Cato - Guilty Men

BY MICHAEL FOOT

GuiltyMen was conceived by three London journalists who had formed the habit of meeting on the roof of the EveningStandard offices in Shoe Lane, Fleet Street, just after the afternoon paper had been put to bed and, maybe, just before the Two Brewers opened across the road. On the roof, no one could overhear what we were saying to one another, but it was also the place where we might remind ourselves what might happen to our city and our country. The term Guilty Men was the one which achieved particular fame, quite unforeseen by us come to that, and to the particular writers in a moment. The scene and the moment are significant.

July 1940 was the finest month in that finest, unforgettable year. Looking back now, we may reckon that the finest hour, to use the term literally, had occurred a little earlier when Chamberlain was slung out and Churchill was put in his place, although Churchill himself did not, immodestly, apply the word thus. His happy compliment was intended for the British people and their performance .

I well remember the London of that July: how the sun blazed more brilliantly each day, how the green parks, the whole city indeed, had never looked lovelier. All of us who lived through those times had a special instruction in the meaning of patriotism. The sense of the community in which we had been born and bred suffused all else, made everything else subordinate or trivial. And one essential element in the exhilaration was the knowledge that the shameful Chamberlain era had at last been brought to an end, and that English people could look into each others eyes with recovered pride and courage.

If anyone questions this last seemingly exaggerated claim, I would refer him to the verdict passed by one of the very greatest journalist-observers of our century. Rebecca West wrote an epilogue to her classic, BlackLambandGreyFalcon, a book about other peoples patriotism to be published a year later. She thought the stain of what Chamberlains England had done to the Czechs and the Poles could never be wiped away, but she expressed too the sense of cleansing liberation which enabled London and later the whole country to survive all the trials ahead.

With unrelenting crudity, without a scrap of Rebecca Wests style, and with nothing to recommend it in a literary sense but red-hot topicality, a book was published that July which purported to describe how the nation had been thrust into such a critical condition and what remedies were needed to save us. It was called GuiltyMen, and maybe, despite the glaring defects in the text itself, the title did have a touch of salesmans genius. It sold like a pornographic classic, especially in bookstalls round Leicester Square and especially when regular bookstalls sought to ban it. Being one of the authors, I can testify that the whole affair was contrived in a rush and a rage: our aim was to secure changes in the men running the war. I could hardly have expected that half a century later it would be the subject of detailed historical analysis.

GuiltyMens argument about how Britain became engulfed in the Second World War became the Churchill argument too. Indeed GuiltyMen quoted Churchill on its cover, and he took a genial view of the exposition at the time. His own post-war volume, TheGatheringStorm, described the events as the unnecessary war; and three of his leading culprits, Baldwin, Chamberlain and Halifax, also headed the GuiltyMen list. Two of them, as we now learn, although no outsiders knew at the time, favoured some fresh deal with Hitler and Mussolini, some fresh infamies, according to the Rebecca West test, in that same blazing summer.

However, despite Churchills prestige both as war leader and historian, despite his strange or interested alliance with the scurrilous GuiltyMen authors, the theory did not stand unchallenged. Gradually, the Revisionists of one school or another got to work. Had not those who made the deal with Hitler and Mussolini made possible the essential British rearmament from which Churchill was to profit? Individual biographers of the particular miscreants shared a happy knack of unloosing some of the guilt on their fellow victims in the dock. Fanciful theories were devised to suggest that the time bought by Chamberlain saved the country in the later struggle. Munich was presented not as a surrender, but as a brilliant stratagem.

Then suddenly, in the early 1960s, a new Revision in a new direction by a real historian dazzled all beholders. A. J. P. Taylor ransacked the origins of the war in the diplomatic archives and offered a more sophisticated analysis than either the Churchillites or the Chamberlainites had supplied. Robert Boyce, the editor of the most important new study on the subject, PathstoWar, published by Macmillan in 1990, asserts in his introduction that Taylor remains the master speculator in this field, and, considering the tumult of debate which had raged back and forth on every aspect of the theme, that is a mighty commendation indeed.

One reason why the Taylor thesis has stood up so well to so much buffeting may be that it was never the apology for appeasement which his critics chose to claim. His Baldwin, Chamberlain and Halifax meant well with their pious self-righteous protestations; but in every crisis they behaved like ignoramuses or poltroons or cowards. Our enemies drew the conclusion that the British people were made from the same mould, and would act with the same pusillanimity. Nineteen-forty taught them how wrong they were.

Mostly, the new excellent series of essays, edited by Robert Boyce, had the effect of revising the Revisionists, a salutary requirement when we recall that a recent supposedly serious study of Churchills 1940 conduct, seen from the Chamberlain camp, suggested that the real question is whether he and the rest of the nation should not have given in, as Chamberlain and Halifax still advised as late as the winter of that year.

However, here at last, as MPs sometimes say, I must declare an interest. The most original essay in the book, by Sidney Aster, Professor of History at the University of Toronto, tackles the neglected question about whether the most modern available evidence, especially from Chamberlains own diaries, confirms the indictment of GuiltyMen.

A note on my two fellow authors and, even more necessary , on our common proprietor, or the casual reader might think I was engaged in some interested concealment . Not so, as Beaverbrook, the proprietor concerned, might himself say, or Peter Howard, one of the authors, might himself say. Peter wrote every Sunday in the SundayExpress the column which many experts thought most directly reflected Beaverbrooks own views. He had other claims to fame. He had been born with a deformed anklebone which looked as if it might snap at any moment, and yet he had survived to captain England at Rugby. Beaverbrook had certainly played his part in making Peter a good journalist.

Frank Owen, the other part-author of GuiltyMen, owed several debts to Beaverbrook too, but he had his own touch of journalistic genius which would have taken him to the top anywhere. He was the editor of the EveningStandard who could inspire the whole staff but he was one of those rare editors who could turn his hand to any other kind of journalism. He seemed especially qualified to edit a newspaper in wartime, having been trained as a military historian and having attracted to the Standard an extraordinary array of military experts headed by Liddel Hart and J. F. C. Fuller. Whatever else could be scoffed at, the military assessments had their basis in his deep understanding of the subject.