Labour wholeheartedly approved of Baldwin’s decision. The only voice of dissent was from Churchill, who warned of an impending catastrophe and urged the government to join the French in opposing Hitler with force. With the enormous benefit of hindsight, many historians have taken Churchill’s view that March 1936 was the last time a military challenge to Hitler might have been mounted by the Allies without precipitating a devastating war.
The government justified its feeble response to Hitler by emphasizing the bigger diplomatic picture. ‘It is the appeasement of Europe as a whole,’ the foreign secretary assured parliament, ‘that we have constantly before us’. His attempt to direct attention to the ‘bigger picture’ did not inspire much confidence, since the picture was not only bigger but bleaker. The treaties of Versailles and Locarno had been ripped up by Hitler, who was unwilling to agree to any new accord that might stabilize international relations. As for the League, it had been emasculated during the Abyssinian affair and was now moribund.
Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland was applauded by the German people, and by the country’s elite. The German chancellor had proved to his country, and to the world, that he could dictate to the other European powers. He soon crowned his success by establishing an alliance with Italy, which was formalized as the Rome–Berlin ‘axis’ in October 1936 (and later confirmed when both powers signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan). While publicly Hitler claimed to have no further territorial ambitions in Europe, he secretly extended his rearmament programme in order to prepare Germany for a ‘worldwide conflict’. The first stage of his plan, announced in Mein Kampf over a decade previously, was to embark on a war against the Soviets, in order to secure land in the east. It is hardly surprising, then, that experienced observers of the diplomatic scene looked to the future with foreboding. Austen Chamberlain, the former foreign secretary, remarked that he had never ‘seen blacker clouds on the horizon’.
27
The Spanish tragedy
Recent diplomatic events had been watched with fascination and horror by the English people. For the first time since the Versailles conference, foreign policy captured the popular imagination and dominated parliamentary debate. Hitler and Mussolini featured in countless British cartoons and advertisements, while their regimes were discussed endlessly in the papers and the pubs. Support for the League of Nations had been a decisive issue at the 1935 election, and the government’s ‘betrayal’ of that organization during the Abyssinian invasion had brought thousands onto the streets in protest. While ‘Leagueomania’ was stronger on the left than on the right, it nevertheless cut across the parties and the classes. Yet the next act of the unfolding European tragedy would divide English opinion clearly along political and ideological lines.
In July 1936, the Spanish military hierarchy tried to seize political power, under the leadership of the ultraconservative General Franco, who admired the Fascist governments of Italy and Germany. Franco’s aim was to re-establish ‘Catholic Spain’, and to crush the modern ‘diseases’ of democracy, socialism and secularism. To achieve this, the Second Spanish Republic would have to be defeated and a military dictatorship established. Spain was deeply divided between a Catholic, authoritarian and monarchical right and a secular, socialist left. The Left flourished in the urban, proletarian centres of Catalonia and the Basque Country, while the Right was dominant in most rural areas, where landowners and the Church held power. These deep social divisions ensured that Franco’s attempted coup provoked a lengthy and bloody civil war.
The conflict soon expanded beyond Spain’s borders. Italy and Germany declared their support for Franco, while the Soviet Union sided with the Republic. It became an international and ideological battle in microcosm, as well as a rehearsal for a full-scale continental war. It also posed a diplomatic and ideological challenge to the governments of Britain and France. A fellow European democracy was crying out for support, but what would be the diplomatic price of assisting her? And what would be the price of refusing aid to the Spanish Republic and standing aside?
France’s left-wing government at first offered military aid to Spain’s republican forces, yet fears that its assistance might provoke its own civil war convinced it to withdraw its offer. Since Britain’s military and civil service favoured Franco, and its establishment feared Communism more than Fascism, the Conservativeled National Government encouraged caution. Baldwin’s principal aim was to try to prevent the Spanish Civil War from turning into a continental conflict, even though there was a risk that maintaining European peace might result in the destruction of European democracy. Bypassing the League, the National Government brokered a nonintervention deal between the European powers and established a committee to enforce it.
The Italians and the Germans soon began to provide Franco with military support on a lavish scale; in response, the Soviet Union offered aid to the republican forces. Both sides wanted to secure an alliance with the future Spanish government; they also regarded Spain as a convenient training ground for their armies and armaments. The nonintervention committee lived up to its name by declining to intervene, even though evidence of Fascist and Communist meddling was conspicuous. The obsolete League, meanwhile, played no significant role. The failure of collective security, as well as British and French inaction, gave considerable advantage to Franco. Democratic British and French governments looked on as the democratic Spanish government was eventually defeated, and the influence of Fascism spread further across the continent.
Labour MPs criticized the National Government’s policy of nonintervention, yet they had no appetite for the war that might follow the pursuit of an alternative strategy. Nor were they unequivocal in their advocacy of the republican cause, since it was supported by Communist Russia. The party’s qualified response disappointed intellectuals on the English left, who took up the cries of ‘Arms for Spain’ and ‘Fight against Fascism’. Some of these radicals left Labour and joined the British Communist party, whose membership swelled from 1,300 in 1930 to 15,000 by the autumn of 1936. Many on the left saw the civil war as a straightforward struggle between Fascism and democratic socialism, the only moral and political basis upon which a civilized future might be built. The English left wanted to hasten and share in this glorious victory. Opposing them were pro-Fascist intellectuals and the vehemently anti-Communist journalists in the right-wing press – the Daily Mail dubbed Franco’s men ‘Crusaders of Righteousness’. Some Conservative MPs also espoused pro-Franco views, while more pragmatic Tories, such as Baldwin, were happy to see Fascists and Communists killing each other.
The Spanish Civil War undoubtedly spread ideology among English youth in the Thirties, but there are deeper reasons for that generation’s engagement in politics. It had, in the words of the poet Edmund Blunden, been in ‘the nursery in 1914’, and was now confronted with the increasingly real possibility of ‘a world roaring with bigger bombs’. It is hardly surprising that the Thirties generation were, in many respects, the opposite of the bright young people. The Twenties cult of the hedonistic rich had been replaced by what Evelyn Waugh called the ‘solemn cult of the proletariat’. A sober style of dress – corduroy trousers, woollen jumpers, plain white shirts – was favoured in the Thirties, together with thick moustaches and beards. Even the flamboyant Brian Howard was forced to tone down his appearance, lest the left-wing opinions he now espoused lack persuasiveness.