New light on Eden—and Munich

1938 CABINET PAPERS ROBERT BLAKE

Robert Blake is Provost of Queen's College, Oxford.

One of the few good things that the present government has done (apart from belatedly snubbing that egregious busybody, Mr Aubrey Jones) is to abolish the rule under which official papers remained closed to researchers for fifty years. The period has now been reduced to thirty. Arguably this is too long, but at least it is an improvement on a usage which would have left the Cabinet minutes of the last year of the First World War inaccessible till now. From 1 January onwards the papers of 1938 are available to historians. I was allowed to have an advance glimpse at them on behalf of the SPECTATOR, and I would like to pay a tribute to the admirable way in which they have been catalogued and to the efficiency and helpful- ness with which the officials of the Public Record Office dealt with my inquiries.

The year 1938 must be one of the most dole- ful periods in British history. It saw an almost unbroken series of disasters and humiliations. Nor is this merely a matter of wisdom after the event. To many people, though admittedly only a minority, of the country, the conduct of Neville Chamberlain and his Cabinet seemed deplorable even at the time. Munich divided the political nation more deeply than any issue during the last half-century, except perhaps the Suez crisis of 1956. Churchill wrote in his memoirs:

'It is not easy . . . to portray for another generation the passions which raged in Britain about the Munich Agreement. Among the Con- servatives families and friends in intimate con- tact were divided to a degree the like of which I have never seen. Men and women long bound together by party ties, social amenities and family connexions glared upon one another in scorn and anger.'

As an undergraduate of twenty-one at the time I could know little of the political world. But for what it is worth my memories would confirm this general picture. An Oxford con- temporary of mine—a relative of the then per- manent under-secretary at the Foreign Office— refused to drink Neville Chamberlain's health in the excellent champagne which his father had brought up from the cellar to celebrate 'peace in our time.' His father ordered him to drink or leave the house. He left the house. It was a long time till they met again, though there was, I believe, a reconciliation before his death in action a couple of years later.

Personally I shall never forget that year, for it was then that I became politically conscious for the first time. The Spanish civil war which roused the feelings of so many of my genera- tion had left me cold. But it was impossible to avoid being 'involved' by the grim train of events which began with the Anschluss and ended with Munich. At the start of this dismal year 1 was a rather passive sort of Conservative. At the end of it I was cer- tainly no convert to Labour whose official policy seemed just as ineffective and even more self-contradictory than the government's. But if I had been registered in the right place I would certainly have voted for an anti-Munich

candidate. I thought at the time that the policy of Chamberlain was cowardly, inept, hypo-.

critical; that war was by the end of 1938 quite inevitable; and that it would in every way have been better to have had a showdown over Czechoslovakia rather than later. All these be- liefs which were really based on very little

except strong feelings seemed to be confirmed by Churchill's vivid account in the first part of The Gathering Storm published in 1948, one of the greatest sustained passages of polemical history ever written.

But time changes perspectives with bewilder- ing rapidity. What seemed self-evident twenty years ago does not necessarily appear so today.

No doubt tout comprendre is not necessarily tout pardonner. One might know every single

fact about Hitler and Himmler, and still regard 'the final solution' as wholly and irrevocably unforgivable. Nevertheless in some fields of history greater knowledge may well make a difference to one's judgment both of the ex- pediency and the morality of past policies. How far is this true of the Chamberlain government, especially in the light of the fresh evidence made available by the Cabinet records?

I must at once disclaim ,anything like a com- prehensive examination of the new material.

This was impossible in the time at my disposal, and clearly it would take much laborious in- vestigation to decide exactly how and where received wisdom on those events needs to be modified or even contradicted. 'concentrated on two matters: the resignation of Anthony Eden; and the strategic considerations (if any) which actuated the Cabinet at the time of Munich. Anthony Eden, as is well known, resigned in February ' because he was against beginning

conversations in Rome with Mussolini until the

Italian government had given some concrete indication of good faith. It is also well known

that he would have liked to have resigned a

month earlier on a totally different issue—the rebuff which he considered that the Prime Minister without consulting him had given to

President Roosevelt's proposal to summon a conference of the smaller powers at Washing-

ton in order to work out plans for the more

civilised conduct of international relations. He only abstained from resignation then because of the confidentiality of the President's pro- posal and the impossibility of referring to it in public.

Both these matters have been the subject of very conflicting interpretations. Churchill, Sum- ner Welles, Eden himself regarded the treat- ment of Roosevelt's offer as a major blunder. Churchill wrote in characteristic style:

'We must regard its rejection—for such it was—as the loss of the last frail chance to save the world from tyranny otherwise than by war. That Mr Chamberlain with his limited outlook and experience of the European scene should have possessed the self-sufficiency to wave away the proffered hand stretched out across the Atlantic leaves one even at this date breathless with amazement. The lack of all sense of pro- portion, and even of self-preservation . . . is appalling.'

On the other hand most modern historians have followed Lords Halifax and Templewood in regarding the President's offer as a nebulous, wishy-washy affair which would not have come to much anyway, for Roosevelt would never have followed it up with anything practical. A similar conflict arises over the Rome talks. The Eden view was and is that a critical question of principle was at stake and that Chamber- lain's anxiety to open conversations without an earnest of Italian bona fides was a fundamental psychological error in dealing with the dic- tators. The contrary view is that it was all a matter of timing and method and too much fuss about Foreign Office protocol. Summing up both episodes Professor W. N. Medlicott in his British Foreign Policy Since Versailles, while conceding that Eden himself took a very different view, writes: 'It is difficult to see in the breach . . . anything more than a difference in timing on the part of two very self-willed men who liked to play the game of politics by ear.'

On the split over Roosevelt the Cabinet minutes throw little light. Indeed it was not till his resignation on the Italian question that Eden informed the Cabinet of his earlier misgivings about Chamberlain's answer to Roosevelt, although no doubt they were already known to some of his colleagues. The minutes are much more informative about the Rome talks. Of course the record cannot in itself settle whether Eden or Chamberlain was right, but it does suggest that the dispute was neither one of method nor one of Prime Ministerial inter- ference. Eden may have been touchy about Chamberlain's tendency to encroach on his province, but he was touchy not only -because of amour-propre but because he genuinely regarded the Prime Minister's attitude to Mus- solini as disastrous. The language used by Chamberlain at the crucial Cabinet meeting when he was well aware of Eden's attitude leaves no doubt about the strength of his feel- ings too. His view, we are told,

'was that the present occasion provided one Of the opportunities that came at rare intervals and did not recur. It was an opportunity to show Signor Mussolini that he might have other friends besides Herr Hitler. He himself [the Piime Minister] deeply regretted that it had been impossible to do this earlier. . . . He was convinced that this was an opportunity that might never recur again, and not to embrace it would be not only unwise but criminal.'

The word 'criminal' is one that would scarcely be used,, let alone subsequently confirmed for the record, unless the Prime Minister had be- lieved that something more than method was at stake. Nor would a Foreign Secretary resign solely on such a difference. Naturally enough many members of the Cabinet, as usually hap- pens with a resignation which they regret, tried to persuade Eden that only a narrow gap separated him from them. Lord Zetland declared that he had thought the gulf small.

'It was deplorable, therefore, that this resignation was impending. On the other hand he [Zetland] was in a better position than most people to realise the extraordinary difficulties that did arise if there was a difference between the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary. This had been brought home to him as the author of the official biography of Lord Cur- zon who had had acute differences with Mr Lloyd George.

The Foreign Secretary said he did not like the parallel....'

Nor was it likely to have pleased Chamber- lain, hatred of Lloyd George having been one of his principal springs of political action for the past twenty years. And in fact it is not a fair comparison. A more substantial cause for conflict stood between Eden and Chamberlain than there ever did between Curzon and Lloyd George. Behind the rebuff to Roosevelt and the offer to Mussolini, the same crucial question lay: were the dictators to be trusted? In brief, would appeasement work?

Eden knew what was at stake. Great efforts were made to keep him. A special committee under the chairmanship of Halifax was set up to devise a formula. The Foreign Secretary said that he felt rather like the Austrian Chancellor at Berchtesgaden but he could not refuse.' Nothing came of it, and with his resig- nation a clear impetus was given—for good or ill—to the policy on which Chamberlain bad set his heart.

This culminated in the Munich Settlement. In spite of all that has been written about it, I have long been puzzled by one problem. To what extent was the decision taken because the Government believed that it was right on its merits or because the military advice which they received led them to the conclusion that they had no other option? On September 12 Lord Swinton pressed in Cabinet for an up-to- date appreciation from the Chiefs of Staff.

Oliver Stanley suggested that any such appre- ciation should also include an assessment of what would be the situation in a year's time if Germany was allowed to carry out a coup d'etat in Czechoslovakia with consequential extension of her influence in south-east Europe. Both points were minuted as agreed by the Cabinet.

The appreciation, dated September 14 and signed by Sir Cyril Newall, Lord Gort and Sir Roger Backhouse, is- a most interesting doeu- mint. 'Significantly it does not attempt to answer Oliver Stanley's highly relevant, if very difficult, question. It deals only with the current situation, and its tone is one of almost un- relieved gloom.

The Chiefs of Staff began with certain political assumptions. Britain would be pulled into war with Germany because we could not safely leave the French alone if they decided to implement their guarantees to Czechoslovakia.

It would be prudent to assume intervention by Italy and exploitation of the situation in the Far East by Japan. The USA could not be relied on to help. 'The attitude of the USSR is in- calculable and it is unsafe to assume that Soviet Russia would go to the assistance of Czecho- slovakia.' They were gloomy about the Middle East. 'Palestine already absorbs a considerable military force and the local authorities have .asked for further reinforcements. There is a danger that the infection of lawlessness may spread to neighbouring Mohammedan coun- tries.' Franco would probably supply port facilities for 'German submarines. The rest of the world would be neutral except for Portugal and Egypt. There followed certain military assumptions. These were that Germany would make an all-out and• successful attack on Czechoslovakia while standing on the defen- sive in the west; that she -would conduct a vigorous naval war against our trade routes; that she would probably concentrate her whole air force against the Czechs and leave the west alone, but it was possible that she might decide to do the opposite and make the west her main objective.

The paper goes on to deal with other factors. Economically Germany would be safe for three months, but 'rigorous economic pressure must thereafter become a factor progressively limit- ing the duration of her resistance.' The Chiefs of Staff platitudinously add that if she lost the Ruhr, the Rhirieland and the Saar districts, it would be a very severe blow. No doubt it would also have been a severe blow to lose Ber- lin. There is no indication of how these districts might be lost, and the matter is not clarified by their assessment of the French role. 'We do not know whether they intend to stand on the defensive on the Maginot line or to attempt an offensive across the frontier.' But in any case, the Chiefs of Staff believed that the Germans could spare enough forces to hold their own fortified line against attack. Inci- dentally, total ignorance about French plans is one of the most striking features of the docu- ment: 'We have no knowledge of whether the French have given consideration to the question of a strategic bomber offensive,' the Chiefs of Staff write in a later section of their paper, hazarding a guess that they probably had not. Early in February Eden had deplored this re- luctance to talk to the French. He regarded it as based on a political assessment of the danger of provoking Germany. He considered this to be outside the terms of reference of the Chiefs of Staff; and he persuaded the Cabinet to in- struct them to change their attitude. It does not look as if the instruction had been obeyed.

As far as air attack was concerned the paper was highly pessimistic. It assumed that the bomber would get through, and, although we are still in considerable'doubt as to the range and capacity of the 'bombers with which the German squadrons are equipped,' they believed that, if concentrated on Britain alone, the potential delivery of bombs might be 500/600 tons per day for two months. They conceded that in practice this figure was very unlikely to be achieved, but they reckoned on a com- parable basis that Britain and France between them could only deliver about half that amount and concluded that for fear of reprisals • no attack should be made on `industrial targets' in Germany. `We make this recommendation with the full knowledge that we are refusinglo take advantage of a fleeting opportunity to attack the "Achilles heel" of our enemy.'

Their conclusion was that it was impoSsible to save Czechoslovakia from destruction. She could only be restored 'as the outcome of a prolonged struggle which from the outset must assume the character of an unlimited war.' They took a' grave view of the intervention of Italy and Japan and ended by quoting from a prev- ious memorandum of their own: `Moreover war against Japan, Germany and Italy simultaneously in 1938 is a commitment which neither the present nor the projected strength of our defence forces is designed to meet even if we were in alliance with France and Russia, and which would therefore place a dangerous strain on- the resources of the Empire.'

The document is sensible in some respects.

It is probably right about Russia, certainly right about the USA, about the impossibility of protecting Czechoslovakia and the inability of the French to invade Germany. It exaggerates, on the other hand, Italy's military strength, the threat of Arab subversion in the Middle East, the danger of Japanese intervention and the strength of the German air force. But one's opinion of the judgment of the Chiefs of Staff is less relevant than the fact that this was their judgment and, therefore, ought to have con- stituted one of the principal factors on which the Cabinet based their decision.

But did it? No one could blame a govern- ment which after receiving such a glum paper from its professional strategic advisers decided that war in 1938 was simply 'not on.' But the curious thing is that in fact, if we are to go by the Cabinet records, military considerations were scarcely discussed at all. Of course they may have formed the background against which the decision was taken, but what ministers actually talked about were political morality, legal niceties (I commend to con- noisseurs the utterances of Sir John Simon, Sir Thomas Inskip and above all Lord Maugham), the desirability of plebiscites, the ethics of self- determination, the trustworthiness of 'Herr Hitler.' It was this total misjudgment which damns the 'Men of Munich.' They behaved not like Tories but like old, weary muddled Gladstonian liberals. Duff Cooper was the only Disraelite among them. If they had been beat- ing a realistic strategic retreat, seeking for 'breathing space,' and if they had felt obliged to cover up the process with a lot of cant and humbug one could forgive them. But *it is atl too clear that most of them believed their own humbug. This is unforgivable.