Phony peace on Earth

Spectator, The, Dec 14-21, 1996 by Hodgkin, E C, Gimson, Andrew

E.C. Hodgkin recalls London's last prewar Christmas. And Andrew Gimson describes Berlin's

IT FELT much more like the first Christmas of war than the last of peace. It was only eight weeks since Munich, and whatever else might be said about that meeting and the drama of the days which preceded it, there was no question that we had escaped war by a whisker. In his famous broadcast on 27 September, the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had said, `How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.' Though it had never been properly explained what good slit-trenches were going to be against air attacks, they were still there at Christmas. Queen Mary had gone to Hyde Park to see the trenches being dug, `also the dahlias in their usual place, what a contrast!'

The position on gas-masks was a bit more complicated. Three weeks after Munich, the Committee of Imperial Defence discussed whether they should be called in. Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, his attitude now stiffening, effectively persuaded the committee that they shouldn't be. In any case it was not clear who they belonged to - the councils who had issued them or the, so to speak, wearers. A man was reported to have thrown his into the fire, but it could not be proved that he had committed any offence (though the rubber must have made an awful stink). Besides, as Wing-Commander Hodsoll, director-general of Air Raid Precautions, reported, `there is quite a traffic in gas-masks to American tourists, who want to take them home as souvenirs of the crisis'.

Hardly a day passed without some fresh sign of preparations for the war which everyone, except Chamberlain and Lord Beaverbrook, was coming to regard as inevitable. On 1 December Sir John Anderson, Lord Privy Seal, announced plans for a national register of men and women - voluntary to begin with but compulsory in the event of war. To cope with incendiary bombs and gas 240 fully qualified inspectors were to be turned out each month. Four days before Christmas, 20 million was voted to provide ten million shelters `in the poorer sections of the population'; these were the `Anderson shelters' at the bottom of many suburban gardens, which did save lives. London hospitals were told to be ready to evacuate as many patients as possible and stand by for air-raid casualties. Anti-aircraft batteries were moved from Lichfield to Wellington Barracks, close enough for the German Embassy in Carlton House Terrace to take notice. At 11.20 on the morning of 8 December, air-raid sirens installed at police stations in the Metropolitan area were tested. Many Londoners were puzzled to know what all the noise was about; they were soon to learn. At the end of October, the Committee on Civil Evacuation reported. It recommended that evacuees should be received `mainly in private houses under powers of compulsory billeting' -- powers of which Evelyn Waugh was to make splendid use in his 1942 novel Put Out More Flags.

All this time poor Czechoslovakia was being dismembered; Poland and Hungary, jackal-like, were nibbling off bits of the rump that was left after Hitler had swallowed the Sudetenland. One of the sick jokes of the time was the advice to Hitler on the lines of the well-known whisky advertisement: `Don't be vague, ask for Prague.' But it was not to be until March 1939 that German troops finally marched into the capital. That was the final disillusionment for Chamberlain, but the glamour which surrounded him after Munich still glowed at Christmas. It shone on Mrs Chamberlain too. It was in December that she opened a fete in Swindon where `almost everybody in the hall tried to shake her by the hand or, failing that, to touch the hem of her garment'.

Nothing did more to reveal to most people the true nature of Nazism than the appalling pogroms, with wholesale arson and looting, which swept through most German towns on 10-11 November (Kristallnacht) after a desperate 17-year-old Jew, whose parents, with 50,000 other Jews, were being deported by the Gestapo, had murdered a member of the staff of the German Embassy in Paris. More than 20,000 Jews were taken to concentration camps, none were to be allowed any longer to drive cars or own retail shops, and the community was fined 1,000 million marks. On 8 December Lord Baldwin broadcast an appeal on behalf of victims of religious or racial persecution. This was denounced in the German press as 'mendacious hypocrisy' and `revolver humanity', but by Christmas the fund had reached 233,000. Halifax thought Kristallnacht had `made the position very difficult', but diplomatic toing and froing went on. Schacht, Hitler's minister of economics, came to London for three days in mid-December. Chamberlain and Halifax went to Paris at the end of November, to be followed by Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, a couple of weeks later. King Carol of Romania and his son Michael started a state visit to London on 15 November. He described his country as `the sentinel of Occidental civilisation at the gates of the Orient', and hoped for a loan. When he failed to get one, he sacked most of his legation staff. I recall the flat of one of them stacked high with duty-free booze as he made his last use of diplomatic privilege. In fact, in April next year, after Mussolini had annexed Albania, Chamberlain gave Romania and Greece an undertaking that if their independence was threatened the British government would `lend all the support in their power' - a fat lot of good that did them.