Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Outside these two groups, and much more numerous (but much more remote from the real instruments of government), were the appeasers and the “peace at any price” people. These were both used by the two inner groups to command public support for their quite different policies. Of the two the appeasers were much more important than the “peace at any price” people. The appeasers swallowed the steady propaganda (much of it emanating from Chatham House, The Times, the Round Table groups, or Rhodes circles) that the Germans had been deceived and brutally treated in 1919. For example, it was under pressure from seven persons, including General Smuts and H. A. L. Fisher, as well as Lord Milner himself, that Lloyd George made his belated demand on June 2, 1919, that the German reparations be reduced and the Rhineland occupation be cut from fifteen years to two. The memorandum from which Lloyd George read these demands was apparently drawn up by Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian), while the minutes of the Council of Four, from which we get the record of those demands, were taken down by Sir Maurice Hankey (as secretary to the Supreme Council, a position obtained through Lord Esher). It was Kerr (Lothian) who served as British member of the Committee of Five which drew up the answer to the Germans’ protest of May, 1919. General Smuts was still refusing to sign the treaty because it was too severe as late as June 23, 1919.

As a result of these attacks and a barrage of similar attacks on the treaty which continued year after year, British public opinion acquired a guilty conscience about the Treaty of Versailles, and was quite unprepared to take any steps to enforce it by 1930. On this feeling, which owed so much to the British idea of sportsmanlike conduct toward a beaten opponent, was built the movement for appeasement. This movement had two basic assumptions: (a) that reparation must be made for Britain’s treatment of Germany in 1919 and (b) that if Germany’s most obvious demands, such as arms equality, remilitarization of the Rhineland, and perhaps union with Austria, were met, Germany would become satisfied and peaceful. The trouble with this argument was that once Germany reached this point, it would be very difficult to prevent Germany from going further (such as taking the Sudetenland and the Polish Corridor). Accordingly, many of the appeasers, when this point was reached in March 1938 went over to the anti-Bolshevik or “three-bloc’ ‘ point of view, while some even went into the “peace at any price” group. It is likely that Chamberlain, Sir John Simon, and Sir Samuel Hoare went by this road from appeasement to anti-Bolshevism. At any rate, few influential people were still in the appeasement group by 1939 in the sense that they believed that Germany could ever be satisfied. Once this was realized, it seemed to many that the only solution was to bring Germany into contact with, or even collision with, the Soviet Union.

The “peace at any price” people were both few and lacking in influence in Britain, while the contrary, as we shall see, was true in France. However, in the period August 1935 to March 1939 and especially in September 1938, the government built upon the fears of this group by steadily exaggerating Germany’s armed might and belittling their own, by calculated indiscretions (like the statement in September 1938 that there were no real antiaircraft defenses in London), by constant hammering at the danger of an overwhelming air attack without warning, by building ostentatious and quite useless air-raid trenches in the streets and parks of London, and by insisting through daily warnings that everyone must be fitted with a gas mask immediately (although the danger of a gas attack was nil).

In this way, the government put London into a panic in 1938 for the first time since 1804 or even 1678. And by this panic, Chamberlain was able to get the British people to accept the destruction of Czechoslovakia, wrapping it up in a piece of paper, marked “peace in our time,” which he obtained from Hitler, as he confided to that ruthless dictator, “for British public opinion.” Once this panic passed, Chamberlain found it impossible to get the British public to follow his program, although he himself never wavered, even in 1940. He worked on the appeasement and the “peace at any price” groups throughout 1939, but their numbers dwindled rapidly, and since he could not openly appeal for support on either the anti-Bolshevik or the “three-bloc” basis, he had to adopt the dangerous expedient of pretending to resist (in order to satisfy the British public) while really continuing to make every possible concession to Hitler which would bring Germany to a common frontier with the Soviet Union, all the while putting every pressure on Poland to negotiate and on Germany to refrain from using force in order to gain time to wear Poland down and in order to avoid the necessity of backing up by action his pretense of resistance to Germany. This policy went completely astray in the period from August 1939 to April 1940.

Chamberlain’s motives were not bad ones; he wanted peace so that he could devote Britain’s “limited resources” to social welfare; but he was narrow and totally ignorant of the realities of power, convinced that international politics could be conducted in terms of secret deals, as business was, and he was quite ruthless in carrying out his aims, especially in his readiness to sacrifice non-English persons, who, in his eyes, did not count.

In the meantime, both the people and the government were more demoralized in France than in England. The policy of the Right which would have used force against Germany even in the face of British disapproval ended in 1924. When Barthou, who had been one of the chief figures in the 1924 effort, tried to revive it in 1934, it was quite a different thing, and he had constantly to give at least verbal support to Britain’s efforts to modify his encirclement of Germany into a Four-Power Pact (of Britain, France, Italy, Germany). This Four-Power Pact, which was the ultimate goal of the anti-Bolshevik group in England, was really an effort to form a united front of Europe against the Soviet Union and, in the eyes of this group, would have been a capstone to unite in one system the encirclement of France (which was the British answer to Barthou’s encirclement of Germany) and the Anti-Comintern Pact (which was the German response to the same project).

The Four-Power Pact reached its fruition at the Munich Conference of September 1938, where these four Powers destroyed Czechoslovakia without consulting Czechoslovakia’s ally, the Soviet Union. But the scorn the dictators had for Britain and France as decadent democracies had by this time reached such a pass that the dictators no longer had even that minimum of respect without which the Four-Power Pact could not function. As a consequence, Hitler in 1939 spurned all Chamberlain’s frantic efforts to restore the Four-Power Pact along with his equally frantic and even more secret efforts to win Hitler’s attention by offers of colonies in Africa and economic support in eastern Europe.

As a result of the failure of the policy of the French Right against Germany in 1924 and the failure of the “policy of fulfillment” of the French Left in 1929-1930, France was left with no policy. Convinced that French security depended on British military and naval support in the field before action began (in order to avoid a German wartime occupation of the richest part of France such as existed in 1914-1918), depressed by the growing unbalance of the German population over the French population, and shot through with pacifism and antiwar feeling, the French Army under Petain’s influence adopted a purely defensive strategy and built up defensive tactics to support it.

In spite of the agitations of Charles de Gaulle (then a colonel) and his parliamentary spokesman, Paul Reynaud, to build up an armored striking force as an offensive weapon, France built a great, and purely defensive, fortified barrier from Montmédy to the Swiss frontier, and retrained many of its tactical units into purely defensive duties within this barrier. It was clear to many that the defensive tactics of this Maginot Line were inconsistent with France’s obligations to her allies in eastern Europe, but everyone was too paralyzed by domestic political partisanship, by British pressure for a purely western European policy, and by general intellectual confusion and crisis weariness to do anything about bringing France’s strategic plans and its political obligations into a consistent pattern.