The Road to War

Abstract

Although Indian policy was the main topic of Churchill’s political activities in the years of the 1931 Parliament, foreign affairs and rearmament were matters of increasing concern to him as the European situation was transformed by the rise of Hitler. In 1930 he expressed his support for the idea of a ‘United States of Europe’, which had been put forward by a Hungarian aristocrat, Count Coudenhove Kalergi: but he thought that Britain should encourage the idea from outside, as her own destinies lay rather with the Empire and the English-speaking world.1 At the end of 1931 he was still convinced that there was no prospect of war in Europe, at least ‘for many years’.2 But in 1932 he became disturbed by the revival of the ‘war mentality’ in Germany. In his visit to Bavaria in the summer of that year to see the battlefields of Marlborough’s campaigns, he gained an unpleasant impression of ‘bands of sturdy Teutonic youths, marching through the streets and roads of Germany, with the light of desire in their eyes to suffer for their Fatherland’.3