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Courage
Lynne Olson’s
new book, Troublesome
Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England,
provides readers with a well-told story of the courage of about thirty
members of Parliament who took the risk to dissent from the leadership of
their party, Neville Chamberlain, and oppose the policy of appeasement with Germany. Olson
describes the political, social and personal price that those dissidents paid
for their actions. Their conflict with Chamberlain was generational, as well
as ideological. The price of loyalty is a theme of this book, and Olson mines
it well. Churchill is a central figure, of course, in this story, and his
loyalty to Chamberlain contrasts well with the courage of the dissidents who
brought Churchill to power. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter
11, “Here Is the Testing,” pp. 192-195:
With his guarantee of Poland
and the introduction of conscription, Neville Chamberlain took much of the
steam out of his critics’ campaign. He had not broadened his government, as
they had demanded, but he had finally taken a stand against appeasement,
ordering his government to prepare—if not full throttle, then at least half
throttle—for war. Even Winston Churchill said he now supported the prime
minister’s policy.
But Chamberlain’s dramatic
about-face was not what it seemed. He had no plans to live up to his pledge
of going to war if Poland
was attacked. Indeed, he had not given up on his hopes of keeping the peace
by reaching an agreement with Germany.
A disheartened Leslie Hore-Belisha told an
acquaintance that the prime minister “seemed to think that an occasional bold
speech was enough in itself” and that “he had no real intention of doing
anything.” According to the war secretary “Neville still believes he can
control Hitler and Mussolini and that they heed him.”
Chamberlain’s promise was
made to assuage angry public opinion and to warn Hitler of the consequences
that would result from a failure to negotiate. Yet the German leader never
paid attention to the warning. Why should he? Almost immediately after the
British guarantee of Poland,
there were unmistakable signs that Chamberlain’s show of firmness was just
that, a show. On April 4, less than a week after Chamberlain’s speech about Poland, The
Times published a leader (an editorial), declaring that the prime
minister’s guarantee did not “bind Great
Britain to defend every inch of the present frontiers
of Poland.”
The leader, like the one on the Sudetenland
the previous year, caused a storm of controversy. The government’s critics
saw it as an indication that Chamberlain was backing away from his
commitment to Poland.
The Foreign Office denied that the government had prompted the newspaper, but
Chamberlain privately acknowledged that it reflected his point of view. “It
is we who will judge whether [Poland’s]
independence is threatened or not,” he wrote to his sister.
The government meanwhile
continued to press the newspapers and the BBC to go easy on Hitler and Germany.
“The public are not being informed of the extent or the imminence of our
immediate danger,” Harold Nicolson wrote in The Spectator in May “I believe that at this moment the country ought to be alarmed, and ought to be disquieted.” That same
month Horace Wilson, who had been promoted to head the British Civil Service
earlier in the year but who still was acting as the prime minister’s
right-hand man, urged top BBC executives not to broadcast reports on
Hitler’s speeches, declaring that such stories create “a war mentality.”
Another Chamberlain staffer informed the BBC that “it is definitely
undesirable that, at times like the present, issues of foreign policy should
be discussed in a controversial spirit on the air.”
German officials carefully
noted such attempts to avoid riling Hitler. In early summer, Herbert von
Dirksen, the German ambassador in London, cabled Berlin that while
“hostility toward Germany is growing [and] the readiness to fight has become
more pronounced” among the British people, the prime minister and his cabinet
favored “a constructive policy vis-à-vis Germany” Dirksen assured his
superiors that “Chamberlain’s personality is a certain guarantee that
British policy will not be placed in the hands of unscrupulous adventurers.”
When Hitler escalated his
demands over Poland,
the British government advised Polish officials to negotiate. Hitler
insisted that the Baltic port of Danzig, which the Versailles Treaty had declared a
free city be returned to Germany.
He also demanded that Germany
be allowed to build a highway and railway across the Polish Corridor, a
narrow strip of formerly German territory that had been awarded to Poland
at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Bolstered by promises of help from Britain and France, the Polish government
refused all of Hitler’s claims. “We in Poland do not recognize the
concept of peace at any price,” declared Polish foreign minister Jozef Beck. Unlike Czechoslovakia,
Beck said Poland
“will fight.”
Although British officials
privately warned the Poles that they must be more accommodating, they never
said that Britain had no
intention of coming to Poland’s
rescue in the event of a German invasion. As a result, the Poles continued to
trust in the promises of their allies, even as negotiations with Britain
over loans and credits to buy arms and ammunition dragged on through the
summer without resolution. “Surely the whole purpose of these negotiations is
to arm Poland,
and to arm her quickly,” Hugh Dalton declared in a House of Commons debate in
late July. “Is it, perhaps, feared that if the Poles get too many arms too
quickly, they will get above themselves? . . . [Is there] some sinister and unrevealed
purpose to try to keep Poland
weak and irresolute?” In his diary, Dalton
wrote of his concern that the government was getting ready to “sell the Poles
down the river, as they sold the Czechs last year.”
As it happened, other
negotiations were going on in London that
summer that, if successful, would indeed “enable Britain,”
in the words of Horace Wilson, “to rid herself of her commitments vis-à-vis Poland.”
These talks, unlike the ones with Polish military officials, were top secret.
“If anything about them were to leak out,” Ambassador Dirksen cautioned the
German Foreign Ministry, “there would be a grand scandal, and Chamberlain
would probably be forced to resign.” The subject under discussion was
undeniably explosive: behind the backs of the British people and Parliament, Wilson had been delegated to sound out Germany on the possibility of
concluding an Anglo-German pact that would involve, among other things,
wide-ranging economic cooperation between the two countries, including
massive loans for German industries. In effect, it was a bribe to Hitler, to
try to persuade him to behave himself and not to precipitate a war with Poland.
The German official
involved in these negotiations was Dr. Helmut Wohlthat,
a high-ranking government expert on foreign trade. Wilson presented Wohlthat with a cornucopia of offers: a nonaggression
treaty, under which both Britain and Germany would renounce unilateral aggressive
action; a disarmament agreement; settlement of Germany’s demands for the
return of its former colonies in Africa, taken away by the Versailles Treaty;
and acknowledgment of Germany’s economic sphere of interest in Central and
Eastern Europe. In a conversation with Dirksen, Wilson
made clear that the conclusion of such an Anglo-German entente would, in the
view of the British government, invalidate Britain’s
guarantee of Poland.
The proposed agreement, however, failed to get very far. Word of the talks
did in fact leak to the British press, and in the furor that followed,
Chamberlain’s government quietly ended them while denying that any such
negotiations were under way. Yet the aborted discussions did have one major
result: they hardened Hitler’s belief that Chamberlain had no intention of
going to war over Poland.
As an added
bonus, in addition to telling the story about the actions of the dissidents
and their role in Churchill’s rise to power, Olson also describes for readers
what happened to many of those young men in later years. Troublesome
Young Men is a finely written history about an important recent period in
history, and about a few individuals whose personal courage made a
significant difference in world events.
Steve Hopkins,
June 25, 2007
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