Alone, 1932-1940

by William Manchester

  As Franco’s Nationalists gained the upper hand, he urged the House not to repeat the Ethiopian fiasco: “It is no use once again leading other nations up the garden path and then running away when the dog growls.” As Sheean had seen, once the tide of battle favored the Nationalists, Churchill turned away from them. In the Daily Telegraph he wrote on December 30, 1938, that “the British Empire would run far less risk from the victory of the Spanish Government than from that of General Franco,” and a few months later he told subscribers to the Telegraph that “the British Conservative Right Wing, who have given him [Franco] such passionate support, must now be the prey of many misgivings.” Since the German threat had absolute priority, he told the House, Britain should refuse to take sides in Spain, though “I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Naziism, I would choose Communism.” He added: “I hope I will not be called upon to survive in a world under a Government of either of these dispensations. I feel unbounded sorrow and sympathy for their victims.”113

  However qualified, this was a remarkable turnabout for the man who, in the turmoil after the Armistice, had led the attempt to stifle bolshevism in its cradle. But he had executed remarkable pivots before: in the first decade of the century, when, as a young MP, he had fought to provide the poor with unemployment insurance, pensions for the aged, and insurance for the sick; again, by joining the IRA’s Michael Collins in the early 1920s to create the Irish Free State; and yet again, after the general strike of 1926, by leading the struggle for the underpaid, ill-housed, ill-fed British coal miners. If a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, Winston was disqualified.

  At the urging of Vansittart and Leeper, Churchill in 1936 embarked on a strenuous campaign to awaken Britain through public lectures and newspaper articles, beginning on April 3 in the Evening Standard. His cry of alarm, published in the most prominent newspapers of fourteen countries, warned that without concerted action by the nations now lying under the shadow of the swastika, “such civilisation as we have been able to achieve” would be reduced by renewed warfare to “pulp and squalor.” The peoples of Europe, “chattering, busy, sporting, toiling, amused from day to day by headlines and from night to night by cinemas,” were nevertheless “slipping, sinking, rolling backward to the age when ‘the earth was void and darkness moved upon the face of the waters.’ ” Surely, he argued, “it is worth a supreme effort—the laying aside of every impediment, the clear-eyed facing of fundamental facts, the noble acceptance of risks inseparable from heroic endeavour—to control the hideous drift of events and arrest calamity on the threshold. Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!!! NOW is the appointed time.”

  Time increased Hitler’s momentum. His triumph in the Rhineland had heightened the Third Reich’s prestige throughout Europe and dealt England and France a deep wound, all the more painful because it was self-inflicted. The damage to Britain had been particularly grievous; in 1914 the French had gone to war because, facing invasion, they had no choice, but the British, who could have remained on the sidelines—where the Germans had begged them to stay—had fought to defend Belgian neutrality. Other small countries had assumed that they too could rely on the righteous might of history’s greatest empire. Now that England had shown the white feather, recruits swelled the ranks of Nazi parties in Austria, Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, western Poland, and the Free City of Danzig. New parties raised the hakenkreuz in Bulgaria, Rumania, and Hungary; and in May a Fascist plot was exposed in Estonia. On July 11 Churchill gloomily wrote Sir Hugh Tudor, with whom he had stood shoulder to shoulder when Ludendorff launched his great triad of offensives on March 21, 1918: “Everything is getting steadily worse on the Continent. A good deal of work is of course going on here, but all about two years behind.”114

  By now Churchill had gathered a formidable mass of data about war preparedness from Morton, Anderson, and the FO. He could not reveal it in open session without further endangering the national security, however, and Baldwin refused his request for secret session. The prime minister did agree to receive a delegation representing both houses of Parliament, and they met on July 28 and 29. There Churchill presented an extraordinary array of facts detailing German air strength, identifying his sources as French to protect his informants. He went on to discuss, among other matters, “night-flying under war conditions”; the need to recruit more university graduates as pilots and to train more navigators; the gap between planning aircraft production and actual delivery; the want of spare parts; the vulnerability of England’s “feeding ports” of London, Bristol, Liverpool, and Southampton; the need for an “alternative centre of Government” if London were bombed flat; proposals to build underground storage tanks to protect the country’s fuel oil from attack; radar; industrial mobilization; and the shortages of machine guns, bombs, searchlights, trench mortars, and grenades. He stopped short of recommending that the nation’s industry be put on a war footing, but he did suggest that “we ought not to hesitate to impinge on a certain percentage—25 percent, 30 percent… and force them and ourselves to that sacrifice.” He said: “The months slip by rapidly. If we delay too long in repairing our defences, we may be forbidden by superior power to complete the process…. I say there is a state of emergency. We are in danger as we have never been in danger before.”115

  After Churchill had finished, Tom Jones wrote in his diary, “all subsequent speeches were an anti-climax.” He was wrong. The most memorable remarks were Stanley Baldwin’s. The prime minister observed that he could not “deal in detail with the many points that have been raised.” He and Neville had discussed the implications of an all-out effort to prepare the country for the worst, he said, and had concluded that the adverse “effect on trade” would be too high a price to pay. Any disturbance of peacetime production “might throw back the ordinary trade of the country for many years,” inflicting grave damage on the nation’s economic health “at a time when we might want all our credit.”116

  Winston could not imagine how British credit could be useful if Hitler’s headquarters were in Buckingham Palace, the Reichstag met in the House of Commons, and all Englishmen in public life were herded into concentration camps. Baldwin assured him it would never come to that. As the City said, the prime minister was a practical man, a “sound” man. Churchill’s figures, he said, were “exaggerated”—unaware that most of them had appeared in the weekly reports he initialed and passed on, apparently unread—and, raising doubts about “the peril itself,” he recited the worn litany that Hitler’s Reich was a shield against the Bolshevik bogey. Germany had no designs on Western Europe, he told them, because “West would be a difficult programme for her.” The Führer wanted “to move East, and if he should move East, I should not break my heart.” In all events, he was not going to get England into a war “for the League of Nations or for anybody else.” If war broke out, he said, “I should like to see the Bolshies and the Nazis doing it.” To Churchill this begged the question. Germany, not Russia, threatened the peace. His fear was that the Tory rank and file, championing Franco’s brand of Red-baiting, would join Hitler’s camp followers. After the meeting broke up he wrote Corbin at the French embassy that one of his “greatest difficulties” was “the German talk that the anti-Communist countries should stand together.” Should Léon Blum—the new French leader, a socialist—support the Spanish Loyalists, he said, “the dominant forces here would be pleased with Germany and Italy, and estranged from France…. I do not like to hear people talking of England, Germany and Italy forming up against European Communism. It is too easy to be good.”117

  The unforgivable sin of a commander, said Napoleon, is to “form a picture”—to assume that the enemy will act a certain way in a given situation, when in fact his response may be altogether different. The first Allied response to the Nazi regime had been prompted by the universal loathing among decent men of modern war’s senseless slaughter. But revulsion is a frail foundation for a foreign policy. As Hitler’s belligerence became cleare
r, Baldwin, Chamberlain, their fellow appeasers in England, and les apaisers in France assured one another that he would fight the Russians and leave them alone. But wishing didn’t make it so, and they should have known that; Baldwin himself had described Hitler as a “lunatic” with whom “you can never be sure of anything,” adding that “none of us know what goes on in that strange man’s mind.” Therefore, in the autumn of 1936, he called for his fiddlers three—Samuel Hoare (now first lord of the Admiralty), Lord Halifax (lord privy seal), and Neville Chamberlain (Exchequer)—and moved toward what they thought was firmer ground.118

  It was quicksand. Their new mantra was diplomacy—negotiation as a sensible alternative to war. Britain’s honor, they told the public, would be preserved; the negotiating table, not the battlefield, was where differences between England and Germany would be resolved. They were convinced that Hitler had his price. Some of them believed this even after all their assumptions, and much of London, lay in ruins. Devoted to peace, they could not understand that the ruler of Nazi Germany disdained negotiations, enjoyed bloodshed—including the shedding of German blood—and therefore preferred military conquest. Churchill understood because of the aggressive drives lying deep in his own complex personality. He worked tirelessly to avoid hostilities, but if the Führer was determined to fight, the prospect of unsheathing the sword of England struck no terror in Winston’s heart. All other remedies having been exhausted, he would wield it with relish.

  Unfortunately it was a blunt, rusting weapon in 1936, and its hilt lay beyond his reach anyhow. Those who held it despised it. And on November 7, after King Edward VIII had opened the new session of Parliament, they all but discarded it. Although the exhausted prime minister was confined to Chequers on doctor’s orders—only a handful knew that the King’s yearning for an impossible marriage was responsible for his exhaustion—his cabinet, meeting in Downing Street and knowing he would approve, set the course which would lead to Munich less than two years later.

  Inskip was first to speak. The devout Anglican had no prayer for the League of Nations. Collective security, he said, was dead; after Ethiopia and the Rhineland, confidence in it had simply “disappeared.” He proposed it be succeeded by broadening “the appeasement of Germany’s economic conditions.” This was the new diplomacy, which had its critics even within the government. Foreign Secretary Eden and Secretary for War Duff Cooper disagreed. The government, they argued, should give absolute priority to preparing a credible response to Nazi aggression within a year. Hoare protested that this would trigger an “immense upheaval,” weakening England in the long run, and William Ormsby-Gore, the colonial secretary, remarked that Britain’s close ties with France were “widely resented in the country.”

  Everyone awaited Chamberlain’s decision. He would move into No. 10 in a few months; his voice would be decisive. After a long pause he adopted a firm, if reasonable, tone. He saw no alternative to a widening of the search for appeasement. The issue of “national safety” was hard to oppose, he said, but as chancellor of the Exchequer he was “concerned that the cost of defence programs was mounting at a giddy rate.” The latest White Paper had led to the appropriation of £400 million. Should the flow of funds continue at the present rate, rumors of an unbalanced budget would spread. If that happened—and his tone left no doubt that he viewed the possibility as calamitous—they might discover that Britain’s credit abroad was “not so good as it was a few years ago.”119

  In the discussion the chancellor’s most enthusiastic supporter was the minister of health, Kingsley Wood. Wood’s forte, and no one could do it better, was tidying files, updating appointment books, and—he was a wizard at this—keeping interoffice memos moving. After four years as Chamberlain’s parliamentary private secretary, he had risen in the postal, telegraph, and telephone services. Baldwin, impressed by the alacrity with which his mail arrived, made inquiries about Kingsley Wood and was told that he was “a sound man.” Soon Chamberlain would appoint him secretary of state for air, assigning him responsibility for the RAF with the enthusiastic approval of The Times, which hoped he would “increase the number of aeroplanes with the same bright suavity with which he has increased the number of telephone subscribers.” Duff Cooper wrote of him: “He clings to the idea of friendship with Germany and hates the thought of getting too closely tied up with the French.”120

  The cabinet approved Chamberlain’s position, and thus his emerging policy was established. To preserve Britain’s financial resources, they would reach some sort of agreement with Hitler. The vote was not, however, unanimous. Eden, Duff Cooper, and Minister of Transport Leslie Hore-Belisha, veterans of the trenches, disagreed with the chancellor, thereby numbering their days in office, for Chamberlain had little patience with men who, after he had given them clear instructions, argued about them. Already it was said of those rallying to his standard that each was “like a naught in arithmetic that makes a place but has no value of its own.”

  “Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle replied, “and the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.”

  Kept abreast of developments at No. 10 by his FO informants, Churchill had seen Chamberlain’s move coming. His intelligence net had provided new evidence that Parliament’s appropriations, which Chamberlain thought improvident, would prove pitifully inadequate should Hitler let slip the dogs of war. Next to air power, a matter of life or death for Britain, Winston took a personal interest in the tank corps. The tank had been his conception, originally meant to mash German barbed wire for British soldiers swarming over their parapets and across no-man’s-land; he had forced it on a reluctant War Office and seen its triumphant performance in the Great War’s last battles. Although he had yet to grasp the role it would play in the next conflict, he knew Allied tanks had to be strong enough to match Germany’s. On the evening of October 27, Brigadier P. C. S. Hobart, commander of England’s only tank brigade, arrived at Morpeth Mansions in mufti and laid before him the full extent of Britain’s mobile armor. Its medium tanks, the world’s best in 1918, were now hopelessly obsolete, surpassed in quality and quantity by those of Germany, Russia, Italy, and even isolationist America.

  In the air Britain continued to lag; Wing Commander Anderson, taking his greatest risk yet, sent Churchill a diagram dated October 6 and stamped “for official use only,” pinpointing the exact location and strength of all RAF operational, training, and administrative units, together with its chain of command. The most dismaying report to reach Morpeth Mansions came from Squadron Leader H. V. Rowley, who had returned from the Reich only a few days earlier. He wrote: “The development of air power in Germany has left me in a somewhat dazed condition, but with one fact firmly in my mind, and that fact is that they are now stronger in the air than England and France combined.”121

  Armed with all this, Churchill struck. The cabinet had endorsed Chamberlain’s proposal, thereby giving formal approval to Baldwin’s meandering appeasement by adopting it as His Majesty’s foreign policy. Winston laid his facts before Austen Chamberlain and other members of the delegation Baldwin had so recently received and reassured. All joined in a phalanx which petitioned the prime minister to schedule a two-day debate on the country’s defenses. Since most of them were elder statesmen of his own party, he had no choice. At long last Churchill would have it out with him with the House of Commons as spectators, and, in a sense, as jurymen.

  In 1897, as a twenty-three-year-old cavalry officer stationed in India, Winston had written a striking essay, “The Scaffolding of Rhetoric.” Unpublished but found among his papers after his death, it dealt with diction, rhythm, accumulation of argument, analogy, and—approvingly—“a tendency to wild extravagance of language.” Extravagance did not, however, mean verbosity; he preferred short words because “their meaning is more ingrained in the national character and they appeal with greater force to simple understanding than words recently introduced from the Latin and the Greek
.” The key to a speaker’s impact on his audience, he believed, was sincerity: “Before he can inspire them with any emotion he must be swayed by it himself…. Before he can move their tears his own must flow. To convince them he must himself believe.” If he has grasped all these, young Winston had written, his is the most precious of gifts: “He who enjoys it wields a power more durable than that of a great king. He is an independent force in the world. Abandoned by his party, betrayed by his friends, stripped of his offices, whoever can command this power is still formidable.”

  Now, nearly forty years later, abandoned by his party, betrayed by friends, and stripped of office, Churchill himself had grasped and mastered rhetorical skills, and in the RAF debate of 1936 his range, force, and depth held the House rapt and brought Stanley Baldwin to his knees. On November 11, the first day of the debate, Winston’s hapless victim was Inskip. Under Winston’s pitiless questioning, the defense minister admitted that England could put up only 960 warplanes to match the Luftwaffe’s front-line strength of 1,500. Churchill then asked him when the government proposed to reach a decision on the proposal to establish a ministry of supply. Inskip was stammering, contradicting himself, evading the issue with vague promises to “review” the matter “in a few weeks,” when Hoare intervened.

  Mr. Hoare: All that my right hon. Friend quite obviously meant—and I repeat it—is that we are constantly reviewing it.

  Mr. Churchill: You cannot make up your minds.

  Mr. Hoare: It is very easy to make interjections of that kind. He [Churchill] knows as well as anyone in the House… that the situation is fluid.122

  In a lengthy exchange Hoare repeatedly used the word “fluid.” It was among the notes in Churchill’s hands when he rose the following afternoon. His sense of history, of irony, and of retribution prompted him to adopt a tactic which struck a profound chord among those who had followed his long struggle, including, in the Strangers’ Gallery, Lady Violet Bonham Carter, with her lifelong emotional commitment to him. Exactly two years earlier Churchill had moved an amendment declaring that Britain’s security from attack, especially in the air, was “no longer adequate.” It was then that Stanley Baldwin had made his formal pledge—a personal commitment—to maintain British military superiority in the air. Now Winston moved the identical amendment with the same cosponsors: Amery, Guest, Winterton, Horne, and, in place of Bob Boothby, who was abroad, Colonel John Gretton.