But Churchill saw it differently. Though he too supported the king and tried to delay the abdication, he believed Edward had a moral and a sacred duty to forget this woman—at least as a wife. Edward of course did not. It all sounds quaint today, and in hindsight, given suggestions about what kind of king Edward would have made, it may have been best for Britain that he did not forget her. But at the time, when love triumphed over duty, it devastated many Britons.
William Manchester relates in
Alone
, the second volume of
The Last Lion
, his three-volume biography of Churchill, that one night, sitting with the Duke of Windsor (formerly Edward VIII) in Monte Carlo, after the coronation of George VI, Churchill told him how he had betrayed the British people, in a way only Churchill could, which did not for one moment lose the tone of respect.
There was a spinelessness about the duke and duchess, who at one point actually believed that a Hitler win would put Edward back on the throne. Many must have hoped for this in the Conservative, Liberal, and Labour parties, judging by the way they ignored Churchill’s warnings. And, as writer and broadcaster Alistair Cooke points out, when Paris was about to fall, the duke and duchess were still there, and had to be ordered into the departing car by their chauffeur. “They were at their best,” Alistair Cooke said, “when the going was good.”
This could never be said about Churchill himself. “There are two Winstons,” Max Aitken once said ruefully. “Winston Up and Winston Down. Winston down—with his back to the wall, is magnificent, Winston up—when things are going his way, is intolerable.” Both Alistair and Max were right.
AS THE 1930S WORE ON
, Max had his games, his dogs—two shitsus that he would carry about and fuss over—his trips with Jean Norton, his paper, his baggage of a past that would not go away. His dreams of going back to Newcastle and living in peace and quiet. He had other lady friends and his games of political intrigue. He was still plotting, still trying to be the boy wonder all over again. When they mention a loose cannon, show a picture of Max in a sunhat, smiling out from under its brim.
The men of power he kept tabs on were the ones, almost to a man, who he felt had forced him into the House of Lords in 1917, which meant that Max’s cannon was always firing in every direction. But he could never fire fast enough or get them all—and even to his adversaries he could and would be surprisingly generous. He once gave Baldwin, who had hurt him more than any other politician save Lloyd George, £25,000, telling him to give it to the charity of his
choice. Baldwin said the reason for this was an accident in which Max came close to death, and he was afraid. Well maybe—but I guarantee it was never Baldwin he feared.
He learned of Hitler’s rise to power, and watched, numbed, as his Conservative Party turned on the only man in the country who might be able to defend them: Winston Churchill. During these years, Churchill almost lost his seat, certainly lost his cabinet seat, and needed spies within caucus just to find out what was going on. He was laughed at by people like Bernard Shaw. (Well, who wasn’t? Shaw was good at laughing, often at better men.)
But Neville Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin were determined to prove Churchill wrong, and they prostrated themselves to one of the most evil men in history in order to do so. As Hitler said about these men in 1944: “My enemies are worms—I met them in Munich.”
When future prime minister Clement Attlee said that Beaverbrook was one of the most evil men he had ever met, he was at the same time agreeing on policy with those who smirked at Churchill and dined with German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop (later hanged for war crimes).
But then again, most people seemed to lack foresight in those times. “Scholarships not battleships!” was a chant that was used against Churchill and his ilk.
“Insensible,” said Sir Archibald Sinclair, then head of the Liberal Party, when asked about the prospects of a British continental army. This was in 1938.
But Beaver did not want war either—and said as much. “No War This Year” his paper stated in 1939. And he too had friends both Italian and German.
That is, he vacillated just as others did. He went to clubs, and ate with pacifists, as well as anyone else. There were leftists on his paper now, like Michael Foot, who later became a Labour minister and was a long-time friend. Still, for most of this time, Beaverbrook was the only support Churchill had.
He allowed Churchill to publish his so-called “war mongering” in the
Daily Express
when no one else in the land would give him a platform and Winston gave his speeches to an empty House of Commons. “You were given a choice between war and dishonour, you chose dishonour and you will have war!”
(Though even Max refused to publish Winston for a stretch in 1938—as a favour to appeaser Neville Chamberlain, then the prime minister.)
On another front, Aitken brought former Canadian prime minister R.B. Bennett, who had betrayed him on Empire Free Trade, to Britain and got him a knighthood, and taught
him what wines to serve with dinner. Max had a father figure beside him again, and he seemed to enjoy his company.
During this time there were moments when Max had an uncanny ability to see with a clarity few men had.
An editorial in his
Evening Standard
sounded a warning about the enthusiasm over the Munich Pact—while, like most papers, supporting it.
It is also interesting to note that one of the great men of the century, George Orwell, criticized Beaverbrook’s papers for pacifism in the face of danger. Still, it might have been wiser for Orwell to understand that the left-wing papers he himself had at one time cherished called for peace right up until Hitler invaded Russia in 1941.
Max did not like the guarantee given to Poland by the British government—that if it was attacked by Germany, England would respond—because the guarantee was given without consulting the Dominions.
He also disagreed with the mutual-defence pact with France, sensing that, if push came to shove, France would capitulate, and Britain would be on its own defending Poland, which could not defend itself. Strategically he was right—as it turned out, deadly right.
He was wrong, however, from the standpoint of moral obligation, and he was wrong to keep Churchill off his
pages, however briefly. When Baldwin kept Churchill out of his third cabinet, for fear he would anger Hitler, Winston boldly said that no greater crime had been committed since Roman emperor Caligula appointed his horse a senator. He was laughed at; he was right.
But no matter what people wanted, war came in 1939. And as it would turn out, without Beaverbrook the Battle of Britain might well have been lost and England’s neck wrung like a chicken.
As Churchill famously said during a speech to the Canadian parliament: “Some chicken, some neck.”
Beaverbrook provided much of the early gristle in that tough neck.
The war came in September 1939, spellbinding in its seeming stupidity. Hitler, self-mesmerized, had no choice. No one was around to stop him. And perhaps that grandest puppet master of all, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, was egging him on. (Some biographers actually say this, and believe that Stalin was expecting an attack. Whether or not this was so, he made the most of it in the end.) Hitler, too, thought Britain’s promise to Poland was an ill-considered one, and they wouldn’t hold to it. He was wrong. Prime Minister Chamberlain had a moral obligation to Poland, and tried his best to prosecute the war, and then resigned. Grudgingly, he handed over the reins to Churchill. And Churchill’s war cabinet appointed Max Aitken as minister of aircraft production.
He was now an unwilling player, with his asthma and ill health, yet here he would be an almost indispensable one. Within a few months he more then quadrupled the
manufacture of aircraft. Each day he was slandered in the House of Commons for duplicity and mismanagement, and he kept going. When the Continental army was forced from Dunkirk in May 1940, he made every effort to retrieve spare airplane parts that were left behind.
There is a story, related by Peter Howard in his book
Max the Unknown
, of Aitken going to see Churchill and meeting in the foyer a high-ranking naval commander who delightedly told him that a new shipment of steel for his destroyers had arrived. Max said great, and, pulling rank, went in to see Churchill first.
“What’s happening, Max?” Winston asked.
“I just got a great shipment of steel for our planes,” Max said.
“Wonderful news,” Winston beamed.
He was the boy giving his landlady her fifty cents all over again.
There are those who said he did not do what he said he was going to do, and that he fudged the results. Historian Roy Jenkins seems to think this, or at least intimates that Max was not that important. As with almost all of what Jenkins says about Beaverbrook, I am going to disagree.
It is widely suggested that, when he took over as minister of aircraft production, there were five Spitfires in reserve—
that is, once the pilots were in the air, five aircraft were left in the hangars.
Four months later, 6,400 aircraft had been built. Where did Aitken get most of the raw materials? From Canada and the States. Where did he get many of the pilots? From Canada as well. He bartered to get machinery and engines from Detroit. When Henry Ford said he would not build engines for belligerents in a war that did not concern the United States, Max used his old connections with Rolls-Royce to get engines and went to the smaller Packard Motor Car Company to build them. Some say that, because of this, he had a hand in jump-starting American production for its own war effort. He spoke of thousands and thousands of planes. Did he fudge the records? Probably—he was Beaverbrook. Did he come up against a bureaucratic wall? Of course, this was England. Was he fighting for England’s life? Absolutely. His arguments would start in cabinet, against one, and then two, and then sooner or later he would be taking on all comers, with poor Churchill trying to keep the peace daily.
“He swept through every department like Genghis Khan—it was remarkable,” said Air Force colonel Moore-Barbazon, member of parliament for Chatham. “He was one of the people Churchill spoke about when he said, ‘Never
was so much owed by so many to so few!’” (This is not a well-known summation of that famous line.)Was he indispensable? For a little while, a little while as indispensable as Eisenhower or Marshal Zhukov. Did he make enemies? Of course he did, he was . . .
No one was going to mess with Max Aitken. He was the inspired little tough from the town of Newcastle, on the banks of the Miramichi. If he had been intimidated by anyone, he wouldn’t have made it out of Newcastle. That’s the secret that Small Town boys know.
But he kept going. Not only with his aircraft production, but with his intrigues and his papers. In fact, he knew exactly what was being said against the present administration in his papers, and didn’t always do anything to stop it, although he was portrayed as the puppet master of his employees. Churchill and others complained in 1940 of leftists in his employ. The Beaver responded that there may well be, but that didn’t mean he agreed with them. He also complained that he was accosted on both sides: on one for telling his employees what to say, and on the other for not telling them what to say.
During this time certain of his younger friends, including journalist Peter Howard, wrote the pamphlet
The Guilty Men
, attacking Chamberlain, Baldwin, Lord Halifax, and
the rest for the terrible lack of British preparedness. Certainly Beaver approved of this pamphlet. So would most of us. He yelled for metal, tin, and copper—he had people give anything they could to be melted down and used to make his planes. He demanded the gates from former prime minister Baldwin’s estate, and said he would send the police to take them. He must have delighted in this, but he was outvoted in parliament, and Baldwin’s iron gates stayed. (However, Max’s gates and railings at Stornoway House were taken with Max’s blessing.)
CERTAIN NOTES FROM 1940
show what a man of mettle he actually was. Bombers were being built in the United States, pushed across the border to Canada, flown to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and put on ships to England. Those that weren’t sunk by the U-boat packs had to be reassembled at their destination. This to Beaverbrook was a criminal waste of time. He proposed to Churchill and got the go-ahead to hire Canadian, American, and Australian bush pilots to fly these planes across the Atlantic, and he then requisitioned and built an airport in Gander, Newfoundland, to get it done. Members of the British High Command howled at his presumption. Of course. Max went ahead. Of course. This was simply the bravest policy decision concerning aircraft in the Second World War.
He also sought and got a dispersal of aircraft-production centres, to thwart the enemy and lessen its bombing successes, but was unsuccessful in trying to stop air-raid sirens, because, he maintained, they slowed work production.
When his son-in-law, Drogo Montagu, Janet’s second husband (a fighter pilot and son of the Earl of Sandwich), was killed in the Battle of Britain, Max phoned his friend Peter Howard to say that nothing but total victory would ever ensure peace. And he sounded genuinely heartbroken.
He was to break Churchill’s heart too. As Peter Howard records, when First Sea Lord Dudley suggested the French fleet be destroyed to save it from falling into German hands, Churchill was aghast, and asked Max for his opinion on the matter.
“Attack it immediately,” Aitken replied. “The Germans will force the French fleet to side with the Italians in the Mediterranean Sea! They will do it by blackmail. They will threaten to burn Marseilles, or even to burn Paris, if the French do not comply.” For someone who hadn’t wanted war, he certainly understood what had to be done once the game was on. Max later recounted what followed. Churchill gave the order; Churchill wept.
There was another moment recorded by both A.J.P. Taylor and Peter Howard. It came when certain naval officers were
considering sending the British fleet to Canada if there was an invasion on British soil. Churchill, after receiving this note from the Naval office, handed it to Aitken. It was Canada they were thinking of sending the fleet to, and Aitken should be informed. But Aitken knew this would look like capitulation to the Americans, whose support they badly needed. Max simply said: “Winston, you can’t do that,” and it was settled.