Alone, 1932-1940

by William Manchester

  Over a hundred collections of papers remain in private hands, including some of Spears’s, Camrose’s, some of Cherwell’s, some of Halifax’s, Amery’s, Lord Lloyd’s, Lord Southborough’s, Butler’s, Lothian’s, Boothby’s, Geoffrey Dawson’s, J. L. Garvin’s, Sheila Grant Duff’s, Ironside’s, Thomas Jones’s, Harold Laski’s, Paul Maze’s, Harold Nicolson’s, those of Viscount Norwich (Duff Cooper), Major General Pakenham-Walsh, Selborne, Vansittart, Weir, Chaim Weizmann, William Heinemann Ltd., Cripps, Rumbold, Salisbury, Swinton, Thornton-Kemsley, Ramsay MacDonald, Cecil, and the Blenheim Palace Archive.

  Primary Historical Sources

  British Documents

  British Cabinet Documents, Premier (Prime Minister), and Foreign Office Documents are catalogued at the Public Record Office in Kew, Richmond, Surrey, under “Records of Interest to Social Scientists.” Guidance is necessary; the records of the Committee of Imperial Defence, for example, are filed under twenty-one different categories.

  Published material may be found in Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939, particularly the second and third series, edited by E. L. Woodward, MA, FBA, and Rohan Butler, assisted by Anne Orne, MA, and issued by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office in 1952. Other unpublished official material concerning Churchill is in the archives of the Air Ministry, the Committee of Imperial Defence, the Treasury, Documents on International Affairs, and Documents Concerning German-Polish Relations and the Outbreak of Hostilities between Great Britain and Germany, London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1939 (The British Blue Book). Verbatim accounts of all proceedings in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords are published in Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), England’s equivalent of America’s Congressional Record.

  French Documents

  Le Livre Jaune Français. Documents diplomatiques, 1938–1939 (Paris: Ministre des Affaires Étrangères (The French Yellow Book).

  Documents Diplomatiques Français, Première Série and Deuxième Série: Les Événements survenus en France de 1933 à 1945, a postwar investigation of French policy in the 1930s conducted by the Assemblée Nationale and published (a two-volume report supported by nine volumes of testimony) in 1947.

  German Documents

  Dokumente der deutschen Politik, 1933–1940; Akten zur Deutschen Auswürtigen Politik 1918–1945 (German Foreign Policy Documents), published jointly by the Foreign Office and the U.S. State Department; issued in Baden between 1950 and 1956. These documents are divided into Serie C (four volumes, covering January 30, 1933, to October 31, 1933) and Serie D, thirteen volumes which are arranged, not chronologically but by subject, but generally running from September 1937 to December 1941. There is an eleven-month gap here, but there are gaps in the Allied documents, too.

  Nuremberg Documents (ND)

  Nuremberg seems far in the future to those who have turned the last page of this book, but it was there that all the secret papers of the interwar years—some dating from 1919—first appeared, and in documents which could not be explained away. They may be found in Trial of the Major War Criminals: forty-two volumes covering the proceedings and exhibits—mostly in German—before the International Military Tribunal; Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression: ten volumes of additional interrogation transcripts and affidavits, in English; Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Tribunals: fifteen volumes of selected material from the twelve Nuremberg trials following the adjournment of the IMT.

  Other Published Documentary Material

  I documenti diploma italiani; Ottavo series, 1935–1939, Rome, Liberia della Stato, 1952–1953; Official Document Concerning Polish German and Polish Soviet Relations 1933–1939, London, 1939 (The Polish White Book); Documents and Material Relating to the Eve of the Second World War, 1937–1939, two volumes, Moscow, Foreign Language Publishing House, 1948; Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, three volumes, London, Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1931–1953.

  Citations from British manuscript collections are puzzling, or rather are a series of puzzles, because each archive makes its own rules. In some instances the archive is not large enough to require extensive cataloguing. With eminent men it is not so simple. However, there are certain constants. The figure or code to the left of the slash—e.g., “123” in “123/456”—identifies the section or shelf where a document may be found. The figure to the right usually identifies the specific box number, or, if the entry is large, such as a scrapbook, the file number which houses the document. See Janet Foster and Julia Sheppard, British Archives: A Guide to Archive Resources in the United Kingdom (London, 1982).

  The first of the three major documents centers for this work is the Churchill College Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge; Correll Barnett, the learned Keeper of the Archives, was ably assisted, during my early visits, by Archivist Marion Stewart, who has since been succeeded by Leslie James. The Centre contains 300 accessions of diplomatic, political, military, scientific, and naval papers, most of them twentieth-century. Everything has been done to make document retrieval simple; even so, the researcher must dig. To take one example, the Spears papers in the Centre comprise four sections. The first number following the code abbreviation gives the section number. Section 1 (300 files) is correspondence, A to Z. The second code number identifies the file number. The papers in Spears’s code 2 (thirty-five files) pertain to personal and family matters. Section 3 (sixty-five boxes) has no material about Churchill and is restricted to scholars. Section 4 (seven files) contains miscellaneous papers.

  The second mother lode of documents is the Public Record Office in Kew, Surrey, safe in the hands of Alfred Knightbridge, head of the search department. Here a letter code (CAB for cabinet papers, PrP for Prime Minister’s papers, etc.) opens each citation. The second part, in numbers, breaks down the mass of materials by dates: the date of a cabinet meeting, or of events between meetings. The slash comes next, then the “piece number” identifying a given document.

  The third trove of documentary material is the British Library’s reference division in Great Russell Street (D. A. Clark and G. E. A. Raspin in charge). Much of the most valuable material here is kept in the Woolwich Repository; delivery is normally a day after application. British newspapers since 1801 are filed in the library’s Newspaper Library, at Colindale Library, London.

  Abbreviations and Short Titles Used in the Notes

  BSCP Papers of the Baroness Spencer-Churchill (Clementine Churchill).

  CAB British Cabinet Documents, Public Record Office, Kew.

  ChP Churchill Papers.

  DBFP Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939, edited by E. L. Woodward and Rohan Butler, assisted by Anne Orne. London, 1952.

  DDF Documents Diplomatiques Français, Première Série, Deuxième Série.

  DGFP Dokumente der deutschen Politik 1933–1940; Akten zur Deutschen Auswürtigen Politik 1918–1945. Series C, D.

  Événements Les Événements survenus en France de 1933 à 1945.

  FCNA Führer’s Conferences on Naval Affairs.

  Hansard Record of Parliamentary Debates (Hansard).

  ND Nuremberg Documents (see also NCA, TMWC, and TWC below).

  NCA Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, 10 volumes of interrogation transcripts and affidavits; in English.

  NYT New York Times.

  PrP Premier (Prime Minister) Papers. Public Record Office, Kew.

  Times The Times of London.

  TMWC Trial of the Major War Criminals; 42 volumes covering the proceeding and exhibits (mostly in German) before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.

  TWC Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Tribunals; 15 volumes of selected material from the twelve Nuremberg trials following the adjournment of the International Military Tribunal.

  WM/[name] Author’s interviews.

  WSCHCS Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, edited by Robert Rhodes James.

  The Official Biography of Winston Spencer Churchill, by Martin Gilbert (Boston, 1966–), is cited as
follows:

  WSC V Volume V. The Prophet of Truth, 1922–1939 (biography)

  CV V/1 Companion Volume V, part 1 (1922–1929, Documents)

  CV V/2 Companion Volume V, part 2 (1930–1935, Documents)

  CV V/3 Companion Volume V, part 3 (1936–1939, Documents)

  WSC VI Volume VI, Finest Hour 1939–1941

  Preamble

  1. WM/Lady Soames (at Chartwell), 10/27/80; Robin Fedden, Churchill and Chartwell (Westerham, Kent, 1968), 13 ff.

  2. Walter Henry Thompson, Assignment Churchill (New York, 1955), 92.

  3. Walter Thompson, 183.

  4. Mary Soames, Clementine Churchill: The Biography of a Marriage (Boston, 1979), 352; Adam Sykes and Iain Sproat, eds., The Wit of Sir Winston (London, 1965), 85.

  5. WM/Lady Soames (at Chartwell), 10/27/80; Fedden, 25–26, 43–44. R. Howells, Simply Churchill (New York, 1965), 19.

  6. WM/Grace Hamblin, 11/4/80, and letter of 9/12/87; Hamblin, letter to Martin Gilbert, 6/12/78; WM/Lady Soames (at Chartwell), 10/27/80; Fedden, 27; Kay Halle, The Irrepressible Churchill: A Treasury of Winston Churchill’s Wit (New York, 1967), 109.

  7. Howells, 41, 36; WM/Sir William Deakin, 10/5/80.

  8. Howells, 36; Elizabeth Nel, Mr. Churchill’s Secretary (New York, 1958), 33.

  9. Norman McGowan, My Years with Churchill (London, 1958), 86–87; Howells, 19.

  10. Howells, 19–20, 49; Halle, 313.

  11. Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, 5 vols. and The Aftermath (New York, 1923–1931), V, Afterword.

  12. Bruce West, Churchill’s Pilot: The Man Who Flew Churchill (Canada, 1975), 6; McGowan, 93; Howells, 110.

  13. Fedden, 50–51; Howells, 37–39; WM/Lieutenant General Sir Ian Jacobs, 11/12/80; Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, ed., Action This Day: Memoirs by Lord Normanbrook, John Colville, Sir John Martin, Sir Ian Jacobs, Lord Bridges, Sir Leslie Rowan (London, 1968), 183; Charles Eade, ed., Churchill by His Contemporaries (London, 1953), 309.

  14. Howells, 36, 138; McGowan, 92–93.

  15. Howells, 20.

  16. Howells, 138; CV I/2 996; Phyllis Moir, I Was Winston Churchill’s Private Secretary (New York, 1941), 1, 89–90; WM/ Deakin; WM/Kathleen Hill, 11/4/80.

  17. WM/Sir John Colville, 10/8/80; Sarah Churchill, A Thread in the Tapestry (New York, 1967), 38.

  18. Fedden, 49.

  19. Fedden, 49; Sir David Hunt, On the Spot: An Ambassador Remembers (London, 1975), 63; Colin Coote and Denvil Batchelor, Maxims and Reflections (London, 1947), 36; Viscount Chandos, Memoirs (London, 1962), 167; Howells, 150.

  20. WM/Virginia Cowles, 10/15/80; WM/George Malcolm Thompson, 10/13/80; WM/Lord Geoffrey Lloyd, 11/27/80, WM/Deakin; WM/Lady Soames, 10/9/80; WM, personal information.

  21. Wheeler-Bennett, ed., 87.

  22. WM/Lord Lloyd; WM/Lord Boothby, 10/16/80.

  23. WM/A. J. P. Taylor 12/1/80; WM, personal information.

  24. Second Earl of Birkenhead, The Professor and the Prime Minister (Boston, 1962), 27–35, 36.

  25. Birkenhead, 129–159 passim.

  26. Sir John Colville, Footprints in Time (London, 1976), 100; WM/Colville.

  27. Birkenhead, 38.

  28. WM/Lady Soames, 10/9/80; Halle, 263; Wheeler-Bennett, ed., 25–28.

  29. Kenneth Young, Churchill and Beaverbrook: A Study in Friendship and Politics (New York, 1966), 130.

  30. Coote and Batchelor, 44.

  31. WM/Cowles; WM/Kay Halle, 8/6/80; WM/Pamela Harriman, 8/22–23/80; Elizabeth Longford, Winston Churchill: A Pictorial Life Story (Chicago, 1974), 87, 130–131.

  32. Sykes and Sproat, eds., 70, 71; Eade, ed., 307; Coote and Batchelor, 119–120.

  33. Lord Moran, Churchill. Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran: The Struggle for Survival. 1940–1965 (Boston, 1966), 198; Halle, 152.

  34. WM/Colville; Wheeler-Bennett, ed., 59–60.

  35. McGowan, 72.

  36. McGowan, 70; WM/Vanda Salmon, 11/26/80.

  37. WM/Salmon; Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years (London, 1981), 28; Virginia Cowles, Winston Churchill, The Era and the Man (New York, 1953), 11.

  38. Walter Thompson, 94; Eade, ed., 356–357; McGowan, 60.

  39. John Paget, The New “Examen” (London, 1934).

  40. Halle, 263; Soames, 323; Gilbert, Wilderness, 129.

  41. Hunt, 77.

  42. Soames, 301.

  43. Eade, ed., 300, 309.

  44. Eade, ed., 305.

  45. Violet Bonham Carter, Winston Churchill: An Intimate Portrait (New York, 1965), 151, 152; Moran, 449.

  46. Kenneth Young, Churchill and Beaverbrook: A Study in Friendship and Politics (New York, 1966), 26.

  47. Soames, 305; WM/Deakin; Moran, 420; Winston S. Churchill, Young Winston’s Wars; The Original Despatches of Winston S. Churchill, War Correspondent 1897–1900, edited by Frederick Woods (New York, 1972), xiii; WM/William L. Shirer, 7/20/74.

  48. WM/Deakin.

  49. WM/Cecily Gemmell, 7/10/80; Walter Thompson, 45.

  50. Wheeler-Bennett, ed., 144; Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters, II, edited by Nigel Nicolson, 3 vols. (London, 1966), 320–321.

  51. Peter Stansky, ed., Churchill: A Profile (New York, 1973), 38.

  52. Robert Rhodes James, Anthony Eden (London, 1980), 229; Moran, 604.

  53. WM/Hill, 11/4/80.

  54. WM/Gemmell, 7/10/80.

  55. Nel, 31.

  56. Moir, 2, 58; Howells, 61.

  57. Nel, 32; Moir, 88.

  Prologue

  1. Times 11/12/32.

  2. NYT 10/19/32; Times 10/31/32.

  3. NYT 10/6/32, 10/25/32, 11/1/32; Time 11/7/32.

  4. Time 11/14/32.

  5. James Morris, Farewell The Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (New York, 1978), 314, 311; Colin Cross, The Fall of the British Empire (New York and London, 1968), 216.

  6. Morris, 313–314; Time 3/21/32.

  7. Morris, 362; Time 4/11/32, 4/18/32.

  8. Sir John Colville, The Fringes of Power: 10 Downing Street Diaries, 1939–1955 (New York, 1985), 71.

  9. Morris, 335

  10. Times 8/18/14; Robert Rhodes James, Memoirs (New York, 1970), 110.

  11. NYT 11/18/29; Nation 2/12/30.

  12. Times 1/22/29; Book Review Digest 433–434, 792–793; Siegfried Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey, 1916–1920 (New York, 1946), 116–119.

  13. Harold Nicolson, Public Faces (London, 1932), 16–17; Richard Kenin and Justin Wintle, eds., The Dictionary of Biographical Quotations (New York, 1958), 35.

  14. Winston S. Churchill, Amid These Storms: Thoughts and Adventures (New York, 1932), 15–16; Telford Taylor, Munich: The Price of Peace (New York, 1979), 204.

  15. Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (New York, 1931), 131.

  16. Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, 5 vols. and The Aftermath (New York, 1923–1931), V, 66.

  17. Hugh Dalton, The Fateful Years (London, 1957), 41–42.

  18. William Manchester, The Last Lion: Visions of Glory (Boston, 1983), 76.

  19. T. R. Fehrenbach, F.D.R.’s Undeclared War 1939 to 1941 (New York, 1967), 22.

  20. Telford Taylor, 107; Alistair Horne, To Lose a Battle (Boston, 1969), 22–23.

  21. Churchill, Crisis, The Aftermath, 156.

  22. William L. Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic (New York, 1969), 137.

  23. Alistair Horne, To Lose a Battle (Boston, 1969), 56–57; Simone de Beauvoir, La Force de l’âge (Paris, 1961), 116–117.

  24. Shirer, Collapse, 203; Beauvoir, 120–121; Horne, 57.

  25. Beauvoir, 120–121.

  26. Horne, 52; Beauvoir, 155.

  27. Robert T. Elson and the editors of Time-Life Books, Prelude to War (New York, 1976), 47.

  28. Elson et al., 74–79.

  29. NYT 12/2/25.

  30. Berliner Tageblatt 6/25/22.

  31. Frankfurter Zeitung 12/2/25; The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed. (Chicago, 1974), XIX, 966–967; Berliner Tageblatt 5/9/19; NYT 6/25/22.<
br />
  32. WSCHCS 5197–5206; J. D. Scott, Vickers: A History (London, 1962), 86–87, 150–151; Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt, Die blutige Internationale der Rüstungen (Berlin, 1933), 50.

  33. General Karl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Col. J. J. Graham, 3 vols. (London, 1911), I, 5: Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (New York, 1962), 314.

  34. Hugh Gibson, A Journal from Our Legation in Belgium (New York, 1917), 324.

  35. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich, 1932), 369–370; Konrad Keiden, Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin, 1932), 36.

  36. Living Age 12/12/25; WM/Tilo Freiherr von Wilmowsky, 5/30/63 (Essen); Der Spiegel 6/5/63; Tilo von Wilmowsky, Rückblickened möchte ich sagen… (Hamburg, 1961), 178–181; The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, XIX, 969.

  37. Hans Kohn, The Mind of Germany, The Education of a Nation (New York, 1960), 308; Franz L. Neumann, Behemoth (New York, 1942), 23.

  38. Süddeutsche Monatshafte 12/21/24.

  39. Time 8/22/32, 10/17/32.

  40. Time 9/5/32, 11/28/32.

  41. Times 2/2/32; Arnold Brecht, Prelude to Silence (New York, 1944), 35.

  42. ND 203, 204, 37–25 PS.

  43. André François-Poncet, The Fateful Years: Memoirs of a French Ambassador in Berlin 1931–1938 (New York, 1949), 61.

  44. NYT 3/25/33; Oswald Spengler, Jahre der Entscheidung (Munich, 1933), xiii.

  45. Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Boston, 1948), 84; Hansard 5/13/32, 7/11/32.

  46. Churchill, Storm, 84; Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler, The Missing Years (London, 1957), 193–196.

  47. Hansard 11/23/32; Daily Mail 10/17/32; WSC V, 627.