To take such an attitude, he said, was indefensible, a flagrant defiance of the facts. Every day, every week, the people of Austria were being subjected “to the rigors of Nazi domination.” Every hour, every minute, the forces “of conquest and intimidation” were regrouping for another assault. Soon “another stroke” would fall. “What I dread,” he told the House, “is that the impulse now given to active effort may pass away when the dangers are not diminishing, but accumulating and gathering, as country after country is involved in the Nazi system, and as their vast preparations reach their final perfection.”

He was nearing the end. The Commons was still as still. He lowered his head and continued, the slight impediment in his speech adding to the drama of his delivery as he followed the psalm form of his notes:

For five years I have talked to the House

on these matters—not with very great success.

I have watched this famous island

descending incontinently, fecklessly,

the stairway which leads to a dark gulf.

It is a fine broad stairway at the beginning,

but after a bit the carpet ends.

A little farther on there are only flagstones,

and a little farther on still

these break beneath your feet….¹³⁶

Then, in measured tones:

If mortal catastrophe should overtake the British Nation and the British Empire, historians a thousand years hence will still be baffled by the mystery of our affairs. They will never understand how it was that a victorious nation, with everything in hand, suffered themselves to be brought low, and to cast away all that they had gained by measureless sacrifice and absolute victory—gone with the wind!

Now the victors are the vanquished, and those who threw down their arms and sued for an armistice are striding on to world mastery. That is the position—that is the terrible transformation that has taken place…. Now is the time at last to rouse the nation…. We should lay aside every hindrance and endeavour by uniting the whole force and spirit of our people to raise again a great British nation standing up before all the world; for such a nation, rising in its ancient vigour, can even at this hour save civilisation.¹³⁷

As he took his seat, the House broke into a hubbub of noise; members rattled their papers and shuffled their way to the lobby. Virginia Cowles was in the House lobby, awaiting a prominent Conservative MP who had invited her to tea. As he strode up she asked him his opinion of Winston’s speech. He replied: “Oh, it was the usual Churchillian filibuster; he likes to rattle the sabre and he does it jolly well, but you always have to take it with a grain of salt.” She recalls: “That was the general attitude of the House of Commons in those days.” Even Churchill realized that Chamberlain’s determination not to “rouse the nation” was echoing the mood of countrymen who did not want to be roused. Fleet Street, in step with its readers, ignored Churchill’s speech and reported Chamberlain’s. The liberal Manchester Guardian declared, “Mr. Chamberlain has overcome the enemies in his own camp,” and in the New Statesman John Maynard Keynes urged the Czechs to negotiate a settlement with Hitler. The Chamberlains and the Cadogans drove to Cliveden for a weekend party with, as Cadogan put it, an “ordinary sort of crowd.” The P.M. won the after-dinner game of musical chairs every time. They always let him win. It meant so much to him.¹³⁸

The morning after his dire warning to the House, Churchill received an unexpected, dismaying, and most unwelcome letter from the editor of Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard, terminating his contract—in effect, firing him. Thus ended two years of fortnightly columns, depriving him of his most valuable public rostrum, because, the editor wrote, “it has been evident that your views on foreign affairs and the part this country should play are entirely opposed to those held by us.” Winston replied that his “divergence from Lord Beaverbrook’s policy” had been “obvious from the beginning, but it clearly appears to me to be less marked than in the case of the Low cartoons.” Then, scathingly: “I rather thought that Lord Beaverbrook prided himself upon forming a platform in the Evening Standard for various opinions including of course his own.”¹³⁹

It was a setback, an annual loss of £1,820—about $9,000 at the then prevailing rate of exchange—and the timing could scarcely have been worse. He was broke. He sat in his Chartwell study, staring at columns of figures which should have made him blush. As chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1920s he had presided over England’s fiscal affairs for nearly five years, yet his personal finances were hopelessly muddled. Few writers could match his income; during the past eight years he had earned £102,102, an annual average of £12,763, the equivalent of about $62,000. Chartwell, his London flat, and general expenses alone exceeded £10,000 each year, and his travels, secretaries, researchers, and the lavish lunches and dinners he gave for colleagues and visitors from the Continent drove him deeper and deeper into the red.¹⁴⁰

The year before, he had faced his first real financial crisis. His letters to Clementine in the first weeks of 1937 are shadowed by a veiled and then explicit preoccupation with money which was wholly out of character—small attempts at economizing while he spread himself elsewhere. He had set up Randolph and Sarah in Westminster Garden flats and had “told Sarah I will give her £200 toward expenses.” But, he added defensively, he was only fulfilling promises made long before. Fuel for Chartwell, delivered “in five ton batches at £9.11.0 each… used to last a fortnight,” he reminded her, but the last load kept them warm for three months, despite weather that was “raw and generally damnable.” Moreover, he had lost only £12 at bezique, he wrote, and “the wine has been very strictly controlled and little drunk.” Also, telephone bills showed “a marked reduction. We are having fortnightly accounts from the Post Office which enables us to check it.” Finally, he wrote, on a note of triumph, “I am not taking Inches with me abroad.”¹⁴¹

Clemmie knew that the little saved by leaving his valet behind would shrink to insignificance beside his Riviera expenses. And indeed, he glumly wrote on February 2 that he had been talking to a Mr. Frank Capon, a real estate agent. Capon “tells me,” he wrote, “that there is a lady nibbling around for a house like Chartwell, and even mentioning Chartwell.” The agent said he would “on no account mention any figure less than £30,000. If I could see £25,000 I should close with it. If we do not get a good price we can carry on for a year or two more. But no good offer should be refused, having regard to the fact that our children are almost all flown and my life is probably in its closing decade.”¹⁴²

Experience had taught him that budgets did not work with his family. The reason—though he would never have acknowledged it—was that he was the family spendthrift. Nevertheless, in April he drew up a balance sheet cutting their personal expenses to £6,000, solemnly telling them: “This cannot on any account be exceeded.” In that year, as in the years preceding, it was exceeded by over £4,000. The flaw in the budget was that the head of the household was exempt; and Churchill had no intention of curtailing his own extravagant life-style. Indeed, no one except Clemmie dared raise the question. By the process of elimination, therefore, he concluded that he would have to work harder. He wouldn’t rattle a tin cup, but he could no longer turn his back on lecture fees, though earning them meant a loss of time better spent working toward the strengthening of England’s defenses.¹⁴³

Now, a year later, he seemed to have no choice—his home and its eighty acres must be sold. Even so, it appeared he would have to quit Parliament to make money, as a writer, lecturer, and/or businessman. His security had lain in his reserve of American stocks. It was from there, where he felt safest, that the blow fell. Early in March 1938 the U.S. recession hit Wall Street. Stock prices plummeted so swiftly, and so deeply, that Churchill’s brokers, Vickers da Costa, told him that his American investments had been wiped out. In fact, it was worse than that—his share account owed the brokerage firm £18,000. Where could he find so tremendous a sum? After his History of the English-speaking Peoples was finished—but only then—he would be paid £15,000. Even so he would be £3,000 in the red. His earnings as a journalist were high; but they weren’t large enough to meet Britain’s income tax and supertaxes. Chartwell must be put on the market.

In his youth Churchill had been the highest-paid correspondent in the Empire; perhaps the world. His articles still brought premium rates from newspapers and magazines, but he knew little of modern journalism. He decided to buy a full page from The Times to advertise Chartwell’s attractions and availability. It was scheduled to run on April 2. He expected, at most, that the fact of his putting up his home for sale might merit a discreet paragraph in The Times’s “Londoner’s Diary.” But famous writers often forget that they are famous, and the malice of political enemies slips the memory of statesmen who hold no grudges themselves. Thus Winston was unprepared for what actually happened. Beaverbrook’s Daily Express picked up the story immediately, and Winston’s once and future friend, now a devout appeaser, managed to insinuate that Churchill was irresponsible, telling the Express’s readers that he was auctioning off his home while attempting to sabotage Chamberlain’s thrifty budgets. The paper’s March 17 headline read: “CHURCHILL FOLLOWING L.G. TO PARIS.” To the Beaver, Paris meant intrigue with a weak ally when the sound course was to embrace virile Nazi Germany. The story beneath the head drove in this long needle: “In some quarters there has been a disposition to question the desirability of British politicians visiting Paris at this juncture.” Hearst never sank lower. And The Times ran an account on its main news page—in those days its front page was still all ads—headed: “MR CHURCHILL’S HOME IN KENT FOR SALE,” and including personal details which deeply offended Winston.¹⁴⁴

Meantime he moved to close one hole in his dike—the loss of earnings from the Standard. He wrote Lord Camrose, proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, explaining the circumstances of his departure from the Standard and proposing to write now for the Telegraph. Attached to his letter were three lists of newspapers which carried his syndicated columns: the first list was of papers in Great Britain, the second of English-language papers around the world, and the third of papers which published them in translation. His agent, Imre Revesz, had drawn up the last list; they meant that Churchill’s views and disclosures—chiefly from his intelligence net—reached readers in seventeen languages. “As you will see it is a very fine platform,” he noted dryly, “though as Nazi power advances, as in Vienna, planks are pulled out of it.” Camrose agreed to a six-month trial, paying Winston £70 a piece. The arrangement continued for fourteen months, until the Daily Mirror offered him better terms.¹⁴⁵

This was an important step but in itself would not have been enough to save Chartwell. The fact is that Churchill never understood money and was awed by those who did. They in turn were captivated by him, which was fortunate, for his profligate ways would have driven him from Parliament long before he became the only man who could save England. Bernard Baruch had rescued him in 1929, but Winston couldn’t go to the same well twice. Besides, Baruch was in America. The only wealthy member of his inner circle was Brendan Bracken, and the origin and extent of Bracken’s holdings were unknown; he cultivated his reputation as a man of mystery. In any event, few men possessed the enormous liquidity Churchill needed, and Brendan wasn’t one of them.

But he knew men who did. The day after the Daily Express story Winston told Bracken that he wanted someone to take over his portfolio for three years, with the power to buy or sell holdings, provided his debt not deepen. He expected to pay interest on the loan—about £800 a year. Afterward he wrote Bracken: “If it were not for public affairs and my evident duty I shd be able to manage all right.” He thought it “unsuitable as well as harassing” to have to follow the market “from day to day when one’s mind ought to be concentrated upon the great world issues now at stake. I shd indeed be grateful if I cd be liberated during these next few critical years from this particular worry, wh descended upon me so unexpectedly [and to] which I shall certainly never expose myself again. I cannot tell you what a relief it would be if I could put it out of my mind; and take the large decisions wh perhaps may be required of me without this distraction and anxiety.”¹⁴⁶

Bracken was alarmed. Austria had just fallen; Czechoslovakia lay between the Nazi jaws; Chamberlain was rejecting defense spending, which Berlin might misunderstand. To Brendan—and he knew he was not alone—Churchill was the one leader standing against the black tide, contemptuous of HMG, Cliveden, and Blickling Hall. The thought of him spending his energy on potboilers for Collier’s and News of the World, leaving his corner seat in the House of Commons to speak in provincial lecture halls—of Churchill absent from the center of action when the future of civilization hung in the balance—was unbearable. Among Bracken’s acquaintances in the City were wealthy men—many, but not all, Jews—who were outraged by Chamberlain’s policy of courting Hitler. He circulated a memorandum among them, explaining Churchill’s quandary. If Winston absented himself from public life he could pay his debts and build an estate. “But how is he to do this,” Brendan asked, “while events run at this pitch?” One man took him aside; they talked quietly and shook hands; it was done.¹⁴⁷

Told of the transaction, Churchill sent Brendan a note: “Enclosed is a letter wh you can show to our friend. This is only to tell you that as Hitler said to Mussolini on a recent and less worthy occasion, ‘I shall never forget’ this inestimable service.” The “friend” was Sir Henry Strakosch, an industrialist in the City, who had been mining gold in South Africa for over forty years. Winston knew him; he was part of Churchill’s intelligence net; since the Führer’s decision to rearm the Reich, the expatriated South African tycoon had been an invaluable source of facts and figures in Germany’s military budgets. Churchill’s pride prevented him from begging; therefore Bracken, his most loyal follower, had done it for him. Strakosch agreed to cover Churchill’s losses, buying his deflated U.S. securities at the price he had paid for them. He wrote Winston that he would “carry this position for three years, you giving me full discretion to sell or vary holdings at any time, but on the understanding that you incur no further liability.”¹⁴⁸

Chartwell had been saved (the Times advertisement was withdrawn after a single appearance) and Churchill had been granted a reprieve—not a gift, but a loan. He would have refused charity, and Strakosch had not amassed his fortune by playing the samaritan to improvident statesmen. Winston could remain a member of Parliament, provided he met his publishing deadlines—chiefly those for the last volume of his Marlborough biography and for A History of the English-speaking Peoples—and sent payments to Strakosch as they came due.

As Europe toiled slowly toward its next butchery—never was there a war so hard to start, nor a warlord more frustrated than the Kriegsherr in Berlin—the quintessential Churchill, the Winston the public never saw, prowled his study night after night, an inner shutter drawn in a private blackout of the mind, excluding everything but the topic before him. His prose grew in intensity as though controlled by a rheostat, as he used the language to express his wrath, a fury matched only by that of Hitler, who was free to act while Churchill, who couldn’t even control his own spending, saw himself approaching senescence with no prospect of any change in his reputation as the leper of Parliament.

Meantime, he limited his attendance in Westminster to great debates and crucial votes. While his colleagues slept in London, in Kent he paced about in his loud dressing gown, scanning précis from his researchers, dictating, sending the typed manuscript to the printer by courier, and revising the galleys in red ink—“playing with the proofs,” as he called it, a very expensive amusement, since extensive changes in the galleys were charged to the author. The grammar and spelling were subjected to a final, rigorous check by Eddie Marsh, his private secretary in earlier years, now recently knighted; then the courier reappeared and the job was done. The front bench was often critical of Churchill’s absenteeism, but had he been faithful in his attendance, what would he have accomplished? In November and December of 1937 he had been completely absorbed in writing his Marlborough biography. During that time the prime minister and his cabinet had, in the name of economy, permitted England’s military strength to lag farther and farther behind Germany’s. Yet had Churchill been in Parliament he could have done nothing; His Majesty’s Government did not need the approval of the House; it was under no obligation even to inform Parliament, and it didn’t. Much of the caviling about Winston’s truancy was disingenuous; when he was at Chartwell, they were safe from his biting wit. Writing Maxine Elliott in February 1938 he said he was determined to finish the book “by the end of the month. I am therefore not paying much attention to the House of Commons, at which I expect the Ministers will not be at all vexed!”¹⁴⁹

Furthermore, his was the most persuasive rhetoric in England, and while speeches in Parliament were heard only by those within earshot, the written word may reach anywhere. Years later the White House revealed that a copy of While England Slept, the American edition of Churchill’s Arms and the Covenant, had lain on President Roosevelt’s bedside table, with key passages, including an analysis of the president’s peace initiative, underscored. Churchill’s prose, so rhythmic that it can be scanned, was vibrant with the terrific energy that can hold and sway vast audiences. Its vitality is remarkable, and in the late 1930s, because of his continuing financial obligations, his output became prodigious. In late 1937 he published Great Contemporaries, which was published in a revised and expanded edition the following year, along with Arms and the Covenant and the fourth and last volume of Marlborough: His Life and Times. Step by Step appeared in mid-1939. During 1938, while working on his four-volume History of the English-speaking Peoples, he also turned out fifty-nine magazine articles on subjects as diverse as “Would I Live My Life Again?” and “Women in War.” Two of the books—Great Contemporaries and Step by Step—were collections of pieces written for newspapers and magazines, and Arms and the Covenant presented key foreign policy speeches; but even they required revision and rewriting. After reading the fourth volume of Marlborough, Maxine Elliott wrote him from the Riviera: “It is incredible to me that one man can possess the genius to write a book like this and at the same time pursue his ordinary life which is a thousand times fuller of grave duties and obligations than that of lesser men.”¹⁵⁰

He paid a price. In a life crowded with incident, familial obligations, recreation, and public service, he published forty-four books, five of them during Victoria’s reign, when both his writing style and political philosophy were formed. Except for the small legacy which he had used to buy Chartwell, writing had been his sole source of income, but he had never written under such pressure, and at an age when other writers slow down or retire altogether.

At times the sheer volume of his research notes and the goading of his agent, his publishers, and magazine editors were exasperating. “I am toiling double shifts,” he wrote Clementine, away on holiday; “it is laborious: & I resent it and the pressure.” Like any other writer, he hoped for windfalls. Now and then an unexpected check arrived, to be greeted with a radiant grin and instructions to Mrs. Landemare for a lavish spread that evening. But at least once he was cruelly disappointed. He had written Clemmie: “Tomorrow the Daily Herald begin distributing the new cheap edition of the World Crisis wh Odham’s have printed. It can be sold for 3/9 for each of two volumes—a miracle of mass production. They expect to sell 150,000! I like to feel that for the first time the working people will hear my side of the [Gallipoli] tale.” The royalty check, which would have exceeded £1,000, would have been equally welcome, but the cheap book was not an idea whose time had come. The workmen remained unenlightened and Churchill uncompensated. So he returned to double shifts. He was irked by deadlines, believing he could do a better job if given more time. He wrote Clemmie: “I should be able to do my books more slowly and not have to face the truly stupendous task like Marlborough IV being finished in 4 or 5 months,” only to face another urgent date for the History, “worth £16,000, but entailing an immense amount of reading and solitary reflection if justice is to be done to so tremendous a topic.”¹⁵¹

The consequences of such a grind have not enhanced his literary reputation. His masterpiece is The World Crisis, published over a period of several years, 1923 to 1931, a six-volume, 3,261-page account of the Great War, beginning with its origins in 1911 and ending with its repercussions in the 1920s. Magnificently written, it is enhanced by the presence of the author at the highest councils of war and in the trenches as a battalion commander. “After it,” the British historian Robert Rhodes James writes, “anything must appear as anticlimax.”¹⁵²

Certainly Marlborough and A History of the English-speaking Peoples are heavy with what Philip Guedalla called “the lullaby of a majestic style.” The second Lord Birkenhead, son of Churchill’s old friend F.E., deplored “his lack of historic objectivity, of the fact that he is usually justifying a policy or a cause, and that his perception of the feelings and motives of others is dim and uncertain.” Ironically, it was Churchill himself who had diagnosed part of his difficulty when, as a young man, he had written: “Few authors are rich men. Few human beings are insensible to the value of money…. Hurried style, exaggerated mannerisms and plagiarism replace the careful toil. The author writes no more for fame but for wealth. Consequently his books become inferior. All this is very sad but very true.” In his contributions to periodicals, however, it is fair to add that he may have had a second, higher motive. Events were moving swiftly in Europe; lacking power in Parliament, he made the press his megaphone. He believed he could arouse the nation by his prose, even though it was not his best. He was right. He did.¹⁵³

After the slaughter of ten million young men twenty years earlier, a renewal of the struggle seemed incomprehensible. The German people hated war as passionately as their once and future enemies, but in the Reich public opinion was forged by the state to an unprecedented degree. The Nazi Reichskulturkammer determined what was taught in the schools, the music people heard, the content of radio broadcasts, the books they read, what was published in newspapers, the churches they attended, and the plays and films they saw. The Führer, they were told over and over, was working toward noble goals and making a supreme effort to save the peace. Those who threatened it, who hated Germans because the Aryan race was superior to their own, were unmasked each year on the anniversary of the Nazi party—the Nuremberg Reichsparteitag, held in September.

The average Briton was better informed. To be sure, The Times was not the only paper in which rogue editors disgraced their craft by the distortion or outright suppression of the facts. Nevertheless the truth was there for those who cared to know. A majority chose to ignore it. Confronted with the prospect of another world war, they sought refuge in escapism. Londoners whose dreams were haunted by Nazi storm troopers could leave their nightmares in the checkroom at the St. James’s Theatre, while they watched Terence Rattigan’s After the Dance; or at the Duchess, where Emlyn Williams’s The Corn Is Green was playing to packed houses; or at His Majesty’s Theatre, where the high point of the evening would be hearing a quartet sing “The Stately Homes of England” in Noel Coward’s Operette, which ran through 133 performances.

If you wanted to forget Japanese aggression in China and mutual aggression in Spain, a smorgasbord of entertainment lay before you: Len Hutton scoring 364 runs against Australia in the Oval Test Match; or, in the book department of Harrods, P. G. Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters, Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, and Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. From across the Atlantic came new works by Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Nathanael West. The United States also presented, to enthusiastic theatre audiences, Life with Father and Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse; and, on what was then called the silver screen, Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

In 1938, the year of the Anschluss and Munich, the British produced a tune and a dance step that swept all Europe and the United States:

Any time you’re Lambeth way,

Any evening, any day,

You’ll find us all

Doin’ the Lambeth walk.

Hey!

But Britain’s greatest accomplishments in the lively arts would follow World War II. In the 1930s her entertainers remained loyal to the traditional, rollicking music hall songs. Yet the huge halls were barely half full now, relics, really; houses haunted by memories of Harry Lauder, Lillie Langtry, and George “Champagne Charlie Is My Name” Leybourne. The brash Americans rushed into the vacuum. Snow White alone provided three hit songs; other imported popular songs of 1938–1939 were “Over the Rainbow,” three inanities—“Three Little Fishes,” “A-Tisket A-Tasket,” “Flat Foot Floogie with the Floy Floy”—and “Are You Having Any Fun?”¹⁵⁴

Among those not having any fun were over two-thirds of Czechoslovakia’s population. The country’s prominence in the news from May 1938 to March 1939 may explain the immense popularity of an old Czech drinking song, “Roll Out the Barrel.” In the popular view, World War II had not yet begun, but that would have been news to the Chinese, the Ethiopians, and the Spaniards. The greatest sufferers, of course, were the Jews. Nicolson, meeting an Austrian “who had just got away from Vienna,” set down the man’s account:

They rounded up the people walking in the Prater on Sunday last, and separated the Jews from the rest. They made the Jewish gentlemen take off all their clothes and walk on all fours on the grass. They made the old Jewish ladies get up into the trees by ladders and sit there. They then told them to chirp like birds. The Russians never committed atrocities like that. You may take a man’s life; but to destroy all his dignity is bestial. This man told me that with his own eyes he had seen Princess Stahremberg washing out the urinals at the Vienna railway-station. The suicides have been appalling. A great cloud of misery hangs over the town.¹⁵⁵

The situation of the German Jews was desperate. In every community, posters declared that they had been stripped of their civil rights and were forbidden to seek employment of any kind; Jewish shops and homes were plundered by Nazi storm troopers. Among the victims were the parents of Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old refugee living in Paris. On November 7, 1938, after learning of this, Grynszpan murdered Ernst vom Rath, a third secretary at the German embassy in Paris. Senior Nazis, SS officers, and Gestapo agents instantly saw this as an outrageous opportunity. On November 9 Goebbels issued instructions that “a spontaneous demonstration of the German people” (“eine spontane Reaktion des deutschen Volkes”) was to be “organized and executed” that night. No one knows how many acts of murder, rape, and pillage were carried out during die Kristallnacht, as it came to be called—Crystal Night, or the Night of Broken Glass—but the pogrom was the greatest in history. Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler’s second in command at the SS, reported that the number of Jewish shops smashed and looted was 7,500.¹⁵⁶

On May 10, 1938, Ambassador Henderson’s first secretary, Ivone Kirkpatrick, lunched with Prince Bismarck. Kirkpatrick had a specific proposition, of which the French, he said, were unaware. In his report to Ribbentrop, Bismarck quoted Kirkpatrick as saying: “If the German Government would advise the British Government confidentially what solution of the Sudeten German question they were striving after, the British Government would bring such pressure to bear in Prague that the Czechoslovak Government would be compelled to accede to the German wishes.”¹⁵⁷

If one assumes that men in public life are guided by patriotism, reason, or even political survival, the conduct of His Majesty’s foreign policy defies understanding. It makes sense, however, if one grasps the fact that HMG and the key diplomats who owed their rise to the men in Downing Street believed that England should sever her bonds with leftist France and form a new alliance with Hitler’s Germany, thereby forming a solid front against the Soviet Union. It is a historic irony that Churchill, Britain’s original anti-Bolshevik, should have fought them every inch of the way.

He could do little beyond sending Bill Deakin as his personal representative, to ask Prague whether the Czech government approved of his plan for a Grand Alliance—which it did—and to inquire about reports of disorders in the Sudetenland. In the spring of 1938 the Czechs were breaking up the Sudetendeutsche riots but treating the ringleaders with kid gloves, determined to give the Reich no excuse for intervention. On March 12—the day Hitler annexed Austria and Churchill unsuccessfully urged Halifax to protest his conquest in Geneva—the Czech foreign minister, Dr. Kamil Krofta, instructed his ambassadors “to avoid all unnecessary criticism, and to make every effort to avoid being involved.” His envoy in London was Jan Masaryk, the son of Tomáš. Jan was worried about London’s vocalizing its support of the Czech cause. On the evening of March 13, a crowd gathered in Trafalgar Square and cheered a proposal that they stage a sympathetic demonstration outside his home in Grosvenor Place. He protested that he was “a good deal disturbed,” and the demonstration was quietly canceled. It was a measure of Hitler’s power that the mere possibility of annoying him was enough to quash a peaceful show of friendship—for a country he had not yet threatened—in the capital of the world’s greatest empire.¹⁵⁸

In newspaper accounts of the Czech disturbances, the German führer was reported to be upset by them. The British public did not suspect his complicity. For better or for worse, but mostly worse, Woodrow Wilson had sown the seed of self-determination at Versailles, and enlightened Europeans sympathized with the discontented Sudeten Germans. If German observers were to be believed—and German credibility was very high among those determined never to fight another war—the Czech government was subjecting the demonstrating Sudetendeutsche to outrageous brutality. As Harold Macmillan later pointed out: “It is a falsification of history to suggest that appeasement up to the time of Munich was not widely supported, either openly or by implication. It was only as the relentless march of events revealed the true character of the man who had seized control of Germany that opinion in Britain began to change.”¹⁵⁹

It was going to take a lot of havoc to turn people around, and except for Churchill few were trying. The London press was disenchanted with the French. The Observer commented: “We cannot allow the British Empire to be dragged down to disaster by the separate French alliances with Moscow and Prague.” Kingsley Martin, then editor of the liberal New Statesman, later reflected on the pessimism in Whitehall and at No. 10. It began, he thought, toward the end of the 1920s, when Germany was still ruled from Weimar and almost every well-informed Englishman “regarded the French notion of keeping Germany as a second-class power as absurd, and agreed that the Versailles Treaty must be revised in Germany’s favor.” But France wouldn’t have it, and Weimar, unarmed but still suspect, was impotent. By 1938, however, Martin felt that “things had gone so far that to plan armed resistance to the dictators was now useless. If there was a war we should lose it. We should, therefore, seek the most peaceful way of letting them gradually get all they wanted.”¹⁶⁰

One of the most outspoken of the appeasers was an Anglican bishop, the Reverend Morley Headlam, who defended Hitler’s suppression of religious freedom before a church assembly, arguing that it was “only fair to realize that a great majority” of the Nazis believed that their cause “represented a strong spiritual influence” and looked upon it as “a real representation of Christianity.” A visiting Nazi told the Anglo-German Fellowship: “Herr Hitler has given the Church a free hand… he is a very religious man himself.” There was “no persecution of religion in Germany,” said Bishop Headlam, merely “persecution of political action.” Geoffrey Dawson published the bishop’s sermons in full while consigning dispatches from his own Berlin correspondent, describing the imprisonment of German clergymen, to the wastebasket.¹⁶¹

The curtain rose on what would be the first Czech crisis when Konrad Henlein addressed a Sudeten German party rally in Karlsbad on April 24. He read a list of eight demands for action in Prague. They bore Hitler’s stamp; two weeks after the Anschluss, on March 28, Henlein had been rushed to Berlin for a three-hour session in which he was coached by Hitler and his foreign minister. Hitler’s closing words to the SDP leader were found among the Wilhelmstrasse debris in 1945 and submitted as an exhibit in Nuremberg. The Führer had told his Sudeten puppet that “demands should be made by the Sudeten German party which are unacceptable to the Czech government.” Accordingly, sandwiched between innocuous demands at Karlsbad were two which any Prague government would reject. One was the recognition of the Sudeten Germans as autonomous within the state, and the other provided them “complete freedom to profess adherence to the German character and ideology.” Later Henlein added another demand: a revision of Czech foreign policy, which had “hitherto placed the [Prague regime] among the enemies of the German people” and had considered it “the particular task of the Czech people to form a Slav bulwark against the so-called Drang nach Osten,” the Reich’s “thrust to the east.”¹⁶²

This was provocative and, at the time, puzzling. If Hitler had the best interests of the Sudeten Germans at heart, or even if he intended to annex the Sudetenland—in short, if he intended anything except the incitement of riot leading to bloodshed—he was going about it the wrong way. Two days earlier President Beneš had told the British minister, Basil Newton, that he planned to open “serious negotiations” with Henlein and his party during May and June and, once they had reached an agreement, to pass the necessary legislation through the Czech legislature in July. Now Prague canceled this program. The Czech press was outraged. Foreign Minister Krofta called Henlein’s program “far-reaching and dangerous”; among other things, it could be used to restrict equality and freedom for other minorities—specifically Jews. The demand that the Sudeten Germans be given a separate “legal personality,” he added, was totally unacceptable. Nevertheless, the coalition government led by Premier Milan Hodža, a Slovak with broad popular support, left the door to negotiations ajar, though he told Newton that he doubted anything “serious” would be possible until after the local elections.¹⁶³

Another French government had fallen in mid-April, and on April 28, four days after Henlein’s Karlsbad speech, the new premier arrived in London for two days of conferences between the allies of the last war. He was Édouard Daladier. Accompanying him was Georges Bonnet, France’s tenth foreign minister in less than six years. Daladier—not yet defeatist—was determined to honor his country’s commitment to the embattled Czechs. Like Churchill, he believed Hitler’s objective was nothing less than the “destruction of the present Czechoslovakian State.” To block him Daladier wanted a joint declaration, putting the Führer on notice that a Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia would trigger declarations of war in Paris and London. But when he arrived at No. 10 Downing Street he found that if he wanted to form a solid anti-Nazi front he had come to the wrong address. On March 20 Chamberlain had written his sister Ida: “I have therefore abandoned any idea of giving guarantees to Czechoslovakia, or the French in connection with her obligations to that country.” He repeated this to Daladier, who left disappointed.¹⁶⁴

Bonnet, whom Churchill called “the quintessence of appeasement,” was secretly delighted, and, in fact, he represented the mood of French politicians and the Paris press. The Army of the Third Republic was ready to fight the Boche; so were the people, with their bitter memories of 1914–1918. But their leaders and their journalists were preparing to turn them round. Professor Joseph Barthélemy, who later served in Pétain’s Vichy government as minister of justice, argued in Le Temps that the frequent violations of Locarno freed France from her treaty commitments. Paris-Soir, Le Matin, Le Figaro, Paris-Midi, Information, L’Action Française, Le Temps, Petit Parisien, the Socialist Le Populaire—every daily in the capital except the chauvinist Epoque and the Communist L’Humanité—opposed defending democratic Czechoslovakia.¹⁶⁵

Churchill’s financial straits kept him at Chartwell most of the time, working to keep faith with Sir Henry Strakosch. Chamberlain’s tenure faced no strong challenge, and his most visible rival was the “Eden Group,” as Fleet Street called them, between twenty and thirty MPs who met regularly at various homes with Eden presiding. Churchill’s followers were the “Old Guard,” never more than four or five at this time. His absences from London were too frequent and too long to attract and hold a large number of supporters, while “Eden’s resignation,” as Harold Macmillan recalled, “had at least produced a pivot round which dissenting members of the Conservative Party could more readily form.”¹⁶⁶

Visitors to Chartwell, correspondence, and frequent telephone conversations brought Churchill abreast of developments in the capital, however, and since public men of that generation kept meticulous accounts of public activities and personal impressions, Churchill’s growing role in British affairs can be traced and documented with confidence. His intellect and will had been recognized since his first years in Parliament nearly forty years earlier, yet his contemporaries continued to charge that he lacked sound judgment. Isaiah Berlin later commented: “When biographers and historians come to describe and analyse his views… they will find that his opinions on all these topics are set in fixed patterns, set early in life and lately only reinforced.”¹⁶⁷

Whenever he was in London, Winston stopped in Whitehall to see Vansittart. Though stripped of power and influence, Van kept in touch with his sources abroad and accumulated inside information in Whitehall through friends and former subordinates. He was troubled, as was Winston, by the rot of defeatism among Englishmen, particularly among British diplomats. In Paris, Sir Eric Phipps told Bonnet that the Czechs, by declaring they would fight if invaded, had “put themselves in the wrong.” Basil Newton, in Prague, consistently supported Nazi demands. If the French believed it “worthwhile to try to perpetuate the status quo in [their] own interests,” he advised the FO, Britain should stand aside. As early as March 13, 1938, the day after the Anschluss, Newton counseled London: “If I am right in thinking that Czechoslovakia’s present political position is not permanently tenable, it will be no kindness in the long run to try to maintain her in it.”¹⁶⁸

The most egregious of all His Majesty’s emissaries was Sir Nevile Henderson. Duplicity had won him his appointment in Berlin, and any other foreign secretary—or prime minister—would have dismissed him long before he could inflict a mortal wound on European peace. When, in the House of Commons, Duff Cooper described him as “violently anti-Czech and pro-German,” no one rose to Henderson’s defense; no other interpretation of his record was possible. He described the Czechs as “a pigheaded race”; Beneš, their president—a graduate of the universities of Prague, Paris, and Dijon—was “the most pigheaded of the lot.” As His Britannic Majesty’s official representative, he informed the Germans: “Great Britain would not think of risking even one sailor or airman for Czechoslovakia and… any reasonable solution would be agreed to, so long as it were not attempted by force.”¹⁶⁹

Putting all other work aside to back the Czechs, Churchill was writing and speaking in their behalf at Manchester, Bristol, Sheffield, and Birmingham, trying to rouse Britain to the great peril Chamberlain and those around him could not see. In the May 1, 1938, issue of the News of the World he opened a new series of articles with a piece on “Future Safeguards of National Defence.” Predicting that Britain’s chances of surviving the approaching conflict depended upon the extent and efficiency of her air-raid precautions, he called for a crash program to bring nearer the day “when the accursed air-murderer, for such I must judge the bomber of civilian populations, meets a sure doom.” The “greatest safety,” he argued, “will be found in having an air force so numerous and excellent that it will beat the enemy’s air force in fair fight”; therefore continued study, expenditures, and preparations were essential. Chamberlain was infuriated; he regarded the article as an attack on His Majesty’s foreign policy, a foul blow at the fragile arch of understanding the prime minister and foreign minister were trying to build between London and Berlin.

Recriminations over what had been done and what had been left undone were futile. Unlike Baldwin, Chamberlain believed in rearmament within limits. The chief limitation arose from his greater concern for Britain’s economic prosperity. As he saw it, the practice under which the cabinet approved estimates submitted by the three services endangered the country’s fiscal security. His solution was to fix a ceiling for defense spending and then let the services distribute it among themselves.

This was a businessman’s way of defending a nation, but to others it made no sense. Duff Cooper attacked “the absurd new system of rationing the defence departments”; the “sensible plan,” he argued, “must be to ascertain your needs for defence first, and then inquire as to your means for meeting them.” Soldiers were even more vehement. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pownall of the Committee of Imperial Defence wrote in his diary that the prime minister’s theory of “limited liability in war” was “a most dangerous heresy”; the politicians “cannot or will not realize that if war with Germany comes again… we shall again be fighting for our lives. Our efforts must be the maximum, by land, sea, and air…. In God’s name let us recognize that from the outset—and by that I mean now.”¹⁷⁰

Chamberlain told his cabinet that British production could not match Germany’s “unless we are prepared to undertake the tremendous measure of control over skilled labour, as in Germany.” He preferred “voluntary” cooperation by arms manufacturers, though such firms had not been noted in the past for their patriotism. The fact was that the bill for years of neglecting the nation’s defenses, most of it during the ministries of MacDonald and Baldwin, was coming due. The people were uneasy; a scapegoat was needed, and the prime minister’s eye fell on the secretary for air, Lord Swinton, who had neglected to show enthusiasm for appeasement policies. Later Churchill wrote of an Air Defence Research Committee meeting of May 12, 1938, at which “we were all busily engaged” discussing “technical problems, when a note was brought in to the Air Minister asking him to go to Downing Street.” Swinton left at once and “never returned. He had been dismissed by Mr. Chamberlain.”¹⁷¹

There was speculation, though not among those in a position to know, that Churchill might be appointed in his place. Instead, the prime minister announced a reshuffling of his cabinet, with Swinton replaced by Minister of Health Sir Kingsley Wood, the P.M.’s oldest and most faithful supporter, a Francophobe and the most fervent of appeasers, more eager even than Chamberlain for friendship with Nazi Germany. Kingsley Wood had never worn a uniform; his career had been devoted to health, education, and welfare. Nicolson wrote Vita: “We had an excitement yesterday, Swinton sacked. At once I telephoned or rather got Duncan [Sandys] to telephone to Winston…. How silly the whole thing is! Here we are at the greatest crisis in our history, with a genius like Winston doing nothing and Kingsley Wood as our Minister for Air.” Other changes in the cabinet seemed just as baffling, Nicolson wrote. He blamed Chief Whip David Margesson (“not… a good Cabinet-maker”) but conceded in the end that in such a hodgepodge it was impossible to assign responsibility. (He overlooked the prime minister.) “Nobody understands anything,” he concluded. “There is a real impression that the whole show is going to crack up. This view is held, not only by protagonists like Winston, but by the silent useful members of whom nobody ever hears. They think that a new Government will emerge on a far wider basis, possibly a Coalition Government.” Nicolson was two years—almost to the day—ahead of time.¹⁷²

The RAF leadership, first under Sir Hugh (“Boom”) Trenchard and then under Lord Weir, still held sacred the doctrine that “the bomber will always get through.” Holding this principle sacred, Trenchard and Weir believed that Britain’s only hope of survival lay in devastating retaliation against an enemy. Every RAF plan had called for two or three times as many bombers as fighter planes. Since bombers cost more, and required larger crews, both in the air and on the ground, the waste, in retrospect, is obvious. In the spring of 1938 Dowding’s reply to this theory—radar and fast fighters to intercept hostile bombers—won acceptance. Before the shift could be reflected in the sky, however, Britain was confronted with a surplus of bombers and a scarcity of Spitfires and Hawker Hurricanes.

The imbalance, the loss of faith in their striking force of heavy bombers, wild exaggerations of Luftwaffe strength, and the deleterious implications of rationing on the service which most needed reequipment crippled RAF morale. It seemed at its lowest point in 1938, urged there by the most famous aviator of his time. Colonel Charles Lindbergh’s impact had first begun to be felt in early 1936; he had just left Germany and was reappearing in London at the invitation of U.S. ambassador Joseph Kennedy, who squired him around as he shared his views with Chamberlain, his cabinet, Fleet Street, and virtually every other Briton who possessed power and made decisions. Göring, General Ernst Udet, and the rest of the Luftwaffe hierarchy had done a job on the Lone Eagle, but there had been more to it than that. Like many other visitors to Berlin, he and his wife had been impressed by the energy and self-confidence of the Führer and his people. She wrote: “There is no question of the power, unity, and purposefulness of Germany. It is terrific.” Nothing they learned in subsequent visits to the Reich caused them to change that opinion. In April 1938 Lindbergh wrote in his diary: “England seems hopelessly behind in military strength in comparison to Germany” and “the assets in English character lie in confidence rather than ability; tenacity rather than strength; and determination rather than intelligence…. It is necessary to realize that England is a country composed of a great mass of slow, somewhat stupid and indifferent people, and a small group of geniuses.”¹⁷³

At the American embassy in September he told a select group of Englishmen, presumably those he would include among the geniuses (Kennedy had not invited Churchill), that they couldn’t “realize the change aviation has made” and that “this is the beginning of the end of England as a great power.” He thought that “German air strength is greater than that of all other European countries combined” and that “she is constantly increasing her margin of leadership.” England and France, he believed, “are far too weak in the air to protect themselves…. It seems to me essential to avoid a general European war in the near future. I believe that a war now might easily result in the loss of European civilization.”¹⁷⁴

At Cliveden, where Lindbergh was guest of honor, Thomas Jones and Lord Astor said it was “necessary for England to fight if Germany moves into Czechoslovakia.” The others, led by Nancy, shouted them down. Later Jones wrote that after reflecting upon what Lindbergh had said, “I’ve sided with those working for peace at any price in humiliation, because of the picture of our relative unpreparedness in the air and on the ground which Lindbergh painted, and because of his belief that the democracies would be crushed absolutely and finally.”¹⁷⁵

After Roosevelt had publicly branded him “defeatist,” Lindbergh’s prestige began to shrink, and when Wilhelmstrasse documents became available to historians during the war crimes trials at Nuremberg, his prewar evaluation of Nazi air strength was discredited. It is a measure of Lindbergh’s prewar renown, however, that Roosevelt found it necessary to take such a step. In 1938 he was at his peak. A. L. Rowse recalls: “Great play in those days, I remember, was made of Lindbergh, treated as omniscient in air matters…. Dawson quoted Lindbergh to me: he was made much of by the Cliveden set.” As Sheila Grant Duff reported to Churchill from central Europe, Lindbergh buttressed the German conviction that England “would be neutral if they attacked Czechoslovakia.” On October 18, 1938, three weeks after the Munich Agreement, Hitler would decorate the American aviator with the highest award Germany could confer upon an Ausländer—the Service Cross of the German Eagle with Star—accompanied by a citation declaring that he “deserved well of the Reich.” The Lone Eagle had earned his Nazi medal.¹⁷⁶

On Friday, May 6, when America’s 1938 recession touched bottom and Churchill found his wallet empty, Lord Rothermere told readers of his Daily Mail that “Czechoslovakia is not of the slightest concern to us. If France likes to burn her fingers there, that is a matter for France.” Bonnet, who was prone to nausea, read it over breakfast and became ill. On Saturday, May 7, French and British diplomats in Prague presented a formal demarche to Foreign Minister Krofta. Hitler already knew the gist of it; four days earlier Halifax had told the new German ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, Herbert von Dirksen, that the demarche would “aim at inducing Beneš to show the utmost measure of accommodation to the Sudeten Germans.” (The foreign secretary had not extended the same courtesy to Czechoslovakia’s Ambassador Masaryk.) The Czechs were asked to make a “supreme effort” to go to “the utmost limit” to meet the Henlein demands of April 24, with the hope of reaching a “comprehensive and lasting settlement” with the Sudetendeutsche. Dirksen reported to the Wilhelmstrasse that Chamberlain and his government regarded the possibility of military action “doubtful,” though the French, more optimistic, were ready to march.¹⁷⁷

Henderson gave the Germans his personal view: “France is acting for the Czechs and Germany for the Sudeten Germans. Britain is supporting Germany.” He “urgently hoped” that the Führer would “not refuse some kind of cooperation with Britain in this matter, which might then, perhaps, lead to cooperation in other matters also.” Ribbentrop quickly replied that after this question was solved, the Reich would be “durchtränkt”—saturated.¹⁷⁸

Any doubts about HMG’s position were resolved by the prime minister. Lady Astor had given Chamberlain a luncheon on May 10; his fellow guests were American and Canadian foreign correspondents. The P.M. was accustomed to the deference of British newspapermen. He also put some of his remarks on the record and some off, a dangerous format, vulnerable to misunderstandings. On May 14 the Montreal Star and the New York Times broke the story, the Star reporting, “Nothing seems clearer than that the British do not expect to fight for Czechoslovakia…. That being so, then the Czechs must accede to the German demands, if reasonable.” The New York Times man, formerly a diplomatic correspondent for The Times, went further: “Mr. Chamberlain today… certainly favors a more drastic measure—namely, separation of the German districts from the body of the Czechoslovak Republic and the annexation of them to Germany.”¹⁷⁹

The British press picked the story up. In less than a week the German embassy learned that the articles had been based on the P.M.’s remarks at Nancy Astor’s luncheon. Dirksen advised Berlin that Chamberlain would approve of the Sudetenland’s secession from Czechoslovakia, provided the wishes of the people were determined in a plebiscite “not interrupted by forcible measures on the part of Germany.”

Hitler had hesitated to threaten Czechoslovakia. The Anschluss, he knew, had been much simpler. Austria had lacked allies and a strong military presence; nor did she have a defensive position which, if forfeited, would undermine Anglo-French security. Because the Czechs had all these, deliberate provocation of a crisis would risk a general European war or a humiliating withdrawal. Everything would depend on speed. He needed a fait accompli, before sympathy for the underdog mounted in the democracies, where public opinion counted, and the Russians seized the opportunity to become a European power through intervention. Hitler had wanted reassurance before he took such risks. And now he had it—from Britain.

Although Chamberlain had eased Hitler’s doubts, the Führer had a backup plan. Colonel Malcolm Grahame Christie was an enigmatic figure similar to those found in Eric Ambler novels and Alfred Hitchcock films of the time. Educated in Germany and trained as an engineer, he had been a British fighter pilot in the last war and, afterward, an embassy attaché in Washington and Berlin, where he had become a friend of Göring. In 1930 he had retired from the RAF, ostensibly to become a businessman whose work required frequent trips to Germany. Actually, he was an intelligence officer gathering data on the Luftwaffe and the Reich’s military plans. Vansittart—kicked upstairs, but still serving the FO in an advisory role—was his control. When Van received a message from Henlein, asking for an interview, he asked Christie to make arrangements for him to visit London and return. If shown British resolve, Van reasoned, the Sudeten Germans might think twice before flouting Prague again. He seems not to have considered the possibility that Henlein, an ardent Nazi, might be acting on orders from Berlin.¹⁸⁰

He was. On May 12, exactly two months after the Anschluss, he had stopped at Berlin on his way west, was admitted to the Foreign Ministry through a seldom-used door, and was ushered into the office of Baron von Weizsäcker, Ribbentrop’s under secretary, for his final instructions. Most important, said Weizsäcker, would be British questions suggesting, or assuming, that he had been briefed by anyone in the government of the Third Reich, such as, say, Weizsäcker. Great weight was attached to his meeting with Churchill. The Führer believed that either Churchill or Eden would head the next government in England. Lastly, and this was a matter of judgment, he was expected to determine the temper of the men now in office. Were they as weak and incompetent as they seemed? Or was it all a trap? The Führer, himself a builder of traps, often thought he saw them in other countries, always with himself as their purported victim.¹⁸¹

Van minuted for the FO record afterward that as “it was impossible for members of the Government to see Herr Henlein lest some sort of negotiations be suspected, it was necessary to arrange that Herr Henlein should see not only myself but some persons of consequence in the House of Commons.” Here Churchill was indispensable. The visitor wanted to sample British opinion; a meeting with Winston might persuade him that the British lion could still roar. Churchill, told of the plan, agreed to give Henlein a lunch at Morpeth Mansions. “His visit is being kept a secret,” Winston wrote Archibald Sinclair. “His wish to come to London to see Van and a few others is a hopeful sign.” The other guests were Sinclair, Christie, and the Prof, who served as interpreter and took notes.¹⁸²

Henlein’s theatrical talents were effective. They listened gravely, nodding in approval as he told them the excessive demands in his Karlsbad speech were not to be taken seriously; they were “bargaining points” from which he was “prepared to recede.” He felt he was entitled to embrace the Nazi ideology but not “to impose it on others.” Questioned over whether he might be used as a pawn in Hitler’s Drang nach Osten, he swore on his word of honor that he had never received orders, or even “recommendations” (“Weisungen”), from Berlin. Asked whether he had claimed a veto power in Czechoslovakia’s foreign policy, he vigorously denied it. Churchill wondered whether he realized that an incident in the Sudetenland “might easily set Europe alight”—that “if Germany marched,” for example, “France would come in and England would follow.”

Henlein replied that he had known that from the outset and had, in fact, avoided incitements, even when he “believed he was in the right.” Looking ahead, he saw three paths: “Autonomy within the Czech State,” a plebiscite which would probably lead to an Anschluss, and war. His followers, who were “impatient,” preferred an Anschluss. If Prague ignored their appeals, they would ask Europe’s great powers for a plebiscite “under international supervision.”¹⁸³

Police, railway, and postal workers in the Sudetenland would be required to speak German and the Sudeten Germans would be entitled to their own town and county governments, but “the frontier fortresses could be manned by Czech troops, who would, of course, have unhindered access thereto.” As he left—not for his homeland, as his hosts assumed, but for Berchtesgaden, where he would report to Hitler—one of the others called out: “We hope you’re not another Seyss-Inquart!” Over his shoulder he called back: “No chance of that!” Churchill immediately laid Henlein’s terms before Jan Masaryk, who, as Winston later noted in his memoirs, “professed himself contented with a settlement on these lines.” On May 16, three days after his luncheon for Henlein, Churchill told an audience in Bristol that he saw “no reason why the Sudetendeutsche should not become trusted and honored partners in what is, after all, the most progressive and democratic of the new States of Europe.”¹⁸⁴

Weizsäcker’s coaching of Henlein—exploiting Britain’s traditional championing of fair play—had been brilliant. The issue in Czechoslovakia had previously been depicted simply, as an unequal struggle in which the huge Reich was intimidating a plucky but outgunned neighbor. Now there was concern over a minority whose rights were being ignored or trammeled by insensitive Prague. In the Berghof, Henlein told Hitler that “no serious intervention in favor of the Czechs was to be feared from England or probably from France.”¹⁸⁵

The lunch in Morpeth Mansions had been on Friday, May 13, and Churchill had spoken in support of Henlein on the following Monday. Now, on Wednesday, a Leipzig newspaper published an account of Wehrmacht assault divisions moving into position on the Czech frontier. Thursday the British consulate in Dresden reported that there was “strong reason to believe that German troops are concentrating in southern Silesia and northern Austria.” Later in the day a similar report arrived from Bavaria, together with a cable from Henderson adding: “My French colleague has also heard rumors of concentration of troops on the [Czech] frontier.” The following day Krofta, alarmed, phoned Ernst Eisenlohr, the German minister in Prague, to protest; on his desk were several reports, each confirming the others, of heavy German troop concentrations in Saxony. Thus the stage was set for the May crisis.¹⁸⁶

Czech municipal elections were to be held on Sunday. Since Henlein’s return the Sudetenland had been chaotic. Gangs of Sudetendeutsche youths wearing swastika brassards had attacked neighbors of Slavic descent, marched through streets carrying torches, and held rallies which culminated in chants of “Sieg Heil!” and “Wir wollen heim ins Reich!” (“We want to go home to the Reich!”). Goebbels, meantime, had stepped up his denunciation of “Czech terror.” The parallels with Austria were unmistakable. Any incident might touch off an invasion, and Friday, May 20, one made to order occurred when two Sudeten German motorcyclists were shot dead after ignoring a Czech policeman’s whistle. After an emergency cabinet meeting in Hradschin Palace, President Beneš approved an urgent recommendation of the Czech General Staff, calling up reservists and specialist troops to man the Sudetenland garrisons.

In Berlin Ribbentrop heatedly denied hostile Wehrmacht concentrations, but when Eisenlohr and his military attaché called on General Ludvik Krejcí, the Czech chief of staff, they were shown an impressive collection of what he called “irrefutable evidence that in Saxony a concentration of from eight to ten divisions has taken place,” with another twelve on the Czech frontier “ready to march within twelve hours.” All the pieces of what had seemed a puzzle were falling into place. Krejcí’s army believed it could hold the Wehrmacht in check long enough for France, Britain, and the Russians to intervene, provided its fortress line was manned and ready. The country would, however, be particularly vulnerable to a surprise attack by Nazi forces assembled and deployed under what Beneš’s General Staff called “the guise of training purposes.”¹⁸⁷

“Training” was indeed the explanation the German high command (OKW) gave Weizsäcker, who passed it on to a skeptical world. But for once it was true. The Wehrmacht wasn’t ready. A scrupulous examination of OKW and German foreign policy documents at Nuremberg after the war revealed that there had been no aggressive concentrations in Silesia or Austria that May. The OKW’s statement that the Nazi troops along the Czech border were assembled for “peacetime maneuvers” was accurate. To foreigners the number of German soldiers near the frontier would have been disquieting, but such numbers could be seen nearly anywhere in the Reich. Germany had become a highly militarized nation; its economy was on a war footing. Hitler did intend to invade Beneš’s country. And these were the soldiers who would form the point of his spearhead. But not yet.

In the spring of 1938, however, the truth was unknown. In Paris and London the men responsible for crucial decisions had every reason to believe that Hitler might be poised to unleash another bolt of lightning from his aerie above Berchtesgaden. Daladier staked out the French position by inviting the German ambassador to his home and speaking “frankly as a French ex-serviceman to his German comrade,” warning him that should Hitler invade Czechoslovakia “the French would have to fight as they did not wish to be dishonored,” and that the result could be the utter destruction of European civilization. Halifax, out of character but acting in the finest tradition of British diplomacy, sent the unhappy Henderson to the Wilhelmstrasse twice with personal messages from him to Ribbentrop. In the first he declared that “His Majesty’s Government could not guarantee that they would not be forced by circumstances to become involved” if France, following her treaty obligations, intervened. The second note warned that if the Nazis resorted to force, “it is quite impossible for me to foretell results that might follow, and I would beg him not to count on this country being able to stand aside.”¹⁸⁸

Now there was no way Germany could avoid an enormous loss of face. Because the Wehrmacht was unprepared, Hitler could not attack, and since he did not, the Allies concluded that he had backed down. That was Churchill’s interpretation. The Czechs, he wrote in the Daily Telegraph of June 23, had seemed doomed “to be swallowed whole by Berlin and reduced to shapeless pulp by the close-grinding mandibles of the Gestapo.” Now Hitler knew Czechoslovakia would not “be left to struggle week after week against an avalanche of fire and steel.”

Churchill thought the incident a triumph for England, but His Majesty’s Government did not see it that way. For men who had presumably won a victory of diplomacy, they took no heart from it. In fact, they were badly frightened. Still convinced that the Germans had been intent on military action, they thought of the peril they had skirted and mopped their brows. Chamberlain wrote his sisters: “The more I hear about last weekend, the more I feel what a damned close run thing it was.” In another letter to them, he wrote, “The Germans, who are bullies by nature, are too conscious of their strength and our weakness, and until we are as strong as they are” (which, if his defense policies were unaltered, would be never) “we shall always be kept in a state of chronic anxiety.” After reviewing the cable traffic, Halifax and Cadogan vowed never again to approach the brink and, accordingly, sent Paris a telegram warning the French not to be “under any illusion” about the possibility of British help “against German aggression.”¹⁸⁹

The May crisis had arisen from a misunderstanding; if the Führer had been a sane man, he would have counted himself lucky to be out of it. Hitler, not sane, personifying the underside of the Teutonic character and four horrible years which had ended in the defeat, not just of Germany, but of him, saw a wrong crying for redemption. The fact that he had been planning the invasion of Czechoslovakia—that the only real misunderstanding in May had been over timing—somehow made it worse. “Injustice is relatively easy to bear,” wrote Mencken. “What stings is justice.” On May 28 the Führer suddenly appeared in Berlin and summoned the hierarchies of the OKW, the party, and the government to the chancellery. His voice still choking with rage, he said that the Sudeten question would be solved “once and for all, and radically.” Preparations for military action must be completed by October 2, the Siegfried Line would be extended by workers toiling around the clock, and ninety-six divisions were mobilized immediately. The execution of Fall Grün “must be assured by October 1, 1938, at the latest.” In his hoarse, staccato delivery, his voice sounding like a bearing about to go, he roared: “Es ist mein unerschütterlicher Wille, die Tschechoslowakei von der Landkarte auszulöschen!” (“It is my unshakable will to wipe Czechoslovakia off the map!”).¹⁹⁰

Churchill, unaware of Hitler’s resolution, shared a fresh sense of relief with his Daily Telegraph readers on July 6. The Anschluss, he had decided on reflection, was not the Nazi triumph it had seemed to be. At the time, he recalled, he had told Parliament that

after a boa-constrictor has devoured a goat or a deer it usually sleeps the sleep of repletion for several months. It may, however, happen that this agreeable process is disturbed by indigestion…. If the prey has not been sufficiently crushed or covered with slime beforehand, especially if it has been swallowed horns and all, very violent spasms, accompanied by writhings and contortions, retchings and gaspings, are suffered by the great snake. These purely general zoological observations… suggest a parallel—no doubt very remote—to what has happened since Austria was incorporated into the German Reich.

Extrapolating from “a continuous stream of trustworthy information” he said that the German Nazis were bedeviled by “Jews in very large numbers… Catholics by the million… Monarchists faithful to a Hapsburg restoration… strong Socialist and Left-wing elements in every working-class district… numerous remnants of what was once the high society of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.” There was also, in Austria, “the strongest and the only covert resistance to the Nazification” which “oddly enough” came from the “Austrian Nazis who were the prime cause and pretext of the invasion.” Churchill was delighted to describe their fury at finding themselves “excluded from all positions of power, profit, and control,” and their resulting rebellion.

By custom, newspaper columnists are entitled to an occasional romp in fantasy, and Churchill’s optimistic picture of the Austrian situation was, unfortunately, that. On the whole, Churchill was a highly reliable journalist. His innumerable informants assured the accuracy of his information, at least eventually. In his Daily Telegraph piece of July 6 he was, however, guilty of another lapse, flagrant now but invisible at the time. “A settlement and reconciliation in Czechoslovakia would be no humiliation to Herr Hitler,” he wrote. The Führer could take pride in having won for the Sudeten Germans “honorable status and a rightful place in the land of their birth,” reforms which would have “strengthened rather than shaken the foundations of European peace.” Churchill had been Konrad Henlein’s mark in a kind of diplomatic confidence game, generating Churchillian warnings to Prague over its treatment of the restless citizens in the Sudetenland and this mild assessment of Hitler’s goals. As late as July 26, Churchill was still lecturing Prague, writing in the Daily Telegraph that “The Czech Government owe it to the Western Powers that every concession compatible with the sovereignty and integrity of their State shall be made, and made promptly.” Englishmen who demanded that “Germany not stir up strife beyond her border” should, to be consistent, offer “no encouragement to obduracy on the part of a small state.”

In midsummer Sheila Grant Duff put Churchill straight. She wrote him of “the use which the Germans and Sudeten Germans are making of your words and actions. They claim to have your support against the Czechs and this is used by the more extreme to force the more moderate to raise their claims.” She reminded Winston that Henlein had “shown himself to be most moderate in his conversation with you and that he had told you that the fulfillment of all his Carlsbad [sic] demands was not the necessary condition of agreement with the Czechs.” But, “since his return to Prague,” she wrote, “he has in fact raised his original demands.” She believed Churchill was “the one British statesman of whom the Germans are afraid. If you are conciliated, they consider that they can expect much greater support from the British Government, whom they think are afraid…. Henlein is much more radical since he saw you.” Indeed he was. Under great pressure from Halifax, Beneš offered the Sudetens “cantonal self-government”—a concession far exceeding the Sudeten German leader’s most extravagant hopes when he had laid his case before Churchill in Morpeth Mansions. His followers rejoiced, but after conferring with Hitler at Berchtesgaden, Henlein rejected the offer, insisting on full independence, including sovereignty over the Czech fortress line in the Sudeten Mountains.¹⁹¹

Churchill’s informants continued to be of a much higher caliber than the government’s. Men unavailable to any other correspondent came to Chartwell to be interviewed by him. As early as July 14, 1938, less than eight weeks after the May crisis and a year before Hitler got round to Poland, Winston interrogated Albert Förster, Gauleiter (Nazi district leader) of Danzig and the Führer’s man, in his sitting room. Many of Chartwell’s visitors came at grave personal risk, though none graver than Major Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin.

On August 18, 1938, Major von Kleist, in mufti, registered incognito at the Park Lane Hotel and was driven to Kent by Frank Jenner, the Westerham taxi driver. As the German talked, Randolph took notes; his father listened and interrupted from time to time with comments and questions. Kleist described an attack on Czechoslovakia as “imminent.” He believed it would come between the annual Nazi rally at Nuremberg in the first week of September and the end of the month. “Nobody in Germany,” Randolph’s notes read, “wants war except H.” The generals were for peace, “convinced that an attack upon Czechoslovakia would involve Germany in war with France and Britain.” They were prepared to disobey the Führer, even overthrow him, but needed “a little encouragement.” Churchill replied that though many Englishmen were unprepared to advocate war “in cold blood,” few would “stand by idly once the fighting started.” He emphasized that he and those who shared his view on this point were “anti-Nazi and anti-war but not anti-German.” Kleist replied that he would share this message with his friends and colleagues but would welcome some gesture, even from “private members of Parliament,” to help consolidate the “universal anti-war sentiment in Germany.” After Kleist departed Chartwell, his host consulted Halifax, and when Kleist left London on August 23, he carried with him a letter signed by Churchill declaring that the crossing of the Czech frontier by German troops or warplanes “in force” would mean the renewal of the world war, which would be fought out “to the bitter end,” with all the nations engaged in the struggle fighting on “for victory or death.”¹⁹²

When Winston received information that could not be published, he usually sent it to men in power. Usually they disregarded it. Kleist could have been invaluable, but when a summary of his message reached the prime minister, Chamberlain waved it away, saying, “I take it that von Kleist is violently anti-Hitler and is extremely anxious to stir up his friends in Germany to make an attempt at its [sic] overthrow. He reminds me of the Jacobites at the Court of France in King William’s time, and I think we must discount a good deal of what he says.”¹⁹³

Like Churchill, who also traveled armed now, Hitler worried that before he could play out his role in history “something might happen” to him. It would be tragic, he told his generals, if, after so much toil in so just a cause, the war were to be fought without him. He knew they were worried about war on two fronts, and so on June 18, when he had drawn up his final directive for the invasion of Czechoslovakia, he had assured Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the OKW, that he would sign the order to march “only if I am firmly convinced, as in the case of the [Rhineland] demilitarized zone and the entry into Austria, that France will not march, and that therefore England will not intervene.”¹⁹⁴

Keitel was a lickspittle, but other OKW commanders were not reassured. On June 12 Daladier had renewed France’s 1924 guarantee of Czech borders, saying it was “sacred and cannot be evaded.” The commanders were depressed further by Kleist’s failure in August in England; the letter Churchill had given Kleist had been invigorating, but he was out of power and likely to remain there. Hitler therefore gave his General Staff additional grounds for concern at the Kummersdorf Proving Ground, delivering one of his fulsome autopanegyrics: “Fortune must be seized when she strikes, for she will not come again!… I predict that by the end of the year we will be looking back at a great success!” The Siegfried Line, growing stronger with each passing hour, could hold the French and British in check, if it came to that, while they and their men overran Czechoslovakia. The man who couldn’t hold the line against odds was “a scoundrel.” At this point Major Helmuth Groscurth, an intelligence officer, scribbled in his diary that the Führer was spouting “völliger Unsinn” (“total nonsense”).¹⁹⁵

Europe’s statesmen, if frozen in time during that late summer and early fall period in 1938, would resemble characters in a grotesque Friedrich Dürrenmatt play, each acting on assumptions the others would find startling or even preposterous. In Paris the prospect of another great war dismays Daladier, but he has faith in his British ally and the greatness of his army, and the mere suggestion that France might break her word is unthinkable. Bonnet, who breaks his own word almost daily, thinks of little else. In London His Majesty’s Government still dreams of scuttling France and forming a new alliance with the Germans. Many powerful Germans would like to reciprocate, but only one of them counts and he is demented. He has told Keitel that the Western democracies won’t fight, but even he doesn’t believe it, and neither does the chief of the German General Staff, General Ludwig Beck, who resigns on August 27. Unless one shares the Führer’s superstitious belief in intuition, his plans are ludicrous. In Beck’s words, he has put himself in an “untenable position.” William L. Shirer will write: “Germany was in no position to go to war on October 1, 1938”—the date Hitler had set, and would cling to—“against Czechoslovakia and France and Britain…. Had she done so, she would have been quickly and easily defeated, and that would have been the end of Hitler and the Third Reich.”¹⁹⁶

It wouldn’t even have gone that far. Conspirators in the OKW would have intervened. At Nuremberg eight years later Field Marshal Keitel was asked to describe the Generalstab’s reaction to Chamberlain’s Munich sellout, and replied: “We were extraordinarily happy [ausserordentlich glücklich] that it had not come to a military operation because… we had always been of the opinion that our means of attack against the frontier fortifications of Czechoslovakia were insufficient.” General Franz Halder, interrogated by an American officer toward the end of the Nuremberg trials, testified that the Czech issue inspired the German generals’ plot against Hitler. Had the Führer ordered the attack in 1938, he said, “It had been planned to occupy by military force the Reich Chancellery and those government offices, particularly ministries, which were administered by party members and close supporters of Hitler, with the express intention of avoiding bloodshed and then trying the group before the whole German nation.”¹⁹⁷

Meanwhile, the Czechs, trusting their formidable defenses and their two fellow democracies in the west, were ready for anything—anything, that is, except betrayal by those two. The Poles and the Hungarians were plotting ignobly; if the Germans took part of Czechoslovakia, they wanted some, too. In Rome, Mussolini imagined that the others were wondering which way he would pounce. Actually, they weren’t thinking of him at all. Since the Ethiopian fiasco the Duce’s legions had been heavily discounted.

But what of the Russians? The fate of Czechoslovakia had the highest strategic consequences for the Soviet Union. If Hitler seized the Sudetenland and the Czech fortifications, the Soviets would lose the outer bastion of their defense system. Hitler understood that; he called Beneš’s country “the Soviet Russian Aircraft Carrier.” The Foreign Office in Whitehall was aware of these implications; its career diplomats had repeatedly urged their political overseers to open “conversations” with the Russians, but although Litvinov had been trying to shoulder his way into an anti-Nazi alliance since the fall of Austria, the appeasers kept pretending the U.S.S.R. didn’t exist.¹⁹⁸

One incident reveals how far certain men in London and in France would go to stifle an alliance with the Soviet Union. Speaking to the French chargé d’affaires in Moscow, Litvinov proposed “immediate staff talks between the Soviet, French and Czech experts.” Bonnet buried the chargé’s report in a locked file and mentioned it to no one. Two days later he misled the British ambassador in Paris, telling him that the Rumanians would not permit Russian warplanes to violate their air space in support of the Czechs. But the secretary general at the Quai, the incorruptible Alexis Léger, had already informed Phipps that permission would be granted. Despite Bonnet, the facts reached R. A. Butler, Halifax’s young new under secretary, who promptly spiked them, remarking, “Let us hope no more will come of this idea.”¹⁹⁹

Churchill prayed that something would. Hitler had massed at least 1.5 million soldiers on Czechoslovakia’s borders and Churchill felt Russia’s help was essential. On the last day of August he wrote Halifax to advise delivery of “a joint note” to Hitler from Britain, France, and Russia expressing their “desire for peace,” their “deep anxiety at the military preparations of Germany,” their common interest in “a peaceful solution of the Czechoslovak controversy,” and their conviction that “an invasion by Germany of Czechoslovakia would raise capital issues.” Ambassadors for the three powers, he said, should hand the note to President Roosevelt, “and we should use every effort to induce him to do his utmost upon it.” To Winston it seemed “not impossible” that the president “would then address H. emphasising the gravity of the situation… saying that a world war would inevitably follow from an invasion of Czechoslovakia, and that he earnestly counselled a friendly settlement.” The “peaceful elements in German official circles”—and no one in the Foreign Office was more aware of their strength—would “make a stand,” forcing the Führer to “find a way out for himself by parleying with Roosevelt.” This sequence of events was conjectural, Churchill granted; “one only sees them as hopes.” But any hope was better than none.²⁰⁰

He drove to Whitehall and handed his letter to Halifax, who went across Downing Street to No. 10. There, like every other communication to the prime minister, including those bearing the royal seal, it came under the shifty eyes of Sir Horace Wilson. At his peak Rasputin was known to all Moscow. Wilson was more like one of the burrowing insectivores. A nation in peril, with hundreds of thousands of lives in jeopardy, does not refuse to answer the doorbell when a well-muscled neighbor, feeling his own future darkened by the same shadow, comes to make common cause. But that, in effect, was Horace Wilson’s advice to his patron. When Churchill’s proposal reached Chamberlain, attached to it was an admonition in his seneschal’s neat handwriting condemning it in every particular. Wilson described it as “a mixture of diplomacy and threat” which would enrage Hitler by including Russia in the coalition confronting him. He predicted that if Winston’s proposal were adopted, England would be carried closer to a situation in which “we might find ourselves… tackling Germany single-handed”—which was, of course, the one thing it would not have done.²⁰¹

Winston, meantime, was receiving confirmation that his plan would have had a warmer reception elsewhere. On September 2 the Russian ambassador sent Chartwell word that he would like to drive down and discuss “a matter of urgency.” Maisky’s mission was to inform him of conversations which had taken place in Moscow the previous day between the French chargé d’affaires and Foreign Commissar Litvinov, the essence of which was that the Soviet Union wanted to stand shoulder to shoulder with the British and French against Hitler. Churchill later recalled: “Before he had got very far, I realized that he was making a declaration to me, a private person, because the Soviet Government preferred this channel to a direct offer to the Foreign Office which might have encountered a rebuff.” He felt this implication strengthened, he wrote after the Russian had left, “by the fact that no request for secrecy was made.” Considering the matter of signal importance, Winston composed a detailed account of the conversation for Halifax, taking special care not to use language which might “prejudice its consideration by Halifax and Chamberlain.” This report, too, was received unenthusiastically by HMG; Halifax replied, Winston later wrote, “in a guarded manner, that he did not feel that action of the kind proposed… would be helpful, but that he would keep it in mind.”²⁰²

Nonetheless, when Churchill’s August 31 proposal was returned to the Foreign Office with Wilson’s comment endorsed by Chamberlain, Halifax had been uneasy. If Hitler was Britain’s enemy, then so was time; the government should make some clear statement of policy before the Reich chancellor delivered another of his incendiary speeches to the Reichstag, touching off rioting among Henlein’s Sudeten Nazis. To restore order Prague would be obliged to use force; Hitler would rant about Czech police brutality, and the cycle would be repeated again, until a single swing of an impatient policeman’s club could bring the Wehrmacht surging across the border. Therefore, the foreign secretary decided he himself should speak, establishing Britain’s disapproval of Sudeten German incidents. He sent his text across the street, and back it came, with its own Wilson critique embellished by the prime minister’s approval.

Wilson liked this even less than Winston’s. He declared that “any intelligent journalist… could draw but one deduction, namely that we were threatening Germany.” Patiently, Halifax sent over a new draft. Chamberlain himself commented on this one, and he could find nothing good to say about it. One paragraph was sure to “draw protests from the Dominions,” another was “clearly a threat”; all in all it was “out of place till after Nuremberg.” The whole point of it had been to put His Majesty’s Government on record before the Führer’s annual diatribe at the Nazis’ September rally. Ambassadors Henderson and Newton were also critical, and Halifax wrote Henderson that he had “more or less given up the idea of making a public speech.”²⁰³

Others, even champions of the new Germany, shared his concern. Henderson reported that Ribbentrop believed England would not “move under any circumstances,” and Under Secretary Weizsäcker had pointedly remarked that “war in 1914 might possibly have been avoided if Great Britain had spoken in time.” In a general FO discussion on September 4, support grew for what one participant called “a private warning” to the Führer, a plain statement “that we should have to come in to protect France.” Cadogan thought this had merit because “Hitler has probably been persuaded that our March and May statements are bluff, and that’s dangerous.” Yet nothing was done. They drifted.²⁰⁴

British policy had evolved subtly since late March, when the prime minister had barred commitments to, or even concern over, political events in Europe. Chamberlain was now concentrating on two objectives which were mutually exclusive: establishing a special relationship with the Reich and, at the same time, preserving England’s longtime friendship with France. Together they were impossible, but some tie with the Continent was necessary. Otherwise England was merely an island country off the Continent’s coast, at the mercy of any dominant continental power. So now, when Lord Maugham, Somerset Maugham’s brother, said that “no vital British interest is involved” in the Sudetenland, Duff Cooper fiercely reminded him that “the main interest of this country has always been to prevent any one power from obtaining undue predominance in Europe,” that in Nazi Germany they faced “the most formidable power that has ever dominated Europe,” and that resistance to power “is quite obviously a British interest.” No one in the cabinet disagreed. Yet as the crisis escalated, no statement of policy was made, publicly or through private diplomatic channels.²⁰⁵

The one British voice which had been heard through the summer was Geoffrey Dawson’s. On June 3, in his lead editorial he had pondered the advisability of permitting “the Germans of Czechoslovakia—by plebiscite or otherwise—to decide their own future, even if it should mean secession to the Reich.” Indeed, he wondered whether it might be sensible to allow other minorities inside the country to take the same course. It would be, he acknowledged, “a drastic remedy for the present unrest, but something drastic may be needed.”

Drastic was not the word; it would be catastrophic. The nation Beneš and Masaryk had founded was a polyglot state, a reflection, in microcosm, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from which it had derived. Within its borders were communities of Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, Magyars, Ruthenians, Poles, and Bohemians. That hardly meant that it was doomed. Dawson was writing völliger Unsinn. But many Europeans had once more concluded that The Times was the voice of Downing Street, and as September 1938 opened, no spokesman of His Majesty’s Government denied this. Since no one in Whitehall was making foreign policy, a newspaper editor had done it.

The prime minister was assigning greater priority to an exercise in personal diplomacy.

There is something almost touching about Neville Chamberlain’s faith in his cherished Plan Z, a simple scheme, redolent of those Chatterbox volumes in which the Chamberlain boys, like so many young Victorians of their class, had lost themselves on long Saturday afternoons when there were no playmates and Nanny was busy elsewhere. Pen-and-ink drawings identified the handsome, mesomorphic heroes, the helpless but winning heroines, and the scowling ruffians doomed, in issue after issue, to be foiled in the last paragraph. And how had they been outwitted? By Plan Z! Or Plan X, or Q, or whatever—a simple ruse, harmless to others but fatal for the wicked. The first we know of its reappearance in the mind of Neville, grown up and grown old, is a memorandum by Sir Horace Wilson, written after the adjournment of a cabinet meeting on August 30, 1938. He and the prime minister had discussed the matter two or three days earlier, and now he wrote: “There is in existence a plan, to be called ‘Plan Z,’ which is known only to the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Foreign Secretary, Sir Nevile Henderson and myself.”²⁰⁶

The procedure’s success, he continued, depended upon “its being a complete surprise, and it is vital nothing should be said about it.” A second Wilson memorandum, filed the following day, gives the whole thing away: “On being told that Plan Z is emerging, Henderson will ascertain where Hitler is, but will not say why he wants to know.” If time permitted, HM’s ambassador in Berlin would receive another message indicating time of arrival; he would pass this along to Ribbentrop. Again, time permitting, “we would like to do this before we make public announcement here that Plan Z has been put into operation. Place of arrival must be Berlin connecting with Henderson and Ribbentrop. (Schmidt is reliable.)”²⁰⁷

Wilson’s emphasis on time is subject to but one interpretation; the plan anticipated a supreme crisis, with a German invasion of Czechoslovakia imminent—perhaps but a few hours away. The need to know Hitler’s whereabouts, and the reference to Paul Otto Schmidt, the Führer’s personal interpreter, contemplated a surprise call on him—uninvited, with no prior arrangements. Presumably the P.M. planned to land in Germany and tell wide-eyed Germans, “Take me to your leader,” though that would have been difficult because he, like Hitler, spoke only his native language.

On September 3 Chamberlain wrote his sister Ida: “I keep racking my brains to try and devise some means of averting catastrophe, if it should seem to be upon us. I thought of one so unconventional and daring that it rather took Halifax’s breath away. But since Henderson thought it might save the situation at the 11th hour, I haven’t abandoned it, though I hope all the time that it won’t be necessary to try it.” If, as Horace Wilson had written, success of the operation depended upon “complete secrecy,” its chances were slim, since Henderson was notorious for sharing confidences with his Nazi friends Göring and Ribbentrop. The circle of those informed widened; Hoare and Simon were also told of it. No one remembered that it was illegal for a prime minister to leave the country without the King’s permission, but the matter of cabinet approval arose. It was, they decided, unnecessary. Chamberlain’s power to commit his country was beginning to rival Hitler’s.²⁰⁸

The year which had begun with Vansittart’s dismissal and Eden’s resignation had now reached the first lovely week of September, and if the Wilhelmstrasse of 1914 had been confused by England’s intentions, the Nazi generation was utterly baffled. The Quai d’Orsay had made it as clear as diplomats can that the French would fight if the Czech frontier were ruptured, and Britain was France’s ally. Yet, after a long cabinet meeting in Downing Street, Henderson told Ribbentrop that “the Sudeten Germans and the Czechs are a matter of complete indifference to Great Britain. Great Britain is only concerned with the attitude of France.”²⁰⁹

It was time to read The Times again. It is in keeping with the bizarre patterns of the Big Czech Crisis, now looming, that the author of the paper’s September 7 leader has never been identified. Dawson would spend the rest of his life explaining that he had returned late from his country weekend, insisting that he didn’t reach the office until late Tuesday afternoon, September 6. He read an incomplete draft of an editorial on Czechoslovakia, cut a paragraph, ordered it rewritten, and, apparently exhausted by this effort, left for dinner. Returning at 11:45 P.M. he had misgivings. A Francophile colleague, solicited for advice, urged further surgery. It would have been more useful, for those who wanted to avoid another great war, if they had burned every copy of the paper and then burned the building. One paragraph, in the words of Martin Gilbert, “gave its support to what was, in effect, the extreme Henlein position, unacceptable not only to Beneš, but also to that large number of Sudeten Germans for whom union with Germany would mean the loss of all liberty, swift imprisonment, forced labour, and death.” It ran:

If the Sudetens now ask for more than the Czech Government are ready to give… it can only be inferred that the Germans are going beyond the mere removal of disabilities for those who do not find themselves at ease within the Czechoslovak Republic. In that case it might be worth while for the Czechoslovak Government to consider whether they should exclude altogether the project, which has found favour in some quarters, of making Czechoslovakia a more homogeneous state by the cession of that fringe of alien populations who are contiguous to the nation to which they are united by race.²¹⁰

Considering the unique relationship between The Times and the government, it would be difficult to find a more irresponsible passage in the history of journalism. The unknown author—his identity shielded by Dawson, who either wrote it himself or knew who did—betrayed a staggering ignorance of geography, history, and both the ethnic diversity and range of political persuasions of the people living in the shadow of the Sudeten Mountains. As Churchill wrote the following day, in a letter which Dawson refused to publish, The Times’s proposal “would have the effect of handing over to the German Nazis the whole of the mountain defence line which marks the ancient boundaries of Bohemia, and was specially preserved to the Czechoslovak State as a vital safeguard of its national existence.” German propaganda had created the impression that everyone living in the Sudetenland was German, and that Henlein was their spokesman. Neither was true; four other political parties strongly opposed his Sudetendeutsche Nazis, and at least a quarter-million voters were German fugitives from the Third Reich. Like their Austrian comrades in terror, they knew that the names of their leaders were on Gestapo lists. For them, the Times editorial was at the very least the first draft of a death warrant.²¹¹

Jan Masaryk had to pay two visits to Whitehall that morning before the Foreign Office agreed to announce that the Times proposal “in no way represents the view of His Majesty’s Government.” By then every capital in Europe was convinced that it did. In Blackpool the Labour party’s National Executive issued a formal statement declaring that “the British Government must leave no doubt that they will unite with the French and Soviet Governments to resist any attack on Czechoslovakia.” Halifax agreed—he was vacillating, not for the last time, on the Czech issue, and like many appeasers he was occasionally discomfited by flecks of doubt about the wisdom of endlessly yielding to Hitler’s demands.²¹²

By now the Czech border was swarming with German assault troops, and London knew that this time they weren’t there for maneuvers. Theodor Kordt, the chargé d’affaires at the German embassy in the absence of Dirksen, had arrived in Downing Street the night of September 6 and entered No. 10 through the garden gate and the Horse Guards Parade. There he told Horace Wilson, and then Halifax, who came hurrying over from the FO, that he had come, “putting conscience before loyalty,” as “a spokesman for political and military circles in Berlin who desire by every means to prevent war.” He and his associates wanted a blunt warning that England would fight for the Czechs. “Hitler,” he said, had “taken his decision to ‘march in’ on the nineteenth or twentieth.”²¹³

Kordt was confirmed by an equally sensational development. Dr. Karl Burckhardt of the League of Nations had given the British ambassador in Berne a message from Weizsäcker, second only to Ribbentrop in the Wilhelmstrasse, confirming Kordt in every particular and underscoring the need to warn the Führer that the invasion of Czechoslovakia meant war. Halifax, with Chamberlain’s reluctant approval, drafted a sharply worded note for delivery to the German government: if the Czech frontier were breached France would declare war on Germany, touching off “a sequence of events” resulting in “a general conflict from which Great Britain could not stand aside.” But Ambassador Henderson—who had no authority whatever to pass judgment on the foreign secretary’s instructions—refused to deliver the note, on the ground that it would only inflame the Führer. Besides, he said, he had already made the British position “as clear as daylight to people who count.” With this assurance, and because of the difficulty of communicating with Henderson, who was living aboard a train for five days while he attended the Nuremberg rally, Halifax, “on understanding that you have in fact already conveyed to Herr von Ribbentrop… [the] substance of what you were instructed to say,” agreed that Henderson need make no further representation.²¹⁴

Precisely what His Majesty’s ambassador to the Reich may have said to Ribbentrop is unrecorded; but the SS officer who served as Henderson’s escort at Nuremberg later said that during his stay he “remarked with a sigh that Great Britain was now having to pay for her guilty part in the Treaty of Versailles” and “expressed his aversion to the Czechs in very strong terms.”²¹⁵

On the third day after the Times editorial, Göring spoke to the vast, hysterical mass at Nuremberg, calling the Czechs a “miserable pygmy race… oppressing a cultured people” and fronting for “Moscow and the eternal mask of the Jew Devil.” The Führer’s turn at the rostrum came, as always, on the last night of the rally, Monday, September 12. Bathed in spotlights, pausing after each scream of invective as the huge, packed stadium roared, “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!” he shouted his distorted version of the May crisis, raging at the recollection of Germany’s humiliation then, which he blamed on Beneš and his “Jew plotters.” Sweating till his cowlick was plastered across his forehead, he called Czechoslovakia a “monstrous formation” and demanded that the Sudetendeutsche be granted the “right of self-determination” and “justice” (“Gerechtigkeit”), adding in a flash of arrogation: “Germans of Austria know best how bitter a thing it is to be separated from the Fatherland. They will be the first to recognize the significance of what I have been saying today.” They would indeed. And so would Winston Churchill. According to the cabinet minutes, Halifax reported that he and the prime minister had seen Churchill on the previous day (Sunday), and said that “Mr. Churchill’s proposition was that we should tell Germany that if she set foot in Czechoslovakia we should at once be at war with her. Mr. Churchill agreed that this line of action was an advance on the line of action which he had proposed two or three weeks earlier, but he thought that by taking it we should incur no added risk.”²¹⁶

Yet while Winston saw an Anschluss replay thundering toward them, the edgy cabinets in Paris and London, listening to Hitler’s Nuremberg speech over radios, heard only wind. They awaited what the FO called “triggers,” vows and demands which could only be resolved by German bayonets slashing toward Prague. Since the Führer was unspecific, however, the prime minister, the premier, and their ministers felt relieved. Misunderstanding him and his genius, they erred. This was his milieu, and he knew, as they did not, that his wild gestures and mindless raving were enough to set off bloody rioting in the Sudetenland. Prague declared martial law and rushed in convoys of troops. “SCHRECKENHERRSCHAFT!” (“REIGN OF TERROR”) shrieked Der Angriff, and Henlein fled into Germany. Then, abruptly, the storm ended. Thursday morning everything in the Sudetenland was normal.²¹⁷

At No. 10 Downing Street and the Paris home of the French premier, things were not. Premier Daladier wired Chamberlain, proposing that France, Britain, and Germany convene for a discussion à trois. But the P.M. had anticipated him. With the Sudetenland rioting approaching its peak, Chamberlain decided the time for Plan Z had arrived. Bypassing Henderson, he cabled Hitler during the night of September 13 that in the light of “the increasingly critical situation I propose to come over at once to see you with a view to trying to find a peaceful solution.” He intended to fly, could “start tomorrow,” asked for the “earliest time” they might meet and “a very early reply.” Chamberlain was eager. And anxious. It was the sort of mood that sales clerks recognize in the customer who has decided to buy even before entering the store, and to pay any price.²¹⁸

Churchill’s Daily Telegraph column of September 15 predicted bloodshed; the Czechs, he wrote, possessed “an absolute determination to fight for life and freedom.” If not “daunted by all the worry and pressure to which they have been subjected,” they would inflict 300,000 or 400,000 casualties, but the world would hold them blameless. It was German aggression which would be condemned; “from the moment that the first shot is fired and the German troops attempt to cross the Czechoslovakian frontier, the whole scene will be transformed, and a roar of fury will arise from the free peoples of the world, which will proclaim nothing less than a crusade against the aggressor.”

He could still sound his bugle, but the rest of the orchestra was following a different score. In the Foreign Office, Oliver Harvey wrote: “British press receives news of PM’s visit with marked approval. City is much relieved. Reaction in Germany also one of relief. In America it looks as if it were regarded as surrender. Winston says it is the stupidest thing that has ever been done.” Churchill knew what the prime minister was planning. He had learned that nearly a year earlier Chamberlain had written what he really wanted to tell the Nazis: “Give us satisfactory assurance that you won’t use force to deal with the Austrians and Czechoslovakians and we will give you similar assurance that we won’t use force to prevent the changes you want, if you can get them by peaceful means.” Declining Lord Moyne’s invitation to join him on a Caribbean cruise, Winston wrote: “Alas, a cloud of uncertainty overhangs all plans at the present time…. We seem to be very near the bleak choice between War and Shame. My feeling is that we shall choose Shame, and then have War thrown in a little later on even more adverse terms than at present.”²¹⁹

The prime minister, of course, saw matters differently. In his eyes the choice lay between peace and devastation, and he saw nothing shameful in buying peace by coercing a pretentious little state on the far side of Germany. Late in life R. A. Butler, who had watched him prepare for his historic trip, described his mood as “exalted.” Some Britons were worried by the loss of a strong ally—Czechoslovakia, whose army was described by the British military attaché in Prague as “probably the best in the smaller states of Europe,” could field thirty to forty divisions after manning her fortress line. Others were troubled by the moral implications, and by the sloughing off of British pride. Winston’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Mary, wrote him: “I have been following the Czechoslovakian problem with keen interest. I think we are making things more difficult by declaring such a feeble policy.”²²⁰

Chamberlain, who distrusted public opinion, the press, and to some extent, the House of Commons and even the cabinet, had taken steps to free himself of unwanted advice while he practiced his personal diplomacy. Parliament was not sitting and would not convene in the immediate future. (They were “being treated more and more as a kind of Reichstag,” Harold Macmillan complained.) The cabinet’s Foreign Policy Committee had last met three months before; the next meeting was a month away.²²¹

Those familiar with later conferences between world leaders, particularly Churchill’s, may be surprised by the fact that apart from two typists and two bodyguards—who would travel in a separate plane—the prime minister took with him only three companions: the ubiquitous Sir Horace Wilson and two young FO diplomats. Like their leader, none in the party spoke a word of German. Henderson, who would join them in Munich, was fluent in German, but of course he also spoke in tongues. Chamberlain and Hitler would talk à deux, aided only by an interpreter. The prime minister had no strategy, no proposals, no conversational lines to fall back upon if confronted by an unexpected proposal requiring thought. As he said afterward, he regarded himself as a one-man mission of inquiry to determine “in personal conversation whether there was any hope of saving the peace.” Horace Wilson had made some notes on reciprocal suggestions, but the P.M., it seems, was prepared only to accept the Führer’s terms. This was his virgin flight, and he had been told to anticipate a bumpy three-hour trip to Munich. Understandably he was nervous, and he had therefore asked Geoffrey Dawson to ride with him to Heston airstrip. At such a time it was comforting to be accompanied by a friend who would console you with reasonable answers to unreasonable doubts, someone who understood you, someone you could trust.²²²

Hitler was guilty of treason, incest, incitement to riot, and the murder of millions. In small matters, however, he was a prig: a vegetarian who scorned nicotine, and was offended by foul language. “Um Himmel willen!” (“For heaven’s sake!”) was about as strong as he got, and he fairly sputtered it when told that the prime minister of Great Britain, the leader of the greatest empire in history, was coming to him, like the English pilgrims in the early days of the Third Reich. Landing at Munich about noon on September 15, Chamberlain enjoyed reviewing an honor guard whose members, Wilson noted without comprehension, wore skulls and crossbones on their caps. Though none of the English visitors knew it, these were members of the Totenkopf (Death’s Head) SS, recruited from Dachau guards. It was not an auspicious greeting.

Chamberlain wrote Ida that he “felt quite fresh” during the ride from the airport to the train station, and was “delighted with the enthusiastic welcome of the crowds… all the way to the station.” A three-hour train ride brought him to Berchtesgaden; then he and his entourage were driven up to the Berghof. There, Chamberlain later wrote, “Halfway down [the] steps stood the Führer, bareheaded and dressed in a khaki-coloured coat of broadcloth with a red armlet and a swastika on it, and the military cross on his breast.” Except for this costume, the prime minister thought, “he looks entirely undistinguished. You would never notice him in a crowd, and would take him for the house painter”—Chamberlain had swallowed this whopper—“he once was.”²²³

The prime minister had been traveling since dawn, and it was nearly 5:30 P.M. when, after tea, he and the Führer, accompanied by Schmidt, Hitler’s interpreter, climbed the stairs to the Berghof’s study, where Schuschnigg had been browbeaten seven months before. Hitler dominated the conversation, running on and on about how he had vowed to solve the Czech issue “one way or another.” The Sudetenland’s three million Germans must “return” (“zurückkehren”) to the Reich. He was “prepared to risk a world war rather than allow this to drag on.” Chamberlain had tried again and again to comment; now he succeeded in interrupting Hitler—something one did not do—and said that if the Führer had decided to resolve the issue by force, “why did you let me come? I have wasted my time.” Hitler calmed down and suggested they examine “the question of whether a peaceful settlement is not possible after all.” Would Britain agree to a “Loslösung” (“liberation”) of the Sudetenland, one based on the right of “Selbstimmungsrechts der Volker” (“self-determination”)? That was the trap. Chamberlain went for it. He was pleased, he said, that they “had now got down to the crux of the matter.” Of course, he would have to sound out his cabinet and confer with the French, he said, adding, according to Schmidt’s shorthand notes, that “he could personally state that he recognized the principle of the detachment of the Sudeten area…. He wished to return to England to report to the Government and secure their approval of his personal attitude.” That, so to speak, was the ball game. The prospect had been hooked.²²⁴

At Chartwell, Winston was writing A. H. Richards, general secretary of the Anti-Nazi Council, “If, as I fear, the Government is going to let Czechoslovakia be cut to pieces, it seems to me that a period of very hard work lies before us all.” Hard work lay ahead for Chamberlain, too. The betrayal of a nation requires just as much paperwork, conferring, and arguing over obscure points as its salvation. But the prime minister believed that he was the savior. He asked for, and was given, Hitler’s promise that Germany would launch no attack until they had held a second summit sometime in the next few days. Departing Berchtesgaden, Chamberlain later wrote Ida, he felt he had “established a certain confidence, which was my aim, and, on my side, in spite of the hardness and ruthlessness I thought I saw in his face, I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.”²²⁵

In London on September 17 Chamberlain described Hitler to the cabinet as “the commonest little dog,” and a “most extraordinary creature,” but repeated his conviction that he would be “rather better than his word,” adding that he had been told (presumably by Henderson) that the Führer had been “most favourably impressed.” This, he said, was “of the utmost importance, since the future conduct of these negotiations depends mainly upon personal contacts.” Hitler had assured him, he emphasized, that he wanted “no Czechs in the Reich”; he would be satisfied once he had included the Sudeten Germans. “The impression left on me was that Herr Hitler meant what he had said…. My view is that Herr Hitler is telling the truth.”²²⁶

Having given this testimonial to the Führer, the P.M. assumed that his ministers would approve of ceding the Sudetenland to the Reich. To his surprise and dismay, several declined endorsing the German claim pending further discussion. In Paris there was also what Phipps described as “considerable heart-burning.” Léon Blum wrote in Le Populaire that war would probably be avoided, but “under such circumstances that I, who for many years dedicated my life to [the struggle for peace], cannot feel joy. I feel myself torn between a sense of cowardly relief and shame.”²²⁷

Churchill’s feelings were unmixed; he was outraged. He sent his agent, Revesz, a statement for distribution to the European press. “The personal intervention of Mr Chamberlain and his flight to see Herr Hitler,” he wrote, “does not at all alter the gravity of the issue at stake. We must hope that it does not foreshadow another complete failure of the Western Democracies to withstand the threats and violence of Nazi Germany.” Phipps reported to Halifax that Churchill had telephoned the Quai d’Orsay, noting caustically that Winston “presumably… breathed fire and thunder in order to binge Bonnet up.”²²⁸

But France was already committed to the Chamberlain solution. A delegation headed by Daladier and Bonnet reached Whitehall on September 18. The French premier’s chief concern was to avoid the proposal of a plebiscite, “a weapon with which the German Government could keep Central Europe in a constant state of alarm and suspense.” Chamberlain assured him that he had discarded that possibility—he knew Hitler would reject it since if the polling was supervised, he might lose. Yet the French were still uneasy; they could not walk away from their treaty with the Czechs. They wanted the British to join them in guaranteeing the borders of the mangled Czechoslovakia that the cession would leave. Chamberlain and Halifax tried to avoid that, but after nearly three hours of discussion they yielded, the P.M. taking consolation in Hitler’s Berghof assurance that he was solely interested in the Sudeten Germans. The issue was absurd. If England had been unwilling to fight for a defensible Czechoslovakia, why should she agree to rush to the aid of the indefensible remnant? Beneš saw that; when the Anglo-French proposal was presented to him by Basil Newton, he rejected it, on the ground, reported Newton, that “guarantees which he already possessed had proved valueless.”²²⁹

The Times, on September 20, in massive understatement, observed that the Anglo-French proposal, giving Hitler what he would otherwise have found very expensive, “could not, in the nature of things, be expected to make a strong prima facie appeal to the Czech Government, and least of all to President Beneš.” It didn’t, and at 8:00 P.M. on the twentieth the Czech government refused to agree to the annexation of its sovereign territory, explaining that as leaders of a democracy they could not make such an enormous decision without the approval of their parliament. Furthermore, they declared, submission to the Führer’s demands would not solve the “question of peace” because they would face minority unrest elsewhere in their country. Lastly, Europe’s “balance of power would be destroyed.”²³⁰

This was one of those mysterious historical moments in which events acquire a momentum all their own and begin to exert an irresistible pressure. There was no reason to hurry; Ribbentrop told Paris, London, and Prague that the Führer could wait, and at his suggestion the next Hitler-Chamberlain meeting was postponed from Wednesday, September 21, to Thursday. Nevertheless, Phipps suggested to Bonnet that they tell Beneš that unless his reply constituted a complete, immediate acceptance of what amounted to an Allied ultimatum, England and France would “wash their hands of Czechoslovakia in the event of a German attack.”²³¹

In Prague the British minister, Newton, advised Whitehall that if he could deliver an “ultimatum to President Beneš,” then “he and his Government will feel able to bow to a force majeure.” That, more or less, is what happened. At 2:00 A.M. on the twenty-first Newton and his French counterpart, Victor de Lacroix, delivered a demarche informing Beneš that surrender of the Sudetenland to the Reich was “the only means of averting war and the invasion of Czechoslovakia,” and that if he persisted in refusing it he would “bear the responsibility for the war,” which would divide France and England, because the English would declare themselves neutral. British neutrality meant further that when “war starts, France will not take part, i.e. she will not fulfill her treaty obligations.” They argued with the old man for an hour and a half; then he threw in his hand. Jan Masaryk sent the text of the Anglo-French ultimatum to Hugh Dalton, a Labour MP and a Churchill ally. When Dalton read it in the House of Commons, Sir Samuel Hoare solemnly replied that it was “in almost every respect a totally inaccurate description of the representations that we made to the Czechoslovak Government.” Among the signs of moral disintegration in Chamberlain’s clique was the adoption, by Hitler’s British admirers, of the Big Lie.²³²

Roosevelt, summoning the British ambassador in Washington, told him that the Anglo-French proposal was “the most terrible remorseless sacrifice that has ever been demanded of a State” and predicted that it would “provoke a highly unfavorable reaction in America.” The president again suggested a conference of world leaders—not in Europe, but in the Azores or some other Atlantic island—which he would attend. Roosevelt’s proposal was swept from the prime minister’s desk into his wastebasket.²³³

The P.M. was equally unresponsive to FDR’s humanitarian appeal for the Czechs who would be dispossessed and were already well into the early stages of panic. The Sudetenland’s anti-Nazis were hopelessly trapped. Wednesday evening Wenzel Jaksch, the leader of Czechoslovakia’s 400,000 German Social Democrats, told John Troutbeck, the first secretary of the British embassy in Prague, that his followers had nowhere to go; the Czechs, overwhelmed by the mass of Sudeten refugees of their own race, were turning Sudeten Germans away. Therefore, Jaksch told Troutbeck, they “must lay their lives in the hands of the British and French Governments and ask for advice as to what was to be done for them.” But the Allied embassies were mute. It was Vienna all over again. Jaksch’s followers applied for British and French visas and were rejected. They returned to their homes to await the Gestapo, which would not keep them waiting long.²³⁴

Churchill had been active from the beginning of the crisis, using every weapon he could lay hands on to subvert Chamberlain. He tried to work behind the scenes, but in a nation with a free press, that was impossible; on Tuesday September 6, to his chagrin, the Daily Express had reported that Heinrich Brüning, the former Weimar chancellor, had visited Chartwell, asking his host to urge His Majesty’s Government to “speak plainly to Hitler.” After The Times ran its disastrous editorial of September 7 proposing a partition of Czechoslovakia, Winston had repeatedly called on Halifax, trying to find out what was happening and then to influence policy. On Thursday, September 15, when Chamberlain departed for Berchtesgaden, Winston devoted his Daily Telegraph column to the Czechs.²³⁵

He bitterly rued his resignation, on a matter of principle, from the Conservative party’s hierarchy in 1931. Like his father, who had surrendered his seals as chancellor of the Exchequer fifty years earlier on another issue, he had been ostracized ever since. Now he was alarmed by news that two strong members of Daladier’s cabinet, Paul Reynaud and Georges Mandel, planned to quit their offices unless France honored her pledges to the Czechs. Churchill had immediately flown over on September 20 to point out that if they quit they would forfeit their roles as shapers of another, more rational foreign policy. Either the force of his argument, his powerful presence, or his position as Hitler’s greatest enemy in Europe—or perhaps all three—brought them round. They agreed to stick it out.²³⁶

His plane brought him back on September 21. Upon returning to Morpeth Mansions he issued a statement denouncing plans to balkanize Czechoslovakia. Partition, he said, would amount “to the complete surrender of the Western democracies to the Nazi threat of force,” putting England and France in an “ever weaker and more dangerous situation.” A neutral Czechoslovakia would free at least twenty-five German divisions to threaten France and the Low Countries while opening up “for the triumphant Nazis the road to the Black Sea.” It was “not Czechoslovakia alone which is menaced,” he said, “but also the freedom and the democracy of all nations.” The conviction that security could be bought “by throwing a small State to the wolves” was “a fatal delusion.”²³⁷

On the twenty-second Chamberlain was on his way to his second airplane trip, with Dawson again alongside to see him off. At Heston Airport the prime minister was irritated by the presence of a small group which had gathered there, not to wish him well, but to boo. The German crowds were friendlier. The second summit was to be held in the small town of Godesberg, on the Rhine, and at the Petersberg Hotel elegant suites overlooking the river had been reserved for die Engländer—the P.M. and his small entourage, which included two British diplomats who had met his plane: Ambassador Henderson and Ivone Kirkpatrick. All that the German people knew of Chamberlain was that he was trying to preserve the peace, but it was enough; they had brought a band, and standing beneath his windows they serenaded him with the rollicking London hit:

Kommt ihr je nach Lambeth-Stadt

Nicht nur abends, auch im Tag,

Findet ihr uns dabei,

Beim tanzen des “Lambeth Walks,”

Hei!

Even as the P.M., Kirkpatrick, and Henderson crossed the Rhine for talks with Hitler in the Hotel Dreesen, Churchill, having left Downing Street, was hailing a cab for 11 Morpeth Mansions. He had called at No. 10 to ask precisely what Chamberlain would propose at Godesberg, and five peers along with three MPs—Bracken, Sinclair, and Nicolson—were gathering in his flat to hear what he had learned. Nicolson, the last to arrive, was waiting for the lift when Winston paid the cabbie and hurried in. As they ascended together, Nicolson said: “This is hell.” Churchill muttered: “It is the end of the British Empire.” According to Nicolson’s diary, Churchill told the group that the cabinet had demanded “a firm stand” on Chamberlain’s part, insisting on German demobilization, supervision of the Sudetenland transfer by an international commission, a refusal to discuss Polish or Hungarian claims on Czech territory, and a German guarantee of the new Czech borders. Almost in chorus, his guests said: “But Hitler will never accept such terms!” Winston replied, “In that case, Chamberlain will return tonight and we shall have war.” In that event, one peer pointed out, “It will be inconvenient having our Prime Minister in German territory.” Winston shook his massive head and growled, “Even the Germans would not be so stupid as to deprive us of our beloved Prime Minister.”²³⁸

Hitler neither accepted nor rejected the cabinet’s terms, because Chamberlain never gave them to him. He never had a chance. Expecting to please the Führer, he told him of the Anglo-French agreement to the Sudeten annexation. To his dismay, Hitler replied brusquely, “Ja, es tut mir leid, aber das geht nicht mehr” (“Yes, I am very sorry, but that is no longer possible”). He had decided to raise the stakes, indifferent to the outcome; war was his objective, and this old man was obstructing that. The Führer now said he thought Warsaw and Budapest were right in advancing claims on Czech territory, and peace could “not be firmly established until these claims had been settled.” Furthermore, the Sudetenland problem must be completely solved by October 1—there would be no time to adhere to the idea of self-determination. The Führer produced a marked map defining the area which must be occupied at once by German troops. Chamberlain, Kirkpatrick’s notes recorded, professed himself “disappointed and puzzled.” He had, he told Hitler, “risked his whole political career” to obtain his cabinet’s approval of the principles agreed to at Berchtesgaden. After three hours of inconclusive and, as Chamberlain reported by telephone to London that night, “most unsatisfactory” talks, the meeting was adjourned, to be resumed the next day.²³⁹

Meanwhile, German troops were reported to have entered Egerland, on the Czech side of the Ohre, and Prague wanted to mobilize. As a sovereign power, Czechoslovakia needed no one’s permission to take defensive measures, but Beneš sought the advice of the two great democracies, if only because alienating them was unthinkable. The Czech request to mobilize was forwarded to Godesberg and answered by Henderson, who, predictably, replied: “Wait awhile.” The exchange had been relayed to London, however, and the cabinet, overruling Henderson, gave Beneš a green light. It was promptly changed back to red on instructions from Sir Horace Wilson in Godesberg, who had consulted no one. But the French told the Czechs to proceed. Prague, understandably confused, hesitated.

Phipps, in Paris, was indignant. “All that is best in France is against war,” he wired Whitehall. “His Majesty’s Government should realize extreme danger of even appearing to encourage small, but noisy and corrupt war group here.” Cadogan, in the unaccustomed role of a hawk, angrily rebuked him: “By war group you surely do not include all those who feel that France must carry out her treaty obligations to Czechoslovakia.” Phipps, equally angry, answered wildly: “I meant the communists who are paid by Moscow and have been working for war for months.”²⁴⁰

Halifax was not a Communist, but he had begun to think seriously about approaching the Russians. In London he was encouraged by Winston Churchill, uninvited but nevertheless welcomed in this anxious hour when all lines to Godesberg seemed dead. The talks between the Führer and the prime minister had been suspended until Friday the twenty-third. War seemed very near. At 1:15 P.M. on Friday the foreign secretary instructed Butler, in Geneva: “It would be useful if you would have a conversation with M. Litvinov on the present situation, and endeavour to elicit from him anything concerning the views and intentions of his Government.”²⁴¹

At 10:00 P.M. Halifax, with the approval of the cabinet, sent Chamberlain word that the “great mass of public opinion seems to be hardening in sense of feeling that we have gone to the limit of concession and that it is up to the Chancellor to make some contribution…. From point of view of your own position, that of Government, and of the country, it seems to your colleagues of vital importance that you should not leave without making it plain to Chancellor if possible by special interview that, after great concessions made by Czechoslovak Government, for him to reject opportunity for peaceful solution… would be an unpardonable crime against humanity.” Godesberg was again quiescent. An hour passed; two hours. Then, to Halifax’s astonishment, Chamberlain sent him a brief report, assuring the nervous FO that Hitler’s demands and a lasting European peace were reconcilable. Whitehall wondered what had happened. The answer was that the prime minister had been duped.²⁴²

The Friday meeting between Chamberlain and Hitler, originally scheduled to begin at 11:30 A.M., had been several times delayed while the two exchanged letters and notes laying out their positions. It was not until 10:30 P.M. that Chamberlain again crossed the Rhine; the German chancellor was waiting at the water’s edge to meet the ferry and accompany the prime minister into the hotel lounge. But the cordial atmosphere soon evaporated as the British party studied the lengthy memorandum the Germans had prepared detailing the Führer’s final position.

The document demanded that the Czechs begin evacuating the Sudetenland at 8:00 A.M. September 26, with the process to be completed two days later. Any who remained would be arrested or shot as trespassers, because the region would be Reich soil. During the two days of evacuation German troops would be moving in to “protect” the area and to “restore order.”²⁴³

Chamberlain was appalled; the talks became agitated and had reached an impasse when an adjutant entered with word that Beneš had just announced Czech general mobilization over the radio. According to Schmidt, the room was “deadly still” (“totenstill”). Suddenly, it erupted in furious argument. One of the few German words the prime minister knew was Diktat, and after rereading Hitler’s memorandum and conferring with Schmidt about the translation, which was still incomplete, he said heatedly: “But this is an ultimatum!” Not at all, snapped the Führer. Pushing the paper under the P.M.’s eyes, he invited him to see for himself. It wasn’t a Diktat at all, he said: “Es steht ja ‘Memorandum’ darüber” (“It is headed by the word ‘Memorandum’ ”). Chamberlain ignored this childish duplicity and rose, saying he would fly home with a heavy heart. Hitler, determined to keep him hooked, quickly offered a Konzession, something, he said, he had never done before. The Czech evacuation needn’t end till October 1. This was flimflam; Chamberlain did not know that the Generalstab had told the Führer that they couldn’t possibly move in before the first of the month. But the prime minister was impressed, and expressed his appreciation. When the meeting broke up about 1:30 A.M., noted Schmidt, “Chamberlain bid a hearty farewell to the Führer.” As he left the Dreesen, a newspaperman intercepted him to ask: “Is it hopeless, sir?” Chamberlain replied: “I would not like to say that. It is up to the Czechs now.” In other words, peace was possible unless the Czechs stubbornly insisted on defending their homeland.²⁴⁴

When the Führer’s terms became known in London, they were met with consternation. “Hitler’s memo. now in,” wrote Cadogan in his diary. “It’s awful.” Over the past week, he noted, they had “moved from ‘autonomy’ to cession,” and “we salved our consciences, at least I did, by stipulating it must be an ‘orderly’ cession.” This meant “safeguards for the exchange of populations, compensation, etc. Now,” Cadogan continued, “Hitler says he must march into the whole area at once (to keep order!) and the safeguards—and plebiscites! can be held after! This is throwing away every last safeguard we had. The P.M. is transmitting this ‘proposal’ to Prague. Thank God he hasn’t yet recommended it for acceptance.”²⁴⁵

The prime minister arrived in London on Saturday afternoon, carrying with him Hitler’s memorandum, a map showing which regions would pass into the hands of the Wehrmacht (followed by the Gestapo), and an evacuation timetable for the Czechs. At 5:30 P.M. he met with an anxious cabinet. At first, he told them, he had been “indignant” that Hitler was “pressing new demands on me.” Eventually, however, “I modified my view on this point.” The prime minister added that he thought he had “established some degree of personal influence over Hitler,” who had told him, “ ‘You are the first man for many years who has got any concessions from me.’ ” Hitler had told him, he said, that if they “solved this question without conflict, it could be a turning-point in Anglo-German relations.” The Führer had voluntarily added that (as he had already said several times) the Czech problem was “the last territorial demand” which he had to make in Europe. The prime minister thought this so important that he had instructed a bilingual young diplomat to write it out in German, and here it was: “die letzte territoriale Forderung.” Chamberlain stressed that the Führer had not been prompted and had spoken “with great earnestness.” (As Eden said later, “Chamberlain knew that Hitler lied. He just could not believe that Hitler would lie to him.”) Now it was Chamberlain’s conclusion that “We should accept those [Hitler’s] terms and should advise the Czechs to do so.”²⁴⁶

Duff Cooper protested. Hitherto, he said, they had faced the unpleasant alternatives of peace with dishonor or war. He now saw “a third possibility, namely war with dishonor, by which I mean being kicked into war by the boot of public opinion when those for whom we were fighting have already been defeated.” But the other ministers endorsed the prime minister’s view.

Czechoslovakia’s leaders could hardly believe that Chamberlain had done what he had done. In France, Daladier was still troubled by “the moral issue,” as he called it. Churchill wanted him to stay on that course. On Monday, September 26, Winston called on Halifax at the FO, asked that Rex Leeper be summoned, and with the foreign secretary’s tacit agreement, stood over Leeper dictating a Churchillian communiqué: “If… a German attack is made upon Czechoslovakia… France will be bound to come to her assistance, and Great Britain and Russia will certainly stand by France.” It is a measure of Churchill’s powerful presence that Halifax then “authorized” the communiqué. As A. J. P. Taylor has observed, Halifax approved this announcement “but did not sign it. In this roundabout way, he secured his position both present and future: he retained Chamberlain’s confidence, yet was later the only ‘Man of Munich’ who continued to stand high in favor with Churchill.”²⁴⁷

The communiqué was ineffective. In Paris, Bonnet dismissed it as a forgery, and Chamberlain quashed it that evening by issuing a statement reaffirming his vow to meet all Hitler’s demands. On Sunday an FO minute had set forth Britain’s new stance vis-à-vis the Czechs: “It can be taken for granted that the only hope of preventing or at least localizing war is for His Majesty’s Government… to make it absolutely clear that they [the Czechs] must accept German plan or forfeit claim to further support from Western Powers.” Nevertheless, Jan Masaryk formally rejected the memorandum that Hitler had handed to Chamberlain, describing it as “a de facto ultimatum of the sort usually presented to a vanquished nation and not a proposition to a sovereign state…. The nation of St. Wenceslas, John Hus and Thomas Masaryk will not be a nation of slaves.” Chamberlain sent Horace Wilson to Germany on Monday as his personal envoy, asking that the details of the annexation be settled by a commission of Germans, Czechs, and English. If Hitler rejected this proposal, Wilson was authorized to inform him that France and England would fight with the Czechs. The request was a bad idea. In his one concession at Godesberg, the Führer had specified that the annexation be complete by October 1. When Sir Horace brought up the commission, Hitler told him that acceptance of the memorandum was a precondition and must be received by 2:00 P.M. on Wednesday, September 28. Wilson called this a “very violent hour.” To his horror Hitler fell to the floor, writhing in one of his famous fits. Henderson, who had accompanied Wilson, noted that the Reich chancellor “shrieked a good deal.” It was effective. Following Henderson’s example, Sir Horace decided not to deliver Chamberlain’s warning.²⁴⁸

That night Hitler, still raging, delivered a venomous attack on Beneš in Berlin’s Sportpalast. William L. Shirer thought he had “completely lost control of himself.” On orders from the Czech president, the Führer charged, “whole stretches of country were depopulated, villages burned down, attempts were made to smoke out Germans with hand grenades and gas.” He paused. “Now two men stand arrayed against one another: there is Mr. Beneš and here stand I.” Another pause. Then: “Now let Mr. Beneš make his choice.”²⁴⁹

Chamberlain’s reaction to the Sportpalast speech was, even for him, extraordinary. Hitler had referred to him in passing, and now he told the press: “I have read the speech of the German Chancellor and I appreciate his references to the efforts I have made to save the peace.” He stood ready, he said, to make further efforts. Wilson paid a farewell call on the Führer on Tuesday, and, according to Schmidt, the interpreter, he told him: “I will try to make those Czechos sensible.” Hitler, in turn, handed him the Reich’s final concession to England, a letter to Chamberlain offering a formal guarantee from him, as Führer, of truncated Czechoslovakia’s new frontiers. That evening of the twenty-seventh the prime minister spoke to the country over the BBC, a speech most memorable for a single sentence which might be called the epitome of defeatism. “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.”²⁵⁰

If Chamberlain knew nothing of Czechoslovakia after the past five months, he was a very slow learner. And, as Harold Macmillan later pointed out, “In this message to the nation, nothing was said of the sufferings of the Czech people, only sympathy with Hitler ‘and his indignation that German grievances had not been dealt with before this,’ together with an offer to ‘guarantee’ that the Czech Government would ‘carry out their promises.’ ”²⁵¹

The people of Britain and France, conditioned by ghastly descriptions of what another European war would be like, were genuinely frightened. Macmillan recalled that “In the last few days of September—the five days that followed Chamberlain’s return from Godesberg—they were grimly… making up their minds to face war,” the “unthinkable” which was now “round the corner.” Air attacks, they had been told, would wreak destruction “beyond all imagination,” and they must “expect civilian casualties on a colossal scale.” Baldwin had predicted sixty thousand Londoners dead after the first Luftwaffe offensive. (In fact, ninety thousand Britons were killed by Nazi bombers during the entire war.) Given these astounding figures, the mind-set of Londoners and Englishmen living in the great industrial cities of the Midlands can be compared to that of Americans in the 1980s if told that missiles with nuclear warheads were on their way to major U.S. cities. His Majesty’s Government did not handle it well. Panic was the inevitable consequence of official notice instructing parents of infants under two years to bring their children to designated centers where they would be “fitted with helmets for protection against the effects of gas.” There were even rumors, some of which found their way into print, that trenches were being dug in Hyde Park.²⁵²

As September 28 dawned, war seemed very near; the Führer’s ultimatum would expire at 2:00 P.M. But late that morning, Chamberlain, through his ambassador in Rome, asked Mussolini to save the peace by intervening. The Duce telephoned Berlin, and within an hour Hitler had agreed to see the British prime minister again. He invited Mussolini to join them, and the Duce, flattered, replied that he was “willing to be present.”²⁵³

The scene in Parliament later in the day was a piece of stage management from the people who had brought Britain to the brink of catastrophe. At about noon Hitler’s invitation to Chamberlain had reached the German embassy in London, where it was immediately decoded and dispatched to No. 10. Three hours passed. Chamberlain, addressing the House of Commons in its first session since the August adjournment, was describing the tangled diplomatic skein when a messenger arrived. Normally so important a dispatch would have been taken straight to the front bench. This one was delivered to Halifax, seated in the Peers’ Gallery. He passed it down to Simon, who read it and pushed it in front of the prime minister. The House watched all this with mounting interest. In a voice that could be heard throughout the hall, Chamberlain asked: “Shall I tell them now?” and, when Simon smiled and nodded, announced: “Herr Hitler has just agreed to postpone his mobilisation for twenty-four hours and to meet me in conference with Signor Mussolini and [Monsieur] Daladier at Munich.” One independent MP, a diarist, described what followed as “one of the most dramatic moments which I have ever witnessed. For a second, the House was hushed in absolute silence. And then the whole House burst into a roar of cheering, since they knew that this might mean peace.” Harold Macmillan remembered that “I stood up with the rest, sharing the general emotion.”²⁵⁴

Some were undeceived by the contrivance. Macmillan recalled that “Eden just could not bear it; he got up and walked out of the Chamber. Another Member sat bravely still and refused to rise. It was Harold Nicolson.” Amery also remained in his bench, arms folded. Men all round them were shouting “Get up! Get up!” and “Thank God for the Prime Minister!” Then, Macmillan recalled, “I saw one man silent and seated—with his head sunk on his shoulders, his whole demeanour depicting something between anger and despair. It was Churchill.” But Winston, ever magnanimous, rose as Chamberlain passed him, shaking his hand, wishing him “Godspeed.”²⁵⁵

The German army’s anti-Nazi conspirators had been about to spring. The order to arrest Hitler and occupy all government buildings, including the chancellery, had been on General Franz Halder’s desk at noon, and General Erwin von Witzleben was standing by to witness his signature, when his orderly entered with a bulletin: Chamberlain and Daladier would travel to Munich for further talks. Halder later testified: “I therefore took back the order of execution because, owing to this fact, the entire basis for the action had been taken away.” The next day, as Telford Taylor writes, “the four men of Munich danced their quadrille.”²⁵⁶

Webster defines “munich” as “an instance of unresisting compliance with and capitulation to the demands of an aggressor nation.” Actually, nothing of great consequence happened at the Munich Conference. The Czechs’ fate had been decided at Berchtesgaden and Godesberg. Britain’s participation was a gross violation of parliamentary government. Unnoticed after the prime minister had been swept out of the chamber by hysterical MPs was a singular omission. His (and Horace Wilson’s) inconclusive, ambiguous, highly questionable exchanges with the German führer had never been subjected to a House debate. The entire cabinet assembled at the airport the next morning to wish him luck, but neither the cabinet (including the foreign secretary) nor Parliament had shared in the formation of the policy that led to Munich.

At Munich the prime minister was clearly delighted to see Hitler again, eager to stand at his side. Here he made a cardinal error. Afterward he happily wrote his sister that the Astors’ son William, recently returned from a trip to Berlin, had the impression that “Hitler definitely liked me & thought he could do business with me.” This was true in the sense that an armed robber thinks he can do business with a bank teller. In fact, Hitler had taken a strong personal dislike to Chamberlain, who impressed him as an “insignificant” man. The Führer dealt with him because he believed him to be infinitely malleable. Other men in Parliament, he knew, were dangerous. On the eve of Munich he said he was “fully aware” that one day Chamberlain might be replaced by Churchill, whose “aim would be to unleash at once a new world war against Germany.”²⁵⁷

The Führer was right. He had never met Churchill, but he understood him, as Winston understood Hitler. Walter Lippmann observed that the supreme qualification for high office is temperament, not intellect, and on that level the two men had more in common than either would have acknowledged. The countless millions spellbound by Winston’s genius would angrily reject any comparison of the two. Nevertheless they were mirror images of one another. Since the embattled defender of Western civilization was the one who was ultimately successful, his vision has prevailed. What would have happened had victory gone to the Nazi leader doesn’t bear thinking about. In the mid-1980s a poll reported that a large majority of Germans believe the worst thing that could have happened to them would have been the triumph of the Third Reich.²⁵⁸

Satan was once angelic; he and God had much in common. Similarly, both the Führer and his English nemesis were born demagogues. Each believed in the supremacy of his race and in national destiny; each had artistic talent—Churchill had more, but Hitler, though dismissed as a shallow painter of picture postcards, was a charismatic figure moved by dark but profound passions, the man whose voice at Nuremberg inspired men to lay down their lives, shouting “Heil, Hitler!” as they died. The inescapable fact is that Hitler and Churchill both were ruled not by reason but by intuition.

Chamberlain, the businessman, accustomed to the friendship of other good fellows who met on the level and parted on the square, understood neither man. The P.M. respected success. He assumed that any man who had risen to rule the most powerful nation on the Continent was a man with whom he could deal. Neville seems to have been oblivious to the fact that nearly everyone who had tried to bargain with this extraordinary man had been murdered, sent to a concentration camp, or hounded into exile.

Chamberlain could not have comprehended the depth of the horrors plumbed by the Third Reich. The Führer vowed that restoring their beloved homeland to the mistreated Sudetendeutsche was his last claim, and Chamberlain believed him. The P.M. had not been deceptive in his “faraway country” broadcast. Although the “Czech problem” had been on his desk for months, to him Czechoslovakia remained precisely that: a problem, not a land inhabited by real people. He knew nothing of eastern European geography, not to mention the Serbs, Croats, Slavs, Slovaks, Czechs, Poles, and gypsies inhabiting the region; he disregarded all the warnings of the FO and swallowed everything he was told by the Reich’s Kriegsherr.

Churchill knew better. He had studied Adolf Hitler’s career with intensity, and remembered his remarkable history of broken promises. When the Führer broke the Versailles treaty he promised to honor Germany’s signature on Locarno; when he broke the Locarno Pact—long before the Sudetenland became a synonym for crisis—he had sworn that the Rhineland would be his last territorial claim. When he sent Wehrmacht bayonets into Austria he grandly guaranteed Czechoslovakia’s borders. His position had subtly evolved; he was interested only in Germans, he said—including, of course, Germans living beyond the borders of the Reich. But over the past two thousand years Europe had become a mix, racially, culturally, and ethnically. As Duff Cooper observed, “There are Germans in Switzerland, in Denmark, and in Alsace; I think that one of the few countries in Europe in which there are no Germans is Spain, and there are rumors that Germany has taken an interest in that country.”²⁵⁹

Churchill’s sources in the Reich reported that the great Ruhr munitions factories, on orders from Berlin, continued to work around the clock. In Kiel and Hamburg new U-boats slid into the water like the litters of an incredibly fertile sea monster; Luftwaffe observation planes, equipped with long-range cameras, overflew eastern Europe, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, even France. Churchill carried graphs when he entered the House of Commons now. They revealed that the gap between British and German arsenals was widening. Since fighting was inevitable, he argued, better that it come now, with France prepared to meet her treaty obligations to Czechoslovakia, thus confronting German strategists with the specter of a two-front war.

Now the crisis had reached its climax. Violet Bonham Carter recalled Churchill’s mood then. “He rightly mistrusted Chamberlain, who, he was convinced, was still searching desperately for a way out” when no honorable way existed. That same September 29, as the so-called Four-Power Meeting began in Bavaria, the Focus group lunched in the Savoy’s Pinafore Room. Violet saw that “Winston’s face was dark with forboding. I could see he feared the worst, as I did. I finally suggested that during the afternoon a few of us should draft a telegram to the Prime Minister adjuring him to make no further concessions at the expense of the Czechs and warning him that if he did so he would have to fight the House of Commons on his return.” The wire was to be signed by, among others, Churchill, Lord (Robert) Cecil, Attlee, Archie Sinclair, Eden, Liddell Hart, Lloyd George, and Lord Lloyd.²⁶⁰

It was drafted—after eliminating the threat—and at 7:00 P.M. they again met at the Savoy. Winston then called for the signatures, and Sinclair, Lloyd, and Cecil came quickly forward. But some who had said they would come had not. Eden, reached by telephone, declined to permit the use of his name. Attlee was then phoned. He, too, refused; he said he would need the approval of his party. As Nicolson wrote in his diary, they “sat there gloomily realising that nothing could be done. Even Winston seemed to have lost his fighting spirit…. So far as one can see, Hitler gets everything he wants.”²⁶¹

It was decided to send no telegram. One by one the group drifted away. Violet wrote: “Winston remained, sitting in his chair immobile, like a man of stone. I saw the tears in his eyes. I could feel the iron entering his soul. His last attempt to salvage what was left of honor and good faith had failed.” She spoke bitterly of those who refused to put their names to their principles. Then Churchill spoke. He said: “What are they made of? The day is not far off when it won’t be signatures we’ll have to give but lives—the lives of millions. Can we survive? Do we deserve to do so when there’s no courage anywhere?”²⁶²

Shortly after noon that Thursday—as Churchill, heavy with despair, lunched at the Savoy—Hitler led his guests from a buffet at the Führerbau (the working headquarters of the Nazi party) and into his private office, to determine the future of a country in a conference from which that nation’s elected leaders had been excluded. Two Czechs—Hubert Masařík and Vojtech Mastny—were in the city as “observers” attached to the British delegation, but when Chamberlain weakly suggested they attend the discussions the Führer had said “Nein!” The issue was then dropped, with the tacit understanding that the delegation from Prague would be informed of the Hitler-Chamberlain-Mussolini-Daladier decisions later.

“O Oysters, come and walk with us!”

The Walrus did beseech.

“A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,

Along the briny beach.”

Mussolini produced a memorandum, ostensibly drawn up by him but actually the work of Göring, Neurath, and Weizsäcker. The Englishmen—Horace Wilson had again accompanied Chamberlain—assumed that it was a base for negotiations, but Hitler did not negotiate. He simply repeated, over and over, what he was going to take, when he would take it, and what he might or might not do with it. Nevertheless, the men from Paris and London kept battering away, through the evening and past midnight. At 1:00 A.M. Chamberlain capitulated. Virtually all of the claims Hitler had made in the past were accepted, including many he could never have won by force of arms. He now held the strategic center of Europe. The agreement signed in the early hours of September 30 (though it was dated September 29) specified that Czechoslovakia should begin evacuation of the Sudetenland at once. All Czechs in the Sudetenland must be gone—no one thought to ask where they might go—by October 10. Their departure would be supervised by an international commission which would also decide when plebiscites should be held, determine where the borders of the rump Czech state should be drawn, and see to it that all “existing installations” remain intact in Czechoslovakia’s lost territories. Poland, exploiting the turmoil, was placated by a slice of the pie, some three hundred square miles of Teschen Silesia. If other “problems of Polish and Hungarian minorities in Czechoslovakia” were not settled by negotiations with Prague, they would “form the subject” of another four-power meeting.²⁶³

The proceedings ended briskly, with efficient young German diplomats tidying up and disposing of loose strings. It had been a disgraceful business, but only Daladier and François-Poncet saw it for what it really was. The French premier was glum and silent; his ambassador to Germany, mortified by his country’s sellout of a faithful ally, was overheard by Ciano as he spoke in a voice broken by shame: “Voilà comme la France traite les seuls alliés qui lui étaient restés fidèles.” (“See how France treats the only allies who remained faithful to her.”)²⁶⁴

As they were about to break up Horace Wilson gave a little start and asked: “What to do about the Czechs?”²⁶⁵

“But wait a bit,” the Oysters cried,

“Before we have our chat;

For some of us are out of breath,

And all of us are fat!”

While others discussed who was to inform the Czechs and how to assure their cooperation, the P.M. and Hitler discussed the Reich’s economic difficulties. Then the Führer consented to glance at a joint declaration regarding future Anglo-German relations which the prime minister had brought with him. This, for Chamberlain, was the high point in the conference. According to him, “As the interpreter translated the words into German, Hitler frequently ejaculated ‘Ja, Ja,’ and at the end he said, ‘Yes, I will certainly sign it; when shall we do it?’ I said ‘Now,’ and we went at once to the writing table, and put our signatures to the two copies which I had brought with me.” Neither Schmidt nor Alec Douglas-Home, Chamberlain’s parliamentary private secretary, who were looking on, shared the prime minister’s conviction that the Führer was as elated as Chamberlain thought him to be. Schmidt wrote afterward that Hitler agreed to sign “with a certain reluctance,” because the wording was too vague to be described as a commitment, and “to please Chamberlain.” Douglas-Home thought he signed “perfunctorily.” Compared with his signature on other documents, this one was careless, even sloppy.²⁶⁶

At 2:30 A.M. the P.M. joined a delegation to tell the Czechs—who were being held in the Regina Hotel, prisoners, in effect, of the Gestapo—the fate of their country. Hubert Masařík, who was given the text to read aloud, later said that the French seemed “embarrassed.” Certainly the agreement was an occasion for Allied embarrassment. To the Czechs the terms were shocking. Yet Chamberlain, according to Masařík, “yawned without ceasing and with no show of embarrassment.” Both he and Daladier said Czech approval was not, strictly speaking, necessary. It was indeed irrelevant; the agreement was final. According to Horace Wilson’s later notes, Mastny was given “a pretty broad hint that… the best course for his Government was to accept what was clearly a considerable improvement upon the German Godesberg memorandum.” It wasn’t. Hitler had yielded nothing. Every outrageous demand he had made at Godesberg had been meekly met.²⁶⁷

As the Czechs were facing those who had betrayed them, Churchill had returned to the Savoy, joining fellow members of the Other Club for a very late dinner, to be followed by a meeting. Sleep was out of the question. According to Colin Coote, a member of the Other Club and also a member of the Times staff, they were awaiting the first editions of London’s newspapers, which were expected to be carrying the Munich settlement. In the meantime, Coote remembered, discussion of the Godesberg terms and whether the P.M. would succeed in modifying these demands sparked “a violent argument. One began to understand why, in the House of Commons, a red line on the carpet, just beyond rapier reach of the opposite bench, marks the limit beyond which the speaker must not stray.” One defender of Chamberlain was insulted so grossly that he left the table and, upon reaching home, sent a letter of resignation from the club.²⁶⁸

“Winston,” Coote remembered, “was snarling and clawing at the two unhappy ministers [First Lord Duff Cooper and Walter Elliot, secretary for Scotland]…. One could always tell when he was deeply moved, because a minor defect in his palate gave an echoing timbre to his voice. On this occasion it was not an echo, but a supersonic boom.” He asked them: “How could honourable men with wide experience and fine records in the Great War condone a policy so cowardly? It was sordid, squalid, sub-human, and,” he said, “suicidal…. The sequel to the sacrifice of honour” would be “the sacrifice of lives, our people’s lives.” In his memoirs Cooper charges, quite rightly, that Churchill was fouling him. He agreed with Winston, but since he was still a cabinet minister, he felt it was “honorable to defend them for the last time.”²⁶⁹

At last one man produced his watch and remarked that the early papers must be on the streets. The member pocketed his watch, left, and returned with a stop press. Duff Cooper snatched it from him and read the terms out loud, according to Coote’s account “with obvious anger and disgust.” Then he rose and departed without a word. Behind him he left silence. In Coote’s words: “Nobody attempted to defend them. Humiliation took almost material shape.” Churchill left with Richard Law, a young Tory MP. They passed the open door of a restaurant, from which issued the sounds of loud laughter. It was “packed,” Law remembered long afterward, “and everyone was very gay. I was acutely conscious of the brooding figure beside me.” As they turned away Winston muttered: “Those poor people. They little know what they will have to face.” In the darkness they may have passed E. M. Forster, an English writer who resembled Churchill in only two traits: both possessed genius and remarkable intuition. Forster heard of the agreement in Munich and wrote that he “trailed about reading the notices, some of which had already fallen into the gutter.” It was “good news,” he wrote, “and it ought to have brought great joy; it did bring joy to the House of Commons. But unimportant and unpractical people often foresee the future more clearly than do those who are engaged in shaping it, and I knew at once that the news was only good in patches. Peace flapped from the posters, and not upon the wings of angels.”²⁷⁰

Later in the morning, still September 30, Winston, Clemmie, and Lord Cecil seriously discussed gathering a group of friends who shared their wrath, marching to No. 10, and heaving a brick through a window. By then the two Czech delegates in the Regina had agreed not to fight. The need for their approval was urgent. By 5:00 P.M. that day an international commission would convene in Berlin to fix the details for evacuation of the first zone of the Sudetenland, which was to commence October 1, and the transfer of policing power from local officials to the German Wehrmacht.

The Czechs were angry, of course—they would have been certifiable otherwise—and the Frenchmen were the focus of their wrath. Chamberlain, to them, was contemptible. Masařík’s narrative concluded: “The atmosphere was becoming oppressive for everyone present. It had been explained to us in a sufficiently brutal manner, and that by a Frenchman, that this was a sentence without right of appeal and without possibility of modification. Mr. Chamberlain did not conceal his fatigue. After the text had been read, we were given a second slightly corrected map. We said ‘Good-bye’ and left. The Czechoslovak Republic as fixed by the frontiers of 1918 had ceased to exist.”²⁷¹

“I weep for you,” the Walrus said:

“I deeply sympathize.”

With sobs and tears he sorted out

Those of the largest size,

Holding his pocket-handkerchief

Before his streaming eyes.

Masařík had not, however, formally accepted Czechoslovakia’s subjugation. Nor could he; that decision had to be made in Prague. But he knew all hope had fled. The Führer didn’t even have to send an ultimatum to Prague—Englishmen did it for him. Frank Ashton-Gwatkin, the member of the British delegation who had been given this dubious honor, arrived from Munich September 30, breakfasted with Lieutenant Colonel H. C. T. Stronge, the British military attaché, and showed him the Munich Agreement. Stronge said Czechoslovakia could never accept such terms; it would mean a sacrifice of their defenses, leaving them helpless. Ashton-Gwatkin said they had to accept. Stronge, to use his own word, was “staggered.”²⁷²

Later in the day, after heated arguments with his advisers, military and civilian, Beneš capitulated. He also resigned five days later, but decided, at the urging of his ministers, to speak to the entire nation in a 7:00 P.M. broadcast, telling them what lay in the hearts of those they had elected to govern them. “They wished,” Churchill later wrote, “to register their protest against a decision in which they had no part.” On the air Beneš said that he remained “what I have always been, a convinced democrat.” That was why he was stepping down; he thought it “best not to disturb the new European constellation which is arising.” (He would be succeeded by an anti-Semitic banker who, in the words of one newspaper, “enjoys the confidence of Germany.”) Beneš said: “Do not expect from me a single word of recrimination. But this I will say,”—here he came as close to bitterness as a gentle man could—“that the sacrifices demanded from us were immeasurably great, and immeasurably unjust. This the nation will never forget, even though they have borne these sacrifices quietly.” He departed to set up a government-in-exile in London. The SS moved in swiftly. No one knows how many Czechs were murdered in the week that followed, though it has been estimated that more than half of them were Jews. Exact figures were unavailable; with the Führer’s men reigning over the Sudetenland, the news blackout was absolute.²⁷³

But answer came there none—

And this was scarcely odd, because

They’d eaten every one.

The German generals, who had been sweating blood, could scarcely believe their good luck. They were unanimously agreed that had the British and French stood up to Hitler, and had Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, the Reich would have been swiftly defeated. All this came out at Nuremberg. Keitel, chief of the OKW, testified: “From a purely military point of view we lacked the means for an attack which involved the piercing of the [Czech] frontier fortifications.” Fritz Erich von Manstein, Germany’s most brilliant field commander (and not a defendant at Nuremberg), said that “had Czechoslovakia defended herself, we would have been held up by her fortifications, for we did not have the means to break through.” And Alfred Jodl, the key general at OKW, taking the witness stand in his own defense, told the International Military Tribunal: “It was out of the question with five fighting divisions and seven reserve divisions in the western fortification [Siegfried Line]… to hold out against 100 French divisions. That was militarily impossible.” Churchill later wrote that he had “always believed that Beneš was wrong to yield. He should have defended his fortress line. Once fighting had begun, in my opinion at that time, France would have moved to his aid in a surge of national passion, and Britain would have rallied to France almost immediately.” The chance had been tragically missed.²⁷⁴

Nevertheless, Hitler, returning from Munich on his private train, was not rejoicing. To his SS honor guard he ranted that Chamberlain had “meinen Einzug in Prag verdorben” (“spoiled my entry into Prague”). In his grand strategy the seizures of Austria and Czechoslovakia were to be the opening moves in a tremendous campaign for lebensraum in the east, to be followed in the west by the conquest of the Low Countries and France. Only ten days earlier he had told the Hungarian prime minister that the wisest course was “die Tschechoslowakei zu zerschlagen” (“to destroy Czechoslovakia”). The sole danger was that the Czechs might buckle at the first threat. Now the British had done the buckling for them; Chamberlain had deprived the Kriegsherr of his first battlefield victory.²⁷⁵

On his flight home Daladier was also out of sorts, desolate and despairing. He later told Amery that as they landed in Paris and taxied toward the terminal he turned up his coat collar, to protect his face from the rotten eggs he expected when he came within range of the crowd. To his astonishment there were no eggs, no offensive shouts of “Merde!” and “Nous sommes trahis!” He paused halfway down the steps, dumbfounded. They were actually cheering him—shouting “Vive Daladier!” “Vive la Paix!” “Vive la France!”—greeting him as though he had won a great victory. Daladier was a man completely without vanity. He turned to Léger and whispered, “Les cons!” (“Fools!”). There were a few grumblers; one man muttered, “Vive la France malgré tout.” Yet for the most part the gaiety was unqualified. It was also mindless. Because the Reich no longer need face the formidable Czech army in the east, Munich had been a catastrophe for France. Hitler’s empire had increased its strength, and could quickly field twice as many soldiers. Nevertheless, the Chamber of Deputies ratified the Munich Agreement 535 to 75. Bonnet told an interviewer: “Yes, we have a treaty with the Czechs, and France remains faithful to her sacred word. Czechoslovakia wasn’t invaded, was she?”²⁷⁶

Nestling in Chamberlain’s pocket was the document he prized; today it lies in an obscure file at the Imperial War Museum, possibly the last place he would have had in mind. At the time that it was famous, Harold Nicolson denounced it in Parliament as “that bit of paper” which had betrayed the Reich’s neighbors and threatened the security of England. In reality the document was meaningless. That was why Hitler had signed it. The first paragraph declared that Anglo-German relations were “of the first importance for the two countries and for Europe”; the second that the Munich Agreement and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935 were “symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again”; and the third that both the prime minister of Great Britain and the Führer of the Third Reich intended to use the “method of consultation” in questions “that may concern our two countries,” because of their mutual determination “to continue our efforts to remove possible sources of difference, and thus to contribute to assure the peace of Europe.” That is all. It lacked even the ringing affirmation of nonaggression treaties; instead it expressed the desire of their peoples not to war on one another. But for a few days in the quirky autumn of 1938—the same season that Orson Welles’s radio drama of Martians landing in New Jersey sent thousands of Americans heading for the hills—people believed that Chamberlain had done rather a good thing. Britons, haunted by the dread that war might be declared at any hour, felt that they had been granted a reprieve. They cast about for ways to express their gratitude. Some became hysterical.²⁷⁷

The P.M. had been “pleasantly tired” during the flight home, but once he saw the size of the crowd awaiting him at Heston Airport, he felt as though he had shed fifty years. To his entourage he seemed as excited and energetic as a youth returning from an adventure. They cheered. He read his three pitiful paragraphs, and they cheered louder, shouting, “Good old Neville!” and singing, “For he’s a jolly good fellow.” Then a courier wearing royal livery appeared and handed him a message from the King, asking him to come straight to Buckingham Palace, “so that I can express to you personally my most heartfelt congratulations…. In the meantime, this letter brings the warmest of welcomes to one who, by his patience and determination, has earned the lasting gratitude of his fellow-countrymen throughout the Empire.” Afterward, Neville wrote Ida: “Even the descriptions of the papers give no idea of the scenes in the streets as I drove from Heston to the Palace. They were lined from one end to the other with people of every class, shouting themselves hoarse, leaping on the running board, banging on the windows, and thrusting their hands into the car to be shaken.”²⁷⁸

But it was in Downing Street that the adulation peaked, and there—though it was not immediately obvious to the crowd—Chamberlain over-reached himself. In the lore of every nation there are scenes, phrases, and deeds which live in the popular imagination. But an event, a speech, or a legend can never be repeated, for part of its appeal is that it is unique. That is why there cannot be another Arthur, another Joan of Arc, another Lincoln. It also explains why Chamberlain’s last public act on his day of glory was a blunder.

Benjamin Disraeli’s supreme diplomatic triumph came in 1878, at the Congress of Berlin. Unlike Chamberlain’s Munich, Berlin was a genuine contribution to European peace. The states of eastern Europe were at each other’s throats; the Russian diplomats were bumbling from bad to worse; even Bismarck couldn’t broker a general settlement. Disraeli could and did. His mastery of divergent cultures permitted him to take the map apart and rebuild it, throttling several wars before they could break out and ending a full-fledged conflict between the Russians and the Turks. The memory of that feat sixty years earlier was on many minds that fall evening in 1938, including Chamberlain’s. He wrote his sister that he spoke to the great crowd below “from the same window, I believe, as that from which Dizzy announced peace with honour 60 years ago.” (He was wrong; Disraeli’s declaration was made in the House of Commons on July 16, 1878.) Now his wife said, “Neville, go up to the window and repeat history by saying peace in our time.” He replied icily, “No, I do not do that kind of thing.” Then he did it. Waving the piece of paper he and Hitler had signed, he called to the dense throng below: “My good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time.” On the whole, public men are wise to avoid extravagant predictions. Very soon Chamberlain would have reason to regret this one.²⁷⁹

Meanwhile, however, the combers of admiration and praise continued to break at his feet. “No conqueror returning from a victory on the battlefield,” The Times trumpeted, “has been adorned with nobler laurels.” Paris-Soir offered him “a corner of French soil” where he could cast for trout, his favorite sport, than which “there could be no more fruitful image of peace.” Fifty Englishmen wrote to Printing House Square, calling for a national fund in Chamberlain’s honor. Those who had cheered his departure for Munich felt vindicated. Nicolson wrote of an exchange with Margot Asquith. She had said: “Now, Harold, you must agree that he is a great man.” He replied, “Not at all.” “You are as bad as Violet,” she snapped; “he is the greatest Englishman that ever lived.” Yet even Nicolson confessed in his diary that he momentarily felt “an immense sense of physical relief, in that I shall not be afraid tonight of the German bombs.”²⁸⁰

But, he added “my moral anxieties are in no way diminished.” After the cheering, a few thoughtful men, in the quietude of reflection, read the terms of Munich and were troubled. Halifax had sensed what was coming; in the triumphant ride from Heston he had astounded the prime minister by suggesting that he form a national government, bringing Churchill and Eden back and inviting Labour to join. Chamberlain replied that he would “think it over,” but there is no evidence that he did. Lord Lloyd, who had been in the roaring throng outside No. 10, remembered feeling “elated” until Chamberlain said “peace with honor.” Then “my heart sank; it was the worst possible choice of words, for I realized that he had sold honor to buy peace.”²⁸¹

The most sensational defection from Chamberlain’s entrenched majority was that of his first lord of the Admiralty, Alfred Duff Cooper, “the pioneer,” Conservative backbencher Vyvyan Adams called him, “along the nation’s way back from hysteria to reason.” Revolted by Chamberlain’s fawning over Hitler, his sellout of the Czechs, and his smug pride in the piece of trumpery he and Hitler had signed, on Saturday, October 1, the day after the prime minister’s return, Cooper resigned. Chamberlain, Duff Cooper wrote, was “as glad to be rid of me as I was determined to go.” Lady Diana Cooper recalled that she “telephoned the news to Winston. His voice was broken with emotion. I could hear him cry.” Churchill exulted that “one minister alone stood forth…. At the moment of Mr. Chamberlain’s overwhelming mastery of public opinion, he thrust his way through the exulting throng to declare his total disagreement with its leader.”²⁸²

The first doubts were struggling to the surface, but it was too soon for them to coalesce. Although some MPs were already wrestling with their consciences, they would have to put themselves on record in just five days, the evening of October 5, at the close of a three-day debate, when the issue before them would be: “That this House approves the policy of His Majesty’s Government by which war was averted in the recent crisis and supports their efforts to secure a lasting peace.” The vote was never in doubt, with the huge Conservative margin Baldwin had won three years earlier. But even those Conservatives who had remained doggedly faithful to their leader were becoming troubled. After the vote, Sir Alan Herbert, an independent member, wrote: “My soul revolted at the thought of another, and, I was convinced by many expert opinions, a much worse war…. But, ‘wishful thinker,’ ‘anxious hoper,’ ‘old soldier,’ or ‘Christian believer’—what you will—I wanted Mr. Chamberlain to be right, and keep the peace successfully…. I voted sadly for Munich; and the whole thing made me ill.”