SURVEYORS establishing landmarks work from several known reference points, and those who wish to view the past in perspective may adopt a similar technique. In the mid-1930s Europe’s anticipation of the future began its swing from the unthinkability of war to the thinkability of it to the fatalistic acceptance of its inevitability. The omens were unmistakable. In March 1935 Hitler had announced that Germany was rearming; eleven days after Baldwin replaced MacDonald as prime minister in June the calamitous Anglo-German Naval Agreement was signed; and, after the Tory landslide in November, the redemption of Hoare’s vow came due. Dead ahead lay the three pivotal crises: Ethiopia, the Rhineland, and Spain.
Using a boundary dispute as an excuse, Italy had begun its east African buildup in February 1935. Emperor Haile Selassie withdrew his troops twenty miles behind his frontier to avoid the kind of incident Mussolini was seeking, but the Duce would not be denied; he declared that he intended to use every weapon at hand, including poison gas, which had been outlawed by international convention. Hoare’s warning speech in Geneva was delivered on September 11, a month before the fighting began. The historian of the league wrote that “it would be difficult to exaggerate the effect of his electrifying address, putting Mussolini on notice.”1
It was Hoare’s finest hour, though he hadn’t meant it to be; to the end of his life he insisted that the world had simply misunderstood him, he hadn’t intended to sound resolute. The fact is that he had been carried away by his own rhetoric. It had been his intention to suggest obliquely that if the league should censure any rupture of the Ethiopian frontier, invoking mild sanctions against Italy, the Duce might be bluffed into backing off. This, in Hoare’s words, would infuse “new life” into the league’s “crippled body.” But bluffs work only if the other side thinks them real. And Italian intelligence agents, after burgling the British embassy in Rome, knew Britain had no intention of using force—had, in fact, no force available to use. Royal Navy ships routinely cruised the Mediterranean, but none carried ammunition. Therefore Mussolini felt quite safe when, as it was reported to Hoare, he appeared on his balcony, jutted his jaw to the cheers of the throng below, and cried that Britain was trying to “rob” Italians of “a place in the sun.”2
Churchill’s steady eye was still fixed on Nazi Germany. England and France needed allies, and the best possible solution to that problem was a strong, united League of Nations. Compared with Hitler’s Reich, he told Parliament, Ethiopia was “a very small matter.” Nevertheless, he had read with pride that the foreign secretary had taken a stand for the independence of the ancient mountain kingdom confronting Italian invasion. It was, he said, a matter of honor. The League of Nations was “fighting for its life. Probably it is fighting for all our lives. But it is fighting.” He believed that the league “has passed from shadow into substance, from theory into practice, from rhetoric into reality. We see a structure always majestic, but hitherto shadowy, which is now being clothed with life and power, and endowed with coherent thought and concerted action. We begin to feel the beatings of a pulse which may, we hope, some day… restore a greater measure of health and strength to the whole world.”3
Actually, he was troubled. His feelings about the issue were far more ambivalent than he publicly acknowledged. In the last war the Allies had barely beaten the Germans with Italy on their side. Backing the league made sense if all the member nations observed its covenant. If they didn’t, Britain’s stand would prove disastrous, for Italy would be alienated. And Ethiopia was not, in his view, a moral issue. Like most men of his generation, he regarded blacks as an inferior race. In Cuba, fresh out of Sandhurst, he had written that he distrusted “the negro element among the insurgents.” He never outgrew this prejudice. Late in life he was asked whether he had seen the film Carmen Jones. He had walked out on it, he replied, because he didn’t like “blackamoors.”4
Berlin, not Rome, remained the enemy capital. To him Ethiopia was a “wild land of tyranny, slavery, and tribal war.” He later wrote: “In the fearful struggle against rearming Nazi Germany which I could feel approaching… I was most reluctant to see Italy estranged, and even driven into the opposite camp.” Moreover, Britain and France were in an awkward position. Arguably they were Italy’s accomplices, because in April at Stresa they had not done what they ought to have done. At the end of the conference Mussolini had made a point of excluding Africa from the mutual agreement to abstain from aggression. The Allied diplomats decided not to argue the point. In Churchill’s words, “Everyone was so anxious for Mussolini’s support in dealing with Germany that it was felt undesirable at that moment to warn him off Abyssinia, which would obviously have very much annoyed him.”5
Now they were facing the consequences. On August 21, when east Africa’s rainy season was still holding Italian troops in check, Hoare and Eden, now minister for League of Nations affairs, had approached Winston for his advice. According to Hoare’s record of their talk, Churchill had “showed himself deeply incensed at the Italian action,” had “urged reinforcement of Britain’s Mediterranean Fleet,” and, above all, had stressed the need for “collective” action—not in the service of the league’s ideals, but because of his “main interest in the League as a defence against Hitler.” Churchill explained, noted Hoare, that “if the League now collapsed in ignominy,” it would mean “the destruction of the bond that unites British and French policy and of the instrument that might in the future be chiefly effective as a deterrent to German aggression.”6
He said as much in Parliament, supporting Hoare’s pledge because the integrity of the league was at stake, but adding that he could not envisage Haile Selassie in the role of martyr. “No one,” he said, “can keep up the pretense that Abyssinia is a fit, worthy, and equal member of a league of civilized nations.” The sanctity of the League Covenant was still paramount, however; he proposed that the British government leave no doubt in Mussolini’s mind that England was prepared to observe the covenant “even to the point of war.”7
The issue was moot and still is. As Telford Taylor writes: “In retrospect, it seems that the wisest course, if bold, would have been to play the game of collective security to the hilt and bring Mussolini down, even if it meant a war, in which Italy would have had no allies. But benefit might also have been derived from a more cautious, if cynical, policy of keeping the Duce on the side of the angels in Europe by allowing him a bit of deviltry in Africa.”8
As it happened, neither course had been given a chance. In “The Hollow Men” T. S. Eliot had written:
Between the idea
And the reality…
Falls the shadow.
Rome’s new legions struck southward from Eritrea on October 3, 1935, erupting across the frontier in a festive mood, trumpets blaring and huge battle flags rippling overhead. But even before they could reach Haile Selassie’s troops the banners were discarded, the trumpets mute, and the Duce’s gladiators bogged down in the wild, pathless terrain. Then the African defenders, attacking to drive them back, proved unexpectedly fierce. Evelyn Waugh described the Italian fighting, if that is the word for it, in his satirical Scoop. But events in the diplomatic arena were even more absurd. The British delegation in Geneva rallied the support of fifty nations in condemning Italy as the aggressor. Asked how far he would go in backing the covenant, Churchill replied, “The whole way with the whole lot.”9
The league voted overwhelmingly to impose economic sanctions upon the Italians, but Baldwin’s list of sanctions suggested that the prime minister had developed a bizarre taste for black humor. Among the items denied to the aggressor were camels, mules, donkeys, and aluminum—a metal so available in Italy that it constituted one of the country’s chief exports. Unmentioned were the raw materials essential to the waging of war: steel, iron, coal, and, most remarkably, oil. Had they been deprived of petroleum, Mussolini’s mechanized columns would have vanished in the ravines and chasms separating them from the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. Indeed, had Baldwin been serious, he could have achieved an even quicker end to the Italian offensive by simply closing the Suez Canal to the Duce. It was suggested. Eden and his colleagues in Geneva answered that if Mussolini’s patience were tried he might lose his temper and spread the war to the Continent, or launch a “mad dog” assault on His Majesty’s Mediterranean Fleet.
This opéra bouffe gained in lunacy as it went along. Ice skating was Hoare’s passion. En route to Switzerland, and accompanied by Vansittart, he broke his journey on Saturday, December 7, to confer with France’s premier, Pierre Laval. Together they concocted a plan which would end the Ethiopian war by ceding two-thirds of the country to Italy—including vast tracts she could never win by force of arms—leaving Haile Selassie with the remainder of his territory and a corridor through Italian territory to the Red Sea. If Mussolini balked, the emperor would be given a different corridor running through the adjoining colonies of Britain or France. Elated, Hoare entrained for the Swiss village of Zuoz, laced on his skates, glided across the frozen lake, and fell, breaking his nose. Churchill, upon learning of the cynical intrigue in Paris, growled, “Too bad it wasn’t his neck.”10
The conspirators had agreed to keep their scheme secret until their governments had approved of it, but Paris-Soir acquired the complete text before Hoare even reached Zuoz, and on Monday the details were on every front page in the world. Churchill was in Majorca. Friends persuaded him that he was lucky to be abroad, so he decided to stay outside Barcelona, painting and writing in the serene countryside. There was no serenity in England; in the House a Labourite proposed that a new sign be erected over the league portals: “Abandon half, all ye who enter here—half your territory, half your prestige.” In a letter to The Times, Harold Macmillan declared that were the Hoare-Laval plan approved, Britain would be party to a conspiracy “to undermine the very structure which a few weeks ago the nation authorized us to underpin. I have never attended the funeral of a murdered man, but I take it that at such a ceremony some distinction is made between the mourners and the assassins.”11
The Hoare-Laval scheme, a loser from the beginning, now became an albatross. Mussolini, Haile Selassie, Baldwin, and Laval’s cabinet all denounced it. On December 17 Randolph sent his father a full account. Relations between the two were strained—and would soon be strained further—but Churchill had found his son a resourceful reporter. Randolph wrote that “Baldwin, Hoare, and Vansittart” had “planned this shameful surrender,” and “are extraordinarily confident of the outcome.” Outraged public opinion on the other side of the Channel forced Laval from office, and the day after Randolph’s report the British cabinet voted overwhelmingly—Neville Chamberlain was the sole exception—to demand Hoare’s resignation. Desmond Morton wrote to Churchill: “Baldwin has completely lost every shred of confidence. He is believed to have sacrificed his friend, not because that friend made an error in method, but because he believed it was the only hope of saving his own skin.”12
In hindsight it seems that Churchill’s wisest course would have been to reject his friends’ advice and return to London the moment the scandal broke. But he still believed his chances of reaching office were greater if he kept his sword sheathed and let others attack the prime minister. Indeed, from October 1935 to March 1936 he neither wrote nor spoke a single word criticizing the prime minister in public. Even his memoirs are bland on the Hoare-Laval deal; he merely comments that Vansittart, preoccupied with the Nazi menace, wanted to strengthen the Anglo-French entente “with Italy in their rear a friend and not a foe.”13
Perhaps the most perceptive glimpse of Churchill during the Ethiopian crisis is provided by Vincent Sheean, the American foreign correspondent. Sheean, like Churchill, Lloyd George, the writer Michael Arlen—and, later, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor—was a friend of Maxine Elliott, a rich retired actress whose white, terraced villa in Cannes, the Château de l’Horizon, offered exotic asylum to celebrities.
“Churchill first became visible to me,” Sheean wrote, “in a red bathrobe over bathing trunks; he wore a large, flopping straw hat, and slippers and a cherubic grin.” He was defensive on the Ethiopia issue, but never evasive. When an elegant Frenchwoman pointed out that the British Empire had been built by the sort of small wars Italy was now waging, Winston smiled benevolently and said: “Ah, but you see, all that belongs to the unregenerate past, is locked away in the limbo of the old, the wicked days. The world progresses.” That, he said, explained the purpose of the League of Nations. Winston declared that the Duce was “making a most dangerous and foolhardy attack upon the whole established structure.” The results were “quite incalculable. Who is to say what will come of it in a year, or two, or three? With Germany arming at breakneck speed, England lost in a pacifist dream, France corrupt and torn by dissension, America remote and indifferent—Madame, my dear lady, do you not tremble for your children?”14
In such company he never criticized His Majesty’s Government, but his letters are full of it. After four days with Lloyd George at the Hotel Mamounia in Marrakech, he wrote Clementine that Britain was “getting into the most terrible position, involved definitely by honour & by contract in almost any quarrel that can break out in Europe” with her “defences neglected” and the cabinet “less capable a machine for conducting affairs that I have ever seen.” He believed that the “Baldwin-MacDonald regime has hit this country very hard indeed, and may well be the end of its glories.”15
Clemmie replied that “I really would not like you to serve under Baldwin, unless he really gave you a great deal of power and you were able to inspire and vilify the Government.” The political situation at home, she wrote, was “depressing.” She saw, as he did not, how powerful his position would be if, when his hour struck, he were free of any tainted association with the appeasers. Afterward he agreed, writing of his years in the wilderness: “Now one can see how lucky I was. Over me beat the invisible wings.” Anthony Eden, less fortunate, emerged slightly stained. He had nearly resigned when he learned of the Hoare-Laval agreement, but Baldwin persuaded him to remain and then appointed him foreign secretary. Eden was only thirty-eight. He looked like a man of the future. But Churchill thought him a poor choice. He wrote home: “I expect the greatness of his office will find him out.”16
It was Eden, in his new role, who had to tell the House that what Austen Chamberlain had described as the Ethiopian “madness” was over. It wasn’t quite; but clearly the old kingdom was doomed to become an Italian colony. Lloyd George rose in a terrible fury. He said: “I have never before heard a British Minister… come down to the House of Commons and say that Britain was beaten… and that we must abandon an enterprise we had taken in hand.” He pointed at the front bench. “Tonight we have had the cowardly surrender, and there are the cowards.”17
In itself, the seven-month Ethiopian war was of little consequence. But the implications of the Hoare-Laval fiasco were far-reaching. By the time Haile Selassie’s capital fell, the League of Nations had been destroyed as a force for peace and a referee of international disputes. At the same time, British hopes for an Anglo-Italian alliance, based on Mussolini’s determination to keep Austria free of Nazi rule, had vanished in the quarreling between London and Rome. Neville Chamberlain, Baldwin’s designated successor, had written off collective security as a bad debt. The Stresa Front, the Duce’s handiwork, lay in ruins, and though he himself was to blame, he resigned from the league in a blind rage and sent his son-in-law and foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, to Hitler’s Berghof retreat on the Obersalzberg, overlooking the resort town of Berchtesgaden. Informal discussions there led to serious talks in Berlin. The climax came in a fateful speech by Mussolini, delivered in Milan’s Piazza del Duomo on November 1, 1936. In it he added a phrase to history, declaring, “The Berlin conversations have resulted in an understanding between our two countries…. This Rome-Berlin line is not a diaphragm but rather an axis around which can revolve all those European states with a will to collaboration and peace.” “Rome-Berlin Axis” would be on front pages all over the world for the next seven years. Thus Germany, though uninvolved throughout, was the one beneficiary of the Ethiopian travesty. The naval treaty with Britain had been Hitler’s first giant step in freeing his country from the diplomatic quarantine imposed on it after he had violated treaties bearing the signatures of Germany’s leaders. Now two clumsy Allied politicians had freed him of that odium. In foreign chancelleries, at least, the Reich was once more respected as a great power.18
Today Hoare’s conspiracy with Laval would mean the destruction of his political career. But fifty years ago members of the old boy network could survive almost any disgrace. Hoare’s career was switched to a siding, but Baldwin had already marked him down as the next first lord of the Admiralty, and subsequently he served as home secretary, lord privy seal, secretary for air, and ambassador to Spain, after which he moved over to the House of Lords as Viscount Templewood. The great mass of the British people had a short memory and paid little attention to upper-class quid pro quo. In 1935 Baldwin merely advised Hoare to lie low for the present. The future viscount understood; he knew the rules; he must stiffen his lip and do his penance when old friends declined to be seen with him just now.
He was, therefore, startled to receive a graceful letter, bearing a Morocco postmark, from Winston Churchill. Winston wrote “to congratulate you on the dignity of yr speech of resignation, & to tell you how vy sorry I am at what has happened…. After so much work & worry I daresay the breathing space will be welcome.” Like the hypochondriac who always arrives at the bedside of the sick, Winston rarely failed to provide consolation for political casualties. But Hoare was uncomforted. That same day he had been subjected to the unkindest cut of all—and from his sovereign at that. Following the timeless custom, he had resigned his office by riding to Buckingham Palace and surrendering his seals of office to King George V. The King said: “Do you know what they’re all saying? No more coals to Newcastle, no more Hoares to Paris!” When Eden arrived to kiss hands and claim the seals, the monarch repeated his royal jest and added that he had been puzzled by Hoare’s response. “You know,” he said, “the fellow didn’t even laugh.”19
Churchill had ended his letter to Hoare: “We are moving into a year of measureless perils.” The first blow of 1936 was the death of the King, at Sandringham, in January. Winston was still in Morocco when he learned of it from a News of the World cable, which offered him £1,000—three times an MP’s annual salary—to write a tribute to George V. He dictated the piece to Mrs. Pearman on a train between Tangier and Marrakech and dispatched it only three days after the new monarch, Edward VIII, had begun his reign. Winston had known Edward for twenty-five years, and to his “joyous and gay” memories of their long association, as he now wrote him, there was also the “hope that Your Majesty’s name will shine in history as the bravest and best beloved of all the sovereigns who had worn the island Crown.”20
Within hours of his return to London he was engulfed in politics. Since Hitler’s early days in power, Churchill had been urging Baldwin to create a new cabinet post, a minister of defense who would coordinate all three services. Support for the office had been growing in Parliament ever since, and now Baldwin agreed. But who would he name? Most MPs didn’t even ask; the appointment of Churchill was assumed. Austen Chamberlain wrote his sister: “In my view there is only one man who by his studies, and special abilities, and aptitudes, is marked for it, and that man is Winston Churchill.” At one time or another Churchill had borne ministerial responsibility for the War Office, the Admiralty, and the RAF. The previous November, when he had been excluded from the post-election cabinet shake-up, Harold Nicolson had written in his diary: “Clemmie tells me that Winston has not yet been approached. It looks as if he were going to be left out till February.” It was February now. H. A. Gwynne of the Morning Post, a harsh critic of Churchill for over twenty years, nevertheless took the matter as “settled.” Harold Macmillan and Lord Castlereagh were openly backing him, and Cavalcade magazine reported that even “left-wing Conservatives, who were hostile to Winston over the India question, now take the line that if there must be a defence minister, Winston Churchill is the man.” Anthony Crossley, a young Conservative MP, parodied the arguments against Churchill’s appointment:
But Winston were worst, with his logic accursed
For he’ll scorn our impartial endeavour.
He’ll make up his mind, right or wrong, with the first,
And how shall we temporise ever?
Let’s have soldier or sailor or peer or civilian,
Whatever his faults, so they not be Churchillian.21
The inner circle around Baldwin—the members, so to speak, of the Dear Vicar’s congregation—were not amused. They were thinking along other lines. Secretary to the Cabinet Hankey wanted a “sound man,” someone who “will work and not upset the psychology of the whole machine.” Warren Fisher, permanent under secretary of the Treasury, thought that the minister “should be a disinterested type of man, with no axe to grind or desire to make a place for himself”—a qualification which would have ruled out every gifted man in the House. Hoare, untouched by the letter which had wished him well in his dark hour, sang Churchill’s dispraises with the prime minister and emerged to write Neville Chamberlain jubilantly: “On no account would he [Baldwin] contemplate the possibility of Winston in the Cabinet for several obvious reasons, but chiefly for the risk that would be involved by having him in the Cabinet when the question of his (S.B.’s) successor became imminent.” News of this reached Chartwell. Sir Roger Keyes wrote Churchill that, encountering Baldwin in one of Westminster’s halls, he had told him that Churchill “would be a very good appointment both in your interests and those of the Country.” “I cannot only think of my interests,” Baldwin remarked, turning away. “I have to think of the smooth working of the machine.” The two minds—one preoccupied with the country, the other with the party machine—could not meet.22
Churchill, at Chartwell, remained on tenterhooks. He wrote Clemmie on February 21: “There is no change in the uncertainty about my affairs. Evidently B. desires above all things to avoid bringing me in. This I must now recognize. But his own position is much shaken, & the storm clouds gather.” She replied: “My darling, Baldwin must be mad not to ask you to help him. Perhaps it is a case of ‘Those whom the Gods wish to destroy….’ ” Ten days later he wrote her: “The Defence business is at its height. Baldwin is still undecided…. Now this morning the DT [Daily Telegraph] comes out as the enclosed, wh is the most positive statement yet & the latest—& from a normally well-informed quarter. Anyhow I seem to be still en jeu.”23
Baldwin didn’t want Churchill, but since the Ethiopian debacle his prestige had dwindled, and support for Winston was growing in the House and in Fleet Street. It was at this moment, when events hung in a delicate balance, that Winston was sandbagged by his impetuous son. Churchill had a premonition of disaster from this quarter. On the day after Christmas he had written Randolph from Rabat: “It would in my belief be vy injurious to me at this junction if you publish articles attacking the motives & character of Ministers, especially Baldwin & Eden. I hope therefore you will make certain this does not happen. If not, I shall not be able to feel confidence in yr loyalty & affection for me.”24
Randolph honored his father’s request; he wrote no pieces critical of anyone else in the government. He did something worse. He announced that he would stand for Parliament, running against the national government’s incumbent—Ramsay MacDonald’s son Malcolm, a member of Baldwin’s cabinet. Winston wrote Clemmie that Randolph had “put a spoke in my wheel.” Later he wrote her: “You will see how unfortunate and inconvenient such a fight is to me. ‘Churchill v MacDonald.’ ” It was worse: Lord Rothermere, the press lord, had assigned Baldwin’s son Oliver “to write up Randolph, which he is apparently ready to do, and to write down Malcolm…. So we shall have Ramsay’s son, Baldwin’s son, and my son—all mauling each other in this remote constituency.” Churchill was apprehensive that the prime minister might interpret Randolph’s candidacy “as a definite declaration of war by me.” Then he surmised that no other interpretation was possible: “I should think that any question of my joining the Government was closed by the hostility which Randolph’s campaign must excite.” Yet he still hoped for a post.25
Winston did not appear in Scotland to speak for his son. He wanted to; Brendan Bracken advised against it. They compromised by agreeing that Churchill should release a brief statement to the press, concluding with the mild observation that with “parliamentary government under grievous challenge in the present age… undue pressure should not be put by the Central Government upon a free choice of the constituency.” That fell far short of a ringing endorsement, but the assumption that he was behind his son’s challenge remained. The Times as much as said so. Winston wrote the proprietor of the paper that he was “surprised to read in the leading article of Saturday’s ‘Times’ on the Ross and Cromarty by election, an insinuation that I had prompted my Son’s candidature. As a matter of fact, I strongly advised him to have nothing to do with it. Naturally, as a Father, I cannot watch his fight… without sympathy; but I am taking no part in it…. In these circumstances the innuendo of your leading article is neither true nor fair.”26
But the skeptics included the Scots voters, who, when they went to the polls, turned the contest into a rout. Malcolm MacDonald’s victory was extraordinary. Of the 17,343 votes cast, 2,427—less than 14 percent—were for Randolph. Boothby wrote Winston that while he was “sorry,” he believed that “a little chastening at this particular juncture will not necessarily be to his ultimate disadvantage.” There was, Boothby continued, “more sympathy & friendly feeling” for Randolph “than he suspects. But, my God, you don’t challenge that machine with impunity.” The Edinburgh Evening News wrote bitingly: “By emphasizing the unpopularity of the Churchillians’ attitude, the decisive defeat of Mr Randolph Churchill in Ross and Cromarty seems to be regarded as another nail in the political coffin of Mr Winston Churchill, either as a candidate for the Admiralty or Cabinet Minister charged with the coordination of Defence Services.” Friends visiting Chartwell were careful to avoid any mention of the by-election, though they could see Winston’s hurt, a wound sharper than any inflictable by a serpent’s tooth.27
The prime minister thought Winston lacked judgment. Yet on his instructions, the cabinet was taking the first of the steps Churchill had demanded. On March 3, the government published a new Defence White Paper, revealing plans to build an aircraft carrier, two new battleships, and five battle cruisers; recruit six thousand Royal Navy ratings; raise four motorized infantry battalions; modernize antiaircraft defense and field artillery; and build 224 more Spitfires and Hurricanes. Fleet Street called it a bid for carte blanche, and indeed the White Paper itself declared: “Any attempt to estimate the total cost of the measures would be premature.”28
Backbenchers were startled. It seemed hardly possible that such a program could get past the Exchequer without Neville’s approval. Nor had it. He had suggested the vague wording, reasoning that “it would probably be advisable to avoid figures which could be added up to a larger amount than public opinion is expecting.” The appropriation endorsed by the cabinet was £400 million, to be spread over the next five years. Since Nazi Germany was spending over twice that much on arms every year, the outlay which troubled Chamberlain seems rather less than exorbitant. It was in fact quite inadequate; RAF strength would rise from 1,512 front-line aircraft to only 1,736. To Churchill a strong England was one capable of defending itself. To Chamberlain it meant balanced budgets. “The British government,” in the words of A. J. P. Taylor, “still lived in the psychological atmosphere of 1931: more terrified of a flight from the pound than of defeat in war…. The confidence of the City of London came first; armaments came second.” Furthermore, the program outlined in the White Paper specified that it must be carried out “without impeding the course of normal trade.” In other words, Britain would observe business as usual.29
Although the step was in the right direction, Churchill told Parliament on March 10, it was far too short. He could not feel that the new policy “has done full justice to the anxiety which the House feels about the condition of our national defences.” Money was irrelevant and should not even be a consideration: “When things are left as late as this, no high economy is possible. That is the part of the price nations pay for being caught short.” Churchill had been startled to read in the press, and even to hear remarks in the House smoking room, “giving a general impression that we are over-hauling Germany now…. The contrary is true. All this year and probably for many months next year Germany will be outstripping us more and more.” It would “not be possible for us to overtake Germany and achieve air parity, as was so solemnly promised,” until the Germans reached a saturation point and decided to end expansion of the Luftwaffe. Then England could bridge the gap. “But this day will be fixed by Germany, and not by us, whatever we do.” He believed that if London and Paris acted promptly, as he later wrote, there was “still time for an assertion of collective security.” But “virtuous motives, trammelled by inertia and timidity, are no match for armed and resolute wickedness. A sincere love of peace is no excuse for muddling hundreds of millions of humble folk into total war. The cheers of weak, well-meaning assemblies soon cease to echo, and their votes soon cease to count. Doom marches on.”30
Doom appears in many forms, but none more naked than fixed bayonets. Even as Labour and Liberal pacifists were fuming that Baldwin, prodded by the warmonger Churchill, was returning England to its militant, imperialist past, genuine militarism was forming ranks on a riverbank 375 miles to the east. On the moonbright Rhine it was Friday, March 6, 1936. Night was thickening. In London’s Savoy ballroom that evening, couples were dancing to the popular American tune “Red Sails in the Sunset.” Across the Atlantic, where it was still afternoon, teenagers leaving school were arguing over the Lucky Strike Hit Parade’s ranking of “In the Chapel by the Moonlight,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” and “Pennies from Heaven.” In Atlanta Margaret Mitchell, an obscure newspaperwoman, was correcting proof for her first novel—she had named her heroine Pansy and titled the book Tomorrow Is Another Day, but her editor had changed them to Scarlett and Gone with the Wind. Meanwhile, for the first time since 1918, the hobnailed boots of German soldiers would march. Adolf Hitler’s first invasion would begin at daybreak.
After the failure of his Austrian coup two years earlier, the Führer had been looking for a quick military victory elsewhere, and increasingly he had found himself looking westward, toward the Rhineland. Although it was the French who had christened this seventeen-year-old state la région zone démilitaire, it remained a part of the Reich, inhabited by Germans and including within its borders some of their greatest cities—Cologne, Aachen, Frankfurt, and Düsseldorf—industrial hubs separated by lovely vineyards producing some of the world’s finest wines. Here the Versailles peacemakers had carved out, from land on both banks of the Rhine, a strip of territory thirty-one miles wide. French troops had occupied the zone after the war but left early at British urging. Under the treaty, Germany was forbidden to billet troops or build fortifications there. The buffer had been designed to provide France and Belgium with security, or at least a warning, should the Germans decide to give the Schlieffen Plan a second try and knife swiftly westward. Even more important, the zone was the keystone to France’s arch of postwar alliances with Poland and Czechoslovakia. If the Germans attacked eastward, the French could race across the Rhineland and strike at the Ruhr, the Reich’s industrial heartland and the center of its armaments works, including Krupp’s flagship plant, the Gusstahlfabrik, in Essen.
At Versailles the losers had had no choice, but six years later Germany had freely joined the Locarno Pact, accepting the demilitarized zone as a permanent buffer. Should German troops enter the zone under any pretext, the Locarno agreement provided, they would be guilty of “an unprovoked act of aggression,” and the other European powers bound by Locarno—France, Britain, Belgium, and Italy—would have not only the right, but the duty, to expel them from the Rhineland by force. Before 1914 generations of Rhinelander children had been taught to sing “Die Wacht am Rhein,” with its rousing challenge: “The Rhine, the Rhine, the German Rhine! Who guards tonight our Stream Divine?” In Wilhelmine Germany the reply had always been: the Sword of Germany. But for the past eighteen years guards had been unnecessary, for under Locarno soldiers of France or Belgium who entered the buffer would also have been guilty of une violation de propriété. The zone was one of the few postwar political achievements blessed by the Führer; as late as his Friedensrede of May 21, 1935, delivered to the Reichstag, he had hailed the unarmed Rhineland as the Third Reich’s “contribution” to European peace. The Reich, he had solemnly declared, would “unconditionally respect” the “territorial” provisions of Versailles and the pledge, freely made by the republic of Germany at Locarno, to honor the inviolability of the Rhineland.31