The diplomats who defeated Hitler

Paul Lay: Welcome to The EI Podcast. I’m Paul Lay, Senior Editor at Engelsberg Ideas and today we’re looking at the unsung architects of the postwar world. And joining me is Peter Ricketts, former British ambassador to France and crossbench peer. And we’re going to discuss his latest book, Peace Makers. I wonder if you could give our listeners an overview of what the book is about and why you felt the need to write it and why now?

Peter Ricketts: Well, Paul, thank you very much indeed for having me on the podcast. I’ll declare a background in that I was a diplomat for 40 years, and so it’s an institution I know extremely well, the Foreign Office. And I always felt that somehow it had been airbrushed out of our national story about the Second World War, which is dominated, of course, by Churchill, by the generals, by the battles, the spies. But the diplomats were also doing fascinating and sometimes very surprising things as part of winning the war. And then, as you said, in thinking ahead to shape the future peace, when the war was over, and I’ve been collecting the anecdotes and the stories for years, and I thought it was worth writing it, because I do think that the men and the women deserve their place in the spotlight. Nothing really has been written about women in the Foreign Office for reasons we can come on to. But they were there. There were many of them, and they did some quite remarkable things.

Paul Lay: Your book opens with a really gripping narrative sequence: the very chaotic retreat of the British Embassy from Paris as the Nazis advanced, and in those very dark days in 1940, it reminded me slightly of Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy, and there is a chaotic element to that, roughly contemporaneous with it. But I wonder if you could set the scene for our listeners. What did it actually mean for British diplomats, not just in Paris, in France, but across this crumbling Europe?

Peter Ricketts: It’s surprising, looking back, that during the phoney war period between September 1939 and the spring of 1940, life continued pretty much as usual in a city like Paris. And then the onslaught launched by the Germans on the 10th of May, which actually was the same day that Churchill came into Downing Street as Prime Minister, suddenly made people start panicking because they moved forward extremely fast. And in the embassy in Paris, having been a bit complacent, I think about the probability that the French would hold out, at least for a time. Suddenly they found themselves burning the secret papers in the stove of the embassy and preparing to evacuate. It was not made easy by Churchill wanting to come all the time and try to shore up the French. And there are stories of his whirlwind passages, first of all, through Paris, and then as the embassy followed the French government, retreating first to the Loire Valley at Tours and then to Bordeaux in the southwest. Again Churchill continued to come. So there are stories about how they were helping British people out of France at that time, while also trying to get out themselves. Endless people came demanding passage out on ships as the German armies approached, including King Zog of Albania, who turned up with his treasure in three or four very heavy boxes. He got away safely and as the embassy left, everybody piled their luggage into the front hall of Britain’s magnificent residence in Paris, the Hôtel de Charost, which I had the privilege of being a tenant of when I was ambassador. So they put everything in. They locked the door. They left it in the care of a gatekeeper, David Christie. A year later, Hermann Goering, in full Reichsmarschall uniform, knocked at the gate, demanded to come in. He wanted it for his residence. David Christie said, ‘This is internationally protected. You’re not coming in over my dead body,’ and slammed the door. They did pick him up and keep him in prison for a few weeks, but amazingly, then let him out. And then when Duff Cooper, the ambassador after the war, arrived to get relations going again after the fall of Paris, the embassy was untouched. So it was a quite remarkable period.

But the scramble to get people out and then to get embassies out was going on all around Europe. Ambassadors and their staff were staying until very late in the process to make sure they got out. One unfortunate ambassador, the ambassador to Belgium, Lancelot Oliphant, left it too late, and he got cut off by the approaching German armies. He was hiding under a juniper bush on the Channel Coast at a little place called Fort-Mahon-Plage. And he thought, actually, this is not very diplomatic to be found under a bush. So he surrendered, and he was incarcerated and kept in internment for over a year. And that was a fate that also happened to other diplomats, as perhaps we can talk about.

Paul Lay: What was the status of those diplomats? I mean, was there any way out of that? Was that what happened to them?

Peter Ricketts: I mean, diplomats remain diplomats, even when you’ve cut off relations. And the custom is that you exchange your diplomat. So for the German embassy people in London were exchanged for the British embassy people in Paris. But that takes some time. In the case of Oliphant, he was interned for a year, kept in kind of police academies and so on. The embassy people in Tokyo had a much more difficult time because when the Japanese declared war and we declared war on Japan after Pearl Harbour, instantly the Japanese crowded all the British community in Tokyo onto the British Embassy compound, which luckily is quite large. And they shut them in. They took away their radios, they cut them off from the world for eight months while arrangements were made to exchange them with the Japanese people in London. In those eight months, there are fascinating newsletters that they put around the compound every day, reflecting a very British social life they set up in complete isolation, while they had no idea what was going on in the world.

There were tennis ladders, there were bridge parties, there was a pantomime at Christmas, musical evenings, language lessons given by the spouses. You get a very vivid sense of this British community wanting to be very British, like a kind of English country club in the extraordinary period where they had no contact at all with what was going on outside. So a lot of ‘keep calm and carry on’ is required in those circumstances, but that’s something that happens to diplomats. If you suddenly find yourself at war at short notice and you can’t get out. You are interned. And maybe for quite a long time.

Paul Lay: I’ve read a lot of diplomatic history going back to the 16th and 17th centuries, and it has a reputation sometimes deserved for being as dry as dust. That’s not a charge that could be made against Peace Makers. It’s a wonderful book and it’s full of characters. What it is, is an ensemble piece, but perhaps the closest figure to a central pillar in the book is Sir Alexander Cadogan. I wonder if you could tell us a little about this extraordinary figure.

Peter Ricketts: With great pleasure. He was the Permanent Under-Secretary for the Foreign Office throughout the war from 1938 under Lord Halifax, as Foreign Secretary all the way through to Bevin in 1946. I felt a particular kinship with him because I later became Permanent Under-Secretary myself, and I put on the wall of the Permanent Secretary’s office, a grand office in the Foreign Office, a document which Alexander Cadogan had had drawn up at Churchill’s request at the first summit with Roosevelt on the HMS Prince of Wales in Placentia Bay in Canada, the Atlantic summit. Roosevelt demanded some sort of statement of the principles that would guide the allies in the future peace and Cadogan sat down at the admiral’s table and wrote out eight or nine principles with no support, which then eventually became the Atlantic Charter and then fed directly into the United Nations.

I was fascinated by this man, a young son of the very grand Cadogan family, who owns Cadogan Square and much else in London and had been a diplomat for many years at the League of Nations. So he knew about international diplomacy, was made Permanent Under-Secretary by Chamberlain and Halifax at the time of appeasement, but he was both running the Foreign Office and keeping a handle on all the foreign policy advice that went to the Foreign Secretary and also became Churchill’s closest foreign policy adviser. Churchill really trusted him. So he was at all the Cabinet meetings late into the night. He was drafting the Churchill messages to Roosevelt and Stalin, while at the same time trying to cope with the business in the Foreign Office. And he was a calm, collected, measured individual, slightly buttoned-up. When his diaries were published, 10 or 15 years later, a different Cadogan was revealed: emotional, caustic, funny. He’d obviously bottled all that up and poured it out into his diary in the evening, which makes a fascinating day-by-day commentary on the ups and downs of the war.

Paul Lay: And how would you rank that among the diaries of wartime figures? There are many very good ones. Alan Brooke, for example.

Peter Ricketts: Indeed, it’s rather like Alan Brooke, seen from a civilian perspective. It’s sparkling, it’s immediate, it’s vivid. Alan Brooke and Cadogan both sat at some of these Cabinet meetings with Churchill, went back home, often both of them, and wrote furiously in their diaries about how impossible Churchill was to deal with. So it’s a very, very direct take on one man’s war, with the ups and downs of that. But he was a man who was at the centre of affairs throughout.

Paul Lay: Now, you mentioned appeasement there. It’s a fact that civil servants are tasked with implementing the policies of elected MPs, whether they agree with those policies or not. But I wonder if there was any sense during the years of appeasement, particularly as it reached the Munich Crisis and beyond, whether there were any fractures in the Foreign Office?

Peter Ricketts: I think views among the Foreign Office people probably reflected views in the wider society. There were some who were for, some who were against. And the previous Permanent Under-Secretary, before Cadogan, called Lord Vansittart. He was ferociously anti-German and peppered Chamberlain with angry memos, telling him he had to toughen up, to the point where Chamberlain got completely sick of him and fired him, or actually moved him upstairs to a job that didn’t really exist, called Chief Diplomatic Adviser and brought Cadogan in. So I think everybody had doubts. Cadogan’s skill was to try to bring ministers to accept that, you know, there have to be limits to our policy. We can’t keep giving way to Hitler. And certainly after Munich, Cadogan and others were absolutely clear that we were on the wrong course. Indeed, Cadogan spoke pretty harshly to Halifax one evening, and Halifax pretty much reversed engines after Munich, and then became strongly against any further concessions to Hitler.

The diplomats asked themselves, after the breakout of war, had they been in the right place? And a number of their diaries and memoirs are worrying about that. Most of them, I think, felt that actually, in the run up to Munich, it was right to buy another year of time to complete the rearmament of the country. That’s now very arguable, but I think at the time that probably seemed like the right thing to do. But those who actually accompanied Chamberlain to Munich really found it horrible to be in the same room as Hitler, to shake Hitler’s hand. A young diplomat called Ivone Kirkpatrick, recorded that he physically recoiled from shaking Hitler’s hand. And yes, they worried about it for the rest of their lives. But they tended to rationalise it in that way.

Paul Lay: Life also shifted quite drastically for those civil servants left in London. And so what did their day to day look like once war was declared during the phoney war?

Peter Ricketts: The Foreign Office people shared, with all Londoners, all the hardships of the Blitz, while also trying to crack out advice to ministers on really difficult policy decisions. They had blackout blinds, they had the people who had to work 24/7, like the people who deciphered and enciphered the telegrams, which were essential for keeping contact around the world. They moved into the basement, many of them young women actually, because the men had been called up for war. Everybody was expected to muck in and do their thing. So you were expected to volunteer either to be in the Home Guard and told her to do square bashing and walk around the corridors at night with bayonets fixed. Although a number of senior diplomats asked themselves, what on earth would we do if we ever met a German? Or they had to fire-watch on the roof, which meant scrambling over the roofs at night, watching out for incendiaries because the Foreign Office is an enormous building, an incendiary bomb could do huge damage.

And so you were doing one or the other of those. Any able bodied man was expected to volunteer for that. And so there was that sense, I think, that we’re all in it together. They worked extremely long hours and there was amateur weekend cover provided by a group called the Resident Clerks, who were young bachelors who agreed to do their week’s work and have a flat in the Foreign Office and take it in turns to cover weekends and nights, which basically meant no sleep. But even Cadogan decided he had to do fire-watching on the roof at his age, late 50s, because he wanted to set an example.

Paul Lay: One of the major strengths of Peace Makers is the way in which it uncovers stories of women who forced their way into what was a fiercely patriarchal institution at that point. You’ve got these great characters: Elizabeth Wiskemann, Freya Stark, Nancy Lampton.

Peter Ricketts: Yes, the diplomatic service was elitist and it was entirely male. I mean, by statute, women could not become diplomats. That means the higher level of civil servants in the Foreign Office, and most of them, because of the entrance exam system, had been to public school and Oxford, because that was the way you expected to come in. There were women pre-war in the Foreign Office. All of them were secretaries or clerks, and the Foreign Office doctrine was, well, women couldn’t really serve abroad because the culture wouldn’t accept it. But a number of women disproved that. I mean, they blew that out of the water. You mentioned Elizabeth Wiskemann. She is one of the three women. I felt that their whole lives had been a preparation for what they did in the war. After Cambridge, she had become a German expert, she was a correspondent, a journalist in Germany, and was from a German background, spoke fluent German, spent a lot of time in Berlin in the Thirties watching the rise of the Nazis. At one point got picked up and interrogated by the Gestapo. After that, she was more on the fringes of Germany, and she made it a specialty to understand Czechoslovakia and particularly the Sudetenland, the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia, which became the flashpoint around Munich. In fact, she wrote a book on the Czechs and the Germans for Chatham House, published in 1938, just before Munich.

She volunteered to work and she was picked up by a sort of hush-hush part of the Foreign Office called the Political Intelligence Department, she was sent to Switzerland, which was one of those neutral capitals where German agents, businessmen, and the British all mixed in a very ambiguous world of shadowy corners and people trying to work out whether you were who you said you were. Think of the film Casablanca. It’s a bit like Casablanca in the middle of Europe. And Elizabeth Wiskemann was in her element there. She had friends and contact networks across occupied Europe, including in Italy. When they became also an adversary, London peppered her with demands to know what the social situation was like. You know, what were the attitudes in Austria? Was there an anti-Mussolini movement in Italy? And she would go all around Switzerland, having quiet lunches and dinners and picking up political intelligence, basically without any diplomatic status. She finally persuaded the men to put her on the diplomatic list, which gave a little bit of safety. But at the end of the war, she decided she wasn’t going to join the Foreign Office because of the misogyny she’d found.

Freya Stark, ditto, she was an Arab expert before the war, well-known as a traveler, an adventurer, a writer on the Arab world. She joined the Ministry of Information, worked for the Foreign Office in Aden and was sent up to Sanaa, which must be one of the most remote places. Her secret weapon was she could get into the harem, and then she’d make friends with the women. And then when the great men came home and sort of took off their robes and relaxed, then she got at them to put across the British message, and she set up networks called Brotherhoods of Freedom in Iraq and Egypt, several thousand each. She was a kind of influencer before the term was invented. Remarkably strong woman. The last one, Nancy Lampton. She was a Persian specialist. She’d learnt Persian in London. The embassy in Tehran discovered her playing tennis one afternoon in 1939, asked her to be the press secretary, which she was throughout the war, and was able to deal perfectly competently with Iranians and combat German influence. All three women really showed that the Foreign Office logic was completely wrong. None of them decided to stay on because of the continued toxic tone in the Foreign Office. But in 1946, the bar to women joining the diplomatic service was lifted. The reason we didn’t have many senior women for so many years was that there was a marriage bar until 1973. Quite remarkable. Any woman in the Foreign Office who married had to resign until 1973. So these were pioneering women, but it still took a long time for women to really establish themselves in the Foreign Office.

Paul Lay: And there was another legacy of women such as them because the Civil Service, although it had this marriage bar, which seems so incredibly archaic to us, but it did commit to equal pay between the sexes in 1955, which was quite in advance of the Equal Pay Act in 1970. Was it the activities of people such as those wartime women that accelerated this process?

Peter Ricketts: Yes, I think so, because across the Civil Service and in the Foreign Office, women flocked to the departments because most of the men were called up and recruitment of men into the Civil Service was barred while the war went on. So you find many, many women running all the secretaries, most of the clerical staff, almost all the telegram decipherers sharing the dangers and demands with the men in postings abroad. And I think the contribution of women overall is one of the reasons why that ban got lifted.

Paul Lay: The book is wonderfully colourful because it’s peppered with eccentrics. We might call them vivid characters who operate somewhere on the fringes of diplomacy. We’ve got, um, Francis D’Arcy Osborne, who spent a long time, four years or so, essentially trapped in the Vatican. And there’s Archibald Clark Kerr, who was an eccentric ambassador to the Soviet Union in Moscow, who managed to befriend Stalin, even.

Peter Ricketts: I think both stories show how people can rise to exceptional moments and find perhaps strengths they didn’t know they had. Francis Osborne was a scholarly, bookish, rather retiring man who was our ambassador to the Vatican, to the Holy See since 1936. He lived in Rome, but was ambassador to the Vatican when Italy declared war. Of course, the Vatican became a neutral enclave, a kind of gilded cage surrounded by hostile territory. The Foreign Office decided he should move into the Vatican. He went in, camped in a convent with his butler, his secretary and his dog, Jeremy. And they had him there because they wanted him to tap into the very large Catholic networks across occupied Europe, again, to pick up political intelligence. And he was very successful in that. Indeed. I think he got some early indications of the Holocaust. But then, as Allied armies landed in Sicily and moved up Italy, he set up from within the Vatican an escape line for allied prisoners of war. I mean, not something a man like that would ever have thought of doing. He found wandering about outside the Vatican a couple of escaped British officers, one called Sam Derry. He brought them in clandestinely, hid them in the convent, and with them he organised an escape line that helped thousands of British prisoners to safety. It became famous with a book and a film called The Scarlet and The Black, which highlighted a Catholic priest, Monsignor O’Flaherty, who was also very brave in this. But it was D’Arcy Osborne behind the scenes, orchestrating a large Allied escape line.

Archie Clark Kerr, very different, very worldly. Loved dirty jokes and alcohol and smoking. He’d been ambassador in nationalist China. He was a kind of larger than life figure. And the Foreign Office decided, rightly, that he would be very good to match Stalin and get alongside him. And so when he arrived, he did find that, by giving him plentiful tobacco and lots of dirty stories, he established a relationship with Stalin. When Churchill went on his first visit to Moscow in 1942, it was pretty pivotal because the alliance with Russia was part of the war winning strategy. The first banquet at the Kremlin went very badly, and Churchill stormed out thinking that Stalin had insulted him, and decided he’d go home. He wasn’t going to have this Russian peasant talking to him like that. It could have been a disaster to ruin the idea of an alliance. Clark Kerr took him for a walk in the woods and said to him pretty bluntly, ‘I think you’re being stupid here. You know you are a great statesman. We need to work with the Russians. He is a Russian peasant. Don’t let him wind you up like that. Go back, have a proper meeting with him and get things sorted out.’ And although Churchill was pretty fed up about that, he took the advice. He went back. And for the rest of the war, Churchill dined out on the fact that he had a very special personal relationship with Stalin, whether he did or not. But Clark Kerr kept the things on the rails. And I think therefore, in a small way that was part of a war-winning contribution the Foreign Office made.

Paul Lay: And also part of that war-winning enterprise was the United States, which entered the war in December 1941. And the sheer scale of Allied resources would shift overnight and exponentially. But how did the arrival of the Americans alter the daily reality for British diplomats, for British civil servants, and especially the leverage they had?

Peter Ricketts: Well, first of all, it led to an enormous expansion of our embassy in Washington, which became a sort of Whitehall on the Potomac of several thousand civil servants engaging with the Americans on everything from commodities, from shipping, from Lend-Lease, all the thousands of areas where we had to cooperate. I mean, it meant that the very top level diplomacy happened between Churchill and Roosevelt, who sent each other endless messages and endless telephone calls. Churchill sent Lord Halifax, the former Foreign Secretary, to the ambassador, and so he was almost like a member of the Cabinet in Washington. He wasn’t really so involved in the high diplomacy, but in every other aspect, the embassy was coordinating, keeping things on the rails and also trying to keep Churchill working with Roosevelt and Stalin, sometimes dampening Churchill’s irritation and anger when things weren’t going his way. So the Foreign Office was very instrumental in keeping that relationship on the road.

Another key relationship where they had to play marriage broker was with General de Gaulle, who arrived in London after France fell. That also could easily have gone seriously wrong because Churchill and de Gaulle were always having great titanic rows. And Anthony Eden and Alec Cadogan were usually the ones who went round afterwards, picked up the pieces and said [to Churchill] ‘No, no, you’ve got to get on with de Gaulle. He’s going to be vital after the war to keep France out of the hands of communists and on the right side.’ And so those sorts of relationships, Stalin, de Gaulle, Roosevelt, were ones where the Foreign Office could help ensure that the Churchill’s bulldozer was pointing in the right direction.

Paul Lay: One thread through your book is the idea of duty. For the civil servants, for diplomats and politicians. Now, you served at the highest levels of British diplomacy. I wonder if you feel today’s political class, its diplomats, its civil servants hold that same institutional sense of duty? And has it changed over time?

Peter Ricketts: It obviously has changed over time. Wartime is a very special time. Nobody would ever complain about an order to go to a faraway country and live there for four years with no contact with your family. I mean, that was the war. People took extraordinary risks in air travel. The Lady Heather was with [Anthony] Eden on a plane. Went out to Malta on the way to Yalta in 1945, the following plane crashed and killed everyone. And yet Heather got on the plane again the next morning to fly to Yalta without flinching. So people put up with the risks, I think, in a way that perhaps today there would be more hesitation.

I think another thing that characterises that period is the security. They didn’t have leaks. Nowadays I think the relationship between politicians and diplomats and civil servants is constantly poisoned by leaks. And therefore the diplomats feel unwilling to speak truth to power because it might leak. Cadogan and others would say things very frankly to ministers if they thought that they were getting it wrong, and there was never any danger of reading that in the Daily Mail the next day. So that is also a change of the culture.

Paul Lay: And as the war drew to a close, the creation of what became the United Nations was advanced. It becomes what you might call the ultimate diplomatic objective. So how was the UN sold to the world?

Peter Ricketts: One of the remarkable things, I think, is that right in the middle of the war with everybody else in the British government concentrated entirely on winning the war, the Foreign Office set up a team to think about the future peace. Alec Cadogan chose one of his best brains, Gladwyn Jebb, and a small team, and they went away up into an attic. It had nothing to do with the war, and they just thought about what kind of peace do we want to follow this cataclysm, bearing in mind these people had lived through two world wars, and by 1945, I think to answer your question, there was a strong sense around the place, perhaps a bit idealistic, that we cannot let this happen again. We need to have an international organisation that is strong enough to keep the peace. From 1942, the Foreign Office was designing that institution. The blueprints came from London, others were being designed in Washington, and gradually the two merged their thinking into an approach which we have now: a General Assembly for all the countries of the world, a Security Council with a smaller number of countries, and within that permanent members, the great powers of the time. And that was sold essentially, it was rammed through.

It was first agreed with the Russians, and then with the Chinese, and then presented to a wider group of countries. And there was quite a long negotiation in San Francisco before they signed. It was not quite take it or leave it, but the plan basically survived. And in the end, all the countries that then existed as independent countries, I think there were 61 countries who signed it, they all accepted it. The Foreign Office crew knew that at the heart of it, there was a big flaw, because they’d had to concede the veto power for any permanent member. They did that because if they hadn’t, neither the Americans nor the Soviets would have signed up. And so they thought on the pragmatic side that it’s better to take the best deal you can get rather than go for the pure perfect deal and fail. But because of that, they were also thinking by 1945 about European security arrangements, what do we do when the Soviets break their commitments and threaten us again? And that laid the foundation for what became NATO in 1945. And one last piece of forward thinking. The Foreign Office also led work between the Americans and the Soviets on the occupation regime for Germany when Germany surrendered. By 1944 it was clear they were going to lose, and by the time 1945 came, they had all the surrender arrangements, the occupation regimes, ready to implement. In the end, the occupation didn’t go as they intended because the Soviets insisted on basically making communist their sector in the east. But very quickly, the Federal Republic of Germany emerged, and that is partly due to the forward thinking in the Foreign Office. So I do think it’s a lesson for today that even in the midst of a world crisis, you need to be thinking of how to come out of it in a better position.

Paul Lay: So we have this new world order after 1945, for all its flaws, and you talk about it unravelling in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq. And why do you think it unravelled then? And I suppose just as importantly, do you think there’s any hope left for a return to a rules based order?

Peter Ricketts: In the end, all international orders break down. The realities on which they were founded change: economic shifts, demographic shifts, and so on. I think the UN was never perfect. I mean, right from the Korean War in 1950, the great powers of the time were at loggerheads. But it did provide a framework and some guardrails about how countries should treat each other. I think after the end of the Soviet Union, frankly, the West thought that basically we’d won. And I think the Iraq war was such a turning point because the Americans and the British went to war with Iraq, arguably without a decent legal base. And since we were the champions of the UN charter, that set a very bad lesson for autocrats around the world. And both XI Jinping and Putin have very much jumped on that.

So as we’ve gone from a world which was American dominated in the post-Cold war period to the return of great power rivalry with the emergence of China as a real global superpower and Russia as a declining but reckless and dangerous power, the UN can’t operate in those circumstances. So there are bits of the UN that work. The agencies are doing great work in the humanitarian areas on child or on public health issues. But essentially, I think the idea of a single place where the world can come together in our fractured world is now impossible. And can we recreate it? I don’t think we can, without another global catastrophe on the scale of the Second World War. It’s only in those situations where you can bring people together to say ‘never again’. So I don’t wish that. I think, therefore, we’ve got to depend on our regional alliances like NATO, get closer to the EU, because replacing the international framework I think is a non-starter.

Paul Lay: Thank you, Peter Ricketts.

Peter Ricketts: It’s been a real pleasure, Paul. Thank you very much for having me on.