BOOKS

This is an important and disturbing book. Since Chester Wilmot's Struggle for Europe (1952) it has been accepted that the allies won the war but lost the peace because of military miscalculation: they missed the opportunity after D-Day to thrust rapidly east, to get to Berlin, Prague and Vienna before the Russians, occupy all Germany and liberate Poland. Lamb now argues, on the strength of newly opened Foreign Office records and unpublished as well as published material, that the miscal- culation was political and went back much earlier. He believes that, if anti-Nazi ele- ments in Europe had been rightly encour- aged, the war could have been prevented; once started, it could have been shortened. Millions could have been saved from death on the battlefield, in the bombed cities and the murder camps. The balance of power in Europe could have been preserved and Bolshevik expansion minimised His narra- tive is at times somewhat disjointed, and there is a sprinkling of small errors: the Sudetenland is described as formerly Prus- sian, and the date of the allied evacuation of the Rhineland is misprinted as 1933, after Hitler's seizure of power, instead of 1930. These do not detract from the argument. It must be taken seriously; and even those who do not accept all of it will be dismayed by what the hitherto unknown documents reveal about the attitude of British politicians and officials to the Ger- mans who gave their lives in opposing Hitler.

Lamb resurrects some Italian ghosts that are more elusive than the German. He believes that Mussolini could have been kept as an ally, following the Stresa agree- ment of 1935 which briefly united Britain, France and Italy against Hitlerite expan- sion. At that conference, British repre- sentatives had not even touched on Musso- lini's known designs on Abyssinia, leading him to think — much as the Argentinians thought recently — that Britain would offer no opposition to an attack. Abyssinia deserved little sympathy. She would never have been admitted to the League of Nations in 1924 if British objections had been heeded. Italy coveted territories inha- bited by peoples unrelated to the ruling Abyssinians, and subjected by them to enslavement and degradation. But Italy's invasion caused Eden's angry promotion of sanctions, abandoned only after Mussolini had been driven into Hitler's arms. Mean- while, Eden missed a good chance of uniting with France against German remili- tarisation of the Rhineland, and then showed supine indifference to the Anschluss, which Chamberlain, for once more far-sighted, realised would danger-

Missing our chances

Thomas Braun

THE GHOSTS OF PEACE 1935-1945 by Richard Lamb

Michael Russell, £14.95 ously strengthen Hitler. Far from resigning in protest against appeasement, Eden, it is now clear, was sacked for alienating Italy while doing nothing to stop Hitler. Cham- berlain's subsequent rapprochement with Mussolini at least secured his neutrality in 1939.

When France fell, Mussolini did join Hitler. Lamb's discoveries about Britain's wartime policy towards Italy are intriguing. Churchill wanted a Free Italian colony of Cyrenaica, 'to be petted and made prosperous'. Wavell and the ambassador in Cairo squashed this outrage to the Arabs. In any case, no suitable Free Italian de Gaulle could be found. The captured general Annibale Bergonzi, a keen bicyc- list known as 'Electric Whiskers', was considered, but proved too eccentric and meddlesome. In 1942 a Swedish business- man nearly sold the Italian navy to the British. A price list, from battleships to torpedo boats, was agreed, and Whitehall sent a first instalment of £3,125. The money was to enable Italian naval officers and their ladies to start a new life in Portugal or elsewhere. But the project fell through when the Swedish police arrested the businessman for espionage.

With the anti-fascist coup in Italy of July 1943, the story takes a gloomier turn. Roosevelt had in January issued his de- mand for Unconditional Surrender. Eden followed this through. The 'unconditional' terms took months to negotiate and even- tually contained 42 conditions. Macmillan and Eisenhower, from headquarters in North Africa, warned in vain of the dan- gers of delay. Without it, Lamb believes that Italian forces might have been encour- aged to secede intact, and Germany's invasion of Italy forestalled.

But would Mussolini have made a useful and trustworthy ally against Hitler? His Spanish interventions, on which Lamb does not dwell in this book, say little for his good faith; and Fascism, though less evil, was akin to German National Socialism. There was a certain inevitability about the Rome-Berlin axis. And if, after Mussolini's fall, the allies missed their chance, so did the Italian anti-fascists. Badoglio, the new leader, was a poltroon. He did not do nearly enough to help the allies, dallying instead with unrealistic hopes of neutrality; and he let Rome and Mussolini himself slip through his fingers.

The German anti-Nazi conspirators were, by contrast, brave, responsible and realistic. It will not be easy to refute Lamb's claim that Britain let them down. Tirelessly active from 1938 onwards, they had British friends in the highest places. On the eve of Munich, Ewald von Kleist was warmly received by Churchill, and Theo Kordt was let through the garden door of Number Ten to tell Halifax, then Foreign Secretary, that the generals would arrest and certify Hitler if only Britain and France stood firm. This plot had an excel- lent chance of success. Most Germans would probably have gratefully accepted their release from the threat of war. Chamberlain threw the chance away, dis- missing the anti-Nazis as 'Jacobites'. But he knew they were sincere. In 1939 he and Halifax talked with Adam von Trott and were impressed. The Foreign Office knew of the unimpeachable credentials of the shadow chancellor, Goerdeler, who had resigned as burgomaster of Leipzig in protest at the removal of Mendelssohn's statue. But its sights were set on appeasing Hitler, even after Chamberlain's fateful guarantee to Poland in March 1939. In September British policy was to give Dan- zig and the Corridor to Hitler; it was Poland, by refusing to negotiate, that forced Britain into war. After the invasion of the Low Countries Halifax was for compromise with Hitler, and wanted to buy peace through Mussolini by ceding Gibraltar, Malta and Suez. Even Churchill once nearly faltered while the BEF was stranded. Once the troops were safely home from Dunkirk, British resolve stif- fened. By the time of Hess's mission, it was natural for Churchill to prefer to see a Marx Brothers film rather than Hitler's deputy.

But the new hard line against Hitler went with a hard line against Hitler's enemies in Germany, despite the repeated efforts of Trott and others, at the risk of their lives, to explain their plans to the allies and enlist their help. The anti-Nazi opposition, while still unknown to the vigilant Gestapo, were known by name to the British Foreign Office. A month before the plot of 20 July 1944, the Foreign Office received advance notice from Trott through Alan Dulles. Sir Frank Roberts marked the list of conspirators 'very bogus and old friends', and a subordinate added `Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all'. When the plot failed and its leaders were eliminated, they could not be thought bogus any more. But for the Deputy Head of Political Warfare, Wheeler-Bennett the historian, they were now something worse than bogus, although he had written Trott a glowing letter of encouragement after their meeting in America in 1940. He now wrote: 'the Gestapo and the SS have done us an appreciable service in removing a selection of those who would undoubtedly have posed as "good Germans" after the war, while preparing for a third world war. It is to our advantage therefore that the purge should continue, since the killing of Germans by Germans will save us from future embarrassments of many kinds.' Churchill repeated this chilling misjudg- ment to the House of Commons.

True, Trott had had to pose as pro-Nazi to retain his post in the German Foreign Office; and in war one must guard against disinformation. But the British Foreign Office seems to have made no proper use of its own well-indexed files in assessing the bona fides of the conspirators. An opinionated intellectual, Richard Cross- man, wrote a report on Trott in 1942 saying that he had known him at Oxford, but had disapproved of his Balliol-inspired philo- sophic views and felt that Trott did not trust him. (In this, Trott was, even then, not alone.) Crossman's conclusion was that Trott 'would somehow twist to avoid the really unpleasant decision to work for a revolution in Germany', but that his group did exist 'and could be misdirected by us in ways useful to HMG'. Misdirected! Eden and the Foreign Office accepted Cross- man's report. Cripps, who wrote to Eden refuting it from superior knowledge, re- ceived no answer. Trott's friend David Astor comments: 'If the police took as little trouble to check on their impressions of a suspected person as the Foreign Office took in checking their suspicions of Adam, it would have caused a scandal.' At the time, Astor was never consulted.

Through meetings in neutral countries, the conspirators pleaded with the allies for a clear statement of peace terms. To begin with, they hoped that Germany would not be forced back to the unjust frontiers of Versailles, but would retain the territories outside them which had large German Majorities. Later, they relinquished this hope, asking only that there should be `some assurance of territorial integrity', that ordinary Germans should not be threatened with deportation to Siberia, and that the allies should realise that terror bombing of civilian targets was enabling the Nazis to take credit for humanitarian relief, and might in the long term benefit the Russians. They desperately wanted to save Germany from communism. That Britain should help them in this was branded as 'unthinkable' in successive Foreign Office minutes. To all overtures from the German anti-Nazis the response, on Churchill's orders, was 'absolute si- lence'. Meanwhile, the Morgenthau plan to `pastoralise' Germany gave Goebbels an invaluable propaganda advantage with the German people, who rallied behind the Nazis despite the imminence of defeat, for fear of a terrible future. Eisenhower pleaded for the offer of terms which would induce the Germans to stop fighting, and managed to persuade Roosevelt to aban- don his demand for unconditional surren- der. But now Churchill overruled Roose- velt, for fear of annoying Stalin. 'Uncle Joe', he wrote, 'wants two million of Nazi youth for prolonged reparations work, and it is hard to say he is wrong . . . .' Any assurances, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick minuted, `would gravely embarrass us later. At the worst to give them a glimpse into our minds might drive them [the German opposition] into the Nazi camp!'

t was not the fault of the allies that I Hitler, having escaped many previous assassination attempts, survived the attempted coup of 20 July 1944 (though it is interesting to speculate on what might have happened if Trott, on his last danger- ous mission to Stockholm, had been sup- plied with the best available British bomb instead of being cold-shouldered). The spitfire pilots who strafed Rommel's car three days before the attempted coup were not to know that they were putting out of action the general with the determination and power to surrender on the Western Front regardless of whether or not Hitler survived, and so to put the allies in a position overwhelmingly superior to Rus- sia. But, granted this double misfortune, Lamb has a strong case in arguing that allied obtuseness was the surest way to prolong the war, and that for this the British leadership must bear much of the blame. The Foreign Office officials were shallow and complacent. Everything done by Eden bears out Belloc's description: `ignorant and as vain as a tart'. Churchill had been the great man of 1940. In 1944, fighting off weariness and with the stuff in his despatch boxes largely unread, he was no longer so great.

But the outlook of the leadership was that of the British people. Even if politi- 'It's medium rare.' cians and civil servants had been as perci- pient as. Lamb thinks they should, that outlook would have been difficult to change. In was conditioned by events. During the Abyssinian crisis, the British had in their millions protested against Mussolini. Sanctions appeared a painless way of expressing moral outrage, as sanc- tions against South Africa seem to some indignant people today. The price of opposing Hitler, by comparison, seemed too high. Horror at the thought of another world war was so great that appeasement was popular and Chamberlain cheered to the end. When forced to keep their prom- ise to Poland and declare war, the British were slow to abandon their appeasement mentality. But after Germany's conquests in the West, they settled down to the business of winning. The bulldog breed held on tenaciously. Allied with Stalin, they meant to keep their bargain with him and let the devil have his due. They tried hard not to think of him as a devil. Inevitably, they regarded the second world war as a replay of the first, in which only 20 years before the British had lost a million lives against a united German 'nation in arms', which had given a ferocious account of itself while still a constitutional state, living under the rule of law and known for its racial tolerance. It is understandable that the British did not now distinguish good Germans from bad, Prussian army conservatives from Nazi gangsters. Richard Stokes and George Strauss were the only MPs to oppose unconditional surrender in Parliament. They met with an unfriendly reception, and Strauss was bar- racked when he spoke of Goebbels's prop- aganda claim that after the allies' victory nine million German people of Upper Silesia, East Prussia and the Sudetenland would be transported. In the event not only they but the Germans of Lower Silesia and Pomerania were expelled from their homelands, with many deaths on the way. Not one Englishman in a hundred today knows or cares.

Britain, that 'profoundly decent coun- try', as the German historian Golo Mann calls her, had not wanted either world war. In the first, as Kipling wrote, 'it was not part of their blood,/It came to them very late/. . . When the British began to hate.' In the second world war they showed less hatred, but they were sick and tired of the Germans. In one of Stella Gibbons's war- time novels, a pacifist lady tells her char- woman that the Germans are not all bad. `They are misled.' Why are they always being misled into other peoples' countries, then?' is the reply. Determined to defeat them once and for all, leaving no pretext for a second 'stab in the back' legend, the British made great sacrifices while seeking nothing for themselves. And so the whole nation, not just the 'frozen codfish' in Whitehall, was blind to its best opportuni- ties. The ghosts of peace haunt a stricken Europe in consequence.