The Gathering Storm, page 14
I hoped that this shocking confession would be a decisive event, and that at the least a parliamentary committee of all parties would be set up to report upon the facts and upon our safety. The House of Commons had a different reaction. The Labour and Liberal oppositions, having nine months earlier moved or supported a vote of censure even upon the modest steps the government had taken, were ineffectual and undecided. They were looking forward to an election against “Tory Armaments.” Neither the Labour nor the Liberal spokesmen had prepared themselves for Mr. Baldwin’s disclosures and admission, and they did not attempt to adapt their speeches to this outstanding episode. Mr. Attlee said:
As a party we do not stand for unilateral disarmament. . . . We stand for collective security through the League of Nations. We reject the use of force as an instrument of policy. We stand for the reduction of armaments and pooled security. . . . We have stated that this country must be prepared to make its contribution to collective security. Our policy is not one of seeking security through rearmament, but through disarmament. Our aim is the reduction of armaments, and then the complete abolition of all national armaments and the creation of an international police force under the league.
What was to happen if this spacious policy could not be immediately achieved or till it was achieved, he did not say. He complained that the White Paper on Defence justified increases in the navy by references to the United States, and increases in our air force by references to the air forces of Russia, Japan, and the United States. “All that was old-fashioned talk and right outside the collective system.” He recognized that the fact of German rearmament had become dominating, but “The measure of the counterweight to any particular armed forces is not the forces of this country or of France, but the combined force of all loyal powers in the League of Nations. An aggressor must be made to realize that if he challenges the world, he will be met by the coordinated forces of the world, not by a number of disjointed national forces.” The only way was to concentrate all air power in the hands of the league, which must be united and become a reality. Meanwhile, he and his party voted against the measure proposed.
For the Liberals, Sir Archibald Sinclair asked the government to summon
a fresh economic conference, and to bring Germany not only within the political comity of nations, but also into active cooperation with ourselves in all the works of civilization and in raising the standards of life of both peoples. . . . Let the government table detailed and definite proposals for the abolition of military air forces and the control of civil aviation. If the proposals are resisted, let the responsibility be cleared and properly fixed.
Nevertheless [he said], while disarmament ought vigorously to be pursued as the chief objective of the government, a situation in which a great country not a member of the League of Nations possesses the most powerful army and perhaps the most powerful air force in Western Europe, with probably a greater coefficient of expansion than any other air force . . . cannot be allowed to endure. . . . The Liberal Party would feel bound to support measures of national defence when clear proof was afforded of their necessity. . . . I cannot therefore agree that to increase our national armaments is necessarily inconsistent with our obligations under the collective peace system.
He then proceeded to deal at length with “the question of private profits being made out of the means of death,” and quoted a recent speech by Lord Halifax, minister of education, who had said that the British people were “disposed to regard the preparation of instruments of war as too high and too grave a thing to be entrusted to any hands less responsible than those of the state itself.” Sir Archibald Sinclair thought that there ought to be national factories for dealing with the rapid expansion in air armaments, for which expansion, he said, a case had been made out.
The existence of private armament firms had long been a bugbear to Labour and Liberal minds, and it lent itself readily to the making of popular speeches. It was, of course, absurd to suppose that at this time our air expansion, recognized as necessary, could be achieved through national factories only. A large part of the private industry of the country was urgently required for immediate adaptation and to reinforce our existing sources of manufacture. Nothing in the speeches of the Opposition leaders was in the slightest degree related to the emergency in which they admitted we stood, or to the far graver facts which we now know lay behind it.
The government majority for their part appeared captivated by Mr. Baldwin’s candour. His admission of having been utterly wrong, with all his sources of knowledge, upon a vital matter for which he was responsible was held to be redeemed by the frankness with which he declared his error and shouldered the blame. There was even a strange wave of enthusiasm for a minister who did not hesitate to say that he was wrong. Indeed, many Conservative members seemed angry with me for having brought their trusted leader to a plight from which only his native manliness and honesty had extricated him; but not, alas, his country.
My kinsman, Lord Londonderry, a friend from childhood days, the direct descendant of the famous Castlereagh of Napoleonic times, was a man of unquestionable loyalty and patriotism. He had presided over the Air Ministry since the formation of the coalition. In this period the grave changes which have been described had overshadowed our affairs, and the Air Ministry had become one of the most important offices in the state. During the years of retrenchment and disarmament, he and his ministry had tried to keep and get as much as they could from a severe and arbitrary chancellor of the Exchequer. They were overjoyed when in the summer of 1934 an air programme of forty-one additional squadrons was conceded to them by the Cabinet. But in British politics the hot fits very quickly succeed the cold. When the foreign secretary returned from Berlin, profoundly startled by Hitler’s assertion that his air force was equal to that of Britain, the whole Cabinet became deeply concerned. Mr. Baldwin had to face, in the light of what was now generally accepted as a new situation, his assertions of November, when he had contradicted me. The Cabinet had no idea they had been overtaken in the air, and turned, as is usually the case, inquisitorial looks upon the department involved and its minister.
The Air Ministry did not realize that a new inheritance awaited them. The Treasury’s fetters were broken. They had but to ask for more. Instead of this, they reacted strongly against Hitler’s claim to air parity. Londonderry, who was their spokesman, even rested upon the statement that “when Simon and Eden went to Berlin there was only one German operational squadron in being. From their training establishments they hoped to form fifteen to twenty squadron formations by the end of the month.” [10] All this is a matter of nomenclature. It is, of course, very difficult to classify air forces, because of the absence of any common “yardstick” and all the variations in defining “first-line air strength” and “operational units.” The Air Ministry now led its chief into an elaborate vindication of their own past conduct, and in consequence were entirely out of harmony with the new mood of a genuinely alarmed government and public. The experts and officials at the Air Ministry had given Mr. Baldwin the figures and forecasts with which he had answered me in November. They wished him to go into action in defence of these statements; but this was no longer practical politics. There seems no doubt that these experts and officials of the Air Ministry at this time were themselves misled and misled their chief. A great air power, at least the equal of our own, long pent-up, had at last sprung into daylight in Germany.
It was an odd and painful experience for Londonderry, as his book describes, after having gone through several years of asking for more, to be suddenly turned out for not asking enough. But apart from all this, his political standing was not sufficient to enable him to head a department, now at the very centre and almost at the summit of our affairs. Besides, everyone could see that in such times the air minister must be in the House of Commons. Accordingly, Mr. Ramsay MacDonald’s vacation of the premiership later in the year became also the occasion for the appointment of Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, then secretary of state for the colonies, as air minister, as part of a new policy for vigorous air expansion. Lord Londonderry with much reluctance became Lord Privy Seal and leader of the House of Lords; but after the general election, Mr. Baldwin dispensed with his services in both these capacities. The great achievement of his period in office was the designing and promotion of the ever-famous Hurricane and Spitfire fighters. The first prototypes of these flew in November 1935 and March 1936 respectively. Londonderry does not mention this in his defence, but he might well have done so, since he took the blame of so much that he had not done. The new secretary of state, wafted by favourable breezes and fresh tides, ordered immediate large-scale production of these types, and they were ready in some numbers none too soon. Cunliffe-Lister was a much more potent political figure than his predecessor and had a better chance and a more inspiriting task. He brought an altogether more powerful force to bear upon our air policy and administration, and set himself actively to work to make up for the time lost by the Cabinet from 1932 to 1934. He, however, made the serious mistake of quitting the House of Commons for the House of Lords in November 1935, thus stultifying one of the arguments for his transfer to the secretaryship of state for air. This was to cost him his office a few years later.
A disaster of the first magnitude had fallen upon us. Hitler had already obtained parity with Great Britain. Henceforward he had merely to drive his factories and training schools at full speed, not only to keep his lead in the air, but steadily to improve it. Henceforward all the unknown, immeasurable threats which overhung London from air attack would be a definite and compelling factor in all our decisions. Moreover, we could never catch up; or at any rate, the government never did catch up. Credit is due to them and to the Air Ministry for the high efficiency of the Royal Air Force. But the pledge that air parity would be maintained was irrevocably broken. It is true that the immediate further expansion of the German air force did not proceed at the same rate as in the period when they gained parity. No doubt a supreme effort had been made by them to achieve at a bound this commanding position and to assist and exploit it in their diplomacy. It gave Hitler the foundation for the successive acts of aggression which he had planned and which were now soon to take place. Very considerable efforts were made by the British government in the next four years, and there is no doubt that we excelled in air quality; but quantity was henceforth beyond us. The outbreak of the war found us with barely half the German numbers.
* * *
9 The amendment stood in the names of Mr. Churchill, Sir Robert Horne, Mr. Amery, Captain F. E. Guest, Lord Winterton, and Mr. Boothby.
10 The Marquess of Londonderry, Wings of Destiny, 1943, page 128.
Chapter 8
Challenge and Response (1935)
The years of underground burrowings, of secret or disguised preparations were now over, and Hitler at length felt himself strong enough to make his first open challenge. On March 9, 1935, the official constitution of the German air force was announced, and on the sixteenth it was declared that the German Army would henceforth be based on national compulsory service. The laws to implement these decisions were soon promulgated, and action had already begun in anticipation. The French government, who were well informed of what was coming, had actually declared the consequential extension of their own military service to two years a few hours earlier on the same momentous day. The German action was an open, formal affront to the treaties of peace upon which the League of Nations was founded. As long as the breaches had taken the form of evasions or calling things by other names, it was easy for the responsible victorious powers, obsessed by pacifism and preoccupied with domestic politics, to avoid the responsibility of declaring that the peace treaty was being broken or repudiated. Now the issue came with blunt and brutal force. Almost on the same day the Ethiopian government appealed to the League of Nations against the threatening demands of Italy. When, on March 24, against this background, Sir John Simon with the Lord Privy Seal, Mr. Eden, visited Berlin at Hitler’s invitation, the French government thought the occasion ill-chosen. They had now themselves at once to face, not the reduction of their army, so eagerly pressed upon them by Mr. MacDonald the year before, but the extension of compulsory military service from one year to two. In the prevailing state of public opinion this was a heavy task. Not only the Communists but the Socialists had voted against the measure. When M. Léon Blum said: “The workers of France will rise to resist Hitlerite aggression,” Thorez replied, amid the applause of his Soviet-bound faction, “We will not tolerate the working classes being drawn into a so-called war in defence of democracy against fascism.”
The United States had washed their hands of all concern in Europe, apart from wishing well to everybody, and were sure they would never have to be bothered with it again. But France, Great Britain, and also—decidedly—Italy, in spite of their discordances, felt bound to challenge this definite act of treaty violation by Hitler. A conference of the former principal allies was summoned under the League of Nations at Stresa, and all these matters were brought to debate.
Anthony Eden had for nearly ten years devoted himself almost entirely to the study of foreign affairs. Taken from Eton at eighteen to the World War, he had served for four years with distinction in the 60th Rifles through many of the bloodiest battles, and risen to the rank of brigade major, with the Military Cross. Shortly after entering the House of Commons in 1925, he became parliamentary private secretary to Austen Chamberlain at the Foreign Office during Mr. Baldwin’s second administration. In the MacDonald-Baldwin Coalition of 1931, he was appointed under-secretary of state and served under the new foreign secretary, Sir John Simon. The duties of an under-secretary are often changed, but his responsibilities are always limited. He has to serve his chief in carrying out the policy settled in the Cabinet, of which he is not a member and to which he has no access. Only in an extreme case where conscience and honour are involved is he justified in carrying any difference about foreign policy to the point of public controversy or resignation.
Eden had, however, during all these years obtained a wide view of the foreign scene, and he was intimately acquainted with the life and thought of the great department upon which so much depends. Sir John Simon’s conduct of foreign affairs was not in 1935 viewed with favour either by the Opposition or in influential circles of the Conservative Party. Eden, with all his knowledge and exceptional gifts, began therefore to acquire prominence. For this reason, after becoming Lord Privy Seal at the end of 1934, he had retained by the desire of the Cabinet an informal but close association with the Foreign Office; and thus had been invited to accompany his former chief, Sir John Simon, on the inopportune, but not unfruitful, visit to Berlin. The foreign secretary returned to London after the interview with Hitler, bringing with him the important news, already mentioned, that according to Hitler, Germany had now gained air parity with Britain. Eden was sent on to Moscow, where he established contacts with Stalin which were to be revived with advantage after some years. On the homeward journey, his airplane ran into a severe and prolonged storm, and when after a dangerous flight they landed, he was almost in a state of collapse. The doctors declared that he was not fit to go with Simon to the Stresa Conference, and indeed for several months he was an invalid. In these circumstances the prime minister decided himself to accompany the foreign secretary, although at this time his own health, eyesight, and mental powers were evidently failing. Great Britain was, therefore, weakly represented at this all-important meeting, which MM. Flandin and Laval attended on behalf of France, and Signors Mussolini and Suvich on behalf of Italy.
There was general agreement that open violation of solemn treaties, for the making of which millions of men had died, could not be borne. But the British representatives made it clear at the outset that they would not consider the possibility of sanctions in the event of treaty violation. This naturally confined the conference to the region of words. A resolution was passed unanimously to the effect that “unilateral”—by which they meant one-sided—breaches of treaties could not be accepted, and the executive council of the League of Nations was invited to pronounce upon the situation disclosed. On the second afternoon of the conference, Mussolini strongly supported this action, and was outspoken against aggression by one power upon another. The final declaration was as follows:
The three powers, the object of whose policy is the collective maintenance of peace within the framework of the League of Nations, find themselves in complete agreement in opposing, by all practicable means, any unilateral repudiation of treaties which may endanger the peace of Europe, and will act in close and cordial collaboration for this purpose.
The Italian dictator in his speech had stressed the words “peace of Europe,” and paused after “Europe” in a noticeable manner. This emphasis on Europe at once struck the attention of the British Foreign Office representatives. They pricked up their ears and well understood that, while Mussolini would work with France and Britain to prevent Germany from rearming, he reserved for himself any excursion in Africa against Abyssinia on which he might later resolve. Should this point be raised or not? Discussions were held that night among the Foreign Office officials. Everyone was so anxious for Mussolini’s support in dealing with Germany that it was felt undesirable at that moment to warn him off Abyssinia, which would obviously have very much annoyed him. Therefore, the question was not raised; it passed by default, and Mussolini felt, and in a sense had reason to feel, that the Allies had acquiesced in his statement and would give him a free hand against Abyssinia. The French remained mute on the point, and the conference separated.
