The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (4 page)

In the last few years there has erupted an unsightly rash of
revisionist accounts, suggesting that Britain should indeed have done what so many people—in all walks of society—were hoping and praying for: struck a bargain with Nazi Germany. The argument goes that the British Empire and the Nazi Reich were capable of peaceful coexistence—and there is no doubt that Hitler had said plenty of things to encourage that idea.

In the 1930s he had sent Ribbentrop over to schmooze the Establishment, and with considerable success. In 1938 Halifax was allegedly so incautious as to declare to Hitler’s adjutant that he would ‘
like to see as the culmination of my work the Führer entering London at the side of the English king amid the acclamation of the English people’.

As we have seen, there were members of the upper and middle classes who had exhibited an unfortunate feeling for Hitlerism—including the former monarch, Edward VIII. And even now, in these evil days of 1940, Hitler would sometimes proclaim his admiration for the British Empire, and his view that it was not in Germany’s interest to crush Britain—since that would only benefit rival powers, such as America, Japan and Russia.

We English were also members of the Aryan race, we gathered—though perhaps not as genetically special as the Teutonic variant. Britain and her empire could survive as a sort of junior partner—full of historical interest but fundamentally effete: the Greeks to the Nazi Rome.

Many thought that indignity a price worth paying for the preservation of the empire, and to avert slaughter. It was not just that people wanted a deal with Hitler: many thought it was inevitable.

The French did: Admiral Darlan of the French fleet was convinced that Britain would lose, and in 1940 he prepared to join forces with Germany.

So did many Americans: the ambassador of the day was the
egregious Irish-American Joe Kennedy: bootlegger, crook and father of JFK. He was endlessly requesting meetings with Hitler and sending lip-smackingly gloomy messages to Washington. ‘
Democracy is finished in England,’ he proclaimed towards the end of 1940, shortly before he was recalled.

He was wrong, of course, just as Halifax was wrong, and the appeasers were wrong, and all the revisionists are wrong today. But to do battle with their nonsense, we have to try to understand what might have happened if their wishes had come true.

I am always nervous of ‘counterfactual’ history, since it strikes me that the so-called chain of causation is never really clear. Events aren’t like billiard balls, with one obviously propelling the next—and even billiards can be deceptive.

Take out one spillikin from the heap of factors, and you can never tell how the rest will fall. But of all the ‘what ifs’ of history, this is about the most popular. Some of our best modern historians have conducted this thought experiment—and they overwhelmingly reach the same conclusion: that if you end British resistance in 1940, you create the conditions for an irredeemable disaster in Europe.

Hitler would almost certainly have won. That is, he would have been able to launch Operation Barbarossa—the attack on Russia—much earlier than June 1941. He would not have had those pesky Brits causing trouble for him in the Mediterranean and in the North African desert, and tying up men and weapons.

He would have been able to direct his full fury at Russia—as he had always intended when, fingers crossed behind his back, he agreed to the Nazi–Soviet pact—and he would almost certainly have pulled it off, before the campaign was reduced to a frozen hell. As it was, the achievements of the Wehrmacht were astonishing: they captured millions of square miles and millions of men. They captured Stalingrad and reached the outer stations of the Moscow metro.
Imagine if they had captured Moscow, decapitated the communist regime, and sent Stalin into a funk from which he did not recover (he had already had a nervous collapse when the German tanks rolled across his frontier).

Historians have envisaged the swift implosion of the communist tyranny—assisted, perhaps, by middle-class victims of collectivisation—and the installation of some pro-Nazi puppet regime. And then what?

Hitler and Himmler and the rest of the satanic crew would have been able to use this vast canvas—from the Atlantic to the Urals—to paint their hideous fantasies of government. With Britain out, there was no one to stop them, no one to interrupt them, no one with even the moral standing to denounce them.

In America, the isolationists would have won: if Britain wasn’t going to risk the lives of its people, why should they? In Berlin, Albert Speer would have got on with his deranged plans for a new world capital, to be called Germania.

At its heart was to be the Hall of the People—a demented granite version of the Pantheon of Agrippa; a building so vast that you could fit the dome of London’s St Paul’s through the oculus—the circular hole at the top of the dome. It was intended to seat 100,000 people, and the chanting and the shouting were expected to be so prodigious that they were planning for rainfall in the building itself, as the warm exhalations rose, condensed, and precipitated on the heads of the fervent crowds of fascists.

This
nightmarish structure was surmounted by a mammoth eagle, so that the whole thing looked a bit like some cosmic Prussian helmet 290 metres high—almost as tall as the Shard skyscraper in Southwark; and around it radiated other vast symbols of dominance: an arch twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe; colossal railway stations from which double-decker trains would zoom at 190 kmh, conveying
German settlers to the Caspian and the Urals and the other tracts of eastern Europe from which the Slavic
Untermenschen
had been expelled.

The whole European landmass, with the exception of Switzerland (though there was a secret plan to invade that, too), was to consist either of the Reich or of client fascist states. As many counterfactual novelists have spotted, there were all sorts of plans to convert the territory into a sinister edition of the European Union.

In 1942, the Reich economics minister and president of the Reichsbank, Dr Walter Funk, wrote a paper calling for a Europäische Wirtschaftsgesellschaft—a European Common Market. He proposed a single currency, a central bank, a common agricultural policy, and other familiar ideas. Ribbentrop proposed a similar-sounding scheme, though, to be fair, Hitler opposed this on the ground that it wasn’t sufficiently beastly to the rest of the Nazi European Union.

In this Gestapo-controlled Nazi EU, the authorities would have been free to pursue their hateful racist ideology. The Nazis had begun their persecutions in the 1930s, and long before Churchill came to power—before the decision to fight on—they were moving populations of Jews and Poles.

They were creating ghettos near railway hubs as a prelude to ‘deportation’—and as Eichmann later admitted at his trial,
deportation meant liquidation. Unchecked and for the main part uncriticised, the Nazis would have got on with the job of massacring those of whom they disapproved—Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally unsound and the disabled.

They would have let their imaginations roam as they performed their experiments on human flesh: horrible, detached, inhuman and arrogant beyond belief. When Winston Churchill spoke later that summer of 1940 about Europe sinking into ‘
the abyss of a new Dark
Age, made more sinister and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science’, he was exactly right.

That is the most likely alternative world, then; but even if Hitler had not succeeded in Russia—even if Stalin had beaten back his assault—would life have been much better?

We would have been looking at a division of Europe between two forms of totalitarianism: on one side a world terrorised by the KGB or the Stasi; on the other side the subjects of the Gestapo—everywhere a population that lived in fear of the knock in the night, arbitrary arrest, the camps, and no way to protest.

Of the roughly two hundred countries in the world today, about 120 can claim to be democracies of some kind or other—to uphold the right of voters to determine their own fate. Most of the world pays at least lip-service to the idea that democracy is, as Churchill once put it,
the worst system of government in the world, except for all the others. But if Hitler and Stalin had prevailed—or if one or the other had prevailed—does anyone seriously believe that democracy would be on her throne today?

With their superstitious habit of imputing justice and rightness to the course of history, human beings would have absorbed a dismal lesson: that the gods had smiled on the tyrannies, and that tyranny was therefore what our incompetent species required.

We in Britain would have acquiesced in this moral bankruptcy—and it is all too easy to imagine how Halifax (or Lloyd George, or whoever) could have persuaded the electorate that this was the peace they were yearning for—and yet there, surely, they would have been kidding themselves.

Do you think that by this cowardice Britain could have bought peace from the Nazis? As Churchill pointed out to the War Cabinet, any deal struck with Hitler must mean disarmament of the fleet, and
a fatal weakening of Britain’s long-term ability to defend herself or to fight back.

And the crucial point was surely this: that there was no deal with Hitler that could conceivably be relied upon. Churchill had been proved crushingly right in his warnings about Nazism—made since the early 1930s, when he had been out to Germany to see the parades of gleaming-eyed youths. In countless newspaper articles and speeches he had identified a spiritual evil that so many others chose not to see: the fundamental revanchism and aggression of the Nazi regime. Now he had been massively vindicated, about the Rhineland, and about Czechoslovakia, about Poland and about the desperate need for Britain to rearm.

Many counterfactual historians have pointed out that the Nazis were a long way ahead of their rivals in developing some of the most lethal weapons of the twentieth century: they had the first jet fighters; they had the first rocket-propelled missiles. Imagine if those German scientists had been so desperate to defeat the Soviets that they had been the first to produce an atomic weapon.

Think of that fate for Britain, all you who are tempted by the revisionist argument, you who secretly wonder whether the country might have done better to do a deal. Britain would have been alone, facing a hostile continent united under a bestial totalitarianism, and with nuclear-armed rockets bristling on the V2 launching pads at Peenemünde. It would have been a new slavery, or worse.

Hitler didn’t tell Guderian to stop his tanks on the Aa canal because he was some closet Anglophile. He didn’t stay his hand because of some fellow-feeling for those of the Aryan race. Most serious historians agree with Guderian: that the Führer simply made a mistake—that he was himself taken aback by the speed of his conquest, and feared a counter-attack.

The truth is that he saw Britain not as a potential partner, but as the enemy, and though he sometimes burbled approvingly of the British Empire, he also called for the complete annihilation of British forces. He didn’t call off his extensive plans to invade Britain (Operation ‘Sea Lion’) because he wanted in some way to spare the British.

He did so because it had become too risky, and because one man was telling the rest of the country to fight on the beaches and the hills and the landing grounds, and was even telling his own cabinet that rather than surrender he would die choking in his own blood upon the ground.

Hitler’s Operation Sea Lion was a project not just of invasion but of subjugation. He was going to carry off Nelson’s column from Trafalgar Square, and install it in Berlin. Goering had plans to pillage the entire collection from the National Gallery. They were even going—infamy of infamies—to send the Elgin Marbles back to Nazi-controlled Athens. The Nazis had already drawn up a blacklist of British figures who were known to be particularly anti-Nazi, who would presumably have been either imprisoned or shot; and at one stage Himmler proposed killing or enslaving 80 per cent of the British population.

Such were the potential fruits of the deal that Halifax offered. Not only would the British have been complicit in the totalitarian tyranny that was to engulf Europe; it seems at least possible, if not likely, that they would eventually have been overrun themselves.

If Britain had done a deal in 1940—and this is the final and most important point—then there would have been no liberation of the continent. The country would not have been a haven of resistance, but a gloomy client state of an infernal Nazi EU.

There would have been no Polish soldiers training with the British
army, there would have been no Czech airmen with the RAF, there would have been no Free French waiting and hoping for an end to their national shame.

Above all there would have been no Lend-Lease, no liberty ships, no Churchillian effort to woo America away from isolationism; and of course there would have been no prospect of D-Day, no heroism and sacrifice at Omaha Beach, no hope that the new world would come with all its power and might to rescue and liberate the old.

The Americans would never have entered that European conflict, if Britain had been so mad and so wrong as to do a deal in 1940. It is incredible to look back and see how close we came, and how well supported the idea was.

I don’t know whether it is right to think of history as running on train tracks, but let us think of Hitler’s story as one of those huge and unstoppable double-decker expresses that he had commissioned, howling through the night with its cargo of German settlers.

Think of that locomotive, whizzing towards final victory. Then think of some kid climbing the parapet of the railway bridge and dropping the crowbar that jams the points and sends the whole enterprise for a gigantic burton—a mangled, hissing heap of metal. Winston Churchill was the crowbar of destiny. If he hadn’t been where he was, and put up resistance, that Nazi train would have carried right on. It was something of a miracle—given his previous career—that he was there at all.

CHAPTER 3

ROGUE ELEPHANT