Gandhi & Churchill (74 page)

The one sour note was sounded by Winston Churchill. That evening he stopped with a friend at a restaurant near the Savoy Hotel. The crowd inside was delighted, even ecstatic, that Chamberlain and Hitler had agreed there would be no need for war. The pair stood watching for a moment in the doorway. “I was acutely conscious of the brooding figure beside me,” his companion noted later. “As we turned away, [Churchill] muttered, ‘Those poor people! They little know what they will have to face.’”
³⁸

Churchill’s gloom was matched only by his frustration. For almost five years he had fought a single-minded campaign against the idea that Hitler’s ambitions could be satisfied by negotiation and concession—the policy called, then and now, “appeasement.” The Munich agreement was appeasement’s masterpiece.
³⁹
It also marked appeasement’s end.

“This is only the beginning of the reckoning,” Churchill thundered in the House of Commons on October 6. “This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year.” Many were already realizing the enormity of what had happened, and that despite Hitler’s declaration—“This marks the end of Germany’s territorial demands”—the agreement was worthless the moment it was signed.

Permanent Foreign Undersecretary Oliver Harvey noted the “vast crowds” and “hysterical enthusiasm” but also saw that “many feel it to be a great humiliation.” Almost a week earlier Leo Amery, no Churchill fan, wrote to Lord Halifax: “Almost everyone I have met has been horrified by the so-called ‘peace’ we have forced upon the Czechs.”
⁴⁰
Chamberlain himself realized that the emotional tide was about to turn even as he made his way from Heston airport. “All this will be over in three months,” he said as he gazed at the smiling throngs.

Indeed, the next six months would see a reversal of public opinion so sweeping and stunning that it would turn Chamberlain from a shining hero into a discredited scapegoat, and turn Winston Churchill from political pariah into national savior.

Those bitter years before Munich have passed into Churchillian legend as the Wilderness Years, with Churchill as a prophet without honor in his own country. Certainly the sequence of totalitarian advance and democratic retreat during that time is all too familiar.

It began in 1935 with Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, which the League of Nations and the Western powers opposed but could not decide how to stop. In 1936 came the outbreak of civil war in Spain, with Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union all pulling the strings and encouraging the slaughter. That same year Hitler broke the Versailles treaty by remilitarizing the Rhineland and Germany’s frontier with France, while Britain and France did nothing. The year before Hitler had repudiated all treaty restrictions on German armaments. Britain’s only response was to sign a naval agreement with Hitler, vainly hoping to limit the size of any future German fleet by treaty with a man who had manifestly shown that treaties meant nothing to him. “Such a view seems to be the acme of gullibility” was Churchill’s choleric comment.
⁴¹

The following year, in July 1937, shortly after Neville Chamberlain became prime minister, Japan declared war on China. In March 1938 Hitler occupied Austria while the Western powers sat idly by; and on September 30 he and they signed the Munich agreement partitioning Czechoslovakia. At each step, with every negotiation and conference, British prime ministers Baldwin and Chamberlain and their French counterparts made every accommodation and bent every principle in order to avoid being sucked into war. And at each step the appetite of the dictators grew more insatiable, and their demands bolder—just as Churchill and a handful of followers predicted.

For four long years Churchill trudged day after day into the House of Commons to voice his warnings about Hitler, Mussolini, and the need for Britain to rearm. Usually he spoke to an empty chamber, with only Brendan Bracken or Bob Boothby sitting loyally nearby. At other times the chamber might be full, but only with Conservatives who came to hoot derisively at Churchill’s impotent fury, or to hear Prime Minister Chamberlain or Secretary of War Leslie Hore-Belisha deliver some withering counterblast, which would set them cheering. The king and queen considered Churchill’s speeches dangerous and hateful. By the time of Munich a movement had developed among formerly loyal supporters to oust him from his parliamentary seat.
⁴²

In retrospect Churchill’s dogged persistence has an irresistible heroic quality. Kipling’s “If” (Gandhi’s favorite poem) contains the lines:

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you…

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting…

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating…

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

By that measure these were the years when Churchill the man first rose to greatness.

He may have exaggerated German air strength and the speed and size of Hitler’s rearmament.
⁴³
Undeniably his own policies at the Exchequer in the 1920s had critically weakened the British navy and army.
^*93
It is also true that his lingering regard for Mussolini led him to dodge the question of how to halt Italian aggression in Abyssinia, and that his sympathy for the Nationalist leader General Francisco Franco made him wobbly on Spain, instead of insisting that Britain oppose intervention there by all foreign powers, including the Soviet Union.

But the fact remains that Churchill’s basic argument against appeasement was correct. No amount of accommodation or compromise was going to gratify the appetite for territory and power on the part of the world’s rising totalitarian states, especially Germany. As a student of history, Churchill saw in Hitler a peculiarly sinister force that others missed. Even in 1930, when Hitler was still a second-rate politician, Churchill warned a German Foreign Office emissary that Hitler wanted far more than just to remedy the “injustices” of Versailles.
⁴⁴
In November 1932, after Hitler had gained a majority in the German Reichstag and was invited into the government, Churchill foretold, “Do not believe that all that Germany is asking for is equal status…All these bands of sturdy Teutonic youths, marching through the streets and roads of Germany…are not looking for status. They are looking for weapons…and when they have those will demand lost territories and colonies, and shatter the foundations of Europe.”
⁴⁵
By 1934 he was warning that the German people are “the most powerful and most dangerous nation in the western world.”
⁴⁶

The problem was that no one believed him. When he warned of a terrible looming “conflict of spiritual and moral ideas,” Britons only wanted to be left alone. When he argued that only the threat of armed force could stop Hitler—“we must arm ourselves so that the good cause may not find itself at a hopeless disadvantage against the aggressor”—others heard needless warmongering. Even as late as 1938 most people found Churchill’s rhetoric overblown and his warnings against the Nazis exaggerated. (A few historians still do.)
⁴⁷

This skepticism was especially prevalent among his fellow Conservatives. “W. C. they regard with complete mistrust,” Nancy Dugdale, wife of a leading Tory, wrote in summing up the feelings of her husband’s colleagues. “W. C. is really the counterpart of Goering in England…bloated with ego and over-feeding, the same treachery running through his veins, punctuated by heroics and hot air.” Those words were written on May 12, 1940, just four days after Churchill had become prime minister.
⁴⁸

Contrary to myth, the distrust of and disbelief in Churchill did
not
spring from a cavalier disregard of the German threat. Many people, especially in the armed services, were worried about German war preparations and British weakness, although few were willing to speak out as forthrightly as Churchill. Major Desmond Morton of the Industrial Intelligence Center passed him confidential estimates of growing German air strength. The general in charge of Britain’s mobile armored forces personally gave him a detailed account of how obsolete and out-classed his tanks were. A steady stream of “leaks” like these from reliable sources gave Churchill valuable ammunition for his thunderous speeches in the House of Commons.
^*94
49

Nor did the British political establishment turn against Churchill because they were somehow sympathetic with the Nazis. The idea that appeasement was driven by “guilty men” who were willing to sell out Britain and bolster Hitler in order to protect themselves against the Left is a myth. A handful, notably Oswald Mosley and the Duke of Windsor, openly approved of Hitler, but none had any direct influence on policy. More thought that if they had no choice, they could accept a Nazi-dominated Eastern Europe as a useful bulwark against Bolshevism. (Churchill, the ultimate anti-Bolshevik, was not among them.) But no one, least of all Neville Chamberlain, was willing to accept that dominance without putting up a struggle, or would deliberately betray British interests.

The truth is that Churchill’s exclusion from influence and power was the direct result of his conduct in the India debates. He had cried wolf for nearly five years, forecasting doom and destruction if the Government of India Bill passed: “a catastrophe that will shake the world,” he had called it. Then the bill passed, and nothing happened. Rarely had a politician been proved so hopelessly wrong, after nearly wrecking his own political party in the process. When he forecast doom again, over Germany, few were inclined to believe him, least of all Conservatives.

Also contrary to myth, he was never a complete political pariah. More than once his name appeared on lists for prospective cabinet posts. He came closest in 1935, when the post of minister for coordination of defense was created. (It went to Thomas Inskip instead.) As late as March 1938 he was under consideration for air minister or even a return to the Admiralty.
⁵⁰

But the appointments never came. Years later, when Stanley Baldwin’s biographer G. M. Young asked the former prime minister what had kept Churchill out of the running for any cabinet office and alienated him from his party, Baldwin answered in one word: “India.”
⁵¹

Churchill’s long battle against Dominion status for India had crippled his effectiveness when it was most needed. At the same time it safeguarded the reputation of the men he had attacked. The champions of the Government of India Act—Baldwin, Sir Samuel Hoare, and Lord Irwin—became the principal architects of appeasement. Tories who battled Churchill in the rancorous debates over India, rising young politicians like R. A. Butler, fought him just as hard over how to deal with Hitler.

Their principles also remained the same. Nationalism, they believed, whether among Indians or Irishmen or Germans, was the trend of the future. It could not be resisted. Using repression or threatening armed force only inflamed passions and aroused more anger and discontent. The only solution was face-to-face negotiation and give-and-take compromise. The success of the new constitution in India seemed to prove that “nations became calm and pacified when their just claims were met.”
⁵²
In this sense, the final fruit of the Gandhi-Irwin pact was the Hitler-Chamberlain agreement in Munich.

Certainly Lord Halifax made his experiences in dealing with Gandhi into his touchstone for dealing with Hitler. In July 1936, right after German troops reentered the Rhineland, Sir John Simon’s former private secretary Thomas Stopford put the question to him. “Is there not a certain similarity” between Hitler and Gandhi? he asked.

Halifax enthusiastically agreed. Both men had the same “strong inferiority complex, the same idealism, the belief in the divine mission to lead his people and the same difficulty with unruly lieutenants”—as if Nehru and Prasad were khadi versions of Herman Göring and Ernst Röhm. Halifax told another friend that Hitler “reminded him of Gandhi in that he has a message to deliver…a prophetic message.” Having cut through the rhetoric of an obstreperous man like Gandhi to strike a deal, surely he could do the same with a “very nasty” but “inspired” man like Hitler.
⁵³

Even two years later, as one disappointment followed another, Halifax’s basic view did not change. He wrote to the governor of Madras, Lord Erskine: “I cannot help contrasting my period at the India Office with the work I do now,” in arranging a deal with Hitler. To Halifax they involved addressing the same set of problems, assuaging the same hurt feelings. “The main difference between the two nations is that a mild Hindu is probably less alarming than the vigorous Prussian.”
⁵⁴

To Halifax and his appeasement allies, establishing peace in Europe seemed no different from drawing up the Communal Award. In dividing up the spoils of power, they had to make sure no one felt excluded. And if one could shape a more just settlement in India by splitting Muslim Sind from Hindu Bombay, or Orissa from Bihar, as was done in 1935, then why not do the same for the German Sudetens in Czechoslovakia? For years critics had deplored the subjection of three million Germans to an alien Czech and Slovak majority. One of those critics had been a leading socialist, H. N. Brailsford. From that perspective, as historian A. J. P. Taylor noted, Munich had been “a triumph for those who had preached equal justice between peoples.”
⁵⁵
The same was certainly true of the India Act.