CATO Guilty Men

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-28094-0
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

In his preface to the 1998 reissue, Michael Foot wrote, 'Guilty Men was conceived by three London journalists who had formed the habit of meeting on the roof of the Evening Standard offices in Shoe Lane, Fleet Street, just after the the afternoon paper had been put to bed and, maybe, just before the Two Brewers opened across the road.' The book's genesis and publication could hardly have been swifter. Its writing took four days from the 1st to the 4th June 1940: it was published on the 5th July. It is an angry book, indeed, a devastatingly effective polemic. Its target was the appeasers of the 1930s, the leading culprits being Baldwin, Chamberlain and Halifax who had left the country so ill-prepared, and who, by their pusillanimity, had emboldened Hitler and Mussolini; and in the case of the last two still favoured some accommodation with the fascist dictators. In today's parlance, it would be called a wake-up call. It was very successful selling about 200,000 copies. Kenneth Morgan, Michael Foot's biographer, describes the book as consisting of 'a series of brief vignettes of key episodes or personalities, the latter invariably foolish or dishonest.' Michael Foot wrote eight of the chapters, the first and most powerful one being on Dunkirk. Although Michael Foot was the main contributor, and the one who suggested 'Cato' as the umbrella pseudonym, the other two, as Michael Foot would be the first to admit, Peter Howard and Frank Own should not be forgotten. Seventy years on, Guilty Men has not lost its readability and power to enrage.

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PREFACE TO THE PENGUIN EDITION

BY MICHAEL FOOT

Guilty Men was conceived by three London journalists who had formed the habit of meeting on the roof of the Evening Standard 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 other’s 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, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a book about other people’s patriotism to be published a year later. She thought the stain of what Chamberlain’s 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 West’s 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 Guilty Men, and maybe, despite the glaring defects in the text itself, the title did have a touch of salesman’s 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.

Guilty Men’s argument about how Britain became engulfed in the Second World War became the Churchill argument too. Indeed Guilty Men quoted Churchill on its cover, and he took a genial view of the exposition at the time. His own post-war volume, The Gathering Storm, described the events as ‘the unnecessary war’; and three of his leading culprits, Baldwin, Chamberlain and Halifax, also headed the Guilty Men 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 Churchill’s prestige both as war leader and historian, despite his strange or interested alliance with the scurrilous Guilty Men 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, Paths to War, 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 Churchill’s 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 Chamberlain’s own diaries, confirms the indictment of Guilty Men.

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 Sunday Express the column which many experts thought most directly reflected Beaverbrook’s 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 Guilty Men, 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 Evening Standard 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.

Beaverbrook himself had no knowledge of our meetings on the roof of the Evening Standard building, which was one of the reasons why we held them there. At the time of the publication, he was fully engaged as the new Minister of Aircraft Production in the new Churchill Government. Normally, he would be in touch with his editors every day. He was fascinated by journalism himself, more indeed a super-editor than a modern proprietor. For whole weeks on end throughout May, June and July of 1940, this mode of communication was suspended. He must have at first been mystified by a production in which some of the style was so familiar and where he himself seemed to be protected from criticism – strange rumours were spread about who ‘Cato’ might be, some spread, I must confess, from the Standard office. A lengthy list of eligible anti-Munichites was available – Randolph Churchill, son of Winston, or Duff Cooper, who had resigned from the Chamberlain government at the time of Munich – these and several more. My own critical review of the book in the Standard book page helped distract attention. After a while, the notion of a composite work added to the guesswork.

How long it took Beaverbrook himself to make the discovery, we never knew, but some months later an authentic conversation was recorded between two members of Churchill’s Cabinet who hardly ever exchanged a civil word. Lord Halifax remarked to Lord Beaverbrook how difficult it must be for a millionaire like him to live on a...