Who were they?
Ramsay MacDonald was of humble origins—a bastard, actually. In his early years he joined the socialist Fabian Society, and in 1924 he became England’s first Labour prime minister. All his life he had been a pacifist; in 1914 he had condemned Britain’s entry into the Great War, and his foreign policy concentrated on the limitation, and then the elimination, of armaments. Bewildered by the worldwide Depression, he was, by the early 1930s, a ruin of the man he had been. “The wretched Ramsay,” Churchill wrote his wife, “is almost a mental case—he’d be far better off in a Home.” His most striking weakness was his vanity. Leonine, with a magnificent thatch of snowy hair, he wanted to remain prime minister despite his repudiation at the polls in 1931. Stanley Baldwin, the leader of the Conservative party, was more interested in power than titles. Baldwin suggested that MacDonald remain at No. 10 as the leader of a coalition, the “National Emergency Government,” while Baldwin actually took the reins in the House as its lord president. MacDonald agreed. On June 7, 1935, however, he and Baldwin exchanged offices. Two years later he was dead.
Stanley Baldwin, “S.B.,” the ultimate politician, was a plain, unsophisticated, and outwardly modest man, affectionately known to Tory ladies as the “Dear Vicar.” Yet he was the most powerful prime minister since Walpole; in one form or another, either singly or jointly with MacDonald, he held supreme power, with two short intervals, for fourteen years, from 1923 to 1937. He had no interest in events on the Continent; indeed, anything beyond England’s shores, including her empire, bored him. His instructions to the Foreign Office were to avoid agreements with Russia, “keep us out of war,” and buy “peace at any price.” Bob Boothby recalled: “If at any time after 1929 you had asked him where he was going, he would have had difficulty in answering the question.” Short and thick-set, he was the personification of John Bull; in an ambiguous comment, Churchill said that Baldwin “represented in a broad way some of the strengths and many of the infirmities of our island race.”5
“Good Old Neville,” Baldwin’s successor as prime minister in 1937, was the son of the great Joseph Chamberlain, who considered him “entirely unsuitable for a political career.” Lloyd George declared that Neville’s vision was no greater than that of “a provincial manufacturer of bedsteads,” and once he had found his footing at No. 10 the French gave him the sobriquet Monsieur J’aime Berlin. His half brother Austen was an eminent statesman and one of Churchill’s few allies in his struggle to prepare England for the coming Nazi onslaught, but Neville was the narrowest of prime ministers. He is still the least understood. His image is that of a weakling waving a frail umbrella while cowering before fearsome Hitler. In fact, he was decisive, self-confident, and—as revealed in his diaries and his letters to his two sisters—domineering. Most of his life had been devoted to business, chiefly in Birmingham. He did not stand for Parliament until his fiftieth year. Sir John Simon, an admirer, wrote that when colleagues came to Neville he would “listen in a businesslike fashion to what one had to say, and then state his conclusions with the finality of a General Manager conducting his company’s affairs.” Chamberlain once told Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador, he felt that “if only we could sit down at a table with the Germans and run through all their complaints and claims with a pencil, this would greatly relieve all tensions.” Later he said: “I don’t believe myself that we could purchase peace at a lasting settlement by handing over Tanganyika to the Germans, but if I did I would not hesitate for a moment to do so.” He was passionately antiwar, in large part because it meant government interference in private enterprise, and the manufacture of armaments which would be useless when peace returned. All in all he was preeminently a man of the thirties, “highly competent,” in the words of Telford Taylor, the historian and lawyer, “but grim and graceless.” J. C. Davidson, later Viscount Davidson, described him as “a good Lord Mayor of Birmingham in a lean year.” Chamberlain, Churchill said, looked at foreign affairs “through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe.”6
The arena where prime ministers and other Englishmen in public life perform—and whence, in Churchill’s prime, the British Empire was ruled—is astonishingly small. Its length, between Trafalgar Square and Parliament, is six hundred yards; its breadth, from the Victoria Embankment along the Thames eastward to St. James’s Park, three hundred yards. Within this small neighborhood are Downing Street, the Admiralty, Westminster Abbey, Parliament, Scotland Yard, and the Palace of Whitehall, now occupied by the Home Office, Commonwealth Office, and Foreign Office (called the FO or simply Whitehall). In World War II Churchill’s bunker, an underground war room, lay beneath Storey’s Gate, where Birdcage Walk, flanking the park, starts. The walk ends a thousand yards away at Buckingham Palace. On the opposite side of the park is the Mall, St. James’s Palace, Pall Mall, and all the famous clubs, including White’s, the Oxford and Cambridge, the Athenaeum, Brooke’s, the Reform, which was the haven of Liberal MPs, and the site of the Carlton, its Tory equivalent until the Luftwaffe leveled it during the Blitz. Churchill’s flat at No. 11 Morpeth Mansions on Morpeth Terrace was within walking distance of the entire area. His daughter Mary remembers it as a “ ‘maisonette-flat-duplex’—just off the unfashionable end of Victoria Street and opposite the Roman Catholic cathedral.”7
Except for Buckingham Palace, whose householder is excluded from great decisions, these are the haunts of the powerful. Their epicenter is the Palace of Westminster, parts of which were built in the eleventh century after the Battle of Hastings. Westminster was a triumph of Victorian exuberance, with over a thousand rooms, a hundred staircases, over two miles of corridors, and an eight-acre roof. Towering, vast, Gothic, built in asymmetric style, and topped by Big Ben, which was installed in 1858, Westminster has an interior which is the accomplishment of an entire generation of skilled craftsmen, who embellished the palace’s robing rooms, private suites for parliamentary leaders, its ancient crypt and cloisters, division lobbies, smoking rooms, libraries, processional gallery, and, of course, the two Houses of Parliament—the House of Lords, with seats for 1,100 peers, and the House of Commons, which is too small to accommodate all 635 members of Parliament. That was deliberate. Regular attendance is rare, intimacy encourages lively debate, and “a crowded House,” in historic moments, creates a dramatic sense of urgency.
The Commons, now rebuilt, was Churchill’s principal forum for over forty years, and it should be envisaged as he knew it, unchanged in 225 years, with its timbered ceiling beneath which lay the well and carved chair of the Speaker, who determined which members of Parliament should have the floor and could intervene when the rules of the House were violated. On either side of the Speaker’s dias, stretching away from him to the far end of the chamber, rose five tiers of benches upholstered in green. An aisle—“the gangway”—cuts across each tier at midpoint. On the Speaker’s right sat MPs of the party in power; on his left, facing them across the well, were MPs of the Opposition. The lowest bench extending from the Speaker’s right to the gangway was reserved for the government—the prime minister and his ministers. It was called the front bench or the Treasury Bench, sharing a common ancestor with the brass plate adorning the door of No. 10.
Backbenchers—“private members”—sat wherever they liked, or, in a crowded House, wherever they could find room. Because of his past glories, however, by tacit understanding the first seat beyond the gangway on the lowest tier was reserved for Winston Churchill, the member for Epping. He cherished it; his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, also a rebel, had sat there in the 1880s. Only the width of the narrow gangway separated Winston from the governments he attacked so unmercifully throughout the 1930s. But his maxim was: “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never… never give in, except to convictions of honour or good sense.”
Hitler had been vexed by Putzi Hanfstaengl’s jeu d’esprit, and understandably so. It was true that both Putzi’s Nazi idol and his British dinner companion were out of office, and certainly
no one was paying much attention to the visitor from England, either here or in his own country. But Hitler, whose political antennae were exceptionally acute, knew how anxiously informed Europeans, and particularly Auslandspolitiker, were following his rising star. What he did not know was the keenness with which Churchill was watching him, or how doggedly Churchill would stalk him for twelve years, until the Führer of the Third Reich lay dead by his own hand in the ruined Reich Chancellery garden, a corpse enveloped by the writhing flames of a Viking funeral, while the blackened hulks of what had once been Berlin collapsed all round him.
Precisely when Winston became aware of freedom’s archenemy is uncertain. In his World War II memoirs he wrote of his stay in Munich, shortly before the Nazis came to power, “I had no national prejudice against Hitler at this time. I knew little of his doctrine or record and nothing of his character.”8 But that is an astonishing lapse of memory. By then he had been well informed about Hitler for two years, had published several appraisals of him, and had repeatedly warned the House of the imminent threat in central Europe. His perception was exceptional; an extraordinary number of his peers were completely hoodwinked.
Once he had moved into the chancellery, Hitler had let it be known that his door would be open to English political figures, and pilgrimages to him became fashionable. His guests returned glowing with optimism, reporting that the Reich chancellor, despite his savage rhetoric, was eager to reach a political settlement with other nations, an agreement exorcizing the threat of war for a decade. In retrospect this is puzzling. Diplomats had already forged such a settlement in two great treaties meant to guarantee peace, not for ten years, but for the rest of the century. The first had been signed at Versailles in 1919. Versailles was now discredited in the eyes of many, having sown seeds of resentment in Germany, but the Locarno Pact, enthusiastically signed by Germany in 1925, remained unslandered.
Yet within a decade of the Locarno agreement, Englishmen of power and influence were discussing new solutions as though this pact, despite its popularity in Germany, did not exist. Lord Lothian wrote The Times: “The central fact today is that Germany does not want war and is prepared to renounce it as a method of settling her disputes with her neighbors”—which is precisely what Germany had renounced, in writing, at Locarno. Thomas Jones, who had been in and out of Whitehall for a quarter century, wrote in his diary: “Rightly or wrongly, all sorts of people who have met Hitler are convinced that he is a factor for peace.” Even after the German chancellor’s aggressive intentions had become clear, Jones accompanied Lloyd George to Munich’s Braunhaus—Nazi headquarters—and returned with the conviction that “Hitler does not seek war with us. He seeks our friendship. If we fail him, he will turn elsewhere and we shall be sorry to have refused him”—which, of course, was precisely the response their Braunhaus host had meant to invoke.9
Of greater interest, however, were the impressions of Jones’s distinguished traveling companion. Meeting the press after he had been closeted with Hitler for an hour, Lloyd George said he regarded him as “the greatest living German,” and had “told him so to his face.” Back in England, Lloyd George wrote for the Daily Express—out of office like Churchill, he was struggling to make ends meet on his £300 salary as an MP, and journalism was a source of income for political celebrities—that the leader of the Nazis was “a born leader, a magnetic, dynamic personality with a single-minded purpose”: to keep the peace. Lloyd George declared that with Hitler at the helm Germany would “never invade any other land.” A year later he wrote to T. Philip Conwell-Evans, another admirer of the Nazis and one of Lothian’s closest friends, of “the admiration which I personally feel for [Hitler]…. I only wish we had a man of his supreme quality at the head of affairs in our country today.”10
No trap is so deadly as the one you set for yourself. Vernon Bartlett, a British journalist with a large following, spent forty minutes in Hitler’s study. Afterward he wrote of his host’s “large, brown eyes—so large and so brown that one might grow lyrical about them if one were a woman.” Actually, Hitler’s eyes were blue. Nazi goals were even applauded by Anglican clergymen, a group of whom expressed “boundless admiration for the moral and ethical side of the National Social programme, its clear-cut stand for religion and Christianity, and its ethical principles, such as its fight against cruelty to animals, vivisection, sexual offences, etc.”11
Later there would be repentance, but the moving finger had writ, and neither sackcloth and ashes, nor magnums of tears could wash out a word of it. And none but Churchill, it seemed, was immune. The impressions of Sir John Simon, His Majesty’s foreign secretary from 1931 to 1935, are among the most memorable. In Hitler he saw not arrogance but a man “rather retiring and bashful and of a certain mystical temperament… unconcerned with affairs in Western Europe.” Later he described him to King George as “an Austrian Joan of Arc with a moustache.” One expects more from Arnold Toynbee, but Toynbee, equally spellbound by the Reich chancellor, declared that he was “convinced of his sincerity in desiring peace in Europe and close friendship with England.” The most painful toast to Hitler, for Americans, is a Walter Lippmann column which appeared in the New York Herald Tribune on May 19, 1933. Lippmann had heard a speech by the new chancellor, and described it as a “genuinely statesmanlike address,” providing convincing “evidence of good faith.” He told his readers: “We have heard once more, through the fog and the din, the authentic voice of a genuinely civilized people. I am not only willing to believe that, but it seems to me that all historical experience compels one to believe it.” He went further. Persecuting the Jews served a purpose by “satisfying” Germans’ yearning to “conquer somebody”; it was “a kind of lightning rod which protects Europe.”12 Walter Lippmann was a Jew.
Churchill didn’t believe it. Ever since the Armistice he had been poring over reports from Berlin and Munich, winkling out evidence of a revanchist Germany. In 1924, when the future führer was still doing time after his failed putsch in Munich, Winston had warned that “the soul of Germany smoulders with dreams of a War of Liberation or Revenge.” That August he told readers of the Hearst newspaper chain that “German youth, mounting in its broad swelling flood, will never accept the conditions and implications of the Treaty of Versailles.” Over the years Hitler confirmed this view, and by 1930 he was declaring openly that once a National Socialist government had been formed, he and his Strassenkämpfer (street fighters) would “tear the covenants signed at Versailles into shreds.” Then they would rearm. “I can assure you,” he said in his thick, coarse voice, “that when the National Socialist movement is victorious in this struggle, the November 1918 revolution will be avenged and heads will roll.”13
Using diplomatic channels, Churchill made his views of the Nazis clear to the Germans. Among the classified documents seized when Allied troops entered Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop’s office on the Wilhelmstrasse in 1945 was a memorandum encoded K567878/A283, an appraisal written on October 18, 1930, by a German counsellor posted to his government’s London embassy. He reported that he had spent the past two days at a weekend house party where he had encountered “Mr. Winston Churchill.” Churchill had expressed his opinions of National Socialism “in cutting terms” (“mit schneidenem Wort”), remarking that it had “contributed towards a considerable deterioration in Germany’s external position.” His indictment of Hitler was specific. He believed him to be a congenital liar and was convinced, in the diplomat’s words, that although Hitler had “declared that he has no intention of waging a war of aggression, he, Churchill, is convinced that Hitler or his followers will seize the first available opportunity to resort to armed force.” Later, after the Nazis had seized power, Fritz Hesse, the press attaché in Germany’s London embassy, called on Winston to sound him out again. He was told that with Hitler in power there was only one solution to the “German problem”—“If a dog makes a dash for my trousers, I shoot him down before he can bite.” Hitler, after reading this, mutt
ered that Churchill was a “Deutschenfresser”—a devourer of the Germans. Each man, therefore, was wary of the other from the outset.14
Political genius lies in seeing over the horizon, anticipating a future invisible to others. Churchill first warned of the approaching war in the Hearst papers on March 31, 1931, when Berlin and Vienna had announced the formation of a customs union. He wrote: “Beneath the Customs Union lurks the ‘Anschluss’ or union between the German mass and the remains of Austria.” Once that happened France’s dwindling population would see “the solid German block of seventy millions producing far more than twice her number of military males each year, towering up grim and grisly.” Nor would France be the only nation under the Teutonic shadow. Czechoslovakia had “3,500,000 Austrian-Germans in their midst. These unwilling subjects are a care.” And an Anschluss would mean that Czechoslovakia would not only be weakened by “the indigestible morsel in its interior” but would also be “surrounded on three sides by other Germans.” The Czechs would “become almost a Bohemian island in a boisterous fierce-lapping ocean of Teutonic manhood and efficiency.”
This was to be one of Churchill’s themes throughout the 1930s. The Germans, he told readers of the Strand in 1935, constituted “the most industrious, tractable, fierce and martial race in the world.” And Hitler, having risen “by violence and passion,” was “surrounded by men as ruthless as he.” Churchill wanted England to pursue a policy leading to a “lasting reconciliation with Europe.” But one could not deal with men who lied and murdered, men without honor or decency, led by a ruthless demagogue upon whose orders armed men tramped “from one end of the broad Reich to another.” Single-handedly Hitler was reversing the decision reached on the battlefield in 1918. “That is where we are today,” Churchill concluded, “and the achievement by which the tables have been completely turned upon the complacent, feckless, and purblind victors deserves to be reckoned a prodigy in the history of the world, and a prodigy which is inseparable from the personal exertions and the life-thrust of a single man.”15
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