Alone, 1932-1940

by William Manchester

  Stalin left central Poland to Hitler. In return he got the eastern provinces, a free hand in Lithuania, and the oil fields of southeast Poland, with the understanding that he would ship thirty thousand tons of crude to the Reich every year. Hitler annexed part of Poland and established the rest as a Nazi vassal state, the General Government of Poland, whose governor-general was Hans Frank, a feisty, dapper young Nazi lawyer, the adoring father of five children, who began braiding his Nuremberg rope by announcing: “The Poles shall be the slaves of the Third Reich.” He also became expert in carrying out programs whose euphemistic names masked some of the vilest crimes in history. Polish intellectuals, professional men, and anyone possessing leadership qualities—men and women who might subvert Frank’s authority—were marked for slaughter. This operation, in which 3,500 persons were actually executed, persons who had committed no crime, who were singled out precisely because they had led distinguished careers, was encoded Ausserordentliche Befriedigungsaktion (Extraordinary Pacification Program). In another Frank campaign, all Jews were grouped together for his Flurbereinigungs-Plan (Housecleaning Plan). Later, after other code words had been tried, the Nazis settled on Endlösung, the Final Solution, to represent the destruction of the European Jews. Their time had come.84

  And so had Western civilization’s hour of maximum danger. Hitler was free now to turn the full fury of his might on England and France. Churchill had repeatedly spoken—mostly to empty seats—on the need to confront Nazi Germany with collective security. Above all, he had said, the Reich must be bracketed by strong nations, east and west, so that Hitler would know German aggression would mean a two-front war. When the Führer came to power the safeguards had seemed solid: France, England, and the Rhineland on the west, and Czechoslovakia and Poland to the east, with Russia, alienated by Nazi murders of German Communists and Hitler’s anti-Soviet polemics, frowning behind them. One by one Hitler had eliminated these threats. He could not have done it alone. He had needed help—and found it in London and Paris. The Polish army had been a disappointment. But France, whose army was vital to the security of free peoples, hadn’t even tried to exploit the period of grace—at least three weeks—when the German armies were tied down in the east. Now the democracies must face him alone—him and, in all probability, Italy, for the unprincipled Duce wanted to be on the winning side, and the Anglo-French alliance had been losing, losing, losing for nearly seven years. In England the iconoclastic General Fuller declared that France must be ruled by lunatics. There they had been in September, he wrote, with “the strongest army in the world, facing no more than twenty-six divisions, sitting still and sheltering behind steel and concrete while a quixotically valiant ally was being exterminated!” In Paris Léon Blum was recalling his conversation with a nonconformist French officer when they met in 1936. The Socialist leader had asked: “What would France do if Hitler should march on Vienna, Prague, or Warsaw?” Charles de Gaulle had replied: “According to circumstances, we shall have a limited call-up or full mobilization. Then, peering through the battlements of our fortifications, we shall watch the enslavement of Europe.” Vienna, Prague, and Warsaw had fallen. Now Blum was wondering whether those battlements and fortifications were strong enough to save France herself from bondage.85

  Hitler had not expected France and England to go to war over Poland. After they had yielded the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, he had assumed that appeasement would continue to be the keystone of their foreign policy. He still doubted that they intended to fight. The French failure to attack the Siegfried Line when it was at its weakest had, in his view, confirmed him. The first inkling that he might have misjudged the British had been Churchill’s appointment to the War Cabinet. Told of it, Hermann Göring had dropped into a chair and said heavily: “Churchill in the Cabinet. That means war is really on. Now we shall have war with England.”86

  The Nazi hierarchy had long been aware of Churchill. That included the Führer, which made Winston an exception. It is a remarkable fact that Hitler knew almost nothing of his enemies and even brushed aside information made available to him, preferring to rely on his instincts, which included contempt for all Ausländer. He did regard England as “our enemy Number One,” however, and Churchill as the symbol of British militancy. After the fall of Poland he lost little time in singling him out. Making his ritualistic peace offering, the sequel to all Nazi conquests, he declared that Poland was dead; it would never rise again; therefore why fight about it? “I make this declaration,” he said, “only because I very naturally desire to spare my people suffering. But should the views of Churchill and his following prevail, then this declaration will be my last. We should then fight…. Let those repulse my hand who regard war as the better solution!”87

  As a cabinet minister, Churchill could now speak over the BBC whenever he chose, and on October 1, in his first wartime broadcast, he had told Britain: “Poland has again been overrun by two of the great powers which held her in bondage for a hundred and fifty years but were unable to quench the spirit of the Polish nation.” The heroic defense of Warsaw had shown that “the soul of Poland is indestructible, and that she will rise again like a rock, which may for a spell be submerged by a tidal wave, but which remains a rock.” He was more intrigued by “the assertion of the power of Russia.” He would have preferred that the Russians “should be standing on their present line as the friends and allies of Poland instead of invaders. But that the Russian armies should stand on this line was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace.” Ribbentrop, he noted, had been summoned to Moscow last week to be told that “the Nazi designs upon the Baltic States… must come to a dead stop.” He continued:

  I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia.

  It is a riddle

  wrapped in a mystery

  inside an enigma;

  But perhaps there is a key.

  That key is Russian national interest.

  It cannot be in accordance

  with the interest or safety of Russia

  that Germany should plant itself

  upon the shores of the Black Sea

  Or that it should overrun the Baltic States

  and subjugate the Slavonic peoples

  of southeastern Europe.88

  He announced with pride—not pardonable, because he still distrusted the convoy policy—that “a week has passed since a British ship, alone or in convoy, has been sunk or even molested by a U-boat on the high seas,” and he closed with one of those passages which men in public life later wish could be expunged from the record. “Rough times lie ahead,” he said, “but how different is the scene from that of October 1914!” Then the French front “seemed to be about to break under the terrible impact of German Imperialism…. We faced those adverse conditions then; we have nothing worse to face tonight.”89

  They faced something far worse, of course, but no one can hold a mirror up to the future, and the speech was well received in England. The prime minister’s junior private secretary, Jock Colville, wrote in his diary that Churchill “certainly gives one confidence and will, I suspect, be Prime Minister before this war is over.” Colville thought he might “lead us into the most dangerous paths. But he is the only man in the country who commands anything like universal respect, and perhaps with age he has become less inclined to undertake rash adventures.” Hoare, another diarist, noted that Churchill seemed “very exhilarated” and that “the Press talked of him as Prime Minister.” It was not just the press; Sir John Wheeler-Bennett was among those establishmentarians who, listening to Winston, “first realized that Churchill was ‘the pilot of the storm’ who was needed to lead us through the crisis of the Second World War.” That thought did not occur to Neville Chamberlain, but he was impressed; to his sister he wrote that he took “the same view as Winston, to whose excellent broadcast we have just been listening. I believe Russia will always act as she thinks her own interests demand, and I cannot believe she would think her interests serv
ed by… German domination in the Balkans.”90

  In Berlin, William Shirer wrote: “The local enthusiasm for peace a little dampened today by Churchill’s speech last night.” Goebbels suppressed references to Winston’s comments on Russia, but his allusion to the Admiralty’s success in shielding merchantmen from Nazi submarines had touched a nerve. Led by Der Stürmer, Völkischer Beobachter, and Deutsches Nachtrichenbüro, the German press had made a great thing out of the U-boat campaign; U-boat captains were the toast of the Reich, and cartoonists had pictured Winston as a battered, cornered prizefighter and as a drowning man surrounded by periscopes. His announcement that the subs had let a week pass without a victory enraged Hans Fritzsche, director of the Nazi broadcasting services. Fritzsche interrupted a program to deliver a thirteen-minute polemic denouncing Winston, quoting him and then raging: “So that is what the dirty gangster thinks! Who does that filthy liar think he is fooling?… So Mr. Churchill—that bloated swine [aufgeblasenes Schwein]—spouts through his dirty teeth that in the last week no English ship has been molested by German submarines? He does, indeed?… There you have the twisted and diseased mind of this infamous profiteer and specialist in stinking lying. Naturally those British ships have not been molested; they have been sunk.”91

  It is possible to be more overbearing in German than in any other tongue, but only if one has mastered it as Winston had mastered English. In any duel of denigration he was bound to leave Fritzsche far behind, and he did it in November, in his second wartime address over the BBC. Germany, he said, was more fragile than it seemed. He had

  the sensation and also the conviction that that evil man over there and his cluster of confederates are not sure of themselves, as we are sure of ourselves; that they are harassed in their guilty souls by the thought and by the fear of an ever-approaching retribution for their crimes, and for the orgy of destruction in which they have plunged us all. As they look out tonight from their blatant, panoplied, clattering Nazi Germany, they cannot find one single friendly eye in the whole circumference of the globe. Not one!92

  Russia, he said, “returns them a flinty stare”; Italy “averts her gaze”; Japan “is puzzled and thinks herself betrayed”; Turkey, Islam, India, and China “would regard with undisguised dread a Nazi triumph, well knowing what their fate would soon be”; and the “great English-speaking Republic across the Atlantic makes no secret of its sympathies.” Thus “the whole world is against Hitler and Hitlerism. Men of every race and clime feel that this monstrous apparition stands between them and the forward move which is their due, and for which the age is ripe.” The “seething mass of criminality and corruption constituted by the Nazi Party machine” was responsible for the power of its führer, “a haunted, morbid being, who, to their eternal shame, the German people in their bewilderment have worshipped as a god.”93

  Jock Colville wrote that he had “listened to Winston Churchill’s wireless speech, very boastful, over-confident and indiscreet (especially about Italy and the U.S.A.), but certainly most amusing.” If Colville was condescending, Harold Nicolson sometimes turned his thumb down on a Churchill broadcast. After listening to one of the early radio addresses, Nicolson observed in his diary that Winston “is a little too rhetorical, and I do not think that his speech will really have gone down with the masses. He is too belligerent for this pacifist age, and although once anger comes to steel our sloppiness, his voice will be welcome to them, at the moment it reminds them of heroism which they do not really feel.”94

  One hesitates to gainsay Harold Nicolson; he was one of the shrewdest observers of his time, and his lapses were rare. But this may have been one of them. Nicolson, with Amery and Spears, was a member of the Eden group and continued to attend their Carlton meetings well into 1940. More important, he—like Colville—belonged to the upper class, and carried all its paraphernalia with him. His credentials as an analyst of “the masses” are therefore thin; as he himself acknowledged, he misinterpreted the feelings of his own constituents. Now that the issue with Hitler was joined and English blood was flowing, Churchill had become the most overstated member of His Majesty’s Government. Clearly that troubled Nicolson; men with his background prized understatement and recoiled from its opposite. Elsewhere on England’s social spectrum, however, that was not true. Among the middle and lower classes, pacifism had begun to fade when Hitler entered Prague, and once war was declared it was replaced by patriotism. Before the war became dreary and stale, the signs of the nation’s shift in mood had been unmistakable. The jubilant response to the naval victory off Montevideo had been one. Another had appeared when the people learned—from accounts of a Churchill speech in Parliament—that Luftwaffe pilots were machine-gunning the crews of unarmed fishing vessels and “describing on the radio what fun it was to see a little ship ‘crackling in flames like a Christmas tree.’ ” Winston was swamped with mail from clerks and miners, waitresses and small businessmen, demanding reprisals. Of course, he refused; he was a gentleman. But they weren’t, and they vastly outnumbered those who were.

  There was talk—more out of Parliament than in it—of Churchill as prime minister. It was, and for thirty years had been, the only job which clearly suited him. That does not mean he was ineffectual elsewhere. He had always been able, and often brilliant, in other ministries, and even his Admiralty critics conceded that no other man in public life could match his performance in the private office. But given the broad reaches of his mind, his knowledge of the entire government, and his inability to hold his tongue in check, he often exasperated the cabinet by trespassing in departments which were the preserve of other men round the table. So it was in his BBC broadcasts. Although he began by confining himself to the war at sea, sooner or later he was bound to touch upon issues which could not be remotely construed as naval. If his touch had been light, the encroachment would have been ignored, but it was also characteristic of him that he was incapable of subtlety. His third major broadcast raised an issue which was clearly the special concern of the Foreign Office. He tore into Europe’s neutral nations. By now none could doubt that the German führer had plans for their future, yet like Scarlett O’Hara they seemed to be promising themselves they would think about it tomorrow, while every tomorrow darkened their prospects. In a BBC broadcast on January 20, 1940, Churchill said:

  All of them hope that the storm will pass

  before their turn comes to be devoured.

  But I fear—I fear greatly—

  the storm will not pass.

  It will rage and it will roar,

  ever more loudly, ever more widely.

  It will spread to the South;

  It will spread to the North.

  There is no chance of a speedy end

  except through united action;

  And if at any time, Britain and France,

  wearying of the struggle,

  were to make a shameful peace,

  Nothing would remain for the smaller states of Europe,

  with their shipping and their possessions,

  but to be divided between the opposite, though similar,

  barbarisms of Nazidom and Bolshevism.95

  Hoare commented in his diary: “Winston’s broadcast to the neutrals. Bad effect.” One consequence of the broadcast, unknown in London, was a Führerordnung to restudy possible operations in Scandinavia. Hitler guessed—correctly—that the first lord of the Admiralty had his eye on Norway. The Foreign Office was more concerned about the reaction in neutral capitals. In a pained note Halifax wrote Churchill: “I am afraid I think the effect of your broadcast in the countries which you no doubt had principally in mind has been very different from what you anticipated—though if I had seen your speech myself, I should have expected some such reactions.” Among the newspapers which had bridled were Het Handelsblad in Holland, Journal de Genève, Denmark’s Politiken, and Norway’s Morgenbladet. Halifax complained that it “puts me in an impossible position if a member of the Gov. like yourself takes a line in public w
hich differs from that taken by the PM or myself: and I think, as I have to be in daily touch with these tiresome neutrals, I ought to be able to predict how their minds will work.” Churchill answered at once: “This is undoubtedly a disagreeable bouquet. I certainly thought I was expressing yr view & Neville’s…. Do not however be quite sure that my line will prove so inconvenient as now appears. What the neutrals say is vy different from what they feel: or from what is going to happen.” In fact Hitler had designs on most of them, and before spring ended the swastika would float over all their capitals but Switzerland’s.96

  Halifax had passed over the one paragraph in the broadcast with momentous implications. It was a reference to the fighting going on in Finland, part of a complex issue which no one in England, including Churchill, understood. The Russo-German marriage of convenience had scarcely been consummated in Poland before divorce proceedings were quietly begun. Stalin, anxious to guard his Baltic flank from a future Nazi attack, signed pacts with Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, permitting Moscow to garrison Red Army troops in each. He then turned to Finland. Among his objectives, all of which were defensive, was blocking the Gulf of Finland with artillery on both coasts, thus protecting the entrance to Leningrad. The Soviet Union offered Helsinki 2,134 square miles in exchange for the cession of 1,066 Finnish square miles. National sentiment—and fear of a German reprisal—barred an agreement. The Russians, desperate, offered to buy the territory. Helsinki still refused, and on November 30, 1939, the Red Army invaded Finland. To outsiders the invasion was an atrocity as black as the Nazi seizure of Poland. In retrospect, however, the difference is obvious. Russia’s need to defend Leningrad is clear. The city came perilously close to conquest by the Germans later, and would certainly have fallen to the Nazis without the strip taken from the Finns.