How Hitler benefited from the Allies’ mutual distrust

In February 1939 Edouard Daladier, the French premier, told the US ambassador William Bullitt that ‘he fully expected to be betrayed by the British’, whose prime minister was ‘a desiccated stick, the King a moron and the Queen an excessively ambitious woman’. The British had become so feeble, he said, that they would betray all their friends rather than stand up to Germany and Italy. The British harboured similar views of France. Even when it came to declaring war in 1939, Chamberlain had to wait many hours for Daladier to follow his lead. Daladier then merely said: ‘We are waging war because it has been thrust on us.’

R.T. Howard’s examination of how British and French intelligence spied on the Nazi threat shows how their efforts were continually dogged by such dislike and distrust. Even during the Weimar period, Paris was almost hysterical about German rearmament and attempted to pull the British into a much tighter alliance, something which London stoutly resisted. Once Hitler came to power, the French grew frantic – in April 1939 they successfully demanded that Britain introduce conscription – but only once appeasement had clearly failed did Chamberlain accept the need for alliance with France.

Spying on Germany was never easy, and British intelligence was anyway starved of funds. But under Hitler it became far harder. Everything was immensely tightened up and the Gestapo was ruthlessly efficient in tracking down agents, frequently beheading them. So although Hitler had launched an all-out rearmament campaign and was rapidly expanding his forces he was at first able to hide this. The Germans even managed to convince the British that the battleships Bismarck and Tirpitz were quite small and lightly armed, as also the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst.