Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (42 page)

What if, instead of concentrating on her air defences, the British governments of the 1930s had built up a serious land force capable of resisting, if not deterring, a German invasion of France? What if Britain and France had resisted the German remilitarisation of the Rhineland in 1936? Hitler himself admitted: ‘If France had marched into the Rhineland’ - which had actually happened in the early 1920s - ‘we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs.’
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What if, despite the known weakness of Britain’s military capability, the government had indeed issued a clear signal - even if it was a bluff - of Britain’s intention to defend Czechoslovakia if it was attacked? What if Britain and France had persuaded Stalin to join them against Germany in 1939, instead of leaving him to succumb to the advances of Ribbentrop? These are among the acceptable counterfactual questions historians have for years asked about the 1930s. And yet the alternative scenarios envisaged are in fact far less plausible than the much less pleasant alternative - of a German victory over Britain.

Britain after the First World War was a shadow of the proud empire which had gone to war in 1914. Economically, the country struggled to turn back the clock to pre-war days, saddled with the huge debt incurred during the war and an economic obsession with restoring the pound’s lost value. From 1920 onwards, unemployment on an unprecedented scale was the recurrent affliction which condemned hundreds of thousands - and soon, for the first time, millions - to inactivity. In the wake of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the European financial crisis of 1931, capitalism itself appeared to be entering its death throes. This had two immediate political consequences which had profound implications for British foreign policy. First, the costs of social security rose as they had never before, growing far more rapidly than the sluggish economy. Secondly - and consequently - the money available for defence became more limited than it had been for over a hundred years. Between 1920 and 1938, British defence spending was consistently less than 5 per cent of national income per annum - less than at any time before or since; and this at a time when Britain’s imperial commitments had almost reached their maximum historic extent. As far as the Treasury was concerned, priority had to be given to the traditional pre-war policies of a strong currency and balanced budgets. In view of the enormous burden of debt run up during the war, and the persistent unemployment caused by the policy of deflation, this drastically reduced the amount of money available for defence. Yet the running down of British security worried only a few hawkish figures like Churchill, the former First Lord of the Admiralty during the First World War. And, unfortunately, he and his associates did not enjoy much popular support. During the Great War, Churchill had won for himself the reputation of a warmonger and, after the fiasco of Gallipoli, a bungler. Nor was that the only stain on his reputation. He was extremely unpopular with Labour because of his perceived hostility to the trade unions and the Russian Revolution. The Liberals thought him a block-head for his mismanagement of the economy as Chancellor in the 1920s, where, incidentally, he too had cut defence spending. And he also managed to make himself deeply unpopular with his own party during the 1930s by opposing the policy of political reform in India and then by espousing the cause of Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson.
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The majority of voters had had enough of war. It was not just the Communist Party - and its young recruits like Burgess, Philby, Maclean and Blunt at Cambridge - who were doctrinally opposed to all ‘imperialist’ war (until such times as Moscow changed its line). Nor was it just the Labour party which adopted a pacifist position summed up by its leader George Lansbury’s pledge ’to close every recruiting station, disband the army and disarm the Air Force’ - in short to ‘abolish the whole dreadful equipment of war’. Liberals like John Maynard Keynes and even the former wartime Prime Minister Lloyd George now regarded the Great War as having been a waste of young lives: the result of diplomatic blundering in 1914 which had done nothing to diminish Germany’s claim to European predominance and everything to aggrieve the German people. A great many Conservatives shared that sneaking sympathy with postwar Germany which was in many ways the foundation of appeasement.

To a great extent, the desire to avoid war was understandable. The apparently futile slaughter in the trenches had provoked a deep-rooted reaction against the whole idea that it was noble to die for one’s country - once the motto of a generation of brave (and short-lived) public-school-educated officers. In addition, there was a fear that technological advances would make any new war far more costly in terms of civilian lives than the First World War had been. ‘The bomber will always get through,’ prophesied the Prime Minister Baldwin. Churchill himself predicted that 40,000 Londoners would be killed or injured in the first week as a result of intensive aerial bombardment.
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The ideal of the American President Woodrow Wilson - that diplomacy should cease to be a matter of secret treaties and alliance, and should become the preserve of a new League of Nations - was an attractive one, as the ten million votes cast in the so-called Peace Ballot of 1934-5 revealed. Well-intentioned clergymen like Archbishops Temple of York and Lang of Canterbury were not the only ones to embrace the attractive but impracticable principle of ‘collective security’. It was in the debating chamber of the Oxford Union in 1933 that perhaps the most famous demonstration of such feelings took place - striking in that it was a demonstration by traditionally conservative Oxford men. Arguing for the motion ‘That this House refuses in any circumstances to fight for King and Country’, Cyril Joad warned his audience: ‘Bombers would be over Britain within twenty minutes of the declaration of war with a western European power. And a single bomb can poison every living thing in an area of three-quarters of a square mile.’ When the tellers tallied up the votes, the result was as clear as it was sensational: 275 votes for to 153 against. Churchill called it an ‘abject, squalid, shameless avowal ... a very disquieting and disgusting symptom’. But his son Randolph’s attempts to have the motion erased from the union’s minutes were defeated
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The combination of financial tightness and popular pacifism explains better than almost anything else the external weakness which characterised most of Neville Chamberlain’s ill-starred premiership. Under those circumstances, there seemed much to be said for a policy of appeasing a Germany which many people - influenced by Keynes - believed had been treated too harshly by the Peace of Versailles in 1919. Appeasement meant, in practice, granting Germany’s supposedly legitimate claims, in order to avert (or, at best, postpone) war. Paramount among these was the claim to ‘self-determination’, a term much used at the Versailles peace conference to justify independence for Poland, Czechoslovakia and other Central European countries; but deliberately not applied to Germany, which in fact had to give up around 10 per cent of its territory to its neighbours. The problem was that if all the Germans in Europe were united in a single Reich, the result would be bigger in extent than the Reich of 1914 - because such an entity would also include Austria, as well as parts of Czechoslovakia, Poland and Lithuania. This was the fundamental flaw in the policy of appeasement: Germany’s ‘back yard’ - a phrase used to justify the remilitarisation of the Rhineland - was much too big for the peace of Europe. Until disastrously late in the day, the advocates of appeasement - in particular, Halifax and the British ambassador in Berlin Nevile Henderson - failed to grasp this.

Halifax himself expressed the views of many aristocratic conservatives when he said about the Germans: ‘Nationalism, Racialism is a powerful force. But I can’t feel that it’s either unnatural or immoral! ... I cannot myself doubt that these fellows are genuine haters of Communism etc.! And I dare say if we were in their position we might feel the same!’ This rather patronising attitude - Halifax momentarily mistook Hitler for a footman when they first met and nearly handed him his coat - was characteristic. When the Führer told the former Viceroy how to deal with Indian nationalism (‘Shoot Gandhi’), Halifax ‘gazed at [him] with a mixture of astonishment, repugnance and compassion’. Similarly, Goering struck him as ‘a great schoolboy’. He could not help but ‘rather like ... the little man’ Goebbels. Yet in telling Hitler that ‘Danzig, Austria and Czechoslovakia’ were ‘questions [which] fall into the category of possible alterations in the European order which might be destined to come about with the passage of time’, Halifax handed him more than just a coat. He seemed to be handing him Central Europe.
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Of course, the strategy of appeasement was far from being an irrational policy in 1938, when Britain was militarily unready for a war which Germany seemed all too eager to fight. Hitler actually felt outmanoeuvred by Chamberlain, whose diplomatic efforts effectively denied him the war against Czechoslovakia he wanted and had been planning for since the spring of 1938. In the most recently published sections of his diaries, Goebbels described Chamberlain as an ‘ice cold’ ‘English fox’, frustrating Hitler’s desire for a short, sharp war with the Czechs by one ploy after another. Evidently, Chamberlain’s sometimes melodramatic diplomacy at Berchtesgaden succeeded in persuading the Germans that he was not bluffing about the risk of British intervention: ‘Things go so far’, wrote Goebbels,‘ that Chamberlain 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.’ On 28 September, Hitler was prompted to ask Chamberlain’s aide Sir Horace Wilson ‘straight out if England wants world war’, from which it might be inferred that he feared Chamberlain might. Goebbels, who six days before had been confident that ‘London is immeasurably frightened of force’, was obliged to conclude that ‘we have no peg for a war.... One cannot run the risk of a world war over amendments.’
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What if, instead of pressing for the fateful four-power conference at Munich, Chamberlain had confined himself to making an explicit guarantee to defend Czechoslovakia if it was attacked? We know that at its meeting of 30 August 1938 the Cabinet had agreed unanimously that ‘if Hitler went into Czechoslovakia we should declare war on him’; but that Chamberlain had insisted on keeping this commitment secret, as he did not wish to ‘utter a threat to Herr Hitler’. What if he had? Would that, as has often been suggested, have been the signal for a military coup against Hitler? It seems extremely unlikely - not least because the key figure, the Chief of Staff Ludwig Beck, had already resigned some days before the crucial Cabinet meeting (a fact not announced until the day after the Cabinet met). In any case, Chamberlain was dubious about the idea of overthrowing Hitler.
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‘Who will guarantee that Germany will not become Bolshevik afterwards?’ he asked the French General Gamelin on the eve of the Munich conference.

Today, we remember Munich as a gross betrayal of the Czechs - which it was. To avert war, Chamberlain effectively forced them to surrender not only the Sudetenland, but also their ability to defend themselves. Yet at the time Hitler saw this as a defeat, not a victory for his policy: he had wanted a quick, violent solution, not a diplomatic compromise. He stormed back to Berlin, furious at the signs of popular enthusiasm for peace in Germany, and ordering a new propaganda campaign to prepare the German
Volk
for war. Chamberlain, by contrast, was fêted as a hero when he flew back to Britain. Indeed, his popularity at the time of Munich was such that if he had called a general election - as some of his closest advisers were urging - there can be little doubt that he would have won a larger landslide victory than even those of 1931 and 1935.

Of course, his achievement at Munich turned out to be ephemeral. On 15 March 1939, Hitler simply tore up the guarantees he had give to the rump Czech state, and unilaterally invaded. This has often been seen as the moment at which war became inevitable. Yet there were still strong voices raised for carrying on with appeasement thereafter. There was nothing inevitable about the guarantee given to Poland at the beginning of April. Indeed, Chamberlain’s first reaction to the occupation of Prague was to hope for the ‘possibility of easing the tension and getting back to normal relations with the dictators’. Poland was not a popular cause in Britain until the war had actually broken out and the Ministry of Information made it one. Lloyd George and many socialists were highly critical of General Beck’s anti-Semitic and undemocratic government, and believed that it was only getting its just deserts for the way it had grabbed Teschen from Czechoslovakia during the Munich crisis. Indeed, Lloyd George remarked that giving Poland independence was like giving a monkey a fine pocket watch. Had Hitler replayed the Sudetenland gambit - stressing Germany’s claim to Danzig and the ‘Polish corridor’ through Prussia on the basis of self-determination - there would have been little in the way of a popular
casus belli
. After all, 80 per cent of the inhabitants of Danzig said they wished to accede to Germany.

The key figure in the decision to commit Britain to the defence of Poland was in fact a repentant Halifax. Had he not succeeded in overruling the powerful combination of Chamberlain, Wilson, Sir John Simon, Sir Samuel Hoare, R. A. Butler, Joseph Ball and others, the Polish Guarantee could not have been made. As it was, it took place without consultation and in an atmosphere of panic created by totally unfounded rumours of an imminent German invasion of Poland and Romania. Halifax’s argument gained vital strength from the constant supply of information, both overt and secret, reaching Britain about the true intentions of Nazi Germany. The so-called
Kristallnacht
of November 1938 - in effect, a state-sponsored pogrom initiated by Hitler and organised by Goebbels - had further revealed the true face of Nazi Germany as far as racial policy was concerned. Now the fall of Prague, and the seizure of Memel from Lithuania, revealed how wrong Halifax had been in arguing, as he had a year before, that Hitler did not ‘lust for conquest on a Napoleonic scale’. Hitler could hardly claim that his seizure of the rump of Czechoslovakia represented a victory for ethnic self-determination. It was this belated realisation - this sense of having been duped - which led to the revolt against appeasement on both sides of the House of Commons. Under these circumstances, could Chamberlain have backed down once again over Poland as he had over Czechoslovakia? Probably not.