The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (24 page)

If you want an example of his love of ‘minutes’—dictated messages on government, of which he would produce dozens a day—look at this amazing document that is framed on the wall at Chartwell. It is a testy response to what seems to have been a very moderate Foreign Office suggestion, about respecting the names people give their own cities.

Prime Minister’s Personal Minute:

Serial No: M 387/5 A

FOREIGN OFFICE

1. The principle at ‘A’ is entirely disagreeable to me. I do not consider that names that have been familiar for generations in England should be altered to study the whims of foreigners living in those parts.

Where the name has no particular significance, the local custom should be followed. However, Constantinople should never be abandoned, though for stupid people Istanbul may be written in brackets after it. As for Angora, long familiar with us through the Angora Cats, I will resist to the utmost of my power its degradation to Ankara.

2. You should note, by the way, the bad luck which always pursue peoples who change the names of their cities. Fortune is rightly malignant to those who break with the traditions and customs of the past. As long as I have a word to say in the matter Ankara is banned, unless in brackets afterwards. If we do not make a stand we shall in a few weeks be asked to call Leghorn Livorno, and the B.B.C. will be pronouncing Paris Paree. Foreign names were made for Englishmen, not Englishmen for foreign names. I date this minute from St George’s Day.

WSC

23.4.45

And look at the date: the Germans are still fighting, British troops are still dying—and he finds time to dictate a humorous minute about place names.

Sometimes, though, his colleagues were grateful for that eagle eye. Shown some pictures of dummy British battleships at Scapa Flow, he noticed something odd. There weren’t any seagulls around
the funnels. The Germans might rumble the deception. So they put enough food around the funnels to bring the birds—and the Germans, presumably, were fooled.

This indefatigability was absolutely essential from 1940 on. He had chosen the nation’s fate. By sheer charisma and force of personality, he had determined that Britain should fight on. But he still had to keep hauling the machine in the direction he wanted; he was the strongman pulling the 747 across the runway; the tug changing the course of the supertanker. As one aide put it: ‘
the ferment of ideas, the persistence in flogging proposals, the goading of commanders to attack—these were all expressions of that blazing explosive energy without which the vast war machine, civilian as well as military, could not have been moved forward so steadily or steered through so many set-backs and difficulties’.

—

O
F COURSE,
he couldn’t have done it without you—I mean you, the young secretary, now back on duty, and taking more dictation. It was part of Churchill’s triumph that he was able to turn the people around him into his personal hive, his ‘factory’, as he called it; and on the whole it was a wonderful factory to work in. If he could be occasionally snappish and impatient he could also be kind and loving to those who helped him, paying for their medical treatment and their time off work for sickness.

He needed the factory to help him process the quantity of data he deployed, and to give him that grasp of detail. And it was the grasp of detail, of course, which enabled him also to be a big-picture man. The reason he was so formidable, in that long and wretched slide to war, is that he had the facts; he knew the reality about Germany and he intuitively understood the threat the Nazis posed to the world.

It is regularly said that his views were discounted at the time, because he had been wrong so often before; and it strikes me that this is an assertion that needs to be challenged. He made terrible mistakes, of course; but even before the Second World War, there is a case for saying that he had been much more right than wrong.

CHAPTER 15

PLAYING ROULETTE WITH HISTORY

I
t hardly bears thinking about, really. Winston Churchill had plenty of narrow squeaks—but when he agreed to loiter in the tearoom of a Munich hotel, he had no idea of the risk he was running. He was almost caught in the photo-opportunity from hell: the one handshake that was likely to prove most damaging to his long-term reputation.

It was July 1932, and he had come to Germany to research the battlefield of Blenheim, with a view to adding some colour to his life of Marlborough. He was staying at one of the swishest hotels in the city, the Regina Palast—the same place, incidentally, that was to accommodate Neville Chamberlain and his wretched delegation when they came to the summit of 1938.

Already there were parades of fascist youths down the streets of Munich—right outside the hotel. Conjure up in your mind brown leather shorts and rippling thighs; oom-pa-pa marching bands and red and black swastika bunting floating in the breeze. Think beaming girls in dirndl serving foaming steins in the hotel
biergarten
, their blond hair whorled in strange pastry shapes around their ears.

Then add Churchill with his lively eyes and puckish curiosity, watching it all from an open window, drinking it in, working it out. His journalist son Randolph was with him on the trip, keen to find out about the Nazis; and he introduced his father to a curious geezer by the name of Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl. This Putzi was a tall, gangling German-American businessman in his mid-forties. He had been educated at Harvard—so he spoke excellent English. Like Franklin D. Roosevelt he had been a member of the Hasty Pudding club, where he had developed his talent for the piano. Indeed, he was the author of some of the famous Harvard songs.

He was talkative, jokey, sardonic, with tweeds and a kipper tie that came, in the fashion of the day, only halfway down his shirt front. He was also a leading Nazi and intimate of Hitler, for whom he acted as a kind of international spin-doctor.

One night Winston, Randolph and Putzi Hanfstaengl stayed up round the piano; and though it is not clear whether Churchill followed his normal practice of singing lustily and tunelessly along, he was certainly pleased to find that Putzi knew many of his favourite tunes. At the end of this enjoyable recital, Putzi started rhapsodising about Hitler, and his successes in revitalising Germany.

Churchill immediately asked about Hitler’s anti-Semitism. Putzi tried to allay his fears. As Hanfstaengl later wrote: ‘
I tried to give as mild an account as I could, saying that the problem was the influx of eastern European Jews and the excessive representation of their co-religionists in the professions.’

Hmmm, said Churchill: ‘
Tell your boss from me that anti-semitism may be a good starter, but it is a bad sticker.’ This is a racing expression. It is a polite, upper-class English way of saying that in bashing the Jews, Hitler was backing the wrong horse.

I tell you what, Putzi told Churchill. He should meet Hitler. It would be a piece of cake, perhaps literally. It seemed that Hitler came
to this very hotel, every afternoon at 5 p.m. They could bond over a couple of slices of Black Forest gateau. Putzi was sure that the Führer would be ‘
very glad’ to meet the English party.

Churchill’s natural journalistic curiosity was aroused—and indeed Randolph was almost certainly angling for just such a meeting. As Churchill said later in his memoirs: ‘
I had no national prejudices against Hitler at this time. I knew little of his doctrine or record and nothing of his character.’

For two days Churchill and Randolph waited; sometimes in the American bar, sometimes in the sunny
biergarten
outside. It is eerie to think of our hero, kicking his heels like a stringer correspondent in some Munich hotel, and waiting to be favoured with an audience by a man fourteen years his junior who was to go on to become his bitterest enemy.

Imagine if they had met. Churchill would have joined the embarrassing roll-call of British MPs and aristocrats to be pictured with a leader who was to become a universal by-word for evil. Halifax; Chamberlain; Lloyd George; Edward VIII; they all made that goof.

(The only man to come through it with colours flying was Churchill’s parliamentary aide Bob Boothby, MP, who famously replied to Hitler’s megalomaniacal greeting of ‘
Heil Hitler!’ with the only logical response: ‘Heil Boothby!’ said Boothby.)

If Hitler had come into that hotel tearoom or bar, Churchill would have been forced at the least to be courteous, if not cordial—and that would not have looked good in 1940.

The interesting question is why Hitler chose not to come. He met plenty of other people in Munich. He dazzled Unity Mitford, for instance, and even bought her tea. Why shouldn’t he have seen a man who was famous throughout England, had held most of the great offices of state, and who had a formidable reputation for foreign affairs?

Before Putzi went off to fix the momentous encounter, he asked Churchill to give him something to go on. Were there any questions that the Englishman wanted to ask, so as to serve as the basis for their discussions? Yes, said Churchill. He returned to the point that exercised him.

‘
Why is your chief so violent about the Jews?’ Churchill asked Putzi Hanfstaengl. ‘I can quite understand being angry with the Jews who have done wrong or are against the country, and I can understand resisting them if they try to monopolise power in any walk of life; but
what is the sense of being against a man simply because of his birth? How can any man help how he is born?’

With these unimpeachably liberal, humane and Churchillian sentiments in his ears, Putzi returned to the Führer; and got nowhere.

‘
What part does Churchill play?’ sneered the Nazi leader. ‘He is in opposition and no one pays any attention to him.’

To which Hanfstaengl replied: ‘People say the same about you.’

I reckon Hitler decided to swerve Churchill not just because he thought he was washed up, kaput, finito. It was because he didn’t like the sound of this boisterous and opinionated English fellow, who was so fervent about democracy and so mysteriously squeamish about anti-Semitism.

He avoided the Regina Palast hotel until the Churchill party was gone; and for the second time in history—they were apparently only a few hundred yards from each other in the trenches in 1916—the two men came close, but never met. Later, of course, Hitler was to issue plenty of invitations to meet Churchill in public, when such a meeting would have been obviously to the Nazis’ advantage; and Churchill always declined.

Right at the beginning of Germany’s nightmare, before Hitler had even become Chancellor, Churchill spotted the evil at the heart of Nazi ideology. There is something innocent in the way he phrases
the question to Putzi: ‘what is the sense of being against a man simply because of his birth?’ In the months and years that followed, Churchill’s puzzlement was to turn to outrage.

While Nazism remained obdurately fashionable in some parts of British society, Churchill campaigned with growing vehemence against Hitler’s mistreatment of minorities. It helped that he had been to Germany. He had drunk in the atmosphere: he had actually seen the files of young men and women, fit, tanned, full of revanchist excitement.

On 23 November 1932 he made a prescient speech to Parliament. He observed that ‘
all these bands of sturdy Teutonic youths, marching through the streets and roads of Germany, with the light of desire in their eyes to suffer for the Fatherland, are not looking for status. They are looking for weapons.’ When they had the weapons, he prophesied, they would use them to ask for the return of their lost territories. France, Belgium, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia—they were all in peril, said Churchill. A ‘war mentality’ was springing up across Europe. It was time to tell the British people the truth about the danger, he said. They were a tough people, a robust people, the British: they could take it, he said. Others, of course, said he was being alarmist: a warmonger.

Six years later he was to be proved crushingly and overwhelmingly correct in his analysis. That was the basis of much of his prestige in 1940—that he had made the right call about Hitler, almost from the start. He put his shirt on a horse called anti-Nazism, and he did it early, at a time when no one much fancied the nag, and his bet came off in spectacular fashion.

To some extent all politicians are gamblers with events. They try to anticipate what will happen, to put themselves ‘on the right side of history’, to show off their judgement to best advantage. In 1902 Churchill observed that a politician needs ‘
the ability to
foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability to explain afterward why it didn’t happen.’

He loved staking his reputation in the way that he loved all risky activities—flying a plane, riding along the front at Malakand, crawling around no man’s land. It gave him the chance to test his egocentric thesis that he was special, that somehow the bullets would whistle past him; that a guardian angel or daemon hovered over him, that Lady Luck was on his side and really rather doted on him. He gambled for money, at the tables of Deauville or Le Touquet, and one of his secretaries describes him leaping out of a taxi and rushing into the casino at Monte Carlo—shirt-tails flapping—and returning a short time later with enough to buy their rail fare home.

No other politician had taken so many apparently risky positions; no other politician had been involved in so many cock-ups—not only living to tell the tale, but flourishing in spite of them. The surprising thing, by the time he lounged in that Munich hotel in 1932, was that he had any reputation left to wager.