by John Kelly
June and July of 1938 passed calmly, but it was not the normal calm of summer. In the Rhineland, construction crews worked double and triple shifts under arc lights to complete the West Wall, a new defensive system that the Allied powers called the Siegfried Line. In Paris Georges Bonnet, the French foreign minister, scrutinized the French-Czechoslovakian treaty for loopholes. In Moscow Stalin, who also had a treaty with the Czechs, watched carefully to see who would emerge victorious from the Sudeten confrontation, Germany or Britain and France. In Washington the Roosevelt administration prepared an appeal for moderation. And in London the Chiefs of Staff issued a new warning: In the event of an Anglo-German war over Czechoslovakia, “it is more than probable that both Italy and Japan would seize the opportunity to further their own ends and that in consequence the problem we have to envisage is not that of a limited European war but of world war.” In July, when Chamberlain spoke at Birmingham’s centenary celebration, the Chiefs’ warning was still on his mind. “The government of which I am at present the head intends to hold on its course, which is set for the appeasement of the world.”
The Essex village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy took note of the speech, though to one Tolleshunt resident, Margery Allingham, Czechoslovakia remained a faraway country with an all but unspellable name until the end of July, when Margery and a group of friends gathered in her yard one afternoon to plan the annual village cricket party. It was a lovely Saturday, the air heavy with the smell of freshly cut grass, and overhead, a few fat cumulus clouds drifting idly eastward toward the sea—just the kind of day that always made Margery feel smug about abandoning a glamorous London publishing career for life in an obscure Essex village whose sole distinction was its possession of one of the two surviving Maypoles in England. The state of the village cricket field dominated most of the afternoon’s discussion, but toward evening one guest brought up the Czech crisis, and Margery, who was thirty-four, found herself thinking back to her childhood in the Great War. She remembered a recurring dream she had had then: “a soldier galloping up on a great grey horse to kiss [a] tearful nurse goodbye . . . then death . . . and not ordinary dying either . . . but death final, empty and away somewhere.” She remembered other things about that time: “the women and old people all in black . . . standing about in the village street reading the enormous casualty lists . . . ; [and] the village boy on a bike with not one telegraph spelling tragedy but sometimes two or even three.” Then an astonishing thought occurred to Margery: war, which had savaged the generation before hers, now seemed about to savage the generation after hers. The thought was so staggering, she found it “hardly to be borne.”
* * *
By early September 1938, reminders of 1914 were everywhere. Poland and Hungary, eager to participate in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, were massing troops along the Czech border; in Prague the Czech government proclaimed martial law; in Nuremberg, Hitler pledged unshakable support for those “tortured creatures,” the Sudeten Germans; and in Britain the Royal Navy was put on partial alert. Passing the Cenotaph in Whitehall that Munich summer, Alec Douglas-Home, a Chamberlain aide and future prime minister, noticed that several fresh bouquets had been placed at its base.
“Well, it has been a pretty awful week,” Chamberlain wrote his sister Ida on September 11. Four days later, the prime minister was flying down the Thames on his way to visit Hitler. Approaching Bavaria, the British Airways’ Lockheed Electra swooped under a heavy storm and set down smoothly at the Munich airport. The cabin door was flung open and, to the tattoo of drums and the snap of swastika flags flapping in a sharp wind, Neville Chamberlain stepped into Hitlerland.
A few hours later, the prime minister was standing in Hitler’s enormous Berchtesgaden office, admiring the Wagnerian view; across the valley, a range of high mountains was half shrouded in a late-afternoon mist. He turned and examined the office. There was a huge globe next to the desk and an oak conference table at the far end of the office. “I have often heard of this room, but it is much larger than I expected,” Chamberlain said, hoping to ease the tension with a little small talk.
“It is you who have big rooms in England,” Hitler replied. Then, having exhausted his store of small talk, he demanded the return of the Sudetenland.
“I’d rather be beat than dishonored,” Alexander Cadogan, permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, said upon hearing that Chamberlain had acquiesced to Hitler’s demand. In the days following the prime minister’s return to London, there was much talk of national honor in certain quarters of Whitehall, Westminster, and the press. But what was national honor to “he that died on Wednesday”? To Chamberlain, such talk only led to more Sommes and Passchendaeles. The Sudeten crisis had to be viewed through the lens of national interest. Was it worth going to war for a small country on the other side of Europe? The prime minister did not believe it was, and it quickly became apparent that most of the British public agreed with him, as did the dominions: Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and especially Canada. “I approve wholeheartedly of the course [Chamberlain] has adopted,” said Mackenzie King, the Canadian prime minister. After several weeks of intense pressure from the British and the French, who also favored a peaceful resolution of the crisis, the Czechs agreed to cede to Germany the regions of the country that were more than 50 percent ethnically German. On September 22, Chamberlain returned to Germany, expecting to sign an agreement. Instead, Hitler handed him a new set of demands: incorporation of the Sudetenland into the Reich and the annexation of several strategic regions beyond the German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia.
“Hitler has given Chamberlain the double cross . . . [And] it looks like war,” William Shirer, the CBS correspondent in Berlin, wrote on the twenty-third. By the end of the week, Shirer’s premonition seemed about to come true. The British fleet and the RAF were on full alert, searchlights scanned the London sky, every significant building in the imperial capital was cordoned off with sandbags, territorials (reservists) were digging trenches in Hyde Park and St. James Park, and the government was requisitioning cellars and basements as air raid shelters. Shocked Londoners felt as if they had stepped through the looking glass into Things to Come. This “is like a nightmare in a film,” Rob Bernays, a junior government minister, wrote. “We are like people waiting for Judgment.” At a dinner party, Bernays made a joke to lighten the somber mood and was immediately cut off by another guest, who snapped, “Damn you! [Don’t] you realize we may be dead next week?”
Meanwhile, in Downing Street, Chamberlain was facing a cabinet revolt. After explaining at some length his indignant reaction to Hitler’s new terms, he recommended that the terms be accepted. This was too much, even for Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary and Chamberlain’s closest ally in the cabinet. “Personally, I believe Hitler has cast a spell over Neville,” he told a colleague. Other cabinet members felt that Chamberlain had been undone by his vanity. And, unquestionably, Chamberlain’s desire to be hailed as a peacemaker did cloud his judgment, though other factors also went into his thinking. On September 20, two days before Chamberlain returned to Germany, a memo by General Hastings Ismay of the Imperial General Staff had counseled prudence: If “war with Germany has to come,” Ismay wrote, “it would be better to fight her in, say, 6 to 12 months than to accept the present challenge.”
In late September, the Czech crisis resolved itself at the Munich Conference, which was convened at Mussolini’s suggestion and was the source of some of the most evocative images of the prewar years: There is a famous photo of Chamberlain, looking more the coroner than the undertaker as he poses reluctantly for photographers in front of the two-engine Lockheed Electra that will fly him to Germany. There is one of Édouard Daladier, the French premier, at the Munich airport, looking physically massive but with vacant eyes that suggest that the premier’s nickname, the Bull of Vaucluse, may overstate the case; and there is one of Hitler standing at the conference table, his expression a compound of all his favorite words: “unshakable,” “invinc
ible,” “triumphant,” “decisive”; and there is one of Mussolini, arms crossed, head tilted at an odd angle to hide the mole on his bald skull. And the most famous photo of all: Chamberlain, on his return from Munich, standing in front of a bank of microphones, promising “peace in our time” under a gray autumn sky. Lost among the lesser footnotes of the Munich Conference are two appeals from President Roosevelt, one urging Hitler to attend the conference, the other an appeal for a peaceful resolution of the Sudeten crisis.
Such was the residual strength of Never Again, not just in Britain but globally, that the morning after promising “peace in our time,” Chamberlain awoke to find himself a world hero. In Munich, Germans, some with tears in their eyes, flocked to the hotel where the prime minister had stayed, like pilgrims to a shrine. In France a subscription was raised to build the prime minister a country house and a trout stream. In Britain streets were named after Chamberlain. Dinners were held in his honor; crowds followed him to Buckingham Palace, where he appeared on the balcony with the king, and on fishing holidays in the Highlands crowds followed him through Scottish railway stations. Babies were named after him, there were Chamberlain dolls, and Chamberlain bouquets with the inscription “We Are Proud of You.” In Brussels a medal was struck in his honor; from Holland came tulips by the thousands; and from the people of New York and the people of South Africa, grateful thanks for the prime minister’s work on behalf of peace.
“All this will be over in early October,” Chamberlain told Halifax not long after his return from Munich. He was right about the fleeting nature of fame, wrong about how quickly it could flee.
* * *
A new Gallup poll taken less than a month after Munich indicated that public support for an antiappeasement government had risen sharply. Another new poll found that 71 percent of the respondents favored keeping the German colonies awarded to Britain at Versailles, even at the risk of war. The sudden stiffening of public resolve owed less to an upsurge in patriotism than to post-Munich disillusionment. Chamberlain had gotten a piece of paper at Munich, and Hitler had gotten the Sudetenland. Emotionally exhausted by two and a half years of lurching from crisis to crisis, people began to rethink their position on war. The pacifism of the interwar years had been driven by the conviction that European civilization had come very close to self-immolation on the battlefields of the Great War. All the peace ballots, debates, and pacifist marches of the thirties were energized by the belief that such a thing must never be allowed to happen again. Munich became the midwife to a new perception among the French and British elites: Terrible as war was, it might be the only way to prevent Hitler and his regime from plunging Europe into a “new dark age.” Munich also gave birth to a new perception among ordinary people, but it was more prosaic. “Living with Hitler,” said one man, “was like living in a neighborhood with a wild animal on the loose.”
In March 1939, when Germany occupied the non-German parts of Czechoslovakia, public opinion hardened further. Lingering guilt about the Treaty of Versailles had restrained Britain’s reaction to Hitler’s earlier occupations. Austria, the Rhineland, and the Sudetenland were historic German lands. In Hitler’s place, Bismarck—or almost any German statesman—would have made it his goal to reconstitute the historic Germany dismembered at Versailles. There was no explanation for the occupation of the ethnic Czech rump except pure, naked aggression. In late March, when the Chamberlain government extended a guarantee to Poland, there was broad public support for the decision.
* * *
In late August, after Hitler and Stalin signed a nonaggression pact, and a German attack on Poland became all but certain, the News Chronicle, one of the big London dailies, decided to test the strength of Never Again. The poll the paper commissioned found that only 11 percent of the British public still remained resolutely pacifist—that is, willing to embrace peace even on German terms. Yet anyone with a feel for public opinion knew the requiems for Never Again were premature. There remained a significant, if hard to quantify, substratum of antiwar feeling in Britain. “It was a vague body almost nebulous . . . and fortunately [had] no leader,” recalled Alfred Duff Cooper, who was on the opposite side of the war debate, having resigned from the Chamberlain cabinet to protest the prime minister’s appeasement. The substratum, said Duff Cooper, “was composed of disparate entities. The left wing of the Labour Party . . . whose detestation of war was so intense that they doubted anything was worth fighting for, . . . the right wing of Conservatism, . . . [whose members] believed that Communism was the greater danger and felt that Hitler had rendered his country a service by suppressing the Communists and might render Europe one by protecting it from the red peril.
“There existed also an attitude even less definite and harder to define, originating probably in the fact that the public mind was ill prepared for war. People had been told recently by ministers, and some sections of the press never ceased to tell them, that there was no longer any danger of war, so that when it [became imminent] they could hardly believe it . . . and clung obstinately to the hope that the whole thing could somehow be patched up.”
Duff Cooper’s list omits one other important center of antiwar feeling: the small but influential section of the British establishment who had grave reservations about risking the British economy and empire in a second conflict with Germany. Members of the group included former prime minister David Lloyd George and Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England, and several peers of the realm, among them Lord Londonderry and the Duke of Westminster. Though not members of the group, two powerful press barons, Lord Rothermere, publisher of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, and Lord Beaverbrook, publisher of the Daily Express and the London Evening Standard, also feared that the British Empire would not survive another total war.
Should war come, the government would have to take these various strains of opinion into account in making decisions about war aims, defense spending, rationing, and a host of other related issues. And should the war go badly for Britain, the government would have to be prepared for the eventuality that all or some of these strands of opinion would coalesce and demand a negotiated peace settlement to save the country from another four years of “death and death and death.”
* * *
I. In actual fact, between 1939 and 1945, 40,000 Britons died from bombing—a significant number, but far less than the predicted number. Things to Come also got a couple of other things wrong. Despite the round-the-clock Allied bombing campaign, German war production continued to rise, reaching a peak in 1944, the fifth year of the war. Not until a good part of the Luftwaffe had been destroyed in the Russian campaign and the bombers acquired fighter escorts capable of accompanying them to and from targets in Germany, did airpower begin to achieve the kind of results predicted by its prewar enthusiasts, and not until the atomic bomb did it become a decisive weapon.
CHAPTER TWO
AGAIN
In August 1914, war had come all at once, in a frightening rush on a glorious August day from a faraway land. One minute the country was at the seashore; the next, everyone was waving miniature Union Jacks, singing “Rule Britannia,” and young men were marching off to France. In the summer of 1939, war approached like the “slow ticking of a clock in a dentist’s office,” recalled one woman. Occasionally an event would shatter the summer calm. The Hitler-Stalin pact, announced on August 23, produced a terrific shock, but a week later everyone had gone back to complaining about the weather. July and early August of 1939 were frightful—heavy rain almost every day. Then, abruptly, just after the signing of the pact, the sun reappeared, and, as if to make amends for its absence, produced two weeks of brilliant, warm, sunny weather. People hiked the Lake County, walked the beaches of Blackpool, Bath, and Brighton, took day trips to Calais, and organized cake sales and cricket matches, secure in the knowledge that Britain’s astrologers and spiritualists unanimously agreed: there would be no war in 1939. Polling in late August showed that only one person in five expected a war, a
nd one in three felt that “anything” would be better than one. When war finally did come on Friday morning, September 1, it came as quietly as a church lady. “There was no bravura, no sudden quickening of the blood, no secret anticipation,” Margery Allingham remembered. “We seemed to go to war as a duty, a people elderly in soul, going in stolidly to kill or be killed.”
The morning that the wireless announced the German invasion of Poland, the smell of bonfires, which drifts across rural England in late summer, hung in the air in Margery’s village. She went out to the garden, sat down in the old wicker chair she had been meaning to get rid of for ages, and finally removed her gas mask from its pouch. Margery had no idea what an elephant fetus looked like, but running her hands across the large plastic eyes and long, trunk-like rubber nozzle, she imagined it must look something like a government gas mask. Elsewhere in Britain that morning, millions of people were already being swept up in the gravitational pull of war. The first news of the German attack had come at about 4:00 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time; by 8:00 a.m. preparations were under way to transport hundreds of thousands of mothers and children, tens of thousands of hospital patients, and enormous quantities of food to safe zones in rural Britain. Parks bristled with antiaircraft batteries, fields with antiparatrooper defenses; barrage balloons floated above London, Birmingham, and Manchester; in the London zoo, the snakes were put down. Later in the morning, veterinarian clinics across the country would be inundated by pet owners eager to euthanize the family dog or cat before the air raids began. At 1:00 p.m. television screens in the Greater London region went black just as a Greta Garbo–like cartoon character was saying: “Ay tank, Ay, go home.” The war had shut down the world’s first television service.