Darkest Hour

by Anthony McCarten

  The Cabinet concluded with no real resolution on the issue. The pressures on Churchill were mounting now that it was clear, even to him, the incorrigible optimist, that he was completely at the mercy of France. His options had all but gone.

  When the War Cabinet met again at 2 p.m. on 26 May, talk shifted to the imminent prospect of the fall of Paris.

  Churchill reported that Reynaud had told him that ‘while he would obey orders and fight it out as long as he was told to do so, and would be prepared to go down fighting for the honour of the Flag, he did not think that France’s resistance was likely to last very long against a determined German onslaught’. The French had fifty divisions against the Germans’ 150, and ‘it was clear that the war could not be won on land’. Reynaud had asked Churchill ‘where then, could France look for salvation? Someone had suggested that a further approach should be made to Italy.’ Reynaud speculated that Italy would extract, as the price for peace, ‘the neutralisation of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, the demilitarisation of Malta, and the limitation of naval forces in the Mediterranean’ – which the French believed should be offered if it would keep Italy out of the war.

  Churchill was desperate to raise Reynaud’s spirits, for he needed the French to fight on if the BEF were to escape. He had told the Premier that ‘we were not prepared to give in on any account. We would rather go down fighting than be enslaved to Germany. But in any case we were confident that we had a good chance of surviving the German onslaught. France, however, must stay in the war.’

  Churchill now suggested that someone ought to leave the meeting and go to the Admiralty and meet with Reynaud himself. The man he chose to do this was Halifax, the peace-maker. Effectively, while talking tough himself with Reynaud, he despatched his most ardent pacifist to continue the vital conversation. Were there mixed messages here?

  Talking to the War Cabinet, Winston was more realistic: he was still convinced that Britain had a slim chance of coming out of this in one piece, but only if France would ‘stick things out for another three months . . . the position [then] would be entirely different’. Here was another admission of how bleak his assessment of Britain’s chances of survival really was.

  Halifax, slow to leave the meeting, and seizing upon this rare bout of realism in his leader, again urged that an approach to Italy – with all this signified – must now be made. He insisted that ‘the last thing that Signor Mussolini wanted was to see Herr Hitler dominating Europe. He would be anxious, if he could, to persuade Herr Hitler to take a more reasonable attitude.’ Finally, the Prime Minister – backed into a corner in the fencing duel that characterized his long argument with Halifax – said that he ‘doubted whether anything would come of an approach to Italy’, but conceded – in the first of what would become a stunning series of concessions that challenge our image of him – that ‘the matter was one which the War Cabinet would have to consider’.

  At last, one for Halifax. How very far Winston had come, in just a few days, from the man who would brook no thought, nor allow anyone else to think, of parley or surrender. But this was the cumulative effect of the avalanche of bad news and collegial pressure that had steadily collapsed all his early hopes.

  Lord Halifax duly left to meet with Reynaud at the Admiralty, and the War Cabinet joined him there when the French Premier had left.

  In a quirk of fate, the Cabinet Secretary, Bridges, was not present for the first fifteen minutes of this meeting, so there is no direct record of what was said during this time. But it is clear that the extreme tension was showing on Churchill, and there is a clue, hidden in the minutes of the following day’s War Cabinet meeting and in Chamberlain’s diary account of the day, that Winston may have made his most startling statement on the question of peace talks to date.

  Sir Alexander Cadogan, who was there at 5 p.m., described Churchill as being ‘too rambling and romantic and sentimental and temperamental’. Why, we might ask, was he this way?

  Chamberlain’s diary supports the notion that on this day, and most likely at this hour, Churchill reached a major turning point in his consideration of peace talks with Germany. The diary records him saying ‘it was incredible that Hitler would consent to any terms that we could accept – though if we could get out of this jam, by giving up Malta & Gibraltar & some African colonies, he [Winston] would jump at it’.

  A collaborating note in the War Cabinet minutes of the following day (27 May) shows Halifax recalling:

  In the discussion the previous day [26 May] he [Halifax] had asked the Prime Minister, if he was satisfied that matters vital to the independence of this country were unaffected, he could be prepared to discuss terms. The Prime Minister said that he would be thankful to get out of our present difficulties on such terms, provided we retained the essentials and the elements of our vital strength, even at the cost of some cession of territory.

  The reason for suspecting that Churchill said all this in the missing fifteen minutes before Bridges arrived to take up history’s pen is because it seems unthinkable that such a significant yielding by Churchill would not merit a single mention in that day’s War Cabinet minutes, even though two other sources verify it. Were it not for Halifax’s officially documented reminder of Churchill’s concession – but only during the 27 May meeting – it would have survived only in the unpublished pages of Chamberlain’s diary, accessible to modern readers via the Birmingham University archives.

  A conspiracy? Churchill’s official biographer, Martin Gilbert, makes no mention at all of the paradigm-shifting notion of Winston saying he would be thankful for a reasonable peace offer from Hitler.

  True to form, once Bridges had resumed his minutes, Winston waxed aggressive once more – perhaps out of his fear that his true thoughts might become public knowledge.

  The first new matter on record, then, is Winston singing an old tune. Trusting that Hitler would offer any kind of respectable peace deal with Britain was absurd, he argued, adding that ‘there was no limit to the terms which Germany would impose on us if she had her way’. He obviously hoped that France would hold out, but ‘at the same time we must take care not to be forced into a weak position in which we went to Signor Mussolini and invited him to go to Herr Hitler and ask him to treat us nicely. We must not get entangled in a position of that kind before we had been involved in any serious fighting.’

  Lord Halifax, perhaps exasperated by all this to-ing and fro-ing, rounded on Churchill and forcefully but calmly reiterated that he attached ‘perhaps rather more importance than the Prime Minister to the desirability of allowing France to try out the possibilities of European equilibrium’. He added that he was ‘not quite convinced that the Prime Minister’s diagnosis was correct and that it was in Herr Hitler’s interest to insist on outrageous terms’. As an Englishman, Halifax would of course not agree to ‘any suggestion of terms which affected our independence’, but if, as he suspected, ‘Signor Mussolini was as alarmed as we felt that he must be in regard to Herr Hitler’s power, and was prepared to look at matters from the point of view of the balance of power, then we might consider the Italian claims. At any rate, he could see no harm in trying.’

  Such a fundamental disagreement between the two men in the moment when they should have been working together was dangerous. The others in the room added little to this fierce debate, in which the stakes were no less high than the future of Britain, Europe and the world.

  In essence the two positions were this: Hitler in control of Western Europe but with Britain’s autonomy secured by a peace deal was something that Halifax could live with, even now welcome. In this he represented, he felt, the will of a large part of his own party, the public, and – moreover – anyone with a sober grasp of the facts on the battlefield. Winston, for his part, was beginning to accept that a peace deal might be a way out – indeed, if the terms were favourable, he would be thankful to find such a way out. But the million-pound question remained. When might be the best time to strike for such a deal: now, or lat
er?

  A Labour Party minister, Arthur Greenwood, was not convinced that Mussolini could be of any help; he told the War Cabinet that he doubted it was in his power to ‘take a line independent of Herr Hitler’. Chamberlain said he believed that Mussolini ‘could only take an independent line if Herr Hitler was disposed to conform to the line which Mussolini indicated’, and in an attempt to make peace within the room added that ‘the problem was a very difficult one, and it was right to talk it out from every point of view’.

  This speculation was getting them nowhere, and Churchill said he ‘thought it was best to decide nothing until we saw how much of the Army we could re-embark from France. The operation might be a great failure. On the other hand, our troops might well fight magnificently, and we might save a considerable portion of the Force.’

  The path of peace negotiations that Halifax was proposing with gusto – with parts of the map used as bargaining chips – could, in Churchill’s opinion, only benefit Germany, which would gain colonial territories and be granted concessions in the Mediterranean, whereas ‘no such option was open to us. For example, the terms offered [by Germany] would certainly prevent us from completing our re-armament.’ Halifax tried to assure him that if this was in fact the case, then Britain would of course refuse the deal, but Churchill was adamant that ‘Herr Hitler thought that he had the whip hand. The only thing to do was to show him that he could not conquer this country.’ If what Churchill expected from Reynaud came true, and France could no longer continue the fight, then ‘we must part company’.

  Among those in the War Cabinet meeting room were several men who had for years labelled him a warmonger. To completely shut down the idea of exploring peace terms now would only cement that reputation and alienate him from men like Halifax and Chamberlain whose support he desperately needed. Weighing his slim options, he conceded: ‘At the same time . . . [I do] not raise objection to some approach being made to Signor Mussolini.’

  Gradually, then, Winston’s language and heart were changing, moving from words like ‘never’ to words like ‘consider’, and agreeing to ‘not raise objection’ to the first step being taken in the peace process – a step whose key aim was to establish what price Italy would ask in order to mediate in peace talks between Germany and Britain, the expectation being that France was most likely out of the picture.

  Greenwood and Chamberlain both believed that the Italian leader would grab this opportunity to make demands not just in Malta, Gibraltar and Suez, but also in Somaliland, Kenya and Uganda. They were very likely right. In his letter to Churchill on 18 May rejecting the Allied cause, Mussolini had, of course, used the example of Britain’s harsh treatment of Italy in Africa. Greenwood also added that with France’s situation worsening by the minute, and ‘if Paris was likely to be taken within a short time, was there really any chance that negotiations would serve any purpose?’ Halifax warned the Cabinet that if they ‘found that we could obtain terms which did not postulate the destruction of our independence, we should be foolish if we did not accept them’. He could not have been clearer. For him, only a very ‘foolish’ person would not now entertain a deal with the Germans that allowed for an independent Britain.

  Winston, offering no immediate counter-argument, no doubt tapped his ring finger busily against the varnished wooden arm of his chair. (After the war it was discovered that this agitated tapping had worn away many layers of lacquer during six years of excruciating deliberations.) What would he say now? What would he do?

  The record tells us.

  At the end of a meeting that had lasted over four hours, and during which the deepest aims and most strongly held principles of powerful men had been pitched against each other in well-reasoned battle, Winston called the meeting to a close with his agreement that Halifax could circulate a draft – a memorandum – outlining his suggested approach to Italy, for discussion the following day.

  Halifax had been victorious.

  And how relieved he must have felt. How much closer peace must have seemed to him, now that the clock of diplomacy had been set running at last. He escaped the Cabinet room and set to creating a draft memorandum that might just – just – restore a shattered Europe to a state of practical peace.

  Churchill, however, had been forced by events and by political pressures to give up considerable ground. He had never been comfortable on the back foot! While Halifax was busy drafting his draft, Winston shifted his focus back onto his own alternative escape strategy.

  In essence, it was this. Save the Army. Without it, Britain could not even insist on decent peace terms, let alone live to fight another day. The country would be in the same dire position that France was now in, with no choice but to accept whatever terms Germany felt disposed to offer. They key was to ensure that the evacuation of the BEF from Dunkirk was a success. But how?

  Roosevelt once said of Churchill, ‘He has a hundred ideas a day. Four are good, the other 96 downright dangerous.’

  Six days earlier one of these four ideas had been – in the parlance of the day – a belter. And it bore all the hallmarks of a great Winston idea: surprising, grand, feasible if risky, potentially vastly costly to human life, and more than a little eccentric at first glance.

  At the morning War Cabinet meeting of 20 May, the situation of the Army, en route to Dunkirk, had again been discussed. Three hundred thousand men were about to arrive at a harbour blocked by burning British ships. The British Navy could not get close enough to the shore to effect a rescue, not without coming under blistering air attack from the Luftwaffe. The best prediction offered by Ironside was that they’d be lucky to get 10 per cent of their men out alive.

  The minutes of the meeting record the following response: ‘The Prime Minister thought that as a precautionary measure the Admiralty should assemble a large number of small [civilian] vessels in readiness to proceed to ports and inlets on the French coast.’

  Small vessels? Winston’s brainwave – for which he has never, to my knowledge, been credited (amazingly not in any biography or news report) – was to ask members of the public, or at least those who could get their hands on a boat of useful size, to sail in a grand if ragtag civilian armada across the channel to save the stranded British Army.

  It is seldom observed, by the public or even by historians, that the father of this colossally risky idea – what has become known as the ‘Little Ships Rescue’, was Churchill himself.

  Within hours of Winston’s brainwave, Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay, the Flag Officer in command of Dover and an old comrade who had come out of retirement at Churchill’s request, was instructed to assemble a fleet of civilian ships that could sail to the Channel ports and evacuate the BEF to England.

  So it was that six days later – as Halifax, with the bit between his peace-making teeth, drafted words of finessed supplication to an unhinged dictator – Winston made haste to the Admiralty. Desperate to find alternatives to the Halifax plan, he was described in those hours by Captain Claude Berkley, a member of the War Cabinet Secretariat, as ‘hurling himself about, getting his staff into hopeless tangles by dashing across to Downing St without a word of warning, shouting that we would never give in’. By this time, Ramsay, from deep within the naval headquarters below Dover Castle, had managed to put out the public call for boats over the BBC and had so far gathered more than 800 so-called little ships to take part in one of the most daring efforts of the war.

  Thus, at 6.57 p.m., on 26 May 1940, Churchill gave the order: ‘Operation Dynamo is to commence.’

  It was a huge gamble with civilian lives, but Winston felt – with justification – that if he had an army to either fight or bargain with, then Britain could yet be saved from the wreck.

  At the same time as Dynamo was commencing, Churchill sent another telegram to Brigadier Nicholson’s garrison at Calais, officially informing them that there would be no evacuation and they must ‘fight it out until the bitter end’.

  Nicholson and his garrison obeyed. They refuse
d to surrender and continued their resistance until the very last as the swastika was raised above the bell-tower of the Hôtel de Ville. After they were eventually overwhelmed that same day, Nicholson’s men were led out of the citadel in single file by the Germans with their hands raised above their heads, and into the courtyard. There they were lined up in front of machine-guns. Prisoners of war. The brave men of Calais were taken to camps in which the lucky ones would spend the duration of the war, and the unlucky would die. Brigadier Nicholson died three years later after falling from a window in a possible suicide at the prisoner-of-war camp in which he was interned.

  In his memoirs, Anthony Eden described the decision not to evacuate the Calais garrison as ‘one of the most painful of the war’. Churchill, more than most, felt this pain keenly, having given the order to sacrifice over 2,000 men in the hope of saving several hundred thousand. When he returned to Admiralty House with Eden, Ismay and Ironside, Ismay recalled how he was ‘unusually silent during dinner that evening, and he ate and drank with evident distaste’.

  What was on his mind? Calais, surely. Halifax, definitely. Hitler, always. Dynamo, with its little civilian navy just then chopping through the waves towards Dunkirk, assuredly. His own leadership abilities, possibly. Self-doubt, guilt, remorse, exhaustion must all have played their part.

  As the men rose from the table, a deep sadness came across Churchill’s face as he told them, ‘I feel physically sick.’ Sickness from the guilt of condemning brave men to a terrible fate, sickness from the worry of losing an entire army, sickness from the fear of there being no way out but through the strangling terms of enemies. It was his lowest ebb, but the following day would only present him with further pressures and an irreparable split within the War Cabinet.