From Havana to Munich, some thoughts about history

First of all, I was amazed to be challenged by a contributor who doubted my description of Fidel Castro as a ‘torturer’ . Let’s get this over with quickly. Castro is mainly a murderer, his regime having put to death, after appalling summary trials (in some of which ‘not guilty’ verdicts were actually reversed on the spot with the aid of the mob) or no trials at all, scores of opponents in its early years. The revolting Ernesto Guevara was much-involved in that bloodstained era. Visitors to Havana can still see the bullet scars in the walls of the great prison fortress above the city, where the murders were carried out while Guevara lounged on the walls smoking cigars.

And the recent death of the noble and peaceful dissenter Oswaldo Paya in a peculiar road accident seems to me to be a bit suspicious. Castro (or ‘Fidel’ as the Left matily insist on calling him) has also been known to lock people up in ‘drawer’ cells, a form of torture in itself which I will not describe here.  Look it up.

But the single best-documented instance of torture under Castro is that inflicted on Castro’s former comrade Huber Matos, who sought to resign from that regime in protest at Communist influence. He was imprisoned  for ‘treason and sedition’ for 20 years  in 1959. No remission for him. As he recounted, after his release into exile in 1979 ‘prison was a long agony from which I emerged alive because of God's will. I had to go on hunger strikes, mount other types of protests. Terrible. On and off, I spent a total of sixteen years in solitary confinement, constantly being told that I was never going to get out alive, that I had been sentenced to die in prison. They were very cruel, to the fullest extent of the word... I was tortured on several occasions, I was subjected to all kinds of horrors, all kinds, including the puncturing of my genitals. Once during a hunger strike a prison guard tried to crush my stomach with his boot... Terrible things.’

Enough? I’m amazed at the free pass that Castro still gets from so many people. Anyone wanting more should look up the treatment given to the poet Armando Valladares, by the funky Cuban maximum leader. .

Now, on to Munich and the book by John Charmley,  ‘Neville Chamberlain and the Lost Peace’. I think several things emerge from this.

One of the most interesting is that in 1936, Duff Cooper , then a junior war minister, urged that Britain should create a continental-sized army. His idea was over-ruled. At least in this matter Cooper was consistent. The policy which he and the anti-appeasers later followed would have made sense had Britain possessed a large conscript army by 1938. Such an army  (though there would always have been a difficulty in getting it on to the continent) was essential if any country wanted to play a serious part in the power politics of the European landmass.

The national government , much influenced by Chamberlain’s own tight management of limited funds, chose otherwise. From the beginning of rearmament in 1934, up till the arrival of war in 1939, Chamberlain strongly favoured the Air Force, and to a lesser extent the Navy.  There simply wasn’t enough money for all three. I should add, though Charmley doesn’t go into this, that the Labour Party largely opposed rearmament during this period, claiming to believe that such weapons would be used against the USSR, though it is hard to see how, why or where that might then have happened.

Most British strategists relied completely on the huge and supposedly excellent French Army (in fact a shell, rotten, ill-equipped and badly led, and over-committed to the fatally incomplete Maginot line, which ran out exactly where it was most needed, thanks to the sudden decision of Belgium to become neutral. The theory ran that the French Army stood as an immovable barrier to German attack, and would certainly hold Germany off for long enough for Britain to create a wartime army if needed.  Britain didn’t introduce military conscription till Spring 1939, a move once again opposed by Labour.

Britain, meanwhile, had its own complete and functioning Maginot Line, known as the English Channel, a defence which proved crucial in the war, and which worked perfectly in deterring attempts to invade our territory.

Chamberlain and his allies chose this course because they saw the main purpose of armed forces as being to protect us from attack, and to defend the Empire in any global conflict.

They didn’t envisage a continental war, and they didn’t want one. And they were doubtful about the old Eyre Crowe theory (very influential in 1914, to disastrous effect) of the ‘Balance of Power’ . This idea, often treated by contributors here as a fact, or a gospel, was and remains a theory, that Britain needed a balance of power on the Continent to be secure in herself. Is this true? I am not sure.

Certainly, our efforts to maintain such a balance in 1939 ended up by creating first one wholly unbalanced Europe under Hitler, and then another almost as unbalanced one in which the USSR was only kept in check by US intervention, and we had to hand over our balancing instruments to Washington.

Now we have the German domination which poor dear ‘Bert’ is unable to perceive, because there isn’t a big sign on top of the Berlaymont Building in Brussels saying ‘German Empire’. Well, so there isn’t. But if he looks at the history of the Bismarckian Empire, which was less tactful about its existence,  he’ll see that it too was constructed through customs and currency union, by centralisation and standardisation (including standardisation of time, NB)  and by regulation.

Back to Mr Charmley. I’m pleased to see that he punctures the absurd myth of Anthony Eden, that terribly over-rated man, who is always given a free pass by standard histories, as if he was in the forefront of the anti-appeasement battle. He wasn’t, and was much more concerned about Mussolini than about Hitler . I’m of the opinion that if we had not been scared out of the Hoare-Laval Pact, we might have kept Mussolini from getting too close to Hitler, and so changed the course of events quite a lot. The Anschluss with Austria might have been much delayed. We might not have need to fight for the Mediterranean.   But Eden had a sort of ‘principled’ objection to dealing with such a nasty man.

Like all those who were terribly principled in the 1930s, notably Winston Churchill, he ended up appeasing Stalin instead. And not just appeasing him but being ordered about and humiliated by him.

What Charmley skates over a bit (and which few people discussing the era ever bother to record) is the curious episode of May 1938, when Czechoslovakia claimed that Germany was about to invade her. Then, when no invasion happened, the Czechoslovak President Eduard Benes boasted to the world that he had forced Hitler to back down. Pat Buchanan, in his fascinating ‘Churchill, Hitler and the unnecessary War’ argues, that Hitler was so enraged by this very public humiliation that he then and there resolved to destroy the Czechoslovak state.

Charmley refers to this event, but nothing like as much as Buchanan does. He does, however, make Chamberlain’s behaviour seem a good deal more rational than most historians do, and produces documents to back this up. What was Britain’s interest in preserving the artificial and increasingly unstable Czechoslovak state.  Was France willing to fight for Prague? No. When Daladier and Bonnet came to London, they were very shifty indeed about what they would do. It was a relic of a French foreign policy dreamed up in more spacious days. Was Moscow willing to fight for Prague? Unlikely. The red Army had just been purged, and the USSR was so hated by Poland and the other East European states that they would never grant the Red Army the right of passage.

It’s hard to see what Britain could have done. We had nothing much to fight with, the French were shaky, by the time we’d acted, the Germans would have seized the Czech lands anyway, much as happened after we ‘defended’ and ‘went to war for‘ Poland a year later.

It would just have been 1939 a year earlier, probably with a neutral USSR. Who knows how it would have ended up, but I can’t see how we could have acquitted ourselves particularly well. The anti-appeasers, on the other hand , all manage to look very noble. But in Cabinet discussions, they didn’t really have much to offer by way of an alternative. We had armed forces suitable for a defensive war, or for retaliation against air attacks (or so we thought – the bombing planes and tactics turned out to be hopeless when the time came, though the fighters, luckily, were much better) and for holding on to the Empire – but not for a war in Europe. Even then, the navy was stretched far beyond its ability, quite unable to defend our Far Eastern possessions and the home islands at the same time.

As far as I can make out ( and I’m still roaming through specialist volumes on the Polish guarantee) it was Lord Halifax, Chamberlain’s Foreign Secretary, who became emotional and sentimental about national pride and standing up to dictators, and who drove the guarantee forward after Hitler’s seizure of Prague.

But whichever way you look at it, whoever’s account you read, it is impossible to doubt that the Polish guarantee either emboldened Poland into refusing to make concessions on Danzig, or convinced Hitler that war with Poland, rather than negotiation,  was the only way to get what he wanted (and that by implication, a partition of Poland with Stalin would be a neat solution). In my view it did both, so hastening the war and ensuring that we would be dragged into it at the worst possible moment. By the way, it also seems pretty clear that the British talks with the USSR were doomed from the start, as we weren’t prepared to let Stalin have the Baltic states. No appeasement, there then. I wonder, if we had been ready to do so, whether he would have preferred our offer to Ribbentrop’s.

Even worse, we were lashed to France, which wasn’t remotely ready to face the revived German army, despite the clear warnings of German tactics provided by the Polish war.  The September 1939 declaration of war still looks like a bad mess to me, and one we need to confront, whereas Roosevelt’s restraint and delay appears sensible and well-considered.

Yet to this day we laugh at and scorn Chamberlain and his umbrella, and refuse to see that he might have been wiser than we thought.  As I have said before, once the floor gives way beneath you, it goes on giving way, again and again until you finally reach the bottom, a disconsolate and bruised bundle covered in splinters and plaster dust, compelled to think thoughts you hate. How much easier it is to refuse to think, and fall back on the Finest Hour or even ‘Two World Wars and One World Cup’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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