by A. N. Wilson
* Duncan-Jones quickly saw that he had been hoodwinked by the Führer and penned The Struggle for Religious Freedom in Germany, Gollancz, 1938.
27
Churchill in 1940
It was a Victorian funeral, held in a post-Victorian world. Everyone who remembers that January day in 1965 will know that as the world said its farewell to Winston Churchill, Britain finally closed an imperial storybook. The child of the celebrated Victorian statesman, roué and cad had outlived John F. Kennedy. The young subaltern who had taken part in the cavalry charge at the Battle of Omdurman, and said: ‘My faith in our race and blood was much strengthened’ had lived into the era of the Beatles. The First Lord of the Admiralty, who sent so many thousands to avoidable death at Gallipoli, had lived to be the contemporary of Vietnam draft-dodgers. The Chancellor of the Exchequer who helped to crush the General Strike was destined to die during the Labour government of Harold Wilson. The man who spent the 1930s in the political wilderness because he could not persuade Baldwin and Chamberlain to rattle their sabres against the European dictatorships lived to see Germany and Japan become two of the most vibrant economies of the modern age, and the European Economic Community one of the most successful economic and political success stories. So those who watched the coffin being borne on its gun-carriage through the streets of London, and saw it drifting on its barge up the River Thames, were watching the history of the early twentieth century being laid to rest. Above all, the world watched this funeral, this hero’s funeral, because he was seen to be the man who would be remembered, above all his other achievements, his failures and his triumphs, as the person who saved his country, and the values of Western democracy from Adolf Hitler. Millions of human individuals had been engaged in that conflict which had called forth in the human race such conspicuous examples of bestial wickedness and superhuman virtue. But there was a more than emblematic truth which saw that war, at any rate, during the crucial months of the summer of 1940 after the Fall of France, as a form of single combat between two individuals, two representatives of entirely incompatible and irreconcilable viewpoints. Both were painters. The one was a boozy, brave, historically obsessed old man, half aristocrat, half American, whose history-writing was as splodged with bright patches of unrealistic colour as were his sunny amateur oil paintings. The other was a teetotalling fanatic, of lower-middle-class Austrian origin, obsessed by race, and by the idea of the Greater Germany, whose essential dullness of spirit was evinced in the postcard-sized eerily normal architectural drawings and watercolours with which he had eked out an idle existence in his Viennese young manhood. Both believed in their race and their blood. Both believed in political systems which, when the devastating war between them was over, were in ruins: on the one hand, the British Empire, spread across the globe; on the other the Third Reich, dominating Europe for a few blood-soaked, hideous years. Both were natural autocrats, though with the essential difference that Churchill gave more than lip-service to democracy, and believed he had been fighting, among other things, for individual liberty. The world of 1965, excitedly discovering freedom like a teenager, believed it owed many of its freedoms to the old man who was being conveyed down the Thames, and hymned in St Paul’s Cathedral, as best of the old world, and saviour of the new. Peace and Love, the hippy luxuries, would not have been much in evidence if Hitler had won the conflict. But nor were they in evidence in those unfortunate European countries dominated by the Soviet Union, the country upon whose alliance Churchill had ultimately relied to defeat the Nazis.
The year 1940 did, in the opinion of Isaiah Berlin, ‘turn a large number of inhabitants of the British Isles out of their normal selves and, by dramatising their lives and making them seem to themselves and to each other clad in the fabulous garments appropriate to a great historic moment, transformed cowards into brave men, and so fulfilled the purpose of shining armour’.1 That was how it felt to a fluent and able political philosopher in 1949. His Churchill was ‘the saviour of his country, a mythical hero who belongs to legend as much as to reality, the largest human being of our time’.2
To write about Churchill is to find oneself in territory highly comparable to that occupied by writers on the subjects of Shakespeare and Jesus. On the one hand, there is the body of accepted factual evidence. In Churchill’s case, this constitutes mountains of written, oral, cinematic and other material. But there is also the huge potency of the collective attitude to the hero. This encourages some sparkier, perhaps attention-seeking historians to poke fun at the myth, to be iconoclastic, to suggest that Churchill was not such a successful war leader, or that he could have done things differently; even, if revisionism wants to attract real obloquy to itself, that the whole war, the deaths of the countless millions, could have been played differently, or avoided altogether. So the revisionists have their little day, and are succeeded once more by the even more bestselling counter-revisionists, asserting that, for all the mistakes made, the cult of the Last Great Englishman is still valid.
Central to the potency of the 1940 myth, however, for the British, is the tragic knowledge that the Finest Hour was lived through at a price, and that the Saving Hero was a figure like Samson among the Philistine lords at Gaza. He could defy them, but in the world conflict which followed the Finest Hour he was obliged to pull down the pillars of the enemy on himself in a great act of self-destruction. All the phenomena in which he believed – British world-domination, through its Empire; and at home, the survival and political usefulness of the Whig aristocratic order – were left, just as surely as was the Third Reich, in a heap of rubble by the time the noise and smoke of battle had subsided.
The fineness of the Finest Hour, when it made its first appearance in 1940 in the Grand Rhetoricaster’s speech, derived from its moral purity, its courage, its rash gamble for victory, its glorious claim that even if victory was not achieved, the fight would go on and on until the heroic end. Upon becoming Prime Minister, on 13 May, he said to the Commons: ‘You ask, What is our aim? I can answer in one word: 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. Let that be realized; no survival for the British Empire; no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for …’
To have made this speech in May 1940, and to have ended, ‘Come then, let us go forward together with our united strength’, was to give new meaning to all the qualities and pastimes for which Churchill was famous: it was fighting talk, it was gambling talk, it was valorous to the point of heroic fantasy. The German army had marched through, and vanquished, all the countries of Northern Europe – Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg. France was on the verge of falling. The British Expeditionary Force in Europe was surrounded by the German army and no one yet knew that Hitler would order his panzers to hold back from all-out victory, so that the German infantry had time to catch up with the panzers. Had General Franz Halder’s urging been accepted, the entire British army would have been surrounded and defeated in that very week that Churchill spoke his words. He made his ‘victory at all costs’ speech before the Germans made their mistake (or tactical error if you believe that Hitler deliberately spared the British army in hope of a negotiated peace).
The ‘myth’ of Churchill’s saving courage is a myth in the sense that it is a story by which a nation tells itself a story about itself. But it certainly happened, and Churchill was a hero in an almost superhuman mould during those weeks. When Stalin toasted Churchill after dinner at Yalta on 9 February 1945, he said something which everyone present believed to be true:
Without the Prime Minister’s guts – the interpreter didn’t say guts, but this is what he meant – England could not have stood up to Hitler. She was alone; the rest of Europe was grovelling before Hitler. Do you know what Stalin said? He said that he could think of no other instance in history where the future of the world depended on the courage of one man.3
By the time Stalin made that speech, nearly
five years after the ‘Finest Hour’, Russia was preparing to take over Eastern Europe, America was insisting that India be given its independence, Britain was economically destroyed, and the world was in ruins. The next especially famous speech Churchill made, first in the House of Commons on 18 June 1940 and then as a broadcast on the BBC, was delivered after the near-miraculous retreat from Dunkirk. By then, he claimed, 1,250,000 men were under arms in Britain. It would certainly have made life harder for any invading force than if General Halder had taken the entire BEF captive three weeks earlier. ‘Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty,’ Churchill said, ‘and so bear ourselves that, if the British Commonwealth and its Empire lasts for a thousand years, men will still say. “This was their finest hour.”‘4
This glorious sentence contains within it the least convincing conditional since Hitler had proclaimed the one-thousand-year duration of the Third Reich. It is some if. Within twenty months, the Japanese would occupy Hong Kong and Singapore and demonstrate to the world the essential indefensibility of British colonial outposts. President Roosevelt made it clear to Churchill whenever they met that he believed India should be given its independence even before the war ended; while his secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, laid down in all his economic discussions with John Maynard Keynes that as far as America was concerned, the removal of Imperial Preference, tariffs and any economic protection of the Empire was a condition of American aid. Churchill from the very beginning had known that Britain could not stand alone for very long against so formidable a force as the as yet unconquered Third Reich. It would need, as he said in another of those glorious 1940 speeches, the one of 4 June, a continued struggle in which ‘our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry out the struggle until in God’s good time the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old’. But only on the New World’s own conditions, only on condition that Britain surrendered any claim to be a world power and handed that role to the Americans. That was what Churchill, great gambler that he was, could not have fully foreseen in 1940. He saw it clearly enough by 1945, and the British, nearly sixty years later, see it more clearly than ever. The British Empire had been shaky at the time, even though it was so dear to Churchill’s heart. Within seven years of his making the speech about the Empire lasting a thousand years, India had gone; within twenty years, the Empire itself no longer existed. In terms of Britain’s Victorian economic ascendancy in the world, that was on the wane by 1929, and the Finest Hour determined that Britain would be not merely economically ruined, but also politically. This might have been in the long term an inevitability. It was not an accident, if by accident one means something which comes about by mere chance or by impersonal forces. It was quite clearly decided by the US Treasury and by the US State Department that if support was given to President Roosevelt’s desire to help Britain and France in the war, there should be a price exacted. And that price was, and should be, the effective dismantling of Britain as a first-rank world economic power.
Hitler told foreign observers, and anyone who would listen, that he had hoped and supposed that Britain would keep out of the European war and retain its Empire. Not many believed that he would allow this to happen. The Anglophile Dean Acheson, Assistant Secretary of State 1941–45, and Secretary of State 1949–53, complained that the US Treasury during the Second World War was ‘envisaging a victory where both enemies and allies were prostrate – enemies by military action and allies by bankruptcy’. They succeeded as triumphantly in this as did the Russians in their territorial and political victory over the countries of Eastern Europe. That is the screen of events through which the British of today see the historical palimpsest of the Finest Hour; and whether they are nostalgic for their old Empire, or embarrassed by its very existence, the Finest Hour has a particular poignancy. Nothing since has matched its glory.
Nor, it need hardly be said, has any British Prime Minister, before or since, ever matched Churchill for colour, exuberance, eccentricity, sheer strength. Alec Douglas-Home (Lord Dunglass as he was at the time of Munich, when he helped Chamberlain carry his briefcase to that sorry episode) once remarked that what he discovered, having been Foreign Secretary and then briefly in the early 1960s Prime Minister, was that prime ministers have very little to do. In peacetime this is true, which is why they have often seemed nondescript characters; none more so than those who were unprepared to admit the fact that for many weeks of the year there was nothing which needed to be done, and who therefore made themselves bustling parodies of a leader, like Chaucer’s Man of Law, who ‘seemed busier than he was’.
In wartime, things are very different, especially if, as Churchill did, the Prime Minister upon taking office pulls off a one-man coup d’état and makes himself into a virtual dictator. Without seeking parliamentary authority, he made himself Minister of Defence and took charge of directing personally all the military activities of the war. He excluded the three service ministers from the war cabinet. He was the warlord by air, sea and land.
Even if he had not been the very forceful and commanding character that he was, he would by this very act alone have been in a stronger position than any of his predecessors to leave his mark on events. Hitler, someone once said to Churchill, does not just want to plan the general policy of the war, he even plans the details. ‘Yes,’ answered Churchill with a smile, ‘that’s just what I do.’5
But of course it was his character which shaped his actions, and which made him into something which no previous prime minister, with the exception of Lloyd George, had even tried to be: that is a leader, a national leader. For all his courtly deference towards the Crown, and towards the great institutions of state, Churchill enjoyed something like absolute power for the five and more years that he held office for the first time as Prime Minister.
When it was all over in 1945, defeated in the polls and crushed in spirits, he went on a painting holiday in a borrowed villa on the shores of Lake Como. His daughter Sarah, his doctor Charles Wilson (who had become Lord Moran in 1943) and various others were of the party. Churchill’s spirits began to rise as he got into his stride once again. (He had painted only one canvas during the war, a landscape in Morocco when he was recovering from pneumonia.) On the walls of the Italian villa, or rather let into the walls, there was a dull landscape representing a lake and a wooded shore. It caught Churchill’s eye during dinner and he said there was no light in it; he could, he said, improve it. Major Ogier, a young officer of the 4th Hussars, saw the chance for the sort of jollities which might enliven a regimental mess, and rose to gouge the picture out of its place in the wall, thereby dislodging quite a bit of plaster. Churchill removed the glass and triumphantly bore off the canvas to his bedroom where, in spite of his daughter’s protests, he proceeded to add a gaudy sunset, using some new paints the young people had found for him in Milan. Later, he sheepishly undid his work with turpentine.
It is impossible to think of any other prime minister who would have played such a prank, and it seems entirely emblematic of his place in the prime ministerial gallery. Arthur Balfour and Herbert Asquith had been men of cleverness; Lloyd George had possessed qualities of greatness as a leader in war and peace. But on the whole, the prime ministers of the twentieth century constitute a procession of dullness from Campbell Bannerman to Bonar Law, from Ramsay MacDonald and Baldwin to Chamberlain. Then, the lightless canvas is roughly hacked from its place in the wall and a bright sunset is proudly splodged upon the leaden lake.
Churchill was sixty-five years old when he became Prime Minister. He was even more out of touch with the way ‘ordinary’ people lived than had been Lord Curzon, about whom the apocryphal story was told that he had ordered an omnibus driver to take him directly to his front door in Carlton House Terrace. ‘He knows nothing of the life of ordinary people,’ said his wife, ‘he’s never been in a bus, and only once on the Underground. That was during the General Strike, when I deposited
him at South Kensington. He went round and round, not knowing how to get out, and had to be rescued eventually. Winston is selfish; he doesn’t mean to be; he’s just built that way. He’s an egoist, I suppose, like Napoleon. You see, he always had the ability and force to live his life exactly as he wanted.’ Thinking that he should express concern for the lives of the ordinary people, when rationing was introduced he asked for some rations to be presented to him on a tray. He was pleasantly surprised and said that he just about could imagine living on what was spread out before him. It was then pointed out that what he had believed to be enough for a day was actually intended to feed an individual for a week.
One of the many paradoxes about Churchill’s relationship with The People during the war was that this noisy, colourful man should have presided over a period of unprecedented drabness in the personal lives of British subjects; and that so self-indulgent and Falstaffian an advocate of excess in matters of food and drink should have been the national leader during a time of tightening belts and food shortages. The great Victorian Libertarian presided over the birth of the Nanny State, where politicians felt it was their business to supervise national eating-habits, and to censor jokes.
The paradox is markedly brought home in Churchill’s correspondence with his Minister of Food, the retailer Lord Woolton. This Northerneducated, socially conscious figure was hardly Churchill’s type of man. He had spent his young manhood as an assistant to a Congregationalist minister, helping out at youth clubs while teaching mathematics at Burnley Grammar School. Later he went into the retail trade, eventually joining forces with David Lewis in his department stores in Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool (no connection with the John Lewis shops in and around London).
When meat supplies ran low in the first years of the war, it was Woolton’s task to try to persuade a largely carnivorous people to enjoy a tasteless pasty of root vegetables that came to be known as the Woolton Pie. Churchill airily assumed that there would always be plenty of meat, and nagged Woolton to make sure that no one ran short of bread or tea.
