The Last Lion

His advice was rejected. As Thomas Jones wrote, in both Paris and London the Men of Munich were “much more optimistic than I am about the behavior of the dictators”—Hitler and Mussolini—and far more wary of the despot in the Kremlin. Jean Montigny, a Radical-Socialist, had warned the Chamber of Deputies on “the error and the illusion of any foreign policy based even partly on confidence in the power of the Russian army outside its frontiers and on the loyalty of the Soviet government.” Many deputies were concerned about Poland’s willingness to accept Soviet aid; as Poland’s ally, France had to deal with it. Nevertheless, on April 22 the French cabinet, albeit without enthusiasm, agreed to Litvinov’s proposal as a basis of negotiation, and so informed the British. The Quai declared, Whitehall delayed.²³

On April 19 the cabinet’s Foreign Policy Committee considered the Litvinov initiative. The Foreign Office was startled by its airtight language; by contrast—and by design—Britain’s Polish guarantee was a sieve of loopholes. Litvinov took Horace Wilson’s breath away; what if a copy of this document fell into the Führer’s hands? Suppose he blamed England for it? The consequences didn’t bear thinking about, and so, instead of thinking about them, Cadogan, in the absence of Halifax, described the Russian plan as “extremely inconvenient,” suggested that Soviet military strength was trivial, and declared that “from the practical point of view there is every argument against accepting the Russian proposal.” As a civil servant, however, the under secretary had to recognize that England had more than one party. Politically, the issue could become a quagmire. Thus, “there is great difficulty in rejecting the Soviet offer…. The left in this country may be counted on” to exploit a refusal. There was also a “very remote” possibility that the Russians might join hands with the Germans. Nevertheless, Cadogan ended, “on balance” Litvinov’s offer should be turned down on the ground that it might “alienate our friends and reinforce the propaganda of our enemies without bringing in exchange any real material contribution to the strength of our Front.” One wonders who, in Cadogan’s opinion, England’s “friends” and “enemies” were.²⁴

The situation, as one cabinet member pointed out, was “very awkward.” The French cabinet, however reluctantly, had voted to accept the plan. Churchill, Lloyd George, Eden, Duff Cooper, Labour, and the Liberals would raise Cain if His Majesty’s Government rejected it. The Poles and the Rumanians, per contra, would be up in arms if Litvinov’s offer were accepted. Finally—and this was decisive—Chamberlain, Halifax, Wilson, Cadogan, Inskip, and Simon were revolted by the prospect of an alliance with Bolsheviks. The Russians, as Thomas Jones wrote in his diary, “made our flesh creep.” Looking for a way out, the P.M. solicited the views of the Chiefs of Staff and seized upon one point in their report. The military support the U.S.S.R. could provide to Poland or Rumania, they wrote, “is not so great as might be supposed generally.”²⁵

Chamberlain ignored what followed, which was the chiefs’ conclusion that “Russian cooperation would be invaluable in that Germany would be unable to draw upon Russia’s immense reserves of food and raw materials and should succumb more quickly to our economic stranglehold.” He also suppressed the chiefs’ supplementary appraisal, which concluded:

A full-blown guarantee of mutual assistance between Great Britain and France and the Soviet Union offers certain advantages. It would present a solid front of formidable proportions against aggression…. If we fail to achieve any agreement with the Soviet, it might be regarded as a diplomatic defeat which would have serious military repercussion, in that it would have the immediate effect of encouraging Germany to further acts of aggression and of ultimately throwing the U.S.S.R. into her arms…. Furthermore, if Russia remained neutral, it would leave her in a dominating position at the end of hostilities.²⁶

According to Cadogan, this passage “annoyed” Chamberlain. Privately he threatened to “resign rather than sign an alliance with the Soviet.” Admiral of the Fleet Lord Chatfield, whose commitment to defend Britain eclipsed his hostility to bolshevism, pointed out that the chiefs were “very anxious that Russia should not under any circumstances become allied with Germany. Such an eventuality would create a most dangerous situation for us.” In the Foreign Office this minute was the source of great amusement. The admiral was informed that Communists and Nazis were as unlikely a combination as oil and water. If he would look after the Royal Navy, he was politely told, Whitehall would tend to foreign affairs.²⁷

After a fortnight of silence from London, Stalin, not a man of great patience, lost the little he had. On the back page of Pravda’s May 3 issue a small item appeared in the “News in Brief” column: “M. Litvinov has been released from the Office of Foreign Commissar at his own request.”

The significance of Litvinov’s dismissal passed almost unnoticed in the Western democracies. Because of an intelligence failure in MI6 and the Deuxième Bureau, Allied governments did not know, as Churchill later wrote, that Vyacheslav Molotov, Litvinov’s successor, “had always been favourable to an arrangement with Hitler,” that he had been “convinced by Munich and much else that neither Britain nor France would fight until they were attacked, and would not be much good then.” Like the FO diplomats, ordinary citizens never dreamed that a treaty binding Moscow and Berlin was possible. Eventually, it was assumed, the two would go to war.²⁸

But it would not be Molotov who would make the final decision as to which way the Soviets turned; that power belonged exclusively to Joseph Stalin. Exploring the mind of a psychotic is impossible—the shortest distance between two points becomes a maze—yet as Churchill perceived, there was method in Stalin’s dementia. In his own twisted way he was a patriot; like Winston he saw the peril in the Reich and wanted his country to survive it. That was his end. Any means was acceptable to him. He was quietly searching for one that would work.

Doubtless he would have preferred to avoid allies altogether. If he was viewed with suspicion in the capitals of Europe, his suspicions of their leaders ran to paranoia. Nevertheless, the necessity of making a choice, however distasteful, was becoming clear to him, and although Litvinov was in disgrace, an attachment to Britain and France was still preferable to a loathsome alliance with Berlin. Therefore the new foreign commissar, despite his Germanophilia, was instructed not to abandon discussions with Halifax and Bonnet.

Coulondre was encouraged by Molotov’s accession. Molotov, he cabled the Quai from Berlin, was chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and a “member of the Politburo, depositary of the thoughts of Stalin”; his appointment meant “Soviet foreign policy can only gain in clarity and precision, and France and England will have no reason to regret it.” Bonnet wrote in his memoirs that he was “quite satisfied by the assurances” of the Russian ambassador in Paris that the switch in foreign commissars “does not denote any change in Soviet foreign policy,” and that diplomatic discussions between envoys of the three nations could open whenever Britain and France were ready. Maisky brought the same message to Chamberlain and Halifax, who protested that they weren’t ready.²⁹

In fact, the democracies had every reason to regret the departure of their champion in the Kremlin. The Germans realized that they had gained ground. To drive the point home, the Russian chargé d’affaires in Berlin called at the Wilhelmstrasse to stress “the great importance of the personality of Molotov”—a curt, mulish man who spoke only Russian and held the Western Allies in contempt—and his “importance for future Soviet foreign policy.” A dispatch from Warsaw reported that Litvinov had resigned after Marshal Kliment Voroshilov had told him that the Red Army was not prepared to fight for Poland and had denounced, in the name of the Russian General Staff, “excessively far-reaching military obligations.” The Frankfurter Zeitung commented that Litvinov’s fall was a serious setback for Anglo-French plans to “encircle” the Reich. The German chargé in Moscow cabled the Wilhelmstrasse:

Since Litvinov had received the English Ambassador as late as May 2 and had been named in the press of yesterday as guest of honour at the parade, his dismissal appears to be the result of a spontaneous decision by Stalin…. At the last Party Congress, Stalin urged caution lest the Soviet Union should be drawn into conflict. Molotov (no Jew) is held to be “the most intimate friend and closest collaborator of Stalin.” His appointment is apparently the guarantee that the foreign policy will be continued strictly in accordance with Stalin’s ideas.³⁰

Some Englishmen were apprehensive. In London, Nicolson noted in his diary that “the left-wing people” in particular were “very upset…. They are not at all sure that Russia may not make a neutrality pact with Germany. I fear this terribly.” In his memoirs Churchill would write scathingly of Litvinov’s dismissal: “The eminent Jew, the target of German antagonism, was flung aside for the time being like a broken tool, and, without being allowed a word of explanation, was bundled off the world stage to obscurity, a pittance, and police supervision.”³¹

The extent of Churchill’s information about Kremlin infighting is unknown. But the Soviet envoy Maisky was almost certainly his chief confidant. It can hardly have been coincidence that he renewed his campaign for the triple alliance on May 4, the day after Litvinov was sacked. The chief stumbling block, he knew, was Poland. The Poles were adamant that Russian troops never be permitted to cross their territory, not even, say, if Germany attacked France and the Red Army lunged westward to support the French. Beck and his fellow officers in Warsaw not only persisted in regarding the Russians as lepers; they resented anyone who suggested that they be treated as anything else.

Churchill believed the moment must be seized despite the fears in Warsaw. He pointed out in the Daily Telegraph that “Ten or twelve days have passed since the Russian offer was made. The British people… have a right, in conjunction with the French Republic, to call upon Poland not to place obstacles in the way of a common cause.” Hitler’s prey needed not only “the full cooperation of Russia” but also the three Baltic states, who, with arms and munitions from the Soviet Union, could provide “perhaps twenty divisions of virile troops.” He appreciated the Polish policy of “balancing between the German and Russian neighbour,” but now that “Nazi malignity is plain, a definite association between Poland and Russia becomes indispensable.” Otherwise, war would be certain, and a German victory likely, with Poland in chains. The British and French could hold the Wehrmacht in the west, he wrote, but without the Red Army, the eastern front would collapse. He believed the Soviet Union would be responsive to overtures.

Russian interests are deeply concerned in preventing Herr Hitler’s designs on Eastern Europe. It should still be possible to range all the states and peoples from the Baltic to the Black Sea in one solid front against a new outrage or invasion. Such a front, if established in good heart, and with resolute and efficient military arrangements, combined with the strength of the Western Powers, may yet confront Hitler, Goering, Himmler, Ribbentrop, Goebbels and Company with forces the German people would be reluctant to challenge.³²

Unmentioned in his column, but of greater concern, was his knowledge that his own government was as hostile to the triple alliance as Beck. Britain had yet to issue a formal reply to Litvinov’s proposal. That same day Lord Camrose, acting, in effect, as Winston’s representative, called at the Foreign Office for a lord-to-lord talk with Halifax. Camrose reviewed all the reasons for establishing the peace bloc. After leaving the FO he wrote an account summing up the foreign secretary’s counterarguments. Halifax thought such an alliance would be ill-received in Tokyo. Rumania, as well as Poland, would oppose it. England’s Roman Catholics would be offended. Spain might react by joining the Axis, Italy would be alienated, the Portuguese might object, and Hitler might be driven into undertaking “desperate measures.” Camrose had patiently replied that all these points were trivial or irrelevant—the Italians were already German allies—when balanced against the need to halt Nazi aggression in its tracks, defend Britain, and avert a general European war. Halifax listened politely but was unmoved.³³

On May 8, three weeks after the Soviet Union had made its great move, London replied to it. “The response,” William Shirer notes, “was a virtual rejection. It strengthened suspicions in Moscow that Chamberlain was not willing to make a military pact with Russia to prevent Hitler from taking Poland.” His Majesty’s Government did leave the door ajar—a few inches. The proposal would be restudied. A flame of hope gleamed, but it was faint and flickering.³⁴

Chamberlain did not reveal his opinion of the Russian proposal in the House of Commons until May 19, and then only after Churchill, Lloyd George, and Eden had, in Winston’s words, “pressed upon the Government the vital need for an immediate arrangement with Russia of the most far-reaching character and on equal terms.” For an hour Lloyd George appealed for decision, a clear policy to succor England’s friends and confound her enemies. Churchill described the prime minister’s speech on the Soviet proposal as “cool, and indeed disdainful.” Chamberlain’s view, he later wrote, showed “the same lack of proportion as… in the rebuff to the Roosevelt proposals a year before.” The P.M. insisted that “the suggestion that we despise the assistance of the Soviet Union is without foundation.” If the government could “evolve a method by which we can enlist the cooperation and assistance of the Soviet Union… we welcome it; we want it; we attach value to it.” It would be foolish, he said, to suppose that Russia, “that huge country, with its vast population and enormous resources, would be a negligible factor.” Talks between British and Soviet diplomats had, he said, already begun. Unfortunately, they had bogged down. He acknowledged that he was reluctant to join hands with Moscow, but insisted that his position was based “on expedience and not on any ideological ground.” There was, he said, “a sort of veil, a sort of wall, between the two governments which is extremely difficult to penetrate.”³⁵

Churchill thought the veil was in the P.M.’s mind. His skepticism was justified; two months earlier, commenting on the Soviet Union, Chamberlain had written his sister: “I must confess to the most profound distrust of Russia…. I distrust her motives, which seem to me to have very little connection with our ideas of liberty, and to be concerned only with getting everyone else by the ears. Moreover, she is both hated and suspected by many of the smaller States, notably by Poland, Roumania, and Finland.” Significantly, he was untroubled by Nazi Germany’s ideas of liberty, though at that time Hitler’s concern with getting everyone by the ears had been far more conspicuous, and certainly more successful, than Stalin’s. Colin Coote wrote Churchill that the prime minister “fundamentally wants Nazi ideas to dominate Europe, because of his fantastic dislike of Soviet Russia.”³⁶

French députés in Paris’s quartier des ministères found an alliance with Moscow more attractive—no Channel separated them from the Wehrmacht—but ministers like Bonnet also regarded the Soviet Union as an evil empire, and made no effort to conceal it. In neither capital were the men in office aware that their personal opinions were irrelevant. Men who control great states must deal with their peers abroad, whatever their opinions of them; the Allies’ studied rudeness toward the U.S.S.R. in the spring and summer of 1939, when Russia was offering them collective security, was inexcusable. Certainly it was no service to the millions they governed. It is arguable that Litvinov, had he met with civility and those supple conversations à deux in which trained diplomats excel, might have stopped the war that all Europe, with the exception of the Führer and his co-conspirators, dreaded. The fact that they did not understand Litvinov’s policy and the inner workings of the Soviet bureaucracy does not brighten their memory.

Winston, looking beyond ideologies, saw England in danger; her survival, for him, outstripped everything else. He doubted, he told the House on May 19, that Chamberlain’s speech had contributed to the task before Parliament. “Nor has it, I venture to say, reassured those who feel deep misgivings about the present situation.” He was, he said, “quite unable to understand what is the objection to making the agreement with Russia…. The alliance is solely for the purpose of resisting further acts of aggression. I cannot see what is wrong with that.” Turning toward the front bench, he told the prime minister: “When you come to examine… the interest and loyalty of the Russian Government in this matter, you must not be guided by sentiment. You must be guided by a study of the vital interests involved. The vital major interests of Russia are deeply engaged in cooperation with Great Britain and France to prevent further acts of aggression.” He asked: “If you are ready to be an ally of Russia in time of war”—as Chamberlain had said he was—“why should you shrink from becoming an ally of Russia now, when you may by that very fact prevent the breaking out of war? I cannot understand all these refinements of diplomacy and delay. If the worst comes to the worst you are in the midst of it with them, and you have to make the best of it with them. If the difficulties do not arise, well, you will have had the security in the preliminary stages.”³⁷

Of course, Winston told the House, there were complicated side issues in any treaty, but here, surely, the issue could hardly be simpler.

I should have thought that this plan of a triple alliance is a preliminary step, and an invitation to other countries in danger on this front to come under its protection, was the most straightforward and practical manner of approaching the subject. I do not know whether I can commend it to my right hon. Friend by adopting a simile selected as a special compliment to him. It is like setting up an armoured umbrella, under which other countries will be invited to take shelter as and when they seek to do so. But we cannot exclude from our minds the fact that we are in a deadlock at the moment. What are the differences? We have already given guarantees to Poland and Rumania, and the Government tell us that they would be glad if Russia would give similar guarantees. Consequently, if Poland and Rumania are attacked we shall be in the war, and so will Russia. It is almost axiomatic that those who are allies of the same Power are allies of one another.

“Clearly,” he went on, “Russia is not going to enter into agreements unless she is treated as an equal, and not only treated as an equal, but has confidence that the methods employed by the Allies—by the peace front—are such as would be likely to lead to success.” Vague policy and wavering leadership discourage nations otherwise attracted to a coalition, and Chamberlain “must realise that none of these States in Eastern Europe can maintain themselves for, say, a year’s war unless they have behind them the massive, solid backing of a friendly Russia, joined to the combination of the Western Powers.” Then Churchill raised what, for Englishmen, was the ultimate issue: “Unless there is an Eastern front set up, what is going to happen to the West? What is going to happen to those countries on the Western front to whom, if we have not given guarantees, it is admitted we are bound—countries like Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Switzerland?… How are they to be defended if there is no Eastern front in activity?”

It is a tremendous thing, this question of the Eastern front. I am astonished that there is not more anxiety about it. Certainly, I do not ask favours of Soviet Russia. This is no time to ask favours of countries. But here is an offer, a fair offer, and a better offer, in my opinion, than the terms which the Government seek to get for themselves; a more simple, a more direct and a more effective offer. Let it not be put aside and come to nothing. I beg His Majesty’s Government to get some of these brutal truths into their heads. Without an effective Eastern front, there can be no satisfactory defence of our interests in the West, and without Russia there can be no effective Eastern front. If His Majesty’s Government, having neglected our defences for a long time, having thrown away Czechoslovakia with all that Czechoslovakia meant in military power, having committed us without examination of the technical aspects to the defence of Poland and Rumania, now reject and cast away the indispensable aid of Russia, and so lead us in the worst of all ways into the worst of all wars, they will have ill-deserved the confidence and, I will add, the generosity with which they have been treated by their fellow-countrymen.³⁸

Winston—and by now the weight of British public opinion—thought this reasoning unanswerable. Bowing to the storm of criticism, the prime minister on May 23 grudgingly agreed to negotiate with the Soviets on the basis of a British-French-Soviet alliance. He remained unpersuaded that such an alliance was necessary, however. And perhaps there was a certain logic in the argument that a strong ally on Germany’s eastern front—or her western front, for that matter—was unnecessary if the intention was to meet Hitler’s demands anyway. That, after all, had been the pattern; capitulation was inherent in the character of the British prime minister. The Führer’s minister of propaganda, certain beyond doubt that the P.M. would yield, openly said so. The Observer quoted Goebbels as predicting that “Herr Hitler will secure peace with triumph because Mr. Chamberlain will force the Poles to give way.”³⁹

After Chamberlain’s vow of support for Polish independence, Daladier had told his cabinet that the British now regarded the Vistula, not the Rhine, as their frontier. At the mouth of the Vistula stood the Free City of Danzig, a free state created by the Treaty of Versailles; the city’s real significance arose from the fact that it lay on the Baltic Sea. Because the port could be approached through the Polish Corridor—another creation of Versailles—it gave the Poles access to the sea and world trade. Like almost every memorable Versailles gift, however, the transformation of the city’s sovereignty had been made at the expense of the Germans. Until the 1919 peace treaty, it had been part of the Second Reich. Danzig, in fact, is a German name. After 1945 the Poles renamed it Gdańsk.

In 1939 it was not Polish territory, though führertreu readers of Völkischer Beobachter and Der Angriff had been led to believe that it was. The victors of 1918 had designated it a free state, to be administered by the Poles, but because the population remained overwhelmingly German, Germans dominated its legislative assembly. Even in the late 1920s friction between administrators and legislators had been frequent, and beginning in 1933, when Hitler moved into the Reich chancellery, it had intensified each year. Elected officials, proud of their membership in the local Nazi party, wore swastikas on their sleeves. On orders from Berlin, they could stage a full-fledged riot within an hour.

The dispute over Danzig was destined to launch World War II, but it had long lain quiescent, like a silent fracture in the earth’s crust which, when it ruptures, will generate an earthquake. The Foreign Office had been largely unaware of the gravity of the problem until the spring of 1939, a shattering example of incompetence in both Whitehall and MI6, Britain’s secret intelligence service. Danzig’s tremors had been perceptible long before the Volksdeutsche made their grievances known in the Sudetenland; the Führer’s plan to exploit them had been inscribed in Mein Kampf. Yet even after the issue emerged, His Majesty’s Government believed it was manageable. It wasn’t, because Hitler wasn’t. The assumption that he was—the root of the government’s foreign policy failures in the prewar years—was to persist through August 1939. Even after hostilities had actually begun, Chamberlain would cling to it, like an old dog worrying a naked bone.

The British might have been more alert had Colonel Beck not obscured the issue during his visit to London in April 1939. Danzig, the suave colonel had assured his hosts, was nothing to worry about; he would not even “trouble” them over it. Beck had been mendacious; the issue of the free city’s future was in fact deeply troubling, and shadows had been darkening over it as early as November 5, 1937, when Konstantin von Neurath had told Józef Lipski, Poland’s ambassador to the Reich, that “the Danzig question” would “permanently disturb German-Polish relations” until solved, and that the only possible solution would be “the restoration of German Danzig to… the Reich.” The following year, in the aftermath of Munich, Ribbentrop had summoned Lipski to Berchtesgaden for a three-hour luncheon discussion about Danzig. It should, he said, be returned to Germany. In addition, Germany wanted extraterritorial rights in the Polish Corridor and a Polish denunciation of Russia. Chamberlain had committed himself to Poland initially because he thought Rumania was next on Hitler’s hit list and he wanted the Poles to join him in pledging support of Rumanian independence. Actually, Poland had been—and still was—in far greater danger than Rumania.⁴⁰

After Prague Ribbentrop had drawn the Poles deeper into the vortex of power politics. On Tuesday, March 21, he had again summoned Lipski, repeating his Danzig and corridor demands and adding complaints: anti-Nazi demonstrations by Poles must be crushed, and criticism of the Führer in Polish newspapers suppressed. The lack of a “positive reaction” to the Danzig issue had made “an unfavorable impression on the Führer,” he said darkly; Hitler now “felt nothing but amazement over Poland’s strange attitude on a number of questions.” It would be wise, he suggested, for Colonel Beck to discuss these matters with the Führer, who might otherwise conclude that Poland “simply was not willing” to accommodate the Reich.⁴¹

Lipski had flown home, received instructions from Beck, and reappeared at the Wilhelmstrasse on Sunday with a memorandum from the colonel. Stripped of its elaborate periphrasis, it was a courteous rejection of all Hitler’s demands, coupled with a refusal to visit Berlin until “the questions [have] been prepared, in advance, according to diplomatic custom.” Ribbentrop, flushed with anger, replied that this response “could not be regarded by the Führer as satisfactory.” If matters continued this way, he warned, “a serious situation might arise.” Monday’s papers carried accounts of anti-Nazi rioting in Bydgoszcz—a city in western Poland whose population was largely German. Ribbentrop exploited the disorders by summoning Lipski, implying that Bydgoszcz’s Poles were to blame, and declaring that he could “no longer understand the Polish government.” He added: “An evasive answer has been given to the generous proposal Germany made to Poland…. Relations between the two countries are therefore deteriorating sharply.”⁴²

The Foreign Office had first heard this ticking time bomb in the second week of April, when Goebbels spread rumors that Germany planned a Danzig coup on the Führer’s birthday, six days away. When this hearsay reached Halifax he wondered how Poland would respond to a staged “internal revolt” in the city, and asked HM’s ambassador in Warsaw to clarify the question, which to him was “by no means clear.” It seemed to him that if the Poles were “prepared to treat” with the Reich, they would “cut the ground from under the German Government by showing their disposition to negotiate.” Beck curtly disagreed. He felt the time was not “opportune” for Warsaw to approach Berlin. If the Germans wanted to alter the status quo, they should take the initiative and state their claims; the Polish government would then consider them. It would not, however, agree to negotiate. Danzig, the Poles insisted, must remain a free city, their only major port, administered by them, as specified in the Versailles treaty. To turn it over to the Nazis would be interpreted as a sign of weakness and would invite further German claims. Halifax, unconvinced, continued to hint at the desirability of negotiations. Beck’s principal private secretary told a British diplomat that these hints “tend to create an element of doubt as to the fixity of [Britain’s] purpose.” They evoked memories of Munich, he added, which was “not a good precedent.”⁴³

The Danzig crisis became public knowledge on the last Friday in April, when Hitler revealed to the Reichstag and the listening world—including the dismayed governments in London and Paris—that the Wilhelmstrasse had been negotiating with Beck over German claims against Poland for the past six months. Danzig was a German city, the Führer shouted; it must “zurückkehren” (“revert”) to the Reich. He also demanded the right to build an autobahn and a double-track railroad across the Polish Corridor to East Prussia. Finally, Poland must join the Anti-Comintern Pact. Hitler called his Polish proposals “the greatest imaginable concession in the interests of European peace.” Yet, he added in a sinister note, the Poles had refused “my one and only offer.”⁴⁴

All this was stage business. The OKW and the inner Nazi circle knew that the Führer had already decided to invade Poland whatever happened. Nearly a month earlier, he had issued to his high command copies of Fall Weiss (Case White), each numbered and labeled Geheimhaltungsstufe—Most Secret. “The task of the Wehrmacht,” he had written, “is to destroy the Polish armed forces. To this end a surprise attack is to be aimed at and prepared.” He added: “Surprise occupation of Danzig may become possible independently of Case White by exploiting a favorable political situation.”⁴⁵

He had created that situation by one of his cleverest strokes. Danzig now had the undivided attention of Ausländspolitiker. The free city, they were convinced, was his next objective. Meantime he would exploit their preoccupation as he prepared to achieve his real goal: the seizure of all Poland. He knew his Chamberlain. “Danzig at present is the danger spot,” the prime minister wrote his sister, thrusting aside all warnings of a larger onslaught. He was “thinking of making a further proposal to Musso that he should move for a twelve months truce to let the temperature cool down.” The Duce, eager to fuel the myth that Hitler took his advice seriously, wrote the Reich chancellor that “the British requests” for a cooling-off period over Danzig “contain the prerequisites… for reaching a solution favourable to Germany” which would not disturb the “rhythm of your splendid achievements… and you will add a fresh indubitable success to those you have already obtained.”⁴⁶

But a Danzig solution—incorporating the city in the Reich—would deprive Hitler of an excuse to invade Poland. On May 23 he summoned all OKW commanders in chief and Chiefs of Staff, each Generalstab officer with the distinctive red stripe running down his field gray trousers, to tell them they would “attack Poland at the first opportunity.” There would be “no repetition of the Czech affair,” the Kriegsherr warned them; instead, “There will be war.” He was convinced that the British guarantee of Poland’s frontiers was a bluff. Several weeks later in Zossen, twenty miles southeast of Berlin, where he had established General Staff headquarters and a small chancellery for himself, he assembled his generals and told them that they should not flinch “from solving the Eastern questions even at the risk of complications in the West,” because he was sure the democracies would not fight, that such “complications” would never arise.⁴⁷

Zossen thought him wrong, but he wasn’t; throughout the summer of 1939 the appeasers remained in firm control of HMG’s foreign policy. Lord Rothermere wrote Churchill on July 17: “Carefully handled I don’t think there will be war over Danzig. Hitler left upon me the indelible impression that overtly he will never take the initiative in resorting to bloodshed. I suppose when I had my long talk with him he mentioned this matter at least a dozen times.” Yet, he wrote, England was going on “arming night and day using up if necessary whatever available resources we can lay our hands on.” Rothermere thought Hitler had been “badly handled. Instead of the language of reproach and rebuke constantly applied to him, I should have tried out the language of butter…. The language of guns may not go nearly as far as the language of butter.” He ended, memorably, “I have never yet seen an authoritative statement made in England complimenting Hitler on his tremendous record of achievement in Germany.”⁴⁸

Churchill replied two days later: “You may well be right about Danzig; but does it really matter very much what the thing is called? Evidently a great ‘crunch’ is coming, and all preparations in Germany are moving ceaselessly to some date in August. Whether H. will call it off or not is a psychological problem which you can probably judge as well as any living man. I fear he despises Chamberlain, and is convinced that the reason he does not broaden his Government is because he means to give in once Parliament has risen [adjourned].” Plugging away at his book, Winston was, he said, “remaining entirely quiescent at the present time…. I have given my warnings, and I am consoled for being condemned to inaction by being free from responsibility.” But of course he would never be free from responsibility. The pressure from without—to remain silent—was over-powered by the pressure from within. His conscience, his very essence, compelled him to shoulder his way into the public forum again and again.⁴⁹

The first occasion was a 1900 Club dinner on June 21. Lord Londonderry, Winston’s Germanophile cousin, was in the chair, and the guest of honor was Halifax. After his ritualistic, oleaginous tribute to those with whom he differed profoundly on the issues of the hour, Winston reminded Londonderry of “the flagrant and brutal manner in which the Munich agreement has been torn to pieces by the Nazi Government” and “the folly or villainy of the Nazi outrage” upon the rump Czech state. Summing up the case for the triple alliance, he concluded: “I believe most who are here tonight approve and endorse the willingness of His Majesty’s Government to make an alliance with Soviet Russia, without which no effective stability can be created or long maintained in the East.”⁵⁰

Privately he was discouraged. Cripps visited him at his flat the following afternoon and stayed for over an hour. In his diary he noted that Winston “inveighed strongly against the PM, said he and Eden had been ready to join the Cabinet since Hitler went into Prague but would not be admitted as it would stop all possibility of appeasement.” He agreed with Cripps that Parliament needed a coalition government “but despaired of any way of getting rid of or convincing Chamberlain.” Cripps added with relish: “Amongst other things he pointed out that but for Chamberlain’s shift on Foreign Policy after Prague, the Popular Front [left-wing] movement would have swept the country and I gather he could have supported it!” On Thursday, June 22, Churchill warned readers of the Daily Telegraph that reports of German troops massing on the Slovak frontier meant the Wehrmacht was intent on driving in Poland’s “southern flank,” and that Hitler wanted Danzig in order “to cut Poland [off] from the sea.” The following day, Winston wrote G. M. Young: “I am afraid I continue to take a sombre view of our affairs,” but in public he kept his spirits high. On Tuesday, June 27, he spoke to the Carlton Club before what the Yorkshire Post called “the largest audience ever gathered there on such an occasion” and appealed for “a full and solid alliance” with Russia. He told his audience that he wished he “could convince Herr Hitler of the fact that the British nation and, surely also, the British Empire, have reached the limit of their patience. We have receded and acquiesced time after time in breaches of solemn promises and treaties. Herr Hitler would make a profound mistake if he persuaded himself that all these retreats were merely the results of cowardice and degeneracy.”⁵¹

However, that was precisely what Hitler thought. Moreover, successful criminals rarely change their M.O.—their method of operation. The Germans in the Sudetenland had led to Chamberlain’s surrender at Munich, and there was a larger percentage of Germans in Danzig than in Czechoslovakia. He would stick to his M.O. He thought the British prime minister would come round to his way of thinking. And he was right. To Ida Chamberlain, Neville wrote that “should the [Danzig] issue come to a head now” he doubted that “any solution short of war is practicable,” but if the Führer “would have a modicum of patience I can imagine a way could be found of meeting German claims while safeguarding Poland’s independence and Economic Security.” He listened again, with thirsty ear, for the cheers acclaiming his return from Munich. His M.O. had been established, too.⁵²

Late in June another Goebbels rumor predicted a coup in Danzig for the weekend. He was testing British resolve, and he found it weak. Ribbentrop’s under secretary, Weizsäcker, told Ambassador Coulondre: “We know you [France] would fight, but we are not sure about England.” Daladier, disturbed, advised the British that “only a declaration couched in very energetic terms… will stop the Danzig coup,” and in Warsaw a member of the ruling military junta told Clifford Norton, chargé d’affairs at the British embassy, that if Britain and France remained “unshaken,” there would be no coup. At the same time, the British consul general in Danzig let the Foreign Office know that Germans there were saying that the Western Allies “will leave Poland in the lurch by not fighting on account of Danzig.”⁵³

The consul general recommended a strong stand by Britain, and Halifax dismissed him. The foreign secretary had no intention of fighting for Danzig. On July 1 the French, acting alone, informed Ribbentrop: “Any action, whatever its form, which would tend to modify the status quo in Danzig, and so provoke armed resistance by Poland, would bring the Franco-Polish agreement into play and oblige France to give immediate assistance to Poland.” Bonnet suggested that Halifax take a similar step “at an early date.” Halifax refused. In Parliament on July 10 Chamberlain declared that a Danzig coup “would involve a menace to Poland’s independence which we have undertaken to defend,” but added that future negotiations “ought to be possible… as the atmosphere cools.”⁵⁴

Churchill knew that the prime minister was putting pressure on the Poles; J. L. Garvin, editor of the Observer, had repeatedly accused him of it, and presently it became common knowledge. As Chamberlain wrote his sister on July 23, he had “heard last week that Hitler had told Herr Förster, the Danzig Nazi Leader, that he was going to damp down the agitation. True, the German claim that Danzig should be incorporated in the Reich was to be maintained, but that could wait until next year or even longer.” Meantime “the city would be demilitarized and the press muzzled, but particular stress was laid on the need for secrecy at present and for restraint on the Polish side.” Chamberlain had undertaken to send “all sorts of warnings to the Poles accompanied by exhortations to let nothing leak out.” Unfortunately, the Germans had “let the cat out of the bag,” giving “all my enemies” a chance “to say ‘There I told you so. He means to sell the Poles,’ and [making] it impossible for me to enter into conversations with Germans on any subject.”⁵⁵

That was shading the truth. He was talking to both the Germans and the Poles through Halifax, and he was consistently taking the Nazis’ side, with his foreign secretary concurring. A remarkable example of their double standard arose when the Poles asked for a loan to buy arms. Colonel Adam Koc, a member of the Warsaw junta, had arrived in London on June 14 with a financial commission. The British had pledged a “general decision on principle,” but during Koc’s first ten days in England he was received but once by England’s chief economic adviser, and that meeting was “purely nominal.” Two weeks later the Treasury offered the Poles eight million pounds. It was far less than they needed, and was accompanied by so many strings that Koc returned to Warsaw alarmed and depressed. The Poles, after deliberations, decided with “great reluctance” that they could not accept the terms. Koc then requested a loan convertible into dollars, permitting Poland to buy weapons in the United States. Chancellor of the Exchequer Simon, who had been willing to let Czech gold slip through his “butter-fingers,” as Churchill called them, replied that because “this would seriously affect our own financial position,” he “could not agree.” Yet at the same time, as Gilbert and Gott found in their study of these transactions, “Treasury officials were offering the Germans widespread economic advantages in return for an Anglo-German non-aggression pact.” Sir Orme Sargent, who had become the strongest Foreign Office opponent of appeasement since the fall of Vansittart, thought it lunacy to extend such privileges to Nazi Germany while Poland was so “roughly handled.” During that summer one of those catchy, anonymous phrases which arise in times of great stress was heard on the lips of Englishmen who agreed with him: “It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.” Proud men all, His Majesty’s Government never dreamed of living on their knees, but they believed that peace would be their reward if they answered the polemics of the Führer by keeping their other cheek turned and extending boundless generosity to Berlin. Meanwhile the Poles, who had been encouraged to entrust their independence to England, were consigned to march into battle carrying obsolete weapons and defective ammunition.⁵⁶

The present is never tidy, or certain, or reasonable, and those who try to make it so, once it has become the past, succeed only in making it seem implausible. Among the perceptive observations and shrewd conclusions of the Churchills and Sargents were clutters of other reports and forecasts, completely at odds with them. All of it, the prescient and the cockeyed, always arrives in a promiscuous rush, and most men in power, sorting through it, believe what they want to believe, accepting whatever justifies their policies and convictions while taking out insurance, whenever possible, against the possibility that the truth may lie in their wastebaskets.

Neville Chamberlain required a very large wastebasket, for he was stubborn and strong-willed, and long after his subordinates had abandoned their faith in appeasement he clung to the conviction that if he could just put the proper deal together, Hitler would buy it. “Hitler,” Macmillan recalled, “was always regarded by British politicians as if he were a brilliant but temperamental genius who could be soothed by kindness or upset by hard words. It was this fearful misconception about the nature of dictators that was… the root-cause of much that went amiss in these tragic years.” Somehow an excuse had been found for every wild threat and instance of extravagant behavior in the Reich Chancellery. Karl Burckhardt, the League of Nations high commissioner of Danzig, who later wrote Meine Danziger Mission 1937–1939, told Halifax that the Führer had said to him: “If the slightest incident happens now, I shall crush the Poles without warning in such a way that no trace of Poland can be found afterwards. I shall strike with the full force of a mechanized army, of which the Poles have no conception.” Burckhardt thought the Führer’s “boasting” arose from “fear,” and Halifax accepted that explanation as reasonable.⁵⁷

By the end of May virtually every powerful Ausländspolitiker in Europe had endorsed the triple alliance except the British prime minister. He wrote his sisters that Halifax had written that he had been “unable to shake Maisky on his demand for the 3 party alliance & Daladier had insisted that it was necessary, Poland had raised no objection…. It seemed clear that the choice lay between acceptance & the breaking off of negotiations,” which “no doubt” would “rejoice the heart of Berlin & discourage Paris.” There was “no sign of opposition to the Alliance in the Press & it was obvious that refusal would create immense difficulties in the House even if I could persuade my Cabinet.” Nevertheless, he still distrusted the Russians, still lacked faith in the Red Army, and still thought it disastrous to divide Europe into two armed camps. The only supporter he could find, he wrote, was “Rab Butler & he was not a very influential ally.” The P.M. was searching for an escape hatch, instructing Horace Wilson to work out a plan which would give the Russians “what they want” but avoid “the idea of an Alliance” by substituting “a declaration of intentions in certain circumstances.”⁵⁸

That was on May 28, 1939. Churchill’s repeated calls for swift execution of the alliance were a growing irritant to Chamberlain, a variant of the Chinese water torture; another of them appeared in the Daily Telegraph of June 8, and this time Winston struck a new, somber note. There was, he wrote, reason to doubt that His Majesty’s Government was negotiating in good faith. This opinion seemed confirmed by HMG’s response to a suggestion from the Kremlin that Britain send a special envoy to Moscow. Eden quickly volunteered. He would have been an excellent choice; he was a former foreign secretary, he had met Stalin several times under agreeable circumstances, and his resignation from the cabinet on a matter of principle had enhanced his prestige on the Continent. Instead, Chamberlain sent William Strang, “an able official,” as Churchill described him, “but without any standing outside the Foreign Office.” It was, as Winston called it, “another mistake. The sending of so subordinate a figure gave actual offence.” The Russians were highly sensitive on matters of protocol, and the junior diplomat from Whitehall, having presented his credentials, was ignored by the new commissar for foreign affairs. On June 19 Nicolson wrote: “Strang has not seen Molotov again since Friday. Yet… Halifax told Winston yesterday that all was well. I confess I am most uneasy.”⁵⁹

In Parliament the prime minister repeated his pledge to stand by Poland if she were invaded. Nevertheless, Churchill felt a thickening sludge of defeatism. As so often in moments of despair, he looked westward across the Atlantic toward the one power which, if aroused and armed, could crush Nazi Germany without mortgaging Europe’s future to Stalin. In News of the World on June 18, after outlining ways in which the “atrocity” of bombing civilian targets could be countered, he wrote: “Of these grievous events the people of the United States may soon become the spectators. But it sometimes happens that the audience becomes infuriated by a revolting exhibition. In that case we might see the spectators leaving their comfortable seats and hastening to the work of rescue and of retribution.”

Britain and France, however, seemed to be losing their audience. The diplomatic conversations in Moscow were not revolting, but they had certainly become tiresome. The negotiations were wallowing. After a brief spurt of activity at the bargaining table, Halifax, on Chamberlain’s instructions, permitted the talks to lapse again. This was dangerous, raising questions in other capitals over England’s resolution and strength. On July 7 Mussolini, the poseur of machismo, summoned His Majesty’s ambassador in Rome, Sir Percy Loraine, and said loftily, “Tell Chamberlain that if England is ready to fight in defense of Poland, Italy will take up arms with her ally, Germany.”⁶⁰

Actually, this was the hollowest of threats. Despite the Pact of Steel, the Italian end of the Axis was tin. Mussolini’s men weren’t ready. However, Whitehall was unaware of that (so was Hitler), and in any event Chamberlain’s extravagant efforts to keep Italy in the Anglo-French entente had already failed.

The defection of Belgium was more serious. Three years had passed since the Belgians’ announcement that they would no longer participate in staff talks with officers from the War Office and the French Ministère de Guerre. Instead they would, in any future conflict in Europe, remain strictly neutral. But Belgium now, as in 1914, did not enjoy the freedom to make that choice. If Hitler’s powerful new Wehrmacht chose to knife through the Low Countries into France, it would drive a bloody blade into the same scar over the same wound the kaiser had opened a quarter-century earlier, and a nation which has been invaded cannot remain neutral. All the callow sovereign in Brussels had accomplished was to ease the task of Hitler’s Generalstab. King Leopold III had reached his decision, Churchill commented, “in a spirit of detachment from the facts.” He lived to see his people subjugated by the Wehrmacht, the young men forced to work as slave labor in Ruhr munitions factories, the old subject to execution as hostages whenever Belgian freedom fighters struck. They would still be bowed beneath the Third Reich’s yoke when he died in 1944.⁶¹

Despite Hitler’s shredding of the Munich Agreement, despite daily reports of Nazi outrages in Austria and shattered Czechoslovakia, and despite brutal incidents on the borders between Germany and Poland (the beatings of civilian Poles by Nazi thugs), Neville Chamberlain remained serene in his stateroom on the Titanic. And his troika—Halifax, Simon, and Hoare—was equally tranquil. Churchill, untranquil but helpless as Europe blundered toward the brink of war, toiled away at Chartwell or sat brooding by his fish pond, his hands in his lap, like weapons put to rest. The Chamberlain government ignored him, but he remained a public figure; J. L. Garvin wrote and published in the Observer an editorial stating that were Churchill taken into the cabinet the decision “would be accepted” throughout Europe as “conclusive proof of national efficiency and resolution.” Pravda, arguing that the Baltic states must not fall into Nazi hands, noted on July 22 that “The security of such states” was of prime importance for Britain and France, “as even such a politician as Mr. Churchill has recognized.”⁶²

Churchill’s rare disclaimers of ambition, his affecting to enjoy the squire’s life in Kent, were merely the palaver expected of any political figure excluded from power. His lust for office remained undiminished. He yearned to be in the cockpit of action, not only for the excitement—though that would always be there, and was part of his charm; his expressions, gestures, and swings in mood evoked images of the mischievous small boy at Harrow. He relished the prospect of glory, and, if he made it to the top, of more decorations and honors, of audiences with his sovereign, and motorcycle escorts as he raced about serving the monarch and his people. But he was driven by deeper motives. He was, and proudly proclaimed himself to be, an egoist. He wanted, he needed power. He knew his worth, and suffered when he saw mediocrities, men without imagination, vision, or honor, betraying his England. Egoism and grandeur are so close that they may merge in one man, and he was such a man. Like Lord Chatham, prosecuting the Seven Years’ War in the eighteenth century, Churchill could say: “I believe I can save this country and no one else can.”⁶³

Clearly Neville Chamberlain couldn’t. His indifference to the Russian proposal proved that. The talks in Moscow remained stalled, and on July 13, nearly three months after the Soviet offer to Britain and France, Winston wrote in the Daily Mirror that there could be no excuse for the “unaccountable delay” in signing “a solid, binding, all-in alliance” between Moscow, Paris, and London. Such procrastination, he declared, “aggravates the danger of a wrong decision by Herr Hitler. It is lamentable indeed that this broad mainsail of peace and strength, which might carry the ship of human fortunes past the reef, should still be flapping half-hoisted in the wind.”

The prime minister was unmoved. He wrote Ida: “I am so sceptical of the value of Russian help that I should not feel that our position was greatly worsened if we had to do without them.” This was a stunning misjudgment. Hitler had told his interpreter that if Britain and France accepted the Soviet offer and formed the triple alliance which had been Litvinov’s dream, he would be outmanned, outgunned, and outwitted; he would be forced to cancel his war plans and bide his time. Churchill later wrote that the three-power coalition “would have struck deep alarm into the heart of Germany.” With “superior power on the side of the Allies,” countries the Führer had marked as future victims would have regained the diplomatic initiative and “Hitler could afford neither to embark upon the war on two fronts… nor to sustain a check. It was a pity not to have placed him in this awkward position, which might well have cost him his life.” Winston concluded: “Having got ourselves into this awful plight of 1939, it was vital to grasp the larger hope.”⁶⁴

Throughout July the three-power talks flickered, sputtered, and guttered, like the last candle in a darkening house. Pravda reported that “in the circles of the Soviet Foreign Ministry, results of the first talks are regarded as not entirely favorable.” Actually Maisky had told the ministry that he believed the men from London “want the talks to fail,” that Chamberlain was a creature of the “Cliveden set” whose only reason for entering negotiations had been to mollify his critics in Parliament. The distrust was mutual. Cadogan was developing a profound hatred for the Soviet delegation. Their chairman was particularly easy to hate. Churchill, who later encountered him at several official functions, described Molotov in vintage Chartwell prose: He was “a man of outstanding ability and cold-blooded ruthlessness. He had survived the fearful hazards and ordeals to which all the Bolshevik leaders had been subjected in the years of triumphant revolution… His cannonball head, black mustache, and comprehending eyes, his slab face, his verbal adroitness and imperturbable demeanour, were appropriate manifestations of his qualities and skill. He was above all men fitted to be the agent and instrument of the policy of an incalculable machine… I have never seen a human being who more perfectly represented the modern conception of a robot.”⁶⁵

But during the Moscow talks Molotov also had reason to fume. Cadogan wrote: “We give them all they want, with both hands, and they merely slap them.” That was absurd; how could they be giving the Russian negotiators “all they want” when, despite repeated Soviet entreaties, they refused to exert pressure on Poland—whose best interests would be served, since the Poles would be trapped in any war between Russia and Germany—to become party to the agreement? The Anglo-French delegates rejected the simple, comprehensive Soviet proposal, suggesting instead unilateral guarantees by individual nations. The Englishmen parried and thrusted, immunized to boredom by their profession and doubtful that Britain had anything to gain or lose here. Like Chamberlain and Halifax, most of them doubted that the Red Army would be any match for the Wehrmacht. And, like them, they believed nothing else was at stake.⁶⁶

Here their error was not only spectacular, it was historic. Harold Macmillan, one of the handful who suspected what was coming, was puzzled by their blindness. In part they were victims of a distorted self-image, an illusion common among superpowers; like Americans a generation later, they assumed that all other countries held them in high regard. Actually, the men in the Kremlin bore malice toward the Western Allies, and with reason. Both England and France had intervened in the Russian Civil War after the Armistice of 1918 and had sent troops to fight the Bolsheviks; both had imposed diplomatic sanctions on Russia’s new regime; and they had deprived the Soviet Union of Russian territories in postwar treaties. Postwar Germany had, on the other hand, shared in none of these actions. Even after the Nazi rise to power, Macmillan noted, “German-Russian relations had been good and even cordial.” To be sure, “Hitler’s violent and offensive anti-Communist propaganda no doubt angered Stalin, but he was not a man to be deterred by words from any action that he deemed advantageous.”⁶⁷

Yet what diplomatic action, in the growing European crisis, would be to Russia’s advantage? War was coming, the Reich would be the aggressor, and Hitler did not wish Stalin well. If Russia allied herself with the democracies, the Führer would be forced to fight on two fronts. On the other hand, such a treaty would mean war between Germany and the Soviet Union. Britain and France could not guarantee Stalin peace—but Hitler could. A Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact would mean peace for a Russia which chose to remain neutral, and would bring about, without the loss of a single Red soldier, the recovery of the lost lands surrendered to Rumania, Poland, and the Baltic states twenty years ago at the insistence of the Western powers. If he chose that course and the Allies were defeated, eventually he would have to face Germany alone. But Hitler might be dead by then, or overthrown; or Germany might be defeated. The temptation to withdraw from the imminent maelstrom, to buy time to arm, was enormous.

Meantime, the talks with the Allies were permitted to continue, in the hope that they would give him reason to turn away from what would, in the long run, be the greater peril. Long afterward, Churchill wrote: “It is not even now possible to fix the moment when Stalin definitely abandoned all intention of working with the Western democracies” and turned his attention to “coming to terms with Hitler.” Maisky told Boothby he thought the die had been cast on March 19, when Halifax sandbagged Moscow’s Bucharest conference, but the evidence strongly suggests that a firm Anglo-French commitment could have saved the triple alliance as late as mid-August. Nevertheless Stalin was keeping his German option open.⁶⁸

How long had it been open? After the war Russian expatriates published Notes for a Journal, identifying the author as Maksim Litvinov. Establishing its authenticity is impossible, but according to this source, the Soviet dictator had pondered a détente with Germany as soon as he read the Munich Agreement. He is quoted as having told Litvinov toward the end of 1938: “We are prepared to come to an agreement with the Germans… and also to render Poland harmless.” According to a journal entry dated January 1939, Stalin had instructed Alexei Merekalov, the Russian ambassador in Berlin, to open talks with Weizsäcker, telling him “in effect” that “We couldn’t come to an agreement until now, but now we can.”⁶⁹

Almost certainly this, or a variant of it, is close to the truth. If Munich had been a battle, it would have been among the most decisive in history. Walter Lippmann wrote: “In sacrificing Czechoslovakia to Hitler, Britain and France were really sacrificing their alliance with Russia. They sought security by abandoning the Russian connection at Munich, in a last vain hope that Germany and Russia would fight and exhaust one another.” Stalin was aware of that. On March 10, five days before Prague, he had savaged the democracies for sacrificing Austria and Czechoslovakia and accused them of trying to “embroil” the Reich in a war with the U.S.S.R., “pushing the Germans further eastward, promising them an easy prey and saying: ‘Just start a war with the Bolsheviks, everything else will take care of itself!’ ”⁷⁰

Whitehall saw no shadows cast by coming events, but Gallic suspicions had begun well before Prague, when Coulondre had warned the Quai that a Nazi-Soviet rapprochement was in train; its objective, he said, would be to divide Poland between them. On May 9 he cabled the Quai: “For the last 24 hours Berlin is full of rumors that Germany has made, or is going to make, proposals to Russia leading to a partition of Poland.” On May 22 he reported that Ribbentrop had said that Poland “sooner or later must disappear, partitioned again between Germany and Russia. In his mind this partition is closely linked with a rapprochement between Berlin and Moscow.” Later Coulondre told Paris that the Führer “will risk war if he does not have to fight Russia. On the other hand, if he knows he has to fight her too he will draw back rather than expose his country, his party, and himself to ruin.”⁷¹

Daladier, having studied the cable traffic from Coulondre, afterward wrote: “Since the month of May [1939] the U.S.S.R. had conducted two negotiations, one with France, the other with Germany. She appeared to prefer to partition rather than to defend Poland.” Chamberlain seems to have been the last politician in Europe to discover that the Russians were keeping two sets of books. In late May, when the P.M. finally agreed to negotiate with the Russians largely on the basis of the terms embodied in Litvinov’s original proposal, Dirksen, the Führer’s envoy to the Court of St. James, advised the Wilhelmstrasse that Chamberlain had taken this step “with the greatest reluctance,” prompted by reports to the Foreign Office of “German feelers in Moscow.” Chamberlain and Halifax, according to Dirksen, were “afraid that Germany might succeed in keeping Soviet Russia neutral or even inducing her to adopt benevolent neutrality.”⁷²

By then the two dictators were in fact on the way to the altar. Churchill observed afterward: “It is a question whether Hitler or Stalin loathed it most.” But marriages of convenience are not expected to be joyous. The one mot which won universal acceptance in the democracies and the United States was “They deserve each other.” Certainly the Führer, until now regarded as the new Machiavelli, had met his match in duplicity. It was characteristic of Stalin’s amorality that on the day after Litvinov had invited England and France to join Russia in an anti-Nazi alliance, Merekalov called on Ernst von Weizsäcker at the Wilhelmstrasse, ostensibly to discuss commercial issues arising from Czechoslovakia’s incorporation into what was now known as Grossdeutschland, beginning with a request for sales to Russia from the Skoda Works, now a Nazi arsenal.⁷³

In fact the ambassador’s objectives transcended trade. His appearance in the office of Ribbentrop’s under secretary marked the beginning of a dramatic shift in relations between the two dictatorships. On that day Weizsäcker responded to the Skoda issue first. He told his visitor that reports of Soviet negotiations with Britain and France, looking toward a military alliance, did not create “a favorable atmosphere for the delivery of war materials to Soviet Russia.” But he knew that trade, even trade in arms, could not be the real reason for this visit. The ambassador had presented his credentials nearly a year ago, and this was the first time he had entered the Foreign Ministry. Weizsäcker, unlike Ribbentrop, was a trained diplomat; he had a pretty good guess at what was coming. To encourage Merekalov to get to the point, he remarked that the Russian press was not “fully participating in the anti-German tone of the American and some of the English papers.”⁷⁴

At that, his visitor spoke up: “Ideological differences of opinion had hardly influenced the Russian-Italian relationship,” he said, “and they need not prove a stumbling block for Germany either…. There exists for Russia no reason why she should not live with Germany on a normal footing. And from normal, relations might become better and better.” This ground-breaking ceremony was followed, first, by two meetings between Dr. Julius Schnurre of the Wilhelmstrasse and Georgi Astakhov, the Russian chargé d’affaires, and second, on May 20, by a long talk in Moscow between Molotov and Ambassador Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg. Schulenburg found the foreign commissar “sehr freundlich” (“very friendly”) and ready to discuss both economic and political agreements between the two powers. Thus the seeds were planted. They might never blossom. Russian diplomats were still courting Britain and France. But if those talks fell through, Stalin had established an alternative.⁷⁵

On July 24 prospects for an accord between the Reich’s three most powerful adversaries seemed to brighten. Molotov, summoning the British and French negotiators, was conciliatory; clearly he had received fresh instructions from the Kremlin. Since the political matters still to be thrashed out were technical, he said, he recommended that they draw up the related military convention spelling out the obligations of each nation, under the mutual assistance pact, in meeting Nazi aggression. The Foreign Office and the Quai were consulted; the French agreed enthusiastically, the British less so. Dirksen reported to the Wilhelmstrasse—now genuinely alarmed by the prospective alliance—that His Majesty’s Government regarded the military talks “skeptically.”⁷⁶

Events swiftly confirmed the German ambassador. In diplomacy great importance is attached to the prestige of the men a nation sends to represent it. For these talks the Russians chose officers holding the highest ranks in the U.S.S.R.: Marshal Voroshilov, Russia’s commissar for defense; the chief of the Red Army’s General Staff; and the commanders in chief of the air force and the navy. To lead the French delegation Daladier picked General of the Army André Doumenc, formerly Maxime Weygand’s deputy chief of staff, regarded throughout France as one of the most brilliant officers to serve under the tricolor. Chamberlain, however, repeated the Strang snub, deliberately offending the Kremlin. A month earlier, when Anglo-Polish military talks were held in Warsaw, Britain had been represented by Tiny Ironside. This time Tiny was kept home. Instead, an obscure and undistinguished British party was led by Admiral Sir Reginald A. R. Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, of whom Dirksen wrote that he was “practically on the retired list and was never on the Naval Staff.”⁷⁷

So slipshod were Whitehall’s arrangements for the talks that Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax wasn’t even given written authority to negotiate—a serious breach of diplomatic courtesy—though he had been instructed to be discourteous anyway; British foreign policy documents reveal that he had been told to be vague and “go very slowly.” As a final slight to the Russians, the British, who were handling transportation for the Allied teams, rejected the suggestion that they fly to Moscow, which would have taken a day. They boarded the nine-thousand-ton passenger-cargo ship City of Exeter, an ancient vessel whose top speed, Molotov’s deputy foreign commissar found, was thirteen knots. They left England on August 5 and did not reach Leningrad until very late on August 9; they arrived in Moscow August 11. The Queen Mary would have brought them to New York in less time. And in this August, like that other August a quarter-century earlier, every hour counted. The triple alliance now had Hitler’s undivided attention; he knew how formidable it would be and had ordered Ribbentrop to break it up. Joachim von Ribbentrop may have been only a wine salesman, but he had been a very good salesman, and he knew Molotov would be an eager customer. The only obstruction was Stalin. That was enough to discourage any diplomat except one who would have to return to the Führer empty-handed. The German’s main hope lay in the possibility that the Anglo-French officers would bungle their assignment.⁷⁸

That is precisely what they—or, more accurately, their governments—did. The military talks in Moscow got off to a wobbly start. Marshal Voroshilov was offended by the failure of Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax to produce credentials signed by Chamberlain. Soviets put a premium on form; they interpreted the lapse as a sign that Britain did not regard the occasion as grave. General Doumenc, on the other hand, was on excellent terms with the Russians from the start. His Ordre de Service, signed by Daladier, was flawless; he had impressed the Red Army’s leaders by his knowledge of Russian military traditions; he sympathized with their painful memories of Allied hostility to the Bolshevik cause in their struggle of 1918–1920 and was tactfully silent about Stalin’s purges of the Red Army. In his determination to impress the Russians in their talks, he had, as one of his subordinates put it, “stretched the truth a little.” The Maginot Line, he said, now extended “from the Swiss frontier to the sea.” As any newspaper correspondent could have told the Soviets—and as their own intelligence service doubtless had—it was less than half that long. In Doumenc’s defense, it should be noted that the French delegation, like Britain’s, had been instructed by its senior officers to gloss over military weaknesses. The British were poorer liars. Their army spokesman blithely declared that Britain could field sixteen divisions “in the early stages of the war.” The French were “astounded,” one of their delegates later wrote; this was “three or four times” greater than Ironside’s figure in the most recent Anglo-French staff talks. Voroshilov, suspicious, pressed the issue, asking, “How many divisions will you have if war breaks out soon?” The embarrassing answer was that England’s standing army at present consisted of “five regular divisions and one mechanized division.” At that moment, one French officer later wrote, “the Soviet delegation understood better than it had the immense weakness of the British Empire.”⁷⁹

The Russians’ crucial question was asked by Voroshilov late in the afternoon of Sunday, August 13. The Soviet Union, he pointed out, had no common frontier with the Reich. What, he inquired, did the French and British General Staffs think the Red Army could do if Poland or Rumania were attacked, since the Soviet troops could not take action without entering “the territory of other states?” There was silence. Doumenc and Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax replied that they would answer in the morning. That bought them a reprieve, but next day the marshal’s questions were more specific: Would Soviet forces be allowed to move against the Wehrmacht through Poland’s Wilno Gap and Polish Galicia? He said flatly: “We ask for straightforward answers to these questions. In my opinion, without an exact, unequivocal answer, it is useless to continue these military conversations.” It was up to the Allies to secure permission for the passage of Russian troops, he said, because they, not the Soviet Union, had guaranteed Poland and Rumania. For the next two days the military talks got nowhere, as Allied diplomats sought to win the cooperation of the Poles. By the seventeenth Voroshilov had run out of patience. He demanded that the meetings adjourn until a definite reply from Warsaw had been received. The negotiators agreed to reassemble on Monday, August 21.⁸⁰

The British and French ambassadors in Warsaw approached Beck on August 18. He told them that Soviet troops were of “no military value.” The chief of the Polish General Staff agreed; he could see “no benefit to be gained by Red Army troops operating in Poland.” Two days later the Polish foreign minister formally rejected the Anglo-French requests. Moreover, he added, he didn’t want to hear any more about it: “I do not admit that there can be any kind of discussion whatever concerning the use of part of our territory by foreign troops.” If Poland agreed, he said, “this would lead to an immediate declaration of war on the part of Germany.” Hitler frightened him, but Stalin terrified him.⁸¹

The provocative question is why Paris and London did not put Beck to the ultimate test. Under these extraordinary circumstances they were entitled to declare that unless Poland agreed to let the Red Army help, Britain and France no longer felt bound to go to war in defense of Poland. Actually this dilemma had been anticipated in April when, four days after Chamberlain announced England’s unilateral guarantee of Poland, Churchill and Lloyd George, speaking in the House, had both urged that the Soviet Union be encouraged to join an entente of countries threatened by Nazi aggression. Lloyd George, and then Churchill, had demanded that Chamberlain’s guarantee be provisional, valid only if the Poles agreed to accept help from the U.S.S.R. Lloyd George had predicted:

If we are going in without the help of Russia, we are walking into a trap… I cannot understand why, before committing ourselves to this tremendous enterprise, we did not secure beforehand the adhesion of Russia… If Russia has not been brought into this matter because of certain feelings the Poles have that they do not want the Russians there, it is for us to declare the conditions, and unless the Poles are prepared to accept the only conditions with which we can successfully help them, the responsibility must be theirs.⁸²

The option was still there. The Anglo-Polish mutual security pact had not yet been signed. Britain’s foreign secretary could have taken the simple step of making Beck’s acceptance of Russian aid a condition of signature. Bonnet actually proposed this stratagem. Halifax sent Bonnet’s proposal across Downing Street; Chamberlain frostily replied that he declined to be party to such a “maneuver.” “Maneuver,” like “creatures,” was one of his pet pejoratives, but in this context it was meaningless. The prime minister had to have had another motive. The likeliest, though he did not cite it, was his visceral dislike of the Soviet Union.

Daladier, more tenacious and dismayed by the loss of a powerful ally on Germany’s other front, was slow to accept diplomatic defeat. After a final appeal to Warsaw, which was brusquely rejected, the premier cabled Doumenc on the morning of August 21, instructing him to sign a military convention with Russia under the best terms possible, with the sole provision that it must be approved by the cabinet. The French premier also wired his ambassador in Moscow, authorizing him to tell Molotov that France approved “in principle” the right of Russian soldiers to cross Poland if Hitler attacked. But these telegrams did not arrive in the Soviet capital until late in the evening, and by then the drama was over.

Pressed to accept Soviet help in the event of trouble, the Poles were also being urged to yield on the Danzig issue, to placate the Führer and alleviate the mounting tension in Europe. In the final British negotiations over Danzig, a key figure, and at times the key figure, was Churchill’s mirror image—the Nazis’ favorite diplomat, Sir Nevile Henderson, His Majesty’s ambassador to the Third Reich. Henderson defended the anti-Semitic pogroms of Danzig Nazis, opposed any link between London and Warsaw, thought the Poles should “talk a little less” about their courage and think “a little more” about the “realities” of their position on the eastern fringe of Grossdeutschland. He criticized his own country, telling Cadogan that England had led Poland “far up the garden path” by her pledges. Britain, he thought, should cede Danzig to Hitler. His great fear was that Beck, Koc, and their fellow colonels might arouse the German’s temper. Danzig, he told Halifax in late July, ought to be declared a “German Free City,” forcing Poles living there to leave. Until then, he predicted, “there will be no real peace” in eastern Europe.⁸³

Clifford Norton, Britain’s chargé in Warsaw, strenuously attacked Henderson in his dispatches. He thought it unlikely that “the present moment is a good one” for negotiations between Germany and the Poles. Before any talks began, he wrote, Poland’s strength, and the justice of her cause, should be “visible and apparent not only to its partners, but also to its opponents.” Actually, he doubted the value of negotiations under any circumstances: “Even if Danzig were removed from the front of the stage… there is little basis for hopes that such a settlement would introduce the millennium.” When Henderson criticized this as “rather hypothetical,” Norton replied that the Führer and his Nazi hierarchy were “imbued with the desire to dominate all Eastern Europe.” That being true, he wrote, “no difficulties… should be allowed to shake the firmness of the Anglo-Polish alliance.”⁸⁴

Reading British foreign policy documents of that summer—Henderson’s dispatches, the memoranda of Halifax, the prime minister’s papers—it is startling to recall that Britain had made a commitment to Poland, not Germany. Norton reminded the foreign secretary of that. In consequence, Halifax tried to bypass him, and in Downing Street he was dubbed “pro-Polish.” It was meant as a slur. His Majesty’s Government was determined to prevent the Poles from embarrassing Britain by dragging her into war. Henderson thought that was their intention. Their objective, he cabled home, was to “humiliate” the Third Reich.⁸⁵

Clearly humiliation was to be the lot of some powers. Governments were taking positions from which retreat without loss of face was impossible. Britain was committed to Poland; if the European balance of power shifted dramatically, and the Polish position became untenable, England would be in the soup. If that thought crossed Henderson’s mind, he made no record of it. Probably it didn’t; as a diehard appeaser, he refused to admit the possibility of a showdown, even to himself. If matters reached an impasse, the disciples of appeasement reasoned, they would negotiate a new settlement and their armies would stand down.

The Wehrmacht wasn’t going to stand down. The Führer had made that clear at Zossen. Germany was going to march into Poland, and the dying would begin, whatever the diplomats did. The Reich’s hopes for victory, however, relied heavily on its chief diplomat. Ribbentrop was doing both his best and his worst to achieve a pact with the Soviet Union, though he had had problems with his führer. Hitler loathed Slavs almost as much as he hated Jews, and while he had known a triple alliance would present the gravest of threats to him and his Reich, he had vacillated through May and June.

In late May the Führer had instructed the Wilhelmstrasse “to establish more tolerable relations between Germany and the Soviet Union,” and said he wanted Count von der Schulenburg, his ambassador in Moscow, to convey this to Molotov “as soon as possible.” Four days later he canceled this and said he preferred a “modified approach.” Trade talks had begun, but in June Hitler suddenly repudiated them. On July 18 they were resumed after the Soviets had said they were prepared to extend and intensify economic relations between the two countries. Hitler’s munitions buildup was suffering from a lack of raw materials; he told Schulenburg to sign a trade agreement at the earliest possible moment and “den Faden wiederaufnehmen” (“again take up the thread”) of political discussions with the foreign commissar. Suddenly, Russians and Germans began talking about power plays in Poland and the Baltic states—grabbing territories by joint aggression—coups elected leaders in democracies would not dare hatch, knowing that a free press and an aroused public would force them to withdraw.⁸⁶

Englishmen were proud of their customs and traditions, some of which bordered on the eccentric. To Churchill’s exasperation, Britain’s ruling class continued “to take its weekends in the country,” as he put it, while “Hitler takes his countries in the weekends.” This was no small matter. It meant that crucial decisions could not be made because those with the authority to make them were beyond the reach of telephones. Suggestions that country weekends be shortened, or that provisions be made for emergencies, were met with icy stares. Britain’s leaders detested being pushed; one of their chief complaints about Americans was that they always seemed to be in a hurry. Haste was somehow regarded as un-British. The ruling class was not called the leisured class for nothing.⁸⁷

The timetable of events, as July melted into August, suggests the price England paid for Edwardian manners when trying to outwit and outmanipulate a twentieth-century Attila. On July 31, the day Chamberlain told Parliament that an Allied military mission would be sent to Moscow, the Reich’s ambassador to Russia received an “urgent and secret” telegram from the Wilhelmstrasse, instructing him to see Molotov immediately. Three days later, before the Anglo-French mission sailed for Leningrad, the Russo-German talks became more specific. Ribbentrop, carrying out his Blitzwerbung, had told Schulenburg to present “more concrete terms… in view of the political situation and in the interests of speed.” The Führer was no longer irresolute.⁸⁸

He had scheduled his invasion of Poland for late August; the Wehrmacht had to overwhelm Poland before the October rains made the unpaved roads impassable for his panzers. He had to outbid the Allies in Moscow quickly, and price was no object. On August 12, toward the end of a meeting with the Italian foreign minister, Hitler said he had just received “a telegram from Moscow. The Russians have agreed to a German political negotiator being sent to Moscow.”⁸⁹

This may have been a trick to impress Ciano—no such cable was found among the German documents captured in 1945—but other documents leave no doubt that on that same day Molotov agreed to discuss issues Schulenburg had raised, including Poland. The foreign commissar stressed the Soviet view that such talks must “proceed by degrees.” When word of this was relayed to the Reich Chancellery, Hitler replied that protracted talks were out of the question. He didn’t explain his reason—that German troops would march in less than three weeks. And the triple alliance was a harrowing possibility: that same afternoon in Moscow, Anglo-French military conversations with the Russians had begun.⁹⁰

Hitler, in his summer headquarters on the Obersalzberg, made his great move on Monday, August 14. He told his court: “The great drama is now approaching its climax!” He was confident that neither Britain nor France would sacrifice a single soldier for Poland. The Quai d’Orsay was deferring to London, he said, and England “has no leaders of real caliber. The men I got to know at Munich are not the kind to start a new world war.” Still, he knew how edgy his generals were about a two-front war, and so, on his instructions, Ribbentrop sent Schulenburg a “most urgent” cable directing him to “read it to Molotov.”⁹¹

In his telegram to the Kremlin, Ribbentrop said the Reich was prepared to send him to Moscow to settle all outstanding problems “from the Baltic to the Black Sea.” At the same time, he played to Stalin’s paranoia. Britain and France, he said, were “trying to drive Russia into war with Germany”—Stalin, he knew, had used those very words in a speech to the Communist Party Congress. Tuesday evening Molotov greeted Ambassador Schulenburg warmly and asked whether the Nazis would join him in a joint “guarantee” of the Baltic states and—this was completely unexpected—a nonaggression treaty between the Soviet Union and the Reich. Hitler was ecstatic; Stalin was offering to play the role of spectator while the Wehrmacht took Poland. Wednesday Ribbentrop cabled the Führer’s reply: “Germany is prepared to conclude a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union… and to guarantee the Baltic States jointly.” His foreign minister was ready, bags packed, to travel to Moscow “by airplane,” bearing “full powers from the Führer… to sign the appropriate treaties.”⁹²

Stalin knew what he was giving Hitler. He also knew what he would get—all that Russia had lost at Versailles and more: vast tracts of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Rumania, and what Ribbentrop’s August 14 telegram had described as “Southeastern questions,” i.e., the Balkans. The Western democracies couldn’t match that. If the Russians signed the triple alliance Nazi panzers might rip through Poland and, without stopping, into the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, when Schulenburg passed along Ribbentrop’s request that he be received on Friday, August 18, the foreign commissar, after consulting with the general secretary, replied this was too soon: the meeting would require “thorough preparation.” But his manner was encouraging. He told the German envoy that he was “highly gratified” by the prospect of a visit by the foreign minister of the Reich; it stood, he said, “in marked contrast to England, which, in the person of Strang, has sent only an official of second-class rank to Moscow.” Meantime, he was directing his military negotiators to ask the Allies, in effect, what Russia would get out of an alliance with Britain and France.⁹³

The tyrant in Moscow continued to play with the tyrant in the Berghof. The Führer’s eyes were on the calender and on the clock. If the war was to start as planned, OKW orders had to be cut quickly: two huge army groups had to deploy on Poland’s waters while fleets of U-boats sailed for British waters. Stalin and Molotov, sensing the Führer’s anxiety, decided to let him hang. On the night of Friday, August 18, Schulenburg was sent another urgent cable from the Obersalzberg; he must insist that Molotov see Ribbentrop immediately, must refuse to take no for an answer, and must repeat that the German foreign minister had been authorized by the Führer “to settle fully and conclusively the total complex of problems.” Ribbentrop was, for example, prepared “to sign a special protocol regulating the interests of both parties,” including “the settlement of spheres of interest in the Baltic area.”⁹⁴

This cable arrived in the Reich’s Moscow embassy at 5:45 A.M. on Saturday, and the German ambassador made a 2:00 P.M. appointment with Molotov. But when they met, the foreign commissar refused to make a date for Ribbentrop’s trip; he repeated that “thorough preparations” would be required. Depressed, Schulenburg returned to his embassy, wondering how he could break the news to a despot who never accepted excuses and ruthlessly punished failure. So fearsome were the consequences that—blasphemous in a servant of the Führer—he prayed. And his prayers were answered. At 4:30 P.M. his telephone rang. It was Molotov, asking him to return. Emerging from the commissar’s office, the elated ambassador returned to his embassy and sent the Wilhelmstrasse a triumphant wire. “The Soviet Government agree to the Reich Foreign Minister coming to Moscow,” it began. The Soviet foreign commissar had stated that Ribbentrop “could arrive in Moscow on August 26 or 27. Molotov handed me a draft of a nonaggression pact.” Hitler was elated, but he had by now set August 26 as the date for the attack on Poland. Drastic measures were necessary. Overcoming his distaste for Bolsheviks, on the twentieth the Führer sent a personal cable to Stalin, accepting the general terms of the nonaggression treaty and urging that final negotiations take place as soon as possible.⁹⁵

Late the next night, Berlin radio interrupted a musical program for an announcement: “The Reich government and the Soviet government have agreed to conclude a pact of nonaggression with each other. The Reich Minister for Foreign Affairs will arrive in Moscow on Wednesday, August 23, for the conclusion of the negotiations.” It was nearly midnight, Monday, August 21, 1939. Europe had ten slaughterless days left.⁹⁶

This conspiracy against peace—for that is what the pact amounted to—was a cynical deal, and Russia would pay a terrible price for it. But the British and French governments had played a sorry role. Over four months had passed since Litvinov had made his proposal to them. Had the opportunity been seized—had Eden, say, arrived in the Soviet capital with plenary powers—Hitler might never have had his chance. Russia needed peace; everyone knew that; but the democracies were insensitive to it. Three years later Stalin explained to Churchill: “We formed the impression that the British and French Governments were resolved not to go to war if Poland were attacked, but that they hoped the diplomatic line-up of Britain, France, and Russia would deter Hitler. We were sure it would not.” Later Winston wrote: “Thus Hitler penetrated with ease into the frail defences of the tardy, irresolute coalition against him.”⁹⁷

Bonnet, as he later wrote in his memoirs, realized that “pour France c’était un désastre.” At a bleak convocation of the Conseil de la Défense Nationale a pall of defeatism hung heavy over the council table. Gamelin, the most spineless generalissimo, said the army would not be ready for war until 1942; the most France could do now was mobilize, bringing “some relief to Poland by tying down a certain number of large German units on our frontier.” Bonnet said flatly that they should ponder whether to ignore their treaty commitment and leave the Poles to their fate.⁹⁸

Only Daladier’s peasant strength suppressed Bonnet’s pusillanimity. France’s commitment to Poland, the premier reminded him, was a matter of honor and had been since Marshal Foch’s secret military agreement with the Poles in 1921. If either a German hobnail or a Russian boot set foot on Polish soil, France had agreed, the Army of the Third Republic was pledged to attack the aggressor. Therefore, at the premier’s insistence, the Conseil de la Défense decided that “la seule solution” in the present crisis was to adhere to “nos engagements vis-à-vis de la Pologne.” In a public statement the French government reconfirmed its alliance with Poland, with each party guaranteeing the other “immediately and directly against any menace, direct or indirect, threatening their vital interest.” The formal language of exchanges between governments could be no more precise.⁹⁹

But the triple alliance which Russia had proposed and Churchill had enthusiastically endorsed—which conceivably could have averted war, or at the very least given the Germans less than an overwhelming margin—had become another of history’s colossal Ifs. England and France were in the position of disappointed fiancées. The Soviets, in need of a spouse, had asked for their hand. They, also lacking a strong partner, had reluctantly approached the altar. There the ritualistic question had been raised: whether anyone had just cause to object to the union. And the Poles, at that crucial moment, had rudely spoken up, leaving the Russians in the embarrassing position of rejected suitors. Ribbentrop, having caught them on the rebound, rejoiced. His glee is understandable. The jubilation of Beck is harder to grasp, but he certainly felt triumphant. Ordinarily, he ran his office like a martinet, his face stiff and expressionless. But all that critical week his smile was vulpine, a smile of malice, the smile of a man who relished revenge. In the Russo-Polish War of 1920 the Bolsheviks had driven deep into Beck’s homeland, to the gates of Warsaw. Now they had thought they could do it again, but he had outwitted them. This, he told his staff, was his greatest success. If he were to be remembered, it would be for barring the Red Army from Polish soil. He had saved Poland from the Communists.

So Nazis and Communists, until now sworn enemies, had been meeting secretly, frequently, and with growing confidence while the frustrated British public watched the Moscow-London-Paris entente, imaginatively conceived, struggling vainly to avoid stillbirth. Churchill’s breathing spells from his book had been rare and brief. Any major issue brought him up to the House of Commons, however, and the prime minister created one when he decided to adjourn Parliament for two months—from August 4 to October 3. Chamberlain wrote his sister from Chequers that “all my information indicates that Hitler now realises that he can’t grab anything else without a major war and has therefore decided to put Danzig into cold storage.” If Parliament urged a show of Britain’s growing military strength, however, the Führer would feel that “he must do something to show he is not frightened. I should not be at all surprised therefore, to hear of movements of large bodies of troops near the Polish frontier…. That is part of the war of nerves and [would] no doubt send Winston into hysterics.” Provocative speeches in the House of Commons and demands for military maneuvers would, Chamberlain wrote, “play straight into Hitler’s hands and give the world [the impression] that we are in a panic.”¹⁰⁰

Churchill—anxious, not panicky—feared, as a friend put it, “that Neville, having got rid of the House, proposed to do another Munich.” Therefore, he decided to protest Chamberlain’s decision to adjourn Parliament. General Spears, who had been staying at Chartwell that last weekend in July, told Harold Nicolson: “The old boy is determined to speak with great violence and to vote against, arguing, ‘It is no good Chamberlain saying he will summon Parliament “if there is any change of situation.” He must promise to summon if any cloud rises at all.’ ” Churchill told Spears that the motion for recess was a profound mistake because it would convince Hitler that Britain would be slow to act in a crisis, and give Russia the impression that Britain was not serious about collective security. “The scattering of Parliament,” he wrote to Lord Wolmer, “is a serious snub.”¹⁰¹

Most Tory critics of appeasement agreed, but thought the issue not worth another vote against their party leader. Harold Macmillan felt that way and phoned Churchill, asking him to reconsider. Winston bluntly refused, Eden also suggested that they let Chamberlain have this one and “toe the line,” as Nicolson noted in his diary, adding: “I would do so were it not that Winston refuses, and I cannot let the old lion enter the lobby alone. But apart from this I do feel very deeply that the House ought not to adjourn for the whole of two months. I regard it as a violation of constitutional principle and an act of disrespect to the House.”¹⁰²

“This House,” Churchill opened on August 2, “is sometimes disparaged in this country, but abroad it counts.” Its debates and motions were particularly weighed by dictators “as a most formidable expression of the British national will and an instrument of that will in resistance to aggression.” Winston had “the feeling that things are in a great balance.” Certainly it was an “odd moment” for a parliamentary vacation “when the powers of evil are at their strongest.” Berlin said the Reich had two million men under arms—the real figure was at least triple that—and another half million would be added this month.¹⁰³

He had learned that public schools in large parts of Czechoslovakia, especially Bohemia, were being cleared and prepared for accommodation of wounded Germans. There was “a definite movement of supplies and troops through Austria towards the east” and a “strained situation in the Tyrol.” The elements of crisis were there, and “all these are terribly formidable signs.” Thus, he said, “At this moment in its long history it would be disastrous, it would be pathetic, it would be shameful for the House of Commons to write itself off as an effective and potent factor… against aggression.” Then he delivered his heaviest blow:

It is a very hard thing, and I hope it will not be said, for the Government to say to the House, “Begone! Run off and play. Take your masks with you. Do not worry about public affairs. Leave them to the gifted and experienced Ministers” who, after all, so far as our defences are concerned, landed us where we were landed in December of last year, and who, after all—I make all allowances for the many difficulties—have brought us in foreign policy at this moment to the point where we have guaranteed Poland and Rumania, after having lost Czechoslovakia, and not having gained Russia.¹⁰⁴

Amery and Macmillan joined in arguing against such a long adjournment, but Chamberlain was unmoved. Nicolson noted in his diary: “To the astonishment of the House the Prime Minister gets up and after saying that he will not give way an inch, he adds that… he wished it to be clearly understood that he regarded the vote as a vote of confidence in himself…. The general impression is that Chamberlain has in fact missed an opportunity and outraged the feelings of the House.” Party strength prevailed, although forty Conservatives abstained; on that sour note the House dispersed for the summer.¹⁰⁵

The following Tuesday Winston delivered a broadcast to the United States. Once more he was looking westward, convinced that the hope of England’s security and, if it came to that, her deliverance lay across the Atlantic, in the vast untapped power of the United States. The fact that his mother had been American in no way diminished his loyalty to the Crown—he had been called “fifty percent American and one hundred percent British”—but he believed in bloodlines, was proud to have cousins across the sea, and admired the United States as Baldwin and Chamberlain did not. Furthermore, Franklin Roosevelt was president. Churchill would have regarded most occupants of the White House as lesser men than himself, but Roosevelt was not among them. Like Churchill, he was a great statesman. The two men were very different in other ways, but both possessed intellect, vision, courage, and the conviction that if civilization was to survive, Adolf Hitler must be destroyed. Roosevelt’s handicap was that his people were overwhelmingly isolationist. Refugees from Europe, or descended from refugees, they wanted no part of “Europe’s wars.” Roosevelt and Churchill saw that the German demagogue was the enemy of freedom for all men. In his broadcast Churchill tried to plant the seed of that thought in the minds of his U.S. listeners, there to be nourished by Roosevelt.

His opening chord was unfortunate. In his hands the rapier of wit or the broadsword of ridicule was deadly, but on this occasion he was awkward, even embarrassing, with the hacksaw of sarcasm. He began heavily: “Holiday time, ladies and gentlemen! Holiday time, my friends across the Atlantic! Holiday time, when the summer calls the toilers of all countries for an all too brief spell from the offices and mills and stiff routine…” This went on. And on. He rumbled: “Let me look back—let me see. How did we spend our summer holidays twenty-five years ago?” Millions of listeners were too young to remember, and the rest had no recollection, as he had, of Germans “breaking into Belgium and trampling down its people.” He had forgotten that the United States hadn’t declared war on Germany until three years later, and that another year passed before U.S. doughboys, most of whom had never heard of Belgium, filed into the trenches.¹⁰⁶

In the same vein of ponderous japery, he said that to believe Dr. Goebbels, “you would suppose that it was… this wicked Belgium,” with “England and the Jews,” who attacked Germany, which in its righteous might fought manfully for four years and was about to win an overwhelming victory when “the Jews got at them again, this time from the rear. Armed with President Wilson’s Fourteen Points they stabbed, we are told, the German armies in the back.”

Dropping his caustic tone, Churchill became Churchillian once more, rousing and persuasive. Now, he said somberly, “There is a hush all over Europe, nay, over all the world.” What kind of hush? “Alas, it is the hush of suspense, and in many lands it is the hush of fear.” But, he said, almost whispering, if you listened carefully you could hear “the tramp of armies crunching the gravel of the parade grounds, splashing through rain-soaked fields, the tramp of two million Germans and over a million Italians.” He recited their conquests—Austria, Czechoslovakia, Abyssinia, Albania—noting that the Duce and the Führer called them “liberations,” and commented: “No wonder there is such a hush among the neighbors of Germany and Italy while they are wondering which one is going to be ‘liberated’ next.”

Once more he appealed for collective security, once again he disposed of the Nazi charge of “encirclement.” Then he drew a striking parallel between the American and British constitutions. “It is curious,” he observed, “how the English-speaking peoples have always had [a] fear of one-man power,” or “handing themselves over, lock, stock and barrel, body and soul, to one man, and worshipping him as if he were an idol.” Tradition in the Reich was different: “In Germany, on a mountain peak, there sits one man who in a single day… can plunge all that we have and are into a volcano of smoke and flames.” If that man “does not make war there will be no war. No one else is going to make war…. No one has ever dreamed of attacking Germany.”

Approaching the end he said: “It is not, believe me, my American friends, from any ignoble shrinking from pain and death that the British and French peoples pray for peace.” He was wallowing again; everyone shrinks from pain, and there is nothing ignoble about it. Yet, as always, he came on strong at the end:

But whether it be peace or war—peace with its broadening and brightening prosperity, now within our reach, or war with its measureless carnage and destruction—we must strive to frame some system of human relations in the future which will put an end to this prolonged hideous uncertainty, which will let the working and creative forces of the world get on with their job, and which will no longer leave the whole life of mankind dependent upon the virtues, the caprice, or the wickedness of a single man.¹⁰⁷