Alone, 1932-1940

by William Manchester

  This is not a question of fighting for Danzig or fighting for Poland. We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defence of all that is most sacred to man. This is no war of domination or imperial aggrandisement or material gain; no war to shut any country out of the sunlight and means of progress. It is a war, viewed in its inherent quality, to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man…. We look forward to the day, surely and confidently we look forward to the day, when our liberties and rights will be restored to us, and when we shall be able to share them with the peoples to whom such blessings are unknown.220

  There was no standing ovation; whips on both sides of the House, wary of Churchill’s rhetoric, had seen to that. But after Lloyd George had delivered the day’s final speech, MPs of all parties surged toward Winston, their hands extended congratulating him. Comparison with the prime minister’s remarks was inevitable. In his diary Amery described Chamberlain’s address as “good, but not the speech of a war leader.” He added: “I think I see Winston emerging as PM out of it all by the end of the year.”221

  If the prime minister overheard such invidious comparisons, he gave no sign of it. Cordially welcoming Churchill, he told him he had considered his letters and then told him the cabinet was being reshuffled. The Liberals had declined to join the government, and until now he had seen no role in the War Cabinet for the three service ministers. They had urged him to change his mind, however, and he had relented, which brought the average age of cabinet members—a matter which had troubled Winston—below sixty. Hore-Belisha would continue at the War Office, and Kingsley Wood would remain as secretary for air. However, Chamberlain proposed to transfer the Earl of Stanhope, now first lord of the Admiralty, to another post, and give the Admiralty to Churchill.

  Thus, at a stroke, Winston was given a place in the War Cabinet and the responsibility of a ministry—the one he cherished most. He was “very glad of this,” he wrote, “because, though I had not raised the point, I naturally preferred a definite task to that exalted brooding over the work done by others which may well be the lot of a Minister, however influential, who has no department.” Had Chamberlain given him a choice between the War Cabinet and the Admiralty on Friday, he wrote, “I should, of course, have chosen the Admiralty. Now I was to have both.” Clementine was waiting in the car outside No. 10, and Winston told her: “It’s the Admiralty. That’s a lot better than I thought.”222

  He would have preferred hurrying straight to his new post, because “the opening hours of war may be vital with navies,” but the first meeting of the War Cabinet was scheduled for 5:00 P.M. It would be largely a formality; nevertheless, he had to be there. Thus he sent word to the Admiralty Board—“I shall take charge forthwith and arrive at six o’clock”—and headed for Downing Street. Newspaper opinion, led by The Times, had favored direction of the war by a small group, not more than five or six members. But counting the home secretary (Sir John Anderson) and the new Dominions secretary (Eden), Chamberlain’s War Cabinet had eleven, the other nine being himself, Halifax, Hoare (privy seal), Simon (Exchequer), Hore-Belisha (war), Kingsley Wood (air), Hankey (without portfolio), Churchill, and Lord Chatfield (coordination of defense). Of these, Chamberlain, Halifax, Hoare, and Simon were still the Big Four; they had been in the public eye so long that if England’s fortunes failed her, the British public would hold them accountable, even though the leaders had stayed in front by following public opinion. Every newspaper reader was familiar with them—Good Old Neville, as the crowds called him at his peak, the archetypical British businessman; Halifax, master of foxhounds, with the patrician’s gift for backing into the limelight; dapper, fussy Hoare, the cabinet’s fixer of Fleet Street opinion; Simon, the pedantic lawyer, of whom it was said that at the Exchequer he was chiefly concerned with making certain that Britain had enough money to pay the indemnity after losing the war.223

  If, as Chamberlain put it a week later, righteousness was “a tremendous force on our side,” no one else felt it. The British were depressed. The Times cheerfully reported that an eighty-six-year-old shepherd had presented the prime minister with a walking stick in the form of a rolled-up umbrella, whittled out of elm wood with a pocketknife; but shepherds were unthreatened by massive Luftwaffe bombings which, according to a Committee of Imperial Defence estimate, would last sixty days, leaving 600,000 dead and 1.2 million wounded. The committee had issued a statement, for reasons which defy understanding, that every possible precaution had been made: hospital beds had been prepared for the injured, thousands of papier-mâché coffins were stacked and then photographed for the press, and over a million burial forms were in the mail. The British public—remembering Baldwin’s warning that “the bomber will always get through”—already lacked a once-more-into-the-breach spirit, and this did not develop it.

  Winston’s critics had predicted that if given a cabinet role he would be divisive, and now they observed with schadenfreude that he already was. The War Cabinet’s first duty was to choose a new chief of the Imperial General Staff, since Secretary for War Hore-Belisha wanted to replace Gort. The War Office preferred Ironside, and so did Hore-Belisha. But Tiny had remained aloof from political maneuvering; other generals had courted ministers who now nominated them. Churchill intervened vigorously, and as Hore-Belisha wrote in his diary that evening, “There was some opposition to Ironside’s appointment, but Winston came down on my side and strongly supported it; and that settled it.” Churchill also asked for a survey of British gun production, and during the discussion Major General H. L. Ismay, secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence, entered the room with an air reconnaissance report: a German Flotte—four or five battleships, four cruisers, and five destroyers—had weighed anchor and put out to sea. As first lord, Churchill was particularly alert to any threat, by submarines or surface ships, to merchant vessels, England’s lifeline. If that was the Flotte’s mission, he said, they would be headed for the Baltic. Kingsley Wood, the air minister, agreed that the RAF could not ask for a “fairer target.” An air attack was authorized, by twenty-seven Blenheim bombers and nine Wellingtons. But here, as in so many other ventures early in the war, nothing went right for the British. Sir Ian Jacob, then a field-grade officer seconded to No. 10, recalls that the RAF mission, which failed, “showed how ineffective and ill-designed our aircraft and bombs were against strong defences and well-armoured ships.” Their mission unaccomplished, the British planes were downed by flak.224

  The meeting over, Churchill headed for the Admiralty—which had already signaled the fleet: “Winston is back”—crossing the Horse Guards Parade with a young friend. Winston observed that to improve British morale, the public’s conception of the country’s military establishment must be revised upward. Between 1914 and 1918 London’s chauvinistic press had elevated general and flag officers to the level of deities, and when the truth about the butchery in France and Flanders had eventually emerged, the crash in their status had been deafening. World War II restored dignity to the military profession, but it was not retroactive; it is still generally believed that during the interwar years English officers were insensitive, unimaginative Colonel Blimps. They weren’t. Churchill had found them to be keen, anxious observers of the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht buildups, and among them were the officers who, by coming to him, had risked their careers to prepare England for the ordeal they—but few civilians—knew was coming.

  One of their projects, undertaken by those who anticipated the bombing of London, had been construction of a shelter for the country’s leaders at Storey’s Gate, two blocks south of Downing Street. Commonly described by the few who knew of it as the CWR, short for Cabinet War Room, it was actually an underground warren of drab rooms, including a bedroom for the P.M., whose sparse furnishings included a desk and a BBC microphone through which the P.M. could address the nation. Construction of this shelter—which might more properly be called a b
unker, for its purpose, like that of the Führerbunker in Berlin, was to safeguard the leader’s life—had begun in 1935, after the War Office pointed out that No. 10 was far too fragile to survive heavy bombardments undamaged. Millions of Londoners, allies, and an unknown number of enemy spies, passed the CWR daily without knowing it. The drab stone building above it, facing St. James’s Park, bore a dull plaque reading CENTRAL STATISTICAL OFFICE.

  Another precaution, anticipated long before the English public would even acknowledge a renewal of the conflict with Germany, was more conspicuous—was, indeed, spectacular. Every major governmental building was surrounded by huge concertinas of barbed wire—coils twelve feet high, with barbs as thick as a man’s thumb. They had lain in warehouses for years and were produced when Britain’s ultimatum was delivered in Berlin. The instant war was declared, up went the wire. The facade of Admiralty House was hidden by intervening buildings until Winston and his companion were almost upon it. Churchill and his companion turned a corner, and there it was, with its vast new concertinas and thousands of barbs gleaming in the late afternoon sun. “Great God!” said Winston’s young friend. “What’s that for?”

  Churchill replied, “That’s to keep me out.”225

  SIX

  CATACLYSM

  AT the Admiralty he was expected, recognized, and saluted as he passed through a gap between concertinas. No guide was necessary, of course; the once and present first lord went straight to a concealed entrance where Kathleen Hill, summoned earlier by telephone, and Captain Guy Grantham, who would be his aide, awaited him. Inside, Churchill raced up the stairway, with Mrs. Hill and the captain panting at his heels, and burst into his old lair, the first lord’s office, known to those who had served under Winston between 1911 and 1915 as “the private office.” Swiftly crossing the room, he “flung open a hidden panel,” as Mrs. Hill put it, revealing “a secret situation map” on which he had last plotted the locations of Allied and enemy ships on that long-ago day when he had last worked here. “The ships,” Mrs. Hill remembers, “were still there”—exactly as he had left them on May 22, 1915, when his daring Dardanelles strategy was, as he later wrote, “ruined irretrievably” by incompetent subordinates, and he himself was generally regarded as a ruined politician. Now, he reflected, “a quarter of a century had passed, and still mortal peril threatened us at the hands of the same nation. Once again defence of the rights of a weak state, outraged and invaded by unprovoked aggression, forced us to draw the sword. Once again we must fight for life and honour against the might and fury of the valiant, disciplined, and ruthless German race. Once again! So be it.”1

  Churchill’s early start at the Admiralty accomplished little; he was adrift in memories of the past—“filled with emotion,” in the words of Rear Admiral Bruce Fraser, the third sea lord. That evening the first sea lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, introduced him to the senior men with whom he would be working, and in the boardroom Winston took the first lord’s chair, as of old. Pound formally welcomed him; Churchill, according to one of the admirals, “replied by saying what a privilege and honour it was to be again in that chair…. He surveyed critically each of us in turn and then, adding that he would see us all personally later on, he adjourned the meeting. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘to your tasks and duties.’ ” They left quietly. “Everybody,” one of them later recalled, “realized what a wider responsibility he had”—his duties as a member of the War Cabinet and its Land Forces Committee, and his concern over the fighting in Poland and the strange lack of it in France.2

  His original instinct had been correct; in the war at sea the early hours were crucial. Yet it is hard to see how anyone in the Admiralty could have prevented the war’s first sea tragedy. When hostilities were declared late that morning, Admiral Karl Dönitz had thirty-nine U-boats cruising outside British seaports. One, the U-30, was lurking 250 miles off the Irish coast. At 7:45 P.M., as Pound was introducing Churchill to his fellow sea lords, the submarine’s commander sighted the S.S. Athenia, no warship but an unarmed ocean liner carrying 1,103 passengers, most of them European refugees heading for asylum in the United States. Hitler had vetoed unrestricted submarine warfare in the early stages of the conflict, but the commander of the U-30, mistaking the liner for a British auxiliary cruiser, had torpedoed her. The 112 dead included 28 U.S. citizens. Two British destroyers and a Swedish yacht picked up the survivors, who signed affidavits testifying that the U-boat had circled the sinking steamship without offering assistance, though by then the sub’s commander knew he had blundered. The Americans among them demanded transportation home shielded by a convoy of U.S. warships, which was not possible. Ambassador Kennedy sent his twenty-two-year-old son John F. Kennedy, a Harvard senior, to defuse their anger, reassure them, and find them safe passage to New York.

  Hitler was indifferent to American public opinion, but Goebbels, as the Reich’s minister of propaganda, could not be, particularly after Churchill publicly declared: “The Athenia was torpedoed without the slightest warning. She was not armed.” Goebbels interrupted a Radio Berlin broadcast to call Churchill “ein Lügenlord” (“lying lord”) and denied Nazi responsibility for the sinking, saying the only source for such reports was “your impudent lies, Herr Churchill, your infernal lies!” Learning that in English Winston’s initials stood for what Germans called Wasserklosett, zealous Nazis painted them on latrines. Berlin announced that Churchill had personally ordered a bomb placed aboard the Athenia. “This falsehood,” Winston noted, “received some credence in unfriendly quarters.” In the House of Commons he said the passenger ship “was not defensively armed—she carried no guns and her decks had not even been strengthened for this purpose.” He added that he had expressed his “profound sympathy with the relatives of those who may be bereaved by this outrage.” Privately, he told the War Cabinet, “The occurrence should have a helpful effect as regards public opinion in the United States.”3

  He did not, however, expect a call from the White House. Nevertheless, in early October, while he was dining in Morpeth Mansions with two Admiralty guests, the phone rang, and a few moments later his valet-cum-butler entered to summon him. Churchill asked who was calling. “I don’t know, sir,” his man replied. “Well,” said Winston, “say I can’t attend to it now.” To his surprise, the butler said: “I think you ought to come, sir.” Annoyed, Churchill went, and it was his guests’ turn to be perplexed, at his answers to his caller: “Yes, sir…. No, sir,” One of them later recalled that there were “few people whom he would address as ‘sir’ and we wondered who on earth it could be. Presently he came back, much moved and said: ‘Do you know who that was? The President of the United States. It is remarkable to think of being rung up in this little flat in Victoria Street by the President himself in the midst of a great war.’ He excused himself, saying, ‘This is very important. I must go and see the Prime Minister at once.’ ”4

  Roosevelt had told him of a strange warning from Admiral Raeder, commander in chief of the Kriegsmarine. The Grossadmiral had informed the Americans that his agents had discovered a British plot: the U.S.S. Iroquois, which had sailed from Cork the day war was declared, would be sunk “in similar circumstances to the Athenia,” which, according to the current Nazi line, meant by the Royal Navy, on Churchill’s orders. The implication was that England would try to blame the Reich for the ship’s loss and thus get the U.S. into the war. After consulting No. 10 and his sea lords, Churchill cabled the White House: “Iroquois is probably a thousand miles West of Ireland…. U-boat danger inconceivable in these broad waters. Only method can be time-bomb planted at Queenstown. We think this not impossible.” Roosevelt agreed and warned the ship’s commander, who quickly sought, and found, safe harbor. But a stem-to-stern search produced nothing. The British accused Germany of trying to spread propaganda against England, and Raeder was embarrassed. The truth is that despite all these hypotheses of Byzantine intrigue, no one in high position was to blame.5

  The real significance of this minor co
ntretemps was that Roosevelt had taken the initiative in establishing a bond with a belligerent power—despite official U.S. neutrality, a policy which enjoyed the overwhelming support of the American people—and had cooperated with the British to a remarkable degree, even following up the first lord’s suggestion that the Germans might have smuggled a bomb aboard the ship. With few exceptions the British people, unfamiliar with U.S. politics and the mood of the American public, were unaware of how grave a political risk the president was taking. One British historian observes that from the outset

  Roosevelt’s idealism was clear-sighted. He was well aware that at least four out of five Americans were unwilling to be involved in what they saw as the Quarrel of European states, the very lands from which their ancestors had fled in search of freedom and prosperity. He was equally aware that the Nazi threat was of greater than local significance…. He was determined to spare nothing in his endeavors to sustain the West European democracies… and he had the vision to determine that whatever advice he might receive to the contrary from his Ambassador in London, Joseph P. Kennedy, Churchill was and would remain the standard bearer of resistance.6

  In bypassing No. 10 Downing Street, the Foreign Office, and his own embassy in London, the president had established a direct tie with the only man, in his view, who could save Europe from Hitler. And since Roosevelt had made this extraordinary move entirely on his own, Churchill was the passive partner in the establishment of the most momentous relationship in his life. Of course, on their level each man was known to the other. Six years earlier, as a rapt admirer of FDR’s New Deal, Winston had sent a copy of his first Marlborough volume to the White House, inscribed, on October 8, 1933: “With earnest best wishes for the success of the greatest crusade of modern times.”7