Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941

by Ian Kershaw

  The new, thrusting authoritarian powers in Europe and the Far East–Germany, Italy and Japan–had a vested interest in challenging and ‘revising’ (or overthrowing) the international order established in the wake of the First World War. Each of them had the feeling, with all its attendant resentment, of a ‘have-not nation’, insistent and determined upon attaining its rightful ‘place in the sun’. Each looked at Britain, France and other imperial powers and wanted its own share of empire, the political dominance that went with coveted great-power status and national pride; the economic area of self-sufficiency that, in a fundamental crisis of capitalism which highlighted the uncertainties and the inbuilt unfairness of an international trading economy, appeared to offer the only solution to sustained national prosperity. Other countries were unlikely to offer voluntarily the territorial acquisitions necessary for the formation of the new empires. So like the old, those of Britain and other major powers, they would have to be taken by force–‘by the sword’, as Hitler repeatedly put it.

  Britain’s interests were exactly the opposite. As a supreme ‘have nation’, her key concern was in upholding her world Empire. This meant adherence to the postwar order, which Britain had been a main party to creating. It meant, too, an emphasis upon international cooperation to maintain security, and the diplomatic negotiation of problems that arose. Above all, it meant a premium on peace. International safeguards and commitment to disarmament would prevent the world once more collapsing into the carnage of 1914–18. The recent and searingly painful memory of the dead millions of the war alone demanded no less.

  From the position of a victorious, and still prosperous, world power, demands for a new order based upon liberal freedoms, international agreements and external trade were not difficult to advance. From the vantage-point of the ‘have-not nations’, precisely this new order was both disadvantageous and, in political terms, humiliating. The memory of the war dead, in the eyes of growing numbers of their citizens, demanded not supine acceptance of the victors’ terms, not compliance with economic rules stacked against them, not the weakness that came from disarmament, and not peace, but war–for national glory, for territory to establish lasting future prosperity, and to rectify perceived past humiliation and current injustice.

  Britain, together with her most important Continental ally, the war-stricken France, and, across the Atlantic, the burgeoning new world power, the United States, saw the postwar settlement, therefore, through one set of lenses, Italy, Japan and Germany through quite a different set. Moreover, the postwar settlement, framed around the Versailles Treaty of 1919 (and the subsequent Treaties of Saint-Germain and Trianon) in Europe and the Washington Nine Power Treaty of 1922 for the Far East, looked fragile. The refusal of the United States of America to underpin the settlement in Europe by joining the League of Nations, the body established to ensure international cooperation, did nothing to encourage optimism about its longevity. In both the Far East and Europe, however, the settlement nonetheless lasted during the 1920s. Japan, a member of the League of Nations, offered no threat to European and American interests in the Far East and ‘appeared willing to play by western rules’.8 Churchill himself outrightly dismissed the prospect of war against Japan. ‘I do not believe there is the slightest chance of it in our lifetime,’ he wrote in December 1924. ‘Japan is at the other end of the world. She cannot menace our vital security in any way.’9 In Europe, too, the signs were improving. The postwar settlement was strengthened through the Treaty of Locarno of 1925, fixing by international agreement the western borders of the German Reich, and by Germany’s accession to the League of Nations the following year. Both were inspired by the outstanding international statesman of the 1920s, the German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann.10 But appearances deceived. The Depression blew apart the optimism. Soon, both in the Far East and in Europe, the postwar settlement would be in shreds.

  In the Far East, British weakness was soon demonstrated by the first manifestations of Japanese belligerence, in the occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and attacks on Shanghai the following year. The chiefs of staff of the British armed forces pointed out the danger to British possessions and dependencies, including India, Australia and New Zealand. Sir Robert Vansittart, the powerful Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, recorded in early 1932 that ‘we are incapable of checking Japan in any way if she really means business’, meaning that ‘we must eventually be done for in the Far East unless the United States are eventually prepared to use force’.11 The United States were not–resorting to largely counterproductive denunciations of Japanese actions, but little else. British policy, in fact, favoured Japan over China, though it tried to square the circle by placating the Chinese and the Americans while not alienating the Japanese and at the same time upholding the League of Nations.12 In early 1934, with Britain still in the throes of severe economic depression, imposing deep constraints on spending for the armed forces (which in any case faced the obstacle of opposition to rearmament in all the major political parties, and in public opinion), the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, stipulated that the friendship of Japan was more important to Britain than that of the United States or the goodwill of China and the friends of the League of Nations.13 The course for appeasement in the Far East was set. By this time, Japan was no longer a member of the League, and a new, closer and graver danger could not be ignored.

  In the crucial early phase when the Nazi regime was establishing its complete control over Germany, Foreign Office officials could not make up their minds about Hitler. Was he the demon of Mein Kampf, whose rule meant not just diplomatic disturbance but, ultimately, war? Or would the firebrand eventually cool down into a ‘normal’ politician as far as foreign affairs were concerned? While they were still trying to decide, Hitler exploited insuperable differences between Britain and France about German rearmament to take his country out of the League of Nations. Like Japan in the Far East, Germany, the wildest card in the European pack, then no longer even paid lip-service to the League’s doctrine of collective security. Disarmament, to which British policy and public mood had been wedded, was dead. It was obvious that Germany was rearming as rapidly as possible in secret, and it was recognized that the growing German strength posed a threat greater than that of either Japan or Fascist Italy. But in Britain complacency merged with financial exigency and the political difficulties of proposing rearmament in the face of hostile public opinion. It led to inaction, drift and a policy of ‘hope for the best’.

  The inertia was ended only with the German announcement in March 1935, in breach of the Versailles Treaty, of an air force and plans for a huge army; then the startling news brought back by the British Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, and Lord Privy Seal, Anthony Eden, from their visit to Berlin later that month that Germany’s air strength was already on a par with that of Britain. Hitler had exaggerated for effect. But the shock running through Whitehall, and in the public at large when the news came out, was palpable. Belatedly, the urgency of rearmament–something that hitherto only Churchill and one or two lone and derided voices had been clamouring for–was recognized, if still widely opposed in Labour and Liberal circles, as it would be until 1938. In air power, however, acknowledged as the new key to military strength and where the enemy threat was seen to be at its most lethal, it would be years before the lost ground could be made up, if at all. This was the weakness that underlay the entire attempt to appease Hitler.

  Stretched by her global commitments, and struggling to overcome lasting economic depression, Britain, it was increasingly evident, could not match, let alone outstrip, German military might. It became equally evident that Britain faced the prospect within only a few years of a new war with Germany. But it was recognized that the British armed forces would be in no position to fight such a war until a lengthy armaments programme had been undertaken, perhaps not before 1942 or so.14 Even then, building up an air force and reinforcing the navy came at the expense of funding for the army (whi
ch would leave its mark in 1940) as attempts were made to keep rearmament costs in line with the demands of a balanced budget and economic recovery from the Depression.15

  As Britain’s military weakness was exposed, her diplomatic strength suffered a calamitous setback in late 1935 in the attempt, together with her ally France, to buy off the aggressor Mussolini at the cost of his victim, Abyssinia. The League of Nations never recovered from the debacle. Profiting from the diplomatic disarray, Hitler sent his troops over the demilitarized line into the Rhineland in March 1936. The German hand was now even mightier. One Conservative Member of Parliament, Robert Boothby, summed up much public opinion, as well as the government’s stance, when he stated: ‘Nobody feels that we can apply very strong or stringent measures against Germany because she has put troops into the Rhineland.’16 The British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, confining the response to diplomatic protest, reasserted the government’s peaceful objective: ‘It is the appeasement of Europe as a whole that we have constantly before us.’17 Three months later, in early July 1936, the Cabinet acknowledged that Britain could do nothing to help eastern Europe and that only force used against the Empire or parts of western Europe would be resisted.18

  When he replaced Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister in May 1937, Neville Chamberlain inherited a foreign policy shaped by confusion, uncertainty and inaction, increasingly compelled to come to terms with Britain’s military weakness and her incapacity to do other than respond, often feebly, to events shaped by Europe’s dictators. Chamberlain now sought starkly to face up to the cold reality and to devise a practical policy on the basis of recognition of this weakness. This meant active steps to accommodate–or ‘appease’–Germany’s interests. Realistic about Britain, Chamberlain deluded himself about German aims. Like most observers of the international scene, he presumed that these were purely nationalist in character. He imagined, as did so many, that Hitler was no more than an extreme proponent of territorial claims in central and eastern Europe which were not altogether devoid of legitimacy and could, with goodwill and peaceful objectives on both sides, be settled by negotiation. If German nationalist aims were met, he thought, war could be avoided. Buying Hitler off was the price of peace. It was, for Chamberlain, a price well worth paying.

  The saga of 1938, as the Czech crisis culminated in Chamberlain’s dramatic flights to Germany to attempt to reach a settlement with Hitler, ending in the Munich Agreement at the end of September, unfolded on this premise. Whether another way out of the crisis, short of war, could have been found is doubtful. But none was tried. Churchill, whose attacks on government defence and foreign policy had mounted with increasing forcefulness since the mid-1930s, was the chief advocate of a ‘grand alliance’ with France and the Soviet Union to deter Hitler and to resist by force, if need be, any aggression against Czechoslovakia (linked by treaty with both countries). The idea had much support on the Left, and in public opinion, but not in the government. For Chamberlain and his Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, detestation for Bolshevism was mixed with deep distrust of Stalin’s motives and contempt for the Red Army. They ruled out any alliance.

  Conceivably, nothing would have come of the ‘grand alliance’ even if it had been engineered. The Soviet dictator claimed that his troops were ready to march if Hitler invaded. It was bluff more than intention. No preparations for military action were made by a Red Army reeling from Stalin’s purges, and its passage through Poland and Romania would almost certainly have been refused.19 In the west, in any case, France was looking to wriggle out of her treaty commitments to the Czechs, and Britain was anxious not to be tied to backing any French involvement. Chamberlain was warned that rearmament was insufficient to engage in a major war, and that nothing could be done militarily to save Czechoslovakia. War, he was certain, would endanger the Empire. British interests in the Far East were already threatened by Japan’s war against China, expanding since it began the previous summer. (The following summer an initially minor incident in Tientsin, in north China, leading to a stand-off lasting weeks between Britain and Japan, forced a British acknowledgement that, as Lord Halifax put it, ‘there seemed little we could do in the Far East unless the United States joined in with us’.20) In the Mediterranean, Fascist Italy and the growing likelihood of a Franco victory in the Spanish Civil War, raging since the summer of 1936, posed a mounting danger to British strength. Chamberlain later suggested that he was left with no choice. Britain was not ready for war; he had to gain time. ‘Any way and whatever the outcome it is clear as daylight that if we had had to fight in 1938 the results would have been far worse,’ he wrote to one of his sisters, months after war had eventually begun. ‘It would be rash to prophesy the verdict of history, but if full access is obtained to all the records it will be seen that I realised from the beginning our military weakness and did my best to postpone if I could not avert the war.’21

  Whether Chamberlain genuinely believed he was gaining time through the surrender of part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, or whether he genuinely believed that he had taken a major step to securing ‘peace for our time’, is even now disputed.22 It is also impossible to be sure whether the squandered opportunity to combat Hitler in the summer of 1938 was better than that which occurred the following year, when war had to be undertaken anyway, and whether a defiant stance over Czechoslovakia might even have resulted in Hitler’s fall through an internal coup. The most likely speculation is in both cases a negative one: that a better chance was not lost, and that Hitler would not have been toppled from within. In all probability, Czechoslovakia would have been rapidly overrun, as war games suggested would be the case, and Britain and France would either have come to terms in recognition of a fait accompli or would have been embroiled in war from a militarily weaker starting point than in 1939. In either case, an armed triumph of German might would have been a distinct possibility. And it must be doubted whether the embryonic German opposition would have been sufficiently well organized to act against Hitler before he could have disarmed resistance through victory over Czechoslovakia while keeping the western powers at bay. Whatever the surmises, the truth was, as Churchill vehemently expressed it in the House of Commons, that, through the Munich Agreement, ‘we have suffered a total and unmitigated defeat’23–though it was one born out of long-standing military weakness and the extremely overdue recognition of the need to rearm with all speed, for which successive British governments, not Chamberlain alone, had to carry the responsibility. At least now, at last, rearmament was sharply accelerated. By September 1939 Britain was still not strong, but she was militarily in a somewhat better position, relative to the strength of German arms, than at the time of Munich.

  Once Hitler had shown his true colours in March 1939 by reneging on Munich and invading what remained of Czechoslovakia, the realization dawned on the British government that war was inevitable. The guarantee to Poland at the end of that month effectively ensured that war was unavoidable by leaving Britain’s fate in Polish and German hands. The concatenation of events in the dramatic summer of 1939 followed inexorably. Chamberlain and Halifax only late in the day, and reluctantly, accepted the necessity of broaching the possibility of an alliance with Stalin. They were upstaged yet again by Hitler. The notorious Hitler–Stalin Pact of 23 August 1939 meant that war was not only inevitable, but imminent. It began with the German invasion of Poland little over a week later, on 1 September 1939. The British and French declarations of war on Germany, turning the German–Polish conflict into general European war, followed within two days. Chamberlain reckoned on a long conflict, but was confident that Britain would eventually prevail.

  It was an assessment based in good measure upon the superior economic resources at Britain’s disposal, which it was presumed would tell in a lengthy war, and upon a perceived critical instability in the German economy. Little dented such underlying optimism during the months of military inaction in western Europe that followed–until spring 1940, when it was blown away within the course
of a few days.

  II

  The thunderclap finally burst on 10 May 1940. For the western Allies, Great Britain and France, the heavy, threatening atmosphere of the ‘phoney war’ that had lasted since the previous autumn now gave way to the predicted mighty storm. It had been brewing for a month, ever since early April when Hitler’s troops had invaded Denmark and Norway. As dawn broke that May morning, German artillery on the Belgian border opened fire. The long-awaited western offensive had begun.

  Advancing with breathtaking pace, ruthlessly violating Dutch and Belgian neutrality, the German advance reached the French coast by the night of 20 May, having covered 150 miles in ten days. The Allied forces, split in two by the speed and surprise of the ‘sickle-cut’ of the German army as it swept through southern Belgium and northern France, were retreating in disarray towards the coast. The last Allied hopes of a counter-offensive proved on 24 May to be illusory. Boulogne fell to the Germans. Calais came under siege. By 25 May the only port still open to the Allies was Dunkirk. Next day, practically the whole of the British Expeditionary Force and most of the French troops still fighting–in all, close to 340,000 men–had started to fall back on Dunkirk and its environs, where they found themselves pinned down between the sea and the German front line.

  As the fates would have it, on 10 May, the very day that Hitler opened his western offensive, the man who was to prove one of his toughest adversaries, Winston Churchill, entered office as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Churchill had been out in the political cold throughout the 1930s. Despite his extensive ministerial experience, dating back to the First World War, he was regarded by the leaders of successive administrations of the ‘National Government’ (which had first come into office in 1931 during the economic crisis as a coalition of the major political parties, and was dominated by his own party, the Conservatives) as too unreliable and too independent-minded for high office. Remembered and disliked as a reactionary on the political Left, he was regarded as something of a maverick adventurer by much of his own side. His responsibility for the disaster at Gallipoli during the First World War had not been forgotten. Nor had his earlier political inconstancy, when he had deserted the Conservative Party and joined the Liberals before, years later, rejoining the fold. ‘I’ve ratted twice,’ he apparently said later, ‘and on the second rat Baldwin’, the Prime Minister, ‘made me Chancellor.’24 As Chancellor of the Exchequer he was not a great success. His ‘years at the treasury’, it has been claimed, ‘were indeed the weakest in his varied career. His erratic finance’–he was seen as too impatient to master the close detail of financial management–‘discredited him in the eyes of more sober politicians and left the treasury weaker to face a period of real economic difficulty.’25 That he was ‘unsound’ seemed once again demonstrated by his outspoken opposition in the early 1930s to his party’s policy of limited constitutional reform in India and his strong support for King Edward VIII during the Abdication Crisis in December 1936.