Dominion

Churchill, the ferocious anti-Socialist and anti-Communist Conservative, unshakeable opponent of Indian political advancement, on that subject a reactionary even by the standards of his own party at the time. But from 1935 on there emerged a third Churchill, the anti-Nazi who saw that Hitler meant war and that appeasement would end in disaster.

He genuinely loathed the fanatic nationalism and anti-Semitism of the Nazis and their destruction of democracy. This Churchill appeared on anti-appeasement platforms with Labour and trade union leaders like Ernest Bevin, and in 1940 allied with Labour against large parts of his own party in his determination to rally the nation to fight the war to the last, and his speeches, personality and human skills inspired both politicians and people to do just that. In old age, during his second premiership of 1951–55, a fourth Churchill appeared, his politics turned centrist and consensual, and who in 1949 admitted to Jawaharlal Nehru that he had done him great wrong.²

It is of course undeniable that throughout his days Churchill was an old-fashioned British imperialist, and that ideas of British exceptionalism were at the forefront of his wartime speeches. So it may seem odd that in this book, whose overarching theme is the dangers and evils of politics based on nationalism and race, Churchill appears as a heroic figure. But it should be remembered that Churchill was never a narrow nationalist, and in 1940–5 he always saw Britain in the context of the wider European and world struggle. This is shown in his June 1940 speech which I have chosen as the aphorism for this book; he saw with vivid clarity the darkness that Nazism and the Nazis had brought to Europe and which would continue to spread if they were not stopped.

I have always been fascinated by the notion of alternate history – how the world might have changed had one seminal event turned out differently. And sometimes, as in May 1940, the history of the world does indeed seem to turn on a sixpence. Of course the story told here, of the events that followed Churchill failing to become Prime Minister, is only an alternate history, not the alternate history, for there can be no such thing. Every imagined change to history, every road not taken, opens up probabilities and likelihoods to the historian, but never certainties. I think, however, that Churchill was right in believing that if Britain had accepted German peace overtures in 1940 it would inevitably have become dominated by Nazi Germany. The world I have created is only one of the scenarios that might have followed, though I believe a likely one.

And so, to turn to that crucial moment in the history of the real world, when Churchill became Prime Minister instead of Lord Halifax. Between 1935, when Fascist aggression in Europe began with Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, and March 1939, when Hitler finally destroyed Czechoslovakia, the policy of appeasement was supported by a majority within the ruling British National Government, a coalition with a large majority which had been in power since 1931. It was overwhelmingly Conservative but included a small number of important Labour and Liberal defectors.

Appeasement was not then a dirty word – it meant, broadly, to seek peace by negotiating peaceful solutions to international problems. People were appeasers from a number of often very different motives. One should never underestimate the importance of the memory of the horrors of the Great War, and the perfectly reasonable dread that with advancing technology, especially in the air, a second European war would be even more cataclysmic and involve the bombing of civilians with high explosives and, it was feared, poison gas. Stanley Baldwin was right when he said, in 1932, that ‘the bomber will always get through.’

Then there were those who thought the Treaty of Versailles, severing German territories from the Reich in a treaty that otherwise idolized the principle of national self-determination, unfair. And there were many, particularly Conservatives, who while they disliked the Nazi regime, and thought its leaders common and thuggish, felt it was not up to them to interfere in German domestic affairs and saw the Nazis as a bulwark against the threat of communism. Lord Halifax, just before visiting Hitler as Foreign Secretary in 1937, wrote that ‘Nationalism and Racialism is a powerful force but I can’t feel that it’s either unnatural or immoral!’, and added this comment shortly after: ‘I cannot myself doubt that these fellows are genuine haters of communism.’³

We know now, more accurately than people did in the 1930s, how appallingly murderous the regime that Lenin and Stalin had created actually was, but in the 1930s it was no possible military threat to the West. The widespread fears on the British right of communism spreading at home were a chimera.

Then there were others who positively admired Nazism. Lloyd George, Prime Minister during the Great War, called Hitler also ‘unquestionably a great leader’ and ‘the greatest German of the age’.⁴ There were Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts, supported for a time by Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail, and Hitler also had influential admirers in business and on the wealthy aristocratic right. There were very few Labour politicians who had any good words for the Nazis, but there were one or two, notably Ben Greene, quite an important figure for a while in the 1930s. In Dominion he becomes Labour leader in the pro-Treaty coalition.

Then there were the pacifists, whose opposition to war in any form was total, even after the Second World War began. Pacifism within the Labour Party had been strong in the early 1930s, but declined as Fascist aggression grew, particularly with the Spanish Civil War. Pacifism remained as a force, though, both within and outside the Labour Party. The position taken by people like Vera Brittain and the minority of some twenty Labour MPs who formed the Parliamentary Peace Aims Group was courageous given the atmosphere of the time, but the Peace Aims Group would undoubtedly have voted for a treaty in 1940, and lived – though perhaps not for long – to regret it.

At Munich in 1938, Chamberlain believed that by ceding the predominantly German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, he had met the Fuhrer’s last demand. When, the following spring, Hitler occupied the remaining Czech lands and set up Slovakia as a puppet state, Chamberlain realized he had been deceived. When he went on to invade Poland in September 1939 Chamberlain declared war, but he was a reluctant and ineffective war leader. His long-held hopes for peace gone, he became a tragic figure. When, in spring 1940, Chamberlain said that Hitler had ‘missed the bus’ for a spring offensive only for the Germans immediately to invade Denmark and Norway, and British military operations in Norway ended in disaster, his position as Prime Minister came under threat. A large minority of Conservative MPs voted against the government or abstained in the Norway Debate in Parliament in May 1940. Chamberlain turned to the Labour leaders with the offer of a coalition; they agreed to serve, but only under a different Conservative leader. Chamberlain realized he would have to go.

Thus followed the fateful meeting of 9 May 1940 between Chamberlain, the Conservative Chief Whip David Margesson, and the two leading candidates for the succession, Halifax and Churchill. Each of the participants left a record of what happened, which differ considerably in detail but not in essentials.⁵ Edward Wood, Lord Halifax, Chamberlain’s Foreign Secretary, had the premiership for the asking. He was patrician, experienced, trusted, reliable and respected, though he had been a leading appeaser and there was sometimes an odd element of passivity in his nature. He was supported by the bulk of the Conservative party, Chamberlain, and the King. His junior minister, Rab Butler, had spent the previous evening imploring him to accept the premiership. Labour sat on their hands between the two candidates. Churchill, on the other hand, who had been brought back into the Cabinet when war was declared, was tough, pugnacious, brilliantly creative and popular with the public; but had a reputation among Conservatives as serially disloyal, an ex-Liberal, an unreliable adventurer who had (as he did) some questionable friends.

But Halifax did not press for the position, and agreed to serve under Churchill. He seems to have realized that he did not have the personality to fight the titanic struggle that was coming; the very next day the Germans invaded the Low Countries and France. He also suffered at times of crisis from agonizing, probably psychosomatic, stomach pains. Honourably, he stood aside. Churchill became Prime Minister and entered the House of Commons to loud cheers from the Labour benches, but few from the Conservatives. They took a long time to learn to love him.

Churchill immediately appointed a new War Cabinet, the central core of ministers to direct the war. Besides himself, Halifax and Chamberlain remained for the Conservatives – other prominent appeasers were cast out (Sir Samuel Hoare suddenly found himself ambassador to Franco’s Spain) – and Churchill appointed two Labour members, the party leader Clement Attlee and his deputy Arthur Greenwood. This was more than Labour were strictly entitled to, given their level of parliamentary representation, but it was a shrewd move – Churchill had not been a politician for forty years for nothing – because both were anti-appeasers who could be relied on to support him in prosecuting the war vigorously. It gave him a majority in the War Cabinet, and Chamberlain too, though now terminally ill, showed a new resolution. This was needed. By the end of May 1940 British and French forces were in full retreat, the British to Dunkirk. At this point Germany made peace overtures, as they did again later in 1940, the thrust of which was that Hitler, who had never wanted war against his fellow Aryan nation, would leave the British