Charisma and patriotism were qualities Churchill greatly admired. They had formed his first impression of Mussolini, and he did not, at first, find Hitler completely beyond the pale. He respected him, Guy Eden writes, “as a man of vision, even if it was distorted vision, and drive, even if it was a drive to evil.” Hitler’s early life had been a catalogue of failures, Churchill observed, but “these misfortunes did not lead him into Communist ranks. By an honourable inversion he cherished all the more an abnormal sense of racial loyalty and fervent and mystic admiration for Germany and the German people.” Afterward, when Hitler had become Führer of the entire nation, a prophet of outrageous dogmas, Winston said that while he despised Nazism, he hoped that, should England ever lose a war, it would “find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.” Nevertheless, he had realized, while Hitler was still in his own wilderness, that sooner or later the man must be destroyed. It is arguable that Churchill was one of the first to comprehend Hitler’s menace because each man was a mirror image of the other. Hitler, with his own remarkable instincts, seems to have sensed that Churchill, though a political outcast then, would ultimately be his archenemy. He told a British diplomat in Berlin that he regarded Churchill as a “Deutschenfresser”—a “devourer of Germans.” “I naturally cannot prevent the possibility of this Herr entering the Government in a couple of years,” he said, adding that he foresaw difficulties “if Churchill comes to power in Great Britain instead of Chamberlain.”308
Long before his countrymen understood the Nazi challenge, Winston realized that Hitler was the very embodiment of evil, but even when they were locked in the most desperate war Europe had ever known, Churchill referred to him as “this monstrous product of former wrongs and shame.” He meant Versailles. He agreed with Hitler; the treaty had, he believed, been a humiliating Diktat. This was not entirely reasonable. The Allied terms had been far less harsh than those Germany had imposed on Russia at Brest-Litovsk in 1918. German pride had been mortified at Versailles, however; the subsequent resentment was not rational but emotional, and Winston, emotional himself, grasped it because, had their roles been reversed, he, too, would have been enraged. That rage was a political reality, and, he believed, ugly consequences were inevitable. In 1925 he wrote that “from one end of Germany to the other an intense hatred of France unifies the whole population,” and he suggested the establishment of neutral zones on German frontiers. He also urged “a substantial rectification” of Weimar’s eastern border, consistent with ethnic realities. Sooner or later, he warned, “Germany will be rearmed”; steps should be taken to prevent “aggression against Poland,” which could draw both France and England into another European conflict. He saw them preparing to do it again and felt premonitions of “future catastrophe.” By 1928 he realized that the ten-year rule had been “a grievous error.” The United States was urging Britain and France to reduce their defense establishments and reduce German reparations payments. Churchill disagreed. Writing a friend about “these stupid disarmament manoeuvres,” he commented that “personally I deprecate all these premature agreements on disarmament.” In a cabinet meeting he opposed any reparations cuts as long as Washington remained adamant on the issue of Britain’s war debts; “we have given everything, and paid everything,” he argued, “and we cannot make any new sacrifice.” A strong French army, he maintained, would shield England from the “most probable danger” of being drawn into another conflict on the Continent.309
Few were convinced, or even interested. His stand on India was popular among die-hard Tory back-benchers, but even they turned away when he raised the question of another war. The last one had been so ghastly that any resumption of it was unthinkable. And men in public life dreaded the charge of “warmonger,” with its attendant possibility that one day they might be held answerable for mass slaughter. H. G. Wells had warned them: “We must put ourselves and our rulers and our fellow men on trial. We must ask: ‘What have you done, and what are you doing, to help or hinder the peace and order of mankind?’ A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissention will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men’s lives should not stake their own.” Throughout 1930 Churchill fought almost alone, and always unsuccessfully, against the Labour government’s decision to accept a reduction of naval power below the Admiralty’s specifications of Britain’s minimal requirements. He rose in the House to warn against emasculation of the navy, and for the first time found support in the Morning Post. “I think this naval business is going to carry us a long way,” he wrote H. A. Gwynne in response. “It may become part of a definite movement to a strong assertion of the life-strength of the British Empire.” It didn’t; Baldwin supported Labour, and Tory MPs refused to sign Winston’s petition of protest. Walter Lippmann wrote: “The people are tired, tired of noise, tired of inconvenience, tired of greatness and longing for a place where the world is quiet and where all trouble seems dead leaves, and spent waves riot in doubtful dreams of dreams.” Churchill himself thought England had entered a “period of exhaustion which has been described as Peace.”310
By June of 1931 even MacDonald felt that disarmament had gone “pretty near the limit of example.” Churchill believed the limit had been passed, and called for rearmament. “England’s hour of weakness is Europe’s hour of danger,” he told the House. Britain was now “extremely vulnerable,” he said; its army, “cut to the bone,” was little more than a “glorified police force,” and the RAF’s strength was an eighth of that of France’s air arm. On August 10 he wrote in the Hearst papers: “German youth mounting in its broad swelling flood will never accept the conditions and implications of the Treaty of Versailles.” Germany and Austria announced the creation of a customs union, and he was alarmed. “Beneath the Customs Union,” he wrote, “lurks the ‘Anschluss’ or union between the German mass and the remains of Austria.” The consequence of such a combination would be a “solid German block of seventy millions” threatening two nations: France, with its dwindling population, and Czechoslovakia. The Czechs had “three million five hundred” Austrian-Germans in their midst. “These unwilling subjects are a care. But the Anschluss means that Czechoslovakia will not only have the indigestible morsel in its interior, but will be surrounded on three sides by other Germans. They will become almost a Bohemian island in a boisterous fierce-lapping ocean of Teutonic manhood and efficiency.”311
The French and the Italians, after reading his speech, objected to the customs union—on economic, not military, grounds—and Weimar, ever unsure of itself, dissolved it, demonstrating that even out of office Churchill was still a force in European politics. Prince Otto von Bismarck-Schönhausen, grandson of the great chancellor and himself a diplomat posted to Germany’s London embassy, had sought an interview with him the year before. The two men had met on Saturday, October 18, 1930. In a secret memorandum Bismarck had reported to Berlin that Churchill had been following newspaper accounts of German political developments “in detail,” and had spoken of the Nazis in “cutting terms.” Hitler, he had held, had “contributed towards a considerable deterioration of Germany’s external position.” The Nazi leader was now insisting that he would never wage aggressive war, but Winston didn’t believe him. By his own admission, the man was untrustworthy; Churchill quoted Mein Kampf: “The great masses of the people… will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one.” He was “convinced,” Bismarck wrote, “that Hitler or his followers will seize the first available opportunity to resort to armed force.” In their discussion Bismarck had referred to the “unsuitability” of the Polish Corridor—a strip of territory which gave Poland, otherwise landlocked, access to the free port of Danzig and the Baltic. Winston had replied that “Poland must have an outlet to the sea.” He pointed out that German freight and railroad traffic passed through the corridor every day to en
ter East Prussia. Bismarck delivered his report to Albrecht Bernstorff, the embassy’s senior counselor. Bernstorff, in turn, forwarded it to the Wilhelmstrasse. In a covering note he commented: “Although one should always bear in mind Winston Churchill’s very temperamental personality when considering his remarks, they nevertheless deserve particular attention,” on the ground that “as far as can be humanly foreseen he will play an influential role in any Conservative government in years to come—however difficult his personal position may be in the Conservative party, where he is mistrusted as an erstwhile Liberal and free-trader.”312
It was at this point that Churchill decided to monitor Britain’s preparedness. He asked the prime minister for access to figures on the strength of the country’s armed forces. MacDonald found military matters tiresome, even trivial. He casually approved his request, and then, apparently, forgot about it. The consequence of this exchange of notes was one of those bureaucratic decisions which are self-perpetuating, remaining in effect unless or until withdrawn. Future prime ministers, unaware of it, would brood over the source of Churchill’s detailed information about service developments. The answer lay, undiscovered, in their own files at No. 10.
Geli Raubal had lain long in her grave when the Austrian government finally approved Hitler’s request to cross the border. He spent an entire evening in the cemetery, on his knees, weeping over her tombstone.
That same week Charles de Gaulle, a French major recently returned from a military mission in the Middle East, was working quietly at his desk in his home at 110, boulevard Raspail, in the sixth arrondissement of Paris, writing Le Fil de l’épée (The Edge of the Sword), a short book on the essence of leadership. Francisco Franco was also in Paris; having defeated Abd-el Krim’s Riff army in Morocco and sworn allegiance to the new Spanish republic, he was studying at l’Ecole Militaire, France still being considered proficient in military science.
On the other side of the world, Hideki Tojo was serving on the staff of Japan’s Kwangtung army, which, using the Mukden incident of September 19 as an excuse, had invaded Manchuria and was now investing the Chinese city of Harbin. Chiang Kai-shek, the new generalissimo of the Chinese Nationalist forces, the Kuomintang, was prevented from launching a counteroffensive by a Yangtze flood and flank skirmishes with Mao Tse-tung’s Chinese Communist guerrillas.
Benito Mussolini had survived an assassination attempt the week before only to be thrown by his horse, forcing him to cancel plans for a Berlin visit. His pride had been restored by a New York Times feature article describing the tremendous “force of his personality” and a statement from Boston’s William Cardinal O’Connell calling him “a genius given to Italy by God.”313
In Moscow a Kremlin spokesman informed foreign correspondents that Joseph Stalin, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist party, was writing a book “dealing with Soviet challenges.”314 Actually, Stalin was no writer and not much of a reader. He usually spent his evenings reading junk fiction; his favorite novel was a translation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes, and he was looking forward to an early screening of MGM’s film Tarzan, the Ape Man, starring Johnny Weissmuller, Maureen O’Sullivan, and C. Aubrey Smith. Stalin had just expelled an American woman, Mrs. E. G. Grady, for telling a joke about his crudity. He was extremely sensitive about his image, and though he cultivated the myth that he enjoyed anonymity, he was constantly in the news, congratulating factory workers who had met their quota of tractor production, for example, and demonstrating the success of his agricultural collectivization policy by exporting grain. This was specious. Because of his agricultural policy, ten million peasants were starving to death. Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, begged him to relent; having failed to persuade him, she, like Hitler’s Geli, would take her own life within a year.
The most interesting politician in the United States was Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York. Reelected by a thundering plurality of 725,000 votes, he had persuaded his legislature, a few weeks earlier, to establish the state’s Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, thus making his the first state to assume responsibility for victims of the Depression. In Albany his wife was packing for Warm Springs, the date of their departure depending on his mother’s health.
None of these men knew any of the others, but Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill passed within hailing distance of each other on the evening of Saturday, December 12, 1931. The governor was in his Manhattan town house at 49 East Sixty-fifth Street, conferring with J. H. McCooey, a Tammany politician, and Winston was in a taxi between the Waldorf-Astoria and Bernard Baruch’s mansion at 1055 Fifth Avenue. Churchill, accompanied by Clementine and Diana, was in New York on business. Early in November he had signed a contract which would bring him £10,000 for forty lectures in the United States. In addition, Esmond Harmsworth of the Daily Mail had agreed to pay him £8,000 for a series of pieces on America’s situation, prospects, and mood.
The Churchills had planned to leave England earlier, but parliamentary matters had detained him. The House was rewording the final clauses of the Statute of Westminster, which meant another debate on India. Kay Halle, an American journalist and an early flame of Randolph’s, was staying at Chartwell the evening before he spoke, and she remembers him “rehearsing that speech all night.” The statute, he told the House the following evening, set forth the Raj’s new permissiveness in “cold legal language.” Indian agitators would be emboldened by the limitations on British power now inherent in dominion status. He was troubled by the transfer of defense, finance, and police powers to native leaders, and the lack of safeguards for minorities. The front bench was tense; Hoare had written Irwin that he was “very nervous” about the new House—needlessly, it turned out, for when Churchill introduced an amendment rephrasing the statute, Sir John Simon, Sir Austen Chamberlain, and Baldwin spoke against it, and it was defeated overwhelmingly, 369 to 43. Having affronted the Conservatives, Winston then gratuitously offended Labour by saying that MacDonald had performed an “inestimable service” for Britain: “He has destroyed the Socialist Party as a Parliamentary force.”315 With that, he was off. Everything he did was contentious now. The morning of his departure from Southampton, newspapers ran editorials castigating him on another issue. They had been promoting a “Buy Britain” campaign. Churchill, the staunch Free Trader, had ignored the Cunard line and booked passage on the German steamship Europa.
His first lecture, in Worcester, Massachusetts, on December 11, was an appeal for Anglo-American unity: “We shall travel more securely if we do it like good companions.” Most of the next day was spent in his Waldorf Tower apartment, 39 A, preparing future lectures and writing for the Daily Mail. Baruch had invited him to dine that evening with mutual friends, but after climbing into the taxi Winston discovered that he could not remember the address of the mansion. The driver was of little help; he was new to Manhattan. They cruised around for an hour, Winston growing increasingly exasperated with the traffic lights, which were new to him; they had not yet been introduced in England. Finally he told the driver to let him out on the Central Park side of Fifth Avenue. He believed he could recognize the house from the sidewalk. Turning to cross the street, he made two mistakes. The light was against him, and he had forgotten that Americans drive on the right. He glanced in the other direction, saw nothing coming, and stepped off the curb. Immediately he was hit by a car driving over thirty miles an hour. Mauled, he was dragged several yards by the car, and then flung into the street. He later wrote: “There was a moment of a world aglare, of a man aghast… I do not understand why I was not broken like an eggshell, or squashed like a gooseberry.” In fact, he was gravely injured, bleeding heavily from his head and both thighs. A small crowd gathered. The driver, an unemployed mechanic named Mario Constasino, was distraught. Though in shock and great pain, Winston wiped the streaming blood from his face and assured the mechanic that he had been blameless. The fault was entirely his own; he had looked the wrong way. Churchill wa
s cold; the temperature was in the low forties, and a wind was rising. Another taxi stopped, and he was helped into it. At Lenox Hill Hospital he was moved into a wheelchair. He thought he had reached sanctuary, but inside he learned that even hospitals have bureaucrats. A receptionist asked him to identify himself. “I am Winston Churchill,” he said, “a British statesman.” He added: “I do not wish to be hurt any more. Give me chloroform or something.” It wasn’t that easy. How was he going to pay for this? Lenox Hill was a private hospital, and these were hard times. He had only a few dollars in his pocket. He asked them to call the Waldorf, and after what seemed an eternity, Clementine and Detective Thompson hurried in. Churchill said faintly, “They almost got me that time, Thompson.” Clementine having produced the cash, chloroform was administered. “A few breaths,” he wrote afterward, “and one has no longer the power to speak to the world.”316
Otto C. Pickardt was the physician who examined him. Clementine cabled Pickardt’s findings to Randolph: “Temperature 100.6 Pulse normal. Head scalp wound severe.” (It had, in fact, been cut to the bone.) “Two cracked ribs. Simple slight pleural irritation of right side. Generally much bruised. Progress satisfactory.” If the hospital had any doubts about the eminence of its new patient, they were resolved when King George telephoned to inquire about his condition. In the beginning Winston’s recovery was swift. He quickly made friends with Pickardt, and then with Constasino, who appeared during visitors’ hours to apologize again. Churchill cabled Lindemann, asking him to calculate the shock, to a stationary body weighing two hundred pounds, of a car weighing twenty-four hundred pounds and traveling between thirty and thirty-five miles an hour, bearing in mind that he had been “carried forward on the cowcatcher until brakes eventually stopped car, when I dropped off” and that “brakes did not operate till car hit me.” He needed the information as quickly as possible, he said, adding: “Think it must be impressive. Kindly cable weekend letter at my expense.” The Prof replied: “Collision equivalent falling thirty feet on pavement. Equal six thousand foot pounds energy. Equivalent stopping ten-pound brick dropped six hundred feet or two charges buckshot point-blank range. Rate inversely proportional thickness cushion surrounding skeleton and give of frame. If assume average one inch your body transferred during impact at rate eight thousand horsepower. Congratulations on preparing suitable cushion and skill in bump.”317
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