The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (59 page)

Herr Hitler had a narrow mind and was violently prejudiced on certain subjects; but he would not deliberately deceive a man whom he respected and with whom he had been in negotiation… The crucial question was
whether Herr Hitler was speaking the truth when he said that he regarded the Sudeten question as a racial question which must be settled, and the object of his policy was racial unity and not the domination of Europe… The Prime Minister believed that Herr Hitler was speaking the truth… He [Chamberlain] thought that he had now established an influence over Herr Hitler, and that the latter trusted him and was willing to work with him.

Predictably, Duff Cooper now pressed for ‘full mobilization’, echoed by Winterton, Stanley, de la Warr and Elliot. Leslie Hore-Belisha, the War Minister, also declared himself in favour of mobilizing the army. Halifax too – hitherto so loyal to Chamberlain – jibbed; Hitler was ‘dictating terms, just as though he had won a war’. So did Lord Hailsham, another erstwhile supporter. With the news that the French as well as the Czech government had rejected the German demands, and the appearance of Daladier to confirm France’s readiness to fight if necessary, Chamberlain had no alternative but finally to take a firmer line. Now Chamberlain proposed sending his confidant Horace Wilson to Germany to present Hitler with a choice: to refer the dispute to a joint German, Czech and British Commission or face war with Britain too if France should enter on the side of the Czechs. This was such a ‘complete reversal’ that Duff Cooper could ‘hardly believe’ his ears and had to ask Chamberlain to repeat what he had said.

For a fleeting moment it seemed as if Hitler had overplayed his hand. The Czechs were readying for war. The French sent a telegram to London asking the British ‘(a) [to] mobilize simultaneously with them: (b) [to] introduce conscription: [and] (c) [to] “pool” economic and financial resources’, requests repeated when General Maurice Gamelin, Chief of the French General Staff, visited London on the 26th. Chamberlain phoned Wilson, now in Germany, and informed him that the French had ‘definitely stated their intention of supporting Czechoslovakia by offensive measures if [the] latter is attacked. This would bring us in: and it should be made plain to Chancellor [Hitler] that this is [the] inevitable alternative to a peaceful solution.’ Although Chamberlain still refused to heed Churchill’s advice to link Russia to the Anglo-French threat, Halifax issued a press statement that, in the event of a German attack on Czechoslovakia, ‘France will be bound
to come to her assistance and Great Britain and Russia will certainly stand by France.’ Far from running counter to popular pacifism, this accurately reflected the public mood, which had never been as supine as Chamberlain and his inner circle. A Mass Observation Opinion Poll conducted at around the time of the Bad Godesberg meetings showed only 22 per cent of the public in favour of appeasement, with 40 per cent against. After Munich, despite the defeats suffered by anti-appeasement candidates in Oxford and Kinross, there was a marked drop in government support at by-elections and a surge in support for the Opposition parties – enough to dissuade Chamberlain from holding the general election he had contemplated. The mood in the House of Commons also shifted at this time. In France even Phipps had to admit that there had been a ‘complete swing-over of [French] public opinion since Hitler’s demands had become known’. On September 27, Chamberlain reluctantly agreed to mobilize the fleet, a decision Duff Cooper was able to make known to the press. In London, gas masks were issued and trenches dug in the parks; the fantasy that war would mean instantaneous German air raids on the capital continued to exert its fascination. Even in the Berlin embassy ‘there was general satisfaction that the die had been cast’.

Yet, unbeknown to his colleagues, Chamberlain had diluted his instructions to Wilson by sending a message via the German embassy that Hitler should not consider the rejection of his demands as the last word. Instead of warning Hitler of Britain’s intention to support France and Czechoslovakia in the event of a war, Wilson allowed himself to be intimidated by Hitler’s fury at Czech intransigence. Within a few days, Hitler declared, ‘I shall have Czechoslovakia where I want her.’ To Wilson’s consternation, ‘He got up to walk out and it was only with difficulty he was prepared to listen to any more and then only with insane interruptions.’ This was precisely the kind of theatrics at which Hitler excelled.
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To increase the pressure on
Chamberlain’s feeble emissary, Hitler brusquely brought forward the deadline for acceptance of his demands to 2 p.m. on September 28, just two days later. Göring added, for good measure, that Germany could count on Polish support in the event of a war. Wilson went even weaker at the knees after hearing Hitler rant and rave at the Berlin Sportpalast, and recommended not relaying Chamberlain’s warning at all. He was overruled and did as he was asked on the 27th, but ‘more in sorrow than in anger’. Hitler was unmoved: ‘If France and England strike, let them do so,’ he retorted. ‘It is a matter of complete indifference to me. I am prepared for every eventuality.’

Wilson returned to London, and Chamberlain now argued that the Czechs should be asked to withdraw their troops from the contested area, pending arbitration, though the majority of ministers rejected this course. The British military attaché at Berlin was brought in to testify to the poor state of Czech defences and morale, subjects about which he was less than well informed; his less pusillanimous colleague in Prague was not invited to offer an opinion. The appeasers also expressed scepticism about French intentions. When French ministers visited London, they were ‘cross-examined’ by the Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir John Simon (by training a lawyer) and their answers found wanting. Gamelin’s plans were taken to mean that the French would advance into Germany but flee back to the Maginot Line if they encountered serious resistance. Chamberlain’s broadcast to the nation on September 27, in which he expressed his deep reluctance ‘to involve the whole of the British Empire in war simply on… account [of] a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbour’, dealt another blow to the ‘war-boys’:

It was the most depressing utterance [complained Duff Cooper]. There was no mention of France in it or a word of sympathy for Czechoslovakia. The only sympathy expressed was for Hitler, whose feelings about the Sudetens the Prime Minister said that he could well understand, and he never said a word about the mobilization of the Fleet. I was furious. Winston rang me up. He was most indignant and said that the tone of the speech showed plainly that we’re preparing to scuttle.

This was prophetic.

Chamberlain took to the air once more. What was agreed at the
Munich conference on September 29 affected only the timing of the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and the means whereby Hitler would achieve his goal. Instead of the Sudetenland’s being forcibly occupied forthwith, as Hitler had demanded, the occupation was spread over the first ten days of October. Plebiscites were supposed to be held under the supervision of an international commission, which would also determine the new boundary between Germany and Czechoslovakia and other matters such as property disputes and currency questions. Individuals were to have the right to opt in or opt out of the territories to be transferred. Of these German concessions, only the first, specifying the timing of the German occupation, was ever implemented. Chamberlain returned home waving a piece of paper that he had persuaded Hitler to sign when the two met privately in Hitler’s apartment. It read:

We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war again. We are resolved that the method of consultation shall be the method adopted to deal with any other questions that may concern our two countries, and we are determined to continue our efforts to remove possible sources of difference and thus contribute to assure the peace of Europe.

It was this that Chamberlain, in a moment of ill-judged euphoria on his return to Downing Street, described as signifying ‘peace in our time’. The next day, Duff Cooper resigned, the only member of the Cabinet to do so, on the ground that Munich meant imminent war, not peace, and that the Prime Minister’s statement would make it hard to justify the accelerated rearmament that was needed.

Cooper was right. By the end of October the Germans had made it clear where their next territorial claims would be: the Lithuanian city of Memel and the international city of Danzig. By the end of November the
News Chronicle
was reporting that Hitler was preparing to march on Prague. The final boundary settlement between Germany and Czechoslovakia was so far from ‘self-determination’ that it placed 30,000 Czechs under German rule. Nothing was done in response, because the promised guarantee to the rump Czechoslovakia never took concrete form. Meanwhile, Hitler made a mockery of Chamberlain’s hopes for disarmament, openly pledging to achieve parity with
the Royal Navy in submarines. Then, less than six months after Munich, on March 15, 1939 German troops marched into Prague, catching the British almost completely by surprise. With German encouragement, Slovakia declared independence and Czechoslovakia ceased to exist – precisely the outcome Churchill had predicted in the Commons just a few days after Chamberlain’s return from Munich.

All of this makes it tempting to follow the conventional line that the events that led to Munich were the greatest failure of diplomacy in modern British history. Yet, as A. J. P. Taylor said, Munich was at least in one respect a triumph – for Chamberlain. Not only did he outwit his opponents in England, he also outwitted Hitler himself. After all, what was agreed at Munich was much closer to what Chamberlain had proposed initially at Berchtesgaden than to what Hitler had demanded at Bad Godesberg. As a result of Chamberlain’s diplomacy, Hitler had been obliged to abandon his design to ‘smash Czechoslovakia by military action’, which he had been harbouring since the end of May. In most British accounts of the crisis, it is Hitler who seems to set the pace. Yet in Goebbels’ diary, it is Chamberlain – the ‘ice cold… English fox’ – who ‘suddenly goes to get up and leave as if he has done his duty, there is no point continuing and he can wash his hands innocently’. At the beginning of September, according to Goebbels, Hitler had felt confident that London would not intervene, but four weeks later he was driven to ask Chamberlain’s aide Horace Wilson ‘straight out if England wants world war’. Goeb-bels himself, who six days earlier had still been confident that London was ‘immeasurably frightened of force’, was forced to conclude that ‘we have no peg for a war… One cannot run the risk of a world war over amendments.’ Gö ring took the same view.

The decisive breakthrough had come on the evening of September 27, when Hitler sent a note to Chamberlain effectively dropping his earlier threat to use military force by 2 p.m. the next day. In this note Hitler agreed that German troops would not move beyond the territory the Czechs had already agreed to cede; that there would be
a plebiscite; and offered to make Germany a party to any international guarantee of Czechoslovakia’s future integrity. Evidently, Wilson’s warning (‘more in sorrow than in anger’) had been more effective than it had appeared at the time. As Hitler said to General Alfred Jodl, Chief of the Army Leadership Staff in the German High Command (OKW), he could not ‘attack Czechoslovakia out of a clear sky… or else I would get on my neck the whole world. I would have to wage war against England, against France, which I could not wage.’ This explains why he so eagerly accepted Mussolini’s suggestion of a 24hour suspension of mobilization. That was why he so hastily sent a message to London inviting Chamberlain to attend a four-power conference in Munich. Had Mussolini not become involved, Hitler would presumably have seized with equal readiness the French proposal for a compromise. Looked at from this point of view, the Munich agreement’s short-lived popularity among MPs – only forty Tories abstained when it was put to the vote – becomes more intelligible. Chamberlain really had averted a war.

But was he right to have done so? For all this goes to show how weak Hitler’s position had become, and how foolish it was to let him off the hook. It was Chamberlain, after all, who prompted Mussolini to suggest a last-ditch diplomatic solution. But why involve the Italians at all, when they made their sympathy for the German side quite explicit? Why exclude the Czechs at this pivotal moment? Why once again leave the Soviets out of the negotiations? Had Chamberlain pressed home the advantage, rather than rushing off to Munich, the pressure on Berlin would have been intense. For – and this is perhaps the crucial point – Germany was simply not ready for a European war in 1938. Her defences in the West were still incomplete; in the words of Jodl, there were only ‘five fighting divisions and seven reserve divisions on the western fortifications, which were nothing but a large construction site to hold out against one hundred French divisions’. No senior German military officer dissented from this view. Nor could Germany count on Stalin’s repudiating the Soviet commitment (made in 1935) to defend Czechoslovakia; Red Army units in the military districts of Kiev and Byelorussia were in fact brought to a state of readiness during the Czech crisis. It is not inconceivable that the Romanian government would have granted them passage to the Czech
frontier. Moreover, the Soviet Foreign Secretary Maxim Litvinov repeatedly stated that the Soviets would honour their commitments to Czechoslovakia if the French did so too, or would at least refer the matter to the League of Nations. Indeed, on September 24, Litvinov explicitly told the British delegation to the League that, if the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia, the ‘Czechoslovak-Soviet Pact would come into force’ and proposed a conference between Britain, France and the Soviet Union to ‘show the Germans that we mean business’.

For these reasons, only a part of the Wehrmacht’s seventy-five divisions – the British military attaché in Paris estimated just twenty-four, though the Czechs were ready for all seventy-five – could have been deployed in an attack on Czechoslovakia. Nor were the Czechs to be dismissed lightly; the British military attaché fully expected their thirty-five well-equipped divisions to ‘put up a really protracted resistance’ against an attacker who would have enjoyed neither decisive numerical superiority nor the element of surprise. In 1939 German reserve officers confessed to a British journalist that the Czech defences had been ‘impressive and impregnable to our arms. We could have gone round them, perhaps, but not reduced them.’ Hitler himself later admitted that he had been ‘greatly disturbed’ when he discovered the ‘formidable’ levels of Czech military preparedness. ‘We had run a serious danger.’ Operation Green, the planned pincer movement by the 2nd and 10th Armies, might have ended in disaster had it been launched. As General Sir Henry Pownall put it, even if the Germans had left only nine divisions along the Siegfried Line in the West and five to defend East Prussia against the Red Army, what Hitler was contemplating was ‘certainly a bit risky’.