The Armies March E-Book

John Cudahy

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Deutsch

Seitenzahl: 394

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

John Cudahy was an American diplomat who served in the years leading up to World War II as United States ambassador to Poland and Belgium, and as United States minister to Luxembourg and the Irish Free State. He was forced to leave his post in Luxembourg after Germany occupied this country and Belgium in May 1940 and the nations set up governments-in-exile. He was a close friend of King Leopold III and publicly denounced Britain, France and the U.S. for a failure to plan an adequate defense. This personal narrative shares many insights on his time in Europe and is a fully detailed account of what happened here and there behind closed doors.

Leseprobe

The Armies March

JOHN CUDAHY

The Armies March, John Cudahy

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9

Deutschland

Printed by Bookwire, Voltastraße 1, 60486 Frankfurt/M.

ISBN: 9783849662561

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

[email protected]

CONTENTS:

INTRODUCTION1

I. FEUDAL POLAND4

II. HITLER CROSSES THE RHINE12

III. THE WAR COMES TO IRELAND18

IV. TINY IRONSIDE25

V. AN ALERTE IN BELGIUM31

VI. THE BLITZKRIEG STRIKES43

VII. THE CASE FOR THE KING62

VIII. INTERLUDE75

IX. STARVING SPAIN85

X. WARTIME BERLIN93

XI. NUMBER ONE98

XII. A MEETING WITH HITLER AT BERCHTESGADEN107

XIII. GERMANY WITHOUT HITLER118

XIV. RETURN TO BELGIUM129

XV. GERMAN ECONOMIC BLUEPRINT143

XVI. GOLD IN THE GERMAN ECONOMY154

XVII. PROFESSOR O. M. W. SPRAGUE ANALYZES THE GERMAN ECONOMIC BLUEPRINT159

XVIII. CAN GERMANY WITHSTAND THE BLOCKADE?162

XIX. THE ARMIES MARCH169

INTRODUCTION

In this personal narrative, touching a few highlights in my career abroad during the past eight years, I have striven to abide by that truth which is the article of faith in all education and the touchstone of civilization. And that has not always been easy

When I came home last summer people remarked, with the uncomplimentary candor of old friends, about my appearance-haggard, hollow eyed, suddenly grown old. It was the truth. In great suffering and pain I had grown old during my brief day of this second war. The first war had been a melodramatic adventure in which one was stimulated by the exaltation that comes from selfless service in an idealistic cause, but there was no idealism, no heroics, in Belgium, , only the depraved spectacle of an innocent people stricken by crude, uncouth force, the insensate brutal impact of the war machine.

On that dawn when German bombers appeared over Brussels, emerging from the disc of the rising sun, they were at the same moment smashing Antwerp, Diest, Nivelles, Toumai, Tirlemont, Wavre, Zoute, Ostend, Gembloux, Saint Trond and Tongres, wrecking the aviation centers, the railway depots and means of communication, paralyzing the utilities and the industrial centers of Belgium with the systematic, scientific, destructive precision of lightning war.

I thought of my conversation with the King the day before and how in his quiet, sad way he had told me that invasion would reduce his little country to a scrambled ash heap. A little more than a week later I saw the scrambled ash heap, and in my mind’s eye I see it still, a fair country laid desolate by man’s depravity. The King had actually jeopardized his defenses in a desperate effort to keep the war from Belgium and every Belgian, both in and out of the government, had worked and hoped and prayed for peace. Then with no warning, with no attempt at any form of ultimatum or memorandum, flaunting all processes of law and order, the Blitzkrieg had descended in raging fury to lay waste the toil and savings of generations.

My feelings were rage mingled with a disgust so acute that it sickened me almost to the point of physical nausea. But in the dead days that followed, this first overpowering emotion was succeeded by wave after wave of culminating bitterness. Hardly a week after this first treacherous assault, the German advance guard in full panoply of victory marched through the Cinquaintenaire Arch, which commemorated Belgian independence, and after them came that endless procession of dull gray trucks jammed with soldiers, munitions, rations, guns, equipment and all the infinite paraphernalia of modem warfare, rolling on like an elemental force, an endless torrent which never ceased during the two months of our residence in the occupied country, and left us all with a crushing depression which I can still feel, and which I shall probably always feel.

Then, when it seemed as if the cup had been drained to the last bitter dreg. Mademoiselle Nerincx, my personal secretary, burst into the Embassy one morning, sobbing unrestrainedly— the King had surrendered. Out on the street, driven by that impulse to search relief in sympathetic grief.

I sought out the Nuncio, the only friend left among the diplomatic colleagues. On the way men and women passed weeping openly and unashamed. The heart of a country was broken. That night when the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, denounced King Leopold for treachery and cowardice, his words fell like a lash on the backs of a stricken people.

Ours was the only radio set permitted in the conquered city and always we reached out for some gleam of hope in the communiques from Paris and London. Gamelin had been relieved by Weygand and the situation was well in hand. The British Expeditionary Force, with epical heroism, had escaped from Dunkirk. The old Seventy-Fives were arrayed along a defense in depth, and were pounding the panzer divisions to smithereens. Remember Joffre and the battle of the Marne, we kept repeating to each other. History would repeat itself. Just wait, the same sort of pulverizing counterattack was coming. It was coming. There could be no question that counter-attack was coming. Every night we listened, hoping, praying. But the German High Command spoke in terse, precise, professional language, and with sinking hearts we knew they spoke the truth. Everything was proceeding according to plan. The Maginot Line was being attacked from the rear. The line of defense had retired from the Aisne to the Somme, then the Seine. Armored amts had broken through this last physical barrier and nothing lay between them and Paris.

One night, after the same dreary recital of monotonous German advance and the same fragmentary irrelevant French and British communiques, our military attaché, Colonel Duncan Brown, switched off the radio, looked at me, and turned his head away. Suddenly we both realized for the first time that our hopes and prayers had played us false, and the awful, deathlike truth was, France was lost.

Ten days later the German swastika was hoisted over the Eiffel Tower and something died within us, who were close to the heart of things. It was as if we were mourners at the funeral of the Europe we had known and loved for a lifetime.

So deeply were we moved that the health of some suffered, but we set about, as people do after a great grief, to adjust our lives and philosophy to a world vacated by a spirit which had animated our lives and affected the whole tenor of our lives.

Every day we saw the blond impassive soldiers of the conqueror in great clumsy boots and sloppy smoke-gray uniforms, but we were resolved to preserve our poise, to suppress our repugnance, to remember that the Germans were human beings like ourselves and guiltless, as individuals, of Hitler’s heinous crimes. We tried to be honest about them, to report the truth of the occupation, but were brought to realize that if it is unpalatable, few people will ever hear or heed the truth. Not alone that, but as feudal lords turned on the bearers of ill tidings, as if they were responsible for the distressing news they relayed, our own people commenced to look upon us with suspicion and distrust. When I wrote the truth of King Leopold’s surrender and showed by unchallenged evidence, which has since been supported by the judgment of Sir Roger Keyes, the only other foreigner in Belgium besides myself, a witness to those last tragical Flanders days, and in possession of all the facts, many people openly attacked me and impugned my integrity of purpose. It was a distressing experience, one that disturbed me a great deal at the time, and I confided my hurt to a friend who is a prominent member of the present British War Cabinet.

"Don’t you realize that during times like these you cannot tell the truth?” he asked, incredulous of my simple faith in human nature, but he added significantly, "Just the same, if I were you, I would keep on telling the truth.”

I have tried to tell the truth in these pages, and whatever my shortcomings, they are not due to lack of good faith and honest intention. The noblest institution of Anglo-Saxon civilization is the common law, its administration, and its tenets of justice to which our race has clung since the emergence of our civilization, and there is a well-known tradition in the American Bar that happy is the client whose lawyer is personally disliked by an honest presiding judge, for then he is sure of being judicially liked. I detest Hitler and all his works and made no concealment of my prejudice while in Germany, but in those parts of this narrative which deal with the German dictator and with the Nazi social and economic scheme, I have attempted to report objectively, in this tradition of Anglo-Saxon truth, with the hope that the account will be read in the same spirit.

John Cudahy

Hilltop, September 25, 1941.

I. FEUDAL POLAND

Truth may be the ideal of the perfectionists, the touchstone of education and civilized progress, but truth has little to do with the moving forces of individual lives or the lives of nations. All of us live in illusion, the illusion of the future, for the present is reality, and reality is so painfully unpleasant that none dare hold the mirror up to the nature of things that are. Life is endurable in the cultivated delusion that a happier horizon awaits beyond the horizon of the morrow, where there will be no unpaid bills, no aches or pains, or disappointments, and the atmosphere will have all the perfect harmony of a symphony.

In this age of industrialization especially there is an urge to escape, escape from a monotonous standardization which parches all romance in a machine age which is turning out human robots in mass production like metal gadgets. Against this spiritless pattern of existence, a struggle is made to live bravely, by proxy, in the identity of glamorous figures of the screen, or a national idol who found wings for escape to another world.

This impulse of escape was everywhere in Europe before the war and the motive of escape was fear. Every day with Doctor Coue’s formula, "every day in every way I am getting better and better,” Europeans Coue’d themselves into a self-hypnosis that somehow the threat of disaster would pass and that the skies would be blue and fair again. They went about the even tenor of their ways building the foundation of the future, arranging business, making plans, marrying and giving in marriage, just as if the pending earthquake was a figment of the imagination. In this self-delusion they persisted because there was nothing else to do, except perish of despair.

Above all Poland was a land of illusion where life was lived resolutely in the same splendor as illustrious ancestors had lived for more than one thousand years.

Josef Pilsudski was the hero of the Polish masses and he had as much to do with the modem era as Boneslas the Brave. He had stepped from the glamor of the Middle Ages upon the prosy stage of the present. A hardy pioneer, robust, tough-fisted warrior, I could imagine him, aglow with the lust of combat, swinging a broad sword at Grunwald in that heroic day when a bold heart and strong arm decided the fate of battle. He always seemed a reincarnation of a knight in armor and had contempt for the lilylike language of diplomacy and the plausible persuasion of politicians. Poland was ruled with as absolute a hand as ever King Sobieski ruled three hundred years ago while Pilsudski was unofficial Chief of State. He had withering scorn for the Sejm, the Polish Parliament, and at times his language addressed at that august body shocked sensitive people into a state of insensibility.

But he was adored by the general run of the Polish people, who knew he was honest and fearless and that he had dedicated his life to his country with unselfish singleness of purpose. In almost every home that could afford it you would see a Pilsudski bust. He had the same godlike stature as Lenin in Russia and Adolf Hitler in Germany.

In the evolution of every dictator occurs the inevitable corrosion of vanity, but Pilsudski’s weakness in this respect was limited to his exploits and eminence as a military leader. He seemed to have no other appetite for general popular applause. Perhaps he knew too well how capricious and cruel the crowd could be. Anyway, he sedulously avoided public appearances and a myth of mystery grew up about him which more and more enhanced his prestige and the aura of his person.

On St. Joseph’s Day, the President of Poland, the cabinet, high officials of the government, and the entire diplomatic corps would assemble to do him honor at the Warsaw opera house, but it was a play without a hero, for the hero would slip off to Vilna to spend a quiet holiday with his two little daughters, whom he loved above all human relations. It was strange that Pilsudski should reject the tinsel and the trappings of the political stage, which is such an important feature in the business of dictators, for he was very superstitious, with a belief in the occult, and his career often influenced by those mystic influences so peculiar to the Slavic race. Close to the earth at all times, although from the lesser nobility, he lived with the simplicity of a Polish peasant and despised conventional society with its superficial, snobbish standards. His ruling passion was the army, and the place in history he coveted was not as a politician or creator of the Polish state, but as a master strategist and tactician. People who knew him well told me he considered himself one of the greatest military geniuses of all times. An assiduous student of military texts and treatises, nothing pleased him more than to be subtly compared with the great Napoleon, but the comparison had to be subtly made, for he had all the shrewdness of the Polish peasant and could detect insincerity with the unerring instinct of a man who has known elemental values all his life. One had to tread lightly where his military reputation was concerned, and well-informed people told me that one of the reasons for the cooling off of Poland s attitude toward France, the two years before Pilsudski’s death, was because of persistent stories in French military circles that Weygand had planned the battle of Warsaw against Russia in 1920, one of the most crucial and decisive military contests in history and upon which the Marshal of Poland based his claim to immortality.

In his character was a strange commingling of prejudice, romance, and the shrewdness of a man who lives near the soil. He was realistic enough when it came to dealing with Germany. When I arrived in Poland in the late summer of 1933, the tension between Poland and Germany had reached the breaking point. Since Versailles, the Corridor and Danzig were constant threats to the peace of Europe, and there had been a sharp controversy over the administration of the Free City. The Polish army was strong. The country had been starved for the army. Probably two million men at that time could have been placed in the field. Pilsudski believed that he could defeat Hitler and he was realistic enough to recognize that if he waited he might well lose military preponderance over the German dictator. The time had come for a show-down, and the Polish Ambassador in Berlin, Lipski, was instructed to tell Hitler in undiplomatic language that he could have war or peace and to make up his mind in a hurry. The German-Polish treaty of January 23, 1934 was the consequence of this vigorous demarche. Germany agreed for a period of ten years to settle any difference with Poland at the conference table and in no event to resort to war.

Shortly afterward I called on Pilsudski at Belvidere Palace, Lazienki Park, where he lived in Warsaw. He was an ailing old man then, with caricaturish profile, outthrust chin and beetling brows over deep-sunk eyes. He wore the gray uniform of a field marshal, his skin had that dull gray lifelessness which proclaims a malignant, fatal disease; and his whole color note, his hair, his profuse brows, his eyes— all were gray. He was an ailing old man, although only sixty-seven years, doomed for an early death.

I spoke to Pilsudski about the peace he had made with Germany and was bold enough to ask him what he thought would be the state of Polish-German relations when the agreement reached expiration. I can see now, as I write, his piercing gray eyes and their twinkle as he leaned over and put his hand on my knee, "Young man, politicians used to build for their countries a generation in the future; now any man who thinks ahead a whole year is thinking a long, long time, and anyone who plans for ten years is just an idiot.”

Just five years and six months after this conversation German Stukas were screeching over Polish towns and panzer divisions were making their pulverizing advance over Polish soil.

I wonder if he knew what would happen to Poland and realized there was no escape. He had a faculty of divination that was almost preternatural, knew Europe well, and was seldom deceived on the fundamentals of the international situation.

Colonel Josef Beck, the Foreign Minister, was a faithful disciple of Pilsudski, with the brittle realism of the Talleyrand school of diplomacy. He believed that the purpose of words was to conceal ideas. Always from my meetings at the Foreign Office, I came away with the feeling that he had held back on me. There was an innate caution in his makeup, and he made a rule of concealment. He was clever and affected cleverness which wasn’t too clever. Negotiations between governments are the same as any other negotiations. Only candor and honesty, or the appearance of these qualities, can beget confidence, and without confidence no negotiation can carry conviction.

Beck was very proud of Poland and his position, and always insisted that the Polish nation be recognized as one of the great powers of Europe with Great Britain, France, Italy and Germany. I found him unable to conceal his elation upon the conclusion of the ten-year pact with Germany, this traditional enemy of his country which three times had brutally despoiled Polish territory.

I always thought of the hardship on the poor Poles caused by the great weight of armament. One half of the budgetary outlay was required for the military establishment, and now that the German agreement was concluded, I inquired of the Foreign Minister whether the load could not be lightened by demobilizing several divisions, but Colonel Beck dismissed this suggestion peremptorily with characteristic cynicism by saying that the agreement would never have been reached if Hitler had not feared Polish military force. This made me ponder on the durability of this forced peace with Hitler, for the population of the Reich was over twice that of Poland. The German ruling passion was soldiering. By tradition and training Germans had been great warriors since the time of Tacitus, and while the Polish divisions outnumbered them today, what would be the situation next year, five years from now? But I kept my speculation to myself, for Colonel Beck would have been offended if I had given utterance to what I considered the truth about his country and its future.

The truth, if you define truth as reality, had little bearing upon the life of Poland. The aristocracy lived in the grand manner, with sweeping, seignorial gesture. They lived gallantly, gracefully, and with no sense of social or political responsibility. They lived successfully, unconscious of the afflicting poverty of the people, and life was a pleasant experience on their great estates, one of them, that of Prince Radziwill, the area of Delaware and Rhode Island combined.

Everyone lived off the earth. Land was the only wealth and there was not nearly enough to go round, but these great proprietors saw no anachronism in this grotesque, uneven distribution of the Polish soil. Once at a shoot, with my irrepressible Americanism, I spoke to Prince Radziwill of the social revolution which, since the reign of the Bolsheviks, was sweeping the world. I said, with typical undiplomatic openness, that Poland was a relic of feudalism and could not escape the universal transition in the division of individual possessions. We were witnessing in Poland the last stand of Feudalism. More and more the State was taking command of our lives and property, soon all would have to march in the regiment as common soldiers. I predicted that in a few years these great shoots with their medieval magnificence would be a thing of memory. But he looked so hurt I was sorry I had spoken. You do not tell a victim of cancer about his fatal disease, and there was something profane in the crass suggestion that there might be an end to the Polish aristocracy and their happy status— immutable as the law of seasons and of stars.

A shooting party on one of the properties like that of Count Morinski s was like a page from Turgenev and had no relation to the prosaic utilitarian temper of our twentieth century. At a comfortable hour the guests were driven from the castle in a high vehicle that in my day was known as a tallyho. Everything was flawlessly smart, the patent-leather top hats of the liveried servants and the cockade, the Morinski Crest, and the fine spanking horses. Magnificent beings of another world, we made our impressive way through the squalid, thatch-roofed poverty of the village just beyond the Prince’s domain, where ragged people bowed and lifted their hats deferentially, the Prince acknowledging their obeisance with a salute of assured authority beyond condescension. I know that the dramatic contrast between our sybaritic elegance and this debasing indigence, which struck me with such painful embarrassment, passed entirely over his head, for he dismissed the suggestion with a light gesture when I spoke of it. The common people had always lived in this humble fashion, he said. They had always accepted the Morinski family and their eminence as one would accept any other permanent institution. But it was more than acceptance, the people took a pride in this fine elegance, they loved all the show, the panoply of power, and experienced a sense of splendor in this fairylike grandeur. Something dramatic, like the Christmas myth of childhood, would be taken from them, if the great castle were to close its gates. Prince Morinski explained with an air of benevolence.

We left the dirty little village and crossed a broad, flat land to a dark forest of tall, slim pines, where a group of two hundred odd peasants, formed in a double line like an infantry company on parade, were assembled for the shoot. The First Forester and his three assistants, in a uniform the color of the pine trees, were drawn up before the beaters and at our approach they sounded a call to the hunt from great curling trumpets. Then the Chief Forester approached Prince Morinski, bowed and kissed his hand. The whole scene was invested with an unreal air of regality of another age and might have been a hunting party of the Sun Monarch at the forest of Fontainebleau.

Now the beaters moved out, and, still in our tallyho, we drove to another quarter of the forest where the guns got out along a clearing and took positions fifty paces apart. The clearing cut a narrow course through the trees like an alley. It was only four yards across and from the time the game emerged and flashed to the cover of the thick underbrush on the other side was one and one half to two seconds. During that time you had to bring your rifle to the shoulder and get in a directed shot. The British military attaché in Warsaw, Colonel Conan Rowan, had been at several Polish shoots with me and we were always hopelessly outclassed by the Poles, for we could never get over the thought of our neighbors to left and right, the danger of hitting them if we shot too impetuously, and this hesitation of the trigger finger always brought off a miss.

White-haired President Moscicki, who was such a passionate sportsman that at a shoot he was like a boy of five before a Christmas tree, told us scornfully that the Anglo-Saxon coordinating processes were too slow for this Polish art of flash shooting, a skill of instinctive co-ordination, brain, muscle, and nerve reflexes one had to cultivate very young, and there was nothing in the shooting performance of the British and American representatives in Poland to contradict him.

The scene this February day at Morinski’s had the enchantment of a fairy scene with the white forest garlanded and festooned with snow, through which we peered like eager hounds as a distant horn announced the beginning of the beat. After an interval of ten minutes, we slipped off our huge fur coats and hung them over our backs, ready for action. Suddenly there was the snap of a twig and, as I shot, the snow tossed up underneath the shadow flashing across the clearing. An instant later two rifle blasts sounded so close together you could hardly distinguish one from the other. The beaters came out a few minutes later. The beat was over. Twenty paces beyond the clearing lay a huge boar, hit in two vital places, the head and high up in the shoulder. Prince Morinski came up now with the other sportsmen, and my neighbor on the left. Count Von Frum, a young German from the Corridor, was congratulated on every side. The prince broke off a little sprig of pine, dipped it in the boar’s blood and fastened it, an accolade of merit, in Von Frum’s hat band. The boar was a big "solitary” with tusks well over six inches and probably weighed two hundred fifty kilos. General Frabisy, who was a great authority on the chase in Poland, said. After the tension of the beat, there was much excited talk and laudatory comment on his distinguished shooting, for the young man, who, through all the hullabaloo, bore himself with great modesty.

That night there was a great party in the castle. A bountiful meal, zakonski, was served with boar meat, spiced fish, and caviar, liberally drenched with starka, and then we went in to the dining room for a dinner of nine courses, which Prince Morinski himself, a famous gourmet, had supervised. There were many delicate dishes that only one of refined, cultivated palate could savor, borszcz, sandre ala Forwitee, saddle of mutton Archiduc, turkey polonaise, Heres 1885, rare burgundy of 1870, Monet and Chandon champagne. With the champagne there was much ceremonial lifting of the glasses. Everybody shook hands with his dinner partner and thanked her, then your partner thanked you for having thanked her, and after that all got up and went shaking hands and thanking all around the table. Prince Druska thanked the host and extolled him as an exponent of the richest traditions in Polish sport, and the host responded with thanks to Prince Druska for his thanks and thanks for the presence of all his gifted guests. Prince Radziwill was reduced to tearful eloquence over the nobility of the true Polish aristocrat and might have wept unrestrainedly if someone had not interrupted with "Nie zgi,” which cannot be translated, but means something like long life, like "Vive” in French. Everyone took up "Nie zgi” and the whole pleasant company started to sing, "Sto Lot, Sto Lot, may you five 100 years, sans tears, may you live 100 years.”

After dinner this bounding exuberance subsided a little and most of the guests settled down to bridge, but since I never play bridge when I can escape, and because I knew an outraged stomach would exact retribution in the morning, I asked young Count Von Frum, who was on the bridge sidelines also, if he wanted to go out and walk with me in an effort to recover from the toxic accumulation of the evening.

Outside a great moon filled the scene with luminous, misty radiance, and the white stillness was oppressive like suspended breath. We walked the road across the long plain which ended in the forest, somber against the snow, where we had shot during the day, and I turned the conversation to the interests of youth and the future. He would finish at Heidelberg that summer, young Count Von Frum said, and he hoped to become an advocat. I was a humble member of the same noble profession and predicted for him a career at the bar as brilliant as his shooting that afternoon. "No, Excellenz,” he said quietly, and turned away with a renunciation so final that I was disturbed. When I persisted in asking an explanation, he told me factually and with no heroics that his generation was caught in the convulsion of the great war which was coming within a few years. "There can be no individual life,” he said with an air of mysticism, "our lives belong to the fuehrer, and all that belongs to us. Most of us will die. What is the use of planning for the future, when most of us must die for Germany”— his voice dropped in reverential respect— "and our fuehrer?”

"Why in hell do you want to die for Germany and your fuehrer?” I blurted with uncontrolled irritation. "Why don’t you live for them? Don’t you want to take a position, get on in the world? Isn’t there a girl somewhere?” But he seemed unaware of my irritation, the conversation fell dead after that, and we walked almost in silence till we turned back to the castle.

I often thought of this episode when I visited Germany and listened in great assemblages to a little man who might have been a waiter, but not a head waiter, with a grotesque toothbrush mustache and a plastered mop of mouse-colored hair, as he exhorted his countrymen to avenge the humiliation of Versailles. Vehemently they cheered him. They listened with the rapt attention one might accord an emissary from on high. He was their fuehrer with the mission of a Messiah to save Germany. Men were going back to work this year 1935. Soon, our Embassy reported, there would be no unemployment. The sullen air of defeatism had vanished before a vibrant, dynamic energy which charged the air everywhere. Germany was on the march, and millions like this young Count Von Frum were marching with blind devotion and the exaltation of fanaticism behind the little man with the toothbrush mustache.

It was in Brussels, six months after the invasion of Poland, that I heard that Ober Lieutenant Von Frum had been killed in the attack on Warsaw.

II. HITLER CROSSES THE RHINE

The decision of Hitler to invade the Rhineland can be compared only to the decision of Julius Caesar, the greatest soldier of antiquity, when, fully conscious that the move meant success or his complete oblivion, he deliberately crossed the Rubicon and marched against Rome and Pompey. By crossing the Rhine, Hitler openly flung a Rubicon challenge to France and England. It was make or break for Hitler and it was make or break for England and France. Hitler realized this fully. The tragedy of Europe is that the people of France and England did not, and their politicians had not the courage to tell them. The Rhine was absolutely vital to any scheme for the defense of France, and after the last war, Foch insisted that the French should control a zone extending from this vital, strategical river well into German territory. Articles 42 and 43 of the Versailles Treaty delimiting a demilitarized area on the right bank of the river was a compromise which Foch had to accept, but which never satisfied him.

The vital character of the Rhineland was recognized in the Treaty of Locarno, wherein three great men, Briand, Stresemann, and Austen Chamberlain, all of whom, disillusioned by the harrowing experience of the last war, were determined to build a permanent structure of peace in Europe. They guaranteed the territorial integrity of Belgium and pledged their nations to enforce by force the demilitarization of the Rhine.

Yet on the 6th day of March, 1936, Hitler, with that audacious daring which has made him such a great leader, moved across the Rhine bridgeheads in open defiance of Versailles and Locarno, and in one stroke irretrievably smashed all hope of orderly settlement of international controversies.

The issue was now clear: unless the Germans were dislodged, the French alliances with Poland and Czechoslovakia were worthless. Our military attaches, earnest, hardworking and competent men, asked what now was the meaning of France and England on the continent. The correlating alliances could never be implemented. This one move of Hitler had reduced the French and British armies to impotency in Central Europe. The diplomatic colleagues asked what now had become of the Balance of Power, that doctrine whereby for two hundred and fifty years, by pitting one nation against the other, England had kept control in her own hands.

The occupation of the Rhineland was a startling, bold move. The German army was still weak. Hitler had no aviation or panzer divisions. Only a year had passed since he had denounced the military limitation of Versailles and his forces did not exceed 100,000 of the Reichswehr, supplemented with the recruits of a single year.

The French army was the commanding physical force of Europe. Two million French soldiers, officered by the most brilliant staff in the world, faultlessly disciplined, and with a magnificent morale, were ready for action. The German defiance was open and unequivocal. Sarraut lashed himself into a fury, threatened Hitler with summary ejection, and nothing happened. Flandin was Foreign Minister. He has always said that the French could not move because Downing Street opposed violence, believing that the way of negotiation was not yet closed. Then there is the story that the French General Staff opposed the politicians and said the army was not prepared for war. Many times I have discussed the whole tragic subject with those who were in high places both in France and England at the time. But I cannot now mention names because the matter is still too acidly controversial and some of the individuals with whom I talked are still in office.

The democracies are always too late, Mussolini puts it succinctly, while the dictators are like a generalissimo in time of war— no one would think of questioning their decision no matter how drastic and opposed to the popular will. There was such a universal detestation of war in France and England at the time of the Rhineland that a referendum in these two countries would have opposed overwhelmingly a marching of the armies. It was argued in England that Hitler had not invaded France. In taking possession of the demilitarized zone, he was simply perfecting his title to his own German territory. France had not been touched and the sentiment was heard openly at the time that the French people would openly rebel against an invasion of Germany unless French soil was first invaded.

All this evidence in extenuation cannot be denied, but the outstanding deficiency in the critical hour was not in democracy but in the leadership of democracy. The stark truth is that there was no man, in the high councils of either France or Great Britain, who had the vision and the courage to face war. Winston Churchill violently denounced Hitler’s action and threatened heavy imprecation, but he never insisted that force be met with force, then and there, and that the Germans be ejected from their crucial position, no matter the cost.

Hitler had defied his General Staff, who told him that the unprepared German army would be annihilated by crushing French forces, but he threw all caution to the winds and gave the order to march. And the sad commentary is that there was no leadership of courageous morality to stand up and oppose this wanton display of immorality in flaunting all forces of law and order.

There were only two men who possessed the leadership to do this, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eamon de Valera. I saw President Roosevelt the evening before his inauguration in 1933, when he closed the banks and saved the country from financial collapse. He was magnificent that night when we met with him at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, like a captain of a ship in a raging storm, with an inspiring courage which dispelled the quaking fear of millions and filled all with his own confidence and resolution. Never have I seen a more convincing exhibition of that moral quality which proclaims the born leader of men.

Eamon de Valera, Prime Minister of Ireland, has the same fearless character which risks danger unflinchingly with unreckoning courage and silent spiritual strength. De Valera is the greatest leader in all Irish history, a man of singular force and outstanding high intelligence, but above all uncompromising conviction. Had de Valera or Roosevelt been Prime Minister of England when Hitler moved into the Rhineland? But there was no man in England to face the mob regardless of personal consequences and to meet Hitler’s bluff. Later, it was too late.

Days went by and weeks after the invasion of the Rhineland, and the emotion which it was necessary to marshal for action subsided until the people could no longer be aroused. The League of Nations assembled in London for a wearisome, futile session, and at the end issued a drastic condemnation of the German Fuehrer. That was all. From that moment the Axis became a vital reality. People talk about Godesberg, Munich, and Czechoslovakia. The cause of democracy in Europe was lost in the Rhineland.

There was no question of opposing force with force now, and the only hope of staying the day of reckoning was in appeasement. Many prominent influential Englishmen, among them the late Lord Lothian, believed that Hitler’s grievances could be met if an analysis was made of them and the feasibility of satisfying them. Therefore, a number of sounding investigations were made. I was in Berlin early that summer of 1936 and learned about one of these expeditions. Ambassador Dodd was in bed with grippe. He asked me to meet one Marcel Knecht of the newspaper Matin, who had come from Paris to see him about a very important matter affecting the peace of Europe.

Monsieur Knecht, who spoke English fluently and who told me he had received an honorary degree a few years before from the University of Wisconsin, looked very dismal when I saw him in the living room of the Embassy. He said there was no escape from the black conclusion that Germany would make war unless its economic demands were met. He said everyone who was capable of thinking realized this and Anthony Eden, who, despite the Rhineland fiasco, was still Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in England, proposed a program, in collaboration with Leon Blum, who had become Prime Minister of France, which would bring about permanent economic appeasement of Germany. It was the only hope, Knecht thought, and he was very impressive in his earnestness when he spoke about the annihilation of western civilization if the armies marched. He advanced the familiar thesis that we should stir ourselves in the emergency because the United States had a stake in the peace of Europe. No American had any quarrel with that general proposition, but few Europeans stopped there. Many of them had the persistent conviction that because we intervened in the last World War, we could be counted upon again to send our army in the cause of justice and democracy and seemed to think we should police all Europe in the cause of international justice as they conceived that abstraction.

The worth of any economic appeasement plan would obviously depend upon its detail, and the trouble with the practical working by France and England for an improvement of economic conditions in Germany was that it meant that French and British businessmen and workingmen would have to make sacrifices and suffer a reduction in their own standard of living. It was the same familiar pinch as the story of taxation. Everyone is willing that everyone else be taxed for the benefit of the community, except himself. And unless the average Frenchman or Englishman was willing to pay for peace, to give something from his own pocket, there appeared little hope of averting the march of German armies. There was no use in saying how much heavier the cost would be, if this catastrophe came to pass, if the armies did march, for no one before the event could ever be made to envisage the destruction of war or made to realize how the blow would hit all, even the humblest. Yet the armies would march unless some drastic measures were taken to halt them. If there was only some way of dramatizing the desperate prospect for Europe unless England and France made some sacrifice, that winter of 1936.

Knecht felt sure the Eden-Blum project was feasible. François Poncet, the French Ambassador in Berlin, would acquaint me fully with the whole outline of the scheme, he said, the broad scope of which contemplated the shipment of raw materials from British and French colonial possessions to Germany in exchange for German manufactured output. The initial financing was to be arranged by loans from London and Paris. Everything looked practical in theory. Here was a reciprocal satisfaction of needs between two complementary economic spheres, always the ideal arrangement in international trade. Everything was satisfied except national self-interest viewpoint, as selfish shortsighted politicians conceived it. German trade with French and British colonies would mean the exclusion of French and British exports, and this would mean less profits for French and British businessmen through the loss of these markets, also a lower standard of living for British and French workmen in order that German workers might enjoy a higher standard. Can anyone imagine the France of pre-June, 1940, or British labor agreeing to any such program? But Knecht was sure François Poncet could satisfy all objections and urged me to call on him. I was not the American Ambassador in Germany, I explained, I would report to Ambassador Dodd.

The implications of the project had possibilities and when the Frenchman left I dashed up the stairway three steps at a time. The Ambassador was propped up with pillows reading a book on Thomas Jefferson, and before I could open my mouth, he began to tell about Jefferson and his knowledge of European affairs, speaking so intimately that I almost expected to see the first great Democrat walk through the door of the bedroom. He went on reciting Jeffersonian philosophy, affectionately, as one would speak of a dear friend, and I am sure he felt that way about Thomas Jefferson. History to him was no dusty record of the dead past. Professor Dodd lived with great historical figures, sharing their adventures and trials, their triumphs and disappointments, and Thomas Jefferson was his idol. I believe at the time of his death he was absorbed in writing a book on some phase of Jeffersoniana.

He went on with such relish and enthusiasm that I did not have the heart to interrupt him, but eventually there was a blessed opening and I told what the Frenchman had told me about the Eden-Blum plan and its far-reaching possibilities. It was the only hope, I went on vehemently, the issue was clear— either the armes marched or economic appeasement would have to be accomplished. Never again would there be a hope of taking the military initiative from Hitler and territorial appeasement was unthinkable, the only hope was an economic settlement. I waited for questions and hinted that Ambassador Frangois Poncet could develop the promising prospect Knecht had proposed. But Professor Dodd went back again to Thomas Jefferson, and I went away thoroughly despondent.

Ambassador Dodd was a fine, representative American of the intellectual type, but he felt disoriented and thoroughly unhappy in totalitarian Germany and even at that time, in the summer of 1936, he told me that he looked forward to resigning. He was a Liberal and detested the European scene and totalitarian Germany. He must have been very relieved when, after four years, the President finally permitted him to retire and return to Virginia and his book on Jefferson.

The Presidential campaign was held that fall, and I came home during the midst of the Democratic Convention at Philadelphia. At the White House the President listened when I told him I was sure that someday the German armies would march. He listened attentively and appeared to share my pessimistic view, but it was easy to see that his mind dwelt more on our own problems than on the distracted continent.

This, the American tendency, is entirely understandable. A greater expanse than the Atlantic Ocean separates us from Europe and such reports as the newspapers and other publications print on European affairs in this country are so vague, so false, and so confusing and misleading that no wonder Europe is a remote, unpleasant enigma to our people. Now with the war, most Americans have passionately taken sides with Britain, but few understand the groundwork of the war, what the war aims are or what would be the shape of Europe and the world if Germany were to win the war tomorrow. We are insular in viewpoint as at any time in the career of this country.

So it was not surprising that people yawned and found my society tedious when I tried to tell them about the fearful storm which was coming in Europe. Once when I spoke at a club in Chicago, back of closed doors, before a gathering of fifty leading businessmen, questions were put at the end of my remarks. An executive of a prominent industry was very frank in telling the audience that he considered my discussion provocative of harm. I was in fact a warmonger, he intimated by broad innuendo. He said that he had just returned from England, where the whole attitude was determined against ever participating in another war, and as a clinching proof of his argument, he said he could assure us the youth of England would never fight. The Oxford Union had passed a resolution that none of its members would take up arms ever again for King or country. I attempted to reply by asking what the youth of England would do if the youth of Germany decided to march and take England away from them. But he withered me with scorn and I could see that most of the hard-headed businessmen about that long table agreed with him. They thought I was a dyspeptic alarmist. War was a fantastic anachronism in this far-advanced day of civilization. Get on with more important business— something that had something to do with reality.

When I spoke during the political campaign, stressing international affairs as the paramount issue, and comparing the outstanding capacity of President Roosevelt in foreign affairs with the Republican candidate, people listened with the rapt attention they might have accorded to a lecture on Babylonian art or Sanskrit. All this European mess was irrelevant to the pulsing movement of the hour. People were far more interested in recovery from the depression. Why should we concern ourselves with Europe, they argued. Europe for the Europeans, and America for Americans. To hell with it.

A current story in the campaign was that after Alf Landon’s nomination, he was asked by one inquiring reporter for his view on the international situation. He is reported to have replied that he thought McCormick a better buy. But he pledged the journalist not to quote him. He never went in for speculation and knew nothing about stocks and shares, he declared.

III. THE WAR COMES TO IRELAND

The happiest event of my official life was when the cavalcade of Irish dragoons in their gay marine blue-and gold uniforms clattered down the road to the American legation in Phoenix Park and escorted the American Minister to Dublin Castle. The call of the blood is strong in all of us. Nearly a century before, my father’s family had gone out from County Kilkenney, driven by the great potato famine of 1849. And now in another generation, I had come back to the ancestral island of saints and scholars, the representative of my President and the country where my father had established his own family. It was the romance of America, this scene, as in Daniel O’Connell top hat, I reviewed the Guard of Honor and presented my Letter of Credence to an Taoiseach de Valera, although it was addressed to His Majesty George VII, King of Great Britain and Ireland.

In the evening there was a banquet at the castle and Mrs. de Valera, my dinner partner, must be blushing yet for the disgraceful failure I made of the Irish words she wrote there at the table for the conclusion of my impromptu speech.

Men prominent in public life are seldom truthfully reflected by the mirror of the press, and the public too often has the most distorted image of them and their character. I had such an estimation of Eamon de Valera. I had read much of him in the news and was convinced that he was a bigoted revolutionary, of narrow limited outlook, an impression heightened by press photographs of a pinched, humorless face behind spectacles.

This unfair judgment was promptly expunged at my first meeting with the Irish Prime Minister. He was obviously an intellectual type, an ascetic, to whom the flesh was an incident, and one could readily believe that he never partook of strong drink or indulged in tobacco— a studious, intent face, deeply lined by furrows of intense thought, with mouth and chin of unyielding determination, an honest and brave man— above all, a man of inflexible purpose. But beyond these qualities is a kindliness and sincerity about Eamon de Valera which one senses as instantly as one feels the warmth of sympathetic human contact. Associates who have fought with him for Ireland and served jail sentences with him all call him "Dev,” but there is no familiarity in that moniker, only devotion and profound admiration. No one has ever yet presumed to trespass upon that impenetrable, austere dignity. Dev has no intimates. He told me his youthful ambition was to attend Samur in France and become a military officer. There is in his bearing— erect, resolute, direct— the mold of a professional soldier.