A History of Britain, Volume 3

by Simon Schama

  Churchill did indeed understand, though not exactly from personal experience, this England, this Britain of the gymkhana, the village institute, the small town chapel, the brass band. But he differed from them by insisting that it would never survive by humouring a hegemony and hoping that it would leave Britain alone. That would be, as his disciple, the Conservative MP Duff Cooper, said, to depart from 250 years of British opposition to one-power dominance in Europe. Churchill himself put it even more vividly in a BBC broadcast in November 1934: ‘There are those who say, “Let us ignore the continent of Europe. Let us leave it with its own hatreds and its armaments, to stew in its own juices, to fight out its own quarrels, and decree its own doom. …” There would be very much to this plan if only we could unfasten the British islands from their rock foundations, and could tow them three thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean …’

  But then Chamberlain did not think of himself as an isolationist; rather as someone who would engage actively with Hitler and make him see reason by promoting the peaceful ‘rearrangement’ of Europe. Halifax had already been to Germany at the end of 1937, in his capacity as the government’s fox-hunter, on the occasion of Goering’s enormous game and hunting exhibition in Berlin. The fact that Britain won the prize for overseas trophies – all those kudu and eland – must have heartened Halifax in his belief, already indicated by von Ribbentrop, that a deal by which Germany was left to do what it wanted in Europe and Britain left alone in the empire could indeed be struck. After the annexation of Austria in March 1938, when German tanks rolled through Vienna to the delight of rapturous crowds, this engagement seemed to become more urgent, especially as Hitler was making noises about the plight of some 3 million ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland region of northern Czechoslovakia. When those noises turned into demands for the Sudetenland to be annexed to Germany, on pain of military action, Chamberlain launched a series of flying visits in an attempt to defuse the crisis. This meant, essentially, persuading the Czechs that, despite the violation of their sovereignty, they had no option but to yield up the territories; persuading the French, who had been co-guarantors of that sovereignty, which had been granted when Czechoslovakia became an independent republic after the First World War, to go along with this plan, and persuading Hitler himself that he could obtain what he wanted without recourse to military action – the last not exactly a hard sell.

  At Berchtesgaden in September 1938, after a meaningless exchange of pleasantries, both Chamberlain and Hitler seemed to have got what they wanted. But at a second meeting, at Bad Godesberg in the Rhineland, Hitler suddenly started making further territorial demands, in particular that areas of Czechoslovakia with Hungarian and Polish populations should also be hived off from the republic. Distressed, quite cross in fact, Chamberlain was still prepared to humour Hitler, especially as the arch-appeasing new ambassador in Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, who dreaded getting the rough end of Hitler’s tongue, cautioned against anything that might provoke, upset or enrage the hair-trigger Führer. But in a moment of incautious courage and common sense Halifax decided that enough was enough and led a cabinet revolt against Chamberlain, insisting that Hitler should be made to honour the substance of the Berchtesgaden agreement and that, in the event of a military attack, Britain and France would consider an attack on Czechoslovakia as an attack on themselves.

  For a week at the end of September 1938, with Hitler’s sabre-rattling undiminished, it looked very much as though there would indeed be a war. Provisional plans for mass evacuations were accelerated. On the 27th Chamberlain made a broadcast to the nation that did little to cheer the nervous. Nor did it exactly suggest a leader buckling on his broadsword for the commencement of hostilities: ‘How horrible, fantastic, incredible’, he helpfully intoned, ‘it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.’ Colonel Josiah Wedgwood, a sometime Labour MP and militant anti-appeaser, commented that Chamberlain was just trying to terrify old ladies so that he could be greeted as the strong silent hero when he came back from doing business with the Devil. ‘Will there be a war, dear?’ Celia Johnson asks Noël Coward, the destroyer captain in the film In Which We Serve (1942). ‘I rather think there will,’ he replies. ‘No point worrying about it until it comes, and no point worrying then, really.’

  Sure enough, on the 28th, while delivering an account of the situation to the Commons, Chamberlain received a note from Samuel Hoare and interrupted his own speech (or purported to) to announce that he had accepted an invitation from Herr Hitler to go to Munich. Someone shouted, ‘Thank God for the prime minister!’ from the back-benches. There was much cheering and waving of order papers. The house, Labour as well as Conservative, got on its feet to give Chamberlain an ovation, with the conspicuous exceptions of Churchill, his friend Leo Amery and Anthony Eden, who, after months of sniping at his own colleagues, had resigned from the government. Churchill did, however, go over to Chamberlain later to wish him luck. Off went Chamberlain to Germany where, not surprisingly, he managed to persuade Hitler that he could have everything he wanted without the need to do anything unpleasant. Although greeted as an extraordinary dipomatic accomplishment, this was not like pulling teeth. On 1 October the Czechs would be told that they must bow to the inevitable and withdraw their border forces from the Sudetenland, at which point German armour would be free to move in. Of course, he added, should the Czechs be ‘mad enough’ to resist he understood perfectly that the Führer would have no option but to invade the rest of Czechoslovakia; but would he take care not to bomb Prague? Oh, said Hitler, I always do my best to spare civilians – and added that he just hated the thought of little babies being killed by gas bombs. Quite so, quite so. Chamberlain then produced a paper of unforgettable sanctimoniousness and futility, the holy scrip of appeasement, which declared Britain and Germany’s desire never to go to war with each other again, and pledged to resolve any and all future difficulties by consultation. Hitler probably could not believe his eyes as he reached for the pen.

  Chamberlain came home as the saviour of European peace, to a chorus of hosannas. He was cheered at Heston aerodrome, where he waved what the Labour politician Hugh Dalton was to call that ‘scrap of paper torn from Mein Kampf. On the balcony of Buckingham Palace, flanked by the king and queen, he faced a huge crowd singing ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’. Outside Number 10 Downing Street it was just the same. Appearing at an opened upstairs window, and smiling his for once less than wintry smile, Chamberlain asked one of his staff what he should say to the cheering throng and got the advice to tell them what Disraeli had said when he came back from Berlin in 1878. ‘My good friends, for the second time in our history’, Chamberlain declared, ‘a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.’ He then told the crowd to go home ‘and get a nice quiet sleep’. In France, where the majority of public opinion was equally happy about the reprieve, the newspaper Paris-Soir offered him a stretch of French trout stream as a token of its gratitude for sparing the country the horrors of war. In the Sunday Graphic, Beverly Baxter wrote that ‘because of Neville Chamberlain the world my son will live in will be a vastly different place. In our time we shall not see again the armed forces of Europe gathering to strike like savage bears.’

  There were lonely exceptions to all this euphoria, especially outside London: C. P. Scott’s Manchester Guardian, and The Glasgow Herald, which called Munich a ‘diktat’. Duff Cooper resigned as first lord of the admiralty, where his demands for rearmament were being opposed, and wrote that, while Chamberlain believed Hitler should be spoken to in the language of sweet reason, he thought a mailed fist might be the better tactic. The historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote to thank Cooper for proving that ‘in this hour of national humiliation there still has been found one Englishman not faithless to honour and principle and to the tradition of our once great name’. G. M. Trevelyan, on the other
hand, who had been an admirer of Baldwin (especially Baldwin’s rural passions), now threw his wholehearted support behind Chamberlain and Munich, deploring the ‘war whoop’ and believing it madness to sacrifice England for ‘Bohemia’.

  On the last day of the debate in the Commons, 5 October, with Czechoslovakia already reduced to a defenceless rump state, Churchill made a speech of enduring, tragic power; the most deeply felt, to date, of his career. Ridiculing the claim that Chamberlain had got Hitler to ‘retract’ claims made at Bad Godesberg, Churchill said sardonically, ‘One pound was demanded at the pistol’s point. When it was given, two pounds were demanded at the pistol’s point. Finally the dictator consented to take one pound seventeen and sixpence and the rest in promises of goodwill for the future.’ He quoted (of course) the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s lament for the attempts of Ethelred the Unready to buy off the Danes and then spelled out the unpalatable truth: ‘We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude.’ The system of alliances in eastern Europe on which France relied had been swept away. Chamberlain wanted peace between the British and German peoples and no fault could be found with that aim,

  but there can never be peace between the British democracy and the Nazi Power … which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force. … What I find unendurable is the sense of our country falling into the power, into the orbit and influence of Nazi Germany, and of our existence becoming dependent on their good will or pleasure.

  It was to prevent that, he said, that he had tried to urge timely rearmament. But ‘it has all been in vain’. Rejecting Chamberlain and Halifax’s insistence that Germany was now ‘satisfied’ and would make no more territorial demands, Churchill prophesied that in a very few months the government would be asked to surrender some more territory, some more liberty. Then he became even more apocalyptic, predicting that conceding those would mean censorship in Britain, since no one could be allowed to oppose such decisions.

  What solution could there be? The sole recourse was to ‘regain our old island independence’ by acquiring the air supremacy he had been asking for. Churchill noted that Lord Baldwin, as he now was, had said he would mobilize industry ‘tomorrow’. He was not going to let the former prime minister off the hook. This was all very nice, ‘But I think it would have been much better if Lord Baldwin had said that two and half years ago.’ He did not begrudge Britain’s ‘brave people’ their relief and rejoicing at what seemed to be a reprieve from disaster. But, Churchill said, in his closing words, they should know the truth:

  they should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road; they should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the western democracies: ‘Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.’ And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.

  The Chamberlains’ Christmas card in 1938 showed a photograph of the prime ministerial aircraft flying over a bank of clouds en route to Munich. Three months later, on 14 March 1939, as if determined to vindicate Churchill’s dire prophecy, German tanks rolled into defenceless Prague. At first Chamberlain still spoke of peace, but when he sensed a sudden backlash amongst Tory backbenchers and read a sharp attack in the Daily Telegraph he decided, at last, to lead from the front. At a speech in Birmingham on 17 March, he spoke of his shock and dismay. On the 31st he announced to the House of Commons that the British and French governments were offering a guarantee to Poland, the latest item on Hitler’s shopping list, his ostensible claim being to the port of Danzig, now known as Gdansk (otherwise landlocked Poland’s access to the Baltic via the so-called Polish Corridor that separated the bulk of Germany from East Prussia and had been created after the First World War). Should Poland be attacked, Britain and France would come to her aid. The logistic impossibility of this aid being delivered to Lodz or Warsaw meant, of course, that there would be a war in the West. But Chamberlain’s apparent conversion to a firm alliance policy concealed the fact that he believed the announcement of the guarantee would deter Hitler, and that it would never have to become operational.

  The unprecedented Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, announced on 23 August, blew that assumption sky-high. Without the collaboration of the Soviet Union, the Franco-British guarantee seemed to be a paper threat. Hitler assumed it was a bluff and that, when it was called, neither state would actually go to war. At dawn on 1 September 1939, in response to an alleged attack on a German radio station in Gleiwitz, a brutal land and air attack was launched on Poland. A ‘note’ was duly handed by the British ambassador to the government in Berlin, stating that if German troops were not immediately withdrawn France and Britain would honour their obligations. The next day the House of Commons, in grim but resolute mood, expected to hear that war had been declared. What they got instead, to general consternation, was an exercise in procrastination from Chamberlain: he suggested that if, through Italian mediation, German troops would fall back, the status quo ante 1 September would still be in place and a conference of representatives from France, Poland, Italy, Britain and Germany could be convened. That, after an initial explosion of rage, was indeed Hitler’s idea, too: he assumed that another Munich would give him what he wanted without the inconvenience of a war. Both Labour and some Tory members were appalled. The Conservative MP Leo Amery shouted to Arthur Greenwood, the Labour leader, three devastating words: ‘Speak for England!’ And Greenwood did, to tremendous and moving effect. When he had finished there were loud cheers. As usual, it was only a threatened revolt among his own ranks that finally overthrew Chamberlain’s latest attempt at appeasement, and later that evening he agreed to turn the ‘note’ into an ultimatum that would expire at eleven o’clock on the morning of 3 September. His most intense reaction, however, was wounded egotism, stressing to the House that, whilst it was a ‘sad day, to none is it sadder than to me’. When, in the mournful tones of someone announcing the passing of a maiden aunt, Chamberlain took to the airwaves a few minutes after 11 to inform the nation ‘that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany’, he could not help but add again, ‘You can imagine what a bitter blow it is for me.’ ‘Well,’ says Shortie Blake, the seaman in In Which We Serve, at this news, ‘it ain’t no bank holiday for me neither.’

  Almost immediately the air-raid sirens went off: two minutes of the rising wail. But when the all-clear sounded, nothing seemed to have changed. No bombs had dropped from the sky. Nor was there any great surge of chest-beating, patriotic rowdiness as there had been in 1914. ‘There’ll Always Be an England’, the Ross Parker hit of the autumn, seemed more resigned than ra-ra. Everything seemed merely muffled; shadowed. Blackouts were ordered; cinemas and theatres were shut (except, of course, the defiantly naughty Windmill, where girls waggled their tassels for Britain throughout the war). Barrage balloons – silver, gold, even a strange shade of lavender – rose lugubriously into the air as if advertising a party that no one really wanted to go to. And by their hundreds of thousands little boys and girls and not so little boys and girls – some in their best flannel short trousers; some, from the terraced streets of Stepney and Salford and Swansea, a bit snottier and scruffier and, as horrified evacuation hosts discovered, lousier – lined up at railway and bus stations on their way to the unthreatened countryside.

  Over 3 million Britons – not just children, but anyone on the high priority list including some hospital patients; Important Civil Servants; BBC Variety (to Bristol); even
the Billingsgate Fish Market – were redistributed around the country. If the Second World War represented a great coming together of the three Britains Priestley had identified – antique-rural, electro-modern and clapped-out industrial – then the evacuations of 1939 were the first act in this exercise in national reacquaintance. As with the stately home opened to the public, it was all, at first, a bit strained. A perfectly wonderful account of politesse under siege to the Cockneys is given by Evelyn Waugh in his brilliant comic novel of the phoney (or ‘Bore’) war, Put Out More Flags (1942). Oliver Lyttelton, President of the Board of Trade, confessed he had no idea that the working classes seemed to be so lacking in rudimentary hygiene. The story of the indignant Glasgow mother who barked at her little girl not to do it on the nice lady’s sofa, but against the wall like she was told, became a favourite piece of apocrypha. And those children who were lucky enough to encounter the stricken conscience of the possessing classes found they quite liked it. A 14-year-old in Cambridge wrote home that ‘we have very nice food here such as venison, pheasant and hare and other luxuries which we cannot afford’. When, however, 1939 turned to 1940 – a bitter winter in which the Thames froze – and there were still no air raids, no invasions, 316,000 at least were returned home, the government decreeing that evacuation would be put into operation again only when raids had actually started.