Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II

The British and their prime minister: Chamberlain

It has become convenient to think of the war as a confrontation between Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill, but Britain’s leader in the years leading up to the war was Neville Chamberlain. Although very much in the minority, there are still those who say that Chamberlain was an astute statesman. They prefer to believe that Chamberlain, by appeasing Hitler and letting him march into Austria and then Czechoslovakia, gained time for Britain to rearm. There is nothing to support this contention.

By 1937 Hitler had provided Germany with formidable fighting forces. His troops had reoccupied the demilitarized Rhineland in open defiance of the peace treaty. In Britain there were no signs of a resolve to confront Germany. According to the foreign minister, Anthony Eden, the elder men of the cabinet were not convinced of the need to rearm.

Chamberlain thought armaments were a wasteful form of expenditure and saw no reason to believe that war was bound to come.

In the previous cabinet, Chamberlain had been chancellor of the exchequer. He knew how much a government’s popularity depended upon keeping income taxes low. Opposition politicians were certainly not demanding rearmament. Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour (Socialist) party, had said in December 1933: ‘We are unalterably opposed to anything in the nature of rearmament.’ His party stuck to that line and campaigned against rearmament right up to the outbreak of war. Prominent churchmen and intellectuals said little about the persecution of German Jews, even though refugees brought ever more appalling stories of what was happening. Priests, politicians and writers combined in such pacifist organizations as the Peace Pledge Union, and the influential voices of Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon and Vera Brittain were heard arguing persuasively against any preparations for war.

Everywhere pacifism was coloured by the fear of what fleets of bombing aircraft might do to large cities. The writings of General J. F. C. Fuller and Bertrand Russell, and the H. G. Wells science-fiction book Things to Come (and the frightening Alexander Korda film based upon it), fanned fears of impending devastation and chaos by bomber fleets. It was against this background that Chamberlain made his decisions about rearmament.

Seen in photographs and cartoons, Chamberlain appears a wretched and ridiculous figure with drawn face and craning neck, but an American who met him in 1940 was impressed:

Mr Chamberlain was seated alone at his place at the Cabinet table when we were both shown in. He was spare, but gave the impression both of physical strength and energy. He appeared to be much younger than his seventy-one years. His hair was dark, except for a white strand across his forehead. His dominating features were a pair of large, very dark, piercing eyes. His voice was low, but incisive.

Chamberlain was concerned with his personal popularity and he spoke of it frequently. The welcoming crowds he saw on his visits to Munich and Rome were reassuring to him. He even remarked that Mussolini did not seem jealous at being welcomed less warmly than Chamberlain and the British party. Chamberlain’s ego led him to believe that his personal negotiations with Hitler were a statesmanlike contribution to world peace. In fact he did little but give way to Hitler’s bullying, and ratify and assist the aggressions he claimed to be stopping. In addition Chamberlain’s well publicized meetings with Hitler encouraged the more extreme Nazis while demoralizing the few influential Germans who opposed Hitler’s methods.

The persistent belief that war could be avoided by appeasement made Chamberlain reluctant to form an alliance with Stalin’s USSR. He and his colleagues shared a well merited distaste for Stalin’s violent and repressive empire, and yet an alliance with Russia – as the British chiefs of staff pointed out – might be the only practical way to stop Hitler. When, in the summer of 1939, General Ironside (inspector-general of Overseas Forces) returned from a trip to Danzig, Chamberlain asked him to confirm that it seemed impossible to come to terms with the Russians. Ironside would not confirm it; he said it was the only thing that Britain could do. Chamberlain was not pleased at this response and retorted: ‘The only thing we cannot do.’

Many military men said that the Red Army was worthless, and that an alliance with the USSR would be only an encumbrance. Britain’s ambassador in Berlin added to Chamberlain’s confusion with a ridiculous warning that a British alliance with Russia would provoke Germany into an immediate war. (To prepare peacetime Germany for a war against Russia would have taken many months.) While Chamberlain vacillated it was Hitler who saw the advantages that a pact with Russia would provide.

Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland and then Austria had been welcomed by virtually the whole population of those German-speaking regions. Blumenkriege the German soldiers called these occupations; flower wars in which the soldiers got kisses and posies, not bullets and shells. But the people of Czechoslovakia – apart from the vociferous Volksdeutschen who lived in the border regions – had no love for the Germans.

Czechoslovakia – the Munich crisis

Czechoslovakia had been created in ten minutes at the end of the First World War. The imperial governor of defeated Austria-Hungary telephoned the illegal Czech National Committee and told them to come up to Hradcany Castle and pick up his seals and keys.

Within Czechoslovakia’s boundaries remained many of the old Empire’s munitions factories. With the newly minted Czech crown unwanted on the international money markets, the Czechs were pleased to find that their armaments could be sold for hard currency.

The new government strongly supported the armaments industry – Skoda at Plzen and Zbrojovka at Brno – and the chemical plants too. Within a decade Czech arms salesmen had 10 per cent of the world arms market. In the violent interwar years Czech arms were used by the Japanese and the Chinese, by the Ethiopians and by both sides in the Spanish Civil War. The British army’s best light machine-gun was named the Bren because it was evolved by the Czechoslovak factory at Brno and the British factory at Enfield.

FIGURE 15 (#ulink_dbe211fe-e10c-58c0-b5b1-b806125d4d8f)

British Bren light machine-gun (#ulink_dbe211fe-e10c-58c0-b5b1-b806125d4d8f)

The German army greedily eyed the Czech arsenals. Rightly so: tanks and guns of Czech design and manufacture were to serve that army throughout the war. Czechoslovakia’s production of aero engines and aircraft components was to prove even more important. Hitler would now add all this to his empire. There was no one in France and Britain with the will and wherewithal to stop him, and yet this was the crisis that eventually signalled the war.

Hitler’s claim to Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland was based upon spurious complaints that the German communities resident there were being harshly treated by the government in Prague. It was not true, but German newspapers, manipulated by Goebbels, told the story the way the Nazis wanted it told. The Sudeten Germans lived in the borderlands, an area well fortified against German attack. The Czechs stood firm and mobilized their army. Chamberlain, convinced that Hitler was a rational individual with whom an agreement could be reached, offered to meet him. Old and somewhat frail, he made his first flight in order to meet Hitler at the Führer’s mountainside retreat near Berchtesgaden. There were more fruitless meetings and for a time outsiders began to think that war was inevitable. Then at the last moment Chamberlain sent a secret message to Italy’s leader, Benito Mussolini, asking him to intercede.

In September 1938 Hitler, Chamberlain, Mussolini and Daladier, the French PM, met in Munich to discuss Hitler’s claim. It was a fiasco that might call to mind a Marx Brothers comedy. The room was crammed with all kinds of officials and hangers-on, milling around and eating the buffet food. Hitler, Daladier and Chamberlain had no common language and their interpreters found it difficult to work in such a restless crowd. Mussolini delighted in the fact that he could manage all their languages. He strode about, turning the meeting into a quiz show in which he played question-master. Eventually, at twenty-five minutes past midnight, the Munich Pact was signed.

Chamberlain came back from Munich waving the agreement, and a supplementary joint declaration renouncing war, and saying that it meant peace for our time. The end had always been a foregone conclusion. The meeting was a futile attempt to preserve the dignity of France and Britain, while allowing Hitler to seize the Czech border regions. By occupying the fortified border the Germans rendered the rest of Czechoslovakia defenceless. The only consolation for the Czechs, who were given no say about the dismemberment of their land, was that Britain and France guaranteed the new frontiers against unprovoked aggression. Germany was also asked to do so, but never did.

Winston Churchill, a rebel back-bench member of Parliament with patchy influence, stood up in the House of Commons and said: ‘We have sustained a total, unmitigated defeat. We are in the midst of a disaster of the first magnitude … And do not suppose that this is the end. It is only the beginning.’ He was shouted down by his fellow members of Parliament.

Any last idea that Chamberlain, and his colleagues, were temporizing, permitting Hitler to march into the Sudetenland to give Britain time to rearm, is refuted by Chamberlain himself. When, after the Munich meeting, Lord Swinton (one-time secretary of state for Air) said to Chamberlain: ‘I will support you, Prime Minister, provided that you are clear that you have been buying time for rearmament,’ Chamberlain would have none of it. He took from his pocket the declaration that Hitler had so cynically signed and said: ‘But don’t you see, I have brought back peace.’

Most of the cabinet, in fact most of the British public, tried to believe that the joint Anglo-German declaration affirming that the British and German peoples would ‘never go to war with one another again’ meant the ‘peace for our time’ which Chamberlain promised. But, according to Chamberlain’s account of that meeting, when Hitler went to sign the declaration there was no ink in the inkwell. A more wary man might have wondered about the sincerity of German preparations that didn’t include filling the inkwells.

The German occupiers of the Sudeten region treated the Czechs spitefully. Families who had lived in the same house for many generations were expelled without household goods or farm animals. SS Einsatzkommandos – a newly formed unit which later, in occupied regions of Poland and the USSR, organized mass murders – were manning the checkpoints to be sure the Czechs took nothing with them. When Hitler, on a tour of inspection, noticed Czech refugees being given bread and soup from German field kitchens he asked General Reichenau: ‘Why do we waste good German bread on those pigs?’ In fact the bread was good Czech bread.

Some Germans were shocked at this first sight of the behaviour of Himmler’s SS units. One Abwehr (Army Intelligence) officer wrote in his diary: ‘The SS Standarte Germania has murdered, pillaged and evicted in a bestial fashion. I saw one unfortunate girl who had been raped nine times by a gang of these rascals while her father had been murdered … these troops believe all they have read in the newspapers about Czech atrocities against our brothers.’

Those Sudeten Germans who had encouraged Hitler’s claim, by totally unfounded complaints about the Prague government’s treatment of them, gained no lasting advantage. After the war ended, all the Sudeten Germans were unceremoniously deported back into Germany at a few hours’ notice.

Appeasement

On 9 October 1938, only days after his triumph at Munich, Hitler made a speech at Saarbrücken in which he attacked the Western powers and forecast that soon warmongers would take control of Britain. It was a reference to Churchill and any others who objected to Chamberlain’s appeasement policy.

In those days before worldwide electronic communications, such as satellite telephones, the role of an ambassador could be vital. It was unfortunate for all concerned that so many of the ambassadors involved were men of low calibre. America’s man in London was Joseph Kennedy, father of the future US president. He was rabidly anti-British and had long since decided (not without some reason) that Britain would not long survive a clash with Germany. The American ambassador in Paris was a man who saw Bolshevik conspiracies everywhere he looked. As their ambassador in Berlin, Britain’s cabinet had to depend upon Nevile Henderson, of whom William Shirer – an American journalist and historian who was at the time resident in Berlin – wrote as a footnote in his memoirs:

I have tried to be as objective as possible about Sir Nevile Henderson, but it has been difficult. From the moment of his arrival in Berlin he struck me as being not only sympathetic to Nazism but to Nazism’s aims. The ambassador did not try to hide his personal approval of Hitler’s taking Austria and then Czechoslovakia – he seemed to loathe the Czechs as much as Hitler did.

But worse than Henderson’s personal prejudices were his personal limitations. Sir L.B. Namier, the British historian, summed them up: ‘Conceited, vain, self-opinionated, rigidly adhering to his pre-conceived ideas, he poured out telegrams, dispatches and letters in unbelievable numbers and of formidable length, repeating a hundred times the same ill-founded views and ideas. Obtuse enough to be a menace and not stupid enough to be innocuous, he proved un homme néfaste [a very bad fellow].’

By the end of 1938 the threat of war was giving the British government economic worries. In April that year Britain was holding a healthy reserve of £800 million in gold, but appearances were deceptive. The money belonged largely to foreigners seeking a safe haven for their funds. The threat of war and the fact that Britain seemed unready for it

caused some £150 million in gold to move out of the country between April and September. Britain’s economy was not resilient enough to cope with such swings of fortune. The cost of the First World War was still a burden on the taxpayer, despite the fact that the war debt to the United States was never paid. The Treasury had repeatedly warned that Britain could not afford to fight a major war lasting three years or more. The armed services all needed money and the government’s headache was made worse by the ever-growing cost of modern armaments.

The reluctance to spend money was most apparent in cabinet on 2 February 1939 when the secretary of state for war, Leslie Hore-Belisha, sought £81 million to re-equip six divisions of the Regular army and four divisions of the Territorials. Chamberlain was against spending such money, saying that Britain’s financial strength would be a decisive factor in any future war. But the French, fearing that the British might be no more than spectators in a future war, had been insisting that the British prepare an army to fight on French soil. In the event, it was decided to re-equip all the twelve Territorial divisions but not the Regular army.

Having occupied the Sudetenland, Hitler encouraged Slovakia – a large section of the dismembered country – to demand autonomy. Nazi demands upon the Prague government became more and more outrageous: Czechoslovakia must leave the League of Nations, reduce the size of its army, turn over part of its gold reserves to the Reichsbank, outlaw the Jews in line with the Nuremberg Laws the Nazis had passed. Inevitably, in March 1939, the Germans took over the whole of Czechoslovakia. Bohemia and Moravia were declared a German ‘protectorate’. Hitler went to Prague and spent the night in the President’s Palace, the castle which was to become the German administrative centre. Soldiers and Nazi party members wearing the red and black ribbon given to those who had ‘rendered valuable service’ in organizing the occupation of the Sudetenland, now got a ‘Prague castle bar’ – Prager Burg Spange