Six Minutes in May
Page 47
TOM FOWLER WENT back to Krogs Farm in 2010 and was reunited with the farmer’s daughter, Torlaug Werstad, who still lives there. On 26 April 2016, the Norwegian Honorary Consul in Grimsby presented him with the Norwegian Memorial Medal in recognition of his part in helping to restore Norway’s freedom during the Second World War.
FRANK LODGE CONTINUED to fight for recognition. In 2008, he wrote a letter to the Defence Secretary: ‘The family of a soldier who lost his life in Burma would receive the Burma star, in Italy the Italy Star, in North Africa the Africa Star, in France or Germany the French Germany star, but for the families of those who gave their lives in Norway, 1940 – nothing.’ He died in 2012.37 There is still no specific Norway Campaign medal.
THE STEINKJER MEMORIAL, commemorating eleven British soldiers who lost their lives in the battle for Steinkjer, was unveiled on 21 April 2010, exactly seventy years to the day after Steinkjer town centre was destroyed by German bombs.
GILES ROMILLY WAS flown from Narvik to Germany where he spent five months in solitary confinement at Stalag XIIIA, then taken to Stalag VIIIB at Tost, and then in November 1941 to Colditz, where he became the first POW to be held hostage as a ‘Prominente’ in case things went badly for Hitler. A letter written to his parents on 27 April 1940 failed to reach Huntington Park in time for Colonel Romilly to know that his son was alive. ‘Dearest Mummy and Daddy, Well, my caravan has halted at last, and I am in Germany … Some day I will be able to tell you the whole story, there are good bits in it.38 But of course you, Mummy, were once a prisoner of war yourself – so naturally you will be a bit blasé about the whole business. Wasn’t a potato pushed at you through iron bars? I seem to remember that detail. I must think up some rather more modern embellishments to tell you … Narvik was dreadful. When I left, early one preposterously cold morning, snow was still whirling down from a leaden sky so low it almost touched the ground. I was glad to be moving swiftly southward towards the spring. A pity Uncle Winston didn’t know when I was leaving – though I daresay he wouldn’t have bothered … I got captured through being too interested in the “story”! I send all my love, hoping you are both well and happy.’ Only weeks later did Giles learn that his father had died on 6 May. Reunited after the war with his Narvik diary, he typed it out and gave a copy to his ‘dear uncle Winston’, as background for the Norwegian section of The Gathering Storm.39 ‘Please raid for facts and impressions, if you find anything useful, and accept this typescript as a Birthday Present.’ He died in California in 1967. His ashes are buried with his mother’s in the churchyard at Huntington, next to his father’s grave.
NARVIK WAS FINALLY captured on 28 May 1940 according to General Mackesy’s original plan, with only 150 casualties, and with French, Polish and Norwegian troops, and no British soldiers involved at all, merely a British artillery unit positioned on a hill west of the town. Any earlier, and the chances were strong that Churchill might have seen repeated the massacre of Suvla Bay in the Turkish campaign – a campaign that had earned him the nickname ‘the butcher of Gallipoli’. After Narvik’s seizure by an Allied force which had changed its name once again (to the North West Expeditionary Force), Admiral Cork’s Chief of Staff, Captain Loben Maund, walked along the beach, and confirmed that British troops would have had to wade a considerable distance ashore, ‘well-covered by machine-gun posts that could not have been neutralised by fire from the sea’.40 Colonel Kurt Herrmann, last survivor of General Dietl’s staff, told General Mackesy’s son Piers that he believed that the British attack as originally conceived and promoted by Churchill would have failed. This is also the opinion of a former machine-gunner from the Norwegian 6th Division. At ninety-seven, Ivan Vanya is the oldest living soldier to have fought the Germans before Narvik’s capture in May. On 23 April, his team were pinned down for a day and a half by a German machine-gun unit on Mount Leigas. For a whole night, Vanya, an expert skier, had to play dead, digging his face into the snow while tracer bullets ripped overhead. He says: ‘The British did the right thing not to land.41 It would have been very stupid to go with Churchill’s idea. They were not well equipped. They would have lost many lives.’ Peter Fleming, allegedly the first British soldier to land on the Norwegian mainland, had taken part in the earlier military withdrawal from central Norway, and recorded how ‘the end of the difficult affair at Narvik attracted little attention at the time and is today scarcely remembered as a victory’.42 After the efforts made to occupy the town, it was held by the Allies for ten days, then evacuated on 8 June 1940 in order to throw every man who could be spared, every gun and every plane, into the battlefield in France. Captain Maund was among the evacuees. ‘The withdrawal though successful in that not one of the 31,000 men was left behind was perhaps one of the saddest journeys most of us had ever made.43 Across the waters ahead of us France had collapsed; Italy declared war and few anywhere outside Great Britain ever imagined England could survive.’
NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN REMAINED leader of his party, as Asquith had in December 1916, and became Lord President of the Council. Offered the Order of the Garter, which would have made him a knight, he turned it down, preferring, he told Churchill, to die plain Mr Chamberlain, ‘like my father before, unadorned by any title’.44 Joseph Kennedy saw him on 16 May. ‘He is definitely a heartbroken and physically broken man.45 He looks ghastly.’ Chamberlain had the example of his cousin Norman, who lost his captaincy in 1917, days before attempting to lead his men ‘unswervingly under extremely heavy fire’ to their objective.46 ‘At bottom it was the humiliation of being degraded in rank that poisoned everything.’47 A similar bane afflicted Chamberlain, even if he half-welcomed Churchill’s accession, now that the battle had intensified. He confessed to Anthony Eden that he had agreed to stay on in the War Cabinet only ‘with a heavy heart’.48 The loss of Chequers was a further blow. He drove down with Anne one evening in June to collect his wood-saw and say goodbye. Jones, the gardener, was in tears. Chamberlain gave him a copy of William Robinson’s English Flower Garden. Then, before he stepped into the Armstrong Siddeley, his eyes took in the shrubs that he had planted: the magnolias on the north lawn, the flowering cherries, and the tulip tree in the east forecourt which was later chosen as his memorial tree (and continues to thrive). After they had to relinquish the house, the Chamberlains could not bear to speak of the place by its name – as in childhood his father had not talked of his mother. Anne wrote: ‘It was like someone we loved had gone.’49 He wrote to his sister Ida: ‘There is no pleasure in life for us just now.50 Week ends cannot be distinguished from week days.’ Yet within a short time Chamberlain discovered that he had become indispensable to the new tenant. Churchill had written to him on the evening of 10 May: ‘To a very large extent I am in your hands – and I feel no fear of that.’51 Neither did Churchill lack the courage to inform Lloyd George that ‘I have received a very great deal of help from Chamberlain.52 His kindness and courtesy to me in our new relations have touched me. I have joined hands with him and must act with perfect loyalty.’ Chamberlain was quick to reciprocate. ‘Winston has behaved with the most unimpeachable loyalty.53 Our relations are excellent and I know that he finds my help of great value to him.’ When Churchill was away in France on 22 May, Chamberlain once again presided over the government, causing Churchill later to admit to Halifax and others: ‘I shall never find such a colleague again.’54 Yet Churchill’s dependence on Chamberlain – and on Chamberlain henchmen like David Margesson, who remained Chief Whip – was not popular. On 21 June, Cecil King wrote in his diary: ‘He is now so much in the grip of the old bunch that people are calling him Neville Churchill.’55 Even as British pilots defended the skies that summer, Maisky noted how ‘the officers and soldiers returning from Flanders take every opportunity to curse the former government which let them down with arms and equipment.56 Many demand that Chamberlain should be brought to court for high treason!’ Against rising criticism, Chamberlain wryly reflected that it was he and Lord Swinton who had pushed ahead with the productio
n of the Hurricanes and Spitfires that were winning the Battle of Britain, against the advice of both Churchill, who six months before Munich had written to Chamberlain criticising these selfsame fighter planes, and that of the Air Staff, who had championed bombers. ‘If I am personally responsible for deficiencies of tanks and A.A. guns, I must equally be responsible for the efficiency of the Air Force & Navy.’57 One of those RAF pilots was Conservative MP Patrick Donner, who, though he had voted against the government in the Norway Debate, refused to join in the clamour to traduce Chamberlain. Donner directed his most burning criticism towards those who ‘having held an erroneous view of Neville Chamberlain for many years … do not possess the resilience of mind to change that view in the light of facts previously unknown to them’.58 Donner concluded: ‘Must not the final verdict be … that Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill between them saved this country.59 Neither statesman would have achieved our salvation without the other’ – a sentiment echoed by one of Chamberlain’s constituents, a Mrs Hodges who wrote to him on the day he died, saying that ‘you saved the life of our Country and we always think of you with deep and everlasting gratitude’, and adding this PS: ‘I have a portrait of you and Mr. Churchill side by side on my mantelpiece.’60 That the relationship between the two men remained unresolved is hinted at in a story told by Chamberlain’s doctor, Thomas Horder, when on 22 September 1940 Chamberlain took the reluctant decision to retire from active public life after confessing to ‘having trouble with my inside’.61 In the last stages of stomach cancer, Chamberlain wrote a letter to Churchill, entrusting it to Horder to deliver. Churchill took the letter, but before opening it asked: ‘Did he say anything about the Leadership?’ As A. J. Sylvester wrote in his diary: ‘The fact is Winston is afraid of NC.’62, 63 Six months after the Norway Debate, on 7 November 1940, Halifax visited Chamberlain, who pointed to a chair by his bed and said: ‘Sit there.’64 They talked for ten minutes, Halifax finding Chamberlain ‘very steady and brave’ and even able to make a parliamentary joke.65 Chamberlain told him with a half-laugh: ‘Approaching dissolution, I suppose, brings relief.’66 Halifax’s diary continued: ‘Then he spoke of our work together, and what it had meant to him, in a way that moved me much. He took my hand in both his, and held it, and so with no more said but with the full understanding of friends who go to different duties, we parted.’ On 9 November, a wet Saturday evening, Halifax was staying with Baba Metcalfe at Little Compton when Horace Wilson telephoned to say that Chamberlain had died. The time and place were kept secret for his cremation the following week. The Daily Telegraph lamented: ‘Never before in England’s history has so much secrecy surrounded a former Prime Minister’s funeral.67 The public was left completely in the dark about the burial arrangements because London is in the front line of battle.’ On 13 November, Chamberlain was cremated in Golders Green without a ceremony, with only Anne and ‘two household servants alone’ being present, and no one from the Clique, not his sisters Ida and Hilda, not his son Frank, with the Royal Artillery in Malta, or daughter Dorothy, nor his niece Valerie, who was training as a nurse in Glasgow. The next day a service to pay homage to his ashes was held in a chilly Westminster Abbey to the wail of air-raid sirens and with the draught from the blown-out stained-glass windows whirling about his empty coffin. As the service reached its climax, one mourner noticed with concern that the congregation was singing ‘the chief hymn to a wrong tune’.68 Chamberlain’s public image has been out of key with his private persona ever since.
WINSTON CHURCHILL RETURNED from Buckingham Palace on the evening of 10 May having ‘acquired the chief power in the State, which henceforth I wielded in ever-growing measure for five years and three months of world war, at the end of which time all our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs’.69 He became Prime Minister again from 1951 to 1955. He died in 1965.
NOTES AND SOURCES
AM – Alexandra (‘Baba’) Metcalfe diary
BCA – Balliol College Archives, Oxford
BI – Borthwick Institute, York
BL – British Library
BOD – Bodleian Library, Oxford
CA – Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge
CP – Charles Peake diary
CRL – Cadbury Research Library, Birmingham University
FRO – Flintshire Records Office
PA – Parliamentary Archives
RU – Special Collections, Reading University
SP – Salisbury Papers
PROLOGUE
1 foul and treacherous, W. S. Churchill, Churchill’s visit to Norway, 15
2 one of the black … world, ibid., 31
3 known all over, ibid., 8
4 Oh no … Britain, ibid., 42
1 PERFECT BLACKOUT
1 Is there any, Cecil King, With Malice Toward None, 15
2 blown to pieces, Churchill, Churchill’s Visit to Norway, 36
3 his face covered, Vernon Bartlett, And Now, Tomorrow, 90
4 we pride ourselves, Churchill, Churchill’s Visit to Norway, 35
5 only known record, Sir Benjamin Stone took a formal photograph in 1903, but Members posed for this.
6 splendid upheaval, A. J. P. Taylor, A Personal History, 153
7 almost inevitable, Vernon Bartlett, I Know What I Liked, 139
8 We are meeting to-day, Pierse Loftus MP, Hansard, 9/5/1940
9 the most momentous, Beaverbrook papers, PA HC/BBK/G/11/11; Stafford Cripps, too, called the debate ‘the most momentous that has ever taken place in the history of Parliament’, Hansard, 9/5/1940
10 altered the history, Harold Macmillan, The Blast of War, 54
11 a little suspicious, Austen Mitchell, ‘A Forbidden Glimpse of History’, The House magazine, 20/8/1992; Sunday Times, 1/5/1966
12 sitting on a jelly, John Moore-Brabazon, The Brabazon Story, 55
13 In vain we look, BOD MSS Macmillan dep c.874
14 rather like a biologist, Ivan Maisky, The Maisky Diaries, xvi
15 It was then, W. S. Churchill, Great Contemporaries, 38
16 Curious what, Borthwick Institute Edward Halifax diary, 21/3/1940
17 Whenever the English, Elias Canetti, The Human Province, 13
18 pinnacle of deathless, W. S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, vol. I, 26
19 If ever there was, Philip Ziegler interview with author, 24/11/2015
20 Six more weeks, Alan Campbell-Johnson, Viscount Halifax, 557
21 the number of people, BOD MSS Woolton 76
22 I think that Kingsley, Henry Channon, Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon, 221
23 People are saying, Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters; 1939–1945, vol.2, 75
24 in the light of, BI EH diary, 16/4/1940
History goes past, Hugh Dalton, The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton, 347
25 What you tell me, CA Amel 8/76, Hore-Belisha to LA, 5/10/1954
26 upon what small, D. R. Thorpe, The Uncrowned Prime Ministers, 138
27 the one time, Lord Hailsham, Desert Island Discs, BBC, 27/3/1988
28 got slightly confused, Andrew Roberts, The Holy Fox, 289
29 It’s all destiny, Frances Campbell-Preston interview with author, 4/5/2015
30 the P.M. considers, Maisky, 161
31 things were “written”, Edmund Ironside, The Ironside Diaries, 40
32 I heard Churchill, James Stuart, Within the Fringe: An autobiography, 96
33 Churchill wrote of, David Dilks interview with author, 29/4/2015
34 extended essay … distortion, David Reynolds, In Command of History, 128, 119
35 It is a pity, Leo Amery, The Leo Amery Diaries, vol. 1, 1896–1929, 592
36 the public of our, Patrick Beesly, Very Special Admiral, 297
37 raising his hand … clouded, Somerset de Chair, Buried Pleasure, 225
38 ought to be a model, WSC, Hansard, 12/1
1/1940
39 Of course, I could, Randolph Churchill and Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–41, 902
40 this narrow, obstinate, Dingle Foot, British Political Crises, 162
41 I myself can, Neville Chamberlain, Norman Chamberlain: A memoir, vi
42 consistently misjudged, Edward Halifax, Fulness of Days, 227
43 less than justice, ibid., 198
44 For a long time, Dilks interview with author
45 Halifax felt it, Zeigler interview with author
46 unwittingly inaccurate, Halifax, 185
47 the real thing, Edward Spears, Prelude to Dunkirk, 133
48 trying to construct, Churchill, Hansard, 12/11/1940
49 Churchill’s writing of history, Ziegler interview with author
50 He sees himself, Cecil King, 60
51 to defend … proceeding, CA WCHL 1/14
52 it would reveal, Dilks interview with author
53 They often get, CA Amel 7/86, LA to EH, 22/11/1954
54 He is a very emotional, Maisky, 337
55 good anti-Nazi, CA Amel 7/86, LA to Lord Lytton, 4/8/1940
56 who wrote history, Otto Mohr, Churchill’s Visit to Norway, 13
57 keen sense of justice, Manchester Guardian, 11/5/1950
58 the irrational … crucial, David Dilks, ‘Appeasement Revisited’: University of Leeds Review, vol. 15, no. 1, May 1972
59 When the clamour, C. L. Lundin, Finland in the Second World War, ii