On 15 March 1939 Germany invaded Czechoslovakia at 6 a.m. It had long been expected, once the Sudetenland had been annexed, and resistance was hopeless. Anthony Eden, the former Foreign Secretary who had resigned the previous year over Chamberlain’s attempts at rapprochement with Mussolini, said, ‘We are heading for a universal tragedy which is going to engulf us all.’ The British government made no official protest but in the eyes of much of the press and, increasingly, of the public, appeasement was seen to have failed.
Behind the scenes, within the government a radical change of heart was taking place. Many Conservatives were beginning to urge conscription, particularly in view of the growing threat to Poland. Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary on 17 March, ‘The feeling in the lobbies is that Chamberlain will either have to go or completely reverse his policy.’ On 31 March, when Chamberlain was to make a statement in the House of Commons, Nicolson recorded the scene:
Chamberlain arrives looking gaunt and ill. The skin above his high cheekbones is parchment yellow. He drops wearily into his place. David Margesson proposes the adjournment and the P.M. rises. He begins by saying that we believe in negotiation and do not trust in rumours. He then gets to the centre of his statement, namely that if Poland is attacked we shall declare war. That is greeted with cheers from every side. He reads his statement very slowly with a bent grey head. It is most impressive.1
Chamberlain’s words were unequivocal:
I now have to inform the House that … in the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence … His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all the support in their power.2
A poll in the News Chronicle showed that just over 50 per cent of those questioned still supported the policy of appeasement – a testimony to people’s unquenchable optimism. But the government had changed course.
On 7 April – Good Friday – Italy invaded Albania. ‘The terrible inevitability of war has descended upon us’ wrote Chips Channon in his diary that night.3 From that Easter weekend onwards, the only question was when? How soon?
On 27 April the government announced its plans for a Compulsory Military Training Bill, affecting some 200,000 men between the ages of twenty and twenty-one.
On 28 April, Hitler addressed the Reichstag for two and a half hours. His speech was ostensibly a reply to Roosevelt’s message calling for assurances that Germany and Italy would not attack independent nations. (He had listed no fewer than thirty-one, including Poland.)
In spite of superficial assurances of Germany’s continued friendship towards Britain, Hitler said:
I am now compelled to state that the policy of England is now both unofficially and officially leaving no doubt about the fact that such a conviction [i.e. that a war between England and Germany would never again be possible] is no longer shared in London, and that, on the contrary, the opinion prevails there that no matter in what conflict Germany should some day be entangled Great Britain would always have to take her stand against Germany. Thus a war against Germans is taken for granted in that country…
Since England today, both by the press and unofficially, upholds the view that Germany should be opposed under all circumstances, and confirms this by the policy of encirclement known to us, the basis for the Naval Treaty has been removed.4
In a private conversation with the Rumanian Foreign Minister, Grigore Gafencu, Hitler’s real attitude emerged nakedly and characteristically. Their meeting was described to Harold Nicolson and recorded in the latter’s diary for 23 April:
[Hitler] had spoken quite calmly at first but when he touched on ideology he began to scream. He had spent the whole time abusing this country. He had complained that there was no British statesman of sufficient magnitude or vision to agree with him to divide the world between them…. All that he wanted was that we should not thwart his destiny in Eastern Europe. It was at this stage that he began to scream. He said that it was grotesque to imagine that he wanted to invade Holland or Belgium. The only small countries he wanted to dominate were those of the East…. He said that if war came we might be able to destroy three German towns, but that he would destroy every single British town.5
There could no longer be any real hope of avoiding war with Germany: hence that ‘unspeakable’ summer.