The Gathering Storm: The Second World War (41 page)

Mr. Feiling tells us that the Prime Minister expressed his mood in a letter to his sister on March 20:

The plan of the “Grand Alliance,” as Winston calls it, had occurred to me long before he mentioned it…. I talked about it to Halifax, and we submitted it to the Chiefs of Staff and F.O. experts. It is a very attractive idea; indeed, there is almost everything to be said for it until you come to examine its practicability. From that moment its attraction vanishes. You have only to look at the map to see that nothing that France or we could do could possibly save Czechoslovakia from being overrun by the Germans, if they wanted to do it…. I have, therefore, abandoned any idea of giving guarantee to Czechoslovakia, or to the French in connection with her obligations to that country.
⁸

Here was at any rate a decision. It was taken on wrong arguments. In modern wars of great nations or alliances particular areas are not defended only by local exertions. The whole vast balance of the war front is involved. This is still more true of policy before war begins and while it may still be averted. It surely did not take much thought from the “Chiefs of Staff and F.O. experts” to tell the Prime Minister that the British Navy and the French Army could not be deployed on the Bohemian mountain front to stand between the Czechoslovak Republic and Hitler’s invading army. This was indeed evident from the map. But the certainty that the crossing of the Bohemian frontier line would have involved a general European war might well even at that date have deterred or delayed Hitler’s next assault. How erroneous Mr. Chamberlain’s private and earnest reasoning appears when we cast our minds forward to the guarantee he was to give to Poland
within a year,
after all the strategic value of Czechoslovakia had been cast away, and Hitler’s power and prestige had almost doubled!

* * * * *

On March 24, 1938, in the House of Commons, the Prime Minister gave us his view about the Russian move:

His Majesty’s Government are of the opinion that the indirect but none the less inevitable consequence of such action as is proposed by the Soviet Government would be to aggravate the tendency towards the establishment of exclusive groups of nations which must in the view of His Majesty’s Government be inimical to the prospects of European peace.

Nevertheless, the Prime Minister could not avoid facing the brutal fact that there existed a “profound disturbance of international confidence,” and that the Government would have, sooner or later, to decide upon a definition of Great Britain’s obligations in Europe. What would be our obligations in Central Europe? “If war broke out, it would be unlikely to be confined to those who have assumed legal obligations. It would be quite impossible to say where it would end and what Governments might be involved.” It must further be observed that the argument about the evils of “exclusive groups of nations” loses its validity if the alternative is being mopped-up one by one by the aggressor. Moreover, it overlooks all questions of right and wrong in international relationships. There was, after all, in existence the League of Nations and its Charter.

The Prime Minister’s course was now marked out: simultaneous diplomatic pressure on Berlin and Prague, appeasement in regard to Italy, a strictly restrained definition of our obligations to France. To carry out the first two moves, it was essential to be careful and precise about the last.

* * * * *

The reader is now invited to move westward to the Emerald Isle. “It’s a long way to Tipperary,” but a visit there is sometimes irresistible. In the interval between Hitler’s seizure of Austria and his unfolding design upon Czechoslovakia, we must turn to a wholly different kind of misfortune which befell us.

Since the beginning of 1938 there had been negotiations between the British Government and that of Mr. de Valera in Southern Ireland, and on April 25 an agreement was signed whereby among other matters Great Britain renounced all rights to occupy for naval purposes the two Southern Irish ports of Queenstown and Berehaven, and the base in Lough Swilly. The two southern ports were a vital feature in the naval defence of our food supply. When in 1922, as Colonial and Dominions Secretary, I had dealt with the details of the Irish Settlement which the Cabinet of those days had made, I brought Admiral Beatty to the Colonial Office to explain to Michael Collins the importance of these ports to our whole system of bringing supplies into Britain. Collins was immediately convinced. “Of course you must have the ports,” he said, “they are necessary for your life.” Thus the matter was arranged, and everything had worked smoothly in the sixteen years that had passed. The reason why Queenstown and Berehaven were necessary to our safety is easy to understand. They were the fuelling-bases from which our destroyer flotillas ranged westward into the Atlantic to hunt U-boats, and protect incoming convoys as they reached the throat of the Narrow Seas. Lough Swilly was similarly needed to protect the approaches to the Clyde and Mersey. To abandon these meant that our flotillas would have to start in the north from Lamlash and in the south from Pembroke Dock or Falmouth, thus decreasing their radius of action and the protection they could afford by more than four hundred miles out and home.

It was incredible to me that the Chiefs of Staff should have agreed to throw away this major security, and to the last moment I thought that at least we had safeguarded our right to occupy these Irish ports in the event of war. However, Mr. de Valera announced in the Dail that no conditions of any kind were attached to the cession. I was later assured that Mr. de Valera was surprised at the readiness with which the British Government had deferred to his request. He had included it in his proposals as a bargaining-counter which could be dispensed with when other points were satisfactorily settled.

Lord Chatfield has in his last book devoted a chapter to explaining the course he and the other Chiefs of Staff took.
⁹
This should certainly be read by those who wish to pursue the subject. Personally I remain convinced that the gratuitous surrender of our right to use the Irish ports in war was a major injury to British national life and safety. A more feckless act can hardly be imagined – and at such a time. It is true that in the end we survived without the ports. It is also true that if we had not been able to do without them, we should have retaken them by force rather than perish by famine. But this is no excuse. Many a ship and many a life were soon to be lost as the result of this improvident example of appeasement.

The whole Conservative Party, except the handful of Ulster Members, supported the Prime Minister, and of course a step like this was meat and drink to the Labour and Liberal Opposition. I was, therefore, almost entirely alone when on May 5 I rose to make my protest. I was listened to with a patient air of scepticism. There was even a kind of sympathetic wonder that anyone of my standing should attempt to plead so hopeless a case. I never saw the House of Commons more completely misled. It was but fifteen months to the declaration of war. The Members were to feel very differently about it when our existence hung in the balance during the Battle of the Atlantic. As my speech has been fully published in
Into Battle,
I do not quote it here save on one point. The issue of Southern Irish neutrality in time of war was not faced.

What guarantee [I asked] have you that Southern Ireland, or the Irish Republic as they claim to be, will not declare neutrality if we are engaged in war with some powerful nation? The first step certainly which such an enemy would take would be to offer complete immunity of every kind to Southern Ireland if she would remain neutral…. You cannot exclude this possibility of neutrality as being one which may come within the immediate sphere of our experience. The ports may be denied us in the hour of need, and we may be hampered in the gravest manner in protecting the British population from privation and even starvation. Who would wish to put his head in such a noose? Is there any other country in the world where such a step would even have been contemplated? It would be an easy step for a Dublin Government to deny the ports to us once we have gone. The cannon are there, the mines will be there. But more important for this purpose, the juridical right will be there. You had the rights; you have ceded them; you hope in their place to have good will strong enough to endure tribulation for your sake. Suppose you have it not. It will be no use saying, “then we will retake the ports.” You will have no right to do so. To violate Irish neutrality should it be declared at the moment of a Great War may put you out of court in the opinion of the world, and may vitiate the cause by which you may be involved in war…. You are casting away real and important means of security and survival for vain shadows and for ease.

The comment of
The Times
newspaper was illuminating:

The agreement on defence … releases the Government of the United Kingdom from the articles of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, by which they assumed the onerous and delicate task of defending the fortified harbours of Cork, Berehaven, and Lough Swilly in the event of war.

Further releases might have been obtained by handing over Gibraltar to Spain and Malta to Italy. Neither touched the actual existence of our population more directly.

With that I leave this lamentable and amazing episode.

An Unlikely Historical Controversy
—
Hitler’s Next Objective — “No Evil Intentions Towards Czechoslovakia
” —
M. Blum’s Pledge
—
My Visit to Paris, March,
1938
— M. Daladier Succeeds M. Blum
—
The Anglo-Italian Pact
—
An Interview with the Sudeten Leader
—
Misgivings and Reluctance of the German Generals
—
The Relations of Soviet Russia with Czechoslovakia
—
Stalin and Benes
—
Plot and Purge in Russia
—
M. Daladier’s Declaration of June
12
— Hitler’s Promise to Keitel — Captain Wiedemann’s Mission to London
—
I Address My Constituents at Theydon Bois, August
27
— My Letter to Lord Halifax of August
31
— The Soviet Ambassador’s Visit to Chartwell
—
My Report to the Foreign Office — “The Times” Leading Article of September
7
— M. Bonnet’s Question and the British Answer
—
Hitler’s Crisis Speech at Nuremberg.

F
OR SOME YEARS
It seemed that the question whether Britain and France were wise or foolish in the Munich episode would become a matter of long historical controversy. However, the revelations which have been made from German sources, and particularly at the Nuremberg Trials, have rendered this unlikely. The two main issues in dispute were: first, whether decisive action by Britain and France would have forced Hitler to recede or have led to his overthrow by a military conspiracy; secondly, whether the year that intervened between Munich and the outbreak of war placed the Western Powers relatively in a better or worse position, compared with Germany, than in September, 1938.

Many volumes have been written, and will be written, upon the crisis that was ended at Munich by the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia; and it is only intended here to give a few of the cardinal facts and establish the main proportions of events. These follow inexorably from Hitler’s resolve to reunite all Germans in a Greater Reich and to expand eastwards, and his conviction that the men at the head of France and Britain would not fight owing to their love of peace and failure to rearm. The usual technique was employed against Czechoslovakia. The grievances, which were not unreal, of the Sudeten Germans were magnified and exploited. The public case was opened against Czechoslovakia by Hitler in his speech to the Reichstag on February 20, 1938. “Over ten million Germans,” he said, “live in two of the states adjoining our frontier.” It was the duty of Germany to protect those fellow Germans and secure to them “general freedom, personal, political, and ideological.”

This public announcement of the intention of the German Government to interest themselves in the position of the German inhabitants of Austria and Czechoslovakia was intimately related to the secret planning of Germany’s political offensive in Europe. The declared objectives of the Nazi German Government were twofold – the absorption by the Reich of all German minorities living beyond her frontiers, and thereby the extension of her living space in the East. The less publicised purpose of German policy was military in character – the liquidation of Czechoslovakia with its potentialities both as a Russian air base and as an Anglo-French military makeweight in event of war. As early as June, 1937, the German General Staff had been, on Hitler’s instructions, busy at work drafting plans for the invasion and destruction of the Czechoslovak State.