by John Kelly
In Downing Street, Neville Chamberlain opened the morning cabinet with a requiem for “peace in our time.” We “meet under the gravest possible conditions,” the prime minister told his colleagues. “The events against which we have fought so long and so earnestly have come upon us. But our consciences [are] clear. There should be no possible question now where our duty lay.” After Chamberlain finished, Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, rose to brief the cabinet on his early morning talk with the German chargé d’affaires, Dr. Theo Kordt. Uncoiled to his full six feet, four inches, the foreign secretary was an imposing figure. The enormous bald head rose above the face like a cathedral dome in miniature, and the voice, cultivated and effortlessly authoritative, suggested what the British Empire might sound like if it could speak. Halifax said Kordt had made the invasion sound more like a schoolyard fight than an invasion. Last night, the Poles had begun shooting across the border, and German troops had responded in kind.
The cabinet continued marching resolutely toward war until the conversation turned to what kind of note Britain should send Germany. The predicate for implementing the Polish guarantee was a German attack, and the early reports of air attacks on Warsaw and other Polish cities had the indefinite character of rumor. “At present,” said one minister, we have “no very definite information as to what hostile action had taken place in Poland.” Another believed that there might be “some further peace effort on Herr Hitler’s part.” A third warned that implementing the Polish guarantee would give Hitler a false sense of security, though how or why it would, the minister failed to explain. Chamberlain was also wobbling. “The big thing was a European settlement,” he told Joseph Kennedy, the US ambassador. “It could be done, if only I could get the chance.” In cases of aggression, the prescribed formula was to send the aggressor nation an ultimatum with a deadline. The note Halifax sent Germany on the night of September 1 was only a warning, and the warning did not include a deadline. In France, Poland’s other guarantor, there were also signs of indecision; just before midnight the French news agency Haves reported that France had given a positive response to an Italian proposal for a conference to settle “the Polish question and all of Europe’s other difficulties.” The Duce was apparently eager to reprise the peacemaker role he had played in Munich.
The next morning, September 2, a good part of London was on a train to somewhere else. The statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus was gone—taken to a hiding place in Scotland. The paintings in the museums were gone—taken to Wales for safekeeping. The children were gone—scattered to thousands of villages, hamlets, and towns. The zoo animals were gone—on the morning train to Edinburgh. And the light was gone—a victim of the blackout that went into effect the previous evening. At 5:00 a.m., when the first filaments of sunlight crept over the silver barrage balloons above St. James Park, early-rising Londoners sighed in relief. Toward evening on September 2, Vera Brittain, whose Great War memoir Testament to Youth was a foundational text of the pacifist movement, stood on a rise in rural Hampshire, watching the parade of London refugees pass by. “The road [was] alive with a restless ribbon of traffic—lorries filled with troops; ‘relief’ buses crammed with passengers; small cars packed with children, their parents, perambulators, and cots; vans from furniture repositories loaded with household goods.” How different this war was from the one she had served in as a nurse, Brittain thought. In 1914–18, “the front was a limited area, and the lives lost were chiefly those of young men between eighteen and forty. Today, the suffering and suspense are universal. . . . There is no emotional barrier between men and women, parents and children, the old and the young; the battle is shared by all ages and both sexes.”
* * *
Lord Halifax began September 2 at the Buckingham Palace Gardens, with his number two at the Foreign Office, Alexander Cadogan. Striding through the fields of freshly bloomed autumn crocuses, the two men made an odd pair. The six-foot, four-inch Hailfax, long-legged and physically awkward, resembled a large, ungainly water bird. The petite Cadogan, huffing and puffing behind him, looked like a gnome chasing his master. For both men, the garden visit would be the high point of a day otherwise crowded with sorrows. At 5:00 a.m., when the British ambassador in Warsaw made his first call of the day, the Luftwaffe had already carried out twenty air strikes against Poland. When the ambassador called again a few hours later, he simply said that the Germans had achieved “very pronounced air superiority.” In the interim there had been so many air strikes it was impossible to keep an accurate count. What the Germans called “Hitler weather”—sunny, dry days—had also proved a great boon to the Panzer columns traversing the dried-up rivers, marshes, and watercourses on the Polish plain. Before the invasion, the Poles had estimated that they could hold for three months; now three weeks sounded like an optimistic prediction.
The reports from Paris were also worrying. The French appeared to be chasing the Italian mediation offer with unseemly haste. Paris had set only one precondition for talks: an armistice, with German troops halting in place. London was demanding a German withdrawal to the Polish border. Just before noon, Halifax instructed Sir Eric Phipps, the British ambassador in Paris, to infuse some “courage and determination into M. [Georges] Bonnet,” the French foreign minister. This was easier said than done. Bonnet, the leader of the antiwar faction in the government of Édouard Daladier, combined the slipperiness of an eel with the “cunning of a fox on alert.” In its brief life, the Italian offer would die numerous deaths, and each time Bonnet would find a way to resuscitate it—sometimes with guile and cunning, other times with outright lies. When Count Ciano, the Italian foreign minister, called Halifax at 2:30 p.m. on September 2, he said he had just spoken to Bonnet, who had assured him “that if Hitler would suspend hostilities and agree in principle to a conference . . . Great Britain and France would participate.” Halifax told Ciano that he had been misinformed.
Two hours later, Bonnet called the Foreign Office. Hitler had agreed to study the Italian proposal under French terms—the German Army halts in place. Halifax said the French terms were unacceptable; Britain would not agree to mediation unless Germany withdrew from Poland. That would be desirable, certainly, Bonnet said, but why should a German withdrawal be an essential precondition? The important thing was to convince the French and British publics that their governments had made every effort to save the peace. Halifax promised to present Bonnet’s views to the cabinet.
As the hot, sultry September afternoon moved toward evening, consternation and alarm grew in the House of Commons. Thirty-six hours had passed since the German attack on Poland, and Britain and France continued to quibble over terms and deadlines. When the prime minister’s 3:00 p.m. speech was postponed to 6:00 p.m. without explanation, the bar in the Commons smoking room began to fill with rumors, each growing more lurid as the consumption of alcohol increased. It was said that Bonnet had told the Polish ambassador to France, “You don’t expect us to have a massacre of women and children in Paris.” It was said that Premier Daladier had gone “wobbly.” It was said that the French wanted to give Germany a full week to reply to an Allied ultimatum; and as the September light faded from the late-summer sky and the alcohol continued to flow in the smoking room, it was proposed, only half in jest, that “Britain declare war on France.”
* * *
When Churchill arrived in the smoking room late on the afternoon of the second, he was already ripping mad at the French. Earlier in the day he had warned Charles Corbin, the French ambassador in London, that if the Daladier government “ratted” on Poland, he, Winston Churchill, lifelong friend of France, would wash his hands of the French. When Corbin blamed France’s slowness in mobilizing on technical difficulties—time was needed to get the army into position and evacuate the civilian population—Churchill shouted, “Technical difficulties! I suppose you would call it a technical difficulty for a Pole if a German bomb dropped on his head.”
Edward Spears, a prominent antiappeasement MP, believed
Downing Street was within Churchill’s grasp that afternoon. “His name was on many lips, [and] the more the Cabinet vacillated, the more eyes turned to him.” Churchill was less sure about the size and intensity of the “Winston” boomlet. No British politician had been more insightful about the German threat. As long before as 1932, he had warned that “all those bands of sturdy Teutonic youths marching through the streets and roads of Germany with the light of desire in their eyes . . . are not looking for status.” “They are looking for weapons, and, believe me, when they have the weapons, they will then ask for the return of lost territories and colonies.”
At his best, said a friend, Churchill could say the “fine true thing with a force that was like an organ filling a church.” But in 1939 what most people remembered about Churchill was how often he had played the organ off-key. The egotism, the waywardness, the ambition, the publicity-seeking, the bellicosity: all were legendary. “Mr. Churchill constantly prefers the large, simple conclusions of the battlefield,” noted a reviewer of Churchill’s biography of his ancestor the duke of Marlborough. There were also the disloyalties: jumping from one political party to another, then back again. And there were the policy mistakes: some—like Gallipoli, opposition to Indian reform, and the decision to return Britain to the gold standard—epic. “Winston was often right,” said his friend F. E. Smith. “But when he was wrong: well, my God.”
Churchill’s greatness was peculiar in character in that it only became “fine and true” in a particular set of circumstances, and on the afternoon of September 2, the man who would later be called the “most remarkable human being to ever inhabit Downing Street” sensed that those circumstances had yet to form. In the name of national unity, Churchill would put away his ambitions for the time being and accept the cabinet post that Chamberlain had secretly offered him the day before, first lord of the Admiralty.
A little before 6:00 p.m., when the Speaker of the House announced that Chamberlain’s speech would be postponed for a second time, from 6:00 p.m. until 7:30, Henry Channon, the Conservative MP for Southend-on-Sea, Essex, was crossing the House floor on his way to his office. Passing a mirror near the smoking room, Channon paused, examined himself, and was pleased at the face staring back at him. “Quite handsome!” he congratulated himself. Politics by its nature attracts egotists, but the egotism of Henry Channon, husband of Honor Guinness, the brewing heiress and member of the most glamorous social circles in London, was singular. In post–World War One Paris, the Chicago-born Channon had been a Truman Capote–like figure: a young man of fawn-like beauty, ambiguous sexuality, and the social ambitions of a Hapsburg duchess. Jean Cocteau once told Channon that his eyes “looked like they had been set by Cartier,” and Proust called his essays on Parisian life charming. In 1925, tiring of Parisian decadence, Channon had moved to London and reinvented himself as an English gentleman. Now he was parliamentary secretary to Rab Butler, the undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, and had transferred his affections from Jean Cocteau to Neville Chamberlain.
Shortly after Channon reached his office, Butler called. The cabinet had just risen and the meeting had been “stormy.” Over the past twenty-four hours, the mood in the cabinet had stiffened considerably. At the afternoon cabinet on the second, the air minister, Kingsley Wood, heretofore prone to appeasement, expressed dismay about the previous evening’s warning note to Germany and cautioned that further postponements in issuing an ultimatum would have a bad “moral effect.” Leslie Hore-Belisha, the war minister, said that Britain should demand a complete German withdrawal from Poland that night, and John Simon, the chancellor of the Exchequer, dismissed the Italian proposal as worthless. Even if Hitler agreed to attend a conference, said Simon, he would never make any meaningful concessions. A few hours later, the prime minister would get an even rougher handling in the House of Commons.
Channon blamed the House’s reaction on the long interval between the afternoon cabinet, which ended at about 5:00 p.m., and Chamberlain’s arrival in the Commons at 7:30. In the interim, “the nervous House, chafing under delay and genuinely distressed . . . [had continued] to quench their thirst in the Smoking Room and when they returned to hear the PM . . . many of them were full of Dutch Courage . . . and ready to fight . . . the whole world.”
Channon was right. Aroused by the gravity of the hour, the House wanted to hear “Come the three corners of the world in arms, and we shall shock them.” Instead, members got an irresolute old man sickened by the thought of sending another generation of young men to war. Speeches are rarely memorable for the things left unsaid, but this one was. Chamberlain made no mention of a British ultimatum or of the British ambassador in Berlin requesting his passport; he made no mention of British honor or of Polish valor, of “sunlit uplands” and “better days to come.” There was just the tired, uninflected voice of a disappointed politician explaining the current state of negotiations. As the prime minister sat down, row after row of hard faces glared at him from the backbenches.
Arthur Greenwood, an unprepossessing North Country man, rose to speak for the Labour Party. A former teacher, Greenwood had a reputation as a drinker, and he possessed no outstanding talents other than the ability to be in the right place at the right time. That talent had won him the assistant leadership position in the Labour Party; it had put him, and not the party leader, Clement Attlee, who was recovering from prostate surgery, in the House on this historic evening; and it had put Leo Amery, a vocal Chamberlain critic, in the Conservative backbenches. Having spent most of the afternoon in the smoking room bar, Greenwood began unsteadily, “I am speaking under very difficult circumstances.”
“Speak for England, Arthur!” Amery shouted.
Greenwood steadied himself, the drink left his voice, and, as Amery requested, the former schoolteacher spoke for England in the simple, unaffected language of a North Country man. “I wonder how long we are prepared to vacillate at a time when Britain and all that Britain stands for and human civilization is in peril.” As Greenwood finished to thunderous applause, Channon sat on the Tory benches, disconsolate at the House’s reaction: “All the old Munich rage all over again. . . . All those who want to die abuse Caesar.” The chief Conservative whip, the imposing David Margesson, fearing a backbench revolt against Chamberlain, signaled the Speaker to gavel the session to a close.
As the crowd thinned out, Channon pushed his way through the departing MPs to the chief whip. Margesson was the kind of Englishman Channon would like to have been. He had an admirable war record, an impeccable bloodline, implacable self-assurance, and he possessed the kind of elegant masculine physical glamour now only seen in movies of the 1930s. Can’t anything be done to help the prime minister? Channon asked. Margesson shrugged. “It must be war, Chip, old boy; there is no other way out.” Later in the evening, the chief whip gave the prime minister the same advice, though in rougher language.
* * *
The civil defense authorities had warned that, should war come, it would begin with a German air strike on London. On the night of September 2, Londoners received a foretaste of what that would be like. The day had been hot and sultry, and, as darkness descended, the dense, humid air congealed into huge black pillars of cloud that billowed upward into the evening sky. At about nine, lightning crackled over the Thames. For a moment, Parliament flashed a brilliant gold, then vanished back into darkness; the wind picked up, the barrage balloons tossed and turned and strained at their cables, and then great torrents of rain began to pelt down on southeastern England, flooding byways, clogging traffic, and sending hundreds of tons of garbage flooding through the blacked-out streets of the imperial capital.
It rained on the Royal Navy ships leaving port to take up blockade positions along the German coast; on the army lorries slipping through the liquid darkness toward embarkation points; on the antiaircraft crews shivering under tarps in Hyde Park; on “the Kennel Farm and Aviary,” which offered “evacuation facilities for pets”; and on the ticket offices of P&
O (Pacific & Orient shipping line), where uncertain patriots could book a “cruise 1,000 miles up the Amazon” for only £75. It rained on the darkened streets where no child’s voice had been heard for days; on the empty museums; on the memorials to the “glorious dead”; and on the surplus women, deep into their forties and dreaming of Leslie Howard now.
In Downing Street, where an emergency late-evening cabinet was in session, a shaken Chamberlain announced that “the strength of feeling in the House of Commons” had convinced him that an immediate display of resolve was needed to steady the country. Therefore, Sir Neville Henderson, the British ambassador in Berlin, had been instructed to present an ultimatum to Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, the next day at 9:00 a.m.; the ultimatum would expire at 11:00 a.m. If Bonnet “could not accept our time for delivery and expiry, the French Ambassador [can deliver the French ultimatum] at a later hour.”
At 11:15 a.m. the following day, the prime minister addressed the nation. “I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at Number Ten Downing Street,” he said. “This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note, stating that unless they were prepared to withdraw all their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking had been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.” No one who heard Chamberlain’s broadcast that morning could have had any doubt about the depth of his disappointment. As the prime minister reached the penultimate passage of his speech—“consequently this country is at war with Germany”—sorrow and despair sang through the melancholic old voice. But then he ruined the effect with a concluding sentence that bubbled over with self-pity and solipsism: “You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that my entire long struggle to win the peace has failed.”