The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Churchill was certainly unpopular in Whitehall. He infuriated service chiefs with his meddling and colleagues with his long interventions in cabinet discussions. He campaigned vigorously to be allowed to chair the Military Coordination Committee, and to chair the Chiefs of Staff Committee, which would make him the effective controller of the war. Half of official London seems to have banded together against the latter idea. One of the inside observers was Jock Colville, a young diplomat seconded to Chamberlain’s Downing Street, who was keeping a gossipy, politically detailed diary. He would soon become Churchill’s private secretary and devoted to him, but at this stage he was hostile. Colville had a conversation with the permanent secretary at the War Office in which they spoke of Churchill and his crony, the commander of the Imperial General Staff, Lord Ironside (who, being very tall, was known as Tiny): ‘We must get the P.M. to take a hand in this before Winston and Tiny go and bugger up the whole war.’ A little later, when the Norwegian campaign had collapsed, Colville records Churchill saying mordantly on a wet May Day in 1940: ‘If I were the first of May I should be ashamed of myself,’ and adds, ‘Personally, I think he should be ashamed of himself in any case.’ And a little later still, just after Chamberlain had resigned as prime minister, Colville records arch Tory intriguer R. A. Butler saying that ‘the good clean tradition of English politics, that of Pitt as opposed to Fox, had just been sold to the greatest adventurer of modern politics’. The victory of Churchill and his rabble was a serious disaster, Butler continued, and the Tory leadership had ‘weakly surrendered to a half-breed American’.137

  These may seem extreme words. They were not uncommon thoughts. Before he became prime minister, Tory whips were putting it about that Churchill was responsible for Norway and wondering out loud whether he should be sacked. For months after he entered Number Ten, Churchill was greeted in icy silence by most Conservative MPs while Chamberlain was cheered every time he appeared in the Commons chamber. Earlier the polls had shown others, notably the dashing Anthony Eden, as more popular replacements should Chamberlain be forced to resign. Despite his age and recent flattery of Hitler, Lloyd George was popular too. But inside Tory circles by far the most popular candidate was Lord Halifax, the fox-hunting churchman described earlier. Chamberlain expected Halifax to succeed and so did the King, who regarded Churchill with deep suspicion – perhaps not surprisingly, given Churchill’s championing of Edward VIII during the abdication crisis. Among other Halifax supporters were the socialist politicians Hugh Dalton, Herbert Morrison and Stafford Cripps, along with Lloyd George. So Churchill’s ascent to power, which now seems so obvious, was quite remarkable. He had comparatively little support in Parliament. He had less inside the ruling Conservative Party. Most of the Labour movement loathed him as a caricature class enemy who had ordered troops to move against workers and helped crush the General Strike. He was distrusted in Whitehall and by many service chiefs. He had some press support, but this was hardly overwhelming and was concentrated in the ‘cheap’ papers most disregarded by Westminster. And however one divides responsibility, he was one of those responsible for the Norway fiasco. So how did it happen?

  The story of the Norway debate of 7–8 May 1940 has been told many times. It was one of the greatest parliamentary moments ever, and little about it was inevitable. The government had an overwhelming majority. Though small groups of MPs were plotting against Chamberlain, they were deprived of their natural leader by Churchill’s presence – and publicly loyal presence – in the cabinet. It mattered that Chamberlain spoke badly, and with grating sarcasm. It mattered that an angry admiral, in full fig, castigated him for the failures of the campaign and said he was speaking for the officers and men of the fighting, sea-going navy, ‘who are very unhappy’. It certainly mattered that a fire-breathing Tory MP who had once been a great supporter of Chamberlain’s father bothered to re-read some comments of Oliver Cromwell, so that he finished his speech by looking directly at the prime minister: ‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.’ It might be thought ironic that the words Leo Amery chose were directed by Cromwell at Parliament itself, as he established a ruthless military dictatorship, just what Britain was now fighting. At the time no one seems to have noticed and the words did their job, electrifying the Commons. Many more speeches followed, including a fine one by the elderly Lloyd George, and Labour decided to force a division. Attlee had been worried about uniting the Tories and cementing Chamberlain’s position, but the atmosphere was changing. In a crescendo of emotion, forty-one Tories voted against the government, many of them younger MPs in uniform and, with abstentions, Chamberlain’s majority crashed from 213 to 81.

  It was a brutal rebuke. But was it the end? Chamberlain thought not. Churchill’s real appeal had been outside Parliament, as a national figure who seemed to embody the fighting spirit the government lacked. If Chamberlain could put together a government of national unity, bringing in his Labour and Liberal critics, then he could remain as prime minister, no doubt with Churchill playing a larger role. Churchill himself agreed and urged Chamberlain to continue. Why? He cannot have seriously thought him fit to lead the war effort. Perhaps he believed Chamberlain was finished anyway, so it did not matter. More likely, he realized that his own position in the Tory Party was still so weak that to plunge in the knife now might make it impossible for him to succeed. Chamberlain asked the Labour leaders whether they would now join a National Government led by himself. They thought the party, then meeting for its annual conference, would not accept this but agreed to go and ask two questions – would they join the government under Chamberlain? Would they join a government under someone else? As they motored down to the Highcliff Hotel in Bournemouth, the question in London then became: if not Chamberlain, who would the ‘somebody else’ be – Halifax or Churchill?

  With the Tory chief whip, the three men faced one another in Number Ten to decide. Though there are different and contradictory accounts of exactly what was said, it is clear that Chamberlain spoke first, and said he would serve under either man. The chief whip, speaking for the party, said Conservatives, or possibly ‘some’ Conservatives, would prefer Halifax. Then the issue arose of whether Halifax being in the Lords disqualified him from being prime minister? Churchill scented a trap and decided to say nothing. He simply turned his back and stared out of the window for what seemed a very long time – more than two minutes. Halifax then said he felt that his being a peer disqualified him – and Churchill was left in command of this small but important battlefield. This was a crisis in which parliamentary revolt had spoken in the language of anti-parliamentary Cromwellian dictatorship, and now the country’s most eloquent speaker had won his victory by saying precisely nothing. It was concluded by the spectacle of the Labour leadership deciding to serve under a man most of them had reviled for years as the arch-reactionary hammer of the working classes; for Attlee called Chamberlain from Bournemouth to tell him Labour would join the government but not under him. On 10 May he went to the King to resign, followed that afternoon by Churchill’s mission to kiss hands and change the fate of the world.

  Melodramatic? Over the top? Churchill has that effect. He came back, according to his driver, close to tears and saying, ‘I hope it is not too late.’ These events have been pored over endlessly, and rightly.138 They comprise the most important political crisis Britain has ever experienced. Some historians believe Halifax had proved a kind of Christian hero in the end: he knew he was not fit to be war leader and stood aside. Others think Churchill and Chamberlain had done a deal which tilted the balance: certainly, Churchill needed Chamberlain once he succeeded him in a way Halifax would not have done. Either way, Churchill was stubbornly determined to become the country’s war leader if he possibly could. He was not put in power by popular acclamation, as the People’s War myth might like us to believe. His morale-lifting, surging speeches had cheered the country up, and when he appeared on news
reels cinema audiences were already cheering him back. But public opinion, in the sense of informed, influential and media opinion, was at best divided about Churchill; and in the Commons, where his power would partly rest, he had been recently unpopular, even a figure of fun. He was put into power by other politicians, from the Tory dissidents who had plotted Chamberlain’s fall with devastating effect in the Norway vote, to the Labour leader Clement Attlee, and those who now stood aside to let him pass, Chamberlain and Halifax.

  They did this because they could see that none of the rest of them, no rival politician of the first rank in Britain at the time, could have dedicated himself to fighting and winning as Churchill did. Halifax wanted to talk peace with the Germans. There is some evidence that his under-secretary R. A. Butler was still conspiring to put out peace feelers even after Churchill became leader, telling the Swedes, possible intermediaries, that ‘diehards’ would not be allowed to stop a compromise between Britain and Germany and that ‘common sense and not bravado’ would dictate British policy. That was a rather different message from Churchill’s to his new cabinet: ‘We shall go on, and we shall fight it out, here or elsewhere, and if at the last the long story is to end, it were better it should end, not through surrender, but only when we are rolling senseless on the ground.’139 Even those who accept the notion of a just war know that war is partly madness. Hitler had a vision, Wagnerian in colouring, that was mad. To combat him level-headed, coolly calculating people were not enough. Churchill was not mad in Hitler’s way, but he had a simplistic, almost boyish and wholly romantic view of human history that was just as vivid. He looked down on lesser breeds and believed in his own ‘race’ and in his own destiny. In normal times this made him an embarrassment and a bore. But this was his hour; and it seems that a majority of the men who might have stopped him agreed. Chamberlain would soon die of cancer. Halifax found himself incapacitated at key moments of the crisis by stomach ache and toothache. The worse things got, the stronger Churchill felt. This is a mysterious tale too, of human will and life force. Meanwhile, the British political crisis was overshadowed by the enemy Churchill simply referred to as ‘that man’.

  Dunkirk Spirit: 80 proof?

  The fall of France to the German blitzkrieg of May 1940 was not the failure of British policy, generalship or soldiers. By the time the attack happened, the quarter of a million British in France were only a small part of the forces colliding. The British Expeditionary Force had five regular divisions and five more made up of former part-timers. France by comparison had a huge army, 2.2 million strong, though including many reservists and conscripts in the eighty-eight divisions. The German army was 106 divisions strong. To put it another way, the BEF was not only less than a tenth of the size of the German force but smaller than the Dutch army and much smaller than the Belgian army. Numbers, notoriously, are not everything. Yet when equipment is compared, the BEF seemed even weaker than the numbers suggested. They had only a single tank division, which was not complete. British tanks essentially came in three varieties. There were tanks with strong armour but only machine guns – so useless against German Panzers. Then there were tanks with armour-piercing guns but whose own armour was dangerously weak. Finally, there were tanks with both useful guns and useful armour. There were very few of them – indeed, just twenty-three – and they arrived late. Transport comprised vans and lorries from post offices, butchers and other commercial companies, scattered across Britain, painted khaki and often in bad repair. General Montgomery, who commanded one division, said the army was not only unfit to fight a first-class war but was also unfit to take part in a realistic exercise. It did have anti-tank rifles, which rarely worked. It also had new French Hotchkiss machine-guns, but no British troops had been taught how to fire them by the time they landed in France. The RAF in France did have some of the new Hurricane fighters, but relied heavily on the unmenacingly named Fairey Battle light bomber, which must be one of the most dangerous and ineffective machines flown in combat. Almost all of them were quickly shot down; despite the courage of their pilots they were virtually useless.

  Yet the appalling story of the ‘battle for France’ cannot be wholly excused or explained by equipment failures. The German army, after all, was using rifles just as elderly as the British and was less mechanized overall: it depended on horses for transport, for example. The French had more modern fighters than the Luftwaffe and tanks that were, at least on paper, better than the German Panzers, though British troops were quickly alarmed by what seemed to be poor morale and low discipline among their allies. In essence, the Germans had better, bolder tactics and a strategy which completely wrong-footed the British and French commanders. How did the Allies fight? Not very well. The German ‘sickle’ thrust depended on a feint, drawing the British and French up to respond to a thrust coming through Belgium, while the full attack was further south. It worked perfectly. They used transport aircraft to bring men forward quickly, while their air force kept hopping ahead from captured airfield to captured airfield. Above all, instead of using tanks in a scattered way to support slow-moving infantry, they used large formations of them to attack directly, backed up by infantry and aircraft.

  None of this was new in principle. Such deployment had long been advocated by British tank theorists such as Basil Liddell-Hart, who had advised the sacked Hore-Belisha, and General Fuller, who later joined the British Union of Fascists. These British theorists were dismissed as self-publicists by the army at Aldershot, but were studied closely in Berlin. French theory was even more out of date. The great collapse was a French collapse, which followed a Dutch and a Belgian collapse. French generals broke down in tears. French politicians were openly defeatist. For none of this can British generals or soldiers be blamed. British politicians can be blamed, however, for the weight they placed on the great French army. They had inspected the Maginot Line fortresses and been wined and dined by affable French commanders, who told them of the latest French tanks and fighter planes. But they had not pondered the results of years of extremist and divided politics in France, the endless coalitions and the bitter rivalries between far right and far left. They had not observed the gap between French conscripts and the small professional army, mainly used in the colonies. They saw France through sunny, sparkling spectacles, perhaps to be expected of politicians who mostly went there for Mediterranean summer holidays.

  Yet the BEF was a nervy shadow of the army which had beaten the Germans in 1918. It performed badly too. This is not to imply that British soldiers did not fight bravely. When modern British tanks, the Matilda Mark 2s, were used in a rare counter-attack, they alarmed even Rommel. Again and again, against impossible odds, British infantry armed with Bren guns, rifles and grenades made rearguard stands of spectacular valour. For their pains, when they eventually surrendered at villages such as Wormhout and Le Paradis they were massacred by Germans who felt humiliated and confused by the fight they had put up. Occasionally British troops fled in terror: one officer was shot by others when he tried to retreat. There were scenes of cowardice and selfishness when, towards the end, morale began to collapse and the British army streamed towards Dunkirk. But there were also heroic examples, and characters in the finest traditions of British eccentricity. One such was Brigadier Beckwith-Smith of the Coldstream Guards, who had to break the news that a battalion had been ordered to hold the perimeter and thus would not escape. He ‘drove up in his car. “Marvellous news, Jimmy,” he shouted. “The best ever! . . . We have been given the supreme honour of being the rearguard at Dunkirk. Tell your platoon, Jimmy. Come on, tell them the good news.” ’ Then, to his fellow officer’s delight, Beckwith-Smith addressed the men on how to deal with the Stuka dive-bombers: ‘Stand up to them. Shoot them with a Bren Gun from the shoulder. Take them like a high pheasant. Give them plenty of lead. Remember, five pounds to any man who takes one down.’140

  Yet no number of last stands, good jokes or acts of individual bravery could disguise the fact of a stunning defeat. Twent
y-two years on, the German army was relishing its revenge for 1918. Desperate last-ditch diplomacy by Churchill, including the extraordinary offer of joint citizenship between the British and French, could not halt the collapse. Now came an act of raw self-interest on the part of Britain that would poison relations with her nearest neighbour for a generation. For if the French were beaten, they did not all feel ready to give in quite yet. There were still courageous French generals and soldiers lined up alongside the BEF, and fighting further to the west. They believed that, by the terms of the alliance, the British would continue shoulder to shoulder until the end; or that, at any rate, an evacuation would be joint and agreed in advance. This did not happen. Once Field Marshal Gort, who commanded the BEF, decided that the situation was hopeless, he broke his agreement with the French commander General Weygand in order to protect his embarkation point at Dunkirk. From then on, the sole British objective was to get out as many men as possible, whether or not the French felt deserted. Instead of making three battalions available for a counter-attack, Gort ordered them to defend a hole in the defences left by the surrender of the Belgian army; later, requests for more British divisions to stay in France, or to return, were refused. In the early stages of the evacuation French troops were more or less literally shouldered aside and it took desperate pleas from Weygand to Churchill before some kind of equity was established. The bombed and bloodied beach was a world away from Churchill’s political fantasies of a united Franco-British spirit. Eventually, of the 338,000 men rescued at Dunkirk, 123,000 were French. Many of them went straight back to carry on fighting with the French forces still resisting in the west.