After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  On 9 January 1940, Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour party and destined to become the Deputy Prime Minister in Churchill’s war cabinet, made a wireless address to the German nation.

  We are opposed to any attempt from outside to break up Germany. We do not seek the humiliation or dismemberment of your country. We wholeheartedly desire to welcome you without delay into the peaceful collaboration of civilised nations. We must warn you, however, that Hitler and his system prepared and started this war. He could not continue if you ceased supporting him. Until this accursed Nazi regime is overthrown there is no hope of peace between us. If you establish a Government willing that Germany should be a good neighbour and a good European, there shall be no humiliation or revenge.21

  This was an important broadcast, since it set out very clearly that, in spite of the invasion of Poland – the immediate casus belli – the British would be perfectly prepared for a negotiated peace with a decent German government. The Americans, however, had a different policy. Roosevelt had pressed for the unconditional surrender of Germany. That is, he would not negotiate with any German, until Germany had been completely destroyed by military force.

  When the war was over, and Attlee had become the Prime Minister, the House of Commons was discussing the rebuilding of Germany. The Labour Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, said that as a result of the policy of unconditional surrender ‘it left us with a Germany without law, without a constitution, without a single person with whom we could deal, without a single institution to grapple with the situation, and we had to build right from the bottom with nothing at all. We had to build a State which has over 20 million displaced persons scattered about it, and we had to build it while something like five million people were driven out of one part of the country into the other.’21

  All this, said Bevin, had come to pass as a result of the policy of unconditional surrender, ‘on which neither the British Cabinet nor any other Cabinet had a chance to say a word’.

  The young Michael Foot, future leader of the Labour party, rose to his feet and asked for confirmation of this extraordinary statement. He asked Bevin if he really meant that the British cabinet had never heard of the policy of unconditional surrender. Bevin replied: ‘The first we heard about it was in the Press.’ Churchill rose to confirm: ‘The first time I heard the phrase was from the lips of President Roosevelt.’ Bevin added: ‘I say that I never heard of that phrase until I saw it in the Press, and that if it had been put to me, as a member of the British Cabinet, I would never have agreed to it.’

  The full import of this has not been understood by all historians, especially by present-day enthusiasts for the Special Relationship.

  The occasion to which Churchill referred, when he heard of the policy of unconditional surrender on the lips of Roosevelt, was the Casablanca Conference, when the two men met from 14 to 23 January 1943. President and Prime Minister had strolled across the lawn in the January sunshine to greet the amazed journalists who had not even been aware that they, together with the deadly French rivals Generals Giraud and de Gaulle, were locked in conference in the hotel. In the spontaneous Press conference which ensued, Roosevelt announced that ‘Some of you Britishers know the story – we had a General called U. S. Grant. His name was Ulysses Simpson Grant, but in my, and the Prime Minister’s early days, he was called “Unconditional Surrender” Grant. The elimination of German, Japanese and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender by Germany, Italy and Japan …’

  When Roosevelt spoke these words Churchill’s Chief of Staff, General Sir Hastings Ismay, noticed a startled look pass over the Prime Minister’s face. Later that day Averell Harriman, the American millionaire turned diplomat, had never seen Churchill so upset. He was ‘offended that Roosevelt should have made such a momentous announcement without consultation’.

  This was not just a question of words. It had the profoundest possible effect on the strategy and conduct of the war. And it led, ultimately, to General Eisenhower’s slow, clumsy advance across Europe, and the failure of the British and American forces to reach Berlin, or Czechoslovakia, or Poland, before those strongholds had been captured by the Red Army. Sir Bernard Montgomery (Monty), Eisenhower’s subordinate, spoke for almost the entire British army, as well as for the peoples of Eastern Europe, when he denounced this policy as a ‘tragic mistake’.22

  The extent to which Churchill had lost control of the conduct of the war was only made clear to him at the end of 1943, at the point described by the Russians as the Turning Point, the Teheran Conference. It was at this crucial summit, held at the end of November 1943, that Roosevelt met Stalin for the first time. Churchill had wanted it to be the world summit which would decide the foreign policy of the Great Powers after the war. Some weeks earlier, he had accordingly dispatched his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, to Moscow to have preliminary talks with the Russians. Churchill was furious that, without his being consulted, Roosevelt had made the Teheran Summit a four-part affair, with the Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek forming the fourth member of the Quadrumvirate. Churchill deplored Chiang Kai-shek’s hostility to the British Empire and resented the fact he had not been told, let alone asked, about the Chinese presence at Teheran. When Stalin arrived, it was as if all Anthony Eden’s carefully worked out Foreign Office briefings about the new postwar France, Germany or Poland had never been discussed. The delegates were surprised, at what they had all supposed was a diplomatic conference concerned with postwar world order, that Stalin ignored the agenda and said he had only one item to discuss – ‘Measures to Shorten the War’. He urged the Western Allies to bring forward the cross-Channel attacks on the French coast.23

  Eden and Churchill then tried to interest Stalin and Roosevelt in making sure that Poland should be guaranteed its independence. After all, the invasion of Poland had been the very reason for the British declaration of war in 1939. Stalin paid the idea no attention. Soviet troops were poised to occupy Poland from the east, and everyone at the conference knew that Britain and America lacked either the power or the will to stop them.

  Roosevelt sided with Stalin in his belief that when Operation Overlord began, the British should effectively abandon their Mediterranean campaign. Roosevelt sided with Chiang Kai-shek against Churchill’s view of operations in the Far East – the Americans and the Chinese believing that all the war effort should be devoted to defeating Japan in the Pacific, ignoring, for example, the British campaign against the Japanese in Burma. (And this came after long days at an earlier Cairo conference in which the Americans had agreed to support the so-called ‘Buccaneer’ British campaign in Burma.)24

  All Churchill’s cherished war plans – to guard and fight for the Eastern Mediterranean, to protect the British Empire by land in the Far East, to liberate Poland, and above all to establish a strong and united postwar Europe – were swept aside at Teheran by Roosevelt and Stalin. For all de Gaulle’s posturing, Stalin and Roosevelt agreed. The ‘real’ France was that of Pétain and the collaborationists. Churchill’s idea that France could ever again be a great power in the world was wishful thinking.25

  One of the most painful moments of the conference, perhaps of Churchill’s career to date, occurred at dinner on 29 November. Stalin was the host and he genially discoursed upon his view that ‘really effective measures were necessary, or Germany would rise again in fifteen to twenty years’. He proposed the liquidation of the entire German general staff – the execution of 50,000, perhaps as many as 100,000 officers. Churchill heatedly replied that he could never agree to cold-blooded murder or to ‘barbarous acts’ on such a scale. Roosevelt tried to rescue the situation with a bad joke to the effect that perhaps 49,000 would do.

  The truth was not that Roosevelt and Stalin were the two brutes in the presence of an English Tory aristocrat. It was much more complicated. Teheran shows Roosevelt at his most mercurial. Was he a good witch, a bad witch, or not a witch at all? Roosevelt let Eastern Europe go to Stalin because he saw no hope of esta
blishing American influence there. He got what he very much wanted: a position of power both in the Pacific and as the principal military controller of Operation Overlord. His rarefied and basically civilized soul lacked the imaginative equipment with which to comprehend Stalin. Churchill, who was half a benign Victorian liberal, half a bruiser, a man who had admired Hitler and Mussolini in the early days, who had rejoiced in the Siege of Sidney Street, in bashing the workers during the General Strike, in clapping Gandhi in irons, understood the bruiser who was Stalin. A part of Churchill even liked Stalin. At Teheran, however, he saw with crystal clarity the nature of the man. Roosevelt thought that when Marshal Stalin spoke about liquidating 100,000 officers he was having his little joke. Churchill knew the sort of people the Bolsheviks were. He was the only one of the three who had known action at first hand. He himself, far more than Roosevelt, had been a hands-on warlord. In the bunker where he sometimes slept in London next to the War Cabinet Rooms the visitor can still see the array of weaponry he kept by the bed – a sub-machine gun and a revolver. There is no doubt he would have used them on any would-be assailant. He had authorized some bloody campaigns and he had sent many men to their deaths.

  At Teheran, Churchill saw that power, because of the war for which he had been so doughty an enthusiast, had slipped from British hands. Thanks to Teheran, Czechoslovakia and Poland and the other countries of Eastern Europe would be ‘liberated’ not by American troops but by the Red Army, and the peoples of Eastern Europe who had been enslaved by Hitler for six or seven years would endure another thirty years and more of enslavement by the Soviet Union.26

  32

  Prisoners

  European wars, historically, offered a variation of life for the criminal classes, since it was from the scouring of prisons that there came the cannon-fodder of battlefields. Enlistment in army or navy provided the convict with a chance of reprieve from the confinement and degradation of gaol. The Second World War was different, as in so many other respects, from other wars. If previous wars allowed criminals out to fight, this war saw to it that thousands, tens of thousands, eventually millions of human beings who had committed no crime against anyone would be herded up and punished in a manner that was utterly degrading and terrible to victims and to perpetrators.

  The opening chords of this war’s music were a reverse of the great scene in Beethoven’s Fidelio when the prisoners come out of their dungeon. The years 1939 and 1940 bring the clank of chains, the sound of bolts being shot, locks fastened, and gates barred. The panic atmosphere of war in Britain led to very many people being quite unnecessarily incarcerated. It was understandable that genuine Nazi sympathizers were interned, figures such as ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s former Press secretary. (He was taken to Butlin’s holiday camp at Clacton which had been requisitioned by the army.) But the great majority of the non-British nationals who found themselves in Britain at the beginning of the war were no threat at all to security. Refugees from the Spanish Civil War, who had arrived without luggage or passport; Jews escaping Nazi Germany; Italian ice-cream vendors: all were detained as enemy aliens. Also imprisoned were harmless British cranks who had joined the Blackshirt movement in the 1930s, who found themselves apprehended under the notorious provision 18B, which suspended Habeas Corpus and allowed for persons to be interned indefinitely without trial. 1,769 British subjects were interned, of whom 764 had been members of the British Union of Fascists, whose leader had urged his supporters to fight the Germans and who had tried to rejoin his old regiment before himself being imprisoned in Pentonville; 1,106 were later released, and the others were kept locked up for the duration, or at least for most of the war.

  ‘I didn’t know there were so many Jews among the Nazis,’ said the commander of the Huyton internment camp as he watched the new batch arriving. The future publisher, Hungarian-born André Deutsch, recalled friendly treatment from his camp commander on the Isle of Man: he turned out not merely to be half Hungarian, but also the son of Baroness Orczy, the creator of the Scarlet Pimpernel.1

  Jews interned on the Isle of Man felt terror, as Hitler’s advance across Europe headed the news, that the British had ‘done Hitler’s work for him’, and that when the invasion came the Germans would find the Jews rounded up already in the camps. Some figures of great distinction were dispatched there, especially in the sphere of music. Three-quarters of what would become the Amadeus Quartet were interned, as were Hans Gal, Egon Wellesz, Franz Reizenstein and Hans Keller. The future controller of Radio Three, Stephen Hearst, the future warden of Wadham College, Oxford, Claus Moser, and his father, with the journalist Sebastian Haffner and the Dada artist Kurt Schwitters, together with many physicists, publishers, photographers, classicists and other scholars, found themselves detained.2

  Naturally, when a war breaks out, there is fear for national security. Rumours abounded that Hitler had planted spies among the Jewish and other German émigrés. Fifth columnists were suspected everywhere in the early months of the Phoney War, and with hindsight, most internees saw the reasons for their uncomfortable detainment. Of course, by the standards of prisons and camps run by the Japanese Empire, or the Third Reich, or Stalin’s Soviet Union, the restrictions in Britain at the beginning of the war were benign. They were still sufficiently a departure from such principles of prewar freedom as justice, and the right to a trial before condemnation, that they provoked intense dismay at the time, not only among the internees and their families, but among those who cared about the principles of a free society.

  Primo Levi, in one of his accounts of life in Auschwitz, tells the story of Chaim Rumkowski, a merchant of the Lodz ghetto who became almost literally its king. He was useful to the Germans, and they allowed him to mint his own coinage, bearing his head, and to tyrannize over the inmates of the ghetto. In the end, of course, he perished, together with most other Polish Jews. What was so shocking about his story was that he came to ape the tyrannical ways of his bullying enemies. ‘He’s not a monster,’ says Levi, ‘but he isn’t like other men either; he is like many, like the many frustrated men who taste power and are intoxicated by it.’ And Levi adds: ‘It is typical of regimes in which all power rains down from above and no criticism can rise from below, to weaken and confound people’s capacity for judgement, to create a vast zone of grey consciences that stands between the great men of evil and the pure victims.’3

  That this should happen in lands where Hitler stood at the top of the pyramid, we can believe that we understand. The whole world, however, became authoritarian after 1939. Churchill made himself a dictator, as did FDR at the beginning of America’s involvement in the war. They were comparatively benign dictators, whereas Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini were the reverse of benign. Roosevelt and Churchill fully intended, no doubt, to lay down their office when the democratic process required it of them. While they held sway, however, it was absolute. And one symptom of this in Britain was not merely the imprisonment of men and women against whom no charges were ever brought but their gross maltreatment when in custody. There was Bathsheba, a Jew, put in the so-called ‘Black’ cell at Holloway, London’s prison for women, for three days and three nights in her nightgown. The cell contained no bedding, or other equipment. Sanitary towels were refused her even though she was menstruating. Dorothy was suffering from hysteria, and an allergic reaction called urticaria, which caused huge painful blotches to form all over her body. Doctors were called only when another prisoner, Alice, threatened to inform the Home Office. Alice herself suffered from boils in her ears. She had a skin disease which, untreated, made her bald. She had about eighty boils over her body, and the pain was so intense for eight months that only when she threatened suicide was she given proper medical attention. Frances, a Polish subject, had a long and protracted labour in Holloway and gave birth when she was unconscious. Gaby, a Spaniard, knew no English. She was not allowed to write to her husband, and her distress became so acute that she was eventually deemed to be insane and locked in a padded cell.
She, together with other inmates of Holloway, had come to Britain as a refugee, and been forced at gunpoint from a foreign ship apprehended in the Channel.4 All these things happened in what Churchill called ‘this City of refuge which enshrines the title deeds of human progress’.5 The brutality, and the disregard for the humanity of the detainees, alerts us to what war does to the human psyche, how it dehumanizes those in authority.

  This phenomenon of imprisonment, and dehumanizing brutality, was replicated across the globe for the duration of the conflict. Each nation and human group carries about its own memories – often too appalling to be articulated until the next generation.

  Of all the great nations, Japan had most successfully contrived to embrace the twentieth century while holding fast to its cultural traditions. One of the most celebrated English works of fiction to emerge from the Second World War was Evelyn Waugh’s trilogy Sword of Honour. It begins with a devout man, Guy Crouchback, the descendant of an ancient and religious family of warriors, feeling an awakening at the moment of the Nazi-Soviet Axis. ‘The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful. All disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.’ Many a Japanese must have felt this as he saw the Far East ruled over by clumsy red-faced British merchants, swigging their gin-slings in Singapore or Shanghai; or when they contemplated the culture of the United States, its Mickey Mouse films, and its seeming lack of any sense of, let alone reverence for, the past, extending its commercial tentacles throughout the Pacific during the 1930s. Since 1904, when it defeated the Russians in Manchuria, the Japanese Empire had shown itself equal to, and militarily superior to, one of the great Western Powers. In 1931, while Great Britain’s economy cascaded as its leaders were forced to abandon the Gold Standard, Japan invaded Manchuria. China, by appealing to the League of Nations, gave an early indication, long before Hitler became Chancellor, of that body’s essential impotence. From that date onwards, Japan, this archipelago of a mere 72 or 73 million inhabitants, was essentially the overlord of the East, combining all the efficiency of a modern state with the ancient tradition of the ancestor-worshipping Shinto religion. Their emperor was a Divinity, descended from Amaterasu, the goddess of the Sun.