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was like a schoolboy he was so delighted…’ At Versailles at a review of 50,000 troops of
the French army, an emotional Churchill spoke of the French army as ‘the bulwark of
European freedom’. Less than two years later that bulwark would have crumbled and
Hitler himself would be driving as a conqueror down the Champs-Elysées.
Hitler disturbed the royal peace less than two months later. The family were at
Balmoral as usual, having arrived there in the royal yacht, the Victoria & Albert, cruising
up the east coast of England so that the King could stop off to visit the Duke of York’s
camp at South wold on the Suffolk coast. On 14 September, warned by Chamberlain
that intelligence reports indicated that Hitler intended to attack Czechoslovakia that
month, the King took the night train back to London to find that his sixty-nine-year-old
Prime Minister had boarded a plane for the first time in his life and flown to Germany
to meet Hitler at Berchtesgaden. As war fever mounted, trenches were dug in Hyde Park
and the King was fitted with a gas mask; Chamberlain made his famously dispirited
broadcast (‘How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is that we should be digging trenches
and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between
people of whom we know nothing’). Hitler then apparently drew back from the brink;
Chamberlain flew to Munich to sign the ‘piece of paper’ which he triumphantly
flourished to cheering crowds at the airport on his return. The King was delighted; he
had wanted to go to Heston in person to welcome the Prime Minister, but had to content
himself with appearing beside him on the balcony at Buckingham Palace. ‘Yesterday
was a great day,’ he told Queen Mary, but as Chamberlain proudly informed the public
outside No. 10 Downing Street that he had brought back ‘peace with honour’, Hitler was
preparing to invade the Sudetenland. Within five months Czechoslovakia would cease to
exist as an independent nation. While most people from the American President,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to the former Kaiser agreed with the King’s support for
Chamberlain’s efforts to preserve peace, Winston Churchill warned, ‘this is only the
beginning of the reckoning’. Elizabeth, now fiercely anti-Hitler, was disappointed that
there would be no war and was reproved by Allah for saying so. ‘You don’t know what
war is,’ Allah told her, and gave the children a lecture on the casualties of the Great
War.
The threat of another European conflict hung in the air by the early summer of 1939
when the King and Queen set out across the Atlantic for the most important state visit
they were ever to make, ‘the tour that made us,’ as the Queen later described it. They
were to visit first Canada and then the United States, the latter as the personal guests of
President Roosevelt. The American visit was a brave gesture; although the Duke of
Windsor’s planned trip there had ended in fiasco and had had to be cancelled in the face
of American outrage over his visit to Nazi Germany, there were still many Americans
who regarded the Duke as the rightful King and had no high opinion of George VI or his
Queen, as a widely publicized article in Scribner’s bluntly put it:
If a public relations counsel had the power to choose from scratch which British personalities he would
drop into the American scene for the greatest British profit, they would not have been King George and
Queen Elizabeth. The important fact about the United States is that a large part of the country still believes