Lindbergh and Kennedy encourage the appeasers,
Chamberlain strikes a deal with Hitler at Munich,
and Roosevelt sets a trap for Lindbergh.
THROUGH LATE SPRING and into the summer of 1938, the unresolved Sudeten question dominated European politics. When in May Edvard Beneš,1 the Czech prime minister, ordered 400,000 troops to the German border, the French, who had guaranteed Czech independence, were joined by the British in warning Hitler to back off.
On paper, the anti-Hitler countries appeared strong. Britain and France had a mutual-defense alliance and Russia was also committed to defending Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain’s warning to Hitler, however, was tepid. The British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, wrote in gentle terms to the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was formerly German ambassador in London, that “His Majesty’s Government could not guarantee that they would not be forced by events to become themselves involved.”
Roosevelt was being urged by his ambassador in Berlin, William Bullitt,2 to convene a conference of European leaders to find a settlement to the Sudeten question, but the president declined. He feared he had little to gain and that the summit would merely confirm that, so long as American opinion remained staunchly against war, he was powerless to act.
It was against such a tense background that Roosevelt made a second attempt to silence the world’s most famous aviator. In June 1938, Lindbergh received a message from the airline entrepreneur Juan Trippe3 in New York asking whether he would become chairman of the newly formed Civil Aviation Commission for a six-year term. Lindbergh was fearful of returning home. He was sure he would be hounded by the press and was wary of the motive behind the invitation. “I told him I did not think it advisable to move my family back to America under present circumstances,” he confided to his diary. “Trippe said the request came from headquarters, which means Roosevelt. I wonder what is behind it. Political gesture? Outside pressure?”4
Lindbergh had other plans. Although he was convinced that France would prove incapable of resisting a German invasion, his guru Carrel encouraged him to buy a ramshackle house on Île Illiec, an isolated islet off the Brittany coast, only connected to the mainland at low tide. From his island fastness he planned trips to Germany and Russia. “I do not want war to start without having a fairly good idea of its causes and probably consequences,” he wrote. “I plan on seeing as much of the European situation as possible in the next few months.”5
One of his first ports of call was Bullitt, whom he had met at an Astor lunch. “There are not enough modern military planes in this country to even put up a show in case of war,” Lindbergh told him. “In a conflict between France, England, and Russia on one side, against Germany on the other, Germany would immediately have supremacy of the air. . . . Germany has developed a huge Air Force while England has slept and France has deluded herself with a Russian alliance. It seems that the French Air Corps is infiltrated with Communism. Especially among the higher officers.”6
On July 20, Kennedy became involved in the ongoing negotiations between Hitler and Chamberlain over the Sudetenland. The new German ambassador to Britain, Herbert von Dirksen,7 had urged him to intercede with the British. Reporting to Hull, the ambassador said Dirksen had told him “it was now time for Britain to make a proposition to the Germans. . . . Definitely he gave me the impression that Hitler was decidedly in the mood to start negotiations.”8
By the end of August, however, Chamberlain had become convinced that appeasement was failing and that Hitler was intent on taking the whole of Czechoslovakia. “It is the belief of Hitler that the French are not ready to fight and that Great Britain does not want to go in,” Kennedy wrote to Hull. He described Chamberlain as “the best bet in Europe against war, but he is a very sick-looking man.”9 Lindbergh, too, was aware that Europe was careening toward disaster. “Rumors of Germany starting war on August 15,” he wrote in his diary.10
On August 18, Roosevelt embarked on a second attempt to educate the American people about the dictators. At Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, he continued where his “quarantine speech” the previous October had left off. “We in the Americas are no longer a far away continent, to which the eddies of controversies beyond the seas could bring no interest or no harm. . . . The vast amount of our resources, the vigor of our commerce and the strength of our men have made us vital factors in world peace whether we choose it or not. . . . I give to you assurance that the people of the United States will not stand idly by if domination of Canadian soil is threatened by any other empire.”11
The implication of Roosevelt’s pledge to defend Canada was plain. As a member of the British Empire and an intimate ally of Britain, Canada could be expected to declare war following any decision by Chamberlain to go to war with Hitler. Roosevelt’s speech suggested that America would stand by Britain in the event of war. He also implied that any threat to trade with North America, currently protected by the Atlantic patrols of Britain’s Royal Navy, would be tantamount to waging war on the United States. Roosevelt urged Kennedy to make it plain that he robustly opposed Hitler’s demands in the Sudetenland and elsewhere.12 Yet on August 30 the ambassador reassured Chamberlain and Halifax that the president had decided to “go in with” attempts at appeasing Hitler.13
The president “became increasingly irritated with Kennedy,” recalled Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau. “ ‘Who would have thought the English (the Cliveden Set) could take into camp a redheaded Irishman?’ ” the president joked. “ ‘The young man needs his wrist slapped.’ . . . As for Chamberlain, the President called him ‘slippery’ and added, with some bitterness, that he was ‘interested in peace at any price if he could get away with it and save his face.’ ”14 Uppermost in Roosevelt’s mind was the desire to avoid the errors Wilson had made ahead of World War One. He told his most loyal aide, secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, that if Woodrow Wilson had expressed himself more vigorously before the European nations mobilized, war might have been averted.
The president was particularly aggravated when he read the draft of a speech Kennedy was to give in Aberdeen, Scotland, that included the line, “I cannot for the life of me understand why anybody would want to go to war to save the Czechs.” Hull struck out the line, but Kennedy nonetheless briefed a reporter from Hearst’s Boston Evening American that “things aren’t as bad as they seem” and that “the thing to do here and in the United States is not to lose our heads.”15 On reading the report of the interview on August 31, Roosevelt cabled Kennedy saying he was “deeply disturbed” by the ambassador’s words and ordered him to stop his maverick remarks. The same day, the president began plotting to circumvent US neutrality laws by arranging with Morgenthau for the delivery of gold from London and Paris against the day the British and French needed to buy American weapons.
Chamberlain’s government was beginning to fray. With Eden already on the backbenches, and with Churchill ready to pounce if the prime minister made a misstep, Halifax too began to think it was time to draw a line that Hitler should not cross. Duff Cooper,16 First Lord of the Admiralty, was even more hawkish and favored halting Hitler by any means, even war. But how would the Americans react to a firmer British line?
Halifax asked Kennedy on September 1 whether he thought Congress would amend the neutrality laws if Britain were to go to war with Germany. Kennedy said it was unlikely and told him appeasement should be given more time. The ambassador reported the conversation to Hull, who relayed it to Roosevelt, who thought Halifax was trying to paint America into a corner. If Kennedy had replied that Congress would act and the British went to war over the Sudetenland, it would seem that America had encouraged them; if Chamberlain offered concessions to avoid war, the British would argue they did so because America would not support them.
To Roosevelt’s alarm, the Halifax–Kennedy meeting was leaked to the British press, who leapt on the news that the ambassador had implied that America would not come to Britain’s aid. Kennedy’s response was to remain silent, which angered Roosevelt, who felt that by failing to deny the reports, he had compromised the administration’s studiedly ambivalent position. Roosevelt’s ambiguous attitude toward German aggression, designed to leave him every option after the 1940 election should he run for a third term, had been put at risk by Kennedy “playing the Chamberlain game.”17
The Times editor and Cliveden regular Geoffrey Dawson floated the notion of surrendering to German demands over the Sudetenland in an editorial in The Times on September 7. “If the Sudetens now ask for more than the Czech Government are ready to give,” he wrote, “it might be worth the Czechoslovak Government to consider . . . making Czechoslovakia a more homogeneous state by the cession of that fringe of alien populations who are contiguous to the nation to which they are united by race.”
Anxious that Hitler was about to invade the Sudetenland, the French foreign minister, Georges Bonnet,18 inquired what the British government would do if the French went to war to protect the Czechs. Halifax responded with typical pusillanimity, “While His Majesty’s Government would never allow the security of France to be threatened, they are unable to make precise statements of the character of their future action, or the time at which it would be taken, in circumstances they cannot at present foresee.”19
By chance, Lindbergh was visiting Czechoslovakia on his way back from a tour of aviation plants in the Soviet Union and he met with Beneš on September 3. Though they spoke about “modern aircraft . . . the war in Spain, of the Russian air fleet, of Czechoslovakian aviation,” Lindbergh failed to raise the subject of German demands that the country be dismembered. He merely noted that it was “obvious that [Beneš] had been, and was, under tension.” He inspected Czech air forces and concluded that the country “is not well equipped in the air.”20
Lindbergh even visited the Sudetenland, where he had lunch with “Prince and Princess Clary Aldringen [sic],”21 Austro-Hungarian aristocrats stripped of their titles after 1918, who were sympathetic to Germany. They feared they were “sitting on a bomb” and worried that there were “many Communists in the territory, all armed, and that there ‘wouldn’t be enough lampposts to hang them by if the trouble started.’ ”22 Returning to France, Lindbergh continued his chorus of alarm by telling the French air minister, Guy La Chambre, that France’s air defenses were “desperate” and that if France tried to resist Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia it would be “suicide.”23
As the slow march of diplomacy proceeded toward war, all Europe was on edge to hear Hitler at the finale of the Nazis’ annual rally in the Nuremberg Stadium on September 12. Hitler’s speech, preceded by chants of “Sieg Heil!” (“Welcome, victory!”), was a savage, sarcastic assault upon Beneš. The dictator’s threats convinced Roosevelt that war was both unavoidable and imminent. He summoned the British ambassador, Sir Ronald Lindsay, who cabled Chamberlain that the president would be profoundly disappointed if he did not stand firm.
As London prepared for war, with trenches and air raid shelters being dug in St James’s Park and gas masks being issued to all residents, Chamberlain took the initiative. Without consulting his cabinet or the French, on September 15 the prime minister flew to Munich. It was the sixty-nine-year-old Chamberlain’s first airplane flight and the first instance of what would come to be known as shuttle diplomacy. In a last-minute effort to boost Chamberlain’s confidence and instill some resolve in the prime minister, Roosevelt sent him a two-word telegram: “Good man.”24 After a grueling seven-hour train journey, he arrived at the Führer’s mountain eyrie, the Berghof at Berchtesgaden.
Exhausted by the journey, Chamberlain was shocked by his encounter with Hitler. As Duff Cooper observed, “Chamberlain had never met anybody in Birmingham who in the least resembled Adolf Hitler.”25 Hitler’s crazed demeanor and intemperate language shocked the timorous prime minister. “I am prepared to risk a world war rather than allow this [Sudeten business] to drag on,” Hitler said. Chamberlain retorted, “If the Führer is determined to settle this matter by force without waiting even for a discussion between ourselves to take place, what did he let me come here for? I have wasted my time.” Hitler replied, “If the British Government were prepared to accept the idea of secession in principle, and to say so, there might be a chance then to have a talk.”
Despite Hitler’s hectoring and mood swings, Chamberlain “got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.”26 Without reference to Beneš, the rest of the Czech government, or the French, Chamberlain agreed to cede the Sudetenland to Hitler.27 Neglected by its closest ally, the French had little option but to follow suit. Although Britain had been rearming for two years, Chamberlain felt the country was not strong enough to save landlocked Czechoslovakia from invasion. He even had little confidence that Britain itself could be defended. Hore-Belisha told the Chiefs of Staff that “to take offensive against Germany now would be like ‘a man attacking a tiger before he has loaded his gun.’ ”28
Returning to London, Chamberlain told his colleagues that the Sudetenland had to be sacrificed to prevent a world conflict. He reminded them “of the horrors of war, of German bombers over London, and of his horror in allowing our people to suffer all the miseries of war.”29 On September 18, the French premier, Édouard Daladier,30 and colleagues arrived in London to discuss the crisis and reluctantly confirmed that Chamberlain’s decision to hand the Sudetenland to Hitler was the right course. Churchill was dismayed. He felt that “the British and French Cabinets at this time presented a front of two over-ripe melons crushed together; whereas what was needed was a gleam of steel.” As for the Czechs, he thought “The Babes in the Wood had no worse treatment.”31
The next day, informed of Britain’s decision, Roosevelt again summoned Lindsay to the White House, telling him that if the isolationists heard what he was about to say he would be impeached. He described the breaking of the Anglo-French promise to protect Czechoslovakia as “the most terrible, remorseless sacrifice” and added he would be “the first to cheer” if partitioning Czechoslovakia proved to be Hitler’s last demand, but he doubted that would be the case. He believed Beneš would reject the deal, in which case the British and French should mobilize their forces, declare a total economic embargo against Germany, and be prepared to fight a defensive war.32 Lindsay twice sent an urgent message to London relaying Roosevelt’s robust approach. Twice he received no reply.
The president still believed that isolationist sentiment was too strong for him to join the British and French in a war against Hitler, but he thought that if Germany invaded an independent nation he could perhaps persuade the American people to support economic sanctions and to let him sell arms at a discount to the British and French.
Kennedy’s response to the betrayal of the Czechs was flippant. On encountering the Czech minister Jan Masaryk in the immediate aftermath of the Munich deal, he joked, “Isn’t it wonderful. Now I can get to Palm Beach after all.”33 Kennedy knew he needed to propose some startling new approach to the Czech problem if he was to add anything to his dispatches to Washington, so he sent an urgent telegram to Lindbergh in Brittany asking him to come immediately. On September 21, the Lindberghs flew to London for lunch at the embassy and the conversation turned to the comparative strength of Europe’s air forces.
As Rose recalled, “The Colonel gave us a rude awakening by declaring from his observations that Germany could turn out dozens of planes to England’s one.”34 He went on to paint a chilling vision of the impending European war that, he predicted, would be even more devastating than the trench-bound carnage of World War One. With its fleets of bomber planes, “Germany now has the means of destroying London, Paris and Prague if she wishes,” Lindbergh told Kennedy, who relayed the grim message to Hull. “For the first time in history a nation has the power either to save or to ruin the great cities of Europe,” Kennedy wrote. “England and France are far too weak in the air to protect themselves.”35 Kennedy asked Lindbergh to write his opinion in a memorandum for Hull.
While in London, Lindbergh called Nancy Astor and was promptly invited to Cliveden. There, to anyone who would listen, the flier denigrated the British at every turn with remarks like, “The best Englishmen have gone either to the empire or to the sea,” “The English are in no shape for war,” “This is the beginning of the end of England as a great power. She may be a ‘hornet’s nest’ but she is no longer a ‘lion’s den’.”36 It was a persistently defeatist view that he dared not express outside the company of appeasers.
Lindbergh was more open about his pro-German sentiments. Typical was his thought that Hitler could “bluff about as he wishes without danger. He probably enjoys having the fate of the world in his hands, especially after the way the world treated Germany after the war. I cannot blame him too much for making France and England worry a bit. . . . Hitler is a mystic and a fanatic, but his actions and results in the past do not lead me to believe he is insane.”37
Four days later, as Chamberlain wrestled with the Czech crisis in back-to-back meetings of the cabinet, Lindbergh made his way to Hammersmith in West London to attend a British Union of Fascists rally addressed by its leader, Sir Oswald Mosley.38 He passed through a Communist demonstration to get to the hall and, while he found Mosley’s sub-Hitler address “not too intelligent,” he thought it “of a much higher quality than that of the Communists. It always seems that the Fascist group is better than the Communist group.”39
Lindbergh’s somber assessment of the relative air strengths in Europe that Kennedy passed to Hull was in line with what the State Department already believed, which is hardly surprising as their view depended on information that largely originated from Lindbergh. Roosevelt’s special secret emissary Baruch, however, confirmed much of Lindbergh’s pessimistic diagnosis, reporting that Germany had spent 105 billion marks ($700 million in 2014 terms) on arms the previous year.
The truth, however, was very different. Lindbergh reported to Hull that Germany’s air force outnumbered the British by five to one and the Americans by eleven to one, and told Bullitt and the French air minister, Guy La Chambre, that Germany was producing 40,000 warplanes a year. In fact, Germany manufactured just 8,000 warplanes in 1938 and 1939 while Britain turned out 11,000.40 By using Lindbergh as his willing conduit, Göring misled the Americans, the British, and the French into believing that they were outgunned and that resistance to Hitler was futile.
Lindbergh emerged as an unwitting agent in a propaganda coup for the Nazis, who in 1938 won the air war over Europe without a shot being fired. Churchill was one of the few to suspect what had occurred. In a statement issued on September 21, he declared, “The partition of Czechoslovakia under pressure from England and France amounts to the complete surrender of the Western Democracies to the Nazi threat of force. Such a collapse will bring peace and security neither to England nor to France. On the contrary, it will place these two nations in an ever weaker and more dangerous situation.”41
Kennedy was active in shoring up appeasement in its dying moments. To minimize the growing alarm about war among the British, at the request of the Foreign Office he reached out to his old contacts at Paramount to censor a newsreel interview with A. J. Cummings, a well regarded political commentator for the liberal News Chronicle, who had declared, “Our statesmen have been guilty of what I think is a piece of yellow diplomacy.”42 The Paramount people complied and the remark was removed. When Kennedy’s role in censoring the newsreel came to light weeks later, he became a target of abuse for those in Britain who advocated standing up to Hitler.
Aware that America remained impotent so long as isolationist feelings remained strong in Congress and the nation, Roosevelt declined a direct appeal by Beneš for him to openly demand that Britain and France stand by their commitment to protect his country. The president also turned down Kennedy’s request that Chamberlain be allowed to broadcast to the American people. If he was to defeat isolationism, the last thing Roosevelt needed was for the British prime minister to go on the radio to make the case for appeasement.
On September 22, Chamberlain flew to Bad Godesberg on the Rhine to meet again with Hitler, expecting to discuss the timetable for the ordered German annexation of the Sudetenland. Instead, Hitler said, “I’m exceedingly sorry, but after the events of the last few days [the deaths of protesting Sudeten Germans by Czech police], this solution is no longer any use.”43 If the Allies did not agree to his plan to occupy the Sudetenland by September 28, the whole of Czechoslovakia would immediately be invaded by German troops. The following day, as a concession, Hitler agreed to move the deadline to October 1.
Chamberlain returned to London exhausted, bewildered, and downhearted. Daladier informed him that in the new circumstances, the French were now prepared to fight. Chamberlain had little option but to acquiesce. On September 23, poised for an imminent German invasion, Czechoslovakia mobilized its troops. On the weekend of September 24 and 25, the British Cabinet went into prolonged session and a clear rift opened between the appeasers, led by Chamberlain, and those, like Halifax and Cooper, who were appalled at Hitler “dictating terms . . . as though he had won a war.”44
Daladier and his supreme army commander, General Maurice Gustave Gamelin,45 flew to London on the morning of September 26 to discuss the next steps. Although the difference between what the British and French had agreed to and what Hitler was now demanding was only a matter of timing, it was belatedly decided to take a stand. Unless Hitler agreed to the Berchtesgaden terms, agreeing to take the Sudetenland but to demand nothing more, Britain and France would go to war. A joint emissary, Sir Horace Wilson,46 was commissioned to fly to Berlin to deliver the ultimatum in person to Hitler. Hearing of the Anglo-French verdict, Roosevelt appealed for calm and, through diplomatic channels, urged Mussolini to summon a four-power conference.
The same day Horace Wilson flew to Berlin, Chamberlain addressed the British people on the radio before delivering the Anglo-French verdict to the Commons. In words that would sound through history, Chamberlain’s broadcast shamelessly played down the importance of the integrity of Czechoslovakia. “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing,” he said. “It seems still more impossible that a quarrel which has already been settled in principle should be the subject of war.”
“However much we may sympathize with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbor, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in war simply on her account,” he said. “If we have to fight it must be on larger issues than that.” Hitler had told him that once the Sudetenland had been ceded to Germany, “that is the end of Germany’s territorial claims in Europe.”47
Hitler, however, was in no mood to compromise. In the Reich Chancellery, as Wilson arrived to present the Anglo-French terms, the Führer flew into a rage, screaming at the British envoy that “the Germans were being treated like niggers; one would not dare treat even the Turks like that,” promising “to smash the Czechs,”48 and predicting that the world would be at war within a week.
Later that day, in a bombastic broadcast from the Berlin Sportpalast, Hitler delivered another bloodcurdling performance, making clear that he was in no mood to abandon his demands. “[Beneš] will either accept this offer and now at last give the Germans their freedom, or we will go and fetch this freedom for ourselves,” he said.49 The American broadcaster William Shirer,50 sitting in the balcony directly above Hitler, recorded in his diary, “For the first time in all the years I’ve observed him, [Hitler] seemed tonight to have completely lost control of himself.”51
Roosevelt listened to the ranting on the radio in his White House study. “Did you hear Hitler today, his shrieks, his histrionics, and the effect on the huge audience?” the president asked his young distant cousin Margaret Suckley.52 “They did not applaud, they made noises like animals.”53 Lindbergh listened to the address at Cliveden and concluded, perversely, that Hitler “seemed to leave considerable hope that war may be avoided.”54
Also listening to Hitler’s tirade was Kennedy, who took a different view to his friend Lindbergh. The ambassador was now convinced that Britain was on the brink of war and he began thinking about evacuating his family from London. “I’m feeling very blue myself today,” he wrote Krock, “because I am starting to think about sending Rose and the children back to America and stay here alone for how long God only knows. Maybe never see them again.”55 A declaration of war by Chamberlain was not in his presidential game plan.
On September 28, “Black Wednesday,” the British Parliament met to consider the unfolding crisis. After Chamberlain described the chronology of events that had led Europe to the brink of war, the packed Commons watched as a note was hurriedly delivered into the prime minister’s hand. A pregnant silence fell over the chamber as Chamberlain took a full five minutes to read the message.
According to Nicolson, Chamberlain’s “whole face, his whole body, seemed to change. He raised his face so that the light from the ceiling fell full upon it. All the lines of anxiety and weariness seemed suddenly to have been smoothed out; he appeared ten years younger and triumphant.”56 Chamberlain looked around the House. “Herr Hitler has just agreed to postpone his mobilization for twenty-four hours and to meet me in conference with Signor Mussolini and Monsieur Daladier at Munich,” he said. “I need not say what my answer will be. I will go to see what I can do as a last resort.”57
At the urging of both Chamberlain and Roosevelt, Mussolini had telephoned Hitler proposing an eleventh-hour four-power summit between Germany, Italy, Britain, and France, to which Hitler, anxious that he might lose Italian support, reluctantly agreed.58 At a tense and strange meeting the following day in the Führerhaus on the Königsplatz, the ceding of the Sudetenland to Germany was confirmed, with German troops allowed to march in just two days later, on October 1.
The two Czech government officials who were invited to witness their allies debating their country’s fate were obliged to wait in a nearby room before being informed of the decision. Daladier poured himself a drink and Chamberlain could not stifle a yawn as a French official read out the terms of the agreement to the Czech pair, who wept as they heard the extent of the betrayal. “They don’t know what they are doing to us or to themselves,” said one to the other.59 The deal, forged at gunpoint, still left 250,000 German speakers living in the remainder of Czechoslovakia, while 800,000 Czechs would wake up to find themselves German citizens living in German Sudetenland.
In a much hyped return to Britain, Chamberlain was greeted by ecstatic crowds and every member of his cabinet on the runway of Heston airfield. He waved the Munich agreement above his head. “This morning I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler, and here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine,” he said. The agreement solemnly declared, “We regard the agreement signed last night . . . as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.”
Speaking from a window of 10 Downing Street later that evening, Chamberlain said the words for which he is still best remembered, the final self-deluding act of appeasement and the end of peace in Europe: “I believe it is peace for our time.”60 Daladier, who had a keener grasp of reality than his British counterpart, was also greeted by crowds cheering with relief when he landed at Le Bourget. “The bloody fools,” he muttered.61