of “red rag” to the other,’ he reported.35
This was more than usual sibling rivalry. David was not just older than Bertie, he was good-looking, charming and fun. Both boys were also aware from an early age that he was destined one day to become King. Bertie had been less blessed by fate. No great intellectual, he had come sixty-eighth out of sixty-eight in his final examinations at the Royal Naval College. Growing up, he began to suffer from poor digestion and had to wear splints on his legs to cure him of knock knees. He was also left-handed but, in accordance with the practice of the time, was made to use his right hand. Adding to Bertie’s problems – and to some extent a result of them – was the emergence of his stammer, which was worsened by the attitude of his father, whose response when his son was struggling for words was a simple: ‘get it out’. The letter ‘K’ – as in King – was to prove a particular challenge, something of a problem for someone born into the royal family.
As an adult, although undoubtedly a hard worker with a strong sense of duty, the future George VI was far from glittering company. Nancy Mitford called him ‘a very dull man’, while the art historian Kenneth Clark’s first impression of the King and Queen was damning: ‘She is not much better than the kind of person one meets at country houses, and the King somewhat worse.’36 Edward VIII was also a hard act to follow. ‘It will be years for Albert the Good to build up a legend comparable to that of his brother,’ Harold Nicolson, the writer and MP, predicted to his wife and fellow writer, Vita Sackville-West, on the day of the abdication in December 1936.37
Edward VIII’s decision to renounce the throne inevitably transformed the relations between the two men. It was not that his younger brother had wanted to become King. Far from it. As Queen Mary later revealed to Nicolson: ‘He was devoted to his brother and the whole Abdication crisis made him miserable. He sobbed on my shoulder for a whole hour – there, upon that sofa’, when he knew he had to take his brother’s place.38 His wife was equally appalled at the prospect of her husband ascending to the throne, not just because of the strain she feared it would put on him, but also because of the impact on her. When the then Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon finally agreed to marry the Duke of York in 1923, almost three years after they first met, she had done so in the expectation of a quiet life. Part of her husband’s reluctance to become King was due to his horror of public speaking and the realization that, as monarch, it would become a vital part of his role. Logue was aware of this – and had experienced first hand the King’s nervousness in the run-up to his coronation and to the radio broadcast he had to give to the Empire the same evening.
The King’s dismay at the way his elder brother had forced him into the limelight went a long way to explaining their future animosity. The Queen also disapproved deeply of Wallis Simpson, who was often disparagingly referred to in the royal family as ‘Mrs S’ or simply ‘that woman’. Such feelings were accentuated by concern at the damage that the abdication had done to the monarchy.
Nor did the former King make matters any easier for himself with his sense of grievance at his family’s failure to satisfy his increasingly outrageous financial demands and his anger at what he saw as the humiliating treatment meted out to his beloved wife. Although she had been elevated to Duchess, the highest rank in the British nobility, the King deemed that she could not be styled ‘Her Royal Highness’ or received at court. Other aspects of the Duke’s behaviour had not endeared him to his younger brother, not least the visit he paid to Nazi Germany in October 1937, where he met Hitler. The sight of the former British monarch doing a Nazi salute, albeit a half-hearted one, was chilling. It also appeared to plant the dangerous idea in the minds of the Nazi leadership that the Duke could be a potential ally – a consideration that was to colour both sides’ respective attitudes to him during the conflict.
The outbreak of war, which found the Duke and Duchess at their home in Antibes, could have provided an opportunity for reconciliation and a chance to heal wounds; instead, it seemed to harden attitudes on both sides. It also presented the King – and the British government – with a ticklish problem. The Duke, who still held the titles of Field Marsh
al, Admiral of the Fleet and Marshal of the Royal Air Force, was keen to serve his country. But in what capacity? A few days later, he and the Duchess travelled to Britain in an attempt to resolve the issue, the first time he had set foot on British soil since December 1936 when he sailed into exile. The King offered the couple a plane; they insisted on a destroyer instead. The royal family awaited the return of the Duke – and even more so, of the Duchess – with some trepidation. ‘What are we going to do about Mrs S?’ the Queen asked Queen Mary.39 ‘Personally, I do not wish to receive her, tho’ it must depend on circumstances; what do you feel about it, Mama?’ Queen Mary’s response is not known, but she is likely to have been equally hostile to the idea. For his part, the Duke was also apprehensive. ‘I don’t know how this will work out,’ he confided to his wife as their ship entered Portsmouth Harbour. ‘War should bring families together, even a Royal Family. But I don’t know.’40