Alone, 1932-1940

by William Manchester

  But there were doubts about Churchill, too. Amery, Eden, and Duff Cooper at least spoke in the idiom of their time, and until now each had attracted more supporters in Parliament than the lonely, eccentric genius whose star was just beginning to rise. In 1932 Nancy Astor had written him off as “finished”; his denunciation of Munich had been regarded as political suicide. Moreover, at this time the fall of Chamberlain, though in many minds, was not an immediate issue. Because of his party’s large majority, only an uprising among Conservative backbenchers could drive him from No. 10. He was in trouble, but not that much trouble. Those who wished him ill could not move until he had suffered an accumulation of defeats. And the House knew that Churchill would not be satisfied with a cabinet post. He wanted office only as a springboard to the premiership, which raised other questions. On a superficial level, Churchill in the 1930s seemed almost vestigial. Approaching his late sixties, eligible for a pension, he was anachronistic in manner, dress, and speech. He could actually remember Gladstone recalling youthful memories of the bonfires celebrating Waterloo. Churchill’s eclipse in the party, indeed, had been a direct consequence of his conviction, an article of faith in the nineteenth century but widely disputed in the twentieth, that the British Raj should continue to rule India.

  Since his exile from power, he had campaigned against his own party’s imperial, defense, and foreign policies, with a signal lack of success. To a people still haunted by the slaughter of trench warfare he had called for rearmament, declared that courage on the battlefield was a virtue, and gave “the world at large,” in Samuel Hoare’s words, the impression that he was “the very embodiment of a policy of war.” He was also immovable. Any other politician twice faced with uprisings in his own constituency would have trimmed his sails, if ever so slightly. Churchill had known that the Munich Agreement, before the seizure of Prague, was popular. But he wouldn’t retract a word. He delivered scathing speeches on appeasement and HMG’s failure to rearm to audiences who felt otherwise, and whose votes he needed if he was to keep his seat. He didn’t enjoy it. More than most public men, he reveled in applause. He just didn’t know how to compromise. In Great Contemporaries he had written: “Politicians rise by toil and troubles. They expect to fail; they hope to rise.” Perseverance is the worthiest of political traits, and certainly the most difficult; a British historian who takes a jaundiced view of Winston acknowledges that “To persist in a political career that appears to others, and even on occasion to the politician himself, as finished, demands exceptional strength of character in a sensitive and proud man.” As Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out, there is a distinction between intellect and character. Intellect had won Churchill acclaim; character prevented him from exploiting it. He yearned for a ministry, but only on his own terms. Had his constituents rejected him, his response would have echoed an Emerson couplet: “Good-bye, proud world! I’m going home; / Thou art not my friend and I’m not thine.”108

  Yet Prague had undeniably transformed Churchill’s political weaknesses into strengths. The policies he had attacked were exposed, overnight, as bankrupt. England had been hoodwinked, and Englishmen wanted no Dear Vicar or Good Old Neville. Martin Gilbert observes: “With the shock of Hitler’s occupation of Prague, pressure mounted for… a decisive change in British policy.” Britons listened with a thirsty ear for a call to arms, but Chamberlain, like Baldwin before him, lacked the voice for that. They heard it loud and clear in Churchill’s rhetoric, however, and his appeal for a “recovery of moral health.” As a contributor to the Yale Review has pointed out, this was “his way of saying that the English after Munich had to learn all over again to recognize evil. They had lost the sense of villainy; they had no solid principles, unshakable convictions.”109

  Chamberlain still held the House of Commons. It is a peculiarity of the British parliamentary system that in insulating Parliament from mass hysteria or chimerical shifts in the public mood, the House may also ignore an aroused electorate and remain loyal to its leader, particularly if he is strong, determined, and clever. Each MP could be held accountable only to his constituency, and then only in general elections. Hitler had touched a nerve when he said on November 8, 1938: “After all, Churchill may have 14,000, 20,000, or 30,000 votes behind him [actually he had 34,849]—I am not so well informed about that—but I have 40,000,000 behind me.” Since he had banned elections, there was no way to confirm that. Yet even in democratic England, Tory MPs were subject to pressure, not from the voters, but from Margesson and his fellow whips, who worked at No. 12 Downing Street and received their instructions from No. 10.110

  Eventually, of course, the House must reckon with the public temper. So must a prime minister, though a stubborn man, which Chamberlain was, may act without parliamentary approval—even without the approval of his cabinet. After Prague, the tide of opposition to the P.M. rose throughout 1939, and it began with Churchill’s readers, whose number multiplied week by week. His pieces were appearing in the Daily Telegraph, Picture Post, the Illustrated London News, the Daily Mail, and—in the United States, where he was sowing the seeds of a future alliance—Collier’s. The titles speak for themselves: “Let the Tyrant Criminals Bomb!” “What Britain’s Policy Should Be,” “War, Now or Never,” “Towards a Pact with Russia,” “Bombs Don’t Scare Us Now,” “Germany’s Use of Tactics of Encirclement,” and “No Blood Will Flow Unless….”

  Churchill’s prose was but one of many forces hammering on the consciences of the British public—Hitler’s actions were the most effective—but the phenomenon of a militant Britain could not have been shaped as it was without him. The “gathering storm,” as he later called it, became apparent to men in pubs, women pushing prams, greengrocers, drummers, lorry drivers, businessmen, shop stewards; to everyone, in short, except the oligarchy in power, which need not face the voters again for three years. Slowly the prevailing opinion of fifty million Englishmen would turn round until Britain became a mirror image of the country whose throne Edward VIII had rejected, a valiant nation glorying in everything it had scorned after Munich. This reversal was far more profound than the Führer’s arousal of his Volk earlier in the decade. The Germans, after all, had been belligerent for two thousand years; British public school boys were taught that “Civilization stops at the Rhine and the Danube, the frontiers of the Roman Empire,” or, as Winston put it, “A Hun alive is a war in prospect.” In the past seventy years Germany had writ her name large on battlefields, while the British Empire had endeavored to impose a Pax Britannica on the world.111

  Once appeasement was discredited, the scapegoating began. Like Gallipoli it became a political weapon, a lash to flog the Conservative party. Michael Foot and two collaborators later published a devastating Labour attack on the appeasers. Titled Guilty Men, it singled out fifteen Tories, among them Chamberlain, Simon, Hoare, MacDonald, Halifax, and Baldwin, indicting each for neglecting England’s defenses and failing to alert and prepare the country for the inevitable conflict. Guilty Men received an enthusiastic press. The Atlantic Monthly called it an irrefutable exposure of Baldwin’s “blunder and blindness”; the Spectator thought it persuasive evidence that coalition and Conservative ministries “were deceived by Hitler and did not, when awakened to realities, apply themselves with vigour to the task of restoring our defences”; and the Boston Transcript found the book’s arguments “unanswerable.”112

  But they weren’t. Throughout the 1930s Foot, a socialist who had cheered pacifist speeches, following Attlee’s pacifist lead, had opposed any appropriations for the British army, the Admiralty, and the RAF. If the Tories had taken his line, Britain would have faced the Nazis naked. The MacDonald-Baldwin-Chamberlain triumvirate never went that far. At least they left the infrastructure intact. Indeed, it may almost be said that Guilty Men was written by guiltier men.

  Churchill was still beleaguered by both sides of the House as the sands ran out, but “the public,” as Brian Gardner notes, “were beginning to think otherwise; for someone who was m
eant to be an adventurer, his warnings had been going on a remarkably long time, and with strange consistency, determination, and integrity.” J. B. Priestly, whose politics lay in deep left field, wrote that there were three urgent reasons for appointing Churchill to the cabinet: his “outstanding ability and experience,” which Chamberlain’s ministers conspicuously lacked; the emerging realization that “the people want him there”; and the fact that “his presence will at least do something to show the world, which has no confidence whatever in our statesmen, that we are in earnest.”113

  In a country enjoying freedom of speech, shifts in public opinion are first sensed by the press. Lord Boothby believed that until the great awakening which followed Prague most of the London press, “with the shining exception of the Daily Telegraph, was bright yellow,” with editors following Geoffrey Dawson’s lead. “Fleet Street,” according to Boothby, “did everything in its power to help Neville Chamberlain and his wretched Government turn the whole country yellow.” The campaign to depict Chamberlain as heroic and Churchill as a blackguard peaked in the weeks immediately following Munich. Even Kingsley Martin, the left-wing editor of the New Statesman, who had indicted His Majesty’s Government for failing to stand up to Fascist and Nazi aggressors, was deceived by the Munich hoax and later felt shame. Sir John Reith at the BBC continued to gag Hitler’s critics—Sir Horace Rumbold and Harold Nicolson were denied airtime because they were “anti-German.”114

  Nevertheless, London newspapermen remained objective. Jaded by their government’s duplicity, half-lies, and distortion, and by the gullibility of their readers, they were surprised to find growing support for Churchill among the middle, lower middle, and working classes—the yeomanry of England, and now, it seemed, her spine. These people wanted Winston in the government, with power to act and persuade—in short, with a ministry. His supporters could even be found in the cabinet. Malcolm MacDonald recalls that “the government was divided over whether Churchill should come in. On balance the younger members were for him, the older members skeptical…. We had begun to think this is war, we must get Churchill in, not as P.M. but as a very important war minister, or war-to-be minister, but Neville was reluctant.”115

  Chamberlain believed war ministers unnecessary because he remained convinced that he had brought Englishmen peace in their time, and this became clear as debate over establishment of a ministry of supply—first proposed by Churchill three years earlier, on April 23, 1936—approached its climax. Without such a minister, an economic czar empowered to mobilize British industry and provide a national arsenal, future recruits would lack rifles, even uniforms. It was no longer enough for a nation to spring to arms. Artillery, tanks, and warplanes, decisive in modern war, must also be there. Such complicated weapons required lead time. On October 28, a month after Munich, the Air Ministry’s director of plans had expressed doubts that RAF reserves would “last for more than a week of warfare on a modern scale.” Churchill’s intelligence net had seen to it that a copy of this report reached Chartwell, and he had written a friend that such failure “strips Ministers of all credentials to be judges of the national interests.”116

  Two days earlier the prime minister had told his cabinet he was ruling out a ministry of supply. No one could shake his faith in appeasement, not even Adolf Hitler. On November 14 Halifax, at a meeting of the cabinet Committee on Foreign Policy, had quoted the Führer as saying: “If I were Chamberlain I would not delay for a minute to prepare my country in the most drastic way for a ‘total’ war and I would thoroughly organize it. If the English have not got universal conscription by the spring of 1939 they may consider their world empire as lost. It is astounding how easy the democracies make it for us to reach our goal.” The P.M., after a moment of stony silence, took up the next item on the agenda.117

  To Churchill the need for the new ministry was compelling. That same week he had risen in the House of Commons to propose an amendment calling for its immediate establishment: “I put it as bluntly as I possibly can. If only fifty members of the Conservative Party went into the Lobby tonight to vote for this amendment, it would not affect the life of the Government, but it would make them act.” The rapid production of munitions, he declared, should have begun long ago, and on a scale immensely greater than anything the War Office now contemplated. HMG’s reply was that a ministry would “seriously dislocate” British industry, that it was wiser “to trust to cooperation than to compulsion.” The House was still Chamberlain’s, and Winston’s rebuff was stunning. Not fifty MPs, but just two—Bracken and Macmillan—joined him. Berlin rejoiced. “GREAT DEFEAT OF CHURCHILL!” read one Nazi headline. Another trumpeted: “CHURCHILL’S INTRIGUES COLLAPSE / EVEN DUFF COOPER AND EDEN COULD NOT BE ROPED IN.”118

  As late as March 2, 1939, the prime minister’s own secretary for war, Leslie Hore-Belisha, told him that if the government was serious about defending the country, something had to be done to arm and equip its fighting men, and Britain’s industrial titans would listen to no one without a seat at the cabinet table. Wearily the P.M. cut him off in mid-argument. They were already “getting the goods,” he said, and “now that public opinion is becoming satisfied on this point I think the demand for a Ministry will die down.”119

  But it didn’t, and Hore-Belisha kept hammering away at cabinet meetings, citing desperate, unmet needs and how a supply minister could resolve them. He met Churchill in Morpeth Mansions for strategy meetings, and once, when Winston had hurt his foot in yard work, he drove to Chartwell for advice. This was risky; in a cabinet dominated by sycophants, the rebellious war minister was isolated.

  Yet the Ministry of Supply had become inevitable, and presently even Chamberlain knew it. In April 1939, after the German occupation of Prague, his panel of industrialists—the men he admired most and had sought to shield from bureaucracy—reported that their chief recommendation, an urgent question to be met squarely “at the first possible opportunity,” was “the establishment of a Ministry of Supply.” Brendan Bracken wrote Bernard Baruch: “Winston has won his long fight…. No public man of our time has shown more foresight, and I believe that his long, lonely struggle… will prove to be the best chapter in his crowded life.”120

  It had been assumed by the public, Fleet Street, Parliament, and most of the cabinet that Churchill would be the man appointed to the new office. No one in the country could match his experience as the czar of war industry twenty years earlier. On April 19 Nicolson wrote in his diary: “The feeling that Winston is essential is gaining strength, and we shall probably see him in the Cabinet within a short time.” Writing Winston, Lord Rothermere predicted “a great responsibility” falling on his shoulders “at an early date” and offering him £600 if he quit drinking brandy for a year; all England, he added, “including especially myself, will wish you to be in the finest fettle when the day arrives.”121

  The new post went, however, not to the superbly qualified man who would have served England best, but to Leslie Burgin, the minister of transportation, an obscure man whose only other appointment had been parliamentary secretary to the Board of Trade. Nicolson set down two reactions in the House of Commons: “a gasp of horror” and “a deep groan of pain.” The British Weekly noted: “There was much disappointment on both sides of the House that the changes in the Cabinet did not include such out-standing figures as Mr. Winston Churchill and Mr. Anthony Eden.” Samuel Hoare later attributed Churchill’s exclusion to his repeated calls to arms, which had stigmatized him as a warmonger, and the prime minister, according to his biographer, was “anxious that Hitler not think of [Winston] as a spokesman for His Majesty’s Government.”122

  Chamberlain’s decision to bypass Winston and appoint Burgin had been made with an eye on the Wilhelmstrasse, and in his diary the prime minister justified it: “If there is any possibility of easing the tension and getting back normal relations with the dictators, I wouldn’t risk it by what would certainly be regarded by them as a challenge.” But he paid a price in Parliament. T
here, Nicolson noted, the general “impression was deplorable.” Independent MPs, he wrote, had “hoped that the P.M. would take this opportunity of broadening the basis of his Cabinet. There is a very widespread belief that he is running a dual policy—one the overt policy of arming, and the other the secret de l’Empereur, namely appeasement plus Horace Wilson. Chamberlain’s obstinate refusal to include any but the yes-men in his Cabinet caused real dismay.”123

  On March 18 Neville Chamberlain celebrated his seventieth birthday. He was exhausted, and the seeds of personal tragedy were beginning to take root. After two grueling years at No. 10, signs of stress were evident. Rab Butler had been in the country on Good Friday. Learning that the Italians had invaded Albania he hurried to Downing Street, and long afterward he recalled being led upstairs to a small room overlooking a garden, which the P.M. used as a study. The window was open; bird food was strewn on a shelf outside. Chamberlain appeared annoyed by Butler’s arrival and expressed amazement at his distress. He said: “I feel sure Mussolini has decided not to go against us.” Butler recalled: “When I started to talk about the threat to the Balkans, he dismissed me with the words: ‘Don’t be silly. Go home and go to bed,’ and continued to feed the birds.”124