On 2 January 1937, while spending the New Year at Chartwell, Churchill learned that his Foreign Office friend and informant, Ralph Wigram, who had been ill for some time, had died at the age of forty. He wrote at once to Wigram’s widow, Ava: ‘I admired so much his courage, integrity of purpose, high comprehending vision. He was one of those—how few—who guard the life of Britain. Now he is gone—and on the eve of this fateful year. Indeed it is a blow to England and to all the best that England means. It is only a week or so that he rang me up to speak about the late King. I can hear his voice in my memory. And you? What must be your loss? But you still will have a right to dwell on all that you did for him. You shielded that bright steady flame that burned in the broken lamp. But for you it would long ago have been extinguished, and its light would not have guided us thus far upon our journey.’
‘He adored you so,’ Ava Wigram replied, ‘& always said you were the greatest Englishman alive.’ On January 4 Churchill drove from Chartwell to Uckfield for Wigram’s funeral. ‘The widow was ravaged with grief,’ he wrote to Clementine three days later, ‘& it was a harrowing experience. There appears to be no pension or anything for Foreign Office widows: but she says she can manage on her own resources. Her future seems blank & restricted. A sombre world!’
After the funeral Churchill gave a small luncheon at Chartwell for the mourners, including Sir Robert Vansittart. Clementine, who was on holiday in Switzerland, realised how much Wigram’s death had saddened her husband. ‘He was a true friend of yours,’ she wrote on January 5, ‘& in his eye you could see the spark which showed an inner light was burning.’ Four days later she wrote again: ‘I felt Mr Wigram’s death would make you unhappy. I’m afraid you will miss him very much.’
Throughout the early months of 1937 Churchill received yet more information of Government slackness in Defence preparations and planning. His new sources included both his former national insurance expert at the Board of Trade, Sir William Beveridge, and his former Director of Naval Construction at the Admiralty, and co-inventor of the tank, Sir Eustace Tennyson d’Eyncourt. But Churchill no longer saw any point in continual public speaking. ‘At the present time non-official personages count for very little,’ he wrote to a senior Liberal Peer, Lord Davies, on January 13. ‘One poor wretch may easily exhaust himself without his even making a ripple upon the current of opinion.’
Churchill did correspond with Ministers privately, seeking to encourage them to greater efforts and vigilance. On January 14 he wrote to Inskip about what he feared was the Government’s dilatory policy towards machine tool orders: ‘With a proper system of control the whole capacity of British industry could be brought in review, and the Government then, when placing the order abroad, would have warned the British firm producing one vital part, that their services would be required, and they would not then be bespoken by the German Government. You say that it is the Government policy not to interfere with normal trade. It may be Government policy and yet not be right. You are under a misapprehension when you suggest that I wish you to ask the machine tool industry “to abandon all their ordinary trade”. I should be quite content if instead of “all” were written “all the Government requires”.’
He had been assured that the British armament programme was falling ‘ever more into arrears’, Churchill told Inskip, and that Britain’s relative weakness in the air, compared to Germany, was ‘marked and deplorable’. His letter ended on a personal note: ‘I postponed writing this letter to you until I was delighted to hear you were rapidly recovering from your influenza. I am telling your secretary not to show it to you till you are quite restored. Grave as are the times, I hope you will make sure you have the necessary period of convalescence. All my household has been down with this minor scourge, and a certain number of days of complete relief from work of any kind is absolutely necessary for perfect recovery. So far I have survived and if I escape altogether I shall attribute it to a good conscience as well as a good constitution.’
Speaking in the Air debate on January 27, Inskip defended the current air programme. At least 120 of the promised 124 squadrons would be completed by July 1938, he said, ‘though not all brought up to their complement’. Speaking after Inskip, Churchill stressed the fact that of the 124 squadrons promised by March 31, only a hundred would actually be ready. But even of these hundred, twenty-two were ‘not in a condition to take part in fighting’. This left only seventy-eight squadrons instead of the promised 124, a shortage of forty-six. ‘Therefore’, Churchill told the House, ‘I say that we have not got the parity which we were promised. We have not nearly got it, we have not nearly approached it. Nor shall we get it during the whole of 1937, and I doubt whether we shall have it or anything approaching it during 1938.’
Two days after Churchill’s speech, he received through Anderson an eight-page memorandum written by Group Captain Lachlan MacLean, Senior Air Staff Officer at the headquarters of No. 3 Bomber Group. The memorandum was critical of many aspects of Air Force development, including long-distance navigation, maintenance work and pilot training. MacLean did not know that Anderson had sent his memorandum to Churchill; the first he heard of it was when Churchill asked to see him at Morpeth Mansions.
***
On February 2 Churchill sent Clementine, who was then on a holiday cruise in the West Indies, the news that Baldwin was likely to give up the Premiership in May, immediately after the Coronation of George VI, and that Neville Chamberlain, who was ‘already in fact doing the work, will without any doubt or question succeed him’. It would, Churchill wrote, ‘be a great relief and simplification of our affairs to have all uncertainty cleared up at that date one way or the other. I really do not care very much which’.
Churchill, still troubled by money worries following the collapse of his shares in the American stock market crash, now thought of selling Chartwell. ‘If we do not get a good price we can quite well carry on for a year or two more,’ he told Clementine. ‘But no good offer should be refused, having regard to the fact that our children are almost all flown, and my life is probably in its closing decade.’
During the Defence debate on March 4, Churchill welcomed the Government’s recently announced increases in defence spending over the coming five years, but went on to ask, ‘When a whole continent is feverishly arming, when mighty nations are laying aside every form of ease and comfort, when scores of millions of men and weapons are being prepared for war, when whole populations are being led forward or driven forward under conditions of exceptional overstrain, when the finances of the proudest dictators are in the most desperate condition, can you be sure that all your programmes so tardily adopted will, in fact, be executed in time?’
Churchill ended his speech by appealing for a genuine British commitment both to the military potential of the League of Nations, and to the moral forces which it embodied. Of those moral forces he declared: ‘Do not let us mock at them for they are surely on our side. Do not mock at them, for this may well be a time when the highest idealism is not divorced from strategic prudence. Do not mock at them, for these may be years, strange as it may seem, when Right may walk hand in hand with Might.’ On March 16 Austen Chamberlain died; his friendship with Churchill dated back to the turn of the century. In the four years since Hitler had come to power their views of the German danger had been closely linked. On March 18 Churchill wrote to Chamberlain’s widow of how ‘shocked and shaken to the depths’ he had been when he had gone to the Foreign Office and learned the news. His letter continued: ‘I pray indeed that you may find the resources in your spirit to enable you to bear this supreme stroke. Nothing can soften the loneliness or fill the void. Great happiness long enjoyed casts its own shadow. All his friends of whom I am proud to be one will miss him painfully. In this last year I have seen more of him & worked more closely with him than at any time in a political & personal association of very nearly forty years. I feel that almost the one remaining link with the old days indeed the great days has been snapped.’
‘I know that you loved Austen,’ Lady Chamberlain replied on March 20, ‘& will feel his loss greatly. He always had a great affection & admiration for you even when you did not agree!’
Towards the end of March, Churchill returned to France for a nine-day holiday at Cap Martin. ‘I paint all day,’ he wrote to the former King, now Duke of Windsor, ‘and as far as my means go, gamble after dark.’ He also wrote privately to Inskip about Britain’s first-line strength in the air. On March 22, a week before Churchill left for France, Inskip had told the Commons that as from April 1 there would be 103 squadrons based in the United Kingdom. But to Churchill he wrote privately to explain that ten of those squadrons would be under strength in aircraft ‘pending the delivery of further machines’ and that some of the recently formed Auxiliary Air Squadrons would likewise ‘not be up to establishment’. Inskip added, ‘I feel justified in giving you, as a Privy Councillor, this further confidential information, especially as you have already had so much secret information in this connection.’
In his reply to Inskip, Churchill accepted that there must be ‘a great deal of reorganisation and weakness during a period of rapid expansion’. He also sent him ‘in personal confidence’ a memorandum on air squadron deficiencies by someone whom he described as ‘a Staff Officer of the Air Force’, but did not name. The memorandum had been written by Group Captain Lachlan MacLean; returning it to Churchill on April 8, Inskip noted, ‘It is undesirable that it should be among my papers in view of your wish that I should treat it as very confidential.’
In sending Inskip this memorandum, Churchill set out his own views on how the deficiencies which MacLean had detailed should be tackled: ‘I wonder you do not get a list made out of everything that a regular Air Squadron should have—pilots, machines, spare engines, spare parts, machine guns, bombing sights etc together with the reserves of all kinds which should be kept at the station. And then, armed with this, go down accompanied by three or four competent persons to visit, quite by chance, some Air Squadron by surprise. If then during the course of a whole day your people went through the list while you cross-examined the officers, you should have some information on which you could rest with some security.’
‘The reason why I am not dwelling upon these matters in public,’ Churchill told Inskip, ‘is because of the fear I have of exposing our weakness even more than is already known abroad.’ After reading his letter to Inskip, Morton wrote to Churchill, ‘As often before, I am astonished at your knowledge of detail on Defence matters.’
***
The Labour Party now brought a motion condemning the Royal Navy’s refusal to support British ships trying to take food to the Republicans in Spain, pointing out that while Britain and France adhered to the non-intervention agreement, Germany and Italy ignored it. To cries of dissent from the Labour benches, Churchill spoke in support of the Government’s contention that non-intervention must continue. ‘Is it not an encouraging fact,’ he asked, ‘that German, French, Russian, Italian and British naval officers are officially acting together, however crankily, in something which represents, albeit feebly, the Concert of Europe, and affords, if it is only a pale, misshapen shadow, some idea of those conceptions of the reign of law and of collective authority which many of us regard as of vital importance?’
Churchill urged Britain’s continued neutrality towards Spain. ‘I refuse to become the partisan of either side,’ he declared. ‘I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Nazism, I would choose Communism. I hope not to be called upon to survive in the world under a Government of either of these dispensations. I cannot feel any enthusiasm for these rival creeds. I feel unbounded sorrow and sympathy for the victims.’
Appealing for one final effort by all the outside powers to abandon conflict and seek reconciliation, Churchill told the House: ‘We seem to be moving, drifting, steadily, against our will, against the will of every race and every people and every class, towards some hideous catastrophe. Everybody wishes to stop it, but they do not know how. We have talks of Eastern and Western Pacts, but they make no greater security. Armaments and counter-armaments proceed apace, and we must find something new.’
Even Churchill’s critics recognised the quality of his mind; one Conservative MP, Henry Channon, though against Churchill’s being brought into the Government, wrote in his diary; ‘Winston Churchill made a terrific speech, brilliant, convincing, unanswerable and his “stock” has soared, and today people are buying “Churchills”, and saying once more that he ought to be in the government, and that it is too bad to keep so brilliant a man out of office; but were he to be given office, what would it mean? An explosion of foolishness after a short time? War with Germany? A seat for Randolph?’
Writing from the Foreign Office on April 16, Eden thanked Churchill for his words of support during the debate: ‘I can assure you they were appreciated by the occupant of this anxious office. May I also say how very good I thought your speech as a whole; indeed I heard many opinions that the speech must be ranked among your very best. It was difficult to make with the House in that tempestuous and unreasoning mood, and you contrived to sober them and cause them to reflect.’
***
That April, Baldwin announced that he would retire from the Premiership by the end of May. In declining an invitation from the Duke of Windsor to visit him in France during May, Churchill explained that he did not think it ‘wise’ to leave England then. ‘The Government will all be in the process of reconstruction, and although I am not very keen upon office, I should like to help in Defence.’ As he once more waited for the call, Churchill found a way of making his views more widely known in Europe. A thirty-three-year-old Hungarian Jew, Emery Reves, had set up a press service in Paris, dedicated to international understanding and democratic values. Reves placed Churchill’s fortnightly Evening Standard articles in newspapers throughout Europe, including those in Warsaw, Prague, Belgrade, Bucharest and Helsinki; twenty-six cities in all.
In these articles Churchill urged all threatened states to band together to prevent German incursions. But while Churchill continued to advocate collective security, Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of The Times, had other views, writing to a friend on May 23: ‘I should like to get going with the Germans. I simply cannot understand why they should apparently be so much annoyed with The Times at this moment. I spend my nights in taking out anything which I think will hurt their susceptibilities and in dropping in little things which are intended to soothe them.’
Three days after this clear characterisation of appeasement by Dawson, Neville Chamberlain succeeded Baldwin as Prime Minister. Like Dawson, he was determined to find some basis for conciliation with Germany, hoping to draw Europe away from the brink of war, not by collective security and rearmament, but by a negotiated settlement of German grievances. There was to be no place for Churchill in Chamberlain’s scheme of things. For ten years they had disagreed on almost every issue of substance with which they had been confronted, from derating in 1927 to the Abdication, and above all about the priority of armaments, and the need to be able to confront Germany; deep differences on policy were exacerbated by a clash of personalities.
On the day Chamberlain became Prime Minister, Lord Derby asked Churchill if he would second a motion, at a Conservative Party meeting in Caxton Hall, nominating Chamberlain as Leader. As the senior Conservative Privy Councillor in the Commons, the task would naturally fall to Churchill. While preparing his speech, he read the new Cabinet appointments. ‘Heartiest congratulations on your great promotion,’ he telegraphed to Duff Cooper, who had been made First Lord of the Admiralty. Inskip remained Minister for the Coordination of Defence. Hoare went to the Home Office. Leslie Hore-Belisha became Secretary of State for War.
One young back-bencher who joined the new Government was Robert Bernays; since the 1935 election he had sat near Churchill below the gangway. ‘Many congratulations’, Churchill telegraphed on learning of his appointment as Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Health. ‘I have only one regret,’ Bernays replied, ‘and that is that I am now removed too far to hear your whispered and pungent comments on the passing Parliamentary scene—which were always so exhilarating. I shall always be grateful—as must be every young man in the house to-day—for the way in which you continually demonstrate to what heights the art of Parliamentary debate can be made to attain.’
No post was offered to Churchill, who on May 31 spoke, as he had offered to do, at the Caxton Hall meeting. After recalling Chamberlain’s ‘memorable achievement’ as Chancellor of the Exchequer in restoring Britain’s financial credit and stimulating foreign trade, he reminded the meeting that the leadership of the Party had never been interpreted ‘in a dictatorial or despotic sense’, and he appealed for the continued recognition of the rights of those who disagreed with Party policy: ‘The House of Commons,’ he said, ‘still survives as the arena of free debate. We feel sure that the leader we are about to choose will, as a distinguished Parliamentarian and a House of Commons man, not resent honest differences of opinion arising between those who mean the same thing, and that party opinion will not be denied its subordinate but still rightful place in his mind.’
In his diary Channon described Churchill’s speech as ‘an able, fiery speech not untouched by bitterness’. Chamberlain would not need to call a General Election until 1940.
Speaking during the Budget debate on June 1, Churchill began with a good-humoured welcome to Chamberlain that set the House laughing. ‘I take a friendly interest in this new Government,’ he said. ‘I do not quite know why I do. I cannot go so far as to call it a paternal interest, because, speaking candidly, it is not quite the sort of Government I should have bred myself. If it is not paternal, at any rate I think I may call it an avuncular interest.’
Churchill then set out his objections to the method Chamberlain had proposed for raising a new tax, the National Defence Contribution, by a special levy on industry. This levy, he believed, would be ‘a check to enterprise’ and not help the revenue. Instead, ‘it would be opening up a whole vista of doubtful, superfluous and troublesome new matter’. He knew from his experience as Minister of Munitions ‘that if the Government cannot maintain a mental and moral relationship with those who are producing arms they may be confronted with the gravest difficulties’. After a detailed presentation of the obstacles, Churchill urged Chamberlain to show ‘the flexibility and resilience of mind, and the necessary detachment from personal and departmental aspects’, to drop the scheme. His speech was successful. ‘One of your best ever,’ a former Liberal MP, Lord Melchett, wrote on June 2, ‘and I believe it was due to the facts you presented, to the tactful manner in which you handled the Prime Minister—grave and gay—that you gave him the courage to abandon NDC.’
Melchett added, ‘You are a very great man, and God knows why you are not in the Cabinet to guide this old country in the difficult times we are going through.’ Churchill knew how deep was the gulf between him and Chamberlain. ‘I am not anxious to join the Government unless there is some real task they want me to do,’ he replied. ‘They are very pleased with themselves at present.’
That summer, Churchill’s sources of information widened, giving him even greater knowledge of the gap between the war supplies being manufactured and the needs of the three services. In June he was sent information by Colonel Henry Hill, the former Commander of the London Air Defence Brigade, and by Admiral Bertram Ramsay, the former Chief of Staff, Home Fleet, both of whom went to see him at Morpeth Mansions. On June 14 he gave another luncheon to the Anti-Nazi Council. A Jewish refugee from Germany, Eugen Spier, who was present, later recalled Churchill’s warning that Britain’s safety was being ‘fatally imperilled’ both by its lack of arms, and by the Government fostering in the Germans ‘the dangerous belief that they need not fear interference by us whatever they do’.
Two weeks after Churchill spoke these words, the Supply Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence discussed Britain’s defence preparedness. Unknown to Churchill, its conclusions completely bore out his fears. During the discussion, the Committee’s Chairman, Sir Arthur Robinson, pointed out that the absence of firm War Office orders meant that ‘the supply work as a whole could not proceed effectively towards a conclusion’. The Air Ministry, Robinson added, had also disclosed ‘a huge gap’ between the supplies being manufactured ‘and the needed war potential’. On present lines, his Committee concluded, ‘it will not be possible for supply preparations to be completed by November 1939’.
Amid his preoccupations about defence, Churchill continued work on his final Marlborough volume. Deakin was frequently at Chartwell to help him. Violet Pearman and Grace Hamblin took turns in working the late-night shifts. ‘My Senior and myself worked alternately with him long into the night,’ Miss Hamblin later recalled. ‘He would come from the dining room at about 10 o’clock—refreshed and often jovial. It was very obvious that this was his best time for working and that he enjoyed these hours. He would become entirely immersed, and would dictate until 2 or 3 in the morning: sometimes very slowly, and always weighing every word, and murmuring sentences to himself until he was satisfied with them—then bringing them forth, often with tremendous force, and glaring at the poor secretary when driving home a point. Often one of his “young men”—a literary assistant—or sometimes a friend—Professor Lindemann or Mr Bracken—would be present during these sessions, and I am sure he liked to have human company at these times—if there were two of us so much the better.’
Grace Hamblin added: ‘There is no doubt he was a very hard taskmaster. He drove us. And he rarely gave praise. But he had subtle ways of showing his approval, and we would not have had it otherwise. He worked so hard himself and was so absolutely dedicated to the task in hand that he expected the same from others. He accepted it as his right. And in time we who worked for him realised that in full return for the stress and strain, we had the rare privilege of getting to know the beauty of his dynamic, but gentle character.’
On July 6, as pressure of correspondence and literary work grew, Churchill appointed a residential secretary, Kathleen Hill, to join Violet Pearman and Grace Hamblin. When her boss was away from Chartwell, Mrs Hill later recalled, ‘it was as still as a mouse. When he was there it was vibrating,’ and she added, ‘He was a disappointed man, waiting for the call to serve his country.’
With Swinton’s approval, on July 9 Churchill visited the Royal Air Force station at Biggin Hill to watch an interception exercise. Shortly after his visit, Anderson sent him a letter from MacLean: it told of a high casualty rate among pilots. Anderson took MacLean to Chartwell, writing to Churchill after their visit: ‘In all sincerity I was very impressed by that incident in the life of the Duke of Marlborough which you read, and by your conclusion as to the power of personal example and inspiration. It is just that influence which is so disastrously absent from the Air Force at this moment. We are, as a Service, peculiarly dependent on, and susceptible to, the genuine inspiration of leadership, far more so than either the Navy or the Army, since in war, work is mainly done as individuals and not in groups or companies.’
***
On September 17 Churchill appealed to Hitler, in an article in the Evening Standard, to abandon the persecution of Jews, Protestants and Catholics. Given Nazi persecution, he wrote, there could be no return of Germany’s pre-war colonies and no British financial help. But he ended on a note of conciliation. ‘One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement,’ he wrote. ‘If our country were defeated I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.’ He had appealed before ‘that the Führer of Germany should now become the Hitler of peace’, and he went on to explain: ‘When a man is fighting in a desperate conflict he may have to grind his teeth and flash his eyes. Anger and hatred nerve the arm of strife. But success should bring a mellow, genial air and, by altering the mood to suit the new circumstances, preserve and consolidate in tolerance and goodwill what has been gained by conflict.’
Churchill’s private correspondence revealed how unlikely he thought it that Hitler would mellow, and how serious he believed the situation to be. Writing from Chartwell on September 23, he told Lord Linlithgow that the year 1938 ‘will see Germany relatively stronger to the British Air Force and the French Army than now.’ Churchill ended his letter with a forecast: ‘I do not believe in a major war this year, because the French Army at present is as large as that of Germany and far more mature. But next year and the year after may carry these Dictator-ridden countries to the climax of their armament and of their domestic embarrassments. We shall certainly need to be ready by then’. As for himself, ‘I have been living a perfectly placid life here painting and working at Marlborough, in fact I have hardly moved outside the garden since Parliament rose.’
On October 3 Churchill invited Eden to lunch at the Savoy with his Freedom and Peace group. Many of the group’s supporters were influential in Labour and Liberal circles, ‘but of course,’ Churchill wrote teasingly, ‘we always have a proportion of live Conservatives as well’. Without the support of the Trade Unions, Churchill wrote, ‘our munition programme cannot be properly executed. This aspect is of real public importance. It may well be in the future that the Trade Unionists will detach themselves from particular political parties.’ This, Churchill believed, ‘would be an enormous gain to our political life’.
***
On October 4 a collection of Churchill’s magazine articles was published as a book, entitled Great Contemporaries. It spanned his whole life, and contained penetrating and amusing essays, including those on Rosebery, Balfour, Asquith and the ex-Kaiser. At the request of the Foreign Office the essay on Hitler, originally printed in the Strand Magazine, had been made less sharp. But neither the toned-down essay nor the conciliatory article in the Evening Standard marked any change in Churchill’s attitude; on October 23 he wrote to Londonderry, who insisted that friendship with Germany was still possible: ‘You cannot expect English people to be attracted by the brutal intolerances of Nazidom, though these may fade with time. On the other hand, we all wish to live on friendly terms with Germany. We know that the best Germans are ashamed of the Nazi excesses, and recoil from the paganism on which they are based.’
‘We certainly do not wish to pursue a policy inimical to the legitimate interests of Germany,’ Churchill told his friend of forty years, ‘but you must surely be aware that when the German Government speaks of friendship with England, what they mean is that we shall give them back their former Colonies, and also agree to their having a free hand so far as we are concerned in Central and Southern Europe. This means that they would devour Austria and Czechoslovakia as a preliminary to making a gigantic middle-Europe bloc. It would certainly not be in our interest to connive at such policies of aggression. It would be wrong and cynical in the last degree to buy immunity for ourselves at the expense of the smaller countries of Central Europe. It would be contrary to the whole tide of British and United States opinion for us to facilitate the spread of Nazi tyranny over countries which now have a considerable measure of democratic freedom’.
At present, Churchill told Londonderry, Germany seemed intent upon a policy which would lead her ‘to invade her smaller neighbours, slay them and take their farms and houses for themselves’. This was not an idea he had been ‘brought up to admire’. All that Germany had to do in order to win British goodwill was ‘not to commit crimes’. Churchill added, ‘One must hope that in the passage of years these Dictators will disappear like other ugly creatures of the aftermath.’
***
On October 12, at a dinner in London, Churchill privately expressed his unease at the general lack of air preparedness. Hankey, who was at the dinner, wrote to Inskip, ‘From some views which I heard Mr Winston Churchill declaiming to a group at the Trinity House Dinner, I should judge that he has a pretty shrewd knowledge of the situation, though he told me afterwards that he could not use his information in Parliament in the present dangerous world situation’.
That very day, Churchill had received a letter from Group Captain MacLean about the forthcoming visit to Britain of a German Air Mission, to be led by the German Air Minister, General Milch. MacLean sent Churchill the official notes of what Milch was to be shown, together with the comment by Air Chief Marshal Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt ‘that we should have to comb the country in order to produce sufficient aircraft to get up any sort of show’. The Air Ministry had decided to allow the German mission to ground inspect an example of each modern aeroplane; as none were yet completely equipped either with blind-flying panels or gun turrets, arrangements were being made by the Air Ministry, first to provide one fully equipped example of each type, and then to train special pilots to carry out a simple formation fly-past. MacLean noted, ‘This is a fair commentary on the state of equipment and the state of training!!!’ Encouraged by Hankey’s apparent interest at the dinner, Churchill sent him a copy of MacLean’s letter, describing MacLean as ‘a high Staff Officer of the RAF’, but not naming him. Marking his letter to Hankey ‘Secret and Personal’, Churchill wrote: ‘As one small instalment of the alarming accounts I have received of the state of the RAF, I send you the enclosed. It is for your own personal information, and I trust to our friendship and your honour that its origin is not probed. But look at the facts! We have invited the German Mission over—why I cannot tell. Highly competent men are coming. A desperate effort is now being made to present a sham-show. A power driven turret is to be shown, as if it was the kind of thing we are doing in the regular way. Ought it to be shown at all?’
Churchill’s letter continued: ‘You will see that a special telegram has to be sent to fetch one of the only men acquainted with this turret to give a demonstration. You will also see the feelings of some of the high officers concerned. You will also see from the statement, made by the Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief Bomber Command (paper C marked in red), Ludlow-Hewitt, how he is forced to address himself to the task of making a show; and what exertions are necessary to put little more than a hundred bombers in the air—the great majority of which (as the Germans will readily see) can barely reach the coast of Germany with a bomb load.’
In appealing to Hankey to take action, Churchill wrote: ‘I remember how you played an essential part in saving the country over the convoy system, and how when young officers came to you and told you the truth, against Service rules, you saw that the seed did not fall on stony ground. If I had opportunity I could unfold a most shocking state of affairs in the Air Force, and no one would be more pleased than I if I could be refuted categorically. But you have a great responsibility—perhaps on the whole second to none—and therefore I leave the matter for the moment in your hands.’
Churchill ended his letter: ‘Please send me the stuff back when you have done with it, for I am much inclined to make a Memorial to the Prime Minister upon the whole position. Obviously it cannot be dealt with in public.’
Hankey had been concerned for some time about deficiencies in the rearmament programme. But he was angered that secret information had been given to Churchill. His reply was an eight-page rebuke; he would not ‘on the present occasion’ probe the origin of Churchill’s information, he wrote, but he could not conceal ‘that I am a good deal troubled by the fact of your receiving so many confidences of this kind’. Hankey added: ‘You and I are very old friends who have hunted together in circumstances of supreme danger and difficulty. I have always valued your friendship. The frequent commendation of one for whom I have an immense admiration has been, and remains, a tremendous encouragement, especially in the parlous times through which we are passing. I feel, therefore, that I can open my mind quite frankly to you on the subject. It shocks me not a little that high Officers in disciplined Forces should be in direct communication with a leading Statesman who, though notoriously patriotic beyond criticism, is nevertheless in popular estimation regarded as a critic of the Departments under whom these Officers serve.’
‘Backstairs’ information, Hankey added, could only breed distrust and have ‘a disintegrating effect on the discipline of the Services’. He advised Churchill to give his informants ‘friendly counsel’, in the interest first of the Service and second of their own ‘careers and reputations’, that they should speak, not to him but to ‘their Commanding Officers’ or to a ‘friend’ in the Air Department. Stung by Hankey’s rebuke, Churchill’s reply was curt: ‘My dear Maurice, I certainly did not expect to receive from you a lengthy lecture when I went out of my way to give you, in strict confidence, information in the public interest. I thank you for sending me the papers back, and you may be sure I shall not trouble you again in such matters. Yours very sincerely, Winston S. Churchill’.
***
Churchill sent his reply to Hankey on October 21. Nine days earlier a secret document, of which he knew nothing, showed panic and conflict within Government circles about Britain’s air preparedness. The document, an Air Staff memorandum circulated to the Cabinet by Swinton, stated that by December 1939 Germany would have a total first-line strength of 3,240 as against Britain’s total of only 1,736. Swinton also pointed out that Britain’s anti-aircraft artillery and searchlight defences ‘will admittedly not even be within sight of completion to the approved scale until 1941’. Yet according to the Cabinet’s Home Defence Subcommittee, even the approved scale did not provide ‘sufficient security’. Swinton’s covering memorandum concluded, ‘It is clear, therefore, that while we are to-day in a position of grave inferiority to Germany in effective air strength, the completion of our present programme will not provide an adequate remedy, and that by 1939 we shall still have failed to achieve that equality in air striking power with Germany which represents the policy of His Majesty’s Government and the subject of Mr Baldwin’s pledge to the country.’
Aware that Britain could not catch up with Germany in the air race, Churchill now focused his energy on the need to form a united front against Nazism. By means of the Freedom and Peace luncheons he extended the range of his contacts both inside the Labour movement and among his fellow-Conservatives. On November 2 he brought together as his guests at the Savoy Hotel, the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, and the Socialist Mayor of Manchester, Joseph Toole. ‘We have a small “focus”,’ Churchill explained to Lord Derby, ‘which aims at gathering support from all Parties, especially those of the “left”, for British rearmament, for the association of the two Western democracies (France and Britain), and for the maintenance of peace through British strength.’ Derby too, an old adversary, agreed to attend.
In a letter to Lord Linlithgow on November 3, Churchill wrote bitterly, ‘The deadly years of our policy were 1934 and 1935, “The year that the locusts have eaten”. I expect we shall experience the consequences of these years in the near future.’ But he did not intend to give way to despair, telling Linlithgow: ‘Our people are united and healthy. The spirit of Britain is reviving. The working people are ready to defend the cause of Liberty with their lives. The United States signals encouragement to us, for what that is worth. We must all fight our corners as well as we can, each in his station great or small.’
‘Of course’, Churchill told Linlithgow, ‘my ideal is narrow and limited. I want to see the British Empire preserved for a few more generations in its strength and splendour,’ and he added, ‘Only the most prodigious exertions of British genius will achieve this result.’
***
At the end of November, Lord Halifax visited Hitler; his visit marked a turning point in the Government’s policy of active appeasement. Reporting to the Cabinet on November 24, Halifax said ‘he had encountered friendliness and a desire for good relations’, although he admitted that his judgment might be wrong. The Germans, he added, ‘had no policy of immediate adventure’, and all would be well with Czechoslovakia if she treated ‘the Germans living within her borders well’. In conclusion, Halifax told his colleagues that he would expect ‘a beaver-like persistence’ on the part of Germany ‘in pressing their aims in Central Europe, but not in a form to give others cause—or probably occasion—to interfere’. Halifax also pointed out that Hitler ‘had suggested an advance towards disarmament’ and that he had also ‘strongly criticised widespread talk of an imminent catastrophe and did not consider that the world was in a dangerous state’.
Chamberlain supported Halifax, telling the Cabinet that, with regard to the League of Nations, he ‘took the same view as Herr Hitler. At present it was largely a sham, owing more particularly to the idea that it could impose its view by force’.
Preoccupied by the worsening balance of power, Churchill pointed out to General Ironside, who drove down to Chartwell to see him on December 5, that whereas the French Army was ‘an incomparable machine at the moment’, and would remain so in 1938 and 1939, by 1940 ‘the annual contingent in Germany would be double that of France’. Churchill and Ironside agreed that 1940 would be ‘a very bad time for us’.
Ironside was impressed by Churchill. ‘He ought to be the Minister of Supply if we are in for a crisis’, he wrote in his diary. ‘His energy and fiery brain seem unimpaired with age. He is certainly not dismayed by our difficulties. He says that our rulers are now beginning to get frightened. He said that sometimes he couldn’t sleep at night thinking of our dangers, how all this wonderful Empire which had been built up so slowly and so steadily might all be dissipated in a minute.’
Halifax’s visit to Hitler was discussed in the Commons on December 21, when Chamberlain expressed his regret that the debate was taking place at all. ‘It is so difficult to say anything that can do good and so easy to say much that might do harm,’ he said. During the debate, Churchill spoke of the persecution of the Jews in Germany. ‘It is a horrible thing,’ he said, ‘that a race of people should be attempted to be blotted out of the society in which they have been born,’ and he went on to express his unease about Halifax’s visit to Berlin: ‘We must remember how very sharp the European situation is at the present time. If it were thought that we were making terms for ourselves at the expense either of small nations or of large conceptions which are dear, not only to many nations, but to millions of people in every nation, a knell of despair would resound through many parts of Europe. It is for this reason that Lord Halifax’s journey caused widespread commotion, as everyone saw, in all sorts of countries to whom we have no commitments other than the commitments involved in the Covenant of the League.’
It would be wrong, Churchill told the House, for any nation to give up ‘a scrap of territory to keep the Nazi kettle boiling’, and he went on to reiterate his theme of close relations with France as the keystone to British security. ‘The relations,’ he said, ‘are founded upon the power of the French Army and the power of the British fleet.’ Britain and France together, he believed ‘with all their world-wide connections, in spite of their tardiness in making air preparations, constitute so vast and formidable a body that they will very likely be left alone undisturbed, at any rate for some time to come’. Towards the end of his speech Churchill argued that it would be wrong to ignore ‘the moral forces involved’ in public opinion: ‘For five years I have been asking the House and the Government to make armaments—guns, aeroplanes, munitions—but I am quite sure that British armaments alone will never protect us in the times through which we may have to pass.’
Chamberlain’s Government was now pursuing a policy diametrically opposed to that which Churchill advocated. On December 22 Inskip explained to the Cabinet the dangers inherent in increased defence expenditure, insisting that it was of vital importance to maintain Britain’s credit facilities and ‘general balance of trade’. Seen ‘in its true perspective’, the maintenance of British economic stability ‘could properly be regarded as a fourth arm in defence, alongside the three Defence Services without which purely military effort would be of no avail’. Another reason for not increasing defence expenditure, Inskip explained, was that Britain’s ‘long term’ foreign policy aimed at ‘changing the present assumption as to our potential enemies’. Far from working with France, as Churchill wished, this would involve planning and expenditure on the basis of ‘no continental role’ for the Army, whose main task would be home and imperial defence. In addition, Inskip wrote, ‘Germany has guaranteed the inviolability and integrity of Belgian territory, and there seems no good reason for thinking it would be in Germany’s interest not to honour this agreement.’
Chamberlain supported Inskip, stating that he did not accept that air parity with Germany was still essential, and explaining to his Cabinet that ‘no pledge can last for ever’. Baldwin’s pledge, after having been long neglected, was thus officially, but secretly, abandoned. After Sir John Simon had spoken against putting any money into an ‘exaggerated production of reserves’, Halifax drew the logical conclusion, telling his colleagues that as a result of their discussion ‘it was of great importance to make further progress in improving relations with Germany’.
***
Churchill was now sixty-three. On 2 January 1938 he left England for another holiday at Maxine Elliott’s Château de l’Horizon. There he dictated the last chapters of the fourth and final volumes of his biography of Marlborough, working so hard, Violet Pearman wrote to a friend, that he did not even have time to paint. He had been very tired when he set off on his journey, but seemed to regain strength through working. ‘Mr Churchill looks better even for this short change,’ Mrs Pearman wrote to Lindemann. ‘He has not lost a single thing on his journeyings alone, and is very pleased.’
On his return to Chartwell at the beginning of February, Churchill found information awaiting him about training problems in Bomber Command; the information came from MacLean, whom he invited back to Chartwell to discuss the matter in detail. Wigram’s friend Michael Creswell, who had just spent two and a half years at the Berlin Embassy as Third Secretary, also asked to see him to discuss the most recent information on the strength of the German Army.
At the end of January, Group Captain Frank Don, who had just spent three and a half years in Berlin as Air Attaché, arranged, without informing the Air Ministry, to give Churchill the latest details of German air preparations. The Cabinet also had these details, but rejected a new Air Staff scheme put forward by Swinton, designed to go as far towards meeting them as peace-time financing would allow. Swinton warned his colleagues that the scheme that was agreed, ‘to speak quite frankly, was inadequate vis-à-vis Germany’.
On January 27, as the first phase of a ‘general appeasement’ of European tensions, Chamberlain proposed, at the Cabinet Foreign Policy Committee, ‘an entirely new chapter’ in the history of African colonial development’, whereby Germany ‘would be brought into the arrangement by becoming one of the African Colonial Powers’. Under Chamberlain’s plan, Hitler’s Germany would be given ‘certain territories to administer’ in Africa.
Chamberlain also hoped to win Mussolini’s friendship. At a Cabinet meeting on February 16 it became clear that Eden, in his insistence on a firmer attitude towards Italy, did not have Chamberlain’s support. The disagreement, which was known to many MPs, came to a climax on February 17 at the meeting of the back-bench Foreign Affairs Committee, at which Churchill was present, and spoke in support of Eden. Eden later wrote that Churchill had urged the Committee ‘to rally behind me at a difficult time’ and had told his fellow MPs, ‘if we were weak now, the risk of war would inevitably be greater in the future’.
Not to be deflected in his search for Italian friendship, Chamberlain decided to open negotiations with Mussolini. Isolated in Cabinet, Eden resigned. Churchill was at Chartwell talking to Group Captain Don when the news of Eden’s resignation was brought in. ‘I must confess,’ he later wrote, ‘that my heart sank, and for a while the dark waters of despair overwhelmed me.’ Eden, whom he had earlier feared was a lightweight, had now become the ‘one strong young figure standing up against long, dismal, drawling tides of drift and surrender, of wrong measurements and feeble impulses.’ That night Churchill was unable to sleep: ‘From midnight till dawn I lay in my bed consumed by emotions of sorrow and fear. I watched the daylight slowly creep in through the windows, and saw before me in mental gaze the vision of Death.’
Hankey felt otherwise, telling a friend that he had woken up that morning ‘with a strange feeling of relief’, and he went on to explain that Chamberlain was ‘determined to improve relations with Italy and if possible with Germany’. During the Eden resignation debate on February 21, Churchill spoke both of the appeasement of Italy, and of Hitler’s action on February 16 in forcing the Austrian Government to give the Ministry of the Interior to an Austrian Nazi. ‘This has been a good week for Dictators,’ he said. ‘It is one of the best they have ever had. The German Dictator has laid his heavy hand upon a small but historic country, and the Italian Dictator has carried his vendetta to a victorious conclusion against my right Hon friend the late Foreign Secretary. The conflict between the Italian Dictator and my right Hon friend has been a long one. There can be no doubt, however, who has won. Signor Mussolini has won. All the might, majesty, dominion and power of the British Empire was no protection to my right Hon friend. Signor Mussolini has got his scalp.’
Churchill warned the House that Chamberlain had acted ‘in the hope that by great and far-reaching acts of submission, not merely in sentiment and pride, but in material matters, peace may be preserved,’ and he went on to ask: ‘What price shall we all have to pay for this? No one can compute it. Small countries in Europe will take their cue to move to the side of power and resolution.’ His concluding words sent a chill down the spine of many of those who heard him: ‘I predict that the day will come when, at some point or other, you will have to make a stand, and I pray to God, when that day comes, that we may not find, through an unwise policy, that we have to make that stand alone.’
The Yorkshire Post described Churchill as having voiced ‘as on many other occasions, the widespread sentiments of anxiety and perplexity in the country’. The Evening Standard, however, not only opposed Churchill’s call for collective action to deter Germany from aggression, but cancelled his contract for fortnightly articles. The Daily Telegraph, a paper opposed to the Government’s appeasement policy, and owned by Churchill’s friend Lord Camrose, agreed to serve as his fortnightly journalistic outlet.
***
On February 26 Chamberlain appointed Halifax to succeed Eden as Foreign Secretary. Hitler was even then putting renewed pressure on Austria to become part of the German Reich. In response to this pressure, the Austrian Prime Minister, Kurt von Schuschnigg, called a plebiscite; Austrians would be asked to vote for or against preserving their independence. On the afternoon of March 11 Halifax telegraphed to Schuschnigg that Britain could not ‘take the responsibility’ of advising him to take any action ‘which might expose his country to dangers against which His Majesty’s Government are unable to guarantee protection’. That same afternoon, after Italy announced it would do nothing to help preserve Austrian independence, Schuschnigg resigned. At ten o’clock in the evening German troops crossed into Austria. Within twenty-four hours thousands of those hostile to the new Nazi regime were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Hundreds were shot. Tens of thousands of liberals, democrats, socialists and Jews sought to flee.
During the Austria debate in the Commons on March 14, Chamberlain promised a ‘fresh review’ of Britain’s Defence programmes. Churchill welcomed this promise, but warned that if action were delayed too long a point might well be reached ‘where continued resistance and true collective security would become impossible’. He continued, ‘The gravity of the events of the 11th of March cannot be exaggerated. Europe is confronted with a programme of aggression, nicely calculated and timed, unfolding stage by stage, and there is only one choice open, not only to us, but to other countries who are unfortunately concerned—either to submit, like Austria, or else to take effective measures while time remains to ward off the danger and, if it cannot be warded off, to cope with it.’
Churchill then spoke of Czechoslovakia, the country which was likely to be threatened next and which, he pointed out, manufactured the munitions on which both Roumania and Yugoslavia depended for their defence. She had been isolated politically and economically as a result of Hitler’s annexation of Austria. Surrounded now on three sides by Germany, her communications and her trade were both now in jeopardy. ‘To English ears,’ he said, ‘the name of Czechoslovakia sounds outlandish. No doubt they are only a small democratic State, no doubt they have an army only two or three times as large as ours, no doubt they have a munitions supply only three times as great as that of Italy, but still they are a virile people; they have their treaty rights, they have a line of fortresses, and they have a strongly manifested will to live freely.’
Churchill feared that Chamberlain’s promise to accelerate rearmament would not, in itself, be enough to preserve peace. The small States of Europe had to be brought into a system of collective defence; had to feel that they could rely upon Britain’s word, and he continued, addressing the Conservative benches: ‘I know that some of my hon Friends on this side of the House will laugh when I offer them this advice. I say, “Laugh, but listen”. I affirm that the Government should express in the strongest terms our adherence to the Covenant of the League of Nations and our resolve to procure by international action the reign of law in Europe.’
Churchill advocated ‘a solemn treaty for mutual defence against aggression’, organised by Britain and France ‘in what you may call a Grand Alliance’, and explained, ‘If they had their Staff arrangements concerted; if all this rested, as it can honourably rest, upon the Covenant of the League of Nations, in pursuance of all the purposes and ideals of the League of Nations; if that were sustained, as it would be, by the moral sense of the world; and if it were done in the year 1938—and believe me, it may be the last chance there will be for doing it—then I say that you might even now arrest this approaching war.’ He then told the House, ‘Before we cast away this hope, this cause and this plan, which I do not at all disguise has an element of risk, let those who wish to reject it ponder well and earnestly upon what will happen to us if, when all else has been thrown to the wolves, we are left to face our fate alone.’
‘Winston makes the speech of his life in favour of the League,’ Harold Nicolson noted in his diary that night. On March 15 the Star declared, in its leading article, ‘We are grateful that one man spoke out in Parliament last night, and made a speech which fitted the hour.’ But at the very moment of Germany’s annexation of Austria, the Government publicly abandoned Baldwin’s air parity pledge of 1934. Of the promise to have 1,500 first-line machines by March 1937 Inskip told the Commons: ‘That promise was not accompanied by another promise that they would be modern machines. It was well known to everybody that they would be to a large extent of obsolescent types.’
Inskip also revealed the Cabinet’s decision not to define air parity as equal first-line strength, telling the House, ‘I think the Prime Minister is only doing what most men of common sense would do in saying that if you attempt to take first-line strength as the one yard stick in determining parity, you are proceeding on a wholly deceitful basis’. Staggered by this new definition, Churchill recalled that three and a half years earlier the Government had based its parity promise on a calculation of British first-line strength, and he added: ‘I think it is very unsatisfactory that now, this having been deliberately adopted as the standard by the Government, we should be invited to adopt an entirely new and vague standard. I am quite certain that we should not have been invited to adopt that standard unless it was impossible for the Government to show that they had maintained their pledge upon the standard which they formerly prescribed to the House.’
***
On March 18, in his final Evening Standard article, Churchill pressed the Government to join the recent French declaration to aid Czechoslovakia if she were the victim of unprovoked aggression. But the British Government had quite different plans; at the Cabinet’s Foreign Policy Committee that day, Inskip described Czechoslovakia as ‘an unstable unit in Central Europe’ and told his colleagues he saw no reason why Britain ‘should take any steps to maintain such a unit in being’. Commenting on the French declaration upholding the integrity of Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain ‘wondered’, the minutes recorded, ‘whether it would not be possible to make some arrangement which would prove more acceptable to Germany’.
Czechoslovakia would be asked to make some territorial concession to Germany with regard to its German-speaking border areas, the Sudetenland mountains. Yet these mountains constituted Czechoslovakia’s natural defence line and contained much of its raw material and industrial wealth.
Despite the deep divisions over policy between Churchill and Chamberlain, there were those in Whitehall who felt that Churchill ought now to be given a Ministerial task. There was talk of making him Air Minister. Among those who were attracted to this was Thomas Jones, the former Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet, who wrote to a friend on March 20 that ‘his driving power would soon be felt throughout the Department down to the typists and messengers’. But on ‘policy’, Jones added, ‘he would have to be kept in chains’.
Chamberlain had no intention of bringing Churchill in. He and Halifax both rejected Churchill’s call for a Grand Alliance. On March 21 Halifax told the Cabinet Committee on Foreign Policy ‘that the great majority of responsible people in the country would be opposed to any new commitments’. This was also Chamberlain’s conclusion. But with Hitler now master of Austria, and beginning a barrage of propaganda against the Czechs, Churchill was convinced that peace in Europe would only be preserved, he told the Commons on March 24, by means of an ‘accumulation of deterrents against the aggressor’. Commenting on a statement by Chamberlain earlier in the debate, that France and Britain would work together for their mutual defence, he asked whether it was an actual alliance. If so, ‘Why not say so? Why not make it effective by a military convention of the most detailed character? Are we, once again, to have all the disadvantages of an alliance without its advantages, and to have commitments without full security?’
Churchill believed that an Anglo-French arrangement for mutual defence constituted ‘the great security’ for both Britain and France, and he exhorted the Government: ‘Treat the defensive problems of the two countries as if they were one. Then you will have a real deterrent against unprovoked aggression, and if the deterrent fails to deter, you will have a highly organised method of coping with the aggressor. The present rulers of Germany will hesitate long before they attack the British Empire and the French Republic if those are woven together for defence purposes into one very powerful unit’. Churchill then spoke of Czechoslovakia. Unless German pressure were countered, he declared, ‘Czechoslovakia will be forced to make continuous surrenders, far beyond the bounds of what any impartial tribunal would consider just or right, until finally her sovereignty, her independence, her integrity, have been destroyed’.
Churchill told the Commons, ‘Now the victors are the vanquished, and those who threw down their arms in the field and sued for an armistice are striding on to world mastery.’ Halifax disagreed; a week earlier he had told his Cabinet colleagues that he ‘distinguished in his own mind between Germany’s racial efforts, which no one could question, and a lust for conquest on a Napoleonic scale which he himself did not credit’.
On the day after his speech of March 24 Churchill flew to Paris, where to Halifax’s annoyance he stressed, with all the leading French politicians whom he met, the need for a binding Alliance between their two countries, to serve as a rallying point for the States of Central Europe and the Balkans. ‘If France broke,’ he wrote on April 14 in the first of his Daily Telegraph articles, ‘everything would break, and the Nazi domination of Europe, and potentially of a large part of the world, would seem to be inevitable.’ A month later, at Morpeth Mansions, Churchill met Konrad Henlein, the leader of the Sudeten Germans. Henlein told Churchill that he was prepared to accept autonomy for the Sudeten Germans within Czechoslovakia’s existing borders. By this means the territorial integrity of Czechoslovakia would be preserved. Speaking at Bristol three days later, Churchill said that he saw no reason why the Sudeten Germans should not become ‘trusted and honoured partners in what was after all the most progressive and democratic of the new States of Europe’.
That May, despite continual pressure from Swinton and support from Duff Cooper, the Cabinet turned down an accelerated Air Ministry expansion scheme; a scheme, Swinton warned, that was itself ‘below what the Air Staff regard as the minimum insurance’. On May 16, having failed to persuade Chamberlain to adopt the minimum air scheme, and beset by criticisms of Air Ministry incompetence, Swinton resigned. Two weeks later Churchill told an audience at Sheffield: ‘It is now admitted that there has been a lamentable breakdown and inadequacy in the most vital sphere of all, namely our Air Force and our Air Defences. The Air Minister, Lord Swinton, has been forced to resign, but I will tell you that in my opinion he is one of the least blameworthy among those responsible. He worked night and day. He accomplished a great deal, and his contribution to rearmament was far greater than that of some others who now hold high office of State.’
***
On August 19, at Chartwell, Churchill received a German Army officer, Major Ewald von Kleist, who belonged to an anti-Nazi group of officers opposed to a German attack on Czechoslovakia. Von Kleist asked Churchill for a letter that he could show his fellow-officers. ‘I am sure that the crossing of the frontier of Czechoslovakia by German armies or aviation in force will bring about a renewal of the world war,’ Churchill wrote. ‘I am as certain as I was at the end of July 1914 that Britain will march with France, and certainly the United States is now strongly anti-Nazi. Such a war, once started, would be fought out like the last to the bitter end, and one must consider not what might happen in the first few months, but where we should all be at the end of the third or fourth year.’
As to the spectre of air bombardment, which four years earlier had influenced Baldwin against British rearmament, Churchill told Kleist: ‘It would be a great mistake to imagine that the slaughter of the civil population following upon air-raids would prevent the British Empire from developing its full war power. Though, of course, we should suffer more at the beginning than we did last time. But the submarine is practically mastered by scientific methods, and we shall have the freedom of the seas and the support of the greater part of the world. The worse the air-slaughter at the beginning, the more inexpiable would be the war. Evidently all the great Nations engaged in the struggle, once started would fight on for victory or death’.
***
Throughout the summer of 1938 Churchill worked at Chartwell to finish his fourth and final Marlborough volume. He also completed the first chapter of his history of the English-Speaking Peoples, writing to Lord Halifax on August 20 that he was ‘horribly entangled with the Ancient Britons, the Romans, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes all of whom I thought I had escaped for ever when I left school!’
A week later, as negotiations between the Czechs and the Sudeten Germans continued, Chamberlain wrote to Churchill, ‘Our latest information from Prague is rather more encouraging.’ Churchill did not share Chamberlain’s optimism. ‘The fabricated stories of a Marxist plot in Czechoslovakia,’ he told his constituents on August 27, ‘and the orders to the Sudeten Deutsch to arm and defend themselves, were disquieting signs, similar to those which preceded the seizure of Austria.’ If left to their own devices, Churchill believed, Henlein and the Czech President, Edouard Beneš, could settle their differences without any transfer of territory to Germany. A British negotiator, Churchill’s former Liberal colleague Lord Runciman, was even then in Prague, seeking to bring the two sides together. It was possible, however, Churchill warned, that ‘outside forces, larger and fiercer ambitions, might prevent that settlement’. Were that to happen, and the Germans then invaded Czechoslovakia, it would be ‘an outrage against civilisation and freedom of the whole world’. Every country would ask itself, ‘Whose turn will it be next?’
On August 30 Halifax told the Cabinet that he had discussed the Czech situation with Churchill, who had referred ‘to the possibility of a joint note to Berlin from a number of Powers’. Halifax deprecated any such joint policy, warning his colleagues that ‘if we were to invite countries to sign a joint note, they would probably ask embarrassing questions as to our attitude in the event of Germany invading Czechoslovakia’. Chamberlain supported Halifax, telling the Cabinet that the policy ‘of an immediate declaration or threat might well result in disunity, in this country, and in the Empire’. He did not think that war was a prospect ‘which the Defence Ministers would view with great confidence’.
Inskip then told the Cabinet, ‘On the question whether we were ready to go to war, in a sense this country would never be ready owing to its vulnerable position.’ Britain had not yet reached ‘our maximum preparedness and should not do so for another year or more.’ Nor could she put an army into the field ‘for many months after the outbreak of war’.
***
The fourth volume of Churchill’s book Marlborough, His Life and Times was published on September 2. That same day Germany mobilised, and Hitler declared that the Sudeten Germans needed to be protected against their Czech rulers. Churchill wrote to the journalist Richard Freund, ‘I have very strongly the feeling that the veto of France, Britain and Russia would certainly prevent the disaster of war.’ That afternoon the Soviet Ambassador, Ivan Maisky, drove down to Chartwell, where he told Churchill that the Soviet Government wished to invoke Article II of the League of Nations Covenant, under which the League Powers were obliged to consult together if war was imminent.
According to Maisky, the Soviet Union was anxious to examine with Britain and France various means of defending Czechoslovakia against a German attack. On September 3 Churchill sent Halifax an account of this conversation, but in his reply two days later, Halifax doubted whether action under Article II ‘would be helpful’. Despite encouragement from Churchill, the Government did not wish to become involved with Russia.
On September 7, to Churchill’s amazement and anger, The Times expressed its support for the separation of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. Two days later, as German troops massed on the Czech frontier, Chamberlain decided to seek negotiations with Hitler, and to exclude the Czechs from those negotiations. Unaware of this decision, Churchill went that day to Downing Street. ‘He had come,’ Hoare later recalled, ‘to demand an immediate ultimatum to Hitler. He was convinced it was our last chance of stopping a landslide, and according to his information, which was directly contrary to our own, both the French and the Russians were ready for an offensive against Germany.’
That night Churchill telephoned Halifax, to reiterate his call for an ultimatum. He could not know that Halifax, that very evening, had warned the French Government that Britain would not be willing ‘automatically to find ourselves at war with Germany because France might be involved in discharge of obligations which Great Britain did not share and which a large section of opinion in this country had always disliked’. Churchill wanted the Franco-Russian Pact to serve as a cornerstone of tripartite action. Halifax was determined to separate Britain from it.
On September 11 Churchill went back to Downing Street, where he told Chamberlain and Halifax that Britain should inform Germany ‘that if she set foot in Czechoslovakia we should at once be at war with her’. He was convinced that such a declaration would deter Hitler from action. Halifax and Chamberlain disagreed. In line with the leader in The Times four days earlier, they were prepared to accept a plebiscite in the Sudetenland, on the understanding that if a majority voted to separate from Czechoslovakia they should be allowed to do so. Returning to Morpeth Mansions, Churchill wrote to Lord Moyne: ‘Owing to the neglect of our defences and the mishandling of the German problem in the last five years, we seem to be very near the bleak choice between War and Shame. My feeling is that we shall choose Shame, and then have War thrown in a little later, on even more adverse terms than at present.’
Chamberlain believed that war could be averted if the Czechoslovak Government would accept the loss of the Sudetenland. On September 15 he flew to Hitler’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps, where he told Hitler that in principle he had nothing against the separation of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, and would support a plebiscite to determine the views of the inhabitants. ‘If as I fear the Government is going to let Czechoslovakia be cut to pieces,’ Churchill wrote to A.H. Richards, on September 17, after Chamberlain’s return from Berchtesgaden, ‘it seems to me that a period of very hard work lies before us all.’
Unknown to Churchill, Chamberlain told the Cabinet that very morning that he wanted neither publicity nor debate about the fact that for the past five days the Sudeten leaders, who had earlier wanted to accept autonomy, were receiving ‘their orders’ from Berlin. ‘As regards Parliament,’ Chamberlain told the Cabinet, his own view was ‘that a discussion would result in wrecking very delicate negotiations.’ Those negotiations were not about the principle of transfer, which Chamberlain had conceded at Berchtesgaden, but about the details of a plebiscite and the timetable of the transfer of territory. On September 21, in strictest secrecy, the British and French Governments urged Beneš to agree to the transfer of the Sudetenland to Germany. If he refused, they told him, it would create a situation ‘for which France and Britain could take no responsibility’.
Unaware of this message, Churchill was certain that if Beneš resisted a German invasion, Britain and France would support him. That same day he contemplated sending him a telegram, ‘Fire your cannon, and all will be well.’ In the end he did not send it, feeling, he later wrote, ‘that I should be grasping responsibilities which I had no right to seek, and no power to bear’.
That night Churchill issued a statement to the Press. The collapse of Czechoslovakia, he warned, would place Britain and France in an ever weaker and more dangerous situation. ‘The mere neutralisation of Czechoslovakia means the liberation of twenty-five German divisions, which will threaten the Western front; in addition to which it will open up for the triumphant Nazis the road to the Black Sea. It is not Czechoslovakia alone which is menaced, but also the freedom and the democracy of all nations. The belief that security can be obtained by throwing a small State to the wolves is a fatal delusion. The war potential of Germany will increase in a short time more rapidly than it will be possible for France and Great Britain to complete the measures necessary for their defence.’
Chamberlain flew back to Germany on September 22, to Bad Godesberg on the Rhine, where he told Hitler of an Anglo-French plan, worked out in London, for a plebiscite, to be followed, if the plebiscite favoured it, by the transfer of the Sudetenland to Germany. Churchill was given details of the plan when he went to Downing Street that afternoon. He then called a meeting at Morpeth Mansions of several friends, all of them Peers or MPs, among them Lord Lloyd, Archibald Sinclair, Brendan Bracken and Harold Nicolson, who feared that Czechoslovakia was going to be abandoned. ‘While I wait for the lift to ascend,’ Nicolson noted in his diary, ‘Winston appears from a taxi. We go up together. “This”, I say, “is hell”. To which Winston remarked, “It is the end of the British Empire.”’
During the meeting of Churchill’s friends at Morpeth Mansions, Clement Attlee telephoned to say that the Opposition were prepared, Nicolson noted, ‘to come in with us if we like’. Nicolson added: ‘We continue the conversation. It boils down to this. Either Chamberlain comes back with peace with honour or he breaks it off. In either case we shall support him. But if he comes back with peace with dishonour, we shall go out against him. “Let us form the focus”, says Winston.’
At Godesberg, Hitler demanded the immediate cession of the Sudetenland. Chamberlain tried to argue in favour of a plebiscite first. On the second day of the meeting he acceded to Hitler’s demand that there should be no plebiscite at all in areas with more than 50 per cent German-speaking inhabitants. He also agreed that all Czech fortifications and war materials in the area should be transferred to Germany.
Assuring Hitler that he would urge the Czech Government to accept these terms, Chamberlain returned to England, where he told senior members of his Cabinet that he ‘thought he had established some degree of personal influence over Herr Hitler’ and that he was ‘satisfied that Herr Hitler would not go back on his word once he had given it to him’. Hitler had assured Chamberlain that he wanted ‘no Czechs’ inside Germany.
On September 26 Churchill went again to see Chamberlain and Halifax at Downing Street, to ask for a declaration by Britain, France and Russia, that Hitler would not be allowed to invade Czechoslovakia. But Chamberlain was even then pressing the Czechs to agree to Hitler’s demands; on the morning of September 28, when the Czechs refused them, Chamberlain telegraphed to Hitler, asking for a further conference.
That afternoon Chamberlain gave the Commons an account of the crisis so far; as he was speaking he was handed a message. He interrupted his speech to say that the message was from Hitler, inviting him to a Four-Power Conference of Germany, Italy, France and Britain, to take place in Munich. Amid much excitement and applause he declared that he would accept the invitation and fly to Munich. Most MPs rose in their seats and waved their order papers with enthusiasm. Churchill, Eden, Amery and Nicolson remained seated. Those MPs near Churchill called out, ‘Get up! Get up!’ Then, as Chamberlain rose to leave the Chamber, Churchill rose to shake his hand and wished him ‘God Speed’.
Chamberlain flew back to Germany on September 29, reaching Munich at noon. He at once asked Hitler if a Czech delegation which had also arrived in Munich could be a party to the discussions. Hitler refused; instead, the Czechs were kept waiting in a separate room while their fate was decided. For twelve hours Hitler, Chamberlain, Daladier and Mussolini discussed the details and timetable of the transfer of the Sudetenland to Germany. Shortly after midnight their agreement was presented to the Czechs, who were given the choice of accepting or rejecting them. There could be no further negotiations on the terms themselves.
The German occupation of the predominantly German-speaking areas was to begin on the following day; without a plebiscite and without delay. Where the linguistic majority was uncertain, there would be a plebiscite. In the transferred areas Germany would acquire all fortifications, arms and industrial installations.
That night, before the details of the Munich Agreement reached London, Churchill was at the Savoy Hotel dining at the Other Club. Among those dining there was the First Lord of the Admiralty, Duff Cooper. The first details of the Munich terms reached the Savoy in the early hours of the morning. As soon as he heard them, Duff Cooper left the room, determined to resign from the Government. When Churchill left the hotel he paused in the doorway of one of the restaurants, from which emerged the sounds of laughter and enjoyment. Then, as he turned away, he muttered to a friend, ‘Those poor people! They little know what they will have to face.’
Three days later the House of Commons debated the Munich Agreement. Having resigned from the Cabinet, Duff Cooper spoke first, telling the House in his resignation speech: ‘The Prime Minister has believed in addressing Herr Hitler through the language of sweet reasonableness. I have believed that he was more given to the language of the mailed fist.’ Chamberlain replied: ‘Ever since I assumed my present office my main purpose has been to work for the pacification of Europe, for the removal of those suspicions and those animosities which have so long poisoned the air. The path which leads to appeasement is long and bristles with obstacles. The question of Czechoslovakia is the latest and perhaps the most dangerous. Now that we have got past it, I feel that it may be possible to make further progress along the road to sanity.’
Not all MPs saw ‘Munich’ as a triumph; the Labour Party leader, Clement Attlee, described it as both a ‘humiliation’ and a ‘victory for brute force’. The Liberal Leader, Archibald Sinclair, said that a policy ‘which imposes injustice on a small and weak nation, and tyranny on free men and women, can never be the foundation for lasting peace’. More than thirty Conservatives also spoke against the agreement, including Eden, Amery, and Bonar Law’s son Richard.
When Churchill rose to speak on October 5 he knew that he was expressing the unease of many ordinary men and women. ‘All is over,’ he began. ‘Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness. She has suffered in every respect by her association with the Western democracies and with the League of Nations, of which she has always been an obedient servant.’ The Munich Agreement was ‘a total and unmitigated defeat’. In a period of time ‘which may be measured by years, but which may be measured only by months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed in the Nazi regime’. When Hitler chose ‘to look westward’, Britain and France would bitterly regret the loss of the Czech fortress line. Many people, ‘no doubt honestly’, believed that they were ‘only giving away the interests of Czechoslovakia, whereas I fear we shall find that we have deeply compromised, and perhaps fatally endangered, the safety and even the independence of Great Britain and France’.
Churchill refused to accept the view that the Munich Agreement was a triumph for British diplomacy, or that it would open the way, as Chamberlain believed, to a reduction of European tension, and to even closer relations between Britain and Germany. Starkly, he declared: ‘We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude which has befallen Great Britain and France. Do not let us blind ourselves to that. It must now be accepted that all the countries of Central and Eastern Europe will make the best terms they can with the triumphant Nazi Power. The system of alliances in Central Europe upon which France has relied for her safety has been swept away, and I can see no means by which it can be reconstituted. The road down the Danube to the Black Sea, the resources of corn and oil, the road which leads as far as Turkey, has been opened.’
Hitler need not fire ‘a single shot’, Churchill said, to extend his power into the Danube basin. ‘You will see, day after day, week after week, the entire alienation of those regions. Many of those countries, in fear of the rise of the Nazi Power, have already got politicians, Ministers, Governments, who were pro-German, but there was always an enormous popular movement in Poland, Roumania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia which looked to the Western democracies and loathed the idea of having this arbitrary rule of the totalitarian system thrust upon them, and hoped that a stand would be made. All that has gone by the board.’
Turning to what he was convinced was the fatal flaw in the policy of appeasement, Churchill told the House: ‘The Prime Minister desires to see cordial relations between this country and Germany. There is no difficulty at all in having cordial relations with the German people. Our hearts go out to them. But they have no power. You must have diplomatic and correct relations, but there can never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi Power, that Power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force. That Power cannot ever be the trusted friend of the British democracy. What I find unendurable is the sense of our country falling into the power, into the orbit and influence of Nazi Germany and of our existence becoming dependent upon their good will or pleasure.’
It was to prevent that, Churchill continued, that ‘I have tried my best to urge the maintenance of every bulwark of defence—first the timely creation of an Air Force superior to anything within striking distance of our shores; secondly the gathering together of the collective strength of many nations; and thirdly, the making of alliances and military conventions, all within the Covenant, in order to gather together forces at any rate to restrain the onward movement of this Power. It has all been in vain. Every position has been successively undermined and abandoned on specious and plausible excuses.’
In the five days since Chamberlain’s return from Munich there had been great public rejoicing, most visible in the enthusiasm of the crowds which welcomed Chamberlain back from Munich. Churchill ended his speech by referring to this jubilation:
I do not grudge our loyal, brave people, who were ready to do their duty no matter what the cost, who never flinched under the strain of last week—I do not grudge them the natural, spontaneous outburst of joy and relief when they learned that the hard ordeal would no longer be required of them at the moment; but they should know the truth.
They should know that there has been gross neglect and deficiency in our defences; they should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road; they should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies:
‘Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.’
And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only 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.
One of Chamberlain’s Ministers, Malcolm MacDonald, later recalled how his own palms were sweating as Churchill spoke these words. When the vote was taken at the end of the debate, thirty Conservative MPs abstained. Thirteen of them, including Churchill, remained defiantly in their seats.
Triumphant at the annexation of the Sudetenland, Hitler now attacked Churchill publicly, telling an audience at Munich on the fifteenth anniversary of his first attempt to seize power: ‘Mr Churchill may have an electorate of 15,000 or 20,000. I have one of 40,000,000. Once and for all we request to be spared from being spanked like a pupil by a governess’.
Returning to Chartwell, Churchill was momentarily defeated. To Paul Reynaud, who had resigned as Minister of Justice from the French Cabinet, in protest at Munich, he wrote: ‘You have been infected by our weakness without being fortified by our strength. The politicians have broken the spirit of both countries successively,’ and he went on to ask: ‘Can we make head against the Nazi domination, or ought we severally to make the best terms possible with it—while trying to rearm? Or is a common effort still possible?’
Churchill did not have the answer. ‘I do not know on what to rest today,’ he admitted to Reynaud, and on October 11 he wrote to a Canadian acquaintance: ‘I am now greatly distressed and for the time being staggered by the situation. Hitherto the peace-loving powers have been definitely stronger than the Dictators, but next year we must expect a different balance.’