by John Kelly
In early March Mass Observation, a social research and public opinion organization, warned the government that “for the mass of people,” the war “seems increasingly pointless. A new restlessness is setting in . . . a desire for something to happen.”
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In a March 25 memo to Chamberlain, Reynaud proposed something spectacular, a three-point plan to energize the Allied war effort. Point one was to provoke Germany into battle by seizing control of the Norwegian territorial waters; point two was using the German counterstroke as cover for landing troops in Norway and Sweden; and point three was the seizure of the Swedish iron ore fields. This was the most modest of the premier’s proposals. Reynaud also wanted to bomb the Russian oil fields at Baku and to send submarines into the Black Sea to stop the flow of Soviet oil to Germany. About Stalin’s likely response to such a provocative action, the memo had little to say; and about the risk of fighting a two-front war—against the Soviet Union, which had 3.4 million men under arms, and against Germany, which had 2.5 million, the memo had even less to say. Reynaud did acknowledge that “the absence of a state of war between the Allies and Russia will perhaps be seen as a legal obstacle to this enterprise [the Black Sea oil blockade],” but said, “the French Government . . . for their part, consider that we should not hesitate to set [the obstacle] aside.”
Chamberlain went “through the ceiling” when he read the memo. The British rearmament program, far behind the German program at the start of the war, had benefited from the relative peace of the past seven months, but in March 1940, the program was still a year from completion. How many British planes and tanks would get built if the Luftwaffe was over Coventry and Sheffield every night? How would the small British army survive if Stalin moved one hundred of his divisions west? The Chiefs of Staff considered the Reynaud memo of interest only as an example of the excitable French temperament. “The lack of spectacular military events tends to create pressure to undertake projects that offer little prospect of decisive successes and are calculated to impair our resources and to postpone ultimate victory. This tendency should be resisted.”
Two days later, Chamberlain was still fulminating about the Reynaud memo. At a meeting on March 27 he described himself as “horrified”; the memo conveyed “the impression of a man who was rattled and who wished to make a splash to justify his position. That Reynaud should mention submarines going into the Black Sea without mentioning Turkey [which sat on the Black Sea and had a vital interest in anything that happened there] seemed fantastic.” The prime minister’s idea of “spectacular” did not include national suicide. He wanted an action large enough to impress the Germans and engage a bored, disaffected British public, but not so large as to provoke a powerful German response.
Behind these differences lay a fundamental difference about what the Allies were fighting for. France’s war aims possessed the virtue of consistency, the imprimatur of history, and the clarity of a propaganda poster. The Reynaud government, like the Daladier government, subscribed to the Clemenceau Doctrine: “There is only one way to deal with a mad dog. Either kill him or chain him with a steel chain.” In practice, this translated into two demands: the defeat of the German Army in the field and the dismemberment of the German state so that future generations of Frenchmen could live in the peace and security denied their fathers and grandfathers. The third French demand was also a testament to the power of memory and loss. Three German wars in three successive generations had convinced the French that there was a systemic wickedness in the German character that extended to the German people; a postwar settlement would have to take this character deformity into account in meting out punishment to a defeated Germany. If the Clemenceau Doctrine shaped France’s war aims, the Treaty of Versailles shaped Britain’s. On September 3, 1939, Chamberlain went to war with the two core convictions: Germany must be taught that aggression does not pay and that it would be self-defeating to impose another Carthaginian peace on it. Look what Versailles had wrought: torchlight parades, goose steps, Poland and Czechoslovakia, concentration camps, pogroms, Hitler, Göring, Goebbels. The desire for revenge had twisted an entire generation of young Germans.
Consequently, well into the spring of 1940, Britain’s war aims were kept vague and ill defined. Was Britain fighting the Nazi regime or the German people? The government was looking into that question. Was Britain fighting for a “just [peace] for all nations, including Germany,” or to liberate Poland and Czechoslovakia? The government was looking into that as well. Was Britain fighting to end Hitlerism or just to depose Adolf Hitler? Another matter requiring careful study. What was Britain fighting for, then? To this question, the Chamberlain government did have a clear answer. Britain’s ultimate war aim was to induce a “change of heart” in Germany, which Britain would do by showing it, once and for all, that aggression does not pay. A German withdrawal from Poland and Czechoslovakia would provide evidence of this “change of heart,” but in and of itself it was insufficient. A withdrawal was a mechanical act; a change of heart, a spiritual one. The Chamberlain government was never able to clearly define what constituted an authentic change of heart. Still, the prime minister was confident if Germany had one, he would recognize it. Did Britain seek the military defeat of Germany? The Chamberlain government also had a clear answer to this question: only as a last resort. Until about March 1940, the prime minister remained confident that blockade and propaganda would produce victory, either by inducing a collapse of the German economy or by triggering a revolt of the German masses—or, perhaps, both.
During a meeting of the Allied Supreme War Council in December 1939, then premier Daladier made it clear to Chamberlain that vague British talk of punishing aggression was insufficient. It was “essential . . . to make it impossible for Germany to disturb the peace once more.” That was French for dismembering the German state. A few days later General Henry Pownall, a BEF staff officer, told Chamberlain that General Alphonse Georges, the deputy commander of the French Army, had warned that “if the British again stood in the way of what the French considered a fair solution, they would never forgive us.” In a January 1940 speech, the prime minister attempted to appease his French critics by blaming the German people as well as their leaders for the war. Chamberlain was careful to qualify the accusation, though. “To put it about that the Allies desire the annihilation [of Germany] is a fantastic and malicious invention. . . . On the other hand, [the] German people must realize that the responsibility for the prolongation of this war and of the suffering it might bring in the coming years is theirs, as well as the tyrants who stand over them.” To keep the French sweet, on occasion other cabinet ministers would make similarly bellicose pronouncements. In a November 1939 speech, Lord Halifax talked of “secur[ing] the defeat of Germany,” and in a February 1940 interview, Oliver Stanley, the secretary of state for war, told the Daily Telegraph, “I have only one war aim, to win the war.” By early March, with the British public confused about Britain’s war aims and the French government alarmed by them, Chamberlain was feeling the need to take bold action. Hence he decided to revisit an idea he had discussed with Daladier the previous December: Britain and France would pledge not to sign a separate peace agreement with Germany; such a pact would ease French suspicions about British resolve and provide an umbrella under which French and British differences over war aims could be hidden. Within weeks, the no-separate-peace pledge was placed on the agenda of the March 28 Allied Supreme Council meeting in London. But before addressing the pledge, Chamberlain intended to put Reynaud in his place.
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On the evening of the twenty-seventh, the new French premier arrived in London amid a swirl of rumor and innuendo so dense it constituted its own weather system. It was said of Reynaud that he was overly dependent on his mistress, the Comtesse Hélène de Portes, that he had “the proclivities of a pocket Napoleon,” that he had a “small man’s arrogance,” that he was a “lightweight” and “high-strung,” and that he was less representa
tive of the real France than his predecessor, the earthy Daladier.
The next morning, at the opening meeting of the Allied Supreme Council, Chamberlain set to work on the premier. One of the other guests, General Edmund Ironside, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, marveled at the prime minister’s skill. Chamberlain opened the meeting “with a ninety minute monologue on the general situation . . . [that] took all the thunder out of Reynaud and left him gasping with no electric power,” Ironside noted. “All the ‘projects’ that Reynaud had to bring forward, Chamberlain took away. It was masterly and very well done. Little Reynaud sat there with his head nodding in a sort of ‘tik,’ understanding it all, for he speaks English very well.” By the end of the meeting, Reynaud looked “for the entire world like a little marmoset.”
Reynaud, who knew a thing or two about political infighting himself, transcended the humiliation. He had brought along one good card—the fragile state of French public opinion—and, a gifted orator, he played the card with flair and drama. He told the Supreme Council that the French people were angry at being dragged into the war by the reckless British guarantee to Poland, angry at the pretense that eight underequipped British divisions in France (each with twelve thousand to fifteen thousand men) represented an effort du sange (effort of the blood); and he warned that his countrymen and -women were becoming increasingly susceptible to German claims that France was fighting Britain’s war for it. The speech tapped into a deep vein of British guilt. Seven months into the Great War, Britain had established twenty-nine divisions in France, all fully equipped.
Chamberlain, whose eagerness to do something “spectacular” had not previously included setting a date for doing it, now agreed to a schedule. On April 1, the Allies would issue a warning to the Norwegian and Swedish governments, and on the fifth the Allies would commence Operation Wilfred, the mining of Norwegian waters. Wilfred was one of the three most important measures approved by the Allied Supreme Council on the twenty-eighth. The second was Royal Marine, the mining of German waters, which would commence a day earlier than Wilfred, with the mining of the Rhine, and conclude on the fifteenth, with the mining of the German canals. On April Fools’ Day, the plan for Wilfred was expanded to include a British ground force, bearing orders to land in Norway if the Germans landed first or if “there is clear evidence they intend to do so.” The third measure was the no-separate-peace pledge, which was widely hailed by the French and British press the next day, but which would be remembered by posterity for its tragic ending.
March had also been a busy month in Germany. Late in the month, British intelligence reported that the Germans were “concentrating aircraft and shipping for operations [against] . . . Norwegian aerodromes and ports.” On the twenty-eighth, the day the Allied Supreme Council met, there was another warning about a German operation against Norway. Two days later, in a radio address to the British public, Churchill said, “It seems rather hard, when spring is caressing the land . . . that all our thoughts must be turned and bent upon sterner war.” Then he warned his listeners to prepare themselves for an “intensification of the struggle.”
The first days of April brought more ill tidings. From the intelligence services came reports of a large troop concentration in Rostock, the German port closest to Norway; and from France came a request from Daladier, now minister of defense in the Reynaud government, for a three-month delay in the implementation of Royal Marine. The mining operation would provoke retaliatory German bombing raids, and Daladier wanted more time to prepare France’s air defense and to evacuate men and war industries from threatened areas. Was Daladier telling the truth? In part, yes, but there were also rumors that the request was an act of spite. One rumor had it that Daladier was jealous of Reynaud’s success in London; another, that he was “a peasant” and that the French peasant was famously vindictive. But the most persistent rumor linked Daladier’s request to the feud between the Marquise de Crussol and the Comtesse de Portes, and there may have been something to that. When Daladier refused to dine with him and Reynaud during an early April visit to Paris, an abashed Churchill declared, “what will centuries to come say if we lose this war through lack of understanding?” Spears knew what Paris would say: “All Paris recognized that unless a bomb eliminated both the ministers’ dulcineas [mistresses],” the Reynaud-Daladier feud would continue. For those inclined to enjoy such a spectacle, Spears’s friend Georges Mandel had a warning. If Daladier brought down the Reynaud government out of spite or for some other reason, Édouard Herriot, president of the French Chamber of Deputies, and Pierre Laval, an influential French senator, would come to power on a peace platform.
In early April, with the British war budget (for 1940) still 40 percent below the German, and the British unemployment rate—another metric of war readiness—still at nearly a million, Chamberlain was facing a political crisis of his own. The Vigilantes, the All Party Group, the Watching Committee, and other opposition groups were intensifying their calls for a change of government. Linked only by a shared fear of Chamberlain’s complacency and incompetence, sixty-five-year-old Leo Amery, a Liberal imperialist whose loyalties were to an England that died at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, had little in common with Hugh Dalton, a Labour MP whose gaze was fixed on the welfare-state Britain of 1945, or with Clem Davies, a Unilever executive and political moderate, other than the desire to remove Chamberlain from office.
Davies, founder of the All Party Action Group, and Lord Salisbury, founder of the Watching Committee, were slower in embracing this ambition than many of the prime minister’s other critics. Both men had founded their groups with the intention of providing advice and counsel to Chamberlain and his cabinet. Only when the prime minister showed little interest in accepting advice did Davies’s and Salisbury’s desire to assist the prime minister become the desire to unseat him. In this journey from friend to enemy, the events surrounding the reshuffle of the Chamberlain cabinet on April 3 played an important role.
Despite mounting criticism from the opposition groups, at the beginning of April Chamberlain still looked politically invulnerable. In the March Gallup poll he had a 57 percent favorability rating—a high number but, as events were about to show, an empty one. By the beginning of the eighth month of war, a large segment of the British public had developed significant reservations about the prime minister’s leadership. But, as yet, the doubts and reservations had not found a catalyzing event. The cabinet reshuffle would provide it. For months, the press and Parliament had been urging Chamberlain to bring new faces into the cabinet and to lighten the departmental duties of the cabinet ministers so they could devote more time to oversight of the war. There had also been calls to bring Labour and Liberal MPs to the cabinet so the government would have a national rather than a narrowly partisan character. Little of this advice was evident in the cabinet reshuffle of April 3. Chamberlain’s inner cabinet went into the reshuffle with nine ministers, all Tories and all burdened with heavy departmental responsibilities that interfered with their war work; and the inner cabinet emerged from the reshuffle with eight ministers, all Tories and all burdened with heavy departmental responsibilities besides their war work. The absence of Labour and Liberal ministers was not Chamberlain’s fault—no member of either party would serve under him—but the cautious, unimaginative character of the cabinet changes were. More to the point, they were also reminders of everything that people disliked about the prime minister. Whatever one thought of Hitler, in newsreels he looked dynamic, vigorous, youthful, in command; Chamberlain looked like an old man with an umbrella and a funny Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down above his wing-tip collar when he spoke.
Except for Churchill, who became head of the Military Coordination Committee as well as first lord of the Admiralty, the prime minister’s new cabinet looked like his old cabinet. The only tangible difference was that almost everyone now occupied a different office. On April 4 the Times usually a reliable champion of Chamberlain, described the cabinet changes as dep
ressing and unimaginative. “So toughly has the game been played that in no fewer than three separate cases ministers have simply exchanged offices.” The Manchester Guardian, less friendly to the prime minister, likened the cabinet reshuffle to “a sort of musical chairs of the old stuff”; another opposition paper called the changes “proof that it is almost impossible for the PM to part with his best and oldest friends.” Unfazed by the criticism, Chamberlain defended his war leadership that same day in a rousing lunchtime speech to a Conservative Party conclave at Westminster Hall, a brooding medieval structure whose history of regicide might have given pause to a politician less confident than Chamberlain on a day when half the papers in the country were calling for his head. The prime minister began:
When the war broke out, German preparations were far ahead of our own and it was natural then to expect that the enemy would take advantage of his natural superiority. . . . Is it not a very extraordinary thing that no such attempt was made. Whatever may be the reason . . . one thing is certain: [Hitler] missed the bus.
A few days later, Chamberlain wrote to his sister Hilda, “My speech to the Party . . . was very warmly received and the informality and jauntiness” of “ ‘[Hitler] missed the bus’ seems to have given peculiar satisfaction.” Not to everyone. Before Chamberlain spoke, Dick Law, a Conservative MP and member of the Vigilantes, gave a “biting little speech” opposing a resolution endorsing the prime minister’s war leadership. Law finished, expecting to be torn “limb from limb.” Instead, dozens of the party faithful—men and women who had stood by Chamberlain through Munich and Poland; who had defended him against charges of smugness, lethargy, cronyism, and complacency—leaped to their feet, applauding. “Why, this resolution is going to fail!” exclaimed a Chamberlain loyalist. On an appeal to party loyalty, an amended version of the motion did eventually pass; nonetheless, the incident placed a new thought in the public mind: perhaps it was not Hitler but Chamberlain who had “missed the bus.”