The Gathering Storm Read online

  The Gathering Storm

  The Second World War, Volume I

  Sir Winston Churchill

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  Moral of the Work

  Theme of the Volume

  Book One—From War to War

  Chapter 1—The Follies of the Victors

  Chapter 2—Peace at Its Zenith

  Chapter 3—Lurking Dangers

  Chapter 4—Adolf Hitler

  Chapter 5—The Locust Years

  Chapter 6—The Darkening Scene

  Chapter 7—Air Parity Lost

  Chapter 8—Challenge and Response

  Chapter 9—Problems of Air and Sea

  Chapter 10—Sanctions Against Italy

  Chapter 11—Hitler Strikes

  Chapter 12—The Loaded Pause—Spain

  Chapter 13—Germany Armed

  Chapter 14—Mr. Eden at the Foreign Office: His Resignation

  Chapter 15—The Rape of Austria

  Chapter 16—Czechoslovakia

  Chapter 17—The Tragedy of Munich

  Chapter 18—Munich Winter

  Chapter 19—Prague, Albania, and the Polish Guarantee

  Chapter 20—The Soviet Enigma

  Chapter 21—On the Verge

  Book Two—The Twilight War

  Chapter 1—War

  Chapter 2—The Admiralty Task

  Chapter 3—The Ruin of Poland

  Chapter 4—War Cabinet Problems

  Chapter 5—The Front in France

  Chapter 6—The Combat Deepens

  Chapter 7—The Magnetic Mine

  Chapter 8—The Action off the River Plate

  Chapter 9—Scandinavia, Finland

  Chapter 10—A Dark New Year

  Chapter 11—Before the Storm

  Chapter 12—The Clash at Sea

  Chapter 13—Narvik

  Chapter 14—Trondheim

  Chapter 15—Frustration in Norway

  Chapter 16—Norway: The Final Phase

  Chapter 17—The Fall of the Government

  Appendices

  Note to Appendices

  Appendix A, Book I

  Appendix B, Book I

  Appendix C, Book I

  Appendix D, Book I

  Appendix E, Book I (Omitted)

  Appendix A, Book II

  Appendix B, Book II

  Appendix C, Book II

  Appendix D, Book II

  Appendix E, Book II

  Appendix F, Book II

  Appendix G, Book II

  Appendix H, Book II

  Appendix I, Book II

  Appendix J, Book II

  Appendix K, Book II

  Appendix L, Book II

  Appendix M, Book II

  First Lord’s Minutes

  About the Author

  About the Series

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  I must regard these volumes of The Second World War as a continuation of the story of the First World War which I set out in The World Crisis, The Eastern Front, and The Aftermath. Together, if the present work is completed, they will cover an account of another Thirty Years’ War.

  I have followed, as in previous volumes, as far as I am able, the method of Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier, in which the author hangs the chronicle and discussion of great military and political events upon the thread of the personal experiences of an individual. I am perhaps the only man who has passed through both the two supreme cataclysms of recorded history in high Cabinet office. Whereas, however, in the First World War I filled responsible but subordinate posts, I was for more than five years in this second struggle with Germany the head of His Majesty’s government. I write, therefore, from a different standpoint and with more authority than was possible in my earlier books.

  Nearly all my official work was transacted by dictation to secretaries. During the time I was prime minister, I issued the memoranda, directives, personal telegrams, and minutes which amount to nearly a million words. These documents, composed from day to day under the stress of events and with the knowledge available at the moment, will no doubt show many shortcomings. Taken together, they nevertheless give a current account of these tremendous events as they were viewed at the time by one who bore the chief responsibility for the war and policy of the British Commonwealth and Empire, I doubt whether any similar record exists or has ever existed of the day-today conduct of war and administration. I do not describe it as history, for that belongs to another generation. But I claim with confidence that it is a contribution to history which will be of service to the future.

  These thirty years of action and advocacy comprise and express my life-effort, and I am content to be judged upon them. I have adhered to my rule of never criticizing any measure of war or policy after the event unless I had before expressed publicly or formally my opinion or warning about it. Indeed in the after-light I have softened many of the severities of contemporary controversy. It has given me pain to record these disagreements with so many men whom I liked or respected; but it would be wrong not to lay the lessons of the past before the future. Let no one look down on those honourable, well-meaning men whose actions are chronicled in these pages, without searching his own heart, reviewing his own discharge of public duty, and applying the lessons of the past to his future conduct.

  It must not be supposed that I expect everybody to agree with what I say, still less that I only write what will be popular. I give my testimony according to the lights I follow. Every possible care has been taken to verify the facts; but much is constantly coming to light from the disclosure of captured documents or other revelations which may present a new aspect to the conclusions which I have drawn. This is why it is important to rely upon authentic contemporary records and the expressions of opinion set down when all was obscure.

  One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once “The Unnecessary War.” There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle. The human tragedy reaches its climax in the fact that after all the exertions and sacrifices of hundreds of millions of people and of the victories of the Righteous Cause, we have still not found peace or security, and that we lie in the grip of even worse perils than those we have surmounted. It is my earnest hope that pondering upon the past may give guidance in days to come, enable a new generation to repair some of the errors of former years and thus govern, in accordance with the needs and glory of man, the awful unfolding scene of the future.

  Winston Spencer Churchill

  Chartwell

  Westerham

  Kent

  March 1948

  Acknowledgments

  I have been greatly assisted in the establishment of the story in its military aspect by Lieutenant General Sir Henry Pownall; in naval matters by Commodore G. R. G. Allen; and on European and general questions by Colonel F. W. Deakin, of Wadham College, Oxford, who also helped me in my work Marlborough: His Life and Times. I have had much assistance from Sir Edward Marsh in matters of diction. I must in addition make my acknowledgments to the very large numbers of others who have kindly read these pages and commented upon them.

  Lord Ismay has also given me his invaluable aid, and with my other friends will continue to do so in the future.

  I record my obligations to His Majesty’s government for permission to reproduce the text of certain official documents of which the Crown copyright is legally vested in the controller of His Majesty’s Stationery Office.

  Moral of the Work

  In War: Resolution

  In Defeat: Defiance

  In Victory: Magnanimity

  In Peace: Goodwill

  Theme of the Volume

  How the English-speaking peoples through their unwisdom, carelessness, and good nature allowed the wicked to rearm.

  Book One—From War to War

  1919–1939

  Chapter 1

  The Follies of the Victors

  After the end of the World War of 1914 there was a deep conviction and almost universal hope that peace would reign in the world. This heart’s desire of all the peoples could easily have been gained by steadfastness in righteous convictions, and by reasonable common sense and prudence. The phrase “the war to end war” was on every lip, and measures had been taken to turn it into reality. President Wilson, wielding, as was thought, the authority of the United States, had made the conception of a League of Nations dominant in all minds. The British delegation at Versailles moulded and shaped his ideas into an instrument which will forever constitute a milestone in the hard march of man. The victorious Allies were at that time all-powerful, so far as their outside enemies were concerned. They had to face grave internal difficulties and many riddles to which they did not know the answer, but the Teutonic powers in the great mass of Central Europe which had made the upheaval were prostrate before them, and Russia, already shattered by the German flail, was convulsed by civil war and falling into the grip of the Bolshevik or Communist Party.

  In the summer of 1919, the Allied armies stood along the Rhine, and their bridgeheads bulged deeply into defeated, disarmed, and hung
ry Germany. The chiefs of the victor powers debated and disputed the future in Paris. Before them lay the map of Europe to be redrawn almost as they might resolve. After fifty-two months of agony and hazards the Teutonic Coalition lay at their mercy, and not one of its four members could offer the slightest resistance to their will. Germany, the head and forefront of the offence, regarded by all as the prime cause of the catastrophe which had fallen upon the world, was at the mercy or discretion of conquerors, themselves reeling from the torment they had endured. Moreover, this had been a war, not of governments, but of peoples. The whole life-energy of the greatest nations had been poured out in wrath and slaughter. The war leaders assembled in Paris had been borne thither upon the strongest and most furious tides that have ever flowed in human history. Gone were the days of the Treaties of Utrecht and Vienna, when aristocratic statesmen and diplomats, victor and vanquished alike, met in polite and courtly disputation, and, free from the clatter and babel of democracy, could reshape systems upon the fundamentals of which they were all agreed. The peoples, transported by their sufferings and by the mass teachings with which they had been inspired, stood around in scores of millions to demand that retribution should be exacted to the full. Woe betide the leaders now perched on their dizzy pinnacles of triumph if they cast away at the conference table what the soldiers had won on a hundred blood-soaked battlefields.

  France, by right alike of her efforts and her losses, held the leading place. Nearly a million and a half Frenchmen had perished defending the soil of France on which they stood against the invader. Five times in a hundred years, in 1814, 1815, 1870, 1914, and 1918, had the towers of Notre Dame seen the flash of Prussian guns and heard the thunder of their cannonade. Now for four horrible years thirteen provinces of France had lain in the rigorous grip of Prussian military rule. Wide regions had been systematically devastated by the enemy or pulverized in the encounter of the armies. There was hardly a cottage nor a family from Verdun to Toulon that did not mourn its dead or shelter its cripples. To those Frenchmen—and there were many in high authority—who had fought and suffered in 1870, it seemed almost a miracle that France should have emerged victorious from the incomparably more terrible struggle which had just ended. All their lives they had dwelt in fear of the German Empire. They remembered the preventive war which Bismarck had sought to wage in 1875; they remembered the brutal threats which had driven Delcassé from office in 1905; they had quaked at the Moroccan menace in 1906, at the Bosnian dispute of 1908, and at the Agadir crisis of 1911. The kaiser’s “mailed fist” and “shining armour” speeches might be received with ridicule in England and America. They sounded a knell of horrible reality in the hearts of the French. For fifty years almost they had lived under the terror of the German arms. Now, at the price of their lifeblood, the long oppression had been rolled away. Surely here at last was peace and safety. With one passionate spasm the French people cried, “Never again!”

  But the future was heavy with foreboding. The population of France was less than two-thirds that of Germany. The French population was stationary, while the German grew. In a decade or less the annual flood of German youth reaching the military age must be double that of France. Germany had fought nearly the whole world, almost single-handed, and she had almost conquered. Those who knew the most knew best the several occasions when the result of the Great War had trembled in the balance, and the accidents and chances which had turned the fateful scale. What prospect was there in the future that the Great Allies would once again appear in their millions upon the battlefields of France or in the east? Russia was in ruin and convulsion, transformed beyond all semblance of the past. Italy might be upon the opposite side. Great Britain and the United States were separated by the seas or oceans from Europe. The British Empire itself seemed knit together by ties which none but its citizens could understand. What combination of events could ever bring back again to France and Flanders the formidable Canadians of the Vimy Ridge; the glorious Australians of Villers-Brettonneaux; the dauntless New Zealanders of the crater-fields of Passchendaele; the steadfast Indian Corps which in the cruel winter of 1914 had held the line by Armentières? When again would peaceful, careless, anti-militarist Britain tramp the plains of Artois and Picardy with armies of two or three million men? When again would the ocean bear two millions of the splendid manhood of America to Champagne and the Argonne? Worn down, doubly decimated, but undisputed masters of the hour, the French nation peered into the future in thankful wonder and haunting dread. Where then was that SECURITY without which all that had been gained seemed valueless, and life itself, even amid the rejoicings of victory, was almost unendurable? The mortal need was security at all costs and by all methods, however stern or even harsh.

  On Armistice Day, the German armies had marched homeward in good order. “They fought well,” said Marshal Foch, generalissimo of the Allies, with the laurels bright upon his brow, speaking in soldierly mood: “let them keep their weapons.” But he demanded that the French frontier should henceforth be the Rhine. Germany might be disarmed; her military system shivered in fragments; her fortresses dismantled: Germany might be impoverished; she might be loaded with measureless indemnities; she might become a prey to internal feuds: but all this would pass in ten years or in twenty. The indestructible might “of all the German tribes” would rise once more and the unquenched fires of warrior Prussia glow and burn again. But the Rhine, the broad, deep, swift-flowing Rhine, once held and fortified by the French Army, would be a barrier and a shield behind which France could dwell and breathe for generations. Very different were the sentiments and views of the English-speaking world, without whose aid France must have succumbed. The territorial provisions of the Treaty of Versailles left Germany practically intact. She still remained the largest homogeneous racial block in Europe. When Marshal Foch heard of the signing of the Peace Treaty of Versailles he observed with singular accuracy: “This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.”

  The economic clauses of the treaty were malignant and silly to an extent that made them obviously futile. Germany was condemned to pay reparations on a fabulous scale. These dictates gave expression to the anger of the victors, and to the belief of their peoples that any defeated nation or community can ever pay tribute on a scale which would meet the cost of modern war.

  The multitudes remained plunged in ignorance of the simplest economic facts, and their leaders, seeking their votes, did not dare to undeceive them. The newspapers, after their fashion, reflected and emphasized the prevailing opinions. Few voices were raised to explain that payment of reparations can only be made by services or by the physical transportation of goods in wagons across land frontiers or in ships across salt water; or that when these goods arrive in the demanding countries, they dislocate the local industry except in very primitive or rigorously controlled societies. In practice, as even the Russians have now learned, the only way of pillaging a defeated nation is to cart away any movables which are wanted, and to drive off a portion of its manhood as permanent or temporary slaves. But the profit gained from such processes bears no relation to the cost of the war. No one in great authority had the wit, ascendancy, or detachment from public folly to declare these fundamental, brutal facts to the electorates; nor would anyone have been believed if he had. The triumphant Allies continued to assert that they would squeeze Germany “till the pips squeaked.” All this had a potent bearing on the prosperity of the world and the mood of the German race.

  In fact, however, these clauses were never enforced. On the contrary, whereas about one thousand million pounds of German assets were appropriated by the victorious powers, more than one thousand five hundred millions were lent a few years later to Germany, principally by the United States and Great Britain, thus enabling the ruin of the war to be rapidly repaired in Germany. As this apparently magnanimous process was still accompanied by the machine-made howlings of the unhappy and embittered populations in the victorious countries, and the assurances of their statesmen that Germany should be made to pay “to the uttermost farthing,” no gratitude or goodwill was to be expected or reaped.