Gandhi & Churchill (78 page)

No one, with the possible exception of Mr Horabin, had seen Churchill as a potential war leader, let alone prime minister. Conventional wisdom had simply crystallized around the notion that putting Churchill in the Admiralty or the Air Ministry would show Hitler that Britons were finally, really serious about halting aggression. It would “send a message” that could not be missed—or so people hoped. A leading German minister in Hitler’s cabinet wanted the same message and secretly communicated that wish to an official in the Foreign Office. “Churchill is the only Englishman Hitler is afraid of,” the German was reported to say. “The mere fact of giving him a leading ministerial post would convince Hitler that [the English] really meant to stand up to him.”
³⁴

Most still hoped that Britain might avoid war somehow, by making the right statements or sending the right signals. If Churchill was aware of such hopes, however, he did not care. He predicted that Poland would be the next hot spot (not a difficult guess) and was furiously trying to assess the state of British readiness as if he were already in the cabinet. Harold Nicolson caught him buttonholing the Russian ambassador in the Commons smoking room and heard him growl, “Now look here, Mr. Ambassador, if we are to make a success of this new policy, we require the help of Russia.”
³⁵
Meanwhile old friends like Reggie Barnes from the Boer War days were sending him letters and telegrams, stating baldly, “England owes you many apologies.”
³⁶

Winston, sensing that the capricious winds of public opinion were shifting in his direction, wanted to communicate to the men he had excoriated as spineless appeasers that he was willing to let bygones be bygones. That magnanimity even extended as far as India, as Churchill himself hinted in a speech at the 1900 Club on June 21. The guest of honor was Lord Halifax, and Churchill was happy to speak on the ex-viceroy’s behalf. “If differences remain,” he told the assembled members, gesturing toward the former viceroy, “they will only be upon emphasis and method, upon timing and degree.” He might have been referring to dealing with the Indian Congress or to Hitler; in Churchill’s forgiving mind, it no longer mattered.
³⁷

The threat of war drew closer. By July 1939 even cabinet members, especially the younger ones, were urging Chamberlain to bring Churchill on board. But he still refused. “Winston Churchill’s nomination to the Cabinet,” he told friends as early as April, “would send a message of open warfare to Berlin.” Chamberlain had served with Churchill since the 1920s; he had seen his bold, reckless plans go awry at the Exchequer and during the General Strike. “If you did not agree with him,” Chamberlain confessed to Lord Camrose on July 3, “he was liable to lose his temper and a number of his colleagues had found that the easier way was not to oppose him,” with disastrous results. Chamberlain was determined not to repeat earlier mistakes. Besides, Chamberlain told Camrose, “I have not yet given up hopes of peace.”
³⁸
Chamberlain clung to that forlorn hope even after Hitler and Stalin signed their nonaggression pact on August 26, securing Germany’s eastern flank, and even as German panzers massed on the Polish frontier on August 31.

Churchill, meanwhile, was feverishly preparing for war more conscientiously than the government was. To clear the decks, in a prodigious feat of concentration and endurance, he virtually finished his
History of the English-Speaking Peoples
. Over the tense summer its theme had bucked him up: “the growth of freedom and law, of the rights of the individual, of the subordination of the State to the fundamental and moral conceptions of an ever-comprehending community.” They were the principles at stake in the coming fight, Churchill felt. And “of these ideas the English-speaking peoples were the authors, then the trustees, and must now become the armed champions,” as he wrote to his assistant Maurice Ashley.
³⁹

In August he made a final visit to France, to inspect its Maginot Line defenses and meet various French commanders in chief. He and a friend took a break to do some painting at Dreux. That same day 375 members of the staff of every British university signed an appeal to the
Times
asking Chamberlain to put Churchill in the government.

On the other side of the Channel, Winston and his friend Paul Maze painted silently side by side. The sun was bright and warm, the air breathtakingly clear. In Europe the summer of 1939 was one of the most beautiful in years. Churchill remarked, “This is the last picture we shall paint in peace for a very long time.”

He made some more brushstrokes, squinting with his usual concentration. Then he said, “They are strong, I tell you, they are strong,” referring to the Germans. A few more brushstrokes, and then Churchill’s jaw clenched in determination, his cigar bristling. “Ah,” he said in a deep growl, “with it all, we shall have them.”
⁴⁰

Churchill returned to England a couple of days later. At eight-thirty on the morning of September 1 the Polish ambassador phoned Chartwell to tell Winston that the German invasion had begun. At ten Churchill phoned General Edmund Ironside at the War Office. “They’ve started,” Churchill said. “Warsaw and Cracow are being bombed now.” That afternoon he drove down to London.

There the War Office had ordered full mobilization starting at two o’clock. The House of Commons was to meet at six. At Chamberlain’s request Churchill stopped at Number 10 for a quick meeting. Chamberlain said: “The die is cast.” He intended, he said, to create a War Cabinet of Ministers without departments; he asked Winston to join it. Winston instantly agreed and hurried off to the House of Commons.
⁴¹

All that night and the next day Churchill waited for the final summons, pacing back and forth in the Commons smoking room. Sir Maurice Hankey caught sight of him holding forth in a circle of his cronies. “He was brimful of ideas, some good, others not so good,” Hankey wrote the next day. “I only wish he didn’t give one the impression that he does himself too well!” But even Hankey admitted that Churchill’s presence was “heartening and big.”

Hour by hour Churchill paced back and forth, “like a lion in a cage,” his secretary Mrs. Hill remembered. He was expecting a call; but the call never came.
⁴²

At the last minute Chamberlain had lost his nerve. Even as German Stukas were pounding Polish airfields and German panzers were driving deep into Poland, Chamberlain announced to the House of Commons that night that “if the German Government should agree to withdraw their forces, then His Majesty’s Government would be willing to regard the position as being the same” as if no attack had occurred at all.

Appeasement was making its last stand. The House was appalled. “There was no doubt that the temper of the House was for war,” Churchill remembered later. “I deemed it even more resolute and united than in the similar scene on August 3, 1914, in which I had also taken part.”
⁴³
Everyone sat in disbelief that Chamberlain was making one last futile gesture to halt the inevitable.

Then a single figure sprang to his feet. It was not Churchill but his old antagonist over India, Leopold Amery. They had been to school together, and in South Africa. They had clashed over free trade (Amery was a devout imperial protectionist) and over the Empire and India—and they would clash again. Privately, Amery considered Churchill a reckless anachronism, a relic from a defunct Whiggish past who would do Britain more harm than good.

But Amery had also stood foursquare against appeasement and, in spite of himself, had even cheered some of Churchill’s furious antigovernment speeches. Now, listening to Chamberlain’s diffident droning voice explain once again why it was best to do nothing, Amery could stand it no longer. As Arthur Greenwood rose to speak for the Labour Opposition, Amery suddenly burst out:

“Speak for England!”

A stunned silence, then deafening cheers broke out on all sides. With three simple words Amery had saved the situation—and saved Winston Churchill’s career. Just before midnight Chamberlain met with his cabinet again. “I never heard the Prime Minister so disturbed,” Halifax recalled. The cabinet agreed, including Halifax and Sir John Simon, that there could be no more equivocation.
⁴⁴
Britain issued one final ultimatum (the last of three) to Germany asking it to stop the attack on Poland. When it became clear that Germany would not, at eleven-fifteen on September 3 a reluctant and dispirited Chamberlain announced to the British nation that they were at war.

After his speech air raid sirens sounded all across London—the first of many for the next five years. Churchill went up onto the roof of Morpeth Mansions to see “what was going on,” as he wrote later. To his pleasure and surprise, thirty or forty antiaircraft barrage balloons were already lifting their heads up “in the clear, cool September sunlight.” Then, “armed with a bottle of brandy and other appropriate medical comforts,” he and Clementine headed for the bomb shelter down the street.
⁴⁵

“A very strong sense of calm came over me,” he said as he sat in the House of Commons later that evening. Chamberlain announced to resounding cheers, “I hope I may live to see the day when Hitlerism is destroyed.”
^*96
Then, after Labour and Liberal leaders had their turn, Churchill spoke.

“We must not underrate the gravity of the task which lies before us,” he said, “or the severity of the ordeal, to which we shall not be found unequal.

This is not a question of fighting for Danzig or fighting for Poland. We fight to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defense of all that is most sacred in man. This is no war of domination or imperial aggrandizement or material gain; no war to shut any country out of its sunlight and means of progress. It is a war…to establish on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man.

Afterward, Leo Amery admitted to his diary: “I think I see Winston emerging as PM out of it all by the end of the year.”
⁴⁶

By now Churchill knew what his post in Chamberlain’s cabinet would be: First Lord of the Admiralty, the same as in 1914. That afternoon the signal went out to the entire British fleet: “Winston’s back.” Duff Cooper’s wife Diana accompanied him as he drove down to Admiralty House in the early evening.

As they turned the corner at the Horse Guards Parade, they came upon roll after roll of concertina barbed wire in front of the Admiralty. The instant war was declared, the wire had gone up all around Whitehall as a security precaution. The sight, however, startled Churchill’s companion.

“Great God!” Diana Cooper exclaimed. “What’s
that
for?”

Churchill smiled and then growled, “That’s to keep me out.”
⁴⁷

Then the sentries recognized their new first lord, saluted, and waved them through. In a moment the car pulled up at the front door, where his secretary Kathleen Hill was waiting for him. She went with him as he strode into the First Lord’s Room and watched as he eased himself into the same chair he had last occupied twenty-four years before.

In the paneling behind the desk was a cupboard. Winston suddenly stood up and flung the door open with a dramatic gesture. There behind the paneling was a large map still showing the location of all German ships in the North Sea on the day he left the Admiralty in 1915—as if frozen in time.

“Once again we must fight for life and honor against all the might and fury of the valiant, disciplined, and ruthless German race,” he thought to himself. “Once again! So be it.”
⁴⁸

He was wrong. This war would be very different from its predecessor, far more complicated and destructive. Unlike the last one it would reach to the farthest ends of the British Empire, even to India. In fact, at almost that very moment, at the Viceregal Lodge in Simla, a man was signing his name to a document that would hurl that side of the world into turmoil and trigger a chain of events that sent Churchill into his final confrontation with his old adversary, Mahatma Gandhi.

Chapter Twenty-three

COLLISION COURSE

1939–1940

The word “defeat” is not in my vocabulary.

MOHANDAS K. GANDHI
, 1940

V
ICTOR
A
LEXANDER
J
OHN
H
OPE
, S
ECOND
M
ARQUESS
of Linlithgow, did not look like a man who was about to change history. A shy, tall, and lean Scot, he had suffered from polio as a child.
^*97
He was in India not to open a dialogue with Indian nationalists, as Lord Irwin had done, nor to preserve the status quo, as Lord Willingdon had done. Rather, he had been sent out in April 1936 to make the new Indian constitution work.

In a sense, the constitution was his brainchild. As chairman of the Select Committee, he had painted its broader strokes—and in the process fought fiercely with Churchill. Far from being a hard-liner, Linlithgow saw a British-sponsored federation as the last best hope of keeping India in the empire. For three tiresome years he had struggled with the problems that the Government of India Act had not addressed: the communal problem; the issue of what to do about the princely states; and the battle over whether the Indian National Congress should accept offices in the various provinces and if so under what conditions. Gandhi had helped him solve the last one. Their discussions had led Linlithgow to take a liking to the Mahatma, whom he found “attractive and extremely shrewd,” even though “I judge him to be implacable in his hostility to British rule in India.”
¹