Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War

by Patrick J. Buchanan

  To Germany, bordered east and west by nations fearful of her power, security lay in unifying Europe under her leadership, as Bismarck had done. British and German concepts of security were irreconcilable. Under Britain’s balance-of-power doctrine, the Kaiser could become an ally only if Germany were displaced as first power in Europe. Historian John Laughland describes the Kaiser’s rage and frustration:

  When the British Lord Chancellor, Lord Haldane, tried to make it clear to the German ambassador in London on 3 December 1912 that Britain would not tolerate “a unified Continental Group under the leadership of one single power,” the Kaiser, on reading the report of the conversation, covered it with the most violent marginal comments. In a characteristic attack of anger, he declared the English principle of the “balance of power” to be an “idiocy,” which would turn England “eternally into our enemy.”67

  THE KAISER WAS CORRECT. As long as Germany remained the greatest power in Europe, Britain would line up against her. Britain’s balance-of-power policy commanded it. Britain thus left a powerful Germany that had sought an alliance or entente, or even British neutrality, forever frustrated.

  The Kaiser roared that Haldane had revealed British policy “‘in all its naked shamelessness’ as the ‘playing off of the Great Powers against each other to England’s advantage.’”68 British doctrine meant England “could not tolerate our becoming the strongest power on the continent and that the latter should be united under our leadership!!!”69 To the Kaiser, the British policy amounted to a moral declaration of war on Germany, not because of what she had done, but because of who she was: the first power in Europe.70

  To British statesmen, maintaining a balance of power was dogma. In 1938, Lord Londonderry, back from a meeting with Hitler, wrote Churchill, “I should like to get out of your mind what appears to be a strong anti-German obsession.”71 Churchill replied that Londonderry was “mistaken in supposing that I have an anti-German obsession,” and went on to explain:

  British policy for four hundred years has been to oppose the strongest power in Europe by weaving together a combination of other countries strong enough to face the bully. Sometimes it is Spain, sometimes the French monarchy, sometimes the French Empire, sometimes Germany. I have no doubt about who it is now. But if France set up to claim the over-lordship of Europe, I should equally endeavour to oppose them. It is thus through the centuries we have kept our liberties and maintained our life and power.72

  TWICE THIS POLICY would bring Britain into war with Germany until, by 1945, Britain was too weak to play the role any longer. She would lose her empire because of what Lord Salisbury had said in 1877 was “the commonest error in politics…sticking to the carcass of dead policies.”73

  THE SECRETS OF SIR EDWARD GREY

  THE STATESMAN MOST RESPONSIBLE for the abandonment of splendid isolation for a secret alliance with France was Edward Grey. When the Liberals took power in 1905, he became foreign secretary, would serve a decade, and would become the leading statesman behind Britain’s decision to plunge into the Great War. But this was not what the Liberal Party had promised, and this was not what the British people had wanted. “Grey’s Germanophobia and his zeal for the Entente with France were from the outset at odds with the majority of the Liberal Cabinet,” writes Ferguson:

  [W]ithin half a year of coming into office, Grey had presided over a transformation of the Entente with France, which had begun life as an attempt to settle extra-European quarrels, into a de facto defensive alliance. [Grey] had conveyed to the French that Britain would be prepared to fight with them against Germany in the event of a war.74

  Prime Minister Campbell-Bannerman and his successor, Herbert Henry Asquith, had approved of the military staff talks, but neither the Cabinet nor Parliament was aware that Sir Edward had committed Britain to war if France were invaded. In 1911, two new ministers were brought in on the secret: Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George and the thirty-seven-year-old Home Secretary, who soon moved over to the Admiralty: Winston Churchill.

  In 1912, Churchill and Grey persuaded France to shift the bulk of her fleet to the Mediterranean to counter the Austro-Hungarian and Italian fleets. While the 1912 exchange of letters on the redeployment of the French fleet stated that Britain was not committed to defend France, Grey and Churchill knew this was exactly what France expected. Should war break out, the Royal Navy was to keep the High Seas Fleet out of the Channel and away from the coast of France. Lord Esher, adviser to George V, told Asquith that the plans worked out between the general staffs of Britain and France “certainly committed us to fight, whether the Cabinet likes it or not.”75

  “FRIENDS FOREVER”

  BY 1914 THERE WAS a war party in every country. In May of that year, Col. Edward Mandell House, the eminence grise of the White House, whom Wilson once described as “my second personality…my independent self,” visited the great capitals of Europe to take the temperature of the continent.76 House came home with a chilling assessment:

  The situation is extraordinary. It is jingoism run stark mad. Unless someone acting for you [Wilson] can bring about a different understanding, there is some day to be an awful cataclysm. No one in Europe can do it. There is too much hatred, too many jealousies. Whenever England consents, France and Russia will close in on Germany and Austria.77

  Germany saw her situation exactly as did Colonel House.

  British hawks looked to a European war to enhance national prestige and expand the empire. A war in which French and Russian armies tore at Germany from east and west, as the Royal Navy sent the High Seas Fleet to the bottom, rolled up the Kaiser’s colonies, and drove German trade from the high seas seemed a glorious opportunity to smash the greatest rival to British power since Napoleon. And the cost of the victory, the dispatch of a British Expeditionary Force to fight beside the mighty French army that would bear the brunt of battle, seemed reasonable.

  Yet, as the summer of 1914 began, no one expected war. The naval arms race had ended in 1913 when Tirpitz conceded British superiority by telling the Reichstag Budget Committee he was ready to accept a 60 percent rule, a sixteen-to-ten ratio in favor of the Royal Navy. Germany could not sustain a buildup of both her army and the Kaiser’s fleet. In the end, the High Seas Fleet had nothing to do with Britain’s decision to go to war, but everything to do with converting Britain from a friendly power aloof from the alliances of Europe into a probable enemy should war come.

  On June 23, 1914, the Second Battle Squadron of the Royal Navy, including four of its newest dreadnoughts, Audacious, Courageous, Ajax, and King George V, sailed into Kiel. And this time, unlike 1906, there was no “invasion scare,” no panic in Kiel. A large and excited crowd awaited. The British officers were received at the Royal Castle by Crown Prince Henry and Princess Irene. Admiral Tirpitz arrived the following day from Berlin, boarded his flagship Friedrich Karl, and invited all senior British officers to his cabin for a briefing on the High Seas Fleet. That afternoon, every British and German warship in Kiel fired a twenty-one-gun salute as the royal yacht Hohenzollern entered the harbor. The British admiral and his captains were invited aboard by the Kaiser, who donned the uniform of a British Admiral of the Fleet and inspected King George V.

  That day, the Kaiser’s yacht regatta began. British and German naval officers visited one another’s warships and attended parties together. Tensions between the two nations had eased. On June 28, the Kaiser was aboard his racing yacht Meteor when an urgent telegram was brought out. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne of the octogenarian Emperor Franz Josef, whose only son had committed suicide, and his wife Sophie had been assassinated in Sarajevo.

  “The character of Kiel Week changed,” writes Massie. “Flags were lowered to half-mast, and receptions, dinners and a ball at the Royal Castle were canceled. Early the next morning, the Kaiser departed, intending to go to Vienna and the Archduke’s funeral.”78 As the British warships sailed out of Kiel, the masts of the German warships flew the
signal “Pleasant Journey.” King George V responded with a wireless message,

  Friends Today

  Friends in Future

  Friends Forever79

  CHAPTER 2

  Last Summer of Yesterday

  THE NATIONS SLITHERED over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war.1

  —DAVID LLOYD GEORGE,

  War Memoirs

  This war is really the greatest lunacy ever committed by the white races.2

  —ADMIRAL TIRPITZ, 1915

  NOT UNTIL FOUR weeks after the assassination of the archduke was the Balkan crisis brought up in the British Cabinet.

  On July 17, 1914, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George, was telling a Guildhall audience the assassination in Sarajevo was “no more than a very small cloud on the horizon…and you never get a perfectly blue sky in foreign affairs.”3 On July 23, Lloyd George spoke of how Anglo-German relations “were very much better than they were a few years ago.”4

  But on July 24, after yet another desultory Cabinet debate on the perennial crisis of Home Rule for Ireland, the ministers were asked to remain for a few minutes. Sir Edward Grey began to read the ultimatum Austria had just delivered to Serbia, and the gravity of it all began to sink in on the thirty-nine-year-old First Lord of the Admiralty:

  [Grey] had been reading…or…speaking for several minutes before I could disengage my mind from the tedious and bewildering debate which had just closed…. [G]radually as the phrases and sentences followed one another, impressions of a wholly different character began to form in my mind…. The parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone faded back into the mists and squalls of Ireland and a strange light began immediately, but by imperceptible gradations, to fall and grow upon the map of Europe.5

  So recalled Winston Churchill.

  In his report to the king that evening, H. H. Asquith, prime minister since 1908, described Austria’s ultimatum as “the gravest event for many years past in European politics as it may be the prelude to a war in which at least four of the Great Powers may be involved.”6 Asquith meant Austria, Germany, Russia, and France. As he wrote Venetia Stanley, the young woman of whom he was deeply enamored, “We are within measurable, or imaginable, distance of a real Armageddon. Happily, there seems to be no reason why we should be anything more than spectators.”7

  “GEARED UP AND HAPPY”

  THE AUSTRIANS DID NOT want a European war. Vienna wanted a short, sharp war to punish Serbia for murdering the heir to the throne and to put an end to Serb plotting to pull apart their empire. For they suspected that Belgrade’s ambition was to gather the South Slavs into a united nation where Serbia would sit at the head of the table.

  The Austrian ultimatum had been drafted in anticipation of certain rejection, to justify an Austrian declaration of war. But on July 26, Serbia accepted nine of Austria’s ten demands, balking only at Vienna’s demand to send a delegation to Belgrade to oversee the investigation and prosecution of the conspirators who had murdered the archduke. Yet, even on this point, the Serbs agreed to refer the matter to the International Court of Justice.

  The Kaiser was relieved and elated. Austria had scored a brilliant diplomatic coup and he could not see what more she wanted. “It was a capitulation of the most humiliating sort,” exclaimed the Kaiser. “With it disappears every reason for war.”8

  But when the Austrian ambassador in Belgrade received the Serb reply, he picked up his packed bags, boarded the first train out, and, once over the frontier, telephoned Vienna. When news hit that Serbia had failed to submit to all ten Austrian demands, crowds were in the streets clamoring for war. On July 27, the Austro-Hungarian empire declared war. On the twenty-eighth, Belgrade was shelled from across the Danube. But in London, writes the historian Robert Massie, “even after Austria declared war and bombarded Belgrade, few in Britain had an inkling that within seven days, England would enter a world war. The man in the street, the majority in the Cabinet and House of Commons still saw the crisis as a distant furor over ‘Serbian murderers.’”9

  “The Cabinet was overwhelmingly pacific,” says Churchill. “At least three-quarters of its members were determined not to be drawn into a European quarrel, unless Great Britain were herself attacked, which was not likely.”10 Asquith’s Cabinet was split between Liberal Imperialists and Little Englanders. Barbara Tuchman describes the latter:

  Heirs of Gladstone, they, like their late leader, harbored a deep suspicion of foreign entanglements and considered the aiding of oppressed peoples to be the only proper concern of foreign affairs, which were otherwise regarded as a tiresome interference with Reform, Free Trade, Home Rule, and the Lords’ Veto.11

  Grey and Churchill believed that if France was attacked, Britain must fight. But Britain had no treaty alliance with France. Indeed, why had Britain remained outside the Franco-Russian alliance if not to retain her freedom of action? Gladstone had stayed out of the Franco-Prussian war, and the Liberals wanted Asquith to stay out of this war. Of eighteen ministers who had participated in the Cabinet meeting on Saturday, August 1, twelve opposed war. A Liberal caucus in the House had voted 4–1 for neutrality.12 The Manchester Guardian spoke of “an organised conspiracy to drag us into war.”13

  The editor of the Times, however, could not disguise his disgust:

  Saturday was a black day for everyone who knew what was going on—more than half the Cabinet rotten and every prospect of a complete schism or a disastrous or dishonouring refusal to help France…. Winston has really done more than anyone else to save the situation.14

  Seven Cabinet members were ready to resign rather than go to war. “The Cabinet was absolutely against war and would never have agreed to being committed to war at this moment,” wrote Churchill.15 Those favoring Britain’s going to war, should it come, were Grey and Churchill, who had made commitments to France. But only the First Lord relished the prospect. On July 25, when it appeared that Grey’s call for a conference of ambassadors to halt the slide to war might succeed, Churchill “exclaimed moodily that it looked after all as if we were in for a ‘bloody peace.’”16

  “Churchill was the only Minister to feel any sense of exultation at the course of events,” writes biographer John Charmley.17 On July 28, he had written his wife Clementine: “My darling one & beautiful: Everything tends toward catastrophe & collapse. I am interested, geared up and happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that?”18

  That same day, the Kaiser was desperately trying to avert the war to which Churchill looked forward with anticipation. “William was ‘feverishly active’ on the 28th, casting this way and that to keep the peace. He had no idea what the Austrians wanted.”19 By July 30, the German chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, who had worked with Sir Edward Grey to prevent the spread of the Balkan wars of 1912–1913, had resignedly told the Prussian Ministry of State, “we have lost control and the stone has begun to roll.”20

  THE FIRST LORD

  AND WHO WAS THIS First Lord whose lust for war caused senior Cabinet colleagues to recoil? Born at Blenheim, ancestral home of the Duke of Marlborough, on November 30, 1874, to twenty-year-old American heiress Jennie Jerome and Randolph Churchill, a rising star in the Tory Party, Winston Churchill had been a poor student, except for a love of history and mastery of the English language. After five years at Harrow, and three tries, he had been accepted at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. There he excelled, departing in December 1894 eighth in his class.

  In October 1896, the young cavalry officer of the 4th Hussars arrived in Bombay. In four years, he would be elected to Parliament. Those years were full of the “crowded hours” of which Theodore Roosevelt had written.

  During his first leave from India, Churchill sailed to Cuba to observe the Spanish in action against the rebels. On return, he learned of a punitive expedition to be led by Sir Bindon Blood to the Northwest Frontier to put down a Pashtun uprising on the Afghan border. A year earlier, Churchill had extracted from Sir Bindon a promise to take him along if there was to be figh
ting. Winston returned from the expedition after six weeks to write The Story of the Malakind Field Force, dedicating the book to Sir Bindon. The Prince of Wales sent a note to the young author praising his work.

  Churchill then had his mother, a famous beauty, intercede with Prime Minister Salisbury to have him assigned to the army of General Kitchener, who was starting upriver to the Sudan to avenge the death of General “Chinese” Gordon by the Mahdi’s army at Khartoum. At Omdurman, Churchill rode in the last cavalry charge of the empire. He would claim to have slain up to half a dozen enemy and came home to write The River War, which charged Kitchener with dishonorable treatment of wounded Dervishes.

  But it was the Boer War that made Churchill famous. Traveling to South Africa as a correspondent, he was riding an armored train to the front when it was derailed by Boer commandos under Louis Botha, who took him prisoner. Held with captured British officers in Pretoria—the Boers rejected his protest that he was a journalist and a noncombatant—Churchill escaped. When news, as told by he himself, reached London, he became an international figure. He returned to South Africa, saw action at the humiliating British defeat at Spion Kop, marched to the relief of Ladysmith, and came home one of the most famous young men in the world. Weeks before his twenty-sixth birthday, he was elected to Parliament. There he would remain, with two brief interludes, for sixty-four years.

  Like his father, a Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston entered politics as a Conservative. But by 1904 he was in rebellion against the campaign by Joe Chamberlain for Tory abandonment of a free-trade policy that had been British tradition since the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. Chamberlain was proposing tariffs to protect British markets against the flood of imports from across the Atlantic as a protectionist America was leaving Britain in the dust, and Germany was approaching industrial parity. In February, Churchill wrote to Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, Salisbury’s nephew and successor, and declared himself “a Unionist Free Trader…opposed to what is generally known as Home Rule [for Ireland] and Protection in any form,” and “a wholehearted opponent of Mr. Chamberlain.”21