Churchill was suspicious. The Führer, he believed, was likelier to remain faithful to his “great lie” credo, set forth in Mein Kampf. Winston had adopted, as a working thesis, the assumption that any given foreign policy statement by Hitler was the exact opposite of the truth. On January 17, eight months after the May Friedensrede, he wrote Clemmie that if his intelligence sources were right, the Führer was planning a major announcement which “may well be that Germany will… reoccupy the neutral zone with troops and forts.” Should that happen, he wrote, the French with British help would be obliged to drive the invaders out. He added: “Baldwin and Ramsay, guilty of neglecting our defences in spite of every warning, may well feel anxious not only for the public but for their own personal skins.”32
He was wrong about the British reaction but right about Hitler’s intentions. Three weeks before promising to respect the territorial integrity of the Rhineland, the Führer had ordered the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht), the high command of Germany’s armed forces, to draw up plans for seizing it. The operation was encoded Schulung (Schooling) and was, according to the Führer, to be “executed by a surprise blow at lightning speed,” with “only the very smallest number of officers” to be informed. Meanwhile he was building an excuse for aggression. He began with the same Reichstag speech, observing, in an aside, that the mutual assistance treaty between France and Russia, initialed two months previously but not yet ratified by the Chamber of Deputies, would alter the status of Locarno by introducing “an element of insecurity.”33
The French government knew what was coming. As early as October 21, 1935, the Deuxième Bureau informed the ministry that German troops were “actively preparing” to invade the zone; on October 21 the French high command sent an alert to the Quai: “The hypothesis of a German repudiation of the Rhineland statutes must be envisaged before the autumn of 1936, at the latest.” The most plausible warnings came from the able French ambassador in Berlin. After a lengthy talk with the Führer in November, André François-Poncet wrote that Hitler had lost his temper “dans une longue tirade contre le pacte franco-soviétique qu’il considérait comme criminel.” François-Poncet was convinced that Hitler now awaited only the appropriate moment to attack.34
Laval wired the French ambassador in London on January 11, 1936, advising him that four German divisions had been moved to the Rhineland’s border. In Whitehall, the FO acknowledged receipt of the message but made no comment. A week later Laval and his cabinet learned from General Maurice Gamelin, the French commander in chief, that intelligence reports left little doubt that the Germans would invade the zone “as soon as possible.” Again the British were informed; again the FO was unresponsive. This silence troubled Pierre-Étienne Flandin, who had succeeded Laval as ministre des affaires étrangères, and in the last week in January, Flandin crossed the Channel, officially to join the mourners at George V’s state funeral but actually to discuss the approaching crisis with Eden.35
The timing was unpropitious. During the past eight months relations between the two allies had become strained; after the Anglo-German Naval Agreement and the Hoare-Laval affair, France seethed with Anglophobia. “With Hitler against bolshevism!” cried L’Ami du peuple, and in Gringoire the fiery journalist Henri Béraud raged: “I hate England. I hate her by instinct and by tradition. I say, and I repeat, that England must be reduced to slavery!” Knowledge of all this had preceded Flandin to London, and diplomatic jargon did not ease the tension. Men charged with managing a nation’s foreign affairs are expected to rise above petty bickering, but Eden’s reception of Flandin on Monday, January 27, 1936, was frosty. On Tuesday the Frenchman talked to Baldwin. Flandin had come to ask precisely what Britain planned to do if Hitler attempted to seize the Rhineland. To his consternation, neither Englishman would say. When he pressed them, they countered by asking him what France would do. It was hardly the sort of encouragement one is entitled to expect from an ally.36
Eden’s own account of the French minister’s mission is almost self-incriminating. To Flandin’s question, he wrote, he had “replied that the French attitude to a violation of the Rhineland was clearly a matter for the judgment of the French government…. If they wished to negotiate with Hitler, they should do so; if they intended to repel a German invasion of the zone, they should lay their military plans. Any forcible action would depend on France.” His “impression” was that “while not prepared to use force to defend the zone,” his French guest had been “equally reluctant to negotiate about it.” The young foreign secretary even entertained the uncharitable thought that Flandin “might be tempted” to “put the blame for inaction on either count elsewhere.” In a cable to the British ambassador in Paris, Eden warned against “hypothetical” discussions and added: “Taking one thing with another, it seems undesirable to adopt an attitude where we would either have to fight for the zone or abandon it in the face of German reoccupation. It would be preferable for Great Britain and France to enter betimes into negotiations with the German Government for the surrender on conditions of our rights in the zone while such surrender still has bargaining power.”37
None of this makes sense. You cannot bargain rights over territory which you are not prepared to defend. If the Allies meant to surrender the Rhineland—and an invitation to open negotiations would tell the Germans that they did—there was nothing left to discuss. The Germans would know they could march into a void, encountering no opposition. But the appeasers assumed that everyone preferred peace to war.
In the early hours of that Saturday, March 7, 1936, darkness and patchy fog lay over long stretches of the ancient Rhine, a river beloved by German poets and a source of exasperation to foreign conquerors from Caesar to Eisenhower, Bradley, and Montgomery. Despite the hour, few Rhinelanders were asleep. All week hearsay had been spreading among them, gathering in momentum, and it was accurate to the last particular. In Germany even the rumors were precise.
As the first streaks of dawn flushed the sky they heard a faint hum coming from the direction of Berlin. It grew to a growl which reached a thundering crescendo as Messerschmitt fighters, flying in tight V formations and bearing the broken cross of the German Reich on their wings, swarmed out of the eastern sky, circled the spires of Cologne Cathedral, and raced back eastward. Then the infantry began approaching from the right bank. Brawny young soldiers in the old, familiar coal-scuttle helmets crossed the bridges on bicycles and entered the squares of cities and towns in the demilitarized zone. Crowds already gathered there murmured their approval, a susurration which rose to an ovation as German battalions wearing red carnations in their belts goose-stepped over the Rhine and into the square under the eyes of their commanding officers, who stood, in full uniform, their medals twinkling, on small platforms which had miraculously appeared to give them eminence. The Volk in the squares rejoiced. Local Nazi leaders, many of them Oberbürgermeisters, appeared in their sausage-tight Sturmtruppen uniforms to lead the singing:
Deutschland, Deutschland über alles…
And then the Nazi anthem, the “Horst Wessel Song”:
Die Fahne hoch! Die Reihen dicht geschlossen.
S.A. marschiert mit ruhig festem Schritt….
Raise the banners! Stand rank on rank together.
S.A. march on, with steady, quiet tread….38
The entire Rhineland was aflame with excitement, but the world was unaware of Hitler’s move until, at the stroke of noon, he addressed the Reichstag in the Kroll Opera House, his deep, resonant voice thundering that the German Reich no longer felt “bound” by Locarno. Therefore, in the “interests of the basic rights of its people to the security of their frontier and the safeguarding of their defense,” he had “reestablished, as from today, the absolute and unrestricted sovereignty of the Reich in the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland.” The Reichstag exploded in delirium. Its six hundred deputies stiffened their right arms in Hitlergrussen and bellowed “Heil! Heil! Heil! Heil! Heil!” until the Führer raised his hand to silence them. “Men of the German Reichstag!” His deep voice was throbbing now. He vowed at “this historic moment,” while German troops were on the march, that he would never yield to force in “Wiederherstellung der Ehre” (“restoring the honor of our people”). But neither would he threaten other nations. He pledged that “now, more than ever,” he would work toward understanding between the people of all European countries, “particularly our Western neighbor nations.”39
This was Hitler at his wiliest. Here he was speaking, not to the Reichstag, but to Frenchmen, Belgians, Italians, and Britons frightened of bolshevism. In an ingenious distortion of carefully worded state documents, he embroidered his argument that the Russo-French agreement was a breach of Locarno directed against the Reich—that it might even force France to join the Soviet Union in a war against Germany. France, said the Führer, “has destroyed the political system of the [Locarno] pact, not only in theory but in fact.” Then, in a characteristic Friedensrede touch, he offered a string of meaningless carrots: immediate negotiations for a new demilitarized zone on both sides of the Franco-German and Belgo-German frontiers; the return of the Reich to the League of Nations; a twenty-five-year nonaggression pact between France and Germany; nonaggression treaties between the Reich and France, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the smaller countries of eastern Europe. Deeply moved, he paused, his eyes moist and his voice choked. Then he made his last two vows. First, he once more pledged: “Wir haben in Europa keine territorialen Fordernungen zu stellen” (“We have no territorial demands to make in Europe”). And then: “Deutschland wird niemals den Frieden brechen!” (“Germany will never break the peace!”).40
The cheering went on and on, but the diplomats, who had to inform their governments, and the foreign correspondents, who had to tell the world, slipped out. Shirer was among them. He observed a few generals making their way out toward the Tiergarten. Their smiles seemed forced. Then he encountered Blomberg and was shocked at his appearance: “His face was white, his cheeks twitching.” In his diary Shirer wrote: “You could not help detecting a nervousness.”41
War Minister Blomberg, General Fritsch, General Beck, and a handful of other senior members of the army hierarchy were now convinced that Nazi Germany would collapse within a week or less. Blomberg bore the immediate responsibility; hence his pallor and his nervous tic. In deciding to invade the buffer zone Hitler had acted in defiance of their advice. The generals knew that the occupation, stripped of the Führer’s thespian eloquence and his hand-picked, carefully rehearsed battalions now camped on forbidden soil, was a gigantic scam. By canceling leaves and putting every trained poilu into battle dress, France could retake the Rhineland in a matter of hours. Outnumbering the half-trained, inadequately equipped Wehrmacht conscripts ten to one, the French infantrymen would be supported by tanks and the finest artillery in the world. Blomberg had agreed to assume command only after receiving written assurance from the Führer that he could take “any military countermeasures” he felt appropriate. If he so much as glimpsed a single French bayonet, he intended to beat “a hasty retreat” back across the Rhine.42
And that, in the opinion of the Militärbehörden—the senior military authorities on Behrenstrasse—would be the end of Adolf Hitler. How many generals had discussed the approaching debacle and shared in planning how to exploit the aftermath is unknown. Blomberg and Beck were excluded; the disgrace of the Führer would also reflect on the army, they were to be the commanding officers, and if they acknowledged defeat before the operation began, their honor would be compromised. But almost certainly a majority of the Generalstab believed France was committed, by a treaty Hitler had approved, to take military action against the presence of German troops in the demilitarized zone. The moment the French infantry moved, calling his bluff, the same treaty required Britain to support France with her own armed forces. The fledgling Wehrmacht would be routed. Hitler and his Nazis would be the laughingstock of Europe. Once the German people realized that they had been betrayed, a military government would move into the Reich Chancellery pending a constitutional convention and free elections.43
It is impossible to overestimate the strength of the belief within Germany’s officer corps that France’s advantage was overwhelming. Ten years later General Alfred Jodl, who became Hitler’s chief of staff, would testify to it before the Nuremberg tribunal. At the time of the Rhineland coup, he said, “Considering the situation we were in”—they knew Gamelin had thirteen French divisions near the frontier—“the French covering army could have blown us to pieces.” Afterward Hitler himself acknowledged it. His interpreter, Paul Schmidt, heard him say: “A retreat on our part would have spelled collapse.” Still later he said: “The forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-racking [die aufregendste Zeitspanne] in my life. If the French had then marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with shame and disgrace [mit Schimpfe und Schande zurückziehen müssen], for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.”44
But in that blustery March week of 1936, Hitler, unlike his generals, saw the Rhineland as a risk worth taking. How much he knew of the democracies’ impotence is unfathomable, but he had been surprised by the feeble Allied response to his earlier moves. In these years, before he became intoxicated with his own triumphs, his intuitive grasp of how far he could go with Allied leaders was uncanny.
Nearly an hour passed before François-Poncet could cable Flandin a terse summary of Hitler’s new sensation. Premier Albert Sarraut immediately summoned his inner cabinet, including the minister of war, General Joseph-Léon-Marie Maurin, and the constable of France, Généralissime Gamelin. Their talks were already under way when the text of Hitler’s Reichstag speech arrived.45
A large crowd of Parisians had begun to gather outside the Hotel de Ville. They seemed more curious than angry, though P. J. Phillips of the New York Times cabled his foreign editor: “Rather than submit to this last crushing piece of Teutonism France will fight.” That was precisely what the premier and three of his civilian ministers wanted to do, but they had no Bonaparte, nor even a Foch, to lead the troops of their Third Republic. After setting forth the basic facts, Sarraut turned to Gamelin and asked him what the army proposed to do. According to the premier’s testimony before a postwar investigating committee established by the French National Assembly at the insistence of wartime Resistance leaders, the premier expected France’s commander in chief to unroll a map revealing swift, imaginative maneuvers which would drive the intruders back across the Rhine. Instead, Gamelin mildly asked permission to take “les premières mesures de précaution.” Asked what those were, he replied that he wanted to recall soldiers on furlough, move reinforcements toward the frontier, and begin preparations to send up more troops should that seem advisable.46
Sarraut was aghast. Gamelin was planning the classic dispositions of a Saint-Cyrl’École graduate whose native soil is threatened by an invasion. “Naturally,” the généralissime said, “there is no question of forcing the Rhine, on which the Germans are virtually entrenched already.” He then ran through what Sarraut later called “the whole gamut of perils.” If France advanced into the Rhineland, the German riposte would be an “attack on us through Belgium, aerial bombing in Paris… attacks by submarines, artillery bombardment of our Rhine cities, Strasbourg, Mulhouse….” He went on and on. Joseph Paul-Boncour, minister for League of Nations affairs, interrupted to tell the general that he would like to see him in Mainz—a German industrial city ninety miles from the French border—“as soon as possible.” That, Gamelin replied, was “une autre affaire.” He would like nothing better, he added, “but first you must give me the means.”
At first they didn’t understand. As commander in chief he was entrusted with all the military means the country possessed. Maurin entered the discussion; presently the two generals were in animated conversation, and slowly the premier and his civilian ministers comprehended. The soldiers were discussing a mobilisation générale, costing thirty million francs and consisting first of putting a million men in positions which, with the Maginot Line, would permit the army to shield France. But that, the exasperated Sarraut pointed out, wasn’t the problem. There were no signs that the Nazis had designs on French soil, at least not now. They had invaded a buffer zone where no soldier of either nation had the right to bear arms—a neutral land essential to France’s survival and her diplomatic commitments in eastern Europe. The generals looked at one another, shrugged, and spread their hands in a gesture which could only be interpreted as “Hélas, la politique!”47
The baffled premier explained that he simply wanted an opération de police, with Gamelin using his vast superiority in infantry strength, fire-power, and air power—the few Nazi aircraft, unarmed, were based on airstrips too far away to intervene in a swift expulsion. It was an absurdité. The invaders had three battalions; the poilus would overwhelm them. “After all,” Sarraut told his commander in chief, “you have just a symbolic force in front of you.”
Shirer was reporting that “for the first time since 1870 gray-clad German soldiers and blue-clad French troops face each other across the upper Rhine.” The world awaited the response in Paris to this gross violation of Versailles and Locarno. Had it known the truth, it would have been incredulous. The elected leaders of France were begging their high command to put up their fists. And the generals were refusing. Gamelin and Maurin were immovable. The généralissime, backed by his war minister, insisted that his army was “une force purement défensive.” Asked to propose an alternative, he suggested that the government lodge a vigorous protest with the League of Nations.
Sarraut asked Gamelin point-blank: “If we act alone against Germany, without allies, what will be the prospect?” The general said that at first, “given the present conditions,” the French would have “la prépondérance,” but in a long war Germany’s industrial power and numerical superiority might tip the balance.48
There was a long silence as they pondered the implications of this: another four years—perhaps more than four—of trenches, barbed wire, incessant shellfire, attaques en masse which gained a hundred yards at most, “leaving the dead,” as Scott Fitzgerald had written, “like a million bloody rugs,” and the legless or blind stumbling around the country while desperate young widows became streetwalkers. All this, and the possibility that France would be defeated in the end.
Then someone pointed out that the premier had assumed they would be acting without allies. France was allied with Britain in the west, and, in the east, with Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia. Locarno had specifically committed Italy, Belgium, and Britain to support the French in expelling troops or weapons Germany sent into the zone. And the Locarno powers weren’t the only countries affected by Nazi aggression in the Rhineland. Aides were summoned, instructed to place telephone calls; they slipped back with promises of support from the Poles, the Czechs, and the Rumanians. Even Austria, bound to France by no pact, was ready to back her. The Belgians and the Italians had adopted attitudes of cautious reserve.49
France’s most powerful ally, of course, lay across the Channel. “Above all,” as Churchill later observed, the French “had a right to look to Great Britain, having regard to the guarantee… against German aggression, and the pressure we had put upon France for the earlier evacuation of the Rhineland.” His Britannic Majesty’s ambassador to France, Sir George Clark, didn’t wait for a telephone call from a Sarraut aide. On instructions from Anthony Eden, he hastened to the Quai d’Orsay and insisted “très vigoureusement,” according to Flandin, that France take “no military measures which commit the future before prior consultation with the British Government.” Sarraut and Flandin, trying to consult Whitehall by telephone, discovered what Hitler already knew—that on weekends most leaders of the English government were inaccessible. Eden was available but unhelpful. When Charles Corbin, France’s ambassador to London, called on him he was told that no decision could be reached before Monday. Corbin reported to the Quai that Eden had “abstained, despite my insistence, from giving me any indication of his own views.” Corbin had mentioned Britain’s treaty commitment; Eden, he said, had “maintained silence.”50
Sarraut was affronted, but France, lacking a moat to separate her from the Germans, needed Britain more than the British needed her, and after an interval the premier put his pride in his pocket and authorized Flandin to inform the British that rather than take an “isolated position,” the French government preferred “to confer with the other powers party to Locarno.”51
Eden handled the French with a duplicity they did not deserve. Among the information Eden withheld from Flandin was that after lunch on Saturday he had driven to Chequers, the country home of prime ministers. In Eden’s words, “Baldwin said little, as was his wont on foreign affairs. Though personally friendly to France, he was clear in his mind that there would be no support in Britain for any military action by the French. I could only agree.”52
Back in the Foreign Office that afternoon, the foreign secretary drafted a long memorandum for submission to the cabinet Monday morning, and then a statement he would deliver in the House of Commons afterward. Any ultimatum to the Germans, he wrote, or even a strong note demanding that the Wehrmacht evacuate its troops in the buffer zone “should certainly not be made unless the powers concerned are prepared to enforce it by military action.” Hitler’s seizure of the zone, he felt, “has deprived us of a useful bargaining counter”—he was still trapped in that non sequitur—but above all, “We must resist any attempt to apply financial and economic sanctions” against Germany. At this point—and the situation in the zone would remain unchanged throughout the crisis—fewer than five thousand German soldiers had been posted within twenty miles of the French frontier. They were not deployed for battle, and they lacked tank support.53
Eden told Corbin on Sunday that there would be no British reinforcements. Reluctantly he agreed to fly over on Tuesday for talks with other Locarno diplomats, provided “it be understood” that those attending the conference would not be asked to agree “on concrete propositions.” The French minister concluded that France’s only hope of salvation lay in changing Eden’s mind, or in persuading Englishmen who made or influenced the government’s decisions to change it for him.54
That would be difficult. The Daily Herald (Labour) had already insisted that Hitler be taken at his word. Lord Lothian approved of the German invasion, remarking that, “after all, they are only going into their own back garden,” a statement that has been widely, and mistakenly, attributed to The Times. It would not, however, have been out of place there; Dawson’s editorial was headed “A Chance to Rebuild,” and although it opened by describing the Nazi coup as “Herr Hitler’s invasion,” Dawson scorned the “sensationally minded,” who had called it “an act of ‘aggression.’ ” As he saw it, the Germans were understandably afflicted by a “deep, instinctive fear—the dread of encirclement,” and the Rhineland had become, in their eyes, “more than a badge of inferior status, a source of military weakness to a Power which might one day become involved in a war on both sides again.”55
Nancy Astor, Tom Jones, and Attorney General Sir Thomas Inskip were guests that weekend at one of Lord Lothian’s house parties at Blickling Hall. The host and his party prepared a comment on Hitler’s seizure of the Rhineland and telegraphed it to Baldwin. They “wholeheartedly” endorsed the Führer’s act, urged that the Nazi “entrance to the zone” be ignored in the light of peace proposals before the Reichstag, and suggested that seizure of the buffer zone should be regarded as an “assertion… of equality and not an act of aggression.” Tom Jones wrote in his diary that he intended to persuade Baldwin to accept Hitler’s proposal at its face value even before discussing it with the cabinet. Harold Nicolson, a wise diarist, noted that the general mood “is one of fear. Anything to keep out of war…. On all sides one hears sympathy for Germany. It is all very tragic and sad.”56
Ambassador Corbin, listening to Eden’s speech in the diplomatic gallery of the House Monday afternoon, found it discouraging. Thankfully, the foreign secretary said, there was “no reason to suppose that the present German action implies a threat of hostilities.” He scolded the Germans’ disrespect for treaties. The invasion had “profoundly shaken confidence in any engagement into which the Government of Germany may enter”—it is a pity that Neville Chamberlain, sitting beside Eden, did not write that down and commit it to memory—but His Majesty’s Government would study the Führer’s new “peace proposals seriously and objectively” to see whether they would shore up “the structure of peace.”57
Eden flew to Paris accompanied by Lord Halifax and Ralph Wigram, but the conference was sterile. The French foreign minister wanted immediate action—ejecting the Germans from the Rhineland while imposing economic, financial, and military sanctions against the aggressor. Eden noted: “The gravity of Flandin’s statements exceeds anything which has been said before.” He opposed meeting force with force, and to Flandin’s surprise and dismay the Belgian premier agreed. The Italian ambassador, after bitterly reminding them that his country was still under league sanctions, folded his arms, lifted his chin, and spoke not another word.58
As they broke up, Eden said he was “glad that there was no intention of trying to reach decisions at this meeting.” Flandin, who had convened the conference with precisely that intention, looked directly into Eden’s eyes and said prophetically: “Negotiations will end in nothing, or rather, they will sanction a new retreat. And this time the retreat will be decisive, for it will generate a whole series of retreats.”59
The following morning the British cabinet met to hear the foreign secretary’s report. In the Quai, Eden had been bland and elusive, but in Downing Street he could be frank. He said he was convinced that if the Germans were permitted to keep the Rhineland, and to fortify it, war would be inevitable in two years—a war which “would be fought under very unfavourable conditions.” The difficulty, he said, was that Sarraut and Flandin did not reflect the views of the typical Frenchman. France was “pacifist to the core”; in battle she would be an unreliable ally. Alfred Duff Cooper, the new secretary for war, disagreed. He too believed that war was inevitable, but he thought that the time to stand up to Hitler was now. French morale would rise, he thought, once the French army had received its marching orders. According to cabinet minutes, he pointed out that “in three years’ time”—1939—“Germany would have 100 divisions and a powerful fleet.” Even with Parliament’s adoption of the most recent White Paper, England could not match Nazi rearmament stride for stride, and “We should not, relatively, therefore, be in a better position.”60
But the rest of the cabinet, including the prime minister, felt otherwise. Baldwin even opposed an appeal to the League of Nations. At some point, he said, “it would be necessary to point out to the French” that intervention in the Rhineland would not only let loose “another great war…. It would probably… result in Germany going Bolshevik.” The first lord of the Admiralty and the secretary for air acknowledged that their position was “a disadvantageous one.” One of Baldwin’s ministers observed that “public opinion” strongly opposed Allied intervention in the neutral zone. Another concurred. And this was a government whose respect for public opinion was profound. In the end they decided to do nothing. Indeed, Baldwin observed, peace was “worth taking almost any risk.”61
Quiet and efficient, British civil servants were taken for granted by most cabinet ministers, and when political issues arose they were treated brusquely or even ignored, despite the fact that most of them belonged to the same class and had gone to the same schools. Sir Robert Vansittart, forceful, knighted, and destined for a peerage, was an exception. Ralph Wigram was farther down the ladder. In Paris he had sat behind Eden and Halifax, speaking only when asked for a date, a statistic, a protocol, or technical advice. Nevertheless, Wigram had vehemently agreed with Flandin, believing a policy of drift now would be fatal, and afterward he had a private word with him. If the Locarno powers were to reconvene in London Thursday, he asked, why not move the league council’s meeting there, rather than Geneva? The hope of action was small, but whatever the Locarno decision, it would gain prestige if promptly endorsed by the League of Nations. Flandin warmly agreed, and spoke to the others. It was done. But Wigram was still troubled, and once he returned to British soil he drove straight to Chartwell.
Although he was exiled from public life in England, Churchill’s political statements continued to be closely studied in foreign chancelleries by those who sensed that eventually his hour would strike. Adolf Hitler continued to be among them. The Führer loathed Churchill and always spoke of him with undisguised malice, but he could not ignore him. In the beginning his insults were merely ugly. Winston, he said, was “a nervous old hen.” You couldn’t “talk sense” to such a man, the Führer said; he was merely “ein romantischer Phantast”—a romantic dreamer. However, once Churchill opened up with his heavy rhetorical artillery, Hitler’s invective also escalated. “The gift Mr. Churchill possesses is the gift to lie with a pious expression on his face and to distort the truth…. His abnormal state of mind can only be explained as symptomatic of either a paralytic disease or a drunkard’s ravings!” After his offer of nonaggression treaties, meant to blur the jagged edge of his thrust into the Rhineland, Hitler predicted that “only the Churchill clique” would “stand in the way of peace.”62
Actually, the Rhineland crisis had broken at an awkward time for Winston. When the Foreign Office phoned Chartwell and read him a translation of Hitler’s March 7 speech, he instantly saw it for what it was: “comfort for everyone on both sides of the Atlantic who wished to be humbugged.” But because he still expected a summons to No. 10 and a cabinet appointment, he suppressed his most compelling instincts and spared Baldwin’s government.63
In public, and especially in House debates, Churchill was civil, almost subdued. Parliament was amused; Winston, for once, was maneuvering for office. He had been sounding his trumpet of alarm for over three years now. His notes had been clear and true, yet they had neither altered the government’s foreign policy nor slowed the rush toward catastrophe. Since he couldn’t give up, he had redoubled his efforts to wedge his way into a seat at the cabinet table, where, he thought, he could control the clattering train. Winston believed, and virtually every parliamentary correspondent and MP not in office shared his conviction, that he would soon be appointed to the office, still vacant, of minister of defense.
Yet though he had spared the prime minister, Winston had not remained mute after Nazi troops burst into the Rhineland. He and Austen Chamberlain had formed a team, working in tandem to arouse the House by spelling out the consequences if the Nazi coup were to pass unchallenged. Austria would be the Führer’s next objective, Churchill predicted, and Austen pointed out that “if Austria perishes Czechoslovakia becomes indefensible.” Once Hitler had mastered eastern Europe, they both told the House, he would turn westward, stalking France and Britain. Some MPs, Churchill observed, thought the French were exaggerating the danger. He told them: “If we had been invaded four times in a hundred years, we should understand better how terrible that injury is.” In France and Belgium, he said, “the avalanche of fire and steel which fell upon them twenty years ago” was still “an overpowering memory and obsession.” He asked: “How should we feel if—to change the metaphor—we saw a tiger, the marks of whose teeth and claws had scarred every limb of our bodies, coming toward us and crouching within exactly the distance of a single spring?”64
In his diary Neville Chamberlain wrote that Winston had “made a constructive and helpful speech.” On one point, however, Churchill had been adamant, and Neville’s failure to assign it importance, or even mention it, reveals the moral gap between the two men. Both Austen and Winston emphasized Hitler’s grave damage to the sanctity of treaties. Britain, they held, must remain faithful to her every vow. There was, Churchill said, much goodwill in England toward Germany, and an abiding hope that “the three great peoples of Western Europe may join hands in lasting friendship. But”—he paused—“it ought not even to be necessary to state that Great Britain, if called upon, will honor her obligations both under the Covenant of the League and under the Treaty of Locarno.” In an article for the Evening Standard he amplified on this theme, appealing to Hitler “and the great disconsolate Germany he leads,” urging them to place themselves “in the very forefront of civilisation” by “a proud and voluntary submission, not to any single country or group of countries, but to the sanctity of treaties and the authority of public law, by an immediate withdrawal from the Rhineland.” It was like telling Rasputin to use his knife and fork. Still, Churchill had mentioned neither the past nor present sins of the men on the Treasury Bench.65
Wigram, reaching Chartwell late in the evening on Wednesday, March 11, found Churchill eager for news. After listening to an account of the Paris meeting, Winston decided he must talk to Flandin before anyone in the government saw him. Breaking the habit of a lifetime, he rose at dawn and drove to his London flat in Morpeth Mansions. Flandin arrived there by taxi at 8:30 A.M. He told Winston he intended to propose simultaneous mobilization by Britain and France of all land, air, and sea forces; producing a sheaf of papers, he read aloud what Churchill afterward called “an impressive list” of support from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Yugoslavia, Rumania, and the three Baltic states. “There was no doubt,” Churchill wrote, “that superior strength still lay with the Allies of the former war. They had only to act to win.” Winston told the French minister that in his “detached private position” there was little he could do, but he guided him to others, like Duff Cooper, who had a voice in the government, and that evening he gave a dinner for him. Influential Englishmen heard Flandin out and left promising to do what they could.66
Churchill himself had left the table earlier. The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee was holding a late session, and he had asked to be heard. There he repeated his insistence that Britain keep her Geneva and Locarno pledges. Alec Douglas-Home, a future prime minister, took notes at the meeting. He recorded that Winston produced Flandin’s papers and then “drew a dramatic picture of all the countries of Europe hurrying to assist France and ourselves against Germany.” The next speaker was Hoare, who ridiculed Churchill’s argument. “As regards Winston’s references to all the nations of Europe coming to our aid,” he said, “I can only say that in my estimate these nations are totally unprepared from a military point of view.” It was Douglas-Home’s impression that after Churchill had spoken “a substantial proportion” of the committee was “prepared to see this country go to war.” But Hoare, he thought, had “definitely sobered them down.”67
It seems remarkable that no one there sought expert opinion on Germany’s military preparedness. If they were unaware that the Wehrmacht was only a shadow of its future self, they surely knew Hitler had introduced conscription barely a year earlier. Doubtless the smaller countries were unprepared. All Europe was, even the nations that had made a fetish of rearmament; the Italians were proving that in Ethiopia. Nevertheless, all had standing armies of trained men. The MPs can hardly have doubted that Hitler would have backed down if encircled by an alliance of France, Great Britain, and the chain of states, swiftly forged by Flandin, on the Reich’s eastern and southern fronts. It seems strange that Hoare, so recently disgraced, could discredit Churchill with so flimsy an argument.
But all the meetings held in London in that second week of March were peculiar. On Thursday, Neville Chamberlain entered in his diary: “March 12, talked to Flandin, emphasising that public opinion would not support us in sanctions of any kind.” Flandin had replied that at the very least Britain could declare an economic boycott. Neville rejected that, though he offered to give up “a colony” in the interests of peace. The appeasers thought their empire a great bargaining counter, when in fact Hitler wanted none of it. The Third Reich, Ribbentrop had explained to Eden, wanted its Lebensraum (living space) in Europe, preferably to the east. In a deep leather chair at his club, Halifax reread Hitler’s Friedensrede of March 7 and found a passage he had overlooked. In denouncing the Franco-Soviet treaty, the Führer charged that it not only violated Locarno but had also introduced “the threatening military power of a mighty empire into the center of Europe by the roundabout way of Czechoslovakia, which has signed an agreement with Russia.” Halifax rang for a Carlton servant and told him he wanted an atlas with a more detailed map of Czechoslovakia. The man returned empty-handed. The map, he explained, had already been checked out by another member, Neville Chamberlain.68
Policy is often determined in camera, which is why contemporaneous public opinion, formed amidst the convulsion of historic events, is shaped by incomplete, often distorted, information. In London that week of conferences in St. James’s Palace—one of the Locarno powers and the other of the Council of the League of Nations—the press was admitted only to the public meetings. It was at one of them that a friend saw Wigram, sitting at Eden’s side, “looking increasingly disillusioned and depressed.” The entire Foreign Office establishment had been shaken by the government’s failure to respond to Hitler’s challenge. The foreign secretary’s conduct completely baffled them. And a few of them decided to tell him so. On the initiative of Rex Leeper, they converged on Eden’s Whitehall office. He told them he shared their concern. But he doubted that the British people were ready for war. Most of the FO believed that Hitler’s Friedensrede offer of nonaggression treaties was fraudulent, and that his invasion of the Rhineland was as great a threat to England as an invasion of Belgium; greater, say, than a conquest of Austria.69
Leeper therefore proposed a nationwide campaign to awaken all Britain to the Nazi menace, persuading the country to “abandon an attitude of defeatism vis-à-vis Germany.” The need, he said, was for “bold and frank speeches, not hesitating to call a spade a spade and not shirking from unpleasant truths.” Eden agreed, but on reflection decided that the idea was impractical. It would divide the country and politicize the Foreign Office. In the end Leeper and his colleagues decided to turn to Churchill. He would lead, and they would support him behind Baldwin’s back.70
Wigram couldn’t wait. Vansittart, who had given him permission to leak data to “selected publicists,”* was dismayed when Wigram gave this mandate the broadest possible interpretation. He called a press conference in his Lord North Street home and gave Flandin the floor. Abandoning diplomatic language the French minister spoke straight to the point. He said: “Today the whole world, and especially the small nations, turn their eyes toward England. If England will act now, she can lead Europe. You will have a policy, all the world will follow you, and you will thus prevent war. It is your last chance. If you do not stop Germany now, all is over. France cannot guarantee Czechoslovakia any more because that will become geographically impossible.” If Britain did not act, he continued, France, with her small population and obsolete industry, lay at the mercy of a rearmed Germany. Franco-German friendship was impossible; “the two countries will always be in tension.” He acknowledged that England could reach a fragile understanding with the Nazis now, but it would not last; if Hitler were not stopped “by force today, war is inevitable.”71
The reporters returned to Fleet Street and wrote straightforward accounts of Flandin’s appeal, which their editors buried. Everyone in Whitehall expected Baldwin to loose a lightning bolt, destroying Wigram, but his irregularity was ignored. Thoughtful Englishmen wavered, hawks one day and doves the next. Harold Nicolson summed up the quandary in a letter to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, that Thursday, March 12. “If we send an ultimatum to Germany, she ought in all reason to back down,” he wrote. But what if she didn’t? Then, he said, “We shall have war.” He assumed that the Nazis would lose, but, he asked, what would be “the good of that? It would only mean communism in Germany and France.” At that his line of reason broke. It wouldn’t happen that way, he decided, because “the people of this country absolutely refuse to have a war. We should be faced by a general strike if we even suggested such a thing. We shall therefore have to climb down ignominiously and Hitler will have scored.” Indecision was the equivalent of a Nazi triumph, and by the end of the week a swelling majority of MPs, diplomats, and journalists decided that Hitler would emerge the winner of the Rhineland crisis—that he had, indeed, already won.72
Flandin, offended and disheartened by the British press’s lack of attention and the failure of his meeting with Chamberlain, again arrived at Morpeth Mansions. Churchill shared his anguish but could offer nothing but advice. As he later wrote: “I advised M. Flandin to demand an interview with Mr. Baldwin before he left.” Darkness had fallen when the French minister’s taxi turned off Whitehall and into Downing Street. The prime minister appeared at the threshold of No. 10 to receive his troubled guest. Baldwin was gracious. Once the amenities were over and they began to talk, however, he told his guest that his cause was lost. Explaining diffidently that he “knew little of foreign affairs”—quite true, but an astonishing admission from the leader of the world’s one superpower, vulnerable, through its empire, to major disorders all over the world—he said he did know the feelings of his people, “and they want peace.” Flandin protested. The peace would be unbroken. Not a shot would be fired. If faced by a police action the Germans would quickly evacuate the Rhineland. According to Flandin, the prime minister replied: “You may be right, but if there is even one chance in a hundred that war would follow from your police action, I have not the right to commit England.”73
The behavior of both men is baffling. What commitment was Flandin seeking? According to his later version, he merely asked Baldwin to give the French a free hand. But France was a sovereign power. She needed no one’s permission to act. Churchill had recognized this weakness in Flandin’s first visit to England, before the invasion. He had thought it feckless of Flandin to come to Downing Street, cap in hand, urging the prime minister to honor England’s treaty obligations and send British troops to join the French in a Rhineland counterattack. Statesmen shouldn’t beg; “Clemenceau or Poincaré,” he later noted, “would have left Mr. Baldwin no option.” If France moved to meet her Locarno commitments—even though England refused to honor hers—Baldwin’s approval would be unnecessary and irrelevant. It was the postwar verdict of the French parliamentary investigating committee that during the Rhineland crisis Premier Sarraut and his cabinet, unable to make up their own minds, were asking the British to do it for them. Churchill would have done it; Baldwin didn’t. He said repeatedly: “England is not in a state to go to war.” Back in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Flandin described his call at No. 10 to Sarraut and his cabinet, concluding, “I understood that evening that I would not obtain, despite my efforts, British acceptance of our military intervention in the Rhineland.” In other words, “Nous sommes trahis.” In Berlin, Shirer scrawled in his diary: “Hitler has got away with it!” And so he had. The Führer immediately ordered a nationwide plebiscite to ask the Volkes whether they approved of the coup, and 98.8 percent voted ja.74
In Parliament that same month Winston reflected: “When we think of the great power and influence which this country exercises we cannot look back with much pleasure on our foreign policy in the last five years. They have certainly been very disastrous years.” He spoke slowly, his voice heavy: “Five years ago all felt safe; five years ago we were all looking forward to peace, to a period in which mankind would rejoice in the treasures which science can spread to all classes if conditions of peace and justice prevail…. Look at the difference in our position now! We find ourselves compelled once again to face the hateful problems and ordeals which those of us who worked and toiled in the last struggle hoped were gone forever.”
He summed up the outcome of the latest crisis: “What is, after all, the first great fact with which we are confronted? It is this. An enormous triumph has been gained by the Nazi regime…. The violation of the Rhineland is serious from the point of view of the menace to which it exposes Holland, Belgium, and France. It is also serious from the fact that when it is fortified… it will be a barrier across Germany’s front door, which will leave her free to sally out eastward and southward by the back door.”75
This speech was ignored. Macmillan recalls that at that time Winston’s “speeches and demands… however effective in themselves, were injured because of the general doubt as to the soundness of his judgement,” and Lady Longford described him as “the disregarded voice of Cassandra.”76
Painter Paul Maze wrote Churchill, “Half England is hardly aware of the situation.” That was understating it. The masses of the British people, few of whom knew where or what the Rhineland was, had returned with relief to their daily routines. Sir Oswald Mosley was planning an anti-Semitic demonstration, the Cunarder S.S. Queen Mary was ready for launching, George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, having received mixed reviews, was selling poorly, and early vacationers in Brighton heard music hall “vocalists,” as they were now called, croon:
These foolish things
Remind me of you…
Nazism had become fashionable in London’s West End. Ladies wore bracelets with swastika charms; young men combed their hair to slant across their foreheads. Paul Maze continued: “Do write to the papers all you can. The German propaganda spread about is most harmful, especially in Mayfair society!”77
The Führer still had many admirers in Parliament and a lofty one (King Edward VIII) in Buckingham Palace. Germanophilia in the British upper classes had begun as an open, closely reasoned cause, but as the nature of Nazism became evident, with Churchill lifting rocks to show the creatures scurrying below, its character had changed. Martin Gilbert and Richard Gott observed that, “the more it was opposed and the more it was shown to be inadequate, if not erroneous, the more it transformed itself into a hidden obsession.” The faithful plotted in the dark, behind closed doors. Sympathy for the Germans, “originally a mood to be proud of,” Gilbert and Gott wrote, “became, with the brutalization of German politics, a mood of whispers and cabals.” The Times echoed Der Angriff and Völkischer Beobachter; much was made of the joint Saxon heritage shared by pure-blooded Britons and German Aryans (and not by Jews). British criticism of the Third Reich was deeply resented in Berlin, and the British embassy there was always quick to apologize for it.78
The Quai d’Orsay and the Foreign Office, bruised and shaken, had done their best to paper over the debacle with new documents, exchanges of formal letters, and sealed covenants. Flandin wearily told the British he would accept Hitler’s coup provided the reoccupation remained symbolique and unfortified—a provision which England could not possibly guarantee. Nevertheless, Eden and the FO went to work, persuading the other signatories to accept the Nazi fait accompli. Meanwhile, the League of Nations council went through the motions of condemning Germany for her treaty violations. On the day of the council’s finding, twelve irreclaimable days had passed since the Führer’s nervous battalions had crossed the Rhine bridges. Since no one even raised the question of imposing sanctions on the aggressor, the condemnation was a meaningless gesture, serving only to demonstrate the league’s hollow authority and shrunken prestige.
The repercussions were not over. In 1918, when Ludendorff was plunging his bloody fists into the snakelike line of Allied trenches winding from the Swiss border to the Channel, the northern anchor of the defense had been held by King Albert’s stubborn Belgians. Now Albert had lain in his grave for two years and the country was ruled by Leopold III, frivolous, shallow, and callow. After the fall of the Rhineland, Leopold decided that Britain and France were no longer reliable allies. He renounced the military alliance Albert had signed with the democracies twenty years earlier and acquired written releases from Paris and London. This meant that at the outbreak of war French troops could not enter Belgium until a Nazi invasion had been confirmed. “In one stroke,” writes Alistair Horne, the British military historian, “the whole of her [France’s] Maginot Line strategy lay in fragments.”79
By March 26, less than three weeks after a few thousand poorly equipped Wehrmacht troops had cowed the armed might of France, photographs of the rising system of concrete fortresses Hitler was building opposite the Maginot Line—the Siegfried Line—came into Churchill’s possession, and during the first week in April he received detailed reports. Shielding his sources, he shared the substance of the reports with the House. In a remarkably prescient speech he pointed out that these redoubts would permit Nazi troops to be “economised on that line,” enabling “the main force to swing round through Belgium and Holland.” If that happened, and the two Low Countries fell “under German domination,” England would be in mortal peril, a terrifying prospect, he said, which was “brought very much nearer to this island by the erection of the German fortress line.” Nor was that all. “Look east,” he continued. “There the consequences of the Rhineland fortification may be more immediate…. Poland and Czechoslovakia, with which must be associated Yugoslavia, Rumania, Austria and some other countries, are all affected very decisively the moment this great work of construction has been completed.”80
Parliament was unmoved. It was characteristic of the late 1930s that His Majesty’s Government—and the vast majority of His Majesty’s subjects—assumed that each crisis was the last, and that Hitler could be taken at his word when he assured them that he would press no further claims upon Europe. Churchill warned them now: “When you are drifting down the stream of Niagara, it may easily happen that from time to time you run into a reach of quite smooth water, or that a bend in the river or a change in the wind may make the roar of the falls seem far more distant. But”—his voice dropped a register, and only those who strained could hear—“your hazard and your preoccupation are in no way affected thereby.”81
On May 18 the Reich’s foreign minister, Baron Konstantin von Neurath, received William Bullitt, Franklin Roosevelt’s friend and the American ambassador to France. Neurath could scarcely have spoken more plainly. In his report to the State Department Bullitt quoted Neurath as declaring that it would be “the policy of the German Government” to take no new action beyond Germany’s borders “until the Rhineland has been digested…. Until the German fortifications have been constructed on the French and Belgian frontiers, the German Government will do everything possible to prevent rather than encourage an outbreak by the Nazis in Austria and will pursue a quiet line with regard to Czechoslovakia.” Neurath’s parting words to Bullitt were: “As soon as our fortifications are constructed and the countries of Central Europe realize that France cannot enter German territory at will, those countries will begin to feel very differently about their foreign policies and a new constellation will develop.”82
If public men of vision are tough, as Churchill was, they endure. If they are not, and most are not, they perish or live out their lives in lonely exile. The future may serve as an appellate court. It cannot, however, award retroactive damages, and so Ralph Wigram can never be redeemed. He was not a weak man. Nevertheless, Hitler’s successful smash-and-grab coup had, in Churchill’s words, dealt Wigram “a mortal blow.” The crisis had subjected him to an unbearable strain. Valentine Lawford, one of Wigram’s subordinates, notes that the “purely physical demands of those twelve days had been almost intolerable; and they had still further enfeebled the frail organs of a frail body.” After Flandin had left London, Wigram forced himself to tour the occupied Rhineland. There he was shocked to see little children, coached by German soldiers, play “grenades” with snowballs. He returned to his Lord North Street home, as Ava Wigram later wrote Churchill, “and said to me, ‘War is now inevitable, and it will be the most terrible war there has ever been. I don’t think I shall see it, but you will. Wait now for bombs on this little house.’ ” He felt a sense of personal guilt. He told her, “I have failed to make the people here realize what is at stake. I am not strong enough to make the people here understand. Winston has always, always understood, and he is strong and will go on to the end.” Several months later, writes Henry Pelling, Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, “depression overtook him and he committed suicide.”83
Vansittart phoned the news to Winston. Churchill wrote Clementine, “I was deeply shocked & grieved…. I thought him a grand fellow.” Meantime Clementine, skiing in Austria, had read Wigram’s obituary in The Times, and their letters crossed in the mail, hers reading: “He was a true friend of yours & in his eyes you cd see the spark wh showed an inner light was burning—His poor wife will be overwhelmed with grief.” Bearing a wreath, Winston attended the funeral, near Hayward’s Heath, with Vansittart, Bracken, and Maze. Afterward they brought the young widow and the Wigrams’ five-year-old mongoloid child back to Chartwell for lunch. Churchill was amazed to learn—it is astonishing that a statesman who owed so much to civil servants should not have known—that, as he wrote Clemmie, “there appears to be no pension or anything for Foreign Office widows.” In another note he added: “Poor little Ava is all adrift now. She cherished him [Ralph] &… he was her contact with gt affairs. Now she has only the idiot child.”84
The last phrase jars. So does Churchill’s mention of Wigram in his memoirs. To be sure, Winston wrote that his death “was an irreparable loss to the Foreign Office, and played its part in the miserable decline of our fortunes,” but then he adds that Wigram “took it too much to heart. After all, one can always go on doing what one believes to be his duty, and running ever greater risks till knocked out.” Churchill, Boothby noted, could be cruel. It seems less than generous thus to stigmatize Wigram, suggesting that he had deserted his post in his country’s hour of need. Yet that seems to have been Winston’s final opinion. One feels that in one of his combative moods, Churchill would have sympathized with General Patton for slapping a soldier broken by the shock of battle. Winston had been hammered and tempered and shaped by ordeals beyond Wigram’s imagining. And, of course, Wigram would have been no match for Hitler. Churchill knew he was, or would be, if he could only reach the helm.85
Now, over two years since Winston had first urged the appointment of a minister of defense to preside over the three services, Baldwin prepared to make the appointment. He had been under great pressure from the press and Parliament to name Churchill. Even Neville Chamberlain, for once in agreement with his half brother, had said: “Of course, if it is a matter of military efficiency, Winston is no doubt the man.” In his memoirs Churchill recalled that “I was naturally aware that this process was going on. In the debate of March 9”—Monday, two days after the Rhineland invasion, when the House first confronted the developing crisis—“I was careful not to derogate in the slightest degree from my attitude of severe though friendly criticism of Government policy.”86
He wrote to Clemmie, insisting, “I do not mean to break my heart whatever happens,” but of course he craved office. In the same letter he examined the prospects of the two candidates most prominently mentioned in the press and reported that neither really wanted the job—Neville Chamberlain “because he sees the premiership not far away” and Sir Kingsley Wood “because he hopes to be Chancellor of the Exchequer then and anyhow does not know a Lieutenant-General from a Whitehead torpedo.” Thus, he reasoned, “it may all come back to your poor pig.”87
Baldwin’s reservations about Winston remained; and he had to consider his eventual successor. One of Neville Chamberlain’s biographers writes: “The party would not have the immediate return of Hoare. If the new Ministry went to Churchill, it would alarm those Liberal and Central elements who had taken his exclusion as a pledge against militarism, it would be against the advice of those responsible for interpreting the party’s general will, and would it not when Baldwin disappeared raise a disputed succession?”88
Churchill, Neville Chamberlain, and Kingsley Wood were not the only names which were submitted for the new ministry; the secretary of state for air, Lord Swinton (formerly Philip Cunliffe-Lister), and Walter Runciman, the president of the Board of Trade, were being considered. And so, by Hoare, was Hoare. Speaking from the back benches the injured ice skater skated on very thin ice indeed by making what a friend recalls as “a curiously distasteful bid for office.” Neville Chamberlain noted it in his diary: “He began well but shocked the House by an elaborate tribute to S.B. which sounded like an obvious and clumsy bid for power and created a thoroughly bad impression.”89
Actually, the prime minister preferred Hoare for the post, but nothing could be done until he had been rehabilitated. Baldwin and those around him also shied away from the thought of what they called “a strong personality” in the new ministry. These and other “niceties and gravities,” as a Chamberlain biographer called them, had been “well weighed” for a full month, the month that ended during the Rhineland crisis.90
Nazi aggression, one might think, should have lent support to Winston’s candidacy. At this, of all times, it seems inconceivable that Baldwin would pick a weak man to supervise the defense of England. Nevertheless, that was what he did. Baldwin said outright: “If I pick Winston, Hitler will be cross.” In his biography of Chamberlain, Keith Feiling writes that the Rhineland was “decisive against Winston’s appointment”; it was “obvious that Hitler would not like it.” As the prime minister’s heir apparent, Chamberlain encouraged Baldwin to think along these lines. He suggested that Baldwin choose a man “who would excite no enthusiasm” and “create no jealousies.” The prime minister agreed. On Saturday, March 14—exactly a week since German troops had crossed the Rhine—he announced that he was establishing, not a ministry of defense, but a ministry for coordination of defense. Its leader, the new cabinet member, would be Sir Thomas Inskip.91
Inskip? Fleet Street and Parliament were incredulous. The name was familiar but had been attached to no political achievements. As a youth Inskip had seriously considered becoming a missionary. Called to the bar instead, he had taken silk, and, for most of the past fourteen years, had been England’s solicitor general or attorney general. Macmillan recalled that he lacked “the slightest glimmer of that ruthless determination, by which alone such an office could have been made effective at such a time.” Until now he had never before been proposed or even considered for a high cabinet post. A search of The Times files reveals that his only notable public effort had been a successful campaign to suppress revisions of the Anglican prayer book. His appointment had been suggested to the prime minister by Chamberlain and David Margesson, the Tories’ chief whip, on the ground that he was “the safest man.” Now, rising from the front bench for his maiden speech as watchdog of Britain’s security, Inskip confessed: “I may say, with all sincerity, that it never occurred to me—I say this in all seriousness—that I would ever be able to discharge this duty even if it were offered to me…. I do not claim to be a superman.”92
In The Gathering Storm, the most personal of his six books on World War II, Churchill wrote that Baldwin had selected “an able lawyer, who had the advantages of being little known himself and knowing nothing about military subjects.” He also set down his deeper, emotional reaction to the Inskip appointment: “To me this definite, and as it seemed final, exclusion from all share in our preparations for defence was a heavy blow.” Bitterness was uncharacteristic of him, but in three acrid sentences he revealed his naked anger, his feeling that England had been placed in even greater peril, and he himself personally violated: “Mr. Baldwin certainly had good reason to use the last flickers of his power against one who had exposed his mistakes so severely and so often. Moreover, as a profoundly astute party manager, thinking in majorities and aiming at a quiet life between elections, he did not wish to have my disturbing aid. He thought, no doubt, that he had dealt me a politically fatal stroke, and I felt he might well be right.”93
He added, accurately, that the “Prime Minister’s choice was received with astonishment by press and public.” Macmillan later commented that “Astonishment is almost an understatement. Even the most defeatist and most adulatory of the Prime Minister were aghast.” Winston’s friends were in shock. Lord Lloyd recalled Lindemann telling him that Baldwin’s choice was “the most cynical thing that has been done since Caligula appointed his horse as consul.” One of Lloyd George’s young parliamentary protégés called it “another glaring instance of the stupidity of party politics, which always denies a nation the services of most of its best men,” and Anthony Crossley added two more verses to his venomous parody:
Did you dare, Father Churchill, did you dare to expect
A summons to the Council again,
In the face of the feeling that haunts the elect
That they scoffed at your warnings in vain?
You’re polite to the small and you’re rude to the great,
Your opinions are bolder and surer
Than is seemly today in an office of state—
You’ve even insulted the Führer.94
Churchill had proposed a five-man cabinet team to supervise preparedness. To the three traditional posts of air, war, and Admiralty he would have added a minister of supply, with a defense minister presiding over the four. Given the complexities of total war, he argued, a ministry of supply was vital. Its responsibilities would include the manufacture of arms and equipment, the policing of profiteers, and agreements with the trade unions, who would become mutinous if, say, excessive profits for defense industries were not restrained. Baldwin, unimpressed, merely told Inskip to “coordinate” defense. He gave him no instructions on what that vague word meant, no power to enforce his decisions, and no professional advisers. It is difficult to grasp what he expected from a committed pacifist who had never worn a uniform nor heard the sound of gunfire, who—at a time when military strategy depended on an understanding of new weapons, including mastery of radar, upon which England’s very survival would depend—had never even flown in an airplane, and whose only previous encounter with Britain’s defense establishment had been a consequence of his opposition to rephrasing the Anglican service for burial of the dead at sea.
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen.
Passed over for a cipher when he had been supremely qualified, Churchill was now free to unsheathe his broadsword again. But to sulk or fume would have diminished him. “I had to control my feelings,” he later wrote, “and appear serene, indifferent, detached.” Of course, he was not capable of detachment. Nor should he have been. Someone had to sound the alarm bell after Göring, contemptuous of the Allies’ pusillanimity, announced that between four million and five million “active, intelligent, valiant Germans” were working “night and day” in the munitions factories of the Ruhr to arm the expanding Wehrmacht. In the Evening Standard Winston expressed astonishment that Parliament and the British people should ignore this boast and its implications. The Reich, he wrote, “is arming more strenuously, more scientifically and upon a larger scale, than any nation has ever armed before…. Surely these are facts which ought to bulk as large in ordinary peaceful people’s minds as horse-racing, a prize fight or nineteen-twentieths of the current newspaper bill of fare.” Over the next several days the Standard received a thick sheaf of letters from outraged subscribers protesting the publication of such “nationalistic” articles by England’s “number one warmonger.”95
He was in fact the country’s number one peacemonger, the last champion of the League of Nations and therefore of collective security, the only policy which could have thwarted Hitler before the war which he alone wanted destroyed Europe’s dominance of the globe. Once other countries had been knitted in a “strong confederacy for defence and peace,” Winston told an inattentive House, “they should give Germany an absolute guarantee of the inviolability of German soil and a promise that if anyone offended her all will turn against that one, and if she strikes at anyone all will stand by and defend that victim.” He ended: “Let us free the world from the approach of a catastrophe, carrying with it calamity and tribulation beyond the tongue of man to tell.” Later he would be remembered as a great war leader, but no man ever fought harder for peace.96
Delivering the first report of progress in the new ministry, Inskip braced his stocky legs and, turning his curiously bunched face to the House, spoke confidently of “a swelling tide of production,” reporting that “forty new aerodromes have been or are being acquired.” In fact the new ministry had already acquired a reputation for slackness. Desmond Morton passed Winston a detailed analysis of Inskip’s speech. “A swelling tide of production”? There was, said Morton, “nothing of the kind”; the only steps being taken were “to get industry into a condition eventually to produce what is required.” Inskip’s staff had contacted fifty-two firms, asking whether they would turn out armaments; fourteen agreed to manufacture munitions, “but none of them, not even the fourteen who have accepted firm contracts, have yet entered into production.” The “forty new aerodromes” were simply forty fields which Inskip’s staff had inspected accompanied by real estate agents. “The forty pieces of ground have not yet even been acquired.”97
In the House in July, Inskip continued to sing hymns of exultation. To be sure, he acknowledged, Britain’s heavy reliance on imported machine tools was unfortunate, and he further conceded that English factories would be unable to turn out shells for at least two years. But he felt certain that the government’s “hope and trust” would assure the recruitment of enough skilled workers to man the machines. Churchill, troubled, replied that it would be unwise for him to set forth his case “in open debate in this Chamber…. The times have waxed too dangerous for that.” Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, meeting behind closed doors, had heard Winston out. Harold Nicolson was there and thought his presentation unanswerable. Ranging beyond defense, Winston pointed out that were the Germans given a free hand in eastern Europe, as they had asked, within a year they would be dominant from Hamburg to the Black Sea. England, in that case, would be faced by the most formidable coalition since the fall of Napoleon. But a majority of the committee members belonged to Baldwin, and “what they would really like,” Nicolson wrote, “would be a firm agreement with Germany and possibly Italy by which we could purchase peace at the expense of the smaller states. This purely selfish policy would to my mind make an Anglo-German war quite certain within twenty years.”98
Churchill would have preferred to ignore Inskip himself, knowing that his criticism would invite charges of jealousy. But he could not remain seated when the new minister told the House that defense preparations for England would “of course” be circumscribed because interference with the country’s commerce, and the everyday lives of its people, was unthinkable. Winston challenged him. Inskip, he said, had “made a very important pronouncement” in explaining that he was “working under peace conditions.” There were, he pointed out, “many conditions” between peacetime and wartime: “preparatory conditions, precautionary conditions, emergency conditions.” He had been under the impression that the new ministry had been created to recommend which of them should be adopted now. Churchill cited fresh data from Germany, obtained “from a source which I cannot divulge.” Checking these figures against those published by the Nazi regime, he had found that they confirmed one another, revealing that Hitler had spent twenty billion marks preparing for war since coming to power, and, during 1935, another eleven billion—far in excess of Churchill’s earlier estimate.