CHAPTER THREE

The First World War and Its Aftermath

On 4 August 1914, following the German advance through Belgium, with which Britain had a treaty of alliance dating back more than seventy years, Britain declared war on Germany. Among those Jews then in Britain who immediately became enemy aliens was Theodor Herzl’s son, Hans. ‘Through Winston Churchill’s influence,’ recalled a leading British Zionist, Selig Brodetsky, ‘Hans was naturalised when the war started.’¹

Two other Jews, both Members of Parliament, were helped by Churchill after the outbreak of war. When his Austrian-born friend Baron de Forest, Liberal MP for West Ham North, was accused of belittling British naval effort and speaking in favour of a German victory, Churchill wrote to the Director of Public Prosecutions: ‘I am satisfied of Baron de Forest’s loyalty and sense of duty, tho’ it is clear at times he has talked loosely and argumentatively.’² Churchill added that de Forest, who held the rank of Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, would be joining his unit in France ‘next Saturday’: which de Forest, urged to do so by Churchill, agreed to do, thereby avoiding possible prosecution. The previous year, Churchill had resigned from the Reform Club after de Forest had been blackballed for membership.³

Also after the outbreak of war in 1914, German-born Major Frank Goldsmith, Conservative MP for Stowmarket, was accused of pro-German sympathies. His nephew Ernst von Marx had sent him a telegram from Germany: ‘How can you consider fighting for anyone other than your Fatherland?’ There were riots in Goldsmith’s constituency. He even had to pay the hospital bills of those who defended him. Churchill, in the words of Goldsmith’s son’s biographer, was one of his few parliamentary colleagues who ‘stood by him’.⁴

* * *

As the war at sea intensified, Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, faced a growing shortage of acetone, the solvent used in making cordite: the essential naval explosive. Through the head of the powder department at the Admiralty, Sir Frederic Nathan, a Jewish chemical engineer, Churchill approached Chaim Weizmann, who had been working at Manchester University since his arrival in Britain a decade earlier. In his memoirs, Weizmann recalled their meeting: ‘Mr Churchill, then a much younger man, was brisk, fascinating, charming and energetic. Almost his first words were: “Well, Dr Weizmann, we need thirty thousand tons of acetone. Can you make it?” I was so terrified by this lordly request that I almost turned tail.’ But Weizmann did answer, telling Churchill: ‘So far I have succeeded in making a few hundred cubic centimetres of acetone at a time by the fermentation process. I do my work in a laboratory. I am not a technician. I am only a research chemist. But, if I were somehow able to produce a ton of acetone, I would be able to multiply that by any factor you chose. Once the bacteriology of the process is established, it is only a question of brewing. I must get hold of a brewing engineer from one of the big distilleries, and we will set about the preliminary task. I shall naturally need the support of the Government to obtain the people, the equipment, the emplacements and the rest of it. I myself can’t even determine what will be required.’

This explanation was satisfactory, and, as Weizmann recalled, ‘I was given carte blanche by Mr Churchill and the department, and I took upon myself a task which was to tax all my energies for the next two years, and which was to have consequences which I did not foresee.’⁵ Those consequences were the support shown by Churchill’s successor at the Admiralty, Arthur Balfour, whom Weizmann won over to the prospect of British support for a Jewish National Home in Palestine once Turkey were defeated.

* * *

Within four months of the outbreak of war, fighting on the Western Front had become a bloody stalemate of trench warfare. As 1914 came to an end, Churchill proposed an attack on Turkey, based on a naval attack at the Dardanelles that would push past the Gallipoli Peninsula and threaten the Turkish capital, Constantinople. Churchill believed that the defeat of Turkey could help shorten the war, ending what he called the policy of ‘sending our armies to chew barbed wire’ on the Western Front.⁶ In the fighting on the Gallipoli Peninsula between April and December 1915 an all-Jewish military force, the Zion Mule Corps, which had been recruited in Egypt mostly from Jews expelled from Palestine by the Turks, fought alongside the British, Australian and New Zealand troops.

The prospect of the defeat of Turkey stimulated British territorial ambitions. One of the two Jewish Cabinet Ministers, Sir Herbert Samuel – President of the Local Government Board – suggested that, once conquered, Palestine should be acquired by Britain as an eventual centre of Jewish self-government. Churchill felt it was time to make a ‘clean sweep’ of Turkey, suggesting, in a note to the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, that ‘Palestine might be given to Christian, Liberal and now noble Belgium.’ Since the outbreak of war, Belgium had been suffering under harsh German occupation. Ironically, it was Sir Herbert Samuel who had taken a lead in Britain in making Belgian refugees welcome.⁷

The failure of the naval attack on the Dardanelles led to Churchill’s political eclipse. In December 1915 he resigned from the government and went to the Western Front, where he served as a battalion commander with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. The division he joined had a French interpreter, a thirty-year-old Jewish lieutenant, Emile Herzog, better known in later years as the writer André Maurois. When Churchill decided to provide his soldiers with hot baths, it was Maurois who went into the nearest town, Bailleul, to negotiate with the local brewery to provide their vats as baths. Later, at Churchill’s request, Maurois helped obtain fresh mutton, vegetables and dairy products from farms behind the line for the men of Churchill’s battalion. Maurois later wrote: ‘I cannot hope he noticed that unknown Frenchman who looked at him with admiring eyes and said little.’⁸ Churchill did indeed notice him, writing to Clementine of the ‘very attentive and spruce’ officer attached as an interpreter.⁹

In May 1916 Churchill returned to Britain and to his place in Parliament. That December, David Lloyd George became Prime Minister, charged with a more vigorous conduct of the war. In July 1917 he appointed Churchill as Minister of Munitions, with responsibility for the manufacture of the weapons, including tanks and aircraft, that were needed to defeat Germany. One of those with whom Churchill worked at his new Ministry was Sir Albert Stern, Director-General of Tank Production, a Jewish engineer who was a strong supporter of Zionism. Another of the senior civil servants on Churchill’s Munitions Council was the Jewish explosives expert, Colonel Sir Frederic Nathan, then Director of Propellant Supplies, under whom Chaim Weizmann was working. Seven years earlier Churchill, as Home Secretary, had signed Weizmann’s naturalisation papers.

In 1916 Weizmann had become the Director of the British Admiralty laboratories, where, by early 1917, he was using bacterial fermentation to produce substantial quantities of substances needed for the manufacture of explosives. Weizmann used the bacterium clostridium acetobutylicum – known as ‘the Weizmann organism’ – to produce the acetone for the cordite which was critical to the British and Allied war effort.

One main source of the bacterium was horse chestnuts. On 8 October 1917 several British newspapers reported that more than 25,000 tons of horse chestnuts, collected by schoolchildren, would reach the Ministry of Munitions by the end of the year. Churchill, who had not been told of the experiments, was puzzled by this activity. ‘Pray explain to me why you are asking for chestnuts and what use you propose to make of them,’ he wrote to Sir Frederic Nathan on 2 November 1917. Churchill underlined the words ‘chestnuts’.¹⁰ It was subsequently explained to him that the horse chestnuts were needed for Weizmann’s experiments; and that acetone, of which there was a grave shortage, was needed for the production of cordite, the smokeless powder used as the propellant in rifle and artillery ammunition.

Churchill sent his letter enquiring into Weizmann’s munitions activities on the same day that A. J. Balfour, Foreign Secretary in Lloyd George’s government, sent a letter to the 2nd Baron Rothschild, a letter known ever since as the Balfour Declaration. The letter, on a single sheet of Foreign Office paper, read in full: ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’¹¹

The War Cabinet hoped that, inspired by the promise of a national home in Palestine, Russian Jews would encourage Russia – then in the throes of revolution – to stay in the war, and that American Jewry would be stimulated to accelerate the military participation of the United States – already at war, but not yet active on the battlefield. To secure these results, Weizmann agreed to go first to the United States and then to Russia, to lead the campaign to rouse the pro-war elements among the Jewish masses in both countries. But on 8 November, before Weizmann could set off, the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd and declared that the war was over. The Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Ilych Lenin, had promised the Russian masses bread and peace: the first to be provided, within days of the revolution, was peace – followed by the unopposed German occupation of vast swathes of western and southern Russia.

The Balfour Declaration had been issued too late to affect the Bolshevik triumph. It did, however, encourage American Jews, especially those who had been born in Russia, to volunteer to fight in Palestine against the Turks as part of the British Army.¹² Churchill always recognised that the British Government’s pledge to the Jews had been made as a result of the urgent needs of the war, and could not be set aside when, in later years, it became awkward to fulfil. The fact that the Zionist Jews had been prepared to try to prevent the Bolsheviks coming to power and pulling Russia out of the war, meant much to him. He saw the dangerous situation to Britain, France and the United States on the Western Front in March 1918, that resulted both from Russia’s withdrawal from the war, and from the growing tyranny of Bolshevism inside Russia. Lenin’s suppression of the democratically elected Constitutional Assembly, and the imposition of the harsh terror of the secret police, were anathema to Churchill.

* * *

In the United States, Churchill’s transatlantic colleague in wartime munitions production and policy was the Jewish financier Bernard Baruch, who was Chairman of the War Industries Board in Woodrow Wilson’s administration. Although Churchill and Baruch did not meet during the war, they exchanged many hundreds of detailed messages, as they worked in tandem to secure the raw materials essential for the continuing Allied war effort.

In France, Siegfried Sassoon, a member of the Sassoon family with whom Churchill had long been a social acquaintance, was writing powerful poems about the misery and futility of war. Churchill knew these poems by heart and often recited them. When Churchill was warned not to see Sassoon, he replied: ‘I am not a bit afraid of Siegfried Sassoon. That man can think. I am only afraid of people who cannot think.’¹³

The First World War ended on 11 November 1918 with the German armistice. In Britain, the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, called an election. The result was a predominantly Conservative House of Commons, which agreed to serve under Lloyd George in a broad-based coalition. On 26 December, while Lloyd George was forming his Cabinet, Churchill wrote to him, by hand, about its proposed composition: ‘There is a point about Jews which occurs to me – you must not have too many of them.’ Churchill went on to discuss the claims of the three Jewish contenders for Cabinet office in Lloyd George’s Liberal Party. Two he wanted to see in the government, but as for the third, he wrote: ‘Three Jews among only seven Liberal Cabinet Ministers might I fear give rise to comment.’¹⁴ In the event, only one Jew was appointed. There were too many Conservatives who needed to be given high office if the coalition was to hold together.

In the Cabinet, Churchill was made Secretary of State for War, his first senior Cabinet post in five years. His first task was to carry out a smooth demobilisation scheme. Jewish soldiers had as much enthusiasm as their fellow comrades-in-arms for the scheme that Churchill devised, whereby those who had served longest were sent home first.

Two years after the war, Churchill was asked to send a message for a book that listed all the Jews who fought, and those who were killed between 1914 and 1918, in the British and Empire forces. ‘It is with great pleasure that I accede to your request to contribute a message…’, he wrote. ‘I feel, however, that any such message from me is unnecessary in view of the facts, which speak to themselves.’ Churchill went on to point out that, although Jews formed only ‘a small proportion of the population of the British Empire,’ some 60,000 had fought in the war in Europe, Africa and Asia. Of these, 2,324 ‘gave their lives for the Cause’ and a further 6,350 were wounded.

Churchill noted with appreciation that five Jewish soldiers won the Victoria Cross, ‘the highest honour it is possible to obtain in our country,’ while a further 1,533 won other awards for bravery. His message ended, ‘I can truthfully say that this record is a great one, and British Jews can look back with pride on the honourable part they played in winning the Great War.’¹⁵

* * *

Churchill’s main task at the War Office was to continue the government’s policy, decided on before he had entered the government, of sending British war supplies to the Russian anti-Bolshevik armies, which were then seeking to drive the Bolsheviks from Petrograd and Moscow. On 2 June 1919 he read a statement by a leading anti-Bolshevik Russian that, once Petrograd had been taken from the Bolsheviks, ‘great excesses’ would be committed by the victorious troops. Churchill at once asked the Chief of the Imperial General Staff to prepare him a draft telegram to the general commanding the British troops in North Russia. Churchill pointed out to them that any force Britain supported even indirectly ‘must proceed according to the recognised laws and customs of war and be guided by human considerations.’¹⁶ The telegram as sent contained a sentence about the widespread but far from universal Jewish support for the Bolsheviks, and its likely repercussions. ‘In view of prominent part taken by Jews in Red terror and regime,’ the telegram read, ‘there is special danger of Jew pogroms and this danger must be combated strongly.’¹⁷

While fighting against the Bolshevik troops in southern Russia, the Volunteer Army commanded by General Denikin, an all-Russian force, turned savagely against the Jews in more than 160 towns and villages; many thousands of Jews were killed. Not only was there a deep anti-Semitic tradition in southern Russia and Ukraine that had seen pogroms and massacres in both the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, but after the Bolshevik revolution in November 1917 many Jews, hoping for better times, had thrown in their lot with the Bolsheviks. A few Jews, whose deeds were much publicised and greatly feared, became political commissars, charged with the imposition of Bolshevik rule in southern Russia, and carrying out their tasks with cruelty and zeal.

Churchill knew this, but condemned the anti-Jewish terror; on 18 September 1919 he warned the senior British general in South Russia, General Holman: ‘It is of the very highest consequence that General Denikin should not only do everything in his power to prevent massacres of the Jews in the liberated districts but should issue a proclamation against anti-Semitism.’ Churchill added: ‘The Jews are very powerful in England, and if it could be shown that Denikin was protecting them as his armies advanced it would make my task easier.’¹⁸

On October 14 Churchill announced that, although British troops had withdrawn from all fighting alongside the Russian anti-Bolshevik armies, British material support would continue. One result of continuing British aid, Churchill stated, will be ‘of mitigating the anti-Semitism which the crimes of the Jewish Commissaries have so fearfully excited and which General Denikin has laboured faithfully to restrain.’¹⁹

The killing of Jews by Russian anti-Bolshevik forces continued. On 21 October Churchill drafted instructions to be sent to General Haking, the senior British officer attached to the anti-Bolshevik forces in the south. The instructions read: ‘Everything will be done … to prevent indiscriminate or wholesale executions … Above all, anything in the nature of a Jewish pogrom would do immense harm to the Russian cause.’

Churchill’s instructions continued with the threat of an arms embargo: ‘All the influence of the British representative will be used in securing the safety of innocent Jews and a fair trial for all. To secure these objects General Haking is entitled to go all lengths in regard to refusal of further munitions or supplies. Using this great lever, he should be able to mitigate the ferocity of the situation which must undoubtedly arise.’²⁰

After receiving a letter from Lloyd George about the continuing persecution and killing of Jews by the anti-Bolshevik Russian armies, Churchill wrote directly to Denikin: ‘Your Excellency, I know, will realise the vital importance at this time, when such brilliant results are being secured, of preventing by every possible means the ill treatment of the innocent Jewish population. My task in winning support in Parliament for the Russian National Cause will be infinitely harder if well-authenticated complaints continue to be received from Jews in the zone of the Volunteer Armies. I know the efforts you have already made and the difficulty of restraining anti-Semitic feeling. But I beg you, as a sincere well-wisher, to redouble these efforts and place me in a strong position to vindicate the honour of the Volunteer Army.’²¹

A day after writing this letter, Churchill wrote to Lloyd George, ‘I send you some papers about the treatment of the Jews by the Volunteer Army.’ The first was that there was ‘a very bitter feeling throughout Russia against the Jews, who are regarded as being the main instigators of the ruin of the Empire, and who, certainly, have played a leading part in Bolshevik atrocities.’ One result of this Russian view was ‘fearful massacres’ of Jews in Ukraine; they had been committed in large part by the soldiers of Simon Petlura, who had proclaimed himself head of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the anarchist warlord Nestor Makhno, and the soldiers of General Gregorieff, a former Tsarist general who had recently carried out a massacre of Jews in Odessa.

Churchill’s second point was that anti-Semitism was shared by all the troops under Denikin, but that as his armies became increasingly disciplined and powerful, and as the administration behind them increased in authority, ‘their feelings will be kept in strict restraint.’ Churchill went on to point out that Denikin had, of his own initiative, ‘constantly and repeatedly repressed by every means in his power all outrages on innocent Jews,’ so much so that he had been attacked by the Petlurists and ‘disgruntled’ Ukrainians as the protector of the Jews and had been accused ‘of being bought by them.’

Denikin’s efforts to prevent the killing of Jews, Churchill told Lloyd George, ‘are endorsed by General Holman, the Head of our Mission, who vouches implicitly for him and the Army Command. Indeed, the papers which you have sent me show that the Higher Command is exerting itself to its utmost.’²²

* * *

As Secretary of State for War, Churchill also had responsibility for Palestine, which was then under British military administration. On 19 September Chaim Weizmann, as head of the Zionist Executive based in London, wrote to him, asking that he appoint as the new Chief Administrator of the British military administration someone sympathetic to Zionism. Weizmann suggested General Wyndham Deedes for the post. Although he did not say so, Deedes had been in charge of organising relief for the Jewish colonies in Palestine after the defeat of the Turks. Weizmann told Churchill he had already discussed the possibility of the appointment of Deedes with General Allenby at the Paris Peace Conference, and that Allenby had seemed ‘in sympathy with such a proposal.’

Weizmann had other requests. The Zionist Organisation of which he was president ‘is also very anxious,’ he wrote, ‘to have freedom to send to Palestine a variety of experts to make a general investigation of the country and to prepare plans, so that when the political adjustments in Paris have been made, the Jewish People can proceed, without loss of time, with the task of reconstituting Palestine as their National Home. In the course of my conversations with Lord Allenby in Paris, he urged this point rather strongly and indicated that the Zionists ought to utilise the present transitional period so as to be ready as soon as the political decision was taken.’

These were two ‘concrete administrative measures’, Weizmann explained, about which the Zionist Organisation was most concerned. ‘I need not say that in general we desire and expect sympathetic treatment by the Military Administration of the whole Zionist Movement in Palestine. I do not wish to stress the past, but for a long time we had, under the Military Administration in Palestine, a most trying and unpleasant series of experiences. Happily, our most recent information is that the instructions sent out to the Administration of Palestine a few weeks ago have produced a very beneficial effect on the official atmosphere. The official conduct, instead of being cold and unsympathetic, is becoming appreciative of the Jewish destiny of the country. We shall be only too happy to learn that this tendency is maintained and strengthened.’²³

Churchill sent this letter to Allenby, who replied on 15 October 1919: ‘However much we may sympathise with Zionist aims, it must be borne in mind that Palestine is as yet merely occupied enemy territory, under a purely military administration. Therefore, the appointment of Chief Administrator is entirely the concern of the War Office; and not one in which the Executive of the Zionist Organisation should have any voice. This does not seem to be quite clear to Dr Weizmann.’²⁴ In the event, Deedes was appointed six months later, and proved sympathetic to the Zionist position.

As Secretary of State for War, Churchill was concerned for the future of the Middle Eastern provinces of the defeated Ottoman Empire, fearing that the British Mandates proposed for both Palestine and Mesopotamia (Iraq) would lead to endless and costly conflict. Lloyd George had stressed to his colleagues that his aim in all foreign and overseas involvements was economy: economy of military effort and economy of expenditure. With this in mind, on 25 October 1919 Churchill wrote a memorandum for the Cabinet proposing that the Ottoman Empire should not be divided among the victorious powers, but preserved intact, and placed under the authority of the League of Nations. Such a plan would bring an end to the British Mandate in Palestine, and would lead to the abandonment of the Balfour Declaration pledge of a Jewish National Home.

In putting forward his case for an end to Britain’s involvement, Churchill pointed out that the French were about ‘to over-run Syria with hordes of Algerian troops’ and would soon be involved ‘in a protracted and bloody struggle with the Arabs who are defending their native land.’ As this struggle proceeded, British sympathies would be increasingly on the side of the Arabs, causing ‘serious injury’ to Anglo-French relations. As to Palestine, Churchill wrote: ‘Lastly, there are the Jews, whom we are pledged to introduce into Palestine and who take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience.’

The above causes, Churchill warned, ‘act and re-act’ upon Britain’s position as ‘the greatest Mahommedan Power’ – because of the twenty million Muslims in British India – and involve Britain ‘in immense expense and anxiety.’ He was therefore ‘reluctantly drawn to the conclusion’ that the policy of partitioning the Turkish Empire among the European Powers was a mistake.²⁵

Had Lloyd George responded positively to Churchill’s suggestion, Britain’s responsibility for the Jewish National Home would have come to an abrupt end. But Lloyd George was keen to retain British rule in Palestine, and committed to the Jewish National Home consequences of the Balfour Declaration. Within four months Churchill became a more articulate and determined advocate of this commitment.