How the sweat must have run down Chamberlain’s forehead in the stuffy, smoky Cabinet Room at Downing Street. To the twenty-two other men seated around the table, and who were now witnessing Churchill desperately trying to pick up the pieces and save England from the same fate as Europe, his failures must have been palpable. When the long meeting was over, Chamberlain returned to Halifax’s room to talk. In his diary, Halifax describes the ex-PM as being ‘a good deal shaken by political events . . . He told me that he had always thought he could not face the job of being Prime Minister in war, but when it came he did; and yet now that the war was becoming intense he could not but feel relieved that the final responsibility was off him.’
With that vast responsibility now on his shoulders, Churchill sat down to write to President Roosevelt. Unlike Halifax, he regarded the United States as Britain’s most immediate bulwark against the Nazis.
Churchill, during his time as First Lord of the Admiralty, had developed a strong rapport with Roosevelt, and so spoke frankly now:
Although I have changed my office, I am sure you would not wish me to discontinue our intimate, private correspondence. As you are no doubt aware, the scene has darkened swiftly. The enemy have a marked preponderance in the air, and their new technique is making a deep impression upon the French. I think myself the battle on land has only just begun, and I should like to see the masses engage. Up to the present, Hitler is working with specialised units in tanks and air. The small countries are simply smashed up, one by one, like matchwood. We must expect, though it is not yet certain, that Mussolini will hurry in to share the loot of civilisation. We expect to be attacked here ourselves, both from the air and by parachute and air-borne troops in the near future, and are getting ready for them. If necessary, we shall continue the war alone, and we are not afraid of that. But I trust you realise, Mr President, that the voice and force of the United States may count for nothing if they are withheld too long. You may have a completed subjugated Nazified Europe established with astonishing swiftness, and the weight may be more than we can bear. All I ask now is that you should proclaim non-belligerency, which would mean that you would help us with everything short of actually engaging armed forces . . .
He then outlined six immediate needs, ranging from a loan of forty or fifty old American destroyers, to several hundred of the ‘latest types of aircraft’ and anti-aircraft equipment, to the purchase of US steel and other raw materials. All of which, he explained, ‘we shall go on paying dollars for as long as we can, but I should like to feel reasonably sure that when we can pay no more, you will give us the stuff all the same’.
Churchill also requested ‘the visit of a United States Squadron to Irish ports’ as a deterrent against a German invasion of Britain via Ireland; finally he requested that the President ‘keep that Japanese dog quiet in the Pacific, using Singapore in any way convenient’. Signing the letter ‘with all good wishes and respect’, all he could do now was wait for the President’s response.
Since the beginning of Hitler’s aggressive rule in 1933, the United States had maintained a steadfastly neutral position, with Roosevelt openly declaring that his country would have no part in any future European conflict. Indeed, during the late 1930s, Congress passed several Neutrality Acts to ban trading or financial loans to belligerent countries. When war eventually did break out in 1939, these terms were revised and a ‘cash-and-carry’ basis of sale (excluding arms) was legalized, enabling the US to provide unofficial support to Great Britain and France, which were considered the only two countries able to pay in ‘cash’ and ‘carry’ the items home themselves.
Two weeks before Churchill took up his pen to write to Roosevelt, Britain had secured a purchase of 324 Curtis P-40 fighter planes for the Army and eighty-one Grumman fighter planes for the Navy. The official line was that the planes were currently ‘being built in and for the United States’. Britain requested permission for one of its aircraft carriers to collect the aircraft from a US port, but this was denied by Roosevelt because of the Neutrality Act conditions; he did, however, suggest that ‘we [America] could arrange to have the aircraft flown to the Canadian border, pushed across that border and flown on to Botwood [Newfoundland]’. Push them across the border? Yes. The rules prohibited any mechanical assistance. But such an almost comical offer, in its makeshift complexity, was also an extraordinary display of determination to get around his own Neutrality Act. Roosevelt’s landslide election victory in 1936 had been won on the basis of a strong anti-war stance, and Churchill knew that despite strong public support in America for the Allied cause, that country’s overt involvement in war at this juncture would be difficult.
Churchill, as he mentioned in his letter to the President, now expected that fascist Italy would come into the war alongside Hitler. The intimacy with which he’d written to Roosevelt was therefore not extended to Mussolini when, on the morning of 16 May, he sent a brief and somewhat theatrical letter to his soon-to-be enemy in Rome:
Now that I have taken up my office as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence I look back to our meetings in Rome and feel a desire to speak words of goodwill to you as chief of the Italian nation across what seems to be a swiftly-widening gulf. Is it too late to stop a river of blood from flowing between British and Italian peoples? We can no doubt inflict grievous injuries upon one another and maul each other cruelly, and darken the Mediterranean with our strife. If you so decree it must be so; but I declare that I have never been the enemy of Italian greatness, nor ever at heart the foe of the Italian law-giver. It is idle to predict the course of the great battles now raging in Europe, but I am sure that whatever may happen on the Continent, England will go on to the end, even quite alone, as we have done before, and I believe with some assurance that we shall be aided in increasing measure by the United States, and, indeed, by all the Americas.
I beg you to believe that it is in no spirit of weakness or of fear that I make this solemn appeal which will remain on record. Down the ages above all other calls comes the cry that the joint heirs of Latin and Christian civilisation must not be ranged against one another in mortal strife. Hearken to it I beseech you in all honour and respect before the dread signal is given. It will never be given by us.
It would seem that old grudges were dying hard not only with Hitler but with Mussolini too, and when he replied, two days later, Mussolini made his feelings clear:
I reply to the message which you have sent me in order to tell you that you are certainly aware of grave reasons of a historical and contingent character which have ranged our two countries in opposite camps. Without going back very far in time I remind you of the initiative taken in 1935 by your Government to organise at Geneva sanctions against Italy engaged in securing for herself a small space in the African sun without causing the slightest injury to your interests and territories or those of others. I remind you also of the real and actual state of servitude in which Italy finds herself in her own sea. If it was to honour your signature that your Government declared war on Germany, you will understand that the same sense of honour and of respect for engagements assumed in the Italian–German treaty guides Italian policy today and tomorrow in the face of any event whatsoever.
Having just begged for help from America, and for decency from Italy, Winston headed straight to the War Cabinet meeting at 11.30 a.m. on 16 May. Once again the news there was grim.
General Ironside informed the room that the Germans had surprised the French by breaking through the Maginot Line and ‘there was no doubt that the situation was most critical . . . All now depended on whether the French would fight with vigour in the counter-attack which General Gamelin proposed to launch.’ The French had drastically underestimated the capacity of the German tanks to cross the weakest point of the line, near the Ardennes forest, assuming the terrain would prove too difficult. Opinion had been that the line’s 85-mile-long series of fortresses and strongpoints was near-impenetrable. The line had cost a staggering 7,000 million francs to bu
ild when it was completed in 1935 but left a vast 250-mile frontier of unprotected border between France and Belgium. The walls were well built, therefore, but the back door had been left open.
Knowing first hand the agitated state of the French PM, Paul Reynaud, Churchill agreed that four fighter squadrons should be despatched to France ahead of his own journey that afternoon to an emergency crisis meeting of the Supreme War Council at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris. He had decided that Britain’s old friend needed to be roused to a heroic resistance.
Accompanied by General Ismay and the Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir John Dill, Churchill flew across the Channel in his trusty Flamingo plane, accompanied by two Hurricane fighter jets. On route he polished his weapons of diplomacy and decided to add to France’s misery by speaking French. (Just as Winston invented new words such as ‘paintatious’ to describe landscapes that begged to be painted, he often spoke ‘franglais’ intentionally, coining memorable phrases such as when, during a heated discussion with General Charles de Gaulle in Casablanca, in January 1943, he said, ‘Si vous m’obstaclerez, je vous liquiderai!’ ‘If you obstruct me, I will liquidate you.’)
Ismay recalled the trip in his memoirs:
From the moment we set foot at Le Bourget airfield, there was an unmistakable atmosphere of depression . . . As we drove through the streets, the people seemed listless and resigned, and they gave no sign of the passionate defiance that had inspired the cry, ‘Ils ne passeront pas’ [‘They shall not pass’], in the previous struggle. They showed little interest in our heavily-escorted cavalcade, and there were no cheers for Churchill . . . The Quai D’Orsay . . . was even more depressing. M. Reynaud, M. Daladier [Minister of Defence and former Prime Minister] and General Gamelin were awaiting us in a very large room, looking out on to a garden which had appeared so lovely and well kept on my last visit, but which was now disfigured with clusters of bonfires. The French archives were already being consigned to the flames.
Churchill entered the room in a dominant mood. French morale was desperately low, and he needed to act quickly to prevent its complete capitulation. He telegraphed the War Cabinet to inform them of the panic in Paris and ‘again emphasise the mortal gravity of the hour’. His suggestion was that ‘we should send squadrons of fighters demanded (i.e. six more) tomorrow’, and requested they meet at 11.00 p.m. that night to discuss the proposal in his absence, sending their reply by midnight. Such a strategy had until now been rejected because it would seriously weaken Britain’s defences, but Paris had been left almost completely undefended and no other option remained. Thirty minutes later, the War Cabinet telephoned back their agreement. Ismay recalled:
[Churchill was] delighted that the War Cabinet had endorsed his recommendation so promptly, and we thought that he would telephone the good news to M. Reynaud at once. But not at all. He was determined to tell it to him face to face. This was in character. We all know the delight that it gives some of our friends, especially our younger friends, to watch our expressions as we open their gift parcels. That was Mr. Churchill’s motive at this moment. He was about to give Reynaud a pearl beyond price, and he wanted to watch his face when he received it.
Churchill and Ismay duly raced over in the middle of the night to give Reynaud the news before leaving for London at 7 a.m. on 17 May. But Reynaud was not at his office; nor was he at home with his wife. He was with his mistress, Mme la Contesse de Portes, in her modest apartment on the Place du Palais Bourbon, where they found him luxuriating in a bathrobe. Winston, apparently undaunted, wanted a bigger audience for his message and insisted that Daladier, the War Minister, be asked to join them. But Daladier was not at home with his wife either. It was Mme la Marquise de Crussol who would pass the phone to Daladier, her lover, and tell him that M. Churchill wished to speak with him on a matter of some urgency.
Relief, gratitude and fervent handshakes greeted Churchill’s offer of more planes, but all three men doubted it would change very much. Winston’s greatest fear in this hour was that France would soon opt for a peace deal with Hitler. Then the full weight of resistance would fall on Britain and its Empire alone.
Upon arrival back at Downing Street, the Prime Minister convened the War Cabinet at 10 a.m. to recount the visit to France. Churchill expressed his regret that they ‘had been faced with the gravest decision that a British Cabinet had ever had to take’, but the War Cabinet’s reply ‘had hardened [the French] to a very considerable degree’.
The meeting in Paris had not been easy. The British commitment to send six fighter squadrons was exceedingly generous considering they only had thirty-nine for the protection of England. Churchill had described the squadrons to the French as ‘the life of the country’ and explained how they needed to be conserved, the British having already lost thirty-six aircraft in defence of the Meuse. The French counter-argued that they ‘had begun the battle with 650 Fighters, and they now had only 150 left’, to which Churchill replied that ‘we had bombarded all the places we had been asked to, and were anxious to attack only such vital objectives as would stop the enemy from attacking by day. It was not reasonable that the British aircraft should be required to take on German armoured fighting vehicles. This should be done by ground action.’ Churchill concluded his account of the Supreme War Council meeting, and then read aloud the reply he had just received from President Roosevelt.
Alas, it was not the life-saving communiqué he had wished for. Roosevelt explained that he was ‘of course giving every possible consideration to the suggestions made in your message’, but any efforts to aid the Allies would ‘take time’.
But for Western Europe time had all but run out. The War Cabinet agreed that under the present circumstances a declaration of a state of ‘supreme emergency’ should be made to the British people. It could be put off no longer. Chamberlain ‘invited the Prime Minister to broadcast a statement on the following day’.
On the morning of Sunday, 19 May, Clementine Churchill returned early from a church service at St Martin-in-the-Fields in central London, having walked out when the preacher delivered a pacifist sermon. Winston told her, ‘You ought to have cried “Shame”, desecrating the House of God with lies! ’ At a time like this, pacifism was exactly the opposite of what the nation needed to hear – and the opposite of what Churchill was preparing to say to them. Later that day, Colville noted that in his frustration and after ‘a gruelling week, [Churchill] retired to Chartwell . . . for a few hours’ sunshine and sought distraction by feeding his surviving black swan (the remainder had been eaten by foxes)’. However, he was almost immediately summoned back to Downing Street for a War Cabinet meeting at 4.30 p.m.
France had still not mounted any credible counter-attack, and with the German Army rapidly advancing to the coast, discussions began among the military about a possible withdrawal of the nearly 400,000-strong British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from near the Belgian border in Northern France to the port of Dunkirk. This suggestion provoked serious consternation among the Cabinet, and Winston believed that if the BEF were forced into such a position they ‘would be closely invested in a bomb-trap, and its total loss would be only a matter of time . . . We must face the fact that the Belgian Army might be lost altogether, but we should do them no service by sacrificing our own Army.’
The War Cabinet concluded, and at 6 p.m. Churchill finally began to write his speech.
He sat, alone, in his office at the Admiralty, pen in hand, sheaves of blank stationery in front of him. Again he faced the challenge: what words, in what order? What notes to sound, what to avoid?
How his pen and imagination must have flown, for only three hours later he sat down in front of the BBC microphone, his heavily marked-up pages before him, to attempt once more to galvanize the support of a jittery nation.
One aspect of the speech rehearsal that the public never saw veers into farce. As biographer William Manchester tells it: ‘After forty years in the House of Commons, Churchill instinctively swung his he
ad from left to right [as he spoke]. That would not do on the BBC, so Tyrone Guthrie of the Old Vic [theatre, London] stood behind him and held [Winston’s] ears firmly as he spoke at a desk in a small room . . . ’
Held his ears? Preserve this image in mind, then, as we see the BBC wall clock strike 9.00 p.m., and hear Churchill, under a green light, begin to speak into the microphone:
I speak to you for the first time as Prime Minister in a solemn hour for the life of our country, of our empire, of our allies, and, above all, of the cause of Freedom. A tremendous battle is raging in France and Flanders. The Germans, by a remarkable combination of air bombing and heavily armoured tanks, have broken through the French defences north of the Maginot Line, and strong columns of their armoured vehicles are ravaging the open country, which for the first day or two was without defenders. They have penetrated deeply and spread alarm and confusion in their track. Behind them there are now appearing infantry in lorries, and behind them, again, the large masses are moving forward. The re-groupment of the French armies to make head against, and also to strike at, this intruding wedge has been proceeding for several days, largely assisted by the magnificent efforts of the Royal Air Force.
We must not allow ourselves to be intimidated by the presence of these armoured vehicles in unexpected places behind our lines. If they are behind our Front, the French are also at many points fighting actively behind theirs. Both sides are therefore in an extremely dangerous position. And if the French Army, and our own Army, are well handled, as I believe they will be; if the French retain that genius for recovery and counter-attack for which they have so long been famous; and if the British Army shows the dogged endurance and solid fighting power of which there have been so many examples in the past – then a sudden transformation of the scene might spring into being.
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