The House was very silent during the recital, but at the end there occurred a scene unique in my own experience. Everybody seemed to stand up all around, cheering, for what seemed a long time. Up till this moment the Conservative Party had treated me with some reserve, and it was from the Labour benches that I received the warmest welcome when I entered the House or rose on serious occasions. But now all joined in solemn stentorian accord.
The elimination of the French Navy as an important factor almost at a single stroke by violent action produced a profound impression in every country. Here was this Britain which so many had counted down and out, which strangers had supposed to be quivering on the brink of surrender to the mighty power arrayed against her, striking ruthlessly at her dearest friends of yesterday and securing for a while to herself the undisputed command of the sea. It was made plain that the British War Cabinet feared nothing and would stop at nothing. This was true.
The genius of France enabled her people to comprehend the whole significance of Oran, and in her agony to draw new hope and strength from this additional bitter pang. General de Gaulle, whom I did not consult beforehand, was magnificent in his demeanour, and France liberated and restored has ratified his conduct. I am indebted to M. Teitgen, a prominent member of the Resistance Movement, afterwards French Minister of Defence, for a tale which should be told. In a village near Toulon dwelt two peasant families, each of whom had lost their sailor son by British fire at Oran. A funeral service was arranged to which all their neighbours sought to go. Both families requested that the Union Jack should lie upon the coffins side by side with the Tricolour, and their wishes were respectfully observed. In this we may see how the comprehending spirit of simple folk touches the sublime.
CHAPTER X
AT BAY
IN these summer days of 1940 after the fall of France we were all alone. None of the British Dominions or India or the Colonies could send decisive aid, or send what they had in time. The victorious, enormous German armies, thoroughly equipped and with large reserves of captured weapons and arsenals behind them, were gathering for the final stroke. Italy, with numerous and imposing forces, had declared war upon us, and eagerly sought our destruction in the Mediterranean and in Egypt. In the Far East Japan glared inscrutably, and pointedly requested the closing of the Burma Road against supplies for China. Soviet Russia was bound to Nazi Germany by her pact, and lent important aid to Hitler in raw materials. Spain, which had already occupied the International Zone of Tangier, might turn against us at any moment and demand Gibraltar, or invite the Germans to help her attack it, or mount batteries to hamper passage through the Straits. The France of Pétain and Bordeaux, soon moved to Vichy, might any day be forced to declare war upon us. What was left at Toulon of the French Fleet seemed to be in German power. Certainly we had no lack of foes.
After Oran it became clear to all countries that the British Government and nation were resolved to fight on to the last. But even if there were no moral weakness in Britain, how could the appalling physical facts be overcome? Our armies at home were known to be almost unarmed except for rifles. Months must pass before our factories could make good even the munitions lost at Dunkirk. Can one wonder that the world at large was convinced that our hour of doom had struck?
Deep alarm spread through the United States, and indeed through all the surviving free countries. Americans gravely asked themselves whether it was right to cast away any of their own severely-limited resources to indulge a generous though hopeless sentiment. Ought they not to strain every nerve and nurse every weapon to remedy their own unpreparedness? It needed a very sure judgment to rise above these cogent, matter-of-fact arguments. The gratitude of the British nation is due to the noble President and his great officers and high advisers for never, even in the advent of the Third Term Presidential Election, losing their confidence in our fortunes or our will.
The buoyant and imperturbable temper of Britain, which I had the honour to express, may well have turned the scale. Here was this people, who in the years before the war had gone to the extreme bounds of pacifism and improvidence, who had indulged in the sport of party politics, and who, though so weakly armed, had advanced light-heartedly into the centre of European affairs, now confronted with the reckoning alike of their virtuous impulses and neglectful arrangements. They were not even dismayed. They defied the conquerors of Europe. They seemed willing to have their Island reduced to a shambles rather than give in. This would make a fine page in history. But there were other tales of this kind. Athens had been conquered by Sparta. The Carthaginians made a forlorn resistance to Rome. Not seldom in the annals of the past—and how much more often in tragedies never recorded or long-forgotten—had brave, proud, easy-going states, and even entire races, been wiped out, so that only their name or even no mention of them remains.
Few British and very few foreigners understood the peculiar technical advantages of our insular position; nor was it generally known how even in the irresolute years before the war the essentials of sea and latterly air defence had been maintained. It was nearly a thousand years since Britain had seen the fires of a foreign camp on English soil. At the summit of British resistance everyone remained calm, content to set their lives upon the cast. That this was our mood was gradually recognised by friends and foes throughout the whole world. What was there behind the mood? That could be settled only by brute force.
There was also another aspect. One of our greatest dangers during June lay in having our last reserves drawn away from us into a wasting, futile French resistance in France, and the strength of our air forces gradually worn down by their flights or transference to the Continent. If Hitler had been gifted with supernatural wisdom he would have slowed down the attack on the French front, making perhaps a pause of three or four weeks after Dunkirk on the line of the Seine, and meanwhile developing his preparations to invade England. Thus he would have had a deadly option, and could have tortured us with the hooks of either deserting France in her agony or squandering the last resources for our future existence. The more we urged the French to fight on, the greater was our obligation to aid them, and the more difficult it would have become to make any preparations for defence in England, and above all to keep in reserve the twenty-five squadrons of fighter aircraft on which all depended. On this point we should never have given way, but the refusal would have been bitterly resented by our struggling Ally, and would have poisoned all our relations. It was even with an actual sense of relief that some of our high commanders addressed themselves to our new and grimly simplified problem. As the commissionaire at one of the Service clubs in London said to a rather downcast member: “Anyhow, sir, we’re in the Final, and it’s to be played on the Home Ground.”
The strength of our position was not, even at this date, underrated by the German High Command. Ciano tells how, when he visited Hitler in Berlin on July 7, 1940, he had a long conversation with General von Keitel. Keitel, like Hitler, spoke to him about the attack on England. He repeated that up to the present nothing definite had been decided. He regarded the landing as possible, but considered it an “extremely difficult operation, which must be approached with the utmost caution, in view of the fact that the intelligence available on the military preparedness of the island and on the coastal defences is meagre and not very reliable”.* What would appear to be easy and also essential was a major air attack upon the airfields, factories, and the principal communication centres in Great Britain. It was necessary however to bear in mind that the British Air Force was extremely efficient. Keitel calculated that the British had about fifteen hundred machines ready for defence and counter-attack. He admitted that recently the offensive action of the British Air Force had been greatly intensified. Bombing missions were carried out with noteworthy accuracy, and the groups of aircraft which appeared numbered up to eighty machines at a time. There was however in England a great shortage of pilots, and those who were now attacking the German cities could not be replaced by the new pilots, who were
completely untrained. Keitel also insisted upon the necessity of striking at Gibraltar in order to disrupt the British imperial system. Neither Keitel nor Hitler made any reference to the duration of the war. Only Himmler said incidentally that the war ought to be finished by the beginning of October.
Such was Ciano’s report. He also offered Hitler, at “the earnest wish of the Duce”, an army often divisions and an air component of thirty squadrons to take part in the invasion. The army was politely declined. Some of the air squadrons came, but, as will be presently related, fared ill.
On July 19 Hitler delivered a triumphant speech in the Reichstag, in which, after predicting that I would shortly take refuge in Canada, he made what has been called his Peace Offer. This gesture was accompanied during the following days by diplomatic representations through Sweden, the United States, and at the Vatican. Naturally Hitler would have been very glad, after having subjugated Europe to his will, to bring the war to an end by procuring British acceptance of what he had done. It was in fact an offer not of peace but of readiness to accept the surrender by Britain of all she had entered the war to maintain.
My first thought was a solemn, formal debate in both Houses of Parliament, but my colleagues thought that this would be making too much of the matter, upon which we were all of one mind. It was decided instead that the Foreign Secretary should dismiss Hitler’s gesture in a broadcast. On the night of the 22nd he “brushed aside” Hitler’s “summons to capitulate to his will”. He contrasted Hitler’s picture of Europe with the picture of the Europe for which we were fighting, and declared that “we shall not stop fighting until Freedom is secure”. In fact however the rejection of any idea of a parley had already been given in the British Press and by the B.B.C., without any prompting from His Majesty’s Government, as soon as Hitler’s speech was heard over the radio.
Ciano records in his diaries that “Late in the evening of the 19th, when the first cold British reaction to the speech arrived, a sense of ill-concealed disappointment spread among the Germans.” Hitler “would like an understanding with Great Britain. He knows that war with the British will be hard and bloody, and knows also that people everywhere are averse from bloodshed”. Mussolini, on the other hand, “fears that the English may find in Hitler’s much too cunning speech a pretext to begin negotiations”. “That”, remarks Ciano, “would be sad for Mussolini, because now more than ever he wants war.”* He need not have fretted himself. He was not to be denied all the war he wanted.
At the end of June the Chiefs of Staff through General Ismay had suggested to me at the Cabinet that I should visit the threatened sectors of the east and south coasts. Accordingly I devoted a day or two every week to this agreeable task, sleeping when necessary in my train, where I had every facility for carrying on my regular work and was in constant contact with Whitehall. I inspected the Tyne and the Humber and many possible landing-places. The Canadian Division did an exercise for me in Kent. I examined the landward defences of Harwich and Dover. One of my earliest visits was to the 3rd Division, commanded by General Montgomery, an officer whom I had not met before. My wife came with me. The 3rd Division was stationed near Brighton. It had been given the highest priority in re-equipment, and had been about to sail for France when the French resistance ended. General Montgomery’s headquarters were near Steyning, and he showed me a small exercise of which the central feature was a flanking movement of Bren-gun carriers, of which he could at that moment muster only seven or eight. After this we drove together along the coast through Shore-ham and Hove till we came to the familiar Brighton front, of which I had so many schoolboy memories. We dined in the Royal Albion Hotel, which stands opposite the end of the pier. The hotel was entirely empty, a great deal of evacuation having taken place; but there were still a number of people airing themselves on the beaches or the parade. I was amused to see a platoon of the Grenadier Guards making a sandbag machine-gun post in one of the kiosks of the pier, like those where in my childhood I had often admired the antics of the performing fleas. It was lovely weather. I had very good talks with the General, and enjoyed my outing thoroughly.
In mid-July the Secretary of State for War recommended that General Brooke should replace General Ironside in command of our Home Forces. On July 19, in the course of my continuous inspection of the invasion sectors, I visited the Southern Command. Some sort of tactical exercise was presented to me in which no fewer than twelve tanks were able to participate. All the afternoon I drove with General Brooke, who commanded this front. His record stood high. Not only had he fought the decisive flank-battle near Ypres during the retirement to Dunkirk, but he had acquitted himself with singular firmness and dexterity, in circumstances of unimaginable difficulty and confusion, when in command of the new forces we had sent to France during the first three weeks of June. I also had a personal link with Alan Brooke through his two gallant brothers—the friends of my early military life.
These connections and memories did not decide my opinion on the grave matters of selection; but they formed a personal foundation upon which my unbroken war-time association with Alan Brooke was maintained and ripened. We were four hours together in the motor-car on this July afternoon of 1940, and we seemed to be in agreement on the methods of Home Defence. After the necessary consultations with others, I approved the Secretary of State for War’s proposal to place Brooke in command of the Home Forces in succession to General Ironside. Ironside accepted his retirement with the soldierly dignity which on all occasions characterised his actions.
During the invasion menace for a year and a half Brooke organised and commanded the Home Forces, and thereafter when he had become C.I.G.S. we continued together for three and a half years until victory was won. I shall presently narrate the benefits which I derived from his advice in the decisive changes of command in Egypt and the Middle East in August 1942, and also the heavy disappointment which I had to inflict upon him about the command of the cross-Channel invasion Operation “Overlord” in 1944. His long tenure as chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee during the greater part of the war and his work as C.I.G.S. enabled him to render services of the highest order, not only to the British Empire, but also to the Allied Cause. This tale will record occasional differences between us, but also an overwhelming measure of agreement, and will witness to a friendship which I cherish.
During this same month of July American weapons in considerable quantities were safely brought across the Atlantic. When the ships approached our shores with their priceless arms special trains were waiting in all the ports to receive their cargoes. The Home Guard in every county, in every town, in every village, sat up all through the night to receive them. Men and women worked night and day making them fit for use. By the end of July we were an armed nation, so far as parachute or air-borne landings were concerned. We had become a “hornets’ nest”. Anyhow, if we had to go down fighting (which I did not anticipate) a lot of our men and some women had weapons in their hands. The arrival of the first instalment of the half-million .300 rifles for the Home Guard (albeit with only about fifty cartridges apiece, of which we dared only issue ten, and no factories yet set in motion) enabled us to transfer three hundred thousand .303 British-type rifles to the rapidly-expanding formations of the Regular Army.
At the “seventy-fives”, with their thousand rounds apiece, some fastidious experts presently turned their noses up. There were no limbers and no immediate means of procuring more ammunition. Mixed calibres complicate operations. But I would have none of this, and during all 1940 and 1941 these nine hundred “seventy-fives” were a great addition to our military strength for Home Defence. Arrangements were devised and men were drilled to run them up on planks into lorries for movement. When you are fighting for existence any cannon is better than no cannon at all, and the French “seventy-five”, although out-dated by the British 25-pounder and the German field-gun howitzer, was still a splendid weapon.
As July and August passed without any disaster we settled ourselve
s down with increasing assurance that we could make a long and hard fight. Our gains of strength were borne in upon us from day to day. The entire population laboured to the last limit of its strength, and felt rewarded when they fell asleep after their toil or vigil by a growing sense that we should have time and that we should win. All the beaches now bristled with defences of various kinds. The whole country was organised in defensive localities. The factories poured out their weapons. By the end of August we had over two hundred and fifty new tanks! The fruits of the American “Act of Faith” had been gathered. The whole trained professional British Army and its Territorial comrades drilled and exercised from morn till night, and longed to meet the foe. The Home Guard overtopped the million mark, and when rifles were lacking grasped lustily the shotgun, the sporting rifle, the private pistol, or, when there was no firearm, the pike and the club. No Fifth Column existed in Britain, though a few spies were carefully rounded up and examined. What few Communists there were lay low. Everyone else gave all they had to give.
When Ribbentrop visited Rome in September he said to Ciano: “The English territorial defence is non-existent. A single German division will suffice to bring about a complete collapse.” This merely shows his ignorance. I have often wondered however what would have happened if two hundred thousand German storm troops had actually established themselves ashore. The massacre would have been on both sides grim and great. There would have been neither mercy nor quarter. They would have used Terror, and we were prepared to go all lengths. I intended to use the slogan “You can always take one with you”. I even calculated that the horrors of such a scene would in the last resort turn the scale in the United States. But none of these emotions was put to the proof. Far out on the grey waters of the North Sea and the Channel coursed and patrolled the faithful, eager flotillas peering through the night. High in the air soared the fighter pilots, or waited serene at a moment’s notice around their excellent machines. This was a time when it was equally good to live or die.
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