‘It is come to this, that the words of the Prime Minister of England, uttered in the Parliament of England, are to be regarded as mere idle menaces to be laughed at and despised by foreign powers?’
(General Jonathan Peel MP, on Palmerston’s refusal to fulfil his promise of aid to Denmark against Bismarck, 27 June 1864)
‘I am satisfied that those who reflect on the season of the year when that war broke out, on the means which this country could have applied for deciding in one sense that issue, I am satisfied that those who make these reflections will think that we acted wisely in not embarking in that dispute.’
(Lord Palmerston, speaking at Tiverton after escaping censure for his betrayal of Denmark, 23 August 1864)
For this chapter I am indebted more than I can say to an undeservedly obscure work by Simon Newman, March 1939: The British Guarantee to Poland.1 The huge controversy and puzzle about this strange, dishonest and inexplicable guarantee hide in plain sight. It is amazing that so little is said about an action so evidently dangerous and misguided. Even Winston Churchill (who continued to believe that a war for Czechoslovakia in 1938 would have been wise) jeered at the guarantee even as he welcomed it. He wrote, in chapter 19 of The Gathering Storm,
And now, when every one of these aids and advantages has been squandered and thrown away, Great Britain advances, leading France by the hand, to guarantee the integrity of Poland – of that very Poland which with hyena appetite had only six months before joined in the pillage and destruction of the Czechoslovak State. There was sense in fighting for Czechoslovakia in 1938 when the German Army could scarcely put half a dozen trained divisions on the Western Front, when the French with nearly sixty or seventy divisions could most certainly have rolled forward across the Rhine or into the Ruhr. But this had been judged unreasonable, rash, below the level of modern intellectual thought and morality. Yet now at last the two Western democracies declared themselves ready to stake their lives upon the territorial integrity of Poland. History, which, we are told, is mainly the record of the crimes, follies, and miseries of mankind, may be scoured and ransacked to find a parallel to this sudden and complete reversal of five or six years’ policy of easy-going placatory appeasement, and its transformation almost overnight into a readiness to accept an obviously imminent war on far worse conditions and on the greatest scale.2
He added: ‘Moreover, how could we protect Poland and make good our guarantee? Only by declaring war upon Germany and attacking a stronger Western Wall and a more powerful German Army than those from which we had recoiled in September 1938.’
And then:
Here was decision at last, taken at the worst possible moment and on the least satisfactory ground, which must surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people. Here was the righteous cause deliberately and with a refinement of inverted artistry committed to mortal battle after its assets and advantages had been so improvidently squandered. Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.3
But did we have to fight at all, at this stage in the crisis? It depends very much on what is meant by ‘have to’. Our supposed obligation to Belgium in 1914 turns out to be at best elusive and at worst fictional. In the epigraph to this chapter I recall Lord Palmerston’s breach of his promise to defend Denmark against Prussian aggression in 1864, mainly on the grounds that it would endanger this country without helping Denmark. Far from being inscribed in the annals of shame, the episode, though certainly disgraceful, is almost entirely forgotten. Likewise, our supposed guarantee of Belgium, the pretext for war in 1914, was far from clear, and was neatly avoided by Gladstone during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, a piece of self-interested deviousness now unknown to almost every living Englishman. When we did honour this supposed commitment in 1914, more as a pretext for what the Cabinet had secretly decided to do than because it was a real obligation, it led swiftly to national bankruptcy and ultimately to national insignificance. As for Belgian neutrality, that country itself abandoned neutrality for much of the interwar period, unwisely returned to neutrality in 1936, and wished it had not done so in 1940. It is now a proud member of the far-from neutral NATO alliance, which maintains its headquarters on Belgian soil. So what was the point of going to war for that?
The Polish guarantee was in a long tradition of pledges either unwisely given or never meant to be kept. Or so it seems. And yet there is a strong argument for the belief that it did have a purpose, even though its aim was certainly not to save Poland.
A. J. P. Taylor, in his Origins of the Second World War, traces Britain’s seemingly involuntary tumble into war a little further back than our 1939 pledge to come to the aid of Warsaw. He begins in 1938. The Munich Agreement of that year followed a curious backwards ballet in which Britain and France retreated from commitments to the Czech state. The two countries cynically used each other’s different doubts as excuses for failing to fight for Prague. France did so out of a sour, weary and reluctant realism. It could not face war, but was still sure it was wrong to give in. Britain did so out of a belief, real or imagined, that redrawing the Czechoslovak borders was a worthy aim in itself.
Very well then, argued the French premier, Édouard Daladier; in this case Britain will not object to guaranteeing the survival of Czechoslovakia, once it is shorn of its German-populated borderlands.
Taylor’s commentary on this is as scathing as Churchill’s on the Polish guarantee. Not that he was kind to the Polish promise either, saying:
The assurance was unconditional: the Poles alone were to judge whether it should be called upon. The British could no longer press for concessions over Danzig; equally they could no longer urge Poland to cooperate with Soviet Russia […] from this moment peace rested on the assumption that Hitler and Stalin would be more sensible and cautious than Chamberlain had been – that Hitler would continue to accept conditions at Danzig which most Englishmen had long regarded as intolerable, and that Stalin would be ready to cooperate on terms of manifest inequality.4
Of the Czech pledge, cozened out of London by Paris, Taylor wrote,
In this casual way, the British government, which had steadily refused to extend their commitments east of the Rhine and had professed themselves unable to help Czechoslovakia when she was strong, now underwrote Czechoslovakia when she was weak and, what was more, implicitly underwrote the existing territorial order throughout eastern Europe.5
This order was, of course, about to collapse in the most spectacular way, mainly because the Munich pact had made it inevitable that it would do so. Taylor says Britain never expected to be called upon to keep its promise. But he adds:
Daladier had built better than he knew. He had committed Great Britain to opposing Hitler’s advance in the east; and six months later the commitment came home to roost. At about 7.30 p.m. on the night of 18 September 1938 Daladier gave Great Britain the decisive, though delayed, push which landed her in the Second World War.6
Well, almost. Britain’s initial response to Hitler’s seizure of Prague and the Czech lands was complacent and mild – which is not surprising given that this seizure was an inevitable, predictable consequence of the Munich settlement. Czecho-Slovakia (it had gained the hyphen after Munich) was by March 1939 no more than a rump state whose constituent parts were hostile to each other. It was not viable, and could never have lasted long. The Czech president Hácha’s nightmare journey to Berlin at this point, much recorded in the standard histories, was at Hácha’s request, not Hitler’s. He knew that his country was breaking up. This territory was coveted by stronger neighbours – including Poland and Hungary – and unable to defend itself. Slovakia was keen to escape the rule of Prague, as it had been before and would be again. But the Prague takeover then became the pretext for the Polish guarantee. And, by giving Poland the power to take us to war alongside it whenever it chose, Britain made that war inevitable. Did its supposedly peace-loving appeasing leaders in fact mean to achieve precisely that aim?
Simon Newman’s account suggests that, during those six months between March and September 1939, there were forces in British diplomacy that actively sought a policy of war with Germany at all costs, and at last succeeded in getting one on the pretext of Poland. Their aims were idealist and emotional rather than nationalist or strategic. They needed to win popular support for a war policy. But they were not the aims claimed by Prince Charles almost 80 years later, of overthrowing oppression and saving the Jews of Europe. It is fascinating to note that the complete unmasking of Nazi hatred of the Jews – during the Kristallnacht pogroms of 9 and 10 November 1938 – do not feature anywhere in explanations of British, French or American changes of foreign policy towards Germany. Germany still had many active and brave foreign reporters on its territory at the time. The homicidal racial savagery of these events – and the lawless complicity of the authorities – were beyond doubt. What any observant person had known for years was now on plain, shameless display to all. But war was not declared, and diplomatic relations were not broken off. Our national policies at the time were not about disapproval of the internal doings of other countries. They were about preserving the standing and reputation of Britain as a Great Power.
There were, it is true, discussions about adopting an idealist foreign policy, but this was much more to do with national status and cajoling the USA into an alliance than it was to do with the plight of the Jews. Indeed, at this very moment, Britain was doing all it could to reduce Jewish immigration to its Palestine colony or ‘Mandate’, after years of anti-Jewish protests and anti-Jewish violence by the Arab population (very probably encouraged by outside influences). By following this policy Britain was actively obstructing the largest single escape route open to European Jews who wished to flee Nazi persecution, violence and state-sponsored theft. The 1917 policy of creating a ‘national home’ for the Jews in the Mandate had been more or less checkmated by Arabists in the Foreign and Colonial Services, who saw Arab friendship as the best way of securing the (supposedly endangered) approaches to the Suez Canal. This futile aim – for the Canal was useless throughout the war – was itself a by-product of Britain’s then obsession with the growth of Italian naval and military power in the region. And that was in turn the result of our curious and idealistic decision, worthless in practice to the Abyssinians, to abandon the Hoare–Laval agreement in 1935. This secret pact, now much derided, sought to avoid a dangerous confrontation between the League of Nations and Mussolini, who had invaded Abyssinia (now Ethiopia). As A. J. P. Taylor says, the agreement was not an outrageous arrangement by the standards of the time, and was in fact a compromise on the lines of those already made by the League over Corfu and Manchuria. It was influenced by Britain’s then naval weakness in the Mediterranean, and Italy’s growing strength there. It is hard to recall now that Britain was for some time gravely worried by Italy’s naval challenge to its Mediterranean supremacy. Had the Hoare–Laval Pact’s contents not been leaked to the French press, it might well have passed more or less unnoticed. As it was, it gave a great opportunity to those who believed in what would nowadays be called an ‘ethical foreign policy’ to demand a hostile stance against the aggressive Mussolini. These tended (as would most of the enemies of the Munich agreement three years later) to be the same people who had campaigned for years for disarmament.
Anthony Eden, then the apostle of Utopianism in foreign policy, was also Sir Samuel Hoare’s deputy. He privately opposed his chief’s policy in Abyssinia, and – perhaps as a result – inherited Hoare’s post when Hoare was forced to resign by an outbreak of morality. In February 1938 Eden would himself resign this post, in an obscure dispute with Neville Chamberlain about the treatment of Mussolini, with whom he seems to have been oddly preoccupied. Yet Eden’s idealist and principled foreign policy did not help the forces of righteousness. By opening a breach between London and Rome, it helped to cement the German–Italian alliance which would last until 1943, mightily boost Hitler’s confidence, and make it far easier for him to annex Austria. It can be argued that the failure to keep Mussolini and Hitler apart cost Britain and France – and in the end, the world – a great deal. It is fascinating to note that Eden’s idealism, deployed against foreign policy cynicism in the 1930s, led to some of the most squalid and dishonest foreign policy skulduggery of the 1950s. For this was the same Anthony Eden who in 1956 colluded secretly with France and Israel to create a pretext for an essentially colonial British intervention in Egypt. Eden would launch the absurd, needless and disastrous Suez aggression against Egypt in the belief he was fighting a ‘dictator’ like those he had faced in the prewar age. He would then write to President Dwight Eisenhower, ‘I have never thought Nasser a Hitler, he has no warlike people behind him, but the parallel with Mussolini is close.’7 Yet in his TV and radio broadcast to the British people of 9 August 1956, Eden would say:
He [Nasser] has shown that he is not a man who can be trusted to keep an agreement … The pattern is familiar to many of us, my friends. We all know this is how fascist governments behave, as we all remember, only too well, what the cost can be in giving in to Fascism.8
Suez followed the new rule, which required foreign policy to have some sort of moral foundation. This was usually based on disapproval of the character of the enemy regime, a factor which earlier diplomats would have ignored. But if Eden had not been able to deploy this argument, that Nasser was similar to the 1930s dictators, he would probably not have been able to win parliamentary or public support for his adventure.
The problem with this approach is that on so many occasions, these moral objections (even where genuine) have to be stifled for reasons of state, just as they always have been. Modern Britain, for instance, regularly welcomes the leaders of the aggressive Chinese police state to London, suppressing hostile demonstrations and providing the hospitality of Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. It makes similar gruesome compromises with the leaders of the aggressive Saudi theocratic despotism, and with other dubious Gulf states.
But men like to believe that they are doing good, even when they are really only doing their duty. Eden was not, then or earlier, the only Utopian idealist in the British diplomatic service.
Newman writes, quoting Sir Alexander Cadogan’s diaries for 20 March 1939,
Halifax [British Foreign Secretary] now felt that the British initiative was threatening to lose its momentum. The whole world was watching London and panic reigned in the Foreign Office. Cadogan [the strongly anti-appeasement Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office] was almost hysterical: ‘… we must have a moral position and we shall lose it if we don’t do something now.’ P. M.’s [Chamberlain’s] speech was all right on sentiments, but the country – and other countries – are asking ‘What are you going to do?’9
Two days later, Duff Cooper, who had favoured the idealist project of a large British land army in 1936, and had resigned from the government over Munich, said something extraordinarily prescient and significant. He wrote to Halifax on 22 March that the USA would fight for Britain ‘On one condition. It must be an ideological war – a war based on moral principle.’10 This is perhaps the first faint bat-squeak, anywhere near government, of the war as Prince Charles was to view it in his Christmas 2016 broadcast. The USA’s attitude towards any conflict between Britain (and France) and Germany was bound to be decisive. But such involvement would also need to be robed in idealistic garments. The American people, whose desire to stay out of Old Europe’s conflicts was strong and reasonable, could only be moved into belligerency by a great cause. It was this that was the problem now. Britain’s brilliant propaganda portrayal of the Germans as monsters in 1916 and 1917 had enticed the people of the USA into the Great War. Straightforward political and economic interest in an Allied victory and a future stable Europe had persuaded the less sentimental American elite to get involved. Now the Americans, elite and people alike, knew that much of the Great War propaganda had been invention and embroidery. And they knew that their gallant ally had then welched on its enormous debts to them. Well before war broke out, a largely ineffectual Franklin Roosevelt was exploring ways of overcoming the sulky neutrality of Congress. But he did not get very far as he did not have the votes in Congress, or any popular mandate for a warlike policy. Indeed, he probably never would have succeeded. As we shall see later, it was Adolf Hitler who rescued Roosevelt from his own isolationists.
The ghost of the future Anglo-American alliance, with the USA very much in charge, already existed. But it obstinately refused to solidify into anything more than a flickering, squeaking shade, as long as Britain still appeared to many hostile Americans as a selfish, mean and bullying Great Power quite capable of looking after itself. Attitudes began to change only when Britain, admitting it was bankrupt, came to America’s doorstep as a penniless supplicant, offering the USA the chance to save the world. The extraordinary (and all but unknown) transfer of Britain’s gold to the USA the following year, which I shall describe in Chapter 4, was the lasting proof that a deliberate, harsh British humiliation had to precede any real alliance.
Donald Cameron Watt, in How War Came, describes FDR’s failed attempt in April 1939 to dilute the fierce Anglophobic ‘nothing doing’ attitude of House and Senate.11 At the time, Roosevelt was hoping to use a visit by the British king and queen in June (of which much more in Chapter 5) to soften American opinion towards the European powers. And he had, astonishingly, moved a great part of the US Navy’s heaviest capital ships from the Caribbean to the Pacific, in response to British pleas (from Halifax). The obsolete belief that battleships could still project power continued to enslave the minds of politicians. In fact, as Britain and the USA would find out in December 1941, they mainly provided targets for the enemy.
Halifax was worried about the growing power of Japan, but said Britain could not spare any ships to cope with it, because it was hard pressed to maintain its strength in the Mediterranean. Italy’s growing modern battle fleet continued to haunt the minds of Britain’s naval chiefs. Since US diplomatic and economic pressure in the 1920s had led to British naval weakness, and broken Britain’s naval alliance with Japan, the movement of the US fleet to the Pacific seemed only just. But it would cost the US Navy very dear in 1941, and do little good to Britain’s naval fortunes either. While this forgotten manoeuvre was proceeding, Roosevelt was finding it much harder to shift senators and congressmen than to move battleships. Despite a good deal of righteous US bombast about Hitler’s march into Prague the previous month, an attempt to authorise arms sales to future belligerents ground its way feebly through Capitol Hill before being eviscerated at the end of June, just in time for the British royal visit. France’s rulers were in despair at this. They could not hope to rearm properly without being able to buy American materials, especially aircraft. Édouard Daladier complained about this to the US ambassador to Paris, William Bullitt. He said the vote had encouraged Hitler to believe the democracies would get neither arms nor ammunition from the USA. He may well have been right. Hitler had well-founded suspicions that the USA was hostile to and jealous of the British empire.
In these days of the supposed ‘special relationship’ and ‘shoulder-to-shoulder’ declarations by British and American politicians, this may seem a strange view. In the pre-Churchill age, when American Anglophobia was common and the fundamentally anti-British ‘America First’ movement powerful and widespread, it was a perfectly reasonable and factual view. The behaviour of Congress must have increased Hitler’s confidence that Britain – and France – would do nothing important if he attacked Poland. In all ways but one he was right. They did nothing practical at all to help Poland, and had never intended to.
They were hoping to rely on inert strength and a naval blockade to teach Germany a lesson about the limits of power. The French government’s weary war propaganda poster ‘Nous gagnerons parce que nous sommes les plus forts’ (‘We shall win because we are stronger’) unintentionally reveals the nature of their policy. It can still be seen in the French Army Museum in Les Invalides in Paris. Most people in Britain and France assumed that its belief in its greater strength was correct, and that they faced no real danger of defeat. Jean-Paul Sartre, in the third volume of his Roads to Freedom trilogy, Iron in the Soul, makes one of his characters, a bitter homosexual soured by years of official persecution, laugh savagely as he sees the poster still intact on a Paris wall, as the abandoned city waits for the German occupiers:
The walls of Paris were still clamorously extolling their merits and their pride; we are the stronger, the more virtuous, the sacred champions of democracy, the defenders of Poland, of human dignity or heterosexual love: the wall of steel will be unbreached, we shall hang out our washing on the Siegfried Line. The posters on the Paris hoardings were still trumpeting a hymn that had gone cold. But they were running, mad with terror, flinging themselves flat in the ditches, begging for mercy.12
So does Evelyn Waugh in his novel of the Phoney War, Put Out More Flags, as Angela Lyne ‘travels in unwonted discomfort through a nation moving to action under the dour precepts “il faut en finir” and “nous gagnerons parce qe nous sommes les plus forts”.’13 But the poster is in fact very informative about the assumptions of the Franco-British leadership in 1939. It depicts a map of the world in which the French and British empires are shown in red, dominating much of the world. Germany, a solitary blob of black ink, sits alone amid all this imperial crimson, seemingly overwhelmed. This is what the leaders of Britain and France believed between March 1939 and May 1940. Thus the overconfidence of dying empires is bitterly mocked by the events which, as we well know, soon followed. So is the romantic myth of Britain ‘standing alone’ after Dunkirk. Not only did French and Belgian troops (often wholly selflessly) help British troops to escape through Dunkirk, but Britain also had a large and wealthy empire behind it throughout the war. Of course, France and Britain did in the end play a significant part in overcoming Hitler. It was, alas, a far smaller part than they had intended to play.
France and Britain declared the war against Germany that the USA and the USSR sought to avoid, and never themselves declared. Both waited to be attacked. Chamberlain and Daladier started the war against Germany which Stalin and Roosevelt would later take over and finish. And they would finish it by destroying the Third Reich and creating an entirely different new order in Europe, one that would last 50 years rather than a thousand, but in which Britain and France would be minor powers. It may be the only case in history of a second-hand war being taken over by other belligerents and used for their own purposes. Certainly Britain and France did not achieve their aim in declaring war. Both sought to stay in the club of Great Powers. Both, in different ways, found themselves being asked to leave that club, though both were allowed the trappings and trinkets of greatness to console them. They were permitted to have unusable nuclear weapons and vetoes on the UN Security Council which could only be wielded by checking in advance with their superpower sponsor.
But in the pre-1940 era, declining British power was still great enough to cause resentment in the rising USA. The especially neutralist Senator William Borah of Idaho often expressed acid and mistrustful opinions of the Chamberlain government. He formed these views largely by reading the communist propagandist Claud Cockburn’s scurrilous and conspiratorial gossip-sheet The Week. He presumably had little idea of Claud Cockburn’s Stalinist aims. In any case, he refused all attempts by Roosevelt to get him to soften his anti-British position. The battle between Borah and Roosevelt would be rerun, with France out of the war and Hitler in possession of its Atlantic coast, a year later. It would then have a significantly – but not totally – different outcome. But in the late summer of 1939, while America was embroiled in argument and debate over whether the visiting King George VI would actually eat a hot dog at Hyde Park, Roosevelt’s New York country house, the supposedly feeble and pacific Chamberlain was quietly certain of war. The country he led was full of warlike preparations and precautions, long before war was actually declared. The king and queen crossed the Atlantic by liner because the majestic and speedy battlecruiser HMS Repulse, originally intended to be their ‘Royal Yacht’ on this visit, was diverted to other more serious duties. They would soon become more serious still, as we shall see. With the king and queen in the convoy that took them to the mouth of the St Lawrence came the first two of many heavy cargoes of gold from the vaults of the Bank of England, to be stored out of reach of the enemy in Ottawa. The gold was secretly loaded aboard HMS Southampton and HMS Glasgow, and equally secretly sent on to the Canadian capital as Their Majesties bathed in the adoration of Canadian crowds, still touchingly loyal to Britain, and touchingly unaware of the approaching end of the empire.
Chamberlain knew perfectly well that war was coming because, heavily influenced by the other supposed pacific appeaser, Lord Halifax, he had decided to bring it about. That, for sure, is the verdict of Simon Newman’s study. He examines Cabinet minutes starting from 30 March 1939, when the Polish guarantee was under discussion.14 Here we find a total refusal even to consider the fact that British forces were then and later quite incapable of coming to Poland’s aid if it were attacked. Today’s reader can only conclude that the British government was quite well aware of the fact that it could and would do nothing militarily when Poland was invaded. But it thought this did not matter. Poland itself mattered hardly at all to the government. Blockade and the economic and numerical superiority of France and Britain would inevitably force Germany to negotiate. What we also find is that the Cabinet was really worried that Poland might come to an agreement with Germany, so cheating Britain of its principled, idealistic stand, supposedly made on behalf of a plucky Poland, but actually an act of self-interest. Far from blundering into a guarantee they did not mean to fulfil, they wanted the guarantee to commit them irrevocably to an idealist war whose practical details interested them very little. For they had resolved to fight such a war that year to reassert their fast-shrivelling power and importance.
This position was made possible by the belief, which ought never to have been current, that France was an effective military ally. Historical knowledge, especially of the French collapse in 1870 in face of a Prussian attack, should have warned everyone that apparent French strength was not always real. The large and significant gap in the Maginot Line along the Belgian border should also have been a cause for alarm. So should a knowledge of French politics, especially bitter in that era, with Judophobic French conservative intellectuals so loathing their own Popular Front government (headed by Léon Blum) that they had been heard to say ‘Better Hitler than Blum!’ They would get their wish, and many of them would, while it lasted, approve of what they got. But there were more surprising forces weakening national morale. It would have been hard for even the most cynical to foresee the future behaviour of the then-powerful French Communist Party. In March 1939 the Communists were the committed foe of Hitler and ‘fascism’. But after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, out of abject loyalty to Stalin, the same party dismissed the war with Hitler as an imperialist conflict. There were honourable rebels against this line. But not enough to stop the French government from dissolving the party and imprisoning several of its senior figures for failing to denounce the pact. Even so, there was organised Communist propaganda against the war, pamphlets given to soldiers saying ‘Soldier, beneath your uniform you are still a worker’ and ‘Down with the imperialist war!’ There were also several episodes of sabotage of military industries and – amazingly – a brief and failed attempt to get the German occupation authorities to permit the open publication of the Communist newspaper L’Humanité. This was the nation on which a lightly armed Britain was relying for its safety and security in a war of choice against a fast-rising and rearmed Germany, never an easy opponent to overcome. How was it that nobody wondered if this was wise? But it seems that nobody did wonder.
Yet it is clear that the British government of 1939, wrongly portrayed in so many versions as anxious for a way out of war, was actually worried that it would be cheated of a confrontation it had carefully sought for several months. For instance, Neville Chamberlain said he was
uneasy at the fact that our Ambassador in Warsaw could obtain no information as to the progress of the negotiations between Germany and Poland. One possible, but very distasteful, explanation of this was that Polish negotiators were, in fact, giving way to Germany.15
The pretext for this swirling panic was one of many very strange scares which infected the Foreign Office during this era. None of these events suggests that the Foreign Office, as we are so often led to believe, was seeking to avoid war. Rather the contrary. At one time or another, British officialdom descended into childish frenzies over more-or-less baseless frights about non-existent German invasions of nearly every country in Europe, from Czechoslovakia to Romania and the Netherlands. The first Czechoslovak scare is now thought to have been a possible trigger for the Sudeten crisis, which might not have happened otherwise. Hitler was furious at being falsely accused of planning an invasion of Czechoslovakia, two months after the Austrian Anschluss. He was then even more enraged at being falsely and publicly accused of having been forced to back down by Czech strength and Western pressure. He then began, for the first time, to consider such a policy seriously. It will be forever unclear exactly where these rumours really came from, but they almost invariably suited that part of the Foreign Office which sought an early confrontation with Hitler.
But the Colvin scare of 29 March 1939 was the oddest and the most potent of all. This author has experienced the chilly disdain of the British Foreign Office for the popular press, even when (as sometimes happens) the popular press has its facts right. And so he finds doubly astonishing the treatment of Ian Colvin’s report from Berlin warning of an imminent German attack on Poland. Colvin was 26, the junior Berlin correspondent of the News Chronicle, a fervently anti-Hitler popular left-wing daily. On the basis of some reports on forward ration dumps, and some incidents involving the German minority in the Polish city of Bromberg (Bydgoszcz), he formed the opinion that an invasion was imminent. He told this story to ‘Mason-Mac’, Colonel F. N. Mason-MacFarlane, the famously bellicose military attaché at the British embassy in Berlin, who would later be chief of intelligence for the British Expeditionary Force. The colonel urged him to take it to London. This he did on 28 March. He told his story to Sir Reginald Leeper, head of the Foreign Office’s news department (who would famously declare in August that ‘all the isms are now wasms’, after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact).
So far all had remained within the normal rules of possibility. But Leeper arranged for Colvin to see the exalted Sir Alexander Cadogan and Lord Halifax himself the next day, an extraordinary privilege for a youthful popular newspaper correspondent. Colvin told his story again. He even lectured Halifax on how Chamberlain’s settlement of the Czech crisis had undermined a supposed German ‘opposition’ plot to overthrow Hitler. This was a claim ceaselessly made by those in contact with this much-cited German ‘opposition’, but rather hard to test. Within a few hours Colvin was, amazingly, repeating his story to the prime minister himself, at his House of Commons office. Also present were Leeper, Cadogan, the future premier Sir Alec Douglas-Home (then Chamberlain’s parliamentary private secretary and known as Lord Dunglass) and a shadowy person Colvin assumed was the head of the Secret Intelligence Service. Access of this kind to the powerful is extraordinarily rare.
Newman says, ‘It was unprecedented that a journalist coming to London with very stale information should be given an audience not only with the Foreign Secretary but also with the Prime Minister.’16 They took Colvin’s thin (and, as it turned out, totally wrong) stories seriously because they greatly desired to believe them. Chamberlain (as he wrote to his sister Hilda) there and then agreed to an immediate declaration of support for Poland, to counter a ‘quick putsch’ by Hitler. But what sort of putsch did Chamberlain really fear? A German attack on Poland, for which there was no real evidence and for which Germany was not remotely prepared at that date? Or a deal, a revived and strengthened German–Polish Non-Aggression Pact robbing Britain of its treasured, carefully nurtured pretext for war?
Newman traces Halifax’s enthusiasm for a Polish guarantee to a meeting on 21 March 1939 with the French foreign minister Georges Bonnet:
Here, appearing for the first time, was the fateful idea of a unilateral guarantee to Poland. Halifax’s position makes sense on two assumptions: that Germany was bent on dominating Europe, and that unless Poland and other states in eastern Europe were prevented by unilateral and unsought [my emphasis] guarantees from making their own accommodations with Germany, the British means to resist German domination would be fatally undermined.17
In other words, if we did not more or less bribe or force Poland to be our ally, we might run out of allies so that we had no actual cause for which to go to war.
But it was even worse than that. Discussing what looked like the choice between fighting or ‘abdicating as a Great Power’, Newman remarks:
It is one thing to retreat in orderly fashion from an untenable position; it is another thing to conduct one’s foreign policy in such a way that one is constantly humiliated and shamed by squaring up for battle and then backing down.18
Thus the critical decisions in March 1939 were made in an atmosphere of panic, humiliation and moral hysteria. A frantic desire to do something – anything – replaced a calm consideration of the alternatives. There arose a clamour for action to cut off the possibility of another surrender to the forces of evil.
And so, inflamed by fear of a new German–Polish deal, and equally inflamed by the contradictory fear of a German invasion of Poland, which was not planned at that time, the leaders of Britain reached for the slogan which would serve them so badly, so many times, in so many years to come: ‘Something must be done.’
It was the desire to have a moral position, worthy of the Great Power we still thought we were, and of finding something to do, which overcame all else. And yet the supposedly moral position involved knowingly giving a false promise to a country we did not much like or trust. Newman speculates that we cynically used Poland (which we expected to hold out against Germany for a few months) to gain time to rearm, by directing German forces eastwards in case they came westwards instead.19 It also signalled a serious economic and political risk, which might endanger this country’s very integrity and independence, as well as exposing its empire to destruction.
It is perfectly possible to argue that, by deliberately seeking to join a European war in a state of dangerous unreadiness, the British government willed the catastrophe of Singapore less than three years later, which was its direct result. This cataclysm, along with Dunkirk and the Fall of France which led to it, was not precisely predictable. But our eventual submission to the war aims of the USA, and the effective dissolution of our empire and national wealth were clear possibilities, if not certainties. Our economic position simply did not allow us to create forces large enough to let us control the course of a European war. We were wholly reliant on French strength in any such conflict, and perhaps we had not tried very hard to discover how strong France really was, in case we found out the truth. As a moral act, it lacked clarity and was deeply irrational.
And those who took this step knew that it was irrational. Not long before, when they had still been thinking rationally, and living within their means, they had decided our interests were best served by building up the Air Force and the Navy. This met two real needs. Fear of Japan’s growing naval power in the Pacific played a large part in this, along with a belief, partly borne out in practice, that aircraft, not armies, were the key to defending the British home islands from any continental threat. The Spitfire, symbol of British military heroism in the ‘Good War’, was always, at heart, a defensive weapon. Neville Chamberlain had said in 1936, ‘I believe our resources will be more profitably employed in the air and on the sea than in building up great armies.’20 Despite active Labour Party opposition to the Service estimates (before then Labour had merely abstained), military spending in this period rose by almost 50 per cent in a short period, and the Treasury reluctantly began to authorise heavy borrowing for warlike expenditure. Yet the economy was doing very badly and could easily have been damaged both by higher military spending (requiring borrowing or taxation) or by the costly imports it would suck in. Britain’s trade deficit in 1937 (not covered by ‘invisible’ exports) was £339 million. In 1938 it was £284 million.21 These were huge sums by the standards of the times, or any time. Without American loans, it was hard to see how Britain could have afforded the war it thought was coming and felt it ought to have, to remain a Great Power. The policy could only have worked if the war had settled down into a long blockade, a hope which would be destroyed at a stroke in August 1939 by Germany’s pact with the USSR. But by then it was too late to pull back. The government’s own Economic Advisory Council reported in December 1938 that continuing the balance of payment deficits might lead first to a flight of capital from London and then to exchange controls.22 That would mean a much-reduced ability to import weapons, fuel, raw materials or food. But a shortage of skilled labour meant that much of what we needed for war had to come from abroad. We could not make it ourselves in the time available. Chamberlain’s economic problems were real, not the result of doctrinaire penny-pinching.
But behind and beneath them lay another fact, to this day little-known in Britain and strangely little-mentioned in discussions of the prewar period. Britain had shamefully defaulted on its World War I debt to the USA, something no solvent nation is ever supposed to do. Elaborate excuses are made for this, including the fact that many of our own debtors had stopped paying us. But they do not alter this fact. Nor did they assuage American resentment. In fact, it was this default which led to America’s sourly anti-British Neutrality Act of 1936, forbidding all loans to belligerent nations. This was amended (too late to affect the 1940 humiliation of France and Britain) by subsequent legislation. It was the basis of the highly restrictive and costly ‘cash and carry’ system under which the Americans vacuumed British gold and securities across the Atlantic in 1939–41 and compelled a fire sale of British assets in the USA, in return for those weapons and supplies we could carry away in our own ships.
The amount of the unpaid debt is colossal, though difficult to calculate realistically in modern terms. According to one of the few published and researched modern accounts of the problem,
In 1934, Britain owed the US $4.4bn of World War I debt (about £866m at 1934 exchange rates). Adjusted by the Retail Price Index, a typical measure of inflation, £866m then would equate to £40bn now, and if adjusted by the growth of GDP, to about £225bn.23
A modern-day British government spokesman is quoted in this article as saying: ‘The UK Government’s position is this: “Neither the debt owed to the United States by the UK nor the larger debts owed by other countries to the UK have been serviced since 1934, nor have they been written off.”’
It is virtually impossible to understand the constraints on British rearmament, or the ill-tempered state of relations between Britain and the USA during this decisive period, without taking this tremendous debt into account. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Britain’s then ruling elite, painfully aware of all these things, simply closed its eyes and leapt into the abyss hoping for the best, on that March day when they made their wild unconditional guarantee to plucky little anti-Semitic Poland, military dictatorship and jackal of Teschen.