‘Vernon Bartlett, friend of the Bolsheviks and opponent of the foreign policy of Mr Chamberlain, has been elected in the Bridgwater by-election.’
(Radio Berlin, 19 November 1938)
In modern democracies, wars have to be popular, at least to begin with. Later, the problem is reversed. The peace has to be popular, and therefore vengeful and often needlessly delayed.
One of the great achievements of the Polish guarantee, with which I began this book, was that it made war with Germany popular, or at least tolerable. This rash and empty promise to defend an undemocratic country transformed Britain. In 1938 we had been a nervous spectator of central European diplomatic manoeuvres. By the end of the summer of 1939 we were an active participant, many of whose people reluctantly but resolutely accepted the need for war.
This transformation was astonishing in its speed and scale. The foolish and inaccurate 2010 film The King’s Speech has, like many such works of art or fiction, now passed into the minds of many as a truthful account of events. Its purpose seems to be to argue that the monarchy is more or less justifiable because of its role in the defeat of Hitler. In fact, like millions of his subjects, King George VI was an enthusiastic appeaser of Hitler. What is more, despite the film claiming the precise opposite, Winston Churchill had sided with the alternative king, Edward VIII, during the abdication crisis. By doing so, he gravely damaged the launch of a national movement for rearmament, ‘Arms and the Covenant’. George VI, as he had told Franklin Roosevelt in their 1939 meeting, deeply distrusted Churchill. Edward VIII, despite Churchill’s support and friendship, later became famous for his open sympathies with Hitler and had to be put far out of reach of Europe during the war. These facts, plus the offhand anti-Semitism common among prominent people in Europe and North America before the revelation of Auschwitz made such thoughts unthinkable and unspeakable, are too complicated and inconvenient.
They are not welcome in a country and a world in the grip of a pseudo-religious myth which wants matters to be simpler and kinder than they are. The ‘Good War’ legend, like other dominant dogmas, requires the facts to be altered to fit the theory. Of course, it is still legal and permissible to speak and think the truth about these events. But the power of cinema drama, combined with the power of myth, means that millions will forever believe a falsehood and glower intolerantly at those who annoyingly insist on the truth.
The closing scene of The King’s Speech shows crowds converging on Buckingham Palace as King George VI nobly rallies the nation to its stern task of defeating Hitler at the outbreak of war. No such crowds in fact converged. What did happen, 11 months earlier, was roughly the opposite. The nation rallied at the palace, it is true, but it rallied against war, and in favour of a negotiated peace with Hitler. The great national demonstration in favour of appeasement in London in 1938 is still largely forgotten. Though not actually suppressed or censored, as it might have been in the USSR, it has simply slipped out of the major records. There are plenty of accounts and newsreels of Neville Chamberlain stepping from his aeroplane on his return from Munich, or burbling foolishly about ‘peace with honour’ from a Downing Street window. Yet few know that on Friday 30 September 1938, a real and enormous crowd, the biggest since the Coronation in May 1937, waited for nearly four hours, much of it in drenching rain, for Mr Chamberlain to appear alongside the king (and at his personal invitation) on the Buckingham Palace balcony. The crowd was so dense around the Victoria Memorial that Chamberlain’s modest car was forced to slow to a walking pace. The elderly and exhausted prime minister was treated to a loud chorus of ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow!’ and shouts of ‘Good old Chamberlain!’
At about seven in the evening, in failing early autumn light, a huge searchlight (one of the few anti-aircraft searchlights then in existence in the London military district) was trained on the balcony. Chamberlain and his wife stood happily alongside the king and queen. The king gestured to his prime minister to step forward and take the applause which was his due, and for four minutes of relief and joy he bathed in the cheers of the multitude.
This fact is not hidden. Anyone who examines the newspaper files of the time can find it generously recorded. But it was not known to me until quite recently. There must be film of it, but I have never seen it. Archive footage shown in TV histories of the era tends to concentrate much more upon Chamberlain himself, or on insignificant and confused left-wing demonstrations calling for support for the Czechs. The idea that the British public, urged on by the Crown, was wildly pleased by Chamberlain’s agreement, is unwelcome to us. We wish to believe that we were not fooled at the time, even though we were. This perhaps explains the comparative fame of the Oxford by-election of 1938, in which the Munich Agreement was publicly challenged.
When I was a left-wing teenager in Oxford in the late 1960s, one of my teachers at the College of Further Education recalled how, in her own youth, she had campaigned for Alexander ‘Sandy’ Lindsay (Later Lord Lindsay) in the great 1938 by-election. It took place in the October of that year, thanks to the death of the sitting MP, just after the Munich Agreement. It has since taken on a golden glow of far-seeing righteousness (oddly enough eclipsing the later Bridgwater by-election in which the anti-Munich candidate actually won). Many stalwarts of the British political Left have said proudly that they took the anti-appeasement side, from the late Denis Healey to two future Tory premiers – the late Harold Macmillan, later Earl of Stockton, and Sir Edward Heath. Macmillan, then a Tory MP himself, was threatened with all kinds of disciplinary action, including expulsion from the Carlton Club, for publicly opposing a fellow Conservative. But no action was taken against him in the end. The idealistic Left of both university and city were united against the Conservative candidate, Quintin Hogg (later Lord Hailsham). Lindsay, Master of Balliol and a distinguished philosopher, stood as an ‘Independent Progressive’. The official Labour and Liberal candidates withdrew to give him a clear run. Overcoming the Labour Party’s deep mistrust of ‘Popular Front’ alliances with other parties on the left, they declared,
Deeply concerned with the gravity of the present situation and recognising the urgent need for uniting the democratic forces of the country, the Liberal and Labour parties of the city of Oxford have decided not to contest the seat at the present by-election.1
Oxford was never a typical English city, thanks to its ancient university, though by 1938 it was quite heavily industrialised and so had a large working-class Labour vote. It had an unusually lively left-wing movement. This stretched from patrician future ministers such as Richard Crossman, who helped lead the Labour group on the city council, to proletarian orators and troublemakers such as the notorious strike organiser ‘Bill Firestone’ (whose real name was Abe Lazarus). These were busy inflaming industrial unrest and in the unceasing campaign (which did not succeed until 1959) to remove the once-famous Cutteslowe Walls, brick barriers topped with spikes, actually built across two suburban north Oxford roads to separate private from council housing. Students in those times could not vote in university towns, but they were free to take part in the campaign, and many did. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was still almost a year in the future, the Spanish Civil War a fresh wound, and the Left more or less united.
Paradoxically, the Left were also united in opposing British rearmament, in the belief that it might be used against Soviet Russia. The Labour Party still opposed any moves towards military conscription. It was against ‘appeasement’ of anti-Communist despots, but was much less clear about what it supported, beyond a vague commitment to ‘collective security’ which might possibly involve an alliance with the USSR. Hogg himself would jeer at this unconvincing position in a book The Left Was Never Right, published in 1945, far too late to do any good. Its left-wing target, the famous Guilty Men, remains the dominant narrative of the time.2
During the Oxford campaign, Lindsay was supported by almost all socialists. But there was an exception. Quintin Hogg was endorsed by Malcolm MacDonald, Colonial Secretary and the son of Labour’s by then reviled ‘lost leader’, Ramsay MacDonald. He told Oxford voters, ‘There is one paramount question in politics today – foreign policy. Our people earnestly desire peace,’ and he illustrated this by pointing out how great a welcome Neville Chamberlain had received on his return from Munich.
But he added in words which official Labour could not and did not use at the time,
Our diplomacy must have strength behind it if it is to succeed in establishing this peace on surer foundations. Our rearmament campaign must proceed with quickening pace. But if the Opposition parties had been in office in recent times our diplomacy would have been fatally weakened through neglect of armaments.3
This is the strange contradictory whisper which can be heard by anyone who goes beyond the crude newsreel interpretation of the era. In the flickering films, we see Neville Chamberlain with his silly wing collar and his piece of paper. Then we see the idealistic demonstrators, modern young men and women like us, urging the government to stand by the Czechs. Who can doubt which is noble and right, and which is squalid and wrong?
Yet those who wanted to stand up to the dictators did not support the rearmament that would have made this possible. Those who wished to appease the dictators supported and pursued what by any standards was a major policy of modernising the RAF and the Navy. The Army, as discussed elsewhere, was a different matter. Contrary to popular belief, Britain had been preparing for a defensive war (not an offensive one) for years before Munich, and was surprisingly ready for it when it came, certainly much more so than the USA, which even in 1941 was wholly unprepared for the role forced on it much against its will by Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war. It is an odd reflection on the judgements of history that Neville Chamberlain, who spoke softly while carrying a reasonably large stick, is excoriated to this day, whereas Franklin Roosevelt, who blustered mightily while carrying a very small stick, is still regarded as a great man.
For the anti-appeasers of Oxford and elsewhere, it was enough to be against what the Tories were then doing. This was the view of the cultural elite of the time, much as it is now. But that elite was then a rather smaller and less influential group than it is today. The contest is mentioned briefly in Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal, in which he recounts driving voters to the polls, urging them to ‘leave a blank for Hogg and put a cross for Lindsay’, later denouncing ‘Oxford’s coward vote’ for the Tory candidate.
The dubious suggestion, that the appeasers were somehow doing the work of the Nazis, was the basis of the anti-government campaign in that poll. It has been the foundation of much received opinion on the subject ever since. My teacher gleefully recalled chalking ‘Hitler wants Hogg!’ on walls and yelling this slogan from her bicycle as she pedalled down the city streets on polling day. Lindsay is said to have much disliked the slogan, but failed to prevent its use. His campaign also issued a placard alleging ‘Hitler says: don’t dare vote for Lindsay’, which Lindsay could surely have prevented if he had really wanted to. The principal of Jesus College, the Liberal A. E. W. Hazel, in theory on Lindsay’s side, pronounced: ‘In 40 years’ electioneering experience, I have never met dirtier tactics.’4 The slogan was a slander. Hogg and many like him would in fact fight bravely against Hitler in the years to come. Hogg, as it happened, was actually wounded in battle against Hitler’s troops. His book The Left Was Never Right would take an elaborate and detailed revenge for this slur, seven hard years later. In response to three Left Book Club volumes denouncing ‘Tory Appeasement’ – Guilty Men, Your MP and The Trial of Mussolini, Hogg listed 136 Tory MPs – and a mere 14 Labour members – who had served in the war.5 Ten Tory MPs had died on active service in the war. No Labour MPs had. And while 57 Tories won medals for bravery in battle, only five Labour MPs were decorated. In a waspish introduction, Hogg noted that the authors of these books, mostly known to him and in many cases of military age, did not seem (with one exception) to have played much part in fighting the war (the exception was Frank Owen, joint author of Guilty Men, who had served in Burma as an army captain).
Hogg described at length Labour’s sympathy for Germany in the 1920s, and Labour’s general pacifism and resistance to armaments and armed forces throughout the interwar period. This was not some footnote, hastily abandoned as the threat of war grew. The Labour Party’s Southport conference in October 1933, months after Hitler came to power, pledged to ‘take no part in war’.6
This attitude continued long afterwards. Hogg noted that on 20 July 1934 Clement Attlee was among Labour MPs voting for a motion regretting rearmament which, they said, was ‘neither necessitated by any new commitment nor calculated to add to the security of the nation’.7 Attlee himself said at this stage, ‘We deny the need for increased air armaments. We deny the proposition that an increased RAF will make for the peace of the world and we reject altogether the demand for parity.’8 It was at this stage that the important and expensive long-term decisions were taken which would lead to the existence of a modern force of fighter aircraft by 1940.
Labour simply did not sympathise with these actions. Herbert Morrison, later a leading figure in the 1945 government, complained in a speech at Whitechapel on 3 November 1935 that Neville Chamberlain was ‘ready and anxious to spend millions of pounds on machines of destruction’.
Mr Morrison plainly did not approve. He was also quite accurate in portraying Chamberlain as a heavy spender on arms and munitions. Just like Labour’s ex post facto pretence of being an anti-appeasement party, Chamberlain’s reputation as a walking olive branch is hugely misleading. Expenditure on the Navy increased from £56,626,000 in 1934–5 to £149,339,000 in 1939–40. The naval building programme from 1936 to 1939 included six capital ships, six aircraft carriers, 25 cruisers, 49 destroyers and 22 submarines.
Army spending rose from £39,604,000 in 1934–5 to £227,261,000 in 1939–40. RAF spending went up from £17,617,000 to £248,561,000 in the same period. The money allocated for munitions rose from £9,073,500 in 1936 to £55,509,000 in 1939. All these figures are equivalent to many billions now, and they are even more notable because government accounting, in those pre-Keynesian times, was so much tighter than it is today.9
But Labour and its press decried such actions. The Daily Herald of 7 March 1935 gave its view on increased spending planned in the Defence White Paper. Labour’s main newspaper, despite Hitler’s arrival in power, still did not favour national military strength as a policy:
The White Paper is not merely a momentary affront to Germany: it is a permanent challenge to the whole system of collective security […] It is important that the world should understand this – it is not the voice of the people of Great Britain.
The liberal News Chronicle opined on the same occasion: ‘The consequence is a catastrophic increase of Germany’s suspicions and fear of encirclement. In twenty-four hours, the British government has immeasurably deteriorated the entire international situation.’10 Nor did the Left’s aversion to war diminish as Hitler grew more powerful abroad and more obviously evil at home.
Clement Attlee, in the House of Commons on 9 March 1936, after the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, moved an amendment which said (among other things),
The safety of this country and the peace of the world cannot be secured by reliance on armaments […] this House cannot agree to a policy which in fact seeks security in national armaments alone and intensifies the ruinous arms race between the nations, inevitably leading to war.11
He said his party viewed with alarm ‘proposals for the reorganisation of industry on a war basis’.
Despite all this, in Oxford the Left had made a great effort to turn an otherwise ordinary by-election into a public contest between ‘appeasement’ and whatever its opposite might be. By doing so, it attracted a great deal of attention. Large crowds besieged the city’s pseudo-Jacobean town hall for the declaration of the result. Fainting women had to be hauled into the building to be tended by ambulancemen. Yet the outcome, compared with these melodramatic scenes, was an anticlimax. In 1935, the ‘National Conservative’, Captain Robert Bourne, had beaten Labour’s Patrick Gordon Walker by 16,306 votes to 9,661. On this occasion, the Tory Quintin Hogg had beaten the ‘anti-appeaser’ Sandy Lindsay by 15,797 to 12,363. Lindsay had done well, but Quintin Hogg had held almost all his forerunner’s votes. He (like his opponents) was in no doubt that his victory had a wider significance. But he did not think (as his opponents had so rudely claimed) that his success would please Hitler. ‘It is not my victory,’ he said.
It is Mr Chamberlain’s victory. It is a victory for democracy, for peace by negotiation, and it is a victory for a united Britain. It is a victory above all for the ordinary man and woman, who have shown again the traditional common sense of the British elector.12
The British elector did not show the same judgement three weeks later, when another ‘Independent Progressive’ and ‘anti-appeasement’ candidate, the celebrity left-liberal journalist Vernon Bartlett, defeated his Tory rival, Patrick Heathcoat-Amory, at a second by-election in the Somerset division of Bridgwater.
Bartlett won 19,540 votes to Heathcoat-Amory’s 17,208, and would hold the seat until 1950. The Daily Mail of 19 November explained Mr Bartlett’s success by saying: ‘There is little doubt that Mr Bartlett’s popularity with both men and women as a radio commentator won him the seat and contributed largely to the poll.’ This is very probably true. Mr Bartlett had for some years given regular BBC talks on foreign affairs and ‘was regarded as one of the best-liked radio personalities’.13 As in Oxford, the result showed divided opinion rather than an overwhelming view either way. Heathcoat-Amory’s vote was only slightly down on his forerunner’s 1935 total of 17,939. Bartlett summed up his policy as ‘a fresh offer to Germany to discuss any grievance or claims but without surrender to blackmail or further betrayal of small nations or of a great principle’.14
This is of course rather subjective. Nobody views his own compromises as surrenders to blackmail. What did Hitler think? Berlin Radio gleefully announced that ‘Vernon Bartlett, friend of the Bolsheviks and opponent of the foreign policy of Mr Chamberlain’ had been elected. Mr Bartlett himself said his election was ‘a miracle’.
It must have reminded Conservative politicians of the equally unexpected result of the Fulham East by-election, just five years earlier, on 25 October 1933. In that contest, a few months after Adolf Hitler’s arrival in power, Labour’s John Wilmot won the seat from the Conservatives with a convincing majority of 4,840. The Conservatives had been defending a freak majority of 14,521, gained in the post-crash panic of 1931 when Labour had split and a ‘National Government’ had been formed. That era was plainly over.
Mr Wilmot was carried from the town hall shoulder-high by his supporters, who sang ‘The Red Flag’ as they went. And he described his triumph accurately as ‘an amazing victory […] probably one of the most amazing victories in our political history’.15 He had little doubt that the main reason for his success was his opposition to rearmament. But there were other influences. He explained, ‘I won this election on three main issues. The first was peace and disarmament; the second, the clearing away of the slums; and the third, the reversal of the government’s low-wage policy.’16 Who can say if he was right to put foreign policy issues at the top of the list? It seems unlikely that this alone swung the election. Plenty of voters must have continued to think that rearmament was necessary for national safety. But the belief that the Tories had lost because of their arms policy suited several factions, took hold, and affected British politics for years to come.
Wilmot did all he could to promote this version, saying,
Wherever I went and addressed meetings, or spoke to electors personally, I found disappointment everywhere at the government’s failure to take the lead in securing peace. This election has proved that the people of this country desire peace perhaps more than anything else.17
Wilmot was plainly a committed pacifist and may have begun to believe his own propaganda. He had gone so far as to demand that Britain should ‘give a lead to the whole world by initiating immediately a policy of general disarmament’.18 Those Conservatives who were worried about the economy had their own reasons for accepting the Wilmot version. They did not want to spend scarce money on weapons if they could help it, and so chose to see the election result as evidence that voters felt much the same. In a curious way, the sanctification of the 1914–18 conflict as ‘The War to End War’ had made pacifism and disarmament patriotic and generally acceptable in Conservative suburbs, in a way they had never been before. But old-fashioned common sense had not died away.
Three years later, Stanley Baldwin famously replied to an assault by Winston Churchill on his rearmament policy in the following interesting terms:
I put before the whole House [of Commons] my own views with an appalling frankness. You will remember at that time the Disarmament Conference was sitting in Geneva. You will remember that at that time there was probably a stronger pacifist feeling running through this country than at any time since the war […] I asked myself what chance was there – when that feeling that was given expression to in Fulham was common throughout the country – what chance was there within the next year or two of that feeling being so changed that the country would give a mandate for rearmament? Supposing I had gone to the country and said that Germany was rearming, and that we must rearm, does anybody think that this pacific democracy would have rallied to that cry at that moment? I cannot think of anything that would have made the loss of the election from my point of view more certain.19
Famously, Baldwin is also supposed to have been influenced by the League of Nations’ Peace Ballot, an unreliable mass poll conducted in the summer of 1935, which, read in one way, showed great support for continuing disarmament. Read in other ways, it was rather more ambiguous.
The truth is almost certainly more mathematical. Britain under Baldwin and Chamberlain most certainly did rearm, though for imperial and national defence, not for a continental land war. But the country was not rich enough to rearm very much, and the public were certainly not willing, at that stage, to suffer the shortages, high taxes and other hardships imposed by a war economy. A fascinating glimpse into the mind of the Chamberlain government is given by the strange and rather sad propaganda film The Lion Has Wings, made in the first months of war when there was great confidence in French strength and no real fear of Germany. It comes from another, far more innocent age. The film shows warships and RAF planes working together, provides repeated footage of factories turning out gleaming bullets by the thousand, and purports to show an air raid on a German naval base, one of the very few targets the RAF was allowed to bomb in those innocent days.
But large parts of it are devoted to pacific sunlit shots of new schools, clinics and blocks of flats, clean, airy and modern. These are accompanied by words of praise for social reform which are almost socialist. The National Government was, as many forget, dedicated to creating one of the most advanced welfare states of the time. Paul Addison, a leading left-wing historian of the period, has pointed out that pre-1939 Britain succeeded in this aim.20 The welfare state did not begin out of nothing under Attlee in 1945, and Neville Chamberlain would have preferred to spend money on such a state than on weapons.
But first he hoped to reassert Britain’s status as a Great Power, and so there must be war, or at least a declaration of war. No doubt Chamberlain and his advisers hoped and expected that war would be either brief, or static, confined to the high seas. Those who had urged Britain’s intervention in 1914 had believed much the same thing.
The idea that the war would bring sudden ruin on France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark and Norway, and place Britain under a sort of siege, did not cross the minds of those who sought it. Not only did they overestimate French power. They never expected the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the most cynical and devastating stroke of diplomacy in modern times. When these disasters happened, it was only Winston Churchill, a man who lived most fully in times of danger, who could understand the choice that then had to be made.
There is a strong impression, in The Lion Has Wings, that the Chamberlain government saw expenditure on bullets and aircraft as a regrettable diversion from the more noble objectives of schools and workers’ flats. Chamberlain and his colleagues saw themselves mainly as builders and reformers, not as war makers. They sighed inwardly over diverting scarce taxes to shipbuilding, rifles, big guns and aircraft factories, or recruitment of soldiers, sailors and airmen. The Treasury of the era was not the profligate body it is now, but a cautious and miserly ministry keen to see every penny accounted for. A pretended or exaggerated fear of pacifist voters was useful to such a government, as an excuse to keep military spending as low as it could get away with. This could explain why it so often rather noisily overestimated the importance of such events as the Fulham East by-election, the Peace Ballot and the notorious February 1933 Oxford Union vote not to fight for king or country.
The Left’s position was even odder. It won the Fulham East by-election on a programme of peace and disarmament. It won the Bridgwater by-election five years later on a contradictory programme of standing firm against the dictators (some of the dictators, anyway, not necessarily including Stalin). But it combined this militancy rather crazily with fierce resistance to rearmament.
Once again, it is necessary to note that this was not a minor sub-clause of the Left’s thinking at the time, but central to its policy. The Labour manifesto for the 1935 general election warned that a Conservative victory would endanger peace by bringing about ‘a vast and expensive rearmament programme’. Was this even true? A few weeks before the poll, on 31 October 1935, Mr Baldwin had said to the Peace Society, ‘I give you my word there will be no great armaments.’ Posters reproducing these unwise words are mockingly depicted in Noël Coward’s film of the interwar years, This Happy Breed.
But until the German occupation of Prague, and the astonishing diplomatic and political developments which then followed, the British public was at the very least deeply divided on rearmament and warfare. The Left was nothing like as militant as it now likes to imagine. The Labour Party itself continued to oppose conscription before, during and after the Munich crisis, and voted against its introduction in April 1939, after Hitler had occupied Prague. It reaffirmed this policy at its conference in May 1939, and did not reverse it until 2 September, literally the last minute before the war.
The Polish guarantee, and what followed it, managed to give the British public the impression, not wholly correct, that they and something they valued were now under active attack. The declaration of war which soon followed meant that, within a surprisingly short time, Britain actually was under attack, after which public opinion was much less of a problem.
But it is still true that an important part of the war myth, that the Left wanted to fight the Nazis, and the Right wished to appease Hitler, not just because he was strong, but because they actively liked his regime, is unsound.
This view, well articulated in the Left Book Club’s 1940 bestseller Guilty Men, simply is not accurate, though it is still quite widely believed. By 1938, only a few eccentrics and wild men on the Right actively sympathised with Hitler or Mussolini. Many more (and they were not confined to the British upper class) originally saw Hitler as a possible ally against Stalin. But Stalin was no direct threat to British interests, and that fantasy finally dissolved with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The Left was a ‘hero in safety’, demanding a policy for which it would not provide the men or the weapons.
In the end, Halifax’s Polish guarantee forced that Left into support for a war it would once have despised. It did this through a series of very clever chess moves. First, it encouraged Poland to resist what might otherwise have been a workable compromise with Germany. Next, it manoeuvred Germany into an unwanted but unavoidable confrontation with Poland, a former ally. Finally, it obliged Britain to declare war on Germany, and Germany alone, if Poland did then (predictably) resist, and if Germany (predictably) reacted by attacking Poland. The manoeuvre made an entirely voluntary war look like a response to aggression and a matter of honour. Had Halifax or Chamberlain known that a Nazi–Soviet pact would be made in August 1939 or that France would collapse in weeks once attacked, they would never have done this. But they did not know, and so an attempt to reassert our position as a Great Power in Europe ended in a world war. And at the end of that world war, we were no longer a Great Power in Europe or anywhere else, and very lucky to have escaped having to sign a humiliating peace with Hitler.
But the chess game worked well on its own terms. Opinion in Britain moved from reluctance to go to war to a grudging but definite feeling that Germany must be fought. The transformation was very extensive. Some of those who had been near-pacifists in early 1939, such as George Orwell, became warlike patriots, drilling with the Home Guard in the summer of 1940. Orwell was perhaps quicker than some on the Left to do so, because his experiences in Spain had alerted him to the real, cynical nature of pro-Soviet Communism. Those whose main concern had been the survival of the USSR became patriots a little later, in the summer of 1941, when Hitler invaded the USSR and turned Stalin, whether he or we liked it or not, into our gallant ally.
But Hitler did not want Hogg, Hogg did not want Hitler – and the Left Was Never Right. The Left still like to think that the 1939 war belongs to them, that it was their outrage at Hitler which finally drove the appeasers into action. This is one of the reasons why they have since sentimentalised the war and falsified its history. But it is not true. It was in fact Neville Chamberlain’s Tories who rearmed the country and manoeuvred Britain into its first People’s War.