When Churchill returned to England, he delivered one of the most powerful and memorable speeches in history to the House of Commons on June 18:
…the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation…. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world will move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States…will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say, “This was their finest hour.”43
A month and two days after the panzers rolled into Belgium, France declared Paris an open city. To defend it, as General Weygand later wrote, “would have condemned the city to irreparable loss of human lives and of national treasures.”44 On June 22, France signed the Second Armistice at Compiègne, in the same railroad car in which Germany had signed the 1918 armistice, and established German and Italian zones of occupation. The National Assembly voted on July 10 to give eighty-four-year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain the position of prime minister of the Third Republic and grant him extraordinary powers that allowed him to govern in line with German wishes. Pétain’s collaborationist government, located at Vichy in the south of France, did something no other conquered or puppet government in all of Europe did—it voluntarily rounded up Jews and shipped them to Germany.
Hitler had everything he wanted: a neutralized French navy and complete control of France without the necessity of stationing additional troops in the South. But the British still held concerns that Darlan or the Vichy government would be unable to maintain the neutrality of French sea power, such as it was. Churchill ordered the Royal Navy to attack the French at Mers-el-Kebir, Algeria. The fleet there was put out of action on July 3 by British warplanes from the carrier Ark Royal and broadsides from the battleships Valiant and Resolution and battle cruiser Hood. Nearly 1,300 French seamen were killed on two older French battleships (one sunk, one run aground) and the newer battlewagon Dunqerque (beached). Eschewing halfway measures, the British bottled up another French battleship and four cruisers at Alexandria and damaged the battleship Richelieu at Dakar. Nonetheless, the French remained true to Darlan’s promise and scuttled their remaining fleet at Toulon when the Germans occupied Vichy France in November 1942.
Operation Sea Lion
From Wehrmacht records it would seem that Operation Sea Lion (the invasion of Great Britain) was never a serious effort, unless, of course, the island was made ready to fall through Luftwaffe attacks. Germany severely lacked landing ships capable of making the operation a reality, and was, in any case, more concerned with the Soviets. On July 13, 1940, Hitler decided to disband seventeen divisions and release the manpower back into his starving industrial base. But seventeen days later, he reversed his decision and ordered planning to begin for a campaign against the USSR.45 Nevertheless, Hitler knew, if the Luftwaffe could prevail in Britain, the removal of British support of the USSR would aid his efforts in Russia. He therefore permitted the night campaign against England’s armaments industry and urban centers to go forward, but with the proviso that it would be discontinued unless a complete success, and in any case, before losses in the campaign would affect the Luftwaffe’s employment against the USSR.46
Churchill knew the Nazis wanted England defeated and occupied. To stave off an invasion, however, the British needed only a draw in the air battle. Their naval strength required Germany to have absolute air superiority, or crossing the Channel would be impossible. Nearly a century later, the “Battle of Britain” remains clouded in its specifics, such as when the first German attacks occurred. Bombs fell on July 31 in Cornwall, Devon, and elsewhere, but Britain adopted the arbitrary dates of July 10 to October 31 to define the conflict. What is less in dispute is the difficulty Germany had in winning. Both sides had approximately the same number of fighters available (1,032 for the British to 1,011 for the Germans; and each side had fewer trained pilots ready than planes); but England had vastly superior production. The Ministry of Aircraft Production under Lord Beaverbrook from June to October 1940 produced 5,185 fighters—almost double the German total during the entire year.47 Thanks to better radar and the Ultra decryptions of the German Enigma machine, the Royal Air Force had infinitely better intelligence about Luftwaffe plans, and was able to intercept German bomber formations at precisely the right place and minimize their fuel consumption. Other factors also ensured Germany’s defeat in the Battle of Britain, not the least of which was—again—poor prewar weapons planning that left the Luftwaffe with only twin-engined Ju-88 and He-111 bombers when they needed longer-range four-engine aircraft. (Probably the most disappointing airplane produced by the Germans and used in the skies over England was the Messerschmitt 110, a two-engine heavy fighter: its handling proved no match for the superior Supermarine Spitfire or even the less agile Hawker Hurricane, and the model was withdrawn after heavy losses.)
England not only won the Battle of Britain, but in the process elevated the stature of both Churchill, through his inspiring speeches, and the royal family, who braved the onslaught in the bomb shelters with everyone else. Indeed, King George VI went on meat rations like an average London clerk, picked up a shovel and helped dig people out of the rubble, and personified leadership. At the end of the war, when public opinion polls found that virtually every institution in British life had seen its popularity fall, the monarchy had actually gained ground. But it was Winston Churchill, not King George, who became the face of British resistance to the world.
Churchill knew war personally. A former cavalry officer in the British Army, he had seen action in India against Pashtun tribesmen and later rode with the 21st Lancers at Omdurman. After these adventures, Churchill returned to England in 1899 to unsuccessfully run for office in the House of Commons.48 When the Boer War broke out, he became a correspondent for the Morning Post; while part of a scouting expedition he was captured and imprisoned as a POW. Escaping from the Boer prison camp, Churchill traveled nearly three hundred miles to the Portuguese-held Lourenço Marques, then promptly joined General Redvers Buller’s forces at the siege of Ladysmith. After these adventures Churchill returned to England, again running (this time successfully) for the House of Commons as a Conservative. In 1904 he crossed the aisle to sit as a member of the Liberal Party, where he campaigned for free trade. The following year, he was appointed under-secretary of state for the colonies, mainly focusing on South Africa. After several years in Parliament, he was named first lord of the Admiralty, where he was serving as war erupted in Europe in 1914.
At the Admiralty, Churchill backed the development of the tank (accounting for the tank’s nautical terminology—hatches, decks, ports, and so on). Arguing for a landing at Gallipoli in 1915, Churchill displayed for the first time his obsession with the so-called “soft underbelly of Europe,” and subsequently lost credibility and support when the invasion proved a bloody disaster. Resigning from his cabinet post under fire in 1915, he exercised his privilege as a reserve major in the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars in November to go on active duty with his regiment in France, where he was soon promoted to lieutenant colonel and given a battalion in the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers. After his battalion was combined with another due to heavy losses, he returned to Parliament in May 1916. Continuing to be tapped for important positions, he served as minister of munitions, secretary of state for war, and secretary of state for air. His next controversy came in 1918, when seeing the threat posed by a Communist Russia, he lobbied for landing British troops at Archangel to secure the delivery of supplies to the Whites, another venture that proved a failure.
Rejoining the Conservativ
e Party, he became secretary of state for the colonies in 1921, and in 1924, he was appointed chancellor of the exchequer in the Stanley Baldwin government, which presided over a period of unemployment. When the Conservatives lost in the 1929 election, Churchill turned to writing and speaking, particularly on the topic of Indian independence. He thought Mahatma Gandhi a fraud, and expressed his willingness to allow Gandhi to starve himself to death if he so chose. Like many, he hoped Hitler might become a reasonable leader and bring Germany “to the forefront of the European family circle.”49 The degree to which he formed a consistent opposition to Hitler at an early date is questionable, but certainly he was among the first to appreciate the threat Nazi Germany posed, and for several years immediately before war broke out, rowed against the tide of appeasement and pacifism.
Portly, chomping his cigars in public and painting portraits in private, Churchill could agitate and irritate with the best of them.50 Against the “heroic defender of the realm” persona that Churchill would, in part, help create through his own writings, several realities emerged to tarnish the portrait. He never saw any state except Germany as a threat, thus downplaying and even ignoring the rise of imperialistic Japan. Combined with his unwillingness to entertain independence for India, Churchill not only weakened the British position in the Far East, but made the American row tougher to hoe. As late as 1928 he favored the “ten-year rule” for British rearmament (then in its last year of implementation), voted and spoke against increasing defense expenditures until 1935, and proved all too willing to leap into bed with any government for a cabinet position, undermining the picture of a lonely British Paul Revere riding through the streets, shouting his alarms about the Nazis.
On the other side of the scales, he never hesitated in tying the Nazis’ policies to the ultimate destruction of the Jews. More important perhaps, as a multiwar combat veteran he never shied away from advocating military force in an era of pacifism and international cowardice. As early as 1934, his speeches thundered on the floor of Commons, detailing ultimately accurate predictions of future air attacks on England, the “flying peril,” as he called it. The following year, he abandoned all restraint in his attacks on the government, although the Hoare-Laval Pact (which turned parts of Abyssinia into an Italian zone), which discredited Stanley Baldwin and was repudiated, left Churchill divided. Britain, he said privately, was not strong enough to be “law-giver and the spokesman of the world.”51 “Smash[ing] up Italy,” he thought, would “cost us dear,” and probably drive Italy into Hitler’s arms. When it came to the French standing strong during the Rhineland crisis, however, he had no compunction about criticizing French weakness as leading to more Nazi aggression.52 It didn’t hurt that Churchill was one of the best orators in England, and a convincing one, too. He was also a prolific writer, churning out more than 530,000 words of his four-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples by the time Germany invaded Poland. This comprehensive history was not completed and published until 1956 due to delays encountered while Churchill assembled his later, more pressing project, a six-volume history of the Second World War.
Then there was Churchill’s sense of political theater, something all great leaders have possessed. Following the Czech crisis, the House took up debate over the Munich agreement, where Churchill spoke on the third day of debate—when the entire House was present and the press in rapt attention. Churchill proved remarkably prescient, warning that the Czech state’s future could be measured only in months, and indicted Britain for allowing the “whole equilibrium of Europe” to be turned upside down. What awaited England, he predicted, was “a bitter cup” unless “by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we rise again and take our stand for freedom.”53
Thus, by the time Chamberlain resigned in May 1940 after the invasion of France, and Lord Halifax turned down the king’s offer to become prime minister, Winston Churchill stepped squarely onto the stage at the precise time when history had written the role which he had prepared for and aspired to his entire life. It unfurled like a flag with his May 13 “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” speech to Parliament as he became the new prime minister:
You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory, there is no survival.54
And he knew whatever followed, America must be secured as an ally or England could not survive, even after the defeat of the Luftwaffe in the skies over Britain.
Securing the Grand Alliance
In the months immediately before and after the Battle of Britain, the Axis powers seemed to advance on every front. U-boats prowled the Atlantic, sinking thousands of tons of vital shipping. Italy besieged Malta, invaded British Somaliland, and pushed into Egypt in September 1940. At the end of that month, Japan, Italy, and Germany united in the Tripartite Pact, formally establishing the “Axis.” The pact committed the participants to go to war with any country except the USSR that engaged in hostilities against any member of the alliance. As Britain’s isolation and desperation increased, Roosevelt instructed Secretary of State Cordell Hull to agree to the forerunner of Lend-Lease, called the “Destroyers for Bases” agreement, in which the United States acquired ninety-nine-year leases for nine naval or air bases in the Caribbean and Newfoundland in exchange for fifty “flush deck” destroyers. Britain immediately pressed those ships into service against U-boats, and in the short run it greatly helped Britain with her shipping problem. The following March, Congress passed Lend-Lease, which allowed the United States to ship $50 billion worth of supplies to England at no charge. If matériel was damaged, or ships sunk, the administration charged a fraction of what they were worth.55
These efforts to aid Great Britain masked myriad other ways in which the United States was already being drawn into the war. Roosevelt announced a security zone in which the Americans would provide air and sea cover for British convoys across nearly half the Atlantic. Sinkings of individual American ships, such as the Robin Moor, a freighter sunk by a U-boat off the coast of Africa in May 1941 (after the crew and passengers were permitted to abandon ship), increased tensions and anti-German hostility. The sinking of the Robin Moor had relied in part on information from the infamous Duquesne spy ring, a coven of thirty-three German espionage agents with key jobs in the U.S. government. Eventually the ring was broken with the help of FBI double agent William Sebold, who had penetrated it over a sixteen-month period from 1940 to mid-1941; the FBI arrested the spies and all were convicted on charges of espionage. It remained the largest successful prosecution of spies in American history, and elevated FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to a powerful force in the federal government. What the FBI did not know—and indeed no one discovered until long after the war—was that the British had a “ring” of their own in the form of agents in major U.S. opinion polling organizations, such as Gallup. Those agents rigged polls to reflect stronger interventionist sentiments in the United States than actually existed.56 But neither the Nazi provocations nor manipulations by MI5 could sway the overwhelmingly isolationist sentiment of the American public. Technically, the United States had to insist it was a neutral nation, even though FDR searched for new ways to support England.
Meanwhile, the United States rapidly built up its military might far beyond the quiet naval expansion Roosevelt had promoted since 1933 to meet Japanese threats in the Pacific. At that time the entire navy consisted of 372 ships, some 150,000 tons short of its treaty allowance, but the Vinson-Trammell Expansion Program of 1933 had authorized the addition of 1 aircraft carrier, 12 cruisers, 65 destroyers, 30 submarines, and 1,184 planes to be put into service by 1942. FDR obtained further authorization for 2 more carriers and 6 cr
uisers in 1936; in 1937 2 battleships were authorized; and in 1938 an additional 2 carriers, 2 battleships, 8 destroyers, 4 submarines, and nine auxiliary vessels were added, along with an increase in naval aviation to 3,000 planes.
But the real push for American military preparedness began in 1940 after the fall of France. In June, Congress voted twice to increase tonnages in literally all classes of ships. The acts provided for an increase in the Navy by 1,492,000 tons, and the total increase was planned as 7 battleships, 22 carriers, 35 cruisers, 115 destroyers, 50 submarines, 75,000 tons for auxiliary vessels, and a naval aviation strength of 4,500 planes. Clearly, the United States had grown concerned about its maritime strength. Its building program in aircraft carriers would give it a planned two-to-one advantage over the Imperial Japanese Navy in carriers by 1944 (although in reality from 1941 to 1945, America outbuilt the Japanese seventeen-to-one in major fleet carriers).
The U.S. Army, however, was a much different matter. In June of 1940, the American Army’s authorized strength of 227,000 men was less than that of Romania.57 Even worse, the Army was nowhere near its authorized strength and most tactical units existed largely on paper. The regular Army consisted of eight under-strength infantry divisions, one cavalry division, and one mechanized cavalry brigade.58 In short, the fighting strength of the U.S. Army was smaller than that of the Dutch, who had held out only four days against the Germans. Although in theory this force was supplemented by eighteen untrained divisions of the National Guard, those units were poorly equipped with obsolete equipment. Many West Point graduates had left the service, but a hidden strength was present in that most serving officers knew one another’s capabilities and were a tight, effective core. When it came time to promote officers into positions of high command, relatively few selections would prove totally unsuitable.
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