Alone, 1932-1940

by William Manchester

  On May 18 the Reich’s foreign minister, Baron Konstantin von Neurath, received William Bullitt, Franklin Roosevelt’s friend and the American ambassador to France. Neurath could scarcely have spoken more plainly. In his report to the State Department Bullitt quoted Neurath as declaring that it would be “the policy of the German Government” to take no new action beyond Germany’s borders “until the Rhineland has been digested…. Until the German fortifications have been constructed on the French and Belgian frontiers, the German Government will do everything possible to prevent rather than encourage an outbreak by the Nazis in Austria and will pursue a quiet line with regard to Czechoslovakia.” Neurath’s parting words to Bullitt were: “As soon as our fortifications are constructed and the countries of Central Europe realize that France cannot enter German territory at will, those countries will begin to feel very differently about their foreign policies and a new constellation will develop.”82

  If public men of vision are tough, as Churchill was, they endure. If they are not, and most are not, they perish or live out their lives in lonely exile. The future may serve as an appellate court. It cannot, however, award retroactive damages, and so Ralph Wigram can never be redeemed. He was not a weak man. Nevertheless, Hitler’s successful smash-and-grab coup had, in Churchill’s words, dealt Wigram “a mortal blow.” The crisis had subjected him to an unbearable strain. Valentine Lawford, one of Wigram’s subordinates, notes that the “purely physical demands of those twelve days had been almost intolerable; and they had still further enfeebled the frail organs of a frail body.” After Flandin had left London, Wigram forced himself to tour the occupied Rhineland. There he was shocked to see little children, coached by German soldiers, play “grenades” with snowballs. He returned to his Lord North Street home, as Ava Wigram later wrote Churchill, “and said to me, ‘War is now inevitable, and it will be the most terrible war there has ever been. I don’t think I shall see it, but you will. Wait now for bombs on this little house.’ ” He felt a sense of personal guilt. He told her, “I have failed to make the people here realize what is at stake. I am not strong enough to make the people here understand. Winston has always, always understood, and he is strong and will go on to the end.” Several months later, writes Henry Pelling, Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, “depression overtook him and he committed suicide.”83

  Vansittart phoned the news to Winston. Churchill wrote Clementine, “I was deeply shocked & grieved…. I thought him a grand fellow.” Meantime Clementine, skiing in Austria, had read Wigram’s obituary in The Times, and their letters crossed in the mail, hers reading: “He was a true friend of yours & in his eyes you cd see the spark wh showed an inner light was burning—His poor wife will be overwhelmed with grief.” Bearing a wreath, Winston attended the funeral, near Hayward’s Heath, with Vansittart, Bracken, and Maze. Afterward they brought the young widow and the Wigrams’ five-year-old mongoloid child back to Chartwell for lunch. Churchill was amazed to learn—it is astonishing that a statesman who owed so much to civil servants should not have known—that, as he wrote Clemmie, “there appears to be no pension or anything for Foreign Office widows.” In another note he added: “Poor little Ava is all adrift now. She cherished him [Ralph] &… he was her contact with gt affairs. Now she has only the idiot child.”84

  The last phrase jars. So does Churchill’s mention of Wigram in his memoirs. To be sure, Winston wrote that his death “was an irreparable loss to the Foreign Office, and played its part in the miserable decline of our fortunes,” but then he adds that Wigram “took it too much to heart. After all, one can always go on doing what one believes to be his duty, and running ever greater risks till knocked out.” Churchill, Boothby noted, could be cruel. It seems less than generous thus to stigmatize Wigram, suggesting that he had deserted his post in his country’s hour of need. Yet that seems to have been Winston’s final opinion. One feels that in one of his combative moods, Churchill would have sympathized with General Patton for slapping a soldier broken by the shock of battle. Winston had been hammered and tempered and shaped by ordeals beyond Wigram’s imagining. And, of course, Wigram would have been no match for Hitler. Churchill knew he was, or would be, if he could only reach the helm.85

  Now, over two years since Winston had first urged the appointment of a minister of defense to preside over the three services, Baldwin prepared to make the appointment. He had been under great pressure from the press and Parliament to name Churchill. Even Neville Chamberlain, for once in agreement with his half brother, had said: “Of course, if it is a matter of military efficiency, Winston is no doubt the man.” In his memoirs Churchill recalled that “I was naturally aware that this process was going on. In the debate of March 9”—Monday, two days after the Rhineland invasion, when the House first confronted the developing crisis—“I was careful not to derogate in the slightest degree from my attitude of severe though friendly criticism of Government policy.”86

  He wrote to Clemmie, insisting, “I do not mean to break my heart whatever happens,” but of course he craved office. In the same letter he examined the prospects of the two candidates most prominently mentioned in the press and reported that neither really wanted the job—Neville Chamberlain “because he sees the premiership not far away” and Sir Kingsley Wood “because he hopes to be Chancellor of the Exchequer then and anyhow does not know a Lieutenant-General from a Whitehead torpedo.” Thus, he reasoned, “it may all come back to your poor pig.”87

  Baldwin’s reservations about Winston remained; and he had to consider his eventual successor. One of Neville Chamberlain’s biographers writes: “The party would not have the immediate return of Hoare. If the new Ministry went to Churchill, it would alarm those Liberal and Central elements who had taken his exclusion as a pledge against militarism, it would be against the advice of those responsible for interpreting the party’s general will, and would it not when Baldwin disappeared raise a disputed succession?”88

  Churchill, Neville Chamberlain, and Kingsley Wood were not the only names which were submitted for the new ministry; the secretary of state for air, Lord Swinton (formerly Philip Cunliffe-Lister), and Walter Runciman, the president of the Board of Trade, were being considered. And so, by Hoare, was Hoare. Speaking from the back benches the injured ice skater skated on very thin ice indeed by making what a friend recalls as “a curiously distasteful bid for office.” Neville Chamberlain noted it in his diary: “He began well but shocked the House by an elaborate tribute to S.B. which sounded like an obvious and clumsy bid for power and created a thoroughly bad impression.”89

  Actually, the prime minister preferred Hoare for the post, but nothing could be done until he had been rehabilitated. Baldwin and those around him also shied away from the thought of what they called “a strong personality” in the new ministry. These and other “niceties and gravities,” as a Chamberlain biographer called them, had been “well weighed” for a full month, the month that ended during the Rhineland crisis.90

  Nazi aggression, one might think, should have lent support to Winston’s candidacy. At this, of all times, it seems inconceivable that Baldwin would pick a weak man to supervise the defense of England. Nevertheless, that was what he did. Baldwin said outright: “If I pick Winston, Hitler will be cross.” In his biography of Chamberlain, Keith Feiling writes that the Rhineland was “decisive against Winston’s appointment”; it was “obvious that Hitler would not like it.” As the prime minister’s heir apparent, Chamberlain encouraged Baldwin to think along these lines. He suggested that Baldwin choose a man “who would excite no enthusiasm” and “create no jealousies.” The prime minister agreed. On Saturday, March 14—exactly a week since German troops had crossed the Rhine—he announced that he was establishing, not a ministry of defense, but a ministry for coordination of defense. Its leader, the new cabinet member, would be Sir Thomas Inskip.91

  Inskip? Fleet Street and Parliament were incredulous. The name was familiar but had been attached to no political achievements. As
a youth Inskip had seriously considered becoming a missionary. Called to the bar instead, he had taken silk, and, for most of the past fourteen years, had been England’s solicitor general or attorney general. Macmillan recalled that he lacked “the slightest glimmer of that ruthless determination, by which alone such an office could have been made effective at such a time.” Until now he had never before been proposed or even considered for a high cabinet post. A search of The Times files reveals that his only notable public effort had been a successful campaign to suppress revisions of the Anglican prayer book. His appointment had been suggested to the prime minister by Chamberlain and David Margesson, the Tories’ chief whip, on the ground that he was “the safest man.” Now, rising from the front bench for his maiden speech as watchdog of Britain’s security, Inskip confessed: “I may say, with all sincerity, that it never occurred to me—I say this in all seriousness—that I would ever be able to discharge this duty even if it were offered to me…. I do not claim to be a superman.”92

  In The Gathering Storm, the most personal of his six books on World War II, Churchill wrote that Baldwin had selected “an able lawyer, who had the advantages of being little known himself and knowing nothing about military subjects.” He also set down his deeper, emotional reaction to the Inskip appointment: “To me this definite, and as it seemed final, exclusion from all share in our preparations for defence was a heavy blow.” Bitterness was uncharacteristic of him, but in three acrid sentences he revealed his naked anger, his feeling that England had been placed in even greater peril, and he himself personally violated: “Mr. Baldwin certainly had good reason to use the last flickers of his power against one who had exposed his mistakes so severely and so often. Moreover, as a profoundly astute party manager, thinking in majorities and aiming at a quiet life between elections, he did not wish to have my disturbing aid. He thought, no doubt, that he had dealt me a politically fatal stroke, and I felt he might well be right.”93

  He added, accurately, that the “Prime Minister’s choice was received with astonishment by press and public.” Macmillan later commented that “Astonishment is almost an understatement. Even the most defeatist and most adulatory of the Prime Minister were aghast.” Winston’s friends were in shock. Lord Lloyd recalled Lindemann telling him that Baldwin’s choice was “the most cynical thing that has been done since Caligula appointed his horse as consul.” One of Lloyd George’s young parliamentary protégés called it “another glaring instance of the stupidity of party politics, which always denies a nation the services of most of its best men,” and Anthony Crossley added two more verses to his venomous parody:

  Did you dare, Father Churchill, did you dare to expect

  A summons to the Council again,

  In the face of the feeling that haunts the elect

  That they scoffed at your warnings in vain?

  You’re polite to the small and you’re rude to the great,

  Your opinions are bolder and surer

  Than is seemly today in an office of state—

  You’ve even insulted the Führer.94

  Churchill had proposed a five-man cabinet team to supervise preparedness. To the three traditional posts of air, war, and Admiralty he would have added a minister of supply, with a defense minister presiding over the four. Given the complexities of total war, he argued, a ministry of supply was vital. Its responsibilities would include the manufacture of arms and equipment, the policing of profiteers, and agreements with the trade unions, who would become mutinous if, say, excessive profits for defense industries were not restrained. Baldwin, unimpressed, merely told Inskip to “coordinate” defense. He gave him no instructions on what that vague word meant, no power to enforce his decisions, and no professional advisers. It is difficult to grasp what he expected from a committed pacifist who had never worn a uniform nor heard the sound of gunfire, who—at a time when military strategy depended on an understanding of new weapons, including mastery of radar, upon which England’s very survival would depend—had never even flown in an airplane, and whose only previous encounter with Britain’s defense establishment had been a consequence of his opposition to rephrasing the Anglican service for burial of the dead at sea.

  Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”

  “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen.

  Passed over for a cipher when he had been supremely qualified, Churchill was now free to unsheathe his broadsword again. But to sulk or fume would have diminished him. “I had to control my feelings,” he later wrote, “and appear serene, indifferent, detached.” Of course, he was not capable of detachment. Nor should he have been. Someone had to sound the alarm bell after Göring, contemptuous of the Allies’ pusillanimity, announced that between four million and five million “active, intelligent, valiant Germans” were working “night and day” in the munitions factories of the Ruhr to arm the expanding Wehrmacht. In the Evening Standard Winston expressed astonishment that Parliament and the British people should ignore this boast and its implications. The Reich, he wrote, “is arming more strenuously, more scientifically and upon a larger scale, than any nation has ever armed before…. Surely these are facts which ought to bulk as large in ordinary peaceful people’s minds as horse-racing, a prize fight or nineteen-twentieths of the current newspaper bill of fare.” Over the next several days the Standard received a thick sheaf of letters from outraged subscribers protesting the publication of such “nationalistic” articles by England’s “number one warmonger.”95

  He was in fact the country’s number one peacemonger, the last champion of the League of Nations and therefore of collective security, the only policy which could have thwarted Hitler before the war which he alone wanted destroyed Europe’s dominance of the globe. Once other countries had been knitted in a “strong confederacy for defence and peace,” Winston told an inattentive House, “they should give Germany an absolute guarantee of the inviolability of German soil and a promise that if anyone offended her all will turn against that one, and if she strikes at anyone all will stand by and defend that victim.” He ended: “Let us free the world from the approach of a catastrophe, carrying with it calamity and tribulation beyond the tongue of man to tell.” Later he would be remembered as a great war leader, but no man ever fought harder for peace.96

  Delivering the first report of progress in the new ministry, Inskip braced his stocky legs and, turning his curiously bunched face to the House, spoke confidently of “a swelling tide of production,” reporting that “forty new aerodromes have been or are being acquired.” In fact the new ministry had already acquired a reputation for slackness. Desmond Morton passed Winston a detailed analysis of Inskip’s speech. “A swelling tide of production”? There was, said Morton, “nothing of the kind”; the only steps being taken were “to get industry into a condition eventually to produce what is required.” Inskip’s staff had contacted fifty-two firms, asking whether they would turn out armaments; fourteen agreed to manufacture munitions, “but none of them, not even the fourteen who have accepted firm contracts, have yet entered into production.” The “forty new aerodromes” were simply forty fields which Inskip’s staff had inspected accompanied by real estate agents. “The forty pieces of ground have not yet even been acquired.”97

  In the House in July, Inskip continued to sing hymns of exultation. To be sure, he acknowledged, Britain’s heavy reliance on imported machine tools was unfortunate, and he further conceded that English factories would be unable to turn out shells for at least two years. But he felt certain that the government’s “hope and trust” would assure the recruitment of enough skilled workers to man the machines. Churchill, troubled, replied that it would be unwise for him to set forth his case “in open debate in this Chamber…. The times have waxed too dangerous for that.” Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, meeting behind closed doors, had heard Winston out. Harold Nicolson was there and thought his presentation unanswerable.
Ranging beyond defense, Winston pointed out that were the Germans given a free hand in eastern Europe, as they had asked, within a year they would be dominant from Hamburg to the Black Sea. England, in that case, would be faced by the most formidable coalition since the fall of Napoleon. But a majority of the committee members belonged to Baldwin, and “what they would really like,” Nicolson wrote, “would be a firm agreement with Germany and possibly Italy by which we could purchase peace at the expense of the smaller states. This purely selfish policy would to my mind make an Anglo-German war quite certain within twenty years.”98

  Churchill would have preferred to ignore Inskip himself, knowing that his criticism would invite charges of jealousy. But he could not remain seated when the new minister told the House that defense preparations for England would “of course” be circumscribed because interference with the country’s commerce, and the everyday lives of its people, was unthinkable. Winston challenged him. Inskip, he said, had “made a very important pronouncement” in explaining that he was “working under peace conditions.” There were, he pointed out, “many conditions” between peacetime and wartime: “preparatory conditions, precautionary conditions, emergency conditions.” He had been under the impression that the new ministry had been created to recommend which of them should be adopted now. Churchill cited fresh data from Germany, obtained “from a source which I cannot divulge.” Checking these figures against those published by the Nazi regime, he had found that they confirmed one another, revealing that Hitler had spent twenty billion marks preparing for war since coming to power, and, during 1935, another eleven billion—far in excess of Churchill’s earlier estimate.