by John Kelly
At 11:27 air raid sirens wailed, and Londoners huddled together in cellars, tube stations, and shelters, awaiting the arrival of the bomber stream and the thud of the antiaircraft guns. A little after noon, the “all clear” sounded, and thousands of dazed men and women climbed back into the brilliant September sunlight, blessing their good fortune. An off-course plane had triggered the alert.
At 5:00 p.m. the French ultimatum went into effect.
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“Thus we tumbled into Armageddon without heart, without songs, without an ally except France (and she lukewarm), without aircraft, without tanks, without guns, without rifles, without even a reserve of raw commodities and feeding stuffs,” wrote Bob Boothby. A week later, when Italy and Japan announced their neutrality, the gravest threat to British security, a world war, receded. For now only Germany would have to be confronted, and, while it would be poked and prodded, it would not be poked and prodded hard enough to incite the holocaust of total war for a second time. Under Chamberlain, Britain would fight a limited war for limited ends and with limited means.
While the pace of rearmament would be quickened, for the time being the prime minister planned to emphasize two other components of his war plan. The first was propaganda. During the autumn of 1939, thousands of copies of dozens of different propaganda pamphlets were dropped on Germany, including Hitler and the Working Man, the best, though not the only, example of why the academics and literary figures the Ministry of Information employed to write propaganda were too genteel for the job. Hitler and the Working Man began by describing national socialism as “an honorable experiment” and noted that its early leaders had had many “fine ideals.” The second component of the Chamberlain war plan was economic blockade. Chamberlain believed—and it was a belief shared by the British intelligence services and many senior civil servants—that the huge cost of rearmament had overstretched the German economy, leaving Hitler incapable of fighting anything but the kind of short, sharp war he was fighting in Poland. Historians would later dismiss the belief in German economic weakness as a myth, but new research has shown that Chamberlain was at least half right. Until the summer of 1940, when the wealth of Western Europe fell under Hitler’s control, the German war machine was under intense economic pressure. In 1939, Britain was spending only 12 percent of its national income on defense, while Germany was already spending 23 percent and its economy was operating at 125 percent of capacity, while the British economy had yet to fully mobilize.
Chamberlain’s miscalculation was in thinking that Germany’s financial weakness would make it even more vulnerable to a British blockade than it had been in the Great War. Blockades, which are intended to deny the enemy resources, only work if they are airtight. And, as Lloyd George, Britain’s prime minister in the Great War, lost no opportunity to point out, this time, unlike last time, the British blockade had a gaping hole. The German-Soviet pact had given Hitler access to Russian oil, to copper—to enough raw materials to sustain a ten-year war. Indeed, when it came to his successor’s faults as a war leader, Lloyd George did not know where to begin or end. The previous March, Chamberlain had blithely handed Poland a security guarantee unenforceable without Russian help; then, when an opportunity arose to strike an alliance with Stalin, he had let it slip away. And because Chamberlain refused to put British industry on a full wartime footing, Britain would not have ten divisions in France until the spring of 1940, and had only 1,270 first-line aircraft and a few hundred tanks, many outdated models. Against this force, Germany could field up to 157 divisions—10 of them armored—nearly 4,000 modern warplanes, and 3,000 modern tanks. It was true that 90 to 94 of France’s 117 divisions also faced Germany, but the French army’s 3,254 tanks and 1,562 aircraft were in the hands of soldiers and airmen preparing a 1939 army with 1918 training and strategies.
No one who lived through the Great War was surprised that Lloyd George had emerged as Chamberlain’s principal critic. The personal vendetta between the two men began in August 1917, when then prime minister Lloyd George dismissed Chamberlain as director of National Service, the organization that oversaw conscription. It was Chamberlain’s first—and, until the collapse of his appeasement policy, almost only—public failure, and Lloyd George was not inclined to let him forget it. In his War Memoirs, he described Chamberlain as “not one of my most successful selections.” Eighteen years later Chamberlain got his revenge. In 1935, when Stanley Baldwin proposed appointing Lloyd George to the cabinet, Chamberlain, who was then chancellor of the Exchequer, said he would not sit at the same table with that man.
In the autumn of 1939, Lloyd George was seventy-seven, and had a large, intact ego and a controversial past. On Mussolini and Franco, on the Munich settlement—on many of the great issues of the 1930s—he had been on the right side of history; but there had been one egregious lapse. On several occasions, Lloyd George had praised Hitler, not because he admired national socialism, but because he believed the Führer, like himself, was a historic leader. In the late 1930s, not many British politicians could have called Adolf Hitler the “George Washington of Germany” and lived to tell the tale, but Lloyd George was admired for his Great War leadership, and, like Churchill, he was one of those larger-than-life, fabulously gifted figures whom the public grants a latitude they deny mere mortal politicians. As “artful as a cartload of monkeys” is how one aide described Lloyd George; “a mind like a scorpion,” said another. One of nature’s slyer jokes was to fashion Lloyd George into an almost perfect physical facsimile of the Wizard of Oz: a great white mane of hair, perfectly matched by a great white mustache and, in between, twinkling blue eyes full of mischief.
The dispute between the former and current prime ministers would dominate most of September and October 1939, and while it began as an argument over the conduct of the war, it quickly turned into a debate about a negotiated peace settlement with Germany; and as it did, the broad middle of the British public, those who had gone to war “stolidly to kill or be killed,” would make their voices heard. The day Britain declared war, Lloyd George pledged to support the Chamberlain government, though he could not bring himself to mention the prime minister by name. “I am one of the tens of millions in this country who will back any government that is in power, in fighting through this struggle,” he had told the House. However, after the quick German victory in Poland, Lloyd George began to fear Britain was overmatched. On September 27 he told the All Party Group, a collection of Liberal, Conservative, and Labour MPs, that if Britain’s chances of prevailing in a war with Germany were less than 50 percent, the government should seek a settlement. Privately, Lloyd George was blunter. “If [the government] rejects the chance of making peace,” he told a friend, “it will not be long before Britain will realize that they [sic] have committed the most calamitous mistake perpetuated by British statesmanship since the days of Lord North.” (Frederick Lord North was the British statesman who lost the American colonies.)
On October 3, the day Poland fell, Lloyd George made the case for a negotiated settlement in a House of Commons speech. Armageddon might be taking its time in coming, he said, but no one should fool themselves, Armageddon was coming. For MPs who had already met Armageddon once before—at Passchendaele, on the Somme, or on Vimy Ridge—that was a sobering thought. The “flood waters are still holding,” Lloyd George said. Let us hope “that as in the time of the deluge, the dove of peace will appear with an olive branch in its beak.” A faint ripple of assent went through the Conservative backbenches. But that was not what most people remembered about the speech. What they remembered later was the shock at hearing a prominent public figure utter the words “negotiated settlement” in the seat of government. Duff Cooper was furious. “What sort of terms would Germany offer?” he shouted from the Tory benches. “And who would be fool enough to believe in their sincerity?” The Labour MP David Grenfell was also aggrieved. After declaring himself an admirer of Lloyd George, Grenfell ripped the old Welshman apart. “If it had been anybody el
se,” Chamberlain wrote his sisters a few days later, “I should have felt sorry for him, but I can’t credit LlG with a spark of real humanity or generosity.”
Outside of a handful of aristocrats with ancient titles—Londonderry, Tavistock, Bessborough—and odd opinions, almost no British public figure of significance praised the Lloyd George speech. The public response was more enthusiastic. “Thousands and thousands have written him about peace,” A. J. Sylvester, Lloyd George’s chief aide, noted a few days after the House speech. Mail also flooded into Downing Street. In one three-day period in early October, Chamberlain received 2,450 letters, and 1,860 of them demanded an end to the war “in one form or other.” The sandal-wearing pacifists, the Oxbridge leftists, and the food faddists who drove George Orwell to distraction accounted for some of the mail, but most of the letters were from people in the broad middle of British public opinion. Members of this group were prepared to fight, but first they wanted all reasonable peace proposals explored.
Hitler’s speech on October 6 kept the peace debate alive and enhanced Lloyd George’s public standing. When the German leader said, “I believe even today that there can be . . . real peace in Europe and throughout the world, if Germany and England come to an understanding,” he seemed to be speaking directly to Lloyd George—and with Lloyd George, flattery went a long way. Watching him work a large crowd a few days after Hitler’s speech, Sylvester was reminded of an old “peacock with his tail in full show.” One moment “he was playing up to blue-blooded Tories . . . talking about our superb air force and the greatest navy in the world. Next, he was playing up the peace mongers, by advocating a conference and peace. He carried everybody off their feet and there was not even a single heckle or question. He had them so, he could make them laugh or cry at his will and pleasure.” Though no government official would admit it, the public conversation about a negotiated settlement also had an influence on official thinking. Like Lloyd George, the leaders of the dominions—Canada, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand—complained that Chamberlain’s response to Hitler’s peace proposal on October 12 had gone “too far in the direction of slamming the door on further discussions.” It would be an exaggeration to say that the views of the king; Halifax; Sam Hoare, the home secretary; and Leslie Hore-Belisha, the secretary of war, mirrored Lloyd George’s, though not a large exaggeration. In private conversations in September and October 1939, all four men would warn that a German war of any length could result in “the complete economic, financial, and social collapse” of Britain.
Despite all the mutual antipathy, Chamberlain and Lloyd George actually agreed about the desirability of ending the war at the negotiating table. Where they differed was on how to make Hitler honor a peace agreement. The Munich settlement had lasted less than a year. What would prevent a new peace agreement from collapsing just as quickly? Lloyd George’s answer was guarantors. Hitler would not dare violate a settlement guaranteed by Russia, Italy, and the United States. Chamberlain believed guarantors were insufficient. Germany also had to learn, once and for all, that aggression does not pay, and his war plan had been crafted to achieve that end. With a minimum of bloodshed, Britain—and France—would make the price of aggression intolerable for Germany. Stalemate on the Western Front would drain its military strength, blockade would break its economy, and propaganda leaflets such as Hitler and the Working Man would undermine the morale of its people. Publicly, Chamberlain was predicting a three-year war; privately he expected starvation, public discontent, and raw material shortages to force Hitler—or hopefully, a new German leader—to the negotiating table much sooner. In early November 1939, he told Joe Kennedy, the US ambassador, “I don’t believe [the war] will go beyond spring.”
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In the autumn of 1939, Americans could be forgiven for thinking that Chamberlain did nothing without first consulting Kennedy. “You and Hitler are running neck and neck to see who has his picture more often in the New York papers,” a friend wrote the ambassador from America. “It is ‘Kennedy goes to Downing Street,’ ‘Kennedy sees Halifax,’ ‘Kennedy has his shoes shined’ . . . the implication in the New York newspapers is that Chamberlain does not dare to go to the lavatory without you.” Even more than making money, Joe Kennedy’s special gift was self-promotion. In 1939, there was scarcely a literate American unfamiliar with at least one part of his biography, whether it be his years in Hollywood; his Wall Street career; his chairmanship of the Securities and Exchange Commission; his large, photogenic family; or his 1938 appointment as American ambassador to Britain. Even readers unfamiliar with the details of his life recognized Kennedy’s big, toothy Irish grin from a dozen magazine covers. Two weeks after the German invasion of Poland, Time hailed the ambassador as the war’s “indispensable man.” “With 9,000 Americans to shepherd in England, with tangible U.S. business interest under his command, with British bigwigs to see, Franklin Roosevelt to keep informed, Joe Kennedy has a bigger job.”
Time had it backward. Kennedy’s “bigger job” was essentially that of a concierge. In the early weeks of the war, while the White House and State Department debated the US response to the European crisis, Kennedy was booking passage for Americans anxious to flee Britain. In early October, when a British colleague mentioned that Roosevelt and Churchill had initiated a private correspondence, the ambassador, who had not been informed of the correspondence, had to hide his surprise. In Washington, Kennedy’s stock began to fall in 1938 when he suggested that the democracies and the dictatorships should “bend their energies toward . . . solving common problems and attempt to establish good relations” in a Trafalgar Day speech. In Downing Street and in certain precincts of Whitehall, however, he remained a welcome presence. In August 1939 he encouraged Rab Butler, the undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, who needed little encouragement, to offer Hitler a proposal “he could hang his hat on,” and in early September he urged Chamberlain to “put in some war regulation that would make the British public think twice about going to war.”
After the Soviet Union occupied eastern Poland on September 17, Kennedy’s appeasement turned into defeatism. From the autumn of 1939 through the summer of 1940, he sent Washington a stream of cables questioning British resolve. “They [the British] have no intention of fighting,” he wrote in one. King George VI, who had been made aware of the cables, complained publicly about Kennedy’s defeatism, and the Foreign Office found the ambassador’s attitude worrisome enough to open an investigation. Was Kennedy a defeatist because of his association with the pro-German aviator Charles Lindbergh? Because he was politically ambitious and “did not want to be tarred with the pro-British brush”? Or because he was an Irish American and thus “predisposed to tweak the lion’s tail”? Oddly, the Foreign Office overlooked the most obvious explanation: Kennedy was an American.
By mid-September 1939, it was becoming difficult to traverse a road or a byway in America without encountering a “Keep the US out of War” sign. A month later, a Gallup poll reported that, by a 95 to 5 percent margin, Americans favored neutrality. Even Abraham Lincoln did not poll that high. “The country is literally drunk with pacifism,” a French journalist wrote from New York. The reasons for the antiwar feeling were many, starting with the nearly universal American belief that, in the Great War, Britain and France had outplayed the United States. For its 116,708 dead, the US had gotten roughly $10 billion in still unpaid European debt and precious little else. Beyond that, every American had his or her own personal reasons for supporting isolationism: German and Irish Americans because of a historic enmity toward Britain; midwestern isolationists from the conviction that the only country an American should defend was his own; businessmen because a world war would disrupt the international economy; and the parents of draft-age sons, such as Ambassador Kennedy, for fear that American boys would be dragged back into the European abattoir.
In the late 1930s, Congress responded to isolationist sentiment by passing the Neutrality Acts, which forbade the sale of US
arms and other war materials to belligerent countries. Under pressure from President Roosevelt in early November 1939, the acts were amended to allow belligerents to purchase war materials in the United States. The cash-and-carry provision, abrogated in 1937, was also reinstated. This allowed other nations to make purchases in the United States, provided they paid immediately and shipped their purchases on non-American ships. The change was expected to benefit the Allies, as Germany had virtually no foreign currency reserves; beyond the amendment, though, Roosevelt was unprepared to go. “Consistent in his inconsistencies, cold and distant behind the . . . warm personality, listening always to some private voice whose tones we can recognize but never overhear and whose advice we can imagine but never verify,” Roosevelt’s thinking was opaque, even to his closest advisers. Still, by the autumn of 1939, his views on several war-related issues seemed clear enough. He recognized that Nazi Germany posed a unique historical threat; he hoped events would educate Americans about the Nazi peril; but, as he was contemplating a run for an unprecedented third term in 1940, he was unprepared to get too far ahead of public opinion.
In the case of the Americans, Chamberlain told a colleague, it was “best not to expect anything but words.”