by John Lukacs
8. CA, 4/150.
9. See Pownall on Churchill that day (“The man is mad,” above). This violent criticism, however, was aimed not at the above dispatch but at Churchill’s earlier endorsement of the larger, so-called Weygand plan.
10. CA 4/150; Neave, The Flames of Calais, 122- 23.
11. Neave, The Flames of Calais, 107.
12. I say imprecision, because at the time of Hitler’s halt order, Guderian’s spearheads across the Aa Canal were not advancing; they were consolidating their bridgeheads. On the other hand, had Hitler or Rundstedt ordered Guderian to proceed with his advance toward Dunkirk, there is reason to believe that he would have arrived there in a day’s march, well before a considerable number of Allied troops, retreating from the east, would have got to the town.
13. Roberts, The Holy Fox, 49.
14. Ibid., 59. See also Pownall, who respected Hitler at that time: a “pronounced Anti-German complex … I regard as a danger to the country” (Chief of Staff 93).
15. While some saw (and some still see) Churchill as a reactionary, others saw him as a pro-democratic demagogue. Sheila Lawlor, in Churchill and the Politics of War: “Churchill and his supporters … were the radicals fighting forces of reaction” (4) • This is quite wrong.
16. Pownall wrote in 1936: Chamberlain is “entirely ignorant about military and strategic questions.… His ideas on strategy would disgrace a board school” (Chief of Staff, 42). Consider, too, Roberts: “The senior anti-appeasers all had fine war records — Duff Cooper, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, Winston Churchill, Roger Keyes, Louis Spears and so on—while National government ministers who advocated appeasement — Baldwin, Macdonald, Chamberlain, Hoare, Sir John Simon, Sir Kingsley Wood — had not themselves seen action” (Eminent Churchillians, 12).
17. See, among other evidences, his 1930 preface to Dictatorship on Trial, mentioned in Lukacs, The Duel, 51.
18. Aster, 1939, 334-35. It is not improbable that Kennedy may have exaggerated. These are Kennedy’s words; he tried to convince Chamberlain to pressure the Poles to give in.
19. Kennedy to James Forrestal, December 1945: “Chamberlain, he says, stated that America and the world Jews had forced England into the war” (Forrestal Diaries, 122). Kenneth Clark, who was fairly close to Chamberlain, wrote in his memoir Another Part of ‘the Wood: A Self-Portrait(a very carefully crafted self-portrait) that Chamberlain had told him at Chequers that “he was a man of facts.” Clark: “Were not Hitler’s speeches and the horrors of Nazidom facts? Mr. Chamberlain closed his mind to them. ‘All propaganda,’ he said, when I ventured to mention them to him” (270-71). (Has Clark “ventured” to do that? Perhaps.)
20. “This was a state of affairs happily concurred with, although for different reasons, by the French government” (Esnouf, “British Government War Aims and Attitudes,” 30).
21. As late as April 1939 “Halifax was deluged with letters from a number of the nation’s grandest aristocrats imploring him to return to appeasement. Althought they differed over details, their general line was that Germany bore no ill will towards Britain per se and ought to be allowed a free path eastwards to fight Russia. To these people the Polish guarantee was a disastrous error. Another constantly recurring feature in the letters was the belief that war with Germany would be ruinous to Britain’s place in the world and only Jews and Communists would benefit. Halifax, who had himself roughly subscribed to almost these views as recently as 1937-38, wrote back long and polite letters, courteously explaining and defending his policy. He knew these correspondents socially; indeed, he had been the Marquis of Londonderry’s fag at Eton. [Some of them] still implored him, well after the war had begun, to review friendship with Germany” (Roberts, The Holy Fox, 151-52).
22. The evidences of this are not easy to reconstruct, since they are scattered and of course incomplete. (There is much interesting material in Roberts, Eminent Churchillians.) Chamberlain did not weed his papers and correspondence (in Birmingham University Library), or at least not much. Halifax (in the Borthwick Institute Library of the University of York) did so more considerably, as did Lady Halifax. In the Churchill Archives, Cambridge, the diaries of Sir Maurice Hankey have been culled: there is either nothing or very little for each year of the period 1939-44, though some of his correspondence is there. In the papers of David Margesson, the chief whip of the Conservatives (deposited in the Churchill Archives by his daughter), the years 1939-46 are missing. Weeded, too, are the Butler Papers in Trinity College, Cambridge: the “Guide” to these papers states, for example, “Four items appear to be of continuing sensitivity and should not be made available until that sensitivity can be said to have evaporated.” (These items are in E 3/60, a batch of letters to and from Sir Samuel Hoare and Wing Commander Archie James, MP, at the British Embassy in Madrid.)
23. Butler to Lord Brabourne, 17 February 1939, Butler Papers, F 79/93-Clark, Another Part of the World, 271. Also Butler Papers, F 80/98 (written mid-1939) : “I have always attempted to do a character study of those with whom I have worked. … Sir Horace Wilson’s power is very great. He is the Burleigh of the present age and he interested me very much the other day when he compared the task of Chamberlain to that of Queen Elizabeth.… [He] likes power and ‘moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform.’ … His forte of industrial negotiation will be stretched to the utmost if he is ever able to come to an understanding with Nazi Germany as he still in his heart hopes to do so.… [But] it would be unfair to say that this notable figure with his blue eyes, soft voice and furtive face, is the architect only of appeasement.”
24. Ibid., F 70/14.
25. Ibid., F 79/24.
26. Roberts, The Holy Fox, 140.
27. Halifax’s autobiography, Fulness of Days, is bland and hardly useful, though here and there it does have touches of humor. The Earl of Birkenhead, Halifax: The Life of Lord Halifax, is more useful and at times critical.
28. Roberts, The Holy Fox, 1.
29. Ibid., 67, quoting from Baldwin’s papers (173/61) on 15 November 1937: “The visit to Hitler constituted the high-water mark of Halifax’s appeasement.” Writing to Baldwin of a recent conversation that the League of Nations’ commissioner of Danzig, Karl Burckhardt, had had with Hitler, he remarked, “Nationalism and Racialism is a powerful force but I can’t feel that it’s either unnatural or immoral!” He added, on the eve of his departure, “I cannot myself doubt that these fellows are genuine haters of Communism, etc.! And I daresay if we were in their position we might feel the same!” When Ribbentrop, then the German ambassador in London, told Tom Jones, then an arch-appeaser, “The sooner Halifax met the Führer the better” (ibid., 64), he was right.
30. CAB 27/623-26 (378).
31. Roberts, The Holy Fox, 95.
32. As early as March 1936 (the Rhineland crisis) Halifax suggested that “any direct approach to Germany should be kept secret from the French” (ibid., 59). In July 1938 Hitler’s adjutant, Captain Fritz Wiedemann, visited London. Halifax received him in his office. As he left, Halifax was supposed to have said that he “would like to see as the culmination of his work the Führer entering London at the side of the King amid the acclamations of the English people.” Wiedemann, who was not unreliable, reported this to Hitler. It is found in the published volumes of the German diplomatic documents and is also cited by Roberts, Eminent Churchillians, 16-17 (where, however, the visit is misdated as July 1939, not 1938) ; but Roberts adds, “It is always possible that the statement was exaggerated, but when the conversation was made public after the war, Halifax made no attempt to deny it.” Halifax’s statement was also confirmed to this author (Private information).
33. Di aries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, 103, 105.
34. CA 2/343.
35. Unpublished note, left in the Garrowby Album (Halifax family scrap-book), cited in Roberts, The Holy Fox, 181. A somewhat curious find, left perhaps by mistake, given Halifax’s careful weeding of documents: “Ever the diligent curator of his own rep
utation, Halifax had afterwards annotated it.”
36. It is interesting that the note is on the prime minister’s stationery. Did Halifax scribble the note in Chamberlain’s office? Or—more probably—was the prime ministerial stationery current in the Cabinet Room?
37. Roberts, The Holy Fox, 188.
38. CA 20/11.
39. Roberts, Eminent Churchillians, 157.
40. Halifax’s diaries were written for circulation in his family; many of the above entries are in the diary at York, A.7.8.4. “Gangsters” appears in the Butler Papers; G 11, others in Roberts, The Holy Fox, 199. See also Lawlor, Churchill and the Politics of War, 35.
41. Halifax Papers, A. 7.8.4.
42. Esnouf, “British Government War Aims and Attitudes,” 196.
43. Before 1937 Chamberlain lived at 11 Downing Street, the official residence of the chancellor of the exchequer; his own house in Eaton Square he rented to Ribbentrop, then the German ambassador.
44. Colvin, The Chamberlain Cabinet 18, 21.
45. CAB 65/7.
46. Sumner Welles in March, after he had visited London: Churchill was unsteady, drinking too much. Adolf Berle, assistant secretary of state: Churchill may be too old and “tired.” On 11 May Churchill was discussed at the White House. Harold Ickes, secretary of the interior: “Apparently Churchill is very unreliable under the influence of drink.” Roosevelt said that he “supposed Churchill was the best man England had.” Frances Perkins, secretary of labor: Roosevelt was “uncertain” about Churchill, asking his cabinet members “what kind of man” Churchill really was. Ickes: Churchill was “too old.” Add to this the view of Mrs. Roosevelt, who thought that Churchill was “reactionary”; she had gone so far as to ask a friend to impress that upon her husband (Lukacs, The Duel, 73). About the early Churchill-Roosevelt relationship, ibid., 72-74.
47. These two pages, including the passages from Churchill’s messages, from ibid., 75-77.
48. CAB 65/7. Churchill’s answer to the Australian prime minister appears in Gilbert, The Churchill War Papers, Companion Volume 2, 119.
49. “During the last war Shakespeare was played continuously at the Old Vic, and it is again the intention of that theatre to keep the door open.… Sadlers’ Wells Ballet lost music, scenery and dresses in Holland a fortnight ago, and has had to revise its repertory. Its London season will open on 4 June.” (The Times, 24 May, praised Richard Tauber’s performance of Schumann songs and Joseph Weingarten’s Beethoven piano concert: “At the end the audience could feel that they had listened to a serious interpretation of one of Beethoven’s noblest works.”) An entire page (5) of the Scotsman was devoted to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, Home and Foreign Missions Day: “Praying about peace, advocating prayers for victory, declared the Rev. Ewan Maclean, ‘we could have peace tomorrow — the Pax Germanica.’”
50. The lead article in the Daily Mail, 24 May, was about the fifth column: “There has been swift action on the home front. The Fifth Column in Britain are beginning to totter. Yesterday the authorities struck. The peril of inward rot is at least obvious to everyone. Holland fell in five days because no man could trust his neighbour.” (That is not why Holland fell.)
51. FR 134• Typical comments: “What’s the use of France? Or if they have an army what do they do with it?”
52. FR 134, 24 May, pp. 3, iii.
53. Nella’s Last War.
1. P. G. Wodehouse and his wife were in Le Touquet when the Germans arrived. The Germans treated them (as they also treated other English residents) with considerable courtesy. Wodehouse was favorably impressed with the Germans’ behavior and let them persuade him to give a talk, in English, on the German radio. His broadcast was mildly humorous and mild in sentiment. Reading the broadcast today, one can find little or nothing objectionable in it, though its attribution to Wodehouse’s naïveté is perhaps too simplistic. Subsequently he was fiercely attacked in Britain, where some accused him of treachery. That was a malevolent exaggeration. After the liberation of Paris, Malcolm Muggeridge, George Orwell, and others, including Waugh, tried their best to rehabilitate Wodehouse. This eventually happened, though Wodehouse, having translated himself to America, never returned to England.
2. Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, 470.
3. The Daily Herald cites Miss Doreen Porcheron, “one of the two West End chorus girls who undertook to fight Vulgar nudity’ on the stage.”
4. The Daily Mail, 25 May: “Ryde, Isle of Wight: 30 minutes’ pleasant crossing over sheltered waters bring you to this Peaceful, Carefree, Holiday-land!” (Only one or two days later the Isle of Wight steamers left: for Dover and then to Dunkirk.) The Daily Express, 25 May: “Ramsgate: Your Place in the Sun for Holidays as Usual!” Worthing: “Tour Wartime Choice!”
5. CA 20/14; also in Gilbert, Companion Volume, 140.
6. CAB 65/7.
7. Giobbe (Paris) in Documenti diplomatici italiani, 1939-43, series 9, vol. 4,439.
8. As a matter of fact the Swedish minister to France, Nordling, brought an indirect message from Goering to Reynaud on 19 May. (Nordling was in Stockholm on 10 May and saw Goering in Berlin on the fifteenth, arriving in Paris on the seventeenth.) On 26 May Goering met with another Swede, Dahlerus, a fervent partisan of an accommodation between Britain and Germany; at that time, however, their talks concerned the future of northern Norway and Narvik.
9. The minutes are reproduced in François Delpla, Les Papiers secrets du général Doumenc, Annexe 6: “Comité de Guerre du samedi 25 mai 1940” 504-9.
10. On 6 April 1940: “I still adhere to my view that [Musso] is going to bark more than bite” (Halifax Papers, A.7.8.3). Halifax was wrong.
11. Churchill, Their Finest Hour, 122.
12. It is perhaps noteworthy that in Bastianini’s autobiographical essays, Uomini, cose, fatti: Memorie d’un ambasciatore, there is nothing about Halifax and May 1940.
13. Roberts, The Holy Fox, 212.
14. CAB 65 / 7. WM 138 (40). Halifax may have had his reasons for bringing up Vansittart (who could never be accused of being pro-appeasement), but not Buder.
15. Did he? His version of the conversation with Halifax (see below) was not telegraphed to Rome until twenty-four hours later (and received in Rome at 5:20 a.m. on 27 May). Even given the weekend and the time necessary for encrypting it, this seems slow. In the margin of the dispatch there is Mussolini’s signature: he read it.
16. Annex to CAB 66/7. The text is Halifax’s dispatch to Sir Percy Loraine, British ambassador in Rome, 212 FO 800/319/70.
17. Documenti diplomatici italiani, 1939-1943, series 9, vol. 4,462-63.
18. Roberts, The Holy Fox, 229; Ismay Papers, CA n /3/100/2. Halifax often criticized Churchill’s war memoirs privately. Roberts’s analysis of the Halifax-Bastianini conversation is worth considering: “There were two totally different Allied plans for action with regard to Italy that were over the next three days to be constantly mixed up and confused with one another. To make matters worse, some politicians, including Halifax, later pretended to be referring to one when it was in fact the other, and after the war they denied the existence of one of the plans altogether. The first was the plan to bribe Mussolini to stay out of the war and the second a scheme to attempt to persuade him to intercede with Hitler to procure reasonable terms for a permanent cease-fire. The two were, of course, mutually contradictory: the first being designed to facilitate the more successful waging of the very war which the second intended to bring to an end” (ibid., 213). Not necessarily: the hope for Mussolini as peacemaker could encompass both, and the two plans did not seem contradictory to either Halifax or Bastianini at the time.
19. At the very time Halifax was talking with Bastianini, “the PrimeMinister hoped that the Fleet would adopt a vigorously offensive attitudeagainst the Italians if they came into the war” (CAB 69/1).
20. Pownall, Chief of Staff, 97.
21. ”I am not quite clear what advantages of a decisive character the Ger-mans would gain by start
ing up a Civil War in Ireland” (PREM 3/129/1). The dinner: Chartwell Household Diary in CA.
22. CAB 69/1; also in Gilbert, Companion Volume, 148-49.
23. CA 4/150.
24. About Italy, for instance, the newspapers printed many reports of the Italian preparations for war. The Daily Express, 25 May: Count Ciano’s speech, telling workers that “they were ready to act with a gun.” Another item: in Turin Fascist youths were told, “We shall leave from Turin for the last war of liberation which will break the chains still imposed on this country, which will open the gates of Gibraltar and Suez, and will make the Mediterranean again our sea!”
25. INF 1/264, No. 8 Secret.