Perhaps one of the most misunderstood lines in the written history of warfare originated with Carl von Clausewitz in his 1832 treatise, On War. For what is actually a rather a large book with many fascinating musings and arguments, it seems that only one thought has gone forward to keep Clausewitz near the top of the quotation league table: his famous phrase, ‘war is merely the continuation of policy by other means’. But as Christopher Bassford has argued, the German word Politik can mean ‘policy’ or ‘politics’, and these are two different things. The first is a rational programme of action designed to produce a desired result, whereas the second is an abstract concept central to human existence, a force which determines the shape of the lives of everyone on the planet. According to Bassford’s interpretation, therefore, Clausewitz required us to understand that war can represent two things at once: a policy in itself whereby the political objectives are pursued by force, and a complete breakdown of all normal political dialogue, leading to the march of armies to resolve the issues. In Bassford’s words, ‘war is what happens when political conflict reaches an emotional level that leads to organised violence’.1
This penetrating reading of the old Prussian’s philosophy neatly underpins the idea that the Second World War was not so much a war between nations in the style of the first great conflict of 1914–18, when the great empires collided in a struggle for European supremacy, but rather it was a war between the three most prominent political ideologies of the era, ideologies which had attained a level of development whereby the conflict between them reached critical mass. Fascism had been around in various forms for at least a century; communism was relatively new, but in the Russian revolutions it had acquired real power. The oldest of all, the democracies, had been badly shaken by the near-collapse of their economic system in the Depression, and had yet to fully recover psychologically from the previous world war.
Three systems, three different political aims. Thus, between the years 1939 and 1945, the war of arms between these three claimed over fifty million lives. We know now that the communists and the democracies prevailed after six years of bloody struggle – if only to begin immediately a new war of ideology which lasted a further forty-five years. It could even be argued that the war of ideas is only now finally over; that the liberal democracies have at last achieved victory, and that the world will forever be governed by stock markets and unknown men in suits, not tin-pot dictators with ludicrous uniforms and a taste for genocide. But that is a matter for future historians to ponder upon. In the autumn of 1939, the ideological elements of the conflict were not invisible to the leaders of the hour, but perhaps they were not so clearly understood either.
The explanation of the war in the minds of many people was still cast in the terms of 1918: a German nation which had not learned its lesson and been allowed to slip the chains forged at Versailles. People spoke of ‘empire’ and ‘colonies’ and the exportation of Kultur as much in 1939 as they had in 1914, but in fact these were nineteenth-century concepts which had been dealt a mortal blow by the First World War, though they proved to be a long time dying. For it was not Kultur which was being exported by Germany this time, it was national socialism. The German nation became the carrier of the Idea, as an organic cell is host to a virus. Those who thought German national aspirations could be satisfied by tinkering with the Treaty of Versailles entirely missed the point, and each concession made to Hitler convinced him not of Germany’s right to a seat at the table of the Great Powers, but of the intrinsic strength of his perverse system of social order. He and his gangsters were naught but bullies in the continental playground, throwing their weight around in greater measure until at last their harassed victims summoned the courage to make a collective stand. Only then did Hitler realise that his power was not irresistible.
The appeasers took most of the blame, of course, not that they wholly deserved it. There was very little that could have practically been done to stop Hitler between 1933 and 1939, given the weaknesses of the British and French military, the lack of public support for war, and the simple but honest fear of another western front like the one where so many millions had died in vain. When Churchill took the premiership in 1940, it was not because he was the best man for the job, he was the only man for the job, for there was no one else to be called upon who had his combination of credibility and experience. A government led by Lord Halifax, the only other serious contender, would have probably sued for peace after Dunkirk. But although Churchill was far from secure until at least the early part of 1941, he nevertheless had one great asset which propelled him into office and kept him there until victory in Europe had been secured: his deep understanding of the philosophy of the Right and the grim fascination it inspired in the minds of the weak. Churchill understood Hitler far better than Chamberlain did. He recognised earlier than most that Hitler was a man driven, not by love of country or even love of himself, but by love of power for its own sake. He also knew that he was not dealing with a single nation, but with a disease which had infected half of Europe. Inside every one of the six nations which sought exile in Britain during 1940 were significant fascist parties or other organisations sympathetic to rightist ideology. Aside from the military pressures after Dunkirk, Churchill knew that he must keep Britain free from the contamination of the fascist idea, and it mattered not to him that a man might be from Austria or Czechoslovakia, Poland or even Germany, only that he did not carry with him that insidious virus which would, as he put it, wreck Christian civilisation if the infection were to become incurable.
In the War Cabinets of June 1940 we see him putting this philosophy into practice. He alone was prepared to throw open the doors of Britain to any man who was prepared to carry on with the fight against Nazism, and while others around him urged caution – and wisely so – he swept aside their concerns and demanded that the soldiers of the six nations be granted refuge, and that their airmen be given the chance to continue the struggle immediately. He justified this policy by claiming that it would give the British war effort that ‘broad international character which will add greatly to our strength and prestige’, which in practice meant a defiant salute to America.2 Fascists and communists were excluded as a matter of course, but the British media made hay with many glorious (and sometimes fantastic) tales of allied heroism and escapology, and the Foreign Office made sure that American journalists got the best scoops. To Churchill, the collapse of the European democracies meant that their spirits could be kept alive not so much in Britain, but in America, where millions of European emigrants had made their homes. As symbols of freedom, fortitude and courage, they were worth their weight in gold – or so it seemed at the time. We know now that recruitment for the allied forces in America was not especially successful, but at least their presence in Britain kept the war alive in the minds of the expatriate communities in America.
But having encouraged Britain to welcome them with much bonhomie and flag-waving, Churchill lost interest in the European exiles after America joined the war in December 1941. He seldom mentioned them in his broadcasts after that date, whereas before that they had a place in almost every major speech. One can easily take the view that to him they had fulfilled their function by enabling the British war effort to be the prototype of his ‘Grand Alliance’, a small community of many flags whose very existence demonstrated that the unspeakable evil could be resisted. In the eighteen months between Dunkirk and Pearl Harbor, Churchill could thus be relied upon to act decisively in matters concerning the exiles; but with the entry of the Americans and the Russians, the responsibility fell entirely upon the service departments and the Foreign Office to maintain the allied relationships, and we have seen how varied and sometimes volatile those relationships could be.
The security services, acting in concert with the national governments, weeded out the suspect, the fanatical and the merely discontent from each group upon arrival. Avowed communists were swiftly shunted off to internment, as were political figures known to have paid too much attention to the principles of fascism. Those men who were critical of their political leaders received sympathetic treatment from the British, hence the decision to allow them to serve in British forces rather than suffer intimidation and victimisation in their own. Anti-Semitism among the exiles was commonplace, but the British did very little to discourage it, preferring instead to leave this highly sensitive issue to the governments concerned. Besides, being anti-Semitic did not mean that a man was pro-Nazi, and it was this that mattered most. Curiously, very few genuine spies were discovered during the filtering process, and it seems that the Germans missed their chance to place efficient agents within the contingents as they escaped from France. Perhaps it had all happened too quickly even for the Abwehr to take further advantage of victory in the field.
Once in Britain, the great priority was to organise and employ all the service personnel as rapidly as possible, primarily in order to maintain morale, but also in preparation for the expected German invasion later in the summer. For its part, the War Office encountered few difficulties with the allied land forces. From the very outset, each one stood as an independent, self-contained contingent which would take its place in the line when the time came for action. The Poles had a huge army in their own right – nearly a quarter of a million men, most of whom saw fierce combat in Italy – but the rest had much smaller forces, little more than brigades in most cases. Each allied government supplied men from its land forces for specialist training and covert operations with the Special Operations Executive, but still the majority of soldiers based in Britain had a long wait for action until the opening of the Second Front in 1944. As for the Royal Navy, it too enjoyed the benefits of having self-regulated, highly efficient naval forces and merchant fleets at its command, and although further research is needed in this area, it would seem that the Admiralty absorbed its new allies with little difficulty or disruption to the Navy’s organisation or general routine.
However, for the Air Ministry, none of these advantages applied. Its war was very much a hot one, being fought by the day, by the hour, even by the minute, therefore Churchill’s directive that all suitable allied air personnel should be thrown back into the fight presented a far greater peril to the Royal Air Force than any of the other services. The slightest error of judgement could have had disastrous consequences, and this is partly why so much suspicion and distrust is apparent in the history of the early allied air relationships. Another reason is that the Air Ministry had to make decisions quickly, and these decisions were often based on assumptions which in themselves were frequently rooted in naked prejudice. It is easy to condemn them from this distance, but it is no exaggeration to state that, at the time, the very existence of the British Empire was at stake. If the French said the Poles were not up to much, then such a view must have some substance, therefore it was better not to trust them. If the Foreign Office said that the Czechoslovaks were riddled with internecine political squabbling, then might that not affect the efficiency or the commitment of the air crews and pilots? Again, it was better to be safe than sorry.
That this ‘safety first’ principle was dominant in the RAF during the chaos of 1940 can be demonstrated by Hugh Dowding’s attitude when he was informed that Fighter Command had at its disposal a number of Polish and Czechoslovak pilots as well as a smaller number of men from the other allied powers. At the emergency meeting convened on 14 July to discuss the integration of the new personnel, Dowding expressed strong reservations about, as he termed it, ‘the infiltration of foreign pilots into British squadrons’. He claimed that pilot morale was the greatest asset he possessed, and unless he could be assured of the fighting spirit of the exiles, he would rather do without their services altogether. He made these statements in a week when he had an establishment deficit of 115 pilots and would lose a further seventy in action, but it soon became clear that he was using the term ‘foreign pilots’ diplomatically, for he had no qualms about was using the French and Belgian pilots immediately. As for the Slavs, however, he argued that he would ‘roll up’ British squadrons before taking any more of them into existing British units. It has been argued that this attitude demonstrated his commitment to the formation of integral Czechoslovak and Polish squadrons, but he insisted that such units be sent to ‘thicken the line in the west’ – that is, the southern Atlantic approaches, well away from the heart of the action in the south-east.3 In short, Dowding was one of the influential band of men who at first drew back from the prospect of East Europeans fighting in the front line, and it is highly likely that sheer desperation – not allied solidarity – drove him to employ the Czechs and Poles in the Battle of Britain.
Why Dowding and others chose to direct most of their criticisms towards the Slav pilots is still a difficult question to answer conclusively, especially since very few British officers had witnessed them in action and the only firm reports came from the French, heavily biased as these were. In all probability, the reasons lay in the pre-war attitudes towards Poland and Czechoslovakia explored in earlier chapters: that they above all others were most likely to be tainted with either fascism, communism or both. When the truncated state of Czechoslovakia was occupied by German forces in March 1939, the reaction of the Czechs appalled senior figures in the Foreign Office. There had been no real resistance from the armed forces, the national organisations, the communists or the general population to establishment of the Protectorate. By May 1939, the rightist National Assembly in Prague had more than two million members, or 98 per cent of all adults qualified to join.4 By the outbreak of war in September, there were 80,000 Czech contract workers in Germany – all volunteers – and in the Protectorate itself there was a manpower shortage as industrial production in service of the Germans got into full swing.
This was hardly the kind of vision to inspire the West into trusting a Czech or a Slovak as an automatic ally, and it goes a long way towards explaining the suspicious attitudes of 1940 in civilian and military circles. That the War Cabinet was aware of this is demonstrated by the memoranda supplied by Robert Bruce Lockhart, in which he drew the government’s attention to the possible collapse of pro-allied support without steps to improve morale. In the case of the Poles, they had sought accommodation with Hitler’s Germany almost from the start, and their bullish diplomatic attitude coupled with their extensive anti-Semitism did nothing to endear them to the liberal powers. However, whereas the Poles could shrug off suspicion relatively quickly once the German atrocities in Poland became commonly known, the attitude of the Czechoslovak population as a whole did not reflect the qualities expected of a committed ally, at least until the appointment of Heydrich as Reich Protector; hence the doubts, hence the ambivalence.
This is not to suggest that the Slavs were perceived as the only obstacles to a successful integration of the allied forces. The French were fighting a war among themselves as well as against the Germans, and it is possible to study the documents and come away against the conclusion that the British would have preferred it if no Frenchman had set foot on British soil for the remainder of the war. The Air Ministry in particular was delighted to receive instructions to post most of them out to North Africa; and although victory there meant that they would return in great numbers for reorganisation, that was at a much later stage when the earlier political bitterness had considerably subsided. We can see through the history of 340 Squadron exactly what some of those problems were, and even though the Air Ministry does not emerge from this study with a great deal of credit to its name, still we must feel some sympathy for the British officers on the ground as they found themselves waist-deep in a vicious struggle for power and influence inside the French forces.
As for the Belgians, the Dutch and the Norwegians, these contingents were either too small to present many problems to the RAF or accepted their lot with a good deal more grace than others. It is possible to make sweeping judgements on the essentially smooth nature of these three relationships simply by acknowledging how few documentary traces they left behind in the London archives. The British trusted the Norwegians to run their own affairs with scarcely any interference at all, and once the Dutch had recovered from the shock of defeat and occupation, they too kept themselves to themselves. Even so, it is important to recall that they also had relatively stable political administrations above them, and once the Belgians had reached an acceptable compromise, they too settled down into a fairly contented alliance. This can not be said of the Czechoslovaks. Their political milieu was volatile in the extreme, even after apparent stability had been reached with the full recognition of the Beneš government in 1941. Beneš himself persisted in seeking to restore his own career and prestige at the expense of his forces in exile, especially the air force, and if the Foreign Office men were troubled by these affairs, they inevitably corrupted, or at least distorted, the perceptions of the Air Ministry.
When all is said and done, the real alliance was with the Poles. They had huge reserves of manpower and an unquestionable commitment to the defeat of Germany, although it took the British a while to believe this. Once demonstrated, however, the relationship was a sound one. All the problems were at the start or at the end, and it could be argued with some justification that the British compensated for their earlier scepticism by supporting the Poles when the communist tragedy struck them in 1945. Much credit must go to the Air Ministry here. It rallied behind the Polish Air Force in its hour of need, and we need only compare its attitude to the Poles with the rather shabby treatment of the Czechoslovaks to see how British postwar policy was by no means uniform. What mattered in the Czechoslovak case, as far as the British were concerned, was securing a military foothold in Central Europe, and no document dealing with the Poles in 1945 contains the kind of language used by Portal when he spoke of being ‘rid of the commitment’ to the Czechoslovak Air Force. It was a brutal and unwarranted comment, but also indicative of the kind of grudging tolerance with which many senior British officers had regarded the Czechoslovak Air Force from the start. This was grossly unfair, and in all probability the irritation was not caused by the men in uniform, but by the constant interference from above.
So the history of each allied air force had a beginning, a middle and an end. This seems logical enough, but in most cases ‘the middle’ was simply the business of war. Only the Czechs ran into difficulties, when Beneš attempted to gain independence again through 1942 and 1943. However, for the others, the resistance encountered in 1940 soon dissipated once they had proved their worth. With each contingent there were political and military problems to be resolved at the beginning, but even the French had put aside most of their grumblings against the British to fully close ranks with them by 1944. At the beginning, every nation, including the British, felt aggrieved and discomfited by the sorry situation in which they found themselves, but to the credit of everyone these emotions were pushed aside in favour of the overwhelming desire to survive.
Yet the ends were not so similar. With the Poles, it ended in sadness and permanent exile. With the French, it ended in brief glory and then swiftly became an interminable struggle to ward off American meddling with their affairs, and to rebuild again the brittle alliance with Britain. With the Belgians, Dutch and Norwegians it ended relatively quietly, each of them prepared to re-evaluate their pre-war positions and seek security within a wider European alliance and model their reconstituted air forces on the experiences they had gained within the RAF. But with the Czechoslovaks, it ended in disgrace. The constant dithering over whether or not the Russians would approve of the squadrons’ return home merely left the Czechs dangerously exposed to further Russian influence. It seems likely that a similar debacle would have arisen over the Polish return had it not been for the faster establishment of a communist regime in Warsaw than in Prague. Beneš and his men managed to hang on to a form of independence until 1948, when they too succumbed to the will of Stalin, and then we find many of the old heroes from the war imprisoned or sent down the mines as ‘enemies of the people’. If anything, the Czechoslovaks came out worst of all, for although the Poles were condemned to life in a foreign land, at least they had a chance to rebuild their lives in a democracy. For the Czechs, they had three short years of hope before their freedom was smashed by Moscow.
In the final analysis, the Anglo-allied air relationships were powerful structures. To be sure, the British do not emerge from the difficulties of 1939 and 1940 looking too good, their reputation for even-handed tolerance having been scuffed and torn by the tussles with the Poles, the Czechs and the French. But it is hard to condemn them entirely. The Air Ministry was trying to do its best in most cases, and although it was certainly guilty of neglect when it came to language instruction and welfare, it was in the unique position of having to check with the Foreign Office before any new initiatives could be advanced. Quite often, the Foreign Office vetoed or amended strictly military proposals which might have had political implications either at the time or in the postwar environment, and perhaps we might feel some sympathy for the Air Ministry at having to work under such a system. Once Halifax had been replaced as foreign secretary by Anthony Eden, he to some extent filled the vacuum of interest at the top, and he played an active role in exile affairs, especially in the Polish and French cases, where he instinctively foresaw postwar difficulties.
But the real credit goes to the officers and men of the six nations. In the face of humiliating defeat, they had picked themselves up and fought on, often against fearful odds, and too often in the excruciating knowledge of what was happening at home. Such pressures never applied to British pilots, for they knew that apart from the bombing, home was safe. The Poles and the Czechs were regularly taunted by German radio when family names were read out followed by accusations of treason, sabotage, or notice of deportation. Such cruelty never dented their determination to fight on. Many drank to kill the pain, a few – very few – lost control altogether. They can be little doubt that they had it worse than the rest, for although the Germans at times ruled with a heavy hand in the other countries, the levels of oppression were nowhere near as constant or as severe as they were in Poland and Czechoslovakia, particularly the latter after the assassination of Heydrich in 1942.
However, one need only read the memoirs of those men who flew in the uniform of the RAF but fought for the freedom of their homeland to understand what the experience meant to them. To this author’s knowledge, there is no dedicated veterans’ organisation for all the air personnel who fought in exile during the Second World War, though the Royal Air Force Association acts as a clearing house for correspondence and locating old comrades, and of course national societies exist in each of the countries. But the collective experience was unique in the history of modern warfare, and perhaps it is time to encourage the exchange of those rich memories as the generation which defeated Hitler moves into old age. As Shakespeare had Henry V say on the field of Agincourt: ‘Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot, but he’ll remember with advantages what feats he did this day.’ Most certainly, every man was proud to wear RAF blue, win RAF medals, and play a small but none the less vital part in the banishment of Nazism from the Continent. But at the same time, he participated in the liberation of his homeland, even if indirectly – and that, to all of them, was where the real satisfaction lay.
1. See Christopher Bassford’s review of On War in Defense Analysis (Brassey’s, June 1996). At the time of writing, the entire English text of On War is available on the Internet at the following site: http://www.bibliomania.com/NonFiction/Clausewitz/War/index.html.
2. AIR/8/370: Prime Minister to Chiefs of Staff via General Ismay, 12.7.40.
3. See AIR/8/370: Conference Minutes 14.7.40; AIR/2/5196: Sholto Douglas to Peirse, 15.7.40; Wood, D. and H.D. Dempster, The Narrow Margin (Arrow Books 1969) Appendices 11 and 13, and Zamoyski, A., The Forgotten Few (John Murray 1985), pp. 75–6. Zamoyski adduces Dowding’s ‘infiltration’ remark as a reason for the rapid establishment of independent Polish squadrons, leading to the formal Agreement of 5 August establishing the Polish Air Force on British soil. Although Zamoyski includes Dowding’s succeeding remark that ‘apart from the language difficulty he [Dowding] is uncertain to the effect this will have on the morale of his squadrons’, he dovetails this with his own observation that ‘the creditable conduct and above-average results of these pilots [and] their growing popularity with their British colleagues and commanders’, leading to the inference that British morale would be sapped by having to fly with better men. In this, he somewhat misses the point that Dowding was pressing for national units for negative, not positive, reasons.
4. Mamatey, S. & Luža, R. (eds), A History of the Czechoslovak Republic, 1914–1948 (Princeton UP 1973), Rhode, Gotthold, ‘The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’, pp. 302–6. The National Assembly (Národní Souruenství) was a collective movement headed by a National Committee (Národní Výbor) consisting of fifty members appointed by Emil Hácha, and was composed of representatives of all the major parties, with the exception of the communists. Membership was restricted to adult males. Its first proclamation denounced Freemasons and Jews. Rhode quotes figures for unemployment as dropping from 93,000 in March 1939 to 57,000 in May and less than 17,000 in June.