The 1930s “was the Devil’s decade. It came in like a ravening wolf, and went out like a roaring lion. It began with a world in economic chaos, and ended with the world at war.” Like Churchill’s description of the German drive to rearm, it was “invested with a ruthless, lurid tinge. It glittered and it glared.”
Churchill was at one of the lowest points in his public career. He became entangled on the wrong side of the abdication question. He would be on the right side of “appeasement,” though here he went against the popular grain. He remained a member of Parliament but had not held cabinet office since 1929; the leaders of his party, including both prime ministers, Baldwin and Chamberlain, held him in contempt. His close supporters in the high reaches of his party, it was said, could fit into a small smoking room. The remainder of the Conservatives, by contrast, were, as the saying went, merely Tories who were ashamed of themselves. According to many of them, Churchill had been a brilliant comet whose trajectory had long since fallen below the horizon. He resumed painting and writing; he brooded; he simmered. But “like the chamomile, the more he is trodden on, the more he flourishes.” Only just not yet. For now the savior of British honor and strength was the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain.
During his years in the wilderness, Churchill wrote his four-volume biography of Marlborough and studied his ancestor’s military imagination. He must have thought many times what it would take to lead a similar Grand Alliance. He also worried about the need arising for it. Churchill was the only man, according to his doomed friend from the Foreign Office, Ralph Wigram, who “has always, always understood.” Wigram was the informant who “clung to [him] like a drowning man to a spar” and who provided the secret intelligence showing the extent of German rearmament and plans, right up to his premature and mysterious death—some said from illness, others suicide—in December 1936.
Churchill had been right about Germany. He was right about the weakness of his country’s armed forces, right about Hitler, right about Chamberlain and appeasement, and right about the stakes for Britain and her empire. No other major political figure detected the immediate future so clearly, or appeared to have so accurate a perception of the mood and capacities of his country, save Hitler himself, probably because the Führer spent so much time reading foreign newspapers and ignoring much of the expert advice that was offered to him. Churchill knew well, as the diplomatic diarist Harold Nicolson put it, that the “British people, in fact, have for years been the victims of too little information and too many phrases. . . . They crooned themselves to sleep with the lullaby of ‘collective security.’ . . . How sane; how sensible; how sinuous; how sound!” The challenge was to avoid being dubbed a Cassandra and to find some way to do something about it.
If the king were thrust into performing a role he said he had never wanted, Churchill thrust himself into the part he had always aimed to play. The king was bound by duty and the desperation of his family, the country, and the institution during a crisis that never should have happened but was predictable and predicted, most of all by Churchill. Although neither man would have been fully aware of it, both, again, found themselves in the right places at the right moment. Imagine if Edward had remained on the throne, even without a Queen Wallis, with appeasement in the air and his integrity thrown into question. The charge against him (and even more so, against her) of Nazi sympathy was exaggerated and probably unfounded, but it was there nonetheless. It did not apply to his younger brother, who, by contrast, had served under fire in the last war and was married to a woman who lost a brother in it. German heritage notwithstanding, there was no love lost for Nazis anywhere in George VI’s household. The public knew this as well as they knew Churchill’s own sympathies.
The story actually was not so simple. In the end, according to Nicolson, it had been Halifax more than anyone else who, as foreign secretary, swayed this king from his loyalty to Chamberlain, under whom Halifax served, and to the “dual policy of resistance and conciliation” that they had designed. It is not easy to disaggregate the prime minister’s character and intentions, and he was not the only guilty party. Chamberlain, in fact, was a more complicated figure whose reputed malevolence, weakness, or incompetence lies in the eye of the beholder. “Do not mind overmuch the attribution of false motive,” Baldwin liked to say. But Chamberlain has yet to overcome the verdict of posterity: that he really was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
—
In early 1939 in London, Halifax unveiled a large map of Europe and said, “What a bloody place it is.” The scars there had only just begun to heal—and to heal badly, in that the scar tissue was a thin one of idealism, escapism, even hedonism, followed by cynicism. Cynicism makes a poor alloy. It divides and it dilutes. An “avenging march of the mediocrities” was under way. How easy, then, is it to dismiss or otherwise to succumb to an ahistorical depiction of the policy of appeasement?
The term “appeasement” reveals its linguistic root: peace. Nearly everyone was desperate to preserve it. George V had forewarned, “I am an old man. I have been through one world war. How can I go through another?” He repeated: “I will not have another war. I will not.” Chamberlain had perhaps erred in his tactics, but his effort was not irrational and certainly not unpopular. Nicolson has reflected the mood upon Chamberlain’s return from Berchtesgaden in September 1938:
When he said these words, “as a last resort,” he whipped off his pince-nez and looked up at the skylight with an expression of grim hope. . . . “It was,” he said with a wry grin, “my first flight,” and then he described the whole visit as “this adventure.” He said that his conversation with Hitler had convinced him that the Führer was prepared, on behalf of the Sudeten Germans, “to risk world war.” As he said these words a shudder of horror passed through the House of Commons. . . . He raised his face so that the light from the ceiling fell full upon it. All the lines of anxiety and weariness seemed suddenly to have been smoothed out; he appeared ten years younger and triumphant. “Herr Hitler,” he said, “has just agreed to postpone his mobilisation for twenty-four hours and to meet me in conference with Signor Mussolini and Monsieur Daladier at Munich.”
First, complete silence. Then an eruption of joy. Nicolson remembered it as “one of the most dramatic moments” he had “ever witnessed.”
For most of his career in politics, Chamberlain did not conform to the umbrella-wielding caricature. He was rather a tough and sometimes principled politician who drove a hard bargain. People who met him noted his strong arms and gaze. The British Empire he led was still seen as powerful and permanent. When he touted the small piece of paper that brought “peace in our time,” he most probably meant it. Yet he had never experienced the kinds of adversity known to either Churchill or the king. Whether this made him more naïve is not possible to know, but it may have made him less courageous and thoughtful. He had high powers of concentration but also a myopic quality when exercising them. “Injudicious they may have been, ignorant never.” This was both an asset and a liability. “Indeed,” Donald Cameron Watt has diagnosed, “that was precisely the trouble. So much of Chamberlain’s thinking, so much of his analysis, was conditional, tentative, contingent. He doubted; but he was never certain. He distrusted; but he did not totally disbelieve.” He was—in other both positive and negative terms—a small-minded person who excelled in a place like Birmingham in peacetime but was ill suited to lead the world’s largest empire in war. The more out of depth he was, the more close-minded and stubborn he became.
For the moment, however, he inspired confidence. Channon, one of his biggest fans, was not alone: “Of course a way out will now be found. Neville by his imagination and practical good sense, has saved the world.” Another Tory later commented, with reference to the security guarantee given to Poland, “You know, I am a trifle uneasy about this Polish agreement. It seems to me to imply a definite commitment on our part.”
“I quite agree,” replied his friend, “and we must thank heaven that we have Neville at the helm.”
Others, not least the royal family, would agree. Chamberlain was in good standing with them. He slipped occasionally, as when the king was “royally displeased” by not having been warned of Anthony Eden’s decision to resign in 1938 as foreign secretary over a disagreement on the timing of negotiations with Italy, one result being that the king became sympathetic toward Eden. That much was implied at least by Eden’s memoirs. (This also was the only moment over which Churchill recalled losing sleep, including the entire period of the war.) Nevertheless, the king had cultivated so good a routine with his prime minister that the latter could regard himself as the royal couple’s “Godfather.” It is difficult to imagine a warm feeling between these two men and yet the king’s letters to Chamberlain following his resignation seem heartfelt. He was sad to see him go. But we get ahead of the story.
The king could talk freely to Chamberlain, but the same was not true in reverse. It is also difficult to know the king’s mind at this stage. Like many people, he probably did not know himself. “Everything is a maze,” he had written back in September. The country seemed desperate to believe that Hitler could have his pound of flesh in the Sudetenland and be done. Perhaps the main cynic was Hitler himself, who was said to believe that Britain was prepared to fight, just not anytime soon. Those who said otherwise, Churchill among them, were perceived to be a small, bellicose minority, also desperate to slay the guilty demons of the last war. Few wanted to hear what they had to say. This included both the king and the queen, and much of the royal family, who were about as pro-appeasement as one could be. Here, for example, is Queen Mary: “I am sure you feel as angry as I do at people croaking as they do at the P.M.’s action. . . . It is always so easy for people to criticise when they do not know the ins and outs of the question.” And the king to the queen: “I wish [Chamberlain] could have got more out of him. . . . I don’t much care for our new guarantees of the new Czechoslovakian frontier against unprovoked aggression. . . . What we want is a guarantee from Hitler that he won’t walk into it in 3 or 4 months’ time.” Even so, the queen had written, “for even if nothing comes of it, [Chamberlain] will have made, in England’s name, the beau geste for peace.” She sent Halifax a copy of Mein Kampf and urged him to educate himself about Hitler—by skimming it. Many decades later, when asked if her views on Chamberlain had changed, she replied that they had not: “[W]hatever people say, [Munich] gave us that year . . . to rearm, and build a few aeroplanes.”
Others no doubt saw matters differently. Churchill played the role of insurrectionist, warning “as familiar as the voice of a muezzin announcing the hour of prayer” about the peril his country faced from the Nazis. They posed much more than a political or military threat; the threat was a mortal one, to all civilization.
—
In the summer of 1938, Their Majesties traveled to France. They reviewed fifty thousand troops at Versailles and were impressed with the tanks, aircraft, and Moroccan cavalry they saw. As it happened, Churchill also spent a good part of the fateful year in France, including five weeks on the Riviera and again later in the year to coincide with the royal visit. For some time he had bemoaned the mood of his compatriots back home: “Chattering, busy, sporting, toiling, amused from day to day by headlines, and from night to night by cinemas, they can yet feel themselves slipping, sinking, rolling backward. . . . Stop it! Stop it!! Stop it now!! NOW is the appointed time.” They persisted in pacifist delusion, promoting the “cause of disarmament” by “Mush, Slush and Gush.” He called for more ships, more aircraft, more expenditure, more preparation.
His warnings were not well taken. He was accused of warmongering. Others greeted him with renewed taunts of “Mussolini!” recalling his earlier praise for Il Duce and his reluctance to condemn the attack on Abyssinia. Some may have wondered, in Channon’s words, if “Winston, that fat, brilliant, unbalanced, illogical orator,” was “more than just that. . . . Or is he perhaps right, banging his head against an uncomprehending country and unsympathetic government?”
On September 6, Chamberlain wrote to the king: “All the same I have a ‘hunch,’ as J. P. Morgan says, that we shall get through this time without the use of force.” Only a week later he warned the king to “be prepared for the possibility of a sudden change for the worse.”
The king in turn offered to send a peace feeler to Hitler, from “one ex-Serviceman to another.” That idea was received skeptically by Halifax. Again, he suggested sending a peace feeler and was rebuffed, this time by Chamberlain. He offered to do this repeatedly not only with Hitler but also with others, like the Japanese. Each time, Chamberlain resisted.
Then, on September 16, Chamberlain went to the palace to brief the king on his latest talks with Hitler, ominously. He assured him that Hitler “was not bluffing” and that “only the intervention of his visit had held up the invasion of Czechoslovakia. He had won a breathing-space.”
Finally, two weeks later—Munich. Chamberlain had received Hitler’s assurance that there would be no war. The king greeted the returning Chamberlain eagerly, even happily. Chamberlain joined him and the queen on the balcony of Buckingham Palace and waved to the cheering crowds. Chamberlain’s appearance on the balcony was a violation of protocol. But few people at the time seemed to care about that. Nor did they understand the consequences of what Chamberlain had done. “You might think that we had won a major victory instead of betraying a minor country,” said a diplomat. “But I can bear anything as long as [Chamberlain] doesn’t talk about peace with honour.” Alas, he did, just a few minutes later.
In his October 2 broadcast, the king thanked the British people “for their calm resolve during these critical days, and for the readiness with which they responded to the different calls made upon them.” Then he concluded, “After the magnificent efforts of the Prime Minister in the cause of peace, it is my fervent hope that a new era of friendship and prosperity may be dawning among the peoples of the world.” He also proposed that Chamberlain give another broadcast calling for national service, presumably in preparation for war should all else fail. Chamberlain rejected it then, but he did it the following January.
What Churchill would have done in Chamberlain’s stead is open to conjecture. The historian Gerhard Weinberg has claimed that back in June, Churchill “was privately telling the Prague government that if in office he would most likely follow the same policy.” This neither was nor is the consensus view. In public now he spoke of “sustain[ing] a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road . . . the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless, by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”
Later, in a confrontation with U.S. ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy and the journalist Walter Lippmann, “waving his whisky-and-soda to mark his periods, stubbing his cigar with the other hand,” Churchill underscored the point:
It may be true, it may well be true, that this country will at the outset of this coming and to my mind almost inevitable war be exposed to dire peril and fierce ordeals. It may be true that steel and fire will rain down upon us day and night scattering death and destruction far and wide. It may be true that our sea-communications will be imperilled and our food-supplies placed in jeopardy. Yet these trials and disasters, I ask you to believe me Mr. Lippmann, will but serve to steel the resolution of the British people and to enhance our will for victory. . . . I for one would willingly lay down my life in combat, rather than, in fear of defeat, surrender to the menaces of these most sinister men. It will then be for you, for the Americans, to preserve and to maintain the great heritage of the English-speaking peoples. It will be for you to think imperially, which means to think always of something higher and more vast than one’s national interests. Nor should I die happy in the great struggle which I see before me, were I not convinced that if we in this dear dear island succumb to the ferocity and might of our enemies, over there in your distant and immune continent the torch of freedom will burn untarnished and (I trust and hope) undismayed.
He proved correct. Little less than a year later, Hitler invaded Poland and another war began. On the first of September the king resumed keeping a daily diary. On September 3 at 6:00 p.m., he delivered his war message by radio:
In this grave hour, perhaps the most fateful in our history, I send to every household of my peoples, both at home and overseas, this message, spoken with the same depth of feeling for each one of you as if I were able to cross your threshold and speak to you myself.
For the second time in the lives of most of us we are at war. Over and over again we have tried to find a peaceful way out of the differences between ourselves and those who are now our enemies. But it has been in vain. We have been forced into a conflict. For we are called, with our allies, to meet the challenge of a principle which, if it were to prevail, would be fatal to any civilised order in the world.
It is the principle which permits a State, in the selfish pursuit of power, to disregard its treaties and its solemn pledges; which sanctions the use of force, or threat of force, against the Sovereignty and independence of other States. Such a principle, stripped of all disguise, is surely the mere primitive doctrine that Might is Right. And if this principle were established throughout the world, the freedom of our own country and of the whole British Commonwealth of Nations would be in danger. But far more than this—the peoples of the world would be kept in the bondage of fear, and all hopes of settled peace and of the security of justice and liberty among nations would be ended.
This is the ultimate issue which confronts us. For the sake of all that we ourselves hold dear, and of the world’s order and peace, it is unthinkable that we should refuse to meet the challenge.
It is to this high purpose that I now call my people at home and my peoples across the Seas, who will make our cause their own. I ask them to stand calm and firm and united in this time of trial. The task will be hard. There may be dark days ahead, and war can no longer be confined to the battlefield. But we can only do the right as we see the right, and reverently commit our cause to God. If one and all we keep resolutely faithful to it, ready for whatever service or sacrifice it may demand, then, with God’s help, we shall prevail.
May He bless and keep us all.
In his diary he added, “Today we are at War again, & I am no longer a midshipman in the Royal Navy.”
—
The calculated game of appeasement had ended. Now came the Phony War, the period of several months in which a state of war existed but without military engagement. It was not clear what the government’s strategy was. Chamberlain described it as a wait-and-see policy of deterrence. “My own belief is that we shall win,” he wrote to Franklin Roosevelt, “not by a complete and spectacular military victory, which is unlikely under modern conditions, but by convincing the Germans that they cannot win.” Did this make sense? Someone in the Foreign Office put it this way:
An elderly gentleman with gout,
When asked what the war was about,
In a Written Reply,
Said, “My colleagues and I
Are doing our best to find out.”
The government, meanwhile, made plans to distribute gas masks and began digging trenches in parks and gardens, including Buckingham Palace Gardens. “Keep calm and dig” was the slogan.
Churchill made his way back to the center of power. He reentered government in September, serving again as First Lord of the Admiralty, though now rather awkwardly under Chamberlain. “There are I believe a fair number of people who think and say that in these times Winston ought to be in the Government, but why?” asked the old diplomat Lord Hardinge. “Could anybody have a worse record? But we are a forgetful and forgiving people.” In August, Churchill had gone to France to visit friends and the ex-wife of his cousin, the Duke of Marlborough. Before his return he remarked to an artist friend, “This is the last picture we shall paint in peace for a very long time.”
Now a half-American buccaneer and a monarch with a list of German titles were again enlisted in saving the British Empire in a world war. The combination did not yet speak its name; neither man knew how much he would come to depend upon the other, if dependence is the right concept. This may be the biggest irony of all: in principle, neither a nation’s savior nor its monarch needs a special ally. Each is supreme in his own role. Yet, as the next chapter will reveal, each is compromised. On the one hand, by the traditional British preference for mediocrity in its political class. It is a mediocrity that infects even the most exceptional of individuals, who must find a way to translate great virtue and power into a cause that is plausible and acceptable to the voting majority. And, on the other hand, by the tremendous demands placed upon him by a conflict so vast and so severe that no individual, however brilliant, can withstand them without the assistance and confidence of others. So a “mediocre” monarch joined an “exceptional” commoner in leading the nation during its finest hour. Before continuing the tale, there is more to say about the hearts and minds of both men.