Ten Days that Saved the West
John Costello
Bantam Press 1991
John Costello has set out to provide, in the words of the publisher’s blurb, “the first behind the scenes account of the agonizing history of 1940′. His aim is to debunk the Churchillian myth that in 1940 Britain was united in its determination to fight Nazism to the bitter end. Churchill may have been resolute but Halifax, the Foreign Secretary and Butler, the second in command in the Foreign Office, were keen to come to an accommodation with Germany. With the collapse of France both considered that the war was unwinnable. To continue hostilities in the absence of any allies outside the Commonwealth and Empire risked a shattering defeat. Rather than follow so suicidal a course, national and imperial interest dictated a deal with Hitler which left Britain and its Empire intact while simultaneously allowing Hitler to proceed on his crusade against the real enemy, the USSR. This defeatism was encouraged by powerful sections of the Conservative Party, the City, industry and the Royal Family, all of whom were disposed on ideological and/or racist grounds to take a favourable view of Nazism.
So it was that Churchill had to fight on two fronts: against Hitler and against the reactionary cabal inside his own country. The war against Hitler was conducted partly by military means: but it was also waged with Machiavellian cunning. Churchill knew that Tyler Kent, a coding clerk at the US Embassy in London, had stolen copies of his correspondence with Roosevelt. Had the details of Kent’s treachery been released the full extent of Roosevelt’s departure from strict neutrality would have become apparent to the American people and the President’s chances of securing re-election in November 1940 would have been seriously damaged. Churchill used this threat to blackmail Roosevelt into providing material support for the British war effort — with the ultimate objective of dragging America into the conflict.
Although Churchill succeeded in squashing the peace feelers put out by Butler and Halifax during the summer of 1940 he was unable to suppress all treasonable activity. Lord Lothian and Sir Samuel Hoare, Ambassadors in Washington and Madrid respectively, the Minister in Switzerland, Sir David Kelly, and the Duke of Windsor maintained highly irregular and compromising contacts with the Germans throughout the period from June 1940 to early 1941. As a result Hitler, who had long argued in favour of an Anglo-German entente, and his deputy Hess came to the conclusion that there was a sizeable group inside Britain which was prepared to overthrow the Prime Minister and make peace with Germany. Hess, secretly supported by Hitler, endeavoured to make contact with the British peace party but his overtures were manipulated by MI5 who lured him to Britain in May 1941. Hess arrived proposing an understanding between Britain and Germany which would allow Hitler to commence Operation Barbarossa without having to worry about a war on two fronts. Churchill was unwilling to tell the truth about Hess in case his peace mission evoked domestic political support. In consequence, once the Deputy Fuhrer had been milked for valuable information (which, duly doctored, was passed to Stalin) he was locked away and the whole affair was buried in secrecy in case it damaged morale. Even after 1945 successive governments have suppressed the truth because it would reveal as fiction the story that Britain stood alone and united against Germany in 1940-41.
Such is Costello’s thesis. His book has considerable merits. It is well researched, drawing upon a wide selection of primary sources ranging from official archives in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and the USA to private collections and even the records of the KGB (mostly used in the section devoted to the Hess affair). Costello’s assiduous pursuit of documentary evidence and his willingness, for the sake of historical accuracy, to discuss events long considered official secrets in Britain puts many of his professional academic contemporaries in this country to shame. He should also be given credit for quoting KGB files, in so doing discarding cold war paranoia (still prevalent if the official reaction to Costello’s coup is any guide) in the cause of sound scholarship.
Despite all this it is difficult to avoid finishing the book without feeling disappointed. There are some irritating mistakes. Helmut Wohltat, the senior German civil servant from the Ministry of Economics, is throughout called Wohltart. The head of the SIS from 1939-52, Sir Stewart Menzies, is at one point named as Sir Robert Menzies. More seriously, Costello too often writes as if he is providing revelations when he is only recounting in laborious detail episodes which are already well known. Chapters 7-11, for example, tell the story of the government’s reaction to the fall of France and discuss the acrimonious Cabinet meetings which debated whether Britain should seek an armistice or fight on alone. Yet there is nothing very new here; the ground has been covered by Gilbert in his monumental biography of Churchill, by Sir Edward Spears in his racy Assignment to Catastrophe (1954), and more recently by Clive Ponting in 1940: Myth and Reality (1990).
Another chapter is devoted to the German intrigues with the Duke of Windsor in Spain and Portugal during the late summer and early autumn of 1940 although most of this is familiar, having not long ago been aired by Anthony Cave Brown in C (1988), the biography of Stewart Menzies. And was it really necessary to give a blow-by-blow account of the military campaign in northern France during May and June 1940, just to suggest that Hitler might have called the Panzers off the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk because he thought the British forces would be useful hostages in a peace negotiation? So much space has been devoted to this reworking of old news that a fair amount of more interesting material is relegated to the appendices where it is presented in a rather abbreviated form. Astonishingly, Kenneth de Courcy, whose activities and contacts make him one of the more significant figures on the British Right, and who was deeply involved in the peace feelers of May and June 1940, suffers this fate.(1)
This is not to deny that the book contains very useful sections which genuinely add to our knowledge of what happened in 1940-41. Costello is convincing on the pro-Nazi machinations of Joseph Kennedy, the US Ambassador in London. He provides the fullest English language account yet of the attempt made by Butler and Halifax in June to set up a peace deal with Hitler using the Swedes as intermediaries. The suggestion that Lord Lothian might have been behind the San Fransisco meetings in late 1940 between Sir William Wiseman, Fritz Weidemann and Stefanie Hohenlohe- Waldenberg is supported by some reasonably strong circumstantial evidence.(2) But in view of the material Costello collected during the course of his researches there should have been more. For example, the Venlo affair (October-November 1939) when two SIS officers, who had been negotiating with what appeared to be an anti-Hitler faction in the Nazi leadership, were abducted from Holland into Germany, is only mentioned in passing; and there is no reference to the simultaneous discussions between Max Hohenlohe and Malcolm Christie, an agent both for SIS and for Sir Robert Vansittart, despite the suggestive evidence that they might be connected.(3) Did Chamberlain back an attempt to assassinate Hitler, as the Nazis claimed? It would have been good to have been told more about this episode — not least because it is suggested that the Hess affair was an MI5 “sting’ operation devised with the intention of making up for the Venlo disaster (p. 453).
One of the major difficulties with this book stems from the approach to the subject adopted by the author. By concentrating so much on high politics and strategy he misses the chance to produce an incisive analysis of what really made the peace plotters tick, of what they believed and of where they were socially located. True, Costello does wheel out some (by now familiar) names such as the Duke of Buccleugh, Lord Holden, the Marquis of Tavistock and the worthies of the Right Club (though even this information is left until the appendix). There are references to anti-war opinion in the City and in industry but hardly anyone in this category is identified: the anti-Communism and the anti-semitism of the conspirators is acknowledged; but it is all rather superficial. Did these people represent a handful of fading aristocrats and eccentric M.Ps or forces which were much more powerfully rooted in the structure of the British State? What was their relationship with the security and intelligence services? Why did Churchill feel the need to have his own intelligence adviser, Sir Desmond Morton?
Costello seems to believe that the pro-appeasement faction was powerful enough to represent a real threat to Churchill’s government but he does not produce the evidence to support this claim. He could only have done so if he had spent more time unpicking the networks of power and interest which tied together figures like Halifax, Hoare, Butler, Joseph Ball, de Courcy, Menzies, Montagu Norman and Lord Aberconway. It may even be possible to argue that these men were broadly representative of the predominant views held within the Conservative Party, the security and intelligence services, the City of London and the Bank of England and large-scale industry. Together with a handful of renegade Labour M.Ps like Richard Stokes, they might have formed a National Government committed to a non-aggression pact with Germany and the pursuit of a managed capitalism at home: a British version of Vichy, in fact. A glance at the kind of deal being offered to Germany right through the 1938-39 period, all the way to the outbreak of war and even beyond, would suggest the plausibility of such a thesis. Unfortunately Costello does not cover the immediate pre-war period at all and as a result the continuity between peacetime and wartime Anglo-German conversations is missed.(4)
Costello finishes his book rather abruptly with a discussion of the Hess affair. He claims that his researches have at long last uncovered the truth and that in these circumstances it is pointless for the British government to continue suppression of the relevant documents until 2017. While these strictures must be wholeheartedly supported, there must be some doubt about whether Costello’s version of the Hess story is the correct one. It is good to have the KGB documents, and the declassified US papers which show that Moscow and Washington were told that Hess had come to Britain with Hitler’s support to offer peace and an anti-Soviet alliance. Such unanimity blows an irreparable hole in the official British version of the saga, namely that the Hess flight was the one-off act of a maverick Nazi losing his influence in the Party hierarchy.
There are, however, problems with the way Costello handles the evidence. For a start he ignores the question of identity, presenting Hugh Thomas’ arguments dead-pan in a footnote and offering no contrary view. Secondly, the sources upon which Costello bases his argument are second-hand. The papers of Eden, Cadogan (the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office) and of John Simon (the Lord Chancellor, who interrogated “Hess’) all show that the government was concealing a very great secret. As Eden told Simon on May 28 1941, a few days before he went off to question the prisoner, Cadogan “alone here knows of project’.(5) This does tend to narrow the field of potentially accurate informants. It suggests that even Ivone Kirkpatrick, who actually supplied briefing notes for Simon’s questioning of “Hess’, was kept in the dark.
What does this imply for the status of the information Tom Dupree gave to Kim Philby not later than May 18? Why should news that was being passed along Whitehall corridors and was even the subject of (admittedly highly classified) diplomatic circulars have suddenly become so secret that only the head of the Foreign Office was allowed to know what was happening? Did something happen between 18 and 27 May to throw the government into confusion? Could Churchill, regardless of the prisoner’s identity, have used his arrival to convince Stalin that he would soon be under attack? What happened to the members of the “peace party’ when the crisis erupted? And why did Hess fly to Scotland at great risk when he could have gone to Spain in security to meet Sir Samuel Hoare, a leading appeaser who only eight weeks earlier had been engaged in treasonable conversations with Max von Hohenlohe? There is still enough obscurity here to make Costello’s claims rather premature.
It may of course be argued that whether the man was Hess or not is irrelevant: what is interesting is why he came here. This is not really good enough. Historical accuracy is one issue. Beyond this, if the man who came to Britain was not Hess but a double, the implications for our understanding of internal politics within the Nazi regime and of the relationship between dissident German factions and influential circles inside the British establishment might be profound. Nevertheless Costello’s researches have left the government in an awkward spot. Its story is obviously not credible. It is doubtful whether any foreign administrations believe it now if they were inclined to before. Is it too much to expect that logic will prevail and cause the files to be released? We should be grateful to Costello for achieving even this much despite his rather overblown claims. But there is still a lot of work to be done.
Notes
- Kenneth de Courcy has featured in several Lobster articles on the British Right. See for example Morris Riley and Stephen Dorril, “Rothschild, the right, the far right and the Fifth Man’, pp. 1-7 in Lobster 16, May 1988. Costello is one of only a handful who have appreciated that de Courcy had any serious significance at all.
- The subject was the possibility of a compromise peace, leaving Germany the hegemonic continental European power, to be agreed following the simultaneous replacement of Hitler and Churchill.
- The Christie papers in Churchill College, Cambridge, 180/1/28, document 28, 13 October 1939.
- For an attempt at such an exercise see my “The economic background to appeasement and the search for Anglo-German entente before and during World War Two’, in Lobster 20, pp. 25-31, November 1990.
- Letter from Eden to Simon of 28 May 1941, New Bodleian Library, Oxford, Simon MSS 39-40.