Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II. Len Deighton

      On 9 October 1938, only days after his triumph at Munich, Hitler made a speech at Saarbrücken in which he attacked the Western powers and forecast that soon warmongers would take control of Britain. It was a reference to Churchill and any others who objected to Chamberlain’s appeasement policy.

      In those days before worldwide electronic communications, such as satellite telephones, the role of an ambassador could be vital. It was unfortunate for all concerned that so many of the ambassadors involved were men of low calibre. America’s man in London was Joseph Kennedy, father of the future US president. He was rabidly anti-British and had long since decided (not without some reason) that Britain would not long survive a clash with Germany. The American ambassador in Paris was a man who saw Bolshevik conspiracies everywhere he looked. As their ambassador in Berlin, Britain’s cabinet had to depend upon Nevile Henderson, of whom William Shirer – an American journalist and historian who was at the time resident in Berlin – wrote as a footnote in his memoirs:

      I have tried to be as objective as possible about Sir Nevile Henderson, but it has been difficult. From the moment of his arrival in Berlin he struck me as being not only sympathetic to Nazism but to Nazism’s aims. The ambassador did not try to hide his personal approval of Hitler’s taking Austria and then Czechoslovakia – he seemed to loathe the Czechs as much as Hitler did.

      But worse than Henderson’s personal prejudices were his personal limitations. Sir L.B. Namier, the British historian, summed them up: ‘Conceited, vain, self-opinionated, rigidly adhering to his pre-conceived ideas, he poured out telegrams, dispatches and letters in unbelievable numbers and of formidable length, repeating a hundred times the same ill-founded views and ideas. Obtuse enough to be a menace and not stupid enough to be innocuous, he proved un homme néfaste [a very bad fellow].’¹²

      By the end of 1938 the threat of war was giving the British government economic worries. In April that year Britain was holding a healthy reserve of £800 million in gold, but appearances were deceptive. The money belonged largely to foreigners seeking a safe haven for their funds. The threat of war and the fact that Britain seemed unready for it¹³ caused some £150 million in gold to move out of the country between April and September. Britain’s economy was not resilient enough to cope with such swings of fortune. The cost of the First World War was still a burden on the taxpayer, despite the fact that the war debt to the United States was never paid. The Treasury had repeatedly warned that Britain could not afford to fight a major war lasting three years or more. The armed services all needed money and the government’s headache was made worse by the ever-growing cost of modern armaments.

      The reluctance to spend money was most apparent in cabinet on 2 February 1939 when the secretary of state for war, Leslie Hore-Belisha, sought £81 million to re-equip six divisions of the Regular army and four divisions of the Territorials. Chamberlain was against spending such money, saying that Britain’s financial strength would be a decisive factor in any future war. But the French, fearing that the British might be no more than spectators in a future war, had been insisting that the British prepare an army to fight on French soil. In the event, it was decided to re-equip all the twelve Territorial divisions but not the Regular army.

      Having occupied the Sudetenland, Hitler encouraged Slovakia – a large section of the dismembered country – to demand autonomy. Nazi demands upon the Prague government became more and more outrageous: Czechoslovakia must leave the League of Nations, reduce the size of its army, turn over part of its gold reserves to the Reichsbank, outlaw the Jews in line with the Nuremberg Laws the Nazis had passed. Inevitably, in March 1939, the Germans took over the whole of Czechoslovakia. Bohemia and Moravia were declared a German ‘protectorate’. Hitler went to Prague and spent the night in the President’s Palace, the castle which was to become the German administrative centre. Soldiers and Nazi party members wearing the red and black ribbon given to those who had ‘rendered valuable service’ in organizing the occupation of the Sudetenland, now got a ‘Prague castle bar’ – Prager Burg Spange