Alone, 1932-1940

by William Manchester

  The House did not shout him down, but it came close, when his attacks on MacDonald took a more personal turn. Returning from Geneva, all smiles, the prime minister of the coalition briefed Parliament on the various proposals he had initialed, all of immense importance, he assured them, though he astonished and embarrassed his admirers by adding, “I cannot pretend that I went through the figures myself.” Winston snapped up that line, noting that though MacDonald was unfamiliar with the numbers, he had taken “responsibility for them. It is a very grave responsibility. If ever there was a document upon which its author should have consumed his personal thought and energy it was this immense disarmament proposal.” This was harshly critical perhaps, but still permissible. Other of Winston’s observations, however, were incendiary: speaking on March 23, Churchill described the prime minister as “our modern Don Quixote,” returning with the “somewhat dubious trophies” collected among the “nervous tittering of Europe.” In Churchill’s opinion, the proceedings in Geneva had been “a solemn and prolonged farce.” He hoped that MacDonald would now take “a good rest, of which I have no doubt he stands in need,” and then devote himself to “the urgent domestic tasks which await him here,” leaving “the conduct of foreign affairs, at any rate for a little while, to be transacted by competent ambassadors through the normal and regular diplomatic channels.”49

  Harold Macmillan, who was elated, later recalled “hearing the speech from the back benches and the impression made by his formidable attack,” but Winston himself saw the “look of pain and aversion” on the faces round him. Even while he was in the midst of it, the protests had begun. MacDonald’s four years in Downing Street, he said, “have brought us nearer to war and made us weaker, poorer, and more defenceless.” This touched off cries of “No, no, no!” Turning toward those who had interrupted him, Winston replied, “You say ‘No.’ You have only to hear what has been said here today to know that we have been brought much nearer to war.” And when they cried, “By whom?” he said sensibly that he didn’t “wish to place it on one man,” but when a single individual had held “the whole power of foreign affairs for four years,” nothing was to be gained “by pretending that there is no responsibility to be affixed anywhere.” Once he sat down MPs from all three parties rose, variously deploring “a disgraceful personal attack on the Prime Minister,” which was “thoroughly mischievous,” and “mean and contemptible.” Winston himself was described as “a disappointed office-seeker,” the pursuer of a “personal vendetta” who was trying to “poison and vitiate the atmosphere” which MacDonald and his foreign secretary had tried to create in Switzerland.50

  As usual Winston had a bad press. The Northern Echo called his performance “vitriolic,” one of “the most audacious he has delivered,” a “furious onslaught.” The Daily Dispatch reported: “The House was enraged, in an ugly mood—towards Mr Churchill.” So it was. It was perhaps a sign of the contempt MacDonald felt for his critic that he chose a thirty-six-year-old Foreign Office under secretary to reply for the government. Churchill’s fear of Germany was groundless, the young diplomat told the House; the Germans merely wanted to replace their small long-service army by a larger, short-service militia. It was unfortunate that the member from Epping had thought so solemn a matter as foreign affairs an occasion for “quips and jests.” To hold the prime minister accountable for deteriorating international relations was “a fantastic absurdity.”

  So said Anthony Eden in the House of Commons on March 23, and under his debonair manner he seemed honestly puzzled. Eden had fought in France as a young officer in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps; he had fought in the trenches, been gassed and decorated. As a Tory he disagreed with MacDonald on most domestic issues, but in pursuing a lasting European peace he felt they should “all pull together,” as in the Eton boating song, “steady from stroke to bow.” How could anyone misinterpret the prime minister’s reply to the rising Nazis? It was certain, Eden earnestly told the House, to “secure for Europe that period of appeasement which is needed.” If appeased, Hitler’s anger would vanish; his fear of encirclement would disappear; the Nazis, freed from anguish and insecurity, would become sensible, stable neighbors in a Europe free of rancor. The House gave him a standing ovation—Churchill and those around him remained seated. The MacDonald Plan was supported by Conservatives, Labour, and Liberals alike. Its essence was simple. The Nazis were entitled to bear arms. At the same time, Germany’s former enemies should take the first long steps toward disarmament. And the first country to spike its guns should be that aggressive, martial, bellicose country—France.51

  Appease vt Pacify, conciliate: esp: to buy off (an aggressor) by concessions usu. at the sacrifice of principles—appeasable adj—appeasement n—appeaser n

  So defined, the word implies a slur, but Eden had used it in its original meaning—to bring to peace, pacify, quiet, or settle. In that sense it has been in the language for five centuries and appears in Chaucer, Spenser, and Samuel Johnson. Churchill had employed it after the general strike of 1926 in describing his approach to the negotiation of a settlement between miners and the owners of coalfields. As an aspersion, however, it had been introduced in the House of Lords on November 5, 1929. The speaker had been the dying Lord Birkenhead, F. E. Smith. Condemning Britain’s conciliatory tactics toward advocates of Indian independence, F.E. called them “appeasers of Gandhi.” Eventually, Telford Taylor notes, “the word became a symbol of weak and myopic yielding when resistance would be bolder and, in the long run, safer.”52

  Churchill used it as a stigma in 1933, when the coalition’s determination to meet the German dictator’s demands became clear to him. Appropriately, the first cabinet minister to rebuke Churchill outside the House for his attack on MacDonald was the man who would become known to history as the archpriest of appeasement. Speaking to his Birmingham constituency on March 24, Neville Chamberlain deplored Churchill’s abuse of his talent “to throw suspicion and doubts in the minds of other Governments who have not expressed such feeling.” He declared it England’s duty to make “every effort,” exert “every influence,” and “act as mediators” to preserve the peace by reconciling estranged countries. The British government wanted to avoid all wars between nations because—and this was a typical Chamberlain touch—“they thereby destroy the possibility of markets for ourselves.”53

  Appeasement became evangelical; indeed, for some the line between foreign policy and religion became blurred. Thomas Jones denounced Vansittart’s hostility toward the Nazis; Baldwin commented: “I’ve always said you were a Christian.” Rage, wrote Margot Asquith, the widow of the prime minister, should be met with Christian love. “There is only one way of preserving Peace in the world, and getting rid of yr. enemy, and that is to come to some sort of agreement with him—and the viler he is, the more you must fight him with the opposite weapons than his.” She concluded: “The greatest enemy of mankind today is Hate.”54

  As for mistreatment of the Jews—some said this and some said that. After all, no one could deny that Jews were, well, different. Churchill, an ardent Zionist since 1908, could speak for himself, but here as in so many ways he was unrepresentative of England’s upper classes. This was over ten years before the Holocaust. The martyrdom of Jews in the 1940s would strip anti-Semitism of its respectability, but in the 1930s it was a quite ordinary thing to see restaurants, hotels, clubs, beaches, and residential neighborhoods barred to people with what were delicately called “dietary requirements.” As late as the 1950s the Pocket Oxford Dictionary defined Jew as “1. n. Person of Hebrew race; (fig.) unscrupulous usurer or bargainer. 2. v.t. (colloq.). Cheat, overreach.” Contempt for them was not considered bad form. They were widely regarded as unlovable, alien, loud-mouthed, “flashy” people who enriched themselves at the expense of Gentiles. Some even said the Germans who abused them were only getting back a little of their own. As Martin Gilbert and Richard Gott observed: “Even England was not free of anti-semitism. Not all Hitler’s criticisms of
Jews were discounted. Rumbold hated the anti-semitism of the new Germany; other Englishmen were less certain in their condemnation.”55

  One of Churchill’s relatives, a peer and an anti-Semite, argued that Anglo-German friendship was mandatory if Western civilization was to be preserved. Churchill replied: “You cannot expect the English people to be attracted by the brutal intolerance of Naziism.” But, he was asked, how brutal are the Nazis? Britons wondered whether Nazi excesses were sufficiently outrageous to permit a deterioration of relations between London and Berlin—thereby forfeiting what many believed could be a lasting peace. The Times thought not. The “shouting and exaggeration” in the new Reich, it assured its readers, was “sheer revolutionary exuberance”; Hitler’s men, feeling “themselves to be the only true patriots, are enjoying the sound of their own unrestrained voices.” The trouble was that the noise, the ugly language, and the accounts of bestial conduct didn’t stop. Be patient, counseled The Times; hysteria was un-British: “Anxious Germans may rest assured that all this is not deliberately misconstrued by foreigners.” Most Times leaders on foreign policy were written by editor Geoffrey Dawson or Robert Barrington-Ward, a fellow Oxonian, both of whom shared Lothian’s conviction that France and Russia were conspiring to deny Germany her rank among the great powers, a place, Dawson said, “to which she is entitled by her history, her civilization, and her power.”56

  Barrington-Ward told a friend that Nazi outrages were “largely the reflex of the external persecution to which Germans have been subjected since the war.” Englishmen’s commitment to fair play, he added, obligated them to help the victimized country “escape from encirclement” and achieve “equality,” the code phrase which meant rearmament. History has credited the Nazis for the restoration of the Reich’s military might, but some Englishmen had anticipated them. In the summer of 1932, Franz von Papen, then chancellor, declared that the shackles of Versailles were “unerträglich” (“intolerable”). The Times—which the Germans believed was the voice of the government—weighed the chancellor’s complaint, found it justifiable, and called for “the timely redress of grievances.”57

  Once Hitler had been sworn in and his Strassenkämpfer began unsheathing their long knives, the British government took the remarkable position that the detailed reports from two of its most eminent ambassadors, describing conditions in the Third Reich, were based on misunderstandings, distortions, and unconfirmed rumors. Speaking in Newcastle, Lord Lothian said that the Germans “have passed through a tribulation which we have never known. We should receive in no niggardly spirit the offers”—they were, of course, demands—“made to the world by Herr Hitler.”58

  The prime minister agreed. According to one Wilhelmstrasse document which came into British hands when Berlin fell in May 1945, MacDonald assured Germany’s ambassador to Britain, Leopold von Hösch, that he knew there were no atrocities, no beatings, no desecration of synagogues—that everything England’s own envoys had reported, was, in short, a lie. MacDonald explained that he understood “very well the character of, and the circumstances attending, a revolution.” According to The Times, Baldwin told Hösch that England was “entirely willing to work closely… with a Germany under the new order”—“die Neuordnung.” It is startling to read this Nazi phrase, so freighted with evil, quoted by a once and future prime minister in the columns of The Times. Doubtless Baldwin had not grasped its implications. But he should have. And he should have spoken out. His silence, his refusal to see, hear, and speak no evil of the Nazi chancellor was characteristic of the response among England’s ruling classes. If they offended him, they told one another, he would become hostile, and his hostility would blind him to reason.59

  Vernon Bartlett thought his countrymen altogether too smug about democracy. Although it “suits us,” he wrote, it “may not suit other people.” Even Bartlett could not defend the imprisonment of Jews who had committed no crime and of former Reichstag critics of National Socialism. But, he wrote, “the Government now proposes to get rid of the concentration camp [sic] without much delay.” Sir Thomas Moore, a respectable MP with a distinguished university career behind him, was another early admirer of Hitler. He joined the Anglo-Germany Fellowship and spent half his time in Germany, where, he reported, he had been unable to find any trace of the abuses Rumbold and Phipps described. After the Nazi chancellor had been in power eight months, Moore wrote in the Sunday Dispatch, “If I may judge from my personal knowledge of Herr Hitler, peace and justice are the key words of his policy.” The next year he wrote “Give Hitler a Chance,” calling the chancellor, now führer, “absolutely honest and sincere.”60

  War between the Germans and Communist Russia was a prospect with twin appeals to Britain’s upper classes, reflecting their pacifism and their fear of bolshevism. But before the two totalitarian giants could meet at a common border, momentous events would be necessary in intervening states: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Rumania, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. The appeasers thought that it would be rather a good thing if Hitler began meddling there. J. L. Garvin, editor of The Observer, owned by Lord Astor, wrote that before a “constructive peace” could be established, “a large part of ‘Eastern Europe’ proper should be reconstructed under German leadership.” The extraordinary Lord Lothian, who held no office, sailed to Germany and solemnly informed Hitler that “Britain has no primary interests in Eastern Europe.” This folly was summed up by the Rumanian foreign minister. He said sadly: “Germany has her plans. Do other countries have their plans? If the other powers are without plans, we will be forced to go along with Germany.”61

  Lords Astor and Lothian were not only forfeiting future allies; they were also overlooking the fact that Britain did have interests in the buffer states between Russia and Germany. France was bound by treaty to go to war should any other country invade Czechoslovakia. And Britain was pledged to follow France’s declaration with her own. In November 1933, in the Wilhelmstrasse, Konstantin von Neurath, the Nazi foreign minister, read a minute from Hösch. MacDonald had suggested that Hitler make a state visit to England. Neurath scrawled across the memorandum: “Unsinn!”—“Nonsense!” And so it was. Why run such a risk when British aristocrats were already giving what even Hitler hadn’t dared ask for?

  Churchill was right—the Geneva conference was doomed—but no one in Parliament would congratulate him on his foresight. In those days faith in disarmament was a creed, and to slight it was poor politics. But then, Churchill was a poor politician. Although the most gifted speaker of his age, he was clumsy, even inept, in manipulating the House, the intricate maneuvering of which Baldwin was master. Neither, in the opinion of prominent Labour leader Clement Attlee, was he a great parliamentarian, “mainly, of course, because he was too impatient to master the procedures.” He was also capable of appalling political misjudgments. By resigning from Baldwin’s shadow cabinet in 1931 over the India issue, thereby repeating his father’s aristocratic disdain for consequences, he assured his exclusion from every prewar ministry and made the eventual designation of Neville Chamberlain as prime minister—with all that entailed—inevitable.

  But no British politician in this century has matched Winston’s skill in keeping himself in the public eye. In 1899, when Winston was still in his mid-twenties, G. W. Steevens, the great Victorian journalist, met him on the boat home from India and wrote in the Daily Mail that Churchill might become, among other things, “the founder of a great advertising business.” Certainly he was a matchless self-advertiser. Even as a backbencher, he made news by his dramatic presence in the House of Commons, by his soaring speeches, by parliamentary tricks which just skirted the borderline of propriety, and by his way of digging into a pocket, producing classified documents, and reading selected passages aloud, with all the gaudy panache he alone could display, to an astonished House, press gallery, and public.62

  Now and then he would enter the chamber carrying a prop. If he had nothing else, at crucial moments he would produce his watch a
nd play with it. Parliament was aware of his diversions, sometimes amused, often annoyed. Yet everything he did was just within the rules. Once, when an Opposition speaker had the floor, Winston lowered his great head and began to swing it back and forth in widening arcs. Backbenchers grinned and then chuckled. The victim said icily: “I see the Right Hon[orable] Gentleman shaking his head. I wish to remind him that I am only stating my own opinion.” “And I,” said Churchill, “am only shaking my own head.” Another time, when an MP was approaching the end of a very long address and was drawing breath, pausing before his peroration, Churchill destroyed it by growling, “Rubbish.” Anticipating an attack on an argument he himself had presented at the last session, he entered the chamber sucking a jujube—a lozenge—and pocketed it as he sat down. His opponent had just begun to pick up momentum when Winston began searching his jacket, vest, and trousers. At first he was surreptitious, as though anxious not to distract the listening MPs, but gradually one MP after another noticed that he was digging into his pockets, ever harder, ever more frantically. Laughter began, and the speaker, trembling with justifiable rage, asked: “Winston, what are you doing?” Churchill said meekly, “I am looking for my jujube.”

  The speaker’s colleagues raised indignant shouts, but when they quieted down he reminded them that he always enjoyed a noisy House and told them why: “Honorable Members opposite will give me credit for not being afraid of interruptions and noise. It even would be much easier to be shouted down continually or booed down, because I have not the slightest doubt that I could obtain publicity for any remarks I wish to make, even if they are not audible in the House.” He did not add, though they knew it, that he could also make money doing it, selling his text in Fleet Street at a handsome price. And if his tactics offended MPs on both sides of the well, he could always win back their hearts. The House of Commons is no less susceptible to flattery than each of its members, and when he digressed for a moment to recall a critical issue in the recent past, concluding, “All through these convulsions the House of Commons stood unshaken and unafraid,” they felt, as Lord Chandos puts it, “that they had been in a battle and had just been decorated.”