The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (62 page)

There was another crucial difference between 1939 and 1914. By the eve of the First World War, Britain had established ententes with both France and Russia. In 1939, however, the Soviet Union was left to align itself with Germany, despite the fact that 87 per cent of respondents to a UK Gallup poll in April had favoured a ‘military alliance between Great Britain, France and Russia’. Why was this? The obvious answer is that, hard though it had been for pre-1914 Liberals to join forces with Tsarist Russia, it was impossible for British Conservatives to do the same with Stalin’s Soviet Union. This was
no doubt a factor for many Tories. Yet Churchill, once the ardent anti-Bolshevik, had no difficulty in praising ‘the loyal attitudes of the Soviets to the cause of peace’ in pursuit of his Grand Alliance (now euphemistically renamed ‘the Peace Bloc’). Chamberlain’s lukewarm response to this, as to all Churchill’s suggestions, may have owed more to his lingering faith in appeasement than to an especially strong ideological aversion to Communism. More importantly, Britain’s new commitments to countries like Poland and Romania made it harder rather than easier to reach agreement with Stalin. The Soviets tended to ask for military access through these countries; how else were they to fight the Germans? With good reason, the East Europeans suspected their motives. The Poles had refused to be co-signatories of the declaration of mutual ‘consultation’ proposed by Chamberlain in March 1939. Not only did the guarantee to Poland bind Britain’s destiny to that of a regime that was every bit as undemocratic and anti-Semitic as that of Germany. It also precluded the kind of alliance with the Soviet Union that might conceivably have deterred or more easily defeated Hitler. When the Soviets proposed a triple alliance between Britain, France and Russia, to defend not only themselves but also Russia’s immediate neighbours from German aggression, they were rebuffed. Chamberlain had flown to Germany thrice to confer with Hitler; he never even contemplated taking a plane to Moscow. He declined even to send Eden (much less Churchill) as a special envoy. Only in late May did preliminary talks begin with the Soviets and they proceeded with painful slowness. Not until August were British and French military delegations sent to Moscow, and they travelled by sea not air, with low-ranking officers at their head. Chamberlain, meanwhile, took the train to Scotland, for a holiday. Here was another missed opportunity. Had Chamberlain been replaced by Churchill in the summer of 1939, an alliance with the Russians might still have been achievable.

Still another difference between 1939 and 1914 was the threat posed by Japan, which had been Britain’s ally on the eve of the First World War. By April 1939 the Naval Staff made the position clear:

It is not open to question that [in the event of Japanese intervention] a capital ship force would have to be sent [to the Far East] but whether this could be
done to the exclusion of our interests in the Mediterranean is a matter which would have to be decided at the time… The effect of the evacuation of the Eastern Mediterranean on Greece, Turkey and the Arab and Moslem world… are political factors which make it essential that no precipitate action should be taken in this direction… It is not possible to state definitively how soon after Japanese intervention a Fleet can be dispatched to the Far East. Neither is it possible to enumerate the size of Fleet we could afford to send.

This was a veiled admission that the order of priorities in a world war would be: the British Isles, the Middle East and, finally, Singapore and Britain’s other Asian possessions. As it turned out, the Japanese were not yet ready to join forces with Germany against Britain. But no one in London could count on that.

Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that Hitler expected Chamberlain to keep appeasing him, selling Danzig and perhaps even the Polish Corridor the way he had sold the Sudetenland, in return for yet another reprieve. True, he now regarded war with Britain as all but inevitable. Addressing his army commanders in May 1939, Hitler expressed his ‘doubts whether a peaceful settlement with England is possible. It is necessary to prepare for a showdown. England sees in our development the establishment of a hegemony which would weaken England. Therefore England is our enemy and the showdown with England is a matter of life and death.’ Yet it was probably not his intention to precipitate that showdown as early as September 1939. He simply did not believe that Chamberlain, a man armed only with his habitual rolled umbrella, had the guts to fight. Thus he did almost nothing in the course of 1939 to encourage Chamberlain’s lingering hopes that Europe might soon be out of the danger zone. On March 23, three days after Ribbentrop had threatened the Lithuanian government with war, Hitler sailed into Memel harbour aboard a German warship, even as Chamberlain was trying to cobble together a four-power declaration against such acts of aggression.

Nor was Hitler the sole troublemaker in Europe. Italy invaded Albania in April, in what was supposed to be the prelude to an Italian takeover of the Balkans; the following month Mussolini impulsively concluded a ‘Pact of Steel’ with Hitler. Undaunted, Chamberlain continued to regard the Italian dictator as a possible partner in his effort
to restrain Hitler. To be sure, the Italians proved to be most unreliable allies to the Germans, declining to join in the war until the fall of France was imminent. On the other hand, precisely this unreliability minimized Mussolini’s influence in Berlin. Chamberlain persisted in believing that Hitler would not ‘start a world war for Danzig’. He failed to see that Hitler did not anticipate a world war; he anticipated another Munich.

If Hitler was confident before the conclusion of the Nazi-Soviet Pact that Chamberlain would not fight over Poland – as German military deployments on the Polish border would seem to indicate – he was all but certain of it thereafter. ‘Now Europe is mine!’ was his comment when the news from Moscow was relayed to him at Berchtesgaden in the early hours of August 24. That was not strictly true, in that he had to allow Stalin half of Poland, Finland and all three of the Baltic states. Moreover, by doing a deal with Stalin, Hitler made it less likely that either Italy or Japan would immediately join his side. But Hitler’s remark illustrates how completely he assumed he had outmanoeuvred the Western powers. He can hardly have been impressed by the reappearance of the spineless Henderson to restate the British guarantee to Poland. ‘Our enemies are little worms,’ he remarked, two days before the treaty with Russia was signed; ‘I saw them at Munich.’ And, indeed, Chamberlain probably would have given him another Munich had it not been for his Cabinet colleagues, who insisted that the guarantee to Poland be honoured, and the Poles, who were suicidally determined to fight. Still he clung to the idea of another conference – which once again the Italians proposed – venturing to mention the idea in the Commons even after Poland had been invaded. Though war was now forced upon Chamberlain, he still sought to avoid (as Samuel Hoare put it) ‘going all out’.

In one respect, British policy did have credibility, despite Chamberlain’s worst efforts. Most members of the Nazi ruling elite continued to regard a war against the Western powers as both likely and dangerous. Göring was far from keen to risk such a war; he knew the true strength of the Luftwaffe. Goebbels, too, remained fearful of British intervention even after he heard the news of Ribbentrop’s coup in Moscow. The news that the Italians were not ready to fight and that the British were resolved to stand by Poland convinced Goebbels that,
as over Czechoslovakia, a temporary diplomatic ‘minimal’ agreement would have to be worked out with Britain, giving Germany back Danzig and at least part of the Polish Corridor. The extent to which Hitler himself, suddenly ‘cautious’, was prepared to contemplate this course is striking. Almost at the last minute, he postponed the invasion of Poland, which was originally scheduled for dawn on August 26, in order to see Henderson again and offer a crude deal: arms limitation and minimal colonial demands in return for a ‘free hand’ in Poland. Three days later, when that had been turned down, he tried another gambit, requesting that a Polish plenipotentiary be sent forthwith to Berlin. However, this was not sincerely meant and Ribbentrop did his best to make it impossible for the Poles to comply, which they did not in any case wish to do. By August 30, with all preparations complete, Hitler had reverted to his earlier confidence (‘The English believe Germany is weak. They will see they are deceiving themselves’). The next day he overruled Gö ring and Goebbels, despite their ‘scepticism’ about English non-intervention: ‘The Führer does not believe England will intervene.’ Apart from Hitler, Ribbentrop alone was keen for war, encouraging Hitler to believe that Munich had been ‘a first-class stupidity’ and assuring him the British would not act. By the morning of September 3, when the British ultimatum was delivered, they had both been proven wrong.

Hitler the gambler had in fact been doubly wrong: wrong to think that Chamberlain had been earnest about war in September 1938 and wrong to think that he was bluffing in August 1939. Yet Hitler’s miscalculations were lucky ones. For if Chamberlain had acted as he expected in 1938 – had actually called Hitler’s bluff rather than folding – Germany’s position would have been far more exposed than it was in 1939, when Hitler guessed that Chamberlain would fold again. By going to war later rather than sooner, Chamberlain unwittingly saved the Third Reich, vastly improving Hitler’s chances of winning the war he had always intended to fight. Hitler presented Britain with a choice. Unfortunately, Britain’s Prime Minister chose the wrong year. In that sense, Churchill was half right. The war of 1939 was indeed an ‘unnecessary war’. But what was necessary to stop it was a war in 1938.

The policy of appeasement was not quite dead after the war began. The option of reaching some kind of negotiated peace with Germany was not closed off until Churchill replaced Chamberlain as Prime Minister in May 1940. It was in these last months of his premiership, more than a year and a half too late, that Chamberlain finally began to take seriously the idea of some kind of regime change in Germany. On January 17, 1940, Harold Nicolson heard that there was ‘still a group in the war Cabinet working for appeasement and at present in negotiation via the former Chancellor Brü ning to make peace with the German General Staff on condition that they eliminate Hitler’. But the chance that the German ‘opposition’ might play the
deus ex machina
was long gone. Roosevelt was even less realistic. He continued to act as if a compromise peace might still be concocted on the basis of Munich-style concessions to the dictators; hence the 1940 trips to Europe by the Under-Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, and the Vice-President of General Motors, James Mooney, the former touting concessions to Germany that even Chamberlain and Halifax thought laughable. Only with the fall of France was appeasement finally buried. Paradoxically, it was at its moment of supreme weakness that the British Empire rediscovered the virtue of defiance. True, a few faint hearts still wondered if somehow the Empire might be salvaged by conceding all Europe to Hitler and Mussolini. But this was not appeasement; it was defeatism. Churchill gave them their answer at the War Cabinet meeting of May 28, 1940: ‘The Germans would demand our Fleet… our naval bases, and much else. We should become a slave state.’

This was surely right. As Hitler had told Keitel and the chiefs of his army, navy and air force on October 9, 1939, his aim was ‘to effect the destruction of the strength of the Western Powers and their capability of resisting still further the political consolidation and continued expansion of the German people in Europe.’ Even his later decision to attack Russia had an anti-British objective; as he put it on July 31, 1940, twelve days after once again offering to make peace with Britain: ‘Russia is the factor on which Britain is relying the most… With
Russia shattered, Britain’s last hope would be shattered.’ The idea that a peace could have been struck with ‘That Man’, as Churchill called him, was always an illusion. The proof that the policy of appeasement had been a disastrous failure lay precisely in the strength of Hitler’s position by the summer of 1940 – victorious from the Channel to the River Bug, protected to the East by a non-aggression pact, able to bomb Britain from French airfields, in a position to make disingenuous offers of peace. Though Great Britain herself could not yet be described as being at Hitler’s mercy, her few allies were vanquished and large swathes of her Empire would be vulnerable to invasion in the event of a Japanese attack. Henceforth – and with good reason – the term ‘appeasement’ would be used exclusively as a term of abuse.

A new order of ethnographic relationships, that is to say a resettlement of the nationalities so that, at the end of the process, there are better dividing lines than is the case today.

Hitler, October 6, 1939

We are paying very heavily now for failing to face the insurance premiums essential for security of an Empire! This has usually been the main cause for the loss of Empires in the past.

General Alan Brooke, 1942

At 4.45 a.m. on September 1, 1939, the tranquillity of daybreak in Western Poland was shattered by a deafening military thunderclap. Five German armies comprising more than 1.8 million men swept across the Polish borders, launched from ideally situated bridgeheads in Western Pomerania, East Prussia, Upper Silesia and German-controlled Slovakia. Almost as loud as the barrages of the German artillery were the roars of engines; the German advance was spearheaded by more than three thousand tanks and hundreds of armoured cars and personnel carriers. From the sky, Ju-87 dive-bombers shrieked down on the hastily mobilizing Poles, their precision bombs destroying bridges, roads and supply convoys, their terrifying sirens sowing panic among the defending forces. The aim was to avoid the protracted attrition of the last war by achieving rapid penetration of territory and swift, annihilating encirclements of enemy forces.
With its devastating combination of artillery, infantry, armour and air power, this was precisely what the blitzkrieg made possible.