Please do not let strategy absorb all your attention to the damage of the greater issue now looming up. From now on it would be wise to keep a very close eye on all matters bearing on the future settlement of Europe. This is the crucial issue on which the future of the world for generations will depend. In its solution your vision, experience, and great influence may prove a main factor.
It is hard to say whether Smuts meant the last sentence sarcastically; it was already plain that, whatever might be said of his experience, the Prime Minister’s influence was pure illusion. He had summoned up the barbarian from the East and the simpleton from the West—Europe meant nothing to the latter; it meant riches, plunder and power to the former. He could write and telegraph to Stalin every day, he could sometimes persuade Roosevelt to join in his appeals, but it made no difference whatever. He did his best. He told Field-Marshal Alexander, still fighting in Northern Italy, ‘if the war came to an end at an early date… to be ready for a dash with armoured cars’—a dash for Vienna, to forestall the Russians. ‘Difficult as the world is now,’ he wrote to the Foreign Secretary, ‘we shall not make our course easier by abandoning people whom we have encouraged by promises of support’; while to Tito he said, ‘we had no desire to intervene in internal Yugoslav affairs, but…we ought not to let the King down.’ Seemingly bewildered by the difficult world, minutes, memoranda and telegrams flowed from his pen while the people whom he had encouraged by promises of support were, in fact, abandoned one after another.
In October he went to see Stalin in Moscow, and made another half-hearted attempt to back up the ‘London’ Poles. He reported optimistically to Roosevelt, who replied: ‘I am delighted to learn of your success at Moscow in making progress toward a compromise solution of the Polish problem.’ Stalin, as always, was adept in keeping the ball rolling, with memoranda, exchanges of views, and the rest of the meaningless manoeuvres which make democratic politicians feel at home. He knew he had Poland in the bag.
It was in February 1945 that the Three met in Yalta, when the photograph referred to above was taken. Between banquets they discussed everything, and settled nothing. They even discussed ‘the all-important question of voting rights in the Security Council’ of the World Instrument for Peace, which was to be set up after the war—a question which had been shelved at Dumbarton Oaks. After much talk they arrived at a world-shaking conclusion: ‘unless the Big Four were unanimous the Security Council was virtually powerless. If the United States, the USSR, Great Britain, or China disagreed, then it could refuse its assent and stop the Council doing anything. Here was the Veto.’ In other words, the whole idea made nonsense from the start, just as did the Atlantic Charter and its four freedoms. They might promise freedom from fear of the policeman’s knock (the present reviewer well remembers reading about this excellent notion in a cell at Holloway Prison) but what did the wild boar care? It was all moonshine. Even with his restricted vision and trustful nineteenth-century outlook Sir Winston must have realised this.
At Yalta, six months after the Warsaw rising, when Russian intentions in Europe were already plain for all to see, he quotes himself as saying: ‘It is no exaggeration or compliment of a florid kind when I say that we regard Marshal Stalin’s life as most precious to the hopes and hearts of all of us,’ and again: ‘We feel we have a friend whom we can trust.’ Is it unfair to quote the idiocies, the indecent nonsense of an after-dinner (or should it be after-banquet) speech? No, since he gives the words in his own book.
Poland, as usual, was on the agenda; the Prime Minister made his contribution: ‘Honour was the sole reason why we had drawn the sword to help Poland against Hitler’s brutal onslaught, and we could never accept any settlement which did not leave her free, independent, and sovereign.’
The last part of the book is an account of submitting first to Russian force and then to American ignorance and obtuseness. Sir Winston could neither control nor influence events in the least degree. It is astonishing that the Americans should have paid such slight attention to his views; he cared far more than they did what happened to Europe, for after all he is half English. He did his utmost to persuade Eisenhower not to withdraw his armies from thousands of square miles of the European heart-land in order to allow the Russians to ‘wend’ their way into it. But nobody listened to him any more.
President Roosevelt died on 12 April. Sir Winston spoke of him in the House of Commons: ‘What an enviable death was his! He had brought his country through the worst of its perils and the heaviest of its toils. Victory had cast its sure and steady beam upon him.’ The German wireless said: ‘Roosevelt will go down in history as the man at whose instigation the present war was spread into a Second World War, and as the President who finally succeeded in bringing his greatest opponent, the Bolshevik Soviet Union, to power’, and Stalin: ‘The friendly attitude of President Franklin Roosevelt to the USSR will always be most highly valued and remembered by the Soviet people.’ He had done irreparable harm to Europe; had he died five years sooner our continent might have been spared the worst. As it was, he did not live to see the consequences of his actions, as his friend Sir Winston has done.
Throughout the victory celebrations he had, he tells us, a heavy heart. He concealed it most cleverly, and a spectacle Europeans found unnecessarily incongruous at the time when their continent was the scene of tragedies of a magnitude hitherto unknown was that of the politician who bore so great a responsibility for these events, electioneering with his cigar and his grin and his V sign, seemingly well satisfied with the turn of events. Perhaps the fact that, although they laughed and cheered, they did not vote for him, shows the electors felt it should be possible to rejoice (if rejoicing at such a time is the order of the day) in a more dignified manner.
‘While the rejoicings in our victory over Hitler and the Nazi tyranny transported the peoples of the Grand Alliance my mind was oppressed with the new and even greater peril which was swiftly unfolding itself to my gaze,’ he writes, and, in a message to President Truman, ‘we hope that the V.E. celebration will… occupy the public mind at home.’ What is this distinction between his mind and the public mind? Does he imagine that no one but he was concerned with the danger? He had got his heart’s desire—he had fought and conquered Germany. Had he never paused till now, to wonder what might happen next?
However, almost at once he thought of a way to solve all outstanding problems and dangers. ‘It seemed above all vital that Stalin, Truman, and I should meet together at the earliest moment, and that nothing should delay us.’ Incredible though it may appear, in spite of his experiences at Teheran, Moscow and Yalta, he was once again longing to repeat the futile discussions, to eat and drink at the banquets, and to listen to and bestow the ridiculous compliments in the after dinner speeches. ‘Nothing can save us from the great catastrophe but a meeting and a show-down as early as possible at some point in Germany…’ he wrote, yet a few pages later he admits: ‘The agreements and understandings of Yalta, such as they were, had already been broken or brushed aside by the triumphant Kremlin. New perils, perhaps as terrible as those we had surmounted, loomed and glared upon the torn and harassed world.’
Again and again Sir Winston refers to this or that problem being settled ‘at the Peace Treaty.’ He never understood that he was fighting a new kind of war with a new kind of ally—who but he could refer to the conquerors of 1945 as the Grand Alliance? A Peace Treaty would have been just as meaningless as all the other commitments and undertakings of his Soviet friends. He looked forward, no doubt, to a Peace Parade and plenty of banquets and endless opportunities for making his V sign, but it was not to be.
However, one last meeting of the three Great Powers was vouchsafed him, this time with the cheerful, energetic Mr Truman representing America in place of the empty opera cloak. It took place at Potsdam in July. Sir Winston writes of the proposed Oder-Neisse frontier for Germany: ‘For the future peace of Europe here was a wrong beside which Alsace-Lorraine and the Danzig corridor were
trifles. One day the Germans would want their territory back, and the Poles would not be able to stop them,’ but he was again unable to influence events in any way.
There were several more banquets. He thought it time Stalin learned to drink brandy out of a bigger glass. ‘So I filled a small-sized claret glass with brandy for him and another for myself. I looked at him significantly. We both drained our glasses at a stroke and gazed approvingly at one another.’
After the Conference Sir Winston heard the result of the General Election. He says:
I intended, if I were returned by the electorate, as was generally expected, to come to grips with the Soviet Government… For instance, neither I nor Mr Eden would ever have agreed to the Western Neisse being the frontier line… The over-running by the Russian armies of the territory up to and even beyond the Western Neisse was never and would never have been agreed to by any government of which I was the head. Here was no point of principle only, but rather an enormous matter of fact affecting about three additional millions of displaced people.
These are brave words. If they mean anything at all, they mean that if Mr Churchill had won the election he would have sent English armies to turn the Russians out of Germany. But of course they are empty, bragging words, meant to discredit his successor as Prime Minister. Certainly, by his own account, not Mr Attlee, not even Mr Eden himself could have carried less weight in the counsels of the Three than he did. The Polish question, the German frontiers, the fate of Austria—his impotence in these matters was plain long before the British electorate turned him out of office. He had won his war, but he lost everything else—much of the British Empire, English honour (so he tells us in connection with Poland) and the General Election.
The number of people living under Communist domination was increased, as a result of the war, from 170 million to 770 million. In Sir Winston’s own words:
The territories under Russian control… include the Baltic provinces, all of Germany to the occupational line, all Czechoslovakia, a large part of Austria, the whole of Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria…. This constitutes an event in the history of Europe to which there has been no parallel, and which has not been faced by the Allies in their long and hazardous struggle.
An auto-criticism which can compare, in its frankness and scope, with the confession at a Soviet state trial.
The Second World War, Vol. VI: Triumph and Tragedy, Churchill, W. (1954)
Hollow France
Hollow Years? Yes, perhaps. Anyone who has suffered a major haemorrhage knows well the empty feeling and the extreme weakness, such weakness that looking over the side of the bed is enough to make him faint. When Alistair Horne was writing about the fall of France in 1940 he decided it could only be explained by what happened at Verdun in 1916, and that again by 1870 in the Franco Prussian war. The result was three brilliant books, which put the hollow years and what they led to in perspective. France in the 30s was too tired, to weak to do much except recover gradually. It had summoned the whole world to help it defeat Germany, and fresh soldiers from America and Canada and Australia had helped exhausted France and England to victory. A peace, which even those who helped draft it had grave doubts as to its durability, followed.
Huge bits of Germany were lopped off and given to Poland, or made into brand new countries with outlandish names, in order to weaken it further, with French guarantees. Then the French lay down to recover. Mr Weber, with hundreds of interesting statistics, demonstrates that their lethargy was fatal to national revival. They thought they had fought and suffered enough; it was a long convalescence. Of course there were extreme nationalists and patriots among them; France would not be France without that. But as far as governments went, ambitious men who went into politics played musical chairs, taking turns in various ministries, the interest and fun of intrigue making them practically oblivious to what was happening elsewhere. East of the Rhine there were revolutions, and at one time it looked hopeful for Marxism. France hardly cared, it had its own Marxists and the people were not enamoured of their bourgeoisie.
The turning point was the vote in the Saar. National Socialism had routed Communism in Germany as democracies looked at it antagonistically, and thought, or wished to think, that the Saarland, rich in coal and administered by the League of Nations, would vote either for status quo or to join France. The English press predicted that although the inhabitants were German, if they were allowed a properly conducted secret ballot they would not vote to join Germany where Hitler ruled. The votes that had brought him to power had been rigged, they said. English soldiers guarded the voting stations; there should be no jiggery pokery. The result was over 90% for Germany. A year later the Germans marched into the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland, and ever since there have been voices in France and England saying that if they had been thrown out then there would have been no war three years later. But France had no wish to begin fighting long before its wounds were healed, and England said after all the Germans were only walking into their own back yard. In the climate of that time nobody could have induced the Allies to move. Weber’s account of France’s backwardness and the misery in which the majority of people in big towns lived is horrifying though not more so than Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier about conditions in the North of England. It is a pity this book is confined to France. It should be interesting to compare what was happening in Germany. At the beginning of the 30s unemployment was a scourge in all three countries. The Germans put their men to work on the infrastructure. How did they and the French compare in essentials such as higher education, consumption of food, percentage of dwellings with running water and indoor sanitation, purchasing power of the workers, holidays, and so forth? Germany’s huge losses in the war make the comparison meaningful. Both, of course, were re-arming.
The great men of our century are those who saw, after the disaster of the Second World War, that Europe must unite or go under. France and Germany must be bound together and never fight again. The vagaries of Brussels are bewildering but unimportant. Weber’s interesting book is less depressing, in the light of the huge rise in the standard of living compared with those days. You cannot make people happy, but they can have some leisure and comfort.
It showed what would have happened if plebiscites had been allowed elsewhere.
The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s, Weber, E. (1954)
A City of Ruins
‘We are confident that Hitler’s mechanised hordes will never get to Paris. But should they come so far… we shall defend every stone, every clod of earth, every lamp-post, every building, for we would rather have our city razed to the ground than fall into the hands of the Germans.’
These words, from a French Government spokesman on 9th June 1940, may be set beside Sir Winston Churchill’s well-known speech to the House of Commons a few days earlier: ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight in the fields’ and so on. Both were typically politicians’ utterances; the difference between them, looked at historically, is that the Frenchman’s words were put to the test of reality within a week, whereas the Englishman’s boast was destined to remain an empty one, since the Germans never crossed the Channel.
It is idle to speculate on what would have happened if the Channel had not existed. One thing is certain: the speeches of politicians, however brave and stirring, would not have affected the issue, which would largely have depended, as it did in France, upon the relative strength of German and English armour and aircraft, and also, to some extent, upon the behaviour of the civilian population. The only evidence we have to go on is what happened to the English army in France in May 1940.
Throughout his book, General Spears pretends that the realities of war do not exist. All that matters is that politicians, and generals too if they can be so persuaded, should continue to shout defiantly that they are winning the war, however obvious it may be everyone that, in fact, they are not. No wonder the French generals were irritated beyond endurance by this attitude, and by the censorious
admonitions to France to go on fighting while English troops were embarking for home in French ports, and the bulk of the exiguous English air force was (quite rightly) being saved for the defence of the homeland. The French begged for more fighter cover for their armies; the English turned them down. Half the book is taken up by these reiterated demands and refusals.
Sir Winston Churchill’s promise to France, on 11th June, of a couple of divisions within a fortnight and twenty five more by March 1941, made when the French armies were at their last gasp facing one hundred and twenty four German divisions, was described by General Weygand as dérisoire. He might well have used a stronger term. At the same conference, which took place at Briare after the Government had left Paris, General Weygand ‘was launched on his favourite theme, the folly of having embarked on war at all. “I wish to place on record that I consider that those responsible embarked upon the war very lightly”,’ he said. Churchill and Eden quickly changed the subject, as well they might. The cap fitted.
After further argument about whether the RAF could be used in the battle, Marshal Pétain spoke. ‘He was calm, detached…. He wished, he said, to support General Weygand in his contention that the present war in no way resembled the last one.… He then paused and said gravely, alluding to Churchill’s advocacy of fighting in Paris: “To make Paris into a city of ruins will not affect the issue”. There was a rather painful pause, brought to an end by Eden’ who told one of those cheering stories which were being spread by neutrals about the very heavy losses the Germans had suffered. For Churchill, with his usual disregard for the consequences, ‘urged the French to fight in Paris, describing how a great city, if stubbornly defended, absorbed immense armies,’ writes General Spears. He adds: ‘The French perceptibly froze at this’. Not only Frenchmen, but the whole civilised world owes a debt of gratitude to General Weygand and Marshal Pétain for saving Paris from this senseless destruction. General Weygand declared the incomparably beautiful capital an open city that same evening.
The Pursuit of Laughter Page 24
