by Simon Schama
Winston’s bull terrier, teeth-in-the-thigh attack on the government did not, of course, do much to enhance his standing among the vast majority of Conservatives. He was now in his 60s and most saw him as a posturing has-been, too flash, too loud, too much in love with the Riviera good life and the country-house extravagance he could ill afford – and, worst of all, too enamoured with the sound of his own voice. Baldwin’s not entirely ungenerous characterization summed up the way many of them felt: ‘When Winston was born lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle [with] gifts – imagination, eloquence, industry, ability, and then came a fairy who said “No one person has a right to so many gifts”, picked him up and gave him such a shake and twist that with all these gifts he was denied judgement and wisdom. … And that is why while we delight to listen to him in the House we do not take his advice.’
Churchill’s shrill alarmism about the fate of the empire meant that, when he made similar noises about the German peril, most of the House of Commons simply turned the volume down. It was not that all its members were impervious to the brutal character of the Third Reich. As early as 1933, when Hitler came to power, at least some of them shared the startled repugnance felt by the British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Horace Rumbold, who recognized immediately that the new regime was not just another run-of-the-mill tinpot dictatorship. Rumbold had read Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf (1924). He believed it. He told the government that in all likelihood Hitler intended to expel the entire Jewish population from Germany. Before he retired (perhaps one of the invisible turning points in the rise of appeasement) Rumbold tried to tell Whitehall, as strongly as foreign-office form allowed, that Germany was being run by people who were not entirely ‘normal’: ‘Many of us, indeed, have a feeling that we are living in a country where fantastic hooligans and eccentrics have got the upper hand.’
But for many in the governing class, including the editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson, Hitler, if a little strong meat, was absolutely normal – or rather would become so once his country was treated properly. Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, who had written authoritative histories of Europe, insisted that the chancellor was a reasonable man who was ‘justly anxious to make Germany respectable again and is himself anxious to be respectable’. Compared with far more ‘eccentric’ types such as the propagandist Julius Streicher, perhaps, or the playboy Hermann Goering, Hitler was unquestionably ‘the most moderate member of his party’. And if he did get steamed up occasionally, that was for public consumption at home – and, besides, was there not a great deal for Germany to be legitimately steamed up about? It had shouldered exclusive guilt for the Great War; had been punished by being stripped of territory in both Europe and Africa; had been saddled with massive reparations that had caused economic meltdown, with untold suffering for ordinary Germans, and had been denied the basic right of sovereign states to have armed forces. Yet all around it were countries bristling with military hardware. No wonder it felt ‘encircled’. When in 1933, Germany walked out from both the Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations itself, the action was regarded merely as the understandable policy of a country that, after years of humiliation, wished to recover its proper sovereignty. When, in March 1936, Germany reoccupied the Rhineland, in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles, that too was seen simply as the restoration to full sovereignty of territory that had been immemorially and incontrovertibly German. As for the Nazi hostility towards the Jews, reactions, with a few decent exceptions, ranged from shoulder-shrugging indifference to outright sympathy for the German policy. The Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, Gilbert Murray, who would become an anti-appeaser, nonetheless let it be known that ‘experience has taught me that they are in some peculiar and exceptional way a pernicious element in any country in the West. … I understand perfectly the German attitude towards these people and approve of it fully.’
Hitler himself was the object more of fascination, even infatuation, than repugnance. A constant stream of approving visitors to Berlin or Berchtesgaden came back glowing with enthusiasm for the miracles he had wrought in Germany – the autobahns, the Volkswagens, the cleaned-up cities. Most depressing of all, David Lloyd George declared him ‘the greatest living German’ and gushed to the readers of the Daily Mail that Hitler was ‘a born leader … [a] magnetic, dynamic personality … a mixture of mystic and visionary … [who] likes to withdraw from the world for spiritual refreshment’, and an Anglophile to boot who wished nothing but the best for the British Empire. Lloyd George’s only regret was that Britain had no leaders of his calibre. To the historian Arnold Toynbee, Hitler was indistinguishable from Mahatma Gandhi, both being teetotal, vegetarian men of peace. Lord Rothermere, the newspaper magnate, swore that he was a ‘perfect gentleman’. When Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador in London, told the secretary to the cabinet, Thomas Jones, that the Führer was really just like Mr Baldwin – a shy and modest type, a gentle artist – Jones did not burst out laughing but felt that it indeed was so. Even Churchill, who throughout the 30s remained a warm admirer of Mussolini, praising the Duce’s ‘gentle and simple bearing, and his calm, detached poise’, allowed, in 1932, that since history had seen many strong men who had come to power using ruthless means, perhaps Hitler too would turn out, in the end, to be a fine specimen of a German patriot. On a research trip to Bavaria in 1932 for the Marlborough biography he came close to a meeting with Hitler in Munich. It was Hitler, warned of Churchill’s pro-Jewish stance, who decided it would be a bad idea.
This did not mean, however, that Hitler’s admiration for the British Empire was at all qualified. He told Halifax that one of his favourite movies was The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), since it portrayed a small group of white men holding hordes of dark men at bay and an entire subcontinent under its sword. The caravan of Savile Row-dressed gentlemen parading through his residences, awash with admiration, not unreasonably led Hitler to believe that an understanding could indeed be made between the British government and the Third Reich. Their fundamental interests, after all, were not in conflict. As von Ribbentrop told Halifax, Germany wished to have a ‘free hand’ in eastern Europe, while allowing Britain to protect and promote its empire in Asia and Africa. What could be neater or more harmonious? In London von Ribbentrop played this tune like a virtuoso, exploiting issues where he thought the British had a tender conscience. Well before the annexation of Austria in 1938, many in government circles and the party were deploring France’s ill-judged alliances with small eastern European states, and saw the ‘reorganization’ of eastern Europe under German leadership as both inevitable and innocuous. After all, a strong German presence in the east would be a cost-free buffer against the Bolshevik menace that, as every right-minded fellow knew, was the real threat to freedom.
German strategic plans in the east, whatever they might be, were certainly not worth risking another pan-European war for. And here, Baldwin’s and Chamberlain’s governments were indeed in tune with the opinion of the vast majority of Britons right through the 1930s. Memories of the last war were still raw and traumatic. If scar tissue had formed over the physical wounds, mental wounds had proved much harder to heal. Many of those who had experienced the horrors of the trenches were now the most ardent for peace, at almost any cost. Some of these veterans, like Henry Williamson, the author of Tarka the Otter (1927) and Salar the Salmon (1935), were so determined, in fact, that they became fascists. But the passionate desire for peace was the monopoly of neither the right nor the left. Thoughtful men like Stafford Cripps and H. G. Wells believed deeply in general and if possible universal disarmament, with the policing of conflicts left to an international security force, run by the League of Nations.
Although he was tarred with the label, not least by Hitler, Churchill, of course, never thought of himself as a warmonger. He too had seen action in the last war; understood perfectly the scale and nature of its casualties; and wanted, as much as Halifax or Chamberlain, to prevent another. It grieved him deeply afte
r the Second World War to say, as he did over and again, not least in his memoirs, that of all wars in European history, this was the one that could have been most easily stopped. But he knew as early as 1933, when the true nature of the Nazi regime registered with him – perhaps as a result of the reports of his son-in-law Duncan Sandys, who had been an assistant of Sir Horace Rumbold – that it would certainly not be stopped by a policy of guilt-stricken ingratiation. If Britain were to be able to negotiate properly with Germany, it had better do so from a position of strength.
Hence the drumbeat, steady and unremitting, that Churchill kept up for the cause of rearmament. From the very early days of the Third Reich he was determined to make its exceptionally brutal nature apparent, especially to those who pretended that, however disagreeable, it was a regime that would obey the usual conventions of statecraft. Churchill’s language in begging to differ was theatrical, to the point where his audiences were rolling their eyes at the performance and muttering behind their hands, ‘There goes old Winston again!’ But when Churchill spoke of ‘a philosophy of blood lust … being inculcated into their youth in a manner unparalleled since the days of barbarism’ he was not exaggerating at all. He was echoing quite faithfully the cult language that the Nazis, especially in the youth movements and the elite militias, liked to use about themselves. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Gestapo, after all fancied himself as a learned ethnographer-archaeologist. Churchill thought the view that under the Nazis the Germans were doing no more than learning national self-respect was pathetically naïve: ‘All these bands of sturdy Teutonic youths marching through the streets and roads of Germany with the light of desire in their eyes to suffer for the Fatherland … are not looking for status. They are looking for weapons.’ On the Jews, another subject thought slightly impolite and altogether irrelevant in the House of Commons, Churchill was equally categorical, referring to the ‘horrible, cold, scientific persecution’ of the Jews, people ‘reduced from affluence to ruin and then, even in that position, denied the opportunity of earning their daily bread, and cut out from relief by grants to tide the destitute through the winter, their little children pilloried in schools … their blood and race declared defiling and accursed, every form of concentrated human wickedness cast upon these people by overwhelming power, by vile tyranny’.
There were certainly influential men in government, like the National Labour MP Harold Nicolson and, most significantly, the permanent under-secretary at the foreign office, Lord Vansittart, who shared Churchill’s views and sometimes spoke their minds. But the closer they were to any sort of power the more tight-lipped they were forced to be, as long as appeasement was government policy. And none of Churchill’s moral denunciations would have had the slightest effect had he not constantly invoked the national interest in taking rearmament seriously. That interest was, in the first instance, elementary self-defence. Influenced by his close friendship with Lindemann, ‘the Prof’, Churchill had come to believe that the next war would begin with, and turn on, massive aerial bombardment of civilian populations. (The Luftwaffe’s experiments in Spain during the Civil War, such as the saturation bombing of Guernica, would have done nothing to disabuse him of that impression.) The vision he had, guided by Lindemann, of what such a sustained air raid on London would be like was apocalyptic. A 60-day attack would produce at least 60,000 casualties (this would in the event be the entire total of civilian dead during the war) and render hundreds of thousands homeless. Millions might be left to flee chaotically into the overwhelmed countryside. Churchill’s own flying experience, however brief, doubtless strengthened the drama of these beliefs. It would be the Allies at Dresden, Tokyo and Hiroshima who would produce fire-storms on this kind of scale.
The best way to avoid such an eventuality, however, Churchill believed, was to keep pace with German aircraft production, which he knew was already rapidly outstripping that of the RAF. His estimate that the Germans were producing approximately two and a half times as many planes as Britain was so close to the mark that he was probably fed some of this information by well-placed sources in the foreign office or central intelligence, perhaps Desmond Morton, who themselves were deeply opposed to appeasement. Baldwin always thought of himself as committed to rearmament as well, but wanted to do so in a quiet way without giving Hitler a pretext to accelerate his own militarization, which might lead to endless escalation. Churchill, on the other hand, actually wanted the potential enemy to pay attention to rearmament by an official recognition of a ‘half-state’ between ordinary peacetime and actual war. The mixture of procrastination and denial that was characteristic of government policy was, he believed, fatal. The government, he said in a Commons speech that perhaps overdid the paradoxes, had ‘decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent. We go on preparing more months and years – precious, perhaps vital for the greatness of Britain – for the locusts to eat.’ Supplied with damning material by his informants, including some from inside the RAF itself, like Squadron Leader C. F. Anderson, Churchill kept wrong-footing Baldwin, forcing him to back-track on earlier, more optimistic estimates of the plane-gap. The nadir of Baldwin’s defensiveness came after the general election in November 1935, when the prime minister, speaking with what he described, with good reason, as ‘appalling frankness’, told the House that, if he had gone to the country and told them that Germany was rapidly rearming, ‘this pacific democracy’ would never have returned him to office, and then where would that leave everyone? Once the jaws had stopped dropping Churchill pointed out, fairly gently for him, that he had always supposed it was the leadership of the nation, rather than the timing of the election, that determined the prime minister’s policy.
After the Germans reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936, unopposed, it seemed that Churchill’s views were steadily gaining more momentum, even if (as Baldwin rightly surmised) the country was not yet ready to batten down the hatches and crank up the air-raid sirens. A great rearmament rally was planned in the Albert Hall that autumn. Chamberlain, Sir Samuel Hoare and Anthony Eden, respectively chancellor of the exchequer, home secretary and foreign secretary, were on the defensive. But on the point of this crusading moment Churchill inflicted an extraordinary, almost unforgivable act of sabotage. George V had died earlier that year, and Winston now threw his support flamboyantly behind Edward VIII’s campaign to marry Mrs Simpson and still remain king. For Winston’s anti-appeasement friends and allies this was more than a bizarre distraction from the main event – it was an excruciating embarrassment. But Churchill was all of a piece and his sense of romantic attachment to the monarchy, as well as a long acquaintance with Edward VIII, impelled him to ride to the rescue. He was, of course, half-American himself and, though mostly bemused by the philanderings of the rich and famous, he may also have had little time for the stuffiness that looked on a king married to a divorcee (who, however, had not been divorced at the beginning of their liaison) as a contradiction in terms. In the end Churchill was more ardent for the king’s cause than Edward was himself. The crisis gave Baldwin a chance to recoup all his fortunes; he leaped at it with gratitude, appearing as the calm statesman in the midst of a constitutional crisis, carefully managing the painful passage of sovereignty from one king to another. In contrast, Churchill seemed all absurd and incoherent bluster. When he got up to criticize Baldwin’s clear alternative to the king of, essentially, dropping Mrs Simpson or abdicating, he was howled down for the first time in decades.
In May 1937 Neville Chamberlain replaced the worn-out ‘dear vicar’ as prime minister; Churchill, sensing correctly that Chamberlain was a much more ardent, principled appeaser than Baldwin, got a second wind. Baldwin, Chamberlain and Halifax all personified, in different ways, a Toryism, or for that matter a Britishness, that Churchill knew very well and was even fond of (although with Chamberlain that would be stretching it a bit). Baldwin had been the embodiment of slightly sleepy village virtues: solid, intelligent
, tolerant and generous, not just slow, but almost impossible, to anger. Like many in his generation, he continued to bleed inwardly for the sufferings inflicted by the war of 1914–18, and had promised himself and his country that those evils would never be repeated. ‘Its memory’, he said, ‘sickens us.’ It was just because the soil of Britain was not fertile for the growth of extremes such as fascism and communism that it had to be protected from their onslaught, so that the British Difference, the national ‘estate’, might be passed on to generations of children and grandchildren.
Halifax, tall, gaunt, Anglo-Catholic, intensely loyal to Yorkshire, the master of the Lyttelton hunt and a famous rider despite having a withered arm, was, both his friends and enemies readily acknowledged, very shrewd. He had spent a lifetime in public office of one sort or another, and prided himself on taking no nonsense; seeing behind the guff of rhetoric; knowing exactly when and how the wheels of power were to be oiled. In India he thought of himself, rightly, as a realist, determined not to have his head turned by the staggering splendour of Lutyens’s Viceroy’s House, which he was the first to occupy; and he was prepared, always, to do what it took to keep the imperial, or as modern men called it, the Commonwealth, connection. Chamberlain, on the other hand, represented the empire of middle-class business and municipal virtue, even though his father’s mansion, Highbury, was a long way from both screw manufacturing and the gas and water municipal radicalism that had first brought the Chamberlains to power. It had been his more patrician stepbrother, Austen, who seemed for many years the more likely of the two to lead the Conservatives, especially since foreign and imperial business had been his speciality. Neville, on the other hand, remained, as he thought, true to his roots: committed above all to the improvement of local government, especially education, possessed of a strong instinct for what the man in the high street, the solicitor or the bank manager, would wish from a properly Conservative prime minister. And that something for Chamberlain, as for Baldwin, was the preservation of peace.
