Churchill: A Life by Martin Gilbert

Author:Martin Gilbert [Gilbert, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780795337260
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 2014-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

24

The Moment of Truth

Throughout the autumn of 1934 Churchill had been preparing a major Parliamentary appeal for accelerated Air Force expansion. On November 25, three days before the debate, Desmond Morton sent him a three-page analysis of German air plans, facts which were equally available to the Government, for whose Intelligence service Morton worked. Churchill sent Baldwin a précis of what he intended to say during the debate, during which he intended to move an amendment critical of the Government’s air rearmament plans. It appeared, Churchill wrote to Lloyd George on November 24, that his amendment ‘has caused much disturbance in Government circles. The facts set out in the précis cannot I think be controverted and the Cabinet have woken up to the fact that they are “caught short” in this very grave matter.’

Ministers were indeed uneasy; on November 25 Hoare told the Cabinet that it was ‘most important to show the world that the Government had just as much as, and more information than Mr Churchill’. At Hoare’s suggestion it was agreed that Baldwin should accuse Churchill of exaggeration. But at a further Cabinet meeting on November 26 the Air Staff urged that, in order to meet German expansion plans, the new British air programme should be accelerated, so that all the aeroplanes involved in the existing British scheme would be completed by the end of 1936, instead of 1939.

Churchill’s speech of November 28 marked a climax in his campaign for a more active Government policy towards air defence. ‘To urge preparation of defence,’ he began, ‘is not to assert the imminence of war. On the contrary, if war was imminent preparations for defence would be too late.’ War was neither imminent nor inevitable, but unless Britain took immediate steps to make herself secure ‘it will soon be beyond our power to do so’. In violation of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was building up a powerful, well-equipped army, ‘though little is said about it in public’, with factory production geared increasingly to war material. German air rearmament posed the greatest danger. ‘However calmly surveyed, the danger of an attack from the air must appear most formidable.’

He did not wish to exaggerate, Churchill said, or to accept ‘the sweeping claims’ being put forward by alarmists. Nevertheless, he believed, in a week or ten days’ intensive bombing of London one could hardly expect ‘that less than 30,000 or 40,000 people would be killed or maimed’, and with the use of incendiary bombs the situation could be even worse.1 As a result of ‘such a dreadful act of power and terror’, in which bombs could go through a series of floors ‘igniting each one simultaneously’, as he had been assured ‘by persons who are acquainted with the science’, grave panic would affect the civilian population, three or four million of whom would be ‘driven out into the open country’.

Churchill warned that it was not London alone that would be at risk from aerial bombardment; Birmingham, Sheffield and ‘the great manufacturing towns’ would likewise be the targets of bombing raids in the event of war.

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