The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (58 page)

Largely as a result of decisions taken during Chamberlain’s premiership, by September 1939 the United Kingdom found herself at war in circumstances significantly worse than those of August 1914. By June 1940 she found herself in the most parlous strategic position in her modern history, standing alone – or rather, with only the Dominions and colonies as allies – against a Germany that bestrode the European continent. What, however, if Britain had stood up to Hitler sooner than in 1939? There were numerous moments prior to that year when Hitler had openly flouted the status quo:

in March 1935, when he announced his intention to restore conscription in Germany, in violation of the Versailles Treaty;

in March 1936, when he unilaterally reoccupied the demilitarized Rhineland, in violation of both the Versailles and the Locarno Treaties;

in late 1936 or 1937, when he and Mussolini intervened in the Spanish
Civil War, in contravention of the Non-Intervention Agreement they had signed in the summer of 1936;

in March 1938, when a campaign of intimidation of the Austrian government culminated in the replacement of its Chancellor, Schuschnigg, an ‘invitation’ to German troops to march into Austria and Hitler’s proclamation of the
Anschluss
; or

in September 1938, when he threatened to go to war to separate the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia.

Of all of these moments, the most propitious was without doubt the Sudeten crisis of 1938. Even if Austria’s disappearance as an independent state had not opened Chamberlain’s eyes – to him it was just ‘spilt milk’ – it opened the eyes of many others in Britain to the nature of Hitler’s ambitions. To be sure, if Hitler had wanted no more than to stick up for the rights of the Sudeten Germans, it would have been hard to justify a war. Konrad Henlein, their leader,
*
struck the British politicians who met him (Churchill included) as a reasonable man whose stated programme of autonomy had the backing of the majority of his people. However, as became apparent in the course of the crisis, Hitler was merely using the Sudeten Germans to provoke a war which he intended would wipe Czechoslovakia off the map.

In the opening phase of the crisis, from May until the first week of September, Sir Nevile Henderson – a quite disastrous choice to represent Britain in Berlin – was almost completely hoodwinked by the Germans into thinking the Czechs were the villains of the piece. Chamberlain’s emissary, Lord Runciman, also fell into this trap. Lord Halifax, now Foreign Secretary, allowed himself to be persuaded by Henderson that firmness with Hitler would only ‘drive him to greater violence or greater menaces’ – a wholly incorrect inference from a war scare in May when the Czechs had mobilized in the mistaken belief that Hitler was about to attack. Throughout this period, the Cabinet did not give serious thought to the option of threatening the use of force. When First Lord of the Admiralty Duff Cooper proposed ‘bringing the crews of our ships up to full complement which would amount to semi-mobilization’, Chamberlain dismissed the idea as ‘a policy of
pin-pricking which… was only likely to irritate’ Hitler. Only four Cabinet members besides Cooper
*
had serious reservations about Chamberlain’s policy at this stage, and all were dispensable. French requests for explicit British warnings to Berlin were politely rebuffed; the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, was prepared to countenance nothing stronger than a ‘
private
warning’ that ‘if Hitler thinks that we shall in
no
circumstances come in, he is labouring under a tragic illusion’. Halifax came very close to sending such a warning – to the effect that Britain ‘could not stand aside’ if Germany invaded Czechoslovakia and France came to her defence – but despite Churchill’s vigorous encouragement (or perhaps because of it) Chamberlain overruled him. Henderson was prepared to go only as far as: ‘I begged his Excellency to remind Herr Hitler that if France felt obliged by her honour to intervene on behalf of the Czechs, circumstances
might
be such as to compel us to participate, just as I realized that there were possibly other circumstances which
might
compel Herr Hitler to intervene on behalf of the Sudet-en[s].’ Unfortunately, he issued this feeble warning to the wrong man. Konstantin von Neurath, of whom he was ‘begging’, had ceased to be Foreign Minister precisely seven months before. Chamberlain was thus able to use all the political means at his disposal to pressurize the Czech government into making concessions. The Czech President Edvard Beneš at length gave in and accepted Henlein’s demands for Sudeten autonomy, but Henlein, under Hitler’s instructions, at once broke off the negotiations. Mere autonomy had never been the German objective. It was Hitler who determined the content of Sudeten ‘self-determination’.

Reports now reached London that Hitler was planning unilaterally to send in his troops. Now the second act of the drama began. The French premier, Daladier, informed the British ambassador in Paris, Sir Eric Phipps, that if Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, France would declare war. Here was another chance to stand firm. At last, on September 9, Chamberlain was prevailed upon by his inner cabinet
to send an explicit warning to Berlin that, if France intervened, ‘the sequence of events must result in a general conflict from which Great Britain could not stand aside’. But Chamberlain, with the encouragement of Halifax and Henderson, decided at the last minute that the telegram should not be handed to Ribbentrop, now the German Foreign Minister. Halifax’s rationale for this was, as he put it to the Cabinet on September 12, that ‘If [Hitler] made his mind up to attack, there was nothing that we could do to stop him… Any serious prospect of getting Herr Hitler back to a sane outlook would probably be irretrievably destroyed by any action on our part… involving him in a public humiliation.’ Four months earlier, when it had seemed the Germans might send in troops, Halifax had blown hot and cold; many believed (wrongly) that Hitler had drawn back for fear of Anglo-French intervention. Now, however, Halifax warned the French
not
to count on British support ‘automatically’. He was unimpressed by Daladier’s assurance that, ‘if German troops cross the Czechoslovak frontier, the French will march to a man. They realise perfectly well that this will be not for
les beaux yeux
of the Czechs but for their own skins, as, after a given time, Germany would, with enormously increased strength, turn against France.’ As far as Halifax was concerned, Czechoslovakia was already as good as finished:

I did not think that British opinion would be prepared, any more than I thought His Majesty’s Government would be prepared, to enter upon hostilities with Germany on the account of aggression by Germany on Czechoslovakia. As I had more than once said… while we naturally had the French obligations clearly in mind, it was none the less true that by no action that anyone could take on behalf of Czechoslovakia could the latter be effectively protected from German attack should such be launched. Nor, if one might imagine European statesmen after another war sitting down to draw the boundaries of Czechoslovakia in the drafting of a new peace treaty, could anyone suppose that the exact boundary as it stood today would be maintained. To fight a European war for something you could not in fact protect, and did not expect to restore, was from this point of view a course which must deserve most serious thought.

This was a circumlocutory way of saying: ‘You’re on your own.’ Small wonder the French wilted. By this time, at last, both Halifax and
Chamberlain had begun to question Hitler’s sanity. Yet this insight impelled them to be more rather than less conciliatory.

It is a myth that there was a consensus for appeasement in the months leading up to Munich. As Duff Cooper later recalled:

… we were being advised on all sides to do the same thing – to make plain to Germany that we would fight. This advice came from the press, almost unanimous on Sunday, from the Opposition, from Winston Churchill, from the French Government, from the United States Government, and even from the Vatican: this advice supported bysuchan overwhelming weightof opinion we were rejecting on the counter-advice of one man, the hysterical Henderson.

Doubts within the Conservative Party were growing rapidly even before Chamberlain began his experiment with shuttle diplomacy. Cadogan, however, snidely dismissed the critics of appeasement as ‘war-boys’. Rather than approve naval mobilization, as Cooper urged, Chamberlain’s inner circle backed his ill-judged ‘Z Plan’ – a flight to Germany to make a face-to-face appeal to, of all things, Hitler’s vanity (a trait Chamberlain could at least claim to understand). ‘The right course’, the Prime Minister argued, ‘was to open by an appeal to Herr Hitler on the grounds that he had a great chance of obtaining fame for himself by making peace in Europe and thereafter establishing good relations with Great Britain.’ In truth, this was a kind of fame Chamberlain coveted for himself. What the Z Plan meant in practice was that Hitler would be offered a plebiscite in the Sudetenland, at which the inhabitants could be expected to vote for another
Anschluss
. The rump Czechoslovakia might then be given some kind of guarantee. The French wilted still further at being thus left out in the cold. The Soviets were even less impressed, though Chamberlain blithely dismissed Vansittart’s warning that excluding them would drive Stalin into Hitler’s arms.

The first meeting between Chamberlain and Hitler was held on September 15 at the latter’s mountain retreat, the Berghof, just outside Berchtesgaden. Extraordinarily, Hitler’s interpreter Paul Schmidt was the only other person present when the two leaders conferred in the Führer’s study. Chamberlain had set out to flatter Hitler; indeed, the very fact of the British Prime Minister’s coming as far as the Bavarian Alps to see the German dictator in his holiday house was a fine piece
of flattery in itself. Chamberlain believed he was stooping to conquer; Hitler, whom he erroneously thought of as a former house painter, struck him as ‘the commonest looking little dog’. Yet it was Hitler who played on Chamberlain’s vanity the more successfully, as the latter’s account of the meeting makes clear: ‘I have had a conversation with
a man
, he [Hitler] said, and one with whom I can do business and he liked the rapidity with which I had grasped the essentials. In short I had established a certain confidence, which was my aim, and in spite of the hardness and ruthlessness I thought I saw in his face I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.’ Hitler made it clear he would settle for nothing less than the immediate cession of the Sudetenland to Germany, without a plebiscite. ‘The thing has got to be settled at once,’ he declared. ‘I am determined to settle it. I do not care whether there is a world war or not. I have determined to settle it and to settle it soon and I am prepared to risk a world war rather than allow this to drag on.’ Even if it did not come to war, he threatened to discard the Anglo-German Naval Agreement if he did not get his way. Persuading himself that Hitler’s objectives were nevertheless ‘strictly limited’ to ‘self-determination’ for the Sudetenland – a leap of faith of no small magnitude – Chamberlain did not dissent and returned to London.

After much deliberation, and objections from Cooper and the other ‘war-boys’, the Cabinet acquiesced, provided that a plebiscite would be held before the ‘transfer’. The next step was to place the blame for the sell-out on the French since, as Halifax put it, ‘it was the French and not we ourselves who had treaty obligations with the Czechoslovak Government’. Rather than brief Daladier on what had been said at Berchtesgaden, Chamberlain proposed that ‘if the French asked us our opinion, we should reply that it was France which was primarily involved, but that we thought they would take a wise course if they said that they would not fight to prevent the self-determination of the Sudeten Germans.’ This was yet more circumlocution to the same effect as before: Britain would not fight. When Daladier came to London he expressed understandable indignation, but to no avail. The most he could achieve was to persuade Chamberlain that Britain and France should guarantee what was left of Czechoslovakia after the transfer of the Sudetenland. All that remained to be done, it
seemed, was to bully Beneš into capitulating. This was an exceedingly painful process. Nevertheless, on September 21, deserted by the French, who blamed their desertion on the British, he did so.

Chamberlain set off for Germany again – this time bound for Bad Godesberg on the Rhine – with what he hoped was the solution. He met Hitler on September 22, a day later than the Germans had been led to expect. The meeting was a fiasco. Claiming that he now had to take into account Polish and Hungarian claims with respect to their minorities in Czechoslovakia, Hitler rejected the idea of a plebiscite out of hand (‘
Es
tut mir fürchtbar leid, aber das geht nicht mehr
–‘I am terribly sorry, but that will no longer do’). In desperation, Chamberlain offered to drop the plebiscite if only territory with a population that was over 50 per cent German were handed over at once; the rest could be referred to a commission, as had happened with disputed territory after 1918. Alleging continued violations of the Sudeten Germans’ rights, Hitler insisted on immediate cession of the territory, to be followed by German military occupation. Indeed, if no agreement were reached, he threatened to send troops into the Sudetenland on September 28, just six days later. To reinforce this crude ultimatum, more German troops were moved to the Czech border, bringing the total number of divisions there to thirty-one. Chamberlain blustered, saying that British public opinion would not tolerate a military occupation; Hitler replied that German opinion would stand for nothing less. Chamberlain complained that Hitler was presenting him with a
Diktat
; Hitler solemnly replied that, if he read the text of the German demands carefully, he would see that it was in fact a ‘memorandum’. Flummoxed, Chamberlain agreed to communicate this ‘memorandum’ to the Czechs. Hitler responded by agreeing to postpone the date of his threatened occupation by three days, a quite empty ‘concession’. The Prime Minister returned to London and put on a brave face, his analysis of the situation mystify-ingly unaltered. Hitler had no ambition beyond the Sudetenland. He was a man Chamberlain could do business with: