A History of Britain, Volume 3 (67 page)

but there can never be peace between the British democracy and the Nazi Power … which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force. … What I find unendurable is the sense of our country falling into the power, into the orbit and influence of Nazi Germany, and of our existence becoming dependent on their good will or pleasure.

It was to prevent that, he said, that he had tried to urge timely rearmament. But ‘it has all been in vain’. Rejecting Chamberlain and Halifax’s insistence that Germany was now ‘satisfied’ and would make no more territorial demands, Churchill prophesied that in a very few months the government would be asked to surrender some more territory, some more liberty. Then he became even more apocalyptic, predicting that conceding those would mean censorship in Britain, since no one could be allowed to oppose such decisions.

What solution could there be? The sole recourse was to ‘regain our old island independence’ by acquiring the air supremacy he had been asking for. Churchill noted that Lord Baldwin, as he now was, had said he would mobilize industry ‘tomorrow’. He was not going to let the former prime minister off the hook. This was all very nice, ‘But I think it would have been much better if Lord Baldwin had said that two and half years ago.’ He did not begrudge Britain’s ‘brave people’ their relief and rejoicing at what seemed to be a reprieve from disaster. But, Churchill said, in his closing words, they should know the truth:

they should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road; they
should
know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the western democracies: ‘Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.’ And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.

The Chamberlains’ Christmas card in 1938 showed a photograph of the prime ministerial aircraft flying over a bank of clouds
en route
to Munich. Three months later, on 14 March 1939, as if determined to vindicate Churchill’s dire prophecy, German tanks rolled into defenceless Prague. At first Chamberlain still spoke of peace, but when he sensed a sudden backlash amongst Tory backbenchers and read a sharp attack in the
Daily Telegraph
he decided, at last, to lead from the front. At a speech in Birmingham on 17 March, he spoke of his shock and dismay. On the 31st he announced to the House of Commons that the British and French governments were offering a guarantee to Poland, the latest item on Hitler’s shopping list, his ostensible claim being to the port of Danzig, now known as Gdansk (otherwise landlocked Poland’s access to the Baltic via the so-called Polish Corridor that separated the bulk of Germany from East Prussia and had been created after the First World War). Should Poland be attacked, Britain and France would come to her aid. The logistic impossibility of this aid being delivered to Lodz or Warsaw meant, of course, that there would be a war in the West. But Chamberlain’s apparent conversion to a firm alliance policy concealed the fact that he believed the announcement of the guarantee would deter Hitler, and that it would never have to become operational.

The unprecedented Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, announced on 23 August, blew that assumption sky-high. Without the collaboration of the Soviet Union, the Franco-British guarantee seemed to be a paper threat. Hitler assumed it was a bluff and that, when it was called, neither state would actually go to war. At dawn on 1 September 1939, in response to an alleged attack on a German radio station in Gleiwitz, a brutal land and air attack was launched on Poland. A ‘note’ was duly handed by the British ambassador to the government in Berlin, stating that if German troops were not immediately withdrawn France and Britain would honour their obligations. The next day the House of Commons, in grim but resolute mood, expected to hear that war had been declared. What
they
got instead, to general consternation, was an exercise in procrastination from Chamberlain: he suggested that if, through Italian mediation, German troops would fall back, the
status quo ante
1 September would still be in place and a conference of representatives from France, Poland, Italy, Britain and Germany could be convened. That, after an initial explosion of rage, was indeed Hitler’s idea, too: he assumed that another Munich would give him what he wanted without the inconvenience of a war. Both Labour and some Tory members were appalled. The Conservative MP Leo Amery shouted to Arthur Greenwood, the Labour leader, three devastating words: ‘Speak for England!’ And Greenwood did, to tremendous and moving effect. When he had finished there were loud cheers. As usual, it was only a threatened revolt among his own ranks that finally overthrew Chamberlain’s latest attempt at appeasement, and later that evening he agreed to turn the ‘note’ into an ultimatum that would expire at eleven o’clock on the morning of 3 September. His most intense reaction, however, was wounded egotism, stressing to the House that, whilst it was a ‘sad day, to none is it sadder than to me’. When, in the mournful tones of someone announcing the passing of a maiden aunt, Chamberlain took to the airwaves a few minutes after 11 to inform the nation ‘that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany’, he could not help but add again, ‘You can imagine what a bitter blow it is for me.’ ‘Well,’ says Shortie Blake, the seaman in
In Which We Serve
, at this news, ‘it ain’t no bank holiday for me neither.’

Almost immediately the air-raid sirens went off: two minutes of the rising wail. But when the all-clear sounded, nothing seemed to have changed. No bombs had dropped from the sky. Nor was there any great surge of chest-beating, patriotic rowdiness as there had been in 1914. ‘There’ll Always Be an England’, the Ross Parker hit of the autumn, seemed more resigned than ra-ra. Everything seemed merely muffled; shadowed. Blackouts were ordered; cinemas and theatres were shut (except, of course, the defiantly naughty Windmill, where girls waggled their tassels for Britain throughout the war). Barrage balloons – silver, gold, even a strange shade of lavender – rose lugubriously into the air as if advertising a party that no one really wanted to go to. And by their hundreds of thousands little boys and girls and not so little boys and girls – some in their best flannel short trousers; some, from the terraced streets of Stepney and Salford and Swansea, a bit snottier and scruffier and, as horrified evacuation hosts discovered, lousier – lined up at railway and bus stations on their way to the unthreatened countryside.

Over 3 million Britons – not just children, but anyone on the high priority list including some hospital patients; Important Civil Servants;
BBC
Variety (to Bristol); even the Billingsgate Fish Market – were redistributed around the country. If the Second World War represented a great coming together of the three Britains Priestley had identified – antique-rural, electro-modern and clapped-out industrial – then the evacuations of 1939 were the first act in this exercise in national reacquaintance. As with the stately home opened to the public, it was all, at first, a bit strained. A perfectly wonderful account of politesse under siege to the Cockneys is given by Evelyn Waugh in his brilliant comic novel of the phoney (or ‘Bore’) war,
Put Out More Flags
(1942). Oliver Lyttelton, President of the Board of Trade, confessed he had no idea that the working classes seemed to be so lacking in rudimentary hygiene. The story of the indignant Glasgow mother who barked at her little girl not to do it on the nice lady’s sofa, but against the wall like she was told, became a favourite piece of apocrypha. And those children who were lucky enough to encounter the stricken conscience of the possessing classes found they quite liked it. A 14-year-old in Cambridge wrote home that ‘we have very nice food here such as venison, pheasant and hare and other luxuries which we cannot afford’. When, however, 1939 turned to 1940 – a bitter winter in which the Thames froze – and there were still no air raids, no invasions, 316,000 at least were returned home, the government decreeing that evacuation would be put into operation again only when raids had actually started.

Although nothing much was actually happening in these unreal months of the phoney war, many Britons still wanted it to be stopped. In the five weeks after 3 September, Chamberlain received 1860 letters urging him to do so. He felt the same way himself: ‘How I do hate and loathe this war. I never was meant to be a war minister.’ Others were more pessimistic but also more steely in their resolve. One of them was George Orwell, who had rediscovered, somewhat to his surprise, that he was a patriot.

The night before the Stalin–Hitler non-aggression pact had been announced, George Orwell dreamed that war had already broken out (a dream, or a nightmare, shared probably by many less imaginative Britons). Since coming back from Spain he had spent years denouncing the coming of war, even though he knew it was more or less inevitable. His still largely unread novel,
Coming Up for Air
, published in June 1939, has its anti-hero, the insurance agent George Bowling, a tubby, balding Great War veteran, desperate to get out of his stale life and return to the country town of his childhood, ‘Lower Binfield’ (standing in for Henley), a place of fresh-baked pies and big, dark fish waiting in the river’s weedy depths to be hooked. ‘Fishing’, says Bowling, is ‘the opposite of war’. Needless to say, he finds his Lower Binfield completely, almost literally, unrecognizable: a tawdry hell of cheap cafés, petrol stations, chain stores
and
plastic. The sentiment is Orwell at his most conventionally pastoral, lamenting the passing of an earlier England in much the same tone voiced by Clough Williams-Ellis, founder of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, in
Britain and the Beast
(1937), edited by Williams-Ellis and including G. M. Trevelyan, E. M. Forster and John Maynard Keynes, who all registered the same prim dismay at pylon modernity.

Then, suddenly, Orwell takes a different tack. At a Left Book Club meeting, set around the time of Munich, a young idealistic anti-appeaser gets up and makes a Churchillian speech of defiance. Bowling tells him, ‘“Listen, son you’ve got it all wrong. In 1914
we
thought it was going to be a glorious business. Well, it wasn’t. It was just a bloody mess. If it comes again, you keep out of it. Why should you get your body plugged full of lead? Keep it for some girl. You think war’s all heroism … but I tell you it isn’t like that. … All you know is that you’ve had no sleep for three days, you stink like a polecat, you’re pissing your bags with fright and your hands are so cold you can’t hold your rifle.”’ But later Bowling listens to a high-minded pacifist – ‘“Hitler? This German person? My dear fellow, I
don’t
think of him at all”’ – and explodes in silent nauseated rage: ‘“It’s a ghastly thing that nearly all the decent people, the people who
don’t
want to go around smashing faces in with spanners … can’t defend themselves against what’s coming to them, because they can’t see even when it’s under their noses. They think that England will never change and that England’s the whole world. Can’t grasp that it’s just a left-over, a tiny corner that the bombs happen to have missed.”’

But that was before Munich, before the occupation of Prague, before the Nazi-Soviet pact that Orwell read about in his breakfast papers the morning after his dream. Now, as he confessed in his 1940 essay ‘My Country Right or Left’ (1940), he found himself, mysteriously, a patriot, although he hastened to say that patriotism had nothing to do with conservatism. ‘To be loyal both to Chamberlain’s England and to the England of tomorrow [his socialist England] might seem an impossibility, if one did not know it to be an everyday phenomenon.’ To this day, he admitted, ‘it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege not to stand to attention during “God Save the King”. That is childish, of course, but I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so enlightened that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions.’ So even though for many reasons – his lungs, his wound – it seemed that no one wanted him to do any fighting, when it came to it George Orwell was ready to do what he could, after all, to resist Hitler.

Churchill, of course, had none of these hesitations to overcome. After the German occupation of the rump of Czechoslovakia, and
Chamberlain’s
change of heart, Churchill became as supportive as he could of the prime minister, on the assumption that military preparations would now begin in earnest. At Chartwell, later in the spring, the anti-appeaser Harold Macmillan found him already fully mobilized, knee-deep in maps, secretaries, urgent phone calls and scribbled strategies: ‘He alone seemed to be in command when everyone else was hesitant.’ He would get his wish for action. On the day war was declared, Chamberlain, bowing to public opinion and a campaign led by the non-appeasement newspapers, in particular the staunchly Tory
Daily Telegraph
, offered Churchill the post of first lord of the admiralty. Famously, the admiralty then signalled the fleet: ‘Winston is back!’

It is just possible, of course, that those in the government who were still cool towards Churchill hoped he might burn his boats at the admiralty as he had done so spectacularly in the First World War. And they were not far wrong. For putting on his sailor’s peaked cap again had brought back memories of the Dardanelles – not, moreover, as a chastening lesson but rather as the nagging instance of what might have been. ‘If only’ circulated in Churchill’s mind, as in ‘if only he had had proper military backing for the naval assault on the forts’. In fact, he had never abandoned the basic strategic principle of hitting an enemy at his weakest, not strongest, point. And he spent much of the Second World War trying to find the Achilles’ heel of the Axis – North Africa, Greece, Sicily – with decidedly mixed results. His first instinct, formulated straight away, was to blockade Norwegian territorial waters and deprive the Germans of the Swedish magnetite iron ore that was critical to their munitions programme. Never mind, though, that this would mean violating Swedish and Norwegian neutrality.