Robert Gilbert Vansittart, 1st Baron Vansittart GCB, GCMG, PC, MVO (25 June 1881 – 14 February 1957) was a senior British diplomat in the period before and during the Second World War. He was Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister from 1928 to 1930 and Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office from 1930 to 1938 and later served as Chief Diplomatic Adviser to the British Government. He is best remembered for his opposition to Appeasement and his hardline stance towards Germany during and after the Second World War. Vansittart was also a published poet, novelist, and playwright.
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Vansittart was born at Wilton House, Farnham, Surrey, the eldest of the three sons of Robert Arnold Vansittart, of Foots Cray Place, Kent, a Captain in the 7th Dragoon Guards, by his wife Susan Alice, daughter of Gilbert James Blane.[1] He was a second cousin of Thomas Edward Lawrence (better known as Lawrence of Arabia.)[2] He was educated at Eton.[1]
Vansittart entered the Foreign Office in 1902, starting as a clerk in the Eastern Department, where he was a specialist on Aegean Island affairs. He was an Attaché at the British Embassy in Paris between 1903 and 1905, when he became Third Secretary. He then served at the embassies in Teheran between 1907 and 1909 and Cairo between 1909 and 1911. From 1911 he was attached to the Foreign Office. During the First World War he was joint head of the contraband department and then head of the Prisoner of War Department under Lord Newton. He took part in the Paris Peace Conference and became an Assistant Secretary at the Foreign Office in 1920. From that year to 1924 he was private secretary to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon. From 1928 to 1930, he was Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, firstly Stanley Baldwin and then Ramsay MacDonald. In January 1930 he was appointed Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, where he supervised the work of Britain's diplomatic service.[1]
Vansittart was suspicious of Hitler from the start; anything Hitler said, he claimed, was "for foreign consumption". He thought Hitler would start another European war as soon as he "felt strong enough".[3] Vansittart supported revising the Versailles Treaty in Germany's favour but not while Hitler was in power. In Vansittart's view, Britain should be firm with Germany, and an alliance between France and the Soviet Union against Germany was essential. Vansittart also urgently advocated rearmament.[4] In the summer of 1936 Vansittart visited Germany and claimed that he found a climate that "the ghost of Barthou would hardly have recognised" and that Britain should negotiate with Germany.[5] He thought that satisfying Hitler's "land hunger" at Russia's expense would be immoral and regarded the Franco-Russian alliance as non-negotiable. It was because he believed Germany had gained equality in Europe that Vansittart favoured facilitating German expansion in Africa.[6] He thought that Hitler was exploiting fears of a "Bolshevist menace" as a cover for "expansion in Central and South-Eastern Europe".[7]
Like Maurice Hankey, Vansittart thought in power politics terms. He thought Hitler could not decide whether to follow Goebbels and Tirpitz in viewing Britain as "the ultimate enemy" or on the other hand adopting the Ribbentrop policy of appeasing Britain in order to engage in military expansion in the East.[8] Vansittart thought that in either case time should be "bought for rearmament" by an economic agreement with Germany and by appeasing "genuine grievance[s]" about colonies.[9] Vansittart wanted to detach Mussolini from Hitler. He thought that the British Empire was an "Incubus" and that the Continent was the central British national interest, but he doubted whether agreement could be had there.[10] This doubt rested on his fear that German attention, if turned eastwards, would result in a military empire between the Baltic, the Adriatic Sea and the Black Sea.[11]
At the Foreign Office in the 1930s, Vansittart was a major figure in the loose group of officials and politicians opposed to appeasement of Germany. In the late 1930s, Vansittart together with Reginald Leeper, the Foreign Office's Press Secretary often leaked information to a private newspaper The Whitehall Letter edited by Victor Gordon Lennox, the Daily Telegraph's diplomatic editor opposed to appeasement[12] This brought him into conflict with the political leadership at the time and he was removed as Permanent Under-Secretary in 1938. A new post as "Chief Diplomatic Adviser to His Majesty's Government" was instead created ad hoc for him. He continued in this role until 1941.[1]
Vansittart was also involved in intelligence work. His thinking was along the same lines as Churchill's. In 1940, Vansittart sued the American historian Harry Elmer Barnes for libel for an article Barnes had written in 1939 accusing Vansittart of plotting aggression against Germany in 1939.[13] During the war, Vansittart became a prominent advocate of an extremely hard line with Germany. His earlier worries about Germany were reformulated into an argument that Germany was intrinsically militaristic and aggressive. In Black Record: Germans Past and Present (1941), Vansittart portrayed German history from the time of ancient Rome as a continuous record of aggression.
Nazism was just the latest manifestation. Therefore, after Germany was defeated, it must be stripped of all military capacity, including its heavy industries. The German people enthusiastically supported Hitler's wars of aggression, just as they supported the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and the First World War in 1914. So they must be thoroughly re-educated under strict Allied supervision for at least a generation. De-Nazification was not enough. The German military elite was the real cause of war, especially the "Prussianist" officer corps and the General Staff: both must be destroyed. In 1943 he wrote:
In the opinion of the author, it is an illusion to differentiate between the German right, center, or left, or the German Catholics or Protestants, or the German workers or capitalists. They are all alike, and the only hope for a peaceful Europe is a crushing and violent military defeat followed by a couple of generations of re-education controlled by the United Nations.[14]
He also wrote "the other Germany has never existed save in a small and ineffective minority".[15]
In other occasions he has also made similar sayings:
We didn't go to war in 1939 to save Germany from Hitler...or the continent from fascism. Like in 1914 we went to war for the not lesser noble cause that we couldn't accept a German hegemony over Europe.[16]
The British historian and R. B. McCallum wrote in 1944: "To some, such as Lord Vansittart, the main problem of policy was to watch Germany and prevent her power reviving. No one can refuse him a tribute for his foresight in this matter".[17]
Vansittart was appointed a Member of the Royal Victorian Order (MVO) in 1906, a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in 1920, a Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB) in 1927, a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in 1929, a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George (GCMG) in 1931 and a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (GCB) in 1938. He was sworn of the Privy Council in 1940[18] and raised to the peerage as Baron Vansittart, of Denham in the County of Buckingham, in 1941.[19]
Vansittart was also a published poet, novelist, and playwright. This is a partial list of his literary works.
Vansittart was a close friend of producer Sir Alexander Korda. He helped Korda with the financing of London Films. His full title was Baron Vansittart of Denham, after the town where London Films had its studio. Vansittart contributed to three motion pictures. He wrote the screenplay for Wedding Rehearsal (1933), contributed dialogue to Sixty Glorious Years (1938), and provided song lyrics for Korda's The Thief of Bagdad (1940), under the pseudonym of "Robert Denham". [20]
Lord Vansittart married as his first wife Gladys, daughter of William C. Heppenheimer, of the United States, in 1921. They had one daughter. She died in 1928. Vansittart married as his second wife Sarah Enriqueta, daughter of Herbert Ward, of Paris, and widow of Sir Colville Barclay, in 1931. He died in February 1957, aged 75, when the barony became extinct.[1]
Daughter of Robert and Gladys, Cynthia, was born 1922 and is still alive. Gladys Heppenheimer had two sons by a prior marriage. One of the sons, who was still quite young at the time, died while she was married to Robert Vansitart. Possibly the 1928 event referred to here. Robert's title went away since he had no son of his own.
| Political offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Sir Ronald Waterhouse |
Principal Private Secretary to the British Prime Minister 1928–1930 |
Succeeded by |
| Preceded by Ronald Lindsay |
Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs 1930–1938 |
Succeeded by Alexander Cadogan |
| Peerage of the United Kingdom | ||
| New creation | Baron Vansittart 1941 – 1957 |
Extinct |