Given the gathering economic crisis affecting the global economy, India was not a subject that commanded widespread popular attention, and because Churchill felt deeply about it, it did not follow that others did so, too. But some powerful people did. Esmond Harmsworth, son of Lord Rothermere, agreed with him on India, so much so that he published his views in the Daily Mail. The Morning Post also supported Churchill’s position. He tried to rouse the passions of Lancashire over the issue of textiles, as India had imposed tariffs on cotton manufactures from Britain. Despite manifold setbacks, Churchill was invigorated by a good old-fashioned political scrap, which involved tub-thumping up and down the country and engagement with a new set of political bedfellows. Though the government had little trouble from the Opposition, Churchill’s India crusade represented a significant challenge to the coalition and to Baldwin’s position as Tory leader. In the short term, however, it was to be Churchill’s reputation and position that suffered the most, because he was simply unable to generate sufficient support or interest for his cause. Once the India Act had been passed in June 1935 (the month in which Baldwin succeeded MacDonald as prime minister), Churchill knuckled down to supporting his party. He also continued to enjoy life; in late 1934, he embarked on a Mediterranean cruise aboard Lord Moyne’s yacht, visiting Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine and flying to Cairo.
On India, Churchill found himself at the apex of several alliances as he berated the government for “throwing away our conquests and our inheritance.”12 Churchill and the Tory diehards mounted an impressive challenge to the seemingly impregnable national government—so it might be suggested that Churchill’s renegade activity was not the strategic blunder it is often presented to have been. The India issue, as has been seen, was not the reason for his exclusion from government; the campaign actually resurrected his claim to be in the Cabinet, and the support garnered in this campaign joined him in the new crusade to get Britain to rearm in the face of the German threat. “Far from being destroyed over India, he was still an indomitable obstacle in the way of the direction in which Baldwin and his government had hoped to travel. Furthermore, on the defense of the realm, Churchill was making his stand on an issue even closer to the hearts of committed Tories.”13 India did not weaken his ability to make the rearmament case, and the campaign for air parity was a triumph within the Tory party, the forum that mattered most. As the 1930s wore on, Baldwin decided not to recall Churchill to government, not because he was unpopular, not because of India, but because he might become too strong.
Churchill and the Rise of Hitler
A fundamental fact of 1930s politics is that Churchill’s “judgement on Hitler was sounder than the dozens of European pilgrims to Berlin and the Berchtesgaden.”14 Churchill’s misgivings about Germany dated from very early in the decade, predating Hitler’s accession to power in 1933. He had visited Bavaria in 1932 in order to tour the battlefields trodden by the 1st Duke of Marlborough. As well as contracting paratyphoid, he was disturbed by the spirit of militarism he observed, which he described in the Commons in November 1932 as “bands of sturdy Teutonic youths, marching through the streets and roads of Germany, with the light of desire in their eyes to suffer for the Fatherland.”15 From this point on, Germany’s card was marked in Churchill’s mind—and Churchill was soon to become viewed in Germany as an enemy of its “rightful” progress as a major power. Given his concerns about Germany, it was logical for Churchill to oppose the general policies of disarmament that were pursued under the leadership of Ramsay MacDonald. While by no means decrying “collective security” (a contemporary buzz term and political movement too popular to work against), he argued strongly against placing all the eggs in one basket and hoping that others would do the same, seeing in this a crashing naivety as to the nature of international affairs.
Churchill also realized how the advent of air power had transformed the strategic situation; “this cursed, hellish invention and development of war,” he said in the Commons in February 1934, “has revolutionized our position. We are not the same kind of country we used to be when we were an island, only twenty years ago.” He went on to argue that it was inconceivable that Britain should delay establishing “an Air Force at least as strong as that of any Power that can get at us.”16 He struck an uncompromising sense of urgency. In March 1934, he implored the House to realize that “this is the stage [at which to increase the air force]. The turning point has been reached. . . . The scene has changed. This terrible new fact has occurred. Germany is arming—she is rapidly arming—and no one will stop her.”17
Churchill had denounced Hitler’s regime as soon as it attained power in 1933 and railed against its “pitiless ill-treatment of minorities.” He never fell for Hitler’s blandishments and empty reassurances about the reasonable claims of German foreign policy. The renaissance of German militarism led Churchill to appreciate the towering importance of the French army and the Royal Navy, the key instruments in any plan to contain German power. But Churchill’s warnings about Germany met with little favor in either the Commons or the country. There was no interest in visions of future war, and there was an obsession on the left with collective security, not rearmament. Both in Britain and France, the public were “keener on hearing what Hitler said about peace than what Churchill said about war.”18
In 1933 Churchill called for the scrapping of the ten-year rule. He condemned government attempts at the International Disarmament Conference in Geneva to reduce Britain’s and France’s armed forces to the level of Germany’s and also condemned the concessions made in the Anglo-German naval agreement of 1935. He firmly believed that diplomacy had to be backed up with credible force. His main political activity in 1936 was trying to align support for the League of Nations with support for British rearmament, a belt-and-braces approach calculated to appeal to the doves as well as the hawks. As he put it, “Some people say: ‘Put your trust in the League of Nations.’ Others say: ‘Put your trust in British rearmament.’ I say we want both. I put my trust in both.”19 By this time, Churchill was convinced that nothing was more important than restraining Germany. Action through the League, he believed, was the way of getting the disparate forces of right and left assembled.
The Focus group, started in 1936, was central to this enterprise, a sort of luncheon club supporting the view that Germany must be dealt with from a position of strength, drawing its members from all political parties. It advocated a foreign policy based on the League of Nations and collective security involving Russia. The Focus group wanted to attract genuine support from the left, hence its emphasis on the League and collective security and its pacifist overtones. It held public meetings and produced research papers. While the Focus group emphasized the prevailing hope that collective security could secure world peace, it was against disarmament. In Churchill’s mind, though the League was a useful adjunct, it could never be a substitute for balance-of-power diplomacy, and the military force that gave it substance.
It was crucial to Churchill’s cause that he strike this mollifying tone. At the 1935 general election, Baldwin had promised rearmament but also to do all he could to ensure that the League and collective security worked. There was no appetite in the country for belligerence, and both the prime minister and Churchill had to tread warily. Many in the Labour Party and on the left firmly believed that any kind of rearmament brought war closer; the message that war was coming anyway and that preparation was likely to be a matter of national survival was not a welcome one. This attitude frustrated Churchill, and he chided the House for not taking the dangers facing the country seriously. He also believed that the government had misled Parliament and the country regarding the relative strengths of the RAF and the Luftwaffe, and that there was too much talk and not nearly enough action, too much wishful thinking and precious little engagement with the harsh realities that threatened Britain’s independence. “Nourish your hopes, but do not overlook realities,” he counseled Parliament at the end of May 1935. But few were for ac
ting.
Churchill thought that Britain’s political elite was destroying Britain’s Great Power inheritance because of its failure to lead. He deplored the “unwarrantable self-abasement” he saw around him. The world, he told Clementine, “seems to be divided between the confident nations who behave harshly, and the nations who have lost confidence and behave fatuously.”20 “We cannot afford,” he told the Commons in October 1935, “to see Nazidom in its present phase of cruelty and intolerance, with all its hatreds and all its gleaming weapons, paramount in Europe.”21 While not wishing to criticize it out of hand, he was distrustful of the whole “League of Nations” mentality as a solution to the world’s troubles. Germany, “now the greatest armed power in Europe,” was unlikely to be tamed by talk alone. As he wrote in December 1935, “The more I think over the European Affair, the more I fear for our future—feebly armed & in the heart of every quarrel!”22 Unfortunately for Britain and its extensive global interests, the trouble didn’t end in Europe; as Churchill noted in January 1936, while Germany caused problems in Europe, Japan was seeking more provinces of China, presenting the problem of two “predatory military dictatorship nations.”
Churchill strove tirelessly to warn the British people of the true extent of the menace posed by the dictators, and to exhort the government to do all in its power to meet it. He launched devastating attacks on the Baldwin government in 1936, chiding it for dithering when resolute action was the only possible course to be pursued: “His Majesty’s Government were very slow in accepting the unwelcome fact of German rearmament,” he said in November 1936 in a lengthy speech chronicling in minute detail the failure of the government to get to grips with the problem and the still extant unpreparedness in Britain’s military structure—reserves not up to strength, a lack of modern weapons in the army, the backwardness of Britain’s tank doctrine and equipment, the limits of Britain’s strength in the air:
Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger greater than has befallen Britain since the U-boat campaign was crushed. . . . The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. . . . I have been staggered by the failure of the House of Commons to react effectively against those dangers. . . . I say that unless the House resolves to find out the truth for itself it will have committed an act of abdication of duty without parallel in its long history.23
“Europe, and it might well be the whole world, is now approaching the most dangerous moment in its history,” he rightly claimed in November 1936. “If it is true, as the prime minister stated last week in a deplorable utterance, that ‘democracy is always two years behind the dictator,’ then democracy will be destroyed.”24
During these crucial years of activity aimed at preparing Britain for war, Churchill kept his eye on developments in France, visiting regularly and spending time with senior politicians and generals, meetings often arranged through the good offices of the British Embassy. On a short holiday to Normandy, for example, he met General Georges; on a trip to Marrakech, he was visited by the French general in command of the large North African army. He was a great believer in the power of the French army and in 1936 watched its maneuvers. Churchill was highly valued in France, despite being out of office, a fact reflected by the favorable treatment he received during George VI’s state visit to Paris in July 1938. On his way to the Riviera at the beginning of 1939, he stopped off in Paris again, where he lunched with Reynaud, the minister of finance, and met the British ambassador, the sometime premier Léon Blum, and General Georges. Back in Britain, while Churchill was out of office, he was certainly no outsider, even though the myth-history of the interwar years often portrays him as such.
Abdication Crisis
There were, as ever, lapses in Churchill’s political fortunes and moments when it seemed as if he’d done a Lord Randolph and shot himself in the foot. One such episode, which gravely threatened Churchill’s credibility, was the position he adopted over the abdication of King Edward VIII in 1936. Churchill had wept upon hearing the king’s abdication speech. He considered himself a friend of the king and a royal counselor of some pedigree and believed that the crown was hereditary and could not simply be given up. In the summer of 1935, he stayed at Blenheim with the king, Wallis Simpson, her then husband, and Duff and Diana Cooper, a suitably raffish, upper-crust set. His support for the king in the following year, when the latter wished to marry the now divorced Mrs. Simpson, badly affected Churchill’s growing reputation and the work being done by the Focus group in sounding the klaxon with regard to Germany and the need for rearmament. Churchill believed that the king would get over Mrs. Simpson, failing to realize that he had made up his mind. With Baldwin’s knowledge and consent, Churchill supported him, hoping to buy time. Many considered his stance very ill advised, and Neville Chamberlain resolved not to offer Churchill a government position when Chamberlain became prime minister in May 1937. Churchill, all on his own, appeared to be making short work of squandering the support he had gained. Such was the hostility to him that many believed his political career was finished. Clementine profoundly disagreed with her husband’s stance on the abdication, recognizing the political calamity he was courting. Churchill was dumbstruck by the hostility in the House when, on December 7, 1936, he begged that no “irrevocable step” be taken regarding the issue of the king’s proposed marriage. In Harold Nicolson’s words, the reception of the speech represented an “utter defeat.” Robert Boothby compared him to a dog being sick on the carpet, only Churchill had been sick “right across the floor” of the house.25 Some of Churchill’s enemies attributed his actions to hostility toward Baldwin, though this was not true. His stock with the new king, George VI, soon rose because Churchill was one of the few who supported him in blocking the conferment of the title “Her Royal Highness” upon Mrs. Simpson. In May 1937, the king wrote him a letter of thanks, which Churchill considered a great tonic, for it appeared in the eyes of many as if the abdication issue had finished him.
The Defense of the Realm
The key theme of Churchill’s political career in the 1930s was his championing of rearmament and sufficiently strong air defenses in the light of the threat posed by a resurgent Germany. He considered it, later in life, to be one of the core aspects of what he termed his “life-work.” In this he was supported by his friend and colleague Professor Lindemann, who had convinced him that there was a lack of scientific research on air defense. In the 1930s, much of the concern surrounding defense related to the growing potency of air power. Baldwin’s succinct phrase of 1932—that “the bomber would always get through”—had become a truism as well as a strategic maxim. It logically followed that in a future European war, there was every prospect of mass civilian casualties caused by incendiary bombs and even gas bombs rained down upon British cities. This created vulnerability unknown in any previous conflict, the immunity afforded by Britain’s island status, and the sure shield of the Royal Navy no longer being enough to guarantee security. On July 30, 1934, Churchill described London as “the greatest target in the whole world, a kind of tremendous, fat, valuable cow tied up to attract the beast of prey.”26 Hence the panic when it was learned that the RAF was weaker than thought. The German air force was a dagger pointed at what Churchill described as the “heart of the British Empire.” As well as publicizing the urgent need to improve the country’s air defenses, he emphasized the need to build up the RAF’s strength as an attacking force, and this, given the prevailing wisdom about air power at the time, meant building bombers.
Churchill argued with Baldwin over the official figures relating to the strength and projected strength of the RAF. Churchill’s carping on this subject was not wholly unwelcome to the government, for by this time Baldwin was convinced that Churchill’s prognosis regarding Germany was correct, though as head of government he had to be careful not to be seen as alarmist or belligerent. Churchill’s endeavors, therefore, we
re a useful way of getting the peace-hungry public to realize that rearmament and war were topics that could not be dealt with by burying one’s head in the sand. The battle for adequate air defenses effected something of a rapprochement between Churchill and the government, though as is now clear, neither Baldwin nor his successor, Neville Chamberlain, had any intention of taking Churchill back into government unless they could really not help it. Nevertheless, dangling the prospect of a return to government before Churchill proved to be a useful technique for both of them.
Churchill kept up his assault, repeating the same simple message. As he told the Commons in October 1938:
The sole method that is open for us to regain our old island independence is by acquiring that supremacy in the air which we were promised, that security in our air defenses which we were assured we had, and thus to make ourselves an island once again. That, in all this grim outlook, shines out as the overwhelming fact. An effort at rearmament, the like of which has not been seen, ought to be made forthwith, and all the resources of the country and all its united strength should be bent to the task.27
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