The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [185]
On 12 September 1938 Sinclair sent Colonel Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, the CID secretary, a ‘summary of certain naval indications’ which showed ‘that Germany is preparing for world-wide war’. Moreover, ‘in the absence of definite signs that these preparations are being suspended or abandoned, the conclusion can only be formed that Hitler intends to attack Czechoslovakia on or about the dates we originally stated, viz: September 24th-28th, and is prepared to support such action by world-wide war if necessary’. For the Czechoslovaks the position was desperate, though not yet perhaps hopeless. While neither of its allies, France and the Soviet Union, was in fact prepared to go to war on its behalf, the British government under Neville Chamberlain seized the diplomatic initiative in an effort to find a peaceful solution to the crisis. Beyond the understandable desire simply to avoid war, the British were also anxious to buy time. Well aware of German rearmament (although there is some evidence that both its progress and German - though not Hitler’s - resolve were slightly overestimated), there was a need to let British preparations reach a point where the country and its armed forces were better prepared to fight a war if necessary. On 15 and 22 September, Chamberlain famously flew to Germany to negotiate personally with Hitler, and over these crucial days there were intense discussions in London as to what line Britain should take. It was a difficult choice: should Britain firmly back the Czechoslovaks and risk immediate war with Germany, or should pressure be put on Prague to concede what many people regarded as Germany’s legitimate claims for the Sudetenland, but at grievous cost to the Czechoslovak state, accompanied by a perhaps cynical (or realpolitik) concession that force was the only relevant factor?
It is an indicator of how tricky these issues were, and how the government sought advice from all kinds of sources, that, unusually and apparently uniquely for the history of the Service so far, SIS was formally asked to submit a ‘policy paper’ in the week between Chamberlain’s two trips. Whatever advice Sinclair and his colleagues may have provided to government hitherto, it appears always to have been on an informal basis. SIS’s specific function was to supply secret intelligence, not policy advice, but in this instance, as Sinclair told Sir Warren Fisher on 19 September, the Foreign Office had ‘asked for our remarks . . . as to what course of action should be taken in Foreign Affairs in the present circumstances and with regard to the future’. The result was a paper by Woollcombe entitled ‘What should we do?’ Woollcombe began by reviewing ‘the aims of the Germans’, which constituted the ‘establishment of general “paramountcy” or “supremacy” in Europe’. This included the ‘absorption of at least the Sudeten areas of Czechoslovakia’, and the domination of the rest of the country, as well as ‘political and economic hegemony over the whole of Central and S.E. Europe, on the “Vassal State” principle’; the ‘recovery, sooner or later, of lost territory’ in the East; the ‘downfall of the Soviet regime’; and ‘penetration in the Middle East and the increasing of Britain’s difficulties there’. As to ‘German methods and principles’, ‘first and foremost’ was ‘force’, and the creation ‘of the strongest possible Armed Forces, sufficient to overcome any combination of Powers and emerge victorious in any conflagration’. Woollcombe added that ‘the [German] Armed Forces leaders do