When Chamberlain signed the Munich agreement in September 1938, he signalled in the most public way possible Britain’s disinterest in the fate of the states of Central and Eastern Europe.1 But almost exactly a year later he announced that Britain was going to war against Nazi Germany, ostensibly to maintain the independence of one of those same states, Poland. This came about because in the winter and spring of 1938–9 there was a seismic shift in British policy. Most policy-makers, even those who had supported Chamberlain’s efforts to secure a negotiated settlement of the Czechoslovak crisis, came to accept that appeasing Germany had failed. The right policy was to do what Eden had suggested in November 1937, that is, to accelerate rearmament and work with other powers to try to contain Hitler’s ambitions. This rapid reversal of policy was driven by three causes. One was a belated recognition that what happened in Central and Eastern Europe did matter because of the repercussions it was likely to have on the security of Western Europe, and more especially on the future of French policy. Another was the emergence of a more realistic appraisal of the military balance which suggested that it was not so dangerously tilted against Britain as appeared to have been the case at Munich. Thirdly, the decision was driven, as so many decisions by the British policy-making elite had been driven in the preceding twenty years, by their perceptions of what they believed the public wanted. Until Munich British moralism had played into Hitler’s hands. It enabled him to exploit the residual feelings of guilt that so many people felt when they contemplated the ways in which Germany had been unfairly treated under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. But after Munich that sense of guilt quickly became overlaid by a new moralism, a perspective which suggested that there was something inherently evil about Nazi ambitions, and that it was Britain’s reluctant duty to curb them. However, not everyone accepted the wisdom of this new direction. Foremost amongst them was Chamberlain. Munich had done nothing to dent his self-confidence, so he could assure one correspondent in January 1939 that ‘I assure you I am not such a “mug” as is generally supposed!’2 Together with a small group of advisers, he remained intent on trying to discover if some means could be found to achieve a settlement of Germany’s grievances that would ensure the continuation of peace, and he was even prepared to work behind the backs of his own ministers to do so.
On returning to London from Munich Chamberlain was greeted by tumultuous crowds cheering themselves hoarse with relief that he had brought back peace, not war.3 Carried away by the emotions of the moment, he proclaimed from the window of 10 Downing Street that, like Disraeli before him, he had returned from Berlin bringing ‘Peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.’4 The welcome he received was both spontaneous and genuine, representing the heartfelt relief of a people anxious above all to avoid war. One woman in the crowd expressed her gratitude to the Prime Minister by saying simply that he was ‘The man who gave me back my son.’5 In the House of Lords the Archbishop of Canterbury, using arguments that were widely accepted, insisted that Britain had no obligation to Czechoslovakia, that there was nothing that Britain could have done to save it, and that by his actions Chamberlain had avoided the evil of another great war.6 In the Commons one of the Prime Ministers sycophantic acolytes claimed that ‘the whole world rejoices whilst only a few malcontents jeer.’7 That was an exaggeration, albeit an excusable one for even as Chamberlain was cheered, there began to develop an undercurrent of feeling that Britain had been forced into making concessions to Hitler because it was too weak to stand up to him, and that the settlement represented a shameful desertion of the last remaining democracy in Central Europe.8 Most local Conservative associations sent messages of congratulations to Downing Street, but coupled them with intimations that the government must put Britain’s defences in order and make no further concessions to Hitler.9 On 3 October The Times published a memorial signed by several dozen Liberal and Labour politicians, including Lord Robert Cecil, A. V. Alexander, and Harold Nicolson, public intellectuals such as H. G. Well, John Maynard Keynes, Basil Liddell Hart, Normal Angell, and Henry Wickham Steed, and a smattering of professors including R. W. Seton-Watson and John Hilton, in which they condemned the Munich agreement as representing a one-sided bargain with a power ‘which has hitherto openly scorned the very principles of morality and justice upon which Western civilization is founded.’10 Similar views were expressed further down the social scale, as noted by an MI5 agent who surveyed opinion amongst rank and file workers in the engineering industry in London, Birmingham, and Newcastle. They, too, placed little trust in Hitler’s protestations that he had no more territorial demands in Europe.11
The Commons debate on the agreement also showed that Chamberlain was already starting to lose the moral high ground that hitherto had sustained public support for his efforts to avoid war. In June Attlee had criticized ministers for failing to grasp that the dictators did not share ‘the British conception of justice, humanity and honest dealing.’12 Now he made no bones about it: the Munich agreement constituted ‘one of the greatest diplomatic defeats that this country and France has ever sustained’. For Hitler ‘it was another step forward in his design to dominate Europe.’ It was, ‘a victory for brute force…a gallant, civilized, and democratic people betrayed and handed over to a ruthless despotism. We have seen something more. We have seen the cause of democracy, which is, in our view, the cause of civilisation and humanity, receive a terrible defeat.’13 But it was Churchill’s verdict on the agreement, ‘a total and unmitigated defeat’, that resonated, and was to make him henceforth the central figure in British opposition to Hitler.14 For the time being Chamberlain could contain any serious disquiet, at least on the government’s own benches. Only one minister, Duff Cooper, resigned from the Cabinet in protest, and only about two dozen Conservative MPs abstained in the final vote.15 More MPs might have made their private doubts more public, but a combination of pressure from the whips and local party associations, the pride which most committed Tories took in being loyal to their party, and a highly effective speech Chamberlain made winding up the debate dissuaded them.16 In the meantime Chamberlain prevaricated. Hoare recommended going to the country but on 6 October Chamberlain told the Commons that a general election called to capitalize on his popularity as the man who had avoided war would be a mistake. It would divide the country when it needed to be united. Privately he may have thought differently, telling one of his sisters that he was eagerly looking for an opportunity to go to the polls.17 However, caution prevailed, probably to his political benefit. On 27 October a pro-Chamberlain candidate did win a by-election in Oxford, but the party suffered a sharp drop in its share of the poll and two weeks later the Conservative candidate at Dartford was defeated. ‘Peace in our time’ did not appear to be a vote winner that would sweep the Conservatives back into power.18 Chamberlain could not, therefore, repeat Baldwin’s success in 1935 and recapture the centre ground of politics for his party. His political fate, and that of his party, would rest squarely on his success or failure in dealing with the dictators.19
Chamberlain had promised the Commons that the government would conduct a review of Britain’s defences, but he had no intention of doing much about them. For Chamberlain Munich was not the end of appeasement, it was a new beginning for, as he told the Cabinet on 31 October:
Our Foreign Policy was one of appeasement: We must aim at establishing relations with the Dictator Powers which will lead to a settlement in Europe and to a sense of stability.
There had been a good deal of talk in the country and in the Press about the need for rearmament by this country. In Germany and Italy it was suspected that this rearmament was directed against them, and it was important that we should not encourage these suspicions.20
In saying this he betrayed the extent to which he misjudged Hitler. He believed that Hitler, like him, abhorred war. The opposite was the case. Hitler had been preparing for war since 1933. For him Munich represented a defeat, not a victory. He may have gained a diplomatic success, but what he wanted was a military triumph, a short, limited, and victorious war to crush Czechoslovakia and swell his prestige at home and abroad.21 The more he pondered the outcome of the conference, the more angry he became: with the Anglo-French intervention; with Mussolini’s desertion; with the reluctance of so many of his own subordinates and the German people to embrace the course he had chosen. The way in which the French and British had collapsed at Munich only whetted his appetite. ‘I experienced those poor worms Daladier and Chamberlain in Munich’, he told his generals in August 1939. ‘They will be too cowardly to attack.’22 The declaration that he had signed at Chamberlain’s behest was a meaningless scrap of paper. Never again, he swore, would he allow Chamberlain or anyone else to interfere with his actions. There would be no second Munich.23
Between October 1938 and March 1939 Hitler pursued two objectives, the final destruction of Czechoslovakia and preparations for war with Britain and France, preparations which included efforts first to neutralize Poland by means of diplomacy and, when that failed, plans to destroy Poland in a brief and limited war.24 On 21 October 1938 he issued a new directive to the Wehrmacht. Its immediate objectives were the liquidation of the rump of Czechoslovakia, and the occupation of the Lithuanian port of Memel. This would be coupled with a campaign of psychological mobilization to persuade the German people that war was both inevitable and necessary.25 Armament’s policy was to be geared towards a war with the Western powers. The tempo of the army’s expansion was to be accelerated. Göering ordered an utterly unrealistic five-fold expansion of the Luftwaffe, so that it might be in a position to wage an air campaign against Britain and France, while the navy’s Z plan, inaugurated in January 1939, was intended to create a fleet which, by 1949, would be capable of defeating the Royal Navy.26 Once completed Germany would be able both to defeat the Western powers and carve out the living space in the east that remained Hitler’s ultimate objective.27 There could be no better evidence of the hollowness of Hitler’s insistence that the Anglo-German Naval treaty and the Munich declaration would set the tone of the future of Anglo-German relations.
Hitler also gave thought to how he needed to shape the international political arena to facilitate his plans. Switzerland and the Low Countries were to be kept neutral. The Anti-Comintern pact was to be transformed into a tripartite military alliance so that Germany, Italy, and Japan could combine in a war against France and Britain. His immediate aim was to conquer France; Britain would then be expelled from the continent, and the two European Axis powers would be able to turn their whole might against her. The Italians initially prevaricated but signed the Pact of Steel with Germany on 22 May 1939. The Japanese were less forthcoming. Opponents of a tripartite alliance in Tokyo were aware that Japan was already bogged down in China and feared that war with Britain would also inevitably mean war with the USA.28 The Poles were even more recalcitrant when Ribbentrop laid Hitler’s terms before them: the return of Danzig, an extra-territorial rail and road link across the corridor to East Prussia, and accession to the Anti-Comintern pact. In return they offered to extend the 1934 German-Polish agreement and to guarantee Poland’s western frontier. As Hitler had announced in September that the Sudetenland represented his last territorial demand in Europe, the Polish government could be forgiven for thinking that any German guarantees would be worthless. Furthermore, they had no wish to become Hitler’s subservient puppet by joining the Anti-Comintern pact, thus angering the USSR, and ending their relationship with France.29 That left Hitler with no choice. Poland would have to be first isolated, and then destroyed. ‘There will be war’, he told his military leaders on 23 May 1939. ‘Our task is to isolate Poland. Success in isolating her will be decisive.’ The timing of the attack would depend on the international situation. Everything pointed to the need to destroy Poland before the Western powers could intervene, but if they did so, he was willing to accept the challenge. ‘If that is not possible it is better to fall upon the West and finish off Poland at the same time.’30
Apologists for the Munich agreement defended the agreement on the grounds that it brought Britain eleven vital months in which to accelerate its rearmament programme, with the result that it was much better prepared to fight in September 1939 than it had been in September 1938.31 There is some truth in this, but it ignores two things. Munich also gave the Germans more time to strengthen their own armed forces, not least by allowing them to take over, undamaged, the Czech arsenal of modern weapons and factories. It also ignores the fact that despite pressure from the COS, some ministers, critics of the government both inside and outside the Conservative party, and a growing section of the press, Chamberlain consistently dragged his feet. He continued to adhere to the belief that too much rearmament would bankrupt the country before a war had even begun, telling the Cabinet on 3 October that:
Ever since he had been Chancellor of the Exchequer, he had been oppressed with the sense that the burden of armaments might break our backs. This had been one of the factors which had led him to the view that it was necessary to try and resolve the causes which were responsible for the armament race.
He thought that we were now in a more hopeful position, and that the contacts which had been established with the Dictator Powers opened up the possibility that we might be able to reach some agreement with them which would stop the armament race. It was clear, however, that it would be madness for the country to stop rearming until we were convinced that other countries would act in the same way. For the time being, therefore, we should relax no particle of effort until our deficiencies had been made good. That, however, was not the same thing as to say that as a thank offering for the present detente, we should at once embark on a great increase in our armaments programme.32
This was not a ringing endorsement of the need for a rapid expansion of the rearmament programme. Chamberlain gave further public proof of his reluctance further to increase the pace and scope of the rearmament programme by his refusal to introduce compulsory National Service, to broaden the basis of his government, or to establish a Ministry of Supply, despite Hore-Belisha speaking publicly in favour of doing so.33 The most he was prepared to do was to hasten the completion of the existing programme. What he would not do, for fear of igniting a new arms race, was to agree to increase its size.34 He did not share the belief that was rapidly gaining ground that Munich had made war more, not less, likely. ‘The papers’, he wrote on 24 October, ‘are largely responsible for it and I want to try and get them back to the view that though there are gaps to fill up we need not believe that we have got to make huge additions to the programme now being put into operation.’35 If existing programmes were extended, he warned the Cabinet on 26 October, ‘We had had a small indication the other day that confidence in our financial position had shown some signs of weakness. It must be remembered that our financial resources would be one of our great assets in any long war, and he thought that any big war would necessarily be a long war.’36
The army did get more searchlights and anti-aircraft guns, the RAF got more fighters, and the Admiralty was promised a few more escort vessels.37 These decisions were politically uncontroversial (in the case of the Admiralty), or had the impetus of public opinion behind them, in the case of fighters and anti-aircraft defences. But the General Staff’s request that the regular and Territorial army field forces should be combined into a single force of eighteen divisions capable of fighting a continental land war had no such impetus to drive it forward, and Chamberlain was far from pleased when Sir Walter Kirke, the Director General of the Territorial army, spoke in public in favour of creating a more powerful field force.38 Similarly Simon resisted the large-scale expansion of the RAF’s bomber force that Kingsley Wood wanted because the country could not afford it. ‘On the financial side’, the Chancellor concluded, ‘he was by no means clear that if we were to adopt the programme now proposed we should get through without inflation. This would mean rises in prices, in wages, and in interest rates, and might well involve some real injury to our financial strength, which constituted a fourth arm of defence.’39 The ‘fourth arm’ was to be preserved for a little longer. Shortly before Christmas, when the CID considered secret reports that Hitler planned to bomb London in March 1939, Chamberlain told the CID that:
So far as acceleration of munitions, etc., was concerned he was very doubtful whether anything further could be done without war powers. Even if we took those powers at once, we were unlikely to get any substantial results between now and March, and we might merely provoke Herr Hitler into antedating his plan. It was therefore essential that any measures that might be taken to improve our defensive situation should be kept as unostentatious as possible.40
It was not surprising that when the CID considered a series of reports on armaments production in early January 1939 they had a sorry litany of delays before them.41
Halifax had endorsed the Munich agreement, but in markedly less enthusiastic terms than the Prime Minister, telling the House of Lords on 3 October that it was not any kind of victory, but was the product of a ‘hideous choice of evils’.42 He was equally blunt when he told his Private Secretary that ‘he thought it was a horrid business and humiliating, no use blinking the fact but yet better than a European war.’43 Henceforth his path and that of the Prime Minister increasingly diverged. Chamberlain genuinely believed that the declaration that Hitler had signed did mark the start of a new beginning in European power politics, and that it would be possible to negotiate a general settlement that would assuage Germany’s remaining grievances and ensure peace for the next generation. Halifax was more sceptical. He shared the sense of humiliation felt by most of his senior officials, angered that they had been compelled to surrender to German bullying because of the backward state of British armaments. Their priority, shared by the Foreign Secretary, was that the Cabinet had to be persuaded to accelerate the pace of British rearmament so that it was in a better position to take a firmer stand against the dictators in the future.44 The consensus that emerged in the Foreign Office during October was summarised Halifax in a letter to Phipps at the beginning of November. Germany, not France, was now the predominant power in Central and South Eastern Europe. Britain and France, therefore ‘have to uphold their predominant position in Western Europe by the maintenance of such armed strength as would render any attack upon them hazardous. They should also firmly maintain their hold on the Mediterranean and the Near East. They should also keep a tight hold on their Colonial Empires and maintain the closest possible ties with the United States of America.’45 But to do this Britain’s foreign and defence policies had to march hand in hand. ‘It is one thing to allow German expansion in Central Europe, which to my mind is a normal and natural thing, but we must be able to resist a German expansion in Western Europe or else our whole position is undermined. It would be fatal for us to be caught again with insufficient strength.’46
In Halifax’s estimation two things were necessary to demonstrate Britain’s new resolve, a compulsory national service register, for ‘the institution of such machinery would create a profound impression both at home and abroad’, and broadening the basis of the government by inviting Eden and some Labour leaders to join the Cabinet.47 Chamberlain had no enthusiasm for either suggestion. Only Duff Cooper had resigned over Munich, and he had little following in the Conservative party except amongst the small band of committed anti-appeasers. The other ministers who had shown themselves to be waverers during the crisis were political lightweights whom Chamberlain despised.48 He had emerged politically unscathed from the crisis and had no intention of inviting his leading critics, either inside or outside his own party, into the Cabinet.49 In December a triumvirate of junior ministers, Robert Hudson, the Secretary of the Department of Overseas Trade, the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava, the parliamentary Under Secretary for the Colonies, and Lord Stratchona, the parliamentary Under Secretary for War, broke cover and threatened to resign unless the Prime Minister replaced Hore-Belisha, Inskip, and Winterton with ministers who showed more dynamism and commitment to hastening rearmament. Chamberlain initially dismissed the malcontents as suffering from a bad case of thwarted ambition.50 But, as outside pressure for such changes mounted, he did, reluctantly, act, although not in a way that weakened his own hold on the levers of power. There were no places for either Eden or Churchill. Instead, in January 1939 Chatfield, a non-party technocrat who owed his place to Chamberlain’s patronage, replaced Inskip, who was moved to the Dominions Office. In January 1939 national service was introduced, but on a purely voluntary basis to provide the personnel necessary to make the country safe against air attack, and when Chamberlain broadcast on the BBC to inaugurate the programme, he carefully made no mention of the need to find volunteers for the armed services.51
In early October it was possible to believe that the Munich agreement, and the declaration that Chamberlain had persuaded Hitler to sign, represented more than the avoidance of war. They had put European political relations on a new and better footing. Diplomatic brinkmanship and threats of war would be replaced by negotiations and summit conferences. But they also ensured that any actions or sayings that fell outside the sphere of peaceful, diplomatic exchanges would be deemed as being not just politically, but also morally, improper.52 Such doubts soon began to emerge, fed by Hitler’s very public attacks on Chamberlain and British policy that began with a vehemently anti-British speech he made at Saarbrücken on 8 October.53 ‘It would be well,’ he insisted, ‘if people in England gave up certain airs and graces of the Versailles epoch. We will not tolerate admonitions to Germany as by a governess.’54 British liberal democracy was a volatile and irresponsible form of government that permitted warmongers like Eden, Duff Cooper, Churchill, and Arthur Greenwood to flourish. ‘We know that the aim of these men would be to begin a war; they make no bones about it.’55 Faced with such threats, Germany had every right to arm to protect itself. The tone and content of these speeches began to provoke a sea-change in British opinion. Before Munich Hitler had publicly justified his aims by reference to security, self-determination, and equality, the very foundations that the 1919 European settlement was supposed to rest upon. But after Munich Hitler abandoned any pretence that German demands could be justified by the liberal norms of international relations. They now rested on the sole basis that Germany’s might was right.56 It was, therefore, not surprising that when Kingsley Wood outlined the government’s very limited acceleration of its air rearmament programme, he was met with obvious dissatisfaction on the government benches.57 His timing could hardly have been worse. His speech coincided with a wave of anti-Jewish violence that swept across Germany on 9 and 10 November and which was widely reported in the British press. The ‘Kristallnacht’ pogrom seemed to represent a return to a kind of barbarity that most British people thought had long been consigned to the past.58 Munich, it was now clear, did not mark Hitler’s conversion to the path of peace and international morality. On the contrary, he was a man whose word could simply not be trusted, and it would be positively dangerous to continue to do so. On 18 November the Church Times, the mouthpiece of the Church of England, told its readers that:
With an adamant scorn of world opinion, Germany has demonstrated this week how it will treat its dependants and its opponents. No one can know what its next demands will be. This country, therefore, which stands in the van of freedom and democracy, is compelled to arm itself effectively against aggression. It is not merely the Fatherland that is in danger; it is Christian civilization …. This week’s events make it clear that the crisis, that the country believed had come to an end with the Munich agreement, still continues.59
Hitherto British moralism had produced a sense of guilt about the Versailles settlement that Hitler had been able to exploit. By the end of November 1938, that is four months before German troops entered Prague and Hitler conquered the rump stare of Czechoslovakia, that sense of moral guilt was fast dissipating. One loyal Conservative party member and former MP, reflecting on the pogrom, wrote in his diary that ‘It really is too appalling that such brutalities should go on in the 20th century—I don’t see how we can go on trying to come to terms with a government capable of such atrocious injustice and cruelty. Public opinion in England simply won’t stand it.’60 Such views were shared by supporters and opponents of the Munich agreement alike. ‘Chips’ Channon, one of Chamberlain’s most devoted adherents in the Commons, was aghast at what had happened in Germany. ‘No-one ever accused me of being anti-German’, he wrote with some truth, ‘but really I can no longer cope with the present regime which seems to have lost all sense and reason. Are they mad? The Jewish persecutions carried to such a fiendish degree are short-sighted, cruel and unnecessary and now, so newspapers tell us, we shall have persecutions of Roman Catholics too.’61 Halifax described the pogroms as being ‘directly opposed to the Christian doctrine on which European civilization has been built’.62 Duff Cooper, now one of Chamberlain’s outspoken critics, told an audience in Paris that the Nazi regime ‘that had begun by burning books, by persecuting religion, and trying to exterminate a race which had given Christianity to the world, had to be considered the enemy of true civilisation.’63 The notion that Nazi Germany represented not merely a threat to British security, but to Western civilization, was rapidly gaining ground.
In the twelve months between Munich and Britain’s declaration of war in September 1939 growing numbers of people struggled to reconcile their fears that the next war would mean the destruction of civilization with their fear that another war would be necessary to save that very same civilization.64 Imperfect although they were, Gallup Polls taken in late 1938 and early 1939 showed that the wider British public had a shared distaste for what was happening in Germany. In late November 73 per cent of respondents said that the pogrom was a significant obstacle to better Anglo-German understanding.65 Opinion more widely was also shifting against right-wing extremism. In December 1938, 61 per cent of respondents said they would prefer the USSR to emerge the victor in any future Russo-German war, and only 9 per cent hoped that German would win. A month later two-thirds of respondents said that if faced by an unavoidable choice between them, they would rather live under communism than fascism.66 Chamberlain’s foreign policy divided the nation. In February 1939 a poll showed that just over a quarter of respondents believed that it would produce an enduring peace, just under a quarter thought it would bring war nearer by whetting the appetite of the dictators, and slightly less than a half believed that it would buy time for rearmament.67 These attitudes help to explain the poor run of by-election results that the Conservative party suffered in the aftermath of ‘Kristallnacht’.68 It also had an impact on Chamberlain’s freedom of action. Rumours in the Beaverbrook press that he was considering making colonial concessions to Hitler provoked a wave of protests from constituency associations, and the sense of moral outrage that swept the country persuaded Chamberlain that he could not afford, at least for the time being, to make any further public concessions to Hitler.69.
But if he could not approach Hitler directly, he might be able to do so indirectly. At the FPC on 14 November, and in the light of SIS reports of Hitler’s anger with Britain, Halifax and Chamberlain agreed that no useful purpose would be served for the time being by a resumption of Anglo-German conversations, but it might be possible to approach Hitler indirectly through Mussolini. At Munich Mussolini had assured Chamberlain that he would receive a warm welcome if he came to Italy. Perhaps in the course of such a visit he might be able to persuade Mussolini to encourage Hitler to behave more reasonably, or even detach Italy from the Rome-Berlin Axis.70 ‘An hour or two tete-à-tete with Musso[lini]’, Chamberlain told one of his sisters ‘might be extraordinarily valuable in making plans for talks with Germany and if I had explored the subject first with France we might see some way of getting a move on. In the past I have often felt a sense of helpless and exasperation at the way things have been allowed to drift in foreign affairs but now I am in a position to keep them on the move and while I am P.M. I don[’]t mean to go to sleep.’71 As a first step ministers acquiesced when Chamberlain insisted that the bringing into operation of the Anglo-Italian Agreement was ‘an essential step in the policy of general European appeasement.’72 It became operative on 16 November, after Mussolini had agreed, as a gesture of goodwill, to withdraw 10,000 Italian troops from Spain. Halifax had hoped that the ratification of the Anglo-Italian agreement would lead to better relations between Italy and France. He was soon disabused of that idea when on 30 November Ciano sparked a carefully orchestrated outburst by Italian deputies in the Chamber who cried out for ‘Tunis, Djibuti and Corsica!’. But, far from intimidating the French, it united the nation in a wave of indignation.73 Even so when Chamberlain and Halifax left for Rome on 10 January 1939 the Prime Minister was cautiously optimistic, believing that he would be able to use his personal charm to persuade Mussolini to support calls for an armistice in Spain and ‘to prevent Herr Hitler from carrying out some “mad dog” act.’74 It was for that reason that he also refused to comply with the French government’s wishes that he make it clear to Mussolini that he stood four square beside them in the face of the Italian demands for French territory and colonies.
Chamberlain believed that Mussolini needed British friendship to overcome Italy’s economic problems, to extricate Italy from the Spanish morass, and to reduce his dependence on Germany.75 His hopes were utterly misconceived. Mussolini and Ciano were so little interested in entering meaningful political discussions that they did not even bother to prepare an agenda for them. The visit, which took place between 11 and 14 January 1939, was largely occupied with ceremonies, banquets, and sightseeing.76 Although Chamberlain had just three hours of conversation with Mussolini, the latter charmed him, and he returned to London elated.77 Once at home he emphasized to the Cabinet the friendly reception he had received, and Mussolini’s insistence that all he wanted was peace and disarmament. Yet on the two key questions that Chamberlain hoped to resolve, he received no satisfaction. Mussolini said nothing to suggest that he would encourage Hitler to show restraint, and he made it clear that he would not withdraw more troops forces from Spain until Franco had won.78 Halifax’s response was more measured and realistic. Mussolini did not want a major war but he would use every opportunity to blackmail his opponents into making concessions.79 Others were similarly sceptical. De la Warr passed a note to Walter Elliot saying, ‘“He does not know the foreign mind”’. Walter scribbled below it: ‘“Caesar Borgia was most charming, and although I had my doubts about Lucretia, I found later that I had misunderstood her.” Extracts from the memoirs of a Roman cardinal published posthumously.’80 Their scepticism was justified. Chamberlain’s polite and understated approach to the talks had merely confirmed what Mussolini, Ciano, and Hitler already believed. The British were weak, indecisive, and decadent.81
By late 1939 British policy-makers were well-aware that Hitler regarded Munich as a humiliation and was bent on revenge.82 In December Sir George Olgivie-Forbes, the chargé d’affaires at the Berlin embassy who was deputizing for Henderson who was on sick leave, intimated that Germany’s over-rapid rearmament programme had brought the country to the brink of a crisis, and ‘If internal dissensions threaten to assume serious proportions, a natural consequence would be to drive Hitler into a foreign adventure.’83 This was the background against which, between December 1938 and April 1939, the Foreign Office received nearly twenty warnings of possible German attacks. Some were received through normal diplomatic channels, others were provided by the SIS, and others by Vansittart’s private agency and other unofficial sources.84 Early reports indicated that Hitler intended to strike eastwards, perhaps into the Ukraine.85 But others quickly began to suggest that Britain ‘is Enemy No. 1 of Herr Hitler and the Nazi Party advisers. He is embittered and exasperated over the British. His extremist advisers, who are particularly anti-British, feed him on tales of British “decadence”’.86 Hitler, it was claimed, was on the verge of madness, hated the British, whom he regarded as ‘an effete, finished race,’ and might soon try to settle matters once and for all with them.87 Ribbentrop was also alleged to have remarked that ‘If no agreement can be reached with England he (the Fuhrer) is determined not to shrink from war in order to destroy her.’88 Such a war, according to another informant would see Germany, Italy, and Japan acting in coalition, so that ‘These English, arrogant apes that they are, think they can rule the world forever with 15 battleships. They won’t, however. Our Air Force and the German and Italian U-Boats will take care of that.’89 In fact, Hitler harboured no such plans. In early 1939 his immediate focus was eastwards, not westwards. It is likely, although the evidence is not conclusive, that these reports were deliberately planted by members of the German conservative resistance in the hope that they would encourage the British to do what they had not done at Munich and take a firm and public stand against Hitler.90
That was something British analysts did not discern. What particularly perturbed some of them was that these reports were coupled with others which pointed to the growth of defeatism in France. Less than two weeks after the Munich agreement was signed the Deputy Chief of the French General Staff warned the British military attaché in Paris that the British must ‘take care of French public opinion. France does not intend to allow England to fight her battles with French soldiers,’ and unless it was certain of significant British military support, ‘France would lose heart in face of the preponderating power of Germany, and might take the line of peace at any price, even if Germany attacked the Low Countries, so long as the territorial integrity of France was respected.’91 His warning was not groundless. There was a real division amongst senior French policy-makers about French policy after Munich. Georges Bonnet, the French foreign minister, had been a persistent advocate of concessions to Germany before Munich, and wanted to continue down the same road after Munich. France should abdicate any role in Eastern and Central Europe, abandoning both the Franco-Polish and Franco-Soviet alliances, so long as Germany agreed to leave France and Western Europe alone.92 The high point of his policy was the Franco-German non-aggression pact signed on 6 December.93 But Prime Minister Daladier was not prepared to see France abandon its great power status. Instead it must construct an eastern bloc of allies from the Baltic to the Balkans as a counter-weight to Germany.94 He was equally determined that France must never again be caught as unprepared as it was in September 1938, and accelerated its rearmament programme.95 Initially a considerable body of French opinion on both the right and centre were perhaps willing to follow Bonnet’s lead.96 But Daladier was able to exploit the deep sense of indignation aroused by Mussolini’s inept campaign of territorial and colonial demands, demands which most Frenchmen believed were supported and instigated by Germany, to unite opinion behind his policy of resistance. He understood, however, that resistance would depend on large-scale British support. What he got in November 1938 were words, not deeds. Halifax understood that a strong and independent France was an essential prerequisite if Britain itself was to be secure, and:
there is perhaps more risk that France may in certain political circumstances turn so defeatist as to give up the struggle of maintaining adequate defences even for the safety of metropolitan France. Hence the great importance which I attach to our using every opportunity of encouraging her by precept and example to rearm as soon as possible. For whether France deliberately contracted out (which I regard as most improbable) or whether she allowed herself to become so weak as to be unable to maintain her own independence, the result for us would be the same—we might have to face alone the full weight of German military power in the West.97
But what British ministers were not yet prepared to do was to make the kind of large-scale continental commitment that the French wanted as compensation for the fact that the Munich agreement robbed them of the assistance they had once expected from the thirty-four divisions of the Czechoslovak army.98 Just prior to a planned visit by Chamberlain and Halifax to Paris the Cabinet agreed that the defence of fortress Britain, not the preparation of a field force to go to France, remained their priority, and that they would neither send troops to protect France’s land frontiers, nor aircraft to defend Paris from the Luftwaffe.99
That was anathema to at least one British policy-maker, Major-General Henry Pownall, formerly an Assistant Secretary at the CID and now the Director of Military Operations at the War Office. He was convinced that sooner or later the British would have to send ground forces to fight alongside the French army and given the refusal of his political masters to accept that fact, when the field force did go, it would be dangerously ill-equipped. ‘Nobody here asks for the preparation of a vast Continental Army’, he wrote:
but we do ask that such regular forces as we have should be ready and properly equipped for the continental role—since nobody can possibly promise they will not be wanted for this role—and that they should be supported by TA as soon as these formations can be released from Home Defence. Surely that is not too much to ask! We are confident we can win a long war; the Germans, realising our latent strength, will hope to fight and win a short war. Our initial task is to ensure they do not succeed.100
Pownall hoped that while they were in Paris the French would make this plain to Chamberlain and Halifax, and to ensure that they did, ‘I hope to “work” this a bit through our M [ilitary].A[ttaché]. in Paris.’101 He summoned the attaché, Colonel William Fraser, to London and told him that although ‘It would be highly improper for the G[eneral] Staff] here to bring pressure to bear on the PM by French Ministers through the French G[eneral] Staff]’, he should ‘have a nice chat with Petibon [Gamelin’s Chef du Cabinet] and make hints, in the form of questions, but such questions might be raised during the discussions. I heard later that questions of British support of France is on the agenda of the discussions….’102 But whereas on 24 November the French leaders readily acceded to Chamberlain’s request that they reiterate their readiness to stand by Britain if it was attacked by Germany, the British were less willing to fall in with French wishes that they promise a considerably larger effort on land if France was attacked.103 The policy of ‘limited liability’ and the priority given to a fortress Britain policy had not yet run its course. Recognizing this, Gamelin stepped up pressure on the British to make a meaningful contribution to the defence of France. When Hore-Belisha visited France at the end of December, he emphasized to him the formidable nature of the German military threat.104 Fraser painted a similar picture, claiming that the French General Staff were seriously alarmed about the imbalance of military power between France and Germany, and added that it was increasingly possible that Bonnet’s policy of giving Germany a free hand in return for a guarantee of French security might triumph unless the British reversed their policy, introduced conscription, and made a real continental commitment.105 Phipps also intimated that German propaganda was making much of the British refusal to offer France the help it wanted.106
In London Gort also took up the cudgels. A year earlier it might have been plausible to argue that the French did not look to the British to provide a field force to assist in the land defence of France. ‘But in the light of the recent conversations in Paris it seems clear that the French do look to us for such assistance.’107 The strength of the Maginot line made it highly likely that in any future war the Germans would seek to outflank it by advancing through the Low Countries, and if they did so they would threaten the security of the Channel Ports, and even the combined actions of the French and British air forces would not suffice to stop the German army conquering the Low Countries. Only troops on the ground could do that, and ‘The effect, military and moral, of despatching an efficient and well-equipped British field force, may again play a decisive part in stabilising the situation and so gaining time to develop the strength of the Empire. We can win a long war. The German General Staff, realising our latent strength, may be expected to pin their faith on winning a short war. We must make sure that they do not succeed.’108 Gort did not press for ‘the creation of an army on the Continental scale, which is fully recognised to be beyond our resources in peace’, but he did want sufficient modern equipment so that Britain could despatch two mobile (i.e. armoured) and four regular infantry divisions to the continent, supported within four months after mobilization by four Territorial divisions. The rest of the Territorial field force was to be given a full outfit of training equipment.109
Their lobbying did finally begin to affect ministers. By the middle of December, in the wake of his trip to Paris and the signing of the Franco-German non-aggression pact, Halifax came reluctantly to the conclusion that unless the British made some concessions to the French, ‘he was bound to point out that a time might come when the French would cease to be enthusiastic about their relations with Great Britain if they were left with the impression that it was they who must bear the brunt of the fighting and slaughter on land.’110 The outcome might be that ‘if Germany attempted to come to an agreement with France for her to stand aside while Germany attacked us, they might be tempted to accept the German request if attention was not paid to their requests for assistance on land.’111 By late January 1939 fears that defeatism would infect the French, combined with reports that the Germans might soon take the bit between their teeth in Western Europe, sufficed to tip the COS towards accepting Gort’s recommendations and drove home the need to prepare something bigger than the regular field force.112 Hitherto the government’s first priority had been the defence of fortress Britain, but Britain could not be secure if France was defeated, for:
if France were over-run by Germany and forced to her knees, not only would the further prosecution of the war be compromised, but we should have already failed in one of the main objects for which we entered the war, namely, the defence of France The situation produced by the possession of the French ports by Germany would be so grave that the prevention of such a situation we consider might more truly be included under the first of the four priorities defined by the Cabinet, namely, ‘the corner-stone of our Imperial Defence policy is to maintain the security of the United Kingdom’. It is difficult to say how this security could be maintained if France were forced to capitulate and therefore the protection of the United Kingdom may have to include a share in the land defence of French territory.113
French independence was as important as the air defence of Great Britain in ensuring Britain’s own security, especially as by late January the Foreign Office believed that an internal crisis was looming in Germany, which Halifax predicted would cause Hitler ‘to “explode” in some direction. The objects of such an “explosion” would be to distract attention from the failure of his system to work in time of peace; to provide an excuse for suppressing the German “Moderates”; and no doubt also—perhaps mainly—to secure by physical force the vast supplies of raw materials which Nazi Germany could no longer procure by legitimate methods of trade.’114 He would try to break the Anglo-French entente and create a European bloc, ‘to be directed primarily against the British Empire.’115 To forestall this, and in another echo of Eden’s recommendations, the British should themselves look for friends with whom to share the burden of deterring Hitler. Roosevelt should be asked to make a public statement warning the Germans of the adverse impact any German aggression might have in the USA, and the French, Dutch, and Belgians should be reassured that the British regarded their security, and more especially the safety of the Channel ports, as a vital British interest.116
Chamberlain did not give up his fortress Britain policy without a struggle. Rather than accept that Hitler was bent on attacking Britain, he preferred to believe the assurances of the German ambassador that Hitler had no aggressive intentions, and on 25 January stoutly resisted all efforts to persuade him that the time had now come to make a public commitment to come to the assistance of France or the Low Countries if they were attacked.117 It was a measure of the Prime Minister’s declining influence within the Cabinet that few ministers agreed with him. They were persuaded that public opinion shared Halifax’s fears, and it was therefore essential to do more ‘to put the Defence Services into a state of readiness to meet the contingency of a possible emergency in the near future’.118 Asked what the British should do if Germany attacked Holland, the COS were unequivocal that such an attack was tantamount to an attack on Britain itself, and would mark the beginning of an existential struggle in which the future existence of the British Empire would be at stake. Although there was nothing Britain could do to prevent Germany overrunning Holland:
failure to intervene would have such moral and other repercussions as would seriously undermine our position in the eyes of the Dominions and the world in general. We might thus be deprived of support in a subsequent struggle between Germany and the British Empire. In our view it is hardly an exaggeration to say that failure to take up such a challenge would place Germany in a predominant position in Europe and correspondingly lower our prestige throughout the world. Therefore we have, as we see it, no choice but to regard a German invasion of Holland as a direct challenge to our security.119
They had to create a field force, not to save Holland in the short term, but to ensure active French participation in the defence of Belgium in a coalition war against Germany. Bereft of British support on land, the French might adopt Bonnet’s policy and strike a deal with Hitler that would leave Britain isolated.120 Even with French participation, it was almost certain that the war would spread, for Italy and Japan would soon side with Hitler, in which case ‘The ultimate outcome of the conflict might well depend upon the intervention of other Powers, in particular of the United States of America.’121 At the FPC on 26 January even Chamberlain agreed that failure to fight to protect Holland ‘would undermine our position in the world and would only mean that at some later stage we should have to face the same struggle with Germany with fewer friends and in far worse circumstances.’122 The Cabinet endorsed this conclusion on 1 February. Britain would fight if Germany attacked Switzerland, Belgium, or Holland, provided the French also did so. To give substance to this decision they authorized joint military staff planning with the French and Belgium governments on the basis that Britain and France would fight in alliance against Germany and Italy, and that their discussions would cover not just Western Europe, but also the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Nor were they in any doubt about just how momentous was the decision they had taken, for ‘this was a big step forward and was almost tantamount to an Alliance; but it was felt that although the step might be a big one, it was one which must be taken.’123 This seemed to represent a sea-change in British strategic policy. For the first time since 1918 a British government had agreed to begin military staff talks with the French to concert their war plans and preparations.124 The significance of this decision was underlined and made public on 6 February, when Chamberlain told the Commons that ‘I feel bound to make plain that the solidarity of interest, by which France and this country are united, is such that any threat to the vital interests of France from whatever quarter it came must evoke the immediate co-operation of this country.’125
But although Chamberlain had given his rhetorical support to the need to give the French substantial assistance on land, it was several weeks before he was willing to agree to give it real substance. In January Simon had warned the Cabinet that there was a damaging outflow of capital from London as investors, frightened that Britain might also soon be at war, had shifted their money to the USA.126 The financial position was ‘painfully reminiscent of those which obtained in this country immediately prior to the financial crisis of September, 1931,’ a warning he repeated on 2 February.127 In the light of what he thought was a colossal British effort at sea and in the air, Chamberlain believed that French demands for a larger British land contribution could easily be rebuffed as ‘we could disclose the whole position as we saw it, and it might be hoped that when the French knew the whole position, they would appreciate not only what a gigantic effort we had made, but also that in the common interest the best course might be that we should not attempt to expand our land forces.’128 Thus when the Cabinet considered Hore-Belisha’s request for funding to create a larger field force on 2 February, the most he could extract was the money to provide the Territorials with more training equipment, and the Prime Minister scolded him for ignoring the fact that ‘finance could not be ignored since our financial strength was one of our strongest weapons in any war which was not over in a short time.’129
But his announcement on 6 February sold the pass, and pressure from the French, from Halifax, from the General Staff, and from his own reading of British public opinion, proved irresistible. As he told his colleagues, unless they acted now it would be impossible to despatch any Territorial divisions overseas in less than twelve months after mobilization, and ‘He thought that public opinion would become restive if the present position became widely known.’130 The result was that by 22 February he reluctantly concluded that he would have to give some ground.131 Hore-Belisha was able to secure most of what he wanted: enough money to equip two mobile divisions and four regular infantry divisions for war on the continent, together with four Territorial divisions within six months of mobilization, and a full scale of training equipment for the remainder, although the completion of two colonial divisions was deferred until a report on the defence of India had been completed.132 ‘The Prime Minister added that while he had come to this conclusion with some reluctance, he saw no alternative.’133 What he had reluctantly accepted was that his preferred policy of creating a fortress Britain was no longer tenable, and that Britain’s own security rested ultimately on its willingness and ability to commit troops to Western Europe to help maintain the independence and integrity of France and the Low Countries. The decision did not remain secret for long. Hore-Belisha included it in his speech introducing the army estimates on 8 March.134 He justified the decision on the grounds that it would represent a powerful deterrent. If, he believed, the British government in 1914 had made it plain to Germany that they would send troops to the continent, Germany would never have dared to go to war. Twenty-five years later they had made such a declaration, ‘and because of what has now been said we can confidently hope that the task will never have to be fulfilled.’135
On 15 March German troops crossed the Czechoslovak frontier and marched unopposed to Prague. Hitler’s bloodless destruction of Czechoslovakia’s independence crystallized suspicions about his ambitions that had been gathering in Britain since November 1938. The sense of moral revulsion generated by Kristallnacht had helped to wipe away any sense of residual guilt that Germany had been badly treated in 1919. Hitler was not merely an extreme German nationalist intent on righting the wrongs done to Germany at Versailles. His ambitions extended far beyond that, to the establishment of German hegemony over the whole of Europe. He seemed to represent a fundamental challenge to British moral values and self-image as a liberal democracy. The occupation of Prague was significant because it turned these suspicions into near certainties. Hitler’s promise that he had no further territorial demands to make was now seen as worthless and the occupation of the rump of Czechoslovakia showed the hollowness of his insistence that all he wished to do was to unite all German speakers into a single state.
Outside Parliament there were calls for Britain to seek allies in order better to be able to confront and contain Hitler.136 The Daily Herald, mouthpiece of the Labour party, did not consign its commitment to collective security to the dustbin when it called for a ‘new Grand Alliance’. Instead it claimed that it would be an alliance of a new kind, for it ‘will derive in spirit not from predatory or self-seeking alliances of the old world, but from the principles of the League.’137 War seemed inevitable and since Munich growing numbers of young men had voted with their feet and recruiting for the Territorial army had risen sharply.138 So when Chamberlain told the Commons on 15 March that although Hitler had broken his word, this would not deflect him from his quest for a peaceful settlement, it immediately became apparent that he had badly misjudged the temper of his audience.139 Critics of the Munich agreement felt themselves vindicated and even one of Chamberlain’s most devoted admirers understood that ‘The country is stirred to its depths, and rage against Germany is rising.’140 Pressure for a more robust response came from Halifax, the Conservative Foreign Affairs Committee, the Dominions, and the American ambassador, Joseph Kennedy, and the Prime Minister quickly backtracked.141 On 17 March, in a speech at Birmingham which was broadcast across the empire and to the USA, Chamberlain publicly reversed his position. Hitler, he told his audiences, was intent on dominating not only his neighbours but the whole world by force, and he warned him that he would be making a mistake if he thought that because the British people ‘believes war to be a senseless and cruel thing, this nation has so far lost its fibre that it will not take part to the utmost of its power in resisting such a challenge if ever it were made.’142
In December 1938, faced by reports that Hitler was intent on expanding eastwards, Chamberlain had told the CID that he ‘could not see that there was any need for us to be mixed up in any Eastern quarrel’.143 The occupation of Prague, and the reaction to it in the Commons and in the press, persuaded ministers that they would have to demonstrate unequivocally that they were not willing to offer Hitler a free hand to swallow up more small states in Eastern Europe. The need to do so appeared to be all the more urgent in the light of a report from the Rumanian ambassador in London. On 17 March he warned Halifax that Germany was about to attack his country. There was no truth in this, and he was quickly repudiated by his own government. But by the time that happened he had set in motion a momentous chain of events that was to overturn Chamberlain’s insistence that there was no need for Britain to become involved in ‘any Eastern quarrel.’144 On 18 March Halifax argued that the real issue was not the independence of Rumania, it was ‘Germany’s attempt to obtain world domination, which it was in the interest of all countries to resist.’145 Chamberlain agreed that the policy of trying to come to terms with the Fuhrer on the assumption that he had strictly limited aims was now ended. His Birmingham speech was:
a challenge to Germany on the issue whether or not Germany intended to dominate Europe by force. It followed that if Germany took another step in the direction of dominating Europe, she would be accepting the challenge. A German attempt to dominate Roumania was, therefore, more than a question whether Germany would thereby improve her strategical position; it raised the whole question whether Germany intended to obtain domination over the whole of South Eastern Europe. He agreed, therefore, with the Foreign Secretary’s view that if Germany was to proceed with this course after warning had been given, we had no alternative but to take up the challenge. On this basis our next course was to ascertain what friends we had who would join with us in resisting aggression.146
Britain should continue its own rearmament programme and simultaneously construct a diplomatic combination that would threaten Hitler with a two-front war.147 That did not mean that he believed that war was inevitable.148 It meant that he believed that Germany could be deterred from going to war by a policy of containment. What he wanted was to secure ‘sufficient assurances from other countries, to justify us in a public pronouncement that we should resist any further acts of aggression on the part of Germany. He thought that such an announcement might deter Germany, at any rate for a period, and that we should take full advantage of the breathing-space thus offered.’149 The resolute tone adopted by the Cabinet, in such stark contrast to their deliberations during the Munich crisis, owed a good deal to the sense of indignation generated by German policy since Munich. But it also owed much to the COS’s most recent strategic appreciation which painted a considerably more optimistic picture of the military situation than their previous assessments. On the debit side the Germans could place in the field an army and air force that were considerably larger than the combined Anglo-French forces, and the British army was far from being ready to fight on the continent. But on the positive side Britain was in a much better position to withstand a sudden German attack than it had been even six months earlier, and at sea the British and French fleets far outnumbered the Germans. Furthermore, Germany had serious problems of its own. Its rearmament programme was increasingly constrained by shortages of raw materials and foreign exchange, and the German people seemed to have little stomach for another war, factors that suggested that if they were placed under serious strain the German home front might collapse.150
The government’s first effort to construct a common front, including France, Poland, and the USSR, to contain Germany was torpedoed by the Poles.151 Hitherto they had maintained their independence by carefully refraining from placing themselves in either the German or the Soviet camps, and they were determined to continue to do so. Not only were they deeply mistrustful of Stalin’s intentions, they feared that if they were openly associated with the USSR in a pact intended to contain Germany it would only provoke Hitler and provoke the very attack it was intended to deter.152 But on 23 March German troops occupied the Lithuanian city of Memel. Doing nothing in the face of two major coups within a week was not an option. Lord Salisbury, the Conservative elder statesman, was probably speaking for a broad swath of middle-of-the-road Conservative opinion when he told Halifax that the government must respond quickly, because ‘the whole world is wondering whether this country really means business and they would not be satisfied with anything which is not practical. Rightly or wrongly the other potential friends of ours in Europe are wondering whether we need more than an “exchange of views”. This hesitation of theirs may be very serious. You want therefore, if I may say so, some definite activity, which will not of course tie our hands too much, but which will involve absolute support to the victims of aggression.’153 The next victim of Hitler’s aggression looked likely to be the Poles themselves for on 26 March Ribbentrop threatened the Polish ambassador that any Polish aggression against Danzig (of which there was no indication) would be treated as aggression against Germany. The Poles had no intention of seizing Danzig by force, but nor were they willing to bow down to German pressure, and they responded by threatening war if the Germans tried to change the status of the city by force.154 Intelligence that Hitler was bent on war was then apparently confirmed, both by the British military attaché in Berlin, and by the journalist Ian Colvin.155 Colvin was usually particularly well-informed about the direction of German foreign policy. He had at least one source who had been present at a meeting in October 1938 when Hitler had told an assembly of senior officials that he would soon abandon all the promises he had made at Munich.156 Chamberlain and Halifax now knew that they had to act and they quickly persuaded their colleagues that Britain must make a declaration that it would go to Poland’s assistance if its independence was threatened, a declaration that would be a first step towards creating a common front in Eastern Europe to contain German expansion.157 On 31 March, once agreement had been received from Paris and Warsaw, and in reply to a planted parliamentary question, Chamberlain told the Commons that ‘in the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence, and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power.’158
The guarantee evoked widespread support. In the Commons the announcement was greeted with cheers on nearly all sides. Dissident Tories such as Churchill and Eden, who had just put down a motion calling for the formation of a national government with full powers over the nation’s wealth and manpower, joined with the Labour opposition in supporting it.159 In April, 73 per cent of respondents in a BIPO poll said that the government was right to issue military guarantees to preserve the independence of small European nations.160 The significance of the Polish guarantee was manifold. In the autumn of 1938 Britain had abandoned Central and Eastern Europe to German domination on the assumption that Hitler would be content to secure German influence by a combination of peaceful economic penetration and the racial unity that he had achieved through the Anschluss and the Munich agreement. The Polish guarantee was intended to send a signal to Berlin that what the British would not tolerate was the creation of a German Mitteleuropan empire by force of arms. On the positive side it tied both Poland and France to the defence of British interests. On the debit side it meant that the British had passed the decision for war or peace to the Poles, although that was something that Chamberlain obstinately refused to accept, believing instead that ‘what we are concerned with is not the boundaries of states but attacks on their independence. And it is we who will judge whether their independence is threatened or not.’161
In saying that Chamberlain revealed that for him at least the guarantee was no more than a political gesture. It was intended be a diplomatic holding operation until the British could construct the peace front to contain Germany that remained his real objective, a front that he believed would by itself deter Hitler from going to war. What the Polish guarantee was not intended to do, at least in his estimation, was to mark the first step in the creation of a war-fighting coalition. British policy-makers had few illusions that the French and British would be able to offer Poland effective military assistance. The Poles alone would not be able to resist the Germans for more than two or three months, although they might be able to inflict considerable losses on the Wehrmacht before they went down to defeat.162 In July Sir Edmund Ironside, widely tipped to be the commander of any field force that the British sent to France, went to Warsaw on a mission to reassure the Poles that British assistance would be forthcoming. In the privacy of his diary, he knew that it would not. He understood ‘that we can do very little to help the Poles in a war that starts against them. An attack against the Siegfried Line will take a long time to develop and air attacks against Germany cannot reach as far as the German forces and bases operating against Poland. Naturally, they demand immediate action, something that they can see. It is difficult to know how we can realise this, despite our guarantee to Poland.’163
The Polish guarantee meant that the British had embarked on a delicate balancing act between provoking and deterring Hitler. An essential part of this policy was the need to maintain good relations with Mussolini, in the hope that he could persuade Hitler to behave reasonably. But that hope was always illusory. Chamberlain’s efforts to wean Mussolini away from Hitler were doomed to failure even before he had gone to Rome. On 14 November Mussolini had ordered preparations to begin for the occupation of Albania in the spring of 1939, a coup which he hoped would frighten Britain and France into conceding his claims to Corsica, Nice, Savoy, and Tunisia. Gort had dismissed a rumour that the Italians were about to act as ‘bilge’ and so when Mussolini occupied the country on 7 April it came as a complete surprise.164 There was nothing that the British could do to save Albania, but the next day ministers agreed to ‘take early steps to reach agreements with both Greece and Turkey, which would make it clear that we would tolerate no interference with these two countries.’165 Doing so seemed all the more urgent following Spain’s accession to the Anti-Comintern pact on 8 April, and reports from the Greek government that the Italians would next turn on Greece and occupy Corfu.166 British Ministers were unwilling to denounce the Anglo-Italian agreement lest it give Mussolini an excuse not to withdraw his remaining troops from Spain. But they also believed that parliamentary and public opinion would not stand for yet another attempt to appease the Italians. Italy, too, would have to be contained. Their intent was ‘to support a Balkan “bloc” consisting of Turkey, Greece, Romania and Bulgaria pledged to resist further aggression by the Axis Powers, and backed by an undertaking that Great Britain and France would go to war if any of the “bloc” were attacked.’167 Constructing such a bloc was bound to take time. So, in order to do something quickly to meet public and parliamentary demands for proof that they were not bent on appeasing Mussolini, and to avoid being forestalled by yet another Axis coup, they agreed that when parliament met on 13 April, Chamberlain would announce a unilateral guarantee to Greece and Rumania.168
The French government were not the only people who believed that it was high time Britain introduced conscription as a token of their determination to stand by France and resist Germany.169 The French press demanded it, the Axis press mocked the British for not introducing it, and the Conservative parliamentary party showed they also wanted it when, on 21 March, a majority at a crowded meeting of the Conservative backbench 1922 Committee strongly supported it.170 Chamberlain, however was unmoved, fearful that the trades unions and the Labour party would oppose it, thereby exposing Britain as a divided nation.171 The impasse was broken by two things. More men were needed to place Britain’s anti-aircraft defences on a higher state of readiness, and the government had to be seen to be responding positively to the rush of recruits who, since Prague, tried to join the Territorials. Chamberlain, who was due to address the 1922 Committee, knew that his backbenchers wanted to know what the government was doing to make the best use of their services, especially as many were now being turned away as units reached their establishment ceilings.172 Hore-Belisha had two answers. Territorial field force units should be allowed to recruit up to and beyond their higher wartime establishments, and once they had done that the size of the force was to be doubled.173 His second proposal was ostensibly intended to raise the state of readiness of the ADGB units so that they would not be caught unprepared by a sudden and unexpected German attack. Men aged 20 to 21 were to be conscripted for six months’ military training, followed by three years’ service as reservists. Horace Wilson, who ferried messages between the premier and the minister, correctly discerned that what he really wanted was to raise ‘a large army available to fight on the Continent.’174 Wilson was far from enthusiastic, not least because the proposals had been cooked up in a matter of hours, neither the CID nor the General Staff had been asked for their opinions, and it had obvious flaws. It would produce a greatly enlarged Territorial field force, but raw recruits could not be transformed into an effective military force in anything less than twelve or eighteen months. Providing for their equipment would place an insupportable strain on the engineering industry, and exports and the balance of trade was bound to suffer. Most important of all, it represented a complete turn-around in British grand strategy. ‘Heretofore’, he reminded Chamberlain, ‘the emphasis has been laid on the Air Force as the deterrent to aggression. This new proposal in which neither the Navy Air [sic] appears is an important new step towards a commitment to fight the next war, like the last, in the trenches in France.’175
The extent to which public opinion was now determining government policy was illustrated by the Cabinet’s discussion of these proposals on 29 March. Chamberlain remained adamantly opposed to conscription for the reasons Wilson had adduced.176 But he accepted that ‘There had been considerable discussion in the country on the question of National Service, whether compulsory or voluntary, and feeling on this matter had developed considerably and had affected opinion in Parliament. There was no wide measure of agreement on any particular course of action, but there was general agreement that some action should be taken in the near future.’177 Consequently, he accepted Hore-Belisha’s first suggestion, to double the strength of the Territorials. Simon agreed with him, admitting that although doing so would add greatly to Britain’s financial problems, ‘It was clear that what was needed, from the standpoint of public opinion both at home and abroad, was some impressive evidence of the prompt determination of our people, expressed in some very definite form. He understood that the Foreign Secretary regarded this matter as of the utmost importance from the point of view of public opinion in foreign countries, and that the step proposed would operate as a severe, but unprovocative, warning to Germany of our fixed determination to resist aggression.’178 The leaders of the parliamentary Labour party proved to be more acquiescent than Chamberlin had feared, and he announced the government’s decision in the Commons on the same day.179
Chamberlain himself remained convinced that the voluntary system could meet all of the country’s needs. But he failed to convince others that he was right, and in April the pressure to introduce conscription became irresistible. In the Commons pro-conscription MPs continued to lobby for it. In France Daladier made yet another appeal for the British to demonstrate their determination to resist German expansion, by introducing conscription.180 The same message was conveyed via Phipps to London by the American ambassador in Paris, who told his British colleague that ‘the President felt very strongly that it was absolutely essential for us to introduce compulsory national service at once’.181 In the Foreign Office he was preaching to the converted. ‘No foreigners can understand it’, Halifax’s Private Secretary wrote, ‘and without this weapon our diplomacy is deprived of half its force as a deterrent to the dictators and as an encouragement to our friends.’182 Halifax himself recognized that it was necessary because ‘we were entering into so many pacts and military commitments all over Europe that we must make full preparations to fulfil them; just as a man who offers to guarantee other people’s bank balance must have the money in his own bank to redeem those obligations.’183 Ostensibly when the government announced its decision to introduce conscription on 26 April it justified doing so by the need to improve the state of readiness of its anti-aircraft defences. But ministers knew otherwise. Halifax had impressed his colleagues with the notion that ‘if the decision on this matter was limited to compulsory service for the air defence of Great Britain, the results would be unfortunate on public opinion.’184
The announcement evoked a mixed response. Daladier was reported to be ‘absolutely delighted with us over conscription.’185 Shortly after the government had announced the doubling of the Territorial army a BIPO poll showed that more than half of respondents still favoured manning the army with volunteers, and fewer than 40 per cent thought it should be done on a compulsory basis.186 But once the government had taken the plunge, 58 per cent of respondents said they favoured compulsion, whereas 38 per cent remained opposed to it.187 To propitiate organized labour the government also announced that it would take steps to curb any excess profits made by armaments manufacturers. It was a measure of the extent to which public opinion had shifted towards accepting that war with Germany was inevitable, and that the country must prepare as best it could, that Labour and trade union opposition was muted. The Labour party objected less to the principle of the bill and more to the fact that it was introduced by Chamberlain, a man whose foreign policy they did not trust, and that he had acted without consulting them.188 Even papers usually sympathetic to the Labour party argued that it was illogical to favour opposing the dictators and yet oppose conscription. In the Commons Labour spokesmen focused not on the principle of compulsion, but on the details of the legislation, and in particular the low rates of pay offered to conscripts.189 In May a conference called by the General Council of the TUC decisively defeated a motion calling on the labour movement to refuse to cooperate with the working of the new act. Ultimately organized labour was more hostile to fascism than it was to compulsion.190
In February 1938 the CID had agreed that plans to supply the armed services in wartime ‘should be based on what may be termed a war of limited liability, i.e., for example, that there will be no such expansion of the Army and consequently of military supply as occurred in the last war, or that, if such expansion does occur, the necessary supply arrangements can be left to be made after the war has begun.’191 Chatfield warned the Cabinet on 29 March that it would take a long time before there was sufficient equipment to meet even the demands of their present plans to equip four Territorial divisions for overseas service within six months of mobilization.192 Public pressure to create a Ministry of Supply to accelerate the rearmament programme had been building in the early months of 1939, and Hore-Belisha had continued to lobby for it inside the government.193 Ministers had bowed to this pressure, but only to the extent that they agreed to plan to establish it, but wanted to delay doing so until after hostilities had begun.194 But the decision to double the size of the field force made further delays politically impracticable.195 Chatfield insisted that the new Ministry should be established forthwith, and it should have ‘a statutory right to enforce the acceptance of, and priority for, Government orders’, on any industrial business.196 The total cost of the proposal was £135 million, and if a start was made immediately, Britain would be able to deploy sixteen of its thirty-two field force divisions within four to six months of the outbreak of a war, and the remaining sixteen by October 1941.197 Simon was horrified at the likely economic and financial consequences of this proposal. It could be, he claimed ‘that terrible criticism might fall upon us if war actually broke out and it was said that a lack of preparedness had resulted from financial considerations.’ But such criticisms ignored the fact that Chatfield’s plans might be self-defeating. ‘We are all jointly concerned with the fate of the country’, he assured Chatfield on 17 April, ‘and one of the things which we have to assure is that our military efforts do not so far impair our economic resources as to render us powerless, through incapacity to command vital imports, to bring a long war or indeed any war to a successful conclusion. This is a side of defence which is giving me the greatest anxiety.’198 The decision to rase a continental-scale army represented a sea-change in British grand strategy that had immense implications, and he questioned whether it was a strategy that was sustainable in the long run. ‘Is it possible’, he asked Chamberlain:
to maintain a great Fleet, an immense Air Force requiring a vast labour force behind it, to sustain the dislocation of continuous bombardment from the air, to provide munitions at the rate contemplated for allies as well as ourselves, and at the same time to fight with an unlimited Army on the continent backed by an unlimited supply of material? Of course the difficulties of purchasing from abroad when the war starts will be far greater than last time, for we have already lost so much gold, and the foreign securities held in this country are a mere fraction of what we requisitioned in 1914.199
On 19 April the Cabinet overruled the Chancellor and the next day Chamberlain announced their decision in the Commons. But that did not mean that he was now convinced that war was inevitable, or that he had abandoned his belief that it would be possible to negotiate with the dictators, and to that end he went out of his way to avoid provoking them. The day before the government announced the introduction of conscription, he gave private assurances to the dictators that it was a defensive, not an aggressive measure. Henderson was sent back to Berlin ‘as a counter-weight to the effect of this decision.’200 This policy was publicly underlined when he appointed a political non-entity, Leslie Burgin, rather than Churchill, as the first Minister of Supply.201 Churchill’s appointment would have sent an unmistakable message to the German and Italian governments that the British now meant business, and they were no longer prepared to meet them half-way. That was not the message that Chamberlain wanted to send, and, convinced that he still had public opinion behind him, he believed ‘I can snap my fingers at Winston and Attlee and Sinclair’.202
The decision to double the army’s field force and to equip it for a continental war had significant repercussions on British efforts to create a front in Eastern and Central Europe and the Balkans to contain German and Italian expansion. All of Britain’s potential partners, the Poles, Greeks, Rumanians, and Turks, looked to Britain for money and arms, two commodities which the British were not able to provide. The Treasury’s view was that ‘we should concentrate primarily on our own programme as regards the employment both of our material and of our financial resources. The Treasury were opposed to a policy of dissipating our strength which would result from an attempt to cater for the full requirements of foreign countries’.203 Charity should begin, and remain, at home, and so when they came asking, the smaller powers received little beyond vague promises. In June the Poles asked for £60 million of export credits. What they got was £8 million and the promise of a handful of aircraft.204 The Cabinet did agree to offer some small export credits to Rumania and Greece, but the sums involved were hardly generous, and lack of money meant that efforts to provide Britain’s putative Balkan allies with British markets for their exports, and so reduce their dependence on Germany, proved nugatory.205 Efforts to secure a tripartite treaty with Turkey, which would have incorporated it within the containment strategy, were also hamstrung by shortages of arms and money. The French and British wanted Turkey to give precise guarantees to Greece and Rumania. The Turks refused to do so until they had received substantial military and financial aid.206 A Turkish mission arrived in London with a long shopping list of the money and weapons they needed, and left with far less than they wanted.207 ‘They seem to think it’s like buying things across the counter at Harrods’, Pownall grumbled, ‘but with the distinction that Harrods shall afford “export credits” for the privilege of dealing with such a customer!’208 A final Turkish response to the British terms for an alliance still hung fire when Britain declared war on Germany.
The facts of geography meant that containment could not work without Soviet participation. Only the Soviets could provide meaningful military support to the smaller states of Eastern Europe which the British were trying to incorporate into their containment strategy. Thus when Chamberlain consulted the leaders of the Liberal and Labour parties shortly before announcing the Polish guarantee, they told him that ‘they were afraid that trouble would be raised in certain quarters, on the ground that the action taken by the Government did not include Russia.’209 The same theme was echoed in the Commons when critics on both sides of the House assailed the government for their irresponsibility in distributing guarantees wholesale without ensuring they were underpinned by Russian support.210 Lloyd George made the same point to Chamberlain in a private meeting shortly after the Prime Minister made his announcement. Asked why the government had risked giving Poland a guarantee before ensuring that it would be supported by the USSR, Chamberlain replied that:
Hitler would never risk a war on two fronts.
‘And where is your second front?’ Lloyd George snapped back.
‘Poland,’ answered Chamberlain.
Lloyd George roared with laughter and started mocking the prime minister: ‘Poland! A country with a weak economy and torn by internal strife, a country that has neither aviation nor a properly equipped army…. And that’s your second front! What nonsense! There cannot be a second front without the USSR. A guarantee to Poland without the USSR is an irresponsible gamble that may end very badly for our country!’211
The COS agreed with Lloyd George that active Soviet assistance would be essential in any attempt to create a credible eastern front. Moreover, it would have a potentially decisive influence in the Far East where fear of Soviet hostility would deter the Japanese from marching against the Western powers.212 However, on 18 March the COS were not present to put their case before the Cabinet, and ministers received only a garbled version of their advice from Chatfield. He failed to mention their conclusions that if they had to choose, the USSR was likely to be a more valuable partner than Poland.213 Public opinion did not constitute an insuperable barrier to Anglo-Soviet cooperation. Asked in December 1938 who they would support in a Russo-German war, an overwhelming majority of respondents in a BIPO poll opted for Russia.214 In March 1939, 86 per cent of respondents said they would welcome closer relations with the USSR, and by April 1939, there was strong public support for an Anglo-French-Soviet military alliance.215 To those policy-makers who were attempting to construct a real military combination, shunning the Soviets made no sense. But Tory politicians who agreed with Churchill about the central role that the USSR should play in any anti-Nazi combination were in a distinct minority. Ministers had no intention of allowing their policies to be driven by the uncertain results of polling, or by the preferences of their political opponents. Chamberlain was not thinking in military terms, nor did he accept the views of the COS and the Foreign Office that war was now all but inevitable, and that their efforts should be directed towards ensuring that Britain fought it in the most favourable circumstances. He still believed that peace could be preserved, that a purely diplomatic combination would suffice to contain and deter Hitler, but that such a combination would be impossible if it had a Soviet connection because the Poles wanted nothing to do with the Soviets.216 Once the deterrent was in place he could remove the underlying causes of tension which threatened to lead to war by reverting to his preferred policy of negotiations and concessions over such issues as the Polish corridor where he thought Hitler had justifiable claims.217 Chamberlain was not, therefore, overly concerned that the Poles had exercised their veto, for as one of his biographers has fairly claimed, his ‘profound antipathy towards the Soviet Union was one of the most consistent features of his personal diplomacy.’218 ‘I must confess to the most profound distrust of Russia’, he wrote to one of his sisters. ‘I have no belief whatever in her ability to maintain an effective offensive even if she wanted to. And I distrust her motives which seem to me to have little connection with our ideas of liberty and to be concerned only with getting everyone else by the ears. Moreover she is both hated and suspected by many of the smaller states notably by Poland and Romania and Finland so that our close association with her might easily cost us the sympathy of those who would much more effectively help us if we can get them on our side.’219
Halifax was largely in agreement with the Prime Minister in believing that Poland was of greater military value than the USSR, although in a comment which revealed the muddled thinking into which their political prejudices had driven them, he also admitted that ‘he thought Soviet Russia would act as a greater deterrent so far as Germany was concerned.’220 Asked to choose between Poland and the USSR, the Prime Minister unhesitatingly chose the former. On 5 April he told the Cabinet that not only did he not trust the Soviets, but that he believed they had little offensive military power and that seeking their cooperation would be a major obstacle to the British policy of constructing an eastern barrier to German expansion because neither Poland nor Rumania was willing to cooperate with them. He also believed that threatening Germany with a two-front war was the essential British goal, and that ‘Poland was the key to the situation, and an alliance with Poland would ensure that Germany would be engaged in a war on two fronts.’221 But in April the Italian coup in Albania, combined with the Turks’ insistence that before coming to any agreement with the British, they wanted to know what the Soviets might do, meant that the British had to at least be seen to be doing something in Moscow.222 Halifax therefore suggested to the Soviets that they should declare on their own initiative that if the Germans attacked any of their neighbours the USSR would offer them assistance. From the British perspective this suggestion would avoid the fact that neither the Poles nor the Rumanians wanted anything to do with a Soviet alliance. From the Soviet perspective it seemed less attractive. The British wanted Soviet cooperation, but offered nothing in return, and the Poles and Rumanians would not be obliged to accept any Soviet help unless they first asked for it.223 The proposal was based on the illusion that Stalin understood that Hitler’s ultimate aim was the destruction of the USSR and so he had no choice other than to throw in his lot with Poland and the Western Powers.224 This was not an illusion that Stalin shared, and the British should have been aware of that fact for the British ambassador in Moscow, Sir William Seeds, had warned that the Soviets might be receptive to a rapprochement with Germany if in return it included an offer to secede Bessarabia, parts of Poland, Latvia, and Estonia to them.225
The Soviets responded by trying to nail down the British and French to a tripartite mutual assistance pact and military convention to be signed simultaneously and containing a stipulation that none of the signatories would negotiate a separate peace. This was to be coupled with a tripartite offer of assistance to any state between the Baltic and the Black Sea bordering the USSR that was the victim of German aggression.226 This marked the start of four months of ultimately fruitless negotiations. The Soviet negotiators were remorseless in pursuing their aims: a military and political alliance that would meet their own needs, that left the Western governments with no room to repeat the policy that had led to the Munich agreement, an agreement that promised them the greatest possible Anglo-French military support in the event of war, and which would secure the political and military support of the Western powers’ Eastern European allies. It was only when it was clear that they could not achieve their last aims that the Soviets abandoned their pursuit of the alliance and began to listen seriously to German offers of a rapprochement.227 It took the British nearly three weeks to respond to the Soviet proposals. That did give the COS the chance to question Chamberlain’s insistence that the Soviets were of little military worth. Their armed forces might not be as efficient as their Western counterparts, and the purges had badly affected the professional competence of their leadership. But their fleet could dominate the Black Sea and contain much of the German navy in the Baltic, relieve pressure on the Royal Navy, and interrupt the supply of Swedish iron ore to Germany. Their air force could contribute to the air defence of Poland, and bomb east German cities from bases in Poland, and the Red Army could mobilize 130 divisions. Although poor communications would make it difficult for them to advance into Poland or Rumania, they could defend their own frontiers, protect the Baltic states, and deter the Japanese from undertaking any adventures in the Far East.228 Furthermore if the USSR was lined up against Germany, the allied blockade would be that much more effective.229 Finally, they also pointed to the converse possibility, explaining that ‘We should perhaps draw attention to the very grave military dangers inherent in the possibility of any agreement between Germany and Russia.’230
The British wanted the best of all worlds. They did not want to forego the chance of Russian help in a war, they did not want to jeopardize cooperation with Poland, and they did not want to endanger the cause of peace by appearing to threaten Germany with encirclement in a way that might cause Hitler to lash out and mount a preventive war.231 Consequently, on 6 May, they once again asked the Soviets to issue a unilateral declaration that they would assist any Eastern European state that was a victim of German aggression.232 But two days previously Litvinov, who had remained an advocate of collective security even after the Munich agreement, was replaced by Vyacheslav Molotov, who was far less ready than his predecessor to work with the Western powers.233 He was determined to extract from the Western powers a binding agreement of support that would cover any possible Soviet-German conflict, and no amount of British blandishments would persuade him otherwise.234 The Soviets believed that they had a strong hand, for as Maisky recognized, the British guarantees to Poland, Rumania, and Greece made ‘a quick deal with the Soviet Union absolutely essential from the British point of view. For without us, those commitments cannot be made good. What, in fact, can England (or even England and France together) really do for Poland and Rumania if Germany attacks them? Very little. Before the British blockade against Germany could become a serious threat, Poland and Rumania would cease to exist.’235 Maisky’s assessment that the British needed Soviet support continued to garner support, driven not least by growing fears that Litvinov’s replacement by Molotov might presage a Russo-German rapprochement.236 Opposition spokesmen continued to berate the government in the Commons and on 19 May Attlee condemned the government’s dilatoriness in reaching an agreement and called for a ‘firm union between Britain, France and the USSR as the nucleus of a World Alliance against aggression.’237 The COS argued that a Soviet alliance would constitute ‘a solid front of formidable proportions against aggression’,238 and that it was imperative to block the possibility of a rapprochement between Moscow and Berlin. ‘We cannot overlook the danger which would result from a rapprochement between Germany and Russia’, they warned, ‘—an aim which has been in the minds of the German General Staff for many years. A combination of the German capacity for organisation with the material and man-power resources of Russia would not only eliminate all hope of saving Poland and Roumania, but would have repercussions throughout Europe and in India, the serious nature of which it would be difficult to exaggerate.’239 The French thought likewise, and in April twice told the Soviets that they favoured an alliance.240 Gradually, this pressure combined to persuade a majority of members of the FPC that they would have to make concessions to the Soviet point of view.241 For several weeks Halifax harboured the fear that a tripartite alliance which included the Soviets would alienate the Poles and Rumanians and make war inevitable.242 But a visit to Paris on 21 May persuaded him to change his mind. Daladier made it plain that if the British remained obdurate they would do irreparable damage to Anglo-French relations.243 Two days later another obstacle to a tripartite pact was removed when the Polish and Rumanian governments intimated that they would not stand in the way of negotiations.244
Chamberlain, however, remained to be convinced, and much resented the way in which the COS and his Cabinet colleagues were forcing his hand.245 A tripartite alliance would, he believed, alienate the ‘moderates’ around Hitler and make further negotiations impossible. By threatening Germany with encirclement, it might also provoke Hitler into mounting a pre-emptive strike against his enemies.246 As an expedient that might avoid this danger he suggested that instead of an alliance the British should issue a declaration that they would act in support of the USSR and France under the terms of article 16 of the Covenant of the League.247 That merely fed Soviet suspicions that the Western powers were plotting to entangle the USSR with Germany. Stalin and Molotov had no intention of allowing the USSR to be hung out to dry while the Western powers stood by, wringing their hands and claiming they could not come to their assistance until the League deliberated and decided. What the Soviets wanted was a tripartite mutual assistance pact, a guarantee to come to the aid of eight states who were to be specifically named—Belgium, Greece, Turkey, Rumania, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland—if they were attacked, and if war ensued, an agreement not to make a separate peace. The agreement was not to come into force until the three powers had negotiated and signed a military convention. Unlike previous Anglo-French proposals, assistance was not to be withheld until the affected states requested it.248
Negotiations then dragged on for several weeks and by July the British and French had reluctantly accepted most of the Soviets’ demands. They had agreed to drop their stipulation that any action would have to be dependent on the agreement of the League. They accepted that the Soviets would not guarantee Switzerland and Holland, but that the Baltic states would receive guarantees, even though they did not want them, and they also agreed to a no-separate-peace clause. The chief British negotiator, William Strang, the head of the Foreign Office’s Central Department, found the exercise ‘a humiliating experience. Time after time we have taken up a position and a week later we have abandoned it; and we have had the feeling that Molotov was convinced from the beginning that we should be forced to abandon it.’249 But he understood why the British and French found themselves compelled to make so many concessions. They had assumed obligations that they could not fulfil without Soviet assistance. By contrast the Soviets had:
at least two alternative policies, namely, the policy of isolation, and the policy of accommodation with Germany. We are being urged by our press and by our public to conclude an agreement quickly; and the Russians have good reason to assume that we shall not dare to face a final breakdown of the negotiations. This is the strength of their negotiating position, and this makes it certain that if we want an agreement with them we shall have to pay their price or something very near it.250
But there were some Soviet demands that the British found it more difficult to swallow. The Soviets wanted a guarantee against ‘indirect aggression’, which they defined as including an internal coup d’état or a reversal of a country’s foreign policy in favour of Germany.251 That seemed to Chamberlain as being tantamount to giving the Soviets the right to advance westwards by occupying any of their smaller neighbours, and might drive the latter into Germany’s arms.252 A breakdown was only avoided when Molotov agreed to open conversations for the military convention in Moscow, intimating that if its terms could be agreed, he might be willing to make concessions over the definition of indirect aggression and the conclusion of a political pact.253 British priorities were the exact opposite. They wanted agreement on a political pact to precede the military convention. Consequently, on 26 July ministers agreed ‘that our representatives should be instructed to proceed very slowly with the conversations until a political pact had been concluded. In particular, it would be desirable that we should not allow Russia to start the conversations by obtaining information as to our own plans, but should rather endeavour to secure that the Russians let our representatives know what they could do to help e.g. Poland.’254 A further intimation that ministers were in no hurry to close on a bargain with the Soviets was that the mission sent to Russia to conduct the detailed negotiations went by sea, rather than taking the quicker option and flying to Moscow.255 But as long as the negotiations continued, they believed that the Soviets would not jump ship and join the Germans. Chamberlain had always disbelieved in the possibility of a Nazi-Soviet rapprochement, telling the Cabinet in mid-July that ‘he could not bring himself to believe that a real alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union was possible.’256 Consequently, he attached little importance to the talks, admitting to the head of the British delegation, Admiral Sir Reginald A. R. Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, ‘that the House of Commons had pushed him further than he had wished to go’.257
Time, however, was not on the side of the Western powers, and Chamberlain was wrong to believe that a German-Soviet rapprochement was impossible. By 1939 Hitler was a man in a hurry. Increasingly conscious of his own mortality, he was determined to fulfil his life’s work while he still had the energy to do so.258 The Polish and Rumanian guarantees, the doubling of the Territorial army, and the introduction of conscription were all part of a policy designed to deter Hitler from going to war. They had the opposite effect. They infuriated him and made him more, rather than less, ready to act.259 On 25 March he told his commanders that although he did not wish to solve the Danzig question by force, and so drive the Poles into Britain’s arms, he would do so if the Poles did not voluntarily agree to secede the city.260 But rather than bow to his demands, they aligned themselves with the Western powers and conducted a partial mobilization of their armed forces.261 That was the final straw for Hitler, and he ordered plans to be prepared for ‘Case White’, the attack on Poland. In mid-June he scheduled the attack to begin in late August.262 ‘The aim’, he told his military leaders, ‘will be to destroy Polish military strength, and create in the East a situation which satisfies the requirements of national defence. The Free State of Danzig will be proclaimed as part of the Reich territory at the outbreak of hostilities, at the latest.’263 But Danzig would not be the cause, merely the pretext for war, for as he explained to a group of senior commanders on 23 May ‘It is not Danzig that is at stake. For us it is a matter of expanding our living space in the East and making food supplies secure and also solving the problem of the Baltic States. Food supplies can only be obtained from thinly populated areas.’264 Hitler wanted a war, but against Poland, not against Poland, France, and Britain. ‘The political leaders consider it their task in this case to isolate Poland if possible, that is to say, to limit the war to Poland only’ he told his commanders in April.265 To that end on 22 May Germany signed the Pact of Steel with Italy, an agreement Hitler hoped would warn France and Britain to desist from aiding Poland for fear that if they did so they would find themselves facing trouble not just in Europe but also in the Mediterranean and Middle East. It was also an agreement that duped Mussolini, who knew that Italy was not ready to go to war. Far from mentioning that Hitler planned to attack Poland, Ribbentrop assured the Italians that he wanted five years of peace and was confident that the Poles would settle the Danzig question peacefully. The Germans had hoped that Japan would join in the new partnership, thus placing still further pressure on the Western powers, but they hesitated to do so. They wanted an agreement directed against the USSR, not one that might draw them into conflict with the USA and Britain.266 But reports from the German ambassador in London, Herbert von Dirksen, gave Hitler cause for optimism. Following the German occupation of Prague, Dirksen reported that although British public opinion was becoming hostile towards Germany and increasingly insistent that the British government must stand by its pledge to Poland, a negotiated settlement remained Chamberlain’s ambition.267 ‘Within the Cabinet,’ Dirksen reported on 10 July:
and a small but influential group of politicians, efforts are being made to replace the negative policy of an encirclement front by a constructive policy towards Germany.…Though there are strong forces at work to stifle this very tender plant—among which may be numbered the press campaign of last weekend—nevertheless Chamberlain’s personality gives a certain guarantee that British policy will not be delivered into the hands of unscrupulous adventurers.268
Dirksen believed that underpinning Chamberlain’s policy was the knowledge that he would have to hold a general election by no later than the autumn of 1940, and the government would soon have to decide how to fight it. ‘Political circles here’, Dirksen wrote in late July, ‘express the assumption, which seems very likely, that the Government can only choose between two slogans “Readiness of the coming (inevitable) was” or “Safeguarding world peace with Chamberlain”.’269 Six weeks later he thought he knew which way Chamberlain would jump. ‘There is a mounting feeling that the possibilities of an agreement in principle with Germany ought to be ascertained within the next few weeks in order to be clear about a slogan for the elections.…It is hoped that the period of political calm, which is expected to set in with the recess, will create the conditions for drawing up a programme of negotiations which would have some prospect of bearing fruit.’270 Similarly, Hans Seligo, the Press Director of the Landesgruppe Great Britain of the Auslandorganisation, the foreign propaganda branch of the Nazi Party, reported to Berlin that although British public opinion was strongly opposed to making any further concessions to Germany, ‘It can be said, with a fair amount of certainty, that Chamberlain himself, and the inner, deciding group of the Cabinet, are definitely working to prevent the outbreak of war, and would prefer a compromise on Danzig and the Corridor, which might be acceptable to their people, to any belligerent action.’271
Henderson also contributed to the image of a British government that was less than determined to stand up to Hitler. On 26 April, when, under orders from London, he gave the German foreign ministry forewarning of the Cabinet’s decision to introduce conscription, he added that it was intended ‘to demonstrate beyond any doubt that in case of necessity she [Britain] was ready to fight, and to defend herself against an attack.’ But he then suggested that this did not mean what it appeared to mean, for ‘the British Government were, as always, determined to do everything in their power to maintain peace, and to seek a satisfactory solution to the existing difficulties without having recourse to war. The Government did not deny that problems existed, but they were convinced that they could be solved without a world war.’272 Three weeks later, in conversation with the German State Secretary, von Weizsäcker, the ambassador again emphasized that Britain hoped to avoid war, this time by means of a freely negotiated Polish-German agreement over Danzig. Britain would fight in order to fulfil its pledge to Poland, but the war ‘would be conducted defensively by the Western Powers,’ although ‘Of course each side would drop a few bombs on each of their houses.’273
News that a British mission had arrived in Moscow tarnished the optimistic tone of these reports by implying that Chamberlain had lost the struggle to keep Britain at peace and that Britain would indeed stand by Poland. But if Britain did Hitler was determined to ensure that it would not be able to give Poland any effective help. On 14 August Ribbentrop told the Soviets that he wanted to come to Moscow in person to negotiate an agreement that would forestall a tripartite pact. On 17 August, five days after the Anglo-French-Soviet talks had begun, it was already apparent that they would probably go nowhere. The fact that the Western missions did not have any plenipotentiary powers to sign an agreement merely confirmed Soviet suspicions that their real aim was just to prolong the negotiations without entering into a firm agreement. The head of the Soviet delegation, Marshal Voroshilov, repeatedly insisted that he wanted concrete evidence of Anglo-French plans, and evidence that the Poles would be prepared to allow Soviet forces to transit across their country. All he received were vague offers to negotiate about principles, something he dismissed as ‘meaningless declarations.’274 While this was happening Molotov responded to the German overtures by proposing a Soviet-German non-aggression pact, and discussions on other issues of mutual interest. The result was the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact signed on 23 August.275 Chamberlain had been wrong to dismiss the possibility of a Soviet-German rapprochement. Once the Germans had opted to seek Stalin’s favour, the die was cast. Hitler could offer the Soviets two things that Britain and France could not, a shift in the USSR’s frontier westwards at Poland’s expense, and a prolongation of peace. If Germany invaded Poland, the tripartite alliance that the Western powers wanted would have drawn the Soviets into a Russo-German war, a war whose outcome was by no means certain. For the time being Stalin preferred the certainties of peace to the uncertainties of war, just as the British and French had done at Munich eleven months earlier.
Ambassador Dirksen’s assessment of the situation in Britain, that public opinion was hardening against further concessions to Germany, and that Chamberlain still sought a negotiated settlement, was broadly accurate. On 29 June Halifax gave a speech at Chatham House. It was broadcast by the BBC on both its home and overseas service and to the USA. In it he set out at length in the most public way possible the two main lines of British policy towards Germany. Historically, Britain had always resisted attempts by any power to establish its hegemony over the European continent, for ‘We know that, if the security and independence of other countries are to disappear, our own security and our independence will be gravely threatened.’ But Nazism represented more than just a threat to British security. It represented an existential challenge to the moral values that the British people held most dear. ‘Over a large part of the world’, he argued:
the old standards of conduct and of ordinary human decency, which man had laboriously built up, are being set aside. Things are being done to-day which we can hardly read without amazement; so alien are they to our conception of how men should deal with their fellow-men. Rules of conduct between nations are overridden with the same callous indifference as rules of conduct between man and man.
The first thing, therefore, which we have to do is to see that our own standards of conduct do not deteriorate. On that point there must be—and I know there is—complete national unity. We respect our fellow-men. We know that without that there can be no real self-respect either for individuals, or in the longer run for nations. The day that we lose our respect for our fellow-men, our democracy would have lost something of which its vitality depends, and would justly become what our critics like to think it, moribund and dead, for it would indeed have lost the right to live.276
The application of those principles meant that Britain would do everything in its power to resist aggression. This was a point he emphasized, not least so as to contradict reports that Ribbentrop had told Hitler that Britain would not fight.277 He ended by saying that, ‘The threat of military force is holding the world to ransom, and our immediate task is, and here I end as I began, to resist aggression. I would emphasise that tonight with all the strength at my command, so that nobody may misunderstand it.’278
The Foreign Secretary had, therefore, followed Chamberlain in sketching the moral underpinning that was to be the foundation of British policy. But Halifax also balanced the warning contained in his message with something more constructive. In May he had admitted to Dirksen that British policy ‘might seem to resemble putting a notice on a plot of grass warning others from treading on it and of the results if this was done. He had added that there was, however, also a positive side to our policy’, and his Chatham House speech was written in such a way that it contained passages that indicated a continued willingness to talk to the Germans if they behaved reasonably. Britain, he insisted, was not trying to encircle Germany.279 The key to German prosperity lay not through the acquisition of lebensraum by military conquest, but by the peaceful increase of international trade. If, by their deeds and not merely by words, the Germans convinced the British that they had abandoned attempts to use force to alter the international status quo, he would be more than willing to discuss matters such as trade barriers, access to raw materials, and international disarmament.280 ‘It was clear’, he told the Cabinet on 19 July, ‘that our right course was to show a firm front, while not excluding the possibilities of adjustment.’281 The speech had been carefully crafted so as to leave the Germans in no doubt that the British had reached the limits of their concessions, that they would resist German aggression by force, but that if Germany behaved peacefully, the British remained willing to discuss their grievances. Whether the speech achieved its purpose, he told Henderson, ‘the German leaders will assume a terrible responsibility if they misread its meaning.’282 They did misread its meaning, but they had plenty of reasons for so doing.
Both Chamberlain’s friends and detractors believed that his speech at Birmingham on 17 March marked the end of his efforts attempts to appease Hitler.283 They were wrong. At one level the policies the British pursued after Prague did amount to a revision to an earlier grand strategy, the pursuit of a European balance of power in an attempt to deter German aggression. The evidence for this lay in the decision to build a European field force, the doubling of the Territorial army, the introduction of conscription, and the creation of a diplomatic front to contain further German expansion. By early July Chamberlain, as he told the king, had ‘heard indirectly from different German sources, one of which was von Dirksen, that Hitler does understand that we mean business this time.’284 But by his own efforts Chamberlain had ensured that the messages reaching Hitler were anything but clear.
Barely a month before the Germans occupied Prague Chamberlain believed that it might soon be possible to resume discussions with Hitler for a disarmament and colonial agreement.285 A careful perusal of the brief speech that he made in the Commons on 31 March when he announced the Polish guarantee made clear that his fundamental policy was unchanged. ‘I am glad to take this opportunity’, he told his listeners, ‘of stating again the general policy of His Majesty’s Government. They have constantly advocated the adjustment, by way of free negotiation between the parties concerned, of any differences that may arise between them. They consider that this is the natural and proper course where differences exist. In their opinion there should be no question incapable of solution by peaceful means, and they would see no justification for the substitution of force or threats of force for the method of negotiation.’286 The Polish guarantee was to be not merely part of a deterrent to prevent war. It was intended, in Chamberlain’s mind at least, to pave the way for further negotiations to right the wrongs he believed that had been done to Germany. Chamberlain had every intention of maintaining Britain as an independent great power, and he was never willing to accept that Germany should be able to establish its hegemony over Europe by force. But he also believed that it was still be possible to reach that elusive general settlement with Germany, a settlement that would simultaneously satisfy German aspirations and be compatible with Britain’s continued independence and great power status.287 War could and should be avoided.
The diplomatic and military deterrent he tried to construct in late March and April was designed to buy time. As he wrote to one of his sisters in April ‘I believe every month that passes without war makes war more unlikely and although I expect to have more periods of acute anxiety yet in cold blood I can’t see Hitler starting a world war for Danzig.’288 A month later he was more emphatic. ‘I myself still believe that Hitler missed the bus last September and that his generals won’t let him risk a major war now.’289 Reports like the one that Henderson sent from Berlin on 6 June, in which he claimed that ‘I believe that Hitler himself, unlike some of his immediate surrounding [sic], wants peace and will not likely risk a world war’, only buttressed his delusion.290 ‘It is very difficult to see the way out of Danzig’, the Prime Minister admitted to one of his sisters on 2 July, ‘but I dont [sic] believe it is impossible to find, provided that we are given a little time and also provided that Hitler doesn’t really want a war. I cant [sic] help thinking he is not such a fool as some hysterical people make out and that he would not be sorry to compromise if he could do so without what he would feel to be humiliation.’291
The essence of what Chamberlain was trying to do was simple to state, but immensely difficult to practice. On the one hand the British had somehow to strike a delicate balance between showing their firm intent so that Hitler did not believe that he could do as he pleased and get what he wanted by force. But simultaneously they had to persuade him that they were not, as Goebbels claimed, trying to encircle and stifle Germany, and that if he abjured the use of force, the British would be willing to negotiate to meet Germany’s legitimate grievances. This was the burden of a speech that Chamberlain gave to a packed meeting at the Albert Hall in London on 11 May. Once again, he staked out a position on the moral high ground. ‘You know’, he told his audience, ‘that nothing would induce us to enter upon a war unless we are absolutely convinced that it could not be avoided without sacrificing our own liberties and our own good name’. But Germany had shown by its actions in occupying the rump of Czechoslovakia that it believed the principle of national self-determination to be of no account, and Britain would not stand by and allow Hitler to use force to crush the independence of those countries to which it had offered guarantees. But he remained ready to negotiate with Germany on matters of common interest, but only if Hitler first demonstrated that he had renounced the use of force.292 Confident that Britain was growing stronger as its rearmament programme gathered pace, Chamberlain did his utmost to maintain this balancing act, believing that the longer war could be delayed the less likely it was that it would ever happen.293
In the meantime the Prime Minister knew that he had to act circumspectly, for, as he told a German visitor, ‘Popular distrust of Germany’s policy, generally believed to be one of conquest, was for the time being insurmountable, but once this had been removed he would again be able to advocate concessions.’294 Anxious after Munich to build on the relationship of trust that he believed he had established with Hitler to achieve a wider settlement, he opted to maintain contacts with the German government behind the back of his own Foreign Secretary through backchannels whose existence could, if necessary, be publicly denied. One such conduit was George Steward, his Downing Street Press Secretary. But Steward was caught out by MI5 in November 1938, after he had assured his counter-part at the German embassy that Chamberlain wished it to be known that he was doing all he could, despite the inclinations of his own Foreign Office, to foster good relations with Germany. When news of the meeting reached Halifax he was aghast, and extracted a hypocritical apology from the Prime Minister.295 But even the German occupation of the rump of Czechoslovakia did not long deter Chamberlain from going down this course. On 3 May 1939 he remined the Cabinet ‘that British industrialists had recently been engaged in promising trade negotiations with Germany which had been broken off at the time of the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. He thought that within a reasonable time, if there was no further disturbance in international affairs, these trade negotiations with Germany might be resumed.’296 As he told the FPC two weeks later, he remained convinced that ‘there were still important moderate elements in Germany which it was desirable to foster and encourage.’297 Again he used unofficial intermediaries to explore these possibilities. One such was the author Arthur Bryant, the educational adviser at the Conservative party’s Bonar Law College. He was sufficiently in tune with Chamberlain’s ideas that he had asked him to edit his collected speeches, My Struggle for Peace.298 Bryant exhibited what his biographer has called ‘a naïve pro-Nazism’, and never was this more apparent than in the summer of 1939 when he flew to Berlin, at the invitation of Walter Hewel, one of Hitler’s secretaries.299 The two men held two lengthy conversations about Anglo-German relations during which Bryant, to his credit, emphasized Britain’s determination to fight if Germany used force against Poland. On his return he reported at length to Chamberlain, and for his pains Chamberlain insisted that he be fully reimbursed for his travelling costs.300 A second intermediary was another Conservative activist, the former MP, Henry Drummond-Wolf. After being briefed by Horace Wilson, Drummond-Wolf travelled to Berlin where he told an official of the Economic Policy Department of the Foreign Ministry that the British government might be ready to resume the economic negotiations that had been broken off after Prague, that they would be willing to forego tariff preferences in the Balkans and Eastern Europe to facilitate German trade, and asked how large a loan German needed to resolve its foreign exchange difficulties.301 A follow-up meeting took place on 17 July when Dr Helmut Wohlthat, Göering’s assistant at the Ministry for Economic Affairs and deputy head of the Four-Year Plan Organization, met Horace Wilson in London. There he suggested that an influential Englishman should ‘visit Hitler prepared to talk to him about the political, military and economic questions which might be of interest to the two countries.’302 Wilson, according to his own account, replied in an entirely non-committal sense. Wohlthat, however, put a different interpretation on their talk. He claimed that Wilson had downplayed Halifax’s insistence in his Chatham House speech that the British were determined to maintain a balance of power on the continent, and instead emphasized that what Halifax had really meant was to express his ‘readiness for cooperation and foreign policy of peaceful change in the present situation, in so far as Germany desired a change and agreement could be reached in negotiations with Britain.’303 He then added that Wilson had laid before him a programme covering political, military, and economic questions ‘approved by Chamberlain, of the points that would have to be dealt with between Britain and Germany.’304 No specific mention was made of the timing of talks, but Sir Joseph Ball, whom Wohlthat had also met on 20 July, intimated that Chamberlain would have to decide by mid-September ‘on what program he wants to fight the General Election, which, according to confidential information from Sir Joseph Ball, is scheduled for November 14.’305 Wohlthat’s meetings with Wilson and Ball were followed by a third meeting, also on 20 July, with Robert Hudson, the Ministry of Overseas Trade. By his own account Hudson sketched a scenario in which, ‘given the necessary preliminary of a solution of the political question, it ought not to be impossible to work out some form of economic and industrial collaboration between our three countries, which should include, in my view, the abolition of barter agreements, exchange restrictions, import quotas, and so forth,’ adding also that he had little doubt that it would be possible for Britain and the USA to cooperate in arranging a loan to assist Germany to overcome its foreign exchange difficulties.306
Chamberlain did not regret the Hudson-Wohthat meeting. What he did regret was that news of it leaked out and was published in the News Chronicle and the Daily Telegraph.307 Hudson avoided dismissal because, like Chamberlain, he wanted to maintain lines of communication with his German opposite numbers. What upset Chamberlain was that what he termed ‘Hudson’s gaffe’ had made that fact known at a time when public opinion appeared to favour an increasingly strong line against Germany. Fortunately, as he wrote to one of his sisters on 30 July:
there are other and discreeter [sic] channels by which contact can be maintained for it is important that those in Germany who would like to see us come to an understanding should not be discouraged. My critics of course think it would be a frightful thing to come to any agreement with Germany without first having given her a thorough thrashing to larn [sic] her to be a toad. But I don’t share that view. Let us convince her that the chances of winning a war without getting thoroughly exhausted in the process are too remote to make it worthwhile. But the corollary to that must be that she has a chance of getting fair and reasonable consideration and treatment from us and others if she will give up the idea that she can force it from us and convince us that she has given it up.308
Chamberlain hoped that by maintaining contacts with Germany through backchannels he could keep the door open to an eventual resumption of negotiations, and in early August those ‘discreeter’ channels included R. A. Butler and Horace Wilson, who maintained contact with senior officials at the German embassy.309 The Germans welcomed this, not because they wanted to negotiate the kind of general settlement that Chamberlain still set his heart on, but because they hoped to use them to persuade the British to stand aside while they crushed Poland. Through several conduits, including Lord Runciman’s son, Leslie, and two Swedish industrialists, Axel Wenner-Gren and Birger Dahlerus, Göering posed as a man of peace, promising that once the Danzig and the Polish Corridor questions had been settled that Germany would be willing to embark on negotiations for a disarmament and trade agreement.310 Dahlerus, who was dismissed by the former Swedish Minister to London as a self-important busybody, had lived in Britain for some years and accounted Göering as a personal friend. He set himself up as a self-appointed go-between in an effort to defuse tension between London and Berlin. He did so by arranging a meeting between Goering and a group of British businessmen so that the former could learn at first hand the real state of British opinion. Goering agreed, and on 25 July Dahlerus met Halifax in London, where the Foreign Secretary told him that although he did not want to have direct or official cognizance of the meeting, he would await its outcome with interest.311 The message that Göering gave them was in essence the same as the message he had already transmitted through Wenner-Gren. It ended with the assertion that ‘on his honour as an officer and a gentleman that Danzig was definitely the last territorial claim Germany had in Europe.’312 Two days later, through the good offices of Prince Max von Hohenlohe, he repeated the same message to Leslie Runciman.313 Hitler’s preferred channels of disinformation were Lord Kemsley, the owner of the Times, and Karl Burckhardt, the League of Nations’ High Commissioner for Danzig. In late July Hitler suggested to Kemsley that as a first step prior to negotiations, both governments should exchange written lists of their desiderata, a suggestion that Chamberlain and Halifax were both ready to accept, although they did so behind the backs of the rest of the Cabinet.314 On 11 August, after insisting that he must have a free hand to crush Poland, Hitler added the reassuring statement that he wanted nothing in Western Europe, and asked Burckhardt to tell the British that ‘I want to live in peace with England and to conclude a definitive pact; to guarantee all the English possessions in the world and to collaborate.’315 When Foreign Office officials saw copies of these reports they only confirmed their conviction that:
The truth is that there is a fundamental irreconcilability between German and British policy. The Germans, as Herr Hitler told Dr. Burckhardt at Berchtesgaden the other day, want a free hand in the East (Göring says in the Near East). Whether this means an out and out conquest (which in practice it probably would) or, as Göring more modestly puts it, the establishment of a sphere of economic interest and of a political order that would not be hostile to Germany (see paragraph 30), the result could not fail to be an encroachment on the independence or neutrality of certain countries in Eastern Europe whose independence His Majesty’s Government have undertaken to assist in defending, if the country concerned puts up a resistance. That being so, there seems little we can do except maintain our present policy in both its aspects and wait.316
The German peace offensive had fallen largely on deaf ears, just as Chamberlain’s back-channel diplomacy had entirely failed to dent Hitler’s determination to go to war against Poland.
By 31 August Hitler was willing to go to war against Poland even though it was probable that the Western powers would intervene. War, even a general war, was not for him, as it was for the British, a policy of last resort.317 In any case the circumstances seemed propitious. The Wehrmacht enjoyed a significant advantage over its opponents, a situation that might not endure for much longer in the face of British and French rearmament. The Nazi-Soviet pact had secured Stalin’s support for German aggression, and in the face of Roosevelt’s failure to secure the repeal of the Neutrality Act, the British and French could expect little immediate help from across the Atlantic. In September 1938, faced by the German threat to Czechoslovakia, the British had backed down and allowed Hitler a peaceful triumph. It seemed not unreasonable to assume that they would now do the same again. But when Hitler invaded Poland, they opted to fight rather than negotiate, for their view of the strategic and political situation they faced was very different. Strategically the situation seemed to be a good deal more favourable than it had been twelve months earlier and politically, ministers knew that if they did not fight their government was unlikely to survive a Commons’ revolt.
In February 1939 the COS had no doubt of the magnitude of the difficulties Britain would face if they found themselves at war with three enemies, Germany, Italy, and Japan, in three different parts of the globe, Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Far East, simultaneously. ‘The British Empire would thus be threatened at home, in the Mediterranean and in the Far East at the same time, and it would be hard to choose a worse geographical combination of enemies’, particularly as they were three of the most powerfully armed states, and were ruled by governments who ‘regard war as a natural means of enforcing policy.’318 So it was with a sense of relief that by late August 1939 it was apparent that events largely beyond their control meant that at least for the time being, they could focus their efforts on Germany to the virtual exclusion of Italy and Japan.
The fact that the Japanese had become seriously bogged-down in China since 1937 gave the British cause to hope that they lacked the resources to direct their expansionist energies towards Britain’s Far Eastern interests.319 In the summer those hopes had been dented when the two powers had quarrelled bitterly over the future of the British concession at Tientsin. Tientsin was a small Western enclave in north China about 80 miles from Peking where about 3,000 British businessmen and their families enjoyed extra-territorial privileges. This evoked Japanese hostility on two counts. Chinese nationalist guerrillas used the Concession as a safe haven from which to attack nearby Japanese troops, and its very existence represented an economic challenge to Japan’s puppet government in Peking. Tension between the Japanese and the local British administration had been growing since October 1938, and a crisis erupted in April 1939 following the assassination of a pro-Japanese official in the Concession by Chinese nationalists and the refusal by the British Consul-General to hand over the suspects.320 On 7 June Halifax complacently predicted, ‘that it was unlikely that there could be any serious development of the situation.’321 A week later he was proven wrong when the Japanese imposed a blockade on the Concession, and widened the scope of the crisis by insisting that the British must now abandon once and for all their pro-Chiang policy.322 Having committed themselves to guaranteeing the security of Poland, Greece, and Rumania, the British knew they had nothing to spare to fight the Japanese.323 A graceful climb-down seemed the only option, and in July that was effected by the British ambassador in Tokyo, Sir Robert Craigie.324 That produced a short-term easing of Japanese pressure on the British position in East Asia. But far more significant than the subtleties of British diplomacy in achieving this were events beyond British control. Only two days after Craigie reached an accord with his hosts, Roosevelt unilaterally abrogated the Japanese–American commercial treaty of 1911. This sent a clear signal that the Japanese would not have things all their own way in China. It also persuaded the British that they, too, must not make further concessions to the Japanese lest in doing so they alienate the USA.325 Finally, the Nazi-Soviet pact, signed on 23 August, undermined one of the pillars of Japanese foreign policy, for it allowed Stalin, if he chose, to focus all of his forces against Japan. The Japanese government collapsed, and, at least for the time being, the aggressively anti-British direction of Japanese policy was temporarily abated.326
The Italians were equally reluctant to follow Hitler’s lead. Ciano had visited Ribbentrop between 11 and 13 August and the latter left him in no doubt that German ambitions went far beyond Danzig. They did not just want the city; they wanted a war to crush Poland. Hitler had taken Mussolini’s support for granted, and so he was dismayed when the Italian dictator responded by insisting that Italy would not be ready to go to war for several years. Mussolini did not believe that a German attack on Poland could be localized. It would lead to a world war for which their country was simply not prepared.327 The Italians underscored the point by presenting Hitler with a shopping list of raw materials and munitions which they knew the Germans would never be able to provide.328 The British knew how reluctant the Italians were to go to war and did all they could to avoid provoking them.329
The result was that by 27 August Chamberlain was confident that ‘I think we may be fairly certain now that thanks to the policy we have pursued Italy will not come in if Hitler goes to war over Poland. And Japan has been so deeply shocked that we may find our anxieties in that quarter greatly relieved if not removed. I’m expecting to see a change of Government there which will be to our advantage, Spain too has had a shock and there we may expect to find a lessening of France’s difficulties.’330 Thus in the midst of the Polish crisis the British now knew that their worst-case scenario had not yet come to pass. At least in the short term they would not have to wage war simultaneously at the opposite ends of the globe but could focus all their efforts on Germany.
They could also assume with a reasonable degree of certainty that their own efforts would be augmented by contributions from most of the Dominions. During the Munich crisis the British had found it difficult to determine what the Dominions might do if negotiations broke down and there was war. On 26 September 1938 Malcolm MacDonald, the Colonial and Dominions Secretary, believed that ‘they had little doubt that if we became involved in war the Dominions would join in too’ but added that while Australia and New Zealand might do so after just a short delay, ‘in the case of South Africa and Eire the delay might be rather considerable.’331 However, the next day he added that, ‘if we were involved in war, all the Dominions would sooner or later come in with us, but it was clear that they would come in only half-heartedly and with mental reservations about our policy.’332 Those mental reservations began to dissipate in the spring of 1939. In September 1938 Dominion leaders had supported Chamberlain’s efforts to engineer a peaceful outcome to the crisis. J. A. Lyons, the Australian Prime Minister, told him that his flights to Germany ‘will in our opinion completely consolidate British opinion over the whole world.’333 Lyons and other Dominion leaders had supported the Munich agreement because they believed that Germany had been cheated at Versailles and denied the right of self-determination. Munich was morally defensible because it represented the belated application of that principle.334 But the German occupation of Prague left such beliefs in tatters. What Hitler had done at Prague was indefensible because it violated the very principle that he had claimed to be pursuing.
In Australia and New Zealand the ties of kith and kin reinforced their understanding that ultimately their own security depended on British strength, and trumped any feelings that they should stand aside from Britain’s quarrel as a way of asserting their national independence. Both Dominion governments had reaped a peace dividend after 1918, and it was not until the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in July 1937 that they awoke to the need to do align themselves with the British. The war in China convinced them that their own security was dependent on the security of Britain, and if the British were to succumb to German aggression, they would be left defenceless at the very moment when the Japanese seemed bent on aggression.335 Just a few days after Germany occupied Prague the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs told a radio audience that ‘there could be no peace or security or progress in the world until the aggressor peoples were confronted by resolute nations standing before them, with a drawn sword, saying, “Thus far and no farther.” That must be the policy of the democracies, not in some remote future, but now. They could not ignore the arrogant challenge of the totalitarian States.’336 By May 1939 the Dominions Office was confident that the antipodean Dominions would follow the British lead. On 18 and 27 August Lyons’s successor, Robert Menzies, sent Chamberlain messages intended to stiffen his resolve, insisting that he must not do anything likely to leave Hitler with the impression that the British would back down from their guarantee to Poland. Anything of the sort ‘would in my view certainly lead to German aggression and war.’337
In Canada everything would depend, as their Prime Ministers had repeatedly emphasized, on how their parliament voted and after Prague Mackenzie King worked hard to convince Canadians that if Britain was attacked they would have to go to its aid.338 He was helped when King George VI and Queen Elizabeth enjoyed a public relations triumph when they visited Canada, emphasizing that in Canada, too, there were still strong emotional bonds linking its Anglophone population to Britain.339 The decision of the Canadian government and parliament to go to war was not based on any specific commitments. Nor, given its proximity to the USA, did Canada go to war because it depended on Britain as its security guarantor. It went to war because it saw in Nazi Germany a threat to the ideals and institutions of the global British world of which it still saw itself as a part, and which it thought it was worthwhile to defend.340
Eire and South Africa were more problematic. Three weeks after the Munich agreement was signed, and prior to a visit to London by the South African Defence Minister, British officials considering what assistance they might get from South Africa in the event of war concluded that:
the Union government would not be prepared to make any definite commitment either to participate in any war in which Britain was involved, or to undertake any particular form of cooperation. The most that could be expected from them was a wholly conditional undertaking, on which we would not be justified in relying in the preparation of our plans. It was also suggested that the Union Government might expect, in return for this very problematical promise of co-operation in wartime, to have a say in the defence business of the East African Colonies in time of peace; and there was general agreement that this adoption of the ‘Big Brother’ attitude was not only militarily undesirable, but might also lead to political difficulties.341
They were right to place no reliance on what the South Africans might do. In the aftermath of the Munich crisis a clear division became apparent within the South African government. Both Hertzog and Smuts agreed that in the event of war the Royal Navy would be permitted to use the Simonstown’s base. But otherwise, Hertzog was insistent that South Africa should remain neutral, and Defence Minister Pirow, who had a well-merited reputation as being pro-German, was reluctant even to discuss possible joint operations with the British when he was in London in November 1938. However, the South African CGS, Sir Pierre van Reynvald, was more inclined to cooperate with the British, fearing the spread of German influence in both South West Africa and in the Union itself.342 The division in their outlooks reflected wider divisions within the South African government over whether or not to follow the British lead. In September 1939 the South African parliament did vote for war, albeit by a narrow majority, and at the end of a debate that saw Hertzog resign and Smuts replace him.343
There was never any realistic prospect that Eire would follow the lead of the other Dominions. In 1926 the Irish representative at the Imperial Conference had insisted that the Free State had little interest in the wider security concerns of the British Empire, and during the Munich crisis the Irish Prime Minister, Eamon de Valera, insisted that the most his government would do would be to maintain friendly neutrality if Britain went to war.344 The British decision to return the treaty ports to Irish control in 1938 changed nothing, and in 1939 he stood by his word. At the end of August 1939 the Secretary of the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs told the German representative in Dublin that Eire would not join Britain in any war, but that it was equally determined that no foreign power would be allowed to use Ireland as a base for operations against Britain.345 The British could not expect any active assistance from Eire, but at least de Valera had neutralized the more extreme Irish nationalists, thus ensuring that his country did not become a German base for operations against Britain.
The British had taken the utmost care to manage their relations with the Dominions so as never for a moment to let them believe that Britain either feared that they might remain neutral, or it took their participation in a European war for granted.346 Their tact was handsomely rewarded. On the eve of war, the British Cabinet could be reasonably confident that Australia, New Zealand, and Canada would follow their lead, South Africa would probably do so, and only Eire could not be counted upon. On 26 August the Dominions Secretary told his colleagues that:
The Prime Minister of Australia and the Acting Prime Minister of New Zealand had both indicated their support of the attitude of His Majesty’s Government. Mr. Mackenzie King had said that he could make no public statement until Parliament reassembled, but that if we were involved in war, his Cabinet is unanimous in its decision to fight. As regards South Africa, General Smuts said that he thought that circumstances would be too strong for General Hertzog, and that he would have to summon Parliament, in which case he (General Smuts) would press for a definite decision between belligerency or neutrality and hoped to be able to carry his colleagues with him in deciding for belligerency.347
The British were also confident that their main European ally, France, was now willing to fight. Following the Anschluss Eduard Daladier had formed a government which proved to be one of the most stable and durable in the life of the Third Republic, and by combining the portfolios of defence with the premiership he ensured that France could redouble the pace and extent of its rearmament programme. Defence spending and the rearmament accelerated still more after Munich, so that by September 1939 France was producing more tanks and fighter aircraft than Germany. French national morale had reached its nadir at Munich. But the acceleration of rearmament in early 1939, a perceptible improvement in the French economy, and a concerted effort led by Daladier to persuade the French people that France was rapidly gaining strength brought about a marked revival of national self-confidence. This was coupled with a widespread sense of shame for all that Munich meant, and a determination that it must not be repeated. Finally, in the spring the British had given the French what they had been seeking since 1919, a military alliance and a promise to lend France support not just in the air and at sea, but also on land.348 When Daladier met Hore-Belisha in Paris on 21 August he left the British minister with the impression that he was in an almost bellicose mood. War seemed inevitable, but the French and British enjoyed much greater access to resources than did Germany, and he was so confident of success that he believed ‘that Italy should be compelled to come in against us if she was not prepared to come in with us. This would give us a chance of an initial military success.’349 On 23 August the Council of Ministers agreed that despite the Nazi-Soviet pact, the French would stand by Poland. If they did not they would be faced by an even more serious threat from Germany in the near future. Only one minister, Bonnet, demurred, and he was overruled.350 A week later the British military attaché reported that, ‘France to-day presents a spectacle of calm determination which is most impressive and the country is by no means disposed to settle this affair on Hitler’s terms. If it cannot have a settlement which will guarantee it against the necessity to mobilise again in another six months or a year, France would prefer to have war now.’351
The willingness of the French policy-making elite to resist the Germans was further bolstered by their reading of the strategic balance. Like their British counterparts they too believed that if the democracies could ensure that they did not succumb to an early German onslaught, the odds were stacked in their favour in a long war and in the spring and summer of 1939 the British and French governments agreed the outlines of the grand strategy they believed would deliver victory. On 6 February, that is a month before the German occupation of the rump of Czechoslovakia had disabused the British government of any real hope that they would be able to deter Germany without making a real commitment to a future land war in Western Europe, the COS recommended that it was high time to concert plans with their French counterparts.352 The French welcomed the suggestion, and on 8 February British ministers added that the talks should also cover not merely a war against Germany, but also against Italy and Japan.353 On the same day the COS accepted, with some amendments, what became Britain’s grand strategy in the opening months of the war. The paper, prepared by the Joint Planning Committee, was entitled, ‘European Appreciation 1939–40’.354 Despite its title, it analysed Britain’s position in a future European war in a global context and its authors had no doubt of the magnitude of the difficulties Britain might face if they found themselves at war simultaneously with three enemies, Germany, Italy, and Japan, for ‘The British Empire would be threatened simultaneously in Europe, the Mediterranean and in the Far East by an immense aggregate of armed force, which neither our present nor our projected strength is designed to meet, with France as our only major ally. The outcome of the war would be likely to depend on our ability to hold on to our key positions and upon other Powers, particularly the United States of America, coming to our aid.’355 A three-front war was the worst-case scenario and it was made even worse because the attitude of some other powers was problematic. While the COS were confident that Australia and New Zealand would support Britain from the outset, Canada, South Africa, and Eire would only do so if they believed that Britain’s cause was just. Portugal would fulfil its treaty obligations, as would Egypt and Iraq, provided the British gave them satisfaction over the Palestine question, and they were confident that Britain could continue to defend them. Elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean they could count on the benevolent neutrality of Greece and Turkey. The USSR was likely to remain neutral unless it was itself attacked. But it would pose a latent threat to Japan, thus ensuring that the latter would not at least initially join the European Axis powers. Poland was written off as being unlikely to offer the Western powers any significant aid, and although the smaller European powers might be sympathetic, fear of Germany meant that they would remain neutral.
In the short-term Germany had stolen a march on the Western powers by bringing its economy to a pitch of war mobilization in peacetime. It possessed formidable forces in being. The army could mobilize between 120 and 130 divisions, at least six of which were armoured, and four motorized. German industry was believed to be capable of providing sufficient equipment to arm a further sixteen or seventeen annually.356 Intelligence concerning the navy was less precise. The Admiralty did not know the details of the Kriegsmarine’s Z-plan, but they did know that Hitler had ordered a major expansion of the German navy.357 Estimates of the size of the Luftwaffe and the capacity of the German aircraft industry continued to be exaggerated.358 But the same intelligence reports also suggested that Germany’s over-rapid rearmament programme was edging that country towards an economic and social crisis.359 The expansion of the Axis powers into Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Albania had done little to enable them to overcome shortages of key raw materials and skilled labour.360 In February the Chiefs of Staff concluded that ‘The stringency of the internal economic measures which Germany and Italy are apparently obliged to exercise in peace’, suggesting that they pointed to a ‘consequent reduction in their staying power’, and underlined ‘that they hoped to reach a decision fairly quickly once they decide to resort to war’, because ‘only by doing so could they hope to reap the benefits of their higher level of military preparedness.’361
That suggested that in the longer term the balance of economic advantage lay with the British and French. Germany, Italy, and Japan all, to a greater or lesser extent, depended on imports of foodstuffs, coal, oil, and industrial raw materials. But they lacked sufficient gold and foreign currency reserves to pay for them, and Italy also suffered from having a weak industrial base. Intelligence reports also suggested that Germany’s over-rapid rearmament programme was edging that country towards an economic crisis.362 Shortages of skilled labour and the use of substitute materials meant that the quality of some manufactured goods had deteriorated, and would limit the ability of industry to increase its manufacturing capacity in wartime.363 In February the Chiefs of Staff believed that with so few underused resources remaining, they would have to try and take advantage of their head start in rearmament and win a short war because they did not have the ability to wage a long one.364 By contrast the British and French had greater financial resources, and their superior maritime power would enable them to secure the foodstuffs and raw materials they required. Even so, the capacity of their own armaments industry would not suffice to meet their wartime needs, French industry being particularly inadequate in this respect. Realistically, these deficiencies could only be made good if the USA was willing in time to modify its neutrality legislation to allow the export of finished armaments.
Reviewing the situation as a whole, the COS envisaged British strategy as developing through three stages. Initially the Germans would try to exploit their head start in rearmament to win a quick victory. Poland was too far away and too isolated for the Western powers to be able to offer the Poles any real assistance. But the Germans were likely to regard Britain and France as their most formidable enemies and, because ‘she must appreciate that in the long-run the economic pressure which we can exert upon her by means of sea power will prove her undoing’, it was likely that from the start of the war the Germans would employ their submarines and air power ‘to force a rapid decision by attacking our supply and distribution system by means of unrestricted submarine and air attack’.365 The Royal Navy would be able to ward off the German submarine threat, while the RAF together with the army’s anti-aircraft gunners would control British airspace. The Maginot line made it likely that the expected German offensive against France would come through Holland and Belgium. That was a threat which the British could not ignore. Fortress Britain could not survive if the Germans established naval bases and airfields in Holland and Belgium from where they could bomb London and the Midlands and interdict their coastal shipping. The British therefore had to make a direct contribution to the defence of the Low Countries. A British field force, ‘though insignificant in comparison with the French armies, would afford a valuable reinforcement. We have reason to believe that any effective French support to Belgium is likely to be contingent on our intervention on land on the Continent. Without the physical presence of British troops, if only as an earnest of our intentions, there is likely to be a tendency for the French and Belgians if seriously pressed to withdraw in diverging directions leaving the Channel ports open to the German advance.’366
After Hitler’s initial offensive had been defeated, the war would enter a second phase. The allies would exploit their superior sea power to intensify economic pressure on their enemies while simultaneously accelerating their own industrial mobilization, and drawing on the resources of their overseas empires. This would ensure that in the third and final phase of the war they would be able to mount an overwhelming counter-offensive on land and in the air to secure the ultimate defeat of both Italy and Germany. ‘Once we had been able to develop the full fighting strength of the Empire, we should regard the outcome of the war with confidence.’367
These proposals were soon approved by a new ministerial Strategical Appreciation Sub-Committee and the Cabinet agreed that a copy should be sent to the French before the talks began. ‘This procedure’, Chatfield told the Cabinet on 2 March, ‘had the further advantage that it enabled us to take the initiative, and might avoid our being faced with a series of French proposals with which we were not in agreement.’368 The first round of talks, held between 29 March and 4 April, focused on the broad principles of Anglo-French strategy, while between 24 April and 4 May a second round turned to the more detailed consideration of plans for particular theatres of war. They also took account that Japan might be hostile and of recent changes in the political situation, such as the possibility that Poland, Romania, Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia might be drawn into the war. These were followed by a third series of meetings held at intervals during the summer, and by another series of conferences between local commanders in the Mediterranean and Middle East and in the Far East.369 The plans that emerged from their discussions broadly followed the COS Appreciation and recommendations. The war would fall into three phases. In the first phase the allied navies would blockade the Axis powers. Their land forces would remain on the defensive, although if the Germans invaded the Low Countries, allied troops would advance north to meet them, thus keeping the land war away from metropolitan France. In the air, in order not to provoke retaliation while their own air defence measures were incomplete, the allies would not initiate action against any but purely military objectives in the narrowest sense. If the Italians attacked allied possessions in North Africa, the allies would respond by attacking Tripolitania or Libya, and by raising the indigenous population against the Italians in their African empire. In the second phase allied land forces would remain on the defensive, but the allies would try to weaken Germany by tightening their blockade measures and by bombing targets inside Germany. These operations would be accompanied by efforts to knock out Italy, whom the allies agreed was the weakest member of the Axis partnership. Throughout the first two phases the allies would also work hard to mobilize their own resources so that at the beginning of the third and final phase they would enjoy a large superiority on land, at sea, and in the air, which they would use to mount a final offensive in the west to crush the Germans.370 For the first time talks between the staffs went beyond arrangements for the transportation of British forces to France and considered how they might conduct allied operations. They also agreed that their joint war effort would be coordinated through a Supreme War Council modelled on the organization that the Entente allies had established at the end of 1917.371 The British also learnt for the first time the number of divisions the French expected to field, their plans for meeting a German offensive in the west, and how they hoped to employ the British army.372
The central role that the blockade was to play in Anglo-French war plans against Germany quickly raised the question of Italy’s possible belligerency. If Italy remained neutral Germany would be able to render the blockade nugatory by sucking in imports through its southern neighbour. But if Italy fought alongside Germany, it would allow the allies to close that gap in their blockade. Ministers like Sam Hoare also believed that Italy would also represent a crippling burden on Germany’s already limited resources.373 As long ago as July 1937 the JPC had identified Italy as being the weakest of the three Axis powers because of its heavy dependence on imported foodstuffs, raw materials, and oil, and because of the vulnerability of its maritime lines of communication linking the Italian mainland to its African empire. The COS also maintained their low opinion of the fighting qualities of Italian troops.374 But if the British fleet was fighting the Italians in the Mediterranean the Japanese might be tempted to attack Britain’s the Far Eastern empire. What then should the British do? Lord Stanhope, the First Lord of the Admiralty, wanted to give priority to the Mediterranean. The Royal Navy should focus on the war against Italy, and rely on the Americans to deter Japan by moving their own fleet to Honolulu. Britain would only despatch capital ships to Singapore once Italy had been defeated. ‘It was true’, he confessed, ‘that we had given an undertaking to the Dominions to send a Fleet to Singapore but we had not said when the Fleet would sail.’375 This represented a seismic shift in Britain’s strategic priorities. Hitherto the British had been willing temporarily to sacrifice their position in the Mediterranean to fulfil the promises they had made to the Australian and New Zealand governments at the 1937 Imperial Conference that in the event of a Japanese threat, the Admiralty would send a powerful fleet to Singapore. If the British now reneged on that promise, Chatfield warned, the empire might disintegrate. Australia and New Zealand ‘might consider whether it would not be more advantageous for them to look to America for assistance.’376
The only way out of this dilemma seemed to be to launch a short, sharp war against Italy. If it was sharp enough to defeat Italy it might also be short enough to enable the British to release ships from the Mediterranean to send to Singapore before the Japanese could take advantage of the situation. In mid-April ministers told the British delegates to the second round of Anglo-French staff talks to tell the French that if Japan did join the Axis powers, Britain would send a fleet to the Far East, although its size and date of departure remained undecided. It would depend on such factors as the attitude of the USA, the extent to which the Japanese were bogged down on the Asian mainland and, crucially, progress in the war against Italy.377 But the French, intent on maintaining secure communications with their North African empire, were loath to see the Mediterranean denuded of British ships and so for the time being the question was left undecided.378 Chamberlain had hardly budged from his fortress Britain policy, telling his colleagues that ‘Should this country be defeated, the fate of the Dominions would be sealed. While, therefore, we should do what we could for the protection of the Dominions, the important thing was to defeat the enemy.’ Optimistically and unrealistically, he believed that if the situation was placed frankly before the Australian government, they ‘would fully appreciate and endorse the reasons for the modification of policy.’379
The JPS had already warned in March that ministers should not delude themselves that Italy was no more than a pack of cards which would collapse at the first blow. Detailed assessments of the situation by local commanders in North and East Africa suggested they were right. At the end of May British and French commanders were told that allied aims in East Africa were to secure the Red Sea route to Egypt and the Mediterranean, which was primarily a task for the Royal Navy and RAF, and isolate Italian territories, deprive their armed forces of reinforcements and supplies, and foster rebellions against the Italians. But given the preponderance of the Italians on land, at the outset local commanders reported that they would have no option other than to remain on the defensive.380 In North Africa the French had an additional problem. On the Tunisian front the French would initially remain on the defensive, and although they would do their best to contain the Italian forces opposite them, they would not have sufficient forces to go over to the offensive against the Italians in Tripolitania until they had neutralized Spanish Morocco.381 The French also wanted British aircraft to counter-balance their own inferiority in the air, something the British were reluctant to offer.382 Not only did they deem the air defences of Egypt, Malta, Gibraltar, and Aden to be inadequate, but both the Air Staff and the COS insisted that the air defence of Britain itself had to have priority over sending squadrons to Tunisia.383 The only thing the allies could agree on was that any attempts to raise a rebellion in Libya against the Italians before the allies were capable of mounting a decisive offensive of their own should be postponed because, ‘An unsupported revolt could only lead to merciless suppression by the Italians’.384 Oil supplies might be Italy’s Achilles heel, and a combination of blockade, and air and naval attacks on oil storage facilities would undermine Italy’s ability to wage war, but only the defeat of its armies in the field would force the Italian government to sue for peace.385 As Chatfield told the COS on 19 July, ‘he did not, in any way, imagine that the Navy would bombard the Italian coasts or that our Air Force would attempt to destroy the industrial areas in North Italy, but he assumed that we should attack Libya and by achieving an early success create a situation which would be damaging in the extreme to Italian morale and particularly to the Fascist regime.’386
In a lengthy assessment they presented to the CID on 24 July the COS showed that ministers who believed that by vigorous operations they could quickly bring about Italy’s collapse and so release forces for operations in the Far East, were under a misapprehension. The first strike would have to be mounted against Italy’s African empire, but it could not be expected to bring about its quick collapse.387 Hore-Belisha captured both the sense of frustration this assessment engendered, as well as the growing resolution of many ministers when he told his colleagues that:
we had already taken the important decision not to send a fleet immediately to the Far East in order that we might obtain successes against Italy first. It had been thought the Navy would cut the Italian communications with their African Empire. Now, however, it appeared that it would be better to have Italy neutral. The Navy could not promise any great success in the Mediterranean. We shall be held up on the Siegfried line and could do nothing to support the Poles. If this was to be our position, it appeared we should lose the war from the start. He thought it was important to make Italy declare her position. Even if Italy remain neutral, we still had to leave our forces in the Mediterranean to watch. It would be preferable to devise means to smash Italy and thus release those forces for action elsewhere. As a neutral, Italy would sustain Germany, whereas as an ally she would constitute a drain on German resources. An ultimatum delivered to Italy on the first day of war would force her either to come in with us or to go on with Germany, in which case her people would be most unwilling allies.388
In July, with no prospect of being able to send a fleet to the Far East quickly if the Mediterranean was to have first call on the navy’s ships, the CID agreed that the relief of Singapore would be delayed for ninety days, a figure they raised to six months in September.389 Malta was also to be provisioned for six months, its air defences increased and reinforcements were earmarked for the garrisons of Egypt and Singapore. Although some ground forces were also earmarked to reinforce Singapore, this was little more than a token gesture. Henceforth ministers had decided to give the Mediterranean a higher priority in British grand strategy than the defence of the Far East.390
Closer to home events seemed to have taken a happier turn. The fear that had gripped ministers during the Munich crisis, that Britain might be subjected to a quick and devastating air attack had lessoned. Its ground air defence system was much better developed than it had been during the Munich crisis, and on 22 August the Cabinet gave Hore-Belisha permission to call up the personnel needed to man coastal defence and anti-aircraft batteries.391 Ministers were also reasonably confident that they had put in place measures to ensure that civil society would not collapse under the expected weight of bombs that they anticipated the Luftwaffe might deliver. Work to do this had begun in 1924–5 in the belief that the French air force might bomb London with a mixture of high explosive, incendiary, and mustard gas bombs. It was carried out by a CID sub-committee on air raid precautions, initially under the chairmanship of Sir John Anderson, the PUS of the Home Office. Anderson believed that precautions were needed not merely to save lives, but to reduce the risk of ‘the moral collapse of the personnel employed in the working of the vital public services, such as transport, lighting, water and food distribution.’392 The committee explored all aspects of air raid precautions, including such matters as early warning systems, the prevention and repair of bomb damage, the maintenance of essential services, the evacuation of government departments to safer locations, the need to educate the public with respect to air raid threats and how they might protect themselves, and the legislative powers that government would need to acquire. The result was that the groundwork for a viable ARP system had already been laid when the German air menace emerged in the mid-1930s. It had the full support of the COS, who were impressed:
with the fact that failure to take adequate measures of this kind in time of peace would undoubtedly increase the general disorganisation and demoralisation which might result from enemy air attacks, and would correspondingly reduce our national resistance and undermine the moral structure of the nation. We would urge strongly that preparations for air raids precautions should be pressed forward, and that the immediate education of the public should be undertaken. There is considerable agitation going on in the Press in regard to the danger of air attack, and we feel it is of particular importance that the public should have a right perspective of the dangers to which they may be exposed and the action which can be taken not only to reduce the danger, but to minimise the moral and material damage which the enemy may hope to achieve.393
In 1935 ministers had established an Air Raids Precaution Department in the Home Office to act as a conduit between the government and local authorities and to supervise the preparation of the detailed ARP scheme that local authorities were expected to formulate. There then ensued a good deal of wrangling over who should foot the bill which was not finally settled until December 1937 with the passage of an Air Raid Precaution Act that included a provision that central government would fund nearly 90 per cent of the costs involved.394 As the civil servant who headed the Home Office ARP Departments wrote in May 1938, ‘air raid precautions is now a permanent feature of the defensive system of this country.’395 The Home Office then ordered all local authorities to prepare ARP schemes that included provisions for rescue, shelters, and fire-fighting. In June 1938 ministers agreed that the task of coordinating all civil defence measures in wartime would be vested in a new Ministry of Home Security, and at the end of October gave the job to Sir John Anderson.396
The Munich crisis highlighted both the importance and the inadequacy of ARP preparations to date, and especially the lack of adequate shelters. Anderson’s response was to announce a scheme to provide 20 million people with splinter-proof shelters funded entirely by the Exchequer.397 In April 1939 a Civil Defence Act was passed embodying the lessons of the Munich crisis.398 It regularized the government’s responsibilities for air raid precautions, gave local authorities new powers to requisition land to prepare public shelters and first aid posts, and required employers to provide shelters at places of work. It also laid down the rules for the blackout and evacuation procedures, as well as the measures that public utilities must adopt in wartime to maintain essential services.399 Anderson also established an organization that divided the country into a dozen civil defence regions and selected regional commissioners for each of them charged with coordinating the activities of all the local authorities in their area. By June 1939 nearly 900,000 men and half a million women had enrolled in various ARP services, there were sufficient respirators for the whole population, and plans had been prepared to evacuate children from large cities liable to attack and to provide extra hospital facilities for air raid casualties.400 There were still gaps in the government’s preparations, not least in the insufficient provision of deep shelters in large cities.401 Even so ministers believed that they had done enough to ensure that the British war effort would not collapse under the first effects of the massive German air raids that they feared would mark the outbreak of war.
By the eve of their declaration of war the allies were therefore optimistic that they could, given time, defeat Germany. But several of their reasons for thinking so rested on some decidedly optimistic assumptions. One was that the German economy was already close to being fully stretched, whilst another was that the Germans would not be able to relieve their situation by drawing on supplies from neighbouring countries. Neither of these beliefs proved to be correct.402 And whether the British would be able to secure the assistance of American industry, and whether they could afford to pay for that assistance, was equally uncertain. Roosevelt’s policy in 1938 was founded on two assumptions: the extremists were now in control of German policy, and the Chamberlain-Eden quarrel and the latter’s resignation was proof positive that the Prime Minister was no more than the tool of selfish City of London interests who were bent on coming to terms with the dictators to save their profits. Chamberlain was ready to make a deal with Hitler in which he would swap German domination of Central and Eastern Europe for the security of the British Empire, and America would lose out because its determination to create a liberal world trade system would be stymied. Until the very last moment Roosevelt held aloof from what he regarded as Britain’s immoral efforts to abandon the Czechs and given the strength of isolationist opinion in the USA, he could have done little else. At the end of September 1938, when war seemed imminent, he, too, was willing to acquiesce in the demise of Czechoslovakia in the hope of preserving peace. It was only in October, when it became apparent that Hitler did not mean to stop once he had absorbed the Sudetenland, that American policy adopted a new course. The president was now willing to see his country become the ‘arsenal of democracy’ by throwing America’s economic resources behind the efforts of the French and British to contain German expansion.403 In September 1938 he had already told a French visitor that ‘you may count on us for everything except troops and loans’.404 The British ambassador believed that this was indeed a fair reflection of the President’s own inclinations, but warned that before he could make good his promise he would have to work hard to overcome the strong strain of isolationism that ran through American public opinion. British prestige in the USA had been badly dented by the Munich crisis.405 Even so, during the winter of 1938–9 Roosevelt sent Chamberlain private messages of his friendship for Britain and his desire to do everything he could to ensure that if war came Britain would have the support of America’s industrial resources.406 The President believed that Germany and Japan were acting in collusion, that the USA would not be safe in a world dominated by the Axis Powers, and that France and Britain therefore constituted America’s first line of defence.407 He hoped to be able to amend the neutrality laws, but in his estimation the British were not doing enough to either help him or themselves.408 Writing to one of his former tutors at Harvard in February 1939, he explained that:
I wish the British would stop this ‘We who are about to die, salute thee’ attitude. Lord Lothian [ the British ambassador] was here the other day, started the conversation by saying he had completely abandoned his former belief that Hitler could be dealt with as a semi-reasonable human being, and went on to say that the British for 1000 years had been the guardians of Anglo-Saxon civilisation—that the sceptre of the sword or something like that had been dropped from their palsied fingers—that the USA must snatch it up—that FDR alone could save the world—etc. etc.
I got mad clear through and told him that just so long as he or Britishers like him took that attitude of complete despair, the British would not be worth saving anyway.
What the British need today is a good stiff grog, inducing not only the desire to save civilisation but the continued belief that they can do it. In such an event they will have a lot more support from their American cousins—don’t you think so?409
Chamberlain had not abandoned his suspicions that in a crisis the USA could not be trusted, and that if it did offer help, it would come with a hefty price tag. This was demonstrated in November 1938 when the Americans struck a hard bargain in the shape of an Anglo-American trade treaty that inflicted considerable damage on the system of imperial preference.410 But he also understood that the Western powers would need American assistance, and during the spring and summer of 1939 he told Washington that it was psychologically important that Hitler should believe that the USA was on the side of the democracies.411 To that end the British did their utmost to garner both public and political support in the USA. In January Halifax sent a lengthy personal message to the President outlining in some detail British views that Hitler might soon take some desperate action that would plunge Europe into war, and asking Roosevelt to make a public pronouncement that might assist the Western powers in dissuading him from doing anything rash.412 Roosevelt’s response was to tell a former Foreign Office official in March that if war came his policy would be ‘The most beneficent possible neutrality towards the western democracies.’413 He welcomed the Polish guarantee, and in April he transferred the American fleet to Hawaii, a welcome development for the British as it took some of the pressure off their own efforts to contain the Japanese at a time when they lacked the ships to reinforce Singapore.414
Roosevelt also did his best to educate American opinion to understand that Hitler and Mussolini represented a threat not just to the security of Britain and France, but also to the USA itself.415 His efforts had some limited success in that Gallup polls showed that a clear majority of the American people would do everything short of war to assist France and Britain if Germany attacked them, and that they believed that if France and Britain were defeated the USA itself would be the next target of German and Italian aggression.416 In June, at Roosevelt’s suggestion, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth extended their royal tour of Canada to pay a well-publicised visit to the USA, a visit that did help to establish the notion of a commonality between the English-speaking peoples on both sides of the Atlantic.417 But, as the Foreign Office knew, isolationism remained deeply rooted in large parts of the USA. It was also powerfully represented in Congress, where the President’s influence had recently declined, ‘owing to the factious spirit of the more conservative elements in the Democratic party which have combined with the Republicans in opposition to the New Deal.’418 In April the Foreign Office concluded, ‘It would, however, be altogether a mistake to conclude that this development has reached a point which would overcome the reluctance of the American people to become involved in war.’ Their most comforting conclusion was that the USA was far more likely to intervene on the side of the Western powers if the Japanese ranged themselves on the side of the Axis. But unless that occurred, they ‘should expect no more from the United States Government in wartime than the maximum degree of assistance compatible with the preservation of the United States’ neutrality.’419
Even if Roosevelt succeeded in amending or abolishing the Neutrality legislation, there remained the problem of how to pay for the goods that the British needed to buy in the USA. In March 1939 he mused that ‘Probably the “cash and carry” rule at present applied to all trade except manufactured munitions would be extended to cover everything. The President thought that that ought to be enough for us. We had ample funds in the United States and anyhow money had odd but sure ways of getting to where it was most wanted.’420 But the British did not have ample funds. In April Sir Alan Barlow, a Treasury Under-Secretary, told ministers and officials that their strategic plans were based on a dangerously misleading assumption, namely that:
our financial strength was such that we could support a long war. The position had radically changed for the worse compared with 1914. First of all our internal financial stability was not so great, and secondly we had not the same resources for purchasing supplies abroad. Large purchases abroad would be required and our financial means, even on the assumption that we were not hampered by ‘neutrality’ or ‘cash and carry’ principles, were enormously less. We were already experiencing anxiety as to payment for stores from abroad for which dollars were required. There had been a fundamental change in our position and it was clear that we could not regard our financial position as comparable in any way to what it had been before the last War.421
In May Simon, too, warned that the accelerating pace of rearmament meant that Britain would soon no longer have the financial wherewithal to wage a long war.422 When his colleagues would not listen and asked for still more money he could only bewail that ‘there would seem to be no limit to the demands which might now be made upon us.’423 In 1934 the US Congress had passed the Johnson Act, which prohibited new loans to any government, including the British, that was in default of payments on the debts it had accrued to the USA in the First World War. Consequently, the British could not expect to borrow their way out of trouble, an important consideration because between a quarter and a third of the cost of finished armaments was represented by imported raw materials, and in 1938–9 rearmament caused a steep rise in imports. This happened at the very time when foreign investors, frightened by the prospect of war, were withdrawing funds from the City of London.424 The value of sterling fell, but the US Treasury’s response was unsympathetic. They insisted that the British had to abide by a currency agreement they had struck in 1936 and prop up the value of the pound by selling gold and foreign currency reserves. Imposing exchange controls might have eased this problem, but it would have been difficult to implement and would have angered the Americans. Anxious to retain as much American goodwill as they could, the British did as they were told. Between March 1938 and July 1939, they spent £300 million, or 40 per cent of their gold reserve, supporting the value of sterling, money they would far rather have spent buying supplies once a war had begun.425 Simon estimated that if gold and foreign currency continued to drain away, a drain that was likely to accelerate once war began, Britain would have exhausted all of its reserves by 1942.426 Any hope that Roosevelt might be able offer some help were dashed in July when a combination of Republican isolationists and anti-Roosevelt factions in the Democratic party blocked his efforts to amend the Neutrality legislation.427 ‘Nevertheless’, Simon warned, ‘unless, when the time comes the United States are prepared either to lend or to give us money as required, the prospects for a long war are becoming exceedingly grim.’428 What the British wanted from the USA, as Sir Richard Hopkins, the Second Secretary at the Treasury who had special responsibility for overseas finance, candidly admitted, ‘would be that they should give us a share of their production without our paying for it.’429 As for the future, Simon believed that ‘It was impossible to say when war might break out. If it should break out some years hence, it was important that those who were responsible for policy should realise that our financial strength was then likely to be much weaker than it was to-day.’430
In April Barlow had bluntly warned ministers that ‘if we were under the impression that we were as well able as in 1914 to conduct a long war we were burying our heads in the sand.’431 But nothing he said could persuade ministers to lift their heads from those sands. They were committed to the notion that Britain must not lose a short war and could win a long one, and the Treasury’s arguments did little to dent their belief. Hore-Belisha derided Simon’s arguments as ‘a gloomy half-baked effort by the Treasury to slow down rearmament.’432 In any case even Simon believed that the British still had enough gold and foreign currency reserves to last them for three years, time enough they believed to win a war. After listening to the Cabinet’s discussion on 5 July, Halifax concluded that:
he rather shared the view that the general effect of these Papers might be to give too gloomy a view. All things were comparative. If our position was difficult, the position of Germany was very likely to be even more difficult in regard to the conduct of a long war. If, notwithstanding all her efforts, Germany was unable to make herself self-sufficient, that militated against the theory of a long war. If this view was well founded, we should not exclude the possibility that our maximum effort would be well applied if we assumed the prospect of a reasonably short war. Even if this assumption should prove to be wrong and the war should last longer than we anticipated, it would be reasonably safe to assume that when the war had continued for some time the attitude of the United States would be sufficiently favourable to us to enable us to win the war.433
This was grand strategy as Mr Micawber might have designed it. The British had enough gold and foreign currency reserves for a three-year war lasting until 1942, and in the meantime something (good) would turn up.
Taken in the round, therefore, Britain’s position appeared to be stronger in September 1939 than it had been in September 1938. It was more assured of the support of most of the Dominions. The French were more determined to make a stand than they had been a year earlier, and the possibility that the British would have to fight three enemies simultaneously in three widely spaced parts of the globe had significantly diminished. Germany itself appeared not be in a good position to fight a long war, and measures were in place to protect the civilian population of Britain from the air attacks that had for so long been anticipated. Finally, although there was reason to fear that Britain might run out of the money it needed in the foreseeable future to fund the imports that were essential to sustain its war economy, there was at least the hope that the USA might extend to it some assistance, albeit at a price.
The very fact that ministers were willing to abandon their conviction that economic strength constituted the fourth arm of defence, a belief that had constituted one of the sacred cows of British grand strategy since the DRC’s report of 1934, suggests that their decision to go to war rested on more than merely strategic calculations. They were also swayed by the purely political arguments in favour of fighting. Chamberlain was right in believing that British opinion was hardening against making further concessions to Germany in the summer of 1939, although not to the extent that he might be summarily ejected from Downing Street. In the spring of 1939 Margesson assured him that the parliamentary party was solidly behind him.434 In the aftermath of Munich opponents of Chamberlain’s foreign policy inside the Conservative party had coalesced into two loosely organized groups. The larger of them, centred around Eden, number about twenty MPs, while a smaller group united around Churchill. Chamberlain’s position was made secure because the two groups hardly cooperated.
After his resignation in February 1938 Eden had walked a political tightrope, opposing Chamberlain’s polices, but anxious not to give an appearance of disloyalty which would be fatal to his leadership hopes. But in avoiding making an overt challenge he risked alienating those Conservatives who looked to him for a lead, and by the spring of 1939 the mantle of the government’s chief critic on the Conservative benches had passed to Churchill.435 Churchill himself remained committed to creating a Grand Alliance, and was unmoved when Halifax explained to him just how objectionable the smaller states of Eastern and Central Europe found the idea of being allied to the USSR.436 In early July some of Chamberlain’s Conservative opponents took up a suggestion, first mooted by a German member of the anti-Hitler opposition, and started a noisy press campaign calling on Chamberlain to invite Eden and Churchill to join the government as the only way to persuade Hitler that Britain really would fight for Poland.437 Chamberlain’s response was to tell Sir Joseph Ball to run his own covert campaign denigrating Churchill and those on the Conservative backbenches who thought like him.438
Suspicion that Chamberlain was still determined to appease rather than oppose the dictators grew in the spring and summer. One of the Prime Ministers critics with close contacts to the Foreign Office believed that Henderson’s return to Berlin in late April, and reports of Horace Wilson’s continued closeness to the Prime Minister, meant that ‘appeasement is again on the ascendant’.439 The Times carried a leading article insisting that Danzig was not worth a war and on 3 May published a letter ostensibly written by Lord Ruchcliffe, a former Minister of Labour, expressing the same point of view. But he was known to be close to Wilson and it was rumoured that the latter was the real author.440 Cadogan confronted Wilson, telling him of ‘a telephone intercept, which looks as if No. 10 were talking “appeasement” again. He put up all sorts of denials, to which I don’t pay much attention’.441 The fact that negotiations for an Anglo-Soviet alliance dragged on for months and got nowhere, and that Chamberlain could not disguise his distaste for them, also fed suspicions that he ‘hates abandoning the last bridges which might still enable him to renew his former policy. So he vainly tries to avoid a war alliance with Russia.’442 When Hugh Dalton met Chamberlain on 28 June to discuss the international situation, he thought that he was dangerously inclined to ‘hedge’ over the British commitment to fight alongside Poland.443 When news of the Hudson-Wohthat discussions leaked to the press in July, there was a storm of protest amid accusations that the British government were about to renege on their guarantee to Poland.444 By the end of July growing numbers of MPs on both sides of the Commons suspected that the government lacked the backbone to withstand further German pressure. Fearful that the government might negotiate a second Munich-style settlement during the parliamentary recess, Chamberlain’s critics demanded that parliament should reassemble early after the summer recess on 21 August, rather than as originally announced, on 3 October.445 Chamberlain retaliated by making the issue a vote of confidence, an Opposition’s motion was defeated by 118 votes, and the Commons adjourned on 3 August. It was a sign of the suspicion with which a good many Tories regarded their own Prime Minister that forty of his nominal supporters abstained.446 Support for the government was already leaking away even before the final crisis.
In their speeches at Birmingham, the Albert Hall, and Chatham House, Chamberlain and Halifax had reiterated the British concept of international morality. International obligations freely undertaken had to be honoured, and that change was possible, but it had to be change brought about by peaceful negotiations, not by brute force. On 1 September, by invading Poland, Hitler demonstrated his total rejection of such notions. Ministers now faced a stark choice. The moralism embodied in Chamberlain’s and Halifax’s speeches had resonated loudly with public opinion, so much so that ministers recognized that if they did not now act decisively and meet force with force, they would quickly be ejected from power. When the Cabinet heard the news of the German invasion of Poland they ordered the armed forces to mobilize and agreed to warn the Germans that unless they withdrew from Poland, Britain would go to war, a decision they reiterated the next day when discussing an Italian proposal for a possible armistice and peace conference.447 They had no intention of reneging on their obligation to Poland. But, under pressure from the French, who wanted more time to evacuate vulnerable civilians from their cities, Halifax and Chamberlain did want to delay an immediate declaration of war. Consequently, the message that Henderson delivered in Berlin was an ultimatum without a time limit.448
But, as Halifax recorded ‘the Cabinet itself was in an extremely difficult mood’, meaning that a good many ministers had lost patience with delay. As so often in the past they were driven by what they believed public opinion wanted, or in this case, would accept. A general election was due by no later than the autumn of 1940, and ministers were increasingly aware that public opinion was insistent that Prague had demonstrated that Hitler could not be taken at his word when he said that he had no further territorial ambitions in Europe. Politicians may have paid little or no attention to the polls, but in July a Gallup poll showed that three-quarters of respondents believed that if Germany went to war over Danzig, Britain should fight side by Poland’s side.449 News of the Nazi-Soviet pact shocked the public, but did not dent their determination that there must be no second Munich.450 On 25 August the German embassy reported that public opinion regarded war as almost inevitable and was solidly behind the government in being determined to stand by the Polish guarantee.451
British ministers had reached the same conclusions. One of them, Euan Wallace, the Minister of Transport, told Halifax on 31 August that ‘Horrible as we know a war would be, I believe the vast majority of people in this country would regard it as preferable to any other outcome of the present situation which made such a war probable, or even possible, within the lifetime of our children.’452 Chamberlain had claimed at the Albert Hall that Britain was still a great and powerful nation. People now expected him to behave like the leader of such a nation, and his ministers understood what might happen if he did not. On 30 August Arthur Greenwood, acting as Leader of the Opposition in the absence of Attlee who had been hospitalized, told Hore-Belisha that ‘his Party were in favour of mobilisation at once and all necessary steps being expedited.’453 At the Cabinet on 2 September Hoare told his colleagues that if they hesitated to issue an ultimatum, ‘there would be tremendous risks in accepting any delay which might well have considerable reactions on public opinion.’454 Hore-Belisha was equally adamant that the government must act quickly, for further delay ‘might result in breaking the present unity in the country. Public opinion here was strongly against our yielding an inch.’455 In saying this they reflected feelings on both sides of the House, for when the Commons reassembled on the afternoon of 2 September many MPs were intensely angry at the government’s refusal to despatch an ultimatum with a time limit to Berlin. On 24 August, in what was generally regarded as an uninspiring speech, Chamberlain had told the Commons that although the Nazi-Soviet pact had come as an unpleasant surprise, Britain would fight to defend Poland, adding that if war came, ‘we shall not be fighting for the political future of a faraway city in a foreign land; we shall be fighting for the preservation of those principles…the destruction of which would involve the destruction of all possibility of peace and security for the peoples of the world.’456 But a good many MPs now feared that he was contemplating a second Munich agreement, whereas they wanted to hear him announce that Britain would be at war by midnight if the Germans did not retire from Poland. Consequently, when they heard him announce that the government was considering an Italian proposal for a five-power conference, and that they were consulting with the French as to a time limit, the result was an outburst of anger on both sides of the House.457 After Chamberlain finished his statement Greenwood rose. As he was about to express the widely shared alarm at the apparent direction of government policy, Leo Amery shouted that he should ‘Speak for England.’458 In doing so he caught the mood of the Commons, and of most of the British public, in a way that had eluded the Prime Minister. There may have been a good reason why Britain had not yet declared war in support of Poland, ‘but there are many of us on all sides of this House who view with the gravest concern the fact that hours went by and news came in of bombing operations, and news to-day of an intensification of it, and I wonder how long we are prepared to vacillate at a time when Britain and all that Britain stands for, and human civilisation, are in peril.’459
Public opinion did not push Britain into war. But, expressed through the Commons, it did hasten its declaration. Chamberlain now understood that if the government did not reverse its policy it would fall the next day.460 The anger and alarm of backbenchers on both sides of the Commons was shared by a many Cabinet ministers. They realized that Chamberlain was acting contrary to the views they had expressed that afternoon. Ten of them assembled in a room in the Commons in a state of revolt, news that was quickly passed to Chamberlain by Simon, who claimed that he fully shared their feelings. The Cabinet rebels told the Prime Minister that an ultimatum had to be issued immediately. Chamberlain was so badly rattled that, together with Wilson, Cadogan, and Halifax, he impressed on the French ambassador and Daladier the real urgency of the position, and the need of an immediate and joint ultimatum.461 When the Cabinet reassembled at 11.30 p.m. Chamberlain realized that he had to act decisively before parliament reassembled at noon on 3 September. Even though they knew that the French would not be able to act in concert, ministers agreed that an ultimatum should be presented in Berlin at 9 a.m. on 3 September and would expire two hours later.462 Henderson delivered the document, and at 11.15 a.m. a doleful Chamberlain made a radio broadcast announcing that Britain was now at war with Germany. Appeasement, deterrence, and containment had failed. Only coercion remained.
The decisions to hold staff talks with the French, and to issue guarantees to Poland, Greece, and Rumania, were the product of two factors. One was the growth of German power, signified by the occupation of Prague and the take-over of Memel. These events came on top of a plethora of rumours suggesting that Hitler’s ambitions were not confined to the peaceful expansion of German power and influence into Eastern and Central Europe, but that he might also be preparing to unleash his armed forces against Britain itself. British policy-makers had always been intent on shaping their grand strategy to meet external challenges, and now that their perception of those challenges had changed, so did their grand strategy. But the external environment had never been the sole driver behind their policies. They had always taken careful account of what they believed the public wanted and what they were prepared to support. In the 1920s and early 1930s they were convinced that the public did not want greater armaments or a military commitment to Europe, but they did want a peaceful and stable continent, and so they gave them disarmament and Locarno. To this extent policy-makers followed, rather than led, public opinion. After he became Prime Minister, and even after Munich, Chamberlain’s reading of what the public wanted remained unchanged. It was the main driver that underpinned his determination to continue to seek a general agreement with Germany. It was because a growing number of ministers, led by Halifax, had a different understanding of what the British public wanted, that government policy could and did change in the spring of 1939. While Chamberlain continued to hanker after a negotiated settlement with Germany, he was dragged reluctantly down the road of making commitments to European powers and acquiescing in the expansion of Britain’s own armed forces.
Between October 1938 and April 1939, the British stumbled towards a new grand strategy combining deterrence and containment as ministers took a series of ad hoc decisions in response to external crises. In January rumours of a German threat to the Low Countries pushed the Cabinet into accepting, at least in theory, a continental commitment to aid France if Germany turned westwards. French pressure was also instrumental in persuading them to double the Territorial army and to introduce conscription, although the latter decision was also the product of their own fears of the potentially devastating effect of a sudden German air attack on London and other major cities. The guarantees that the British offered to Poland, Greece, and Rumania, and the treaty negotiations with Turkey and the USSR, were not meant to be the first steps towards creating a war-fighting coalition. They were intended to demonstrate that a new firmness now underpinned British policy. The aim of that policy remained as before, the search for a general settlement that would assuage the ambitions of the revisionist powers by means of peaceful negotiations. But in attempting to impress Germany with their own strength and determination, they faced an up-hill task, because British policy-makers did not speak with a single, united voice. Halifax’s public insistence that Britain would oppose any further German expansion brought about by force or the threat of force was undermined by Chamberlain’s expressions, by backstairs means, of his continued willingness to do a deal with Hitler. Appeasement and deterrence were incompatible bedfellows. Hitler’s surprise and dismay on 3 September when he received the British ultimatum was entirely understandable.463
Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement: British Grand Strategy, 1919–1940. David French. Oxford University Press. © David French 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192863355.003.0010