by John Kelly
Baldwin’s strong performance on the air debate also owed something to his instinctive understanding of what an antiwar electorate would tolerate in the way of defense. In the mid-1930s, when “the bomber will always get through” was the eleventh commandment of military doctrine, the RAF proposed to spend its entire budget on a bomber force. But the bomber was an offensive weapon, and Baldwin’s political instincts told him that the 11.5 million Britons, half the national electorate, who had voted in the Peace Ballot of 1934–35, would find it as appalling as he did that “two thousand years after Our Lord was crucified,” European children should be immolated by incendiary bombs. During the war, Baldwin would be widely criticized for allowing Germany to gain a lead in the air—not least by Churchill, who, on hearing the Germans had bombed an iron factory owned by Baldwin, remarked that that “was ungrateful of them.” Nonetheless, and despite himself, Baldwin did bumble into one decision about airpower that, in retrospect, would prove farsighted. He pushed the RAF to pay more attention to the development of the fighter, not only because the fighter was much cheaper to build than the bomber—£5,000 to £10,000 per plane versus £50,000 for a bomber—but also because its defensive character made the fighter an acceptable weapon to an antiwar public. In the summer of 1940, when Britain’s survival hung on the performance of the RAF’s Fighter Command, Baldwin’s decision would serve his country well.
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Just before noon on Saturday, March 7, 1936, Adolf Hitler stood at a podium in the Reichstag examining his speech notes. Modestly dressed in a simple gray field jacket that covered his wide hips, his brown hair neatly combed, his coarse features relaxed—in repose like this, Hitler could be the minor bureaucrat his father had been. “Altogether, he looks entirely undistinguished,” said a British official, who, like many British visitors to Germany in the 1930s, confused the polite, petite bourgeois figure they encountered in small gatherings with the public man. Hitler put down his notes and surveyed his audience: six hundred Reichstag delegates, almost uniformly big of body and bulging of neck. Then he began as he began many of his speeches, with a denunciation of the Treaty of Versailles. These perorations served him the way a warm-up serves an athlete. His eyes grew hypnotic; his clenched fists cut the air. His forelock became unstuck; his fleshy face tightened into an arc of anger; then the man at the podium disappeared, replaced by a wronged Germany in all its righteous wrath. Shouts of “Heil! Heil!” greeted the announcement that Germany was renouncing the Pact of Locarno and reoccupying the demilitarized Rhineland. Hitler raised his hand for silence; then he began again, this time in a lower, more resonant voice that partly obscured the grating Upper Austrian accent. “Men of the German Reichstag, in this historic hour, when in the Reich’s western provinces German troops are at this minute marching into their future peacetime garrisons, we are united—” The rest of his words were drowned out by more shouts of “Heil! Heil! Heil!” This time Hitler did not resist. He stepped back from the podium, folded his arms across his chest, and allowed himself to bathe in the adulation. The next morning, when church bells rang in the little villages along the upper Rhine, German troops in field gray and French troops in horizon blue faced each other across the old Franco-German border for the first time since 1870.
A few days after the Rhineland coup Robert Boothby, a member of the December Club, a group of antiappeasement MPs, warned the House of Commons that if allowed to stand, the coup, which violated both the Pact of Locarno and the Treaty of Versailles, would undermine the postwar system of collective security in a way that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put back together again. Churchill issued a similar warning, but he was almost the only politician of national stature to do so, and his warning, like Boothby’s, was largely ignored. Paul Emery Evans, another member of the December Club, blamed Baldwin for the apathetic public reaction to the growing German threat. “The country was never told the truth, and those who endeavored to explain what was going in the world . . . were written off . . . as a small body of alarmists.” Baldwin was guilty as charged, but if he committed a crime, it was telling an antiwar public what they wanted to hear. In the late 1930s, the antiappeasement movement would grow in strength, attracting other national figures besides Churchill, including Alfred Duff Cooper and Leo Amery, two former first lords of the Admiralty, as well as promising young politicians such as Harold Macmillan, a future prime minister. But young or old, most of the men who formed themselves into antiappeasement groups such as the Vigilantes, the December Club, and the Watching Committee, had been shaped by Harrow dawns and Cambridge nights. When they spoke of war, they spoke of it in the heroic language of “Vitaï Lampada,” that ode to public school valor.
The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead
. . . England is far and honor a name
But the voice of a school boy rallies the ranks
Play up, play up and play the game
To the housewife in London and the postman in Leeds, as to Stanley Baldwin and to a large part of the Labour Party, war was not a schoolboy poem, it was the first day of the Somme battle—almost sixty thousand men killed or wounded between sunrise and sunset; it was the soliloquy in Act Five of Henry IV: “What is honor? . . . a word. Who hath it? He that died on Wednesday. Therefore I’ll none of it.” A few weeks after the Rhineland coup Hugh Dalton, a senior Labour politician, spoke not just for his party but for most of Britain when he told Parliament that “public opinion . . . and certainly the Labour Party would not support the taking of military sanctions or even economic sanctions against Germany at this time.” In France, public reaction to the Rhineland coup was more a shrug than a shout. Joked the satirical weekly Le Canard enchaine, “The Germans have invaded—Germany!” In Belgium, also a party to the Pact of Locarno, the response was close to naked fear. Except for a small sliver of the country around Ypres, Belgium had spent most of the Great War under German occupation. The Belgian government immediately revoked the alliance with France and declared that, henceforth, Belgium would adopt Swiss-style neutrality. Eventually, the Rhineland dispute found its way to the council of the League of Nations, which declared Germany in violation of both the Pact of Locarno and the Treaty of Versailles; but since the council lacked the means to enforce its judgment, the German troops remained on the old 1870 Franco-German border.
In “Omens of 1936,” published in the Fortnightly Review in January of that year, historian Denis Brogan predicted that 1936 would be the year that faith in Never Again began to falter. And events would prove Brogan more right than wrong. In addition to the Rhineland coup, 1936 was the year civil war broke out in Spain, Hitler and Mussolini formed the Rome-Berlin Axis, Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, and the European press began to report regular sightings of the death ship. Not coincidentally, 1936 was also the year when the diplomatic visit became a staple of the cinema newsreel. Typically, the newsreel would open with a panning shot of dignitaries standing on a railway platform, the politicians in top hats and frocks, the soldiers in gold-braided comic opera uniforms. A whistle is heard, heads turn, and a mighty engine appears, black as the African night, its swept-back nose creating the impression of great speed even as the train crawls into the station at ten miles per hour. Pulling to a halt in front of the platform, the pistons emit a snake-like hiss, and the waiting dignitaries disappear into a vapor of white steam. After the cloud dissipates, a flower girl appears and presents the visiting diplomat with a bouquet; pleasantries are exchanged on the platform; then the diplomat vanishes into the backseat of a big five-liter Horsch limousine with gull wing fenders or into a black Renault sedan with silver chevrons on the grille.
If the newsreel is set in the Balkans, the diplomat is French and he is there to shore up the troubled Little Entente, the alliance France has formed with Czechoslovakia, Romania, and the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Yugoslavia). If the newsreel is set in Spain, the diplomat could be a German—or an Italian, visiting Generalissimo Franc
isco Franco, leader of rebel Nationalist forces—or a Russian, visiting members of the Republican government in Madrid. If the newsreel is set in Berlin, the diplomat is Japanese, and he is in the German capital to witness the signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact between Japan and Germany. And if the newsreel is set in Rome, the diplomat could be German, or, even more likely, British, in which case he is in Italy to do the bidding of the new prime minister, Neville Chamberlain.
The House of Chamberlain, founded by the prime minister’s father, Joe, lord mayor of Birmingham, and long presided over by older half brother Austen, a foreign secretary, had a history of producing able, ambitious, thrusting personalities. And Joe Chamberlain’s youngest son would more than live up to that standard. When his turn to lead the family came, Neville would not only raise the roof, he also would put a new wing on the House of Chamberlain. As minister of health, Chamberlain was dynamic and innovative, and as chancellor of the Exchequer (Treasury secretary) he was very nearly great; under his guidance, Britain emerged from the Depression several years earlier than the United States. In every office he occupied, including prime minister, Neville Chamberlain delighted civil servants who admired his competency, his organized, orderly mind, and his ability to firm up the flaccid machinery of government. Among political colleagues, he was less popular. Cross the prime minister, they knew, and he would throw you to his minions in the press for a public savaging. Remarkably, this dynamic figure is completely absent from the newsreels and newspapers of the time, which gave us an image that continues to resonate to this day—Chamberlain as the undertaker on holiday: umbrella in hand, homburg on head, face pale, back slightly bent, eyes anxiously scanning the sky for signs of rain.
A photo of Chamberlain taken shortly after he became prime minister is truer to the real man. Here, the eyes are penetrating and intelligent, the sharp arc of the nose gives the face a hawk-like handsomeness, and the smile is inviting, with a hint of the warmth that always eluded the photographers but delighted intimates. The bold, almost aggressive way the prime minister addresses the camera catches another often overlooked trait. Like the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Neville Chamberlain’s ego was a wonder of the world. In his weekly letters to his spinster sisters, Hilda and Ida, the vanity is so guileless it is almost charming. “This year has seen a record for social invitations,” the prime minister notes in a weekly letter to Ida. “The Queen . . . remarked on the confidence everyone had in me,” he tells Hilda in another letter. In public dealings, however, the vanity became hubris, not in the ancient Greek sense of someone who takes pleasure in shaming and humiliating, but in the sense of the book of Proverbs, “a pride that blinds.” Chamberlain’s view of himself as more than a match for any opponent allowed him to be played time and again by Mussolini, who thought him an old fool “not made of the same stuff as Francis Drake and the other magnificent adventurers who created the Empire,” and by Hitler, who referred to the prime minister as “that silly old man with . . . the umbrella.” Still, any fair assessment of Chamberlain’s relations with the dictators is incomplete unless it also takes into account the decline of British power.
In 1937, when Chamberlain took office, Britain, a small island state, was sinking under the enormous military and economic burdens of a global empire, and the domestic burdens of the Depression and pacifism, and it was increasingly menaced by technological change. The advent of airpower had called into question the strategic advantages hitherto provided by the English Channel and the Royal Navy; and the fragile, spotty economic recovery from the 1929 crash had limited British rearmament. Aircraft production was rising, though not fast enough to build and equip an air force capable of fighting a European enemy; and the plan to create an expeditionary force capable of fighting a war on the Continent had fallen victim to budget cuts (including by Chamberlain) and to Never Again. The British public, said one senior politician, would be “strongly suspicious of any preparations made in peacetime with a view to large-scale military commitments on the Continent.” In addition the dominions, which had contributed so much to the British war effort in 1914–18, were either growing isolationist—Canada and South Africa—or becoming burdens themselves. Australia and New Zealand looked to Britain for protection against Japan. Finally, there was the empire: the work of three centuries, the source of Britain’s global power, and, now with the “hot winds of nationalism” blowing from Cairo and Calcutta, increasingly a deadweight, militarily and economically. By the mid-1930s it had become almost impossible to imagine any eventuality under which Britain could fight a major European war and emerge with the empire still intact.
In December 1937, the Chiefs of Staff addressed the consequences of British weakness in a forceful memorandum: “We cannot foresee the time when our defense forces will be strong enough to safeguard our trade, territory, and vital interests against Germany, Italy, and Japan at the same time. [We cannot] exaggerate [the importance] from the point of view of imperial defense of any political or international action which could be taken to reduce the number of our potential enemies.”
Chamberlain was already thinking along similar lines: “Prepare for the worst, hope for the best”—his foreign policy—rested on two pillars: continued rearmament to deter Germany, Italy, and Japan, and appeasement to assuage their grievances. Supporters of the prime minister hailed the policy as a masterstroke. One or two of the potential enemies might be won over by appeasement, and, should the strategy fail, the year or two consumed in negotiating grievances would buy Britain time to build up its defenses, especially its air defenses, which Chamberlain, like Baldwin and Churchill, viewed as the key to victory in a modern war. The policy also had the important advantage of being in tune with public feeling.
What grievances should be appeased? In the case of Japan, no legitimate grievances suggested themselves, but Japan posed a threat to Australia and New Zealand, so Chamberlain swallowed hard and ignored Japanese infringements on British concessions in China. Italy, which was behaving menacingly in Spain and North Africa, felt aggrieved that the Mediterranean was a British, not an Italian, sea. Chamberlain swallowed hard and turned a blind eye to Italian attacks on British ships delivering goods to civil war Spain. However, lingering British guilt about the Treaty of Versailles gave German grievances a special standing in Chamberlain’s eyes. Hitler was a beast, of course—a vicious anti-Semite and mad, to boot. Nonetheless, mad or not, Germany had been roughly handled at Versailles: stripped of its army, its Rhine borders, and several historic German regions. By the late 1930s, some of the injustices had been corrected, though Danzig, a historically German city, was still in Polish hands and the Sudetenland, another historic German region, was still in Czech hands. Austria was not a lost territory, but it was shrunken almost to insignificance by Versailles, and many Germans felt its rightful place was inside a Greater Reich.
In November 1937, Lord Edward Halifax, a member of the Chamberlain cabinet and one of the prime minister’s most trusted advisers, met with Hitler. This was Halifax’s second visit to the “new” Germany. After the first one, he returned to London sounding like a botanist who had discovered a bizarrely florid but probably benign new species of plant life during his travels. Halifax “told me he . . . was much amused by the visit,” a friend said. “He thinks the regime absolutely fantastic, perhaps too fantastic to be taken seriously.” In late 1937 Halifax still thought the Hitler regime fantastic, but he was becoming aware of its dangers, and, like millions of his countrymen, he did not want Britain dragged into a war on the far side of Europe over issues that did not affect its security and that, in British eyes, had a measure of legitimacy. During his second visit, Halifax told Hitler that, provided peaceful means were employed, Britain would be prepared to accept “possible alterations in the European order, which might be destined to come about with the passage of time. Amongst these questions were Danzig, Austria, and Czechoslovakia.”
Hitler assured Halifax that Germany wished to have good relations
with all its neighbors. Four months later, the Wehrmacht marched into Vienna and Austria became a part of the Reich. Two months after the Anschluss—May 1938—rumors began to circulate that ten German divisions had been moved to the Reich border opposite the Sudetenland. “Those d——d Germans have spoiled another weekend for me,” Chamberlain complained to his sister Hilda on May 22. Britain issued a mild warning; Germany denied that it had troops on the Sudetenland border; then, in an inspired piece of diplomacy, it was decided to blame the crisis on the Czechs, the only party to the dispute incapable of starting a world war on its own.